726: This $500k/mo+ Entrepreneur Says Key is Minimizing Expenses

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She wanted to take the risk of shoppable, which she did in 2011, launched officially 2012, has now a team of 20 based in New York City.

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They've raised about 5 million bucks, have over 438 merchants with over 2000 brands using their platform, paying anywhere between 10 grand and 90 grand per year, some smaller, some more, but doing well north of 500 grand per month in revenue. This is episode 726. Coming up tomorrow morning, we'll learn why people pay this guy 10 million plus per year, or $4 on every $10 in ads that he manages.

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But first, here's today's episode. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million.

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He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.

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Hello, everybody. My guest is Heather Marie. She is the founder and CEO of a company called Shoppable, a technology company that helps media companies, brands, and retailers bring the checkout experience to anywhere a consumer discovers or engages with their products.

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While with Shoppable, she won the 2013 Women in Digital Award from L'Oreal and was named one of the 10 most powerful millennials in Manhattan. I love that title. By Gotham Magazine and one of the 11 tech gurus changing the luxury game by Refinery29.

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The company was a 2014 Webby Award honoree for online shopping, a 2016 Webby honoree for technical achievement, and named one of the 100 brilliant companies by Entrepreneur Magazine. Heather, are you ready to take us to the top? Yep, absolutely. My gosh, you're winning awards all over the place.

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So do you own New York City yet? Not yet. Just a small part of it. It's a small goal, right? Small goal.

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Exactly. So tell us about the company. Tell us what it does specifically. Yeah, so we, you know, kind of taking it from the top here, we created a technology that essentially lets you purchase anything that you see anywhere online. So if you think about e-commerce in general, you can, of course, purchase things directly on any retailer's website.

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But if you think about everything else that exists from social media to blogs to publishing content to ads, videos, everything else you see as consumers, we're discovering products so many other places. And prior to shoppable, there was no way to really make anything shoppable unless it was a shop itself.

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So what we're doing is we've created patent pending technology that we're bringing to all these different locations outside of traditional retail shops to create shoppable experiences. So you have this beautiful chicken and egg problem, right? Like it won't work unless you get a lot of these retailers actually using it.

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But when I first started it, that was definitely a huge problem, which was how do we decide which one to get first? And part of it was we found and we kind of pitched the concept to to a number of different retailers, got their kind of loose buy-in enough to say, you know, these brands are coming on board and then bring them to find our launch partner.

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And we actually launched the technology with the Wall Street Journal during the holidays. And by having them on board, they actually, you know, as someone with the Wall Street Journal, that caliber of branding and that type of company was able to bring in a bunch of retailers and advertisers that they already work with.

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And then that kind of helped fulfill the need of the products out of the gate for that particular partnership. And it really created this amazing flywheel type of experience where once they were onboarded in general for them, they were onboarded for the next company and the next company and the next company. So you have to start somewhere and start small, but we've grown tremendously since then.

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I go to your website and I see the marketplace with most popular stuff listed here. But then I look at your, your Alexa ranking and it's super low, which means people necessarily aren't seeing these. Like the key to making your thing work is they have to see this Ralph Lauren, black and white striped scarf, like on somebody on Instagram or on Facebook, like you have to make the sale happen there.

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Like, which is maybe why you don't share, you know, you know, transaction numbers. Like, how do you solve that problem? Well, so we solve it by, so we actually are not about bringing people to shoppable.com. It's about bringing the technology to where consumers already are. So integrating the technology across a number of other different websites. Can you give me an example?

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I would love to actually see that. Yeah, sure. So like going to, let's go to like dove.com isn't easy. Yeah, D-O-V-E. And then if you click the product tab, and then just click on anything. Okay. Okay, got it. While it might take you a second to load, but once you get into product detail pages, everything you see here is powered through Shoppable.