The Key to Finding Your Next Customer

0:00The founder path is totally different than everyone else in the company. and in order to build something, yeah, you're going to mess some stuff up. You're going to have to fix it. And as you go through them, you get better at them. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm your host, Shuang Esther Shan. What is the hardest thing about building a company? Is it perfecting your product or working with a manufacturer? Our guest today, Mark Burrows, is a three-time founder, and he says the hardest thing is finding your next customer. Mark is here today to share how that mantra guides his business moment in an eight-figure global marketplace for creatives to sell gear, online courses, trips, and much more.

0:46Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah. You have such a prolific career, multi-time founder, and throughout all of the businesses, you mentioned one thing that really struck with me is that you said the most difficult part is finding your next customer. It's not about perfecting your hardware or building a community. Why is that so important? Yeah, it's a great question. I think I spent my career doing consumer. So maybe 20 years at this. First company I started was almost pre-social media, pre-YouTube, pre-all the tools you use now. And so had to constantly evolve and use the latest tools, but I think we've always found the hardest part is just getting another customer.

1:30In the early days, you really don't know what works. I'm a big believer in just trying everything. Whether it's events or word of mouth or paid ads or you're just kind of experimenting. Some people will say, hey, focus on one channel. Early on, you're just trying to figure out which channel works. Then once you find a channel that works, I believe that everything is tied to what works to get another customer. Whether you're going to invest in a new product idea, whether you're going to hire a marketing role, or whether you hire a salesperson, or you decide to spend money on a team event, the whole premise is, how can I reach that next customer in Fair Work to get them?

2:03I found it's way harder than everything else. The product stuff is a little bit easier. Making physical products can be challenging, but I have found that the whole premise is you need more customers to grow. If your business has a high subscription or repeat rate, then you get customers to come back pretty frequently is great. I would say a lot of physical products don't really have that, So you definitely need the customer to come back and buy again. And so, yeah, early on, you just want to figure out kind of what is the recipe that works to get another customer. And then experiment constantly until you find things that work and then try to grow those areas that really work.

2:34Yeah. And your first company, Contour, focused on hardware. What were some of the learnings you took from that that you wanted to do differently with Moment? All of it. Really? It was an action camera business. GoPro beat the crap out of us on, you know, how to win a consumer. We thought best product wins. We very much focused on making the best product. They taught us that it's not really the best product that wins, and they did a great job capturing hearts. I think the thing I took from that first company was, consumer is very emotional. I love finding things where people do it on the weekends.

3:06I think those are easier to build brands around. But you really have to connect at the heart level and not the mind level. We really convinced people. If you look at everything we did, the name of the brand, the name of the products, how we positioned them, was very functional, trying to convince you why this was better than that or why this feature was great. And I think GoPro just beat the hell out of us on just capturing hearts. They kind of captured the essence of action video. And they really sold action video and they just happened to be making a camera. And I think maybe they lost their way when they got bigger, but early on they did a really good job of that.

3:34And I think I kind of missed that. So in Moment, it was very much back to why we love photography, why we love shooting video. And we really found it's about getting out, going places, being with our friends. and so very much tied to the emotions of just doing the activities. And we just happen to not make products that deliver on that. But I think probably the number one takeaway in consumer I found when you're trying to reach end customers is just the heart over the mind. And I think that's probably the biggest lesson I learned. So taking that mantra of everything should be about finding your next customer, how are you putting that into practice for Moment today?

4:09Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's got two parts. One is we're finding there's kind of less channels available on one side. So I think back in the day, you could get press and you could do small events. You could do lots of channels to reach customers. And we are kind of finding it's consolidating back to a lot of paid ads and paid ad channels with Facebook and Google. And so on one side, that's gotten trickier. And on the other side, it's actually interesting is the thing that's starting to work now is stuff that worked maybe five or six years ago. And so there's almost this cycle of the things we're seeing now are like actually events and going out and talking to customers and stuff that we kind of got away from that really wasn't working.

4:43Maybe it was pre-COVID and COVID changed all that for us. But online, the channels are less. And then offline, we're seeing an interest in going out and talking to customers. And in our world, we're doing photography and filmmaking. So I'd say workshops are back, meeting in person is back. And those are kinds of like marketing tactics which you started the company on. Originally, our products were very tactile. You had to see and touch what we were making. We're making products that turned your phone into a better camera. So we were doing, honestly, the original Instagram photo walks and those types of events where people would go out and use a phone and capture photos.

5:15And that's kind of coming back. It's in a new form of how people are doing events, but that's definitely come back. So I think as you think about, okay, how do I get other customers? There's this push towards what channels are working online. There seems to be less and less of them, which is unfortunate. You basically are paying Facebook a lot of advertising dollars or consolidation of advertising dollars. And on the other side, you have to kind of reinvent the playbook and go back to stuff that maybe worked before that stopped working. And so that's kind of where we are now, which is the in-person stuff is starting to work again.

5:42maybe hard to scale, and then the online space has been consolidated to less options. It's like the evolution of Moment, so many different chapters, and you're retesting what has worked. Talk to us a little bit about that evolution, right? Like the beginning of Moment, the vision you had about kind of optimizing mobile photography, creating hardware, and then evolving it to events, presets, working with creators as well. When you start these things, people don't tell you that it takes at least a decade. I think if people as a founder that say, hey, you're going to spend 10 years on this, usually find you'll actually stop and think about it a minute longer.

6:19Like, do I really want to do this for 10 years? And so Moment's actually 10 years old now, which is kind of funny. And so it starts very simple, which is make products, get customers, see what works, slowly grow the team. Along the way, we had built the brand through the content. So kind of back to the GoPro contour days, I learned that content was the thing that It really worked experimentation-wise. We tried lots of things, and what was working was the content. You put out content, it would reach millions of new people. This was kind of early Instagram, early YouTube days. It was a lot less pay-to-play.

6:49So you actually had a lot of organic reach that really worked well just by putting out great content. And then in the content, people were asking us, okay, besides your phone, what else do you use? We started putting other products in the content. People clicked through and bought it. And so at the moment, we've kind of organically evolved based on what the customer's done inherently. If they clicked through and bought things, or they asked for other products, or what customers were saying. When we started making just phone products, there was a struggle, which is the repeat purchase rate is once every 18 months, once every two years.

7:18What's the cycle people get new phones? By expanding into the rest of the things creatives need, it allowed us to grow and keep the business growing. Otherwise, it would have been probably pretty small and pretty tough to keep going because a customer comes back every two years. Moments have grown from a product company We make products and make your phone a better camera into a marketplace for creatives. So we kind of sell everything creatives need. And what's interesting is that we find 80 % of customers started on their phone. And so we're very good at this kind of beginner up and coming. And so part of, as we've been here 10 years, you kind of have to grow with what the customer's doing.

7:52And so a lot of our customers have gone from, I shot on my phone, now I shoot on a camera, now I'm a filmmaker, now I'm a producer and a DP. And so it's been fascinating even seeing the growth of the customer evolution. And we've just kind of grown moments to keep up with it. But otherwise, if we had stayed with probably the original five or six products, I'm not sure we'd still be here. You're truly fitting into each of the moments of your customer, like finding them throughout their life stage or the progression of their career. And I think it's so special, right, because you also collaborate with creators and they share what's in their kid.

8:24And then that inspires people to maybe make a purchase. you were able to actually create this community online and people are very much loyal to be in the community and check out where creators are using and purchase from moment was there ever like a hesitation when you decided to go into this marketplace route oh for sure definitely i mean it comes with its own challenges because it's more complicated than just the product there's definitely days where it's like hey just make products would be a little bit easier because that you focus on a few SKUs and you tell a story. I think the hardest part for us is just evolving the brand because the brand originally was known for the first product.

9:00It was known as Moment Lenses, essentially. You take a lens and put it on your phone. That was kind of the hero product. It's taken us a while to grow the brand and get that across of what the brand can become. So we picked a big, probably another learning from the GoPro contour days, early on when you pick your brand, pick something big you can tell a story with, something you can build into. We picked something very functional around contour. It was very contoured to the actual object itself and how it fit on your body. And so I think going back in Moment, we thought it could be like the next Kodak and actually capture emotion.

9:29And so we thought with a big brand, you could fill it in with lots of products. But yeah, it's been interesting probably evolving the brand. And then from a marketplace point of view, we've learned a ton. So I think with any company, as you go, you're just going to learn a lot. And the stuff we wouldn't have predicted turned out to be true, and some stuff worked and some stuff didn't. And so I think what we've learned is that Moment as a marketplace is much more curated today than when we started. So it's really focusing on what creatives need sell the best products in every category. We don't need to sell everything.

9:55And what we've learned over time is that people come to us just looking, I want to say, for advice, like, which one should I get and why should I get it? And so it's a lot of moments. It shrinks early on were making products and telling you what we were using. And so the marketplace has kind of come back to that, which is helping you find the right one. Okay, which mobile microphone do I need? There's lots of them, and we get it down to a handful, and here's why. Synthesizing the information, making those purchase fatigue, decision-making fatigue a lot easier on the customer. Yeah, it's kind of hard to imagine that the Genesis was those early days where there was just a couple of lenses and you were on Kickstarter.

10:32Still the Kickstarter, we're going back next week. Yeah. But I think one more thing that's interesting in there is like some of the original, when you get into it for 10 years, you can kind of lose track of why'd you start it originally, right? So we basically started by making products for our phones and we were going out and shooting. And if you traveled or you went places, that was a reason that you needed a phone and a phone camera and a phone lens that was actually the number one driver. It was interesting because you hit COVID along the way and all that went away. And people basically lost the whole essence of idea of going outside.

11:01And we kind of lost a little bit too from a brand point of view because now you're making content inside and you're kind of doing now studio stuff. And it was very different than why we started the brand. So even as you run it for a long time, you have to keep the brand true to what you're doing. And so we're actually going back to a lot of the early days of getting outside and going places and capturing moments. And we kind of lost that along the way, I would say. which is hard when you're running a company for 10 years because it's easy to lose the original essence of the brand. I think if you're building a consumer business, you have to A, get the brand right in the beginning, and then B, try to keep it consistent as you grow, which is really tough when you've got employees and financial things to worry about and market changes and things like COVID.

11:39I think for us, evolving the brand and then also keeping true to why we started it is something we've had to work on. I find that very interesting where you mentioned you're actually circling back to Kickstarter. Why is that important to get the community involved and fund a project? Because you've gone through so many different iterations of fundraising. Kickstarter has changed a lot. It basically started as a community, like you're talking about. And the early things were all like believing in the project. And unfortunately, it has definitely turned more towards an e-commerce experience. Like, where's my stuff?

12:12I want it yesterday. and people want it immediately. We have found that when you do a harder project, there's a lot of financial risk. And so we do crowdfunding because it helps us almost with a great pre-order campaign, just figure out, okay, we're about to press the manufacturing button. Is this worth doing or not? Because some of these projects are expensive. You have to tool them and you have to pick how many you're going to buy and you have to ship them. And yeah, we've grown, but we're not in a spot where we want to risk$500 ,000 on this product we think may hit, may not hit. And so we use it for our biggest projects, maybe once a year, is bring something back that says, hey, we want to really build this project out.

12:44We think it's a great product. We did all the engineering, design, testing, manufacturing. Let's see what the community thinks. And sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong and people aren't as interested as we thought. And I think that's such a cool way to validate an idea and also making sure that there are customers already when the product is made. But then you've also raised seed rounds and you've gone through different versions of fundraising. What is your advice now for new founders who are thinking about going through that process? Oh, you spent a whole podcast on it. What's funny is that it's changed today than what it was even 10 years ago.

13:22And so you do find it's kind of cyclical to which consumer things are hot. You know, AI didn't exist now like it did then, right? Where social media is mature-wise and channels didn't exist then as it does now. And so I think from a fundraising point of view, at the end of the day, I think the best advice I'd give is like, if you're going to raise money, you've agreed to sell your business. And so I don't think people internalize that. If you raise outside capital, these investors want to return. And so at some point you have to find a way to get them in return. You have to buy them out or you're going to have to sell the business.

13:54So the moment we started kind of organically our own money, got it going, it really started to grow. And this I'd say like pre-COVID. So we had the great idea to raise a bunch of money, raise about five million bucks, and then we hit COVID. and we just couldn't get product of anything. Any product we were selling, even our own stuff, we just couldn't get it. And so we just basically had to pivot a bit and go back towards where we started, which was a profitable business that grows, smaller team, because the growth worked. But at the end of the day, we couldn't get the product, it just led to large cancellations and issues.

14:25So I think in Moment's Journey, I wouldn't just say you're going to run into COVID, which would have totally changed your trajectory. But I think from a fundraising point of view, I'd say, you know, you just got to agree like, hey, I want to sell this thing at some point. I'm either selling it in the future because I've agreed to take money and I'm going to sell it, or I want to sell all of it today. That's what I think about it. You're very pragmatic when you're talking about fundraising and also like ownership of the company. Did letting go of your first business with Contour help in that? Because there is this like intense emotional connection you have with something you build, right?

15:02In your first one, it's kind of like a dating relationship. You kind of need to get your heart broken to figure out how to fall in love. I got my heart smashed in the first one, which was, hey, I built a business for 10 years. It's like a$30 million business. And we had like 50 people, raised money, got fired from it because I was running it like a founder, not a CEO, and watched them bankrupt a$30 million business in like nine months. But yeah, I got my heart crushed. I had never, it was my first job. I hadn't been through anything yet. And so I think if you get your heart broken, you figure, okay, now what you like, what kind of people you like, who you want to be.

15:34And so I spent most of my 20s trying to figure out who I was going to be and what kind of CEO and what kind of company I wanted to run while running a company. And so, yeah, second company gets a lot easier towards like, what do you like? What kinds of people, what kind of culture, what do you want to build? I love building things, and we've been at this a decade. The interesting thing with Moment is that we've just been able to evolve and it keeps it interesting, right? So building the marketplace has been new. along the way built one of the best pro camera apps. That was new and interesting.

16:00The products, mobile has seen a huge resurgence with what Apple's doing in the camera. So that's almost like new again for a bunch of new products. And so for us, it's always finding new, interesting projects to keep going. And it sounds like it's such a big inflection point where you got to like turn things around, think about what you do next. And a lot of the times, like that might be a moment of stuck for a lot of people too, where you're like, I've tried, it was a great success and now it's not, I don't even know how to turn things around. How did you find yourself again and build something new again?

16:33On a personal level, it's tough. I always tell people, you haven't learned to build a company until you've had to take it apart. And so I've had to do it a few times. My first company hit 2008, so that was a big COVID-like economic deal. And we were in trouble. We cut it, I think, from 13 to 8. And we basically bet all the company on a new product. It was an HD-based camera. The first time it was an HD camera, and it worked. And that's what saved the company and got us out. This was different where all of a sudden you hit COVID and you couldn't get products. You had to go back to the basics of what worked and rebuild from that original foundation with moments.

17:10I just find you have to go through them. Unfortunately, with company building and team building, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. They are painful, and you have to go through them to learn from them. And that's just the reality of it. And so, yeah, I would say outside of it, it really helps to have people you can count on. So in my case, first company was single, you know, hadn't been through any of this, lost my mom from cancer. And then at like the lowest point, that was 2008 when the economy totally tanked. Then I met my wife who probably saved my life. And from there, everything else was easier.

17:40And so in second company, her and I kind of went through, okay, what kind of company do you want to start? What kind of lifestyle associated with it? Do you want to raise kids? And so I think having someone in your life, whether a significant other or people that are close to you, you can count on, helps a lot because you have to be able to decompress from the stress of it. I'd say the money side or it's not working is by far the most stressful part. And that part, if you're a founder or you're running a company, it can just eat at you. And so I think finding an outlet for that or finding someone that can help you or a way to talk about it helps a ton.

18:10Yeah. And I can hear this sense of calmness as we're talking about these moments of crisis. Does it feel less intense now because you were able to go through those challenges? Because you mentioned all the stress with COVID, but I felt like on the outside looking at moment, it felt like you guys adjusted perfectly and it doesn't seem chaotic. Great. Perfect. I would say it's chaotic. It's just like you're kind of asking different questions, if you will. So if you say the founder part, and if this audience is, hey, I'm building companies, I'm building startups, I'm building an e-commerce business.

18:48There's just a different set of problems or things you go through than I'm in the company, I'm operating marketing inside the brand that's running on Shopify, for example. So I'd say the founder journey or the founder path is totally different than everyone else in the company. And in order to build something, yeah, you're going to mess some stuff up and you're going to have to fix it. That can be people things, that can be wrong hires, that can be wrong investors. As you go through them, you get better at them. I think the skill you end up developing, which is just, what are the top problems?

19:16You have to hit them straight. The most important problem you had to hit first, you can't really delay on it, you can't really drag your feet. You've got to find a solution. If you are running out of money, you have to hit that straight up. Or if this marketing isn't working, you have to hit that straight up. I think as the founder, the hard part can be, you have to work on the most important problems, and they might not be the problems you're most interested in. You may love the products. And I love making products, but you realize, if I don't get the financials working, we're not going to have products anyway.

19:43So I think from the founder journey, it can feel all over the map, and there are just these crises along the way that you're going to hit, and your job is to hit them straight on, and you're going to learn from them. And a bunch you're going to get wrong, and hopefully you can pivot fast enough and fix them and get them right. We're going to learn even more about how different moments of moment have helped grow the business. But before that, I wanted to thank you, our listeners, for tuning into the show. We also have launched a YouTube channel where you can watch some of our favorite in-person interviews.

20:14So check it out and thanks again for supporting Shopify Masters. Moment is just one of those companies I've been following for many years. And I've noticed that within the last year, you actually replatformed to Shopify. Yeah, we started Moment before Shopify kind of existed. it. So it's kind of like you start along the way. We had built a custom platform in a sense because as we expanded the categories, there was no commerce store that let us sell the physical gear, digital tools, courses. And we're actually selling trips, believe it or not, pre-COVID. So we really struggled with the breadth of what creators wanted to purchase and what they wanted to sell.

20:51And Shopify was actually iterating faster than we can iterate. So every time Shopify drop a whole bunch of new features, our team was like, those are great. We'll get to those maybe in a year. And so we just saw the rate, I think to Shopify's credit, the rate that they were innovating on features from a commerce point of view was just faster than we could build separately and faster than any other platform was doing. And so yeah, we finally made the calculations, like it'd be just easier and cheaper to run on Shopify. And so the team just started working on that. I wouldn't say that was an easy project because you had 10 years of legacy, like bringing all the customer data over in a secure way and rebuilding all the pages and having pages look better than the default stuff.

21:27That took the team, I don't know, six to nine months to get it all working. Our business is a little bit more complicated, but I think if I were to start it again, yeah, I'd start it on Shopify, because it's just easier to build. And I think it was a good reminder to really focus on what you're awesome at. And so for us, building the best commerce platform is not where we win, it's not our DNA, it's not where we're great at. So having a platform that does that well has actually helped a ton. And it's allowed us to go back to what we're really good at, which is, okay, let's help people find the right products.