How Pietra Is Enabling Solo Entrepreneurs to Build $100M Brands with AI | CREATOR COMMERCE S1E9

0:00E-commerce and direct-to-consumer brand building is highly operational. It is a very tedious operational process. And so with this new launch, we're deploying a set of AI agents that you can think about as a business operator, as a digital army of workers. These digital workers are working 24-7, 365, two steps ahead of you at all times.

0:20Ian Shepherd:In the latest episode of The Business of Creators, I talked to Ro and Tala from Pietra, and I learned about the launch of their AI assistants and their bold claim that one day one person will run a$100 brand. 80 % of the work that we see people do is like busy knowledge work. It's not the fun part of your job. So we literally took a 6 to 12 month process. And within 48 hours, you can have, I would say, between 5 to 10 factories that are ready to take your first order. You are the CEO, like Rose said, you're the approver. The agents work for you. But now when you layer on these AI assistants, Think of it as we're leaving an era where you had to use SaaS tools to run your business.

1:02And we're entering an era where you can deploy agents to use those tools for you. And this idea of democratizing brand building and brand scaling has been our ethos and our mission from day one.

1:14Ian Shepherd:If you're a creator, entrepreneur, or operator, this one's going to shift how you think about what's possible.

1:28Ian Shepherd:Before we dive into today's episode, let's talk about what happens when you've developed a winning product. Once you've built something amazing, you need a trusted, lasting place to promote it. And that starts with your domain name. A.store domain is a branded, commerce-focused web address that tells your audience, this is where I sell. It boosts click-through rate by nearly 90 % and doubles organic visibility, all while staying platform-independent and fully owned by you. And so whether you're building your first course or your 10th product line, give your brand a domain name that's built to sell.

2:02Ian Shepherd:Get yours today by using my special link in the description. Right, let's get on with the show. So you said that Pietra AI Assistance could enable one person to build a$100 million brand. That's an exciting promise. So can you tell us about this new launch? Totally. So we have been building an e-commerce platform to help business owners start and operate their brands for quite some time. And now we're entering the era of abundance where the most difficult thing for people to do is scale up their operations as a business. It has to touch the physical world. It needs to be creative and it needs to do things at scale.

2:37And so with this new launch, we're deploying a set of AI agents that you can think about as a business operator, as a digital army of workers, and then they can touch the real world and actually get things done. So this new launch is about bringing AI agents into the e-commerce space and allowing these agents to effectively run 80 to 90 % of their business for you or run your business for you. And the goal is that these digital workers are working 24-7, 365, two steps ahead of you at all times. And a business operator doesn't play the role of executing anymore. They play the role of being a creative director and a decision maker and a true CEO.

3:14And think about what you can accomplish with an unlimited, virtually unlimited workforce that can change the real world, can do things like manufacturing and fulfillment and shipping and marketing for you. That's why I think there's going to be, you know, a hundred million dollar brand that's created with just a single person somewhere in the world. And I think what people forget is e-commerce and direct to consumer brand building is highly operational. It is a very tedious operational process in this day and age with Shopify. And, you know, people are really only exposed to the last step of it.

3:44But everything before that is such hard work. And so the idea here is where this never existed before, we're now sort of layering on a tech layer that really, really streamlines this process.

3:58Ian Shepherd:Excellent. Well, I'm really excited to get into the detail. I actually had an e-commerce business throughout COVID, so I know how hard it is. But tell us what's under the hood, like what's powering these AI assistants and how do they know about an entrepreneur's business? Yeah, good question. I think that the bedrock of our company and what we set out to build was, you know, our mission statement is modern infrastructure for better commerce. And that first part, modern infrastructure, is what is all about it. What's the bedrock of this launch? The infrastructure that we built to all businesses around the world is turnkey solutions for things like manufacturing and procurement and sourcing, fulfillment and shipping and storage, and then And even marketing and media buying.

4:39So content creation and media buying. And so the bedrock of the AI assistants is first building an entire company that founders funded A16Z and M13 have believed in for many years around just a typical SaaS company that needed to exist in 2020, 2021. And that was awesome. But now when you layer on these AI assistants, think of it as we're leaving an era where you had to use SaaS tools to run your business. and we're entering an era where you can deploy agents to use those tools for you. And so the key difference here is if you don't have those tools and the services connected, you can't really affect change in the real world, right?

5:17And that's where all these AI assistants and all these agents and all these companies that are out there fall short. And I tell people, we don't need another AI that tells you to do homework. We need an AI system that can actually do the homework for you. And so I don't need to log into a base model and say, you know what you need to do? You need to streamline your procurement process. We need an agent that says, okay, here's a plan to streamline your procurement process. And here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to reach out to all of your suppliers. I'm going to talk to them in this way.

5:47I'm going to call you only when the job's done. And I'm going to say, hey, you need to sign up on this. It's not a consultant. It's an operator, right? And that's like the real function we've tried to make.

5:57Ian Shepherd:It's exciting, but also scary, right? So what happens is, is there a way to override the AI assistant or is it just going to go until it makes a mistake, perhaps? Yeah, what I like to say is like an operator myself is you're the approver, right? You are the CEO. Like Rose said, you're the approver. The agents work for you. And so where you would spend six hours in the middle of the night talking to a supplier on the other side of the world, the agent's doing that for you overnight. You do what you need to do. In the morning, you get all the information, you approve it, and then you go again. And so I think it's maybe scary, but it's almost so delightful that it's not scary enough to overpower how helpful it is.

6:39Yeah. I think the fear is overcome by... A lot of people in the industry don't talk about this, but I feel like we've worked at so many of these brands where 80 % of the work that we see people do is busy knowledge work. It's not the fun part of your job. It's like, who wants to go do a bunch of quote gathering from vendors? Who wants to do an analysis on market research and what you should expand to and put that together in a slide deck? Who wants to go into your sales data for the last three years and try to mine for insights? What people really want to do, what we see is they want to do the thing that's fun about entrepreneurism.

7:13Be creative, make the big decisions, affect change in the real world, see your product out there. And I think what we focus on as a company, which is super important, is we're trying to remove the 80 % of busy, annoying work. And I think this is a very different potential. I think it's a very different approach in a lot of companies, which is we talk to brand owners and we say, we're going to build this or we're going to build that. And they say, don't take away the fun parts of my job. I like being creative. I don't need a button that designs my website for me or makes a logo. Guess what? That's the fun part of building a brand.

7:46Don't take that away from me. How about you do my finances for me? How about you talk to all of my vendors and renegotiate rates for me? How about you tell me when my inventory is going to run out two months before it runs out? Yeah. And it's really funny because, yeah. Sorry to interrupt you, but most importantly, how do you stitch all of those things together? That's what they want, right? Because right now, running an e-commerce brand, you're using 15, 20 different apps. And so stitching those all together in one hub is also really, really valuable. Right. And I think like we, you know, people in this space that are building these types of AI tools, they jump right to the sexiest feature that you could probably build right and and what i keep saying is my favorite analogy here is people are like they see a video model get created and instead of thinking how they can make video editors faster give more creativity to the video editors they go you know what we should replace movies i'm like whoa we don't need to replace movies yet guys like how about we apply this technology to the parts of these you know really creative people that exist in the world um and make their lives easier eventually if it transforms a movie into she-gross.

8:48And I think of that as Tala was saying. Instead of going and reinventing the next mega app, how about you help them with the 35 apps that are on average installed in their Shopify site, right? Because that's the thing that they're hiring someone overseas to do or getting an intern or staying up at 11 o 'clock and trying to figure out themselves. That's where we are very, very open and honest about we build the things that people don't want to build. And because of that, there's so much value that we can create for these operators.

9:15Ian Shepherd:That makes absolute sense. I've been there myself. What have you seen from people testing it? Are there great use cases that you can explain to us just in practice what it looks like? Yeah, I'll use one of my favorite examples that happened during anyone who hasn't been living under a rock knows that Trump has come out and has talked about all these tariffs. And, you know, that has been a roller coaster to say the least for brand owners in America, but around the world. So a good example of this was our first ever AI assistant that we built was because everyone that we had been previously working with calls Tala and goes, oh my God, my company is going to go under.

9:56I need to find a whole new supply chain. And Tala would be like, oh my God, there's literally hundreds of companies. At one point, we were doing webinars with 400 or 500 companies being like, I know, guys, this is very crazy. Typically, you're not going to be able to find a new supplier, do quality inspections, get quotes on a six-month time frame. You're now working on a one-week time frame. So the first thing that Tala, to her credit, turned that into a pretty amazing product, which is let's go deploy the equivalent of a sourcing agent where you can say, here's a purchase order of something I've made in this part of the world.

10:33This is my cost per unit. I need an agent to go to every single factory that you know about in the world. talk to all of them, see if they can recreate the thing that I need in the price point that I want with lower tariffs, calculate all of this for me, and then send me a very simple quote table of this factory in this country has confirmed they can make your products in this way at this price point. Do you want to talk to them? So we literally took a six to 12 month process. And within 48 hours, you can have, I would say, between five to 10 factories that are ready to take your first order. And that might be a sample or the first step.

11:11But as soon as we built that agent, and I think it was in a bunch of press around this because it was incredibly valuable to these brand owners. I mean, I think that business is now doubling, tripling, just that part of the business. We realized, oh, if you can convert six months of work and an agency into 24 hours of work, and it's up to 100 % of the... It's 80 % of it. You have basically created value that a team of five or 10 can provide. And that was like the first kind of catalyst to now we have marketing agents, we have data analyst agents, but the first one really came from, can you just tell an agent, go find me a factory that can make, you know, this bomber jacket that I've been making at this price point.

11:53And it literally goes and searches the internet, searches Pietra, reaches out to them, emails them back and forth, and then just gives you a very simple quote table with a Zoom link to go talk to them. So anyways, that was, I don't know, Tala, that was a pretty crazy time for you. I would say about two months ago. Yeah. Yeah. And I think Rose, right. We've really replicated that model. What are the core needs? What are the painful processes that these brands have to do over and over and over again? And how do we just make that simpler? Because AI is, you know, like everyone talks about every day.

12:26It's game changing. It's world changing, particularly for this industry, in my opinion, because it is such tedious work.

12:34Ian Shepherd:Are there any ethical concerns like AI? Can AI ensure sustainable sourcing, diversity, IP originality, these types of things? Does it come into question? I'll start and then, Ro, you can continue. I mean, I think from my perspective, I don't see it as any more concerning than humans, to be honest. I mean, I think AI has the ability to do a ton of background research, a ton of checking. You know, what certifications do you need? What vetting do you need for your suppliers? What's out there already? I mean, I think that's actually made it almost more conservative, if you will, because you're not really relying on human error or memory.

13:15You really just have a robot that's thinking about all of the scenarios at one time. And we've really seen that be a benefit to our customers. You know, if you look at our sourcing product, it is so thorough. It thinks about everything, whereas a lot of brand owners might have not thought about that. And so I don't know if that exactly answers the entirety of your question. But from my perspective, from, you know, in that process, it's actually a level up. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that was a perfect, perfect response. I think the question around creativity is I can add to this, which is something that since we started, people have been asking us about.

13:51When you make things easier for someone, does it all turn into, what do they call it now, slop? Are you removing creativity from the world? Are you adding to it? At first, we were optimistically when we started this company being like, no, we're building tools and there's going to be more creativity. Now, definitively, we can say that there's going to be more creativity. I think one of the most interesting learnings that I've had is giving more people tools to bring their vision to life. Doesn't, it raises the floor and the ceiling. Yeah. And so everyone has access to these tools now. And the quality has to increase.

14:26And people's taste is not going to change, right? Like people, when I say not change, I mean people will still have taste and they will have their level. Each person has their own level of what they find tasteful or not. So yes, there might be more things that enter a level of tasteful. But just because if you think about me and you, you're not going to lower your standards because AI creativity tools are there, right? You're not going to buy crappier products, so to speak, because AI exists in the world. You're still going to have your bar of this is quality and this is what I believe to be true.

15:00And I think that as long as we remember that, right, we realize that giving people the tools to bring their vision to life is always the bottleneck in every industry, right? Music hasn't gotten worse because we allowed people to not have to rent a$10 ,000 plus studio every single night, right? It's actually like proliferated music and more people overall are listening to music, get the genre that they like. And I think of entrepreneurship in the same way. We make it easier and more entrepreneurs happen, right? Or more entrepreneurs are created, more businesses are created, and then the customers get more choice and they can decide what's good and what's bad relative to what's being launched.

15:34And when you take an example, right, like we have a brand, it's a very seasonal brand, a very niche. It's actually sort of goth and Halloween oriented stuff, all different types of things. And so, you know, this founder is a creative. She has a very, very clear point of view. And she said this to me a few months ago. She was like, Pietra has honestly enabled me to spend the majority of my time thinking about new SKUs, thinking about what I want to create next, focusing on my designs because I don't have to be the CFO, the COO, you know, the account, all of those things, right? A marketer thinking about what are my social campaigns look like?

16:15What are my Google campaigns look like? And so those types of things, I think actually create more space for authenticity, create more space for creativity of those founders, because we see that all of these brands that are blossoming, these sort of founder-led, creator-led brands, those people aren't necessarily, you know, operators or folks that really want to be in a P &L all day. And so to solve that problem for them actually lets them spend the majority of their time on the things that are authentic and unique.

16:45Ian Shepherd:I love that response. And I'm a big advocate for AI. It's great to hear that. So let's take a step back, perhaps for people that are less familiar with Pietra. Can you share some examples of top creators or celebrities or entrepreneurs that are using the platform? Yeah, I mean, we work with a pretty wide range of entrepreneurs and businesses, which is very exciting. And because we provide the building blocks for businesses, we get the luxury of working with some of the biggest and best brands in the world. So, you know, on one side of the spectrum, these big brands, you have things like Everlane and Roadskin, Houseplant, which is an amazing brand by Seth Rogen using these tools and their teams are really using these tools to grow their businesses.

17:26And so they're using it more in a modular fashion, right? They have a specific need inside of their business. How can we deploy the software and services and AI to make this grow faster? And on the other side, we have creator-led brands that are just getting off the ground. So another good example, and this is crazy to say, but you see someone like Paris Hilden just launched another product line. She's a maven of industry, unbelievable business owner, but still needs to take a new beauty brand and get it off the ground. So on the other end of the spectrum, you have these types of entrepreneurs that are trying something truly from scratch.

18:02And you can notice that it doesn't really matter how big you are as a creator or how famous you are as a celebrity. I'm really anchoring on where you are in the process. I mean, my best friend who just had an idea for a brand, and it's literally the idea phase gets to use Pietra as well. I'm launching my own CPG product through Pietra. I am as well. Yeah. It's like, I just had an idea. How do I bring that to life? So we have these... A good example is Sunday School, a really fresh new brand that's a lifestyle brand that's going viral in New York City, gets to have a chance to succeed. And they come in through Pietra through one of our three areas.

18:41Do you need help with manufacturing and sourcing? Do you need help with fulfillment in this case, shipping, freight, or do you need help with marketing and growth? And so we, over the years, I think we've launched, I mean, countless, we've helped launch countless celebrity brands. We're partnered with all the, you know, celebrity agencies in Los Angeles. But our core DNA is actually not that. It's what Tala was saying. It's the person who worked at Hulu or Pinterest on the marketing team. So this woman that is one of my favorite small businesses, worked at Pinterest. He goes, you know what? I really wanted to make...

19:17I'm going to have a kid. I really want to make a line of baby clothes. And I had this really cool idea. She has a really cool product where it's called Grip Baby. And it's a onesie that has little grippy things all around it so the kids don't slip. And that is our core customer. That's why we are excited to build this company. Where you look at something like a Grip Baby, and she was able to leave her job, her big tech job, follow her passion and grow a really successful, awesome small business in America. And it's designing and selling baby clothes to other moms, right? That is the true beauty of this platform.

19:55I can sit all day and talk about the celebrities that we've helped work with. But of the tens of thousands of business owners in America, that's less than a percent of those people. Really what you're doing is you're opening up to millions and millions of entrepreneurs that are Ali from Grip Baby, right? Which is, I have a passion in something. I have a creative outlet that I need to, or a creative itch. Now you can literally sit down. My favorite thing is I say, you can sit down with a cup of coffee and say, I want to launch a baby clothing brand. And guess what? By the end of that cup of coffee, you will have found through Pietra factories that can manufacture the products, the packaging.

20:31You will have a fully set up turnkey warehouse for you to store and ship those products. And you could start making a website and creative assets to promote it on social media, TikTok, Instagram, et cetera. That is something that I think will usher in the next 10 million small businesses in America because you could do it on a Saturday. And not at all possible before AI, right? You'd have to go and do all this stuff yourself. And so even though Pietro brought that all together, if this was three years ago, I would be saying, you could probably do this in six weeks. Now I'm saying you could do it in six hours.

21:03So think about what's going to happen in three years. Am I going to be saying you could do this in six minutes? I don't know, right? Once the agents talk to other agents, you start to see, oh, wait a minute. Like getting a quote from a vendor in Bangladesh could be agent talking to other agent. And that's going to be a one second outcome. Right now it's agent talking to human, but you can kind of see the way the world's going. And I think this idea of democratizing brand building and brand scaling has been our ethos and our mission from day one. Before AI, it really was using our infrastructure and tech to democratize.

21:40Now with AI, it is just a new world. And I'm not even a real tech person, right? I'm truly an operator. And I think I'm the most excited one in our company about AI and what it will do for our platform. I don't think it's a scary thing because ultimately we have the control and the way we're building it, that you do have the control over what the bots do or the agents do. Yeah, I think the digital workforce analogy feels to me like the right one, Tala, that you put out, which is when you run a business, you hire capable people, you have some trust level with them. You start with lots of controls, lots of approvals, etc.