In short
GenBrain/“Checkmate” (a savings/personalized offer app) explains how it went viral and then unlocked revenue by timing offers and using identity/inbox signals to bridge brands and shoppers. They describe Google Sign-On rate-limit chaos, TikTok-era distribution, and experiments on when to show offers.
Guests (backgrounds)
- Harry Dixon: ex–EasyPost partnerships/infrastructure; later co-founder of GenBrain/Checkmate; focuses on brand/consumer connection and ad-tech shifts from Apple privacy changes.
- Rory Garton-Smith: ex–Apple iPhone team; toured as a DJ signed to Sony; co-founded GenBrain/Checkmate; focuses on consumer distribution and offer strategy.
Key claims
- Saving money is a “universal” value prop; virality comes from “aha moments” (offers) not generic ads.
- Best offer timing is ~15 minutes (earlier than 15 minutes performs worse; later drops off).
- Honey-style generic code aggregation fails because it can’t personalize using shopper identity/content.
Notable examples
- Your Paradise music festival in Fiji coincided with Slack alerts: 10k signups/min, then 20k, reaching #1 US App Store; Google Sign-On temporarily switched them off as if under attack.
- Wishlisting/collections didn’t work because it delays intent; generic “flyer” timing/offer doesn’t convert.
- They now use transparent SSO/inbox access to personalize single-use offers and support brand integrations.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Unexpected Surge of Sign-Ups
0:00 to 0:58
Learn about a sudden influx of sign-ups that surprised the founders.
“We ended up putting so many people through Google Sign-On in 24 hours that Google Sign-On switched us off, which no one knows that that's a thing.”
Six Months of Insane Growth
2:12 to 3:14
The founders reflect on their rapid growth and profitability milestone.
“How would you summarize the last six months?”
Creating Value for Brands and Consumers
3:14 to 4:50
Exploring the balance between working with brands and attracting consumers.
“But virality is also something you can't plan.”
The Seven Deadly Sins of Consumer Products
4:50 to 6:08
Discussing how successful products resonate with basic human desires.
“So maybe that's where Rory is kind of taking this.”
The Role of Social Media in Growth
6:08 to 7:59
How social media and viral marketing contributed to their success.
“But I think like there is a natural viral sharing quality to what Harry and I refer to as like kind of like an aha moment.”
The Challenges of Launching a New Product
7:59 to 9:37
Facing difficulties and unexpected situations during their product launch.
“Brands were not loving the experience because it was actually doing a lot of generic code use that wasn't uplifting.”
Insights from Previous Experiences
9:37 to 12:21
Reflecting on valuable insights gained from past jobs and industries.
Navigating the Startup Landscape During COVID
12:21 to 14:00
Coping with the challenges of building a startup during a pandemic.
“And so, we were fortunate that that allowed us to then go deeper and deeper and back to the original, like, what changed in six months.”
Navigating Early Challenges and Insights from Apple
14:00 to 17:44
Discover the insights that shaped the early operational strategies of the founders amidst challenges.
“Rory and I are both living in San Francisco and we kind of joke that we could have gone full degenerate and bought PlayStations and not do anything or you could build a company together.”
Recognizing Market Opportunities Post-COVID
17:44 to 19:30
Learn how the founders identified a significant market gap during the pandemic that others overlooked.
“And that door, I only see opening wider, not narrow.”
Show all 27 chapters
The Evolution of Their Marketing Strategy
19:30 to 24:02
Explore how the founders adapted their marketing strategy to connect consumers and brands effectively.
“And what those platforms don't allow you to do is actually really interact with data on the identity front or on the content creation front.”
Leveraging Technology for Business Growth
24:02 to 27:50
Understand how advancements in technology and data utilization have propelled their business model.
“And it just, it turns out to execute it.”
Building Relationships with Brands
27:50 to 28:00
Hear about the journey and strategy of fostering deeper collaborations with brands over time.
“as well, which is allowing brands to essentially figure out who people are and when to reach them.”
Introduction to Timing in Business
28:00 to 28:30
Learn how timing and AI are crucial for brand integration.
“And so, we're kind of a timing business if you think about it in this more like abstract conversion type experience and we're using AI models to do that.”
The Journey of Brand Integration
28:30 to 30:10
Explore the challenges and milestones of working with brands.
“Like, you know, technically, like an affiliate integration is an integration.”
Understanding Consumer Intent Signals
30:10 to 31:40
Discover how intent signals impact consumer behavior and purchasing.
“And so, we take intent signals from your inbox, where you browse, stuff like that.”
The Wishlist Problem in E-commerce
31:40 to 33:50
Examine why wishlisting products can hinder purchasing decisions.
“Because when someone wishlists a product, that's actually stopping the buying intent signal.”
Effective Timing for Product Offers
33:50 to 35:50
Learn about the importance of timing when delivering offers to consumers.
“It was five minutes ago that you were looking at that product.”
Ad Tech Evolution and Consumer Targeting
35:50 to 37:00
Explore the future of ad tech and the shift towards personalized marketing.
Data Insights on Consumer Behavior
37:00 to 39:30
Understand how consumer behavior data influences product development.
“But just to kind of go into like a problem set around like what do brands know about you?”
Trends in Online Shopping Behavior
39:30 to 42:00
Identify key trends in consumer shopping behavior across different days and platforms.
“I don't know why it really came to my mind.”
Understanding Timing in Marketing Campaigns
42:00 to 44:18
Learn about the optimal timing for marketing tactics and the surprising statistics that influence customer engagement.
“They're very in the numbers and in the weeds.”
The Evolution of Marketing in E-commerce
44:18 to 46:33
Explore how online marketing has become a technical role requiring a deep understanding of various metrics and performance indicators.
“And then it's like, how do you actually impact?”
Building Company Culture in Startups
46:33 to 48:28
Discover the importance of creating a strong company culture and employee engagement in startups.
“One of the guys on my team messaged me a few weeks ago on a Saturday and he was like, I wish the weekend would end because I'm so jazzed about what we're doing right now.”
Navigating the Seed Funding Landscape
48:28 to 51:16
Gain insights into the seed funding process and the significance of personal connections over product perfection.
“What worked, what didn't work at the seed round?”
Unique Hiring Strategies for Startups
51:16 to 53:10
Learn innovative hiring practices that create memorable experiences and attract top talent in startups.
“And I think that really helps because like we're not safe as houses yet.”
Vision for the Future
53:10 to 53:46
Understand the ambitious goals set for the company's future and the pathway to achieving widespread recognition.
“The same way that our Afterpay is synonymous with financing and you saw that logo everywhere, we want Checkmate to be on every single store in the world in like two, three years time.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Harry Dixon:We ended up putting so many people through Google Sign-On in 24 hours that Google Sign-On switched us off, which no one knows that that's a thing. I went to a music festival in Fiji called Your Paradise, and I was like, all right, it's my first week off in a year. A few days later, we woke up and everyone on Slack was going crazy because it was like, guys, we've had like 10 ,000 sign-ups in a minute. Now we've had like 20 ,000 sign-ups, and within like five or six hours, we were the number one app in the US App Store. But just kind of like all these triggers we'd set in place just all hit at once.
0:26Harry Dixon:What have you learnt about how consumers are behaving on the internet? People shop less on Tuesdays than they do on Wednesdays. People are typically, there are two shopping windows during the day. They typically shop at either lunchtime or they shop at like 6pm.
0:40Rory Garton-Smith:We run hundreds of A-B tests on timing. Putting it off in front of someone, it actually performs worse if it's before 15 minutes. 15 minutes is the sweet spot. If you do it 20, 30 an hour, two hours, it drops off significantly. And like we have stats and significance on 15 minutes. Welcome back to Wild Hearts. Two founders were looking into the abyss. One's in Fiji, one's in a boat getting smashed by a storm off the coast of Perth. Neither of them are supposed to be working and Slack is losing its mind. 10 ,000 signups in a minute. Then so many people are hitting their app at once that Google cuts them off.
1:16Rory Garton-Smith:It assumes it's cyber attack. Because the alternative that a startup that just went viral that fast was statistically less likely. That's the night checkmate hit number one in the US App Store. Today's guests are Harry Dixon and Rory Gardensmith. One sold helicopters to NBA players, the other toured the world as a DJ, signed to Sony sharing stages with Diplo. Neither of them were supposed to build a tech company and yet 260 million users, eight figures in ARR, 6 ,000 % revenue growth in six months. Behind the remarkably simple answer that finally unlocked them, the right offer, the right person at the right second, multiplied across 260 million people, is years of being wrong, experimenting, building things people use but nobody pay for, and throwing darts in the dark.
2:06Rory Garton-Smith:And so I wanted to figure out how they traveled through the abyss to find the clarity that they've arrived at. So let's dive in.
2:16Rory Garton-Smith:I know it's been an insane six months. How would you summarize the last six months?
2:22Harry Dixon:two really interesting narratives here the first is that like we've been dominant in u.s consumer for a while which is great but the nature of our business required a lot of partnership work to really kind of like lock in on the revenue side and in the last 12 months that's where we've won and so we've crossed over eight figure arr now we grew literally something like 6 000 percent in revenue in the last six months which is crazy exciting um and uh the momentum is incredible The whole team is like, you need, I mean, you'll hear so many founders say this, but startups should feel a bit cult-like.
2:54Harry Dixon:And on our last retreat, Harry got off and announced that we hit profitability and everyone was losing their minds. Everyone's running up and down the street, carrying each other. It was fantastic. So what does it mean to be dominant in consumer? We launched the consumer product and we put in every viral hook that we could to make it go viral. But virality is also something you can't plan. So, like, we planned for it, but the timing around it is not, like, you kind of need to let the market, like, take it and run. And our whole plan was, like, let's...
3:26Rory Garton-Smith:Sorry, just to back up. I mean, I guess what we actually are is GenBrain. We help people save money. We partner with brands and generate offers. We have, like, an app in market that, like you mentioned, Mason, hitting on one of the app store. We now put offers in multiple places that help essentially drive personalized shopping. So, when we talk about these viral loops that Rory's, you know, I think about to tell some pretty interesting stories on, I think the core product that we think dominance in, and when I say dominance, like, we are creating an elevated experience that was generic code usage into a personalized tailored offer for you that both supports brands and consumers.
4:05Rory Garton-Smith:And so, like, creating this middle ground between both the people providing the product and people wanting it is something that you thought was solved. But honestly, like, the RetailMeNotes and Racketons of the world, like, doing more of a spray and pray approach that was really, like, hurting brands when, like, they couldn't... You thought it was a bad year with COVID and then tariffs got implemented. iOS 14.5 got implemented. Like, honestly, if someone can create an online business in the last, like, seven years, like, kudos to them because, like, everyone is getting smashed. And so, providing tooling that can really help both brands and ultimately us at the end of the day because, you know, consumer, you know, spending things are a little concerning.
4:47Rory Garton-Smith:So, creating those win-wins has been, I think, where, like, we leaped into that dominance and acquiring people in consumers' hearts. So maybe that's where Rory is kind of taking this.
4:59Harry Dixon:So when you think about consumer as a whole, there's really only a few value props that actually truly hit across all of consumer. Every successful product of all time seems to hit on what I would call one of the seven deadly sins, interestingly enough. And that is resonatingly true. And for us, I guess saving money sort of falls into greed, but it's the most polite way of greed. You know, it's sort of like, it's the most tangible and palatable way of expressing that of the seven deadly sins. but it's one of the value props that truly resonates with literally everyone like who doesn't want to save money and um so we were really like first to market on mobile savings especially as harry alluded like as covid was kicking off the market was really changing everything was moving towards tiktok and like shopify was creating this scalable way for anyone to make a store and we got in there real early um harry had a lot of insights from what he was doing at easy post and i had a lot of insights from what was happening at apple on the kind of the iPhone front and we created a product that spread really quickly through the US and got millions of users really fast and we're very very proud of that and then the social media and brand recognition followed suit so I think we're the number three or number four most followed fintech in the world on social media across all of our channels which is great shout outs to Cash App and Afterpay who were beating us but we're we're coming for them you share some of the viral hooks that that worked if you think about like consumer distribution there's sort of like this age-old model i actually remember like when we were kicking off our seat around a uh a partner from andres and orowitz sat in front of harry and i and said if you guys were a consumer inevitably at some point uh your company will be made or broken by your ability to spend 14 million dollars on facebook ads and i just remember coming out of the mini thing like that is just not that doesn't sound right like and they're a great fund like it's shout outs but like it doesn't sound right and then we actually we met with blackbird um a few months later and tom said to us tom humphrey from blackbird said to us uh this business will be made or broken on your ability to get to a negative cac which i think is like a much better way of framing it where it's like andreason will like burn the money and get the users and tom was like be smart figure out a way to grow with negative cac right but we thought about that for a long time.
7:12Harry Dixon:But I think like there is a natural viral sharing quality to what Harry and I refer to as like kind of like an aha moment. And saving money is an aha moment. You like want to tell people about this. And so we latched onto like every community we could. Like Harry was going into like Telegram channels and Discord channels for like moms in the Midwest. Wow. Like kind of planting viral seeds in there.
7:34Rory Garton-Smith:Yeah, we were doing a lot of posting. I think one of the big timing factors that I think is pretty interesting between the, I'll call like adoption of TikTok, is how the algorithmic changes work. And so, when we launched just to kind of lay the market out in the savings world. So, Honey had just been bought, which was an offer extension that used generic codes from the web. Buy PayPal for like$4 billion. dollars. Brands were not loving the experience because it was actually doing a lot of generic code use that wasn't uplifting. Mobile was becoming the dominant platform. And while Rory was at Apple, they launched mobile extensions, which is essentially the ability to help consumers across a browser journey.
8:23Rory Garton-Smith:And so, there were these big factors. There was also TikTok getting launched, which they took the algorithmic model of like, I don't know if you remember for Instagram, there was like iPow, Sway House, like all these like Instagram houses. And the social contract that they were all buying into is how the algorithm worked on essentially building like beating CPMs. So the CPM change was that you needed someone with clout or following to like it to break through that next thousand eyeballs. TikTok changed the model completely where they just put out good content. And so they said, we're going to, instead of show it to your friend, we're going to show it to someone.
9:00Rory Garton-Smith:If that someone engages, it will go and go and go. And so as we were kind of building this infancy of a product that was a win-win between consumer and brands, we were building content to support that, thinking this is going to take a long time. and so what we did was just create you know two posts a day every day for you know months and months and months and that's how we grew a natural audience that when we're actually really ready to go more viral towards the holiday period because that's when you know big spending happens it just like culminated with all these communities that you know you can't plan virality but it just like it was timing the way that we built a social following on a new platform and um i think they were like kind of the kindling for this like spark moment and we hilariously we because you can plan
9:50Harry Dixon:to some extent and we were like okay we're shopping seeking is coming all these and all these things are going to align we're blowing up a tiktok we're blowing up on reddit like it's all going to the styles are going to align but we have a few days before it kicks off and harry had just gotten married so he went off on his honeymoon and we're like we'll we'll be back on this in just a few days i went to a music festival in fiji called your paradise and i was like all right it's my first first week off in a year and then uh a few days later we woke up and everyone on slack was going crazy because it was like guys we've had like 10 000 signups in a minute now we've had like 20 000 signups and within like five or six hours we were the number one app in the u.s app store but just kind of like all these triggers we'd set in place just all hit at once and we're like okay you can't plan this we were hoping this would happen in a few weeks but here we are let's go i i was there's a photo of me sitting in fiji next to a pool with my laptop looking so stressed even though it was the best time ever i didn't sleep for like three days it was so
10:46Rory Garton-Smith:stressful oh my gosh incredible ride right so bring us to go into a bit more detail you're in
10:53Harry Dixon:fiji share a bit more about it we could just see so we had we have a slack channel internally called new user signups and it was just a slack hook anytime someone signed up via sso i that channel would just ping and you know for the first few weeks after we launched it was like every time it goes off everyone's like yeah we got a user let's go it was like a kind of trickle in and then i have this video i was filming my screen with my phone and it's just going like it's like slack is like hitting the rate limit um we ended up putting so many people through Google sign-on in 24 hours, the Google sign-on switched us off, which no one knows that that's a thing.
11:31Harry Dixon:No one knows there's a rate limit on Google sign-on. They don't put it anywhere. There's no setting to go and change that or discuss it. It's just a thing where they go, if a company gets X sign-ups in this time period, switch them off. They're probably getting attacked. And so we had to get on the phone with this random engineer. I was ringing Japan from Fiji, trying to get on the phone with this engineer to re-approve us. And he was like, oh i'm sorry we just assume you were getting spammed i see now that it's legitimate and they switched us back on but it was like it was absolute chaos that's fascinating because it's like it's
12:02Rory Garton-Smith:more likely that you are getting attacked than you are doing well like that's how rare the event is to google that's it yeah it's crazy i was like rory said just got married kind of taking a little bit of downtime i was on a boat back from rockness we're both from perth and um the weather had turned you know the freemantle docked fully come in and we were getting smashed on this like little boat where we're getting absolutely rocked and i just assumed my phone was waterlogged because like it was just constantly buzzing and like i couldn't check it if i wanted to because the swell was pretty gnarly but i like got back to port and i was like oh i need to get to a laptop very quickly
12:51Rory Garton-Smith:yeah it was yeah it was a kind of a wild few weeks and it kept going and going and going and it was the start of of checkmate and kind of you always face this chicken and egg problem when you're working both with brands and with consumers and so um you have to try and solve both where you know you need to add value which is working with the brands but the brands want the consumers to be able to then like integrate and spend their time because they're always doing this trade-off. And so, we were fortunate that that allowed us to then go deeper and deeper and back to the original, like, what changed in six months.
13:25Rory Garton-Smith:I think having that validity, because we've only been around for really a couple of years, like that kind of kickoff moment was only, you know, two and a bit years ago that now we actually had the resourcing to go and work with these brands on an individual basis. And that's where kind of some of these kickoff points of, it's a building block. Everything's like a house, you're building it. And, you know, a lot of the foundations were getting set then so we were a team of five at the time like literally
13:53Harry Dixon:five and um it's so funny because it to cut forward a few weeks a few weeks after that google ventures ended up leading our series a but one of the things i always remember from the first meeting with google ventures and she said what would you guys do if we like with the money if we invested harry and i both said like ops like immediately because we had so many just users writing to us and just tickets and customer support things and apparently because it wasn't obvious to us at the time but like well not to me but google ventures said later like you know one of the clear signs you need a series a is when you're so swamped with ops and like customer support that you like really need someone to bring in and we we end up the very first hire we made after our series a was like a an ops person to help out with all the support tickets and like it
14:35Rory Garton-Smith:was crazy yeah so what insights did you bring from apple and how are you from easy port that I guess turned out to be right and maybe any that were wrong as well. It was interesting. It was just like a crazy time. COVID was, you know, in full swing. Rory and I are both living in San Francisco and we kind of joke that we could have gone full degenerate and bought PlayStations and not do anything or you could build a company together. So, we kind of spent nights as neighbors. Yeah, it's one of the other. It has to be. Just fully standard.
15:10Harry Dixon:Yeah.
15:10Rory Garton-Smith:No matter what you do, you should be world-class in it. Yeah, exactly. And so, that's why now I'm Call of Duty, world number one.
15:22Rory Garton-Smith:But no, we were kind of jamming and like EasyPost for Clarity is like an unknown infrastructure provider that are pretty big. They power, they're like a multi-carrier shipping API. So, in Australia, it's like StarshipIt. But EasyPost, just for clarity, does Walmart and Fortune 1 companies and things like that. And so, I came in on partnerships team and I was really... I like listening to problems before just prescribing a solution because it may or might not fit them. And a lot of logistic stuff is obviously COVID-related. But the second thing that was happening was the iOS 14.5 update, which is Apple's ability.
16:03Rory Garton-Smith:And so that marketing pain point kept kind of nagging in my head. And so people just couldn't reach the right person. So that's kind of where Rory was directly on the team. So I'll kick it to Raw, but I think that was big.
16:18Harry Dixon:I was very lucky to be working on the iPhone team at the time. And I guess the insights there were very technical because it was all around like I could see a lot of changes happening in ad tech, primarily because Apple was launching their own ad network. and the privacy updates in iOS felt a lot more like a middle finger to meta and Google than it did as like a consumer thing. But I watched this and all we could see everywhere and all Harry could see it in his job was online stores are getting hurt. And all that does is like push everyone back towards Amazon, right? And so suddenly you have like millions of really good e-com stores around the world that are struggling to bring users in because all these ad networks have been shut down unless you start borrowing ads directly with like ginormous tech companies and that's all that that was about and we sat there and we were like there just has to be a better way to connect consumers and brands and um it really like the vision really started that symbol and to this day like is still that simple it's like we just want to connect consumers and brands in the best way possible and uh and and it's been a roundabout road to get there but now i think we've like we found what really truly works and we're just doubling and tripling down on it
17:23Rory Garton-Smith:so what gave you the conviction when you're at the when you can see how much power and influence these bigger platforms have when you're at the mercy to their changes how did you sort of build the conviction that you still wanted to fit in the middle of it um so that you could connect
17:38Harry Dixon:brands and consumers we're naturally risk averse people i mean we build a company that's based around frugality right um i think like nothing that we built is uh like you know every week you hear about like x percentage of startups were like destroyed by big tech this week like big tech added some feature that like killed all these startups building an ai marketing platform for brands and a company that connects consumers directly to brands it's not really the kind of thing that big tech do like we build on the rails of big tech and they love that and that's why products like the iphone are so successful that's why products like chrome are so successful because they allow this whole marketplace of things that creators have gone and created and um now that we're like much deeper in the tech world and like quite well networked with these companies like they adore people like us like that we are literally their market we're who they're building for and so um it wasn't so much of having like the balls to to go in and kind of like interfere it's more like we we saw that there was this wonderful op there and no one was going for it like absolutely no one was going for it harry and i might have been the first two people in the world to to really like spot that there was off the back of these privacy changes a really big opportunity and just totally go for it.
18:45Harry Dixon:And that door, I only see opening wider, not narrow. I think we're having a move away from the consolidation towards big tech. I think we're seeing a move away from M &A towards big tech, especially from the SEC. And now we're seeing sort of like, you know, these 49 % buyouts where it's like, bring some of the team and some of the founders across and the company IP remains. I think the scene has changed dramatically since the days where it was like, Google flick a switch and turn off 50 startups. It doesn't really seem to happen anymore.
19:15Rory Garton-Smith:Harry, you mentioned that Honey didn't provide the right upsell to brands. I'm just wondering if you could go a bit deeper. What was really missing in their product that you were like, actually, this is where we fit? Yeah. So, a lot of nuances here, and this might be too in the weeds, but there are platforms that connect advertisers. So, they're called affiliate networks. affiliate networks range from affiliate is like an influencer or it could be time magazine or it could be even like tv there is a wide range of it uh offers and offer platforms like a honey or retail me not fit into that category and so where i think you know they provide a solution is aggregation across all these platforms of all these merchants they're called advertisers so So, you know, if you're Aloyoga or Stanley Cups or whatever, you're one of those advertisers.
20:10Rory Garton-Smith:And what those platforms don't allow you to do is actually really interact with data on the identity front or on the content creation front. So, content could be an offer. And so, Honey built their whole entire platform, I'll call it over the top, which means they use just affiliate networks and no direct integrations to essentially try and change behavior. So they were really subject to like welcome 10 offers or save 20. And I think where brands really needed support was actually understanding who the shopper is and presenting them with custom content. And so to just kind of give some insights into our product, when users sign up to Checkmate, we are extremely transparent around data transfer.
20:56Rory Garton-Smith:So, what we figured out is that, like, Mason, you might be signed up to Key Sunglasses or someone like that, and they're sending you a bunch of emails and messaging to get their product. You've already given over your details, your name, date of birth, email, all this information that they're really wanting to know about you. And we were providing an access into the inbox. people it's a single sign-on and we figured out who you are and we extracted that for you as a consumer so those single-use offers we would show to them but when we integrate with brands now we can actually go cool like we know what mason's about do you want to bridge the gap because we know he hasn't converted in his normal time frame or hey you know he's looking at these other things so we're able to now take that kind of like data transfer and broker i would say this relationship between someone who has intent and a brand that wants to get in front of them.
21:52Rory Garton-Smith:And so the honey of the time couldn't do that. And neither of these other generic platforms, like if you've ever tried to type in, I want to discount code at X brand, you get taken to these like pages that are like, you try and unlock a code and never works. And like, that just sucks. And where we work with the brand is we generate it, but we make sure it's approved. And so, that wasn't really a part of their journey where they're kind of spraying and praying. And so, I think that's an opportunity that really lends itself to the next wave of personalized conversion, essentially. And really, the biggest converter is an offer.
22:30Rory Garton-Smith:That's pretty standard throughout history. My mom's favorite four-letter word is sales. So, I think you take that. that's right so anyway why is that your mom's favorite word oh i love the deal though i think that's just why you could be australian in it yeah she's gonna hate that one but i want to sit up i kind of think it also speaks to what you guys and the team find really important
23:03Harry Dixon:it's savings and no wonder she likes the sale it's wonderful and it's it's so funny because it's like the the vision harris has painted a few there like when we were telling the app story before you know we we got to like a million users in our network very quickly and we were like very excited about that and as we continue to build and build a build and now as harry mentioned like going in like working directly with stores plugging into the back end of stores like actually becoming like their ai marketing platform um our network crossed 260 million uh users like a few days ago which is like this is like now it's kind of like silly numbers you know it's like Like we refreshed and we're like, this is crazy.
23:41Harry Dixon:Like this is an insane amount of reach. And so the vision was just, it kind of like to this day, it baffles me how simple it is when you think about it. It's just like give people the write-off at the right place, the right time on the item that they care about. And they will convert. And that is the basis of any ad network. And that's all the marketing is, is plugging into that. And that's all the consumers want is plugging into that. And it literally is that simple. And it just, it turns out to execute it. you got to work 80 hour weeks for a long time and age dramatically, but here we are.
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24:13Rory Garton-Smith:What do you think was special about the timing and why it could only be done? It feels like this sort of simplicity feels like it could be an idea at any point in history, but what made it right?
24:26Harry Dixon:The first two that come to mind for me is one, the growth of Shopify has enabled anyone to go and make a storefront, which is huge. And a storefront that you can plug extensions into and you can run as your own storefront because a lot of Amazon storefronts are not really storefronts. It's like the skins of Amazon, right? On the Amazon website. But Shopify allowed anyone to go and create a brand. And that is ginormous. And they're a very, very good company. They're incredibly good at what they do. So I think like that's like, for me, that's like Catalyst 1. The second one is like kind of more of a tech answer, but like over the last four, five years, cpus and gpus have become unbelievable the ability to run on-site scripts pixels like anything on device has become so so so much easier for like people like me who like want to build things on device and um like 10 15 years ago you could like there was tech to do similar things to what we're doing but it would slow everything down so much and uh and i think like a lot of this like it's more on the cpu side than the gpu side but the cost of both and compute in general has gone down so much that it just totally makes sense for both consumers and brands to be able to like use stuff like this and not have an impact anything.
25:34Harry Dixon:So that's kind of like two very different answers there. You might have some thoughts as well, Ari.
25:39Rory Garton-Smith:No, I just, I mean, like earlier talking about marketing front, the pain points, reaching people, like it, you know, to elaborate on that network number, like, you know, we said earlier that like Andreessen was like, you got to spend all your money on meta. and I think people are fed up with meta I think cpms and things have blown out and cpcs so like this world of the you know way to reach people we're based on a cpa so all these acronyms cost per acquisition so when when a brand sells something we take a small cut of that but it's on the guarantee that we've actually moved the product so we're essentially a zero risk opportunity for a brand that instead of having to gamify all this content and stuff like that we go great you know we'll we'll put it we'll sell it and if you make money we'll hopefully make money with you and so that's where we become quite a good partner and now we've just been extending our network and so you know the analogies in the space would be what they call like demand side platforms or like dsp so like app lovin is one in the like mobile gaming space where they have an sdk that connects to a lot of apps there is the same kind of philosophy which is just extending reach for us And so, we have now signed these partnerships with some people we can say and some people we can't say.
26:58Rory Garton-Smith:The ones that we can't are like big TV providers in the US. And so, those channels are now picking up momentum and allowing us to reach people in their audiences through this custom connection. What's been the evolution of the business model? um interestingly we have always monetized consumers the similar way cpas but some brands we work with don't like to offer discounts as you kind of get it like for instance like seven for all mankind or frame denim and so um we're finding out interesting ways that the way our identity network has been built is now they just want to access that without being restricted to Checkmate's business models.
27:47Rory Garton-Smith:So, we do have like a data product that is getting a lot of momentum as well, which is allowing brands to essentially figure out who people are and when to reach them. And then we just give them that event trigger to essentially say, hey, Mason's good to go. You shouldn't hit him right now. And so, we're kind of a timing business if you think about it in this more like abstract conversion type experience and we're using AI models to do that. So we have a data product that is really enabling us to work with any brand, not just a discount heavy merchant. When did you start working so intimately with brands?
28:29Rory Garton-Smith:About six months ago. Yeah, it's been a bit of a journey. uh probably like nine months is when we started like ramping up and i think take us back to take us back to the beginning of the journey i'm curious like how you thought through the chicken and egg problem but what the the lows were in figuring that problem out and then coming out the top six months ago with here we are with brands yeah i'm i'm in a little bit trouble but No, you have to kind of sell the dream a bit. Like, you know, technically, like an affiliate integration is an integration. I think where we talked a lot earlier in, you know, our selling journey, it was like an optimization.
29:14Rory Garton-Smith:And so, our products can work on both rails. It works better when it's directly integrated because of the custom content and a number of other things. But we'd had some good over-the-top integration work with them. So I think going the easy path through a solved method gave us the ability to prove that there was something there. And so I think you kind of have to take shortcuts where you can, where we didn't really build the business around like, okay, we have to directly integrate with brands. Now we have kind of a two series like value that we add, which is like the really deeply ones we can do a lot.
29:52Rory Garton-Smith:You know, the other ones we can do a little. and so I think starting with the scaled approach and then moving into what we knew had to be done kind of got us there it kind of got us the validity and integration so millions and millions millions millions of people and then hardly any revenue and then was it six thousand percent yeah yeah something like that yeah and authenticity sells and I would love to personally learn about like we were testing these few things didn't work didn't work didn't work we started testing this and we started seeing some traction and like pulled that thread and we we dug into it I think there's yeah there's a few I mean you know if you want to go into stuff that I think like we I think we know we have everything solved definitely I think there's going to be be other learnings um one on the consumer front that um i think rory and i still believe to be not really solved in the market but something that um we didn't take the right swipe at was uh like the concept of like wishlisting and collections i think uh it's a really hard problem to solve for a number of reasons um but for us i mentioned we're a timing business And so, intent is everything.
31:14Rory Garton-Smith:And so, we take intent signals from your inbox, where you browse, stuff like that. And we are, I believe, one of the best position to actually figure out when and why people want things. But you have to really try and create this behavior where people want to save items. And without a discount, it didn't really work. The only time it worked was when an offer was present. and so we kind of learned that you have to be able to dynamically price which is essentially the the vehicle isn't offer um to be able to do that and so i think lower intent journeys saved and surmised you know maybe we looked at it a two time short time you know frame window like 30 days but like if you save a lot of items across the web getting to an actual sale is a lot more work than just providing a single use offer that we think uh expands the ltb for a brand
32:15Harry Dixon:or you know a conversion so i did a presentation at the last company retreat around sort of like basically what you're asking mason like things we've tried to find pmf on versus things we've definitely found pmf on and then just kind of like learnings from each and it was to really distill it it's sort of like uh the places where we have found strong pmf are only ever fit this exact criteria we are giving the right person the right offer at the right time and the places where we haven't has one of those three things has been like the mold has been broken and so like a good example like harry touched upon we had a crack at a wishlisting type of product and the reason why and i can name like so many companies that have tried this exact thing like carrot karma benji like there's literally so many companies have tried this exact thing none it hasn't worked for any of them most of them have tried other things and then gone through good stuff um but why doesn't it work?
33:08Harry Dixon:Because when someone wishlists a product, that's actually stopping the buying intent signal. That's saying, I'm not going to buy this right now. I'm going to buy it at a later date. I'm going to wait for another signal to go and buy this. And then theoretically, at a later date, when they do get sown, oh, hey, by the way, that thing you wanted, now it has a discount. They're no longer thinking about that item. It might be three months later. They're no longer in that buying journey. And so the reason why a regular ad network performs so well, Think about when you go to a website like, a classic example is like Fashion Nova.
33:37Harry Dixon:If you've ever gone on that website, you view an item on that website. You then go to any other website on the internet. They put a third-party cookie on your browser. Now they know who you are across the net. You go past any ad that they own and you see their product on another site. It was five minutes ago that you were looking at that product. You're so much more likely to convert because now it's like, oh, you have a Deormous product that you looked at five minutes ago. So you're in a shopping journey right now and you go and convert. and on every product that we've made that we found really strong traction with over the last six to 12 months has fit that exact mold and uh and so that's a really strong learning for us and it's i think like a good analogy we used in the last retreat was like when you get a flyer in the mail like why does it never convert you know like you get like a catalog in the mail like that it never drives buying behavior i don't remember the last time i opened my mailbox and was like great i kind of loved from target and i went and like bought something the timing is completely off and also the offer is so generalized like it's going to like every consumer that target would send that to millions of people it wasn't just to me so um we think we're we're incredibly good at getting really granular and i think this is where the the future of ad tech is moving because if you think about like what meta are really good at and what rocks are really good at is not one-to-one interaction it's broad stroke interaction that will take a generalized approach and say okay rory is in his 30s and he lives in new york and therefore he probably likes a clothing company like theory in theory because like that's who they tend to go after so i end up in this demographic cohort of people they can go after and they can plug away with cac at that um where we want to take this and where we think it's heading is literally a one-to-one level where it's like rory is this and this and we know that he likes theory because he was there he was on that side a moment ago he was in that store a moment ago now's the time to hit him where's the best place to hit him sms is a push is it email is it in our app like where can we reach him let's reach him let's convert him and um so that that's been the big learning and i think like it's nice seeing the world in these sort of axioms and building according to these axioms because whenever we do it it works so um i think that's like yeah that's the last the big change over the last 12
35:40Rory Garton-Smith:months is we got smart yeah strong opinions loosely held i think that's the strength of the team where it's like we're not afraid to walk stuff back like if we had advice for any other
35:50Harry Dixon:the founders out there it's like try like so many things like try because some of the stuff we found pmf and we're like we had no idea that how it would work and now it's working like crazy and then to the contrary there's there's features we added that we did everything the right way it was like a user interview suggested it which is always you should always take that feedback and we polled people and they were like we'll all use that like a classic example was everyone we spoke to when we first launched was like i would just love it if you could make it so i could upload my own gift card and then when i'm at checkout remind me to use that gift card and harry and i like that's a great idea and everyone's asking for it and it comes up in user interviews so we built it in and absolutely no one used it we literally have like 12 people in history interact with this and i was like okay interesting like user interviews aren't aren't the be all and end or like honestly user data is where it's at and so then that got us thinking like well what like what does find pmf you know and um it's usually the simpler the better the most ungated the better the less user interactions the better and harry talks a lot about passive flows where it's like if you can slot into existing user behavior and uh and find something there it's much easier than trying to change user behavior and a lot of the most successful companies just slot into what you're already doing and find a way to monetize it nicely and provide value and um that's that's a large part of what we focus on now what have been some features in
37:07Rory Garton-Smith:the last 12 months that have that you're really proud of you don't talk about enrichment harry And I mean, yeah, I mean, selling, well, when I say selling the data, it sounds bad when I place it like that. But just to kind of go into like a problem set around like what do brands know about you? Because like we talk a lot about brands because I think that has been the unlock in here. You know, the value we're providing, I think is clear. We talk about savings at Nauseam. But what you see behind getting a single-use code pushed to you is made up of so many different data points. And so, turning that kind of engine is something that's really been our focus in the last six months.
37:43Rory Garton-Smith:And so, when you think about who do you actually know or what do you know about a person, it's very limited. So, say you go to Key Sunglasses while I bring them up. They're one of our first brands. They took a chance on us and they've been an awesome Australian and US partner. Yeah. And so, what you get is largely just like your name and like some random location. Like, it's even really quite hard to abstract out like even some UTMs that are broken and things. So, UTMs are where people come from or where they're going and things like that. Where we can really expand that understanding is like we can know, you know, demographic, gender, you know, really granular stuff about location.
38:24Rory Garton-Smith:We can know where you've been shopping. We know how much you spend. We know receipt data. We know what you're interested in. We know when you're on a shopping journey. We know when you've just made a purchase. Like all these different micro factors that actually start really illuminating who and what they care about. And so, you can create like tags or segments in, you know, either the brand's marketing platform or ours that you can then go, great, I want to reach these specific attributes like travelers, for instance. So, if you have an upcoming flight, which we figure out because we see the email land in their inbox, that's an example of like, great, you know, maybe we should push you some suitcases or something like that.
39:06Rory Garton-Smith:And so, that is like a big unlock on how the offer is delivered. It looks very simple on the other end, but it's kind of all, you know, the unsexy but sexy stuff on the back end that I think has been where we've been investing our time. I love it. It's like a duck. Moves really hard under the water, but it looks simple on top. I would just start using that. It's like the product duck analogy. I don't know why it really came to my mind. I'm a duck man. That's so funny.
39:42Harry Dixon:Was it 290 million users have registered? 260. It's coming up a lot each day. It might be 270 now. I haven't checked it out. By the time this comes out, I'm sure it'll be 290.
39:55Rory Garton-Smith:What have you learned about how consumers are behaving on the internet? And how have you taken that data into how you build your own product?
40:05Harry Dixon:That's a great question. People shop less on Tuesdays than they do on Wednesdays. People are typically, there are two shopping windows during the day. They typically shop at either lunchtime or they shop at like 6 p.m. Not a lot of shopping in the morning, not a lot of shopping late at night or during like peak work hours. um there is a pretty even split between mobile and desktop shopping now we see a slight edge on mobile um for lower AOV items and a slight edge on desktop for higher AOV items uh we can capitalize on both so that's great um I think like overwhelmingly a lot of people trust a wide variety of online stores I think Shopify for that like the back in the day it was like this store seems dodgy you know like stores have like a lot more trust and uh we have seen an expansion of the number of places that people shop at over the last few years so it used to be like our average user would regularly check out on like 18 stores and now your average user regularly checks out on 41 stores which is a huge change that's a huge market change people are willing to try way more brands when they used to find a just absolute one favorite brand and just um and and you know just only shop there um i think uh users are much more digitally savvy than they used to uh i think there's standard checkout flows that just like completely work i mean we've yeah we we have a lot of data on this so you look at it a lot and honestly it's pretty fun um there are huge shopping spikes like five times per year there's black friday cyber monday there's labor day sales there's memorial day sales and then actually back to school sales are like very hot we see a lot of like a lot of stuff kicking off there um and uh what else what else what else we learn area there's a lot of stuff in
41:40Rory Garton-Smith:it i i actually think a lot of it individualizes the brand so you know with the data we've been now to uncover some things but like you know back to key you know hype them up again but like they do a late night shopping sprint so the trend would say after 9 p.m is bad but they get these like late night shoppers where they have like pretty steep bogo sales and stuff and so like that is like actually a big conversion time so that's like an interesting part um you know other people like bathers because the u.s is obviously winter that their time is not now so like friday side monday wasn't very good for them but then they have their other periods there is like what comes up new new new year new me uh which is like all vitamin companies and so like as much as you aggregate it together i think the general like throughput is like category specific which is actually part of the personalization journey because we started making things generic and what we learned is that it's not and so like we run hundreds of a b tests on timing and so like putting it off in front of someone it actually performs worse if it's before 15 minutes 15 minutes is the sweet spot if you do it 20 30 an hour two hours it drops off significantly and like we have stats significance on 15 minutes which is crazy and then we ran that across all verticals all aovs and categories so it's like that surprised us i was like nah like let's yeah give it five minutes that seems really good and it's like not so um very very interesting yeah yeah super interesting i mean i think lots
43:18Harry Dixon:also like uh kind of a shout out to a lot of the partner brands we work with but one of the learnings we've had over the last 12 months is like online stores and marketing teams are very clever very very very clever marketing has become a deeply technical role i think it was always somewhat technical but over the last few years deeply technical every store we work with are very fluent in like CAC, ROAS, POAS, LTV, attribution channels, how they all work, how they fit together. They're very in the numbers and in the weeds. They truly understand what they're doing. And that makes our life easy because our product, like we can pitch and say like, hey, we're going to multiply your ROAS.
43:52Harry Dixon:They're like, great, let's go. Like it's fantastic. Like with online stores, e-com in general has attracted some very, very clever people. And marketing has gone deeply technical. And I think it's fascinating. And I love being a part
44:04Rory Garton-Smith:of it what have you learned about working with and selling to brands uh you can't just give people data um you have to help them implement it no matter how smart they are no matter how in the
44:19Harry Dixon:weeds they are but a product still has to be a product you know it's still got to be like there's
44:24Rory Garton-Smith:a call to action like yeah yeah and i think that's that's the product bit i think we give we gave people a lot of those overarching stats we just walked through, which was like, we gave them a snapshot on their business. And that was interesting for a second. And then it's like, how do you actually impact? And so, as I talked about all the hardships that brands are going through, it means that it actually removes the noise from what they have to do, which is performance, which is ultimately like keeping the business profitable and then selling. And so, performance to me is sales and so we actually removed a lot of the product noise around just like nice to haves and it's all need to like you need to impact performance so like we build products that can do that if it doesn't do that then you know what's the point so i think something super unique about our business is we have our own channels to test and to optimize our ad algorithm i like draw analogies from like Applovin, which, you know, bought and like had one of the biggest gaming studios because they wanted to figure out exactly how to find the right content for the right person at the right time.
45:37Rory Garton-Smith:And they use that up to an extent where, you know, this year they divested out of that product, but it was kind of the chicken and egg problem we've kind of kept talking about, which is you need the data flows on the user perspective to be able to actually change and unoptimized. And so that's where I think we'll go deeper and deeper into, you know, like more an AI marketing platform to help across the marketing stack for these brands because we just want to get performance for that. Has it been hard or easy to evolve your brand or your reputation from like savings app to to like a genuine performance driver for these brands um to share a bit about how your brand
46:23Harry Dixon:has evolved in their eyes um people say that names don't matter names do matter names matter hugely like what you call something conjures imagery in your head i think it really does matter um so that's that was one big learning i guess like on a personal note like i got over stage fright pretty fast and so we eventually had to go and do like you know stand in front of like scary investors and things like that or even just like standing in front of the company or hiring people like i feel like nothing like i have like no like zero stage right in any scenario i don't even remember what it feels like if there's one thing like i'm i'm truly proud of harry and i even more so like like hitting revenue is fantastic you know releasing products to do well is fantastic like super proud of that but like one of the hardest things of all is building a company culture that people want to work out and be there we have like very very high employee retention and i'm very proud of the culture that we've built and like our employees hang out without us and that's sick.
47:15Harry Dixon:They want to hang out. They want to do stuff. One of the guys on my team messaged me a few weeks ago on a Saturday and he was like, I wish the weekend would end because I'm so jazzed about what we're doing right now. And I was like, this is that cult-like thing that you can't fake. It's like a real thing. And it's been so much fun. But with that, there's a reason people go to startups and not big companies. They want to be in the trenches. They want to have the crazy stuff go down. And so we try and foster that environment and it works. But sometimes you You have to be one of the crazy founders.
47:45Rory Garton-Smith:You have to create new songs every week.
47:50Harry Dixon:I made for our employees and investors just like this internal tool to watch our revenue over Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But it was like a rocket launching and every 10 grand of revenue, it would go past another milestone. But the milestones had names. It was like pizza, donut. And we watched it go off. I'm like, can it reach the pretzel? Let's go. It was all like our revenue goals and we had like internal company betting. People were betting on how much revenue we would do. Amazingly, and we're so proud of this, but every single person's bet was wrong and we exceeded the entire table. Like we were way off the table.
48:24Harry Dixon:Like the revenue was so much higher than anyone thought. And we were like, oh, so clearly we're not that good at predictive analytics yet. But it was a good, we failed off. We failed off.
48:34Rory Garton-Smith:Yeah. Yeah. What worked, what didn't work at the seed round? Yeah. And I think this is like a good off the back of, I think, Rory being an exceptional human is that like we kind of have, I would say like imposter syndrome a little bit. We're like, you know, grew up in Australia, tall poppy syndrome is real. And in the US, you just bred into a very different culture. And you have to be good at elevator pitches. You have to be good about talking about what you are good at and, you know, kind of not showing those weaknesses. And what we learned at the fundraising was like, one, people doesn't really matter if it's domain expertise.
49:11Rory Garton-Smith:They just want to see you have tenacity and ability to be successful in a domain, which I think we had done at some points. And then the second part of it is like, people say it, but it's true. It's like a people culture fit, both on the investor, founder side. And so, I think that's hugely overlooked where you have to want to work with people. And I think that's true with hiring, but even more importantly, funding where we are both very jovial people in general and to bullshit, but we work hard. And so, we actually found like a litmus test that worked both ways was like even if we're getting down and out on like back-to-back investor calls, we would make a rule with ourselves to always be jovial to begin with, which means like we would be laughing or having banter.
50:05Rory Garton-Smith:And I think that like helps bring people in. And if they don't get brought in by that, like, fuck it.
50:13Harry Dixon:We set the call off on the right foot. But even like a deeper rule we had, Harry, which I just remembered was we, so we were offered term sheets from some funds and one of these funds on the calls we have with them, they never smiled. Not one single time. And we deliberated internally and I just thought like, I just don't, like we just don't like these people. Like they were so cold and they were trying to be so like businessy. And then I adore the cap table we built because we like everyone on it. we really like i want to see everyone in our capital with the great people and every one of those calls we spent the first 20 minutes yapping and bantering and hearing about their life and you know like what are you up to like what do you do for fun or whatever and then and i remember so succinctly like at the seed round you know some of the investors coming in they were like we know you guys haven't got everything figured out this is a whole new idea but we're backing with people that's what we're backing and i later i think we both learned a lot later like that is the nature of the seed round it's like they know there's a good chance you pivot so back the people and know that they'll figure it out and um now i think like if i was giving advice to any anyone raising a seed route like you as the person the c route is much more important than the company that completely changes for series a and series b but at the seed round it's like it's it's you that they're really assessing and um we love everyone that we brought in like so much it's such a great cap table
51:30Rory Garton-Smith:i think that is true i think the other cultural thing though that like even tom and blackburn and we appreciate the wider team is like hiring is hard and what we do is we have we ask you know handful of investors to send a quick note to candidates so we're trying to get nudged over where it's this kind of like momentum swell so i would say more like free advice that i think costs zero and it kind of proves if you have the right people is get a few of those key stakeholders to just explain how they see the world. And I think that really helps because like we're not safe as houses yet. You know, we have big ambitions, but it's like, you know, we're doing the steps to get there and people do take risks.
52:14Rory Garton-Smith:They are joining from, you know, organizations that are a little safer than ours. And, you know, that's where you have to, I think, yeah, make sure that you can just provide as much context. So, it's been a good idea.
52:27Harry Dixon:Getting those are. Getting those very first early employees can be so tough because they're taking a bet and leaving their cushy job right. One of the things, we would do everything it took. Harry and I were making personalized Spotify playlists so that when they joined the call where we make them the job offer, we were like, we made you this playlist. We're all going to push play at the same time. It would be like big soundtrack, like Hans Zimmer soundtracks from Interstellar. That's amazing. We were like, all right, welcome to the offer call. you know because like that this is why people join startups this is why they want that experience because like apple's never going to do that to you you know and so and it worked it was really impactful it totally worked in a in a year from now what are some bets that the team will be making on where the company will be i want to be well i want to be synonymous with savings everywhere i i want to be uh maybe 12 months is is ambitious for this so let's call it like two three years but every single online store in the US, I want our name at checkout.
53:29Harry Dixon:The same way that our Afterpay is synonymous with financing and you saw that logo everywhere, we want Checkmate to be on every single store in the world in like two, three years time. And we have a roadmap that can get us there and no reason why we shouldn't. Amen.
53:49Harry Dixon:Absolutely loved it. So yeah, thank you so much for having us.
53:56Rory Garton-Smith:Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn more from other ambitious people building, designing and creating the world that we all want to live in, then please hit the subscribe and follow button. It would mean the world to us, the founders, the operators and the investors who join us on Wild Hearts. This podcast is a labor of love from the Blackbird team and day one. The show is produced by Camilla Herring and Melia Rayner at Blackbird. Our marketing genius is Eva Telemachus and our editors are from day one, Annie Jones and Sanjay Chabaria. Thank you all so much for listening.
54:35Rory Garton-Smith:We'll see you next week.
From the publisher
When Apple's iOS privacy changes hit, most people saw a headache. Rory Garton-Smith and Harry Dixon saw something else: millions of brands suddenly unable to reach customers, and no good solution in sight. So they built one.
Checkmate connects consumers with personalised offers at the exact moment of intent, replacing spray-and-pray marketing with something precise enough that household brands are now paying attention. Eight-figure ARR. 260 million users. Revenue up 6,000% in six months.
But the more interesting thing is what they've learned along the way. Because when you sit inside the shopping journeys of hundreds of millions of people, patterns emerge. Shopping windows. Platform preferences. How intent signals behave. What converts and what doesn't - and exactly why. That data is now the foundation of an AI marketing platform that goes well beyond savings.
In this conversation with Mason Yates, Rory and Harry talk about how they found the gap, how they solved the chicken-and-egg problem between brands and consumers, and where the intelligence they've built is taking them next.
