Adam Kitain: Be Helpful – Why Going the Extra Mile Always Pays Off

[00:00:01] Hello and welcome to My Biggest Lesson, the show that brings you the key learnings from the most influential founders, executives, and investors in the Colorado tech community. My name is Adam Burrows. Adam Kitain And I'm Chris Erickson. Together we are the co-founders of Range Ventures, an early stage venture firm based in Denver. You can find out more about what we're up to at range.vc. Our guest this week is Adam Kitain.

[00:00:28] Adam is the co-founder of IntelliGems, a profit growth platform that helps e-commerce brands make smarter decisions through experimentation and personalization. The company is a Techstars 2021 Boulder grad and recently closed a great Series A. Adam, thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, happy to be here. Adam.

[00:00:58] This is going to be a lot of fun today, right? Going back? Yeah, yeah. Am I the first time you've had a second Adam on the show? You are. You are. Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining us. We'd love to hear me. We'll take you from the top. Tell us a little bit about IntelliGems and how you came to start the company. Cool. So yeah, I'm Adam Kitain. I'm the CTO and co-founder at IntelliGems. And IntelliGems, we call it a profit growth platform for e-commerce brands. But maybe starting a little bit at the beginning or even before IntelliGems.

[00:01:28] So Drew is my co-founder. He's the CEO. He and I worked together for a number of years at a ride-sharing company called Via. And I was on the engineering side. He was on the operations side. And together we built dynamic pricing. So Via was based in New York. And we very much competed with Uber and Lyft on shared rides in New York City. Via really pioneered the sharing model where multiple people would get in the same car and was really effective and efficient in New York. We'd have people walk to the corners.

[00:01:57] Anyway, Via started at $5 flat rides anywhere in New York City or at least in the zone that they served, which was an awesome model for growth and a way to get people into the product and $5 flat rides just whenever. No surge pricing. Just $5. The unit economics on those probably not going to fly in 2024 or 2025. It didn't fly. It didn't even fly in 2017. There was some back of the envelope, Matt, that you could do where you could see $5 getting towards unit economics. That made sense.

[00:02:27] And there was some assumptions based on scale and density and things like that. So $5 wasn't totally off the mark. But as Via continued to grow and continue to scale and as Uber continued to grow and scale, Uber actually would go as cheap as $3 on some rides and then up to $20 something dollars. And so what would end up happening is the invisible hand of the market. Via ended up with all these really long, tough to get economically good rides. And then all of the really short economically good rides would go to Uber because

[00:02:57] they were cheaper. And so actually, hence the need for a more dynamic and variable pricing model to try and fight the hand of the invisible market. So we moved away from a flat $5 pricing model into a more dynamic model based on distance and time of day and origin and demand and weather and all sorts of traffic and all sorts of factors. Built that for a number of years. Again, I was on the engineering side and Drew on the operations side, he was sort of like the head of revenue,

[00:03:24] pulling the levers of the engine that my team was building. 2020 came around and both due to COVID and sharing really taking a hit as well as the company pivoting its model based on capital requirements and things like that. And Drew and I were looking for an opportunity to take our hard-earned knowledge about pricing and elasticity and profit optimization and things like that to an industry that might not be as sophisticated

[00:03:52] or data-driven when it comes to pricing. So a few iterations later, we ended up in e-commerce. And basically, our initial goal was help e-commerce merchants make more money through better pricing tools. And our first product at IntelliGems was a price A-B testing tool. So we started the company January 2021. So just about four years ago exactly. Went through the Techstars Boulder program that winter. You know, started building from there. So that's a little bit about IntelliGems and our origin story.

[00:04:23] Awesome. And I know you guys have gone through a few twists and turns. So you said that was the first product. Where are you at today? Yeah. So today, we are almost 30 people. We raised a Series A over the summer. I have about 1,500 merchants using the platform. Where the product evolved initially was not just A-B testing prices. So I know imagine some of our first customers, all of our customers today still sell on Shopify, which is quite a big e-commerce platform. Some of our first customers were Colorado-based.

[00:04:51] So Shinesty, which sells underwear, among other things. Sheets and Giggles, which sells eucalyptus sheets. And then a number of other companies. And let's say, Shinesty that sells boxers. They had the question, you know, how much should I charge for my boxers? What happens? Right now, they're $25.99. What would happen if I charged $26.99 or $27.99 or $28.99 for them? And so that was the initial question. And that was the initial product. It was A-B testing and measuring conversion.

[00:05:15] And then getting a picture of elasticity and understanding where I can increase price in order to extract more value and profit from my customers. Where a decrease in price might yield an outsized improvement in conversion rate to drive more sales, which would then also yield higher profit, albeit at lower margins. But then people started asking, well, what about my shipping rates and my free shipping threshold and the discounts and the buy three and save X and all those kinds of things.

[00:05:44] And so as people started asking questions that were natural extensions of, okay, I charged $25.99 for this pair of boxers. But then there's a lot of other dollar and cents type questions beyond that. That was like where we expanded first was A-B test anything dollars and cents on your store was sort of the next evolution. So again, that was shipping rates and discounts and things like that. And then whenever people would say, can you A-B test content or images or the color of the button or user flow?

[00:06:14] We generally said no to those requests because while we had the underlying capability and technology, didn't feel like we were differentiated in market. And there were some like really cheap competitors, namely Google Optimize, which was literally a free Google tool that you could do all that stuff. And we were never going to win against a free Google tool. And so didn't compete with any of those tools until Google Optimize decided to sunset the product as part of their transition from universal analytics over to GA4 a couple of years ago.

[00:06:44] And so we saw that as an opportunity and stepped in there and we're like, okay, we can now not just A-B test anything dollars and cents, but A-B test anything on your site. That's an unusual thing. Usually when Google makes a move for a startup, it usually goes the other way. You're like, oh crap, Google's making a move. They're probably coming into our space. You're like, oh, bank error, you're a favorite, right? They've been getting out of our space. A hundred percent. And I also like, there were a number of things and we can maybe circle back to this,

[00:07:11] but there were a number of elements about that being in the right moment at the right time and ways that that worked out in ways that we didn't foresee and go to market and how we position ourselves and agency partners and things like that. But so that was like, that was tremendous. That was back in around August of 2023. So a bit over a year and a half ago. At the time, we were approaching a million in ARR and things were good. But since then, like things have also moved really quickly.

[00:07:40] So that was a year and a half ago. And then where we are today, on top of A-B testing, anything where we're really thinking is like, how do we go beyond just testing? Because we don't aspire to just be a testing platform. We weren't really like, our mission is to help e-commerce brands make more money through sophisticated tools. And testing is one of them, but there's a lot of other tools. So we built and deployed a tool last summer. We call it personalizations, but it's basically personalized experiences on site

[00:08:05] and helping really tailor the experience or discounts or shipping thresholds to people as they come to your site based on different factors that we can know about them. And A-B test those and then find opportunities where maybe one experience works great on desktop, but it doesn't work as well on mobile. And you can turn that into a personalization where IntelliGems controls when these experiences are shown in hidden.

[00:08:30] And then going forward, we see a lot of opportunity in different widgets like bundles and buttons that allow you to buy more of an item and get discounts and save and really different ways of merchandising, upsells and discounts and things like that. Again, these are features that exist in the market, but really sort of taking a holistic approach of what's going to drive and increased profit, both how do we A-B test them and optimize them,

[00:08:57] but then also deliver just like a consistent and cohesive experience with all of these widgets. That's sort of what we're thinking about now. So when I started by saying we are calling ourselves a profit growth platform, this is sort of like where we're thinking about going and thinking about growth tools and growth features for our brands. Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, I know you mentioned you were at Via in New York with Drew, your co-founder. He's still in New York. Some of the team's in New York, but you moved out here.

[00:09:26] So what prompted that and how have you found being in Colorado and kind of building the company remotely? Yeah. I mean, I love Colorado. Moved out here in 2020. I actually moved from Tel Aviv. So I lived in New York for four years and worked for Via originally in New York, but all of the engineering at Via was done in Tel Aviv, Israel. So I moved within the company from New York to Tel Aviv in 2017 and spent three years on the R&D side in Israel.

[00:09:54] My wife and I, so there's a half personal story here. My wife and I met in Tel Aviv and got married there. And that was in 2019. And as we look towards the future and starting a family, really wanted to move back to the United States to be around our families and the support system. And so New York felt prohibitively expensive knowing that I wanted to potentially start a company and start a family. I was not going to be able to live in New York City.

[00:10:24] And I grew up in the Burbs in Westchester and didn't necessarily want to live in Westchester. And then Nikki grew up in LA. And I wrongly imagined all of California as being like LA, which... And also I know LA is undergoing a lot right now. So I feel really bad throwing shade on LA. But I did not want to live in LA and felt like California

[00:10:51] was also equally potentially unaffordable. So we were considering different places that had tech hubs that also had quality of life values that were similar to Tel Aviv that we really enjoyed where it didn't feel like it was about the car you drove or the clothes that you were wearing, but going hiking on the weekends and being outside and being with family, going to the beach. I mean, you can't do that in Denver, but that was a big activity in Tel Aviv.

[00:11:17] And so I picked Denver and I've been loving living here. Yeah. What's it been like being here? And I know you've gotten to know a lot of other companies. We'd love to hear if there's any companies... You mentioned Shynist, you mentioned Sheets and Giggles. Love both those companies. But any companies here that you're particularly excited about that you've seen in your journey here? Yeah. I've seen a number of Techstars classes go through, Techstars Boulder classes. I'm excited for that to come back to the ecosystem. I think that was really exciting.

[00:11:46] And I know a lot of the Colorado startup community was rallied and built around that. So that was a big part of it. I mean, I remember going through the program and all of our mentors in the program were based in Boulder and we would go up to Boulder every couple of weeks and just have coffee with everyone. And there's so crazy, the density of smart, successful entrepreneurs and people who are involved in that ecosystem that are here both in Denver and in Boulder.

[00:12:15] But to answer your question, one of the companies that I've been really close with, they're in our space. We share a bunch of mutual investors, is Two Boxes. So Kyle and Evan over there, they're also in broadly the e-commerce space, but they focus very much more on the warehousing side and specifically on returns. So they have a whole spiel that they can give you about how the returns process is broken and all of the items that get sent back generally end up in a big pile that generally ends up in the trash.

[00:12:45] And their aim is to actually improve that process and both save the warehouse's money, save the brand's money and save the landfill from a bunch of trash. And so I'm very envious of their model. They know this space super well and they've got a great team. So Kyle's based here in Colorado. I know they've raised money also from Matchstick and another e-commerce specific number we share. Oh, and from you. Cool. I didn't know that.

[00:13:15] There you go. I didn't even know I was plugging a range company. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Yeah, but extra credit for you. Boom. The one thing about Two Boxes, I'll say, and I should have Evan on almost, because he's kind of taken leadership in this now for them. They have the best content, natural content production I've ever seen, which is like their return of the week or return of the month. Yeah, you can start. The craziest stuff. Oh my God. I don't know all of the examples, but my favorite that I saw recently was Evan posted. It was a picture of a candle that was literally burnt.

[00:13:45] The entire candle was in a glass jar and there was no wax left. And then the person returned it expecting a refund. It's like, what? You like the candle? Like you burned all 80 hours of this candle and now you're returning it? It was like, people are crazy. Yeah. They probably did get a refund too. That's where Two Boxes is obviously trying to change that. Exactly, exactly. Which is the nature of that post. So I think that they've got, there's so much wrong with it. And I didn't appreciate it when I started getting into e-commerce. But yeah, a lot of these brands

[00:14:14] deal with almost 30% returns, which is just, the system isn't built for that. You know, the system is built for pulling things off of the shelf and sending it, getting it to your door, not then getting it from everyone's door back to the shelf. Another opportunity for IntelliGems too, right? In reducing returns on the front end, potentially as part of the, part of the problem. Yeah. And actually, neither here nor there, but have helped customers A-B test some of their return policies because it's a big, it's a big cost driver for them as returns. Absolutely. Well, let's segue into kind of the main, for us,

[00:14:44] we want to talk about, which is your biggest lesson. So you've seen a bunch of interesting stuff via, you know, starting your own company, IntelliGems and beyond. What's the lesson you want to share? Okay. So I've been thinking about it. It's going to sound super corny, but it's one of our core values at IntelliGems. And it's something that I really believe is important, which is being helpful and saying yes and going above and beyond for people. And, and it always pays off.

[00:15:14] And well, maybe it doesn't always pay off, but more often than not, the winds down the road will happen because you went above and beyond for someone today. And I have a few examples of that. I was trying to think of like good examples, but one that ties a cute big component of the story together was like, when I was at Via, I started relatively junior and I was on the rider growth team. So figuring out how to get more people to take those $5 rides. And there was an event in New York on the driver team

[00:15:42] to just sort of get all the drivers excited about driving for Via. And that was like, not the team I was on. It was not part of my job, but they were looking for help setting up and cleaning down and breaking down the event. And so I went and volunteered and helped do that. And, and riding the subway to and from the event, I rode with this woman, Megan Richer, who was a principal on that team and just finished business school and was leading that team.

[00:16:10] So I had never really interfaced with her. Didn't really know her very well, but we rode to and from this event together on the subway, got to know each other much better, really hit it off. And that like, was maybe the basis of that relationship. Fast forward like eight years, I applied to Techstars and it turns out that Natty Zola, who was on the selection committee for Techstars at the time, his sister-in-law was Megan Richer. And so he reached out, he heard that Drew and I worked at Via and he's like, oh, my sister-in-law worked at Via. And he reached out to Megan

[00:16:40] and asked Megan, what did you think of these guys, Adam and Drew? And she had really positive things to say about us. And I think that like, if I hadn't volunteered for that event and helped out, even though it wasn't related to my job, it wasn't with the people that I was working with. I just wanted to help out. And, you know, maybe I wouldn't have gotten to ride the subway with Megan and maybe she wouldn't have had as positive things to say when Natty asked her and then I wouldn't have gotten into Techstars and, you know, so many other things down the road. So that's one example. And again, I get kind of a corny one,

[00:17:08] but even with our customers, I mean, our earliest customers, we spent so much time helping them. And I was basically a theme contract website developer for half of our earliest customers and things would break that were absolutely not related to IntelliGems. And going in and fixing them, I would either learn about features that Shopify had that I didn't know about that we were able to leverage.

[00:17:37] They would be so ecstatic and so grateful for our help that they would introduce us to people who, of course, we had no idea that they knew that ended up being helpful with intros or getting us on their podcast, which got us more connections and things like that. So it's in our company values and we really believe it. And I think that when we work with our team and one of our objectives for the team last year was building what we called the 11-star experience, which we stole from Brian Chesky in one of his blog posts.

[00:18:07] But maybe he stole from somewhere else. But if you go above and beyond for people, they really, really appreciate it. And right now, we're not in a phase of trying to eke out profitability or trying to be as efficient as we can be. We're still building trust and building the foundations of what we hope to be a much, much bigger company someday. And so the more

[00:18:36] that we can help people, even if it's not related to something that, A, we're getting money from. Like, all the time, people reach out to our support team and say, X, Y, and Z has broken on my site and I just installed IntelliGems. Like, we think you did it. And so often, it has nothing to do with us, but if we can go and even spend 20 minutes to help them fix the problem, A, that buys a lot of positive trust and that goes a long way. So, yeah, it's kind of corny,

[00:19:05] but being proactive and helping out and I think is a really good long-term perspective. What's the act, like you said, it's one of your company values. Have you actually codified it? Is there a phrase that you use or it's just the ethos of it? Yeah, I mean, the phrase that's on our website is be helpful, which is number two to number one is putting our customers first, which is also a similar vein, but being helpful goes beyond our customers.

[00:19:34] So I gave a few examples, but sometimes it's technology partners and a technology partner, hey, IntelliGems, can you help show that we're not at fault for a problem or help A-B test our value proposition and that we're actually delivering the value for this customer and yeah, there's a lot of situations where we're not making any money in it, we don't have any skin in the game, maybe no real incentive to jump in, but other than

[00:20:05] creating equity and social capital that way. I mean, this one resonates with me a lot. One of our core values that we've codified since the beginning is, you know, in our case, we say yes to every Colorado founder. Like, that's one of our values and obviously for us, that doesn't mean we're going to invest. We're going to invest in very few, but genuinely want to be, you know, a resource and supporter for any Colorado founder because we admire the heck out of what they're doing, right? And I think it sounds similar to what you guys do. I mean, anybody who's starting a Shopify business,

[00:20:34] you know the stuff they're going through and how difficult it is and the stress they're under and so, you know, I think they appreciate that. They appreciate it. Yeah. How do you, you know, how do you balance that particularly with customer service or let's say even on sales or having metrics and, you know, you don't want people spending all day long being helpful with, you know, give me a shoulder to cry on because I want to talk about my cat. It's the extreme, right? But making sure they do go that extra mile. Yeah. It's a, it's a really tough balance.

[00:21:05] Even for me as a founder, Andrew, like, feedback that we get all the time is that I need to be better at saying no because there's a lot of things that we say yes to that create debt as opposed to capital down the road. Now, okay, we've got this thing that we're supporting because we said yes and we're not getting paid very much for it and it's not in the core, it's not in the strike zone. So, sometimes those,

[00:21:35] those things actually cost more than you even anticipate and so, hopefully, in aggregate, the value in aggregate outweighs the cost but so, there is a little bit of some intuition that goes in here. I think that also, as you get more operational and you talk about, okay, my support team or my, yeah, my customer support team, they have a lot of people that need their help and so, like, also, you know,

[00:22:04] if three people need help and going above and beyond for person A means that I don't get to help persons B and C, well, that's not necessarily then being helpful and so, like, I think that it's trying to make space and time and, you know, when there are extra minutes in the day or hours in the day or, you know, if the, if the inbox is light or, you know, but there's nothing else pressing going on being able to, to go above and beyond so, I think there's, you know,

[00:22:32] finding those are opportunities but also, you know, there's also then that trickles up and it's like, maybe, maybe we want to have more people on this team so there can be more space so we can be more helpful and again, it's not, you know, very much, right now our support team is our biggest team at Intelligems actually. Like, we're almost 30 people and our support team is seven and we have a three-person success team so, like, literally a third of the company is, like, just support and success

[00:23:02] and so, yeah, more support people than engineers. But we're for area that reflects your value, reflects your values. Yeah. And, I mean, there are some people that are overseas, we've got a guy in Brazil, a couple people in the Philippines but, like, you know, our support people are also, like, I don't know, it's like, it's a first-class function in Intelligems. Like, it is a, it is a rigorous interview process, there's a take-home, there's,

[00:23:32] you know, like, an interview with one of the founders as part of it, like, there is still, you know, support team is first-class and those guys and girls on the support team are smart and A-plus and so, you know, I'm sure all founders that you have on this podcast think that their product is complicated and difficult to use but Intelligems is complicated and difficult to use and so, want to make sure that the people who are answering those questions

[00:24:01] actually provide good answers and good support to those people and so, yeah, it's something we mess along. It's a kind of an unrelated tangent a little bit but I'd love to, you know, there's got to be some research around this and the ROI of support. I just think about even in the B2B context, some of the products that we use where they clearly have invested in support, clearly they are, you know, paying above market and bringing on a different caliber of person and at least anecdotally, that is, to me,

[00:24:30] it has paid dividends like tremendously in our loyalty and our ability to promote that product. It's got to be a huge ROI positive move for them, so. Yeah, I mean, one case study for that and I'm sure there's many of them but one that's top of mind is this company Attentive which is an SMS marketing platform in the e-commerce space and they were not the first and they're not the only and there are incumbents that had this product

[00:25:00] and there are startups that are at their heels but what Attentive notably did was they hired an army of people to help you onboard and be successful setting up their platform, setting up the SMS flows and the marketing flows and the triggers and refining it and looking at the analytics and their belief was that if they could make people successful with it, it would, like, they're going to continue to use it and it's going to grow

[00:25:30] and so they were very services forward. I mean, obviously, there's a technology component too but they were very services forward in a way that did not scale and was not profitable and that, I mean, they are now 1,200 people and, you know, well over nine figures in revenue so clearly that did well for them. There's a podcast, the Reed Hastings podcast, Masters of Scale and, like, the gist of that podcast is, like, do things that don't scale and figure out how to scale it later because, like, you want to lay the right foundations

[00:26:00] and earn the trust and also with services, maybe another, like, parallel thing, we just spun up actually a services arm where actually, because success and support we don't charge people for. You know, like, I don't charge you more because you email my support team a thousand times more than someone else. We just spun up a services team which we do charge for but what's interesting about that team is we are learning so much about how people ought to use our product because they are, like,

[00:26:30] users of that product inside the company and so that's another, maybe, knock-on effect. Again, it kind of related to the example of me learning more about Shopify by having folks solve their website problems how someone else have solved it before. Getting your hands into the details, you can learn a lot and I think it's really important. Staying hands-on and being services forward I think is a good way to really stay and help those details. Adam, this is awesome. Thanks. It's a fantastic lesson.

[00:26:59] No surprise that IntelliGems has been so successful. Wish you a ton more success in the future so thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, Adam. This has been super fun. Yeah, and if you've got a Shopify store or know someone who does, check out IntelliGems. Definitely can help you make more money. Thanks, Adam.