WEBVTT
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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I am so excited to showcase today's not only entrepreneur.
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You know how much I love our guests, but I am so in love with this guy's business because this is a really cool use of technology to actually change the world for the better in a way that I think we've all experienced.
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If you've ever sold something on Facebook Marketplace, you know how painful it is to craft the perfect product description, but today's entrepreneur is changing the way that resellers list and sell products online.
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Let me introduce you to him.
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His name is Graham Wood.
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Graham has over 20 years of experience building software ranging from safety critical software and aerospace products to cutting edge mobile apps.
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He's worked in big tech, at Google Media, at BuzzFeed, at several large aerospace companies and has founded several technology and consulting companies, of which I love his company, shopik, which.
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Shopik provides companies with the ability to catalog and list items quickly and automatically by using their app or their API.
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You can upload photos and get back complete product specifications, along with having the background removed from the photos.
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What I really love is, as soon as you go to their website when they talk about the way that Shoppik functions.
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Essentially, instead of using your keyboard, you simply use your camera, you take a picture of an item and it will create that product listing.
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So Graham has such an innovative and very talented mind.
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I'm excited for all of us to learn from him.
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So I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Graham Wood.
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All right, graham, I am so very excited to have you here on the show.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show, thank you, thank you.
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It's great to be here.
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Heck yeah.
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So I love technology and I think it's really cool to see new ways that people are using technology.
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Graham, you've got such a cool business.
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I want to hear the backstory that led you there.
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Who the heck is, graham?
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How'd you get into doing all these cool things?
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Yeah, so it's an interesting story.
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The business came about in the summer of 2023.
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I was at a wedding and I ran into somebody that had also been laid off in tech I was laid off from Google in early 2023.
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And he had this idea.
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He had started to kind of run with it a little bit.
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Um, we got to chatting and I built something for him and and in no time and we were off and running.
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Probably two months we had an mvp and we started to get customers, and that was about a year and a half ago and, uh, I now am the sole owner of the business.
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My previous co-founder departed.
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But yeah, it all came about at a wedding in summer.
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Yeah, I love that, graham.
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I would imagine, whenever I hear these founding stories, where my head goes obviously I interview entrepreneurs for a living is I say, well, really the idea, the backstory, it all started long before that because, because, obviously you've had a career in building software and in some really cool and different spaces.
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A lot of people I would imagine, graham, in your personal life, look at your trajectory and they say aerospace to now product listings online.
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What does that transition look like?
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Talk to us about that foundation you built from.
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Yeah, so I was in aerospace doing safety-critical air data systems and then I transitioned onto a project that was using a proprietary operating system Well, formerly proprietary.
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So I worked at Honeywell for nine years.
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They spun off a real-time operating system that they developed and so when I moved companies, all of a sudden this company was using this operating system that was now public and I had a lot of expertise on it, and so I moved over to this project that was doing electronic flight bags and cockpit data management, and one of the products that they were starting to do that with was the ipad.
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Uh, and the apple.
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Apple just opened up to sdk, not not too uh, long before that.
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So my wife, she we were at dinner one night and she said can you build apps?
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Is that something that you could do with your skill set?
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And I said I'm sure I could learn and and and not long after that we founded a company building apps.
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Um, apps were new.
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Um, it quickly turned into.
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I mean, our original idea was we're gonna throw some apps on the store, get rich.
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Um, the app store is very tough.
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I mean, at the I put out my basically Hello World apps and would make a few hundred dollars from apps that really didn't do anything.
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So it was a business model to begin with, but it quickly became a consulting business and I grew that over the next five years.
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I grew that over the next five years.
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Then that company I merged with another company which I actually was working out of this co-working space back in 2014 with that company and then BuzzFeed acquired us a few months later to build up their Minneapolis engineering presence.
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So I did that the next seven years and then I went to Google to work on.
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I was leaving a team doing sensor data collection for Pixel Watch and unfortunately I was caught up in the layoffs.
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Google, along with a lot of other technologies, grew very aggressively in 2021 and 2022.
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And so I was part of the.
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I was part of the last and early 2023.
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I had just gotten my real estate license out in California.
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It was just so I could kind of take, take on the, get the commission for the purchasing of my own home and and kind of doing all the work myself and we were my family and I were about to relocate out there.
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It was kind of perfect timing for everything.
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The kids were all at an age where moving wouldn't be detrimental.
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One of them was starting high school, and when that fell through I kind of came back to you know what?
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What should I do now?
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I was working out in Californiaifornia, commuting, getting ready to move, and now all of a sudden I'm in minneapolis.
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Uh, out of work and not really wanting to dive back into the industries in minneapolis that I was in a decade earlier, and so this opportunity kind of came about at the right time to build something, which kind of that's how I wound up here.
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Yeah, I love that backstory, Graham, especially because it's all those life twists and turns.
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Those are also the same entrepreneurial twists and turns that we all experience.
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You talk about.
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Everybody thinks, oh, I'm just going to launch the maps in the app store and I'm going to be filthy rich overnight.
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And, of course, I love the fact that you called out yeah, I was making a few hundred bucks here and there, so it's such a cool story to see how you've built that up.
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I've obviously seen Shopik, so I would love for you to introduce listeners to Shopik who haven't seen it to the same extent that I have, because I want to hear about the problem that you identified in the marketplace, which is so real for so many people who have sold something online, and then talk to us about the solution that you've developed with Shoppik.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So part of the process when I was getting ready to move out to California for Google was getting my house and getting rid of all of these things because we were going to have to kind of downsize a bit.
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And and there's this, basically this price point for everything that you walk around and it's like, is it really worth listing this for $20?
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You know, everyone's got that kind of like bottom line and the process of taking a picture, listing it.
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It's pretty daunting and a lot of this stuff just ends up in a pile in the corner with a note that I'm going to do it later.
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And so when I was approached with this idea, I thought this is perfect, this solution, it solves that for a lot of people.
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When I was approached with this idea, I thought this is perfect, this solution, it solves that for a lot of people.
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But Shopik is really about for me, it's about helping enterprises reduce labor costs with listing, because the consumer market I mean this app can help people, help users, but there's just a lot of different product features that I think for the consumer space.
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I'm more focused on helping companies that are listing large amounts of products online kind of reduce that cost it takes.
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So I mean the idea is you take a picture, you can upload it with API or we've got a web bulk uploader where you can throw a thousand pictures in there at once and we'll generate complete product specs for these products and and then from there they can go to.
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They can go to your custom e-commerce site, shopify and eBay.
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Yeah, graham, it's really cool hearing you talk about that, because I love the fact that you intentionally know where in the market you want to play.
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You and I obviously have experienced it on the consumer side onesies or twosies when we're moving and we're listing things on Facebook Marketplace.
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But I love that your business mind also kicks in.
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You're not just on the technology side of things saying, hey, let's build something that appeals to the masses, you're saying let's plug a real hole in the marketplace, and so what really fascinates me about that is people are throwing AI around in all the ways.
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Now, a lot of times when we're simply talking about automation, people are labeling it as AI, because AI has just become this umbrella term.
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Of course, you actually are using ai to piece together understanding of what it is that you're taking pictures of.
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talk to us about the, the doors and the possibilities that ai has opened in this type of application sure, yeah, I think I think the um I mean ai is such a funny because it's become such a trending um topic in the last few years.
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And you know, when I was in college in 2002, I remember taking some classes around AI and you know video games and non-player characters that are growing more intelligent.
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If you go play what was it?
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I was playing Grand Theft Auto from like decades ago you can see how the characters are just kind of like dumb compared to how they are in a game today.
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But they were using AI and still are, and so that term is a lot of it lately has been associated with LLMs.
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But all of the different applications of machine learning and computer vision that I use, the technology aside from LLMs, has been around for a while.
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But the capability to process more quickly and to perform complicated tasks I think that's something that kind of goes forward has moved forward quite a bit with GP processing and being able to kind of just do a lot of computations very quickly, and LLMs have really pushed that, you know, pushed NVIDIA and all these companies to make the hardware better, which makes all the applications for AI machine learning move along much more quickly.
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Yeah, graham, because when I think about how you're applying that with all the things you're doing at Shoppik, I picture, for example, selling an old laptop.
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That's something that when I do it, I'm just like, oh, what year is it, what model is this, what size screen is it?
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There's all those questions because we have to get that right for the listing.
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Of course, those are essential things and I would imagine that on a obviously we're talking enterprise level, that's a much bigger scale of someone figuring out what are all of these things that we need to get live on our Shopify page.
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Talk to us about how AI makes sense of that.
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So, for listeners sake because I've seen, I love the demo video on your homepage Basically, we take a picture of that laptop.
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It figures out what it is, how much it weighs, the dimensions, all of that.
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Walk us through that process.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So I mean, when LLMs first came out, I think this was more like mind-blowing technology, but I see it as kind of more of a tool.
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It's like you're using a tool like you would a hammer to build a shed.
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You need to know how to use it best to your advantage.
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So if I'm selling an iPad, for example, you can't just take a picture of the iPad and AI is going to know which model, which year, how much memory that's going to have to come from the model number, which you could take a picture of the back and take a picture close up of the label, and we'll use optical character recognition to get as much information as possible to complete the listing.
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So the tool really performs better when you give it more data and so when people understand that, it makes it really powerful.
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So the app's got a microphone where you can kind of comment on what you're taking a picture of.
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You can take a picture of text that helps give the model number information.
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And also, if you don't want to use our pricing, you can just say it and the price that you say will override what we come up with.
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And so it's really knowing how to take advantage of the technology to get the best result possible.
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Yeah, graham, all right.
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Well, we're talking tech, but I do want to shift gears a little bit and get into your business mind as well, because you've used all different types of business models.
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You've obviously built apps and launched them in the app store.
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You've done consulting.
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You've obviously had a nine tofive job and seen the behind the scenes of the world of how google monetizes and buzzfeed.
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As a media publisher, you've seen all these different business models.
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Talk to us about the business model that you're choosing with shoppik, because I would imagine that there's probably 12 different business models that you could choose to go with, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the current as well as the future.
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Yeah, so yeah, the business model.
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I think for me the SaaS, like enterprise software to businesses, makes the most sense based on well, I have to make a living and the ability to kind of have an ROIi.
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I can offer my services for integration.
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So I have just a handful of customers now and I've really tuned in custom integrations with them to make their business process flow smoothly and they you know that one of them's taken a 45 minute listing time down to two, three minutes and another one's taken eight, 10 minutes down to one at most.
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It's more kind of parallelizing a lot of the listing that used to be a serial eight, 10 minutes each item.
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So I think kind of finding a way to make money quickly was kind of key.
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I mean, building a product that I have to invest a lot in advertising and acquiring users that are just going to spend a handful of dollars a month.
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That wasn't going to work for me to be able to commit to this.
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So that wasn't going to work for me to be able to commit full-time and bootstrap the business.
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So that's why the enterprise I think there's just a lot more opportunity there and I can use my consulting experience consulting experience to kind of help businesses get their results.
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Yeah, that's very cool to hear.
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Actually, I didn't even think about the integration work that this opens up the doors for, because, of course, when we talk about any development roadmap, there's no way it's going to fit every single solution.
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So the fact that you, as the founder no one understands the tool better than you can make it work within an enterprise or an organization's existing tech infrastructure, that's a really cool use case.
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On that note, how much of your developmental roadmap is that?
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Okay, let's make it so it works for most of the cases.
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We know a lot of people work with Shopify.
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We know exactly what the most common CRMs are.
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How much of development is balancing those real-world applications, but also, of course, the custom stuff, because your enterprise customers those are big customers that we're talking about and so you obviously want to cater to them.
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How much does that factor into your decision-making when it comes to the development and the roadmap of features?
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Sure.
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So when I get a feature from a customer, I mean if it's a big one that is paying my bills like that, no question it's going to go in as soon as I get the bandwidth to do it.
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And for the smaller consumers, I mean, I have a handful of personal users that just kind of use this to clean out their garage and they're they're very, very understanding about the nature of kind of early product and they they love to be able to provide input to me and so it's kind of if if they have a feature that I think is going to advance the product and help others, I will, I will put it on the roadmap and try to prioritize that.
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And it's an ongoing balance between making sure I one don't break things for current customers and, two, I'm just kind of growing on all the aspects I can, just making a better, better product.
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So it's really, how well does this fit in for the product as a whole?
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But also I'm trying to trying to make my users happy.
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Yeah, graham, I've got to ask you this question then while we're here on the air together, because I'm so fascinated.
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It's obviously come up a few times in our conversation about bandwidth and resources.
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I am always in awe at people like you, graham, who can actually build things, but you also are building a business simultaneously.
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You have a lot on your plate with regards to the technological part of your business, as well as, obviously, the strategy, the execution, the implementation, the client servicing, the marketing, all of these things.
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What does that bandwidth look like?
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How does Graham Woods structure his day, his week, his quarter, his month, his year?
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I'd love to get behind the scenes into how you're managing all of that.
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Yeah, that's been the biggest struggle, I think, because my background is very technical and it's what I enjoy at heart.
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I'm an engineer.
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I love building things.
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If it were up to me, I'd just sit here and build features all the time and not have to worry about revenue, which was what was nice about working in big corporations.
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I was attached to the revenue and, of course, making sure I drive business impact.
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I was attached to the revenue and, of course, making sure I drive business impact, but right now it's it's kind of like I I'm learning to.
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I need to set aside a day where I don't touch code and I need to do marketing.
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I need to, you know, make some, make some social media posts, get some content.
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That's a lot harder for me.
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I have to kind of use tasks a lot like what Jacob was talking about on your podcast with Flow Savvy and I've had to manage a lot of productivity so that I can do the tasks that I find less enjoyable, but force myself to do them and, you know, keep doing them and and I have kind of a lot of tasks in that space that you know, I've got to do my email marketing.
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I've got to set up there's.
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There's just a lot of stuff that I I am still doing.
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That is is a non-technical work that I just try to fit in when I can.
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Yeah, I love that perspective.
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Hey, and Graham, as a podcast, you're giving us some episode recap by throwing out Jacob Barnes from Flow Savvy.
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I so love that callback and I really actually I appreciate the fact that you also resonate with Jacob's story and obviously you guys both are building incredible software tools that change your respective industries.
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When I think about Jacob, here's where I'm at.
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Graham is, you and I were a bit older than Jacob is, and so what I really appreciate something you teased early on is the fact that revenue now is a priority for you, and rightfully so.
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You have children, you have a life, you have bills, you have expenses.
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You have all of these things, and every entrepreneur does.
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However, the older I get, the more I appreciate If I can balance long-term sustainable growth with upfront revenue.
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That upfront revenue is going to, in turn, power that longer-term sustainable growth, and so, in talking to Jacob, who is a brilliant entrepreneur, I love Jacob, I love what him and his brother are building with Flow Savvy and I love the fact that they've made their.
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They've set their sights very clearly let's go get users.
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Let's get as many people as possible using Flow Savvy.
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What's the equivalent of the that for Shoppik?
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Is it that question of let's get as many users as possible and look for the network effect and get market penetration, or is there a different go-to-market rollout strategy?
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Yeah, it's really been focused on making sure the few customers that I've been able to have helping the outcomes for them be the best possible outcomes that they can, keeping my customers happy, and I figure from there it will scale as I come in contact with more customers.
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That's been my hardest part.
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I recently teamed up with a friend who's helping me do some sales and we're just getting that machine going.
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And once I get in front of somebody who could use this for their business who's helping me do some sales and we're kind of just getting that machine going and once I get in front of somebody who could use this for their business, it's a simple decision for them.
00:22:48.960 --> 00:22:53.684
They're super excited, they're happy it works out.
00:22:53.684 --> 00:23:07.756
The hard part is getting in front of the right people to realize that this is what this, this would be helpful for them, because it's not necessarily the person listing the items, it's.
00:23:07.756 --> 00:23:16.829
It's usually somebody higher up with the decision making capabilities that's kind of responsible for overall revenue, that that really sees the value.
00:23:17.714 --> 00:23:20.464
I agree with you fully that it really is a no brainer.
00:23:20.464 --> 00:23:39.115
I'm a big fan of solutions that have a better outcome but also save a company money, and so when I think about you've already talked about in our conversation today about decreasing the time for listings, where my head goes as a business owner is I'm just like all right, cool, you're decreasing my staffing costs and we're having better output.
00:23:39.115 --> 00:23:41.601
We're launching more products on our e-commerce store.
00:23:41.601 --> 00:23:43.964
We're doing so much more good stuff To me.
00:23:43.964 --> 00:23:46.710
I'm just like well, graham, get it in front of as many people as possible.
00:23:46.710 --> 00:23:48.722
Is that the value proposition?
00:23:48.722 --> 00:23:50.663
Is that how those conversations look?
00:23:50.663 --> 00:23:56.545
Is it focused around, basically, roi, if this is actually going to save you money rather than cost you money?
00:23:58.296 --> 00:24:06.438
Yeah, it's a combination of cost savings on labor and increased revenue as a result of being able to get more products online.
00:24:07.179 --> 00:24:15.124
Um, that's because, because people are really bandwidth limited, there's some companies that that just have things listed around.
00:24:15.163 --> 00:24:42.104
Like early on I talked about kind of personally, here's like there's a 20 cut off on what, um, what I would list online, what would be worth my time but for, for companies that are doing this, um, like resale companies, that the ability to list something online the the quicker you can do it, the lower the price needs to be to be able to make a profit there.
00:24:42.104 --> 00:25:01.096
So so being able to kind of move this like because I work with a lot of companies that have store fronts and and so their e-commerce is is always a factor of like, what's my shipping costs, what's, um, all the costs associated with you know what cuts can ebay going to take?
00:25:01.096 --> 00:25:21.586
Uh, they have all those decisions that they have a number for their average price that they need to list something at average profit to be able to make it worth their while, and with Shopping that number can go down so they can list a lot more products online that they wouldn't have been able to before, to kind of unlock that revenue.
00:25:22.634 --> 00:25:39.182
Yeah, graham, that is an attractive sales proposition and I am very excited for it to get in front of more people because the fact that you very clearly understand and I love the way that you're articulating it for us here today of that value prop on both cost savings as well, as you can just list a lot more I think that that's such a powerful takeaway.
00:25:39.182 --> 00:25:41.943
Give us a visual of that landscape.
00:25:41.943 --> 00:25:48.469
A lot of listeners probably aren't aware of how big this reseller opportunity is and how big that industry and that entire market is.
00:25:48.469 --> 00:25:49.980
What are those companies like?
00:25:49.980 --> 00:25:58.282
I can think of some of them, the really, really big ones that we see on TV that kind of auction off a lot of these products and they list a ton of products every single day.
00:25:58.282 --> 00:26:10.067
But, of course, there's all different types of resellers that you work with and retailers Talk to us about what that landscape looks like yeah, so I I think the numbers uh, is it trillion?
00:26:10.106 --> 00:26:23.306
there's a huge uh resale industry and I think currently, uh, it looks like we're heading into a recession and I think that the resale market really can, can thrive in that market.
00:26:23.306 --> 00:26:30.483
People are looking to save costs and I mean, one thing I'm also passionate about is I don't like things going into landfills.
00:26:30.483 --> 00:26:35.342
You know the amount of waste out there with.
00:26:35.342 --> 00:26:41.962
You know throwaway fashion and just consumer products that just end up in landfills.
00:26:41.962 --> 00:26:48.281
I'm really interested in seeing that, um, these products kind of keep in circulation.
00:26:48.281 --> 00:26:50.488
So, like, goodwill is a huge.
00:26:50.488 --> 00:26:56.079
I I think a few hundred million um dollars a year.
00:26:56.079 --> 00:27:00.488
Well, there's so many different goodwill uh pieces.
00:27:00.488 --> 00:27:02.395
I think it kind of varies from state to state.
00:27:02.395 --> 00:27:10.701
But companies like that they don't take, uh, they're a nonprofit, they don't um, they don't purchase their products.
00:27:10.701 --> 00:27:13.323
So it's really like, how much can they move through?
00:27:13.323 --> 00:27:24.290
Um I cause they they push some stuff through the stores, some on e-commerce um, the e-commerce piece they really could open up with something like shopping.
00:27:24.290 --> 00:27:29.253
On e-commerce the e-commerce piece they really could open up with something like Shopping.
00:27:33.474 --> 00:27:46.948
There's all these chains of secondhand clothing which I've really tried to break into, but it's tough when people have their point of sale software, those relationships they don't want to let a business in to try to kind of integrate.
00:27:47.174 --> 00:28:00.222
You know, when you have to play with another system that the business uses, that company starts to kind of worry about oh they're going to encroach on my space and then all of a sudden I'm going to become irrelevant.
00:28:00.222 --> 00:28:05.558
So they're very protective about those relationships, become irrelevant, so they're very protective about those relationships.
00:28:05.558 --> 00:28:25.627
That's one of the big challenges with with getting into these, these chain franchise retail stores that do resale and kind of the more established, uh, resale market that has already a bunch of software that manages inventory, because you know, once you put a product online there's so much more.
00:28:25.627 --> 00:28:51.023
I mean, especially when I've helped customers grow their online inventory, all of a sudden they have too many things to ship and they there's more labor there that I can't do for them and and so they have all these other tools and things that they use to work with these processes and trying to get in and work with those vendors is tough.
00:28:51.826 --> 00:28:53.816
Yeah, for sure, I can definitely hear you there, graham.
00:28:53.816 --> 00:29:09.672
I will say, having lived in Los Angeles, I've seen that there's a fine line between thrift stores what I thought were thrift stores and then these vintage resellers that they can take an old shirt you know, nba shirts from when you and I were little and they'll resell these for 180 bucks.
00:29:09.672 --> 00:29:10.715
And you're right.
00:29:10.715 --> 00:29:12.440
What I'm thinking is a lot of them.
00:29:12.440 --> 00:29:20.237
You only get to see the products that they have if you walk into their storefront, because, you hit the nail on the head, they just simply don't have the resources.
00:29:20.237 --> 00:29:38.445
There's no chance that they have the resources to manage a Shopify store, and so the fact that they can take this inventory and take pictures of it and have these listings generated and listed online, that's an absolute game changer that opens them up to an entire world of potential customers, especially because how many of these shops exist in LA?
00:29:38.445 --> 00:29:49.227
That's such a refined and specialized market that people in Tampa, florida, where I am, they, would love to tap into the Los Angeles inventory because there's a lot of really cool things there, and vice versa.
00:29:49.227 --> 00:29:51.222
Regionally, there's so many different things.
00:29:51.222 --> 00:29:53.955
So, graham, I'm a big fan of the work that you're doing.
00:29:53.996 --> 00:29:56.001
I'm only going to put you on the spot one more time here.
