Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. All right. So I understand your business. Where do you go from here?

Ryan Millman: I spend all my time focusing on Undigital, my newest endeavor. It is a little bit related, but it is more of a pure technology company. From a personal perspective, when the companies get big and mature, a lot of your work and effort is focused on HR and admin. I like to be on a small team solving a puzzle that hasn’t yet been solved.

Several years ago, I got this idea when I was in our manufacturing facility. We ship out thousands of orders per day. When I saw all the packages leaving the warehouse, I recognized the importance of that as a touch point in e-commerce. All those packages going out is a very important moment for our customers.

I wanted to get truly personalized one-to-one communication inside the package because all marketing should be one-to-one. It’s the right message to the right customer. There was nothing out there to do this. The only thing that people were doing at the time would be pre-printing some piece of collateral and everybody gets the same thing inside.

I got excited about this concept. I hired the best engineers, and we invented what we call in-package personalization. It’s like Facebook ads for packages. It’s an automated platform. When packages leave a warehouse, we look at who the customer is, we have the data about the customer, and on demand, we produce collateral completely curated to that user.

It could say, “Hey, Julie, Thanks for ordering the moisturizing cream. Here’s how you apply it because you have dry skin. These are the other products that we think will help you. By the way, we see you haven’t joined our loyalty program. These are all the reasons why you should join. Click here or scan here to activate.”

It’s extremely detailed and we back it all up with a full analytics suite. Brands can now use this channel to optimize A/B testing or hold out groups and use this channel to drive significant growth in revenue very quickly through the correct use of in-package marketing.

Sramana Mitra: And what is the stage of this company? You’re just testing it or you’ve already started selling the product?

Ryan Millman: We’ve been selling the product. We’ve got customers, and we’ve been live. I’m not able to disclose revenue for this one as it is early days. We do have a lot of customers though. We have dozens of fulfillment houses that we partner with that service many customers. We work for major companies such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever brands, and lots of cosmetic brands. We’re doing millions and millions of packages that are going out with our personalization, but we’re still early days.

There’s a lot of technology to develop in this startup, but we’ve developed a full ecosystem, not only hardware technology in fulfillment centers but also software and our online platform where customers can create all of these campaigns and accounts.

Sramana Mitra: And is this part of the same entity, the holding company, or is it a separate entity?

Ryan Millman: It’s a separate entity.

Sramana Mitra: What are the names of your previous e-commerce businesses?

Ryan Millman: Well, I’d mentioned Greek Yearbook and Nations Photo Lab. We also have a company called Artsy Couture and this company that we’re talking about now is called Undigital.

Sramana Mitra: What else do you want to talk about with respect to Undigital? I understand that you don’t want to discuss certain things, but what is learning worthy in this case study from this experience?

Ryan Millman: What do you like to focus on? Is really just specifics on what is the business?

Sramana Mitra: Strategy.

Ryan Millman: Okay. I think category creation would be a good one because it’s a part of building a company and relevant to certain businesses that are building something that’s new. So if you think that’s interesting, I can touch on category creation.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital
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