Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. So, the customer, however, has to do the first sale for Bolt to kick in.

Justin Grooms: The customer needs to create a Bolt account somewhere in our network.

Sramana Mitra: The customer acquires the consumer. And then connects into the Bolt network and then Bolt provides additional identity data and more marketability to that customer. But the customer acquisition is happening at the retailer.

Justin Grooms: It might be via advertising or anything else, but the retailer is responsible for getting the consumer to their site. It’s a very important aspect of our model, is that consumers are always proactively opting in to share information with a specific merchant.

I have a Bolt account, I might be comfortable or willing to share my information with a handful of merchants over here, but not merchants over here. I, as a consumer, have the opportunity to proactively opt in on each one.

What we don’t do and what we think is why merchants get comfortable with Bolt compared to some other paths that you could pick is that we are not aggregating that information on the back end and then selling it off for marketing purposes or allowing cross-marketing between merchants to occur. We’re really just saying, do you want access to a robust profile so that you can have a one-to-one relationship with your consumer that’s intimate, personal, curated, and opt-in on both sides.

Sramana Mitra: Are you integrated with the shopping e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce and so on?

Justin Grooms: Yes, absolutely. We have direct integrations with all the major players. Shopify runs more of a walled garden ecosystem. So I’d say the world primarily exists as Shopify and their ecosystem and their model that they’ve built over time. And then the other side is more retailers that are sort of focused on best-in-class individual solutions to build custom experiences for their consumers.

Sramana Mitra: So does Shopify have something similar to Bolt?

Justin Grooms: Shopify has a really interesting product in ShopPay, which you can use off of the Shopify site. It’s bundled with payments and is a turnkey solution for retailers that are looking more to move toward a monolithic future.

Then the other side is you go with someone like Bolt, which is this large, similar-sized, API-based network that can sit behind any best-in-class solution.

Sramana Mitra: BigCommerce and all are integrated with you?

Justin Grooms: Yes, we have great relationships and integrations with BigCommerce and all of those other types of players out there like Adobe and Salesforce.

Sramana Mitra: And what scale are you at from a revenue point of view? It’s an ARR model, right? It’s a shopping action model.

Justin Grooms: Right now, from a growth perspective, we’re very much focused on saturation of the marketplace. Our model works at scale and what we’re focused on right now is getting massive scale.

We’ve definitely had strong revenue growth over the years and are moving towards better margins and more sustainable growth.

Right now, we’re most focused on our significant install base with merchants in the market. We are by far the most dominant player of large enterprise retailers on managing global identity for shoppers.

We’re repeatedly the ones that are locking down this business, and it’s very much because of how we play this double opt-in model. Our economics are very clear to retailers on where we make our money. It’s transaction-based. We’re not monetizing their data in other places or selling it to other people.

We’ve also very uniquely decided early on that we’re going to sit behind the retailer’s brand. We’re not going to be another button on their checkout. We’re not going to require that our brand be advertised or for them to rent our brand to have some brightly colored button or something.

We’re going to let them use any payment processes that they want. We’re going to be agnostic around how things are actually paid for. So our revenue is growing, but more importantly for us, right now, our install base is growing significantly, including some of the largest brands out there.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms
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