Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Category creation is interesting. Let’s talk about category creation.

Ryan Millman: Undigital is a category creator. We’ve invented what we call in-package personalization. Category creation is extremely different. When you go out to a company as a category creator, nobody has you in the budget, right?

So, we go to companies and say, “Hey, we provide this great service. It’s unboxing marketing, but fully personalized.” They love the idea, but it’s not something they’ve budgeted for. So, a lot of the focus has to be on education. You’re getting that flywheel turning in the early days. You have to build awareness about your products and services because the market doesn’t really know you exist.

It’s an expensive endeavor because you’ve to create content, get it out there, and base it on the sales cycle. In our case, we need both the operations team and the marketing team to work together and say that we want to bring in Undigital because we place printers in the fulfillment centers. It takes a little while to get all that coordinated. It can take anywhere from six months to twelve months from the first conversation to getting a contract and ultimately deploying it.

Much of our effort goes into building this awareness, getting people excited, getting the companies ready, and getting their budget set. Sometimes you have to wait till the next budget cycle. So, it’s very different from solving a problem that customers are eager to address.

Sramana Mitra: And what mechanics have you applied to do that customer education process for them to even be aware that this thing is possible and to even think about how to bring something like that in?

Ryan Millman: After we’ve identified our ICPs [ideal customer profile] and who they are, it’s a matter of creating our content and putting it in front of them. So it could be podcasts, a blog post, or advertising.

Outbound has been a great channel for getting messaging out in front of them. It’s amazing how many big Fortune 500 retailers have responded saying that this is really compelling and they want to know learn about it.

It’s difficult even going to trade shows, right? People walk by, as they don’t know about Undigital. If they stop by and you get to explain it to them, they thing it’s a great idea, but you’re still at the early days.

It’s very much enterprise selling. You’ve to get other team members involved. Our goal is to get in front of them, educate them, and get them excited. It’s pretty easy because it’s innovative for them to start to ideate in all the ways that they could personalize messaging and better connect with their customers. But we’ve got to make sure that they very quickly understand the value proposition in a very short and succinct way so that it starts to resonate that they can start to bring us into the rest of their teams.

Sramana Mitra: It’s interesting. All of your other businesses are e-commerce businesses, and this is an e-commerce marketing business.

Ryan Millman: Yes, it is interesting. I think one of the things that was so exciting about this is it’s very rare to have a built-in market that’s so large when you’re creating a category. If you think about all the great category creators, a lot of them created the market. For Airbnb, it was mattresses that you rent in a room. There wasn’t a big market cap or a lot of revenue going around for that particular problem, but they were able to go and build that.

We have 40 billion packages being shipped worldwide a year. So our market is naturally already so big. There’s already a problem. People just didn’t know that there was a solution or maybe they hadn’t thought of our solution or just didn’t know it existed. So we don’t have to get people to do something to help us to potentially have the ability to recognize revenue. The revenue potential is already there. It’s really about the education and getting in front of people and executing on getting them to sign on and helping to take it.

Sramana Mitra: In that sense, Airbnb is the same. There were apartments and houses that existed. They needed to educate their market and create that category that you can actually rent out your room to travelers and people with you instead of hotels.

Ryan Millman: Yes, I’d say the only difference was, a lot of people before us had been doing unboxing marketing maybe in a more fashion blast or traditional way. So yes, there’re 40 billion packages. I’d say a good percentage of them were attempting to do things. There was a known problem that people were trying to solve in perhaps not the most elegant way. We were able to come in with a better solution going from let’s print something and give everyone the same thing that has little impact to let’s give somebody something extremely relevant that has a high impact.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not that there was no budget for it. Unbox marketing exists. Personalized unbox marketing is your innovation.

Ryan Millman: Yes, exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Right. Great. Well, very nice talking to you. Congratulations.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital
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