Five Reasons I Decided to Join a Company I’d Never Heard Of

Alternative Headline: The biggest bet of my marketing career ?? ‘cause the headwinds are pounding, and everybody is bigger than us.

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First things first, I’m thrilled — and more than a bit nervous — to finally announce my position as Head of Marketing at Recart , an SMS app for Shopify businesses.

Massive thank you to David Toth for kicking this whole thing off via a cold DM on LinkedIn and Soma Toth for all his time + tireless efforts to bring me on board.

So, why join an ecommerce SMS app that (1) I’d never heard of, (2) isn’t on anyone’s radar or “top-five” list — yet! — and (3) serves an industry facing the most daunting headwinds in its history?

Great question …

1?? Impact

Simply put: I want the work that I do to matter.

As I made my way into Recart, it became painfully obvious its inbound and top-to-mid-funnel marketing simply didn’t exist. Content was outdated, inconsistent, and thin. Its social presence, empty. And paid efforts weren’t even yielding a 1x return.

On the other hand, the product itself, partnerships, and lead nurturing were phenomenal.

About 18 months ago, Recart pivoted hard from Facebook Messenger. They shipped fast, hit ~80% feature parity with competitors, built a few unique features, and quickly migrated a host of large accounts.

Their focus on customer experience, service, and increasing ROI from SMS yielded a -148% churn rate; meaning, the businesses they won didn’t just stick around … they accelerated in value by 1.48X within a year.

All that spoke to exceptional product-market fit and the kind of organization I could genuinely help.

More succinctly: Fire, meet gas.

2?? Opportunity?

Unlike Recart, major players in the SMS world rode ecommerce’s pandemic tailwinds to gob-stopping valuations. Recart didn’t because they couldn’t.?Normally, that’s a death knell.

However, with the market’s downturn — particularly the one-two combo hitting technology and ecommerce — for them, it was perfectly timed.

Sure, our competitors have deep pockets. Yes, they’ll survive. And, naturally, it’s f****** intimidating.

But next steps (either IPOs or M&As) for post-money valuations between $1B–$10B are all but impossible. A two-to-three-year window exists for anyone who establishes a strong pattern of growth to capitalize … and win.

Plus, with less than majority adoption among the top 10k Shopify stores (41.4%) — to say nothing of the top 150k (11.7%) — that growth is still wide open.

3?? Service

Does Recart want to “capitalize and win”? Do I?

Of course, but there’s a deeper motivation rooted in its founder and CEO’s history of having run his own multi-million-dollar DTC brands.

The more time I’ve spent with Soma, leadership, engineering, and the marketing department (all three of us) the more clear their service orientation has become.

As an example, every Recart plan comes with fully-managed service. At first, I scoffed. Now, I’ve seen first-hand what that entails. It’s the stuff of marketing dreams.

“You know how you’ve been meaning to set up SMS for your ecommerce store, but just haven’t had the time or resources? Don’t. Let us do it for you. All of it.”

That’s one of three positioning statements in development. And not a word of it is a lie.

Recart wants its customers to win. Our success depends on their success — especially in a low-margin SaaS business like SMS.

4?? Honesty

Speaking of lies (namely — “lies, damned lies, and statistics”), with empathy comes honesty.

Well before day one, I pushed hard on Soma Toth regarding three outward-facing SMS metrics:

• ROI
• % of sales
• Additional revenue

The numbers across Recart’s assets varied greatly. Worse, much of its advertising majored on the outsized ROI of SMS versus paid advertising.

I f****** hated those ads and the charts onsite.

So much so, I even shared this in the main Slack channel:

All my criticism was squarely met with: “Okay, how do we fix it?” No egos. No fights. Just … let’s get to work.

Honestly, the amount of work that went into substantiating this single chart was ridiculous. Still, that’s exactly the point: honesty takes effort.?

5?? Unity

So, why keep ROI at all then?

Like any channel, SMS wants to justify itself. It wants to claim as many sales as it can. At least, most do. Digging into the numbers, I bumped up against the final reason.

First, Recart doesn’t attribute any sales through “view” windows. Period. That’s utter bulls*** for SMS. Instead, it only counts a sale when someone (a) clicks through to buy within 7 days or (b) uses an SMS-only discount code.

Second, still a chance for inflated returns? Maybe.

But I actually watched a marquee customer leave because a competitor showed them “better” results; then return — when those better results turned out to be non-incremental sales.

Third (more to the point), I watched as Soma refused to change Recart’s attribution to compete because he fundamentally believes it isn’t good for other people’s businesses.

I’ve watched the team clean lists of unreachable numbers that businesses had been charged to send to for months (at other platforms).

And, I’ve watched them engineer A/B tests to not just improve onsite CVR but also cohort revenue in 1-day, 1-week, and 1-month windows.

That’s what I mean by unity: Being in it together. We’re hungrier. We’re more nimble. And we’re more willing to commit ourselves to the growth of our customers … because we have to.

1. Impact
2. Opportunity
3. Honesty
4. Service
5. Unity

Are those five reasons enough?

Time will tell.

Today, I celebrate. Tomorrow, it’s back to the headwinds, the goliaths, and upending where this article started:

Becoming a company you and I both have heard of.