Scaling Europe
00:00:03 · Sebastian Johnson, Omer Kaplan
[00:00:03] S0: All right. Hello, and welcome back to Scaling Europe Show. I'm Sebastian Johnson. Today, I'm joined by Omer. Omer is the founder of ZyG. Thank you for joining me. How are [00:00:09] S1: doing today? I am great. How are you? Very good. Well, ZyG is fundamentally trying [00:00:13] S0: to change and transform the way that e commerce brands scale. Take me back. You know, when you first started this company, what beliefs did you hold then or do you still hold today about e commerce and the future of e commerce that led you to creating this company? [00:00:28] S1: So I believe that there are really so many companies out there with great products and great entrepreneurs, And it's very easy for them to sell online. It's almost instant, right? You can use, obviously, with AI it's even easier, right? But it's like you can literally be up and running with a store in no time, But for some reason it's still incredibly hard to scale online. Despite the fact that there are so many point solutions out there and services and Shopify and Amazon, it's still extremely, extremely hard. And the vision of ZyG or what gave us the understanding that there's something really big to do here is that there's a very strong need for an end to end solution here. For a company that can identify who are those brands. Because all of the brands think that they have the potential, but at first you need to identify. But if it's there, they can focus on the product and you are delivering scale.
00:00:28 · Omer Kaplan, Sebastian Johnson
[00:00:28] S1: So I believe that there are really so many companies out there with great products and great entrepreneurs, And it's very easy for them to sell online. It's almost instant, right? You can use, obviously, with AI it's even easier, right? But it's like you can literally be up and running with a store in no time, But for some reason it's still incredibly hard to scale online. Despite the fact that there are so many point solutions out there and services and Shopify and Amazon, it's still extremely, extremely hard. And the vision of ZyG or what gave us the understanding that there's something really big to do here is that there's a very strong need for an end to end solution here. For a company that can identify who are those brands. Because all of the brands think that they have the potential, but at first you need to identify. But if it's there, they can focus on the product and you are delivering scale. [00:01:41] S0: And what do you mean when you talk about companies scaling? What stage, what size company do we talk about when we say struggling to scale? [00:01:50] S1: I think that going from selling a few million a year, one, two, five, 10, and going from that to 50,000,000, 100,000,000 and more a year, that's like an extremely hard kind of barrier to go through. That's what I mean when I'm saying scale. Like not scale by 20%, but scale by 10x.
00:01:50 · Omer Kaplan, Sebastian Johnson
[00:01:50] S1: I think that going from selling a few million a year, one, two, five, 10, and going from that to 50,000,000, 100,000,000 and more a year, that's like an extremely hard kind of barrier to go through. That's what I mean when I'm saying scale. Like not scale by 20%, but scale by 10x. [00:02:15] S0: Why do you think it's so hard still? You're right, companies like Amazon and Spotify and Shopify have made it so easy to kind of get up and running and sell one unit or five units. Why is it still a struggle to go from 1,000 to 100,000?
00:02:29 · Omer Kaplan, Sebastian Johnson
[00:02:29] S1: So would divide that to two. First, I think it's poor product bets. Think that most of these companies, they don't really understand if there is a real TAM out there, if there's a real need. It's really emotional. Consumer entrepreneurs, it's really emotional based. So they might be betting on a product on a very saturated market, as an example. They might be betting on a product when a category is actually declining. So I would say that first is product bets, but then even if you're choosing a product with potential, execution is extremely fragmented. You need so many things to work together. You need to build an amazing store and brand. You need robust data infrastructure to really crack attribution and lifetime value and predicting lifetime value because media is really expensive, you're actually losing money on the first purchase. Even thinking like that is very hard and not intuitiveforecom. You need to be able to do conversion optimization, right? The entire CRO funnel. You need to do email marketing because everything is retention based today and SMS marketing and customer support. You need to connect all of this also to inventory forecasting. And I'm telling you, it's mind boggling. And I think that because you need to master so many things differently, you need to get an A plus in all of them because it's really hard. And to bet on the right product, I think that that results on the vast majority of them failing. And then how are you solving this? [00:04:16] S0: What have you built to try and plug this gap and solve this problem?
00:04:16 · Sebastian Johnson, Omer Kaplan
[00:04:16] S0: What have you built to try and plug this gap and solve this problem? [00:04:19] S1: So we are literally taking the entire scale challenge, the entire problem of scale, which is comprised out of all of these nuances I just told you about, and we are delivering an outcome service. We've built endless agentic capabilities to make sure that we can manage all of these in a very effective way, scaled way, but also connected way that all of the agents are speaking to each other and improving the funnel. Then so we literally would replace for that company, we would replace all agencies, all internal marketing teams, all creative, like literally they would outsource scale to us. But it's important to say we will only do it with companies that we think that they have the potential to really break the internet, right, or to really like 10x. That's why we always start in the validation process. [00:05:24] S0: And so this takes us to ZyG Score, right, which you've just announced. And this, I guess, is your way of assessing those companies. Can you talk a bit about what that process and what it is that you've released?
00:05:34 · Omer Kaplan
[00:05:34] S1: Yeah. So it's very exciting. It was announced today. So let me walk you through the onboarding funnel. So first, I'm a consumer company. I'll go to the ZyG website and then there are kind of pre requirements to start the process. So you need to sell it at least $1,000,000 a year. You need to have an AOV, an average order value of $40 per transaction. And then you're starting with what we're calling an intake, which is you just give the domain, like basic contact information. We will send many agents to kind of pre fill all of this process for you. This is something without that will take you a few hours because we are literally x raying everything about your business. From modes to brand voice to target audience to cogs, to like really, really, really deep, deep, deep understanding. And then you would go through this agentic onboarding form where it will take you ten minutes instead of maybe, I don't know, five meetings. Right? And then after that, within a couple of hours, we would generate an opportunity kind of assessment which we're calling a ZyGNAL, where we would literally go and send agents to every relevant place online, paid resources, open resources, our own taxonomy, our own benchmark, competitors, like really, really deep research. And you're going to get this report that analyzes the market, analyzes the competition, but really going deep into each of your competitors, analyzing your moats, analyzing different funnels and USPs and claims, and what can you say that others can't say, or what are others saying that you can, and really take all of that and give you a first assessment of understanding when looking at the market and looking on only the things that you can say, your specific differentiator, you would get a first indication of, is there a signal for something interesting here? And if the answer is yes, then you'll get invited to move to the next phase where we're using all of these insights to now agentically build all of the assets that we need. So a store, creatives, landing pages, messages, everything we need in order to do advertising and to bring real world users into this funnel to really measure what is their potential. We are combining, we're using really advanced AI capabilities to build and optimize and understand all of the messaging here, what we want to offer the world. But then we don't stop there.