Matthew: [00:00:00] I should give a thing for Slice. DM me, and I’ll give you a code for free pizza.
Phillip: [00:00:03] I’ll add it in. We’ll tease it at the front.
Matthew: [00:00:04] If you’re listening to this, find me. DM me, I’ll send you a code for free pizza.
Brian: [00:01:27] Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about the intersection of culture and commerce. I’m Brian.
Phillip: [00:01:33] And I’m Phillip. And today we have, I think, one of the more important types of businesses that exist in the world, the most important cultural institution in the way that people connect over meals and experiences. Of course, we’re talking about pizza.
Brian: [00:01:48] Yeah.
Phillip: [00:01:49] What else would we be talking about?
Brian: [00:01:49] Pizza futures. {laughter}
Phillip: [00:01:51] And today with us is the newly minted CMO over at Slice, Mr. Matthew Kobach. Welcome to Future Commerce for the first time.
Matthew: [00:02:00] Yeah, thank you. Really excited to be here. And you are absolutely correct on pizza being a cultural phenomenon. It brings people together, brings community. It is the one food that just transcends class, community, and people. It’s amazing. I love it.
Phillip: [00:02:17] It is. And today we’re going to jump into a lot of it. We’re going to talk a little bit about your perspective, Matthew. I know that you’ve spent a lot of time on the technology side in businesses that power eCommerce. You’ve had quite a storied career. I’d love to hear a little bit about how those roles in your past inform your present and future. We’re also going to talk a little bit about what the future might mean to Slice. But for those who aren’t familiar, you’ve been in the role now for all of a month or so. What have you learned so far? And tell us how you came into the position over there at Slice.
Matthew: [00:02:53] Yeah. So what I’ve learned is Slice is slightly different, in terms of a business, than I understood before I joined. So this is what actually really got me excited to join. And I’ve learned more and more, just in the first few weeks that I’ve been here about the opportunity. A lot of people, myself included, thought it was a third-party delivery app, no different than Uber Eats or DoorDash, and it’s not. It is quite different. So that was the number one thing I’ve learned. But the problem is if I thought it, our customers definitely think it and we’re a B2B2C company. So the shops think it. So what really got me excited was, okay, we’ve got a product that shops love, but they don’t quite understand what we’re doing. So one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in the first few months is really explaining what we do. It’s a messaging issue. It’s a value prop issue. And that’s kind of what I started my career on. So it was really exciting to get into that and figure out all right, how do we succinctly describe what it is that we do? And so that’s what really got me excited. Other than the obvious, I’m a big fan of the founder. I’m a big fan of pizza. I’m a big fan of bringing community together. But the challenge ahead was something that I really wanted to tackle.
Brian: [00:04:02] So what is the message? Tell us. Tell our audience what that message is.
Matthew: [00:04:07] No, I love this. Because this is the right audience to understand this, because I can’t actually use this with pizza shops, but I can use it with you all. We’re more like HubSpot for pizza shops. We are actually like automated marketing. So what we do is we collect as much customer data as possible and then we use that data to the advantage of the shop. Now again, those third-party delivery apps collect the same data, but they use it to their advantage of themselves. They don’t care that they’re sending you back to the same spot that you ordered from. They just care that you’re back in their ecosystem, ordering more often, bigger. We literally care that you are going back to your favorite shops. And so we’re using this data to send push notifications, to send emails, to send texts when applicable. But then we’re also using that data to help the shops understand do I need to run a promo today to get more orders? Like are Tuesdays a slow day? Is July 4th a slow day? What can I do to get more people to order digitally? Because when they order digitally the orders are higher. So we’re taking all this data that shops are either 1) giving away to third-party apps, or 2) they’re not collecting already and we’re using it on their behalf all automatically. They don’t have to do anything. We certainly sit there and help them understand the data if they want to. But if they’re just like, I want to make food, I want to make pizza, and I want to make my customers feel loved, they can hand all of that off to us and they never have to worry about it.
Brian: [00:05:29] So it’s on the consumer side. It’s pizza discovery and pizza love, following through on that. But on the pizza shop owner side, it’s actually like a pizza insights engine and marketing engine.
Matthew: [00:05:46] It’s a marketing engine. That is our biggest value and the main difference being the third-party delivery apps, they’re really good at discovery and you pay 30% for that discovery. And that’s actually kind of fair for a new customer. If you’re selling anything like a 30% cut for a new customer, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s reasonable.” But what you don’t want to do is pay a 30% cut for average loyal customers or like really, really loyal customers. So that’s where we come in and we are good at helping with discovery, but we’re really, really good at maximizing loyalty. And so that’s why we’re actually able to charge shops less. And so then on the consumer side, we are very similar. I mean, we’re a marketplace app. So the experience is very similar if you’re ordering on a third-party delivery app. But we can charge less because we’re able to get more orders for the shop at a lower cost than the third-party app. So it actually ends up being beneficial to the consumer as well.
Brian: [00:06:40] So what I’m hearing is this is pizza commerce for a pizza world. And really what I think is going on right now is that Slice is going to be so good at what they do that eventually we’re just going to self manifest or Slice is going to manifest Snow Crash for us.
Phillip: [00:07:02] Wow. Well, I was going to take it in a more practical direction.
Brian: [00:07:04] Okay, let’s do that.
Phillip: [00:07:06] Best thing that’s ever happened is, of course, if you’re listening to this, we are recording from eTail Boston. But I just had the greatest compliment that’s ever been paid to us is that we are heady, pretentious, and unapproachable.
Brian: [00:07:23] {laughter} That’s true.
Phillip: [00:07:25] Which is actually the greatest compliment that’s ever been paid to us at Future Commerce. I do think that the maturity of commerce, the maturity of eCommerce in particular, is that we no longer have to rely on these tools that provide generalized solutions. So email marketing, MailChimp. Okay. Mailchimp is for who? For everybody, and it doesn’t matter. You could be a pizza shop, you could be a DTC eCommerce brand, you might be a house of worship or a local band. You use MailChimp. That’s not the way that the world works anymore. It might have been that way 20 years ago. Today we have the digital transformation engine has allowed that industry can have its own solutions that are purpose built for them. Matthew, coming back to you on this, how does your perspective of industries that you’ve worked in because you’ve had a few not career changes, but you’ve hopped industries over the life of your career, you’ve seen a bunch of things. How does your perspective on this sort of idea of a bespoke or purpose built solution for one industry impact the way that you’re thinking about your prior experience and how does that shape the way that you’re going to lead the team at Slice?
Matthew: [00:08:52] Yeah, you end up… It’s funny because I think you’re exactly right. So what you end up wanting is a lot of people who understand the industry that you’re in because the problems, like you said, the problems of a place of worship or like the obstacles of a place of worship are very different than a band. It’d be very different than a restaurant. And certainly there are similarities, but what you want to do is build a team that is optimized for the industry that you’re in, and that’s currently what I’m doing right now. You asked, I think you asked why I joined Slice. Maybe I answered anyways, if you didn’t ask it. One of the interesting things is that the team isn’t actually built. This is like an old company that’s been around for almost a decade or maybe longer than a decade. I need to do my research, but they’ve been around for a little bit and it was kind of coming into a bare cupboard here. So one of the things that I’m currently doing right now is filling that cupboard with people who understand the space, either from the consumer side or the pizza shop side because they understand the pain points. And again, this kind of goes back to that first thing that we were talking about, where I think our messaging is off right now. They don’t understand what we do. And to really, really get good at messaging, you have to understand the customer and that’s the part that I think transcends any industry, but you need that industry expertise if you’re going to be messaging to them. And the reason I’m so big on messaging is it’s one of those things that like ten Xs an ad. Once you can succinctly explain what you do or what your value prop is and it immediately sticks in someone’s head, that’s how you make an ad more impactful and how you make all your marketing more impactful. So hopefully that answered your question. But it’s, you know, I really like this idea of having industry relevant people, talking to people in that same industry.
Brian: [00:10:34] 100%. Yeah. And I think especially as we’ve seen and we’ve talked about this on Future Commerce a lot, context is becoming more and more difficult to address because the pace of change is so crazy. And technology is putting different contexts and mashing them up together and we’re seeing context collapse.
Phillip: [00:10:54] Yeah, consumer context.
Brian: [00:10:55] Consumer context. Thank you. Yes. And so it’s really, really difficult to approach different consumers, let alone across industries. Even in industry, it’s difficult to address them with specific or broad market tools. And so what I love and I think I feel like you are on the forefront of, and I think we’re going to see a lot more of this is these industry specific, purpose built solutions because context is hard all on its own, even within the industry.
Matthew: [00:11:33] Yeah, I’d love to even take that a step further because you’re touching upon something that’s in the back of my head, it’s on the back burner and it’s something I need to tackle in the upcoming months. Think about just ordering pizza. You think that’s kind of a general thing? I could just need some brand awareness. Everyone orders pizza. But what’s interesting is think about kind of the average guy that just graduated college that is going to be ordering pizza a few nights a week because maybe he didn’t learn how to cook or he’s got a new job and he’s too busy to… The messaging to that consumer And the context needed to convince that consumer to use Slice is very different than a suburban parent who wants to do weekly ordering. Those messages are very different and the context that they’re using the product is very different and honestly, where you even meet them. Obviously, there are digital ads and you can target, but if you’re going outside a digital, where you put these ads matter. So it’s really interesting to think about how context impacts what your message is, even if you’re selling the same product. So I like that you brought that up because it’s something that I’m going to have to tackle very soon.
Phillip: [00:12:39] I think my clear if I had to reference a pop culture reference, there’s a scene in the office where Michael Scott gets a new boss, and his new boss, he discovers, doesn’t come from paper. What do you mean you don’t come from the paper industry? And I believe that even though it may not be so outspoken or something that’s so in our face all the time, I believe that sometimes the way that we sell to these incredibly diffuse industries, especially a lot of these companies that are adopting technology at this point, like Slice, are probably small chains, local restaurants. They have aged technology or none. They are looking at you as a leader to help their business grow, but they have to trust you that you understand the nature of their business. And for lack of a better word, do you come from paper? You have to talk the talk. And so I guess my question to you would be looking at what I know you for, which is one very small curated, one curated perspective of who Matthew Kobach is. I know you through stellar social media. You are a master of creating and managing conversations and getting attention online. How do you turn that prowess or at least one perspective of who you are that I understand you to be, how does that inform the way that you build trust in not just Slice as a business technology company, but how others look at you? And how do you manage their perception of Slice as a brand?
Matthew: [00:14:25] Yeah, so I’ll answer that two ways. One, you didn’t quite ask this question, but I want to answer it because I think it’s relevant to what you said. Like you don’t come from paper. You don’t come from pizza. Yeah, I didn’t work at pizza before, but I did work at a restaurant for several years. I was friends with the owner. I’ve got friends who’ve worked in the restaurant industry. So I know how that works. I know that slug, I know how lonely it is. But more importantly, our founder did that, and that’s why a founder is so key. So everything he does, it just bleeds into the company. It becomes part of your DNA. And that’s the case for every founder. Who you are and what your experience is matters. Now, for me personally, what I think I’ve been able to do well on social media is really just get attention through really concise, interesting hooks, social media. So that is something that I personally believe in in terms of marketing. And again, it’s why I was so excited about messaging. I need to figure out what’s that one hook that’s going to get an owner or a customer to pay attention. And then what’s the short little pitch I can give them? And maybe, if it’s a video, maybe it’s 10 seconds. If it’s a tweet, it’s a sentence or two. But being able to have that, I got your attention, and I understand I have only got it for half of a moment. What is the key information you need to remember there? And so like, that’s what I try to use, whether it’s for a personal brand, whether it’s on Twitter, whether it’s on TikTok, whether it’s a billboard. You’ve got to figure out that way to stand out and deliver your message quickly. And that is true, in my opinion, across every industry. Now, certainly, there are times like industry reports, and thought leadership, where you have that freedom to go a little bit longer. But to me, it all starts with getting that first attention.
Phillip: [00:16:12] But let’s dive into that a little bit, because is a great segue. A lot of technology companies use thought leadership as a way to credential themselves with their customers. So one way to do this is we had to use an in-band example is Nobell has a Pizza Futures report that I think people only looked at because it had sort of an aesthetic.
Brian: [00:17:40] It was pretty.
Phillip: [00:17:41] It was a very modern looking report. Some of the criticism around the report is it’d be nice if they actually had a product to sell while they’re talking about the future of pizza. Maybe they should be making pizza. How much does Slice either utilize thought leadership from others in the industry that are leaders or how much do you generate to your knowledge to help to credential yourselves amongst other people in the industry, either your buyer or your partners?
Matthew: [00:18:10] Yeah. So they currently do this thing called Slice of the Union. It’s once a year. It’s at the beginning of the year. And I love it. I’ve seen it. It is like, what is the average cost of a pizza per state? What are the most popular toppings? What are the pizza trends of 2023? We were able, this is going to sound really stupid. We were able to predict that pickles on pizza was having a moment. And so we were like three months ahead of the trend. And then when there are stories in food magazines about it, they’re able to contact us because it was like we had it in writing before it ever took off. And so one of the things that I want to do is like, this is really interesting data and what we can do is actually one, use this for consumers because it’s kind of fun and silly. We even have stuff like the most popular pizza names like sales pizza’s number two, and Matt pizzas, there’s not a lot of mats making pizza, apparently. So we’re 418th, whatever the number is. But there’s all this stuff that’s like fun for consumers but then is actually really important for shops. And so what I want to do is take these industry insights. We have, and they’re very regional too, and repackage these on a consistent basis to the shops. A good example is there are certain areas where Ranch is a lot more popular than other areas. So 1 or 2 things, it means one maybe in the Midwest… I’m from the Midwest, by the way. So I get to say this about my people. We love Ranch on pizza. I love Ranch on pizza. I just had a pizza and I ordered like 13 Ranches. There was a group of us. But maybe the data tells us people are already adding Ranch for an extra dollar or two to their order. And what we can do is take this information and go, “Hey, all you shops in the south, our data says that people tend to like Ranch, but you don’t have it as an upsell option.” So we can actually take the data that we have, the insights that we have, and help them increase their average volume order through industry expertise. And then we kind of know we can look to it’s like, “Oh, cool. It’s kind of actually trending. It looks like it’s going across the nation,” or “It looks like it’s kind of popped up here.” So maybe in Phoenix, we let all these shops know, “Hey, this is something you need to add. Similar with toppings, similar with menu items. We might say, “Hey, our data again says people love to add mozzarella sticks to their pizza.” I’m making it up. I don’t know what this is, but that’s the kind of insights and the kind of thought leadership that’s like actually relevant to a shop that they can then use to increase the bottom line. Because all they really care about is money. Right? How can you make me more money?
Brian: [00:20:34] Restaurants are tough businesses.
Matthew: [00:20:37] Unbelievably tough. So then imagine this, we could say, “Hey, you know what? There are some really high margin menu items that shops in your area have that you don’t have. You might want to consider adding whatever this item is because we know that they sell really well and we know that you can mark it up 50% compared to some of the other stuff because that’s what consumers are willing to pay.” And so there is this really interesting dynamic that we have all this data that is going to waste. We send it to them once a year and it’s really kind of thin. I want to get into a place where we’re giving shops all this data so they can maximize their order size and maximize their profits.
Brian: [00:21:14] Oh my gosh. So this actually makes a ton of sense now. Your experience in Northbeam seems like it would just play perfectly here because what you’re really doing is a data play in many ways. You’re helping them understand when and how to raise their prices, and when and how to add an item to their menu that you know is trending. And I’d love to hear more about like how psychographics can pop up in one area and you all might have the data to be like, “Oh yeah, experimental pizza people in a city that’s 1000 miles away might actually be the ones to try this thing that’s popped up in this one region because they’re also experimental pizza tryers.” But yeah, tell me a little bit about how your experience at Northbeam and analyzing data and having that sort of data background is helping you do this just for you personally.
Matthew: [00:22:08] Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I don’t know that you could say it better. The thing that working at Northbeam taught me. The thing about ad buying that I learned because I was not a well-versed ad buyer, I hadn’t bought an ad like a digital ad myself since I think 2014 or 15 or something when I joined Northbeam. So I knew enough to know that I didn’t know anything. And then when I got like back in the weeds of it, I realized how much of an art it was. It sounds like it’s a science, and there’s certainly like scientific parts to it, but to know kind of what to look at, to know what to compare, to know that like, hey, this data is telling me one thing, but my gut is wrong. Let me dig deeper. Let me figure out if I take this variable out or I add this variable in if I still am getting the same thing. And I think that’s very similar to what’s going on when you use data in any capacity. It’s really easy, and maybe this is my I’ve been burned before. I’m a little… It’s easy for data to tell you whatever you want it to tell you. You can kind of take something out, put something in, and it’s like, “Look at the data proves what I thought.” It’s funny too, because I come from a social media background and I always used to laugh whenever anyone wanted really, really specific social media data. And if you’re not counting downloads or purchases or redirects or something like that, really all you can care about is impressions because everything else is kind of manipulatable. I can probably like, “Here’s our five best tweets,” “Here’s our five best Instagram posts.” It’s like, what does that really tell us? And so you can just manipulate data so easily to tell the story that you want. You can gerrymander data and the people who are really, really good at looking at data are the ones who tell you there’s no right or wrong way to look at data because they understand that anyone who says there’s a right way, they have an agenda. And that’s how I feel about it no matter the industry.
Phillip: [00:24:01] There’s something that I have done in my career where I know what works and I have instincts around what works, and I have formed opinions or hypotheses about what might work in the future, and you bring your whole self to work. How much of your prior experience… You have created cultural moments that we have cited at prior companies. Fast with the hoodie. Northbeam, I think, you guys kind of became known in the B2B space as trying to yes, you have a great product, but you’re also celebrating the business operators and their roles and sort of treating them to higher end experiences than others did in the space. At that point, you have executed a playbook that is, I think, interesting and novel in a lot of different ways and also has been critiqued a bit. And so I’d love to get you to unpack what you’ve learned about that and what you might bring with that knowledge and experience into your role at Slice.
Matthew: [00:25:06] Yeah, let’s start with Fast because I think that’s the one that feels most tangible, especially if people have been on Twitter and kind of saw hoodie giveaways and stuff. So first, let me tell you about the biggest lesson I learned there. When I joined Slice. I owned the… Well, actually, let me let me pause. Let me rewind for a second just so people understand kind of the industry that it was and the industry that Slice is. We are a B2B2C marketplace. It’s what Fast was, that’s what Slice is. So I need to get people to buy, I need businesses to buy from us, and then I need consumers to buy from us. And my role at Fast was the consumer side. So I needed to get… And if you aren’t familiar with Fast, we were an online payment processor. We since went bankrupt. No money. Sold for parts. But my job was to get the consumers excited to use Fast. I actually think we were quite successful with that. The problem was we were ahead of both the product and the B2B sales. So the most valuable lesson there I learned is you’re marketing, I don’t want to say better, because everyone’s like, “Oh, your marketing was better.” It wasn’t better. It was ahead of where the company was. And so the biggest lesson I learned there is I can’t drum up a bunch of excitement for something that isn’t ready for prime time. And in my own defense, I was being told to do that. And it was like, “No, it’s going to be ready. We’re going to do this. We’re going to get it there.” And it just took longer than you thought. And that’s the case for every startup, really. You have a launch date…
Phillip: [00:26:35] Yeah. That’s tech.
Brian: [00:26:38] Vaporware.
Matthew: [00:26:39] And so the biggest lesson there was I actually needed to dedicate all my time to the B2B side to start because without that I had… The reason the hoodie thing kind of took off was because we actually couldn’t redirect them anywhere else to buy something that they were interested in. But it was really easy to get them to go through in order to the hoodie. Now, what made the hoodie so nice, other than the price, the word was kind of cool. Like wearing Fast on your chest is kind of cool. There’s something about that brand and that name that resonated with people. They wanted to wear it. I actually think Slice has something similar, so I think I can tap into that same thing. Slice is kind of a cool thing to wear. It’s like it doesn’t, you know, it’s not like Northbeam is great, but it’s a B2B SaaS company that doesn’t like isn’t really necessarily a cool thing to say or to wear. And so what I want to do is take the lessons I learned from Fast, which was focus on the B2B side first, get that up and running, then focus on the consumers, and then do some kind of fun giveaways and make people billboards and stuff. And that was the other reason it was kind of easy to justify too. You want walking billboards. And so if you can sell a hoodie at cost, great. If you sell it at less than cost, then so be it. You just can justify it as essentially out of home. And then one other thing to dispel with Fast. One of the reasons we also did this too, we were dogfooding our own product. So when we did some of these we needed massive order volume to find out what was breaking. So that means you need people in like different countries ordering with different currencies, ordering at different times, picking different size combinations, and all this stuff. And so we were actually, you know, I’m making up a number, but for $20,000, we actually got people really, really excited about our brand. And then we were able to identify, you know, 50 bugs and then we were able to knock all those out in two days, which had we not done that, probably would have taken months to find all those. So that was why. But like the excitement we got was real. I just wished I could have been like, “Here’s a pair of Nike shoes I can sell you.” And we were just never able to get there. And the real tragedy is we got there close. We had some really big brand names sign on right before we shut down. So our timing was just off. With that said, I actually think it’s a bad business model and it’s doomed to fail anyway. Even if it had survived and we had some competitors that are still alive. You know, if you’re from one of those, you know who you are. You’re listening. I’m sorry.
Phillip: [00:29:08] But I guess, without being too romantic about it, you know, life is long. You get a lot of opportunities to right past wrongs or I mean, maybe not wrongs, but you get another at bat. And this is your next at bat, and I love that you’re sort of setting the record straight in your own words in a bunch of ways. And I’m sure that you’ve done that on other shows as well. I think the eCommerce industry in particular likes to level a lot of critique about a right way to do things. Do you think that the same critique can exist towards the current business that you’re in? Do you think that pizza shop owners and their customers have a perception about the right way to sell pizza to a customer online? And how might you address those concerns when they come up? And if they brush up against the types of things that you might do to drum up consumer awareness?
Matthew: [00:30:07] Yeah, I think this alludes to something that you said earlier in terms of like I’ve got a playbook, I’ve got an idea of what I think is going to work. And then it’s kind of like, now let’s see if it actually works. It reminds me of that, Mike Tyson quote, where he’s like, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” And so what I think it means in this context is that there are certain things that are going to work for a shop. There are certain basically fundamental things that you have to do if you want to be successful or that 90% of successful shops do and maybe 10% can get away with not doing it. And then there is that other 50% that is shop dependent. It’s culturally dependent, the way that people order and eat pizza in New York is very different than in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where I’m in right now, which is very different than Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is where I’m from. And so you can’t have this playbook. And again, I think this applies to DTC brands. It applies to anything that you’re selling. It applies to B2B SaaS. If you come in saying, “This is exactly how to sell this, this is the playbook, we don’t need to change a thing,” it’s going to fail because every business is different, and every customer is different. And we even see it in Slice. We’re literally before I did this interview, I was in a Slack message talking about the different cohorts of shops that we have and how we’re going to strategically go after them. We have an email sequence I’m writing right now and I have six different shop cohorts just for current customers that don’t even include prospects. And so we’re giving each one of them a different message because there is no one way to convert all of these different shops. We want to have a more robust relationship with them. And there’s not one way that we can do it with all these different cohorts that we have. And so I very strongly believe that, yes, there are foundational things you need to do in order to be successful, and then 50% of it, you’ve got to use your instinct or your gut or realize that your past experience, even if it’s not 1 to 1, on how you’re going to market this either specific product or to this specific cohort.
Brian: [00:33:31] The great thing about the business you’re in is that it’s a business that everyone loves. Literally, everybody loves pizza. There’s no one… I mean, I’m sure there are exceptions out there.
Phillip: [00:33:42] Are you gluten intolerant?
Brian: [00:33:43] But I still love pizza. I love pizza.
Matthew: [00:33:46] We have gluten-free. There are gluten-free pizza shops.
Brian: [00:33:48] That’s right. No, And there are some phenomenal ones in New York. So it’s an interesting industry in that demand is there. And actually Slice has an incredible name already. You’ve got a pretty rabid fan base out there. Merch, no brainer. Like you said Slice is a great idea for just throwing on a shirt. I’m in. It’s cool. So as you look at Slice as a business and kind of where you’re headed, it seems like it’s got a lot of legs. You are on a bit of a rocket ship right now. As you approach the role, we’ve talked about some of your experience at Fast. We’ve talked about Northbeam a little bit. What are the things that you’re going to do to help accelerate that even faster, faster and to go faster and grow maybe even at a rate that it wouldn’t have organically grown just given the industry you’re in?
Phillip: [00:34:46] Matt, can I… Let me just pop in there. I would almost say, if this company is going to grow despite all the odds because it’s a killer category and everybody loves pizza, how do you prove that your hire is the thing that was the rocket fuel?
Brian: [00:34:59] Yeah, it’s a great question.
Matthew: [00:35:00] Yeah. So one, I don’t know that I need to, and if my boss is listening, plug your ears right now. I purposefully want to join companies, and this was a lesson I learned, that have wind at their sales and that have a lot of momentum. I want to add gasoline to an already burning fire. And I think there are times in your career where you can start from scratch and do that and realize that’s what I did at Fast. I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t do it at Northbeam. We already had some of that. So I want to go to a place where it’s like, “Man, everything’s going well and marketing is humming and I think it was marketing, but maybe it wasn’t marketing.” And we can get into attribution and I can do like mixed media modeling and all that to figure all that stuff out. But I do want a place where if all of a sudden the numbers start dramatically going up, it coincides with when I joined. And I think that’s kind of an easy enough data point to look at to think this is working well enough, we’re not going to do anything. And so, yeah, it is very purposeful that I joined this company. Now with that said, I don’t think that it is a foregone conclusion that we will be a household name. If you are in the Northeast and you walk outside, you all are in Boston right now. If you walk out in Boston, I bet five out of ten people would probably say, “Yeah, I’ve heard a Slice.” If I go outside in New York, maybe it’s like 7 or 8 out of 10 people have heard of Slice. If I go outside right now in Atlanta, I’m willing to bet I’d be lucky if one person had heard a Slice. And so how I see my job as they’ve done nationwide stuff and it just hasn’t caught on the same way that it did in the Northeast. So I see my job as figuring out, okay, it turns out we probably have more of a local business than we realize. And I think this goes back to, again, this cohort, this playbook. I need to figure out how to sell Slice to pizza shops in the Southeast because it’s probably going to be slightly different than how I sell it to shops in the Midwest and to shops in Texas, which is its own thing and shops on the West Coast. And so what I’ve got to do is I’ve actually got to again, go to that idea of playbooks that we’re talking about. I’ve got to figure out what are the fundamental ways to launch Slice in a city or in a geographical area, and then what are the things I need to change when I go from a Wisconsin shop to an Arizona shop? And that’s what gets me really excited and that’s how I can, I think, prove my worth, because if we go, “All right, we’re very deliberately going to expand to Atlanta,” and it’s going to be a team effort because it has to be sales and it has to be go to market and it has to be, honestly our current customer success because we rely on referrals and all that stuff. But if I can be a part of that, it’s almost like I don’t care if I get credit for it or not. I think anyone in the company would be foolish to say, “Hey, this worked, let’s mess with it, or let’s not give marketing credit.” I just don’t see that as an issue. But that’s something about it. I really don’t think that we are destined, but I think we have product market fit. And that’s what really excites me. I’ve got to take a product that I know shops love and I’ve got to get them in other geographical areas to understand why it’s so great.
Brian: [00:37:58] It’s interesting. One last thing there on that is I love that you’ve identified that you kind of are a local business. Do you think that there are some limiting factors, especially because I think actually the West Coast is a really weird place when it comes to pizza? There is actually a lot more chain activity than you might expect. And I think about my town, we have like 4 or 5 pizza shops and only one of them is a local chain of ten pizza shops. Do you think you’re going to have any trouble in geographies and regions where…
Phillip: [00:38:37] There’s not a diversity.
Brian: [00:38:38] There’s less diversity of pizza, and also there’s more driving involved in those communities. Things are more spread out. Yeah, that’s an interesting thought.
Matthew: [00:38:49] So I completely agree that it is different per region. And right now we’re learning that what worked in New York doesn’t necessarily work on the West Coast. So we’re building that muscle to be able to sell there and to be able to build that habit. And what that honestly might mean is there are places that are absolutely pizza shops and there are places that are absolutely not pizza shops. And then there’s a bunch of shops in the middle. And so what we’ve got to figure out is we need to get… And the shops in the middle are already on Slice. A good example is my local Chinese place here in Atlanta is on Slice. The reason is because they added pizza to the menu during Covid because they realized a lot of people just wanted to take out pizza and they’ve kept it. It’s been a success. And so what we’ve got to figure out is how do we get… It’s almost like we have pizza, but we need to branch out a little bit beyond just pizza because even your favorite pizza shop probably sells really good wings or probably sells a really good sandwich. And again, it depends. This is where the local thing is really interesting. In Philadelphia, you probably have a lot of pizza places that also sell cheesesteaks. In Boston, I think it’s roast beef sandwiches. And in Wisconsin, it’s going to sound weird. It’s like fish. You have fish fries. And so it’s figuring out all right, how do we get those shops that are in the middle? Because all of a sudden then the amount of restaurants that you can order from become a lot larger. And so that’s how we’ve got to think about expansion in the areas where it’s not as, you think of a stereotypical New York pizza shop.
Brian: [00:40:13] Everything is pizza. That’s what I hear. {laughter}
Phillip: [00:40:16] It’s been really cool to actually finally meet you, to have you on the show. I really appreciate that you’ve put all of this in the context that I think our audience could really grab something on and give them a better perspective of how they see their business or the challenge in their business. We usually wrap up by asking, “What is the future of commerce?” I think we all have established that the future of commerce is pizza, but I think that there’s probably something here that you could talk a little bit about, which is, yeah, this nature of the digital consumer and reaching them in their region and in their context where they are and not really just taking something for granted as you kind of put it out into the world and then people adopt it. You kind of have to adapt it to market. So maybe wax poetic a bit on that and then tell us where we can find you online.
Matthew: [00:41:11] So I agree with you. I’m going to even answer with I think the future of commerce, we look at it from a consumer standpoint all too often. And so I want to look at it from a business point of view. And if you look at like DTC is very digital-first and it’s almost like we’ve hit penetration or at least in terms of like growth, like year over year growth. Take the pandemic out of it. It’s going to kind of look, you know, obviously people aren’t watching me, but I’m going up into the right and that’s kind of how it is. But there are so many industries that have not adopted this, I don’t even want to say digital-first, but digital option way of doing commerce. And I think the shops that do that the quickest are going to be the most successful. And it’s not even necessarily because people are demanding to order digitally. I think some of them are. I think a lot of people go to a website, they want to order. They can’t. I know a lot of Gen Z hate calling someone on the phone and they just want to order. But really, to me, it’s more about owning the data. It’s this idea that you have all this data and you are throwing it away. And so to me, the future of commerce is shops that have not yet harnessed the power of data to do something really special with it and to figure out how to maximize the value of their customers. To me, that’s where this is going. And what you’re going to see is a lot of shops over the next ten, 15 years, they’re going to have a turnover of the parent or grandparent who owned it and you’re going to have a grandson or a child inherit it and they’re going to realize, “I’ve got to figure out how to make this work in 2025, and how I make that work in 2025 is very different than how it was working in 1985.” And so those people are going to be the ones that are going to have a very clear advantage over the shops that have not adopted the power of data.
Phillip: [00:42:58] That’s a phenomenal last word. Thank you so much, Matthew Kobach. Where do we get your thoughts and insight and follow your new journey?
Matthew: [00:43:06] Let’s just do Twitter. It’s just MKobach on Twitter. That’s where… I’m on Instagram, too. But I just post my kid there and no one cares about that. So Twitter. Find me on Twitter.
Phillip: [00:43:15] Very cool. We’ll link it up in the show notes. Congrats on the new role. Best of luck and wish you all the success in the world. Hey, I’m going to go install Slice. Very cool.
Matthew: [00:43:24] I should give a thing for Slice. DM me, and I’ll give you a code for free pizza.
Phillip: [00:43:28] I’ll add it and we’ll tease it at the front.
Matthew: [00:43:29] If you’re listening to this and find me, DM, and I’ll send you a code for free pizza.
Phillip: [00:43:32] Very cool. Thank you so much, Matt.
Matthew: [00:43:33] Thank you.
