[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features founder and CEO of Particular Audience, James Taylor. Particular Audience is an Australian technology platform helping e commerce retailers create a more intuitive and personalized shopping experience by through merchandise search and advertising. They now boast clients including the good Guys, Singapore Airlines and Calvin Klein and across territories including Australia, US, UK and Canada. Since 2019, they've raised 13 and a half million dollars in investment and are set to continue this growth. James, we have learned a lot around Particular Audience and personalized targeting via product which here to learn a little bit more about you. All right, I've got five questions for you. Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
James Taylor: It's probably nothing too weird to buy online. These ill fitting shoes are pretty weird on purpose. Pretty useless once you got them.
Nathan Bush: Oh, I hate buying, I hate returning anything. And that's probably a rant for another day.
James Taylor: And they're terrible at returning.
Nathan Bush: Hey. Oh, horrible, horrible. I've got, I've literally like you can't see it in my office right now. You can see me on Zoom. I'm facing the back wall, but under this desk here is just boxes and boxes full of stuff waiting to be returned and I'm just too lazy to do it at the moment. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
James Taylor: Oh, the good guys.
Nathan Bush: Why?
James Taylor: Long standing client. They describe us as their, their innovation arm. So very close to them and I think they do a fantastic job. You wouldn't think receiving a fridge is that easy, but I think they do a really great job at the whole delivery experience.
Nathan Bush: I find that the good guys are really, they support a lot of Australian up and coming technology in the e commerce space. Are you finding that with them?
James Taylor: Yeah, they're great. They're super engaged and they're always wanting to do new stuff.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
James Taylor: So I think that appetite's great and it sets them a really good step for success.
Nathan Bush: Nice. Which e commerce practice do you wish
James Taylor: was History grouping customers by broad segments?
Nathan Bush: Well, our CRM managers are covering their ears right now.
James Taylor: Well, you know there are API based technologies that they can access slightly better ways to do it.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Okay. And number four, you had a great recommendation actually in our main chat, but can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners could immediately get into?
James Taylor: I am really enjoying Andrew Chen's the Cold Start problem at the moment. I think the e commerce industry as a whole could benefit from a deeper prescriptive understanding of network effects and how it can impact their businesses. It's an interesting read and it's a sort of practical read.
Nathan Bush: Why is it called the cold start?
James Taylor: Well, I think the perception is that when you have a network effects business, it just takes off. But that's not true. You have to get that initial atomic network, as he calls it, going. You look at something like afterpay, and of course it did fantastically well from having the afterpay brand on hundreds and then thousands and tens of thousands of websites. But to get that sort of first initial set of exposure and therefore users is a challenging thing. And you typically have two sides to a network, the hard side and the easy side. Pretty cold cold start.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. Andrew Chen's the Cold Start Number five finish this sentence.
James Taylor: The future of retail is contextual, relevant and available everywhere.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. Anyone doing that today, do you think?
James Taylor: I think that there is a lot of trend towards contextual commerce. The fact that you still have to manually set an item to sell in Instagram, for example, says that we're still very early in that journey. I mean, retailers used to have to manually merchandise websites as well. I don't have to do that anymore. There's intelligent ways to automate that placement with similar ink, a chrome extension. That example of when you go to a YouTube review and it shows you where you can buy that item, well, that's all automatic. It shouldn't be manual. So I think that that kind of automatic, relevant contextual commerce is going to increasingly be part of our experience on the web, especially as advertising comes less part of our experience on the web.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. Love those thoughts. James, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
James Taylor: Thanks Dave.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from James, jump back into episode 154 where James shares why he thinks the future of website personalization is in product intent rather than in customer cohorts. Pretty scary for some of our CRM managers, right? We also dive into his particular audience journey, their plans for their B2C product called Similar, and we look at what the future of data privacy means for retailers. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
