#7 - How Sundays' agile digital product team is a competitive advantage.

Welcome back to Don’t V*LOOKUP ☄️, where we explore how top commerce operators and practitioners leverage data to make critical business decisions.

In the latest episode, we spoke with Don Pawlowski, VP of Engineering & Digital Product for Sundays for Dogs, a hyper-growth human-grade dog food business that uniquely leverages their serial founder’s tech background to build an engineering and data-first brand.

For the more technically inclined, make sure to tune into our recording to hear from Don on the advantages of building a custom cart vs. using Shopify (this is a 🔥 take that is worth a listen) and how robust server-side tracking is a data goldmine.

🎯 The TL;DR on what you’ll learn in this post 🎯 

1. How tech and high-leverage experiments are core to Sundays' competitive advantage.

2. The impact of a simple yet transformational decision using exit intent popups and why to never stop testing.

3. The significance of the payback period as a North Star metric.

*for more from Don tune into our full-length interview above or through 
🎶 Spotify or 🍎 Apple podcasts.

» How Don’s career took a turn from structural engineering to leading engineering and data teams in eComm.
» Why Custom built > Shopify is a significant competitive advantage for brands who are able to stand up agile engineering, product, and marketing teams.
» Why server-side tracking is a bullet-proof way to overcome tracking related hurdles posed by privacy-related restrictions.
» How access to + understanding of data is key to developing a data-driven organization. 

🤖 Sundays’ a tech-enabled…pet food brand? 🐶 

As the brainchild of a serial tech entrepreneur and veterinarian couple, Sundays' mission is to feed millions of dogs as fast as possible with healthy, human-grade food.

And as Don puts, the tech-first approach by Sundays has allowed them to quickly scale their marketing and experimentation efforts to achieve the goal (I can attest, this is one of the fastest-growing brands I’ve seen in a while).

Let’s run through some of the technical decision made early on:

• Building a custom cart to handle subscriptions (vs. leveraging Shopify)

• Hiring a lean technical team - VP of Engineering & Product & 4 engineers

• Developing their own server-side tracking (vs. Segment and GTM)

"Everyone has their competitive advantage, ours is that we have a tech DNA. It's one more lever we can pull vs. our competition."

The most impressive element of their technical focus is not just what they have built themselves, but rather how integrated their marketing and product decisions have become.

I mean, how many brands have a true digital product team to help bridge the engineering and marketing functions?

🖥️ How rapid experimentation through exit popups changed the trajectory of trial conversions 🖥️ 

As a subscription-only business, Don and the team knew that once dogs tried their high-quality product, there was no going back for the owners.

So as a way to increase trial, they developed a sample pack with a thesis that trial customers would highly convert to loyal subscribers.

After much marketing debate the team settled on an ideal test to increase sample conversions…exit-intent popups.

Don admittedly hates popups, and didn’t think this experiment would work but one of the many advantages of a custom cart and a simple popup? The ability to rapidly experiment.

“If you can code something in a day, then just test it and let the customers tell us if its works.”

You probably guessed, but this experiment worked exceptionally well.

• Conversions from samples to subscriptions were ~30%

• Since these were exit-intent customers, these were true net new buyers that may have never come back (incremental subscriptions increased dramatically)

But even more important, Don’s main advice..

“Don’t ever stop [testing]”

After continued A/B tests where the team took the popup off certain pages, they were able to continue to push up conversion rate another ~20%+, while maintaining their trial rate.

🔎 Main Takeaway 🔎 

A marketing team with access to an agile engineering and product development team is a dangerously good combination. And, never stop testing.

⭐️ North Star Metric ⭐️ 

North Star Metric:

• Payback Period

  
  Don makes very relevant points that many important drivers like CPA, discounts, and effort to retain customers are reflected in this metric. Payback periods keep the team honest about the business, especially as they experiment with pushing money-losing trials to subscriptions.

» For the full run-down of insights from Don @ Sundays and from our other expert guests don’t forget to check out our Youtube channel.