A Hundred Little Things

If you even spent a minute on DTC Twitter in, say, 2022, chances are you saw Eli Weiss, then the Director of Customer Experience at Olipop, responding to a tweet about the “awful” taste of the better-for-you brand.

And, if you caught that, you usually caught an exchange in which someone turned that “ugh, this is gross” moment into a “hey, cool brand.”

Weiss has been gone from Olipop since March 2022, but he’s now at Yotpo, where he’s—again—helping a brand go from “gross” to “cool.”

Incredibly, perhaps, is the fact that Weiss seems to make these shifts by focusing on what seem like smaller moments or smaller improvements. They feel, almost, to be at the margin of the brand.

We sat down to talk with him about that, whether he thought our sense was right, and why the small things matter so much to him—both as a marketer and a consumer.

Read on.

If you, sort of, zoom out on things, it feels like you’re a believer in little things making a big impact. An example of that: I remember when you were at Olipop, and if someone posted about not liking the taste, you’d reply and offer a refund. I guess two questions: One, is that true? And, two, how'd you think to do it?

I've said this in a couple different variations over the course of the last few years, but I'm a difficult customer. When I say that, people laugh, but it's true. I'm an insufferable customer: I hate when I spend hard earned money, and it doesn't turn out the way I expected to be.

And I learned pretty quickly—at the luggage brand in my first stint—that expectations and reality were the place that kind of screwed everything else up. The hardest part for me at the luggage company was they had spent all this money on R&D and production and the product was so expensive and the margins were not great, so, effectively, you never had the ability to do these refund types of moves. You had to kind of do much larger PR things, like tell a different story and spin it a different way and beg people to wait, because you didn’t have the money to refund them.

When I joined Olipop, the economics were so drastically different, and I understood very early that we were creating something that didn’t exist in the space—healthy soda. 

In traditional beverage, people sample so many times and in so many different retail locations. When covid hit, we had this thing where we were doing a ton of Sprouts tastings and, suddenly, we couldn’t do any of those. And, so, we're saying DTC is going to be our method to get to people.

And I said, OK this is obviously a much more expensive method of tasting, but if we assume that people are buying beverage for the first time online and we assume that 30% of the people will be kind of hesitant on buying it and, of the 30%, probably 2 or 3 percent—max—will say “This is awful!” and of the 2 or 3 percent, maybe 1 percent will actually reach out, the upside of refunding a person $35 is dramatically higher perceived value for the brand than not refunding them.

And that was my pitch early on: Let's see how many people it is, but most of them are complaining on public platforms and this gives us the ability to put a stake in the ground.

We learned pretty quickly that the upside of a satisfaction guarantee on conversion rate was much higher than the loss of refunding. 

And that was very much an Olipop decision, because the product was delicious, according to most people. If you have “bad” product, please don't try to push a satisfaction guarantee and then not pull through on it. 

One of the interesting parts in there is the expectations meeting reality, and when you think about a lot of advertising that's done now, it’s done in a way where we overstate a lot of things that we didn't before. Mostly because of the reliance on UGC, influencers, so on and so forth. Everything is the best X they've ever had or, the life-changing Y.

The concept of maybe ratcheting that down or, being willing to stand by those claims more than, then you maybe have had to historically, is kind of thing that changes that dynamic in a way where there's a reason to offer the refund, but, also, perhaps a reason to adjust your creative, if you can't go and do number one.

I'd say it's even a step further. There are so many kinds of “better for you” products and we put so much emphasis on the fact that this is exactly X, but ten times better for you. 

Very often, the shopper is not looking for exactly X. They’re actually willing to take a little bit of a hit on the taste profile as long as it's not terrible.

Or, an example of clean makeup: Yes, the mascara won't be waterproof and stay on your eyes for four days, but it doesn't have harmful dyes that might give you cancer.

We learned early at Olipop that a lot of our early customers weren't necessarily heavy soda drinkers. We were adamant that this would be the future and, today, they're gonna do $500 million in revenue this year (a massive portion of that is probably traditional soda drinkers). But when it was Erewhon and Sprouts, these weren't people that were guzzling a case of Diet Coke a day. They weren’t.

So, by using “this tastes exactly like X,” we probably didn't need to do that.

We tested it. We saw on the back end, the LTV of those customers were garbage, because the product wasn't exactly like soda. So, we acquired the wrong customer. 

Now, you're seeing a lot of Olipop ads kind of coming back towards that old soda profile-esque ads. And that's probably the decision they made after a bunch of years when they went much wider in the market and they said, “That's the thing we need to say when we're targeting the Walmart shopper.” 

Do you see kind of that widening of TAM kind of playing out again for you, because, I think, what's interesting is you went from brands where you had the opportunity to set the expectation and then deliver on the reality and you're now at a brand that's more established and that expectation has previously been set. So, you are trying to actually flip some.

Are you coming at it from the same kind of principle there? Or is it a little different?

On the brand side, a lot of the misalignment around TAM and expectations comes from how leadership sets the focus. Often, they hire a growth marketing person and say, “Here’s your CAC,” without considering the bigger picture, like “Here’s your LTV.” This narrow focus leads to mismatched expectations.

Now, on the SaaS side, I quickly learned—or rather, was reminded—how similar it is to e-commerce in terms of customer perception. The way someone feels about a SaaS company is quite like how they feel about a brand. Think about it: if you’re wearing your lululemon joggers, holding your MacBook Pro, and sipping a pumpkin spice latte, that says a lot about you. SaaS is no different.

In fact, it goes even deeper. In a quirky way, people will discuss their SaaS tools, like their SMS platform, at a dinner party. It’s odd, but it shows how much these choices matter to people, just like choosing a brand does.

The second insight I had is that perceptions of a company often aren’t based on personal experiences alone. Just like with any brand, they’re shaped by stories others share—the “that could be me” effect. For example, someone sees a Google Review about a bad experience buying shoes from a brand and thinks, “What if that happens to me?”

The reality is that negative experiences get shared widely, while positive ones don’t unless someone pushes for it. So, when you’re expanding your TAM, you need to account for this imbalance.

The third point is that a brand isn’t just one big picture; it’s a hundred little things. You can hire the best branding agency or design firm, but that won’t change a brand’s DNA. To change that DNA, you need to tweak a hundred components—if it’s even possible.

Take Yotpo, for example. People often say, “If Yotpo wasn’t so expensive,” or “If Yotpo wasn’t so difficult with contracting.” But if you think about it, customers usually know the price and contract details upfront. The issue is often with missed expectations on things like implementation. These are the smaller things we need to solve, but they aren’t surprises that pop up last minute.

In traditional SaaS companies, there isn’t one person overseeing all these micro touchpoints. You have a brand team thinking about the visual and copy elements, a sales team focusing on the pitch, a CS team looking at service, and a CEO with a 10-year vision. But there’s no one person thinking holistically about the entire customer journey across every touchpoint.

What I’ve realized is that to manage these micro touchpoints effectively, there has to be high-level alignment on the customer experience. If that’s in place, you can widen your TAM without losing your core identity or diluting your brand. It always comes back to how you align these little details with the bigger picture.

I took this job because I wanted a challenge, but it’s one that feels achievable and aligns with how I see things. I like to view things from a wider frame, considering my own experience with Yotpo—using it, churning from it, and listening to both the good and the bad that others have shared. It became clear that the issues were often about misaligned expectations or a short-term game being played.

So, the challenge is about resetting expectations across all these micro touchpoints. It might be painful in the short term, but in the long term, if we can reset those expectations, the outcome could be transformative. 

One of the cool parts of your job and what you're tackling is kismet in that you believe so heavily in the hundred little touch points and you’re getting to kind of tinker there around the edges and refine and so on and so forth. But what I'm beginning to internalize around what I think Yotpo wants me to see Yotpo as is “We’re about the hundred little touch points.”

I don't know if there's a question in there, it's just an observation.

Absolutely, and that’s a key realization. We often focus intensely on how we show up at big events like ShopTalk, but is that really the message our customers are receiving throughout the sales cycle? For example, some customers just sign up for Reviews, download the product, and move on. Or they grab Yotpo SMS from the Shopify App Store and start sending messages immediately.

This raises a critical question: how do we set ourselves up for success when our initial touchpoints are so transactional?

In SaaS, particularly when serving consumer brands, the markets are significantly smaller unless you’re offering a horizontal product. The experiences—those hundred little things—really count. 

It's interesting, maybe because I’m somebody who's been in SaaS for a long time and often just serving consumer brands, the flip of it is SaaS  just has significantly smaller markets basically anywhere you go unless you're a horizontal product. So, those experiences, those hundreds of small things that you're talking about, 80% of them probably happened to a person as a customer and that's what really gets word of mouth going.

I think you're hitting on an important point around the TAM.

At NUGGS, for instance, we constantly asked ourselves, “How many people can we miss expectations with and still keep enough untouched TAM for vegan chicken nuggets?” It was a big concern. 

We’d promise two-day delivery, miss that mark, and burn through a million customers. We had to ask, “How many more millions are out there in the U.S.? And after that, do we just move to Europe and keep churning through customers?”

In SaaS and with platforms like Shopify, this realization hit me even harder. If you’ve gone through 20,000 to 30,000 customers over the years, and several have churned, you start to run through your TAM just based on the experience level alone.

High-level thinking here is fascinating. People falling in love with a tool seems bizarre, yet it happens. There are tools in SaaS—where just like a MacBook—people just can’t live without.

But somewhere along the line, we chose to ignore the importance of brand, thinking, “Build the best product, and they will come.” 

Honestly, I think that’s a miss. Yes, having a great product is crucial, but look at Monday.com versus Asana. Monday.com could be ten times better, but without the brand presence—without the billboards and all the brand-building efforts—they’d be in trouble.