Startup interview: Harvey Hodd, Founder and CEO, Blueprint
RTIH gets the lowdown on Blueprint, a conversational CRM platform for online merchants.
RTIH: Tell us about yourself and Blueprint
HH: My name is Harvey Hodd and I’m an ex-professional footballer turned tech startup founder and CEO.
I’m building Blueprint with my co-founder and childhood friend Rory Jeffries to revolutionise the way e-commerce brands scale their businesses.
It is the world’s first SMS & WhatsApp platform powering retention for direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce stores. We are a venture backed B2B SaaS business launched in early 2021, and now serve hundreds of customers across the UK and US.
Blueprint helps Shopify merchants build better retention and lifetime value (LTV) from existing customers using two-way conversational messaging sent via SMS and Whatsapp.
We enable flexible subscriber management to reduce subscription churn, intelligent replenishment and cross-sells to drive multiple repeat purchases, and generate audience feedback loops to build sticky customers.
Since launching last year, we have generated more than $1 million of retained revenue for brands and grown our customer base 50% month-on-month.
We serve some of the world’s top e-commerce brands, including Daring Foods, Rise Brewing, Dash Drinks, Misfits Health, Days Brewing, Candy Kittens, and Wild Nutrition.
RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the company up?
HH: Myself and Rory are serial entrepreneurs in the eCommerce space.
While growing our previous business - a beverage brand called Matcha Works - we came up against a problem that a lot of DTC stores face. Namely, that it was very tough to get customers who’d ordered from us once, to return to buy from us multiple times.
We found no tech solution that truly enabled us to build real relationships with our customer base at scale, hear what they thought about our product, or ultimately, help us increase retained revenue.
So we did what any scrappy startup does - we improvised. Using a crummy burner phone we started texting our customers directly. Our audience was receptive, and we were able to engage in some hugely valuable back and forth conversations.
What we saw over time, was that not only did we now understand more about our buyers, but the LTV of those customer cohorts we’d had conversations with started to increase.
That’s when a light bulb went off in our heads.
We’d hit upon an SMS-based solution to a retention problem many e-commerce brands like ours faced.
We decided the e-commerce industry needed to radically rethink the way it built long-term customer relationships and retained revenue, and the rest is history.
RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?
HH: The reaction so far has been great. We launched in early 2021 and have grown rapidly since. E-commerce brands are crying out for a solution to their retention problems.
We speak to operators all the time and issues like subscriber churn, lack of customer feedback and replenishment challenges are keeping them up at night.
The Shopify ecosystem is home to thousanns of apps and tools, but not one solved for these specific pain points until we came along - so brands are now jumping onboard.
Where we’ve seen the most success is with stores selling high velocity, low AOV or variable usage products – i.e. businesses whose products lend themselves to multiple purchases over time.
In terms of verticals, we work primarily with food & beverage, beauty, health, wellness and home brands.
RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?
HH: Our biggest challenge is just the sheer scale of the problems we’re trying to solve. Retention is a really nebulous issue for e-commerce brands. So much goes into it and it’s a really difficult thing to measure over time.
Fixing the way the industry does retention is a huge task, and requires specialist focus and know-how.
There’s a reason why no one’s attempted to tackle this before - even the big software players in our space, your Klaviyos and your ReCharges, aren’t touching this issue.
RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the online retail sector right now?
HH: Aside from the retention piece that we’ve already mentioned, the biggest issue for operators right now is the sheer amount of noise there is out there.
Consumers are bombarded with approx 6,000 advertising messages a day on average, which makes it very tricky for an individual brand to stand out against that.
As a result, new customer acquisition is increasingly difficult and expensive, which makes holding onto your existing customers even more important.
RTIH: What's the best question about your company asked of you recently by an investor and/or a customer?
HH: As the new kids on the block, we’re constantly being asked how we fit into the e-commerce tech stack, and how we are going to stand out in a very competitive global market for software.
After all, we’ve got some very big, well resourced competitors out there.
For us it’s about not trying to out-Klaviyo Klaviyo, for example, or beat Zendesk on CX.
They’re amazing at what they do and we’re aiming to sit alongside them by solving a very specific set of retention problems that they can’t touch. If we can keep customers coming back to spend cash at online stores then we’ll have done our job.
RTIH: What can we expect to see from Blueprint over the next 12 months?
HH: We’ve got big ambitions. We want to empower as many merchants as possible to take control of their business by unlocking retention, and in doing so change the face of an e-commerce space which at the moment is very acquisition oriented.
To do that we’ll be expanding heavily into the US market as we mature as a company.
We also know that retention is a big issue for brands beyond the verticals we’re currently addressing, so we want to expand our product to service a greater variety of e-commerce operators.
