Retention Chronicles Podcast with Wes and Deneb

Greetings and welcome to Retention Chronicles, the podcast with learnings from expert e-commerce brands and partners. I’m your host, Mariah Parsons.
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If you’re here, you’re either on a quest for e-commerce enlightenment, or you accidentally clicked the wrong link. Either way, I am thrilled you stumbled into our corner
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of the internet, and I hope you’ll stick around. We’ve got pearls of wisdom for everyone, whether you’re running a multimillion dollar business
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or simply just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey. Before we unleash the brilliance of today’s guest, let’s give a shout out to our podcast sponsor.
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Get ready for insights, chuckles, and perhaps a profound realization or two with this newest episode of Retention Chronicles. Hello everyone and welcome back to Retention Chronicles.
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I’m psyched for our episode here today. It’s usually one guest that we have on, but today we have two, so we have double the fun.
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Wes and Dana, thank you so much for joining us. I’m going to ask you both to say hello to our listeners
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and give a quick personal background of what you all have been up to and what’s led you to this point in your career so far.
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So, Wes, let’s start with you. Kick us off, tell our listeners who you are. Nice to see everybody.
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I’m Wes, I’m the creative director and CEO at Sea Monster Studios. Most of the time I’m involved in all
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of our projects from a direction standpoint, but oftentimes as a business owner of a small business goes, I’m
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involved in just about everything. So, a common character in this role here. Love it. Love it. And now Dana, please say hi
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to our listeners and give a quick intro. Yeah, so I’m Deni. I actually was a high school English teacher for about 10 years.
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Whoa, okay. And transitioned into web development about five years ago. Wes started having me do some accessibility work
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to make sure that our websites that we were developing for clients were accessible. I just found my love.
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I love making sure that everybody can use the site, even if they have no arms, even if they have no eyes,
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whatever it is that they need accommodation with the site should still work for them. I just found it really interesting how we can code it so
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that it works that way. So, yeah. Okay. So we’re going to have to pause here for a minute. Why the switch?
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Was there a pivotal moment or was it just something you were always interested in both studying English
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and then also compliance? Was there a pivotal moment where you’re like, you know what, I think I’m ready to make this jump?
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Well, I really did not want to change from being a teacher to web development, but I felt like that was kind of
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what I probably needed to do. But I really loved teaching and I didn’t like the idea of having to sit kind
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of confined in a cubicle someplace coding. But I just felt like it was what I needed to do for my family.
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‘Cause you can’t raise a family on a teacher’s salary, I’m afraid. Mm-Hmm, yes. Yeah. That I think a lot of people relate to.
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So the coding I found interesting and it was okay. It was fun. I had a lot of learning to do.
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And so Wes certainly helped me with a lot of that. But when I figured out, oh,
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accessibility is something that actually Wes doesn’t know about, he’s asking me to figure it out. I just found it fascinating.
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And so really just got interested in it. Okay. Okay. I love that Dan is underselling his capabilities here as well,
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but he holds some pretty serious certifications in WCAG compliance, knowledge and capabilities. I think, more than most people,
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he’s put in a massive amount of effort to become sort of provably certified at what he does and sort of the expert in the room, I guess you would say.
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And so now as a team, he guides the ship. His actual job role in that position is called Captain Accessible,
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which is pretty awesome, I think. We take his lead now rather than doing what we think is right.
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Now we know what’s right. I love that. Can I just call you captain accessible for the rest of this podcast?
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So when I first started giving him accessibility, I asked the whole team, I said, oh, so
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what should my actual job title be? And so everybody put forth a bunch of, oh,
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you ought to be chief Accessibility officer, you know, whatever. But Wes was like, nah, you ought to be captain accessible.
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I said, perfect, let’s do it. I love that. Yeah, that’s great. I feel like it can be very daunting, like,
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sitting from someone who does not know much about coding, I’ve done a couple of courses, can be pretty daunting
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to see the laundry list of what you all accomplish for the clients you work with. So I’m excited to get into it.
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And obviously our listeners, they’re probably putting two and two together to know that we’re going to dive into a lot
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of compliance and a lot of different aspects from what we normally talk about. I think that’ll be very exciting.
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They obviously all come back to retention anyways, but that’s a little Easter egg for everyone. So we’ve done the personal intros.
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Can we now do a company intro? Tell us about Sea Monster Studios? Wes, we’ll start with you and then Dan, if there’s things
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that you want to pepper in there, please feel free to. Sure. So, I started the company as sort of a weekend warrior while I had a day job,
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as a younger lad, working in the coffee industry. One of the things that attracted me to this line
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of work was it was what I was doing in that industry. Back in the good old days when there wasn’t Shopify,
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or there weren’t e-commerce platforms per se, you had to build your own e-commerce system or whatever. One of the things that we figured out along the way was,
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we sell a habitual product that people want to receive on a regular basis. We figured out a way to sort of build
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what I would call the rudiments of a subscription program when things didn’t really exist. We were sort of a younger, decent sized company,
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but smaller in comparison to the Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts of the world. One of the things that set us apart was
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that you could actually buy our products online and subscribe to them and do all these really novel things back when we didn’t even have responsive websites
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and we were just looking at things on a laptop or a desktop. I figured I was young enough and bold enough to take a risk and start a company.
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If it all fell apart, I could always go back to working in the coffee industry or whatever. Eighteen years later, we’re still sitting here. That makes us sort of old in the industry, I guess.
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What I think that it means is that we’ve run a good business, treated our people right, built neat things, and hopefully our clients think so as well. It seems to be that way anyway.
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Yeah, no, I think, like old and wise, I think are, those are usually what I think about when someone’s been in the space for a while. The technical understanding of having to build out platforms on your own
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or with your own team, I think has a very useful background. I know I appreciate that. I could not do that as of today if you sat, you know,
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if you told me to do that. I think so. You know, they say like, necessity’s the mother of invention, I suppose.
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Right. These days there’s so many inventors, there’s always an app for some solution or there’s a tool that’s been made.
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Back in the good old days as a younger developer, it was like none of this existed.
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You either have to dream it and build it and hope for the best, and sort out the edge cases.
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These days I think the systems and the players in the field are so much broader that in a lot of cases you don’t necessarily have
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to be the innovator that you did back in the day. I think there’s still plenty of room for
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that understanding how systems work together or what pieces play nice together. Even just building the one thing that’s missing from the puzzle is an important aspect
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of being a good developer or a good solution maker of all kinds. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. This is a little bit of a tangent
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and just a more fun question before we dive into the technical part of this podcast. But Sea Monster Studios, the logo
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and the name, how did you come up with it? I’m always so, well, is there a fun story behind there?
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It’s kind of a fun story, I guess. So we’re based in Seattle, and when I was trying to think of the name for the company,
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it was an exercise I’d done before in the industry that I previously worked in from a branding perspective.
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I didn’t want it to be like West Company or Seattle Web Design or something like that.
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It was trying to find things that sort of lent themselves to being in Seattle, sounded cool, felt memorable or whatever.
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Then there’s sort of the semantic side of, well, what’s on the U-S-P-T-O and what trade names aren’t taken
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and what domain names are available. Twenty years ago or whatever, there were a lot more domain names
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available than there were today. Trying to find that, it sounds like everyone has a domain. Yeah. Now what’s just available to buy.
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I had a bunch of different names that I thought were cool and then found that this one was available.
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There were no trademarks and it sounded like the best winner to me anyway. That was the genesis of the name.
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Sort of a creative thing, but also a like, it was all open and usable kind of thing. Our project manager was actually our first employee
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who was employed as a designer back in the day. He helped design the first version of this logo, which looked very similar,
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but different graphic technique and stuff from so many years ago. It looked very different. We’ve just iterated upon it since then.
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This is where we’ve landed. Okay. Amazing. Now let’s cover, let’s go one step deeper. I mentioned this a little bit earlier in this episode,
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but there are so many things that you all cover, and your expansive knowledge is very helpful for those who are in the Shopify space looking to check off certain things or improve certain things about their e-commerce store.
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Can you give us a synopsis of, first, what are those areas of expertise that you all are experts in and offering to merchants with your services?
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Was it a compilation of just having to build, you mentioned those specific platforms ’cause there weren’t so many innovators
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or so many SaaS solutions in the space. Is that kind of the reason, if you had to put, you know,
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if you had to put money on why you all are so expansive in your offerings, is that the reason that you can cover
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so many different areas of servicing an e-commerce brand? Sure. We describe ourselves as a full service agency.
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We deal with branding of all kinds, whether that’s naming a company to designing a logo or evolving a logo
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or a brand presence into something else, to the strategy that goes into that. Why is your company named the way it is?
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What’s the vision that you have for your company? What languages and visual elements are we using to describe your company
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to an audience that isn’t you? We help business owners or entrepreneurs sort of step outside of themselves
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to help their audience understand who their company is and make sure that the audience thinks of it the same way that they do.
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The natural evolution in branding is things like graphic design and product packaging. If you’re selling a widget of some sort,
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you’ve got to have a neat box to put it in and a store shelf to stick it on. Over the years as we’ve sort
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of done those projects, we’ve learned a lot about where do you get things printed or how do you get it on a store shelf,
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and what does the sales negotiation look like to get it there? Of course, that naturally evolves into an
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omni-channel presence, like e-commerce, and as Shopify came along, early in the days, we found it to be an awesome platform.
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It was very easy to use. In comparison to some of the other tools that existed way back in the day,
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it felt like the right platform for us. As we’ve evolved along with Shopify, we’ve become experts and partners and so forth,
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and sort of learned the ins and outs of the system. As a result of that, you run into
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the SaaS platforms that come along with it, whether it’s subscriptions or tracking pages or upsells and retention programs.
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We’ve sorted out what we think are the most usable or the best in class and have chosen to partner with those platforms.
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Generally, I sort of pitch ourselves from a web design and development standpoint as we can design anything you want
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and build anything that you want. There are really very few limits to our capabilities there. I think to some end or another, most agencies do that
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and then figure it out in the back end probably is sort of how it works, right? Generally, we can take a customer from having no business name and a sort of idea for a product to a solvable product
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or a shippable product all the way through their presence online and offline. Then deal with the strategy that comes around
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after you’ve gone live. Figuring out how do we retain our customers longer, what other marketing or other strategies should we employ?
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In this case, we sort of draw the line at some of the more mystical things, I guess advertising,
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maybe the more technical aspects of marketing to folks beyond what your website and your brand does for you.
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Things like email campaigning or SMS campaigning or communications. We tend to partner with agencies that we think focus specifically on those things
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and do a much better job. Outside of that, we play very well with other agencies and we often are brought in on projects
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where we’re one of the many pieces of a puzzle type agency solution. We also have a data scientist on the team
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that helps us do things like data migrations, whether you’re coming from a platform to another,
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or turning subscribers from one subscription platform into another. I think that’s played very nicely into our skillset of,
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if we need to bring you from one place to another, if we can’t move your data, then it’s a really big struggle for a business to have systems that aren’t congruent with each other,
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or understanding the flow of data into your order tracking or the reports that your CEO needs or otherwise.
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I think are a really important aspect of doing a successful online or offline business. Likewise, the connectivity of systems, making sure
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that everything’s communicating effectively with itself. Over time, as Dan mentioned, we evolved into dealing with compliance.
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That covers everything from branding to development to design of all kinds. It touches a little bit of every part
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of this thing that I just described. It was something that I found to be incredibly daunting from a technical standpoint
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or a knowledge standpoint. If you look at the rules, they’re robust and extensive. Finding somebody who’s willing to be an expert in it
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and find the passion in making the internet accessible to everybody was an important factor of doing good business.
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Why would we sacrifice a chunk of our audience for lack of capabilities? If we can just enhance our capabilities, we can also make things more available to a much broader audience at the very sort
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of businessy side of things. More importantly, we bring equity to the table in an environment where that’s not always part of the conversation.
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A lot of people build neat websites and that’s it. We build neat websites for people, I guess. Hopefully it’s all people, not just some people.
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Yeah. I love it. That was a very comprehensive journey in describing what you all do. A couple of notes as well,
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and a couple of rabbit holes I want to go down. The first one that I would want to go down
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is, you mentioned, obviously you’re, one of the great aspects of Shopify is that you’re able to plug
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and play with different SaaS providers. Obviously that’s where my background is. Different agencies where your background is.
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I want to get your opinions on looking at the different, when you’re evaluating the tech that you’re bringing into the merchants that you all are working with.
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Are you looking at, how is their platform built out? How is it compliant? How is it a good partnership for us? From a business standpoint of yes, we can, like,
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there are multiple platforms that can solve this one specific issue that a merchant is facing, but when you’re looking at, okay,
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this is the platform that maybe stands the best with what we all do, is that part of the conversation
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or is it really just like when you’re in the platforms of ease of use and stuff like that?
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I think it starts with the review of the platform, right? We’re lucky enough sometimes to have the platform come to us
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and say, Hey, we like what you’re doing. We want to show you our thing. Other times it’s something we find ourselves
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and stumble into in some way because the client maybe already had it or thought that it sounded cool and wants us to check it out
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and maybe vetted a little bit. It sort of starts from all angles. For me, the thing that makes me use platforms,
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whether it’s my CRM or my sales tools or my accounting software, it has to sort of look good and work well.
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It has to be highly usable from an administrative standpoint. There’s always room for the really ugly tool that does a great job at things,
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but I think I’m always more inspired to use it if it feels good to me from a use standpoint.
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A lot of times we’re looking at the administrative functionalities of does it make sense? Does it look beautiful? Is it easy to use?
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Can our clients use it? Most importantly, since we’re sort of setting it up and handing them the keys,
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are they willing to use it as well? A lot of times when I’m talking to clients about platforms, it’s a question of,
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is this inspiring for you to continuously run the show with? If you can’t administrate your subscriptions, then you sort of let them lag
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and then they become less important to you as a company and that’s not what we want. Or you can’t send emails
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because you can’t rapidly iterate upon them. You should think about using a different platform because it’s more inspiring to get the job done
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and make more money, which is what we’re all sort of here to do, I guess, than to sort of suffer through a platform that you don’t like.
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I think on top of that, whatever happens for the consumer, it’s really important to see that it works well as well.
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I think usability for the consumer is ultimately more important than usability for the administrator.
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They both kind of have to be good. If the consumer experience is a hundred percent and the administrator’s only 75%, I think that’s pretty tolerable.
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Users always come first. I think the people part, you know, and then I think maybe the other side of it, a little bit
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that we focus on is the technical side. Do search engines pick something up or does it play nicely with technology
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of other kinds? A lot of our analysis comes into the way that Shopify has connectivity amongst systems.
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Who integrates with what, who shares data? I think having disparate data systems and having to sort of collate
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and curate that data into something that’s unified is really difficult to manage. Even for data scientists or people who do it all day long,
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it’s a job that doesn’t necessarily need human interactivity. If you can skirt around it a little bit, if you think about the cost of labor
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or the cost of mental space when you could be making a new pitch or inventing a new product, rather than manipulating a spreadsheet to get you the data you need just to understand your product,
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I think it’s all the more important to understand what does it connect to and how do your tech stack talk to itself and what does it produce from an analytics or reporting
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or informational standpoint? Without great data, you can’t make great decisions. If you can make a data-driven decision more than a gut feeling decision,
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oftentimes it serves your needs as the business owner much better, or as the business administrator or otherwise.
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Yeah. This is something obviously I think a lot of marketers in this newer age of marketing with the internet bump up against
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where we have so much more data. Being able to actually quantify and make decisions with data versus just like a gut feeling,
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I feel like a lot of that, there’s still a lot of it, but we’re inching closer to that not being a reality and like that not being acceptable anymore as well.
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I’m happy we’re back at the data piece because when we were reviewing the different offerings that you all have and the different teammates, you have to have experts.
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I think it’s so interesting that you also have someone who is able to help with migrations. ‘Cause I think that’s a lot of the,
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from if you’re sitting in emergency just from this podcast even I’ve learned like once you have systems set up to migrate them to something else
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that is a headache. If you all are able to assist in getting these different platforms to work together, getting off of one platform and onto a new entirely different platform is very, very interesting.
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I think data scares people as well. It’s spreadsheets and numbers and what if I make a mistake?
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Does it ripple through? Those kind of things. I think, I don’t know, I’m pretty nerdy I guess,
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and I really like data. For me it never felt super scary. It just felt something that needs exacting needs,
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or needs to be exact with. If you’re manipulating something, you have to be able to measure the outcome and understand
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what it’s supposed to be, those kind of things. I think that’s where people tend to be really intimidated.
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At the end of the day, having somebody who has the expertise or has an “I got you” moment,
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generally makes people pretty comfortable. I think also it comes down to feeling stuck as a business owner.
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You may not be the technologist and you need to move for a cost of your ownership or tech stack reasons,
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or you need something that’s more effective. If you’re sort of beholden to not being able to move because you can’t pick up the box
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and move it from point A to point B, I think that presents unique challenges for folks that maybe don’t deal with data on a regular basis.
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I think it’s important to always have a stranglehold on the ownership of your data and being able to manipulate it in a way that serves your needs best.
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Yeah. I’m also, it’s timely for me ’cause I just finished reading Data-Driven Marketing by Mark Jeffrey. I don’t know if you’ve read it before, but it was all in the realm of what we’re discussing.
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The third comment that I wanted to make, and then we’re going to dive into a little bit more of your area of expertise, Dana, but bringing equity to the internet, that’s kind of how you phrased, right?
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This arm of Sea Monster Studios, and I love what you were saying about, or something along the lines of, you’re in the internet, you have to make sure that you’re compliant and like bringing in all like a
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hundred percent of people that you’re a hundred percent of customers, right? You don’t want to just not do something because you’re not capable of doing it.
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The onus is on you type of messaging that you were talking about. I think it’s interesting ’cause especially in the
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e-commerce space, you have so many people who are just up and starting these new companies. I also look at it as people might be either investors
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or entrepreneurs and not even know about this whole realm of how to be compliant. That’s what this conversation is going to be very interesting.
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There are just people out there who might have a great idea and just hop on Shopify and might not know like, okay, you need to design graphics in this specific way.
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You need to have your brand kit match these regulations and these rules. It can also be something like data that’s intimidating to have a complete
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and robust understanding of all these different things. With that, I’ll lead us into high level. Dan, can you tell us about,
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and we can assume that our listeners have not just ’cause it’s easier or not super familiar with WCAG
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or ADA compliance. Can you give us like an overall summary, I guess, of what it even means for you to be working in this area, this industry day to day? Sure. When the internet was started,
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it was just put out there kind of as is for whoever wanted to or was able to come see it. Back at the beginning, there weren’t
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a lot of things that could be inaccessible. There weren’t a whole lot of multimedia. There weren’t even very many images
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or that sort of thing. As people continued to build more and more complex things, it started to get harder
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for some set of people to access. Everybody started wanting to access it. If you were blind, for example,
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there was something called a screen reader that you could then listen to the page be read to you.
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But the more complex pages got to be, the more things started being not read correctly. You’d get a lesser view
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or understanding of the page from your screen reader. That just got worse and worse until finally,
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there were some standards that needed to be set. They were called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,
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which were standards that were put out by an international organization called W3C, that governs the web.
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They put these standards together saying, okay, in order to make sure that everybody can understand the pages that are on the internet
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and can interact with them, you need to follow these certain guidelines, these content guidelines, web accessibility content guidelines.
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If you do that, then people will be able to use their assistive devices, whatever they happen to be,
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whether it’s screen readers or voice command systems or whatever. People will be able to get what they want,
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what everybody else can get from the web. These standards became very important. Since they are still fairly recent in terms of,
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they’re updated every year, but we’re only on version 2.2 of these standards. They’re still fairly young.
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Lots of people don’t know that they need to be obeying these standards. They need to follow these certain rules in order to make it
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so that blind people can still get access to the content in the way that they need. If people don’t have access to a mouse or they can’t use a mouse,
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they don’t have that good motor control, they can still get around the site. Neurodiverse people who just need something different in order to be able to understand what they’re perceiving or seeing,
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they can be okay on this. There are a thousand different capabilities that need to be taken into account.
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The web content accessibility guidelines, WCAG is kind of what most people refer to it as, or WC, those make it so that if you follow those,
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you can be fairly certain that most people can get what they need from your site. Talking about retention, I’m glad
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that this is a retention conversation, but even before people can be retained, they have to get what they need from your site.
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If they had difficulty getting it in the first place, they’re probably not going to come back and get it again.
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If they had trouble ordering the product in the first place, they won’t come back to your site so you won’t retain that customer.