Effort

As a SaaS company, our basic goal is to create value for our customers. And ideally it’s incremental value, ie, they are making more money than they would without Intelligems. This year though we’re putting a new wrinkle on it - we want to create a huge amount of “while-you-sleep value.” Customers can turn on Intelligems and rest easy knowing that it’s making incremental profit for them in the background. 

“While-you-sleep” value is kind of the beauty of DTC commerce to begin with. You can plug money and creative into Meta, and it finds you customers autonomously. You set up a store on Shopify and people can browse and check out whenever they want, no staff required. There is a ton of work that goes into making this a reality, but the core purchasing flow is quite passive.

There are two main reasons we’re prioritizing this:

1. Most brands and retailers are effort constrained, not idea constrained. Especially as margins have tightened over the last few years, we’re seeing leaner teams than ever

2. AI and Agentic software has the potential to massively reduce effort

A related concept we discuss a lot is “value:effort ratio.” You can create the most value in the world, but if it takes a tremendous amount of effort to acces it, the end market is going to be quite small. Sometimes it’s better to go with a simpler solution that maybe has a lower ceiling, but costs significantly less effort to access. Ideally you can find ways to increase the potential value while reducing the level of effort required. 

For example - everyone buys into the great vision of 1:1 personalization and a compeltely fluid site and shopping experience. I have seen < 5 brands actually go after this in a meaningful way. It’s not because it’s unclear what to do - the mechanisms are pretty clear and good tech exists - but it’s because there is SO much work required to do this and maintain all these versions of your shopping experience.

What happens if that “effort” constraint goes away? Suddenly, brands have the opportunity to invest in every incremental gain—no matter how marginal. 

Maybe that’s not fully true, but, in spirit and over time, I think it is. Maybe AI can only absorb so much work so fast today. But most DTC brands would struggle to throw that much work at AI today.

The net of this is that pretty much every idea becomes worth exploring, and the number of ideas that can be explored at the same time (or over a specific time period) can increase, too.

There is still a prioritization matrix needed here. Experiments and experiences that are believed/proven to be high-impact are obviously the ones to tackle first. But the data might also show that a certain onsite experience may lift conversion rates for customers who previously bought a particular SKU. 

If that conversion rate lift is, say 10%, but the traffic from those customers is only 3% of all traffic, you might notice it, see that the total upside is an overall 0.3% lift, and let it go because there’s so much more to tackle, so many bigger swings to take. 

But when you don’t need to do the work yourself this example goes from an obvious “no” to an obvious “yes” for the roadmap. There’s no reason not to do it: The upside is clear and the effort is near zero.

The benefits of this compound quickly—without the traditional counter arguments around opportunity costs. The bar for what work gets done moves significantly in favor of doing more. 

Which poses the question: If effort stops being the constraint, what work finally becomes worth doing?