Congratulations on 100 episodes
Thanks so much Miles!
Listening to the POD–especially the discussion with @HendrikLaubscher and @Victor_Castro about AI and datasets (and the purchase of MosaicML)
There is an opportunity for companies like MosaicML (and also Shopify) in development of reusable/resellable datasets covering areas like
- Sales Reactivity by product type/customer location (based on sales) for e.g. weather or other external factors (sports team results?)
- Price elasticity by product type/customer location (based on sales and pricing/promotion feed). What price cut do I need to get X sales uplift (per customer demo/customer location)
To make this work you need to have privileged access to sales flow/order flow.
The “ML” parts of the tooling will calculate the metrics; the AI can be used to do deeper inspection of the products as merchandised on the website (e.g. images) to properly categorise the product for the ML to then calculate the data.
Some large retailers already do the ML parts of above, and there are some ISVs that cover the ML space (ML/data science as a service or just providing the software for retailers to use on their own data sets).
Shopify (and similar operators) could use the data they can see in the platform (with permission) to build the datasets and then sell the data back to subscribers as smart tooling to drive more sales at better margin.
@HendrikLaubscher Re your comment about Amazon marketing cloud on the POD
How do you think a DTC brand that is not on Amazon would best leverage Amazon marketing, and is there any way to leverage Amazon marketing to improve sales off the Amazon platform?
Currently, the best way for DTC businesses to use Amazon’s marketing prowess is to sign up for Buy with Prime. Use that as a way to drive traffic off of Amazon. This is currently US only.
For non-US brands, I would sign up for Amazon marketing cloud, upload all my data, and use that as a tool to generate new audiences.