S3E10: Raj De Datta - The Journey of Bloomreach

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the tastemakers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce famous. Alright.

Welcome to episode 10 of Commerce Famous, the finale of season three. And I've got another amazing guest here joining me today, Raj Dedata, the CEO of Bloomerich. Raj, welcome to the pod. Jason, it's great to be here with you. Well, let's let's jump into this.

So the the basis of what Commerce Famous is is it's a podcast that, really highlights some of the taste makers of ecommerce over the last twenty, twenty five years. There is no ecommerce hall of fame, and so this is our way of recognizing people that we think would probably be in it. So let's do this, Raj. Why don't we start off with, introducing yourself, to our listeners, and then we'll dig into some of your journey. Sounds great, Jason, and thanks for the invite.

It's a privilege to be here. So I'm I'm Raj Dedata. I am the, current CEO and cofounder of Bloomreach. Tell you a little bit about Bloomreach in a bit, but as far as background, I've been an entrepreneur for over twenty years. The third company that I've, gotten off the ground based out here in in Silicon Valley on the West Coast.

A lot of it has been using technology to transform people's lives in in all kinds of different ways, and and Bloomreach is is no different. Came to The US when I was 18, 17, actually, for for university from India and The Philippines where I grew up and and, have been really excited to have the opportunity to build these great companies. Amazing. Well, let's talk a little bit about, some of your early days in ecommerce. So where did you kinda get introduced to commerce?

Maybe you tell us a little bit about that story. Yeah. For sure. You know, I had I had been involved in in starting, some deep tech companies and, one of them was in the in the communication space, one of them was in the network infrastructure space. And around, you know, kinda 2005, 2006, I really felt like we were scratching the surface of what was possible on the web, and in particular, what was possible using large amounts of data on the web.

And so I started to go out and look at the the trends. We had seen by then what was happening with eBay, and we had seen all the what what what was happening with with Amazon, and we'd seen a lot of the false starts as well, the the days of pets.com. I'm I'm certainly that old on the on the Internet. And, you know, I just felt like this was really the beginning of an ecommerce wave. I mean, if we if we looked at the size of the retail industry, if we looked at how much was online and that the trends that Amazon and and and, and eBay were setting, it was clear it was gonna permeate every aspect of our life.

So I got very interested in the topic of you've got a large catalog, you've got a lot of scale, you've got a lot of potential customers. How can we use data to transform those customer experiences? And that was around 2005, 2006, around that time period. Gotcha. Well, let's talk.

You you've, you've got, like, seventeen years at Bloomreach since you founded it. Maybe take us back to what the conditions on the ground look like when you when you recognize an opportunity to start Bloomreach. Maybe talk about what the thesis was, if you're still on that thesis, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Remarkably, we are still very much on the thesis with which I started the business.

You know, when we started, we could see Google and Facebook kinda really coming to life. We could see it permeating the lives of of, lots of people. And, the thesis of of Bloomreach in those days was, look, people are not gonna be manually curating websites and apps and mark their marketing forever. It just is impossible. If you even have a thousand customers and those thousand customers express themselves in a thousand different ways, and and then you have thousands of products, just the sort of n squared problem that that creates means that your your ability to create a digital experience is almost impossible manually.

And so we've gotta harness data and algorithms to enable each digital interaction to be amazing for each person. And I really felt like algorithms and data science were gonna play a a core role, and that is a lot of my background. And so, you know, I pulled a team of people together who had mostly worked to build the search engine at Google, who had worked on the news feed at Facebook, the early days of the fabric of what we now know as social and search, and said, hey. How about if we apply this class of technology to the digital web? And we go serve brands, retailers, merchants, others others that are participating?

Instead of building a search engine or a news feed, let's go algorithmically power a lot of these digital interactions to help, help scale how these brands could communicate. That was the original thesis of of Bloomreach and at at the time when I started it in 2009. It was our original kinda series a pitch. There there was me, a team of, at the time, four, core technical people, and, we went and were fortunate enough to meet, an investor from Bain Capital Ventures and pitch them on this idea and said, hey. How about if we could go algorithmically personalized websites?

And we said, hey. Give us $5,000,000 to get started. We promise not to spend it because we're gonna need to experiment a lot to go make this happen. But, that was the birth of Bloomreach. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants.

More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com. Well, let's go back to 2009 because it's in a really interesting time to be fundraising. I mean, if you think about I mean, you you'd lived it, so you know better than I, but this is coming right off of the the housing crisis, the shutdown of some major banks. Take us through the world in 2009 and what you're up against.

Yeah. You know, when I started Bloomeries in 02/2009, I had spent what I would call, you know, my two years in the wilderness, which is two years of trying to start companies and struggling to do so often because there was very little funding available for, startups. And, and so it was very it was a very difficult pay you know, period of time to start a business. At the same time, you know, starting a business in the most difficult times is often what creates the best businesses is what what I realized in retrospect. So it was very difficult to fundraise, but it was also a period of time where you could attract talent because, you know, just as it was difficult to fundraise, it was difficult to to go land amazing jobs for amazing people.

And so, you know, I I feel like, especially at a very early stage, it's actually an amazing time to start a business when, the supply of talent is large and the supply of money is not that large. It it means that you can you can create incredibly healthy businesses and and be forced to do things that create commercial viability earlier than you might in more high b times. Yeah. I I love that. I think you're exactly right.

I you know, obviously, a lot of people who listen to this probably listen to the all in pod and they start talking about vintages of of startup years. And I hear them talk about 2009, 2008, 2010 all the time. This is companies that if I'm not mistaken, companies like Uber and WhatsApp and Pinterest Yeah. Kind of all came out of that same Venmo, I think, came out of that same vintage. Yes.

That's right. I mean, and I think the generation of, world class consumer internet companies came out of that vintage. There also were a collection of SaaS companies that came out of that vintage. Yeah. I think I think, basically, that period of time was was challenging enough.

And and remarkably, that period of time stands out because after that, there was almost a ten year bull run. And so there were ebbs and flows after that for sure in the markets, but it probably didn't, you know, get as bad as 2009, 2010, 2008 until kinda COVID. Yes. Another big paradigm shift. So so talk a little bit more.

Let's go back to 2009. You raised $5,000,000, which is amazing with Bain, who's a tier one, you know, money source. You got some really smart people. You got a great product idea. How do you win your first customer?

How do you how did you talk someone into going first on this big idea? Yeah. You know, the the Bloomreach pitch in its earliest days was remarkably simple because we had started with we said, okay. We wanna go personalized websites and apps, do it in many cases for ecommerce. But no one's gonna, like, hand a five person startup their entire digital experience.

Yep. There was Shopify in the way in which there there is today. And so we were starting with brands that were fairly well recognized. And so we would go to them with this pitch, but we felt like we needed to start with a narrow application. And that narrow application was largely, we'll build landing pages that would drive SEO traffic from you know, for retailers and for brands from Google and Bing and and places like that.

But we'll do it with algorithms. We'll figure out what pages you're missing, build those pages with algorithms, and that will attract more demand. It will create a new storefront for you. And that was the original pitch, but there was no proof that it would work. So Yeah.

Yeah. So the pitch was incredibly direct. Like, here's this amazing team. It has the potential to drive be an acquisition source of new customers for you in a in a fairly substantial way. There is no proof, but if you wait for proof, you'll be late.

And so if you wanna work with us, you know, we we will do everything possible to harness the best minds to make you successful. And most people, of course, wouldn't take that risk, but some would. And I think the directness of that pitch and the honesty of it, to say, hey. There is no proof that this works, but if you wanna be early, you know, this is a unique opportunity. A couple of people, ultimately, you know, chose to start.

And I remember our first customer well because I was the person selling all the software in the early days, and it was a lighting company called Bellacor that sold, lighting based in in Minneapolis. And they, signed up. It it true to my word, it actually didn't work early on. And pretty soon, it started to work really well, started to, drive a lot of traffic, and they called up at that point and said, hey. Shouldn't we work out some kind of commercial arrangement here?

And that's how we got our first customer. I love it. Well, Bellacor. I'm in Minneapolis, and I was like, Bellacor. I know that name.

That's that's probably why. Yeah. Amazing. So tell me about a little bit of the pivot or not really a pivot, but you you learn it's a test and learn model. Right?

You deployed some stuff. Some things worked, some things didn't. How did you use that to inform the product strategy, the ICP? Like, how did it sharpen your focus is really the question. What what it showed us in the early days is we were very good at driving traffic to folks that had meaningful sized catalogs.

So, you know, just working with a brand that at the time had a small number of products, you know, there wasn't a need for data and algorithms to create these landing pages at scale. Whereas if you had a large enough catalog, it it did matter. You also had to be the kind of brand that would cause people to come visit if you were a really small brand that nobody had ever heard of. It was less likely to work. And then, of course, ecommerce was a core learning.

I I would say when the company started, we were very horizontal. And then we learned ecommerce was a sweet spot because if we could drive valuable customers to the website, of course, a percentage of them would convert and there was a willingness for that brand to pay us. And so there are a lot of attributes of those kinds of of, ecommerce brands that made it an early sweet spot in terms of ICP. And that just, and then we learned a lot about the business model. And so one of the crazy things we did early on was charge on a pay for performance basis.

So the early days of Bloomreach, we'd drive traffic, we'd figure out how much the value of that traffic was, and we'd send you a bill at the end of every month. And that turned out later on to be a terrible idea. But early days, it drove a lot of revenue for Bloomreach and was very aligned with the earliest customers. Tell me a little bit about what you learned in that process and why it became a bad idea. I have my thesis, but what why why did you hit the ceiling of its utility and move to something else?

Well, we can we can definitely have this conversation for a while because I think in the if if I circle back at a high level and I'll I'll answer your business model question, a lot of the early decisions we made at Bloomreach were very good early, and a number of them were terrible over the course of time. And so couple of years in, I would say, if I were to summarize the Bloomreach journey, it was a rocket ship in its earliest days, and it totally hit a wall. And one of the reasons why it hit a wall was this business model. Because as we got bigger and as the business started to really scale, ultimately, it created adversity with our customers. The more we we, drove traffic to them, the more they paid us.

But at a certain point, brands couldn't have unlimited budgets, to pay a software vendor. And so they would start to quibble over every bill. We would have to justify every every incremental dollar, and it became really difficult to figure out the attribution models. And it just created an unhealthy dynamic, I think, between our customers and us. So what was very aligned early as it grew, I think became less and less aligned.

So that was definitely, a big problem. It was also kind of a model that where we were charging on a basis that we didn't control because, of course, the early application of Bloomreach was driving traffic to websites, but ultimately the traffic came from Google. So it's not like when a customer call would call us and say, Hey, Raj, how come my traffic is down? Honestly, we wouldn't know. And so, it it felt like we were not in control of the value proposition we were selling.

And that was kind of problem number two. So misaligned business model, you know, kind of like the dependence on Google meant we were largely not in control. And then third, it created an incredible concentration of revenue because certain brands would skyrocket, others would not. And pretty soon, we'd look at our customer list, and it would be very dependent on a small number of customers. So I just I really didn't sleep very well at night in those days.

I know exactly what you lived through. So when you when you send them a bill and then the next call is justifying everything, every month you become a conflict in the way that, you know, the incentives are no longer aligned. And that that is a problem. And I love your point around concentration problem. Any rev share business asks this problem.

Shopify asks this problem too. They just don't talk about it. The fact that they make all their money in payments and their largest customers use them for payments, huge concentration problem. No doubt. No doubt.

It's a drug that you need incredible scale to grow out of. So I think we had you know, if I were to rewrite the kinda Harvard Business School case study on Bloomreach, we made every kinda business school error from a first principal's perspective, I think, that we could have made. Like, the one thing we got right is the business worked, and we drove revenue, and we drove scale, and the technology worked. So it's sort of like the tech worked, the value proposition was strong, but everything else was wrong. The whether it was the business model, the concentration, and the dependence and the platform risk in terms of being in a business that was largely at the end of the day controlled by Google.

Yes. Yes. Well, so where did you pivot in terms of pricing? Did how did you get more aligned with the what the market would, appreciate and value? We moved, I would say, to a more traditional SaaS model, which would tier for sure, but ultimately was, a flat, you know, kind of fee and recurring revenue and, a longer term contract.

So I think we moved to a more traditional model, and we had to migrate a lot of our customers, you know, to that. It was a very complicated period of time. This all started to happen around twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen where I I would say we launched into a complete pivot of the business. And and it was one of the changes we made was transform the business model into a more traditional SaaS model. Yep.

Smart pivot. Now m and a has been an important part of your strategy. Do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the industrial logic as to why you did acquisitions, what needed you you felt like you were you were getting by by acquiring businesses? Yeah. You know, I mean, the Bloomreach vision has always been clear but big.

You know? And what I mean by that is we've always set forth to say we're gonna go personalize the web, personalize commerce, and personalize every touchpoint by which a human being communicates or interacts with a brand. And the thought was if we could go do that, you could one day have your commerce platform of choice, and then you could put Bloomreach on top to handle, you know, connection and communication with your customers, and you could be done. But to do that, you have a lot of pieces of the mix. And, you know, Bloomreach started with landing pages, then we added search, then we added recommendations, then we added Yep.

Merchandising. We added more and more capabilities, but there was only so much we could go build. And so I think our first, you know, substantial acquisition was to get into the content space because we felt like, we needed to be it needed to be possible to curate not just the products, but the content. And so that led us into the content space. Later on, we would get into, the marketing automation space, which we can speak about.

We we we more recently have gotten into the conversational commerce space. But these are all very substantial technology stacks and businesses. So I think that what marks the hallmark of the Bloomreach m and a strategy has been stay focused on the same North Star. Don't diverge from that, and go acquire amazing adjacent products and services that are in and of themselves leading edge in their category. So we've never been financial buyers looking for a great deal.

We've been we've been always product led buyers to say, we wanna be in this space. Who's the best, you know, product or tech in this market? Let's go acquire them. Let's make sure that the DNA of the people matches, you know, who we are culturally. And, let's stay constant with respect to the North Star.

And then let's deeply integrate the products and services we acquire. Because if I go look, we've probably done, you know, four major acquisitions over the life, but they've been spaced out over kinda three plus years. So the idea here is you actually spend the time to integrate into a core platform. And so by the time the customer experience is revealed, it it does it feel it feels like an integrated platform. Yep.

So talk a little bit about so there's four acquisitions. I think one of them was, Hippo, which is a c open source CMS. What were what were the others? Maybe talk us through what those were. Hippo was an open source CMS.

I think I think that that that was a very substantial acquisition. Yep. The company is based in The Netherlands. Probably the most significant acquisition we've done, most impactful was a company called Exponia, which was in the customer data and marketing space. And we acquired the company back in 2020, and it has absolutely skyrocketed.

And marketing has become a much more substantial part of the business. And then, more recently, we acquired a company called Radiance Commerce, which is, which was really in the conversational shopping space, and that we did about eighteen months ago. So I would say those three were the material ones. We did an acquihire as well, earlier than that. But as far as, you know, products and businesses, those three were really the substantial ones.

So the the lion's share of the Bloomreach Shopware overlap is really in the Hippo CMS plus Shopware use case. So I've got a lot and we're open source, and you've got that product that's open source. So I I I have a pretty strong understanding of that one. But let's talk about the the radiance one with Yeah. With conversational commerce.

Unpack for us what the core value prop of what this unlocks for merchants. Yeah. So our perspective is that if we look at the last twenty years of ecommerce, you know, we've done a lot. But if we were if we're self critical for a moment, all we have done is created storefronts to enable people who already know largely what they're looking for to buy the thing that they're looking for online that they could have bought in a physical store. I think we've largely been in the in the fulfillment game.

We have not been in the, what I would call, the seeking game. Yeah. And I wrote a book called The Digital Seeker, and the whole thesis is that most of the time before we buy a product as human beings, we're trying to solve a problem. Mhmm. And whatever that problem is, whether it's like I'm redecorating my living room or whether I'm looking for an outfit, the burden of figuring out what to buy is mostly on the consumer.

They have to go visit lots of websites. They search around. They go to Amazon. They ask their friends. They go to social.

They do all of that work, and then they show up at the end and and search for something and buy it. But 80% of the work has not been taken on by commerce technology. It's been left to the consumer to figure out. And, the thesis is that conversational can change that. Because in conversational, all of a sudden, it feels a lot more like you're speaking to a sales associate in a store.

You can go back and forth around what you're looking for, what problem you're trying to solve, where you might find it, if you found the destination, what product best meets that needs, questions you might have about the upholstery of a sofa or whether it has allergens. These are experiences that are very difficult without conversational. And so we really think conversational is a fundamentally new paradigm for how people find what they're looking for online. And we felt like we needed to be part of, enabling that, and that's that's why we've made a bet on conversational. Sounds sounds perfectly aligned to today's to the AI, AgenTic commerce world.

Is there was that intentional, or is there luck involved? Or explain what some of the logic there is. You know, I think I think one of the principles of Bloomreach, because we're in the business of ultimately personalized and customer facing experiences, one of the core principles of Bloomreach is be wherever the customer is. And over the course of fifteen years, I've seen everything from people are gonna use cryptocurrency, people are gonna use metaverse, people are gonna build Facebook stores, people are gonna, you know, on and on and on. People the mobile apps are gonna displace mobile web, you know, and on and on.

And mostly from a Bloomreach perspective, we try to say, which of these trends are real and which of these trends are not real? And the ones that are not real, we try to judiciously not build software or not be in the game to power. And I think we've been right about a lot of those. But when we feel something is very real, we we are willing to make a bold bet really early. And we have felt that conversational was one of those bets, that it is early.

It is no doubt early, but we're really confident that shopping will get transformed, and we are comfortable with the risks involved in being early for something that we believe will really be transformative. And, and so we were like, you know, we gotta be in this game. Yeah. Well, that's I mean, you gotta make up founders and tech companies who wanna grow and out, you know, outgrow the market have to take big bets. And so yeah.

That's right. So you don't have a good meta metaverse, in the name on the on the horizon? We don't. And we actually you know, I think I think if I say what I've gotten right and what I haven't gotten what I've gotten wrong, metaverse, we were very we were like, yeah, we just don't see this. We just don't we don't see this transforming commerce, transforming brands in the way in which it's it feels really kinda like people in Silicon Valley dreaming up a future that nobody wants.

On the on the other hand, I think what I missed is social commerce as a result. Yeah. I think what what I didn't do is do enough in social, and we continue to think about that, because because I think we were very focused on I think we I think I confused metaverse with social commerce, and we were right to not get into metaverse and wrong to not get into social commerce earlier. I like it. I I completely, appreciate your take.

I will say that there's elements of what I think the future experiences are gonna be that will be that will kind of rhyme with what happened in the metaverse, like Yeah. AR and VR and smarter glasses and, you know, those types of things are coming as you're already well prepared for. No doubt. Yeah. I think I think one of the things that has worked really well for Bloomreach, as I mentioned, is to be where the consumers are.

So you observe the behavior of where they're going en masse and and ask yourself, can we add value to that that space? You know, the one of the other the reason the the Exponia acquisition was as successful as it was was we felt like we needed to own customer data. And we felt like the linchpin of how we were gonna power all these channels was gonna be about whether or not you could have one platform upon which you could personalize on the basis of. And to do that, you have to understand the customer in the first place. And so I think that took us into the first party data space, which then allows us to then go say, whether you're communicating via email or on a website or on an app or via social or via conversational, you want all of those interactions personalized off the same dataset.

Yeah. That's the power position. When you when you have the data, then you can absolutely help. You can be the trail guide as to what to do with it. And that's the privilege we now find ourselves in.

And I think if I were to summarize what has made the last eight or nine years so successful for Bloomreach, it's that we have become the data layer for for commerce that helps helps you understand your customers. And on that, you can go build a lot of the really interesting personalized applications, to go interact with them. So what's so funny, you know, I think my first interactions with Bloomreach is probably six or seven years ago now at this point. And when we first started interacting, this is when I was at Digital River, the conversation with Chris Gardner and the team over there at Bloomreach was the one that was centered around we're like Adobe at a fraction of the price. So it was all, like, CMS play, and it was all around, the that user experience.

And clearly now things have pivoted. Yeah. I think I think to speak a little bit about that, the the content the content business, we continue to think is an important part of our business. But I think what's changed is actually, you know, if I I had expected that more and more people would be building new experiences on Blue Ridge. And for that, you need a content management system.

Instead, what's happened is more and more people are taking existing experiences and optimizing and personalizing those experiences. And so, you know, if I look at where where 90% of our businesses today, it's mostly brands who've got an ecommerce brand because folks like Shopify have made it so easy to build that you don't really need all the tools you once did in order to build a digital experience. But what you still need is the ability to personalize those customer experiences on and off-site in order to communicate with your customers. And and that's been what has what has changed. So, yes, I think what we are seeing in the business is people, you know, are basically coming off of Adobe and Salesforce en masse.

Mhmm. And they're sort of hard of how difficult it is to build these personalized experiences on those two stacks. And they're they're coming to folks like Bloomreach, you know, at a much faster rate than maybe ever. Yep. I think you're exactly right.

And I think there's a there's a massive sucking sound towards Shopify in this kind of classic simple b to c. We've done incredibly well in the regulated industries as well as the the complex b to b. In those scenarios, we've taken 3,000 customers off of Magento. Wow. And so, so I'm completely aligned with the there's a big transitional thing happening in commerce, and Bloomreach is still right at the center of a lot of those conversations.

Yeah. I think what's been interesting, you know, to talk about Shopify for just a minute, you know, Shopify become a a core partner of Bloomreach. And I think for many years, we felt like, you know, Shopify is really in the SMB game. We're really more focused on enterprise and mid market, and they're kinda too small. But we're seeing really big brands move on to Shopify.

And as that's happening, Shopify is saying, you know what? We need a partner that we can go compete with Salesforce, compete with Adobe with that can handle the personalization of the interactions with customers. So increasingly, Shopify and Bloomreach are partnering with each other to move brands over to a modern stack. You know, both are effectively unified platforms. You get you get the unified back end from Shopify, you get the unified front end from Bloomreach, and you're done.

Yep. Yep. Exactly. Well, let's talk a little bit about the branding challenge that Bloomreach has. You guys have been now you're a bit more of a house of brands.

You've acquired a bunch of businesses. You've integrated them, which is kudos to you. How should people think about Bloomreach now, as opposed to a collection of acquisitions? Yeah. Talk talk about that.

I think I think evolving the positioning is is is itself not easy. I mean, as a founder, you're always sort of in the future, but, you know, your customers are where you were three to five years ago. So there's always a gap there that that, needs needs reconciling. And and, you know, I think if we think about Bloomreach today, it really is back to that original vision. We are finally kinda where we I wanted us to be when I started the company seventeen years ago, which is you should be able to take any digital experience, any commerce interaction.

You should be able to load your data into Bloomreach very quickly, by the way. Algorithms and AI should play a role in determining what experience to put in front of a human being that increases the probability that they engage with your brand, that they, that they stay with your brand, and that they ultimately buy one product, two products, and three products from your brand. And that's the problem that Bloomreach solves. And what that then means is that every consumer interaction becomes personalized across every touchpoint, and the LTV to CAC or the economics of your brand get transformed as well because you can acquire customers at lower cost, you can retain customers at higher rates, and you can keep them converting along the way. So if you think about how we do that, it's basically load your data into Bloomreach.

We understand your customers and your products. We run our AI models on top, and then we power every channel by which you communicate with the customer, your website, your search engine, your recommendation tools, your email, your SMS, your WhatsApp, your ad targeting on Facebook and Google, every way by which a consumer shops with you, we're gonna personalize that that touch point. You know, and and it's a big vision because it basically means we reject the hypothesis that there should be search vendors, CMS vendors, email vendors, SMS vendors. And the re the the reason we reject that is because there's not a human being I know who gets up in the morning and says, today, I wanna shop with search, and tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up and shop with email, and the day after, I'm gonna wake up and shop on Facebook. They just go look for a product.

They go look for a problem to solve. And so our perspective is the technology industry has created unnecessary complexity, and that we should just make it really easy to personalize every personalize and power every interaction with a consumer wherever they're shopping. Yeah. You guys went from being a landing page company to a marketing operating system. Exactly.

Yep. That's what I said. You can use it. The, it's fascinating story. So what role do things like the analysts play?

Gartner, Forrester, and the like. I mean, and maybe talk a little bit about your position because you guys have done very, very well in their eyes. Yeah. I think I think the analysts are important, you know, and and a lot of our customers trust their judgment. We're fortunate to be in the upper right quadrants of a lot of Forrester and and Gartner, you know, quadrants.

What's, important we've we've decided is that, you know, the analysts don't necessarily see the world the way we see the world. Like, as you said, we're building personalization across every channel, marketing operating system. They've got reports for cross channel marketing. They've got reports for search. They've got reports for digital experience management.

They've got all kinds of reports. And and we've just sort of said, you know, that's okay. We're gonna we're gonna fight to be in a leadership position for the critical ones. Often that's they're not doing that because it doesn't make sense. That is often how buyers buy our software.

Increasingly, people are just buying the entire platform. But in many cases, people say, I just wanna start with email. I just wanna start with search. I just wanna start with recommendations. I just wanna start with with SMS.

And and so it's logical that you would want some best of breed reports that that, stack rank vendors across those categories. And, you know, we have one of the reasons it's taken seventeen years is we think we have to be this all in one platform, but we also have to be really good at the pieces. If the pieces are not excellent, then, you know, brands aren't gonna trust us for one substantial capability. Well, that that was why I asked the core question is because analysts look at the world very myopically and you're looking at it as a as a sweet, a best of sweet approach with unbelievably good parts. And so that was why I asked the question, how do you embrace their point of view at looking at just the pieces?

But it's, your answer was perfect. Yeah. I mean, I I think we have to recognize because I think they're mirroring a lot of clients. A lot of our clients might just start with the website or might just start with the marketing marketing, and we encourage that. We say, you the architecture of Bloomreach is really almost modeled on the way Google Cloud Platform or AWS works.

It's a collection of APIs on top of a core data engine at the end of the day. So the adoption of the APIs is it can be incremental, and we encourage that. So we're not trying to go in and say replatform your entire stack when you move to Bloomreach. We're trying to say, start somewhere, get an ROI, and keep growing. Got it.

Land and expand. Only where it makes sense for you. Yep. Yep. Fabulous.

Well, we've we've chewed through already most of our time, but one of the traditions that we do have on this pod is we like to give you the opportunity to think about who's been instrumental to you in your e commerce journey, people you've interacted with and you, who you would probably consider to be an e commerce hall of fame. So does anybody come into mind as to who we should reach out to have as a guest? You were recommended twice. I got a look back as to who it was, but that was why I reached out. Yeah.

Well, look. I appreciate firstly, I appreciate I appreciate the invite. I think that commerce is is changing, for sure. And, you know, one of the for me, as I look at at who has influenced us, I think it's it's a lot of our leading edge customers, who who have been willing to experiment with us. I'll I'll give you one specific example, and he might be an interesting guest for you.

His name is John Coral, and he was the chief digital officer of Canadian Tire, the, of Neiman Marcus. He was at Williams Sonoma. He was at eBay. And and I've worked with John over many years. I think he's now over at Facebook, if I'm not mistaken.

And he's been one of those guys who early on when I had crazy ideas that we should go build a a mobile optimization technology or we should go build something in the, personalization space or in the search space. He'd be a guy that would come in and experiment with me. So what I appreciate about John is he's not you know, he didn't he didn't grow up in the software technologies world. He grew up on the consumer side at great places like eBay, but always had an appreciation for the transformative effect of technology on business. And so I've done a lot of experimentation with him over the years, and I'd nominate him for that, hall of fame.

Amazing. Well, I will definitely take you up on an intro to John. I would love to spend a half hour talking about some of his experiences. It sounds amazing. Perfect candidate.

Awesome. Awesome. Fabulous. Well, we are at time, so let's let's adjourn here. But if folks wanna get in touch with you, Raj, what do you recommend they do?

Yeah. They can they they can find me on LinkedIn, for sure, or I'm at raj@bloomreach.com, and that works too. Fabulous. I always love when CEOs give out their personal email. I mean, they are customer centric is what it means.

That's right. That's right. Yes. Great speaker. Thank you, sir.