The Future of Mobile Apps for Shopify - "This is the Way"

Jay Myers: Ross, it's so good to have you here on the show and Don't usually do this right off the bat But I feel like your background and a little bit of your history I think is important for some context to what we're gonna dive into.

So can Tell us who you are, but go into a little bit of like where you were before and how you came to be here.

Ross Correia: Yeah. I mean, I was just talk for the next 45 minutes.

Jay Myers: That would make my job really easy.

Ross Correia: So, I mean, I think my background started over 10 years ago. So I was on the merchant side. I had a beef jerky business that most people don't know about. It, it didn't go so well. I mean, it did, it did. We did pretty well.

We started out as, as a hobby. We started making beef jerky for our friends. I think we were all into working out at the time. So high protein, low carb stuff. We started selling in gyms and then a couple of months later, we found ourselves. Selling in grocery stores. And have you ever had a food business?

Jay Myers: Not a food business, but I was not a merchant for since 1998, but I sold archery supplies. So, which I think we talked about a little bit once at one time, but not food, man. I don't, I have respect for anyone that sells food. Like it's

Ross Correia: Food sucks. It's perishable. We were in grocery stores. The shelving cost to be in a grocery store is ridiculous too. So we pivoted immediately to Shopify and started selling beef jerky online. And everyone thinks that's a horrible idea, but it was the best decision we ever made. We started doing, I think we were up to a couple hundred grand a year in beef jerky sales online on Shopify.

back in 2015 or 2014. It was crazy, but ended up falling in love with Shopify in that process and falling out of love with beef jerky. So I applied for a job at Shopify. It was a support job. It was the, it was the only job I thought I was qualified for. I got the job. Best day of my life. I was like, I get to work for Shopify.

I told my family and friends and they were like, what is this company? Why are you working here? Why are you working from home? Do you really have a job? They're like, go to the office. But had an amazing time there. I was there for three years. I started in support. I worked for a team that got to travel all over Canada and the U S talking about Shopify with merchants.

I was then on a sales team. I told my lead at the time, Jamie Armstrong, he'll remember this. I said, I never want to be in sales. So I applied for a solutions engineer job and the offer letter came back as a sales job. And he was like, try it. I promise you, you'll love it. And I did. And he was an amazing mentor.

Spent a lot, a couple of years there. Then I worked for a buy now pay later company back when everyone talked about buy now pay later. This is right before COVID

Jay Myers: Okay.

Ross Correia: right. And, and part of it was, Hey, you're moving to New York city. And I was like, this is the best. I always wanted to move to New York city. So me and my partner were moving to New York city.

We were expecting a baby March or April, 2020, of course. COVID happened. So we didn't end up moving, ended up building a team remotely for this public company here in Toronto, spent a year and a half there. I then worked for another company called Plobal Apps. Again, most people have probably never heard of them.

They were building apps in the Shopify ecosystem. Of course, I pulled Zach in immediately. Of course, we're kind of tied at the hip ever since Shopify. Spent three years there building that out. And then one year ago we started Reactiv.

Jay Myers: Well, and

Ross Correia: It's been crazy.

Jay Myers: so one thing I just want to say, it's super interesting. I I'll, I'll have to have who you probably know Daniel from ABRA promotions.

Ross Correia: He actually invested in our Reactiv

Jay Myers: did he? Okay. I didn't know that, but he also had a beef jerky company, didn't he? But it was what do you call it? Bill, Bill Tang, Bill, Bill Tong. That's it. It's the South African.

Were you guys competitors with your beef jerky?

Ross Correia: I'm going to have to ask Daniel the official term, but we were kind of frenemies during that period because we also both sold to Shopify. So Shopify would buy our product for the offices and give it to all the employees. But. We were both doing it and internally there was this constant debate of is his biltong better or is our beef jerky better?

Jay Myers: Right. So what is the actual difference between Bill Tong and beef jerky? Is it like the way it's made or something? Or. He would probably be able to explain that better.

Ross Correia: I think so. So ours, you know, we would use, we would marinate our meats for like overnight in like sauce. And then you use these dehydrators and you put them in all these racks and you dehydrate them for 12 hours at a time. It was the most painstaking thing ever. I listened to the most amount of podcasts then.

But built on, I believe you just hang dry it in a room and it's, it's seasoned with only, I think three or four things. It's like salt coriander and something else. And you can only season it with that for

Jay Myers: Okay. That's what, okay. Interesting. I'm going to have him on the show one time and we'll all ask him whose was better and we'll we'll settle that,

Ross Correia: Spoiler alert, his is better.

Jay Myers: okay. Simpler. And anyways, back to e commerce. So Yeah, there was, I, and I knew a bit of your background and the reason why I thought it was relevant, of course, is one, you, you, you spend time at Shopify.

You were with the plus team. You were talking to larger merchants. I know we were talking before the show that you actually helped close one of their first large plus merchants back in, I guess, 2018 was that when Steve Madden came on

Ross Correia: I think it was maybe 2017 or 18, I can't remember now. It was early days, yeah.

Jay Myers: right? Which to be honest, like plus kind of launched in like 2015.

15. I want to say 2006. Yeah. So like you had a much harder time selling back then than it is now. Like now the, the momentum is towards Shopify. It was very different back in, back then. And then global apps, I think some might know of it. They, they, they were decently. Large. Like I, I know I certainly knew of them like at bold.

And so you've got this background in Shopify and then you've got this background in the mobile app space. And it's really interesting because now you've started Reactiv, which I want to get into. Of course I want to get into, but I think I'm willing to bet that 99 percent of our listeners, maybe even 99.

5 percent don't have a mobile app for their online store. Like it's, they, they, they feel it's probably it's out of reach. It's too expensive. Why do I even need a mobile app? Every site's mobile friendly. So I'm willing to bet that it's a very high percentage. And so before we get into Reactiv, I. I think it's important to kind of talk a little bit about like how we got here because I remember a time, so I, I started selling online in 1998 before there was even mobile, I, I, well, I remember in 2009 when I first found Shopify and I went in their theme store and they had responsive, Themes that just were responsive by default.

That was actually why I moved one of my stores onto Shopify was like, it looked good on mobile. Even then that mobile wasn't a main,

Ross Correia: What, what was the main phone out there? Was it Black, it was Blackberry. It must have

Jay Myers: yeah, well Blackberry before that I had Palm Pilots,

Ross Correia: Yeah.

Jay Myers: and then Nokia flip phones before that. Right. So, but yeah, 2008 kind of iPhone started to become popular and then 2009 responsive things, but it was still was like everyone was designing up for desktop and it wasn't like. Mobile wasn't really that important.

Then Apple kind of came out with HTML5 saying we don't even like mobile apps

Ross Correia: the future.

Jay Myers: who needs apps? Why do people, which, you know, back then data speeds were very slow. So like it would take a long time to download an app and there was a lot of friction and phone storage. I think my first phone had 16 gigs, so

Ross Correia: You were lucky. I had the 8 gig iPhone. It was awful.

Jay Myers: Did you have a gig? I might've been a gig. I honestly don't remember,

Ross Correia: With the silver back and the black bottom. I love that phone.

Jay Myers: yeah, well the, my first one, I couldn't even slide screens. Like it was like, you could only have apps. I remember when they

Ross Correia: one didn't even have the App Store. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So, so it's, it's, you know, I remember very much a time when shopping on a mobile phone, people thought, well, yeah, people will, might look on a mobile phone, but they're not maybe going to buy there.

They'll go to their desktop to buy, or they're in this. Now you fast forward. It feels to me a little bit now. Like we're reliving that a little bit, but take out mobile friendly and verse, and then put in the word mobile app. And you could probably have, it's the exact same conversation. I feel like people are like, well, do I really need a mobile app?

Is it even that important? And I feel like. We might be having this conversation 10 years from now. Like I, we are now about mobile apps when I think you probably see a world where every single store has a mobile app and someone listening right, right now, Michael, well, that's impossible. And I know, I know it is very possible and we're excited to get into that.

And so. I, I, before I actually the show today, I just, you know, I, I, I Googled some of well, how, what, what is the importance or what is the difference between shopping on a mobile app versus shopping on a mobile website and the. Data is actually staggering. I'm sure you probably have a lot of data points on this.

Ross Correia: Oh, it's insane. It's insane. And those are only the public facing data. I feel like the best brands like Nike and Lululemon and Amazon, they don't even share how well their apps are doing, but you can tell because you'll walk into a retail store. I don't know if you've had this experience at Nike. I think it's the weirdest thing where you go to buy a pair of shoes and you get up to the cash and And you're ready to pay.

And they say, Hey, do you have the app? And if you say no, they'll give you 15 percent off your order just to install the app.

Jay Myers: did that at one time when shopping at a Nike store, like that exact experience. That's how much they want you to get the app because they know that's how, so some of the data points. When I just did a look like a quick bit of research this morning was 90. This, this blew my mind. 90 percent of mobile internet usage is on a phone is spent in apps, not on a browser.

90%.

Ross Correia: Wow.

Jay Myers: Users view 4. 2 times more products per session on mobile apps. Versus mobile sites. And I don't know the reasons. Some might say, well, you know, you can't just open a tab to another site. You can't click back or can't go to like you're in an app. Maybe I don't know all the science behind it, but there's 420 percent more, 4.

2 times more products per session. Conversion rates, three times higher on apps than on mobile websites. And then there's. A bunch of data around how much better it is for entertainment apps, travel apps, convert 220 percent higher retail, retail apps specifically. So just specifically in e commerce convert 94 percent higher than a mobile.

Like we pay agencies a lot of money to increase website. Conversion by 3 percent or 5%. And if you go to a brand doing even just a couple hundred or sorry, a couple million a year, like to increase conversion, like it's insane. And just apps convert 94 percent better. Anyways, the list goes on. And then the thing that I found was really interesting was.

This one website I went to I'll put all the sources for these in the, in the notes, but, or the show notes app usage since 2008 or 2018. The average American spent 2.4 hours per day of app usage. Then it went up to 3.1, 3.35, 3.4, 3.47. Today it's it's like 4.2, but browser usage has stayed at, in 2018, it was 0.25 hours in 2019 0.24, 2020, back up to 0.25, and it stayed flat ever since.

Actually last year it was 0.23, so it actually decreased a little bit. So like I look at these numbers and it's man, how could anyone not be pursuing a mobile app strategy? So why, why, why not? I mean, this must've been the problem that you, you saw, but why, why doesn't every single store have a mobile app?

Ross Correia: That's a great question. I think, I think you've kind of answered it by asking the question. I think it really comes down to education where a lot of brands and businesses just don't know. Right. And there's so much data all around it. But. To, to actually speak to someone who has the data, who works with, you know, a hundred different brands at a time.

I think that's the best way to learn, but I think it comes down to an education problem of people just not knowing it, but then also a time problem. So apps have been out since oh nine. I think you said it, the first app store for Apple came out in oh nine for the iPhone and. App development has stayed the same throughout the process, right?

There's two options. There's the build option where you work with an agency or you hire a team in house and you build it and it costs you a couple hundred grand or close to a million dollars. And then you need to maintain it as time goes on. And as your e com provider changes their APIs, you need to make those same changes.

It's a cumbersome process. It's really easy to design an app in Figma. and get something out the door, but the process of managing it over sucks and it hasn't changed in 15 years. And then your other route is going the cookie cutter route, right? So you choose a platform. This is what they have within the box.

This is what you're limited to. And it usually doesn't allow the brand to shine through it. You're just kind of, you know, Stuck inside of what this platform allows you to do. And those have been the two options. So our focus at Reactiv, not to throw ourselves in the mix is to be right in the middle of that, where you have the 80 percent that the platform gives you and we give you the extensibility.

So if you're a enterprise customer doing 300 million a year, You can use our SDK and you can make the app look and feel custom so that you're not, you know, held back by us at any point. So that's where Reactiv comes in. That's the problem we're trying to solve.

Jay Myers: So, well, let's get right into Reactiv. What, what is Reactiv?

Ross Correia: Yeah. So we're a mobile app platform where we give you 80 percent of what you need for a mobile app. It's the core platform. It's connected to Shopify. It allows you to build an app. We have an AI tool that'll actually build the app for you in minutes. It's insane.

Jay Myers: Tell me what that means. What does that mean? So I, I know nothing about building a native iPhone or Android app. Can I use it?

Ross Correia: you can use it. So we have this cool thing. It's called an AI pipeline and what it does is several things. So the first thing it will do is it'll recognize, Hey, this is JSTOR. This is your URL. It'll then say, okay, what's the name of your store? It'll pick all that easy stuff up. It'll pick up your brand colors, your fonts.

Then we use vision models to understand every section on your website. So is this a product carousel? Is this a hero banner? Is this a call to action for a product? We understand those. And then we, we use our vision model to then build that natively within your mobile app for you. So now you don't need a designer.

You don't need a launch engineer. The AI tool will actually build your app. Based on your website and have it ready to go for you. It's really cool.

Jay Myers: And then can I just launch it into the app store or do I, does it need to get approved or what does that process look like?

Ross Correia: great question. So we also built a, we have so many pipelines at Reactiv. This product is so big and I think it's taken us a year to get here and you don't think about it on the outside, but so we have a build pipeline and what the build pipeline does is it allows you to push publish and it'll get your Apple app store credentials, your Google, Google store credentials, and it'll publish it directly to them for you.

It doesn't require anyone on the Reactiv side. It's. It's pretty wicked.

Jay Myers: So then you own your app store listing as a merchant.

Ross Correia: Yep.

Jay Myers: So then you're responsible for the promotional images, everything else. And then there's like a listing ID of some sort that you connect with Reactiv and then it pipelines it to that. Is that the right?

Ross Correia: It's, it's even easier. So all you have to do is set up an Apple account and a Google account, and you can add us as a developer to that. And it allows us, yeah, it allows us to just push it through from end to end. We also use AI to generate, you know, your app store listing images, your screenshots. Yeah.

Based on, as well as based on app store optimization. So if we know. These types of screenshots, these types of stuff, you know, verbiage work really well. We'll make sure we incorporate that for every single brand. And it's not just static. So as things change over time and we see new trends, we constantly update it in the background for the merchant as well.

Jay Myers: So, I guess do, do retail apps generally always get approved or is there restrictions on what you can sell? What's, what's that process like?

Ross Correia: Yeah. So there are some products that we're not allowed to sell. I'm sure you can guess it's probably the same list of products that Shopify payments do. Doesn't approve you for is kind of the easy way to go about it, but the rest of the process, you know, we build apps as a platform, so we know the things that Apple and Google look for.

So as part of our build submission, all of that stuff is taken care of. So we take that entire burden on our team and remove it from the merchant.

Jay Myers: Interesting. Okay. Have you had, and has anyone not cut approved yet? That would be, that would fall within the criteria of what's allowed to be sold. But I don't know, for whatever reason, they might not get approved or does that.

Ross Correia: Nothing yet in the past life, you know, at working at one of the other players in the space when cannabis first started being accepted on Shopify, we started to build some cannabis apps. It's kind of gray area right now. Apple has some rules about it, so it's possible, but there were definitely times where things did not get approved.

Jay Myers: Right. Okay. So now I've installed Reactiv. I've let the AI builder build my app. Is there still as a, as a merchant, can I Does it just mimic the products on my website and my collections and categories and it pulls that in? Or can I pick different things I want to feature on the homepage? Or maybe I want to do like app specific discounts.

If you install the app, you maybe get 20 percent off something that's not on the website. Or like what, what control do I have of the app versus the website and what's synced?

Ross Correia: yeah. So for better or for worse. We have a CMS tool that you can go in and you can drag and drop different sections in your app, different products, carousels. The AI tool will do it based on your website because most merchants wanted to look very similar to that. But within a couple of minutes, you can drag and drop different collections, different banners.

We've even built our own offer section. So you can offer. You know, a 20 percent exclusive deal inside of the app or discounted products only within the app we've, we've built this massive product with all these rails to be able to do it Yeah, it's, it's really cool.

Jay Myers: So, so that you can do that. You can give an S a promotion in an app that's not available on the website.

Ross Correia: That's, that's what we recommend. And that's probably the easiest way to get customers in the app. I think one of the biggest questions we get when working with brands, especially smaller brands, I think when people think about mobile apps, like you mentioned earlier, they think, Oh, you know, I'm too small, maybe in a year from now, but that's not, that's not true.

That's not accurate. You want to start as early as possible, be as close as you can to your customers, cause you're just, you're fighting for that wallet share, right? And if your customers are going to shop in apps and they're going to get notifications from your competitors, you should do the same thing.

But one thing that we recommend is most merchants have a welcome discount, right? When you shop with them for the first time, change that to, instead of saying, Hey, get 15 percent off. For giving me your email or your phone number to 15 percent off your first order in the app. And our tool can do all of the work behind the scenes for that.

And we've noticed that drop off is very, very similar to email. Get you get a much stickier customer.

Jay Myers: Interesting. Okay. So I know, I know I'm asking kind of very basic questions, but I think. I, you know, like I said earlier, like I, I would be willing to bet if you took a poll of a thousand Shopify merchants, their level of experience with app building is probably very, very minimal. So some of this seems like a big black box that they like, can anyone just get in the app store?

Does there does it, you know, so, so I'm hopefully covering some of the things that listeners are, are, are thinking. One of them is as far as like payments is that, is it, is it Is the Shopify checkout embedded within the app or does it direct to a checkout page or how does that work?

Ross Correia: So we embed Shopify's new checkout directly within the app. So this is great too, because if you're already using you know, scripts or different checkout stuff. That's happening on your website, they'll work natively within the app as well. So functions, right? For example, functions worth natively inside your mobile app as well.

There's no additional customization, no additional work you have to do on the backend. It's all incredibly seamless. All those orders flow into Shopify. And what's cool is you can actually see it in Shopify. So when you look at your analytics and Shopify, you'll see online stores, a sales channel, maybe Amazon, maybe Facebook Reactiv, or your mobile app will show up as a sales channel there.

Yeah,

Jay Myers: So then everything works as far as shop pay and every payment method you accept.

Ross Correia: shop pay, Apple pay. We're doing actually a lot of testing to see, to compare credit card versus Apple pay for shop pay, how we display them in the app. Do we show them at cart? There's so many small things that we can do that have a massive impact on conversion, especially when, you know, you shared it earlier conversions three to four times higher, we've seen merchants with.

Five, six, 10 percent higher conversion. And we're always trying to find that silver. It doesn't even make sense. We're trying to find that silver bullet. And I think what's hard too, is we're very data focused. So we try and compare apples to apples as best you can. But when someone does take that extra step to install the app.

Is it really comparing apples to apples? So I know we'll talk about it later, but I'll share some of the experiments we're doing with app clips to really compare the same intent on both sides.

Jay Myers: well, yeah, I mean, I definitely want to get into that and that, so, I mean, the next question I was going to ask was why did you, why did you build it? What is there not, was there not good solutions out there where they, did you see them as too expensive or they like legacy software or what, what made you want to build Reactiv?

And then let's get into app clips for sure, because I think this is really cool what you're doing, but, but why Reactiv?

Ross Correia: Yeah, I, I, I mean, there's so, there's so much I can say about here. I feel like we could do a whole podcast on why Reactiv, but I think one of the biggest things is. is that I've been looking at this mobile app space closely for the past four years, right, working in a competitor who's not around anymore and really seeing it firsthand, building in that space, selling to the same user base.

And there was just this massive gap in the market, right? Again, You either go and build it yourself and you spend a ton of money doing it. And a lot of brands and businesses, especially with today's economy, just don't have the budget for that. Or you use a solution that you can buy off the shelf that you can get integrated fairly quickly.

It still takes a long time, has tons of problems, a lot of tech debt on the legacy players. And we just wanted to use the most. The best, the modern technology that we could find, solve all the pain points from being there as well. Right. And I think a big thing is AI. When we were at a, our previous company, we had people that were doing the onboarding.

We had people that were building designs, people that were integrating every single app, people that were saying, segmenting your customer base for you and sending notifications for you and suggesting notifications and all these different things. It always required people, but when you're a platform and you get to work with hundreds, thousands of merchants, you start to amass data and using that data, we started to work with AI and we let AI handle a lot of those things.

It not only makes the experience faster, but it doesn't require someone who could make a mistake as well. We could just do it at scale a lot quicker. So. From the beginning of Reactiv, we wanted to make sure that every step that usually required someone's handholding or doing it for you, we can use AI to, to replicate that.

And that's been a massive unlock for us.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So some of those examples, I know you mentioned one time before, like push notifications, leveraging AI, and there's some other what are some ways that a merchant might leverage that?

Ross Correia: Yeah. So it comes back to the biggest pain point. So the biggest pain point was onboarding before getting the design built, getting it out the door. So AI will do that for you now, but once you had the app live merchants were still in the middle of the desert because as the update stuff on the website, the app wouldn't automatically update.

But now our AI models, when you update stuff on the website, the AI model will update the app for you. You don't have to manage multiple CMSs. So that was a huge unlock. Then once you had your app live and you're updating content, you have to engage with these customers. These are your best customers. They want to shop in your app.

So you need to give them the best experience. Again, it required someone previously to go in. Segment the customer base based on the data. And there's so much data in an app who opened the app, what time of day they opened the app, how long did they spend on X page? Did they add to cart? Did they remove?

There's so much different events that we track again, something that's not truly scalable to ask every e commerce brand to do. So now AI will do it for you. It'll create those segments. It'll send those notifications faster than you could ever do it, right? If we notice you and I are both looking at the same product and we came in through the same funnel, Let's use the same campaign for Ross and Jay.

If it doesn't work, immediately pivot the next cohort of customers. Let's try something else. It's insane what you could do with the technology today.

Jay Myers: Anytime I add a new product to the site, change a description price. That's just synced real time. Or was it a daily push or

Ross Correia: Real time, real time. Yeah,

Jay Myers: So you're pulling, so the app is pulling from the same product database as your store.

Ross Correia: exactly. We pull all that, all that hard data down from Shopify in real time. And then a lot of the soft data, like your content, your hero banners, your images, your notification banners. We use AI to pull that down as well.

Jay Myers: And then there's Reactiv specific content, I imagine.

Ross Correia: And then you could do static content just for the app.

Jay Myers: Just for the app. Yeah. Wow. Amazing. That's such a good point. You said like when you said your app users are your best customers and. I hadn't thought of that before, but that's so true is if someone is using your app, that's the customer you want to give the best service.

If you have a membership program, get them in the membership program. If you have loyalty or, you know, like that's who you want to double down on. That's a really interesting data point that, yes, that is probably your You're one of your most engaged customers.

Ross Correia: and and we're we're we're biggest skeptics here at Reactiv to so, you know, when you shared all those amazing details about app versus web. There's always a self fulfilling prophecy, though, that someone who's going to install your app, they're going to be that VIP shopper, they're going to be the best shopper.

But we're really finding that it's not about taking someone who is going to buy at web and moving them to app, but for some reason, and I can't tell you what it is yet, I hope we can tell you soon, but for some reason, when someone shops in the app for the first time, they just become that VIP customer.

It's almost Building more VIP customers. I don't know what it is yet. I don't know if it's because it's always on your phone. It's on a homepage because of the notifications, but something about it is just so intrinsically sticky that it works.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I'm well, I noticed that in my behavior too. And I, you're right. Like I couldn't say exactly why, but I'm going to Home Depot, I'll open the Home Depot app. If I'm going to Ikea, I open the Ikea app, not the website. And. I maybe didn't do that four or five years ago, but I find myself doing that now.

Like I, I instead of going to Safari and searching, I just pull down on my phone. I type in, I'll just use Ikea as an example, pull up the app. Maybe because that process has become faster. Finding an app is more intuitive and I you're right though. And I don't know what it is, but it, it, I find myself doing that exact same behavior

Ross Correia: I, we don't know what it is yet. We're trying to figure it out and I hope.

Jay Myers: Hey, just ride it.

Who cares? It's it's so, okay. Now Before I get into AppClicks, one last thing I want to clarify, just someone's probably thinking this, but now, even though it's pulling everything in from the store, if I'm a, if I'm a hundred million dollar brand and I, and I want full control and I say, yes, Reactiv, this is nice and pretty that you pull in my templates, can I still have 100 percent full control or is there some limitation to what I can do?

Ross Correia: So today it's not a hundred percent full. I would say it's probably around 90 percent full. There are things that we don't want you to break and, and, and mess up. But in terms of just branding and letting your company and your business shine through, all of that is fully accessible, but really getting under the hood.

There are some things that we don't allow yet. We're going to get there. It's just making sure we can build it in a scalable way so that. You know, Missouri star, one of our merchants there, they sell quilts. They're doing multiple hundred million dollars a year selling quilts, which is just insane by itself, but that they can't, you know, update their daily deals or their tutorials in their app and crash the entire platform or do something with the code base.

So there are things that you can't do. But for the most part. Everything is there. And we recommend working with an agency too. I know, you know, most of these businesses, they don't have the time. I think that's why we built all these AI tools to help with the automation. So working with an agency like domain or laser, one of our partners, they'll build those customizations for you.

You'll save a ton of money versus going custom and you'll end up with a custom product.

Jay Myers: Okay. App clips. This is you know, I actually didn't know what they were and I remember, so one of the other co founders of Reactiv Zach he messaged me. I don't know, this was maybe like five months ago and he said, Hey Jay, check this out and he sent a link and I clicked, I clicked the link and it.

Instantly opened an app and I actually, that was the first time I had experienced an app clip and I thought, what the heck is this? I never downloaded this app. It just opened the app. And I said this is super cool. Is this a new, new thing that Apple is doing? I, I, I, because we don't, we don't really do much in the iOS space or Android space.

And so I, you know, I wasn't aware of it. And so tell me tell me what, Obviously I'm not describing AppClips the best. What are AppClips and let's start with that. What are

Ross Correia: Yeah, I think, I think in its simplest form, an app clip, or we call them Reactiv clips here at Reactiv is. It allows you to open and run or stream whatever word you want to use a mobile app without ever installing it. So if we think back to 2009 or 2015 or 2019 or 2023, the biggest pain point with apps, even when talking to customers, talking to merchants is getting a customer to install the app.

And I know we've talked about strategies and how. It's actually not that difficult. There are a lot of simple things, but imagine if you could get every customer into the app now and you could, without them having to go and install it, an app clip allows someone to click on a link anywhere on their iPhone or their Android.

And it'll open. The app automatically without ever having to go to the app store and installing it. It's insane. You kind of have to try it for the first time to, to feel it.

Jay Myers: I will put a link in the show notes, but if you're on an iPhone and you're looking at the show notes as a demo, I think there's a, there's a demo site,

Ross Correia: There's a demo. We've got tons. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Okay. Because I agree it it's, it's, it's an, it's a native mobile app that loads instantly that doesn't install, like it doesn't go through the app store.

Now, are there, well, the, the first thing that I thought was cool about this was like, you're in the app. So I imagine a lot of the data points that we talked about earlier, like the higher conversion, the looking at more pages, I don't see why that wouldn't be true with an app clip. It just, it feels a hundred percent like a native mobile app. Are you seeing the same data when someone opens an app clip versus opening like a native app that was installed through the app store?

Ross Correia: This, this is a great question. So even when you, when you talk about it, even when I talk about it, we always talk about it being almost native. It's fully native. I, again, you have to try it right. To, to experience it. It's not a PWA. It doesn't open in the browser. It's the app.

Jay Myers: Well, it's going to be a, it's going to kill PWAs.

Ross Correia: I think so.

I think, I think, I think there's a lot of markets we're going after there.

Jay Myers: Progressive, progressive web apps is PWA for,

Ross Correia: for everyone that doesn't know, no, no, no, you're right. What's really cool with the app clip is, We're just starting to see the data. And again, this is such an it's when in our lives have we ever been able to launch something that no one's ever heard of that we've had to say, Hey, try this to experience it.

It's so cool. So we're going through early data now. This, this month will be huge for us with the election coming up with black Friday, cyber Monday, people are fighting for attention, right? You're fighting for your customer's attention. So we've rolled this out with a handful of merchants and we're analyzing the data to see what's happening.

I think what. is one of the coolest anecdotes that no one probably thought of is that the conversion isn't necessarily better. It's a little bit better, but we don't know if that data is truly accurate. So someone will click on an ad on Instagram or Facebook, and instead of going to the browser and having pop ups and all these things, it's now opening inside of the app.

And I think people are like, Whoa, what is this? Why am I in the app for, for one? So maybe it's a cool factor, but then what we're seeing is that people are going back later. So I don't know if they're, they're doing it in the middle of a work meeting or they're just busy with life. People are going back, you know, so when you swipe up on your iPhone, you can find that app clip later and that's how people are going back into it.

So that's kind of a been, been a big unlock

Jay Myers: Oh,

Ross Correia: people are able to, people are able to get back to it. Then once people are able to get back

Jay Myers: so just the nuance there. Just it's, it's not just a tab within Safari when you swipe up on your iPhone and you see every other app that is open, it's still there.

Ross Correia: it stays there until you close it, which is crazy. So people will go back later, and then we're seeing conversion on that second or third open as just being astronomical, which is crazy. Again, we don't know why, but it is. I think it has to do with people's attention and just maybe they're now, you know, I put my kids to bed at 7 p.

m. Uber Eats is the best of both worlds. This, by the way, me and my wife put our kids to bed at seven and at seven oh two, there's a notification. Hey tacos your house 15 minutes and like food is already on the counter. We're like, oh, that sounds amazing. Let's order But I think it has to do something with that.

So people are coming back later And then one of the biggest unlocks has been the notification. So if someone opens your app clip, you get eight hours to send them additional notifications when they open those, when they click on those notifications again, you get an eight hours chunk every time they open it.

So you now get to retarget as much as you'd like every single person who's clicked on one of your ads for free.

Jay Myers: Wow. And that's, that's a native push, push notification in the app. They don't have to have the app open.

Ross Correia: don't have to have to

Jay Myers: like any other push notification.

Ross Correia: Yeah. And it's fully branded. So it's not like an SMS where it'll come from four, eight, seven, eight, nine. It'll have the brand and everything. It's so cool.

Jay Myers: That is, I mean, are you seeing brands? Yeah, that's super powerful. So, so can you give me some examples of what obviously I imagine there's okay. Abandoned carts, or did you, did you leave something behind? Or we have a special like a special for this might be a new customer who clicked an ad.

Can you, can you segment who the notifications go to, or is it right now? Just send this four hours to everyone that clicked on the app. Or can you get specific?

Ross Correia: You can get as specific as you'd like. So you can do it based on the journey that they have inside of the app, the different events that they have. If someone added to cart, so abandoned browse, abandoned cart are really easy ones. If we. We also are, we're trying a lot of different notification styles, you know, 15 minutes after we send the abandoned cart, but we're trying stuff around the three hour mark, the five hour mark.

And then at the eight hour mark, we do a last ditch effort with a discount code. And those have been incredibly powerful too. It's still early days. We're still experimenting, but the power and the capability has been crazy.

Jay Myers: Yeah, it's amazing. So someone can click an ad. Open a native app and you can send push notifications. I mean, I think of you know, Gary Vaynerchuk, he always is like in the world of social media, he's the, he's the, you know, buy attention when attention is cheap, get in. And when, when face in the early days of Facebook, you could get attention for cheap in the early days of Google ads.

Like I remember acquiring customers for 5 cents a click. Now you Can't get it for a dollar a click, but it's probably more like three or 4 a click, but anyways, they, so

Ross Correia: on your segment and all that fun stuff. Yeah.

Jay Myers: anytime there's something new, new, new technology, you want it. Like the first movers are the ones that see the biggest. The biggest return.

And so this will probably be normal in a few years, but right now there's a amazing window of opportunity that you can, cause I mean, let's face it, like with, with the iOS cookie blocking and everything else, like it's very hard, you're, you're, you're spending a lot more to get customers and you know, a lot less about them.

This seems. Like a really, really good solution to some of those challenges that brands are facing.

Ross Correia: yeah. I mean, it's, it's crazy. The things that you can do. I think one of the big things that we're focusing on is also privacy and not. You know, spamming your customers. So one thing that we want to, and we completely agree with you, I think this is the sign of, I know this is going to sound dramatic, but the death of the mobile browser that's something that we say internally, that app clips can completely replace Safari, even small tasks you know, if you're going to watch a baseball game, or you're going to watch a basketball game today, when you go, you scan a QR code under your seat, it opens a website, you try and order, you need to log in.

All that can be an app clip or you go to a restaurant and they make you scan, at least this happens here in Toronto all the time, scan this QR code to pull up the menu and you do it. But the, the, the restaurant doesn't get any information about you. They can't even ask you, Hey, leave me a review 24 hours later.

Jay Myers: That would

Ross Correia: do that with app clips.

Jay Myers: so good for restaurants. Yeah.

Ross Correia: so many cool applications that I think are going to come out of app clips and all this amazing technology. And for us, it's just important to, to, to be on the side of the customer as well. So we do have some, some blocking and things in there. So you're not spamming your customers that when someone opens an app clip and there's a Reactiv logo somewhere there, you know, Hey, I'm not going to get spammed by this, right?

So we're kind of thinking about both sides, but the, you know, the Another cool workflow that we're actually building for retail is when you walk into a retail store, a Shopify store you can scan a QR code and it'll open a barcode scanner app clip. So it's not something you have to download. It opens your camera.

You can now scan the products in the store because we have all of that Shopify data. You could do a self checkout and walk out the store from an app clip

Jay Myers: Wow. Cause you're logged into your Shopify account. You're paying with shop pay. You

Ross Correia: or Apple pay or

Jay Myers: or, or Apple pay. Yeah.

Ross Correia: Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Actually Apple pays probably it's that's amazing. So now can you push users to install, you know, when you go to a website that has a mobile app and then the top header pushes down and it says install our app what's the flow to get someone if they, once they're using that app clips to become a full app install user.

Ross Correia: that's the goal, right? Because if you get them to be that full app user, you now look at that app data again. You're like, Oh, this is amazing. My conversion is better. My lifetime value is higher. What we're seeing. And we're trying a couple different things. So, as one of the push notifications, you can ask them to install the app.

Or, if we know that they make a purchase, we actually send a notification after that says, Hey, install the app so you can keep track of your order. Because then we'll send you a notification when your order's being packed, your order's up for delivery. We can also do that within the app clip alone, without the push notification.

Meeting the customer to install, which is really cool. So if a customer purchases, Apple allows us to ask for as much time as we'd like on the notification. So there'll be a pop up, there'll be an opt in and we can say, yeah, we'll say, Hey, we'd like to give you notifications at every part of your order journey.

Will you approve us to send you notifications over the next seven days? Customers will say yes. And every time there's an order update, we send it over notification.

Jay Myers: Okay. So just for not indefinitely, just for the, until the agreed,

Ross Correia: period of

Jay Myers: period, but more than the eight hours. Yeah.

Ross Correia: Yeah. A cool other to kind of help everyone better understand that too. I think a cool use case would be with enterprise rental. So you go to rent a car, right? Today, when you rent a car, it's easy at the beginning, you go, you pick it up, you drive off. When you drive back, you get this long email that says, Hey, make sure you do X, Y, and Z park the car here.

Blah, blah, blah, blah. Imagine you rent with enterprise. You use the app clip to do the rental, use the app clip to pick up the app. Cause how often are you renting a car? And then seven days later you get the notification. Hey, this is where you drop off the car. Scan this QR code at the door. It's going to unlock the gate.

There's so many possibilities.

Jay Myers: Yeah. That's so it's, can you maintain a logged in state in an app clip?

Ross Correia: You can. Yeah. So we can keep a unique customer identifier that allows us to keep that customer logged in. It also means when the customer installs the app in the future, they don't have to go through the entire login signup process again. It's ready to go.

Jay Myers: Amazing. So, you know, you know, the device, you know, the Mac address of the user. When, even when they open an app clip. So if I'm, if I scan a QR code a year later, it's not like a poor experience. So I have to relog in all the time.

Ross Correia: Exactly. We get it down to the exact device. It's so cool.

Jay Myers: yeah. And to be honest, until I saw that link and that demo link that Zach sent.

I hadn't experienced an app clip before and I remember actually sending it to someone else saying man, check this out. This is so cool. Like it's, there is, there's for sure a window right now where this is an opportunity that merchants should take advantage of 100, a hundred percent.

This is, there's, there's it's just Even just for the sake of appearing ahead of the curve, not, not, not, not, you know, T even taking out all the, the extra conversion and the extra data you get and all the other benefits. But

Ross Correia: that's, that's why we built Reactiv the way we did, because we knew that everyone's going to want this, right, especially everyone who runs ads, every single person who runs ads, this is, this is going to help you reduce your ad costs significantly, right? You get notifications for free to every click. So we, Go ahead.

Jay Myers: I was going to say, and you can link to any section of the app, I imagine,

Ross Correia: Any section of the app. Yeah. And so now all the merchants that we're talking to, they're like, how do I get app clips tomorrow? How do I get this in two days? And then it comes back to the first half of our conversation. Well, Hey, there's this AI tool. You install it. The I tool will build it for you. Push publish.

Everything will happen in the backend and you can send out clips tomorrow. And all of that hard work over the last year has finally starting to kind of pay off because now we can build apps so quickly, such great apps so quickly. It, you know, it detects what integrations you have on Shopify. Pulls those integrations down.

It can, you know, it adds your API keys. It simplifies the entire process so that you could just think about, you know, running app clips and getting that immediate benefit in

Jay Myers: Okay. That's so to be very clear. So someone right now who wants to have a mobile app for their Shopify site can install Reactiv and how fast the, the, there's probably a delay to get the app approved in

Ross Correia: 24 hours.

Jay Myers: 48 hours to, you could potentially have an app in the app store in 48 hours, but app clips hours, how fast could you be running app clips?

Ross Correia: to have an app clip, this is a good prerequisite. Good question. You must have an app in the app

Jay Myers: Okay. Okay. So whenever that app is approved, you're having app clips

Ross Correia: You're running AppList immediately. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Amazing. What are some of the I know you guys just came out of stealth, I guess, was it last week or two weeks ago?

Ross Correia: One week ago. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Well, and you, you raised, was it 5 million?

Ross Correia: 5 million us.

Jay Myers: may, I may, well, congratulations.

That's huge. You've been building. And in stealth, which means it's, you know, hasn't been public. You, you've, you've kind of, you had a website and people knew what it was, but people didn't really know what the product was, but I know you had a number of early adopters using it.

Ross Correia: Yeah.

Jay Myers: Can you, can you share, and I've seen some really cool stories actually.

And I see like developers raving about it, saying how much they love building with it and agencies. And what are some of your favorite, like early success stories that you've seen?

Ross Correia: Yeah. I mean, I think the, My favorite is probably Missouri Star Quilt Company. The quilt company, I always talk about the quilt company, but they launched with us back in April. So, many, many months ago. They were on a platform that is not here anymore, and the app just stopped working. So they had Yeah, they had hundreds of thousands of users that would open the app and it would just say, Hey, we're in maintenance mode.

So we launched their app in two days for them. They were, yeah, they were incredibly happy. It didn't have all the features that it has today. And they love what they saw immediately. So they started to invest, but rather than them build in house. They use domain, which I'm sure everyone in the Shopify ecosystem has heard of.

So domain came on board and domain built a ton of customizations for them. So if you install their app, there's this tutorial section where it pulls down their tutorial videos from YouTube. You can watch them, you can favorite them, pick your favorite quilter and then you can buy all the products in one click.

From from those YouTube videos, which is so cool. They built a custom daily deal page that updates every night and has an exclusive offer for their customers within the app. They're building this custom machine, machine quilting flow within the app. So if you want to get your, your family a quilt for Christmas, you can go in the app and you can pick, you know, the size and the backing and the colors and they'll ship a custom made to your house is a ton of cool stuff they're doing.

Jay Myers: Amazing. Yeah, domain. I think, are they, are they the largest Shopify? I know they, they kind of amalgamated half Helix and are they, they are the largest Shopify agency I think right now. Right.

Ross Correia: I think so. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Okay. I'll have to get actually Mack King, one of the, I'm sure, you know, Mac quite well I have to get him on the podcast.

He's

Ross Correia: You have to get them on the

Jay Myers: I'm going to have just all the original Shopify guys that started at Shopify and then started a business as a partner on Shopify on the podcast.

Ross Correia: They've got a great business partnering with tomorrow. They've built some of the best looking websites I've ever seen. And with, with the partnership now I think they're going to build some of the best apps that we've ever seen. And it's been so cool to see them who've just been focusing on websites, being able to go back to their user base and say, Hey, do you want a custom app for not a custom app pricing or not a custom app timeline?

And it's been crazy.

Jay Myers: it's, it's something that merchants just probably don't unless you're really, really large, like merchants just don't think about it. They don't talk about it. And actually what's interesting is if you search if you go on iTunes and search mobile app, Podcast or there's just, there isn't content on it.

I listened to like almost every single e commerce related podcast and it's something that's not talked about because maybe it's always been thought of for the elite or not the elite, but the larger, larger

Ross Correia: Enterprise of the

Jay Myers: Yeah,

Ross Correia: I have this crazy fact. I don't know if I've asked you before. So I think it was 2023, Apple released the state of the app store and they publish a ton of information that everyone listening can go and read up on. We'll share it in the show notes after I'll send

Jay Myers: sure. Yeah.

Ross Correia: But in 2022, take a guess at the total GMV process within apps in the shop, in the Apple app store alone, 2022. So two years ago

Jay Myers: Well, does that include like Amazon's app?

Ross Correia: it does everything travel apps, everything.

Jay Myers: okay. In 22, I

Ross Correia: Yeah.

Jay Myers: could be way off here, but I feel I don't know, 500 billion.

Ross Correia: Great guess. 1. 1 trillion,

Jay Myers: That's not a great guess. I'm half off

Ross Correia: I mean, we've heard people say, we've heard people say 5 million.

Jay Myers: Ah, I was going to say a trillion at first and I thought, ah, that's

Ross Correia: That's too big, right? And, and then let's remove, let's remove travel. Let's remove grocery, let's remove all of the anecdotal apps and just focus on CPG retail e commerce. It's the lion's share.

It's 621 billion.

Jay Myers: Yeah. That's what I was thinking of when

Ross Correia: That's what you're thinking of.

Jay Myers: yeah.

Ross Correia: And the craziest thing is that number has been going up 30 percent year over year. And for some reason, you're right. It's just, it's not talked about. I think the barrier

Jay Myers: percent year over year.

Ross Correia: It's growing faster than Shopify, but the barrier to entry for apps has been so high and there's been so many compromises that businesses have had to make.

And I think by going through, you know, the experience of Shopify, going through the experience of the previous company for three years, we've learned everything what not to do. We've learned what doesn't work at scale because we've gotten to scale before and things really started to blow up. And we're really trying to fix all of those problems now with Reactiv.

Jay Myers: So you've built an app that can turn your Shopify store into a native mobile app within hours and have it published in the app store within 48 hours, built a way for merchants to have app clips. That you can open a native app without downloading it and leverage a lot of all of the native app features. And you just came out of stealth a week ago.

Ross Correia: Yeah.

Jay Myers: So one of the questions I always ask is what's on the horizon. What are you excited about for the future? I feel like there's been, this is like a lot already, but what's, what's in the future for Reactiv.

Ross Correia: We're, we're so excited. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is data, right? And Being in the app space for so long, we've kind of been the underdog where you get into the conversation and everyone's, everyone's wants to, Oh, the conversion can't be that high. And we show them, we show them the analytics, look at the conversion.

They would say, Oh my God, that's crazy. And they would sign up. But I think one of the big things that I want to see over the next, you know, this Christmas season, this holiday season is comparing true apples to apples, which has never been done before. So if we take a group of customers that click on an ad.

One that goes to an app clip with the same amount of intent. They just clicked on an ad and one that goes to the web. Let's look at those cohorts and truly see how sticky these apps are. Because if it is just that, you know, Hey, someone's shopping within the mobile app, and for some reason that cohort is higher within the app clip.

I mean, that is, that is incredible news for us. And if it's not, then let's find out why not, or let's find out, you know, what we can do. So I think it's going to be all about data over the next couple of months.

Jay Myers: I mean, if you, if, if you can say that that is even just. Percentage points

Ross Correia: Incrementally. Yeah.

Jay Myers: than, than every brand spending, you know, 10, 000 a month, an up should be on, on ads should be sending them to app clips, not landing pages.

Ross Correia: yeah, it completely think it changes how we think about it, right? Because when you think about an app, you think about retention and lifetime value. But now we want to focus on the acquisition part too. We're crazy. So we want to do both.

Jay Myers: I love it. So, how does someone get started with Reactiv? Cause it, is it available on all Shopify plans? Is there a trial? Is there an onboarding process? If someone listening right now is okay, I'm in, I got to get on the apps, get on this bandwagon. What do they do?

Ross Correia: Yeah. So you just have to go to the Shopify app store, search Reactiv, and you can install this through there. There's two pricing. It's just our core plan, which includes. everything we've talked about except for the custom development. So you can't go in and build on top of the platform. You get the AI tool.

You get all that fun stuff. But you don't get, you don't get the the custom development. You don't get the app. Of course, for app clips, you do have to go on our plus plan. So we have a plus plan. It's, it's not a revenue share. It's a fixed cost. But you can go on our plus plan and app clips is included there.

So you can install it there. Okay. You can either meet with someone, you can meet with me if you want, and I'll tell you all about it and teach you and show you the data, or you could just go in and do it yourself. If you don't want to talk to us,

Jay Myers: Are you finding people are installing it and just by themself, completely getting set up and have a live app without interacting, or does there involve a bit of engagement?

Ross Correia: it involves a bit of engagement. So I think the people that have installed since going live are really interested in app clubs and want to talk about the data. A lot of bigger brands. So we're spending a lot of time working with them on just the entire journey and kind of setting KPIs for them. I'm like, okay, if we want to run app plus by black Friday, what types of data do you want to see?

Are we looking at revenue? Are we looking at installs? What are those KPIs? Let's set up and let's track. But there are a bunch of small businesses that are just going in and signing up and signing up on the core plan and just going,

Jay Myers: I feel like you're going to disrupt this industry a bit because don't a lot of your competitors, A, they're not doing what you're doing, but B, don't they also charge transaction fees for sales through the mobile apps?

Ross Correia: they do. Yeah. So we are, we are trying to disrupt that. I think we learned that lesson in a past life about revenue share and. You know, especially with scale, as you scale, you want things to be a little bit cheaper. So fix cost is the best way to do that, especially when our whole pitch with Reactiv is around ROI.

Even if you, so if you do have an account with us, we have a dashboard. It's very basic. It's still early days, but at the top of the dashboard, it says ROI on Reactiv. And we break down our, our costs based on your orders, based on the price you pay us. And for most of our merchants, it's less than one cent an order is the cost of Reactiv.

Jay Myers: Wow. Amazing. That, well, I'm sold. That's all I need to hear. We are, I, I, I think let's, let's wrap this up here. This has been, this has been amazing. We went a little bit over time, but I, I think I learned a lot to be honest on this, on this, I am not in the mobile app space at all. And so a lot of this, I feel was a black box to me.

And I feel like this is probably a black box to a lot of merchants. And so if someone is listening right now and they, they want to get started, I know you mentioned you can go to the app store and just search react. Reactiv IV. Are, are, but you personally or the company, what, what social media platforms are you active on where someone can connect with you or where do you want to send them, Ross?

Ross Correia: Yeah, LinkedIn is a great one. We're doing a lot on LinkedIn. The entire team's on LinkedIn. We're posting a lot on LinkedIn case studies, all sorts of fun stuff there. So follow us there. We're just getting Instagram set up. We're just getting X set up. It's weird how over this conversation, I'm hearing myself talk and I'm thinking about all the stuff that we prioritize and we went live and we're like, Oh yeah, we forgot about Instagram.

We forgot about X yet. We built this entire platform. But LinkedIn is probably the best way.

Jay Myers: Awesome. And I'll make sure I have your social links in the, in the profile as well. So, or the show notes as well,

Ross Correia: Jay, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you wanting to jump on and getting to share our Reactiv vision with everyone. It means a lot.

Jay Myers: oh. Back at you man. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the raise and wish you all the success and we'll do this again maybe in a year or 18 months and catch up. 'cause I feel like the way that the speed that you're moving, there'll be a lot to talk about, so

Ross Correia: It'll be so cool to look back on this.

Jay Myers: Yeah, for sure. Right. One week after coming out.

All right. It's been great. Thanks Ross.

Ross Correia: See ya.