Summary

Episode 98 is a Wednesday conversation-style episode with two guests who know each other. Ishan Rakshit, co-founder of Shopflo (D2C checkout infrastructure, 1100-1200 brands, 65-70M users transacting) and Sortment (AI lifecycle marketing agent, warehouse-native, replacing Braze/Iterable/HubSpot) discusses the journey from VC to founder, the unbundling of ecommerce growth tools, and how Sortment's human-in-the-loop agentic approach differs from wild-and-free AI. Shopflo was recently acquired by Bindlabs. He also compares India vs US consumer brand dynamics — cost-to-acquire vs cost-to-retain, brand role, and structured growth teams. Suhas Motwani of The Product Folks (APAC's largest builder community, 240K members, 7 years old, 66K Slack, 128 WhatsApp groups, 35-40 events/month across 20 cities) discusses the evolving PM role in the AI era, feature load as the next risk, why build-and-sell are the two last standing roles, synthetic user simulation, user research resurgence, and how young builders are entering the market fearlessly. Both guests discuss India's global positioning, the India-US corridor for VCs, and the future of communities like TPF.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners, this is stream 98 Utsav and I are chatting with Ishan Rakshit today of Shopflow and Assortment. Ishan, firstly, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): Thanks. What has been happening in life lately? Quite a lot actually. So two months ago, I moved to New York. So just to get used to the life here, but yeah, no, things have been great for both Shopflow and Assortment.

Dhruv Sharma: Do you want to tell us a little bit about Shopflow and Assortment and what's the difference between the two and the journey?

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): Sure thing. So Shopflow actually got started in 2022. Right when, after the pandemic, we saw a surge of people starting their own brands and a lot of comfort being built in India on transacting online, especially directly from the brand's website or apps. And we felt like if commerce was getting unbundled, good software plays would be needed to allow the brands to get the right infrastructure for growth. So that's when we started picking up conversion as a problem statement, built a checkout and said okay, let's just build an identity network to power personalized checkouts a lot faster. The next couple of years, we just doubled down on the overall growth infrastructure thesis saying that what are the other tools needed. So discounts, rewards, upsells, cross-sells, post-purchase experiences, all of that end up getting built out by Shopflow. And I think by the end of four years, which ended right last month, since we launched, we have reached around 1100 brands, 1200 brands, which are using our services. And there are a good amount of 65, 70 million users who have transacted through.

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): Assortment actually is very different. Assortment is on the retention and lifecycle side of the equation. So think of once you have a subscriber base or user base, typically for consumer tech or B2C companies, how do you sort of extract more value out of them? How do you deliver more value to them? That's typically the role of a lifecycle marketer or retention marketer. When we started dabbling with AI, as well as we used a lot of data in Shopflow to build personalization, we started realizing that not all companies might be there where they need to be when it comes to data and marketing coming together. And that's when AI came in really beautifully — hey, I don't want to expose you to a library and figure out what book you want. Let me give you the librarian as well. AI could sort of guide you to the right strategy, right data point, right campaign, right message, to be sent to the right user.

Utsav Somani: And what is the agentic part of this thing? What is broken in lifecycle marketing management?

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): Marketing teams would be coming up with 10 ideas, five would get shot down because the effort to build a business case around it is too much. Out of the five, three would get shot down by tech or data teams. And out of the two, one gets executed. We're just saying all three drop offs need to be questioned again, because now with AI, you don't need to depend on people, you can get access to that data, you can get things faster. Perhaps instead of 2 experiments per month, why not do 20?

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): Sortment always has an approval flow, will have a Slack notification delivered to your team inbox or a channel where you can see what it's working on. So it's not running wild and free. We are looking at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot Marketing, Braze, Iterable, Moengage, etc. That's where it's a direct overlap and a complete sort of replacement. We actually run directly on the data warehouses. So you just plug in your Snowflake and you're good to go.

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): The transition for me was very eye-opening, and again, as a VC, perhaps I didn't realize it then, but you don't get to go into the depths of a problem statement so much. And you don't appreciate how impactful customer insight can be. It taught me how to have a stupidity filter on ideas.

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): With engagement and growth, I feel like people have a very different perception in Indian versus US companies. The cost to acquire versus cost to retain equation differs a lot in both those geographies. Brand plays a very different role in conference rooms. You perhaps can throw an ad which might not cut the quality bar, and people will still be happy for it if you did it at a cap of two rupees in India. I don't think that will fly here.

Ishan Rakshit (Shopflo, Sortment): Times are changing so fast. FD today might not be relevant tomorrow. There was a time where we used to think of prompt engineers, like what the hell happened to them? Now agents came and there were tools like relevance and N10. I think the world is changing very fast. I'm already starting to see the frontier model itself becoming a lot more better. The value of selling right and selling fast has increased.

Utsav Somani: Bindlabs, I think that's a great, great place for Shopflow. Thank you so much, folks. All right, Suhas, we got chatting about everything. You have good insights into everything that you've built, but I think that comes from the time that you spend closely with your community. So let's introduce the community. What does the ProductFolks do?

Suhas Motwani (The Product Folks): So I think today ProductFolks is one of APAC's largest builder community with over 240,000 members. Started almost seven years ago. It's completely volunteer-driven, so I think never expected it to become what it is today. We have a funnel which starts with the website newsletter, it goes into a Slack — it's almost 66,000 members right now. We run 128 WhatsApp groups and then comes the entire offline. We have six, seven different IPs that we run and anywhere between 35 to 40 events every single month across 20 different cities.

Suhas Motwani (The Product Folks): To be very honest, I think the world has changed in the last two years. The cost of building and the time to building has reduced. But I feel like the bottleneck now becomes on, hey, what exactly should we be building? Because today, feature load is the next big risk that everyone is going to be facing.

Suhas Motwani (The Product Folks): Every PM is now an AI PM, right? Like by definition, there is no world outside of that. The ones who are early into their career, they are gonna be native by default. They are in fact picking up skills a lot faster. Fearless is the word that I use for building, right? Some of these people in college going out there building very ambitious ideas.

Suhas Motwani (The Product Folks): Build and sell are probably going to be only two roles left in the market. On the build side, I don't think great engineers' roles are going anywhere. If you're a great engineer, you're always going to be in demand for the next decade. PMs, yes, their role shifts — either you go super deep into figuring out what to build, or you're seeing a lot of them now start moving into growth roles, slightly more GM kind of role, forward deployed roles.

Suhas Motwani (The Product Folks): Next year: going global across top 30 tech cities, spending more time on the West Coast. Consumer AI as a wave, in my opinion, still hasn't landed. There are very interesting things happening. There's a huge opportunity that lies ahead.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners. That's it from us today. That was a good fun jam with a couple of friends. We'll see you on Friday at four o'clock for stream number 99. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.