Keeping Up on Consumer Trends with Lee Meyer

Intro: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Lee Mayer, the co- founder and CEO of interior design startup Havenly, based in Denver, Colorado. Lee, thank you for joining me today.

Lee Mayer: Thank you for having me.

Matt Blumberg: So I love your business and it's so interesting. It's so interesting how so much of that industry has been moving to the internet over the years and it's a little harder because it's kind of large goods, heavy goods as well as small things. And one of the things that I was thinking about when I was thinking about your business was kind of how you stay current with customers in a design oriented B2C environment where trends and things are moving pretty quickly? So I was wondering if you had a couple of tips on that.

Lee Mayer: I certainly do. I have a few. Let's go with three because it's a nice number and obviously it's a particular passion of mine. So first, I think the best part about consumer businesses is every day your consumer tells you something, and if you're smart enough to listen, you can kind of figure it out. So get to know your consumer data and obsess about it. That can go as deep into why are they clicking on this and not that, why are they using your product this way or that way, but make it a practice as a CEO to consistently go into, so in my case, projects that clients are doing and try and understand exactly what's... Follow it through and try and understand what people are doing and then also look at the data behind it and try and understand what that means. So that's tip number one. And by the way, don't delegate that. Do it yourself.

Matt Blumberg: Interesting, right. So you're diving through product, not logs, but Pendo reports or whatever yourself.

Lee Mayer: Yeah, I totally am. And you can make it... For me, it's like a couple of hours a week, but it just gets me in the practice of forming my own thoughts a little bit on what's going on from a consumer's perspective.

Matt Blumberg: That's great. I love that. Okay, so swim in the data, what's next?

Lee Mayer: Swim in the data. Second is be an avid and curious consumer yourself. So what that means is you kind of have to love the space you live in. It means you're buying or potentially interacting with a lot of your competitors, but also people that are adjacent to your space. So I love getting deep into companies in the beauty space or apparel space, design and home space. So a lot of where my customer is shopping and I ask a ton of questions, so I ask, sometimes I'll get on the phone with their customer service teams and ask their questions. I ask my friends questions when they use other products that I'm familiar with, and I act as a consumer myself. And it's something that I consider, again, part of the practice of understanding the market and trends.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that's founder market fit at the very highest level.

Lee Mayer: At the core, you sort of have to love it. Consumer is is not as lucrative as some of the other areas that venture capital flows into. And so you really just have to love it to do it.

Matt Blumberg: Have to love it. Okay. And what's your last one?

Lee Mayer: And the third is you have to talk to your consumers yourself. So that means I work our design studios a couple of days a month. That means I respond to customer service emails and call my customers a couple of days a month. And what that means is you're getting full frontline customer interaction and you're trying to understand, again, directly from the person that's interacting with your brand and your consumer exactly what they want and need.

Matt Blumberg: I love that. When I worked at Moviefone running the online business there many, many, many years ago now, I used to love doing the support emails myself periodically.

Lee Mayer: It's really inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: Even when I had a big team, I was like, there's nothing better than seeing someone's actual frustration with your product or thanks about things.

Lee Mayer: That's totally true. And actually it can be really fun. I've found some really interesting connections through that process as well.

Matt Blumberg: Definitely. All right, Lee Mayer from Havenly. Thank you so much.

Lee Mayer: Thank you.