Last week I had the opportunity to speak on a panel at the CNBC Disrupt50 event in Philly.
I was joined by the COO of Rent the Runway, Maureen Sullivan, and we were interviewed by CNBC senior media lead Julia Boorstin. Julia, to her credit, made a great effort to ask less obvious questions of both of us.
They called the panel “Renting and Revving in the Age of Amazon”, which sounded as ridiculous as it was awesome.
It highlighted topics on customer value creation along with attempting to cover “Amazon proofing” the business, which Maureen and I both agreed is impossible and has been for over a decade. (cue Jaws theme)
If you know the RevZilla backstory, my early segue in this talk is not new information. I did, however, get to speak about the approach to becoming an “indepensible resource” for your customer, the “final 10%” uses-cases which Amazon will have a hard time executing on across retail, and I even got pulled into the goPuff weeds.
I also got to give a shoutout to my pop, who was in the back of the room, for his contribution to RevZilla’s origin. Remember, he forbade me to have a motorcycle in high school or college, which eventually turned into my bad-decision Ducati Monster purchase at 26. With the then dearth of great moto eCommerce options, RevZilla was born.
Here is a link to the full article about our panel. Here is the article with embedded video clips for the whole Disrupt50 day.
I do love that this is the quote they pulled: “If you are in B2C, it is great to provide consumers with vitamins, things they love and that make them feel good, but it is way more valuable to be a painkiller.”
I say it all the time. Clearly one of my favorite frameworks.
Know your customer. Know their pain. Offer them relief. Become valuable to them. Win.
See the full video on YouTube:
Yeah, I’m wearing Iverson and Kobe non-matching Stance socks on stage. It is what it is.
