82. E-Commerce Entrepreneurship: Heather Udo's Lessons from Shoppable's Success

In the realm of e-commerce, Heather Udo personifies success, innovation, and tenacity. A trailblazer who pushes what’s possible for brands, publishers, and retailers, Heather has her finger on the e-commerce pulse.

Join Jim and Heather as they dive into the business challenges of creating an innovative tech platform that transforms e-commerce shoppers into loyal buyers

3 Key Takeaways

- Raising Venture Capital Might Create Problems: If you successfully raise capital before your product is fully fine-tuned and before the market is ready, you could run into trouble. Take a feather out of Heather’s cap: consider keeping a lean team and funding your growth via sales (bootstrapping).

- Strategy First; Technology Second: If a company doesn’t have a strong go-to-market strategy, it doesn’t matter what your technology does. Strategy first. Technology second. It’ll never work if you try to do it the other way around.

- Educating Your Customers Can Be A Slow Burn: After Heather shared her e-commerce visions with some retailers and brands, many of them balked. They just weren’t ready to do more than the required minimum with their online stores. But they could see the value in upping their digital game. Over the years, they came around.

Resources

Heather Udo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherudo/

Heather on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathermarieudo/

Heather on Linktree: https://linktr.ee/heatherudo

Shoppable: https://linktr.ee/Shoppable

About Our Guest

Heather Udo is the Founder and CEO of Shoppable, an e-commerce solution that helps brands, retailers, creators, and publishers power innovative commerce experiences such as ads, websites, mobile apps, and shops.

Some of Heather’s career highlights:

- Won the 2013 Women in Digital Award from L’Oreal.

- Named one of the ten “Most Powerful Millennials in Manhattan” by Gotham Magazine.

- Identified as and one of the eleven “Tech Gurus Changing the Luxury Game” by Refinery29.

- Holds three U.S. Patents for technology she invented.

- Prior to Shoppable, participating in a successful exit as the business she co-founded was acquired.

About The Dirt Podcast

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

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Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses.

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