Under The Hood: Arsh from ASYSTEM

Hey Arsh! Great to have you. Can you give me a sense of when you joined ASYSTEM? And what’s been the growth like since you started? 

I joined 3 months before the brand launched,  as a member of the founding team, to oversee digital product. Now I oversee a variety of different functions, including supply chain and logistics, digital marketing, finance, in addition to the digital product. 

ASYSTEM was launched in late 2019 and our growth's been more like a step function kind of graph for a variety of reasons. When we launched, many of our plans went out the window once COVID hit. Community development, wholesale, partnerships just weren’t possible anymore. So a lot of 2020 was us just being reactive and adapting to the environment, which in hindsight was really good for us. It helped us build this muscle of being antifragile which sometimes doesn't always happen unless there's some macro event. 2021 had its own challenges with supply chain issues and iOS changes, but we've known the dynamics of the business are going to change and the team is resourceful.

We transformed from a men's oriented wellness platform at launch to a unisex advanced supplements platform. That transition led to launching new products, optimizing on ads, building partnerships etc. that let us cater to a wider audience. And it’s paid off as we grew 300% overall last year.

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300% growth is huge. What’s driving that growth? 

Similar to most digital brands - it’s Facebook. We got much better at creating amazing and high converting content, including  UGC. We closely watched our retention and  acquisition metrics to identify winning products and when they could be breaking even, and that’s helped us get more confident to scale things up. Strong retention is the earliest sign of product market fit. 

We did explore expanding into other channels as efficiency on Facebook decreased in the late part of last year. But we found that it was spreading our team too thin, and those channels also weren't performing as well. 

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So over the last few months, we've been super focused on Facebook and we think we can still make it work. We've been improving on our internal organizational structure to strengthen feedback loops - which has hugely helped our performance. 

Tell me more about the content that’s working for you on Facebook

As a brand, we’ve built our customer personas and leverage those insights to personify the talent in our ads. So for example, we have a UGC ad with a yoga instructor, and another one with a film director highlighting his day to day. They share their lifestyle and how the product fits into it. 

What about these feedback loops. What’s the right internal team structure to drive a faster loop?

Our team layout is: a media buying partner, 2 content creation partners (one is able to do full shoots and the other is able to edit content), and a development partner. The main driver of the feedback loop is insights from data that results in actions. We use in-platform data, Nautilus for LTV analysis, Motion for creative and Hotjar for landing pages.

We all come together for weekly meetings where we analyze the data, come up with new ideas and iterate. That’s our process. 

Let's dive into your favorite topic: Supply chain & operations. How do you win at that?

We've been lucky to have a really good advisor on this part of the business. Shout out to Kevin Datoo. He’s been with us since the beginning. He is currently the President of Manscaped, and he previously was COO at Dollar Shave Club. He's provided us with a myriad of great frameworks for modeling many parts of the business. 

The type of model that I think a business that our scale typically doesn't have fleshed out is a model that puts together every function of the business: From product development to marketing expense to inventory purchasing to headcounts. We update that at month's end, validate if our assumptions were accurate in the forecasting and then take those learning to update the future-looking forecast. It brings the full machine of the business together and that allows us to be thoughtful and decide how we allocate capital. This ultimately gives us more predictability and understanding overall cash flow.

Another massively useful model which we look at at the end of every month is our inventory reconciliation and forecasting sheet. We look at any purchase orders that we've made, any items that have left the warehouse in terms of sales or gifting and we tie that back into an inventory value that gets put into our accounting systems. Most operators use software for this, but we've been able to do it in house.

Tell me about your stack:

Since we were just on the topic of inventory, I'll start with Settle. 

They provide a really good solution to delay our payments to manufacturing vendors which allows us to optimize our cash flow. Our manufacturers are great and we have a good relationship with them, but we're always looking to extend paying for products only after they get sold. Solutions like this exist in the market, but they're very old school. Settle's modernized the approach, making it super intuitive and accessible for us and a lot of other brands. 

Another tool that I use almost daily is Nautilus Analytics. We use them for visibility on our cohorts. They do a good job in providing data in a variety of vectors like incremental or cumulative retention data on orders or revenue. We look at that data by product, by collections, by customer type, by channel. They also have other strong reporting functionality on subscription versus one time purchase and time lag to subscription. We would not be able to do what we're doing without that tool.

Another tool that we're big fans of is Okendo. They've become the go-to solution with reviews in the last year. Shout out to Rachel and Adena who run a really strong partnership program. 

I’m also a fan of Dovetale for influencer marketing. A lot of the solutions in that space are overly pricey and most brands don't understand why. Dovetale’s product has a strong feature set and is competitive with many enterprise level solutions. So shout out to Mike there - we've been using them pretty much since we launched. 

And whenever I talk to brands starting out, I recommend they install TaxJar. It's one of those things you don't think about and the tax reporting within Shopify historically hasn't been great. So TaxJar has done a really good job making sure that you're covered and making it super easy. 

You mentioned landing pages earlier - what are you using there? 

We're going to start using Builder.io. There's been a challenge for us to get the cart to work on most landing page builders including Unbounce. So instead of going through the more tedious process of designing the landing pages, then getting our developer to build those pages in Shopify (which is what we've done to date) - we’re gonna transfer to Builder.io next week so we can go from idea to the page quicker and with the right functionality.

Last question: What do you attribute most of your success to?

Iterating on really any part of the business. From the brand to the products,  to how we do our marketing. We've been really willing to really test any element of how we approach the business and our ability to test and has put us in a good spot. 

Thank you Arsh! You rock. Appreciate you sharing all these gems.