Hey, thanks for tuning in to another Partner Interview at EcomBalance. At EcomBalance, we’re all about creating win-win partnerships where we are able to grow with other companies in the eCommerce space.
In this exclusive interview, we interview Debarshi and Eitan from Maverick.
Eitan was born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia and currently lives in San Francisco. He studied management science and engineering at Stanford. Before Maverick, he worked as a product manager and ran an ecommerce store selling the comfiest alpaca apparel. When he’s not being a maverick, he loves playing soccer and CS:GO.
We hope that you enjoy the interview and that it brings value to you as an eCommerce business owner.
Connor: Hey Debarshi and Eitan, thanks for taking the time to chat with us here. We love getting to know our partners better so that our community can benefit from what our partners are offering and doing in the industry. To get started, can you give us a high level overview of Maverick and how it got started?
Debarshi and Eitan: Sure! We’re Maverick, a startup that uses AI-generated deep fakes to help ecommerce brands create personalized videos at scale for their customers. We started Maverick to help other entrepreneurs. Before landing on the idea that would become Maverick, we spent 2 years working on other ideas, none of which worked. We knew firsthand how hard it was to get a business off the ground, and we wanted to make it easier for business owners to grow their companies and develop deeper relationships with their customers.
Connor: That’s awesome! Can you dive a bit more into the products and services that you offer in sending personalized videos at scale for online retailers? I’m sure our audience would love to know exactly what problems you could solve for them.
Debarshi and Eitan: Maverick’s AI-generated personalized videos are currently being used by successful e-commerce brands across the user journey for use cases like recovering abandoned carts, thanking customers after a purchase, re-engaging lapsed clients, and sending out offers. Businesses using Maverick’s personalized videos are seeing 10X – 60X ROI and getting tons of positive feedback from delighted customers!
Connor: Jumping off of that…if there was one problem you’d say that Maverick solves best for your clients, what would it be? Why?
Debarshi and Eitan: Video is the most effective type of marketing content, and personalization is a multiplier on top. However, creating personalized videos at scale for each of your customers is time consuming to the point of being impossible for busy ecommerce brand owners and teams. Maverick helps ecommerce companies create and deliver personalized video content at scale using AI to help drive conversion, retention, and LTV.
Connor: As the company continues to grow over the next year, what are your plans for expansion? Any new products or offerings or enhancements to your current products?
Debarshi and Eitan: Our north star is delivering as much ROI for the brands we work with as possible. Over the next year, we plan on expanding the channels brands can deliver Maverick videos on to include SMS delivery, embedded videos within brands’ websites, and tighter integrations with brands’ CRMs. We’re also planning on deepening the level of personalization that we can provide in each video to include variables past the customer’s name, such as product names, locations, and discount codes. Finally, we’re going to continue to build out our ability to drive and attribute revenue for brands by enhancing our analytics and attribution system.
Connor: And how specifically would you say that Maverick and your team is different from other similar businesses in the industry?
Debarshi and Eitan: Other solutions generally fall into two categories. The first category of products lets you manually record each video and send it to your customers. The second category automatically personalizes the video but in a relatively basic way (e.g., add a slide with someone’s name to the beginning of the video). Maverick is unique in that we help brands automatically generate videos with deeper personalization where the team behind a brand can call out a customer by name. Whereas other similar companies target a broad range of industries, we have decided to focus specifically on e-commerce, we believe this is the best (and only way) to build a truly exceptional product.
Connor: What made you decide to get involved in the online video marketing space? What’s your starting eCommerce story? From what we’ve found, a lot of business owners online marketing space have fun stories of how they first started…
Debarshi and Eitan: Eitan ran an ecommerce store where he was importing alpaca apparel (hats, slippers) from his native Bolivia and selling them in the US. He’d do things like write handwritten notes to his customers to create a personalized experience for them- and his customers loved it!
Debarshi spent some time building visual AI apps, including an app that used computer vision to automatically identify the content of an image and pair it with a quote.
As we talked to more ecommerce store owners, we realized that we could build on our ecommerce and AI experiences to build a product that allowed ecommerce businesses to create personalized video content for their customers at scale, and from that seed came the company that today is Maverick!
Connor: Love it! Talking more about the eCommerce industry, where do you see it going in the next 1-2 years? Any unique predictions that you could share?
Debarshi and Eitan: We think the trends that have been helping grow ecommerce for the last 30 or so years are going to continue to run their course. Sure, the pandemic accelerated some of these trends (and now we’re seeing a bit of reversion to the mean for ecommerce growth), but more and more shopping experiences are going to move online. As more brands grow their online presence, it’s going to be even more important to stand out from the crowd.
This is where video and personalization come in. This is already happening, but in the coming years, video is going to become an even more critical part of engaging with your customers- brands will need to have video-driven experiences throughout their customer journeys.
Connor: Giving you an open mic for a minute, what is something you’d want the EcomBalance audience to hear?
Debarshi and Eitan: Ecommerce has made the process of shopping very convenient, but we’ve lost some of the personal touch you get from walking into a store. Customers don’t want to feel like just another order confirmation number- they want to feel like experiences are designed specifically for them. They don’t want to feel like just an order confirmation number. They want to see the faces behind the brand and engage with the people making their products and services, and we think we’re going to see customers want even richer personalized experiences over the next couple of years.
Connor: Changing gears a little bit…When it comes to bookkeeping and accounting, what do you think the biggest pain points for business owners are? Feel free to speak from personal experience as well.
Debarshi and Eitan: You know, Debarshi was a freelancer for a long time before starting Maverick, and we actually spent about a year building a fintech product for freelancers/independent business owners. We think a lot of the problems faced by freelancers are the same ones that ecommerce owners face. There’s a ton of information you need to know- cash flow, balance sheets, projections, taxes, and you’ve got a million other things you need to do to build your business. But all of the financial stuff is super important! That’s why it’s really helpful to have a partner like EcomBalance to guide business owners through the financial side of running a business.
Connor: As we close this out, I just have one more question. Where is the best place to find and follow you and the company online? Also, if you have one, is there any special offer that you’ll be offering to the community today?
Debarshi and Eitan: You can check us out at trymaverick.com or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter. And totally! For any brand that signs up for Maverick and mentions EcomBalance, we’re happy to offer them a one month free trial of Maverick so they can try it out and see results firsthand risk-free.
