Founders: Wesley Abbey, Jessica Meher & Brian Whalley
Founding: 2020
Mission: Empowering brands to deliver exceptional experiences
Employees: 17 & 50% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $6M raised
Investors: CRV, Defy.vc, Underscore VC & various Angels
Key Customers: Igloo, Ridge Wallet, Jones Road Beauty, simplehuman, and Feastables
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Wonderment is “post purchase e-commerce software for retailers”. Founded in 2020, Wonderment was created by two former Hubspot colleagues who were independently exploring building something in the e-commerce space before they decided to come together. Brian Whalley & Jessica Meher were soon joined by Wesley Abbey on the engineering side of the house with a mission to help build a better post purchase experience for e-commerce retailers.
The early team was backed by their previous employers – the founders of Klaviyo, early Hubspot executives Mike Volpe & Jim O’Neill, and Sravish Sridhar of TrustCloud to help give them some runway to explore e-commerce solutions in the summer of 2020. The original thesis was that consumer subscription products, specifically their retention, was broken. Brands struggled to run subscription programs profitably. The consumer space is hard, and the Blue Apron story is probably a good example of CAC to LTV getting out of whack.
The Wonderment team didn’t start out with a focus on the post purchase experience. But Brian stayed close to a lot of merchants he worked with from his Klaviyo days. As they worked through their customer research, they received a lot of complaints about shipping. And this was before the supply chain blew up! Who can forget the images of container ships scattered in ports across the U.S.? The L.A. harbor looked like someone threw a bucket of legos in a bathtub! But I digress..
Jess, Brian, Wesley & team were hearing from merchants on the leading edge of the supply chain about the issues they were experiencing. These retailers had thousands of packages lost or missing and no one could tell them where their orders were. Perhaps the Wonderment team could build a dashboard using Shopify data to help merchants track their shipments?
Believe it or not, that didn’t exist. Retailers couldn’t see where their stuff was! And the reps. Pray for the reps. Wonderment helps e-commerce stores with a really tricky problem. Once you place your order, products usually go into the black box of USPS, UPS, or FedEx. If something is late or goes missing, the customer support rep is checking the same major shipper’s tracking number you would if your head wasn’t about to pop off from frustration.
The Wonderment team built their first MVP, a “where’s your order finder”, to give merchants a dashboard for late & missing orders integrated with Shopify. Next, they built a bunch of integrations to send that information to platforms like Klaviyo, Postscript, Gorgias, etc so merchants could better communicate with their customers and let them know they were tracking things, knew packages were late, and were being proactive.
The real value they uncovered is that the moment a brand proactively communicates with a customer, it really defuses customer frustration. Customers are used to bad experiences with brands. They expect to get on the phone, and in the ring, to get their stuff or their money back. Or maybe the package arrives late and they don’t need it anymore. That new jeans feeling can be fleeting. The unlock for the Wonderment team was “we have something powerful here”.
Amazon, Walmart & Apple can do all of this themselves because they’re vertically integrated. But the little guys? If you’re a Shopify merchant without your own 3PL, good luck. Wonderment customers see a 40% reduction in “where’s my order?” tickets.
When I chatted with Brian I asked him “can’t Shopify build this themselves?” He replied “It’s not that interesting to Shopify”. They don’t really focus on end merchant functionality. They’d rather empower an ecosystem of applications to be built on top of their platform with flexible use cases that supported SMB & Enterprise use cases. Fair enough!
A shipping finder is useful and they’ve made that into a powerful tool. The next opportunity is to turn that into a full on Customer Experience (CX) growth channel. Now, customers can use shipping notifications & order statuses as additional touchpoints in the customer journey they didn’t previously have access to. Brands can leverage customer interactions during a high touch period of the customer lifecycle: products about to arrive on your doorstep for the first time.
What was your favorite unboxing? Picture it now. Mine was Christmas 1996, opening Nintendo 64 for the first time. Wiping away a tear now just thinking about it. Anyway.. Wonderment’s long term vision is that every small brand can wow customers without a big-box retailer budget. They’re building the tools and resources so that every eCommerce company can deliver an amazing customer experience and are bringing the leading post-purchase platform to market to deliver delightful post-purchase experiences.
Their core customer is a mid market retailer or brand doing $5M – $100M GMV (gross merchandise volume). Their pricing is a classic PLG (product led growth) model where it starts out free and converts customers to paid as their order volume grows. In 2023 they’re continuing to scale past 7 figures of top line revenue and aiming to grow 100%+ y/y with a focus on efficiency.
Wonderment has a Boston center of gravity but is building a remote workforce. They brought everyone to Orlando to kickoff the year and try to do something as a team – in person or remote – once a month. They have just over 20 employees today split across GTM, Engineering & SGA. Each new employee gets a quarterly stipend to spend on their customer’s products too which is pretty cool. Who doesn’t like free stuff??
Operators to Know (Locally):
- Jeff Dutremble, Head of Sales
- David Frymoyer, Senior Software Engineer
- Julie Hayes, Head of Customer Success
- John Maguire, Senior Software Engineer
- Charlene Mulholland, Head of Agency Partnerships
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Wonderment team I know I missed some operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- More roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the big 2023 goals Wonderment is trying to achieve this year?
- Who are the biggest competitors and how is Wonderment working to differentiate itself?
- What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 25 employees?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Wonderment you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more e-commerce providers into the post purchase digital age. All frustrated consumers applaud your efforts. See you around the internet and on doorsteps worldwide!