Paul Mabray: Founder & CEO of Pix
Episode 231
Listen as Paul Mabray, Founder & CEO of Pix, shares how he developed the perfect matchmaker - for wine that is. This digital and wine expert shares lessons on how he is bringing wine into the 21st century on this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow!
Resources from
this episode:
Enjoying this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow? Let Kara know by clicking on the links below and sending her a quick shout-out on social!
Follow Kara on LinkedIn – Instagram – X – Facebook – TikTok – YouTube – Threads
Have a question for Kara about one of our episodes? Reach out to Kara directly at [email protected]
More links from this episode
Transcript
Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to
just make sure you will get knocked down but just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you
can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show, though, join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. It’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And I am super, super excited to have a incredible entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of pix Paul Mabry, I’m not going to pronounce your name right or my
Paul Mabray 0:58
That’s right. Paul Mabry works great. You can not pronounce any way you want. Great to see you.
Kara Goldin 1:03
Great to see you, too. So Paul is, as I mentioned, the Paul De Paul is the founder and CEO of picks and picks is the world’s first wine discovery platform with a simple matchmaking mission, which is to pair people with bottles that bring them joy. I loved that when I was reading your mission. I loved it. So great. So Paul is a serial entrepreneur, we’ll let him talk a little bit more about some of his other ventures. But he has just been this amazing change maker in the wine industry. He lives up in Napa not too far from where I am. He’s been up there for 20 years, he had actually asked me to come and speak at one of his summits. And that’s how we got to meet. So I’m so so thrilled to have you here. And just to hear a little bit more about your story. So welcome, Paul.
Paul Mabray 2:03
Thank you, Kara. It’s great to be here. And you’ve been here of not just mine, but the wine industry for a long time because I’ve been shouting you from the top of the rooftops before you came to the summit. So
Kara Goldin 2:12
I love it. I love it. And so let’s talk about the beginning. And I love talking about this because I often don’t even know this about people I don’t know sort of about you like when I was young Paul, like who? Who were you as Did you always know that you were gonna be a serial entrepreneur or, and live in Napa and all that?
Paul Mabray 2:35
No, no, actually, I grew up enough. I wanted to get out of here as fast as possible. So I went away to film school, I want to be a director and a writer. But I got a job as a salesman for a guy named John Wright who founded domain shutdown. And I’m the worst, worst worst sales guy you’ve ever met in your life. But I’m a bit of a nerd. So I programmed my own little CRM program that would tell me who to call when and my sales hockey stick that looked like I was a hero. But it was just me paying attention to the accounts, you know, over and over. And that kind of set my career in a different direction. So while all my friends were Busboys and waiters in the film industry, I had a $2,000 expense account, I had free, you know, booze, had lots of dinners, and I was making really good money. I’m like, I think I’m gonna take a career shift. This is really cool. And then quickly, I fell into the bucket of hubris, thinking that I was going to be one of the big change agents of the wine industry. And I wanted to be the next Robert Mondavi, but using digital Oh, no, it’s a very different story. Yeah.
Kara Goldin 3:38
So interesting. So you started out in sales and marketing and then, like, how did you get into direct to consumer then?
Paul Mabray 3:47
Yeah, it’s it was actually my second job. I found out that I wasn’t gonna be CEO at the time I was 23, which shouldn’t have been by there. They’ve been terrible title, inflation and I went to work for knee balm, Coppola, Francis Ford, Coppola’s YNAB and I report directly to the CEO and I was the skunkworks guy. My job was to do all kinds of wackiness, the CEO decided everything from their food line to their ERP to compliance, it was his great cross training. And then he gave me a project, you know, said I’d like you to start our first wine club. And back then, that was really a subscription business now essentially, right? Like hint Tez Yeah. And back then the wine club and the subscription business you are the quasi mode. It was the worst job to actually have. I was I remember crying to the CEO saying i Please don’t make me do this. And he did still. And we became incredibly successful. Wine Club is the most successful I think from like zero to 3000 wine club members in six months.
Kara Goldin 4:45
What year was this? Like? 95
Paul Mabray 4:47
is way back.
Kara Goldin 4:48
Oh my god.
Paul Mabray 4:49
So we did. Or 96 And what was interesting about that wine club is it was more like plated than it was like a wine club. We had the pasta from Francis Ford Coppola. We had a movie We had a recipe American zoetrope and the wine. And so you get this package every month, almost like plated. And it was like Francis eat like drink, like be like Francis in a box. So pretty interesting.
Kara Goldin 5:11
So talk about how the journey in the wine space has changed from the beginning until now. I mean, I think, you know, obviously, you’re a wine ecommerce pioneer, being back in in the same time that I was starting all this e commerce stuff. So talk to us about some of the challenges that you had to overcome. I mean, there’s there’s lots of regulations that have changed over the years, some still haven’t changed. But can you share a little bit more about that? For those who are not familiar with some of the hurdles you have to hop over? Yeah, so
Paul Mabray 5:45
wine was probably the last industry to adopt the internet. And I say probably was, I’m pretty sure it was, and it only happening during COVID. But a lot of that was tied to regulatory barriers, and also the apathy because we were growing so fast. I mean, the winds, she’s been successful for 20 years straight, double digit growth, both volume and then price point. So Napa as a as a small example, eco tourism here is amazing. I mean, you come here, it’s just getting more and more busy in Sonoma, Napa Santa Barbara. So we’ve been very fortunate as an industry. So when you don’t have to change if it’s not broken, why fix it. So that’s been kind of one of the great hindrances, but then the regulatory stuff has been brutal. You know, back when ecommerce first came out with virtual vineyards and wine, calm and wine shop are kind of the three first things. There were state regulations that shifted and adjusted and how much wine you could get where it became so convoluted and so terrible. That it was almost impossible to ship wine. And then in 2005, wineries got permission because of a Supreme Court case called the Granholm decision. And now whiners can ship pretty much to any state. But retailers can’t and still going through this, you know, regulatory changes, but COVID unlock that at the Union see an acceleration, that they’re going to see more companies selling wine in different ways. It’s like the genies out of the bottle. And the the speed by which we’re going in the internet is just unbelievable.
Kara Goldin 7:09
And many people don’t understand that the business of alcoholic beverages, it really still depends on like, what type of alcohol right that there’s hard alcohol. And so how is that different from beer versus versus wine?
Paul Mabray 7:24
Yeah, so wine has been kind of at the forefront of shipping, it’s kind of nice price point is considered like much more of a social beverage than it is that kind of pre prohibition, abusive beverage. You know, that’s where spirits kind of fall into. I think those other industries that are adjacent to wine have been slower to kind of break down the regulations on the on the beer side, the cost per shipping was pretty expensive. It’s a heavy product like water. So you know, unlike water, though, you have to have an adult signature, you know, you have to have all these other layers and barriers to get there. So that made it much more challenging some of the costs, the ROI and doing beer was pretty low spirits has been pretty high, but it’s such a competitive market for shelf space. And it’s not a very longtail product and you go into the vodka section. There’s what 2030 vodkas, you go into wine, there’s 200 different wines just in a supermarket and one, you know, in the United States every year, I think we release 160 180,000 new wines. And they say good in the market to, you know, to 10 to 20 years. So, right now for sale, there’s probably 2.5 million different wines for sale in United States right now. Wow, everything from a really old port to like, you know, Sutter Home White Zinfandel.
Kara Goldin 8:39
Amazing. So how have you seen the the, you know, the fires, the weather changes? I mean, you’re living up in Napa, obviously had lived through many of those pretty scary times over the last few years. But how has that changed the wine industry overall.
Paul Mabray 8:59
So the wine industry is probably the most in touch with the earth in a lot of ways. At the same time, we have an original sin. So we we feel fires and earthquakes, we feel climate change. We’re right there we see it in the vineyards, we see it in our water tables, you know, all the different things that people so we’re very tied into that land. And we’re actually very conscious about climate change. You know, the Torres family, the gallows, they really lean into solar, they try to find ways to reduce bottle weight. But we also at the same time we wrestle with which is wine is original sin for us to taste wine from Australia, or from Spain, we have to put that juice in, you know, in some sort of container, right and across the world, right, right fit across the world whatever way we do and not only we ship across the world, we ship it multiple times in multiple places across the world. So that will always be our sin. It’s the only way that we can actually enjoy those products from different places and times. So it’s something that we’re facing all The time looking at how we offset that, how do we make balance with the world?
Kara Goldin 10:04
So technology has been something that you’ve gravitated towards over the years, as you mentioned. So, and you spotted opportunities early around you, how can technology really change? What haven’t we done yet? I mean, we’re talking about web three, we’re talking about NF T’s. We’re talking about any of that kind of stuff. I mean, what changes are we gonna see?
Paul Mabray 10:28
You know, we’re always on this rat race changing the next chasing the next kind of our crazy yeah, you know, the NF T’s being an example or cryptocurrency or web 3.0. Look, there’s so much to unlock with web 1.0, web 2.0. And some industries are farther behind than others. So I think COVID As terrible as the situation is, it was for all of us was kind of an acceleration, to adopt these tools to make a sustainable. And we know that digital tools, let us talk to people in Boston and Austin, real time and let’s say one human scale, times 10, it lets us do better customer service, you know, better than anyone how you can manage these tools to do automated sales and customer care. And then you can keep raising the high level parts, which is the human experience. And I’m actually really a humanist that believes that technology is a tool to enable better humanism, right? You know, that we can have like you and I talking right now we’re using digital tools. At scale, it’s pretty amazing, you know, having a video conference and being able to record it. That’s, that’s part of the journey. And and now we have better conversations before and after, and how I can text and more inner engaging texts that are all part of it. So I think that what we’re going to see is not really about the next wave, it’s how do we unlock the ways that we have I think we’re still maximizing those for a long time. And these these new, flashy Lewers are interesting. But as you know, many of them fade out are actually really inefficient tools. I mean, cryptocurrency as a key example, why would I pay you $1? And Bitcoin today that could either be worth 50 cents tomorrow or $5. Tomorrow? It’s a terrible currency. Right? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have that much volatility in it.
Kara Goldin 12:05
So interesting. So let’s talk about your company picks. Very, very excited. So what made you decide that the world needed picks? I mean, what was kind of this? When you had the idea? What, how did you think about it? What was sort of the first steps?
Paul Mabray 12:24
Yeah, so I’ve been selling tools to wineries my whole time. So I became this nerd, like I said, and then I went into the 2000s, actually starting company. So I started the first e commerce SAS company for the winery called wine direct. So if you bought wine online from a winery, it was probably wine direct that did it. And then I did a big social media listening company called Vintage Inc, that I sold, and it was the gigantic suffer. I kept selling these tools to wineries. And here’s a shovel, go dig or here’s a fishing pole Go fish. And I was realizing that that wasn’t going to do the job. And then when COVID hit Actually, I’d stand on stage. And you know that even the summit that we do is trying to teach the wineries to think differently. And as much as I believed in the internet, I actually didn’t think I’d see it in my lifetime care. I really was like, even though I knew to my mitochondria that this was the right thing to do. I didn’t actually think I would see the changes happen. Yeah. And when COVID happened, I said, Well, the best thing I can do for the industry. And this is where my hubris has changed from trying to be the change agent to my neighbors and friends are going to continue to struggle. The wind Street is becoming more and more challenging. It’s competing as more and more things whether that’s climate change, whether that’s oversaturation, but also adjacent categories, you know, hard seltzers, hard kombucha, the stomach share for spirits and beer. I mean, it’s a it’s a very different drinking atmosphere than it was a decade ago. We’re Omni drinkers. And these beautiful little boutique wineries, finding them on the internet is, you know, a needle in a haystack. So my best job is to aggregate as many consumers as I can, and help guide them in this discovery journey. And so that’s what you’ve done. We launched on January 12. We are the second largest, fastest growing wine selection in the world. Day one, it’s been really exciting. So we have a quarter million wines, 5 million offers across 5000 different wine sellers, day one and and we’re growing every day by five to 10. And it’s a really fun journey. It’s really magical and find all kinds of interesting parts of the story. So
Kara Goldin 14:16
and so you’re not taking inventory or anything. You’re
Paul Mabray 14:20
I’m even more I’m not even getting in the middle of the transaction. I fundamentally believe that marketplaces eat markets, right? So all of these marketplaces that do that and then become the the owner of the traffic. My job is to send the traffic to the retailer, the winery, I’m much more Google esque or kayak the original kayak than I am a cart and, and the good news about that is that’s the way we sell wine. You know, we have different states. Maybe I’m in Seattle, maybe I’m down by your house in the valley, like I need to get a bottle of wine for you tonight. I don’t know the retail stores I don’t or maybe I’m looking at a wall of wine and I’m not sure which one to pick. And I’m in the wine industry, even Masters of Wine. There’s so many wines and so many places and so many changes. My job is to help navigate that.
Kara Goldin 15:00
And so what is the business model for you then? Yeah, so
Paul Mabray 15:03
just like Google, we follow a keyword bidding model, right? So most of the sites are free. And then if you want to bid your way up to be adjacent to the products, or the selection sets that you have you buy that in so I deliver pure high fidelity customers to wineries and retailers.
Kara Goldin 15:18
This episode is sponsored by hashtag paid. I’m constantly on the lookout for new ways to market all the things that I’m involved in, whether that’s hint, or the Kara Goldin show. And marketing isn’t always so simple to understand what to do. That’s until I came upon hashtag paid. Hashtag paid is a very cool marketing platform that allows you and your brand to collaborate with creators, those creators build content that help you market smarter to the audiences you want to reach. First, they match you with creators ideal for your campaign, then those creators pitch their campaign concepts to you for review, hashtag paid has been rated a number one Creator marketing platform, they make it easy to choose your objectives from the creators you choose in a quick process that gets results. Their promise to you is that you’ll never have to spend hours searching for creators. The price is set up front so you know what you’re paying for. And you’ll get the data to see how the campaign performed. So here’s how you can give hashtag paid a try. Go to go dot hashtag paid.com/kara Goldin that’s go dot hashtag paid.com/kara with a K golden sign up there for your trial offer. Again, that’s go dot hashtag paid.com/kara Goldin. This episode is brought to you by Coinbase. While cryptocurrency has been around for over a decade, it feels like now more than ever, everyone is talking about it. But while everyone is talking about it, the topic of crypto still feels a bit daunting to most. So I’m going to let you in on a little secret, I have discovered an amazing tool that I want to share with you and it’s called Coinbase. Coinbase offers a trusted and easy to use platform to buy, sell and spend cryptocurrency. They support the most popular digital currencies on the market. And they offer portfolio management protection, learning resources and a mobile app. So you can trade securely and monitor all your crypto in one place. Whether you’re just getting started or seeking a better way to access crypto markets, you need to check out Coinbase find out why millions of people in over 100 countries are using Coinbase. And for a limited time, new users can get $10 and free bitcoin when you sign up today at coinbase.com/kara Goldin sign [email protected] Kara Goldin for $10 and free bitcoin. This offer is for a limited time only. So be sure to sign up today. That’s coinbase.com/kara Goldin. How many people do you have now?
Paul Mabray 18:14
24?
Kara Goldin 18:14
Yeah. 24. Wow. So god, that’s amazing. That’s, that’s Wow, that’s so so great. Because I remember when you were just getting started. I mean, you’re was. So what’s the hardest thing about this? You’ve done this as your third startup. And what’s been the hardest thing about this one in particular?
Paul Mabray 18:35
So I think two pieces about it that have been really hard. One of them is tamping down expectations, because we have such an all star team. And I’ve done so many startups before that they expect me to be like Google out of the gate. And as you know, Google has 1000s of engineers and totally, I mean, we’re 24 people doing the best we can, you know, that sounds like a lot of people. But it’s when you’re lifting up that much inventory. The other one is, you know, making sure people understand how special we are compared to the startups and failures have happened in wine tech prior to us that by taking this experience team, that’s why we’ve gone so fast. That’s why we’re winning the hearts and minds of all these wineries and retailers and partners all across the world. It’s because we’re doing it differently in smartly.
Kara Goldin 19:18
That’s awesome. I read an article that you said that you’re currently or work currently in the golden digital age of wine. So what does that mean? Yeah,
Paul Mabray 19:28
so Golden Age is always that new era where things are happening special and it’s unlocking all this innovation and changes and so wine has been completely hampered and hindered prior to COVID. It’s it’s been the wineries in adopted retailers. The consumer was always there wanting to buy but no one was really facilitating that. And then COVID happened. And what happened is all the consumers as you know, we were hoarding toilet paper. We were buying everything online for a while we are all quarantining trying to figure out those things. So Suddenly, now everyone has to sell. And you know, the acceleration of both all of these different factors, more people buying wine online, learning how to make it easier, more retailers learning how to is getting better and better. And I’ve never seen so much acceleration in evolution, and it’s going to be so fun to buy wine soon, you know, it’s getting easier. In fact, even the things that we’re doing. So for example, we do these things called collections where we make small bite sized pieces of a giant wine. And we make fun ones, wines with dogs on the label, you know, wines with female owners, minds with female owners under 50 cases, because it’s our job to make this big category small and easy. That’s an it’s a, it seems like a small thing. But that kind of innovation is not being done by a retailer. But because we’re this macro wine selection, we can do insane, fun things with this virtual inventory to help customers find what they want.
Kara Goldin 20:48
How are you getting the word out about picks?
Paul Mabray 20:51
Yeah, well, there’s so many different factors in that, but really, right now that we got so much organic traffic that we’re really leaning into, because we’re really kind of the AB positive of platforms, you know, there’s no other platform that really exists like us, that helps the consumer find where to buy the wine, they’re looking for how to buy it and other wines to buy. Right? So we have such a wide selection, no one has a wide selection like us, except for another small search engine. So we’re getting traffic partnerships like Robert Parker, bloggers point to us, you know, all these great publications who when they right away, they say, Look, I just gave it 95 points, let them help you find where to buy it. And that’s our job, right? Obviously, we were doing really well in the press, we’ve already gotten really high accolades from things, we won the Wall Street Journal for our content, and we have a pretty good content engine as well, that writes really fun articles.
Kara Goldin 21:41
That’s awesome. I was actually interviewing Do you know, minted? Marissa? I was interviewing her yesterday, that podcast hasn’t come out yet. But we were talking about web three. And it was really interesting what she was talking about how kind of along the lines of what you’re saying too, about the search engines and you know, who, like, it’s just much more specialized and unique. And when people are focused on something, it’s, I mean, to find what consumers are looking for, that they would find on picks is, is just not what you’re going to find on Google unless they’re multiple strokes. And Google is going to make a lot of money off of those. And anyway, I think it’s, it’s really fascinating. You guys should connect, actually, and figure out on sort of, cuz I think a lot of stuff that she’s thinking about, ultimately intersect. So she had actually started a long time ago, even I knew her back in the 90s, she had started a beauty company called Eve. And kind of along the same lines as you like to bring small, you know, unknown. I mean, this is before Sephora, and, you know, bringing sort of unknown brands into the world. And she sold the company, you know, early on, but anyway, it was a lot of what she’s talking about, I think, totally different industry, obviously. But is a lot of what you’re talking about, too. So
Paul Mabray 23:10
yeah, distractions are the same. I mean, like our job is Botha boxer protrudes and everything in between, right. So, but your your point is well taken. If I look up sharpening on Google, which is the most amazing tool in the world, it’s pretty magical tool. But it doesn’t understand subject matter expertise. So if I look up Chardonnay, I’m going to get Chardonnay, the great Chardonnay, the color Chardonnay for sale, and Chardonnay and the Marvin Gaye song, you know, it’s all of those things will come up in the search results. So interesting. Yeah. So for us, distill it down help the buyer get the path. That’s why open table works so well. Right? Google has a great restaurant tool as well, but open table, because it specializes and it focuses can do better results than Google can.
Kara Goldin 23:51
So so true. No, it’s a great example. Actually, I think thinking about Open Table versus pix. I mean, it really is a great way to describe it. So for sure. So definitely the organic traffic. But then do you think you guys will be advertising? Do you think you’ll be doing mostly PR word of mouth? I mean, how do you get people to really know that you guys are out there? And sort of,
Paul Mabray 24:18
yeah, we’ll definitely do a ton of PR a ton of word of mouth. Obviously, the SEO game is always part of the engine, the content game is part of the engine. And you know, as long as I can, I want to keep our customer acquisition costs as low as possible, because that allows us all so focusing on ad based buying is not really the the key I mean, I we have a really good engine for absorbing and helping traffic get to where it needs to be. And because we’re providing so much of it for free. We want to continue to suppress that customer acquisition costs as much as possible. So, but we’re also like I said, we’re this great AB positive, and I use that kind of blood analogy, which is, you know, even our big partners so Treasury is one of our biggest partners. The wine group is a big partner when t these big companies that don’t want to sell direct to consumer, but want to help their customers find, let’s call it, Martha Stewart’s new 19 crimes wine. We’re that ultimate vehicle that they can send the traffic and we will point them to the right direction because we’re not in the middle of the transaction. Our job is to stimulate the market and help them help the customer get to what they need.
Kara Goldin 25:21
I love it. No, it’s so great. So you don’t think you’ll be opening up a winery anytime soon? So that’s not, I don’t know, it’d be it’d be kind of fun that we could taste all the different wines. And so I get it.
Paul Mabray 25:33
Let’s do some big events, probably. But we’ll organize what we want to do. But opening a winery is not in my eye. We have one woman in the family that does that, you know, my wife runs? Yeah, um, so I stay out of that.
Kara Goldin 25:42
And Donna miss, like my favorite, which you turn me on to it. So it’s such a so so good. So, so share a story about a challenge or a failure that you’ve had along the way it could be with picks, although it’s pretty new. But you never know, there could have been some pieces, especially during the last couple of crazy years. And what did you learn from those experiences or that experience?
Paul Mabray 26:11
I, I’m a fundamental believer that failure is a better teacher than success. I think it helps guide you and understand better than because success kind of breeds. It teaches you things but it doesn’t help you overcome challenges that you’re facing. And failure does. This company, I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of failure on my way here, as well as a few successes. And bring it together, I knew how to bring together a wine culture, a business culture and a technology culture. But I didn’t know how to bring an editorial culture, you know, and so mapping these together. And then this thing is bigger than anything I’ve ever built at a speed that I’ve never built. And so oftentimes in the entrepreneurial spirit, people get caught up in trying to over engineer solution, trying to over build it. And so we came up with these really kind of quick, witty things that we’ve kind of incorporated. So you know, perfect is the enemy of good good is the engine of better, right and fast, gets good, better than good gets fast. Those are kind of two mantras we use. And one of the ways that we’ve done that is, when we were first starting to design the site, I mean, 250,000 wines is an impossible goal, right to say, I’m going to fill them out, if I charge if I say I pay someone $5 per wine, it’s a lot of money in the garbage can. Because next year, I have another 160. And I’m going backwards in time. So we created this framework, because everyone was struggling with it, it was we were failing at getting out of the gate. I was like I need to hire a 50 editors, I need to fire 100 writers, I’m like guys, you’re gonna burn through all of our capital before we totally get out of the door. And so I said, look, let’s learn and this learning structures, let’s do it 10 times ourselves, let’s do 100 times, you know, between different groups, and then we’ll do it 500 times. And each of those checkpoints we see. Where’s our thesis falling down? On its structure? Where are we failing? Or what can we do and can’t do so in the product example that I just gave you, you know, we filled it out 10 times and we’re like, okay, it takes about 10 minutes to fill out these products, it’s gonna cost us x. And then we had 100 people do or you know, 20 of our 10 of our employees do 100 Digit 10 each. And we found that wineries content was crazy. They were writing about their wines in first person, if you’re cutting and pasting that onto our site, it looked like pics was saying, we designed this wine, we made this wine in 1927 from this vineyard. So we are learning all along these ways. This is kind of like a fail forward framework they does. And it was a tough struggle, I have to tell you, the editorial team was really struggling with this whole piece. And they were really upset that we’re gonna have all this content that had grammatical errors, it was in first person versus third person. And I went home and I was just very fatigued and tired because there’s a lot of dynamic disagreement going on. And the next morning when I was taking a shower, and this is how I became a success. I remembered the story about the Microsoft Windows used to have the bug it said Microsoft Windows has had a critical error and some guy in customer service, change that message. And I’ll have to dig it up in the archives and said, your program has caused Microsoft to have a critical error. So they took the onus of the problem. And their customer service calls went down like 90% or something ridiculous. So what I did is at the beginning of every product, instead of it being from us, I said from the producer. And so it was a suddenly everyone’s happy the editorial team was happy. We didn’t have to cut and paste it. We didn’t have to edit it we we got to go get it from the wineries and can be as garbagey as they want it to be you know are good is as good as they wanted it. Right. So yeah. Interesting. Interesting segue into that. But yeah, that was a learning how to fail forward and learning how to bring another culture who wanted to make it perfect. That’s the editorial team wants to make it look like a magazine. And we want to make it look like this clay that iterates over and over again. So this is how we got through that.
Kara Goldin 29:50
super interesting. Well, it’ll be interesting to to see kind of as you iterate because it’s like, you know, you probably have to have everybody on the same kind If they have to have a certain style, right, for it to kind of blend, I mean, they all have to have their, their own style, but they have to, they have to keep up with it. Right, too. So I think that that will be key in order to be a part of what you guys are doing. And as you guys grow, I think that it will become more and more important for people to, to do what is right for their. And I guess I feel like so many of the wineries that are out there now. I mean, it’s so different than even it was 20 years ago. I mean, they didn’t have the story. Right, they didn’t have a lot of the editorial, I mean, are you finding like most of them kind of are able to keep up with what you need them to do.
Paul Mabray 30:42
So because of where we came from, we’re able to help them go faster than Yeah, done before. So we know the backdoor into places where we can help them and make it as painless as possible. That’s our job is to try and make it as easy, remove friction from the system, and then reward them based upon the effort that they actually do. So that’s, that’s, that’s where like, if you look at Google, they reward people based upon a better site responsive, mobile friendly, were the same thing give us better content, give us more content, give us better integrations. Right.
Kara Goldin 31:12
Very, very cool. So last question, where are you guys gonna be in six months from now? Besides traveling or doing something fun, but I mean, where where do you hope Pyxis gonna be?
Paul Mabray 31:24
So pix will be the world’s largest wine selection six months, no question at the pace we’re going. We’re adding five wineries and retailers that day, 10,000 products a day, it’s going crazy. And then we’ll be international will be in the UK, probably by the end of this quarter, the very beginning the next quarter. And we’ll launch hopefully our mobile app by the end of six months, so that we can follow you around in your pocket and say, let me help you wherever you’re trying to find help if you’re the shelf in front of wine, or if you’re in a restaurant, or and the eventual goal is you walk into a place and we say by the way, we know you’re shopping for wine today, you’re in a wine retailer. Here’s five wines you’re just gonna love.
Kara Goldin 32:01
I love that now. It’s so great. Well, super super thrilled to hear all about your story and and pics, and it’s so interesting and such a great time to be doing this too. So definitely definitely can’t wait wait to watch the future and see exactly where you guys go with this. But I agree. I think the next six months it’s gonna be really fun to check back in with you for sure. So how can the audience stay connected with you and pics?
Paul Mabray 32:31
Yeah, so we’re at pics wine on Twitter and Instagram. Everywhere. Pics is the name. I’m at p Mabry, P Ma, B ra y everywhere. It’s kind of in my social handle for a long, long time. But I’m looking forward to sharing glass of wine with you at each of these milestones. Champagne two, will pop some good stuff.
Kara Goldin 32:50
Super great. And Paul and I are buddies on Twitter, if anybody wants to pop with us on Twitter, definitely we have some good conversations with each other another people on there. So really, really fun. So thank you again for coming on. And thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode. Please subscribe to the Kara Goldin show so that you’re sure not to miss amazing stories like Paul’s and pics, and please be sure to send in those five star reviews too. They made such a difference on the algorithm. Our podcast has grown significantly, we’re turning, we are showing up on some number one slots and different parts of the world, especially over the last few months and entrepreneurship. So it’s very, very exciting to watch that. And please don’t forget to follow me on Kara Goldin. also pick up a copy. If you haven’t read my book, and daunted or listened to it on Audible. I hope you will do that as well. And we are here every Monday and Wednesday. And thank you, everyone and have a great week. Thanks, Paul. Thank you. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book calm and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know and if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple pod cast. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening