Harvey Hodd, founder and CEO, Blueprint – Retail Technology Innovation Hub

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RTIH gets the latest news on Blueprint, a conversational CRM platform for online merchants. RTIH: Tell us about yourself and Blueprint

HH: My name is Harvey Hodd and I am a former professional footballer turned founder and CEO of a tech startup.

I’m building Blueprint with my co-founder and childhood friend Rory Jeffries to revolutionize the way ecommerce brands scale their businesses.

It is the world’s first SMS and WhatsApp platform that enhances the loyalty of direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce stores. We are a B2B SaaS company backed by a business launched in early 2021 and now we serve hundreds of customers in the UK and US.

Blueprint helps Shopify merchants create better retention and lifetime value (LTV) from existing customers using two-way conversational messaging sent via SMS and Whatsapp.

We enable flexible subscriber management to reduce subscription abandonment, smart replenishment and cross-selling to drive more repeat purchases and generate audience feedback loops to create clingy customers.

Since launching last year, we’ve generated over $ 1 million in retained revenue for brands and increased our customer base by 50% month over month.

We serve some of the best ecommerce brands in the world, including Daring Foods, Rise Brewing, Dash Drinks, Misfits Health, Days Brewing, Candy Kittens, Wild Nutrition, and more.

RTIH: What was the inspiration behind the creation of the company?

HH: Rory and I are serial entrepreneurs in the eCommerce space.

While growing our former business, a beverage brand called Matcha Works, we ran into a problem that many DTC stores face. That is to say, it was very difficult to convince customers who had ordered from us once, to come back and buy from us multiple times.

We haven’t found any technology solution that would truly allow us to build real relationships with our large-scale customer base, hear what they thought about our product, or ultimately help us increase retained revenue.

So we did what any shoddy startup does: we improvised. Using a shoddy phone, we started texting our customers directly. Our audience was receptive and we were able to engage in some back and forth conversations of enormous value.

What we have seen over time is that not only have we now understood more about our buyers, but the LTV of those cohorts of customers we have had conversations with has started to increase.

It was then that a light bulb went off in our heads.

We found an SMS-based solution to a retention problem that many e-commerce brands like ours have been facing. We decided that the ecommerce industry needed to fundamentally rethink how it built long-term relationships with customers and conserved revenue, and the rest is history.

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