E136: Nick Knuppe

Richard Hill:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One, and welcome to episode 136. In this episode, I'll speak with Nick Knuppe, Senior Director of marketing at Juni. From working with some of the most well known agencies in the world, like Ogilvy, and then onto brands like booking.com, and then to e-commerce tech firms in the payment space, like Mollie, now at Juni, working with merchants and tech partners, helping merchants navigate the options available to them, managing their finances and maximizing their cash flow better.

In this episode, Nick and myself talk all things finance. What do businesses need to be aware of over the next 12 months to keep profitable? When shouldn't a business take out a credit line? What advice would Nick give to business owners who are struggling with the cash flow? This one might surprise you. And what options are available to merchants to cash flow projects, stock, and ad spend, etc, and so much more in this one. If you enjoy this episode, then please hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast. You're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now let's head over to this fantastic episode.

Hi there. I just wanted to take a quick break to introduce our sponsor, Prisync. Prisync is a competitive price tracking and monitoring software that can dynamically change your products' prices on all sales channels. They work with brands such as Samsung, Sony, and Suzuki, to increase their online revenue. If you run Google shopping ads, like I know a lot of you do, this software is absolutely key to accelerating profits. One of the reasons I recommend Price Inc to my clients is because you can find out what your competitors' pricing and stock availability is in one simple to understand dashboard, giving you a huge competitive advantage. If you have any questions about this software or your red, take a 14-day free trial, head to ecomone.com/prisync. That's ecomone.com/prisync, P R I S Y N C, and complete the inquiry form, and we will connect our listeners to the Prisync team. Right, let's head straight back to the episode.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of eCom@One. Today's guest, Nick Knuppe, Senior Director of Marketing at Jooni. How you doing Nick?

Nick Knuppe:
Hey Richard. Good, thank you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Richard Hill:
No problem at all. Great to have you on. So I think before we get stuck in to all things finance and related, it'd be good to introduce yourself and how you got into the world of e-commerce, Nick.

Nick Knuppe:
Yeah, well, thanks. You have given me a lovely introduction. My first few years in e-commerce, I was working at a digital ad agency called Hello Computer in Cape Town, which later merged with the FCP, and I started my career in advertising, and a few of the first projects that I worked on was building the first e-commerce store for a very big MCC brand, Method Cap Classic, so it's not champagne, from South Africa. It was JC Le Roux. And whilst e-commerce I think today in South Africa only accounts for 4%, it's still a thriving industry and very advanced. My introduction was building websites on Magento, from project management all the way through to trying to manage clients' expectations with the custom build versus off the shelf and what the costs associated were. And then I took a bit of a turn. I was working at Ogilvy and my customer at the time was Tencent or Tencent Africa.

So they were a joint venture between Naspers and that was to launch WeChat, so focusing on mobile commerce, and also mobile payments. And that was really my change in peripheral moving from agency to marketing and building up the marketing team at Tencent Africa. And I've really been on both sides of the fence, having led the product marketing team at Mollie, which for most of you that know or don't know was at the time, I think pre-COVID, a small payment service provider, well not so small, but mainly processing payments for SMBs in the Benelux area. And that was a wild ride, was there for two years talking all things checkout optimization, alternative payment methods, and then we were doing a due diligence on card issuing companies and Juni popped up on the radar that was a company that were just doing things very differently with a big mission to remove financial barriers for digital commerce businesses.

And it resonated strongly with me because I have a sister who is an e-commerce operator and owner for a skincare business in South Africa and the Netherlands. So I've had a very interesting vantage point to see the firsthand case of the struggles that an e-commerce founder has, and what Juni was doing on the opposite end to try and solve and remove these barriers. So it was a no-brainer for me to join Juni.

Richard Hill:
Wow, what a journey, hey. You've seen it from both side of the fence and obviously worked for some of the very well-known tech brands. We know the guys at Mollie very well and a brand that we realize what they're doing there. And so you've seen the pain from the Magento side and the pleasure and the agency, the marketing, so a lot of experience there and seeing it. Obviously when we think about our listeners, that'll resonate with them a lot in terms of, I know we have a lot of people using different payment facilitators and providers, and obviously there's a lot of options out there now, but I think obviously you guys offer a slightly alternative option, as well, to more traditional providers. So why should our listeners and e-commerce store think about using Juni over more traditional methods?

Nick Knuppe:
Well, I think, if you look at traditional banking and what you get from your bank, and how technology has advanced in the last five to 10 years, if you go back and you think of e-commerce, the founders and operators of e-commerce businesses from 15 to 20 years ago are starting to get gray hairs today. So it's still a very new segment in some ways when you're comparing it to brick and mortar retail. But at the same time, Juni was born out of our co-founders' frustrations with their bank. And that can be surprising or unsurprising when you are scale an e-commerce business, you get impacted by card declines, the cards don't have high spend thresholds, you have to phone your bank, you get put into another department. It's just not efficient and it's not at that level of the speed that an e-commerce business needs.

If you want to change currencies, you get whacked by high FX fees that you sometimes don't even know about or you get billed seven days later. If you need cards, you have to order them, and you have to wait another seven days. So the whole experience has just been very slow and clunky. And don't get me wrong, some banks have definitely stepped up and they've started to understand the importance of having a beautifully simplistic user interface. But really, to try and think of why customers should consider Juni, is it's really being able to take their financial partner to the next level. And I think what I mean by a financial partner, Juni had a positioning not so long ago where we were the financial companion made for e-commerce.

And whilst that was very easily explained on our side from a Juni perspective, people didn't understand the financial companion part of it. And what that really means is that we want to help e-commerce founders or fast-growing finance teams, these are our two ICPs that we look at, to really be able to just from a founder's perspective, simplify the way that they look at their business. And that's the unification of key data points from your Shopify store to your actual bank, so we connect to your bank via open banking, to understanding your Facebook and Google Ads analytics, and really unifying all these different data points into one beautiful dashboard.

Richard Hill:
I think that will have a few light bulb moments for people. Obviously, I think ultimately connecting your platform to your banking in terms of, right, okay, you've got this much in sales coming through or this much pending, you've got this much been spent on this platform, this much been spent on that platform. Well ultimately there's a lot of funds that are in flow coming in and out, but ultimately using that data to then... Whether that's to lend, which ultimately to borrow, sorry, I think there's not many people doing that. I know there's a couple of options out there, but I think it's quite a unique proposition. Very, very few.

Nick Knuppe:
What we see with our customers today is that they can use a combination of traditional bank, neobank, then they may use a Wayflyer for credit. And it's still quite a fragmented space if you look at what it takes to be able to just keep abreast of how much are you spending on one card. And I think the biggest challenge that we've seen is that, from a banking perspective, your bank doesn't understand your return on ad spend, your bank doesn't unify your insights from your Shopify store. And we really just want to bring that together in the most simple and beautiful way possible.

But also, so I always say we want to save customers time and money, but also give them the wisdom to do more with it. And I think that's something that we are investing in a lot in is being able to not just say that we give you insights but make them insightful that you can actually take actions with. And that's what we found is... I think even when Friday, we launched automated reports so that instead of having to log into Juni on a Friday, you can get a overview of your financial position.

Richard Hill:
No, great. So I think it's quite good timing to have you on at the moment. There's obviously a lot of negativeness out there, I think, depending where you look, but obviously our listeners very much, right, let's push through, let's crack on. But I think ultimately there's quite a lot of negativeness around redundancies, around things getting squeezed, and this that and the other right now. But what would you say are some of the biggest challenges merchants are facing right now with the finance side of things and the cash flow side of things?

Nick Knuppe:
So I'll start with saying that I believe there's a level of optimism. I was reading a report last week that surveyed over 500 e-commerce operators in the UK, and over 80% of them had a more optimistic look at this year, but a more conservative approach to their forecasts. And I think that's something that is so critical when you think of just general cash flow hygiene, go back to basics and make sure that you have the basics in place, and that means the basics controls very accurate forecasting. I think we still, from the customers that we speak to, there's still a lot of uncertainty around supply chain continuity or consistency. We often write in our Juni blog, we go deep on specific topics like that to better understand and how to optimize your supply chains. But again, that impacts the business in so many ways that you may not foresee, because sometimes if your delivery time for a product may be between eight to 10 weeks, customers want instant gratification. They want their product next week, meaning that they will likely go and shop somewhere else.

And that just adds much more challenges when you're trying to forecast your revenue. So I think that we're still feeling the impact of uncertainty around supply chains. And I think also just accuracy on forecasting is probably one of the key. Whilst we want to make sure that customers can feel confident with their cashflow and give them the tools and the insights, we still see a lot of growing e-com businesses, we call them mid-market internally, although not a lot of them like being called mid-market externally, but it's an internal term that we use, and we actually still see that a lot of the cash flow and management is still done in an Excel sheet.

Richard Hill:
It surprises me. Obviously we are dealing with hundreds of merchants here at the agency behind the podcast, Econ One. And forecasting is one of those things that it's just, it astounds me. I understand that typically a lot of e-com stores can start from a back bedroom or from... obviously to sell a couple of things and then fast-forward 2, 3, 4, 5 years and they're doing 20 million pounds a year. But it's obviously then as those months and years and you progress through the business, getting that cash flow for, well, not just the cash flow forecast, but the stock forecasting, we're talking about, obviously it is both, but when you've got such long lead times, potentially, from the manufacturer, even distributor, depending on what it is, it's just so surprising that everyone seems to be just in time with stuff in terms of not really forecasting, they're just winging it, really. It's quite surprising they're not using any tech to forecast. So Juni helps you do that, I assume, yeah?

Nick Knuppe:
So forecasting is something that we're investing in now, but it's more about being able to have an overview of funds coming in and going out of your business. And I think being able to have that realtime snapshot is just an additional layer of accuracy. Whereas when we speak to CFOs or financial controllers, we try and make sure that we are speaking at least once a week to just fast track that customer feedback straight back into the product and engineering teams. And I think it's interesting to hear often that forecasting has gone from, it's not just a quarterly exercise anymore, it's daily.

And I think that's the type of rigor that you need in this environment of economic uncertainty, to give yourself that peace of mind. But it's just how manually intensive it is to keep your finger on top of that with the right resources. There's so much more that we try and help out with from a Juni perspective, when you think of the automated workflows that you can put on top of your virtual cards, we do automatic receipt matching, particularly for Facebook and Google Ads. So the compound impact of small automations that can just help our customers save time.

Richard Hill:
I think that's a great one, isn't it? Just little additional automations that goes across all different things with running a business, but just having your eye on things and that consistency. So next 12 months, then, what would be some key things that you think our listeners need to be aware of to maintain profitability? Because I think this is the key word that we talk about a lot. It's all right turning over thousands and thousands of SKUs, and millions of pounds worth of revenue. But ultimately we want our listeners to be profitable, as we all do in business. Not be one of the statistics that we see all too often on LinkedIn and social media at the moment, but remaining profitable. What are some of the things need to have their finger on the pulse with to remain profitable?

Nick Knuppe:
I think the first thing that we found very interesting is for traditional B2C businesses: don't ignore wholesale, particularly when you're launching into new markets. It's one of the safest routes to test market receptiveness, and that's something that we've started to see becoming more and more obvious as a blend of wholesale and D to C, but then again that comes with also managing tighter margins on wholesale versus D to C. I think that, for me, that's probably one of the most interesting things that we're starting to see is because how do we build for e-com businesses that are not just e-comm, they also have a wholesale play, and how do we make sure that we are also accounting for that dimension of the business from a financial perspective.

I think also it's interesting to see more and more customers explore how to use credit that works for their business and not the other way around. And that's what we're seeing more and more of, our customers applying for credit, getting to turnaround time, but also being able to free up that cash flow when you can have extended credit terms. So for us, we really see credit being one of the bigger products that we're diversifying into new credit solutions, where it's not just credit on card but also be credit on invoicing, which we will be launching towards the end of Q2.

So we buy media pay later, is an internal term that we're using now, but sometimes when you're looking at offsetting cash to run Facebook ads, the likelihood is that you're only going to see that revenue beyond 14 plus days, depending on what you're selling. There could be a lots of caveats to that, and I think for us, customers are utilizing the 1% cash back that they get from Juni on their cards to spend, because it actually does really help with their bottom line. When you're spending hundreds of thousands of euros a year, and you can get 1% cash back that's paid into your account monthly, that's better than any type of cards rewards or air miles you can get, and we're seeing become more and more evident in the feedback that we get from our customers.

Richard Hill:
That's great. I think that adding in that B2B and that wholesale option that you started with, we talk about that quite a lot. A lot of the platforms now are geared up more than ever for the dual side of things. And we've done quite a few episodes with the guys at BigCommerce and obviously other platforms as well, but I think it's quite often just missed. But something I think if you're listening right now, is that an option for you guys? I think it can be quite a interesting journey for doing B2B and B2C. We ran one of our masterminds last week and we had two companies in the room that are traditionally B2B, but they're looking to... It's actually the other way around, really, but they're traditionally B2B and they want to launch B2C. So there's the potential challenges or concerns and questions around, you've got those two sets of customers, you don't want to upset either, but ultimately there is a market for both. So it's just the way you do it. So with the finance side of things... Sorry, go on.

Nick Knuppe:
One other thing. I think it's so important to understand how to retain and sell to your current customers, and understanding the investment and costs associated to acquiring new ones. I think that's something that sometimes is also ignored too, is to actually double down on your customer research, get as much feedback into what your customers want, are your price points still resonating with them? Do you need to adjust your pricing? And that's something that's often either just ignored or it's done top down. So you're doing your own price promotions based on your numbers, but not necessarily validating whether it's going to impact your customer or not. And then you also have the age odd question, well do you put your brand at risk by just becoming an always on promo brand? Which is another risk.

Richard Hill:
We talk about that a lot. Obviously just always discounting, always having this percent off. It's not an ideal model. That's my take on it. So obviously you talk about, then, finance and looking at the options available to you. I think a lot of people will be like, oh 1% sounds nice, doesn't it? I think you're getting approached no doubt by hundreds and thousands of e-commerce stores. But are there specific businesses that you would say shouldn't take credit, and specific businesses that you'd recommend and warn against taking credit? Maybe not business types, but situations where they shouldn't be taking credit?

Nick Knuppe:
I think there are definitely a few. You should be able to factor in the impact of credit if you can't pay your credit off. I think that's the main risk. But also looking at your own credit history, that all impacts the decisions that we make when we do our underwriting on customer eligibility for credit. Do they have bad credit history? Is there a lot of uncertainty around their short term cash flow projections? Credit is based on your eligibility to afford the credit and pay it off. But I guess those would be probably my highest cautions to factoring in, will this help your business? Do you have that continuity or sell-through in order to be able to pay back the credit? And a lot of businesses do, but they understand how to use credit and their cash flow.

Richard Hill:
So the traditional things and really, ultimately, if you can afford to pay the monthly, you've got a good credit. What's the word? What's the word I'm looking for? Credit, not... Score?

Nick Knuppe:
Yeah, credit score, credit profile.

Richard Hill:
Profile a bit different as companies. But ultimately I think it can be quite easy to get credit, but you've obviously got to be super, super careful at the same time. Ultimately it has to be paid back, has to be factored into your cash flow forecast, doesn't it? And I think that's what it boils down to. I think, potentially, people will go and get credit when there's two types of people or two types of scenarios. There's probably several, but there's people that, or companies, that go get credit because they're desperate for money, which isn't always, well I think quite often, is not the answer. There's usually a bigger issue with the business that needs to be resolved, i.e. it needs to be running more profitably, needs to be more leaner. Whereas quite often the companies that probably should be applying for credit or some type of funding, are the people that maybe don't even need it right now, but they then have it there if and when they need it to then...

Nick Knuppe:
So it is a safety line in some ways. And we've seen our customers that have credit lines don't always use what they're eligible for, and that's playing it smartly. That's the type of customer where you understand what you need, when you need it, and you have safety there as and where needed. And I think that's a very progressive way of trying to operate and make sure that businesses that are cash flow positive still sit with a credit line but don't always use it. And that's the dreamy data that we want to see is that businesses can uphold their agreements or at least pay back within the times. But I think one of the main things with our credits is that, based on your profile, you have extended terms of 30 plus 30 days and 0%, or we call it zero cost capital sometimes, but...

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I just wanted to take a quick break to introduce our sponsor, Prisync. Prisync is a competitive price tracking and monitoring software that can dynamically change your products' prices on all sales channels. They work with brands such as Samsung, Sony, and Suzuki to increase their online revenue. If you run Google shopping ads, like I know a lot of you do, this software is absolutely key to accelerating profits. One of the reasons I recommend Prisync to my clients is because you can find out what your competitors' pricing and stock availability is in one simple to understand dashboard, giving you a huge competitive advantage. If you have any questions about this software or your red, take a 14-day free trial, head to ecomone.com/prisync. That's ecomone.com/prisync, P R I S Y N C, and complete the inquiry form, and we will connect our listeners to the Prisync team. Right, let's head straight back to the episode.

Nick Knuppe:
It's really being able to understand what that extended runway can do for your business when you're impacted by longer inventory cycles. And really for the larger econ customers that we have, that's the biggest impact that we make for, particularly on extending and easing cash flow.

Richard Hill:
So those longer life cycles of getting products in. Basically, you've got that funding there to help with that. But I always remember, there's obviously a lot of different firms listening, but I was importing from China for probably 10 years straight, before the agency. And this is a specific scenario, but ultimately just negotiating very, very, very strongly with your manufacturers, I think if you're dealing directly with manufacturers, obviously if you're dealing with a manufacturer for the first time, the terms will be one thing. But when you bought 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 containers off these guys, of course, you are in a stronger position to negotiate a much better deal from that manufacturer. I remember that, and this is going back some time now, but we would usually put 10% down on a container, a typical container for us could get anything from 30 grand to 200 grand, depending on what was in it. 10% down as opposed to 100% upfront, it's very rarely pay 100% upfront, but maybe a first time.

Well, no, very unlikely actually. But 10% down, then the stock arrives. You've obviously got the duty and the VAT, etc in the UK, but then a percent, potentially, and then an amount there, that might be another 10, 20%, 30%, 40% depending on, ideally, another 10. And then from the point it lands negotiating a 60 days from there. Now that's a hell of a timeline if you can do that, but the difference that'll make to your business, and that's not day one with the manufacturer, but over time when you're building those relationships, so building deep relationships with a handful of core suppliers, manufacturers, and then obviously not every manufacturer's going to do that with you, but obviously if you've got a handful of those where you've got potentially 120 days, maybe, on 70% of the finance, the difference that can make. And that was very much my model for, I can't remember the exact numbers, but for quite a lot of our high value products, that's what we tried to do.

Because then we got that 120 days on 70% of the finance where we were bringing in computer components, which were pretty high value back then. So we were bringing in, I remember bringing in digital photo frames for about a year. Probably twice a month we'd have a container. Some of those containers were 200, 220,000, from memory, somewhere there. It's a very big cash flow for us at the time. So if we didn't negotiate those terms, we wouldn't have done those volumes. But on the flip side, the manufacturer, the factory, they had an insane margin from what I understood. So it worked for them as well. And so negotiating those finance deals with the suppliers, I think it obviously varies on who you're working with. Obviously everyone's a little bit more, what's the word? Maybe a little bit more anxious now about that sort of timeline, but it's to be had, possibly, out there still.

So let's get back to cash flow for a minute. So I think it's pretty well known that cash flow is a thing that usually scuppers most businesses. They run out of money. That's a short version, the amount of very, very strong businesses on the surface, but they run out of money and run out of options. So what advice would you give to people that maybe are sitting there thinking, every month it is more of a challenge, becoming more of a challenge? What are some of the things that our listeners can do to help with the cash flow?

Nick Knuppe:
I think something that came through, we were having this discussion last week, just from a content perspective on how easy is it to be able to just go back to basics and really look at... There's different levels of complexity for cash flow. So when you're a multi-entity ecom business, you have much more complexity around your larger cost centers. We see on average sometimes just on performance marketing, it's 30% of the total cost center for the business. And I think it's being able to find the granularity. So if you're a smaller business, it's understanding your margins. That's really everything that you have to play with. And we're seeing a lot of businesses actually outsource more, rather than having the fixed costs of salaries, where you can out outsource an entire ops team now in today's world. So it's really trying to keep your costs as low as possible.

And also I think just from sourcing suppliers, we're a global marketplace. Post-pandemic world's very different to being able to access suppliers, get better margins on products if you're looking at beauty and cosmetics, to understanding if you're a European business, sourcing suppliers locally versus from China. I think these are all exercises that probably aren't as revisited as often as they should be, in order to actually just, excuse the pun, take stock of exactly what is your financial position, and what do you need as a business from a three to six to nine month trajectory in order to maintain healthy cash-positive balance?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, no, I love it. I think, it's going back to basics, isn't it? I think it's, don't want too many cliches, but ultimately I think as a business, anybody in business, quite often it's just so easy to just keep doing the thing you're doing, because that's how you did it, which we all know can be quite dangerous. So you're buying from the same supplier, because you like the guy and this, that, and the other, and they're very reliable, and that's great. I'm a big believer in working with people, but ultimately it might mean a few tough decision, a few tough conversations, but ultimately that could mean the difference between you're still doing business with that firm or having to say, sorry guys, but we're really struggling. A couple of percent here, there and everywhere, four or five little tweaks can make a huge, huge difference.

Nick Knuppe:
It's actually spending the time to go and find those. Where can you shave off a few percentages? And I think often the first thing sometimes that's often looked at is marketing, and I think it's very interesting when a company goes and does an audit on just their SaaS tools and how much they're spending on marketing SaaS tools, it blows my mind to see how much waste there is for... Do you really need 10 seats on Miro. So I think there's a lot of just basic hygiene principles that can have a big impact when you're a small business and you need to be able to save 500, 600,000 euros every month, compounded per annum, that's a big saving and that can be put straight back into stock.

Richard Hill:
So I would say there's an action right there for our listeners that are with us right now, go and download all those monthly direct debits that are going out of your account and get somebody to go through them. You go through them. Because ultimately that's something we do in our business very, very consistently. And there's usually something that sneaks in that, oh, do you know, we stopped using that two months ago? Oh, hang on a minute. We actually use this now, and we're still paying $600 a month for that.

Nick Knuppe:
That happened to myself personally, and I'm like, what? I didn't remember renewing this.

Richard Hill:
I think the Godsend sometimes is when your credit card expires and then stuff starts to not autorenew, and then you're like, oh, that's great. I didn't even want that anyway, sort of thing. But I think the amount of money that businesses must be, if you put it across the industry, in the millions of subscriptions that are getting paid for, for seats that are no longer needed, as you said, all the software that doesn't even get used anymore, it's never been logged into. Amount of sales tools and sales products that have been tested over the years. Oh, yeah, we'll keep that. It's a bit akin to you go in your wardrobe, and you open your wardrobe up, and ultimately you've got your 40 shirts in there or whatever it may be, but you'd probably wear five of them, but I'm probably going to wear that one now.

I'm going to keep that one because I'm going to, oh no, and then you maybe put two in the bin or to charity and you've still got 38, haven't you? But then a year later you're thinking, I still haven't worn them shirts, I still don't wore them shirts. So it's a bit like the direct debits, oh, we better keep that because we oh, we've got a good deal on that. We might use that, but you've not logged in for two years, cancel the damn thing. I think it's quite scary the amount of money that is being wasted on direct debits and whatnot. And I've been guilty over the years, but it is something that's built into our processes now. So what is a cross functioning operating model, and how can companies scale it? This is a question one of my colleagues put together.

Nick Knuppe:
Oh, yeah? So I think I can speak about this for hours, and coming from a product marketing background where you are the connective tissue between engineering product, commercial, customer success, everything you do is cross-functional, so you're wearing multiple hats. And I think if you look at a cross-functional operating model, I would probably look at it like an orchestra. So you've got percussions and you've got the strings, but you're actually all trying to produce the same song. And if you think from a tech perspective, you've got multiple teams working on multiple projects, but you're trying to get to the same goal. And when you look at an operating model, it's really what are your workflows between your teams to achieve the same output? And the most simple way to look at how to scale it is be very clear, explicitly clear, on the roles and responsibilities, who is a lead on a role and who is a support?

If you do not have that defined, you leave a lot up to ambiguity, and that's a very dangerous place to be in. I think being able to scale is just being able to understand also just when we look at the world of product and engineering and Juni and the expectations, and we hold ourselves accountable for a lot, but I think it's also to have the clarity on who's responsible for what. Who's held accountable at the end of the day? And if that's not very clearly laid out on paper or somewhere in a notion page or somewhere, that's your first error.

Richard Hill:
I think that's a great one. I did make that mistake recently, personally, hold my hands up. A new framework that I've come up with or initiated, shall I say, on the SEO side of the business. And I had four or five of our SEO team in the room, and I didn't really put a lead and say, right, you do it. I just said, right, this is the idea, right? I'll leave you guys to it now to sort it. And then looking back, I said, what? That was ridiculous. And there was no responsibility assigned, which is unlike me, to be fair, I'm very much about, right, you're in charge of that, this is the next steps, these are the actions, this is the deadline. But that particular one, it was very much a bit of a free for all, and the outcome wasn't what I was hoping for, to be honest. So I think it'd be good now to, last couple of questions, give us a feel for what's on the roadmap. You mentioned a couple of things at the beginning, but what's on the roadmap for Juni over the next 12 months?

Nick Knuppe:
So I will start with, I guess, the immediate three months, but we're super excited to release our Send Money feature. So one step closer to parity of banking, basic banking functionality, which I think is super important, and customers have been asking for it. And I think it's something that we pride ourselves with is just accelerating the feedback that we get from customers. So being able to send money out of your Juni account to pay suppliers. And then we have an app, we have a mobile app that we've actually invited our customers into beta. And that's something that is super interesting, because manager your cash flow on the go is a marketing term that we discussed. But when you actually think about how businesses manage their cash flow, it's definitely not on an app.

But if you think of what Juni is, we are in a very interesting space as a business because we are solving a big problem within traditional banking, but we also have functionality that extends itself over to expense management. And I think we're starting to see a lot more trends and the convergence between payments and expense management for ecom businesses. And an outcome of that is that we will be launching an invoicing feature very soon. So cleaning up the way that you match invoices, pay invoices, or schedule and pay invoices on credit. This will be started with one of the biggest problems customers have, which is with your Google and Facebook ads.

So that's something that I think is going to be an absolute game changer for businesses as well. Just double down on the way that they've centralized their financial management. And another big one is an Amazon storefront integration. So we had a Shopify storefront integration. If you have multiple Shopify entities, you don't need to be logging in looking at multiple screens. We centralized it. We're doing the same for our Amazon customers. I personally did a presentation for Juni at the amaNordic's event in Sweden, and my mind was absolutely blown with how big that ecosystem is. So we're super excited. That's definitely on the roadmap in the next quarter. And then that's as much as I can tell you for now.

Richard Hill:
Okay, well that's great. That's great. We'll have to see how things progress over this next three to 12 months, and maybe get you back on in 12 months time and see.

Nick Knuppe:
Yeah, I'd love that.

Richard Hill:
So I like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. Do you have a book to recommend to our listeners?

Nick Knuppe:
I do, and I picked it up a week ago, so I'm only, I think, on page 15, but it is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. It's a very well known book, so I'm late to the party here. I always find that a lot of what you do in both your work and your personal life is negotiating. It's either a negotiation or an outcome of that as a compromise. And I think it's important to, I'm finding it interesting to take some learnings from a former FBI hostage negotiator.

Richard Hill:
That is a book that was recommended to me a couple of years ago by one of my best friends and yeah, cracking book. Brilliant. Well, thank you for coming on the show, Nick. For those that want to find out more about you, more about Juni, what's the best way to do that?

Nick Knuppe:
So, simply head on over to juni.co. That's the easiest way. Or you could pop me a message on LinkedIn. It's LinkedIn/Nick Knuppe. Otherwise, I'm sure the details will be on your show too.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, we'll link everything up. Well, thanks for coming on the show, and I'll also look forward to speaking to you again.

Nick Knuppe:
Thanks so much, Rich.

Richard Hill:
Thank you for listening to the eCom@One e-commerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe, and don't forget to sign up to our e-commerce newsletter and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at Econ One, the e-commerce marketing agency.