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From leading sales at Zillow to brand strategy at Tumblr to revenue at FiscalNote (a global policy platform), Justin Scott started noticing a trend. Across markets, companies were “taking big data sets and visualizing them in interesting ways to create user experiences.”
Experience is the keyword here. Thanks to massive technological advances happening in big data and AI, Justin saw new possibilities for improved user experiences with a brand.
And he wanted in.
“For the last 10 to 15 years, VR/AR has been really buzzy but hasn’t quite gotten there. The technology is there — the power of computing to actually harness that value. And we need platforms to be able to do that. So that’s what Dopple is.”
Dopple is a visual commerce platform that allows its clients to seamlessly integrate 3D and augmented reality tools into their brand experience.
But that’s not where they started.
When Justin and his initial team started looking for a way to capitalize on VR/AR technology, they focused their attention on the “made-to-order” industrial market.
But they quickly realized the market was too small and that there was a bigger opportunity elsewhere — in wider B2B and B2C commerce. That’s where 3D products were really going to explode.
So the task was to pivot — or as Justin put it, “How do you skate to where the puck’s going to be?”
In September 2022, Dopple publicly launched its new platform. Dopple’s earliest customers are already seeing a 40% increase in conversions, and 71% of their visitors interact with 3D-enabled products.
Jera Brown interviewed Dopple founder and CEO Justin on how he launched Dopple and found success by pivoting to a new market. You can stream the entire conversation or read highlights below about how they found their market.
Full Interview: Audio Only
Full Interview: Video
3 Lessons From Justin’s Experience
1. They Formed a Strategic Partnership With an Agency to Work On Their Brand Positioning
Dopple’s team worked with Tomorrow, an ecommerce-focused agency, to shape their positioning. “We started talking about, what is the ethos of the brand? What are the values of the brand? How do buyers of the technology want to feel about that brand?” Justin explained.
Working with Tomorrow gave them a safe space to brainstorm and work through ideas with experts who knew the market well. This gave them an advantage when it was time to launch.
2. They Launched With a Platform, Not a Product
Another big advantage? They launched with a working platform, not just a couple of features.
“We hit it pretty hard. We just didn’t build a product; we built a platform out of the gate,” Justin said.
When launching a startup or adding a new product, common advice is to start with a minimum viable product (MVP). But Dopple’s team took the opposite approach.
They saw a huge opportunity and wanted to claim a space in it. “We wanted to be where the hockey puck is going, and we felt that a long-term platform would differentiate us.”
In Dopple’s case, the difference between a product and a platform is reach. Dopple’s expansive feature set allows its customers to use 3D or augmented representations of their products on any channel.
By launching with a robust platform, Dopple is prepared to be true partners to their customers, not just a product provider.
3. They’re Careful Which Customers Have a Say in the Future of the Platform
When you’re taking advantage of an emerging market like VR/AR, there are so many ways to grow. But especially if your product or platform has a high purchase price, you’re going to have fewer initial customers, which means you have to be really careful which customers get a say in the future of your company.
Do they want to grow in the same direction as you?
“We wanted partners that were on the cutting edge of innovation,” Justin explained. “If you’re putting your products on Amazon, you’re probably not our ideal customer. We want people that are trying to do something a little different and lean into future-proofing their business.”
Dopple has been careful which customers they invest in, making sure that their product roadmap aligns with where they continue to see the “hockey puck” moving. For instance, Dopple is now in the early stages of exploring how customers can use the platform to enhance physical retail or live event activations.
In the beginning, Justin explained, you can’t do it all. You need to plan exactly where in the market you want to penetrate, then be prepared to iterate from there: “You’ve got to be really planned and persistent. And then once you get that traction, then you can really get into building the bigger ‘it.’”
Full Transcript From the Interview
Justin Scott
We really took magazines — two-dimensional ads — and just pasted them on the internet. But that’s not how we live. In offline, things are embodied. They have dimension, they have shape, they have personality. And so the internet is great about information. But it’s not great yet about communicating that information in a real world way.
Jera Brown
That was Justin Scott, the founder and CEO of Dopple. You’ll hear Justin’s founder story and how he created a first-in-market platform that allows companies to seamlessly integrate 3D and augmented reality tools into their brand experience. I’m EJ Brown, cohost of the Growth Stage Podcast and Senior Content Strategist at FastSpring. On this podcast, we share stories from global SaaS leaders that you can use to inspire new growth strategies in your own business.
Justin, thank you for joining me.
Justin Scott
My pleasure. Great to get a chance to speak with you today.
Jera Brown
So let’s just launch right in. Tell me about Dopple. And tell me how you got there.
Justin Scott
Oh, good story. So where do you want to start? I think that everything I’ve ever done in my professional career has kind of led up to Dopple, and there’s some things that I am passionate about there, you know. I guess a good place to start is what is Dopple? Dopple is a 3D commerce platform, which is really trying to remove the friction, in a low-code/no-code way to give access to marketers and other groups — artists, designers — to this great emerging medium of 3D. If you’ve been in the digital game long enough, you’ve seen video, even before video, and so the JPEG and PNG get standardized, you saw the costs of those mediums go down. So for the last 10, 12, 15 years, VR/AR has been really buzzy, but hasn’t quite gotten there. But the technology is there, the power of computing to actually harness that value. And we need platforms to be able to do that. So that’s what that’s what Dopple is. What’s the there there is kind of another question you ask the why. Visualizing information is incredibly interesting to me. And so I did early stints at Zillow, Tumblr and a company called Fiscal Note, all in different markets, doing different things in different market segments. But inherently taking big data sets, and visualizing them in interesting ways to create audience to create experience, and really to connect to creators that can express you know what we call brands storing an interesting way. So happy to dive into that. But that’s kind of what we’ve been up to.
Jera Brown
What’s your audience like for Dopple? Or your customer base?
Justin Scott
Yeah, the the customer base is interesting. 3D is incredibly flexible, it has incredible utility because it is in our case, it is the visualization of a product, right it’s a digital product. So the markets that we serve are focused on our real beachheads, It’s in sports and recreation, bikes, boats, boards, that’s very expressionary, there’s a big community around that in the b2b2c market, right? So there’s an OEM creating the product, they’re probably selling it online, most have a digital channel or through a distributor. It’s truly about expression of that product. And that’s a strong market that we serve. Outside of that, you’ve got the d2c players, right. So just the b2c right, which is more what I call Instagram brands, right?
Jera Brown
Yeah.
Justin Scott
New entrants. They use our technology to compete against what they would call the bigger players. So think, think fashion, think garments. And there’s a strong use case in b2b, which is, hey, we have large, large equipment. You know, these are huge investments, hundreds of 1000s of dollars, think trailers and farm equipment that have a lot of base plus options. And that’s really hard for sellers on the b2b side to communicate. So we try to serve, you know, our ideal customer profiles, the best we can, but it’s really in that b2b2c, b2c or b2b market, where they’re looking for a technology advantage. And it’s usually around communication of their products. And we like to say that we personify products and what we mean by that is, if you build digital models, and you can create features that tell that that brand story or communicate the product details, which every PDP wants to do, then you create a conversation between that buyer and that object. And that that dialogue starts ultimately self qualification. And so I believe in buyer empowerment. You know, no disrespect to salespeople, I started my career as one, but you the buying process doesn’t start with the seller. It starts with self service. And so as we move as we move into that, the embodied internet, as I call it, I think we’re serving those use cases for our clients really well, a lot of benefits to that as well.
Jera Brown
I love that. So, you know, one of the things I was thinking about is, I’m an avid hiker, I buy a lot of hiking products. And I remember the first time first couple of times, I saw like videos of the product on Zappos and Rei site was leading me through it, and I could see it on all different angles without needing to go into the shop, you know, and it was so
Justin Scott
Oh, yeah,
Jera Brown
Groundbreaking, you know, but but that’s even changing. And it’s not, it’s not doable for every, every product, every site. But now we have things like Pinterest that at home shopping experience, and Google lens is changing things, and more people are using it to experience a product before they buy it. So tell me a little bit about how you’re seeing just consumers. expectations change about the online sales experience.
Justin Scott
It’s insanely exponential, if you think about it. That’s a big question. So I think we got to start with just the the visual nature of information. So if you if you think about the brands you currently love, high probability, they’re incredibly visual. Uber has got visualization of maps, and it kind of gamified, that experience of the car coming to you. If you look at the feeds that we are obviously obsessed with, there’s algorithms feeding us visual information, in new interesting ways. And so we really think about the ability to create that experience, barrier free. So let me give you a metaphor. If you’ve ever seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and you don’t really have to, I’ll explain it. Audrey Hepburn is looking at these beautiful jewels behind a glass window. But all she really wants to do is go into the store and reach in and, and break the barrier of that glass and reach through and touch those objects. So if you think about the democracy of information on the internet, we want to do that too. Right? We don’t call up travel agents, we book it ourselves. So there’s buyer empowerment. And I think our ability to deliver those experiences without barriers, creates that conversation with the product. So Rishad Tobaccowala , who’s a digital prophet, if you follow his work, he says the future won’t be contained, or won’t be held in the containers of the past. Okay, I’m going somewhere with this. We really took magazine’s two dimensional ads and just pasted them on the internet. But that’s not how we live.
Jera Brown
Right.
Justin Scott
In offline things are embodied. They have dimension, they have shape, they have personality. And so the internet is great about information. But it’s not great yet about communicating that information in a real world way. So Dopple is Dopplezing offline products, and bring them online. One because convenience, that’s where shopping starts. Two for that conversation, and three for that confidence. So you know, we’re breaking that container, we’re removing that glass, and we’re allowing that buyer to reach through and have a relationship with that product object. And that’s, that’s a great experience. But chemically in our brains, there’s reasons that that’s great, right? It is a creative act for that buyer. Art is the ability to assemble things in new and novel ways. And we can do that with product. So a little bit of a geek, I think that products are beautiful machines are beautiful. The ability to create brands storytelling is art. And so if you’re an avid hiker, I’m gonna bring it around center to you. If you’re an avid hiker, and an outdoor enthusiast, right, that gear that you buy is an extension of yourself. It is expressive, when you spend time wanting to understand it. And so it’s a better way. It’s a better way of communicating. How do I know this? Right? Well, you’re seeing the rise of video. Right. We’ve seen that in our lifetimes. I think there’s there’s another way to break down those barriers. And I think Dopple is doing a good job at that. I hope wasn’t long winded.
Jera Brown
No, that’s great. So for anybody listening like this, obviously, if you’re not, if you’re not a consumer driven brand or whatever, keep listening because now I want to take it back and talk about what it’s like to recognize an opportunity in the market and figure out your place in it. So where were you before Doppel? And how did you recognize that this is this is a thing.
Justin Scott
Okay, so as I mentioned before, I’ve been really interested in how to visualize information mostly to make better decisions. If you make better decisions then usually happy with purchases or, or decisions. So I got really lucky early. And I was one of the first revenue employees at Zillow. And Zillow was, at the time, this is gonna sound crazy, it was really good at creating a PDP for a home, right, a home details page and great at creating great visual images to get you interested in that home.
Jera Brown
Yeah.
Justin Scott
So back in the day, back in the day, this is back in digital cameras, right? This isn’t digital digital phone cameras, right? We worked really hard to deliver that audience. And it was a lot about one, high definition 2d photos. Later, with mapping technology I got really interested in virtually walking around my neighborhood. And I thought, how cool would it be to be able to throw my phone up against a house and see into the home?
Jera Brown
Yeah.
Justin Scott
And that’s, you know, that was visionary at the time, these are all things that happened. And the birth of those concepts, or the, the ideation of those concepts later became 3D home tours. Alright, so I got really interested in, you know, empowering buyers there. The next step, I started getting really interested in in network effects, so marketplaces or networks, but I got interested in a place called Tumblr, that was really around the creator economy, and giving creators tools, you know, big creators or brands and small creators or consumers like me, the ability to express themselves through largely visual information, I think Tumblr had five or six media types. But I thought, wow, how are how empowering that a consumer through their phone can use this technology that I don’t quite understand. But I can publish, I can have a voice. And through those creative tools, I can create my audience. And then after that, I got I got more geeky, and I thought about behaviors, and AI, and NLP. And we did policy analytics around how people create legislation and regulation. And interesting ways to visualize that data. The net takeaway there is humans have patterns. And it’s really hard to diagnose and decide around those patterns in text. But if you can use NLP and AI to visualize that, you can recognize those patterns. And so that was really about giving an even playing ground for for companies to navigate the policy market. Okay, so what is that all about? I felt like there was an easier way to communicate goods and services online, digitally. One thing that we really like is high value information, low cognitive load. We don’t need blocks and blocks of text. So I took that passion, and was through a friend got connected with a company that was doing visual CPQ company called Atlatl. But that was really for mid market manufacturers and kind of a small market. And a group of us got together and said, hey, you know, you’ve got a couple of macro events coming. You’ve got the trillion dollar industry of E commerce, it’s going that way. I think the the Amazon effect.You got to creator economy, you got the attention economy, you have the experience economy, right. And we have this technology that we can we can serve to empower buyers better, we decided to spin Dopple out of Atlatl and create the Dopple brand. And obviously, that’s a hat tip to the mirroring effect of the offline world to online world. So there’s a consistent theme throughout my career that I’m a passionate about, and Dopple employees are passionate about. But we think we’re, especially with AI, we’re on the precipice of really a tectonic shift on how we consume information. Again, breaking those barriers..
Jera Brown
Yeah. Breaking it down a little further, a couple of things that strike me is like, you were able to notice trends across very diverse industries and markets.
Justin Scott
Yeah.
Jera Brown
And bringing it back to the psychology of experience and both the experience you wanted as well as what you were seeing organizations needed in order to better communicate to their buyers or their audience. But then, all of a sudden, the I turned into a we and I’m really curious about that. Like, it sounds like there was a group of you, unless it’s the royal we, there was a group of you that was was taking this opportunity to potential buyers. So who who is that we?
Justin Scott
Yeah, that’s a good that’s a good question. So it’s the initial foundation right? So let me let me dive into what I look for. And then that’ll that’ll get into we.
Jera Brown
Okay.
Justin Scott
What I continually look for, in my experience at Dopple is a lot of people say, Well, how do you skate to where the pucks going to be? You’ve got to have enough conviction. And the confluence of those factors, those economies that I talked about, all coming together. That’s the macro wave. You can’t create that you got to get in front of that. So if you believe that waves coming, your job is to get on your, I’ll use a surfboard analogy, create something valuable to float, to create value in that marke. In the short, mid and long term, do you want to catch that wave? And if you do that magic happens. Think about the wave of the smartphone, think about the new wave of AI. Think about the past wave of the internet or the browser. When you’re doing that, going at that alone is really hard. Also, if you’re an aware founder, which I try to practice to be, you know what you’re good at, you know what you’re not good at. So it’s not a royal we it is a team of teams, we. You got to put good people around you. And you got to have you got to start with great investors that believe in your vision. There is a large leap of faith in any entrepreneur endeavor, then you got to stack your team to give you a high probability of making quick decisions. Startups are all about breakages. And you’re either spiraling up or you’re spiraling down. If you’ve got a diverse group around you, then you can you can mend those breakages quick, quick. And that’s when the growth happens. The we was a couple of us at the old company looking at what skill sets we needed to go forward. Being very candid about what we thought we were good at it and not, and, and slowly evolving into that team that we have today. I think you’ve got to be constantly scaling thyself getting better yourself, and then pushing others through what we call radical candor, to get bette. Nobody does it alone. So for founders out there that have heard the, you know, the lightbulb moment, I haven’t seen that to be true. I’ve been around some greats, it’s a, it is a process not only to build a team, but to build a vision and build a strategy to match that vision.
Jera Brown
Nice. So it sounded like were you talking to potential customers, before investors or did that happen at the same time?
Justin Scott
So we had an interesting birth, we had a previous company that was pointed at a different market segment. And the visual technology was simplifying the complex in a category called “made to order.” And that means that it is not base plus options think piping system thinks gas tanks. It is a specific spec, there is only one of one of that product, right? So technology, technology can solve that. But the market of eto is fairly small. What we were really looking at is how do you take this technology? And how do you bring it to the masses for visibility, because the secret sauce is really the data around the interactions between the 3D model. Remember that conversation that we talked about earlier? So there’s feedback off that conversation. So if you’ve if your are you a fan of Madmen?
Jera Brown
Yeah. Well some.
Justin Scott
The the metaphor will land. There’s a one way mirror, right? And they’re, they’re looking at Bobby eat cereal, right? And it’s a focus group. Well, if you create those conversations visually, then the byproduct is data of how that consumer behaved with your product, like a focus group. We call it digital body language. As somebody’s interacting, you can see what they zoomed in, you can see what they moved out. Think heat maps, right? We use heat maps on our web pages, you can kind of do that with a product. See if they’re looking at stitching, if your value prop is the stitching and they’re not looking at the stitching, something’s wrong. So it’s it’s creating that conversation. But it’s creating a dialogue with marketers on how to really create not only better products supply chain downstream proactive supply chain, but also again that brand storytelling.
Jera Brown
Yeah. Yeah, okay, so this gets into the rebranding right. Because you started on this made to order focusing on a made to order industry, realized, I guess that the bigger opportunity was for the masses. Is that what happened?
Justin Scott
Yeah, think right technology pointed at the wrong market.
Jera Brown
Yep, yep, totally.
Justin Scott
And what we decided was that brand and that company wasn’t sustainable wasn’t sustainable for growth, we wanted to point at a big market, we wanted to set the technology free, to be honest with you. And a webpage that has, you know, hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of traffic per months, is a good a good way to have those conversation. So we started talking about what is the ethos of that brand? What are the values of that brand? How do the buyers of that technology, want to feel about that brand? And then we worked with a great group out of out of New York called Tomorrow. That is that is a commerce agency, to really help us construct that. Happy to dig into that process, if you like.
Jera Brown
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I’ve got other questions. But I want to I want to hear about this.
Justin Scott
Okay, good. Well, I think you got to, you got to ask yourself, what do we stand for? And what do we not stand for, so you got to substact away all the stuff that you are definitely not. And then then hone in on the signal of what you think you are. And then it’s it’s good old fashioned, original creativity and conversation. Putting out good ideas and bad ideas, and being in a safe space, where you can have those, those good conversations with we. And Tomorrow did a really good job of kind of guiding us down the path. And you know, there’s, there’s lightbulb moments, and there’s frustrating moments, but you gotta you gotta work on the process. And then when you when you kind of hit it, you know, you’ve got it. One of the things that we were interested in is the structure of the brand Doppel, we liked the kind of alliteration there. We wanted to use it as a verb, right? You can Doppelize, your products. And so we had some corner pieces, or construct boxes to check through that process. I’ll let you ask more questions. I can go deeper.
Jera Brown
Yeah so scaling back and thinking about, you know, I think that this would be a great conversation to promote, as you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re early stage. Or if you’re, like, well developed and have lots of paying customers, there comes a point when you realize, like, you need to expand out into new marketplaces, or new markets. And whether it’s a complete rebranding, or just would you call it its horizontal expansion, right. When you’re, you’re moving into new markets? How do you do that well? It seems like two of the things that you did was finding these strategic partners to help you learn a new market. It felt like there was a second one, but talk about finding those partners and for other like SaaS executives, or founders, like, how do you find the right partners? And how do you build a partnership that works for both?
Justin Scott
Good question. Well, I think my initial thought there is digital partnerships don’t know borders, right? We’ve really broken down that. And so actually, our first client was out of London. So it, it kind of forced us, it was an inbound client, they had a use case, a problem to solve in the furniture industry. And that got us thinking that we would you know. You don’t as a startup, you do want to deflect inbound interest, right? So you’re like, okay, we need to think we need to get the global perspective, although I would say dominant in our portfolio is dominantly in North America. How to do that, right? One, you got to know what your partner needs to look like, either client or partner that you’re working with. Right? So what is good look like? What do I know I want? And then what are my known unknowns? How do I find that information? And I think you got to screen you got to screen each other. And I think you’ve got to have, you know, I always think about 8 to 10 criteria, how am I going to make the decision first, as founders before emotions get involved? How am I gonna make the decisions? What are my criteria? What are the boxes to check? Who am I screening against that criteria? And how am I scoring that? And then how am I talking with my team about does that reflect, you know, our values and this can that partner grow with us? What does that mean for us? Well, one of the pillars is we wanted, we wanted partners that were on the cutting edge of innovation. You know, if you’re putting your products on Amazon, you’re probably not our ideal customer. We want people that that are trying to do something a little different. And lean into future proofing their busines. This is an investment. And so a lot of those partners, they’re being more pragmatic in their investments they’re consolidating SaaS spends. We’re arguably going into a tougher market. And so you’ve got to find partners that want to unlock different growth levers around 3D. And there’s a lot of them, right. There’s conversions, there’s returns. There’s cross functional utility between design and distribution. And it’s kind of a crawl, walk run strategy. But I think the to the horizontal question, you can’t be partners with everybody. And I think you’ve got to have the discipline, which is paradoxical for for startups, is you got to say no, and you got to know why you’re saying no. If you say yes, all the time, you will go to horizontal, and you will go to thin really fast. And it will cause confusion in your organization. As you go horizontal, say, okay, we’re horizontal, but we’re going in this market. So let me bring it back to the example. Furniture industry, that was a market we knew we could deliver on. Yes, they were in London, yes there were our first customer, but it’s just a time change. I think you have to be very disciplined on how you’re making decisions, as you try to try to scale globally and deliver that brand experience globally.
Jera Brown
Another thing I was thinking about was, I mean, this is really just finding product market fit right, like you started in one market, realized that there was not scalability, pivoted to another market. And then once you knew that, there was product market fit, and you found the right partners to really help you, that’s when you started figuring out the messaging to show it right. But what makes you unique in this case is that you’re one of the first, right, so you’re not you’re not moving into a market where people are already aware of this need.
Justin Scott
Yeah.
Jera Brown
Talk about the education of this.
Justin Scott
So I think we talk a lot about product market fit.
Jera Brown
Yeah.
Justin Scott
But we reversed it. We look at the market, and fit the product, right? So in that we looked at what what in the market is our total target market? Who are the segments we want to serve? And it’s the whole faster horse, if they’re looking for faster horses and you’re selling automobiles, then you’ve got to diagnose what they’re really solving. What are you trying to solve? I’m getting from point A to point B. So for us, they’re investing in commerce, right? Or they’re investing in a way to decrease costs against photography, or the better way to show their product. So you talk about what are you trying to solve in your business, and then you need to relate that problem to your solution as an option to them. So they’re the market, the market, Mr. Market is, can be ferocious at times, right? You gotta meet the market. And you’ve got to make a bet calculated bet on delivering as expectations, which creates education, right, which creates execution of deals, which creates market awareness of what you’re offering. So yes, 3D has been around for a while. But the understanding and utility of 3D, it’s still very early stages.
Jera Brown
So how is it going? Like, let’s put this on a timeline. Like when did you start moving into this market? Where are you now?
Justin Scott
Good question. So the, I call it the store, our storefront, our digital storefront, the website launched in September. So you know, we’re roughly into March. So almost eight months, right, seven, eight months. We recently closed our 15th customer.
Jera Brown
Nice.
Justin Scott
And that seems to be accelerating. We hadn’t we had an event starting point we, we spun out of a company. So we, we hit it pretty hard. And by that I mean, we just didn’t build a product, we built a platform out of the gate, which there’s pros and cons of that. You know, you got to kind of land a product expanded to the platform, but we wanted to be where the hockey puck is going. And we felt that a platform long term would differentiate us. And what I mean by platform is once you’ve invested in 3D, it’s not just commerce, right? It’s a digital representation of your product. Some people call it a digital twin. So that that Doppelized product that can be used anywhere your channels are. What I mean by that, well, direct mail is still a great business. If I’ve configured a product online, and I know Justin likes the black matte bike, right? I can take that information and do one to one marketing through direct mail, because it’s the representation product. Billboards, the platform is really to serve commerce first. But there’s there’s layers or perpetual leverage is a word I like to use for 3D into the future.
Jera Brown
And with each of these customers, I mean, these are true partnerships. This isn’t just plug and play stuff. I’m assuming that you’re learning a lot about creating the right tool set for each to succeed.
Justin Scott
Absolutely. If you were to pull open the hood of the platform, it’s a suite of connected tools. That suite of connected tools is an end to end workflow. And we talk about the job to be done at every point. And then the pathway that job completed has to travel. What’s he talking about? It’s collaboration. If the center of the experience is the digital product, then you’ve got marketing teams, you got sales teams, you have design teams, you have product teams, you got IT teams that are global.
Jera Brown
Yup.
Justin Scott
All those groups have to meet in a network effect. Right? Remember that, that playback to Tumblr in the Creator market, well all these people function as creators to deliver that brand experience that experience creation, to the front end of their digital storefront, the website. The connected tools or the job that Justin has to complete that day. But the job that Justin also needs to communicate to Patrice as I pass off that work now, where are we going? That collaboration will not always be human to human. Humans to machines will interact, right? So I talked about that conversation with products, we also have the ability to have conversations with, you know, generative AI, right, the helper, right the assistant, the person that amplifies my intelligence, instead of artificial, more amplification. So in that tool set, I want to be able to easily access that tool. But I want to go from a early user to an experienced user. And that education curve can be fueled through tutorials, AI, collaboration, communication.
Jera Brown
Yeah it’s really an experience suite, which can grow in so many directions, depending on the experiences needed per customer, per audience, it seems like.
Justin Scott
If you distill it, it is around communication of your product, generating demand. And then thinking about where to distribute it.
Jera Brown
For sure.
Justin Scott
If you’ve ever seen a iPhone on a billboard, that was a 3D phone. That’s a 3D render that’s in two dimensions. So you’re seeing it a lot more than you think you just don’t know it.
Jera Brown
Cool. Last question, you ramped really quickly, it seems like pivot and jump. What advice do you have for other founders who are expanding into new markets or needing to escalate quickly based on the demand that they’re seeing? What helps put a younger company or a younger market into overdrive?
Justin Scott
Hmm. What I have seen work really well, is to have great conviction. But you can’t have blinders around that conviction. So you’ve got to be you’ve got to be somewhat flexible and adapting. But what works is not saying yes, it’s about being disciplined and being decisive on what your beachhead is going to be, and how you’re going to how you going to penetrate that market. There’s a lot of good stories Zappos, Airbnb, about being scrappy, right? And in doing whatever it took, It Takes What It Takes is a great book, Ben Horowitz, but it does in the beginning, right, you’re you’re clawing tooth and nail and I think you got to be really planned and persistent. Then once you get that niche and traction, then you can really get into building the bigger it. What I mean by that. There’s a lot of quick, cost effective ways to test your assumptions about the market without spending a lot of money. Information is basically free. And, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, people used to say go to the library. Now you’ve got the library of God at your fingertips. So you can kind of find out what you need to do and then you need to get good people around you that can challenge each other. In penetrating, that’s a vector. It’s force plus direction, and not doing everything being disciplined and deciding and acting ruthlessly. That seems to work for us and I have seen it work in the past. That would be, that would be my advice.
Jera Brown
Who are you interested in talking to? And how should they reach out?
Justin Scott
You. I’ve been interested in talking to you. Yeah, listen, we’re we’re open to having conversations. Anybody that wants to talk about 3D in the community, there’s there is a tide that is rising, that’s gonna increase all ships. So if you’re interested in 3D, if you’re interested in the 3D utility, and specifically how bringing together organizations or departments in your organization can can go around 3D, we’re happy to talk to you. If you want to make more money in commerce, we want to make more money with you.
Jera Brown
Right.
Justin Scott
So brands that have a story to tell. We want to have those conversations. I’m easy to find, right? I’m on LinkedIn, my email is justin@doppel.io. Justin Scott for the LinkedIn crowd, and check out our website. You can do a lot of self education there. If you don’t go with Dobble you should definitely learn about 3D.
Jera Brown
Awesome. Well, thanks for the story. This was fascinating.
Justin Scott
Yeah, thank you. I enjoyed talking to you.
Jera Brown
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