Paperbark pivots to fix ecommerce revenue leaks and wins Unilever brands

The useful part

Customer data startup Paperbark signs Unilever brands to tackle ecommerce sales gaps. The problem they set out to solve had its own problem: on Maslow's hierarchy of product market fit, they'd built a 'nice to have' rather than 'must have'. The brands using the free pilot gave them "false positives" about the idea – they weren't going to pay for it.

How it works

• "The thing I kept seeing there was brands with enormous amounts of customer data and no way to use it on the customer in front of them," he said.
• It recommends follow-up actions, which users can approve for execution through their existing tools.
• Antoine recounts how one brand identified 10,500 customers who had requested restock notifications through support tickets, but never received them, representing around $2.1 million in missed sales.
• Then there's the workwear brand, who found a customer who'd spent $30,000 on gear, waited nine days for an response to a support ticket, and hadn't bought again 17 months later.
• Watchful founder Josh Parsons backed the pair $120,000 in January, and as they gear up with Paperbark 3.0, a new round of capital is being considered.

What to take from it

Runway half gone Six months into a 12-month runway, they decided to focus on single, core problem. In August, Paperbark passed Unilever's security review and signed on Onnit and Olly, shedding customers that no longer fitted that focus. Antoine, Paperbark's CEO, had witnessed the problem repeatedly during five years in ecommerce marketing technology, including at Blackbird-backed Instant.

Example or evidence

• The duo are building Paperbark to do things like sending a reminder to customers around the timeframe they typically buy a particular product again.
• Turns out understanding what a customer wants and when they want it works just as well for building a startup as it does in ecommerce.
• Then they realised they were on what Antoine calls the "Palantirization" path – a trap AI startups fall into, where, without large government and defence contracts, the numbers down stack up.
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Details worth keeping

Facebook X LinkedIn Bluesky Copy to Clipboard Copy Business Customer data startup Paperbark signs Unilever brands to tackle ecommerce sales gaps Paperbark ditched nice-to-have AI and landed Unilever brands by exposing ecommerce revenue leaks. Simic previously built customer data models at VGW and Cashrewards. Six months later, a month after raising $120,000, they killed the product.

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