Interview with Martijn Wijsmuller from e-commerce agency Ask Phill

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Martijn Wijsmuller. As Commercial Director at Ask Phill, I focus on the commercial aspects of the business.

Ask Phill is an agency specializing in e-commerce, particularly on the Shopify platform. We help clients build and further optimize their webshops. Our USP is that we build headless e-commerce platforms. We do this for fashion, lifestyle, and beauty brands looking to set up or optimize their D2C channels.
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What are your growth goals for 2020?

Our goals this year are to double in revenue and team size. We've managed to achieve this multiplier every year since our company’s inception in 2016, and we aim to continue this trend.

A second goal is to expand our services. We want to offer e-commerce strategy consulting.

Previously, we would deliver a website, but now we want to look more closely at how the platform is performing and how we can improve it. This way, we build stronger relationships with our clients and grow together.
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What are your biggest challenges in growth?

We are growing without investors. This makes cash flow a challenge when you are rapidly expanding and building your team. It’s about finding the balance between bringing in new projects and hiring new employees.

Sometimes we have too many projects and not enough people. This puts too much pressure on the team. We need to maintain quality. Based on the team's availability, we decide which projects to take on. We have enough experience to know how to shuffle projects around to meet deadlines. Another way to ensure quality is by working with skilled developers.
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Can you tell us how your funnels are set up? Or how your marketing is structured?

At Ask Phill, we have three main marketing channels:

1. The Shopify Platform: We receive leads through the Shopify network, which is specifically geared towards the e-commerce platforms we build based on Shopify.
2. Visibility through Awards: We’ve won several awards from prominent design platforms like Awwwards and FWA. These awards generate leads because people can find us through these platforms.
3. Word-of-Mouth: Our existing clients spread the word about our projects, and we receive a good number of leads this way.
4. LinkedIn: We share our knowledge and articles about headless e-commerce on LinkedIn.

Headless commerce is quite niche, and people want to know if it’s something that could benefit their webshop. When someone searches for it on Google, we rank at the top, which brings in leads.

We don’t have a standard funnel set up for Ask Phill. Our website has a Typeform that people can fill out. This allows us to filter clients based on size. We send a pricing estimate directly so prospects know immediately what a webshop might cost with us. This helps filter out smaller parties who might not be able to afford us. We then start discussions with the prospects that fit us.
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Do you notice existing channels becoming saturated? Are there opportunities in new marketing channels?

We see the cost of Facebook ads rising for our clients. Webshops are looking for new channels. I haven’t seen a clear shift to new marketing platforms yet.

What I do notice is that more webshops are testing offline campaigns. This includes flyers inserted into other companies’ shipments or billboards throughout the city. It’s an experiment to see if these are more cost-effective ways to buy traffic.
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What new trends do you see, and are you planning to leverage them? Or where are the opportunities for e-commerce in 2020?

The first trend is user-generated content. This works really well.

One of Ask Phill’s clients creatively implements this. When a consumer buys something in their webshop, they pay customers €50 in cash if they record a video testimonial or an unboxing video. The video can be used as an ad or on the website. This way, the company gets cheap and authentic videos because it’s user-generated content.

I found that to be a clever idea since you don’t see it much yet. It’s much cheaper than having a professional video made.

The second trend is headless e-commerce. The brands we work with want to create a cool online experience. We build digital flagship stores with 3D models, high-quality photos, and videos.

The downside is that the ‘normal’ website then becomes slower. Headless e-commerce is the solution. It looks fantastic without sacrificing technical performance.

Another advantage of headless e-commerce is that you can choose your tools modularly. We use Shopify for the e-commerce part because we think it’s the best system. But the content management system we use is called Contentful. We create content pages in a separate system from Shopify.

For search functionality, we use Algolia, as it’s also the best tool in its category.

We choose the best of each tool and put together an e-commerce system with modular components. The best part is that these components all run in the cloud, so you don’t need a server.
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How do you deal with competition?

If you have a strong brand, you essentially have no competition.

Customers buy directly from you for the brand.

If your brand is weaker and you only compete on price, it’s a race to the bottom. You won’t have any margin left. That’s the downside of platforms like Amazon and Bol.com. You can only win if you’re the biggest, with the biggest marketing budget and the lowest price. We advise our brands not to advertise on Bol.com or Amazon. You end up competing on price, and you won’t win against these big players.

If you have a strong brand that people love, you can build an experience around it. You can set the price as high as you want (within reason, of course). People will continue to buy from you because of the strong brand.

Even strong brands face competition, like Nike and Adidas. Consumers can only spend their money once, after all.
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How big is your team, and how do you manage it?

Paul and I are the founders, and we now have 17 people.

Our structure is project-based. We have 2 project managers. Underneath them, the developers are grouped per project. Depending on the project, we adjust the team size.

We work in weekly sprints. This way, we know what’s happening and where people are stuck. We can help the team make progress.

All offices are currently closed due to the corona crisis, so everyone is working remotely. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep communication flowing. You don’t know if someone is stuck or just not behind their laptop. Normally, you’d be able to see each other in the same room and help when needed.

We use Slack and have a Slack channel for each project where all the information is stored. Daily communication happens there. This way, information doesn’t get lost. Everything is also in Asana, so everyone knows what needs to be done and where everything is. It’s a good project management tool.
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What tools do you use?

Besides Asana and Slack, we use Harvest for time tracking. It integrates well with Asana.

We use Harvest to track our hours. We often give an estimate of how long something will take and then track how long it actually took. This helps us improve our planning.

We also use BuiltWith.com to check the tech stack of websites. If you enter a website there, you can see which tools are being used.
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How much do you use data?

For our organization itself, we don’t use a lot of data. But for our clients, we use a lot. When we optimize a website for a client, we always base it on data like Google Analytics and e-commerce data.
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Would you like to add anything else?

In addition to being an agency, we also have a venture arm. We have participated in Cycle Care, Parfumado, and Gaia Gaia.

We invest our knowledge, time, and amounts up to 50k. We primarily invest in companies that are in the seed investment phase. Entrepreneurs with a good plan but no fully developed platform yet.

When we invest, we help build the platform to grow to the next phase and make sure the company is ready to scale. We bring design knowledge, online marketing strategy, and our entire network of partners.