Outer Signal raises $22M Series A to give e-commerce brands real-time identity profiles on every customer

Speaker 1: No. No.

Speaker 2: You're good. It's all good.

Speaker 1: You're good. Come back on or or flag when you have some of these Yeah. Some news in in personal agent world.

Speaker 2: Fantastic. Will do.

Speaker 5: Thanks, Hans.

Speaker 2: A good rest Talk of your to you soon. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas.

Speaker 15: Your

Speaker 2: AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system contacts. Our last guest of the show, Noah Friedman, is here in person in the TBPN UltraDome. Welcome to the show, Noah. How are

Speaker 14: you doing? I'm good, boys. Good to be here, the UltraDome.

Speaker 2: What news do you have for us? Oh my. Should he hit the gong?

Speaker 1: Do it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 14: We are announcing Outer Signals $22,000,000 series a today. Do I just

Speaker 2: go Congratulations. Yes. Smash it. That a real instrument. It is. It is. Smash it. Fantastic. So so introduce Outer Signal. Introduce yourself for everyone who doesn't know, and then I'm sure there's so many questions we can go through Yeah. There.

Speaker 14: Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it. Outer Signal's a customer intelligence and agentic personalization platform. So when any consumer checks out or transacts with the business Yeah. Most businesses really only know about that person that their name is Jordy. Yep. They live in LA. Their email, Outer Signal paints the rest of that Right? So we give a full time in real time name, email address, date of birth, age, gender, occupation, property value, a full profile behind every single consumer, which lets businesses actually speak to their consumers like humans Yeah. Not just orders.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And and what is the best way to actually take advantage of that as an e commerce business? I mean, I can imagine, okay, some celebrity shows up, maybe you reach out to their agency to do a deal, all the way down to like personalizing an email which is its own fraud thing because sometimes Sure. You get an email and you're like, that's a little too personal. Don't know.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'll I'll start with an example. Yeah, please. I know I know Aurora Yeah. Is a customer Love her. Of Outer Signal. Yeah. I remember within the first three months of launch, Brian or Charlie messaged me and said something like, I'm not gonna name the person but it was like a top five actor in the world. Yeah. And I was like, how do you even know that? And they were like, well, we're using this thing called Outer Signal. Yeah. And that person wasn't even using their actual like they were using a pseudonym Yeah. For the the the order. Yeah. So it was like

Speaker 2: But it linked it all up.

Speaker 1: But it showed and and and so yeah, it's like I think people it's not just these sort of extra, you know, elements and kind of like populating data that's already out there. There's like other Sure. Sauce that you guys have.

Speaker 14: Yeah. There's certainly other sauce. Mean, it's doing what we do is both a technology challenge and an anthropology challenge, like and the example that I give is you know how many people there are named Noah Friedman in the world? Oh, yeah. So, like, if Noah Friedman orders from Aurora, disambiguating which one is me is remarkably difficult, and that's what our engineers have spent hundreds and hundreds or thousands of hours mastering. And it's a really hard problem, but we've cracked the code on it. I think to your question, John, it's actually a lot bigger than just like, these examples of finding celebrities are very cool and fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Huge business No.

Speaker 6: It's more

Speaker 14: built around that.

Speaker 1: It's more like cool for the for the For the personalized market.

Speaker 14: Yeah. Exactly. It's cool for But the example I give is this. Like, literally when we when I was in the green room there, I got an email from a brand that I probably spent thousands of dollars with telling me that their new drop had just hit and it was like sports bras. Yeah. And it's like, I've spent thousands of dollars with this business. They have every right to know who I am. I'm a very, like, you you can Google me and figure out who I am and they just didn't take the time to do that because it's impossible. Right? Mhmm. And so the downstream impacts of what Outer Signal is all about is really to say, like, behind every order, behind every consumer who transacts with the business, there is a human being. Yeah. And those human beings deserve to be treated like human beings. And so across email marketing, right, where, like, a brand that hits me with an email about performance in the gym or when I'm up late working on my business, like, that's gonna slap. That's gonna hit a lot better than if they hit my mother with that. Right? So across email and retention, across paid media and acquisition, all of this is downstream of this concept of, like, everybody transacting with these consumer business, they're real people. And these companies just have no basis or bearing to say the second an order comes in, we're basically just routing them into the arbitrary Klaviyo flow or what have you just to like hope that it lands with them. When in reality, there's so much more context that can be grabbed Yeah. In the real world.

Speaker 2: How do you think better intelligence in the e commerce world flows to retail strategy? Mhmm. There's always this pitch of like, okay, you look at the shipping locations and you see that everyone's within, you know, two miles of this store, we should go pitch that store. But it feels like it can go a lot further. How are you seeing because I I I mean, I feel like every ecommerce business now, like the D to C era is fully over. Like, your omnichannel Gotta be at least day one in the deck if not day one in Day one the deck. I like that.

Speaker 14: Day one in

Speaker 3: the deck. That's a banger. Not Bar.

Speaker 2: But if but like you need to be thinking about this and you can't be turning down opportunities for retail expansion and saying, we're a pure play d to c company that cuts out the middleman if you wanna scale in

Speaker 14: the

Speaker 2: modern era.

Speaker 14: Look, I think there's a couple angles

Speaker 2: to it.

Speaker 14: Yeah. Number one is saying if you're trying to activate and pull deeper velocity Mhmm. At any of these retailers, which is ultimately, I mean, we talk about

Speaker 2: this with Lucy all

Speaker 14: the time. Right? This is the hero is how fast you're pulling through these stores. Understanding how to locally activate an audience, which Outer Seed can allow you to do in ways that Meta just can't. And being like, look. Around these ZIP codes in Metro LA or in the middle of the country, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 14: We can actually drive hyper targeted funnels and flows in the store Yeah. Because we know who these people are and we know how they're different in these different markets. That's huge. We've also had probably hundreds of brands at this point both find retailers that were buying from them

Speaker 2: Oh, with

Speaker 14: their personal address

Speaker 2: Yeah. I've seen them before.

Speaker 4: On ecom.

Speaker 14: Yeah. Like a huge creatine brand was able to get like a really big placement Yeah. Because they found out that the senior buyer from Walmart, like their square ICP had been buying personally as just a fan Yeah. Under his email.

Speaker 2: So,

Speaker 14: you've got that angle and you've also got like when you're pitching retailers. Right? Like you guys know this. One of the most important things you can do is have a really fundamental understanding of like who the hell you're actually selling to. Alright? And I think so many consumer businesses have this archetype or the persona of who they think they sell to and it all feels very much the same. Like, I cannot tell you how many brands we meet and onboard into Outer Signal where in the sales process we're like, hey, who do you guys think your customer is? And they're like, young urbanite professionals in New York. Yeah. Well, you can't all sell to the same person. Right?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 14: And it turns out when you activate it, it's like, no, it's actually Midwest moms with high disposable income. They're the ones paying your bills. This persona of, like, the young professional urbanite in New York

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 14: Is a super small percentage of your revenue. It's actually a less valuable customer, but they gravitate to one specific product. And so across merchandising, to understand which products resonate most with this demographic or this demographic, and across actual placement in store and pitching retailers

Speaker 5: there's

Speaker 14: so much depth and nuance that comes from understanding who the f these people are that are actually buying from you Yeah.

Speaker 1: How are you right now, explosion of of personal agents, you have Instinct and Yeah. And Muse. And and even in the last twenty four hours, it seems like Instinct started doing Yeah. Like basically like texting Texting. Texting product recommendations, which exposed something that was kinda interesting to me, which is that the agent knows about the user. I saw one where the user it was pushing various car products for a Targa. And the user was like, how do you know I have a Targa? And it's like, oh, we worked on like getting insurance for a car like Yeah. A while ago. But then the agent was actually recommending products like just products that a Targa would never need. Like pushing a trickle charger and indoor cover, which like a real I don't know any like real car guys that are like, I gotta keep my 2026 Targa

Speaker 2: The best and and and

Speaker 1: No one I know is like using indoor covers because real ball knowers would know that like if you if you drive your car outside and then you put a cover over it Right. And you put and and there's like debris between the paint and the cover, it will actually wear the paint down faster That's ball. Yep. Do more damage to the car. So like, that basically it was like a personalized recommendation from somebody that shouldn't be making a recommendation. Right? Yeah. Like someone that did not have ball knowledge.

Speaker 14: Lack of ball.

Speaker 1: Still still to be clear, like it's almost like on the brand side, the brand needs to like brands need to be thinking about educating agents Mhmm. Totally. Because the agent knows the customer, but the agent needs to know who to pitch it to. Yeah. Like a like somebody with a Ferrari or a ten year old Ferrari should get recommended like, hey, maybe if you're not using a trickle charger, your battery is gonna wear down fast or But it feels like an entirely new task for the for the company to like educate agents.

Speaker 14: Couple thoughts.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 14: Couple bars in there, by the way. Ball network there. I think it's we just have, like, a thing now, like, you can't make personalized recommendations unless you know a ball.

Speaker 2: Right? Sure. Yeah. So out of Yeah. The bar has moved.

Speaker 14: The bar has moved.

Speaker 4: Ball posts

Speaker 2: have moved.

Speaker 14: Couple Couple things. Number one, I think that example actually touches on something critical, which was that that personalization was really just behavioral. Right? You bought this, you might like that. Right? It has no context on like who the hell you actually are as a person. And that's really been the failed promise of personalization for the last decade, which is like a lot of the companies out there selling personalized solutions for marketers. It's all based on Jordy clicked on this ad or he came in through this landing page and he bought this product. And so we think and we guess and we're just gonna make some hypothesis finger to the wind that the next product he might like is why. It's all pulling from the same signals that it's been pulling for from the last ten years and, like, it just doesn't work. And the outcome of that, whether it's an agent recommending it or the brand on email or just the landing page, is that it feels highly impersonal. Right? And I would argue that the next layer, the next frontier, and the one that we're ushering in is to say, like, who the hell is Jordy? Right? Like, did he just post on his Instagram last week that he got a new Ferrari? That's really important context for me to know, not just that he actually has a car and checked out insurance last month, and so, like, let's upsell him and try to up select him into some other product, which we can draw some fuzzy connection to. Right? Mhmm. So I think agents are going to like, agentic commerce as a concept is in its very early days. Right? Like, think all these companies are still trying to figure out what does it actually look like for Muse or Dot or Dots or whatever the hell the play for the month is, right, to recommend a product to you in chat and in feature. Very early days of that, and we're keeping a close eye on how we can interface with that and play with it. But I think at the end of the day, it all comes down to, like, whatever touch point a business has with their consumer is the most valuable real estate they've ever had.

Speaker 11: Right?

Speaker 1: Yeah. And the and the and the main thing for customers is, like, getting pushed a product that makes no sense for you.

Speaker 14: With a message that makes no sense.

Speaker 1: Well, getting pushed a product that makes no sense for you just completely like, I've I've had this with with

Speaker 2: You don't need a charger battery?

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. No. I just had this at, car like, sometimes you're you're if you're at a car dealership, like, the associate will try to sell you of their one of

Speaker 2: their system.

Speaker 1: No. One of their cars in a way where, like, you realize, okay, I actually know more about, like, the pros and cons of this vehicle than you do. And I explained my situation to you and you're still kind of pushing this thing. Yeah. And then it just destroys like the trust.

Speaker 2: Why are you pushing understated rims? It clearly needs spinners.

Speaker 1: Nose ball. When you get when you get truly like the perfect Instagram ad Yes.

Speaker 2: Where you

Speaker 1: get truly like the perfect like, you know, a sales associate texts you Yeah. I got this. Do you want it? Yeah. Before it it hits the floor Yeah. Like that is a really good feeling.

Speaker 14: Yeah. That's delight.

Speaker 1: But but like the gap right now is just so surprisingly wide between those like actual human led experiences which is like sales associate knows your preferences well, has a unique product for you at and the right what brands are able to do.

Speaker 2: It's basically back to the hallucination era. Like Yeah. We we we we left the hallucination era where if you look up, you know, the history of a company on any LLM, you're gonna get something that's pretty much like the Wikipedia page Yeah. Pretty accurate. But, you know, four years ago, you ask an LLM, you know, anything and you could just wind up in crazy made up territory and it's the same thing for agent e commerce.

Speaker 14: We think of and this is a core value admission of the business. We think of the ultimate protagonist and end customer of what we do as the actual consumer. Right?

Speaker 2: Oh, okay.

Speaker 14: We are serving brands in the sense that they need to be delivering

Speaker 1: delightful experiences help you.

Speaker 14: We're helping brands help you. Right?

Speaker 1: At the end the day We're helping brands monetize you.

Speaker 3: Helping brands yeah. Look, I think we all Love it. We all believe in

Speaker 1: No. We're we're very commercial Yeah.

Speaker 14: We love personalization because I think it unlocks delightful experiences as cliche as that sounds in ways that just ultimately is a net positive for the business and the customer.

Speaker 2: What do you think the role of outer signal data, market research, customer personas, profiles is in actual product development, product line expansion. There's some there's some product line expansions and and just new products that I'm like, okay. That didn't come out of a committee. At the same time, sometimes you look at a business and it's like it's been staring you in the face Yeah. For years. Yeah. And everyone was gonna buy the the non caffeinated version of Coke

Speaker 1: or whatever.

Speaker 2: And so how how do you think about the role that Outer Signal Data should play in like the boardroom or product development room as opposed to just, the marketing engine?

Speaker 14: Yeah. It's a good question. Look. We see a ton of our businesses use Outer Signal in their product merchandising and product development and r and d

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 14: Actual processes. Right? And so a couple concrete examples here are massive massive multi billion and $100,000,000 businesses have discovered that they have some like really core persona.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 14: For example, one massive beauty brand found out that like 10% of their customers were like very distinctly nurses and doctors and like practitioners of medicine.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 14: And they weren't speaking to them at all. Okay. Right? It turns out that they were buying one very specific SKU in their set dramatically more than the rest of the customers. Right? Which informs not only how you market to that group, also how you segment them and also expanding more for them. Right? Yeah. The second part of this is like because Outer Signal's real time

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 14: Right, you can now see when you launch a product. Like if Mountain Valley is gonna launch some new SKU online, in real time, they can see this SKU is over indexing with women and it's over indexing with men or women in $3,000,000 homes. It's dramatically under indexing in this cohort which starts when

Speaker 2: from high ABV Mountain Valley. High ABV It's Mountain

Speaker 14: a top shelf plug

Speaker 1: right there.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Very good. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3: I like it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Give everyone overview of Top Shelf.

Speaker 14: Top Shelf is a fund that I started in 2022. That's how you and I met Yeah.

Speaker 2: On the

Speaker 14: board of Lucy, obviously. We started investing in vice businesses Sure. Booze, nicotine, etcetera. And we've expanded into just the broader consumer

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 14: Market. So businesses that connect with their

Speaker 2: customers Yeah.

Speaker 14: And technologies that help them do that Outer Signal. Top Shelf's a very proud investor in Outer Signal.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What what is the biggest trend in in the alcohol space these days? I feel like we're post seltzer boom, but is there a next next thing that's the hot trend? I haven't really kept up with it.

Speaker 3: Booze has had an interesting few years. Wait.

Speaker 2: No one's drinking anymore. Right?

Speaker 14: Total nonsense. Turns out

Speaker 1: they are.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Who's drinking?

Speaker 14: Apparently no one in LA. Although the other night I was out I still drinking. Right?

Speaker 1: Look, think No. Part of part of the thing is like LA has fallen off so hard as a city Sure. That people assume no one's drinking anymore because you drive around on a Thursday night in in the places where nightlife used to be And it's like health mecca. So people are No one's drinking. It turns out all over the country, other Yeah. Places, like Okay. You know, business as usual.

Speaker 2: But but, yeah, I mean, what are the growth growth categories? Wine, beer, spirits, seltzer, something new? Like, where where's the energy in the industry?

Speaker 10: I mean, we were the

Speaker 14: first check into a premium box wine called Grazi Okay. Which has become one of the largest wine businesses in America. Sure. And they are basically premiumizing what used to be black box, which is like the thing you drank in college and slapped

Speaker 2: the Yeah. Grozzy. And that sort of happened with cut water where they took cocktail mixed cocktails and put that in a more accessible form factor at a lower price. Yeah. Then that started flying.

Speaker 16: Interesting. I think

Speaker 14: occasions are changing modestly. I think the notion that young people don't drink anymore is ridiculous. I think

Speaker 2: that

Speaker 14: they were just delayed because of COVID.

Speaker 2: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Speaker 14: The big trend that just completely messed up the headlines. But you returned to normal. Returned to normal. They were just delayed. Yeah. So there was stagnancy because they weren't going out. I still think the loneliness epidemic is real and

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 14: There's another argument as to why abuse is actually a cure for that, we don't have to go there in the Ultra Dome today.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Maybe after we wrap.

Speaker 14: Booze is gonna yeah. Maybe after we wrap.

Speaker 1: Cure for all of society. Booze gonna be just for alcohol according to alcohol investor. Yeah.

Speaker 4: That's why

Speaker 2: I said we have to go there.

Speaker 14: Talk about ball knowing. Yeah. Brotzi's Brotzi was one of the first Outer Signal customers Yeah. And they've seen some crazy results.

Speaker 1: Oh, you guys have a very interesting lens on like for actually investing in consumer Yeah. Just given given your role as Yeah. The data provider.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What's the growth the growth strategy for Outer Signal? Yeah. Is is there a distribution mechanism where, like, you can vend in through like a Shopify plug in Yeah. Be discovered there? Totally. I imagine you're doing paid ads on your own, maybe sponsoring podcasts that target things, going to trade shows. But what what's working the best for you in terms of getting in front of e commerce entrepreneurs?

Speaker 14: It's been remarkable word-of-mouth driven by strong product market fit.

Speaker 1: Sure. People who Yeah. Brian discovered the product said that he's like sent a bunch of bunch of different brands Yeah. Your way.

Speaker 14: And that happens constantly. We are running ads. We have a Shopify app. Ads We have an agency partner program. We have a killer sales team. We have content that goes out. And all of this has been know, the company is only a year old. Right?

Speaker 2: Oh. So agency would be like a Yeah. Performance marketer that wants

Speaker 14: to The attention bring marketer, performance marketer, influencer marketing teams, agencies. Right? Outer Signal is a magical magical experience

Speaker 1: for agencies.

Speaker 2: You can also sell it to the CEO because they want to look For sure. Pretty dashboards even For sure. If it's less tactical for them.

Speaker 14: And so in e com, you know, that's a very tight market. Yep. I think we've done a pretty good job both making friends in and also doing right buy. We're also getting pulled up market pretty quickly. Hotels, large scale consumer apps, massive retailers, they all have the same problem. Like, of my favorite stories, one of the biggest hotel companies in the world that you guys have all heard of, we won't name names, but they inbounded. I took a call with them and I said, what caught your attention? And he was like, dude, LeBron James checked into my hotel. And I didn't know about it

Speaker 2: Oh, interesting.

Speaker 14: Until he got into the lobby. Yeah. And I was mortified and I chewed my team out and I went and looked and like, yeah, his name was there but it was technically his assistant. But if anybody had taken the time to look, we would have caught it. Of course, they didn't catch it. Yeah. Because who's looking at all that stuff?

Speaker 2: He was

Speaker 14: like, we need outer signal.

Speaker 2: Of course. Right? Or at least exercise more discretion. Exactly. Make him feel welcome. Exactly. Fascinating. Very cool. Well, congratulations

Speaker 14: Thank you,

Speaker 2: the raise.

Speaker 1: Congratulations. Such a such a cool business. Yeah. Like, it's one of those things like you're you you can give that magic moment to founders and, like, management teams, which again, like, we experience that really early on at at Aurora. Yeah. But then continue to deliver value and get much deeper into the stack and help them run, you know, better email marketing, all all these different channels. It's sky's the limit. So Yeah. Excited to see where you're

Speaker 4: Appreciate you,

Speaker 14: boys. Thanks for Well, having

Speaker 2: that's basically our show. There was some breaking news while we were live. What is it? A Gemini four Argon launched. Cool new name.

Speaker 1: What about your

Speaker 2: Bunch of benchmarks.

Speaker 1: Yeah. What are your thoughts

Speaker 7: on it?

Speaker 2: No. No. No. No. We're all going to digest this. We'll talk about it tomorrow and and go through the benchmarks. But you can go check out Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show posted about it and everyone can take it for a spin. We'll talk more about the reactions tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

Speaker 1: That's right.

Speaker 2: And we will see you tomorrow at eleven Pacific. Goodbye.