EPISODE SUMMARY

Ronak Trivedi is the Co-Founder & CEO of Pietra, the A16Z & Founders Fund backed platform that brings sourcing, fulfillment, and e-commerce under one roof to make launching a commerce brand a breeze. To date, the company has raised over $15 million and has supported thousands of brands, including a few that have been on DTC Pod (shoutout Suckerz, Form, & GEM!). Prior to starting Pietra, Ronak led product at UBER for UBER Pool.

EPISODE NOTES

On this episode of DTC Pod, Ronak joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about evolving dynamics of the creator economy, how creator brands are typically launched, how Pietra solves for sourcing, fulfillment, and e-commerce, productizing a service for the most time-constrained customers, how their marketplace got started, how they raised their seed and series A from top VCs, brands that have launched on Pietra, what scale can look like in this niche, and much more.

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EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

6:10 The Fastest Way To Drop Your Own Line 🛍️

So you, as a business owner, went from having to master the supply chain and understand all these pointless things like warehousing and labor and importing and exporting and whatever. To, I have a website, I have a place to sell my product. I have access to the world's best factories. And now all I have to focus on is design and promotion. Everything else is taken care, taken care of for you, through the platform of PIETRA.

9:50 How To Outsource The Dirty Work 💸

Like you didn't have to go spend six months building a data center. Cause in a couple of clicks, Amazon just set up your data center for you. Right. You don't have to go figure out a commercial lease because in a couple of clicks, we worked gave you office space. And that discrepancy, I think, just like in the tech sector allowed all of these amazing developers to like make apps and start companies like Uber being one of them. there needed to be some sort of huge push on the other side of the spectrum. And that's where we really saw an opportunity. I'm like, it shouldn't be that hard for someone who has a cool idea to start their own sneaker line. Like they shouldn't have to spend three years of their life trying to do this.

17:40 Let Creators Create 💎

Why do they need to care about labor and importing and warehousing and staffing and sourcing? Like they don't, they want to design candles. They want to show up in a warehouse and they want two day shipping everywhere in the US for a cheap price, but like everything else, take it off their plate, let them go on their vacations, let them be creative.

36:51 Avoid Predatory Partnerships 😵💫

Exactly. Even worse. That's like the worst case, right. Where a creator has no control over their company. And so they're like, because you know how to set up a factory, I guess. And like you have some homeys in Switzerland that knows how to make watches. Like you're taking 75% of my business. we take that and say, you can start your business for 39 bucks a month.

This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:

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Ronak Trivedi - Founder & CEO of Pietra
Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io
Blaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

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