Noibu founders roundtable: Noibu 3.0, AI & the future of ecommerce (ep. 100)

Kailin Noivo: Welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Toolbox Expert's Perspective.

Kailin Noivo: Today's a really, really special and important episode.

Kailin Noivo: First and foremost, it's our 100th episode, and I'm joined by the wonderful Filip and Rob.

Kailin Noivo: Welcome, boys.

Filip Slatinac: Thank you.

Robert Boukine: Hey.

Robert Boukine: Thanks.

Robert Boukine: Thanks for having us.

Filip Slatinac: Finally, he invites us.

Robert Boukine: We're honored guests.

Robert Boukine: What a privilege.

Kailin Noivo: I hear it a lot from these two.

Kailin Noivo: For those that don't know, Rob and Fil are my partners.

Kailin Noivo: We all work together.

Kailin Noivo: They're the co-founders of Noibu.

Kailin Noivo: We all started this thing back together, which seems like a long time ago.

Kailin Noivo: And the podcast now is at about 100 episodes.

Kailin Noivo: They like to make fun of me off-camera that I'm kind of like a washed-up TikTok star that does these things.

Kailin Noivo: So that's how it goes, but wanted to just do a brief introduction.

Kailin Noivo: If you guys just want to do brief introductions of yourselves, and then we'll dive into what it means for us to be at 100 episodes, and then we're going to dive into some of the big and exciting things that are going on with Noibu.

Kailin Noivo: So maybe, Rob, why don't you kick us off?

Kailin Noivo: And then, Fil, you can go ahead.

Robert Boukine: Cool.

Robert Boukine: Thanks, Kailin.

Robert Boukine: I'm Rob, one of the co-founders here at Noibu.

Robert Boukine: Have known these guys for years and years, coming on decades now, which is crazy.

Robert Boukine: And it's been great working with the guys.

Robert Boukine: We've gone through what I'll call a lot of ups and downs, a lot of pivots.

Robert Boukine: And now that we're at our hundredth episode, it's pretty exciting.

Robert Boukine: And what's more exciting is obviously the great product work that we've done and all the great customers that we've been able to talk to.

Robert Boukine: And, also, even if there weren't Noibu customers, I listen to mostly every single episode.

Robert Boukine: As much as we chirp Kailin, we do enjoy listening to the podcast.

Robert Boukine: I learn a ton just from all of the insight.

Robert Boukine: And as folks that entered the ecommerce industry through technology, listening to podcasts like this one is a big part of how we actually educate ourselves to actually build a product.

Robert Boukine: So super excited to be here.

Robert Boukine: A big fan of the pod and the fact that I'm on it, I feel honored.

Robert Boukine: So thanks for having me, Kailin.

Filip Slatinac: I'm Fil, one of the co-founders as well at Noibu.

Filip Slatinac: I work primarily with our engineering and product departments, so I speak to our customers.

Filip Slatinac: And we make sure that we're understanding their problem sets and, most importantly, that then we deliver on those problem sets with the features and products that we build.

Filip Slatinac: And I'm sure given that it's our 100th episode, we're going to be talking about the repositioning, the new product vision, and all that stuff.

Filip Slatinac: So I'm really excited to jump right in.

Kailin Noivo: And just to kick us off, we started the podcast about two years ago.

Kailin Noivo: Our wonderful head of marketing, Anthony, had approached us with this idea.

Kailin Noivo: We were quite skeptical at the beginning.

Kailin Noivo: We weren't sure what exactly the value it was going to bring to our business and our customers.

Kailin Noivo: But through that process, we discovered that our size of company and our revenue was actually much bigger than was realized in the market.

Kailin Noivo: We hadn't really invested into marketing at all prior to that.

Kailin Noivo: So our goals with the podcast was to just grow our brand, grow our reach.

Kailin Noivo: But more importantly, and Rob alluded to this earlier, was to really meet with the experts, understand what's top of mind to them, and really broker some of those relationships into Fil and to Rob to really extract what is the next generation of our product look like and how can we best serve our customers.

Kailin Noivo: And looking back now 100 episodes deep, which has been at least two years, our product and our market has gone through a massive shift.

Kailin Noivo: And those are some of the things that we're going to talk to today.

Kailin Noivo: But really being able to build a center where not only we could learn, but the market can learn, we feel like is pushing ecommerce technology ahead.

Kailin Noivo: So on that note, I think it's been a great success.

Kailin Noivo: We're really happy with its results.

Kailin Noivo: And for those that are thinking about launching a podcast, I'd highly, highly recommend it.

Kailin Noivo: I'm going to pass it off to Rob to talk a bit about what our mission is today.

Kailin Noivo: And I think it's really important there's a really famous saying that you can't understand where you're going unless you understand where you've been, and maybe talk us through where we've evolved from launch to today.

Kailin Noivo: And as everyone who's listening hopefully knows, we've just gone through a major change in our product strategy, which we're rolling out due to the fantastic work of the team and mainly spearheaded by Fil.

Kailin Noivo: But maybe, Rob, why don't you kick us off by educating us a bit about the launch to today and taking us through a bit of a history lesson?

Robert Boukine: For sure.

Robert Boukine: Sounds good.

Robert Boukine: So I think it's only fair to start at the genesis of Noibu, which brings us back, I think, over a decade or nearly a decade now to 2017 where, candidly, Fil, Kailin, and I, we didn't really know what we were doing...

Robert Boukine: All we knew was we wanted to build a technology company in the retail and ecommerce space, and we did the opposite of what we'd recommend any fledgling startup or entrepreneur. We basically took a cool technology, which was VR, and we basically tried to smash it into the retail vertical.

Robert Boukine: And what that actually looked like from a product standpoint is we tried to create 3D and VR shopping for brick-and-mortar stores that they could put onto their ecommerce website. So picture something like Google Maps, where you can go on street view, walk through the city. Imagine doing that actually, in a store with a VR goggle headset or just basically on your computer, clicking around.

Robert Boukine: And the whole hypothesis was if you have a brick-and-mortar store, you've invested a ton in it, may as well put it online to differentiate yourself against your competitors because, usually, ecommerce websites look somewhat similar to grid layout with categories, PDPs, etc. And we thought that by putting a store onto your ecommerce storefront that it could potentially build trust and increase conversions.

Robert Boukine: Fast forward about two years, we built the product. We signed 10 customers with the promise that we would deliver the product. We actually ended up deploying this technology on those 10-ish brands. And lo and behold, conversion actually decreased. So our hypothesis was quite invalid there, where having customers shop online through a physical store, breaking news, doesn't increase conversion.

Robert Boukine: So that's kind of Noibu 1.0, we'll call it, and the best thing that happened there was we made those connections. We got to talk to 10 incredible merchants. Some of them were on Shopify. Some of them were on Magento. I think one or two of them was on BigCommerce as well. And we got to build relationships.

Robert Boukine: And I think just through kind of that founder hustle and potentially them feeling a little bad for us, they did give us the time of day, and we were able to sit them down and it was, I think, March 2019 after we decided to pivot the company to a new product line. And we sat down with them and said, look. What we're building clearly isn't working for you, but you can see that we care. We want to drive value to you guys, and we really enjoy candidly just collaborating and working with you all.

Robert Boukine: We'd love to continue that, and we know that we can't with our current product line. So do you mind if we ask you guys some discovery questions to understand how we could potentially drive tremendous value to you? And that's exactly what we did, and it was through that process that we actually discovered that errors impacting the checkout flow are quite a big pain point in ecommerce and continue to be today.

Robert Boukine: And that's where Noibu 2.0 formed where we became the leading ecommerce front-end monitoring solution in the market where we would detect all technical issues, assign a dollar value to it, help teams prioritize those issues, and really drive conversion in a non-traditional way where you're working from a backlog of not features, but bugs that impact the bottom line.

Robert Boukine: And that really popped off in ecommerce, especially during COVID. That messaging really resonated. We were able to grow really quickly and acquire thousands of domains that we were able to deploy on. And that really has carried us up until, I would say, the second half of last year where it's a great product. It's still part of our core offering, but we had our customers wanting more and more and more.

Robert Boukine: They knew that we did a tremendous job with errors, and they were like, look. You collect awesome information about our ecommerce experiences. We'd love help understanding not only what are the top issues impacting our conversion, but also what's slowing down our website. Are there opportunities to improve page speed?

Robert Boukine: Not only that. Do you guys have any ideas on how we can improve conversion and grow conversion through analyzing things like customer journeys, heat maps, scroll maps, other telemetry that is super helpful for increasing conversions.

Robert Boukine: And it's a long-winded way of saying we really evolved to now what I would call Noibu 3.0, where we aren't just identifying technical issues and surfacing the top ones that can drive conversion, but we're capturing every single conversion opportunity in one platform to help our amazing merchants drive conversion.

Robert Boukine: And that's really where we're at today. I'll actually probably save a little bit of the details about that 3.0 version of Noibu for Fil to cover. But that's essentially kind of how we got here today, and I'm super excited that we're now the leading ecommerce monitoring and experience analytics platform. It's a really exciting time at Noibu.

Kailin Noivo: And just as a follow-up on that, these are discussions, obviously, we've all had. I think, Rob, you specifically have done a good job setting up the customer advisory board meetings. Fil, you've been leading our research through your teams and yourself, chatting with customers, always staying on the pulse.

Kailin Noivo: One of our investors and friend of the show, John Merris, he gave me a book a long time ago called "What Got You Here Won't Get You There." And I feel like through the different researches that your team put together, Fil, and through the CAB with you and then the podcast, we somehow started to triangulate towards the back half of last year that what got us here won't get us there.

Kailin Noivo: And, Fil, I'll pass it to you to really understand, are there market dynamics that changed? Is it just maturity of the market, or did something inherently change in Noibu for us to come to this conclusion?

Filip Slatinac: I think it's a combination of both of those things. The market is definitely evolving. The ecommerce market is totally maturing, and Noibu also needed to change. And the market is evolving because the platforms are evolving. Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, Magento, they're all evolving.

Filip Slatinac: And so with them evolving, obviously, they provide better services to their customers. The tools that our customers have access to are also evolving. You have better tools to monitor your ecommerce flow. You have better tools to monitor your errors. You have such a variety of tools that you can put in your toolset to do your job.

Filip Slatinac: And with that, obviously, the end merchants, our customers, they end up benefiting from that, and their needs change as their tooling changes, as the platforms change. And then, obviously, that pushes us to change.

Filip Slatinac: With all of these things changing, what is still constant? And by talking to all of our customers consistently, even with all of this market changing, with the platforms changing, the tools changing, they were still struggling to understand pretty much a fundamental thing in ecommerce: how to drive more revenue, whether it is through conversion rate optimization, whether it is through fixing the most important errors, whether it is through increasing AOV.

Filip Slatinac: They had all these tools and the platforms are evolving, and they still couldn't have a crystal clear answer as to how to actually improve those most important metrics. And so we kind of took that learning. We took the fact that everything is changing, and we've embedded that into the team, into the company to kind of spit out that V3.

Filip Slatinac: It's not just about errors. The platforms are changing. They're evolving. Things are changing. How can we solve the first principle pain that still exists with all of these things changing? And that was kind of the genesis of that V3 idea. We need to stay relevant as your environment keeps changing as well.

Kailin Noivo: You're right. And it's so refreshing when we hear some of our customers validate this. We obviously have a very famous customer in Mejuri. And another friend of the show, Rohit, their CDO over there, was mentioning to us the other day that a few things have changed in the last few years as to what Fil's saying is now completely bang on with where the market's going.

Kailin Noivo: We're seeing more and more people move towards a platformized ecommerce. So a homegrown self-built solution is a thing of the past. More and more marketing and IT are getting smashed in under one org, under a chief digital officer or some equivalent title. And what you're flagging, Fil, I think is completely accurate where if the platforms are changing and the team structures are changing, the tooling is going to change.

Kailin Noivo: The days of the engineering team working out of the Datadogs and the New Relics and the days of the marketing team working under FullStory or Hotjar are disappearing. Like, these teams are having to collaborate more. Their goal at the end of the day is to drive conversion. Doesn't matter if it's coming from a bug, a user flow, or a performance. And I think that's very, very refreshing as a product vision is something that's resonating.

Kailin Noivo: And, Rob, I'm curious. If you had to describe in a single sentence what Noibu stands for a year ago and now, what do you think those are, and how has that really evolved?

Robert Boukine: Good question. So back last year, I'd say we were the leading solution at detecting all of your technical issues, prioritizing them with a dollar value, and providing all of the technical information to close the loop and recover that revenue, really a point solution for front-end errors on an ecommerce website.

Robert Boukine: And I would say that we've evolved into a platform that captures all of your data needed to basically provide you with all of the information needed to drive up your conversion rate in a single tool, single pane of glass without having to switch tools, whether it's a technical issue, a performance issue, a UX issue. All within one platform, you'll be able to align all of your teams cross-functionally to drive up your conversion rate. That's a little bit more than a sentence, but I do think it was worth going into a little bit of detail there.

Kailin Noivo: I think that makes a lot of sense. And, Fil, a follow-up question for you. It's a hot summer here in Ottawa. I was swimming in a pool of a friend a couple weeks ago, and their 65-year-old dad looks at me and goes, "That AI thing, it's not going to ruin your business?" I'm like, that's a very profound question. And on these customer calls, we've now gone from a transition from a point solution to a platform, like Rob just went through and, like, you just flagged. Does this all change on the back of AI? How are we thinking about this? And curious what your thoughts are on the back of that.

Filip Slatinac: Yeah. Very profound question from that gentleman at the pool. A smart man. But it's honestly a good question. I'll give a potentially controversial take on this whole AI space. There's a lot of excitement about AI, and excitement can be dangerous because we're just excited. We don't think about the risks, the benefits. We're not properly evaluating what's happening.

Filip Slatinac: And I think the best stance to take at this point for any company is that this AI or the current state of LLMs is a technology, is a tool — a technology and a tool that companies can use to get to their vision faster and ultimately serve their customers better. And so how we're thinking about AI is how can we use that technology to make sure that customers understand why exactly conversion rate dropped five days ago.

Filip Slatinac: They can understand the relationship between performance, errors, user behavior in a better way. They can communicate with the tooling that they already love in a natural language. And so instead of treating AI as kind of like the product itself, we need to treat it for what it is. It's a technology that helps companies achieve their vision faster and serve their customers better.

Filip Slatinac: And what this mindset has allowed us to do is to treat it with caution, not get excited, not just kind of slap AI onto our products and call ourselves an AI company. It's to really test this AI, make sure it's accurate, make sure it's solving a real problem. And we've gotten great results by doing that. People have started using our AI products or our AI tests, and we're going to keep doing that. And we're going to use this technology to further our mission and get to our vision faster.

Kailin Noivo: If I'm a customer, Fil, what does this mean for me tactically? What can I do now that I wasn't able to do before in its present form? And how do you envision my work changing long-term through the adoption of AI tools?

Filip Slatinac: Well, if you're a current customer and you probably have a team of analysts, at the very least one, and your conversion rate — you just launched a new marketing campaign. Traffic is flowing, but conversion isn't there. Today, what you do is you ask your analyst or analysts, please go figure out why. Tell me why my new product or my marketing campaign isn't converting as much as I expected it to.

Filip Slatinac: That takes a week. You come back with some results. Maybe you're going to run an A/B test. But in a lot of cases, you kind of say, I don't know. Hopefully, it gets better. What we're currently working on, what we want to achieve, is that instead of you having to group a bunch of people together to get these answers in a matter of weeks, we want to provide you with a platform where you can just ask that question. We have that data. We can give you those answers as soon as possible.

Filip Slatinac: And then not only are we able to answer your question pretty much as soon as you ask it, but then we're able to recommend what should you do about it. And so the time to action goes from weeks, maybe even months in some cases, to minutes or hours. And that has a lot of impact.

Kailin Noivo: I love that, and I completely agree. And I think we're already starting to see it. And, Rob, I know you like to hop on customer calls to really stay close to the customer. Do you have a customer story and anecdote as of late that kind of accentuates how our repositioning is landing?

Robert Boukine: That's a good question. I think one that comes to mind is a company called Cozy Earth. So Cozy Earth was using a pretty complicated tool stack. They had a digital experience analytics tool, so session replay, heat mapping, etc. And then they had an error monitoring tool that was pretty good at error monitoring. And then they also had Noibu in the mix as well to specialize in prioritization of front-end issues.

Robert Boukine: And they came to us with a problem of, hey, our tool stack is pretty complicated. Our DXA is pretty specific. It's pretty complicated, and it's only useful for a certain type of user. And every time our engineers try to collaborate with the business teams, they struggle. And then on the other side, that technical tool was not super accessible by the business users.

Robert Boukine: And now that our vision really is to become the one tool for all conversion rate collaboration, we came to them with essentially a demo. We let them try the product, and it spoke for itself. They ended up opting just to go with Noibu alone to solve that entire problem of growing their conversion rate and maintaining their conversion rate from a technical standpoint, largely due to the simplicity of having not necessarily all of the data, but the right data presented in a certain way that solved the entire problem for them.

Robert Boukine: And they were able to simplify process, simplify their tooling, and candidly save some money in the process as well. So that was a really cool win, and we were super pumped about that one. Definitely validating the approach that we're taking.

Kailin Noivo: Yeah. And I think we're seeing it all over the field. A lot of people are over-tooled. Candidly, during COVID, people signed up for long contracts. Maybe they're now compressing digital and technical teams into one. It's an interesting perspective.

Kailin Noivo: And, Fil, on your side, from a product perspective, how does this repositioning expand the opportunities moving forward of what we can innovate into next? Do you have some insights into problem areas that are adjacent to this that you think we want to continue expanding into?

Filip Slatinac: Totally. Noibu was so focused on errors for quite a time and kind of going into this new iteration of Noibu with this new repositioning. We're really speaking the language of the ecommerce people. Errors is a subset of the things that they care about, but it's not the whole story.

Filip Slatinac: And the whole story could probably be summarized as: in ecommerce, you care about conversion rate. You care about average order value. You care about how much money you're spending on ads. You care about your general traffic. And errors kind of fits into the category of conversion rates. Certain errors can cause your customers to leave the website, which impacts your conversion rate. But that's only one out of those four things that I've just said.

Filip Slatinac: And with this new repositioning, our product and engineering team gets to focus on each one of these problems specifically. What are the problems that exist in AOV, for example? How do you increase AOV? Well, an idea could be you add recommended products. But is that data-informed? Do you know that when people buy a shoe, they will also buy that specific type of pants?

Filip Slatinac: Sometimes those guesses work because of intrinsic experience, but in many cases, they can't predict what the shoppers want. They need data-informed decisions. Since now the product, engineering, and design teams are focused on each one of those categories, they can pinpoint specific pains and build that into Noibu.

Filip Slatinac: And back to our AI conversation: allowing a conversation to flow between the AI system (Noibu Intelligence) and the end customer. For example, which products should I recommend for my brand-new shoes? Well, now that I've collected all of the data that's ever happened on your ecommerce site, I can actually recommend the products you should recommend. And it's not a guess. It's based on real data.

Kailin Noivo: And, Fil, one thing I used to think about late into the night is: we're the tenth, maybe fifteenth session replay company, the X error monitoring company, and now we're the analytics DXA. Why do we have the right to win? How is verticalization and specialization part of that strategy, if anything?

Filip Slatinac: Because ecommerce is hard. Ecommerce is very hard. It probably, at the surface level, looks easy: all you have to do is increase conversion rate and increase traffic. But when you're serving a horizontal market — multiple industries — you don't get to appreciate the complexity of ecommerce.

Filip Slatinac: So you solve at the surface level: “I'll display your conversion rate over time and job's done.” But that's not how it works. Ecommerce people have to analyze the data, come up with insights, build hypotheses, run tests, and get approval from leadership. Between all of these steps, so many problems can happen. If a company serves banking, ecommerce, restoration, how are they going to allocate the time to think about each individual one of these problems? They won’t. But Noibu will — because that's our bread and butter. We only focus on ecommerce.

Filip Slatinac: So the fact that it could be difficult to generate a report to share with your manager? We really care about that. If your report gets rejected, that's our problem. It may not be the problem of people who serve ten industries, but it's our biggest problem. That’s why we have the right to win — because we only focus on ecommerce, and the smallest amount of friction in their workflows is our biggest problem.

Kailin Noivo: I mean, you sold me. Sign me up for another ten years of this.

Kailin Noivo: Rob, ecommerce has a lot of transition in leadership roles. A VP here becomes a VP there. I feel like the average tenure is maybe 18 months. Maybe give us insight where you've had to meet with an executive on an existing customer. Maybe they're familiar with generic tools in the market. How did you convince them they need a verticalized tool like Noibu now?

Robert Boukine: It's usually a pattern, not one example. For context, I meet VPs and C-levels nearly weekly. When I ask, “Why Noibu? Why do you continue to select us as a partner?” it comes down to ecommerce expertise — not only in the product, but also in our customer success team. They're ecommerce professionals, not just technologists. They speak the language of ecommerce managers, product owners, ecommerce developers. They understand the platforms, integrations, and they essentially act as consultants and an extension of the team. That’s why they pick a vertical solution like Noibu and cite us as best in class.

Kailin Noivo: And just to pair that with feedback I'm hearing: if you look at the commerce platform market, folks that try to build commerce in a larger engine have struggled. Oracle ATG shut down. SAP Hybris sunsetted. Adobe Magento’s fading. On the flip side, Shopify, CommerceTools, BigCommerce are owning the market. Commerce is valuable enough to justify vertical tooling. Horizontal players have struggled. That makes sense.

Kailin Noivo: Fil, what excites you most or scares you most about the market over the next twelve months?

Filip Slatinac: A few things. The one on my mind most: what do ChatGPTs of the world do to shopping? Does shopping in 2035 look the same? Are people still using traditional grids on websites, or talking to something that shops for them? I think there will be resilience in brand power and individual websites. But even within those websites, will you shop through the UI or interact via chat? I don't know — and ecommerce companies need to start thinking about it.

Robert Boukine: I agree. Some customers are already getting traffic from LLMs. Sometimes LLMs recommend links that land on 404s, which hurts conversion. We’re investigating how to help customers capture and grow traffic and conversions from these sources. AI will definitely impact ecommerce, so we need to monitor closely.

Kailin Noivo: Exactly. Looking back, commerce has always evolved: offline → phone → mail → digital catalog → websites. Maybe website traffic goes down, but sales go up. GMV will increase over time, and as long as there’s abandonment, we can provide value. I don’t know the next channel yet, but there will be one. And we’ll evolve with it.

Filip Slatinac: Right — maybe AI-native browsers, dynamic websites, or influencers playing an even bigger role. Commerce will adapt. Noibu will adapt too.

Kailin Noivo: As we wrap up, one last question: what excites you most about the next 100 episodes?

Robert Boukine: I’m excited to track how merchants adopt AI — in workflows and customer experiences. By episode 200, some of today’s open questions might be answered.

Filip Slatinac: For me: selfishly, I want to see how Noibu’s new platform serves customers. And second, I’m curious about brand loyalty. With AI recommending products across brands, how will brands earn loyalty?

Kailin Noivo: For me: I’m most excited to demystify conversion rate optimization and make insights accessible not just to enterprises, but to everyone — the way Shopify demystified store creation. That’s the big opportunity.

Kailin Noivo: Cool. Thank you guys so much for your time. And for listeners, we’re always open to feedback. Please find us on LinkedIn and send us a note. Thank you so much.

Filip Slatinac: Thank you.

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