Exclusive Q&A with Harper Reed, CEO of Modest

Modest is a mobile-first e-commerce platform that provides easy and open integration for businesses who want to step into or improve upon the mobile shopping experience. We speak with Harper Reed, CEO of Modest, about identifying and solving the problems involved with mobile shopping.

Kevin Xu: Can you describe Modest and its conception?

Harper Reed: Well, basically I think the best way to start is to start in the beginning. We had - “we” being my co-founder and I, Dylan - we’ve been working together for quite a while, sort of friends, we spent some time at Crate & Barrel and what we just kind of kept seeing over and over again was that the fact that we were were building the same technology constantly.

And two, I think this is more important, the technology we were often building was just the technology that helped us on the back end. So for the longest time, I mean you know the industry, technology has been focused on how to make logistics quicker, how to make your distribution centers more efficient. It’s literally like how you may have shelved the pick and pack with lots of math and really cool stuff going behind it, payment which is much more about the transfer of money than it is about the user experience.

Not only had we built the same technology over and over again, but we’re building the solution that we were super stoked about. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about this and we were just kind of like, “how do we build that thing that does solve this problem in a way that we are stoked about it?”

“How do we build that thing that allows us to do and have this user experience that we kind of expect from everything?”

We have to start in the place where it’s most broken and we felt that was mobile. And so this all happened over the course of a year and we exited that thinking we were going to build this company. We established the mobile web-based point and then we just started building, and a lot of what we built was a user experience that is, we think, fits on mobile.

And when I say “mobile” I’m talking specifically about mobile phones. And so we have a couple of launch partners that were able to use our technology that very easily kind of solved this problem. But also, the consumers are stoked about using it and able to take advantage of the fact that the people who are using it the most are their best customers, the people that are waking up and saying, “Oh, no, I don’t have coffee,” and are able to instantly buy something.

And so I think one of the main differences about our technology is that we’re aggressively focused on the transaction. We’re not necessarily focused on the payment side. We’re not focused on the performance side. We’re just focused on making sure when you want that product and you click buy, that the intent that you’re showing you want it, we can fulfill in a very real way.

So this is a little bit different I think than e-commerce technology in the past which was a lot about kind of fear where it was like, did you mean to click buy, enter your address twice, enter credit card again even though you’ve already entered it. And then let’s get to the page which I think is hilarious, the one that has all of their information to review and then it’s like, yes, I meant to enter all of this information correctly. So we’re just like, let’s get rid of that and let’s just make it so when you click buy, we ship it to you.

Everything is one tap, everything is very quick, and then we made it so it’s pretty acceptable and honestly, pretty inexpensive for these retailers who never have had access to this level of technology.

About the payment side of things. Are you looking to integrate, let’s say, one-touch buying with Google and Apple Pay?

Yeah. So Apple Pay is launching imminently with some beta tests right now and should be available publicly in the next week or two. Google Pay is coming out whenever our Android platform comes out which is hopefully in the beginning of Q2.

We think this fits a lot into our philosophy, like I’ve said we’re trying to be very pro-user, pro-consumer. And one of the things that we had seen in our tests is that there’s a lot of consumer trust in Apple Pay. We’ve also seen how it interacts with the crowd and whatnot that it also is a very base payment method. So this is an interesting time for payments because suddenly the payments are much more on the side of the consumer, much less on the side of the retailer. We’re very excited about that because we’re very pro consumer. Our belief is that if we make it easier for the consumer and safer for the consumer, then it gets better for everyone up the chain.

Would you say this is like a natural evolution of mobile commerce? There’s always a lot of complaints about the lack of responsiveness and usability for the mobile front end.

We definitely look at this as an evolution where we started in the ‘90s thinking e-commerce, how do we build up consumer confidence, right?

Every holiday still - which is just driving me crazy - is that kind of very conservative article saying, well, you know, consumers are too scared of entering their email and their credit card information online.

I don’t believe it, because we’re not seeing that when it comes to the number of transactions. And so I think that we’re removing that kind of fear and making it so it’s much more positive in an evolution. I think we’re working it so that the users aren’t punished if they make a mistake. In fact, they themselves can help out fixing that, which is a key aspect of our platform, giving the users an opportunity to fix mistakes they make in the transaction.

So we’re doing returns, even with the best e-commerce providers in the world, it’s still a pain in the butt. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can make it so it’s easy. And so it’s about how do we do that. Yes, I think it is an evolution.

And how difficult was it to actually get all these moving pieces together? Because you are providing the front end and the back end together on multiple mobile devices, which seems difficult.

Yeah, so that’s a super good question because it was a super big pain in the ass. One interesting property of e-commerce is it’s really hard to do it halfway.

There’s a lot of really great books about failed e-commerce experiences. There’s a lot of great books about people putting millions of dollars on e-commerce to get it right. And we were very hesitant of: “if user experience is so important to us, how do we make sure that it’s perfect?”

So we invested in the beginning on the front side of that, quite a bit of time and resources to try and make sure that the users had a good experience. And that means that the back end has to be perfect, right?

That means that you really have to be focusing on how to solve some of these big problems as you alluded to. And so, for us, what that really meant was, we had to preload a lot of the issues and we had to build the back end, and we had to build the front end; and that we have to do a lot of testing to make sure it worked wholly.

So we had a very long beta period before we went public, just to make sure that it worked exactly like we wanted it to work.

We spent a whole bunch of time testing the front end. And so we have pretty significant integrations with Shopify, our Magento integration right now is in beta.

We have a really cool real-time API integration that allows people who have custom e-commerce platforms to integrate with us real-time so that we don’t have any inventory problems.

And then over and over again we deal with these integrations. But one of the best parts about e-commerce is e-commerce is as old as the Internet, and that means that there’s a lot of old technologies built into it.

One of the examples of this is, we have a pretty healthy usage in some cases for integrations of EFD files. And so we’re able to say, yes, sure, we’ll integrate EFD files. Because what we’re just trying to do is making it easy.

We don’t want the retailer to have to change their whole program to integrate. We think that’s a pretty big mistake to do that. So, for us, it doesn’t matter if a huge part of your business is EFD files. We’ll take that and run with it. So there’s a lot of that where it’s just, “how do we make this as easy as possible for the retailers?” And, yeah, we’re excited about it.

Harper Reed, CEO, Modest
Harper Reed is a hacker/engineer who builds paradigm-shifting tech and leads others to do the same. Harper loves using the enormity of the Internet to bring people together, whether as CTO of Obama for America, CTO at Threadless.com, or on his own projects. Harper and his team created Dashboard, a site that connects volunteer teams and acts as an online component of the field office. You can often find Harper playing with new technology, looking for something to hack, or enjoying life in Chicago with his amazing wife, Hiromi.