#529 - RJ Talyor - AI for eCommerce

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#529 - RJ Talyor - AI for eCommerce

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RJ Talyor is the Founder and CEO of Backstroke a AI for eCommerce generative content platform for email marketers. Instantly create on-brand, high-performing email subject lines, preview text, mobile push notifications, and SMS messages.Summary of PodcastPodcast introduction and guest backgroundGraham and Kevin introduce the Next 100 Days Podcast and welcome RJ Talyor from Indianapolis. RJ describes Indianapolis as offering the best of a big city with a small-city feel, with about a million people, great sports, culture, food, and good cost of living. He has traveled extensively but always enjoys returning home.Backstroke's AI email generation platformRJ introduces Backstroke.com, which generates performant email campaigns for e-commerce retailers selling clothes, pet food, furniture, and other products online and in-store. E-commerce brands typically expect 20-50% of revenue from email marketing while sending 3-5+ emails weekly, with customers spending 8-12 hours per campaign. Backstroke reduces this to approximately 15 minutes while personalising content so each customer receives a different message tailored to their interests and behaviour.Personalisation through data and engagement Backstroke personalises emails using multiple data layers: subscriber status, past engagement (opens, clicks, conversions), and appended third-party data revealing demographics like age, location, and gender. When additional data is unavailable, the platform uses progressive profiling—analysing engagement patterns to infer preferences. For example, if a customer consistently clicks on men's content over women's content, or prefers dark-coloured shirts over light ones, AI identifies these patterns to drive personalisation, which is more effective than manual analysis.Real-world personalisation: from negative to advocateGraham shares a personal story about Son of a Tailor, a Portuguese apparel brand, where his initial experience was poor—they sent him a shirt too short for his frame. However, the company responded exceptionally well, ultimately creating a monogrammed, high-quality shirt that transformed him into an advocate. RJ explains this is valuable data: AI can flag customers who experienced negative-to-positive journeys as potential super-fans or loyalty advocates, a pattern most marketers miss because they lack time to identify such nuanced customer experiences.AI pattern recognition beyond traditional metricsTraditional RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) models reduce customers to transactional data, but AI can extract signal from unstructured data to identify complex patterns. For instance, AI can recognize when a customer buys different sizes (suggesting purchases for others) or when multiple preferences exist within one account—like RJ's Spotify feed where his children's music preferences mix with his own. AI discerns these overlapping patterns that aren't immediately obvious to humans, enabling more sophisticated segmentation.Team expertise and company historyRJ co-founded Backstroke with his wife Allison, who holds a PhD in deep data analysis and chemical reagents, bringing statistical rigour and predictive modelling expertise. RJ's background includes starting Pattern89 in 2016, an AI company predicting Instagram and Facebook clicks using computer vision and natural language processing, which he sold to Shutterstock. Many Pattern89 team members joined Backstroke, bringing 10 years of AI-based marketing experience, while the team continuously innovates with new foundational models from Anthropic and OpenAI.Implementation results and Surge featureBackstroke achieves an average 30% uplift in conversion rates for new clients. Implementation typically takes about a month for full transformation, but recognising customer demand for faster results, the company launched "Surge," enabling campaigns to launch in 48 hours. This rapid-deployment feature demonstrates predictive capabilities quickly, satisfying customers who want immediate proof before committing to full onboarding.Email variants and human approval at scaleWhile technically capable of generating 10,000+ unique email variants, Backstroke has found that customers require human review of every variant version. Current implementations range from 60-100 variants, with combinations of hero images, subject lines, and templates creating exponential possibilities. The company is building QA agents to enable scaling to millions of variants while maintaining human oversight, recognizing that creative teams ultimately bear responsibility for brand representation.Brand guidelines versus performance metricsA fundamental tension exists between brand teams (who enforce guidelines like "models must face forward" or "only use this colour") and performance marketers (who know "shirts perform better laid on a bed than on a human"). RJ explains this is often gut-feel decision-making based on outdated tests—teams cite tests from a year ago by employees who've since ...

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