Renato Mota: Co-Founder & COO of Napps

^{Joe Fox (00:00.926)}
Hey everyone, thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Retain Grow Thrive, the Growave podcast. I'm your host and the President at Growave, Joe Fox. Today I'm joined by one of our newest integration partners, one of our tech partners. I'm very excited for this conversation. We've been doing some really, really cool work together. We have a ton of shared merchants. We've got a lot of great opportunities. And I'm also a little bit jealous of our CEO.

who was able to catch up in person with Renato and the NAPPS team over at the Shopify event in Portugal recently. Very jealous. I love Portugal. I love Portuguese people. Renato is no exception. Please welcome Renato from NAPPS. How you doing, man? It's good to see you.

_{Renato Mota (00:50.382)}
First of all, thank you two for having me here. For a while we talked about doing the podcast, starting to record our conversations that are always amazing and thanks for that. And it's great to be here and yeah, you should come in the next event for sure. You need to come to Portugal. If not, I will come to you. So that's something that we need to do.

^{Joe Fox (01:11.05)}
Absolutely. We can always do both. can always do both. No, absolutely. mean, you know, I'm very excited for this. You and I kind of started this conversation probably six months ago now. I think it may be, yeah, about six months ago. I really

_{Renato Mota (01:29.996)}
Yeah, almost.

^{Joe Fox (01:35.195)}
Love what you're doing with the NAPPS technology. I really love your energy as a founder. I think you're an incredible person who's operating in this ecosystem and in the Shopify ecosystem. And I'm very excited because I feel you're relatively early in the journey of NAPPS. And I know the journey for NAPPS is gonna be incredibly large based purely upon how good the product is. But for the audience who are watching,

This is a Renato, I know we've discussed this, but a lot of our agency partners will be watching this. lot of Growave's customers will be watching this. So I think it's a really good opportunity to introduce NAPPS to that wider kind of Growave ecosystem. Do you want to tell the audience a little bit about what NAPPS does? I mean, I could do it, but I always love hearing the founder, you know, give their pitch.

_{Renato Mota (02:30.412)}
Yeah.

Now, yeah, of course, NAPPS is a mobile app builder. Okay, so we create, we transform all the Shopify store into a native mobile app. Okay, we synchronize with everything, customers, orders, products, all the metaphills, meta objects, all that stuff is synchronized. So any change on Shopify will change on the mobile app, but the front end is native. So it's not like a web or some components that are web. No, it's all native. We do every everything on our side as well as the integration with Growave so all the screens are native so what we are creating is like a retention tool for the users trying to bring all the social media experience like Instagram stories we have a product component with the Instagram stories to show more videos we have like a TikTok-alike feature that we call drops

that have the same experience as TikTok. So people are used to this on mobile. So we are trying to bring that social media experience into the shopping on a native mobile app for each brand. So every brand will be able to connect with the user phone on his pocket with a push notification and then the user will have like a great experience.

as they have on a social media what they are used to. So that's our vision to try to increase retention through a great mobile shopping experience.

^{Joe Fox (04:07.881)}
I love that. And I think it's, you know, so crucial. And I'm not sure if we've discussed this, but I, in my, you know, kind of prior life before jumping into the SaaS world, I worked, uh, agency and I have my own agency and I scaled and sold it in Australia. And one of the biggest, you know, trends that I saw back, we're talking like 20, 2013 sort of 2012 was this huge, um,

influx towards mobile, right? So it was like, and during that period, everything was focused around reshifting ad spend, whether it be on back then it was Facebook, but meta now, and then Google ads and everything like that, and really shaping everything to focus more towards mobile. And I think mobile is more prevalent than ever now, you know, particularly with all of the the way

_{Renato Mota (04:49.39)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (05:04.39)}
the exact audiences that you mentioned on the social platforms that you mentioned. This is how, you know, that generation is consuming content. And that is how this generation and that generation is purchasing and they're right at the point of purchase. And I think that incredible experience that you, that you have built with NAPPS and that you are continuing to build upon, makes so much sense for so many brands. I think, sorry.

_{Renato Mota (05:30.799)}
And I keep, sorry for interrupting you. No, but I was just add one thing that there are more and more brands right now than the number of brands are growing so much that each one needs to have like a very good experience for the users to grab them. And I think that it's the why the brand should have the mobile app.

^{Joe Fox (05:36.687)}
No, no, no, it's okay, Renata, I was just gonna say.

_{Renato Mota (05:56.975)}
and put the mobile app into the strategy is just to try to have like, and all our features are focused or think to be easier for brands to like create this different experience for the users. That is what you are saying. The mobile is with everyone and this particular thing on all the brands that are on e-commerce like or doing e-commerce need to create this experience with the customer. It's just not just

buying from an ad or buying from it's creating like a relationship with the customer.

^{Joe Fox (06:33.305)}
Absolutely. I think, you know, to that point I was making earlier, like being there and in someone's pocket and in a place where people want to come back and engage with the brand based upon that experience is so powerful. And from a loyalty and a retention perspective, you know, speaking from a grow wave perspective, and hence why we were so keen and everything to get this integration.

underway and the success we're seeing with some merchants now. It's just such a great way to be able to encourage loyalty and really getting people to become not just shoppers, but creating such a good experience that they really become brand advocates and they're really engaged from a loyalty perspective. So absolutely love that. And I think the other thing that I, you know, kind of want to dive into

now because it makes a lot of sense. And I know a lot of people watching this are probably thinking, that's cool. There's obviously, you know, other vendors in the space, but I think the features that you're mentioning are so unique and so sticky. It's really cool. But the other thing that we aligned on and we align on is the pricing and the pricing model. And I think that's really cool. What you've done there, Renato, with the team around

the pricing model and the way that you make this accessible and affordable for all brands to access. So do you want to dive into a little bit around that?

_{Renato Mota (08:10.414)}
Yeah, I can because one of the things that we heard when we start this maybe we connect with the wrong people but they told some things to us that was like, okay, we need to try to explore this and was like, you guys are like creating a mobile app builder but the apps fever was like into 2016 you are too late and you don't see any brand with the mobile app. I don't know what you guys are doing and for us

was like yeah man no one has a mobile app because a mobile app costs like 100k so for brand to think about creating a mobile app with an agency or internally was like okay I need to create iOS I need to create Android I need to test if I want to change any feature I need to test it again so it's very hard for brands to do it and what we are doing is we do

that for ourselves and we want to scale these to globally and we can get have a good price and regarding our plans what we did was we will offer for 100 euros monthly the first plan and on the first plan you can have a very good mobile app with almost everything but you need to work a little bit more in terms of changing things and automations

Then when you start growing or you have more collections, you more users and all the stuff that is growing, it's going to make you increase on the pricing plans, okay, from 100 to 300, 500 and then 1000. But 1000 is for customization. So we are talking about big enterprise brands and on the 43 plans, almost you have access to everything, okay, on our platform.

just with a little bit concerns or not concerns but a little bit limitations on video parts okay but you can have access to it so it's like with fun 500 euros you have like a full mobile experience completely different from an optimized website and that you can compete with the biggest top level brands like Nike and others like this

_{Renato Mota (10:36.845)}
So, yeah, that first words or that first sentence that someone told us about our product made this journey come to this today. So it's really amazing how a no or you are wrong can change all your path.

^{Joe Fox (10:49.391)}
Yep. Yep.

^{Joe Fox (10:56.611)}
Absolutely. And, and you know, you're, you're proving them wrong, which is the, which is the funny part about all of that. I love to, I love to hear stories like that. And I think, you know, it's, it's really cool working with you and working with the team and seeing the product teams work together. I really liked the culture and everything that you're building, you know, at NAPPS as well. I think it's a very, very positive, very helpful, very,

_{Renato Mota (11:01.111)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (11:26.745)}
community focused culture that you're building over there, Renato. So I love that. I like to do this with particularly with tech founders, because I think it's a really good opportunity for people who are watching, for example, it might be an e-commerce customer to just kind of, you know,

_{Renato Mota (11:32.569)}
Thank you so much.

^{Joe Fox (11:53.378)}
What is, okay, so when you came up with the concept of NAPPS, when you went from idea to creation, so ideation to creation, what was the main driving sort of thoughts? You touched on a couple of things about creating that experience for a customer, but what was the sort of, I guess, the sticking point of what you wanted to make happen for merchants?

_{Renato Mota (12:20.387)}
Yeah, at the beginning what we... We are like in our team, on our founding team, me and Nuno, we are very picky with... We are not perfectionists, but we are very picky with a lot of things. So for us, like the best optimized mobile website have not the good experience to spend time on it. Okay. And...

^{Joe Fox (12:44.343)}
Yes, yeah.

_{Renato Mota (12:45.227)}
when we start we focus a lot on that on trying to have okay we will win for the experience maybe no one can like at the beginning feel the same as us but after you start using the app you will notice the difference between a website a mobile website because one of our biggest competitors it's like this mobile first thing that everyone talks about it today and that's

Because 80 % of the mobile portions are on mobile. So that's normal. And what we try to do is, okay, let's bring like an high value experience on those people that are buying for mobile and try to give the best performance we can. Like no peaky and the things that are not so well because on the browser it's impossible to compete with the app experience that it's native.

And that's why we focus on native mobile apps and not on web apps, for example, because you can have like all the push notifications and be close to the customer with a web app. But you don't have like this performance thing that will make the experience different. And those kinds of Instagram stories and TikToks would be impossible if we went for the... No, you can do it, but it's not the same experience if you do it and build it native.

and was like our main focus when we started with the mobile apps to try to bring this amazing experience that you have on apps, on native apps that you cannot have on the browser.

^{Joe Fox (14:26.977)}
I love that. you know, so it's almost as though you felt it was an unknown from a, not just from a gap in the market, but you've you felt that it was something that needed to be built out of necessity, essentially, because there wasn't anything that was providing that.

_{Renato Mota (14:46.595)}
Yeah, yeah, we are not like the typical founders that you see, okay, there is no one doing this and we have this crazy idea. Let's try to fight about this, like creating some categories on Shopify or creating some new products that are changing the world. No, you have like a common product as when you see, okay, what do you guys are doing? Mobile apps, okay, mobile apps have like a lot of years, but

for e-commerce, specifically for retailers like fashion industry, cosmetics. We have like a very, very, very great product in terms of experience to retain. When we started talking with you guys with Grow Wave was amazing because we were like looking into a loyalty program because it's perfect for the retention. And we thought to create our loyalty program, but...

was like, okay, we will not build two different businesses, not products, but businesses. So we need to find the right partner. And we are very happy to work with you and with all the Growave team. And it's amazing to see how the discord with both teams works. But we talk about this later, but was like to create this experience. Okay. And our main focus was to bring this. Okay. We are creating a product that everyone knows.

^{Joe Fox (16:02.518)}
Yeah.

_{Renato Mota (16:14.095)}
We are entering on a market that already has some players there but we will do it differently because we are very picky with some details so we'll be able to create a different product a different experience in the mobile app world and after some time working on the product we were able to create some features that no one has like the drops and all that kind of stuff

^{Joe Fox (16:41.462)}
Yeah, I love that. And I think that laser focus of what you were trying to build has just paid off. And I think that's why you've been able to grow and essentially scale so quickly. And I think that you're going to continue to experience this, you know, hockey stick level of growth, which is amazing and all credit to you and you guys deserve it. Tell me a little bit about

how, what were you doing prior to this Renato? What was your, what was life like before Napps?

_{Renato Mota (17:16.111)}
Before NAPPS, I worked as the biggest retailer in Portugal, it's a grocery one with a lot of stores and I was a simple stock manager from different types of products and I worked... It was good because I learned to be on the retailer part and that's why...

^{Joe Fox (17:42.837)}
Yes. Yeah.

_{Renato Mota (17:43.184)}
This helps to create a product because I was on the other side. I know the business. I know more. That is not only e-commerce, just the online. I know the stores. know all the logistic part and this helps to create the product. But I didn't know anything about technology. I can use the laptop and that was it at that time.

^{Joe Fox (17:48.865)}
Exactly. Yep. Yep.

_{Renato Mota (18:12.847)}
Right now I'm the connection in apps between the sales and the product. And I bring all the feedback and all the stuff. I'm to the guy that tests everything. I love to test because I want the perfection on the experience. But it was like a big change for me to go from like a management team.

like a normal guy starting his career, like going to try, try to go with on the commercial part and change to a tech founder and knowing nothing about gold. Right now I can't go, but I can read gold, all this product structure. know everything. So it's amazing how your life can change when you start doing something by yourself.

^{Joe Fox (19:09.961)}
Absolutely. and absolutely. And doing something you love and something you're passionate about. And I think that really shines through in everything that you're doing, which I love. I love that perspective too. It's like understanding that retailer perspective, understanding that retailer mindset is so powerful for shaping product. And I really love the fact that you're so hands on in.

_{Renato Mota (19:10.285)}
with a team of course but...

^{Joe Fox (19:36.458)}
getting in and getting that product feedback and understanding it and that level of perfection. So that's awesome. That's, that's really, really cool. I want to chat a little bit too. I think I really liked a couple of the points that you were making earlier around looking at this from a business perspective and saying, Hey, you know, obviously I selfishly love it because we have this partnership in place that I like, but from a

From a business perspective, I think that's very interesting. And I think a lot of potential future founders who are watching this or even existing founders can learn this little bit of wisdom that you mentioned. It's like, we don't want to do X, Y and Z or we don't want to do loyalty. There's plenty of companies out there doing loyalty. We want to stay in our lane and focus on this.

and partner with the right partners. And I think that that is such a really powerful sentence that you said Renato, because that sums up good partnerships in a, in a very simple, short business format, which I love. So that was great. Okay. Moving on now, I really want to talk about what it would look like for the customers of grow waves that are

watching this and saying, hey, I want this experience for my customers. How do I get NAPPS up and running? How do I get my own app? How do I take advantage of this? Talk, talk the viewers through Renato, what the process looks like from a customer perspective of NAPPS.

_{Renato Mota (21:21.837)}
Yeah, so we are like a new sales channel for the brands. So we know that launching a new sales channel is something that brands think a lot. So we are here to help on everything. So on the first thing, on the first meeting, we want to proceed, we want to try and see everything. We are able to create the first app layout.

the perfect desire app you want, but it's something based on your website. So currently what you are like showing a banner, some products, we will do like a first layout. And with that first layout, you are able to try and feel this experience that I'm talking about. Okay. And after that, if you want to proceed, we have like two ways to do it. The first one is launch the app on Napps accounts and we can do that immediately.

or if you want, that is the one that I recommend, to create your own account and we will launch the app on your account. You don't need to do anything until this point. And after this is when you start meeting with us, with our customer success team and start to work on your strategy, redefine some things on the layout. I personally can help you guys on this because...

We know that we have like a very big platform with a lot of details. All our product detail page is based on components with meta fields, meta objects from information that come from your Shopify. So we have like all the documentation and an Help Center with everything. But to create a good customer relationship that we love and that's why I do this personally sometimes.

because I want to have a good relationship to the customer be open to say to me, Renato, I need this, I need that. This feature is incredible, but if you change something, will work better on my brand. And those kinds of things help us to create and shape the product. I say this a lot of time, our product, it's a product, so it's not custom made for everyone, but our platform,

^{Joe Fox (23:23.314)}
Absolutely.

_{Renato Mota (23:42.838)}
is made to fit on your brand and not your brand fit on our product. Of course, it takes some time to build some features to adapt some stuff, but we are open to it and we love to receive that feedback. So for the user perspective, we will try to reduce the learning curve at the max with those meetings, helping them and trying to make

them the owners of the platform, not fighting with the platform. That's what we try to do with those meetings. So we offer the first app set up. help you with everything that is not good. That is the technological part, the send to Apple and Google be approved. Okay. So we help with everything. And after the approvals, we launch the app and we are up and running. And it's very easy.

^{Joe Fox (24:36.485)}
Love that. love that. Renato, typically, what does that timeline look like? Just out of curiosity for the audience.

_{Renato Mota (24:44.975)}
That's the hard question. It usually depends a lot on the merchant side. Because if it is on the NAPPS account, we can do it usually in less than two weeks. Because we do the app layout, we do all the stuff for the app stores and we launch...

^{Joe Fox (24:54.278)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox (25:03.387)}
Okay, perfect.

_{Renato Mota (25:11.787)}
and then forget the approval of the app which takes like three days on apple in average okay can be less can be more but in three days we have the the app good if it's on the the brand accounts it takes more time because to create the account it will need the apple approval the google approval all the validations on the account documentations and that stuff takes some time

And usually brands are not rushing to create the account, so they forgot to see the email. And it takes some time, so one month, one month and a half. But some brands that are rushing, imagine right now every brand is rushing because they are like, OK, I want to have the mobile app for Black Friday, so let's try to do it.

^{Joe Fox (25:59.803)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox (26:04.561)}
Yeah.

_{Renato Mota (26:06.573)}
So right now we can do this with on the brands accounts in like two, three weeks, but normally they take more time when they need to create the accounts.

^{Joe Fox (26:16.101)}
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And that makes a lot of sense. And that's a lot quicker than, than I sort of thought in my mind, to be honest, which is awesome. That means you're doing things very efficiently and effectively. that's, that's very cool. Renato, I know you and I could sit here and talk forever, but we do, we do have to stick to a time limit. and I look very much look forward to doing a part two of this. just lastly,

_{Renato Mota (26:36.294)}
Hahaha!

Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (26:45.11)}
I, I like to make sure two things. Where can people best stay in contact with you reach out to NAPs? Is there any offers that you would like to offer the, the, the viewers or the listeners of the podcast?

_{Renato Mota (27:02.295)}
Yes, we have like we have they can reach us through our website. We have the book demo link on a lot of places there we have intercom so they can like a chat to talk with with us they can install naps and reach us by mail by the chat that we have on our dashboard so there are a lot of places they can reach me on LinkedIn too if they find looking for Renato Mota

Napps they will find me and they can reach me through a LinkedIn message too or anyone of my team. the discount we have like a very good deal with Growave and all the people that are using Growave that we can extend for the viewers of this podcast so just reach me tell that you are coming from this podcast and we talk about that deal.

^{Joe Fox (27:37.765)}
Absolutely.

^{Joe Fox (28:00.294)}
Perfect. And I'll make sure all of the links you mentioned, including your LinkedIn are included in the show notes as well, just to make it nice and easy for everyone. Renato, thank you so much for coming on. Just before I let you go, one of the things I like to do with our guests and to talk about with our guests, because we all travel so much. Once again, I have massive FOMO that I missed out on the Porto event last month, but

Can you tell me, Renato, what is the one thing that you can't travel without?

_{Renato Mota (28:37.033)}
Oof, hard question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a hard question because I'm not like... I don't know, Because the phone, it's not a good answer because everyone goes with the phone, right, those days. So I'm not very close to things, but...

^{Joe Fox (28:38.405)}
and you can't say a person.

^{Joe Fox (28:53.017)}
Yes. Yeah.

_{Renato Mota (29:01.357)}
Yeah man, that's a very good question.

^{Joe Fox (29:01.657)}
Is it an app? Is it maybe an app? Is it music? it a lot of people, a lot of people say playlists.

_{Renato Mota (29:06.083)}
Yeah, no.

No, one thing that I can go without is with some I always travel with some podcasts on offline mode. OK, so to go listening some podcasts on like very long trips, I always have like

ten podcasts because maybe I go in the middle of one is okay I'm tired of this matter I will change and I try to listen to different podcasts not just learning podcasts but some ones that are talking about anything okay just to be listening to people experience people that travel to the most crazy places I love to hear those to hear about those kind of experience so

Yeah, it can be some digital. podcasts are a must for me on every trip.

^{Joe Fox (30:02.511)}
I love that. I love that. No, no, that's a great one. That's a great one. And I'll have to get your recommendations on some of the travel podcasts because I'm a massive traveler. Very, very big fan. That's why like to, to selfishly, I get little, you know, tips and tricks from people all over the world as to what they're doing for their travel hacks. So it's, it's, it's a, it's a good way of, it's a good way of getting podcasts recommendations, book recommendations.

_{Renato Mota (30:20.335)}
No, that's a very good job. That's that. Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (30:32.079)}
Gadget recommendations, the work. So, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's good. And I love that one. And I will definitely be asking you for some tips when we jump offline, but look, Renato, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for being an amazing founder. Thank you for the awesome partnership that grow wave and NAPPS have. Thank you for really leading that, you know, with myself and with the team, really, really grateful for that.

And just super excited for what the future holds, not just for our partnership, but really the incredible future that NAPS has ahead of it. congratulations and thank you for coming on board.

_{Renato Mota (31:12.985)}
Thank you so much and we need to do the second episode for sure. Yeah, for sure.

^{Joe Fox (31:17.418)}
Absolutely. think I try and do them. I've been, I've started booking some of the first guests in for theirs in about three months. So it'll probably work out to be around nine months, I would suggest, but we definitely will. And I know that we've got a heap of joint content coming out, some joint case studies and everything with NAPPS and Growave. So very excited for all of that to continue.

_{Renato Mota (31:41.239)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (31:46.35)}
Thank you for coming on board.

_{Renato Mota (31:47.568)}
Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Joe. It was a pleasure to be here. Do you know that? Because I already told you that I love you guys. I love your team and I love what you are doing too. So let's keep in touch. Let's keep doing our job and try to bring some good case studies on the second episode. Okay.

^{Joe Fox (32:05.783)}
Absolutely, absolutely. Renato, thank you for coming on board. Audience, thank you so much for tuning in. If you're a customer of Growave's watching this podcast, I really, really, really encourage you to go check out our NAPPS integration. Reach out to Renato, go check out the website. All of the links are below. It's an incredibly, incredibly powerful integration. We have a lot of integrations at Growave.

I can't say who all my favorites are, but I can certainly say that this integration is one of my favorites. I think it has the opportunity to really drive retention and loyalty to a whole other level. Some of the data that we're starting to see come through from existing customers is incredible. So go support some cool young founders at the cutting edge of this mobile app technology in the Shopify ecosystem. Check out NAPPS.

If you're not a customer of Growave watching this, you should be. So please check the link below for a special discount for our viewers. And thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Retain Grow Thrive. I'm very excited to say that we have got season three confirmed. We've started booking guests for that already. I think we're at sitting at around 35 to 36 recordings at the moment. So we've got some really, really cool upcoming guests.

and potentially some other sponsors of the show as well as grow wave. So super excited for that. And, you make this podcast happen. So if there's anyone you'd love to see from the Shopify ecosystem, another founder and agency, whoever it is, please feel free to comment below and let me know who that is. And we'll do our best to get them on board. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. I'll talk to you soon.