The world of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands isn’t the same as the world of traditional businesses. Doing more with less is the name of the game. To build a D2C brand that will still be growing five years from now, you need to do more and do it for less.
- You need to deliver better customer experiences without increasing costs.
- You must scale operations while maintaining quality.
- You have to innovate products faster without expanding your team.
This isn’t groundbreaking insight by any means. Every D2C founder knows this challenge intimately. Savvy founders also understand that they need to maximize efficiency instead of burning. Yet many struggle to do so. Why? The culprit is often “clutter.”
This clutter starts with technology. Many bootstrapped startups cobble together free or cheap tools and then patch the gaps with elaborate SOPs and playbooks. While this approach works initially, those small cracks can widen into major pitfalls over time. As a result, work processes become cluttered and inefficient. Your team starts losing valuable mental energy in dealing with workarounds and manual tasks. Customer experience plateaus because you’re too bogged down in day-to-day operations to innovate. Ultimately, you can’t move as quickly as the market. This is why 9 out of 10 D2C startups fizzle out.
How Does Rigid Tech Make D2C Companies Lethargic?
As a D2C brand, you know one thing for certain: you are creating something that didn’t exist before. Whether it’s your product, how you deliver it, the price at which you sell it profitably, or the service after the sale, you are breaking new ground. To support a company doing what hasn’t been done before, you need tech that evolves with you.
Rigid tech, however, is the opposite; everything is hard-coded. Even if it’s not hard-coded, customization is expensive (and you can’t expect it to be done repeatedly). Contrast it to the design of D2C company’s operational model. A D2C business has to quickly respond to customer needs, which are never static. So, how can the right technology be the right choice for any D2C company? The common approaches chosen by founders and CTOs in D2C startups fall short.
- Some founders try to build their own tech. However, it’s one thing to be great at sales and another to build a sales CRM. Invariably, founders realize that building in-house tech is more complex than anticipated.
- Others convince themselves that ordinary tech is sufficient. They feel the product and marketing are the superstars of the company, and tech does not have a big role to play. However, they soon find that rigid and patchwork tech becomes a chain around their agile business. It slows everything down, it stifles work, and it binds the company in red tape.
Instead, as a D2C leader, you should trust the same first principle thinking that motivated you to start your company.
- What are you truly in the market for?
- What is the most meaningful work?
- Which KPIs accurately measure that work?
- What processes should exist for optimal work?
- How do you streamline these processes?
- How do you keep your team motivated?
- How do you identify top performers and value leaks?
- How do you address these leaks?
Of course, you won’t know the answers. You’ll discover them along the way. That is exactly why you can’t start with complex technology that dictates how everyone works. Instead, you need adaptable tech that moulds to your business. That’s where Low-Code comes in. Whether it’s an overall ERP system or a purpose-specific solution like a service CRM, Low-Code is the right choice for D2C brands.
How Does Low-Code Let You Do More with Less?
D2C challenges the settled norms of business. It rejects outdated rules and “best practices” in favour of responding to real-world forces. The same philosophy applies to Low-Code tech. This is not about coding apps line by line. It’s not even about building customizable tech for specific processes (because in D2C, today’s processes evolve every week, so a one-time customization will soon become outdated).
Instead, Low-Code tech makes technology usable for anyone with basic computer knowledge. All they need to do is think in terms of their work, not programming. This approach turns everyone into a developer, and they don’t need to know how to code. This democratization of tech is the true strength of Low-Code platforms. It means everyone can shape the tech they use in a way that makes sense for their work. This is possible through components like workflow builders, WYSIWYG application builders, easy integration setups, and ready-made templates that can be easily tweaked.
The immediate effect is significant:
- What used to take ten weeks now takes one week.
- What required budgets that finance would never approve now cost a quarter of that.
- IT departments, previously groaning under the pressure of high-priority issues, now have time to solve critical IT problems that can be game-changers.
In this way, everyone in the company starts thinking about how to make their work easier and faster. Instead of ticking process checklist boxes, they can think about how to make errors impossible, what information they need to make accurate decisions, and how to free up brainpower for big-picture thinking.
They ask questions like:
- Why am I doing what I am doing?
- What’s a better way to achieve the same outcome?
- How do I make the customer feel special without doing anything extraordinary?
Low-Code empowers everyone to answer these questions by shaping tech to fit their needs. It lets you do more with less in the truest sense of the phrase.
Why Is Amoga’s Low-Code Platform Right for You?
These are the kinds of questions that excited us when we set out to build Amoga. Today, it is a platform that D2C companies love. Finally, there is a tech stack that speaks the language of the real world. Our tech adapts to the shape of your business, not the other way around.
Amoga’s Low-Code platform allows you to do more with less. It empowers you to create and adapt solutions quickly, without needing extensive coding knowledge. This means you can respond to market changes swiftly.
If you want to know more about how we have helped D2C companies achieve this, book a no-obligation conversation with us. Discover how Amoga can help you streamline your processes, reduce costs, and stay ahead in the fast-paced D2C market.
