We recently connected with Claire Stepanek and have shared our conversation below.
Claire, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
This was one of the most fun parts of my journey! I had come up with the idea for ergo after years of leading price negotiations at Apple and seeing what worked and what didn’t. But to actually turn it into a product, I then flew out to San Francisco to meet up with our first hire, Jenna, who is our Director of Product. We spent two days using colored paper to map out the retailer flow and the shopper flow within our app. Each piece of paper represented a click, and our goal was to make the simplest, most easy-to-use app, so we wanted to use the least amount of paper. Our colored charts took over the entire floor of Jenna’s apartment, but we had gone from an idea to a real product in just two days!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
For some background on me, my favorite subject in school was always math, and then in college, I studied math, economics, and neuroscience. When I was recruited by Apple to join their Supply Chain Team, I was suddenly leading negotiations and loving it, and I realized that price negotiations are exactly where math, neuroscience, and economics all come together. I’ve been fascinated by pricing ever since. When I founded ergo, my goal was to share the price negotiation knowledge I had learned at Apple with the world and give everyone the ability to negotiate. With the ergo app, retailers can add a ”Make an offer with ergo” button to their product pages, so that shoppers who want the product but find it just out of budget can propose a price. Essentially, retailers can put items on sale and clear inventory without having to actually announce a sale. It’s a win-win, the best negotiation outcome!
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
At ergo, our relationship with the retailers using our app is a top priority. Our initial users have been so generous with their time and expertise, providing feedback on the app experience and giving us ideas for what to add. And I hope that they can see how much their feedback matters to our team, since we implement their ideas in new product features all the time!
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
I learned so much about being a manager when the pandemic hit. Everyone had so many unique circumstances and so many things going on, I realized that the best way to manage a team was to be flexible. And I’ve found that the teams I manage appreciate that and in turn, produce great results and are really excited to be part of the team!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ergooffers.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ergooffers/
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/claire-stepanek
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Claire_Stepanek
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ergooffers