Rick Ton (00:00)
to put it in a numbers perspective, that app, within a ⁓ short period of time, grew from 0 % of revenue starting from scratch. And then now it's 1 third of all transactions, or roughly about $30 billion once that feature.

Dennis (00:18)
Hey everyone. My name is Dennis Mink. I'm here today with Rick Ton and this is a new podcast that we're just launching called Just One Thing where we sit down with a very accomplished senior growth marketer to hear one story, something that they've done that was so meaningful or so impactful in their career or in their job or in growth that it's worth sharing. So Rick, thanks for joining me. Yeah.

Rick Ton (00:40)
to be here.

Dennis (00:41)
And ⁓ maybe just before we get into your story, tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Rick Ton (00:46)
Yeah, my name is Rick Tan. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm actually from Chicago and I've had a few stays in different places, Romania, Bulgaria, Baltimore, Austin. So I'm kind of a traveler in the sense of that I pick up and go every few years, but I've been here for about eight years.

Dennis (01:02)
And where in the Bay Area do you live?

Rick Ton (01:05)
San Mateo, so just south of the airport for those of those who don't know from over there the area.

Dennis (01:08)
Yeah.

It's a of good Japanese food in San Mateo.

Rick Ton (01:12)
Yeah, it's good. like, low-key, like, ⁓ Chinese food's, like, rising here, so I do that. But my favorite restaurant here is a restaurant called Daeho. It's a kalbijum, and they, like, toast the cheese on top.

That's like my ultimate comfort food. I literally like they get a they have like a portion for two But I usually try to sit there and eat that for myself But it's like a big scolding pot of like short rib stew and it's spicy and it's cheesy and chewy It's something I try to get whenever I feel like I need to add a few pounds on

Dennis (01:44)
It's a Chinese restaurant? What is it? Korean, Daeho. Daeho. Okay, okay. Sounds good. I'll be up there soon enough. Daeho. Sounds good. Good tip. And then maybe like tell us a little bit about your background.

Rick Ton (01:46)
No, it's a Korean. Korean, it's called Daegu. Yeah, highly recommended.

go.

Yeah, so like I said, I grew up in Chicago. I was a computer science major. I actually started working in the field in my sophomore, junior year. I was a back end developer. And then I started working for a small startup. I transitioned over to the marketing side when they said, hey,

We need someone who understands the product to go talk to customers and activate our product. And we think it should be you. And back then, super green to the space. But from there, I just kind of stayed in the marketing growth space, kind of swap in between agencies and client side. But really what I focus on is growing, like businesses doing the right thing for long-term benefits as opposed to just short-term pops.

Dennis (02:39)
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I haven't met too many people that started like within like computer engineering and moved to marketing. Maybe more finance moving into performance, but computer engineering a lot less so.

Rick Ton (02:47)
Yeah, this was a...

I wouldn't say was the best engineer. I did back end and I did quality assurance too. I learned early on in my career that I probably wasn't going be a rock star there.

Dennis (03:01)
But no formal training in marketing, no studying, no...

Rick Ton (03:05)
No, no, it's all intuition and you know, you take your bumps and bruises along the way. there'd be, you know, for me, I just like to have structure and try to drive towards a goal. I always understood like the business side of it really, really well, like why you do something. So, you know, I would work on larger campaigns, you know, launch products. And it's like, well, how much money we make from this? And it's usually on the creative side, it's like the last thing people are thinking of. They think about how beautiful it is, but there's always like a structure I think about, well, why would I do this unless it's going to

that provides numerical value for a business.

Dennis (03:36)
Yeah, that's like a, that's a real performance marketing mindset for sure. Yeah.

Rick Ton (03:40)
Yeah,

maybe it's the cheapness in me. Where if I was paying for this for myself, then I would just be more thoughtful around how I'd spend the money.

Dennis (03:46)
Yeah, yeah, it's good mentality. That's a good like a small business, small business owner mentality too.

Rick Ton (03:52)
Yeah, but most of my experience is at large enterprises, know, the Walmarts, the Metas, the Walgreens, Under Armour is the world.

Dennis (03:59)
Yeah. So, so speaking of which, ⁓ I know we met last week. I heard a little bit about the story that you're going to tell today, but ⁓ maybe let's, let's get into it. Maybe give a little bit of get provided, maybe perhaps a little bit of context or background to it.

Rick Ton (04:13)
Yeah, so at one point in my career, worked at Walmart Sam's Club. And I joined Sam's Club at a point where they're facing pretty flat sales growth, mostly through e-commerce. Their e-commerce business was just emerging. They had hired a dot-com CEO.

who's a leader in industry is now for a publicly traded company. Within the wholesale category, their competitors are BJs and Costco. Costco is a great business, amazing product, amazing value, amazing service. one of the challenges that Samsung Club faces, one, they were having these issues with slow sales growth, but also they have a very viable competitor and also they share parking lots with Walmart. So your direct competitor is like the largest public traded

a publicly traded company in the world. So where we decided to focus on is how do you actually be better or at least be competitive and we started to focus on convenience. And through this lens, one of the efforts that I'm proud to say I've worked on is a product called Scan and Go.

Dennis (05:09)
Scan and go. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Ton (05:10)
Yeah, it's a feature within

the Sam's Club app, but it was born out of a hackathon that the team was essentially curating on. meant to be like a pocket self-register so you can help self-checkout. One of the unique things about a wholesale model is that they have these executors.

because you don't bag your groceries. They're usually these giant boxes and they sort through it. So it's actually the smartest move in the sense that ⁓ you can get people through the registers pretty quickly or in and out of the club pretty quickly.

Dennis (05:38)
And so, can you explain how works? How Scan and Go works?

Rick Ton (05:43)
Yeah,

so you download the Sam's Club app, toggle over to the Scan-to-Go feature. ⁓ Obviously, you to be registered, so you sign in. Just scan items in the club, and then you hit complete, and you purchase the items, and then you get a full receipt that you can just show the person, the executor. So you kind of bypass all the lines, and for those of you who've gone to Costco on a weekend or Sam's Club weekend, it's quite crowded. It also helps people kind of control spending, and when you think about those formats, people tend to over-shop.

So it's helpful for one, like getting you in and out quickly, not interacting with people, but also helps you save time.

Dennis (06:18)
Yeah,

so it's really meant to be a convenience feature for Sam's Club shoppers. Right. And what was the... what... so you... and you said this was born... the idea was born out of a hackathon.

Rick Ton (06:23)
Yes.

Yeah, there's a two-person engineering team who built it. They came with the idea, they launched it, and then it transitioned over to like a go-to-market team who was really focused on stabilizing, commercializing, rolling it out broadly. There were some lofty goals that were set up in place to get to 10%, 20%, 30 % adoption, but there was a tough road to get there.

Dennis (06:50)
So what was, tell me a bit about what your involvement was. Sounds like you were part of the go-to-market team.

Rick Ton (06:58)
Yeah, was on the founding team. Early on, we were just trying to launch, bring it to select areas. We had different coverage areas, about 30 stores. what we were trying to do is get viability of product, understand some of the product issues, because there was a lot of issues with stabilization, full catalog. I would try to drive a lot of ASO, because we were balancing two apps at the time. Because it wasn't nationwide, we actually had to have a separate app for it.

We had to do a lot of cross app promotion, tons of UA, lots of signage in store, PR. We had to manage like stakeholders on the board and leadership because everyone thought it was an awesome opportunity to drive digital acquisition and just improve customer experience as a whole.

Dennis (07:32)
So that you read, I mean, for initiative like this, imagine there was a lot of top down support. Yeah.

Rick Ton (07:37)
tons. Yeah, there was a lot of

leadership, C-level, VP level who had interest in it because they saw the opportunity to one, like free up traffic in the store, potentially have more store space, but also improve labor efficiencies as well. You know, they actually do now have ⁓ full Scan-and-go only stores. They have the Sam's Club now in Dallas, which you don't have any cashiers, and there's another one around the Dallas area as well.

Dennis (08:00)
Yeah, interesting. So what is it about this story that you wanted to share?

Rick Ton (08:08)
Well, one, I think for the audience,

Sam's Club was $60 billion at the time, now they're $90 billion in sales. oftentimes, people think that innovation can happen in big settings like that. And just to put it in a numbers perspective, that app, within a ⁓ short period of time, I'm about four or five years, grew from 0 % of revenue starting from scratch. And then now it's 1 third of all transactions, or roughly about $30 billion once that feature.

The

scale of which it operates at is quite huge. But also there's a lot of lessons to be learned. When you think about scaling either for a small company or large company, how do you break down these populations and cohorts? As an example, when you launch a feature like that, it makes sense a lot as long as there's good product marketing. For some people, especially the early adopters, you'll get that first nudge.

but after that it becomes different and different. And I always say that Midwest represents like the heart, but also the most difficult audiences to be able to drive adoption. If you look at the coast, like, you know, have friends, I grew up in Chicago, right outside of Chicago. you know, I asked him, was like, hey, do you guys know what Chat TV is? This is like a year ago.

And they're like, no, I don't know what it is. And in the Valley and in the coast, everyone's talking about it as like, hey, this is gonna replace jobs. This is gonna 10X me. But back home, a lot of people are using it. So I was like, oh, I have time. And fast forward now, people I know that I grew up with in low income areas, they're like, oh yeah, I've downloaded the app, but I just use it to replace Google. But a lot of people I know who are SamSchool members are like, yeah, I love the app. I love those features.

Dennis (09:19)
Yeah.

Rick Ton (09:31)
but it took a long, tough road to be able to break through those audiences. But also the amplifier effects it had for the company. When I first joined Sam's Club, they had like 40,000 users for the app, and now there's well over 15 to 18 million. So the amount of opportunity it has to not only help out with the ship to home or pick up business, it's tremendous. So it does have app client factors.

Dennis (09:51)
And tell me a little bit more, like what were some aspects of this that you worked on? You mentioned ASO, but what are some other aspects of the project that you worked on?

Rick Ton (09:59)
Yeah, so we were trying to get all the items online. and we also did a bunch of different things to build a catalog. User acquisition was the hardest for like the second cohort. So, you know, early on we had issues with stability, which obviously had a great engineering team, great product team, we were focused on that. Adding items to the catalog, because initially we didn't have things like weighted items. You know, if you go to like a Costco or a Sam's Club, there's a ton of like steaks and...

ground beef that's sold, but it's not the same price for everything. So you had to take a variable price items. There's also gas and a few other categories that were things. So we basically had the full store, about 50 % of the items were eligible for sale, which creates a bad experience. So imagine you're filling up your cart, you're trying to check out, and then half the items can't be purchased. You're just gonna try it from that experience. But at the same time, you had to introduce to someone who may not be familiar with how to download an app, how to download an app.

So we would have literally people standing there line busting, giving out free samples of food to be able to break their time, break their visual planes. We would have like tear away cards that associates would give them. I would go constantly to like the Dallas and Vegas regions to run experiments to figure out which experiences will help drive.

velocity and you know, we even had issues where we use scent like we'd pipe in rotisserie chicken or apple pie just to try to draw people into like a stand. I actually would put some people on my team in like costumes like superhero costumes just to like really throw them off because we had to break through. We had to find the most ridiculous things that try to break through for these populations as we were doing it because we had these this goal from leadership to get the 30 % adoption. This is when we were saying 5%.

And we couldn't see a happy path. We couldn't just spend our way there. We were doing tons of UA with everyone. We were trying to manage rank. We were doing cross promotion. the cost per incremental user to get to 30 % was like, you're talking about 15 million people-ish, was crazy high.

Dennis (11:48)
We're

talking about getting like the base of 40, like 30 % of the base of 40,000 installs to adopt it or, or like the full members get 30 % of the entire membership base to download and start using the app and scan and go being like the primary driver, the primary use case.

Rick Ton (11:54)
No. The full map interface. Yeah.

Yep, for the trendsetter.

Yeah, that's a halo feature. you know, and when you think about the 30th, it's right now the numbers roughly are on 30 % as they're public report. So they're basically saying if there's, you know, 10 people who go in the store and make a purchase, 3.3 of those will be using the Scanning Go app to pay. That's basically like credit card. Yeah, it's huge.

Dennis (12:23)
Yeah, that's phenomenal. Yeah, I didn't

realize that that's how Scan and Go works. I was thinking it's more like you're scanning, you know, maybe QR codes or scanning labels in order to like, maybe you're, you know, getting a discount or something, you know, when you go and check out. But to actually be able to just scan and then self-check out, that sounds so convenient.

How does the and then how does the so you go and you just something I'm just sort of curious as like a as a consumer So I go I put a bunch of stuff in my cart. I'm scanning everything I purchase I Pick up boxes on the way out

Rick Ton (12:50)
Yeah.

You can pick up boxes, yeah. The boxes are always self-serve for the wholesale models. It's not everyone needs them, most of them, there's no bags at wholesale. So you can just grab a bunch of boxes, ⁓ most people do, but they're always sitting at the front by the vetsers.

Dennis (13:10)
Yeah.

How long of a project, like how long of a period of time did you work on this project?

Rick Ton (13:19)
We broke up in chunks, so we set up by phases and by years and goals. you know, the ultimate grail for us was getting to like where we can actually have people purchase fuel at the fuel stations for it, because that was a difficult transaction. So we had to break it up in things, chunks, and it ended up being about a three-year project. And there's still, there's still major emphasis for it because it does amplify the rest of the business. It makes it more efficient. So they've since made it a lot more phases.

Dennis (13:43)
And was this a three year project for you as well?

Rick Ton (13:47)
I was there from its inception to the point we got to about 30 % and then I exited the organization.

Dennis (13:50)
Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. And what was your, were you part of a team? Were you managing a team? Like what area of this were you responsible for? Was it purely the acquisition side? Because it sounds like you had played a hand in a variety of areas.

Rick Ton (14:05)
Yeah, so I was on the product marketing team, so I was responsible for messaging, branding, know, GTM. Then I was on the performance side where I oversaw the performance aspect, which is obviously mostly UA, cross funnel, worked very closely with the CRM team, retention team, to build retention. And then I oversaw behavioral science within the organization, so we've run a lot of field experiments and partnered very closely with product and operations to execute rollout.

Dennis (14:27)
Yeah, that's actually pretty impressive that they operate in a way that they would allow you to play in a number of areas on this. That sounds very entrepreneurial.

Rick Ton (14:38)
It was, I would say. I felt very blessed because in most organizations you kind of have like a job in a silo and you just have to deliver that. I would say the one thing I really liked about Sam's Club, which kept me there, they gave me lot of autonomy to just go pursue things that made sense and I was really blessed to have done that because there was a, Scan and Go, there's a bunch of things I was able to do that in normal settings, like they would say, oh, that's not outside of your scope of your role.

Dennis (15:01)
Yeah. How does that, how does that, because I know that you're, you're exploring opportunities right now. Like how does that kind of shape your, your thinking or your mentality around like, how do you, how, you want to spend your time? You know, what, what, you know, how do you envision your career? Like what kind of influence did that have in your thinking?

Rick Ton (15:18)
⁓

Pretty significant. So for me, I've always been good at driving a number just growth and you know You have the paid aspect which is one lever and you know, my career spent billions of dollars, you know driving different goals But I always took a different approach it you know, for instance I instead of just focusing on ROAS I'd focus on like long-term aspects and long-term health. So like Acquiring someone first time I know that there's gonna be causal things towards I get someone to shop online for the first time They're gonna have X amount of purchases per year. So I'd focus on these aspects

And the thing I really like about what I'm thinking about the future, I really want to be an organization of culture where I'm shaping the future of the company. Not to say there's direct correlation, but I left the company, Sam's Company, they were 60 billion, now they're 90 billion. So I could say I had a hand in that from the projects I do, or I could take all credit for it. Maybe I'll do that. There's a lot of people there.

Dennis (16:04)
Sure.

Man, you single-handedly generated 30 billion dollars for Sam's Club. Amazing. Yeah, yeah. Have you ever thought about maybe like starting your own thing, building your own business?

Rick Ton (16:10)
There's no royalty checks, let's just put it that way.

Uh, yeah, maybe at some point, you know, I would have to have some conviction around what I can do and what I could drive. Um, I've talked about it with my wife, but at this point we're, kind of looking, I am advising a lot of startups right now. I'm supporting nonprofit and, um, obviously talking to companies about, you know, what's next and where I could be a fit. Um, I have looked at it, but maybe later, uh, there's some like things that I want to do first, uh, for public or private companies and, uh, eventually I'll kind of get there.

Dennis (16:47)
Super interesting, You had an opportunity. It sounds like a very rare opportunity. Absolutely. I mean, to be able to have this opportunity in such a large organization, you just don't really hear stories like that. Small, of course, jump in, you know, a lot of opportunity. But yeah, I think it sounds like you were in a very unique position, and it sounds like you got a lot out of it, and learned a lot, and I'd have to imagine that it absolutely would be shaping your thinking about your career moving forward.

Rick Ton (17:12)
Yeah, I think for me, I was really energized in that period of time. Because you have just a common goal amongst teams. You can just kind of be open. We had worked very closely with various senior leaders. It's like, all right, well, if you want to be part of this effort, you have to also do IC work. if you want to just, we didn't need people just to say, hey, increase the goal. We would hear that every once in while from leaders. That's not really helpful. How do you actually make it easier? What are the key challenges?

Hey, do better. Yeah.

Dennis (17:37)
Yeah, or just like stay in your lane. Yeah,

cool man. Well, I appreciate you coming online and sharing your story with me. So Sam's Club, Scanigo, sounds great. Yeah, congratulations.

Rick Ton (17:47)
I downloaded the app.

If I had an affiliate link, I'd tell you to use that, but I don't. But I'll send my demo, I'm joking.

Dennis (17:54)
Yeah, exactly. How could people send you money? What's your bad luck? Yeah.

Rick Ton (17:57)
Yeah, LinkedIn, you know, I also have my personal

site, ricton.me.

Dennis (18:01)
Great, yeah, actually, yes, if people wanna follow you or get in touch with you. So LinkedIn is the way to find you? So, cool, Matt, appreciate the time.

Rick Ton (18:07)
Yes, best way

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