43. Made With Intent – bringing a personal touch to digital retail

Founder: David Mannheim
Founded: 2022
Website: madewithintent.ai

“In ecommerce, we’ve forgotten how to sell like humans, in favour of pushing for a quick buck,” David Mannheim tells us. “We’ve digitised the shopping process, but also made lots of things about it cold or binary.

“But people don’t work this way. Buying doesn’t work this way. So when retailers work this way, they limit the number of people who will purchase from them.”

Mannheim recognised the disconnect between business metrics and the human experience. In an industry where “personalisation” is more about commercialisation than actual human connection, he felt the person had been lost. 

So, he set about creating a platform with a mission – to help retailers understand and target customer intent, bringing a personal touch back into digital retail.

We’ve digitised the shopping process, but also made lots of things about it cold or binary. But people don’t work this way. Buying doesn’t work this way

This simple summary rather undersells the technical complexity of the Made With Intent platform. Mannheim had to develop the technology to track every micro-interaction on an ecommerce website, model it in real-time, and automatically assign weightings to each interaction using a large language model.

The code may be complex, but the logic at the heart of it is reassuringly old-school. “We do what any good salesperson would do – focus on the customers and their intent. We predict where people are on their purchase journey and treat them accordingly.”

Outside of developing the MWI platform, the biggest challenge was convincing retailers to rethink the way they approached personalisation. “The industry was stuck in a mindset of pushing for sales at every turn, assuming every visitor was ready to buy,” Mannheim says.

The industry was stuck in a mindset of pushing for sales at every turn, assuming every visitor was ready to buy

“Getting them to embrace a more intent-driven model wasn’t easy, it meant a complete shift in perspective.”

He tackled this by sparking conversation, drawing on insights from his book, The Person in Personalisation, and some 153 expert interviews he conducted to show the impact of intent-based marketing. Mannheim even launched the Statements of Intent podcast to keep spreading the word.

Of course, talk without data is a tough sell. But, early partnerships and beta tests showed how focusing on customer intent led to a 9.4% average revenue uplift. 

Numerous clients are onboard, including Ernest Jones, Bensons for Beds and Rapha, and the firm has secured a multi-million seed round. It’s early days, but for Mannheim, a shift towards intent-based selling is a global opportunity worth evangelising about.