Every Shopify brand spending real money on TikTok, Meta, or Google is facing the same growing problem: your ad creative has gotten radically personalized, but your storefront still shows every visitor the exact same thing.
If you’re doing $5-50M in revenue and pouring budget into paid media, the gap between what your ads promise and what your product pages actually deliver is quietly eating your conversion rate. The hyper-targeted ad earns the click; the static one-size-fits-all PDP loses the sale.
Kratik Agrawal is the founder and CEO of Kinect (spelled with a K), a Y Combinator–backed company that’s less than six months old and already powering real-time storefront personalization for 20+ hand-selected Shopify brands across fashion, supplements, and furniture. Before Kinect, Kratik worked at Google on the hotels and ads teams and built personalization software at Revo, an AI CRM for B2B sellers, while his co-founder Varun consulted for brands like Ralph Lauren and Sephora. Early Kinect customers are reporting overall conversion lifts in the 10–12% range, with shoppers who engage Kinect’s on-site AI sales rep converting at multiple times the baseline.
In this conversation, Kratik walks through the framework Kinect uses to figure out who a visitor is, why they came, and which version of the product page they should see—without crossing the line into creepy. You’ll hear his contrarian take on agentic commerce, his prediction on which AI shopping protocol ultimately wins, and the exact moment a Shopify brand should start caring about all of this.
Let’s dive in. 👇
✅ Why your website is still your home base in the age of AI shopping—and the simple one-line filter Kratik uses to decide when agentic commerce actually matters for a brand
✅ The three layers of an adaptive storefront that work together to personalize the experience without feeling intrusive, including the one element most brands forget to align with their own voice
✅ The conversion lift Kinect’s early customers are seeing, and what separates shoppers who bounce from those who stick around for 6, 7, or even 8-message conversations on site
✅ How traffic signals from TikTok, Meta, and Google turn into different product page variants, and why Kratik insists he doesn’t need to know it’s you to deliver a personalized experience
✅ Kratik’s prediction on which AI shopping protocol wins the “agentic commerce wars,” plus what brands should actually be doing right now to prepare
✅ The biggest mistake brands make when they bolt AI onto their storefront, and the Amazon Rufus rebrand decision that shows exactly how to get it right
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The widening gap between hyper-personalized ad creative and static Shopify storefronts is the problem most operators feel but haven’t named. Kratik Agrawal saw it from both sides: years on Google’s ads and hotels teams watching marketers spend on increasingly precise targeting, then watching those same visitors land on websites that treated them like they were all the same person. Kinect is what he and his co-founder built to close that loop.
The premise is simple to explain and hard enough that no one had shipped it: Kinect sits on top of your Shopify store (and headless setups), reads signals from where a visitor came from and what they’re doing on site, and then shows a version of your product page tuned to that intent. A runner, a gift buyer, and a repeat customer looking at the same workout shirt see different images, different copy, and get different answers from the on-site AI sales rep. Kratik calls it putting an AI version of the founder on the website. Early results are promising: 10–12% overall conversion lifts across the 20+ brands they’ve onboarded, with shoppers who engage the assistant converting at multiple times the baseline rate.
What makes this conversation different from the usual AI commerce pitch is Kratik’s contrarian take on agentic commerce. He’s not telling brands to panic about agents buying products on behalf of customers; his line is simple: if you’re not selling toilet paper, agents aren’t replacing your homepage anytime soon. People still want to shop—they just want to shop somewhere that feels like it was built for them. That reframe matters because it puts your energy back where the ROI is right now: making your website smarter for human visitors first, then making your product data agent-ready as a separate, lower-urgency project.
Steve and Kratik also get into the tension every brand feels around personalization—where helpful crosses into creepy—why most chatbots feel cheap (and how to avoid that), the geo-targeting misfires haunting brands like Travis Mathew, and the very practical reasons a six-person engineering team is operating in pure white-glove mode instead of self-serve. Kratik is candid about why he qualifies who he works with, which brands are a fit for Kinect today, and why those doing under $1M a year usually aren’t the best starting point yet.
This isn’t a product pitch. It’s a working framework for closing the disconnect between the ads you’re paying for and the experience your visitors actually get.
👉 The website is still home base, even in the agentic commerce era. Unless you’re selling commodities, agents aren’t replacing your storefront anytime soon—people still want to shop. For most brands, that means stop panicking about agentic traffic and pour your energy into making the experience for human visitors radically better right now, while treating the agent layer as a second-phase project once the market is actually there.
👉 Hyper-personalized ads deserve hyper-personalized landing experiences. If your TikTok and Meta creative is tightly tuned to specific audiences but every one of those visitors lands on the same static product page, you’re wasting upstream media work. The fix isn’t stacking more apps; it’s an intelligence layer that reads the signal (where they came from, what they clicked, what device they’re on) and shows the PDP variant that matches that intent. Even if you never deploy Kinect, run the diagnostic: pull up your three highest-spend ad sets and ask whether the landing page reflects any of that targeting.
👉 Personalization done well is invisible, not creepy. Kinect’s goal is “helpful and direct,” not “we know everything about you.” That means adapting the product page quietly to fit the segment, then being upfront when the AI sales rep proactively suggests something based on context. The brands that win here don’t get sneaky—they use data to make the experience feel handcrafted and are transparent that this is what’s happening.
👉 Treat your AI assistant as brand voice, not bolt-on chatbot. The biggest mistake Kratik sees is dropping a generic chatbot in the corner that doesn’t sound, look, or feel like your brand. Amazon folded Rufus into Alexa for a reason: brand-native AI builds trust, while generic AI erodes it. Whatever you launch on your site, ask: does this feel like an extension of our brand, or like a random piece of software glued on?
👉 Your AI surface is your fastest user research tool. In the first two weeks with one brand, Kinect surfaced 18 content and merchandising gaps just from questions visitors asked that the site couldn’t answer. If people keep asking for running shorts to go with a shirt you sell, that’s a merchandising signal. If they ask about gift wrapping you don’t offer, that’s a Q4 opportunity sitting in plain sight. The conversations happening on your site are a feedback loop most brands are ignoring.
👉 The sweet spot for adaptive personalization is $1M+ in revenue with paid media in the mix. Below that, you usually don’t have enough traffic or intent data to make personalization pay off, and your bigger jobs are product-market fit and channel selection. Above $1M—especially in fashion, supplements, and furniture (high-education or high-taste categories)—the lift tends to be most pronounced. If you’re earlier in the journey, nail the fundamentals first; static pages aren’t what’s holding you back.
Kratik Agrawal
Founder and CEO, Kinect
Kratik is the founder and CEO of Kinect, a Y Combinator–backed AI personalization platform that’s been live for less than six months and is already working with 20+ hand-selected Shopify brands across fashion, supplements, and furniture. Early customers are seeing overall conversion lifts in the 10–12% range, with engaged shoppers converting at multiple times the baseline rate.
Before Kinect, Kratik was building personalization software at Revo, an AI CRM for B2B sellers, alongside his co-founder Varun. He previously worked at Google on the hotels and ads teams, watching marketers invest in increasingly precise targeting only to send that traffic to websites that didn’t reflect any of that work, while Varun spent years consulting for brands like Ralph Lauren and Sephora. Today, Kinect is a six-person engineering team where everyone—including Kratik—still writes code daily.
What makes Kratik’s perspective valuable is the mix of frontier AI experience and operator-level pattern recognition. He’s not selling agentic commerce hype; he’s focused on what actually works for Shopify brands in the $5-50M range right now—and he’s candid about which problems aren’t worth solving yet.
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Steve Hutt:
Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I’m your host, Steve Hutt. Today we’re sitting down with Kratik, who’s the founder and CEO of a company called Kinect, and they’re at trykinect.ai. They’re a Y Combinator–backed company that’s literally less than six months old, just out of beta, and already reshaping how Shopify brands think about their websites in this AI era. Here’s why I believe this conversation matters right now.
Steve Hutt:
Most brands are running websites that look the same to every visitor—whether that person came from a TikTok ad, Google Search, or even a podcast like this one. Meanwhile, ad creative has become hyper-personalized and customer behavior is shifting fast. With AI shopping, the gap is widening between what brands promise in their ads and what visitors actually experience on site. I think that’s what Kratik is building with Kinect—closing that gap. In a nutshell, it’s real-time personalization and personalized storefronts that adapt to where the visitor came from, what their intent looks like, and what they’re likely to need. It’s very interesting how they’re able to hypothesize all of this.
Steve Hutt:
And he’s got some really good points around agentic commerce. I did some early research through LinkedIn and X, and it’s interesting to see some of his angles and what he’s been able to uncover. From what I’ve read, it goes against a lot of what the AI commerce crowd is saying right now. Whether you’re doing 500K a year, a million dollars a year, or more, that’s a good starting point. I think you’re going to learn a lot about how you can move along in your journey and adopt a very progressive tool. I’ve read some of their early reviews and case studies—pretty impressive what’s been happening. This episode should really have your full attention. If AI means anything to you and you’re trying to figure out the ROI of AI, today’s episode is going to be very impactful for you.
Steve Hutt:
So, Kratik, welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.
Kratik Agrawal:
Thanks, Steve. Excited to be here and excited to talk about Kinect and tell you more about what we’re building. As you said, there’s a big disconnect between what the ad platforms do, what people are expecting, and what DTC websites look like today, and we’re looking to solve that.
Steve Hutt:
So talk about the moment you decided to actually build Kinect. What were you seeing in the market that told you, “Hey, this product needs to exist right now”? And what was the alternative you almost built instead? I kind of snuck on your LinkedIn to learn about this.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, 100%. My entire team has been in personalization software for a couple of years at this point. Right before this, my co-founder Varun and I were at a company called Revo, which is an AI CRM for B2B sellers. We were working on how we could help B2B sellers convert more and win more deals using personalization, research, and so on.
Kratik Agrawal:
A mix of that, plus me being a big shopper—and my entire team being big shoppers—made us realize there’s a huge gap in eCommerce. That was the initial idea. It started as a little Saturday thought I had.
Kratik Agrawal:
Varun and I are very close friends. We started ideating: “Is there something here?” We’ve always wanted to build, and both of us have some experience in eCommerce. I was working at Google for their hotels and ads teams. Varun worked for Ralph Lauren and Sephora, consulting for them. We thought, “There’s actually something here.” We went on a bunch of websites, kept talking to more leaders, and realized there’s a huge gap between the experience people are looking for and what’s actually available. That was the real start of Kinect. This was back in late December, near the holidays.
Kratik Agrawal:
We had some time off from work and asked ourselves, “What can we build? What are some cool things here?” Both of us had some sort of network in eCommerce we could go to, ask questions, and bug them a bit. They said, “Yeah, people have tried to solve this. No one really has, or it hasn’t been possible.” Varun and I, being on the frontier of what’s possible with personalization and AI, thought, “That’s impossible—there has to be a better way.” So we just went out to solve that.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, it’s amazing. I was reading your prep doc, and one of the things you mentioned is that brands don’t sell to one audience—they sell to many. I think that’s quite interesting. We talk about this multichannel world and attribution across all these different channels. It’s a very difficult problem to solve right now, especially with all the privacy policies, last-click attribution, seven-day cookies, and all this craziness.
Steve Hutt:
What’s interesting, from my perspective, is that websites really haven’t caught up to that reality of where people are coming from and how you’re interacting with them. Can you walk me through what that actually looks like right now for a Shopify brand? Where does this disconnect show up most painfully, from where the customer comes from to when they finally show up on the website?
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, you’re totally right. Right now, Shopify websites—or any DTC brand—spend hours, if not days, coming up with a set of pictures and copy that try to fit all audiences.
Kratik Agrawal:
The classic example I give is this: my dad and I have very different ways of working out, but if we look at the same workout shirt, the way it’s positioned today, it might only really fit one of us. That shirt could be great for both of us. Every product or brand has multiple audiences they can target. Today, they’re able to do that with ads, UGC, and their marketing.
Kratik Agrawal:
But no matter where someone comes from—TikTok, a specific Meta ad, or anywhere else—when they come to the website, they see one static copy and one static set of pictures. It’s that one-size-fits-all approach. That’s what we’re setting out to solve.
Kratik Agrawal:
We sit on top of Shopify stores today, and we’re working with headless stores as well. The idea is to build an intelligence layer that sits on your store and tries to figure out who this person is. I don’t need to know it’s “Steve Hutt.” I just need to know Steve is based in Vancouver, he does this, he likes to do that. Based on that, we can start personalizing PDPs or different pieces of the site to make it more relevant.
Kratik Agrawal:
The next thing we do is build the AI sales rep. Every person has different questions, different ways of looking for items, and different concerns. Right now, the only way to answer them is to read and try to come up with your own conclusion. If we’ve learned anything in the last couple of years, it’s that people are lazy—they don’t want to read.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah.
Kratik Agrawal:
They’re used to just asking AI for answers. They don’t even like Google anymore because Google makes them click a link and then go read something. We wanted to bring that behavior onsite. We’ve seen ChatGPT shopping blow up. We’ve seen a ton of AI shopping use cases. But websites—the home base of a company—haven’t gotten smarter in the last couple of years.
Steve Hutt:
Right. So there are a couple of components here. You mentioned three products with one intelligence engine underneath. One part is these adaptive product pages. That’s interesting. Talk about what that is. Let’s say someone comes in from a TikTok ad and lands on a PDP powered by your solution. What does an adaptive product page actually do?
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, 100%. The first part of the problem is figuring out who they are and what they might be looking for—basically, understanding their intent. We create connectors into TikTok, Meta, and so on to figure out what content they were looking at, or whether they came from Google search. Just knowing that helps us figure out who this person might be.
Kratik Agrawal:
We also look at what they’re doing on the website. We don’t just solve for paid media or ads—we also solve for organic traffic. We look at what they click on, what they view, what they spend the most time on. Based on that, we show a different variant. We cluster that person into a segment and then show a different side of the PDP, a different set of images, a different description. We also give our sales rep all of this context.
Kratik Agrawal:
So when the AI answers, it has all this information.
Steve Hutt:
I see. I’m looking at one of your examples called “same product, three different shoppers.” You show a runner, a gift buyer, and a repeat customer. With that context, it suddenly feels a lot more personalized.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, 100%. There are so many inputs. Every day we come up with a new signal and try to bake it into our system. Previous orders help us. If you’ve been on the website before, that helps. Even things like geolocation or what device you’re on are great inputs to power recommendations.
Steve Hutt:
Another component of your platform is the AI shopping assistant. Most people have seen some version of this. Some CRMs have done interesting bolt-on solutions—Gorgias, Gladly, and a few others started with live chat and then moved into crawling FAQs to help resolve support tickets, pulling tracking numbers from Shopify, answering “What’s your return policy?”, and so on. Let’s talk about your shopping assistant, because I think you look at it from a different angle.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah. Kinect is trying to solve for pre-purchase support. The idea is: how can we help someone with discovery, answer their questions, get them to the right product, and make them feel, “Hey, this is the right thing for me”?
Kratik Agrawal:
I just made a LinkedIn post about this yesterday. Amazon launched Rufus about two years ago and just recently decided to axe it—or at least that’s how it looked. But if you read the articles, they didn’t really axe it; they rebranded it into Alexa. In my post, I said this is such a smart move because Alexa has been part of the Amazon ecosystem for 12 years. It’s very on-brand.
Kratik Agrawal:
One of the biggest decisions we made early on was that if we put Kinect on a website, it should look, talk, and feel like that brand. It shouldn’t be a generic chatbot sitting in the corner that everyone has learned to hate. Our whole thing is: how can we embed this AI experience into the website in an almost seamless, very brand-native way that keeps trust high? We want the visitor to feel, “This brand has built this experience for me,” and that it speaks about the brand in a different way. That was one of the first things we did.
Kratik Agrawal:
On the tech side, we look at your entire website, build a full knowledge base, and ingest any information you want the agent to surface. A fun way I like to describe it is that we put an AI version of the founder on the website to talk. When I say that, people love it. They say, “Oh, I get to be on the website.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s exactly the experience—we want to bring your passion for what you’re selling into the online store.”
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, it’s amazing. Have there been early case studies around some of the lift? That’s what people love to hear. If your technology is as great as you think it is, what have early adopters found by implementing it?
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, it’s been amazing. As you mentioned at the beginning, we’re less than six months old—about four and a half months, really. We’ve been fortunate to work with a set of customers who helped design the product and work with us through early iterations. We’re seeing overall conversion lifts of about 10–12%. People who engage with our sales reps convert at roughly two to three times more than the baseline.
Kratik Agrawal:
We’ve realized people really like this experience. Conversion rates are going up, and people are having conversations that last six, seven, eight messages. That tells you they’re enjoying it. So now we’re finding new ways to activate the chat and guide people into that AI experience because it’s been so strong.
Steve Hutt:
What’s interesting about agentic commerce—and this is a bit of a pivot I’m thinking about—is that if you’re not in a commodity space, maybe you don’t need to worry too much about agentic traffic right now. I’m not sure what your thought is around this, but I don’t think that’s the bulk of Shopify brands. Most people want their own unique product-market fit, with uniqueness and a brand behind it.
Steve Hutt:
As we continue down this journey of agentic commerce, there are a lot of “wars” going on between Shopify and Google with UCP—the Universal Commerce Protocol—there’s ACP, and then Stripe is getting involved. It’s crazy, and we don’t know who’s going to win yet. I’m curious about your perspective.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah. I said this to a friend yesterday: if a brand is not selling toilet paper, they shouldn’t be worried about agentic eCommerce right now. It’s simple—I’m not going to give my OpenAI agent $100–$200 to spend on something I’m going to wear every day. I just don’t trust it yet.
Kratik Agrawal:
Where agentic commerce is useful today is discovery. People are using it to find five different options for the sweater they’re going to wear to a Christmas party.
Kratik Agrawal:
But that’s not where the bulk of your traffic is going to come from, and that’s what I keep telling people. Home base will always be your website. Shopping is something people love to do, and it’s hard to believe they’re just going to hand that over to agents.
Kratik Agrawal:
For non-commodity brands, what you should be doing about agentic commerce is making sure your data and your website are in the right place and the right form factor. We’ve seen UCP, and my take is that UCP is going to win.
Kratik Agrawal:
Shopify and Google are pretty big—it’s hard to beat that. We’re also seeing players like Amazon jump in. UCP will set up the rails to make it easier to transact and find products, but it only really works if your product data is in good shape and you leverage the infrastructure they’re putting down. At Kinect, we’re building the conversion layer for humans, and we’re going to do the same for agents eventually.
Kratik Agrawal:
It’s just not a big enough market right now for us to put all our energy into that side of things.
Steve Hutt:
I noticed that across these three parts—from the product page to the chat agent and being on-brand—there’s also a dashboard with analytics, conversions, and so on. Can you talk about what people see on this dashboard? What are the insights or attribution it provides, and how can founders or marketers leverage what they’re seeing?
Kratik Agrawal:
We list it as three products, but honestly, they’re all baked into one. We don’t really say, “Turn this on, turn that off.”
Steve Hutt:
Right, right.
Kratik Agrawal:
They just work together. The agent helps the adaptive product pages. The way we grab context for the adaptive product pages helps the agent. All of this flows into the dashboard, where merchants, brands, and marketers can see the conversations people are having, the journeys they’re taking, and the questions that keep coming up that the brand doesn’t have answers to.
Kratik Agrawal:
Sometimes the answer is nowhere on the website. There’s a lot of that. One early customer, we found around 18 gaps in their website in two weeks—just from questions people asked that the brand didn’t have answers for.
Kratik Agrawal:
Once you have all this information in the right place, with real intelligence running on top, it helps every function of your business.
Kratik Agrawal:
If someone keeps asking for running shorts to go with their workout shirt and you don’t sell running shorts, that tells your merchandising team maybe this is something to prioritize. If everyone is talking about buying gifts, that’s a signal to add gift wrapping or make it a bigger part of the offering. We’ve seen a lot of “unattributed” performance improvements because of Kinect. We help marketing with more information, help merchandising, and help the eCommerce team find gaps. It’s been super valuable.
Steve Hutt:
Let’s talk about how you actually implement this solution. Some tools are DIY—you sign up and figure it out yourself. We’ll talk about some bonuses for listeners today. There’s DIY, and then there’s more hand-holding, white-glove service. Where do you fit on the implementation side?
Kratik Agrawal:
We’re white glove, and we want to continue to be white glove. I’m a startup founder with a small team. If someone sells me software that I have to spend hours setting up, I’m not buying it.
Kratik Agrawal:
We brought that same philosophy to our brands. We’re giving you a tool that’s going to help you, and we’ll help you set it up. We’ll test it with you, hop on a meeting every week, you’ll have my phone number, and we’ll be in a Slack channel together. That’s the bare minimum these days.
Steve Hutt:
I see. I want to go back to personalization because it’s stuck in the back of my mind. I understand what you’re doing. Your platform understands where the traffic is coming from and creates a personalized experience on the website. That’s your unique value proposition.
Steve Hutt:
But when many people think about personalization, they think of segmentation in email—Klaviyo, Rebuy Engine, and so on, doing things on-page or in how they interact with customers. What do you see as the difference between real-time storefront personalization and what these kinds of tools are doing?
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, that’s a great question. The way we approach it is that the store should feel like it was made for that customer. That’s the experience we want to deliver.
Kratik Agrawal:
Imagine being able to research every customer, have everything ready, and position it in the way they’d like. Everything is extremely relevant to that person. That’s the experience we want to give, with a sales rep trained on who this person is, ready to give them an amazing experience. We want to bring that luxury in-person feel to any website.
Kratik Agrawal:
Another way I like to put it is we want to bring the feel of TikTok onto your website. I wouldn’t scroll TikTok or Instagram if everyone had the same feed.
Steve Hutt:
No.
Kratik Agrawal:
And that’s what eCommerce websites are today: a single feed or a single experience. The customer is supposed to connect the dots and decide what’s right for them. That’s a broken experience.
Steve Hutt:
Right. I totally agree. When we think about personalization, some people find it a bit creepy, but done well, it’s invisible. The user just feels like the brand knows them.
Steve Hutt:
Where’s the line? Where do you see brands crossing it—where they know too much and it feels over the top—versus what you’re advocating, where most websites still look static no matter where a visitor comes from, paid social or organic? On the flip side, there are tools that “unmask” visitors and figure them out, and that can get extra creepy. What’s your take on that?
Kratik Agrawal:
Another great question. We’ve all had that moment where we’re talking about something and five minutes later we go on our phones and there’s an ad for it. It feels creepy.
Steve Hutt:
It does.
Kratik Agrawal:
It feels so creepy. I was just reading about this a couple of days ago. The reason that happens is usually because you’re on the same Wi‑Fi as someone who searched for it, and the ads targeting them also target you.
Steve Hutt:
Right.
Kratik Agrawal:
But yes, there are ways personalization can feel creepy and icky. For us, the idea is to be straightforward with the personalization we do. We have a mix of seamless and interactive experiences. The adaptive product pages change based on who you are, but the sales rep might say, “Hey, I know you might be looking for this. We have this for you.”
Kratik Agrawal:
We don’t want to be sneaky. One of our core values is to be upfront. We are smart; we figured out you looked at this ad, and you might be looking for this thing. You clicked for a reason, and we’re just going to show you that version.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I totally get it, and that makes complete sense. On the opposite side, what I really don’t like is when you come from an ad and sometimes you don’t even land on the PDP—you end up on a collection page. Then you’re forced to scroll and hunt. Add geo-targeting into the mix—especially when I’m in Canada coming off Instagram or TikTok—and it becomes a really disconnected experience.
Steve Hutt:
You see things like, “We see you’re from Canada, do you want to go to the Canadian site?” This happens a lot. I love Travis Mathew, the golf brand, but here’s a great example. I click an ad for a new button-down polo. It goes to travismathew.com, then pops up, “We see you’re in Canada. Do you want to go to that page?” I say yes, and then it just refreshes to the homepage.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, and that’s just so broken. What is that?
Steve Hutt:
It’s terrible.
Kratik Agrawal:
People ask why we started with landing pages or PDPs. It’s because that’s where people make decisions. They’re not deciding on the homepage or collections page. They decide where the “add to cart” button is. That’s where we fit in.
Kratik Agrawal:
Once someone has shown intent—especially from paid media—or even if they came directly to your site and made it to a PDP, they’re interested and want to know more. Just show them what’s relevant and help them make that decision.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah. So you really fit there. You mentioned at the top of the show that you’re helping with awareness and discovery, and then moving visitors along the funnel to conversion.
Steve Hutt:
Have you thought much about what happens post-transaction? You understand the customer’s data, their flow, which ad they came from, what the PDP looked like when they converted. Do you know when they come back a second time? Are you thinking about lifetime value at some point?
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, that’s something we definitely want to do. We just haven’t gotten there yet—we’re still early. We’re a team of six, and we’re all engineers who code every day. I still code every day.
Steve Hutt:
Love it.
Kratik Agrawal:
Our customers give us new ideas every day. We think, “Oh my God, that’s awesome,” and then it goes on our ticket board. We’ll get to it at some point.
Kratik Agrawal:
But you’re totally on the right track. If Kinect can do what we say we can for conversion, we should be able to help with lifetime value too. Your email flows and every interaction with that customer should be relevant in that same way.
Kratik Agrawal:
I don’t think we’re going to try to step on people’s toes—like Klaviyo—to go win email. More likely, we’ll build integrations.
Kratik Agrawal:
So they can get smarter with our data.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. One of the questions I always ask guests with great new tools is about that bigger picture. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to interview you today because you’re so new and fresh. I have case studies of founders who came on this show and went on to be very successful. Some were acquired by companies like Yotpo after being on the show. There have been life-changing exits that started with conversations here.
Steve Hutt:
I think you’re building something very unique and interesting, and you’re in the awareness stage right now—just letting people know this is available. A lot of people don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know this technology even exists.
Steve Hutt:
It’s worth a trial just to see what it can do. Since there’s this white-glove opportunity, what do you see as the next steps for those thinking, “Hey, is there a sweet spot of merchant where the amount of data will be impactful to the bottom line?” Once we understand that sweet spot of your ideal customer, what should they do next?
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah. Because we’re a young team and we have very close relationships with all our customers—we’re basically friends with all of them—we’re also qualifying who we want to work with.
Steve Hutt:
Right.
Kratik Agrawal:
We have over 20 brands we’re working with today that we hand-selected. Typically, that means they’re doing more than a million dollars a year. They’ve figured out some scale, are likely growing their team, and are starting to invest in paid media.
Kratik Agrawal:
We’re also mindful that our product is still early. If you have a 100-person team, we might not be the right fit today. But if you want to talk, we’ll explore what a solution could look like and build something that works.
Kratik Agrawal:
We’ve worked with brands across verticals—supplements, fashion, furniture. Those are some of our best fits, partly because they’re either high-education or high-taste products. Being able to differentiate there matters a lot.
Kratik Agrawal:
Truthfully, we can work with almost any brand. We’ve seen lifts for single-SKU companies and for brands with 100,000 SKUs. It really comes down to whether you believe in personalization, in building a brand-new experience, in agentic commerce, and in what the future of agent shopping will look like—and whether you want a partner to help you through that.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, that’s amazing. I know we talked offline before recording, and I understand there’s a listener-only bonus or promotion we can offer people tuning in today.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, 100%. I’m excited you brought that up. First, we’re just coming out of beta, but for any eCommerce Fastlane listeners, we’re happy to extend our beta pricing.
Kratik Agrawal:
For context, our smallest tier starts at $1,000 a month in beta and is going up to $3K a month after this. We’ll extend that $1K pricing because we recorded this before beta ends and I want people to come talk to me. My calendar is open for anyone here. I want to talk about agentic commerce and see what you’re working on.
Kratik Agrawal:
I’ll do an audit of your website and give you ideas with no obligation. For me, it’s been wonderful to find folks who want to share what they’re doing and give feedback. It lets me build a community around Kinect that we can leverage long term.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I love it. Because you’re so small and new—but with a lot of fresh ideas—you almost feel like a business partner to these merchants. In your early days, it’s easier to be close to the fold because you have a smaller team and a smaller group of merchants who are clearly seeing the impact of the Kinect platform.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, and that’s what we want to do for a long time. We want to find ways to work super closely with customers for years to come.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah.
Kratik Agrawal:
If that means growing the team, I’m happy to do it. We’re backed by Y Combinator, and we’ll be raising more money soon. One of our big values is doing whatever it takes to make customers happy.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I love it. So a 30-minute AI readiness audit, plus extended beta pricing. I think that’s amazing. There’ll be a link in the show notes—trykinect.ai/fastlane. “Kinect” is with a K. It’ll redirect to a landing page so they know where you came from.
Steve Hutt:
Can people find you on LinkedIn? Where’s the best place on social?
Kratik Agrawal:
Yes, LinkedIn is perfect. I like to post there. I’m on X as well.
Kratik Agrawal:
Thanks for having me, Steve. This was amazing.
Steve Hutt:
My pleasure. I’ll have everything in the show notes. This has been excellent. I joke on the show that I’m often on two pages of notes—today is another one of those days. “Life of learning” is my mantra from Shopify: thrive on change and be a constant learner.
Steve Hutt:
I really appreciate you and what you’re building. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to learn about a tool that’s just coming out of beta. It’s exciting and fun. I wish you continued success, and I hope many people listening—there are thousands right now—at least check it out. You don’t know what you don’t know. Get the free audit, then potentially try the tool and see what it can do. The upside is clearly there with these early beta testers.
Kratik Agrawal:
Yeah, this was amazing. Thanks. Excited to meet your Fastlane listeners.
Steve Hutt:
All right, have a great afternoon.
Kratik Agrawal:
All right.
Steve Hutt:
Take care.
Steve Hutt:
Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. My hope is this podcast gives you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my personal goal to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify.
Steve Hutt:
Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey.
Steve Hutt:
Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.
