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PROVO — Danny Jones, Brice Douglas and Santiago Gomez-Paz all took different routes on their way to Brigham Young University.
Jones, a native Utahn, returned to BYU for college after spending his high school years in New Zealand. Douglas grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, and came to BYU due to its focus on spirituality and education with a particular interest in business. Gomez-Paz perhaps took the longest route of all. Hailing from Argentina, he served a mission in South Korea before venturing to BYU to study computer science.
Despite these differences, they were eventually brought together through one thing: the spirit of entrepreneurship.
Their interests collided and the three formed Zaymo, an e-commerce startup that embeds the online shopping experience within a customer's email, creating one-stop — or click, in this instance – shopping experience for consumers while also removing the links and extra tabs that, to the ire of companies, most consumers don't bother with.
"I think we absolutely see this as potentially a billion-dollar company," said Douglas, who co-founded Zaymo along with Jones and Gomez-Paz.
And if early indications are any sign, Zaymo is certainly on the right trajectory to live up to the group's lofty expectations.
In May, the Zaymo team attended the 2023 Rice Business Plan Competition in Houston and took home $875,000 in total cash investments after earning third place in what many consider the biggest and most prestigious collegiate business plan competition in the country.
The team won six investment awards in total — two more than their closest competitor — after pitching their business plan to investors, entrepreneurs and executives. The latest round of investments comes after Zaymo won the $30,000 grand prize at the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge earlier this year.
"It's easy to believe in yourself and like, when you're kind of in the idea, you believe in the idea," Jones said. "It was cool to go to this competition (and) be presenting in such of big investors and have them be like, 'Oh yeah, that makes sense.' That, kind of, external validation was really good to get."
What is Zaymo?
Essentially, Zaymo embeds applications inside of an email, allowing consumers to complete shopping actions without having to leave the email when clicking on any links. With the web app embedded into the email, users can change options, read descriptions, look at images, add a discount code or change their order without leaving their email.
"We see our mission as kind of getting rid of links inside of emails so that people are more incentivized to actually complete a task inside the email itself," Douglas said.
While this idea may seem great to any shopaholic, it sounds even better to the direct-to-consumer brands that can harness Zaymo to effectively reach more customers.
For this reason, Zaymo's technology is sold directly to the companies. If one of your favorite companies starts to utilize Zaymo, every email you receive from that company will automatically include Zaymo's technology, eliminating the need for consumers to have to download an app or browser extension.
"We integrate with the email-sending platform to change the way the emails work," Jones said.
Douglas said that brands will typically make 30% of their total revenue from email channels, something that increases the allure of Zaymo among direct-to-consumer companies.
"Those emails, you're sending thousands, tens of thousands (and) often hundreds of thousands of emails every month to get people to convert and only two or three percent of people actually do go and convert," Douglas said. "So our pitch is, 'Hey if you pay a small monthly fee to use us, we're going to significantly increase the revenue that your company is bringing in from this really important sales channel that you use, which is email."
Game-changer
All three of the students specifically credited the BYU Sandbox program — which allows students to launch a tech startup for credits, in lieu of taking classes — and managing director Chris Crittenden for getting their idea off the ground and being influential in the formation of the company
But to turn Zaymo into the next big startup to come out of the Beehive State, the team knows that it can't get complacent, even in the wake of recent success.
With that in mind, Jones said that the group is focused on wrapping up its current round of funding before jumping into Zaymo full-time — a reality made possible through the company's latest funding round.
Additionally, they think they'll have a good shot of changing the way we think about something that has remained relatively the same for decades — email.
"We've seen a lot of improvement in different sales channels. You know, social media wasn't here 20 years ago but if you look at email, email hasn't changed in the last 20, 25 years," Gomez-Paz said. "(We're) very excited to change that. To bring something new to customers. We're excited for the years that come."
"This is a game-changer," Douglas said.
