- The Early Checkout
- Posts
- 🛠 How We Turned Compatibility Friction Into a Moat (and a Growth Flywheel)
🛠 How We Turned Compatibility Friction Into a Moat (and a Growth Flywheel)
Kent Wilson
May 09, 2025
Hey everyone,
Today, I want to share how we turned a huge problem into our biggest competitive advantage today.
It’s actually a common process big brands go through.
It’s not easy, but that’s exactly why it works.
How we built our moat below 👇️
🚫 When Friction Kills Growth
At RV SnapPad, our friction point was compatibility. Our jack pads didn’t work for every rig, and many customers didn’t even know what setup they had. As we grew and expanded beyond a single model, questions exploded, conversion rates tanked and my brother and I were buried in support emails.
But friction like this isn’t unique.
Every ecommerce brand faces some version of the same problem — complexity that creates doubt, slows conversion, or overwhelms your team.
Think:
Nutrition brands with dozens of SKUs for different goals, diets, and restrictions
Furniture stores where customers aren’t sure if the item fits their space or style
Outdoor brands where customers don’t know which gear matches their environment or use case
Overcoming these sounds like a lot of work — and it is, but there’s a silver lining.
Whether you know it or not, you build a moat when you put the work in to solve these problems.
Here’s how it went down for us 👇️
🧠 How we did it
🚀 Unlock #1 → Turning Friction Into Lead Capture
At first, we didn’t think RVers would share their rig info voluntarily.
But, we found ways to test our assumptions:
A giveaway contest requiring RV info → junk data from most, simply looking to win the prize
A July 4th promo with a rig info form → moderate but meaningful completion.
The insight: People wanted the product enough to share their info. We didn’t even have to bribe them.
So we made it permanent and evolved it over time:
Basic web form → first success gathering rig info.
Typeform quiz → better UX, still limited.
No-code chatbot (Landbot) → enabled precise recommendations at scale.
(We skipped typical quiz platforms — at the time, they couldn’t handle the sophistication we needed.)
This became our “Submit Your Rig” (SYR) quiz.
Today:
SYR captures email + rig details.
If people can’t complete the quiz, they’re routed to CS for human assistance.
Roughly 1 in 5 shoppers who engage with the SYR chatbot go on to purchase right away.
The rest get personalized follow-up content and offers by rig type.
🔑 Unlock #2 → Building a Proprietary Compatibility Database
Once SYR was up and running, we noticed something. We were now collecting rig data at scale. So we started logging it.
Manually at first:
Make, model, year
Leveling system
Jack type
✅ What fit
❌ What didn’t
At first, it seemed like a simple customer service fix. But then we realized: no one — not Amazon, not RV retailers, not jack manufacturers — had this level of insight.
Today:
13,000+ lines of compatibility data (growing daily).
We're building a custom chatbot trained on the data to help people find the right product.
We map our database to regional RV sales information. This has become a sales tool for partner dealerships, telling them what kinds of SnapPad SKUs to stock and how much they could make in revenue.
Using Semrush, we identify ultra-specific Google searches tied to each rig type. Then we build SEO briefs around those terms so AI can generate strong SEO content with nearly no human input. Scalable, high lift.
Every sale improves our data. Every data point helps create better UX and future sales.
The flywheel has started.
🧠 Friction Became a Moat (and Competitive Advantage)
Our jackpad compatibility system became our differentiator:
CS reps answered questions with speed and precision.
Response time became a selling point.
Happy customers raved about how helpful we were.
And crucially: The more SnapPads we sold → the better our database got → the easier it was to sell SnapPads.
🕵 Why This Matters So Much
Because we created the category, competition was inevitable. Copycats have started to appear. But they face a major problem:
Our database and compatibility UX are too far ahead to catch.
Their only option? Pick off easy SKUs with simple compatibility. But they lack the data, the will, and the architecture to compete.
They can copy our product. They can’t copy our moat.
🔎 BONUS - Why Naivety Helped Us Win
Here’s the irony: To RV industry insiders, this looked like an intractable problem:
Too many jack types.
Too much customer uncertainty.
Too much support required.
But we weren’t insiders.
Our naivety led us to a blue ocean, provided we were willing to figure it out.
Lesson: "What insiders see as a dead end, outsiders sometimes see as opportunity."
🧰 Tools We Use
SYR chatbot → Landbot
CS + chat/email integration → Gorgias
Email & SMS → Klaviyo
Data Connections → Zapier
Regional RV Sales Data → Statistical Surveys
👀 How other brands did it
Jones Road Beauty
Friction: New customers constantly asked: “Will this shade work for my skin tone?” — especially for their hero product, Miracle Balm, which looks different on every face.
Problem: You can’t swatch it in-store because it’s sold DTC-only, and it’s not cheap.
Solution: Instead of simplifying the shade range or relying on generic swatches, they:
Collected tons of UGC and videos of real people applying each shade
Encouraged customers to tag their skin tone + product on socials
Organized that content into shoppable, shade-specific galleries
Built a live chat flow where support could send personalized shade picks using real photos as references
Why it’s a moat: They did the work to curate visual proof at scale, and no one else had the depth of examples or the confidence to make 1:1 recommendations in chat. The more people buy, tag, and share — the stronger the loop gets.
And they didn’t build fancy tech. They used community, curation, and manual effort to outlearn everyone else in their category.
⚡ Takeaway → Your Bottlenecks Might Be Your Moats
Most founders hate friction. But friction can be a gift.
If you solve it well enough, it can:
✅ Build defensible IP
✅ Improve conversion
✅ Power retention
✅ Create a growth flywheel
The key isn’t just removing bottlenecks. It’s turning the solution into an asset.
That’s what we did with compatibility.
What’s your biggest friction point right now?
It might just be your moat in disguise 😉
If you enjoyed this edition of The Early Checkout, hit reply and tell me what bottlenecks you’ve turned into advantages.
PS — I occasionally work with founders/operators on strategy, growth, and ops. If you think I might be able to help, tell me a bit about your business here.
At The Early Checkout, we are strongly committed to protecting your privacy and providing a safe & high-quality online experience for all visitors. See our Terms & Conditions here. If you have any questions, reply to this email or visit our Website to view our official policies.