In this episode of the MarTech Matrix, Sean Simon interviews Arthur Root, CEO of Nostra, discussing the critical importance of site speed for e-commerce brands. Arthur explains how Nostra enhances website performance through its Edge Delivery Engine, optimizing load times and improving personalization without compromising user experience. The conversation delves into the technical aspects of site speed, the role of cookies in personalization, and how Nostra integrates seamlessly with existing tech stacks. Arthur also shares insights on measuring success with Nostra and the future of site speed in the e-commerce landscape.

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Takeaways

1. Nostra helps brands improve ROI by enhancing site speed.
2. Site speed is crucial for conversion rates and user experience.
3. Technical expertise is often required to address site speed issues.
4. Cookies play a vital role in personalization and user tracking.
5. Nostra’s Edge Delivery Engine caches website content for faster loading.
6. Crawler optimization is essential for SEO and personalization.
7. Nostra integrates easily with various e-commerce platforms.
8. Success can be measured through A/B testing and site speed improvements.
9. Nostra is positioned as a leading solution in the market.
10. The future of e-commerce will increasingly rely on edge computing for performance.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Nostra and Site Speed Importance

02:53 The Technical Aspects of Site Speed

06:04 Overcoming Site Speed Challenges in E-commerce

09:03 The Role of Cookies in Personalization

11:57 Nostra’s Edge Delivery Engine Explained

14:55 Crawler Optimization and SEO Benefits

17:45 Integrating Nostra with Existing Tech Stacks

20:53 Measuring Success with Nostra

23:53 Nostra’s Unique Value Proposition

26:53 Future of Site Speed and E-commerce

29:44 Lightning Round and Conclusion

Speed Is the New Personalization: Why E-commerce Growth Starts at the Edge

Let’s be honest: if your site takes longer than three seconds to load, you’re leaving money on the table. We’ve all heard that before, but most teams still attack the problem backwards—stacking on more tools and “personalization” widgets while quietly taxing the very performance that drives conversion. In a world with 20,000+ MarTech solutions, speed has become the clearest, least controversial growth lever. No one has ever said, “That site was too fast.”

That’s the core argument behind Nostra: treat performance as a first-class product feature, not a back-office chore. Nostra’s approach flips the typical CRO playbook by optimizing the foundation first—how the browser and server connect—so every other investment (recommendations, testing, analytics, paid media) performs better.

Fix the pipe, then the pages

Most commerce sites are a blend of static and dynamic content. Images, styles, and layout frameworks are largely the same for everyone; carts, pricing, and logged-in experiences are not. Nostra’s Edge Delivery Engine sits as a Cloudflare reverse proxy between user and origin, caching the HTML “scaffold” and pushing as much logic as possible out to the edge—close to the buyer. Pixel by pixel, it decides what must come from origin and what can be served instantly from a prebuilt cache.

The result? A baseline lift in real-world speed—often 20–30%—whether you’re crawling from five seconds down to three or sharpening two seconds to one-and-a-half. That lift doesn’t just feel snappier; it compounds into better SEO (Google and ad platforms punish slow sites), higher conversion, and more efficient paid spend. Time kills deals; speed creates them.

The uncomfortable truth about “personalization”

Personalization works—when you actually recognize the shopper. On mobile Safari alone (frequently 40% of traffic), anonymous users are often “forgotten” within seven days because cookies aren’t treated as mission-critical. Nostra’s identity extension fixes that with first-party, server-set cookies at the edge. Think of Netflix: you never get logged out. With the right setup on your own domain, cookies can persist for months, even years.

Why it matters:

• Better onsite relevance: Recommendations and content improve when you can stitch behavior across visits, not just sessions.
• Cleaner measurement: A/B tests hold buckets; lifecycle tools (Klaviyo, Attentive) see the real journey; paid platforms attribute accurately beyond a week.
• Less vendor sprawl: Instead of asking every tool to hack identity, fix it once at the edge and let everything downstream benefit.

Implementation is refreshingly simple: add a DNS record or worker. If you’re on Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware), or similar platforms, there’s no heavy engineering.

Don’t forget the new crawlers

Search is changing. Beyond Google, large language models (LLMs) are already crawling and summarizing commerce sites. Many of those bots don’t render JavaScript, which means your reviews widget, FAQs, and dynamic content may be invisible to the very systems shaping buyer research. Nostra’s crawler optimization serves a fully cached, bot-ready experience—fast and readable—so both traditional search engines and LLMs see the substance, not a blank shell.

What great brands get right

The best-performing commerce teams don’t start with a target conversion rate and bolt on shiny objects. They start with a single North Star: “How do we make the experience feel instant and effortless?” Speed is customer experience. The difference between a page that paints immediately and one that stalls behind a white screen is the difference between curiosity and bounce. Nostra has measured the impact at scale—hundreds of human years reclaimed from loading spinners.

And when speed lands, the economics change. In controlled A/Bs, brands run half their traffic through the edge layer and watch revenue deltas in their own analytics. Some see double-digit conversion lifts; others simply see their RUM dashboards shift down by a second overnight. Either way, both marketing and engineering win: lower acquisition costs and fewer performance fire drills.

Where this is going

More logic is moving to the edge—performance, identity, security, even analytics signal routing. The upside isn’t just “faster pages”; it’s a more resilient, privacy-aware stack where first-party data and user experience aren’t at odds. That’s why many teams come to Nostra not to rip-and-replace, but to amplify the tools they already bought.

If you’re investing in content, media, and personalization, make sure the foundation isn’t sabotaging you. Fix speed first. Everything else gets better.

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👉 Want to dive deeper? Listen to the full conversation with Arthur Root on The MarTech Matrix Podcast.

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Sean Simon (00:01.038)
Welcome to this episode of the MarTech Matrix. A big thanks to our sponsor at Blurbs. Blurbs is a community-driven platform designed to help connect buyers and sellers in a way that builds trust and confidence without the BS. You can find everything you need to know at trustblurbs.com. In today’s episode, we’ll be taking a candid look at how Nostra is helping brands squeeze more ROI from the same traffic by fixing speed, not buying more eyeballs. If your emails…

Sorry, if your e-commerce site takes longer than three seconds to load, today’s guest says you’re leaving money on the table and he’s got the data to prove it. The blurb for Nostra reads, Nostra amplifies website performance by cutting load times, improving personalization, and boosting conversion rates. Their edge delivery system, crawler optimization, and identity extension streamline the process. Ideal for e-commerce brands needing rapid,

impactful enhancement to their site capabilities without heavy lifting on their part. Arthur, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Arthur Root (01:07.226)
I’m doing great. It’s beautiful here in New York City. Nothing could be better than being here with you.

Sean Simon (01:14.062)
We love New York City. Well, let’s give the audience a little bit of a background on you and tell us what led you to build Nostra.

Arthur Root (01:25.352)
Yeah, so I was doing a lot of cool work in the personalization space.

And we were working on product recommendation engines and content discovery and all of these amazing things. And we found that we could deliver very meaningful value there. However, the downside was that we would slow down websites. And so we found ourselves in this very interesting situation where there was always a benefit to what we’re doing. combined that benefit was kind of, know, hey, Robin,

Peter to pay Paul. Yes, conversion rate would go up because we’d have a more personalized experience. However, SEO and traffic would go down because Google and Facebook didn’t like sending traffic to low and slow websites.

We took a step back and we kind of realized, well, what’s one of those situations where both sides win? You know, both the marketing team, the technology team, the e-commerce side, everyone wins. And, you know, there are very few situations where that’s the case, but site speed and just making your website faster. I’ve never heard somebody complain, man, I went on that website and it was too fast. And so we took a step back. We decided our

Sean Simon (02:50.06)
Thank

Arthur Root (02:53.57)
Well, what can we do to universally make commerce websites faster? And that’s how we came across the Edge Delivery Engine. And I’ve been just so impressed about all the things you can do kind of on a Cloudflare Edge instance.

Sean Simon (03:10.828)
That’s it’s interesting. you most of my career, I was been on the sales side and everybody wants to put up their JavaScript or their tag, whether it’s on the site, in the header, in the container tag. and every marketer, shouldn’t say every marketer, most marketers would say, well, is it going to slow down my site? I think that these marketers who aren’t necessarily as tech savvy as maybe the engineers on the backend have been just, it’s been pounded in their head. can’t put more stuff you put on the site, the slower it gets.

Is there truth behind when you put more JavaScript up, whether it’s in a container tag or not? Does that really slow the site down or is there a way to do it where it won’t slow the site down? And does Notia solve for that?

Arthur Root (03:56.776)
So the answer is yes and no. Everything you do, every time you add something to the website, it will have an impact. It will slow down the website to some extent. Now the question is, will it slow down the website in a manner that is noticeable to a human or is it not noticeable to a human? So, yeah, they’re simple things, right? If you have a script or tag that loads after…

the hero image after the rest of the page loads in, technically the website is still loading, but for all intents and purposes it’s fine. With that said, and so there are a lot of different tools out there that help kind of you order which script loads in when, or if you have a developer that can go through and kind of do that themselves, and you know that’s a common practice that somebody on your team or a

a tool that helps with that. that’s very, it’s great, it’s super needed. What we do at Notre is slightly different. We focus on getting your server and your browser to connect as quickly as possible, regardless on if the browser needs to load in a little bit or a lot. And so the way that we do that is,

A typical ecommerce store has kind two groups of how of parts of their website. Part one is a part of the site that is the same for every single person. So think about like your images. Images tend to be, you know, there’s some personalization, but generally roughly the same. Those all live out on a content delivery network.

And so your website just wouldn’t load in without those. Now let’s say that makes up half the loading of your website. The other half is what’s called dynamic content. That’s think about your like shopping cart, right? Sean would have a different shopping cart than Arthur. And so those tend to have to come from origin servers. What we do at Nostra is we actually focus on how do you get as much stuff that is kind of personalized out on

Arthur Root (06:05.564)
to the edge onto the content delivery network so it can load in super super quickly and go to for as little as possible to the origin.

So that’s what we focus on. So yes, the more scripts you have, the slower your website will be. And Noture definitely does help just kind of raise the baseline. you can kind of expect when our software gets to more generally like a 20 or 30 % faster website, just, and whether that’s taking you from an egregiously slow website, like a five second load time down to four or three seconds, or it’s going from two seconds down to a

and a half. know one way or the other you know we kind of always find it that we’re faster.

Sean Simon (06:55.19)
Makes sense. Given what I said earlier about how it always came up for me in terms of people worried about site speed, why do you think it’s such an overlooked factor in the conversation around conversion optimization?

Arthur Root (07:12.848)
I think that site speed is such a technical…

It takes such a high level of technical expertise to work on it. And a lot of times you have somebody who owns conversion rate, who’s not an engineer. and so there’s kind of a level of frustration with both knowing how important that is, right? They know that it doesn’t matter what they do. If website doesn’t load in, nobody’s going to buy anything. and they own that key performance indicator. own that KPI, but it’s also such a technical project that

they don’t feel that their ability to influence it, what is probably the most important part of the buying journey. And so there’s just such a level of frustration that comes out of a lot of our buyers because they kind of look at them and they say, wow, this would be so awesome if my site was faster. And on top of that, I have no idea how to make it faster.

Sean Simon (08:12.258)
Yeah, I wish I had sold your product when I was younger, then no one could give me that argument, because I’m there to help them with their site speed, right, as opposed to the closet slowdown. Have you ever experienced a moment with a client where performance, the load of the site visibly killed the brand’s growth?

Arthur Root (08:18.137)
Exactly.

Arthur Root (08:30.958)
all the time. And a lot of times we see that in the inverse, which is brand will come to us. You know, this is, you know.

A brand will come to us and they’ll say, oh yeah, we’ll make our website faster. And, you know, we’ll see a 30 % lift in conversion rate. This isn’t our like every day, every time it’s a 30 % lift, but you know, we’ll see that. And then the brand will just take off from there because the difference in economics of a business when you have a, when you, when you, when you’re able to have that sort of impact, it’s kind of night and day. And so, you know, it’s kind of hard to say.

Hey, you know, we know this brand didn’t work out because their site wasn’t fast But we can say that there are handful of brands that we work with that quite frankly would not be growing at 50 100 200 300 percent a year if Their site did not kind of have that initial boost in and revenue And both on the site speed side and conversion rate side, but also can have that sort of impact on the paid media side as well

Sean Simon (09:37.152)
So when you’re talking into the e-comm community, what do most e-comm leaders get wrong when they’re thinking about site optimization when it comes to speed?

Arthur Root (09:48.36)
I think a lot of the times people…

start with the KPI of conversion rate and work backwards from there. I think we all want a 5 % conversion rate and win. But I think the way that, you know, a lot of brand leaders think about things is just so like black and white there. I think you should really start with, hey, how do we make the customer experience the best? How do we go out and surprise and delight our customers? Because when we look at the brands that are growing at an incredible

rate that’s the only North Star that they have. They have KPIs that they need to hit and they look at and they optimize but all of the ways that they get there think about what is how do I put my customer first how do we optimize to their experience and so you know site speed yeah conversion rate definitely goes up there’s no doubt about it there’s a one-to-one correlation between site speed and conversion rate but even better than that there’s a one-to-one correlation with you know site speed and how

happy your customer is. Like there’s nothing more frustrating than scrolling on your phone on the subway and you get hung up and it didn’t load in. Like that’s infuriating and we help fix that. Just like if you were to walk into a store and you you were able to see just the perfect thing right in front of you right when you walked in and the sales associate came right up to you and said hey I think that you want this versus having to search around maybe this door closes in your face.

Sean Simon (11:01.571)
Yeah.

Arthur Root (11:20.846)
that it’s just a night and day experience.

Sean Simon (11:23.886)
That’ll happen as soon as AI agents take over the in-store experience. And I have to imagine, as I’ve done this, when I experience what you just described there with a slow loading site or a site that doesn’t load, I blame my carrier, or my signal’s gone or something like that. I never think that it’s the website’s fault. And I’m in the business. It doesn’t really come to mind.

Arthur Root (11:29.159)
Yeah, exactly.

Sean Simon (11:45.71)
that often. So for people hearing this conversation for the first time, maybe they just weren’t familiar with this topic, can you describe Nostra in one sentence? I know I gave you my blurb earlier, but in your voice, what’s Nostra in one sentence?

Arthur Root (12:03.216)
News for a simple, it is a Cloudflare instance that makes your website faster, that enables you to track users not for seven days, but for as long as you would like. You can keep the same cookie. You’re able to protect yourself against bad bots and optimize your website for good bots.

and generally do all of these things, whether you’re an engineer with 30 years of infrastructure engineering experience or you’re a digital marketer who just wants their conversion rate to go up and their customers to be happy. And so we kind of we fancy ourselves as a company that bridges a highly, highly technical and highly important part.

of an e-commerce journey with a non-technical, very easy to use product.

Sean Simon (12:57.272)
Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. I think for a lot of e-commerce folks that maybe aren’t familiar with this sort of category of solutions, they’re blaming other things. And maybe they’re blaming the wrong thing for their challenges, whether that’s sales or site speed. So what exactly, actually, before we dive into the next question, you mentioned cookies are persistent. Cookies can stay longer. We’ve talked a lot about cookies in the show, especially when the topic of deprecation was hot.

Can you explain to that, you double click into that one in terms of how do you, is that a third-party cookie you’re referring to, first-party cookie, how do you help it live longer?

Arthur Root (13:35.816)
Yeah, so there are really two groups of cookies as far as kind of a very high level explanation. There are cookies that browsers like Safari see as mission critical cookies and there are cookies that they don’t see as mission critical cookies.

Arthur Root (13:53.508)
If a cookie loads in from your own domain on the server, it is deemed a mission critical cookie. And so an example of that is you notice how you never get logged out of Netflix. That is a, they set it as a first party server site cookie and it is mission critical. The issue is a lot of Shopify, a lot of e-commerce stores don’t really understand the nuances or don’t even quite frankly have access to their own first party domain. And so what they

do is they either set it up as a subdomain, xx.domain.com, which is where they kind of have their server-side cookie, or they just set it via JavaScript on the browser.

And either one of those are deemed kind of the second group of cookies, non-mission critical cookies. What ends up happening when you have a Cloudflare reverse proxy running is you get control over your own domain. And so you can actually just set the cookie by adding, you know, we do it through a Cloudflare worker where you have your cookie is set and it lasts forever. And so whether that’s your AV testing tool so that people, you know, stay in the same A or B bucket, whether it’s a Facebook

Facebook cookies so that Facebook can track people not just for seven days but in perpetuity whether it’s your Klayvio cookie or your attentive cookie so you can send more abandoned cart emails and text messages and be able to track people and build out more robust profiles and so it’s very simple what we do is we actually give you control over your first party domain

And then when you have control over that, we have a very, very simple solution that, again, doesn’t require any engineering that will enable those cookies to last in perpetuity.

Sean Simon (15:39.928)
So you mentioned the product, the Edge delivery engine. How does that work behind the scenes? Like if I’m an e-commerce folk, I’m that high technical, can you explain what it’s actually doing behind the scenes?

Arthur Root (15:53.212)
Yep. So it is sitting as a Cloudflare reverse proxy. So it is enabling us to sit between the user and the origin. And we are kind of intercepting a request.

and caching the HTML of the website. It’s kind of the thing I like, we’re caching the structure of the website and kind of going pixel by pixel and saying, okay, this specific pixel needs to come from the origin and this pixel can live on our server in a pre-built, close to the user manner. And we’re able to expand from half your website being on these pre-built, you know, super fast servers to 99.9 % of your website out there.

Sean Simon (16:39.32)
So basically everything that’s not super personalized is cached. so let’s talk about some of your other products, crawler optimization and root ID. Why do these matter for SEO and personalization readiness?

Arthur Root (16:44.136)
Correct. Yeah.

Arthur Root (16:56.84)
So when you think about personalization, you really can only personalize based on information you know about somebody. And so without Nostra, you kind of reset the clock on anonymous users every 24 hours to seven days if they come in on an iPhone, is 40 % of most people’s traffic. And so if you want to continue to have a personalized experience, you have to build up

a view of that person over not just a couple of days, but over weeks, months, and years. And so when your cookie ends up lasting six months, 12 months, 24 months, and so on, you are able to do on-site personalization. Your product recommendation is really much better for Sean. If you knew, he clicked on these eight products and you can track him over a two-year period. I’m a firm believer that these personalized e-coms

commerce flows that are kind of, you know, these Clavio flows that will be tailored, each person has their own email. That only works if each person has their own data, right? If you can match somebody and view them over a six month, 12 month, 24 month period, you’re going to be able to really see.

deliver a truly personalized experience to them. And there’s a lot of great work that’s going to go into the modeling and the text creation and the image creation that’s personalized to that person. But the only way that that’s actually useful is if you have unique data on that individual.

And the only way to have unique data on that individual or one of the most important things is having a cookie that lasts forever on that person. So that’s another way we think about it. And then the crawler optimization is also right up the alley of how do you optimize for e-commerce, right? There’s a whole slew of new e-commerce buyers coming from ChatGPT and from Perplexity and Claude. And when those crawlers

Arthur Root (19:03.108)
come to your websites, you need to make sure, one, you are showing a fast experience, right? And so we’ve built out kind of a second product that has an entirely cached experience just that is optimized purely for these crawlers. And then two, you know, a lot of people don’t realize that these bots are less sophisticated than Googlebot and that they don’t render out.

JavaScript on your website. And so that means if you have a reviews widget that renders the reviews via JavaScript, when the crawler comes to the website, it will not actually render out those reviews. And so the mind of the crawler will not have

all those reviews. And I think, you know, it’s, too early to confidently say, Hey, 100 % having reviews has X, Y, and Z impact on these large language models. But I also think you’d be very naive to think that it’s a good thing to not have large language models, you know, read the good reviews about you. And so, you know, kind of the, the crawler has kind of two very distinct, but two very important use cases, which is one.

allowing the crawlers, whether it’s ChatGPT or Google or who have it, to read two, three, four acts of the number of pages. And then number two is allowing them to actually render out JavaScript so that they can read all of the important information on your website.

Sean Simon (20:37.87)
That’s powerful because I am one of those people that’s using chat GPT or perplexity more for my searches. And I do notice that sometimes I don’t get back complete data and it’s probably not using Notia. When you go back, I’m gonna go back to root ID and like personalization, because you mentioned personalization earlier and personalization vendors lean into the fact that

They have this cookie, they know all this information about the user and every user, you they say is going to get a unique experience. But to your point around, well, that’s only if the cookie is persistent, right? If the cookie lasts between visits. Are those companies, are those personalization tools, are they overstating their ability since they don’t necessarily have control over the CloudFair like you do?

Arthur Root (21:30.632)
They’re doing the best that they can with the access that they have.

It doesn’t mean that they can’t be better. I think that every personalization company is staying up at night and thinking, how in the world do I identify more users and get more data? Like that is, that is the crux of it. The algorithms are one side. The other side is how do you get more data, you know, garbage in, garbage out? How do you get the best information in there? And a lot of some of these companies, I’m thinking like segment and dynamic yield.

actually give you instructions as to how to set up a similar thing to Nostra on their own. The issue is that those are that’s two or three out of the you thousand providers out there and on top of that you’d only be doing it for two of the apps and so the biggest and the most sophisticated players in the space have actually found a way

and have identified that this is the best way to do it. The issue is actually implementing that if you’re on a platform-based site like a Shopify or a Demandware.

or Magento is impossible because you don’t even have access to implement it without Nostra. So it’s kind of been deemed setting up a cookie via proxy, the best practice. The issue is that people don’t have access and they don’t have documentation for, they might have documentation for two out of their 40 cookies, but not out of, you know, not the other 38.

Sean Simon (23:09.676)
Yeah, this is a really important topic for the listeners. We interviewed a lot of buyers over the last 18 months and in particular last year, personalization was number one in terms of things that e-commerce managers and marketing managers were thinking about, like how do we do a better job with that? And I think that they typically think about, who are the personalization solutions out there and what can they personalize for me as opposed to how do I make personalization better? How do I set that vendor up to be successful?

I think this is probably a question that most people didn’t think to ask, right? So hopefully it just this goes to show how integrated all these technologies can be which brings me to my next question How does Nostra integrate with the brand’s existing tech stack? Does it work with any econ platform any analytics tool? Like what do they need to have or not have to be successful with Nostra?

Arthur Root (24:03.048)
For the SightSpeed tool, if you’re on Shopify or Demandware or some of the other platforms, it’s just adding a DNS record and we’re able to handle the rest. And it is totally compatible. The tool that ends up being the identity tool, the cookie extension tool.

actually works on any website on the internet. And so whether we have to bring over our own reverse proxy or they have their own reverse proxy and we just integrate within it, we’re able to extend the cookies in five minutes, no work, you’re just adding a worker or adding a DNS record and we’re able to go from there. And you should see, you know, 40, 50 % longer cookie lifetimes within a couple of months.

Sean Simon (24:52.462)
Okay, let’s pivot a little bit to more about the customers and the differentiation that Nostra has in the marketplace. So who is your typical customer in terms of your ICP? Who do you go after?

Arthur Root (25:06.439)
So we work anywhere from, you know, fortunately, I shouldn’t say fortunately, we work anywhere from publicly traded large enterprise, which is we love working with those folks and they’re wonderful and they tend to really get what we do all the way down to a Shopify store doing 10 or $20 million a year and anywhere in between. you know, the buyers of our software.

They’re the VP of engineering and that’s great. And they really see this as a most efficient way to get their site to be faster or their cookies to last longer or whatever it is. And sometimes it’s a CMO who’s just saying, Hey, I think that it’s a better customer experience if the site’s faster and I want a higher conversion rate.

And so we work in kind of a ton of different verticals, a lot of ways, a lot of the time, you you want both the buy-in from the technology team as well as the marketing team.

Sean Simon (26:06.158)
Makes sense. Okay. So how would they measure success? Like what is, we talked about the speed earlier, but it’s not the only data point. So how do your customers typically determine, let’s say a pilot, what success looks like?

Arthur Root (26:22.428)
Yeah, our customers look at success in kind of two groups. We have one group that says, hey, we need to A-B test and see what

the impact on conversion rate is. And so we give them a, hey, if you’re willing to put your money where your mouth is, we’ll do a totally free A-B test. And we’ll say, if Nostra is able to increase revenue by 3%, let’s say, we’ll call it a win. And so we’ll run half the traffic through Nostra, half the traffic not through Nostra, and our customer will be able to look within their Shopify account and see, hey, Nostra delivered this amount.

out of value. So that’s kind of one option and you know fairly typical option that people take. The other option is we have folks that say hey conversion rate yeah it matters but we just want to make a website faster and in that case we’re able to go and you know just deploy it at a hundred percent and you see that you know the next day whatever real rum tool whatever real user metric tool you’re looking at

the site will go from here to here and it’ll just be that much faster. If it was a three second load time, it’ll go down to two and you’ll be thrilled.

Sean Simon (27:39.512)
So first, this conversation has been amazing. I’ve learned a lot. I imagine a lot of people have. A lot of things that you mentioned stand out to me. But what makes Nostra remarkable in your mind? I guess maybe another way to think about that is why do brands switch to you? And maybe the question I should ask before that is are brands switching from your competitors?

or are they coming to you and this is all new?

Arthur Root (28:10.12)
You know, we believe we’re the best product in the market, so.

But most people don’t have a solution. So it’s much more blue ocean where people, we are either looking at nose trade or no one. so we, and we believe we are by far the best product in the market and very, very much standing behind it. But a lot of the times people say, great, you can make my website faster. Great, it’ll increase revenue. Sign me up. I don’t need to wait and see what other things.

things are going on, I’m just happy with a faster website. And so, you know, I’d say the 75 to 95 % of our customers, you know, are just that that’s kind of their perspective. They’re not running an RFP. They just say, hey, yeah, I’d love to have a faster site. And then when somebody does run an RFP, I would say we win the vast majority of times because we’ve kind of the most robust platform in the space.

Sean Simon (29:11.65)
Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s one of those things where people know, some people might know that their site could be faster, or maybe their other tools could be better, but they’re not necessarily thinking about this because they don’t know about it, right? So how do you communicate that message to the ecosystem, to the market that, hey, you should be thinking about site speed and all the things that come along with the tools that you bring to the table?

Arthur Root (29:40.742)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, my view is how many people have ever regretted that the person that they’re emailing replies right away? How many people have ever loaded in a website and been like, man, that was too fast.

And how many people have ever been like, man, that deal happened because we really took our time. You know, if you come from the investment world, there’s a saying, time kills all deals. You come from the sales world, you know that timing kills all deals. And this goes not just through our website and what we believe there, but it also is kind of how we approach customer support. think our average

Response time is sub three minutes And that includes, you know when people message us at 2 a.m And because we believe that like time time time like just responsiveness both when you’re when we’re talking to our customers That’s what they get and when our when their customers are talking to their website, that’s what they get responsive fast 24-7, know time time time is what matters and we looked at an interesting

at which was, and this was when we were smaller even, but over the course of a year we saved multiple centuries of people just staring at blank white screens. Like think about that, over a year, a hundred years of human time, over a hundred years of human time was saved from looking at a blank white screen. That’s like, you know, that’s pretty awesome.

Sean Simon (31:14.862)
Yeah, that is pretty awesome. How do you measure that? it just focus groups? How do you measure white screens?

Arthur Root (31:22.748)
Well, you can, you know, what we focus on is eliminating that like white screen. Like it just gets it in quickly. and you know, we have a certain amount of Patriots, I don’t know if it’s 10 billion or 20 billion, whatever, however, and then we had, you know, our average amount of time that we’re faster versus not having us. And you can see that it came out to literally hundreds of years of time saved.

Sean Simon (31:46.99)
Yeah, if I were selling Nostra based on what I heard today, I’d be focused again on all the investments a brand has already made in these other tools that will just perform that much better with Nostra involved. So where do you see this space evolving over the next year, year and a half?

Arthur Root (32:07.868)
Well, I believe more and more of the internet will be happening on the edge. I think speed matters. think the ability to route on the edge and make decisions closer and closer to the individual matter. And so.

You know, to answer your question, where do I think the world, the Internet and where do you think NOSHRA is going? I think that I would be very bullish that more and more logic, whether that’s site speed logic, whether that’s cookie logic, whether that’s large language model optimization logic.

more more of that will be happening on a proxy or whether it’s security, whether it’s bot protection. All of these things will be happening on the edge or analytics for that matter. And so, you should expect to see, know, Nostra not only continue to improve our site speed, but to start to kind of horizontally become a…

platform that merchants look at as, great, Nusra made my website faster, but also protected me from this DDoS attack, but also helped my cookies last forever and so on.

Sean Simon (33:22.978)
Very good. Okay, it’s time for our lightning round. Are you ready for this? We’ll go super fast, Arthur. A brand that you think is quietly crushing it online.

Arthur Root (33:26.555)
Shoo!

Arthur Root (33:33.732)
man, that’s a great one. I am a huge fan of Passion Footwear. Haley, their CEO, is awesome. They have managed to scale without spending any money on ads, which is pretty great. When they first onboarded on to Nostra, this was the first time that they went viral and we thought that they were under attack.

because they got a million sessions in like, you know, a couple hours. And so that is a brand that is crushing it. And if you go check out Haley’s TikTok, I think that every D2C founder should be doing stuff like that.

Sean Simon (34:09.398)
Excellent. A book, podcast, or idea that’s reshaped your thinking lately.

Arthur Root (34:15.944)
I remember my senior year of college I read a book

Man’s Searching for Meaning, think is what it was about Victor Manning. I might be butchering this because it’s been a while, but at the end of the day, us as humans, look for purpose. And it’s a story about him surviving the Holocaust as a psychiatrist and how even in the darkest times, in probably the most atrocious situation that’s ever happened, people were able to

laugh. It’s a very profound book and had a big impact on my life.

Sean Simon (34:59.744)
to be self-deprecating. Your favorite aha moment from a client implementation?

Arthur Root (35:06.664)
My favorite aha moment from a client implementation was when a client asked to have access to their Cloudflare account and started showing us, well, I’d love to do this. I’d love to do that. I’d love to do this. And we just started building with them.

Sean Simon (35:27.65)
Right on. Okay, so wrapping up, where can listeners find Nostra? Your URL, your blurbs page, obviously, LinkedIn, tell us.

Arthur Root (35:40.102)
Yeah, our blurb page, that’s the best place to find us, especially if you’re listening to this. I’m very active on LinkedIn. You can email me, Arthur at Nostra.ai and then obviously we have a website that works very well.

Sean Simon (35:56.474)
I would hope so. Anything new on the horizon people should be aware of, new product features? Are you hiring, any events hosting or attending?

Arthur Root (36:06.808)
We have a lot of stuff new there will be a big announcement in terms of our cookie technology in the coming weeks. A lot of you might not realize that NOSFER is running in the background on your website already powering some of your major third parties and so yeah be on be on the lookout for for understanding what NOSFER can do for you.

Sean Simon (36:28.462)
All right, Arthur Root, CEO of Nostra. Thank you for being with us today on the Martech Matrix. We appreciate your time. For the listeners out there, like Arthur said, you can find them at his website at Nostra.ai, on their Blurbs page, which is trustblurbs.com, or on our LinkedIn profile. And that will do it for our show today. Look forward to talking to you next time. Thanks, Arthur.

Arthur Root (36:51.612)
Thanks. Take care.