528: TikTok Shop, AI, Meta Ads & More Gossip – ECF Recap Part 2 With Toni Herrbach

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You’re listening to the My Bob Quirter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now, Tony and I were at the eCommerce Fuel Conference in New Orleans last week, and this is part two of the series where we’re covering the gossip, the hallway conversations and the sessions at the event and some of the trends that we’re seeing. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are almost sold out over at sellersummit.com.

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The Seller Summit is an e-conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events.

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so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off tickets at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250K or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, the tickets are almost sold out. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur Yet,

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It’s available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

01:55
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. It is day two of, actually it’s day three. It’s day three. Day three of ECF Live where we’re covering Andrew Udarian’s eCommerce Fuel event. And Bo, Tony and I went to a number of talks and we’re just going to do a little bit of a recap today. Yeah. You said you’re exhausted and can’t wait to get home. I did so much talking today. Actually all days. Yeah. I feel like I’m at that stage where your throat’s just starting to like get that, oh, I need to shut up.

02:25
for a little bit. So let’s record a podcast. Our friend Noah lost his voice on day zero. Yes. Right when he arrived at the opening party. Yeah, he has it back a little bit today. He does. Yes. Yeah. So. So what, are some key takeaways? So I’m seeing a couple common themes. One of the things that we did this time at ECF, which I don’t think we’ve done to this level, is break into those small groups called houses. And I think we discussed that last time.

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but today we basically did mini masterminds with our houses. And the one thing that I’ve noticed throughout the several days, just getting more of those one-on-one conversations and small group conversations is that everybody wants to talk about branding and marketing and content. Yes. Actually, my whole table was mostly about content. Yeah. And how to do it, the methods of doing it and the types of content. Yeah. So I think that’s a common theme. And it’s interesting because we see this a lot with Amazon sellers.

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where people are like, oh, can’t put all my eggs in one basket. I need to get off Amazon. I need to start creating that brand. These people already have brands. They’re not really, I mean, some of them are selling on Amazon, but primarily they are selling on Shopify or BigCommerce. They already have a brand created, but they have trouble creating the content to go along with it. Which I find interesting actually, because if you’re already doing pretty well at D2C, usually you have one channel down, one or two channels down, I would say. And I would say the majority of the people least I talked to are doing really well on.

03:53
Facebook advertising still and that’s what I heard as well though people were unhappy. Oh, okay They were unhappy with Facebook ads. Yeah, they’re just okay, you know, it feels like a roller coaster Well Facebook did go down really recently and yes did so So one of the interesting talks I went to yesterday Was a talk on digital product, which I don’t think Andrew’s ever had a digital product talk And so I was mostly curious

04:21
as to what it was going to be about. from the amount of people in the room, I will say that people didn’t think that was a good idea to have that talk. people were in the room, just curious? About 15. Oh, wow. That’s really small. small. Okay. And it was unfortunate because I feel like that was the sleeper session of the event because it was taught by Julia. She owns a Barware brand.

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which I was explaining this last night to people and one person thought it was club wear, like dancing, like stuff you’d wear to a bar. Pat from Pat, the CB radio guy, thought it meant things you wore to ballet on the B-A-R-R-E bar. And I was like, no, it’s like cocktail shakers, bar wear. Like, so anyway, just to clarify, that’s what she sells. And she actually got her start with digital products and then moved into the physical product space.

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and the way that they are using digital products and they basically are talking about courses. So I think they have eight courses on their site and she shared her numbers for Shopify. So they sell on Amazon and Shopify. For Shopify, about 20 % of her sales on Shopify are the digital products. making up a huge chunk of the actual Shopify revenue. But not only that, they use that instead of a lead magnet.

05:41
So we talk a lot about lead magnets. talk about creating mini courses, PDFs, things like that to get people on your email list. They’re using it as an incentive to buy. So they have a beginner bartender type course, which is $150. It’s set up similar to our courses with person talking video, although they’re actually showing like demonstrating, creating the drinks and stuff. It’s $150. And they basically offer that if you spend over a certain dollar amount, you get that for free.

06:10
So if you spend $75 in the store, you get the course as the bonus, right, as $150 value, which is a huge value and it costs them absolutely nothing, right? It doesn’t cost them anything to mail it. So even though like we do a lot of like free gift with purchase, but this is a hundred percent free gift with purchase and it’s an unlimited quantity. The other thing she said that it worked really well with is

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when people want to give corporate type gifts, which they have a product that lends itself to that, the fact that you can get it, you can also purchase the class. So just think about this. If you’re like in a big company and you want to give your top manager something, you give them all a fancy cocktail set and they get this bartending class. So it takes this product that it seems good and makes it great. And so they’re spending double the amount of money and Julia’s spending

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zero double, you know, she’s spending just what it costs to get the barware and people are double happy. Right. So it’s really a smart move. I talked to Pat for a long time about it last night. He’s like, I need to create a CV. You know, I was like, yes, you do. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity in that for people to start creating digital products, courses to go with the products that you already sell and using that as your either upsell or your free with purchase.

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or as opposed to just a straight up like put your email address in and get this for free. I like that idea. You know what’s funny is I think at least at this conference, just digital products and courses are kind of looked down upon. Yes. Right. They don’t realize that’s 100 % profit. Yes. And it’s like her course is $150, which is really reasonable for a tad to learn how to mix drinks if that’s what you’re into. That’s a very reasonable priced course.

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And it’s all profit versus maybe her $75 shaker set costs her 10 bucks or five bucks. Plus she’s got to ship it. Plus there’s all these other added costs to it. So someone who was in that session sells a product to style. It’s for men. It’s like how to style thinning hair. it. You just see this teeny tiny comb. Comb with two T’s.

08:28
I think like some sort of like actual like gel or it’s a baby brush. Anyway, but he was he’s been doing digital products for long time. So he actually chimed in on the conversation was really interesting. And he basically sells manuals or courses on how to style and get haircuts that are is good for like thinning or fine hair, which like I’m like, that’s a no brainer, right? You already sell the product.

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it’s not hard to sell somebody on and now we’re going to teach you how to do your hair in a way that makes it look better. Oh, and by the way, with our products, right? Right. And his story was actually funny. So he got into digital products because before he even launched this haircare brand, he has a course that teaches people how to dance. And he said, he said it’s not about his quote was interesting. It was basically, it’s not about the.

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minute details of the course. He’s like, I don’t teach any dance moves that that you can’t learn anywhere on the internet. He’s like, but I target my dance course to older men whose kids are getting married and they want to be able to dance on the dance floor. Like that’s his market because that’s his market for the hair products. Right. I’m like, right. I’m like, give him a microphone. But it’s genius. Right. So it’s like you can take a very simple digital course or product.

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and add the right marketing spin to it, right? Because all dance moves are the same. It’s not like a 60 year old man has a different dance move than a 20 year old girl, right? So they can all do the same dances, but because he’s marketed it in this very specific way, he gets a very targeted customer, which is exactly the type of customer he wants. So I think that’s important for people to think about when they’re thinking about the products they sell, or maybe they don’t sell anything yet, right? And like, I just wanna do something digital.

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you know, what should I do? It’s not necessarily about reinventing some sort of technique. It’s just about putting a spin on that technique that makes it relatable to your demographic of people. Does he still sell that dance course? Yes. To the to the hair? I mean, I the market, I mean, I don’t think he’s like selling it on the same site or anything. OK, I got it. And, you know, if you already sell on Shopify, Shopify has some native integrations that allow you to deliver digital products. So it’s not like you would have to go create something totally new if you wanted to add this to your product suite on Shopify.

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If you aren’t selling anything already, you can do it on WordPress really easily. So we talk about digital products a lot, but it was really cool to hear it talked about in the e-commerce setting and to see people’s like light bulbs going off. All 15 of them? All 15 light bulbs are going off. Anyway, so I thought that was kind of the sleeper session because I think people could really take advantage of this and it’s not hard to create that content these days, especially with AI and overseas, VA’s, things like that.

11:19
So that was my, that’s kind of my winning session as far as like an idea that’s been around forever, but people aren’t utilizing. So my session was the complete opposite of yours. It was packed. It was a Facebook ad section and it was Taylor holiday and her David Herman. I had David Herman on the podcast before, so I kind of knew him pretty well. The first half was about finances. Like, do you even have the numbers to even support ads?

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And I actually had this issue in my class, people want to run ads and they just start doing it without, you know, watching any of the videos and then they fail and they’ll go, Hey, can you take a look? And I’m like, Hey, this product’s not going to work or the numbers don’t work here. Yeah. Cause the product costs 10 bucks. You’re not going to be able to get a conversion for like three bucks. Right. Or whatever. So he went through and what was nice is someone from ECF volunteered their numbers to do a full case study. so they’re.

12:17
there was OpEx operating expenses and then cost of goods. The operating expenses on its own was over 40%. And the margins just didn’t make sense. Basically, if you just added the numbers, there was a negative 10 % profit. Right? And so the whole point of that talk was, you have to get this amount, you have to be able to support the ads before you even think about running them. Right.

12:43
And then the sweet spot average order value is usually 60 to $80. And one thing that I learned that didn’t quite make sense to me, so I talked to David afterward about it. He said anything that’s like over that is actually harder to run Facebook ads for because the impulse buy amount tends to be in that $68 range or less. And any more than that, you have to spend a lot more money

13:10
to determine whether your Facebook ads are gonna work. So it’s a much bigger risk when it’s more expensive because the conversion rate tends to be lower. Yeah, because people, it’s easy to get people to spend a certain amount of money on this for the moment. I mean, I’m not buying a $200 product because I’m scrolling on Facebook. Yes, yeah. And the other funny thing was, you know, he talked about like the minimum budgets and he was just kind of throwing out, you wanna get to like $1,000 a day and you know, this is how you do it.

13:37
Well, what’s nice about this particular talk over other Facebook talks that I’ve been to is that they did it from the perspective of a complete beginner and they kept it really simple. One campaign, Facebook advanced shopping, and then just maybe like three ads of your best ads and just go from there. So was very achievable. And I think it applied to most of the crowd who either just dabbling in Facebook ads or just about to start Facebook ads.

14:07
And then last night we had a party. We, you and I didn’t have a party. We went to a party. went to a party. I’m trying to think who I talked to. I talked to so many people at that party. I talked, this is probably the most people I’ve talked to at a party in a long time. Like the variety of people, met a lot of new people and oh, I also went to the women’s breakfast on Thursday morning. I am curious. So at the women’s breakfast, are you guys like a lot more open because us Neanderthals aren’t around?

14:36
Is the atmosphere different? Yes, we all sing songs and get out our knitting needles and we all work on a friendship blanket. It’s really wonderful. I don’t know. I think it’s nice because you can like make connections. It’s sort of like if they had a breakfast for runners or people that were really into like extreme sports or it’s just sort of like puts you in a group of people that’s smaller and more like so it’s easier to meet people. Right. It’s hard to meet people in a room full of two. If you don’t know anybody.

15:05
Wouldn’t you rather walk into a room of 10 people than 200? Sure. So I kind of look at it that way. It’s interesting because I ended up at the Asian table as I as I often do. That was on purpose, right? Yes. I know. I was the first person to sit there. You’re like, for the second person. I was like, oh, these are my people. I’m going to get better at math this morning. No, brilliant, brilliant women. So I’ve never.

15:33
I don’t think I’ve been to a women’s breakfast before. So I went to the dinner, so I don’t have much to compare it to. But we were pretty intentional at our table. I think there were three tables in the room that had people sitting at them. And our table, everyone went around and just basically said what they sold or what they did and just a little bit about themselves. So I was able to meet everybody at my table and a lot of people doing some really interesting and cool things. Not all of them are in e-commerce, like the data. I think it’s Celine, Selena, Celine.

16:04
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16:34
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

16:44
I don’t know if I think she’s speaking today about oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she was there the girl that sold the jumpsuits She was there a girl that I ended up talking to last night named Brooke who sells leather handbags Actually, you met her. Yes. Yes. Right next to me. Yes today. Yeah So anyway met a lot of interesting people learned a lot about their products learned a lot about what they were doing and It was nice because then throughout like all day yesterday and today

17:12
I saw them because it’s easy to stand out as a female ECF because there’s not a lot of us still. There’s more. There’s more than there were in the past years. So it was really nice because it just kind of gave you more friends. as some like there were a lot of people at my table, this was our first ECF. So, you know, they’re coming in probably not knowing a lot of people. And so I think especially for those people, it’s really nice because now they have people to find at the parties and find someone to sit next to and things where in a very like

17:41
easy environment to meet people, which I think the houses did something similar, right? It allowed you to connect with people in a very casual, not like what do you sell walking up and like barging into a conversation sort of thing. Well, that was my indirect way of asking, should what you think about doing that for seller summit or no, we have enough women. We’re half women. OK, OK. We that’s we don’t have a big enough room. So but no, it was great to meet a lot of them and find out what they were doing and.

18:10
It’s interesting because at my table, I believe they were all younger. OK. Like I was definitely the oldest person at the table, but I’m one of the older people here and or feels like I am sometimes. And so like a lot of them didn’t even have kids or weren’t married or anything like that. So they’re in a very different phase of life. Right. Which is also interesting. I’m like, go get it now. It’s your chance. It is right. You get weighed down. the kids start popping out, it’s game over.

18:35
But it was, I do think it was a good way to connect with people. And then I’ve been able to like have other conversations with the same people from my table throughout the last two days. Yeah. What I enjoyed is at our table, we actually just went around and talked about problems and you know, all the businesses have problems. Everyone has problems. Yeah. And this is something I talked about earlier. Whenever I interviewed someone for the podcast, we usually just talk about their successes.

19:02
And then once I hit the stop button, like the real conversation happens. I really wish I could record that part of the conversation. Well, it was like when we recorded the podcast two days ago or yesterday. And then after we were done, Andrew came into the room. And so it was the three of us hanging out for like 30 minutes. And we were all like, this should have been recorded. Like that was the. Well, that was for different. That was ammunition. Yes, that was ammunition against each other. But it was still a really interesting conversation.

19:31
So today we did those masterminds. I don’t know what else to call them. They called them problem solving pods. But for all intents and purposes, they’re masterminds. I was very nervous about this. Why? Because when I was running it, the instructions that I had were, let everybody form into their own groups. And I was like, absolutely not.

19:53
because this, gave me like flashbacks to like the kid in fifth grade that doesn’t get picked on the kickball team. And there’s like the one lonely kid standing on the sideline. And I was like, that’s not going to happen to my group. We’re not going to have the one person left out, like no way. So I just made people count off like one, two, three, four, five, and then listen. Okay. What did you all just get into groups? We did. just sat and you didn’t even pay attention that there was somebody that was without a group.

20:21
No, there’s only two tables. Only 14 people showed up, I think, out of the 25. Oh, really? We had all but one show up. Oh, really? Okay. Guess Ocean Group wins. So, so there’s one topic that came up. One of the entrepreneurs wanted to hire like a director of marketing. And this person made about three million ish, I would say. And he wanted to hire someone local.

20:51
and just outsource all the marketing because he’s like a product guy. And he’s like, the problem is where I live, it would cost like $150,000 a year. And I don’t know if I can like stomach that. then the whole discussion was why are you like, are you looking for like a magic bullet director of marketing? Or can since you’ve been doing marketing and clearly doing a pretty good job, could you just kind of document what you do and then hire someone to just kind of pick up where you left off and have a really strong set of SOPs?

21:20
And maybe you postpone that decision. Maybe you don’t even need a director of marketing, but you’re still growing and you’re the one in charge of doing it. You just don’t want to do it anymore. Right. And so I think he came away with perhaps outsourcing, maybe even someone from the Philippines or overseas, Columbia came up as well. Yeah. And save a ton of money and you wouldn’t feel bad. It would just take a little bit of time to train that person up. Yeah. So in my small group today, I can’t talk about our specific conversations because we had a, we had a blood pact not to share outside the group.

21:50
However, one conversation that we had that was definitely shareable was that one of the people in the group sells some sort of supplement. It wasn’t a supplement, but like an herbal, all-natural type product. He’s a product and manufacturing guy, of like the opposite of your person, right? Who’s like loves branding. He needs more marketing because the problem is they have a hard time getting people in. Once people are in,

22:19
they stay, they continue to purchase because it’s a consumable product, that sort of thing. But his issue was how do you get those people in initially? And because they are like a health product, there’s definitely a lot of things you can’t say and things like that. So when he starts talking, the first thing out of his mouth, and I felt like we were on a coaching call, like it just gave me, I was completely transported to my computer in a Zoom because he said, we bought the fifth largest winery in Colorado, but we don’t make wine.

22:47
That was his starting sentence and I was sucked in and then he could started to tell what he did. He had, was showing us on video and I was like, dude, like this is made for like Tik Tok, Instagram reels, YouTube, like just the initial sentence of I bought the fifth largest winery in Colorado and I don’t make wine. Like you think about that or was it just a casual? It was just, and you know how many people we talk to in coaching calls, right?

23:16
who say like three things and it’s like the best branded statement they’ve ever made and they have not thought about it for two seconds. That was exactly what he was doing. And as he continued to talk about his products and share, I was like, this should be recorded. Like it was all so good. But it just gave me that flashback to so many people, all they needed to do is tell their story, right? Because so many people have such interesting stories. And there were four of us in our little group.

23:42
And all three of us were like hanging on his every word because we were so fascinated by the fact that he bought a winery and doesn’t make wine and he uses the fermentation with the herbs and stuff. And he’s showing this video of like in like one of those wine vat things that normally they stomp on grapes, but he’s churning, who knows, parsley and whatever. I don’t know what it is, but it was just absolutely fascinating. And I was like, oh, people will watch this and they will buy in. They will buy into your product. They will buy into your story.

24:11
they will try it. And he had no idea that his own just talking about the brand was an absolutely amazing story. So what’s funny about that conversation is that occurred at our table too. And people were worried about being the face of their brand because they didn’t want like, if they were to ever sell the business, then they’d have to go with it, right? But I brought up the analogy like Ezra, boom by Cindy Joseph. Cindy Joseph passed away, unfortunately. And the way Ezra solved that problem is he

24:41
just kind of transitioned away to multiple influencers. I think the whole point of that is once you’re successful and you’re ready to sell, you can solve that problem. Like with money or, phase yourself out essentially. And I don’t even think he needs to be the face of the brand. I think it could all just be video shots and information from the actual process. Like just, it could be voiceover, right? Because the story is so interesting, almost like a documentary.

25:08
But anyway, so that was really interesting. And our group primarily did not talk about business. It was a lot of life optimization hacks, time management hacks. One of the people in our group is scaling a business right now, working a million hours a week, really quite unhappy. Like as anyone is in this phase, no one is happy in that scaling phase and just was looking for some like help getting more discipline.

25:36
in their life. so I just think that, those things, you know, oftentimes we get in these masterminds and people talk about their business, like true business, like I need a marketing person, or I don’t know how to do Facebook ads, things like that. But I think some of the conversations that were had in my group are probably even more impactful, because it’s about how you actually optimize your life.

25:57
It even got into like parenting hacks and really we didn’t have any conversations about and one of the people was like, well, I’m Eastern European. So we kind of believe in a pretty firm. Yeah. And I was like, I’m I’m a white girl. Like you’re I’m lucky if I can get him in time out like, you know, but anyway, it was just really interesting. It was really interesting the conversations that we were having about life in general, because I think

26:22
Life does affect business. Business does affect life. know, like if you’re in a growth period in your business and you’re working 80 hours a week and you have a family that affects your family, it affects how you treat them and all those things. And vice versa. If you have a new baby that like, you know, one of the guys in my house, not in my group, you know, he traveled here with his five month old, you know? And so I was talking to him in the elevator. He’s like, I’m exhausted. Right. I was like, yeah, because you’re sleeping with a five month old baby after being out till.

26:50
one in the morning. So I think all those things kind of work together. So it always makes me happy when people are comfortable enough to share those types of things, because those are really personal. Right. And it makes me happy that they’re willing to share and talk through it and, really be vulnerable, which I feel like we get a lot at seller summit, but that’s because we really put those groups together on purpose. And I made people count off to get in a group. you know, so it was interesting in our group also is someone had the problem where all their customers were asking for a very specific product.

27:19
that this person could make but she didn’t want to make it because she didn’t she wouldn’t buy it herself or she didn’t like that product and then she asked the group hey should I just make it is actually should I make this color is the same product just a different color of the product she didn’t like the color she didn’t like the color but everyone’s asking for it so her question was should I just do it anyway and everyone’s like yeah yeah it’s not about you it’s about yeah it’s about what people want yeah and so

27:49
Yeah, that was actually one of our main key takeaways. think she got a lot out of it just for that one question. Some people just need to hear it, right, from other people. And then the other thing that we did in our group, which was this was not a whole ECF thing. I just did this on my own is do you remember? I think we talked about this. Andrew made us write a letter to ourselves a couple of years ago. Right. And so I had people at the very end write a I just had little note cards and with, course, Ocean themed because we are Group Ocean, whatever Ocean House.

28:18
I know you’re rolling your eyes at me. I had them write something that they wanted their future self to remember. Because what I hear a lot from every conference, and we go to a lot of conferences, and I hear this from everybody, it’s like they leave really overwhelmed. They have some takeaways, but by the time they get home, they’re just like spent, they’re tired, they’ve been up all night, they lose their voice, all these things. And I was like, just write something you want yourself to remember in six months.

28:45
Because a lot of the key takeaways from my ocean house were stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. Work on the stuff that you think is a priority, not what other people think is a priority. Stay focused. There was a lot of that in the theme and I was like, this is a really good opportunity for people in six months to open up this letter that they get and remember what they told themselves the last day of ECF. So I was a little worried because it was off the script.

29:11
that people will be like, I don’t want to do this because I didn’t want to do it when Andrew had it to do it, but I did it anyway. And I was glad that I did. But everyone was seemed everyone at least told me they were OK with it. They probably are lying. But what you wrote, I didn’t write it. I’m done. You said you did it last year. It was like five years ago. We did it. OK. have no idea. No, I have no clue. What a cop out. I wish I did. I can’t remember. I honestly don’t. So after that, I went to a session on TikTok shop.

29:40
I was given by Paul and he’s basically doing a million a month on TikTok Shop and he just talked us through, you know, exactly what’s necessary. And here’s some of key takeaways. If you’re going to do TikTok Shop, you want to pick like one hero product that you promote and you want to start seeding the people right away. He’d already done a lot of prep work before he started TikTok Shop, which he attributed

30:09
know, partially to the wild success he had over the holidays. But here he had influencers that had the product and within the platform, there’s a built-in affiliate program. There’s a built-in influencer program where you can give out products, people can request products. And it’s just this glorious cycle because once someone starts promoting and making money, your store goes up in these ranking charts that TikTok proposed. And then the creators see this, that they’re making money promoting a specific product. So they jump on board.

30:39
which causes TikTok to show your product even more. And it’s just this glorious cycle that turns in this gigantic tidal wave. I was thinking how I could apply this to my store. don’t know if I could find a hero. You have to carry a lot of inventory. He’s like, if you’re doing this right, you’re gonna run an inventory. But as soon as you run an inventory, all the momentum dies on TikTok and you have to build it up again and again.

31:08
And the beauty of it, he said, is for the people that are requesting product through TikTok shop, you shouldn’t discriminate because he had this one girl who had less than 500 subs promote his product and made over $90,000 for him. And she got a $20,000 commission. That’s amazing. It’s crazy, right? Yeah. And then once word gets out about that, all these other creators jump in and then promote your product because that’s like the cash product.

31:36
TikTok makes that perfectly visible to everyone too. So there was a strategy, I didn’t go to that when I went to AI, which we can talk about in a minute, but there was a strategy in my small group time where basically at Christmas time, they seeded their product all over YouTube, sending it to creators and they basically did it with only an affiliate relationship, not paid to make videos. And he was saying the goal was that when someone went on YouTube,

32:05
it gave the impression that every person in the world was using this product, right? Because there were so many videos about the product. And I feel like that’s how TikTok shop works as well with the affiliates is that once that one video hits or the shop climbs up in the rankings, other creators see it and then they want to work with them. so it’s like, have you been on TikTok and not seen the athletic greens? Oh yeah. AG1 is everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s, that’s what they’re doing.

32:32
They want you to think that everybody and their grandmother is using this product. So you have to buy it right this minute and drink it every day and you’ll feel amazing. But it’s a strategy that can actually work for smaller brands because you’re really just leveraging commission and the cost of your product, which is usually pretty low. So it’s not like you’re paying people to make the content. I think your margins have to support it, right? Because a lot of that is heavy on the discounting.

33:01
In that example from the presenter, I think a $24 product was being sold for like six or seven bucks. Right? that, I don’t know, you have to have really crazy margins in order to support that to go viral like he did. Yeah, I think we bought some stuff off TikTok Shop for Christmas. So they seemed heavily discounted. It’s funny too, the negative about TikTok Shop, and I think we’ve talked about this, is like you don’t get any customer information. It’s just like Amazon.

33:27
You do have their address though. So you could take their address and get their email, you know, through one of those append services. The other thing is that, and I’ve heard this from people who sell a lot on TikTok shop is that it’s hard to get them to be a repeat customer because they don’t remember who they bought it from. Right. Which is maybe why you plug in all the address information you have into a service. Yeah. But the other thing that was talked about was the halo effect. So when it went viral,

33:56
the Shopify sales went up like 30%. And this person’s not on Amazon, but I would imagine Amazon would have skyrocketed as well. Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. I think TikTok Shop is very similar to Amazon as far as like the pros and cons of it. I think it’s different because it’s like a roller coaster ride. You have a wave, you’re probably gonna go out of stock unless you have some gigantic inventories.

34:24
And what was interesting was that the presenter had to weigh in his mind, do I put down a whole ton of money and just go all in on TikTok shop, which is a risk, right? Because you might not establish that wave again. But fortunately, he played his cards correctly. Yeah, I I know people making a lot of money on TikTok shop. So I know it works. It’s just hard because you don’t get the customer. It takes work to get that customer information. You can put as much flyers and stuff in the product as you want, though.

34:53
Unlike Amazon, there’s no policy against doing that. So the people I know selling on TechShop are putting like, you know, basically catalogs in the shipment for people. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So I went to an AI talk, which was, can’t think of Kevin’s last name. Williams. So Kevin, what is he like a fractional CMO? He’s kind of like a jack of all trades. Yeah.

35:20
Um, far too much to cover on a podcast and he used far too many specifics. So like, I’d have to go look through my photos of his slides, but basically he was talking about how, like all the different ways he uses AI and his company, uh, or in his companies that he works with and what the capabilities of it. And he actually walked us through a whole process of, um, how to, he was working for a dog food brand and they wanted a picture of a dog with the dog food and how there was all these iterations that it took to look.

35:50
And by the end, the end result looked amazing. And the one thing that he kept saying that really resonated with me was, this is the worst it’s going to be ever, right this minute, which was like so interesting when you think about that. and we were watching this video of golden retriever puppies jump around in the snow and it looked almost realistic. the dog, like everything looked real. It looked like an anim, a very realistic animation. And you’re watching that going, this is as bad as it’s going to be.

36:19
Like this looks pretty darn good, right? In three months, it’s gonna look 10x better and in 12 months, it’s gonna look 50 times better, right? It’s nuts. So it was a really interesting talk. He gave a lot of resources. He showed how different ways that they’re using it in the companies, the tools they’re using and kind of walked through all the different, not all the different resources, some of the main ones.

36:45
He talked about you should not be using Chat GPT if you’re not using the paid version. He was saying that the free version is pretty much garbage at this point. And also if you’re using it, you are the product if you’re using the free version. So he really discouraged against that. And he also talked about a company that I think it’s on Wednesdays. It doesn’t really matter what day it is, but basically this company has their entire workforce spend every Wednesday only on AI.

37:15
learning it, using it, playing on it, like all the different things because they are so confident that it’s sort of the future of everything. Did I tell you that the last website critique I did as a student in the class, I actually redesigned her entire website and I used AI images. It was a cat harness and it looked really good. And the missing piece was, you I had it

37:44
generate a generic cat harness, but then you can Photoshop the actual harness on there. It looked fantastic. Like the images look completely real. And I got this idea actually from another student who designed a purse and didn’t have the money to hire models, know, to model her purse. So what she did was she just had, you know, mid-journey, I think is what she used to generate the models and then carrying purses. And then she Photoshopped her own purse in there.

38:13
So it looks like she has this huge budget with all these models. and yeah that Sounds similar to what Kevin and he was he made a good point about like the video production side of things and he was saying that this is really gonna level the playing field because Forever the only people that could afford big video budgets were huge companies, right? Because video productions it’s very expensive. And so now it’s basically leveling the playing field for some of these brands because anybody

38:42
can has access to these tools and can create these images, use them. And a lot of what it seemed to me, was like, you need a couple tools to be able to do these things. It’s not like there’s one tool that does it all for you. Like one of the ones that we were looking at, it was the pet food one. kept iterating and they got the right image. And then the pet food itself was wrong, right? Because this was like a wet dog food as opposed to like the pebble-y stuff that goes in.

39:11
And AI couldn’t get that, right? Like they know dog food is what most of us think of dog food is. So they ended up Photoshopping the dog food in at the very end. you know, they’re still using Photoshop to do some stuff with it, but it was super interesting. And it was interesting to watch sort of the process of everything. Like he showed us a video from last year and it was like Will Smith eating food, but it was all AI and it was…

39:35
Terrible. Oh, yes. Yes. I remember seeing that Yeah, and then it’s like and then you look at what we have today and it was like he was showing this it was a girl walking through a field and she was wearing some sort of sundress and They’re like make this under us right the Sora demo, right? I asked before his talk. He doesn’t have access to Sora yet But really he was just showing the stock Yeah, the stuff that you can do or will be able to do very shortly is pretty phenomenal It’ll make YouTube b-roll so much easier

40:03
And then I’m going to cancel my Storyblocks subscription. Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting is, especially because we had all these people wanting to talk about branding and content creation and things like that, is that I think there’s still some really important fundamentals that AI doesn’t have yet. And that I think you still need to be very aware of. Like I think about in our course, how we have a whole content section. And a lot of it is in formatting and stylizing and things like that.

40:31
Right now, AI is just shooting out blobs of information and still having been able to organize those in the right way for online content is important. But I think anybody will be able to create content and create ideas. And the other thing is, his big thing was right now, the best use is you’ll never have a blank page. It will give you as many ideas as you can possibly handle to create content. So you put in, own a baby brand, I sell blankets and

41:01
you know, pajamas, our style is, you know, Peter Rabbit, whatever, you can put all that in. Give me 100 video ideas for this. Give me 100 blog post ideas. Like that to me is where it really is. Like today you can start doing this and it’s a great resource. Yeah, absolutely. mean, we part of our discussion at the roundtable also was where the world’s going for the next generation too. Yeah, not just ourselves.

41:29
I mean, I think we’ll be fine since we’ll be on kind of like the cutting edge, hopefully. Yeah. yeah, I do fear for the next generation. Yeah. I was 20 years younger and I was working, you know, just some regular job and I was one day wanted to do something else, I would invest my free time in learning, learning everything I could about AI. Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. Maybe the I want to go that.

41:58
talk later today since the conference isn’t over yet about that woman who you had lunch with. Yes, the data girl. I think that one’s targeted towards like 100 million dollar businesses though, right? That was just, she did another talk that was targeted to larger businesses. I think this is a more broad talk. Okay, yeah, because it would be interesting to see how larger companies actually handle all the data that’s coming out with AI. well and he talked a little bit about using AI to mine data and understand data better.

42:27
He actually used Klaviyo as an example. They have an AI tool to segment people where you can, instead of understanding how Klaviyo segments work and how to set them up properly, you can actually use AI to say, want a list of people who have spent over a hundred dollars in one transaction, you know, blah, blah, blah. And if you tried that, yes, it doesn’t work terribly well. Oh, okay. But here’s the thing. I tried it three weeks ago. It might work great today, right? Like that’s how quickly things change. When I tried it and

42:57
once again, a lot of this is about the information you’re giving it. And I tried it a couple different ways and I couldn’t get exactly what I needed. So obviously part of it’s me not being able to define it correctly for a clavio. Maybe I’m not using the right terminology or the terminology that they understand, but it gets it pretty close. But you can just massage it from there. Does it literally just use the pull downs after you say it?

43:22
Yes, it does. create the answer. So you can just massage it. It might be off, but then you can correct it, right? Yeah. OK. That sounds like a pretty good feature. I do think it’s good. It’s not quite there, but I’m sure it will get there very soon. And there’s lots of Klaviyo competition popping up also. Yes, there is. So, yeah, I guess once you start getting big, Klaviyo just went public. know, once you become popular, there’s going to be a lot of, I guess, copycats or competitors coming in.

43:52
Anything else you got? We have two, I have a couple more sessions today. Yeah, and I gotta hop on a plane, unfortunately. It’s hard to be away for four days. It is. My biggest takeaway, I think, in the conference isn’t over, but I would say this year I’ve tried really hard to meet new people. I went to a breakfast, I went to a dinner, which I normally never do. I have breakfast and dinner and lunch with all my friends, which is one of the main reasons why I come. So I don’t feel bad about doing those things.

44:21
but I was like, you know what, this year I’m just gonna put myself out there and try to meet some new people. I’ve met some great people. And so I’m really glad that I sort of pushed myself out of my comfort zone to do that because I do think it adds more value to your conference experience. I’ve still hung out with all the people I know. So it’s not like I’ve avoided my friends, but although we haven’t seen each other a whole lot at all. Not today, certainly. No, but most of that has to do with scheduling and wanting to go to different sessions and things like that. So I actually think if you’re,

44:51
going to a conference and you don’t know anybody, it’s really hard to do that. It’s really hard to put yourself out there. It’s not hard for me. I was a house leader. People know me from seller summit. But even if you weren’t a house leader, I was chuckling when you were saying all that because you can just burst into a group and just start talking. I can. That’s not in my bag. However, it’s still hard. Just because I can do it doesn’t mean that I don’t find it difficult. There’s a difference.

45:18
And so I know if it’s hard for me, it’s really hard for other people because it’s definitely something that I’m pretty okay with doing. But I think it’s so valuable to meet new people. I’ve met a couple people this time that I’m like, I think we’re gonna probably be friends to some extent, right? Like online friends. And so I’m really glad that I pushed myself a little bit this year. Because it’s really easy to come to these things and hang out with your four best friends. And there’s nothing wrong with.

45:46
wanting to see old friends, I think it’s really important and one of the main reasons why conferences like this can still exist because people do crave being able to see people once or twice a year. But meeting the new people has been really valuable for me. Yeah. I would say I’ve met the same amount of people as usual. All six of them? Well, no, no, no, I always just talk with random people, but I always make sure to have at least one dinner with

46:11
with the people who are my good friends who I met. The OGs. The OGs, yes, that’s correct. I did feel a little older this year. Yeah, I felt super old. But it’s more of, I don’t know, for you, I feel like there’s still a lot of males here. I feel like the female demographic is really young. Probably true. Because at my table at lunch today, two people were at the table were 49, I’m 51, and the other person was 59. Oh.

46:37
So was like, we must have been at the geriatric. That’s what it was. But overall, like I said, some of the people who’ve impacted my life the most I’ve met at events at ECF, fact, Lars and Dana, Andrew Udarian, of course, Bill, Brandon, Eli, and they all keep coming back. We’re one of the OGs. I’ve been to every single ECF. You’re one of the nine, right? One of the seven. Seven. Okay. Seven OGs. Yeah.

47:05
Can’t wait to hear what your takeaways are for today’s session.

47:13
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, if you missed Ecommerce Live and you want to attend a conference of like-minded entrepreneurs, then join me at Seller Summit. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 528. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

47:43
Head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.