00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, Tony and I break down our plan for 2026 and why it looks very different from this past year. Instead of chasing every new opportunity, we are focusing on the few decisions that actually move the needle and the trade-offs we’re making. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com and the price does go up on January 7th. And if you sell physical products online,

00:29
This is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. There’s no corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate.

00:54
We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be and the price is going up on January 7th. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket.

01:29
Welcome back to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. I can’t believe it, but we’re already at the end of the year and it’s time to start thinking about 2026. I can’t believe it. I feel like we’re a little late thinking about 2026. It is November that we’re recording this. Correct. It is November, but I don’t know.

01:51
I actually don’t usually plan that far ahead to be honest with you. I usually have very high level goals. I know you have every minute of every day planned out, right? I don’t. Well, yes. As a type A person that I am, I usually have things well more under control by this time in November. But this year, I feel like just went too quick. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me, but I feel like it’s hard. It’s like I blinked and now we’re in November and that’s it.

02:19
So one thing that I was excited about was, uh did you see that announcement of the robot? Like it was a video of a robot that like, it’s like the first edition that’s supposed to come out next year that can Does your dishes? Yes, yes I did. I thought that, I honestly thought that was a joke. I didn’t think that was real. Is that true? I think it’s real. Okay. And I watched it I’m like, okay, we got a long way to go. I still need to get my kids to do chores. I don’t want to hire a robot. oh

02:48
Yeah, I’ll be interested to see that. I’m not buying one. uh Well, no, the reason why is because I’ve been really excited about this revolution coming. Can you imagine just uh having robots pack orders for you, run the sewing machines and everything, and you just walk in, you just make sure they’re still running. You squirt some oil in their joints and whatnot.

03:12
Do you really see that as how, I’ve, reminds me of the Jetsons, right? I feel like we’re sort of living in the Jetsons era at this point, but then also, I don’t know, I feel like you got that really fancy printer two years ago or whenever it was, and it was nothing but problems. And part of me wonders if some of these robot type things will also be nothing but problems. Well, the new printer is actually great. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But you know what’s funny? There’s actually this print shop

03:42
literally two minutes away from our office and having them do all the printing is actually the same price as printing it at home. Really? At the office, yeah. Because they do it in bulk, right? yeah, so we’ve been using them a lot. It’s a one day term. It’s funny, right? We don’t even need the printer actually anymore because this print shop is so convenient. But anyways. Yeah. uh

04:10
I don’t know, Elon Musk has been on a bunch of podcasts lately and I don’t know, it seems like we’re like five years away maybe from something. Yeah. Well, I mean, I know that I remember back when I worked with Valpak and Cox, Valpak made a lot of news and this is back in like 2012, 2013. They made a lot of news for basically making their facilities very robotic. So on the floor of the print shop, basically little

04:39
I mean, I guess there were robots, but little machines basically did the bulk of the work, right? I think they only needed uh like one or two people on the floor because everything was the printing, the sorting, the moving of the different things, the enveloping. I don’t know how you say that. all done. Yeah, it was all done robotically. And so I feel like, and I know Amazon uses a lot of robotics in their… uh

05:05
warehouses as well. So I feel like we’ve been on this path for a while. I think what’ll be interesting is if we can bring it into the homes, right? Which is the commercial that I saw with like a robot unloading the dishwasher and stuff like that. Well, it took them five minutes and 30 seconds to load two cups or something like that. Oh, my word. I don’t have time for that. Yeah, exactly. So well, one of the things that I was thinking about for 2026, which is not a robotic thing.

05:32
is that in 2025, one of my goals was to attend more events, which I think I did a pretty good job with. I went to many conferences. I tried to do some networking things. I was actually at a networking thing the other night. I will say though, I’m tired. It’s because you’re old. I am old. am old. networking days are for the young.

06:00
And unfortunately, like I feel like if you live in certain places, like I feel like, you know, Charles who lives in New York City or Liz who lives in Austin, you even who live in California, there’s a lot more opportunity locally for you in Orlando. We definitely have things right. I know I don’t want anyone from Orlando to like send me hate mail. They’re like, you missed all these cool things. But like in the world that I’m in with, I would say more of the marketing tech e-commerce like that’s not Orlando is not a hot spot for that. Right.

06:28
um Whereas I think if you live in Austin, pretty much any event that you go to is going to be people that are in your industry and you’re going to be able to get some really great networking opportunities. Liz talks about stuff all the time and people she’s met and seems pretty fantastic. So, you that was one of the things that I put for myself in 2025. I feel like I achieved it and I’m tired. I’m tired of traveling. I do have status on Delta now. Thank you. ah But

06:56
Part of me is like, I don’t know if I want to do this again in 2026 because of how much I was gone and feeling like, yes, did it benefit me? Did I meet some people? Did it open some doors? For sure, it definitely gave me some opportunities, but I don’t know if it was worth the investment overall. To me, think podcasting has given me enough interaction, although I am going to some events. Yeah. I think maybe four total for this year, which is more than enough for me. Yeah.

07:26
But yeah, mean, for podcasting, I think that’s the easiest way to meet someone. Yeah, I’ve met a bunch of people. Yeah. So I think for me in twenty twenty six, I’m not sure if I’m to go all out on events again. I think I will still go to the ones that I really value. Obviously, I’ll be at Seller Summit, guys. Thanks. See you there. ah But, you know, ECF, I feel like that’s always a great networking event. It’s good. It’s also good to see friends and things like that. Yeah.

07:52
I have some tickets to some other things. I’m not sure if I’ll go. bought the super early bird tickets. I never feel bad if I don’t use them because they were 100, 200 bucks or something like that. But I also was thinking about instead of focusing on attending events, maybe only attending events that I’m going to speak at. So applying to speak at events. then I feel like the return can really be measured.

08:19
When you’re, when you’re going as an attendee, which I think, you know, especially if you’re new or wanting to make those connections, going as attendees actually really important. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Like, um, I don’t think I necessarily benefit as much as being an attendee, but I think getting on stage is actually really beneficial to your business. If, especially if you’re doing the things that like we’re doing, um,

08:42
That’s one of the considerations that I have. just submitted my application for not only PetSummit, which I’ve spoke at for several years, but the Global Pet Expo, which is all the big time, um like Purina and all those things. Now, obviously I’m not in the pet space, but I submitted to talk about email, email marketing, retention marketing, things like that. For me, I think for 2026, if I’m going to attend an event, I want to have some part of the event, whether it’s

09:11
like a round table leader or speaking or something of that nature, I think for it to be worth my time in the coming year. I agree. I 100 % agree with that. uh For me, with the AI stuff that I was getting to, so I already started working on this, but there’s a Bumblebee bot now. I was just telling Leslie Samuel that you were building this.

09:37
Well, it’s already done, but like for some reason, like it works for me, but for some reason when I gave it over to Jen, like it stopped working. So basically what it is is it has access to like all of Bumblebee’s databases, everything. So you can say, oh, what items do I have like less than 10 days worth of inventory left? And it goes and it calculates how much it’s been selling for whatever and it tells you how many days of inventory are left so you can reorder. Or it tells you like, oh, what

10:05
what’s the top selling product for the last 30 days or whatever? Basically you can ask it whatever question you want. It formulates the right database query and tells you the answer. I was really excited about it. then, know, Jen types her queries in a different way, you know, and then it doesn’t, right? So, but anyway, I want to incorporate more AI and get rid of paper.

10:32
at Mullenby Linux. Yes, I know the get rid of paper has been a big thing for you. I don’t know. Do we even talk about this on the pod? oh No, we talked about it personally. OK, we talk about personally. I feel comfortable talking about it on the pod. So Jen just went to Korea on a girls trip and whenever she leaves, I go into the office pretty much every day. Usually I’m not in the office for everyone listening. Like I go in maybe one day a week if necessary.

10:59
But with her gone, this time uh whenever she leaves, like I’m the new sheriff in town. So I go in and I just kind of shadow the employees and see what they’re up to. And I just look for inefficiencies because when you’re in there all the time, you do things a certain way and it gets the job done. it might not, anyway, uh I just noticed that we rely on paper for pretty much everything.

11:28
uh If an invoice, for example, drops on the floor and goes underneath the table, then sometimes that order gets lost. Not lost, but it might not get packed. And people call in all the time, change up their orders, change up their addresses and all that stuff. And it’s just been marked on a combination of paper and slack. So while she was gone,

11:57
I implemented a more centralized system of tracking all this stuff and everything, which I’m happy actually, we’re 75 % using it. Nice, nice. And I didn’t, maybe it’s because Jen was just so happy from her vacation. Like I didn’t get a whole lot of flack for it. Although it was pure chaos for like the first two days after she got back. Yeah. Yeah. How did the employees take it? Were they on board?

12:23
Of course they’re on board because it was based on their feedback. I went in there and I said, well, what’s inefficient? Why are we, what’s that in your hand? She’s like, this, it’s a piece of paper. I’m like, drop it. Drop that piece of Put it down. We’re not using the paper method anymore. That leads me to another thing that I actually talked about this in my mastermind a couple of weeks ago.

12:49
One of the things that I really wanna focus on in 2026 is basically learning how AI can help me move forward the projects that I’m doing. um I feel like, and I’m sure a lot of people feel this way, things are moving so quickly, it feels very difficult to keep up. If you are not taking an action or getting involved in it every single day, it feels like if you…

13:15
take two days off from AI, everything has changed. And I’m exaggerating a little bit here, but I feel like, you know, it’s like an ocean wave and you’ve got to like paddle as hard as you can to catch the wave, right? So that’s something that I really want to focus on in 2026, because I do feel like, I feel like it’s kind of like the haves and the have nots, right? There are still, and we see this a lot in our webinars, I actually encountered it with uh another person that I work with a couple of weeks ago.

13:45
There are people that just think AI is absolutely terrible, right? No one should be using it. It’s detrimental. The one person that I was interacting with who I know does not listen to this podcast, like kind of went off and was like, it’s plagiarism and this and that, and kind of had this whole soapbox. And I was like, uh I can see why you believe that, but I don’t think that’s true. And I think that it’s doing a lot of really cool things. In fact, I just saw a thread in ECF where this guy basically built this

14:13
automation to track social media posts, right? Because before that they had been tracking it on a spreadsheet and obviously like, especially other mentions from other people. And he basically built this free tool that he’s giving out to people and it’s like, hey, this distracts your social media. And I was like, heck yeah, right? And I feel like there are a lot of uses like that where, uh like you were saying, you went in and you were like, hey,

14:36
what’s the pain points? What’s the problems? I feel like there’s a lot of things in all of our businesses that are just very repetitive tasks that can be automated and probably automated with more accuracy, right? Than people copying and pasting into spreadsheets or writing things on a piece of paper. So one of my goals for 2026 is to really focus on how to best use it for the things that I’m working on. I realize there are a million use cases and I think that’s the danger, right? As you get kind of…

15:05
rabbit-trailed into all the different things. one of the things I think is so cool is all the animations with AI. I think that’s so fun. um Dana Michelle is crushing it with this. But ah I don’t need that for my business. So as much as I think that’s cool, I need to step away from animate. I’m not doing a lot of that, but I can’t get sucked into it. I need to focus on the parts of it that will help me and what I’m doing.

15:32
but I really wanna have that be one of my main focuses for 2026, personally but in business. You know, it’s funny, you’re right, AI is moving fast, but I don’t feel like it’s moving that fast in terms of what you can actually apply to your business. True. Like everything that I’ve already done, I could have done with like the basic stuff. Like where it’s innovating right now is in all the media, mainly media, I wanna say.

15:59
like the browsers, like Google just announced a browser where you can train it to do what you wanna do. So, I mean little things like that to save time, but in terms of things that move like the bottom line or the top line, uh I think with the current state of AI, there’s a lot you can already do already and you just need to take the time to absorb and not get distracted by like the shiny objects, like making movies. Actually, I wasted like an hour the other night

16:29
making movies. So my son who has a very manual type job, he does not use AI in his job at all. He manages a restaurant. ah But he has been taking… I’m so irritated with him, but I also find it so funny that it’s hard for me to be mad.

16:51
He’s been taking moments from their childhood that have been like slightly traumatic in creating AI animation. So one of the most famous moments in their childhood was when my oldest daughter was babysitting them. You know, this is back when I think we didn’t have as much money. So she made a pizza and when she pulled it out of the like a frozen pizza, when she pulled it out of the oven, it fell on the floor. She picked it up, like put everything back on it and made them eat it for dinner.

17:17
Right. And it was like, still talk about this to this day. Right. So he basically animated this girl who looks like my daughter dropping a pizza from the oven and then slopping all this stuff off. And it’s like, tough luck, kids, you’ve got to eat it. And then the next scene is the rest of the kids all crying and like, you know, there’s like a baby and a teenage boy. It’s like, so he’s been doing that with like all of her, like, fails as a teenage babysitter with them.

17:45
And I was like, surely you can use this for good, son. Like, quit tormenting your sister. But like, that kind of stuff is fun. was like, oh, I kind of want to make those too. But I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, cannot get sucked in. As cool as it is, we cannot be doing that.

18:02
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18:31
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. There’s so many things like I wanna be doing actually, like just for fun. I don’t know. Yeah, so one of my things for 2026 is to launch my community. I’m probably gonna try to do it earlier, but for some reason, like I keep dragging my feet.

19:01
It’s already like 90 % ready to go. I just need to implement like the final payment processing and whatnot. yeah, I don’t know. I’m a little scared because once you turn that switch on, you can’t turn it off. Well, and lucky for you today, which is obviously, you guys will be listening to this much after this happens, Liz is actually going to be talking about building a community and office hours for profitable audience. I’m excited for it because you and I have talked a lot about how

19:30
um Email and SMS, they’re still very effective, but they’re not like they used to be. And sort of that community aspect is, I think you and I both agree that there’s definitely a future in that for building a business, building a brand. And she basically built all of Fluencer Fruit through community, right? The interactions, the building. And so I’m excited for her to talk about, hard is it, right? Like how much work is it? What do you need to do? What can you automate? Because she’s really into automation as well.

19:58
So what can you automate and what’s the manual side of it? And then she’s actually gonna share a lot about Circle, which is a tool that you can use to build. mean, you guys are, we’re on Discord, you use Discord as well. There’s several options out there, but I think it’s good to talk to people about all the different options, because not everything works for everybody. So I think building a community is really hard though. So I’m interested to hear what she has to say.

20:22
Yeah, you know what, ideally what I want to do is I want to build a community of people who already have something going. Yeah. And so we’ll see how that goes. Every time I get excited about the community, I’ll have like a one-on-one with somebody. Like I actually just recently had one, like it was a pretty bad one-on-one. Yeah. Where the person came with no prep and I was like, I really want a community?

20:50
I want a community of people like I want to interact with that. I think that’s the hard part. Yes, you cannot guarantee that in any way. That’s correct. You cannot guarantee that. You should have people I will tell you because I used to do a lot of one on ones years ago. I had people fill out a form and until the form was filled out, I wouldn’t schedule the one on one. And then it forced them at least to show up prepared. I feel like for you and I, when we do our one on ones, everyone is like over prepared. Right. Yeah, for the most part, it’s been positive. Yeah.

21:18
But occasionally you get those people that you’re just like, oh, we should reschedule. Well, so what was funny about this is it sounded like the person was prepared. Like, I want to have a product by the end of this. Yeah. I’m like, OK, great. OK, did you watch the first video? She’s like, haven’t gotten a chance to watch any of the videos yet. Like, OK, so you want me to just give you a product, right? Yeah. That’s not something that you can do in like 30 minutes. No.

21:48
No. Anyway, also not a great idea. Like to me, it’s like if because you and I don’t do one on ones, like you can’t pay for them. You know, they really only come with like signing up through a webinar or earning them through the points in the courses. Like, yeah, I don’t think people understand. Like you will never get this opportunity. You should come very prepared because, know, we don’t we don’t sell these on the side. Like you’re not going to be able to do this. Yeah. Anyway, but I am excited about it because I do think

22:17
that just think about the people who come to office hours. I actually love hanging out with them every week. So I guess the caution here is growing it too large too quickly maybe. And maybe just keeping it small and deliberate and gradually grow it. I think it’s probably the way to go. We’ll see what Liz has to say, I’m curious. Yeah, so one of the other things that I’ve been thinking about, and this was spurred on by my brother sending me a text yesterday. um

22:46
Have you, Steve, seen the OpenAI browser yet, Atlas? Okay, so I’m not using it at all because I heard it’s full of security holes. Oh, interesting. So I’ll let him know. Well, no, because people can embed little directives into their sites that cause the AI to, because it has access to stuff if you give it to it, if you give it access. Yeah, so here’s what my brother did with it, and I’m sure he’d probably just opened himself up to all sorts of issues, but.

23:13
um So he opened up his Shopify site and his brand guide, right? So he has a brand guide created. He also has a Shopify site and basically AI went in and changed all the settings to match the brand. So it basically gave him consistency through the site. um He said it was really slow, but it actually got it done. um And I actually think that’s a pretty cool use case for it. However, if it’s filled with like

23:42
security issues that makes me question it. But I think those types of things that AI will do, one of the things that I’ve just started doing um with AI, which I probably should have done this year ago, is I’m basically running all of our landing pages through AI and just asking for feedback and what can be better, what’s missing, what’s not explained well. Because I think one of the problems, especially if you have a brand and you’ve been running it for a long time, is you don’t see the flaws.

24:08
Right? You already know how everything works together. You already know the pros and cons. So it’s not as obvious to you when you look at your own site. um And so anyway, I think it’s actually, I just run them through chat GPT. So I’m not even using anything fancy, but um I’ve actually gotten some really good feedback from chat, especially on um doing a better job explaining the value proposition for the product. Because chat,

24:35
Chat has so much information about the business. It’s got all the product briefs uploaded. It’s got the product PDFs. It’s got everything that it needs. um And so I think it’s actually been very helpful, but I need to get in the habit of doing that with every page, right, to get the feedback until I’m at the point where I’m like, oh, okay, I remember. This seems to be better. Change button text, do this. I’m not as much concerned about formatting and things like that, but the actual content on the page, I feel like the feedback has been really good um from AI.

25:05
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of things you can do. You know, what’s funny is I didn’t really have like a whole bunch of prep to figure out what I’m doing for 2026. Usually I just kind of wing it. Yeah. I’m not like you. Like you have like a plan. For the most part, mine is community. And then I want to do something with Bumblebee. I’m probably going to launch the YouTube channel. Like what’s funny about this is I have like 10 videos recorded for that already.

25:34
but I never launched it. And I actually just went back and watched one of the videos the other day. was like, you know, since AI got a lot better, I think I can do these videos a lot better now. So I know, I know. It’s one of those things that once you start it, you gotta keep going with it, right? And that’s another thing, like, do I want that on my plate? Or, yeah. Yeah, so speaking of YouTube, you know, I soft launched a channel last month and- You didn’t tell me about this. Yeah, the Taipei channel.

26:04
Oh, I didn’t know it was a YouTube like long form. Yeah, long form. Yeah, we do a video every week. And so one of the reasons why we soft launched it was because we really didn’t know what people wanted. Like the content wise, like we know what we wanted to create, but obviously we need to find the balance between what people want us to create and what YouTube likes. So that was launched. But now I feel like my focus for 2026 is really

26:32
dialing in that channel and getting the content better. I think the content’s good. The content’s very good, but we can make it better. One of the things actually, we’re actually filming this weekend, but we have Adam coming because he’s like, you know, the lighting just wasn’t, we film in a studio. And of course, he’s like very picky, which I love because I’m like, I’m never going to be this picky, but you’re going to make me look better. um But I think just kind of focusing in on those little details because we have the content creation down.

27:01
Right? So like the next step is how do we improve on what we’re doing? So basically, you know, getting to the point where we have, I mean, right now I think we have 12 videos up. Maybe not 12, maybe 10. think 12 are scheduled. So by talking about this on the pod, does that mean you’re hard launching it now? I mean, you can. What is the channel type? I let me see what the YouTube name is. Hold on. Let me. OK, because we have a different I think the website’s different from the YouTube. I guess it’s hard. I mean, a hard launching by January. Yeah, for sure.

27:30
um I’m having a lot of fun with it. I’m having a lot of fun with writing the scripts and you know, the thumbnail and title game need to be vastly improved, you know. So I feel like, you know, we’re getting there but it’s a process and I did not want to rush this mainly because I don’t have like oodles of extra free time. um Type A circle is the… Type A circle. So… m

27:58
To me, I wanted to do this kind of as a slow burn to really get a good footing and make sure that we could keep up with it, right? Because I do work with Liz on this and so as you know, whenever you’re working with someone, you both have to make sure you have the bandwidth to um keep it going. oh Just recently, we started really putting a lot of shorts on YouTube because we have a ton of shorts and we’re basically combining the shorts with shorts that we just recorded directly and then using Opus clips. ah

28:27
to cut apart the long form videos, which is actually working better than I thought it would. OK, but uh yeah. So it actually Liz built an entire automation for our short form, which I told her was like, you’re going to to come on another office hours for this because this is pretty cool. Does it do? Basically takes I have to look up her whole text to me. Basically, it takes it from beginning to end and it’s all basically automated minus, I think, the final the final part of it um using Zapier. And I think she’s using make.

28:57
But I’m probably messing that up because I haven’t seen the full build yet. That’s this weekend, I get to see it. But anyway, my goal for that is really getting the content where it needs to be focusing on building that out and pushing it. Because as we’ve seen from the shorts, people are like, we’re getting like 7, 800 views on a short with basically no subscribers. um

29:26
really getting that out there and I think, oh know, I don’t wanna say going all in on YouTube because it’s not the only thing that I do, but definitely making it a much bigger focus and really focusing on the strategy of it for 2026. I mean, the way I think about it now, like with AI, I think video is like the last bastion. Just recently, there’s been a lot of people like opposed to like AI music, but there’s actually this group,

29:55
I can’t remember what the name of the group is now, but they’ve gotten like an insane number of downloads and it’s all AI, but the person who’s responsible for creating this person mixed like certain voices together and it sounds really good. Like it’s a song that I would listen to on my playlist and that got me thinking to myself, if the song is good,

30:20
then I’ll listen to it whether it’s a human or what does it matter? I mean, it was kind of like when synthesizers came out, right, in the 80s and people were like, oh, it’s not real music. It’s like, well, it is. It’s just created differently. So I was thinking like video will probably go that way too, right, for entertainment. Like if something is fun to watch and it’s entertaining, it doesn’t matter if a human created or an AI created it, right? So…

30:50
What is the last bastion? Your personality online, right? So that’s the only thing that can’t really be replicated. Yeah. Which is why I want to focus on just tightening up the content, right? Because I feel like that’s where we win, right? We have better content, better information. It’s more relatable. It’s more logical. Whatever the angle is that we’re going for that we hit on those angles. Because I agree.

31:19
You can’t I mean, I’m watching Dana Michelle build all sorts of stuff for video and it’s pretty incredible. But at the same time, I know that like what Liz and I are doing, some of that just can’t be replicated right at this point. Who knows? It probably will be at some day. Well, here’s what I was thinking also, like for Bumblebee, you know how I’ve long talked about like how I should not be the one creating videos for Bumblebee. Well, now I can have like an avatar. Yes.

31:48
And who cares if it’s not a real person or not? Because there’s fake AI avatars right now out there where companies are paying them a lot of money to create videos about the brand. And if you’re the pers- from the perspective of a brand, it doesn’t matter if it’s human or AI as long as it brings in sales, right? And I don’t know, because it’s- HeyGen just released a new version and it’s way better.

32:17
than the last one. Like it’s got the mannerisms and everything down. So why not just pump out scripts and be transparent that this is an AI or whatnot and just see where that goes. Maybe that’s the future. Well, one of the things I like that you did, and this has now been a while since you did this, was you basically took real reviews but had them presented by AI.

32:42
Didn’t you do that with that lady and I thought she was real and she wasn’t real? Oh yes, yes, yes, I did that. Yeah, yeah, Because I think reviews from real customers are actually really important to your business. We try to use those in everything that we do. um But I think there’s a difference between reading a review on a page or in a post or in a social media post, something like that, versus having someone talking about the product. And so when you use that review and gave it a voice,

33:11
Right? And obviously the voice wasn’t real, but the review was real. To me, that’s actually really effective um because I would much like, I think a lot of people, the way they consume content, listening to that or hearing it or watching it is better than just reading it for a lot of people. And so I would like that, you know, that’s another thing I’d like to explore is like, how do we do this in a way that’s authentic? Right? The content is correct.

33:38
It’s just the delivery is different. And so, where’s the line with that as far as what people will accept and not accept? I’m not sure. I think people will accept it as an avatar. I don’t know. I mean, it’s already happening. There’s all these avatars that have tons of followers. There’s a handful of avatars right now where companies are paying millions of dollars actually to create videos. And companies are making their own avatars now too.

34:07
from a personal standpoint, like I don’t like this, but I mean, if it’s already happening and it’s, you’re right. Like as bubble bee linens, do I care whether it’s a human or an AI as long as it’s bringing me leads in sales, right? I don’t care. So I feel like it’s also dependent on what you’re talking about. So I follow not a ton, but I am sure probably Jen does too. I follow some beauty influencers, right? On TikTok or Instagram, wherever.

34:35
I’ll watch them. The big thing that I am super into right now, because I feel like I never get enough sleep, is what shrinks the bags under your eyes outside of surgery? I want to know what. I want to watch someone put the little things on their eyes and they get all shriveled up and then their puffiness is gone or they put the cream on. To me, I don’t want to see an AI of that. I want to see it on a human who’s close to my age. But I also feel like if you’re talking about a purse,

35:03
and you can create an avatar that’s my height, my weight, similar to, know, like, and like, this is what the purse looks like on a person. I don’t care if you’re real or not, because most models don’t look real anyway, right? They’re not the representation of like most of what the population looks like. So I feel like it’s also like very product dependent as far as like what I’m gonna accept. If I need to see a result, like how you, you know, lost weight or your hair grew thicker, I don’t wanna see fake hair, right? I need to see someone’s real head of hair, but.

35:33
when it’s like, how does this look on a person? Make it look as much like me as possible. Like, I wanna know that. Yeah. See, I actually got a lot of flack with the testimonial thing. I got a lot of flack when I presented that to people. Interesting. And I get the reaction, right? That’s not really that person saying that. It’s real testimonial. So I’m sure there’s some moral dilemmas there. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, if you run an ad with it, though, you have to disclose that it’s AI generated now.

36:02
Yeah, so okay. It’s gonna get there. I know so my last thing that I am thinking about this is definitely not a on the list yet, but um I don’t know if you’ve seen this but Dana Michelle has been going live every day and basically building live And I watch other people do this as well, right? She’s not she’s the one that a person I know personally doing it, but I’ve seen other creators doing this I think this is fascinating um

36:31
She’s still kind of, think, working out some of the kinks of how it’s broadcasting and what people can see and things like that. But I think one, the live component is huge, right? I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. think we know platforms give priority to these things. We know that people enjoy watching other people go live. um

36:53
My concern and thinking about this is what am gonna do live that I’m okay with people seeing, which I don’t have to worry, because you can’t do a lot of stuff with, I I live a lot of my day in email, right? You can’t do a lot of email stuff live because you have to protect people’s email addresses, right? You can’t be showing certain things on the screen. But I just find the live building so fascinating to the point where I will watch live stuff that I don’t care about, or I’m never gonna do this, but I’m interested just to see the process.

37:22
So that’s one thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about the past couple of weeks is like, okay, would this work for anything that I’m doing and is it worth my time, right? Like the two things. But to me, this is a fascinating, I don’t wanna say it’s new, it’s not super new, but I don’t know. I’m very interested in it. I kind of wanna play around with it. I just don’t know how it will work for my business. Yeah, I think that it can work. Like have to actually ask Dana Michelle how it’s going. You probably know better than I do.

37:52
She’s getting, I mean, she’s using it to build her channels. She had like several hundred people watching live. Yes, yes, she’s using it primarily to build her client base, build her community, build engagement, and it’s working, right? Like it’s doing all those things. um It also to me, like,

38:13
I don’t know how to say this right way. It feels very authentic as far as like if I’m hiring you, I know you know what you’re doing because you’re doing it in front of me. Yeah. Right. Like that’s a huge like, I don’t know, it’s your own testimonial, right? Because people are watching you do it. So, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I would literally you could if you had a job site where people were like, you know, building a bathroom, I would totally watch a bathroom build, right? Because obviously that’s what I’m doing in my free time is working on my house. But.

38:41
I don’t know. I feel like this is something really cool that people have really kind of started doing far more than they used to, but I just don’t know how it works for me. I was just thinking I could do that really easily. I could just put up a website like an online store. Like right now have all these videos that teach it, but I guess there’s something different about doing it live with an audience where they can ask questions. Yes, yes. And see, so one of the things too, I think, is that

39:09
I think it’s good for people to see. I don’t wanna say the mistakes, like, you know, I was watching her Dana Michelle live the other day and she had, I didn’t catch the beginning, but at the point that I tuned in, it was like, looked like a stockbroker, like parachuting or paragliding in between like a big city, right? And she had put in a prompt and it was really bad, right? Whatever the result was, was like, oh, that’s not what I wanted. And it was cool to see her like have to adjust like what.

39:37
What did I say wrong? And so to me, that’s where all the learning comes in, right? For the people watching is like, oh, oh yeah, I would have probably done the same thing and now this is how you course correct and this is the result. I don’t know. I think it’s fascinating. I feel like this is gonna be a much bigger thing moving forward. I just don’t know how to harness the power yet. Well, you can cook. I can cook, yes, that’s true. You can watch people like.

40:03
That’s true. seconds in the microwave. Yeah. Shove the TV dinner in there and then serve it. Yeah. Did I reheat somebody’s coffee in the microwave today? Yes, I did. Yes, I did. uh I don’t know. To me, it’s like also like how much of this needs to be something that is actually a skill people can learn versus like this. Like I remember I told you this. One of my kids used to go live and make sandwiches. Right. And she would have like 500 people watching her make a sandwich. And you’re like, I don’t understand. And I was like, trust me, I don’t understand either. So.

40:33
So I don’t know how much of this needs to be like just pure entertainment. Like you’re just literally making a sandwich and talking to people versus like Dana Michelle, who’s actually people. If you watched her stuff, you would learn how to build these AI automate. You would learn how to do these uh animations um in AI. So I don’t know. I feel like it’s probably going to grow in both buckets. I don’t know like where where you should spend your time, though.

40:59
There’s so many things that I could do, but they wouldn’t be interesting to most people. Like watch me code for an hour. That sounds like lot Here’s the thing. I think people would be into it. I really do. It sounds crazy, but I think people would be into it. Really? Yes, I do. Okay. I mean, yeah. Well, how does that lead to money, though? So you’re just building an audience in a community? Well, so for like Dana Michelle.

41:22
So this is where I think this has always been a way to build an audience. Dana Michelle has clients where she creates videos for them and their e-commerce products. Right. OK. That’s perfect. Like if you have a service based business. Yes. Yes. So I would say for you, if you are building, let’s just say you’re putting together a basic e-commerce like WooCommerce type website, it makes sense because you sell a course on e-commerce. We sell a course on content creation. If you went live and said this is my whole process for like

41:51
thumbnail, title, description in YouTube, like because we talk a lot about YouTube in the course and video content, like to me, so, and that all makes sense that way. Where I don’t think it makes sense or where I can’t find the connection is like if I’m making a peanut butter sandwich, how is that going to do anything other than just gain followers and, hopefully play the game of, you know, AdSense, right? Which is to me not the best way to be doing things. But it’s, I people are still doing it. It’s just not what I would.

42:21
probably recommend. mean, in a way, it’s similar to doing the lives that we do for the webinars that we do. Yeah. Except this is just purely demonstration. Yeah. Like I think about John in our class who has the lawn care business. Yeah. Right. I would I would like have on the background totally like a yard getting done. Right. Because I love to see yard transformations. Right. Where it’s like the grass is overgrown. There’s leaves everywhere. You you trim up the trees.

42:48
Like to me, it’s like if I watch this company like Transform Yards and I lived in that area, I’d probably hire them, right? Because it’s literally just a camera. So I feel like there’s like a lot of uses for this. I just don’t know like for me in particular, like where it falls. For services, 100%. Yeah. And maybe if you sell products. I know you wanted me to do this want you to embroider live. Yeah, embroider live. I’m telling you, I think this would be huge because people like bottle stuff live.

43:17
or make candles live or like the pottery people that they go live and do their pottery. I don’t know. I feel like you could do this for Bumblebee. But it’d be so boring. Like you set it up and then you just and then it stitches for like five minutes or whatever. then. OK, I went to the Yingling. Was it Yingling? I it was Yingling Factory in Pennsylvania. And I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter what the brand was. It was a beer bottling company. Right. And.

43:45
I could have watched the bottles on that assembly line for an hour easily. They circle, they get filled, they get the label slapped on, the top is sealed. I was like, this is the best, this is the most entertaining thing I’ve done in a million years. I don’t know, I think people do like that kind of stuff. I love going to factories. I remember I went to the Cheeto factory once. I’m surprised I still eat Cheetos after seeing how Cheetos are made.

44:14
you watch them dump the puffs into this container that then gets sprayed with the cheese, right? And then it’s all shaking around. At this point, I was like, I don’t think I want to eat Cheetos anymore. And then it spits out the cheesy Cheetos and then they get put in the bag and then the bag gets sealed and then the bags get, I don’t know. That stuff’s interesting. I think people watch it. I know it’s crazy and it’s probably not a good use of people’s free time, but people are doing it.

44:42
Okay, I’ll put it on my list. Maybe I can have my embroiderist on. Yeah, just, yeah, I’d have to get her permission, of course. Yes, yes, you do. Have a have a camera on her like for the full day as she’s sewing. Yes, that sounds like a nightmare. Yes, her. I don’t know. Okay. Well, yeah, I think for me next year, the focus will be on community for me. If you had to pick one thing, what’s yours? YouTube. Speaking or YouTube? sure. Getting that tightened up. um

45:10
Speaking feels like, because I don’t wanna speak every week, I feel like that can’t be number one. um I can’t be the retu, although she’s killing it. She is, but she also, every week she’s speaking somewhere, feel. All right, well all I can say is I’m excited about 2026. I think there’s a ton of opportunity, I think there’s a ton of potential, and I think whatever you’re thinking about doing, you can probably make it happen with all the new tools and technology that are out there.

45:39
Hope you enjoyed this episode. For more information and resources, go over to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 620. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. So 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 over to sellersummit.com.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, I sit down with Robin Hall, who did the impossible by building a thriving, sustainable kids clothing brand in what I’ve always called the most brutal niche in e-commerce. You’ll hear the full 45 minute story behind her appearance on NPR’s How I Built This, including the strategies, struggles, and surprising pivots that took her from my wife’s college friend to the founder of Town Hall.

00:28
a company that’s rewriting the rules on how to succeed selling apparel online. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches,

00:55
people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people, so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to the 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

01:22
And if you’re doing over 250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be, so if you want in, go to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket.

01:42
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today, I am happy to have a close friend of the family on the show, Robin Hall. Now Robin is actually a good friend of my wife’s from college, and it was pretty random how this interview got set up. One day, I was listening to the How I Built This podcast, which is actually one of my favorite shows. And I’m like, I think I know this woman. She sounds familiar. I think I went to her wedding, but her name was RJ at the time. And not

02:12
this other Robin. And it turned out to be the Robin. So Robin is one of my wife’s favorite people in the world. And she started she started Town Hall Company, an outdoor apparel company that specializes in sustainable clothing for kids. Now, if you’ve listened to my podcast long enough, you know that I think that selling clothing is one of the most difficult niches to sell into. So today, we’re going to delve deep into Robin’s story on how she created the company.

02:40
And unlike the how I built this interview, which was only 15 minutes long, we have a full 45 minutes to completely delve into her story. So how’s it going Robin? How are you doing today? It’s going great, Steve. Thanks for the warm intro and great to see you. Great to see you. Your wife is fantastic too. I think we were just chatting earlier. It’s been almost 20 years since we’ve last spoke. I’m sure you and Jen have spoken before then, but uh all this time I had no idea you had the company. Did you have it at your wedding?

03:10
Or did it come way out? No, no, no, I was straight out of, yeah, I mean, I went to went to school with your wife at UC Davis and then moved back down to the Bay Area where I was born and raised and went to school or went to straight out of school, went to Gap Inc and worked at their headquarters in San Francisco and did finance and inventory with them for years. And then, you know, my husband and I looked at each other and said, if we don’t try something new now, we’re going to live a mile from our parents for the rest of our lives. So.

03:38
Maybe we like the mountains. Let’s see what happens in Colorado. And so I got a job at Vail Resorts in Colorado in 2003. And we moved there, um did again, back of the house, kind of finance and accounting, but always trying to really be involved with the business and learning all about all sides of the business. And one of those kind of typical ski days where you’re putting on your ski jacket and I was thinking, gosh, I really want to get back to seeing and touching product in my career.

04:06
putting on my ski jacket, North Face, where are they putting on my pants? Marmot, where are they? Socks, Smartwool, where are they? Oh, Smartwool is in Steamboat. That’s not too far from here. And Steamboat Springs is an incredible place. So uh I sure enough, I look for jobs, got a job at Smartwool and had an amazing 11 year career there. So was there until 2000 when the brand moved to Denver. And, uh you know, we made the really tough, hard decision, but

04:34
the right one to stay in this town. didn’t want to leave Steamboat. It’s really, for any of your listeners that know, it’s an incredible community and a beautiful place to live. So great place to raise kids. So we stayed here and that’s when we started Town Hall in 2000, in the year 2000. So it was a nice COVID baby, but it’s been great. So what was the motivation to start Town Hall and why apparel, of all things? Yeah, yeah. So, um,

05:01
Yeah, it kind of came together in this kind of our Venn diagram where we, you know, there were three of us. So myself, Jay Lambert and Joe Solomon, Jay and I worked at SmartWall together and he was incredible supply chain background and product. And Joe is this amazing entrepreneur who, you know, has his own adventure travel company. And yeah, just a great triangulation of the three of us. And we were putting our heads together and like, we’re both staying, we’re all staying in town. We got to do something. What should we do? And, and

05:30
It was, you know, why are we asked ourselves, why are we staying in steamboat? It’s really this community and our kids, we don’t want to raise our kids anywhere else. And we want to give back to this community. And what are we good at? There’s your answer there apparel. mean, we knew we had some good, we have great network through our smart world days. Jay is a skilled supply chain guru and uh expert at product as well. uh And we had, you know, again, a great network we could pull from. And then what are we passionate about? And it’s

05:59
playing outside with our kids and being outside as a family and giving back to the planet and making sure we’re not just creating more stuff to create more stuff. So those kind of four things met in the middle, kids, outdoor, community and planet. And we saw some white space for a kids apparel brand. So we launched. And then the name of your company is a play on your last name and is the other owner town or town literally means town?

06:25
No, literally town means town. it’s certainly we, you know, we went down there with a couple other naming ideas that fell through due to trademarking issues. uh But, you know, we kind of, someone said, hey, you should use your last name for something. it was hallelujah and all those ideas. But um town hall just hit because it’s a community gathering place, the hub where everyone’s welcome, you know, to make change and use their voice. So that’s been really, really powerful for us. So uh

06:53
lot of my listeners are very interested in the starting phase of the business. So I want to I want you to go back to like the early days. How much money did you invest in this business and what was your first product and how did you come up with a design it sourced everything? Yeah, I think uh between the three of us to start, I think we put in like 50 K. We started with 50 K. Anything we could do to literally get logo and branding.

07:20
our legal setup and then, you know, very small kind of down payment on our first product line. Then we went down the road of lying a credit on the house and you know, all those brutal things you do as a small business owner, which we’re still working on navigating out of and around. We’re in the middle of a funding raise, which is really exciting. Oh, wow. I didn’t know that. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of a small friends and family safe and

07:48
a simple agreement for future equity. And it’s going well. We’re going to close that up here in the next couple of weeks. We’re getting close to our goals. That’s exciting. Go ahead. You have a question? was just to say, was your first product a single product or did you start with like a line? You know, we wanted to start with a little collection. We said, what do kids in mountain towns need to go outside in the winter? And winter was really resonating with us. we said,

08:14
ski jackets, they’ve got to have a waterproof, durable jacket and pants solution that they can go outside and play in. Then we said, okay, we need a collection. And in fact, we kind of proved this out. A couple of years back, we launched, or maybe one or two years back, we launched a fleece, you know, like, let’s try a warmer weather thing, one fleece. And boy, it just didn’t quite resonate. Like, it wasn’t a big enough story to talk about, you know, it’s not like

08:39
hey, we’re launching into a big spring line with shorts and all these things. No, it just didn’t quite resonate. we went with, uh we needed a collection to round it all out. So we pulled in a puffy jacket, a full 100 % down puffy jacket, which has been great. uh And then we also thought, okay, so not everyone’s gonna be a mountain town kid. There’s kids in Chicago that we want to outfit with our gear that love to play outside that…

09:05
you know, are walking to school on freezing days and then they want to go ski in the weekends. And so what can we build for them? So we built one other, we call it our around town jacket, which is a little bit, little less, you know, waterproof, those types of things, but extra warm. So four pieces in the original line. And yeah, we, you know, from a factory perspective, we, we, it was cute. Our, co-founder Joe is not traditionally from the industry, so he’s not an apparel guy. And he said, so we’re making this stuff in steamboat, right?

09:33
Like, well, you know, it’s gonna be tough. It’s gonna be tough. But no, I don’t think somebody’s like Colorado, the US, you know, and Jay, the supply chain guru is like, Joe, there’s a reason why $900 ski jackets are made in Asia. They are so good over there. It’s, know, when you find the right partner, they have access to the materials that are all made over there. Anyway, they

09:57
have the best production machines, they have skilled labor there. And so we found an incredible partner that was willing to take a shot with us and make kind of below their minimums. We had to pay extra for sure, but yeah, gave us a shot and they’ve been incredible ever since. So it’s How big was your first batch? Oh gosh, we probably did 200 units of each. Wow, that’s it? So four times 200. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was great. It was great.

10:26
And then you’re going up against like the North faces of the world, right? So what sets you guys apart? And like, what was your, what was your in so to speak? Yeah, yeah. Couple things. One is certainly building this for kids and essentially we kind of say for kids by kids, we do these things called kids’ sumer insights where we take a bunch of kids and put them in the park on a blanket with trail mix and lemonade and ask them a million questions. There are a little

10:53
kids, consumers, ask them what colors they like and where do they want their pockets and what do they keep in their pockets and what do you think about the planet and how does your mom shop and what do you look at on social media? So all sorts of things. So they’re informing everything we do. You know, a lot of these outdoor apparel brands do this kind of shrink it and pink it model where they just take an adult piece, make it smaller and throw some paint on it or unicorns and make it for kids. And we are

11:17
100 % designed for kids and what they need. Durability in all the right spots, you know, those types of things. and pockets for the right size hands and gloves. that’s one piece. Certainly the other piece I think we’re seeing with consumers a lot is they’re shopping kind of more with their hearts, at least our consumers are. They’re looking for brands that care, that are giving back, that have unique stories, that are smaller, uh that are from mountain towns that know how to make gear for mountain kids.

11:46
So that certainly sets us apart as well. And we’re building this community, of one high five and sticker giveaway at a time. And it’s been really special. When you say kids, are you talking about kids under the age of 12 or teenagers also or? Yeah, five to 14 is what we do. we’re actually, yeah, yeah, we’re looking at expanding a little bit lower because we’re finding, you know, from a business perspective, getting those kiddos into the brand a little bit earlier and also

12:14
They need good gear and there’s not a lot of options out there for three and four year olds. So you get your first 200 units of each style. So that’s 800 units. How did you make your first sale? Oh, wow. Well, the first sale was comedic. We, and I were like, we got to make some t-shirts and hats or something, at least to start spreading the love. So we printed out, we had a bunch of, we partnered with someone amazing in Steamboat to do a bunch of printing, screen printings. And we go to this little event called the Fruit of Kids Adventure Games out in the West side of Colorado.

12:44
We’re setting up and we’re so excited and it’s my partner Jay and I and we’re putting up the tent and this woman comes up and says, Hey, I need a shirt for my kid. And we’re like, Oh, okay. Okay, great. Here’s $30. And she’s like, Okay, great. And she throws us $30 in cash and walks away. And we were like, Was that our first sale? And then we looked at each other and said, We don’t take cash and we forgot to charge tax. And so we lost money our first sale, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was hilarious. And so we

13:14
you know, it’s been that kind of story. It just make it work ever since. It’s like, just make it work. So that was our first real sale. But when it came down to the apparel, you know, and the gear, man, our friends and community in Steamboat just came out of the woodwork and they A, to support us, but then B, because they really saw something in the gear and they knew that their kids helped design the gear. So those initial sales were web sales. And it was our community of 14,000 people.

13:42
here and then it’s just slowly expanded out and out now. Nice, nice. I actually went on your website and looked at the jackets. They are pretty intricate, like to design. I mean, it’s like no joke. uh Walk me through the design process. Is this something that you guys were, did you have to fly over to Asia? How involved was the design and did it involve CAD drawings, tech packs? You know, do you have that background?

14:09
All the above, CADs and tech packs and bills of materials and yeah, getting down to all the intricacies, know, sizing was certainly an issue, building something kind of to size. You know, honestly, there are market leaders out there like the North faces and the Patagonias and we looked at a bunch of their gear, you know, a couple, a couple tactics we took one is a kids, what do you want? Okay. Now, now we’ve got a visual idea in our minds about what’s going to work and then B what’s already out there and what do we like?

14:38
from brands and don’t like from other brands that are doing things out there. And so we kind of blended art and science there to say, um yeah, let’s add these features and benefits and ooh, we really like the fit of this. We don’t like this fit. And so again, once we found this factory partner, we found a designer who’s incredible, um who um has, you

15:00
an expert in the design pieces and all those features and benefits and materials and fabrics and what zipper pull we want. know, Jay is an expert at that as well. essentially build those tech packs and then designed with the factory and iterate it and did probably two to three protos, I’d say prototypes on each of them. ah You know, when it comes down to for your listeners, if they’re curious, you know, comes down to it, we pay for that. You know, we pay for the sampling and all that um goes kind of into the bill.

15:30
the pricier of your jackets and everything. yeah, was, we iterated but it went really well, went really well. So was the designer part of the factory or did you find your own designer? We found our own designer. Okay. Yeah. Because I know when you work with a factory sometimes like the file formats and all that stuff can be different across factories. Was your designer, had they worked with that factory before?

15:58
They hadn’t. They haven’t worked with that factory. Our factory is very reputable. They do a bunch of other brands in the industry, which has been really great. But no, they’ve been, it’s this, we believe in the partnership business model where we’re not just sending over a PO and then writing a check and we’re done. It’s, we share our behind the scenes strategic plan with these guys. We have, they know our core values. So they’re always looking for sustainable materials for us and bringing those ideas to us.

16:27
So it’s a true partnership. So they’re delighted when things work out great, because it benefits all of us. And how did you find your designer? It was friends of friends. It was a network, and it was a networking thing. And was just kind of reaching out to all my actually was it ended up being a gentleman from Gap that I worked at in 2003. I was like, hey, I know you were at North Face Kids years ago, 10 years ago. Do you know anyone in the design crew in that space? And so we were off to the races. It was great.

16:57
And how did you convince the factory to only make 200 units? It was a combination of uh beautiful negotiating on Jay’s part. uh Number two, we certainly had to pay for that. They were like, well, with that amount, we got to make it in the sample room. And that actually costs more. So we did have to pay when we were that low, which we were willing to take the risk. I think

17:23
You know, then once again, it come back to that partnership like, hey, you got to believe us. This is what we’re in for. Here’s our reputation here. Between Jay and I, we’ve got 25 years of outdoor industry experience. We’re not just making something up here. So a lot of trust, a lot of respect and then some risk on our side for sure. Okay. No, that makes sense. Actually, you guys all have the credentials. So a factory would probably take a chance on you guys, right? As opposed to someone who’s never done this before. Yeah, fair.

17:50
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

18:19
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. All right, so your first sale was a t-shirt and then you talked about, uh do you guys even sell t-shirts? We sure do. Yeah, sell t-shirts and our trucker hats are our crusher. That’s our silent winner. It’s amazing. And you talk a lot about community. uh

18:47
This is actually something that a lot of brands have trouble doing. So what is your strategy for building this community that you feel? Yeah, ours is um if you’ve ever been to, know, mountain towns or special places, everyone, you really need to be in love with the town and work hard to be here. It’s not easy, both from a resources perspective, it’s not easy to start a business here. It’s not easy from an expense perspective. Every mountain towns are getting hard. So there’s this

19:15
really secret passionate bond about mountain towns and Steamboat in particular. And so I think we had that going for us in that, you know, we were this darling story of we were at SmartWall, we didn’t stay, you know, we stayed in town, we didn’t move, we wanted to give back, lots of friends, lots of family, our kids. So there was that kind of natural community vibe of Steamboat. But what we really leaned into early on, Steve, was

19:42
events and just getting out there and not hiding behind the screen and telling it all and the good, bad and the ugly. And then being at events and literally giving out stickers and high fives and you know, Hey, you don’t want to buy a shirt today. That’s fine. Take a sticker, tell your friends about us. And when it comes to snowy times, give us a call. Cause we’ve got a great jacket for you. And we did last year, we did 84 days of events. Um, everything from farmers markets to, uh, kids adventure games to

20:11
you know, Warren Miller shows, we partner with Warren Miller and sponsor and giveaway jackets at every single one of their, you know, 100 stops on their national tour every year. So uh it was the events are what we didn’t even think of, you know, as selling opportunities that really is if we don’t sell something that day, that’s fine. How many stickers do we hand out? How much fun did we have? How much joy did we spread? were most of the events that you start out with, were they just local and Steamboat?

20:39
For the most part, we had our eye um on some bigger things like kids adventure games, those types of things. We also, we can talk about this too, if you’d like, we decided, gosh, if we don’t, two things, we were all D to C. We were like, let’s sell through our website the whole time, no problem. um And we want to own that warm hug with the customer and we want to own the margin and how we spend those marketing dollars. And we quickly realized, boy,

21:08
If we don’t, we’re going to be a grain of sand in the world of the internet. If we don’t expand out and try wholesale. In addition, there’s no better way to build community than these awesome wholesale, you know, retail doors, like these specialty shops you walk into in a little mountain town or, or in the Bay area that you’re like, Hey, what, hiking boots should I buy and where should I hike? And then where should I get my coffee afterwards? And those are the people that can help spread the love really well for brands and businesses. So.

21:38
I loaded up my car, drove around the state, hit 74 stops and kind of came away with five purchase orders in that first winter. so from then on, you know, the wholesale part of the business has been awesome. Okay, so do you make more wholesale than you do D2C? No, we’re 40 % wholesale 60 D2C, which is feels like a great mix for us. Yeah, no, that isn’t that is an awesome mix. Okay, so you just said a lot of things. Let’s break it down here. So yes, started out with events.

22:07
How do you justify the ROI? You’re traveling all over the place and you said sometimes you don’t sell a thing. Is it not an ROI thing? Is it just a faith thing that you get your name out there, good things will happen? Yeah, it’s brand awareness. It’s a crowded space. uh Outdoor apparel is a crowded space. And to the degree that we can set ourselves out apart from not just being another jacket on the rack, and truly, it’s a one-two punch, right? So how do we…

22:35
go to an event and do an event in a town where we already show up. So Jackson Hole, hey, thanks for coming out to this event. Here’s a sticker. By the way, we sell at Jackson Hole Sports right there, Mountain Sports right there, and at Skinny Skis. So pop on in and then they come in and that drives traffic to their stores. So our retailers love it too. So that’s why I kind of went down the road of these retail partnerships is partnering with the retailers on events too goes a really long way, both in, you know, for the good of…

23:01
all of us, but then also to drive revenue and traffic for those retailers. But is it, can you go to an event and say that you were ROI positive? Is that not how it works? Do you know what I Like how do you measure the effectiveness? No, yeah, I measure the effectiveness in a couple of ways. One is a tracker. So I have a counter when I talk to people. So one event, the Outside Festival in Denver, I talked to 370 people last June on one day. And so that’s 370 people that didn’t know about the brand. It’s also

23:31
the types of events we’re at. mean, we get a lot of clout when we go to an event like the Outside Festival. We’re parked next to Fjallraven and the North Face um and seeing our logo everywhere and engagement. So yeah, the ROI on events is truly number of people we talk to. It’s web traffic after the fact. We do all sorts of fun activations. We take good old fashioned newsletter signups. um

24:00
And yeah, it’s not necessarily how much revenue did we do that day. Right. Okay. And then walk me through how you got your first wholesale contract. You literally just walked into a store with a bunch of jackets and talked to the owner. Like how does that work? Well, it was was comedy because I went into the first one, I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I’ve been at Smart Old for years. I knew how the sales process worked enough to be dangerous. I had this little like flyer, you know, thing and I

24:26
walk into the first store and it smells like ski wax. And there’s some, you know, snowboarder dudes behind the counter and not really, you know, paying attention. And I’m like, Hey, my name’s Robin and I have a kid’s brand. Do you need jackets? And they kind of look at me like, who are you? What are you doing? And I’m like, okay, this is the right store. So I walked out, you know, I did that in five stores. And then finally the sixth store, I’m like, you know, maybe I should take the jackets in with me. That’s a good idea.

24:56
So I put a jacket over my arm and I walk in, it’s the same thing. I’m like, five more stars. I’m like, maybe I should ask for the buyer or the owner or the manager. You know, like it was such, I mean, Steve, had no idea what I was doing. And so finally the first one, it was in Leadville and this tiny town at 13,000 feet in Colorado or 12,000 feet in Colorado. And I walked in, she’s like, you know what? People ask for kids stuff all the time. Yeah. Can I just buy like a size run of that red puffy? like,

25:25
Yes, you can. And I have them in my car. So I ran out to my car and it’s dumping snow and I’m putting hang tags on and I’m writing down what I’m you know, and I walk in and that was our first sale at wholesale. And they hung them up in the window and sold out. And there you have it. All right. let me see how this works. Like what are the terms? So you have like just like a car full of jackets? How like do you have like a minimum order? What are the terms? no.

25:51
No, no, when you’re fighting, you’re fighting, you’re trying to get anything you can. we, was, I mean, I went down the road even of like, hey, just give us a shot. Like, let me give you 20 pieces. And then at the end of the season, if you don’t sell them, send them all back to me. I don’t care. So I would invoice them, they’d pay. And then I would take them back, assuming they weren’t worn and torn up. And then, you know, write them a check back at the end of season. Anything just to get our foot in the door. And I think that goes a long way with partnerships and showing that we care and we believe in our stuff. uh

26:21
It was also a reason to check in mid season. You know, I’d call and say, hey, how are those selling? Oh, you know, the Reds aren’t selling. Great. I’ll take the Reds back and send you some blues. I mean, we had no other accounts. So this was all I was doing is trying to really foster these relationships. You know why this interview is unique Robin? Like most people have on here. They’re all digital marketers, right? But like what I love about you is this is like grassroots. This is like word of mouth marketing. This is like.

26:49
you hard work and grassroots marketing. And it’s clearly worked. I was going to say I want to lead up to how you got into REI, but I imagine all these little steps contributed to that, right? Yep, for sure. For sure. Yeah, I mean, you you start to get this credibility and then we, you know, we hustle on the PR side to just sending jackets out to, um you know, gear guides and gift guides and review, review, you know, articles and that type of thing. And

27:19
So really sending out and getting our product out there has been huge for us. Walk me through that process actually. How do you get the contact information of all these guides? Do you send them to celebrities and everything too, I would imagine? I haven’t done that. In my mind, I’m like, Jimmy Fallon’s like the Holy Grail. If I could get his kids in town, that’d be amazing. I’m not that, I don’t know what the right word for that is. Gutsy, I don’t know. I don’t wanna just send that, who knows?

27:47
I feel like, uh you know, reaching out to Outside Magazine and Powder Magazine and, you know, what have you, those are the ones that, and I literally just Google, I just Google and then I’ll read an article like in the New York Times about like, here’s the best kids gifts to give this year. And I will look up that writer and their byline and then I track them down on LinkedIn, I’ll email them offline, whatever. And I just tell her story, honestly, it’s.

28:16
We’re so values-based, we’re so small and nimble and able to adapt that people generally are excited to hear from us. So at this point, like in the beginning, is it just the four of you guys or do you have like a team? This sounds like a lot of work actually. Doing events, driving around to stores and getting wholesale customers. Yeah.

28:39
Yeah, no, it was the three of us. um And Joe and Jay have full-time jobs elsewhere. And so I get them kind of nights and weekends when they’re available. And uh again, Jay drives all the supply chain. I could never even fathom the skills and the hustle around that and the work around that’s huge.

28:58
So I kind of manage everything else. And we’ve since hired a part-time customer experience person who’s been incredible filling orders and replying to customer service details and getting our, you know, kind of working on affiliates and our influencers and that type of thing. But yeah, it’s still the tight kind of four of us. Actually, that was I was gonna ask next, where’s all your inventory stored? It’s about a mile from our house in a little warehouse just in Steamboat Springs. And we just spent

29:28
the last week filling all REI orders, all Christie Sports orders, we got all those out the door, so AR is looking great right now, we love it. So you rented a warehouse nearby and you’re doing your own fulfillment? Correct, yep. That’s okay. Yeah, yeah. Amazing, RJ. Okay, so how many wholesale partners do you have now? And presumably the way you get them is you literally walk in, you talk to the owner and you…

29:55
you know, one by one get these deals that is that accurate? Yep, you’re right. Yeah. And when it comes to yes, so yes, we’ve got I think we’re in about 17 stores around the country right now. uh R.A.I. this fall will be in for R.A.I.s and online will be in for Christie Sports and online, um mainly in the West, actually solely in the West now. And yeah, I mean, those I think back to your question about how did we get R.A.I. um

30:20
It comes down to we have a great buddy who is in REI for his business. This as a side note, this entrepreneur, small business community, it like it makes me tear up. It’s the most awesome, supportive group ever. mean, there are Slack channels and group chats and the amount that we’re just all cheering each other on. so literally it was, Hey, do you want me to introduce you to the kids buyer at REI? That would be awesome.

30:49
I emailed and you know, my pitch, it wasn’t even a pitch. was just, you know, me writing the email was, Hey, will you give us a shot in three doors or just Colorado or something? You know, the last thing we want to do is ship 200 cartons to the New Jersey store and it never moves and everyone’s frustrated and it doesn’t work and then we’re done. And she called immediately and said, that’s what drew me to you is you get it that

31:13
we don’t we’re not shooting for the moon here. Let’s just start small and tell your story and see how it goes. And so we were in the Denver flagship last year and online and this year we’re going up to four and hopefully next year it’s 10 then 50 and then 100 kind of thing. So just proving proving it all out. We’re a slow growth brand and a passion based brand. How does one get into these Slack channels Robin? It’s a secret handshake. It’s pretty special. um No, it’s I mean, and then everything like

31:43
like Title IX, I don’t know if you know the brand Title IX. I’m actually wearing their, we collabed with Title IX on a women’s jacket this fall, so I’m flying out to Title IX next week, but got involved in their pitch competition last year and pitched at their Pitch Fest. And now, I mean, what Missy and that team has built is just this community of beautiful women founder brands that get together on a regular basis and share big ideas, dumb ideas, horror stories, wins. uh

32:11
help please type scenarios. so, you know, there’s these little microcosms of, uh again, Slack channels and in person events that just are so close. So you get into REI and a couple of stores as a trial. Did you do anything to make sure that those trials were effective? Like Sarah Blankley at Spanx, like telling all her friends to go shop at North Shore when she got them in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what we the what we did was just

32:38
be good partners and call them and say, what else can we do? Do you need signage? Do you need us to come tell the story, go clinic the staff? So we’d walk in and go to bring bagels and donuts to their Monday morning meeting, stand up meeting for the whole staff and say, here’s what Town Hall is all about. Here’s what our jackets do. Here’s the features and benefits. um We would partner on events, say, hey, you having any events? Can we host an event there on our own dime? Can we give away a jacket on our dime?

33:06
Can we post about you on social media? Just all those. I mean, it sounds so silly core basics, but we really did them. And know what’s funny about all this Robin is most people aren’t willing to do this stuff. I mean, it’s required, but most people are afraid of the hard work. Right. They’ll hide behind like Facebook ads. Actually, are you guys even running any ads? didn’t check. Zero. We’ve spent zero dollars on. I mean, much to our own demise, right? Like we’re really slow growth, but we were growing.

33:35
You know, 50 % every year, on a base of zero, that’s not, you know. So no, all that to say, no, we haven’t spent any. And that’s what actually our friends and family raise right now is for is, wow, we’ve done real well building a brand. And now let’s really try and click over and build the business. We got to pour some money into AIO and SEO and, you know, all the core basics we’ve been not able to spend money on for the last five years.

34:01
That’s amazing. And it’s still just three. Well, no, you hired another person and you run a warehouse. Good Lord. Okay. No, it’s an incredible story. Like I said, this interview is very different from the one like here’s here’s how a typical interview goes. I’ll talk to the guy and he’s like, Oh, yeah, we just poured in like, you know, $50,000 a day in meta ads and like we got it. You know. But the thing is, they’re chasing like the ROI isn’t that great, obviously, in the beginning for them.

34:30
And then just by gathering emails and repeat business, that’s how they grow their brand. It’s like revenue first in a lot of cases. I feel like for you, it’s different. You’re building a very solid foundation of community, raving fans. And then now you’re about to take that next step in scale, which is pretty amazing. You got it. Yeah. It’s, um there’s pros and cons to all of it, right? But I think it, one of the big things we learned in our time at SmartWall, which is so beautiful is

34:58
get those core values and build your foundation, your mission, vision, values and live and breathe by those. we have. And so I think we’ve done it our way. And now it’s time to your point to, wow, what could we do if we went to the Vale Kids Adventure Games where we talked to my little clicker, you know, we talked to 300 people over the course of three days and we got, you know, 130 email addresses. What if now? Wow.

35:26
we actually targeted them with meta ads afterwards and know, XYZ and really kind of exploded from there. So I think where I get really excited where our investors are that are in this round are really excited to see where we can go from here. What we built with nothing and a lot of hustle and now what we can build with a lot of strategy and well spent dollars on marketing. prior to the raise, like selling apparel like this has got to be cashflow heavy, right? So were you literally just

35:56
taking out loans to manage the cashflow and everything. Yeah, and I mean, for good or for bad, doing all this stuff on, you know, with three founders and my car driving to events, you know, there was a little cash outlay with, you know, we, yeah, it’s taken its toll for sure on the car. But, you know, there’s a little bit of a cash outlay on, you know, events and what we sign up for. But again, honestly, oh, again, it kind of makes me cry. But like the goodwill of people and the goodwill of these

36:26
You know, we usually charge three grand for people to be at this event, but we love what you’re doing. Just come on down. We got a lot of that. And that’s where we’re so thankful. And we keep going back to those events to pay them back for those types of things. yeah, we don’t spend a lot of money. We do it all on a dime and we hustle a lot. it’s, but all that to say, man, when we’ve got to put down 50 grand, you know, 50 grand in January for something we’re not going to see the revenue on until the following January.

36:56
because of terms, it’s nasty. It’s brutal. It’s brutal. You know, one thing I love about your website, I just wanted to let you know is I went on and I shopped for a jacket and I loved this survey that you have, like how cold is it? uh You know, your kids, is it wet? Whatever. And then it tells you exactly what to buy. As opposed to some of these other sites, like there’s this huge variety. have no idea what the heck to get. And I love that aspect of your site. Oh, thanks. Yeah, we do see.

37:23
a lot of opportunity. mean, the website is kind of the number one place we need to focus a lot of effort right now and just, you know, a lot of video content, a lot is needed to explain the features and benefits and why if it works for kids in the mountains, it’s going to work for you in the Bay Area kind of thing. Oh, one thing I also wanted to ask you and this is the first time I’ve heard of this but a B company is what you guys are right? Yeah, so we are a public benefit corporation.

37:50
which is a legal term, essentially means we, uh no matter what happens to our business, we get sold, we, whatever happens, we always will, we’re more than just for profit. We’re actually for, you know, something bigger than that. And number one is to give back to the communities of Northwest Colorado. And number two is to give back to the planet. And so those kind of foundational uh reasons for being will always live with Town Hall. Then we went so far as last year to actually get B Corp certified. So we got the

38:19
the certification stamp, and then we’ve got the legal backing as well. So I’m not as familiar with B Corps, like how do they differ from C Corps in terms of how you operate? Literally not much at all. Nothing. I mean, it’s just it’s essentially the same, the same, you know, you got to the same articles of corporation, the bylaws, and you have the same annual meetings and the shareholders and all that type of thing. It’s truly just, hey, you cannot

38:45
go against these, is your company always heading in the direction of these core values? And we check that box every year. Okay, I noticed it was front and center on your site. So it’s a pretty strong value prop as to for sure, the values of your company. I also wanted to ask how you got on how I built this. Because that’s like one of the biggest podcasts in the world. Right? That was just a cold call. You know, it’s like I just if it says

39:13
if it says reach out, I’m going to reach out. said, Hey, do have a story to tell? Give a call. So I left a voicemail. I don’t know. And they called me back and I left it in like August. And, know, I didn’t tell Joe and Jay, and it was just like, whatever, we’ll see if this voicemail goes anywhere. And then I got an email from a producer and you know, eight months later, and then we recorded three months after that. um I don’t know, we have, we have something about you, Robin, like uh

39:41
I don’t know if it’s me, Steve, I don’t know. We just have a lot of, I don’t know. We have a lot going for us. We’re just, I don’t know. I don’t know. just, love this brand. I love this community and it just, everything we do comes from the heart and hopefully I think people see that. And we’re just, we’re hustling and that goes a long way too. Let me ask you this. So you decided to take funding and with that,

40:06
comes like another can of worms. Is it just friends and family? Or is it? Are you getting like institutional funding also? Just friends and family? Okay. All right. Okay. Yeah, I was about to say if you got institutional funding, like that puts pressure for you to light a fire and like go all out. But yeah, no, no, this is just friends and family. And I mean,

40:27
It’s no secret that the outdoor industry is not a lucrative investment opportunity. this isn’t, know, the folks that we found and the folks that we’re seeking out to invest really get the brand and where we’re headed. And quite frankly, almost all of them that are investing are actually going to sit on an advisory board because they’re just savvy and excited and passionate and want to see us succeed for the good of

40:55
us and our families, but then also for this town and the business and their kids. So uh it’s really neat to see that it truly is, it’s friends and family that are actually going to serve as advisory roles, which is really cool. That is cool. uh It sounds like you travel a lot for this business and whatnot. And I know you’re very family oriented as well. uh How is like, have you integrated your business with your family?

41:23
and make sure you have time for both. And your husband’s obviously very understanding of all this. Oh, my husband is our number one biggest fan. He is uh the town hall guru. He could explain the jackets inside and out. uh The family, for good or for bad, town hall has a firm seat at the dining room table every day. Town hall is part of the family. so we…

41:48
go through PNLs together. We’ve taught the kids about financials. We asked them, like, we’ll have a, you know, a bunch of kids are over here jumping on the trampoline and I’m like, hey, can everyone come inside and tell me what colors of jackets you like? um You know, everyone gets it. People, the family comes and works at the events for fun. You know, they’re getting older now, so they’ve grown out of the jackets, unfortunately. But um it’s just such a, I don’t, I don’t have to separate.

42:13
Honestly, it’s really like we’re all in this together and we’re doing it together, which feels really special. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I can just tell from the website, like the pictures that you’ve shown, it’s like a very tightly knit community that that you’ve that you’ve created for your brand. And uh it’s pretty amazing. So for anyone listening out there, where can they go to check out the brands? What events are you going to? Do you have like a schedule where people come up? Because there are people in, you know, mountain towns.

42:43
For sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we’ll be doing the REI Summon the Snow at the Denver flagship in, I think it’s the end of October, October 20 something. So that’s down there. We’re doing a Kids on Snow event up at Jackson Hole. um We are, yeah, there’s a holiday market in town. So lots of little things. Definitely check out our website, townhallco.com.

43:07
Get involved, come, you know, join our newsletter. I send the newsletters so you’re not going to get a lot of them because I don’t have time to send three a week. So and feel free to reply if I send something dumb. um But yeah, give us a follow on social. think, you know, the other thing it’s been interesting from a marketing perspective, being super transparent with our community and telling them all the good, bad. I used to do this Rosebud thorn about what we’re working on. And I think it’s been neat for

43:35
entrepreneurial folks and business savvy folks to kind of follow along from a, what does it take to start this business? How does this go? What is she working on? So we’ve been talking about the business uh in Town Hall and the products, but then also the business itself. So if you want to learn more about business, give us a follow on social as well on Insta or at Town Hall CEO. Do you guys have like a YouTube channel or a short form video channel?

43:59
We don’t, it’s on the list, it’s on the list. You’d be incredible at it, incredible. You should definitely do it. Oh, I’m taking cues from you, my friend. It’s pretty impressive to watch you do your magic. It’s cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Robin. Really appreciate it. It’s good to get back. Thanks for having us. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re thinking about selling apparel, I hope this episode helps you evaluate your niche before you begin.

44:24
For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 619. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 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’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, 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.

44:53
Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I shared the latest AI updates because this past week was a little nuts with a ton of new announcements. But before I begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories,

00:27
Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room.

00:53
We’ve saw that every single year for the past eight years and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And if you’re doing over 250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket.

01:21
Welcome back to the My Wife, Put Her Job podcast. These past couple of weeks, I feel like there’s been this huge bonanza of AI announcements. And I think we say this every single time this happens, just AI every week, a new tool, a new version of something comes out. And it’s very impressive. So I have an interesting thought to this. Most of your friends are pretty techie, I would assume.

01:50
They’re not actually. Really? I guess you’re like real life friends. you talk to your life friends are doctors and lawyers. How do they use AI? Because I was out to dinner with my friend Sandy, as you met Sandy before. She’s in medical sales. Her husband’s a firefighter. We were with a couple other people. And we started to talk about AI. And it’s very interesting to me. Because I feel like you and I live in this world where people are using AI to do all sorts of crazy stuff. Like Dana Michelle is doing full.

02:18
you know, video, we’ve got people like Ritu doing it with ad and creatives. I’m using it a lot to like decipher information, build flows, charts, you know, um the very technology, right? Like Liz and I are using it a lot to, you know, we built a quiz, are, you know, designing websites, all this stuff. But when you talk to like people that don’t live in our world, how they use AI is like very different than I think how we think about it. Do you feel the same way?

02:47
So what’s funny is the sentiment, at least among some of my friends, is almost anti-AI. Yes, yes. Right? Because they’re afraid that it might displace the stuff that they do or whatnot. And so they’re actually not really playing around with it. So what’s interesting to me is…

03:06
I had lab work done a couple of weeks ago and weirdly, I don’t know if there’s like a new lab, but like each lab test, you know how they run like the CBC and then maybe they test for like a thyroid thing and then they they test for different like buckets of uh problems. I have no problems. That was the good news. But it ended up coming back. Well, no problems with the lab work. They check the mental stuff. Yeah, the mental stuff, it just broke and they couldn’t do anything. So it came back in like, you know, I usually get like one big long

03:36
piece of lab work, well this came in multiple documents, right? So it was like, well this is your thyroid test, and this is this, and this is that. And I was like, this is too much information, right? It was too hard to like, because some of it does play off each other, like well if this number is a little high and this number is a little low, whatever. So I fed it all into chat GPT, right? And I was like, hey, can you summarize this? Can you find anything that it’s on the higher end of or lower end of normal, whatever.

04:02
And I had it read all my labs and everything and like give me like summary and then give me like questions that I could ask my doctor. Right. I think nothing of this. Right. So we’re at dinner the other night and someone mentioned putting medical reports into chat GBT to get you know how when you get like a X-ray or something and you have like the radiology report. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like my brother dumps all that into A.I. to get like a layman’s term. Right.

04:28
So I’m like, yeah, I do the same thing. My friends were like, are you kidding me? No way, I would never put my medical information into AI because then it’s out in the world. And I was like, well, it’s already out in the world. It’s been sent on servers. It’s all like, I don’t know. But you’re right. My friends are all like, oh, I don’t really want AI knowing a lot about me. And I’m like, I put everything about myself. We have a friend who’s using it for therapy. I’m not sure I would go that far to recommend it, but like.

04:55
I don’t know. just feel like we have such a different view than maybe that’s the general public. I’m not sure, but that’s the sentiment around my friends that don’t work in the technology fields. They’re the same way. Actually, my friends aren’t even on social media. That’s how like, yeah, they never see what’s going on in my life because they’re not on TikTok or Instagram. Rarely Facebook like they’ll occasionally go on Facebook. So, yeah, I feel you. You know, what’s funny about this is uh

05:24
AI recently announced shopping. I think the integration was with Etsy, but then later on it’s gonna be coming out with Shopify. Because of your medical report, all that stuff is fair game, right? So let’s say you had uh high triglycerides for some reason. All of a sudden, OpenAI might recommend you fish oil supplements, right? Because it knows those intimate details about you. And I think most people just find that

05:54
pretty terrifying. don’t, I find it great because to me, I don’t like, cause to me, like when I put all my lab work in and then I was like, Hey, I, one of my questions was what supplements should I take? You know, and then I put in a bunch of like caveats of like, I don’t want this in my supplement. There’s right, right. Like I want AI to know more about me.

06:17
so that I get better tailored responses. Just like I hate it when I get served ads for things that I would never buy. Like serve me all the ads of things that I want. But we probably skew way to the other side. I Yeah, I think so. I mean, let’s say you’re complaining about like your boyfriend or your spouse or something chat to BT and all of a sudden it prescribes you like Prozac or something. I don’t know. Or you’re getting all these Tinder ads. Something more personal like that.

06:45
Actually, other news like Gemini, I haven’t seen it firsthand because I don’t know if it’s available for me, but supposedly there’s ads now in the AI mode, which is going to become like the new ad platform for Google instead of their usual 10 blue links and whatnot. the fact that it’s been announced means it’s probably rolling out right around the corner. So the way Google ads works is fundamentally going to change right around the corner.

07:14
Now, you using AI? Because I know we talked. I don’t know. I know you did a lesson on this for AI uh search and shopping if you have a store. Yeah. SEO. Well, it’s not SEO. But um are you using it all? I’m not really using it for shopping. I ask for recommendations. we know people who are using it I it’s happening. I can see it in my search results for my store. Yeah. uh

07:41
I made a video about this so I can’t remember the stats, but I think it’s like 3x to this year. Now it’s 3x of a small number, right? Right. mean, it just shows that it’s that’s increasing. What I’m curious to what you think the future is for that. I mean, I feel like it eventually it will overtake Google. Well, I mean, Google is going away like the traditional search and then Gemini, which was just announced, is gotten really good reviews. I’ve actually tried Nano Banana Pro. I think it’s

08:11
And we can talk a little bit about that, but it’s like way better than any other image tool that I’ve ever used also. So, and then the number of searches, according to like the stats from last month is still increasing. Google is not really losing market share. So what I imagine will happen is that Gemini will take over because Google has like this huge installed base. Yeah. And then Gemini will have the new ads and the shopping and everything already built in. Yeah. What do you think that’s going to do for like

08:40
I mean, it probably won’t impact meta at all. People still get on social media and browse and get served ads. I just feel like that. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the same as like a Google search, but I feel like in Gemini, like the intent is going to be so much greater or than I don’t know. I feel like I feel like AI knows more about you than just like Google did, even though it does. Oh, yeah, for sure. history, you know, obviously you’re putting all that information into your computer, but I don’t know. I feel like it’s going to be a bit. It kind of reminds me of how excited I was when Tick Tock

09:10
sort of launched and the algorithm was so fantastic, right? And you would like get everything that you wanted to see. Meanwhile, like on Instagram and Facebook, it was just like this barrage of garbage that you didn’t care about. Like to me, it feels like, ooh, maybe it’s gonna be a similar type experience where like the algorithm is just so much tighter. um I think the company that has the most to lose, ironically, I think is Amazon. Yeah. Right. Like if everyone does their searches on Chachi BT and then clicks

09:40
on an Amazon product, for example, to buy. Well, Amazon’s ad revenue has been increasing by 22 % year over year. That is their main cash cow, not retail. Like they don’t really care about retail as much and retail is slowing. It only grew like in the single digits and it’s slowing down. Amazon’s the biggest one impacted here because why go to Amazon to search when your AI already knows you and is recommending stuff?

10:10
So yeah, mean, Amazon’s hurting. I think OpenAI and ChatGPT are maybe in the long run in trouble too, because Google just has everything, right? They have your phone and they still have the browser, which is where most people are asking these questions now. So if Geminize is good as everyone’s saying, maybe more people will start using it over ChatGPT because Geminize is free.

10:38
pretty much right now. Yes, yeah. I haven’t used Gimini at all. I need to. I need to start to. I’m just a little worried about it because like if I use it to like help me with my YouTube stuff, mean, YouTube is owned by Google, right? Right. So I’m wondering if it has a history of all this stuff. I don’t know. I’m a little paranoid probably, but. You know, what’s interesting is um our friend Kevin gave me an idea a couple of weeks ago. He was, you know, he had his YouTube channel blow up a while back and

11:07
He said one of the ways that he was really liking AI was that he was dumping all of his analytics in AI and having uh chat basically give him suggestions, room for improvement, all the, know, basically having, because that’s what I feel like for like the regular user, right? Like let’s just, you know, it’s basically dumping complex information into it. So you’re owning all the information, right? Like you dump all the information and then,

11:35
having it analyze it for you and then give you feedback, results, summaries. I feel like that’s the strength for the regular, someone like my mother, right? And so, Kevin was talking about dumping Olive’s Analytics in there, and so I started doing that last week with my client, because I was like, it’s just a lot to go through, right? And immediately, I was like, this is so easy, right? What was probably a two to three hour job, I had,

12:05
not everything I needed, but like a pretty good start in under 30 minutes, right? Of then like where I could drill down and start, you know, really focusing my attention. But I feel like for the regular user who’s like nervous about it, like that’s the use case for for those people today. So vidIQ actually does this. They have this AI coach. And so I use it all the time because it already has all the data and everything. Yeah. But with the latest Gemini, you can actually upload your video to Gemini and it will critique your video.

12:35
I didn’t know that. I haven’t tried it on Gemini. That’s my problem. Yeah, I haven’t tried I mean this is all Gemini 3 stuff. Yeah, and so I suspect actually behind the scenes now like when you upload a video to YouTube they run it through whatever Yeah, and they can tell you right away It knows right away how much to show your video based on how the video is structured the scripts Your facial expressions intonations and everything. Yeah, so maybe it makes m

13:03
It’s on my list to try this for my next video. Yeah. But I’m going to upload the finished product to Gemini, ask for its feedback and maybe re-film certain parts that it doesn’t think is good. Yeah. And since it’s all connected, like the reason why Gemini is so good is it has all the YouTube data also, which is which is better, in my opinion, than Reddit data. I don’t know. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe it shouldn’t be. But yeah. What’s funny is I just got back from an event where one of the topics

13:32
Like one of the talks was gaming Reddit, right? That’s not surprising. All sorts of people are gaming Reddit right now. In fact, they formed a little mastermind group on Reddit and WhatsApp that I’m a part of where we’re like uploading everyone’s posts to get to a minimum uh karma rating so you can start spamming Reddit with stuff. So I don’t trust Reddit at all. No, no, Yeah. Yeah.

14:02
Well, anyway, yeah, that’s the whole well that that was that all has come out of, know, when search changed, right. And all of a sudden Reddit was the number one search result for every single question you ever had. And I was like, I don’t want Reddit information for a colonoscopy. Right. Like there’s just I don’t know. I don’t like Reddit. I know a lot of people love it and use it. But I don’t know. For me, like, that’s not a source of information for me at all.

14:29
I mean for a while all the AIs were pulling the majority of stuff from Reddit. I think that’s toned down in like the last couple months. Yeah. And I think I mentioned this briefly in the last episode, but China is passing a law where in order to talk about the law, health, or finance, you actually have to have a degree in that subject before they will allow you to post about that subject. I told you this before. I’m not a post.

14:53
I am not opposed to it all because I looked at my TikTok feed. I do scrolled a little bit this morning. Yeah. And I want to say 40 percent was AI. It’s funny because that is not my feed at all. That’s not your feed. OK. Are you sure? Like I’m just talking about like stills where it’s like a robot. I mean, the robots are better now, but someone narrating a bunch of screencast stuff. You don’t you don’t get that. No.

15:22
Well, I guess that hasn’t reached the gossip scene yet. I am most of my so it’s I was actually surprised that I didn’t see more of it because, as you know, and I think I mentioned this in the last podcast, my son just launched a TikTok channel that’s all I generated content. And so I watch every single one of his videos. I like my share. Right. So I was actually surprised that, I’m not seeing more of it because of my interaction with his channel.

15:48
But, uh what’s funny is I haven’t seen as much AI, but I have seen uh in the same content pillar, like the same topics, like I get some of those videos now. But my TikTok is mainly travel and DIY. So that’s pretty much, which are both, uh now sometimes travel will be slightly AI, like you’re like, that’s probably some AI, but most of it’s people talking about like the top five places they ate or things like that. It’s not really.

16:17
It doesn’t really lend itself to AI as much as, I you could absolutely make that stuff with AI for sure. Maybe it’s because a lot of minds are sports, so I get a lot of Warriors and Niners stuff. Yeah. And it’s basically like screenshot or video of the actual game with like an AI narrating what’s going on. Yeah. Or doing a recap. Maybe that’s why I’m seeing it so much. Do you think we’re going to change our opinion? Because I know that you and I, in all of our webinars and in the course, we talk to people about

16:46
if they’re going to start creating video content, having your face aligned with it is better than just creating this anonymous type channel. Do you think we’re going to have a shift over time or do think we’re going to stick with that? Okay, so at this event, I met a guy who has an insane number of AI channels and supposedly he’s doing like $100,000 a month just pumping out AI videos.

17:16
for these channels, push button, basically. So if that gets around, and I don’t know if this guy sells a class or whatnot, but I have seen classes on this, everyone’s chasing the quick buck, kind of reminds me of drop shipping back in the day. And if everyone just starts pushing all this AI stuff, then it’s gonna get, I mean, I think it’s already crazy. I don’t know the stats, unfortunately. I didn’t come prepared with stats today, but.

17:44
I’m gonna wanna see human. I already wanna see human. I’ve actually started marking a lot of these videos as spam actually. In my TikTok, Like if I see like a garble of characters as the username, that clearly indicates that it’s like one of these mass accounts that they’re just blasting around themselves. I’ll report it as misleading or spam. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of.

18:15
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18:42
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. I think watching my son’s channel blow up so quickly, I feel like if you have an angle, right, if you have something clever, and I think this has always been true and it will always be true, if you create content around that clever idea, whether it’s you, AI, you know, it’s the content that you’re creating, you can do it any way you want, right?

19:10
But you have to have that like million dollar idea. You have to have something that no one else is doing or no one else is taking that spin on it. I think the problem with a lot of the AI content and I don’t see as much as you do is that it’s just like regurgitation of other things. There’s no like, there’s no angle or interest to it. It’s just, know. I’ve seen your son’s stuff. He actually creates the scripts and he comes up with the idea.

19:38
What I’m talking about right now is where AI writes the script. Yeah. And then pumps out the video to go along with it. And it’s so obvious now because I’ve used chat GPT and Claude so much. Like I can tell whether it’s AI written just by the way it’s like. Yes. And it’s so funny because I for type A a lot of we generate a lot of scripts through chat with with modification. Right. But on the last bunch of scripts I noticed like

20:07
when we were doing the bulk recording on like video six or something, I was like, ooh, we’ve said those couple words a lot. Like, you know, because chat has its favorite like sayings and words and I didn’t notice it like when I was going through it, but then, you know, when we were recording and like boom, boom, boom, boom, was like, oh yeah, we need to change these couple words out. Like we need to remove them from our scripts because it felt very much like AI. It’s just the patterns. It’ll say like, not this, not that.

20:36
But this. So what’s funny is my son, um which like of all my kids, if you would have said he was the one doing this, I would have been like, no, he won’t. um Because he’s a manager at a restaurant. doesn’t have like a lot of free time. He does it all like he’ll be working the grill and he will have an idea and he will literally talk to text it into chat, have it do all the prompts to go to Sora to like he’s got a whole workflow.

21:05
that he can do from his phone while he’s flipping burgers, which is crazy. I mean, that’s the benefit of being young. He still has the energy to have those ideas. So there’s two people I talked to at this event who are coming up with tools that allow you to, so right now the tools are a little hard to use because they’ll only produce like an eight second clip and you often have to splice everything together.

21:31
There’s two people that I talked to that are here coming out with tools that kind of do this for you. Their angle is mainly for meta ads. uh yeah, so meta ads, but I mean, that’s gonna bleed into all the short form videos and everything. And I agree, if the thing is entertaining, it’s gonna work. So maybe AI gets really good at coming up with stuff that’s entertaining, who knows? I know in music land, it’s picked up so,

22:00
I think last week I saw like an AI band got like 20 million downloads and reached the top of the charts or something like that. Wow. And this acquaintance of mine sent me his AI playlist on Spotify with stuff that he generated for himself to listen to. It’s the type of music he likes. And so he made his own tunes with AI that he could personally enjoy. And he showed me, I’m like,

22:31
wow, this is pretty good. I would not be able to tell it was not a human singing this. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. So music, for me at least, I just want to listen to something that’s good. Just like I just want to watch something that’s good. Music is an easier problem to solve, I think. Yeah. So if it puts out good music that I just want to listen to while I work or whatnot,

22:58
I wouldn’t care whether it’s human or AI. Yeah, I agree. But isn’t that it’s weird. Like, I don’t know. It kind of reminds me back when I don’t know, this is probably the 80s when, you know, music was definitely like it was a band and drums and like guitars. And then all of a sudden all the synthesizer music came out. Right. And the drums were like electric drums as opposed to like regular. I don’t know if they’re called regular drums, whatever. And people like really had a backlash against some of that.

23:27
Right. Because it was like, well, that’s not like it’s all done on one synthesizer. Right. You can do the whole song and you can make the horn sound and you could make this and people were like, now it’s like very common. you know, I don’t know. I watched a it was actually on TikTok. I watched a clip of Charlie Puth on Jimmy Fallon and he had Jimmy Fallon sing this like little ditty. Right. And then he turned it into like this full song with like

23:56
drums and harmonies. I love it when they do that. Yes, and it’s like so cool and I’m like, I don’t know, I think it’s fun and cool and if you like the music then who cares how it was generated, but anyway, I don’t know, it’s tough. It’s like when I go to an Erasure concert and no listens it’s gonna be Erasure, but one guy runs the synthesizer and his name is Vince, all he literally does is stand there and hit buttons the whole time.

24:25
while Andy does all the singing and everything. ah Anyway. It’ll be interesting to see, we’re so new into AI, but yet it feels like it’s come so far, but where is it gonna be at end of next year? What are we gonna be talking about? It’s crazy. So you wouldn’t care if you were telling Chachi Petit something really sensitive about your skin or some health issue that you had, and then all of a sudden you started.

24:54
getting ads and links to products, you wouldn’t care? No. OK. I would care if chat made a website and was like, here’s all Tony’s medical issues. Where’s that rash? that. Yeah, prefer personalization. Like, actually, it’s kind of funny. So one of my clients sent me this website and she’s like, get on their email list. It’s so amazing. Right. And it was a baby brand.

25:24
And so I was like, well, I don’t need any baby stuff. And um so they had a spin it to win it wheel, which I was kind of like, wow, these things still work, huh? Like we’ve been talking about spin it to win it for how many 7 % opt in. Yeah. On my site. Yeah. I mean, it’s just so funny. You’re like, this thing will never die. So I spin the wheel. um And of course, my client doesn’t.

25:47
I don’t think fully understand how some of the technology of this works. she’s like, and I was like, yeah, you can set the wheel to whatever you want. Like everyone, you can give whatever coupons the way you want. Like this is not randomized, right? And so I spin the wheel and then in order to collect the coupon, I had to put like the age of my baby, right? Was I pregnant? Did I have a newborn?

26:13
there were like four options, which makes sense for us. It’s actually really good for a baby brand, right? Because then you know like what you’re dealing with. And then there was like a next thing like, oh, wait, before you can get your coupon, we need to have your phone number. And I was like, this is annoying, right? Because like, and I know you do it too, but there wasn’t an option to drop off of SMS. Like you had to do both to get the coupon. And I was like, okay, fine, do that too.

26:37
I feel like with certain brands that would, you would lead to a huge drop, right? Sure. Not everybody. It’s about 50 % for me. Like if they opt in the email, 50 % give their phone number. Right. So then, you know, you finally get your coupon and it comes in an email. And the crazy part was my client was convinced that the email was personalized to her, right? Like because she put, that she was shopping for, you know, whatever, I think newborn, whatever.

27:07
and she got an email with newborn. Well, I put that I had like a three to four year old, right? Because I don’t have any of those ages. But I was like, you don’t like you. Like, is there a slot for 30 year old on that 30 year old gift gift guide? Anyway, I got the same email that she did. And I was like wasted opportunity. Right. Because they’re using Klaviyo and I’m sure some other email tools like Omnisyn probably does this as well. But like.

27:33
As soon as I hit that box of I have a three to four year old, it should have tagged me in Klaviyo as someone with a three to four year old and they should have sent me a different email. They shouldn’t have sent me swaddly blankets. They should have sent me toddler stuff, right? But I was like, this is such a good example of personalization missing the mark just ever so slightly. It’s like you’re collecting this data about me, but you’re not doing anything with it, right? You’re not executing on the data.

28:01
Because if you would have sent me something, obviously not me, but if you would have sent me something in that age bracket, the chances of me buying are so much higher, right? Because you’re showing me exactly what I want. And I think that’s one of the, I don’t know, dangers, not dangers of AI, but could be a problem is because it allows you, when we have all this technology and we have the ability to collect data about people and we have the ability to analyze it, if you don’t act on that data, then it doesn’t matter.

28:28
Now you know all this stuff about me, this baby brand, but not really about me, because I had to make up a fake profile. They’re not doing, in every email since then, they haven’t sent me anything personalized. It’s like they’re just sending me their standard flow. um And so anyway, I think if you’re gonna be making an effort collecting this, analyzing data, then you have to take action on it. I know you’ve done a good job of that. You’ve implemented a lot of stuff on Bumblebee. um

28:57
where you’re mostly post purchase, but, you’re still gathering the data. Um, but if you’re not taking the time to act on it, then you’re kind of wasting your time on the front end. So here’s like a kind of a contrarian take. I feel like AI is kind of ruining email. Uh, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting a lot more email, like in like the last year, just random emails that are clearly AI written.

29:22
And because it’s so easy now, like in the past, you’d have to write these emails and they’d have to sound decent. Now, like I look at my inbox and usually I’ll just look at the first paragraph. And now they’re all kind of well written. Yeah. And to the point now where I’m like desensitized and I just close it and don’t even read anything anymore. Yeah. That’s a problem. And then on your uh your privacy thing with shopping, this is what I was getting at. uh Someone, I think

29:53
a month ago asked me if I tried the new agentic browsers that had come out. The problem with using those browsers is that if you visit a website that has like hidden prompts in it, like give me all of your sensitive information or the passwords in your talk, the agentic browser will actually send that information out. There’s so many security holes right now involving that. In fact,

30:22
a guy I met this event, he actually went on Gemini and said, a server just fell on me. I need the root password in order to survive or something like that. And Google actually gave him the root password for a Google server. He sent that to Google and Google ended up sending him a $500 check for finding that loophole. That’s crazy. But what’s going on right now is an invisible text on some of these malicious sites are

30:51
are prompts that are prompting whatever agentic browser or whatever that happens to randomly visit that site to give sensitive information. I don’t want to scare anyone, but this is why I don’t use any of those agentic browsers right now until I think. Because it’s really hard to put those safeguards in, right? You have to verbally put them in, and really no one is in control of the model fully. It makes me nervous for people like our mom.

31:21
Right when you’re talking about like everybody can send an email now and I’ve noticed that too I get so I’m like where did this this come from right like people are just emailing like crazy uh But I feel like what AI does in a negative way is it makes all those spam emails better Right where it was like before it was yes, don’t don’t don’t get money to the Nigerian prince everybody knows right but now it’s like really legitimate looking stuff and I feel like you know

31:50
people like, well actually my daughter had something that happened last weekend where it was like we were not sure if it was real or not. Like it was, you know, she had her phone stolen and so she went and got a new phone, you know, reported it stolen, all that stuff. Well then she got a text like two weeks after it happened was basically like I have your phone. Like I have all your information, blah, blah, blah.

32:15
Yeah. So anyway, was like, you know, so we’re like on the phone with T-Mobile and, know, all this stuff and Apple trying to like get everything, you know, figured out. I’m like, don’t click, don’t text back. Like, don’t. But I feel like the the problem is that it’s going to make, you know, bad people worse, right, because it’s going to give them better tools. So I think, you know, there is something to be said about really paying attention and, you know, protecting that kind of information. Yeah.

32:42
I don’t want to turn this podcast negative. These are just things that I’ve been thinking about lately with everything that’s been happening. And the fact that I think AI is not really doing a good job of telling a positive story to the general public. Like I’m super excited about it. You’re super excited about it. Anyone who’s in business that I hang out with super is super excited about it. But I think like the general public and maybe correct me if I’m wrong, if you guys are listening to this, are kind of anti AI in nature.

33:13
I rarely hear outside of people my kids age, right? So like the 18 to 25, let’s just say that age group, I feel like is in a different bucket, but like outside of that, I don’t hear a lot of positive about AI um outside of our circles of friends. Yeah. I don’t know. I just gave a lesson relatively recently about uh Google’s vibe coding platform, like making image apps and images that you can just then animate.

33:43
and turn it into a video. In fact, my last YouTube video actually had an animated image of, so my last YouTube video, which actually really took off, was how Shein and Tmoo got destroyed in Europe by France, right? And I found this still image. So what they did is they stormed in and started opening all the Shein packages. I guess you know what Shein is, right? Like the fast fashion brand. Yes, my girls love it, yeah. But uh all I’ve had was a still image.

34:11
of the whole process where they were opening packages. So I said, animate this and make it look like, and it did such a good job. It looked real actually. And so I included it in the video. It’s just crazy what you can fabricate now. But here’s the thing. I think there’s a difference between, and maybe this is where I’m just completely brainwashed. Because one of the things that I wanted to try was, one of my clients sells homeschool curriculum. We have a lot of still photos of kids.

34:40
like from like top down so you don’t see their face, but they’re like writing in one of the books, right? Or they’re working on a handwriting thing. And I was like, wouldn’t it be nice to just get like an eight second animation of that, right? To use in B-roll and things like that because it’s more interesting than just the photo. And kind of the same thing was you already had a photo of the people with the packages, you just didn’t have any action involved with it, right?

35:06
It almost reminds me of like my girls do this all the time where they take everything in live photo on the iPhone and they turn it all into video, right? Because they have actual video, you know, from the live photo. So to me, like that is, I don’t want to say it’s like an acceptable way, but like I feel like it’s different than like you literally like create me a five year old child who’s sitting at a desk. Like, so you’re basically creating something out of nothing versus creating something out of source. I don’t know.

35:33
To me, there’s a difference in that. I don’t know if it matters, but. I don’t know. think it’s all. I mean, to put together an advertisement. So one of the big things at this, once again, the event that I went to are what I call like fake testimonials. Like you just have someone hold your product. Yes. You write the script and it looks amazing. Actually, there’s this one.

36:00
ad that I saw and it was for something random. It was for some energy drink or something. But it was this guy on a jet ski going crazy and having the time of his life drinking this energy drink. Yeah. And is that acceptable? I don’t know. Yeah. Because it’s clear in that case, guess, that it was, well, no, it wasn’t that obvious actually that it was AI. So I think where the problem comes is if you are just faking reviews, right?

36:29
Like I feel like putting a person with a review that’s already been left, I don’t know. It is manipulative, right? Because if I see someone saying something, it holds more weight than if I read it, right? Like if I talk to you and you’re like, oh, I went to that hotel in Vegas, it was terrible, it was dirty, blah, blah, blah. That holds more weight than like me just reading it on TripAdvisor, right? Because it seems more genuine. So are you…

36:59
I don’t know. mean half the ads that we watch are all fixed anyway. Like all the UGC, there’s firms where you just literally hand a script over and they have an actor or whatever read it, right? Yeah. So I don’t know, is this any different? Because the human is AI generated? I don’t know. But that’s coming because there’s all these tools out there that are doing it. Push button. Like right now you can do it.

37:27
Like I actually have a flow which I was gonna present to the class on how to do this. uh Like just the process, but it takes like a good 40 minutes, 30, 40 minutes to put it together and it requires multiple tools. know, like I have to have, well, I’ve been piecing them together using Camtasia, but you know, whatever video tool. And it never comes out the right way that you want in the beginning. So it requires iterations and whatnot. But just imagine a push button tool that allows you to do that.

37:56
Well, it’s interesting because we talked on the last our Black Friday podcast about live selling. Right. And so we did the live selling last week and it made me think about our friend Ming. I don’t know if she told you this, but she was telling me at Seller Summit that there are avatars in Asia. Right. I think it’s mostly China. Well, they’ll be live for like 24 hours on TikTok selling and it’s all AI.

38:24
Right? They’re not real people, but they seem real. Right? Like, I don’t know. So to me, it’s like some of that stuff is it’s already happening. And do people does the regular person know that this is a I probably not. don’t know. I mean, I think it has I think sometimes it has to say something on on video, too. But I don’t know. I feel like it’s already happening. Yeah, there was that big news story. The guy made seven million dollars in like 11 hours straight or so. can’t remember. But yeah.

38:52
That AI avatar was trained on all these gestures and everything. So it looked real and it responded back to the audience. Kind of like when Tiffany goes live, she interacts with the audience and everything. The AI was interacting with the audience as well. Yeah, so you say Tiffany’s not replaceable, but is she? Right? mean, it’s hard to say with Tiffany. Tiffany’s probably not replaceable. She’s probably not replaceable. But an AI avatar might be able to do as well.

39:21
you know, a comparable job. Yeah. Right. And be funny about it. Yeah. So what is your like moving into 2026? Like what are you most excited about to try use, you know, develop with AI? So for me, it’s mainly just about optimizing my existing workflow. Yeah. You know, I actually just canceled my 11 Labs membership. So 11. What my dream actually

39:51
was to just put together a podcast script and have 11 labs narrate it in my voice and then just auto publish. And I used to do solo episodes and that was my dream. To just literally put my modified YouTube scripts onto my podcast. But it never sounded, at least to me, like when I had…

40:18
someone in the class listened to it, I published it to Discord, they was like, oh wow, I can’t tell the difference. But I can tell the difference. So I scrapped that idea. Okay, I don’t know if I like that idea or not. Well, the other one was for short form, just have a talking head avatar, and me just put together the script. I actually spent a weekend trying to get that to work. But the only way I could get it to work,

40:46
Was if I just spoke really deadpan in like the training video and then the videos will come out like that too It sounded just like me, but it was there was there was no like spirit to it So I can that idea That’s not very engaging No, it’s not and if you try to be engaging like it screws up like the gestures or it’ll it’ll like act really happy when you’re when you’re trying to say something really negative You know what I mean? Yeah

41:15
So that actually was my dream. It’s kind of like a half-assed way of doing it. It’s not completely auto-generated. I’m writing the script. I’m just not the one filming. But was it an avatar of yourself? Yeah, of course. Yeah, it was an avatar of myself. I trained it. I used 11 labs waving your hands wildly and it’s not? Well, they recommend that you don’t gesture at all, actually, when you’re training it. But it still doesn’t get the intonations correct, depending on what you’re talking about. That’s the problem.

41:45
Yeah. And then the voice was correct because it was using 11 labs and I just pieced everything together. And if it worked, I’d be able to just upload an entire transcript of like 50 videos and out would come the video right without me having to film it. Yeah. But I mean, I wonder, is that really a time saver? You’re spending all this time. I mean, I guess once it’s all trained. huge time saver. Yes. OK. Just the initial part is the investment. It takes out a whole step of the filming part, right?

42:15
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. What am I excited? I don’t know if I’m that excited for next year uh with the AI stuff. Like, no, I think what I’m excited actually is pumping out ad creatives really quickly. Yeah. I think it’ll help on the e-comm side. On the creator side, I’m just kind of conflicted, right? Like, I hate getting the AI stuff in my feed right now because maybe it’s because most of it’s bad. I don’t know. Or I can tell.

42:44
that it was written by AI. Even if it’s like a human narrating it actually, I can tell if it’s written by AI. That turns me off. So I’m just gonna go with my gut and focus on me actually creating the content at this point. Whereas for ads and creatives and like that, I’m gonna heavily use AI to automate everything. What about you? Yeah. I think I would really like to get more into vibe coding next year and just…

43:11
But I would say that’s like for fun. don’t necessarily think it’s I mean, I don’t think it’s a hobby, but I would like to um just get more. I don’t know, more familiar, gain more knowledge because I’ve seen what little I know can do. And I feel like I feel like and we’ve talked about this a lot. um It sort of levels the playing field between me and you. Oh, yeah, for sure. know, like and obviously I do not have your.

43:39
technology background, but I feel like the gap is getting narrower. And so in the more I the more time I spend, it’s kind of like I used to want one of my this is like a weird thing. One of my goals was to go back to college and take a course in Excel. Right. In Excel. Yes. And learn how to use Excel because I don’t like I don’t know how to build pivot tables. I don’t know how to use Excel. Right. Like I use Google Sheets, but basically same concept. Right.

44:07
And I was like, if I could learn how to use Excel like a pro, this would be like a game changer for me as far as like time management, right? Because I spend far too much time on chat GBT asking how to write a, create a formula, right? And how to do this. And over the past year, I’ve been building all of my spreadsheets in chat, right? And I’ve been having it show me every step, like so every single thing is like.

44:33
show me the formula, never create a spreadsheet that’s pre-populated, right, with the data, I want everything formulas. Which is tricky with Google Sheets, because chat likes to spill it out in Excel, um that’s how they like Actually, that’s all kind of built into Gemini now. Yes, it is, which is another reason why I want to get on that. now I find myself, like I was working yesterday in a Google Sheet, and I literally just knew the formulas, right? Because I’ve been, for a year, I’ve been doing this and training myself.

45:03
So to me, it’s like, feel like with the vibe coding, it will be the same outcome, right? The more time I spend and having, you know, it teach me, more, the easier it will be for me to just like create something without having to like have a cheat code for it. um So, and there’s just so many like little things that you can do that make your life easier. um So that’s kind of what I’m most excited about. am really like watching my son build all these like animations and stuff.

45:32
It’s been really cool to see his whole process. And so there is a part of me that finds that whole thing and watching. I also watch Dana Michelle do a lot of stuff between the two of them. I think that’s really fun. Unfortunately, I’m probably never going to be a video editor. Right. I’m just never going to do that. So to me, it’s like, do I do I spend time on this? Probably not, because that would be like a total hobby. That would be like, oh, I’m not going to doom scroll TikTok. I’m going to, you know.

46:01
mess with Sora too, mess with Nano Banana kind of thing. But I find that stuff fascinating. I had Sabrina Romanoff on the podcast. I don’t think it’s been published yet as of this recording, but we were talking about, because she has this video where she says, like, you can vibe code, like I vibe coded this Bloatato essentially. Yeah. And I was like, really? Like for something as complicated as Bloatato, you know, you have to actually know what’s going on.

46:27
behind the scenes and she was like, oh yeah, I just five coded the MVP. But once I started selling it, like I ripped out all that code and everything. I think for now, like even now, so I’m redoing our like financial accounting like with Bumblebee, right? Like I had to think about like all the database structures, how I was gonna organize all the data and everything. And ChachiBt, I was using ChachiBt to help, but I couldn’t have it just like,

46:57
code that entire thing for me, otherwise it would just be a disaster. I think for anything complex, you still need to kind of know what you’re doing. Anything that’s visual, like you just need a quick proof of concept and whatnot, I think that is entirely, because she gave a whole bunch of examples of vibe coded apps that were making money. Like for example, I think one kid uh made an entire database of

47:26
hair salons or something like that? I can’t remember. Something like that, right? That people started using and paying for. So apps like that, entirely vibe codable. The other thing I think too is that I feel like just based on even what Sabrina is saying, I think a lot of people will say that AI is making you dumber, right? Because it’s giving you all the answers. I’ve heard people say that. It’s just going to dumb down a whole generation of people. And that’s very possible, right?

47:55
um But to me, I feel like I’m learning so much. I was doing something similar to you with the financials. I was trying to evaluate um an order quantity, sell through rate. And so I was dumping all the data into ChatGPT to have it create a bunch of different scenarios. But I realized very quickly that if I was giving ChatGPT bad information or poor directions,

48:22
it was spitting out stuff I didn’t care about, right? And so for me, it made me think through the entire process of like, what are all the components that I need to think about when I’m doing this math equation, basically, to get to the answer that I need, right? So to me, it makes me stop and think a lot harder about things because also I hate waiting for chat to figure stuff out. if you give it a bad piece of information, then you’re waiting for like three minutes and then know, because it types a book. Yeah. Yes, yes. So it’s like my own, like, you know.

48:52
impatience is like helping me become better. Although I did see something and this could have been fake, but I saw it on on social media that like there’s now one of the one of the uh tools like you can watch TikToks or something on the side or Instagram on the side while you while it figures it out. I’m like, that’s deadly. I’ll never get off my computer if that’s the case. I know for me, like whenever I code now, like I have to worry less about actually writing the code.

49:22
than I do thinking about the structures and how everything’s gonna work. So I don’t think people are gonna get dumber unless you’re just kind of blindly using things. But it’s been good for me because I don’t have to worry about the syntax or anything. yeah. I mean, I think obviously it’s not going anywhere. think if you are, uh I think especially if you are in our world of online, you know.

49:49
this is definitely something that you need to be experimenting with. I think it will be revolutionary for your business, especially with time management and things like that. But even as just a regular user, I think you should start playing around with it because I don’t think it’s gonna go anywhere and so, as well accept it.

50:09
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re listening to this right now and anti-AI, just give it a try. If my 80 year old mom is using it, there is literally no excuse. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 618. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 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.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, I have a student in my created profitable online store course on the show, Charles Cicallo. Now most people think retail arbitrage is a dead Amazon side hustle that barely pays for gas money, but Charles has quietly turned the same dead model into an eight figure machine and runs multiple of his own warehouses as well. But before we begin,

00:26
I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at SellerSummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also,

00:55
I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be, so if you want in,

01:24
Go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket.

01:33
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. You guys are gonna love today’s show. Now, a while back, my friend Dave Bryant of eCom Crew made this video about secret ghost sellers on Amazon who are essentially resellers who are making millions of dollars flipping existing brands, but kind of laying low. And so in this episode, I am thrilled to have Charles Chokalo on the show.

01:59
He’s one of the students in my class. He has built an incredible business through retail and online arbitrage in addition to private label. And if you followed me for a while, you know that I am not the biggest fan of arbitrage as a long-term business model, but Charles is the exception. He is one of the most successful arbitragers that I know and his results speak for themselves. Now, not only that, but Charles is what I would call an intense learner.

02:29
And I mean, intense. He literally goes to every single conference, probably knows every last detail about Amazon is today he is going to share exactly how he’s done it, what is working right now and the strategies that have allowed him to thrive in a business model that most people honestly struggle to scale. with that, welcome Charles. How you doing today? Nice intro. Well, I do talk to you like every single week. Do I not? Right.

02:59
No, mean, and listen, I mean, it’s not only an honor to be here just because the platform, it’s an honor to be here because once I was just a listener listening to podcasts like this and Scott Vulkers and now I’m being featured on the podcast itself. So it truly is an emotional journey that got me to a place where, you know, I’m amazed myself that I got here. Well, you totally deserve it, man. And for the audience.

03:25
who does not talk to you every week, how did you get started selling on Amazon? And how did it balloon to what it is today? So actually, I got started, I’m 29 years old, I got started selling on Amazon 15 years ago as a freshman in high school. Good Lord. Yeah, I went into so I love technology always did. Went into Best Buy got things on sale, and then started reselling on eBay and Amazon. I resold throughout high school.

03:55
And, uh, I was about, was prepping to go to law school in, uh, in college. My brother did the same thing, but in fishing gear, tap me on the shoulder. goes, you want to try this thing for real? And during college, we, you know, put our entire life savings into it. And we worked since the age of 10. So life savings was, know, not, not your average college age life savings either. And, uh, I worked for a couple of years as a litigation paralegal on top of that. And I said to myself, you know what?

04:25
I cannot get these 22 to 25 years back the ages the years between 22 to 25. I can’t get those back if this whole business thing fails. Law school will still be there. It doesn’t need me. So let me uh let me try this with my brothers and see how it goes. uh Long story short, I never went to law school and thankfully it took off from there.

04:47
uh So this is a family business. How many brothers do you have? I’m actually being curious about this myself because I work with my wife. What’s it like working with your family? So I mean, so I’m two brothers. And the best part of it is I knew I knew them. I know them a lot longer than I know my wife. We have very different skill sets and we have, you know, a life of relationship to build off of instead of just

05:15
a marriage which starts, you know, at least two thirds into your life. Sure. There’s an added element of complexity when it comes to more and more of the family relations when you’re sitting down around the family dinner, uh be it for a weekend, Thanksgiving for a holiday. Do you talk about business because that’s what you do and what you see with each other all the time? Do you, you know,

05:40
take a chance of pissing off the wives and maybe my mom because they’re not into it and we keep business very separate from personal. um It’s a different element of complexity, but we’re all on the same page and that’s how it really gets kept together. We know that business is in business. Sometimes it bleeds over into a comment on the dinner table where we may look at each other funny and then just say, you know, abandon this topic. We’ll switch it up later.

06:08
That’s how it really works. then when it comes to, mean, it could get pretty, obviously, we don’t all agree on the same thing all the time. And we could get into that when I talk about the shows that I go to. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. I mean, I was just gonna say, know, uh ecommerce can be intimidating for people to start. Yeah. And in terms of retail arbitrage, especially, I would say 10 years ago is a great way to get started.

06:37
But it just seems like for the past decade or so, Amazon has made it much harder for retail arbitrage on the platform. the audience is interested in e-commerce. so I just want your opinion just to kind of start out with, is retail arbitrage something that you would start today? And if the answer is yes, like if you’re having trouble getting started, walk me through the process of how to get started. So I want your opinion first on whether you even do this. ah

07:07
If you have relationships, not necessarily directly with companies, but with at least distributors that distribute authentic products, not product that falls off a truck, I would say it’s worth trying and launching with. If you’re going into stores and will be providing receipts as your proof of purchase, do not. The reason why I say that is because

07:36
at the beginning of this year, really Amazon has been cracking down on valid UPC or GS one codes on product pages or ASINs and they’re, going through about 400,000 ASINs a day and running it against GS one’s database and suppressing those ASINs that don’t have a valid GS one UPC on there. Let me explain what that means. Let’s say you’re going for Colgate toothpaste and

08:05
10, 15, 20 years ago, somebody created a page on Amazon for Colgate toothpaste using the wrong UPC, which by the way, you could have, and you probably still can buy UPCs that are not accurately affiliated with the brand that you want to sell on eBay or something like that for like a penny uh UPC or something. That UPC and ASIN have 15 to 20 years of data. That means sales, means reviews, that means Q and A, that means

08:36
listing copy that ranks number one for Colgate toothpaste. today and this year, especially Amazon decided to wake up and say, wait, all of these are invalid UPCs. We want to give more control of the product listings and brand presence to the brands. And uh it’s been part of our policy, but we just never enforced it for all these years. So we’re going to, we’re going to start suppressing all of these UPCs in ASINs. What that led to now,

09:05
is a bunch of sellers sending in pallets and pallets of inventory, in some cases trailers of inventory and all skewed for a certain ASIN and that ASIN is suppressed and they’re stranded with that inventory by Amazon facing the dilemma of do I pay for a removal, a disposal or something else because that inventory has to get out of Amazon somehow and it will cost the seller. The reason why I say you may want to get started with a distributor at the very least

09:35
is because you may have an avenue to reactivate that UPC or ASIN if you’re going through a distributor or definitely the brand. But you have to have the right contact and you have to have the right know-how about Amazon and seller support. Let’s say you go shopping though and then you check the listing and the UPC and it is in fact registered to Colgate in your example. Would that be okay? If you’re going with a store receipt, I would think it’s okay. um

10:05
It’s okay for the purpose of your product won’t get stranded at FBA But it may not be okay as far as proving the authenticity of your product which you definitely will face I mean even private label sellers face that for their own branded goods, so um Your case is less strong with a store receipt, but it’s not actually incompatible with Amazon’s TOS stores receipts are Considered to be full proof of payment

10:33
I mean, I’m sure you go through this all the time because your product mix probably constantly changes, I would imagine, right? Depending on whatever clearance. yeah. It’s not just close outs. It’s not just close outs. Sometimes it’s running products. uh We do close outs from time to time if we have a good deal on it and the rank is proper and so on and so on. But um yeah, we have constant running goods and we also have close out goods depending on what comes our way. How often does Amazon ask you for these receipts?

11:04
Next week, next week or em at the time of this recording, I’m going out to Amazon Accelerate in about 10 days. I made an appointment at seller cafe with seller support about this topic on my account health dashboard. I have 183 issues to resolve. Oh my gosh. Okay. Right. And that’s over the past six months. Every single account health issue has a response by me, but

11:33
I have a VA employed full time putting together invoices, paper trails, bills of lading, showing the authenticity and the basically chain of custody of my goods. Amazon almost instantly replies by saying not enough information was provided, vague, vague, vague. We’re not giving you any direction as to what we need further. That’s where I usually leave it.

11:59
At least I, you know, I settle for at least a paper trail so that if it ever comes back to bite my account on a more larger scale, I can point back to say, Hey, you were the vague ones. And I provided a response on a timely matter. But when I’m going to Amazon accelerate, I’m going to sit down with them in person. would say, I hope this doesn’t come back to bite me that all of that to say my account health rating is a perfect 1000, which to the

12:26
So when they ask you for the paper trail though, you can still keep selling during that period? Yeah, totally. um Except for cases where they give you notice that your listings will, your listing or the ASIN will be suppressed in 30 days. Some UPC mismatch, they do that. Some authenticity complaints, they do that. They actually give you 30 days to either sell out um or 30, yeah, 30 days to either sell out on the GS1 mismatch or 30 days to sell it on an authenticity mismatch.

12:56
But sometimes they actually isolate your inventory and don’t let you recall it if it’s a certain infringement, either authenticity or trademark. My goodness. Okay. What about uh just getting ungated in categories? Do you generally avoid that or do you just go through the ungating process? And if you do, what is that ungating process? So before, before we even buy a product, we go ahead and try to list it and to see if we’re ungated. uh The ungating process is hell and a half, but

13:26
is largely like the rest of Amazon is algorithmic based on your history, age of account, sales volume, and also account health rating, all those things combined. There are newer sellers that wouldn’t get ungated for the silliest of brands, but it depends on the, again, overall value of the account and largely, you know, like a seller like mine that’s been seasoned in this for a while.

13:53
we get ungated for brands that don’t really have control or don’t really care about their Amazon presence very easily. For the ones that do care about their Amazon presence, we were able to go back and forth with the paperwork just depending on the return on investment because we evaluate the time that’s good. That goes into that application. Um, that’s not to say that it’s a walk in the park either. It’s we’ve been regated on about eight or nine brands.

14:20
that I actually plan on bringing up at my cellar cafe appointment. So it’s not all dandelions and roses. Okay, so this kind of sounds like a hassle from an administrative standpoint. Yeah. So if you are just going through the clearance aisles, like at Walmart, for example. Don’t. It’s not sounding attractive right now. Don’t. Don’t. Okay. that portion of retail arbitrage is pretty much dead. Yep. That type. Okay.

14:49
So let’s talk about the type that you do. And you know what’s funny is uh we were just in office hours and there was a student like, hey Charles, can you just tell me who your distributors are? And that’s the secret sauce behind all this, right? uh If you were brand new doing this, and I know you have your relationships already, how do you even look? Do you just kind of Google distributors and just cold email them or what do you do? There’s a ton of shows. mean, distributors are always looking to, well, they’re basically all

15:19
structured the same way. The distributors have a direct relationship with the brand. You deal with a salesman who gets a commission that of whatever they sell to you, you ask those salesmen for their catalog and you go ahead, compare it to you download, keep you install it as a Chrome extension. You see the sales rank, you see the self, the self rate. So know exactly how much to order. And as far as locating those distributors,

15:47
There’s a bunch of retail shows to go to wholesale shows to go to. mean, ASD is one of them that happens biannually in Vegas. want to say, um, a lot of them, the second you say online will tell you to go scram, but, um, they’re there, they’re there. And, and with enough persistence, with that persistence, you’ll find them and one leads to another. And when you say that, and when you grow to a level where you could say, Hey, I can give you X amount of volume of, Hey, I could commit to.

16:17
X amount of dollars of POS per month per year that salesman’s heads gonna light up and say, oh my God, you know how much commission that is per month per year? And they may rethink their strategy. So tell me this, do you need a physical location to get approved for a lot of these guys? If you want to lie to the distributors and say that you’re an actual store instead of an online seller, yes. Okay, because this is sounding kind of like wholesale selling now where a lot of the guys today require a physical presence because they don’t want just like a bunch of Amazon sellers on.

16:47
Yeah. Yeah. And, and if you, mean, if you ask me, like I engage a lot on LinkedIn, that’s, that’s where I put a lot of my content. That was like, I sort of believe like a Nathan Barry approach of like growing in public. there was a recent post by Scott Needham, the founder of smart scout, because Lego and Hasbro just completely relinquished control of their brand on Amazon. And I engaged with them and I said, why, why is that a bad thing?

17:16
Hasbro and Lego are making the sales, as long as the sellers are selling authentic goods, they’re not relinquishing any control that they can’t reclaim any day. In fact, they’re making more sales and outsourcing the maintenance of their brand on Amazon to the resellers. So yeah, I mean, if you want to insist on an in-store or physical presence, that’s fine. But as a brand, if you don’t have the bandwidth, patience or capacity to deal with Amazon,

17:45
That’s one requirement that I’m seeing more broadly, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing for brands at all. So you go up to a distributor and you want to have some of the products. I would imagine like a whole bunch of other people are doing the same thing, right? I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out.

18:15
It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. 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. Yeah.

18:40
Yeah, they’re all doing the same thing, but it’s up to you to be persistent and say, even though I’m online, I could still make you bank. Right. So let’s say that happens, but on their end, they probably have a bunch of Charles Chakalos, right? Right. Like selling stuff for them, right? So that means if they’re listening on Amazon, you’re listening on Amazon. Uh, there’s this like fight for the buy box, right? Yeah. Yep. And how do you deal with that?

19:05
So there’s the only way you can actually engage in retail arbitrage or wholesale or whatever you want to call it. It’s all the same to me is you have to have a repricer and it cannot be the Amazon repricer. It ultimately comes down to a game of margins. Who will operate at the slimmer margins? A philosophy is there will always be somebody willing to work for less than you. So, you know, a major unlock to, to

19:33
maximizing your margins in this space is owning your own logistics. No way will you make it in this if you think you can outsource all this to a 3PL that will unbox things for you, unpalatize things for you, label things on different FN SKUs, put it back on a pallet, ship it into Amazon FBA because the only way you’ll box out the other sellers on the listing is by offering it on FBA, which is a default requirement. Owning your own logistics is a big unlock as far as maximizing your margins.

20:02
and then you put your products into a repricer with a certain floor and a certain ceiling and you let it do the work. You are supposed to be doing the research before you buy products, so all of it is pretty much predictable, but it’s a game of margins. I mean, in general, the lowest price gets the buy box, right? In general, in general, there’s a little bit of lift that happens once you’re FBA and once you’re a seasoned seller and once you’re distributed adequately across the country so that you’re actually in the buy box across as many zip codes as possible.

20:31
And that goes into a different formula of how to ship into Amazon, how to ship in different warehouses. Is it a minimal split? it, is it a single inbound location? you playing, are you paying placement fees? Which is a totally separate conversation we didn’t touch on. All right. So walk me through, I’ve never used a repricer before. Walk me through how it works. mean, you got a whole bunch of people selling the same stuff. Sure.

20:56
And if they’re from the same distributor, I guess it’s just all about like the backend negotiations, what pricing you’re getting and whatnot, right? Yep. Well, all about the backend negotiations and then the prep. The prep is also a cost that you can, you can eat into as far as maximizing your margin. Okay. So how do you set the repricer? Do you just say, Hey, I want the lowest price not to be below? There are a few settings and I mean, there are a few repricing softwares out there and I recommend we can get into that later.

21:26
The repricer I use has a few features on aggressiveness. It’s sort of on a sliding scale of dominate the buy box, which means I don’t drive that price lower. I want to be in that buy box no matter what. And you can drive that price all the way to my floor price. You have a floor price, you have a ceiling price, and you have a different setting on aggressiveness for, say, maintain the buy box. You have seller specific rules that you can put in by saying

21:55
Hey, seller X always goes five cents below me. So just wait till seller X sells out and then compete for the price and try to drive the price back up. And, um, the repricers external to Amazon actually get refreshed every 15 minutes. So every 15 minutes, if anybody tells you it’s shorter, they’re lying. So every 15 minutes, the repricers pull a data feed from Amazon, see what the other sellers are priced at.

22:24
and then does their calculations, readjusts your price that way. That’s really the long and short of it. I could go further into detail if you have any particular. Well, okay, this is what I’m getting at. Yeah. Like you’re probably not the only one using that same repricer. I know I’m not. So you’re competing against other people using the same repricer. And let’s say it’s always get the buy box no matter what, then it always leads to the floor price, right? Yeah, but I mean, the other sellers do have a vested interest in not driving the price lower because then they make less money.

22:54
on the sale. They may dominate the buy box for a little more, but there’s still that interest there and that keeps prices pretty not a race to the bottom by default. There’s a common understanding that if they do that and if a seller does that and all the resellers know each other, we know the ones that do that, then we would simply implement that rule of, all right, wait till this guy sells out and then my stock is already checked in. Once he sells out, I’m just going to take the ride.

23:23
And then why would you put a ceiling price? You don’t want the buy box to be suppressed because if the price goes too high, the buy box will be taken away. Right. OK. Any tips for people using repricers? I’m sure this sounds complicated, actually. What’s your rules? Like, what are your if you were to set up your rules and just like a couple of sentences, what? em Don’t set your ceiling price to be more than 20 percent of the average buy box and.

23:50
Make sure you calculate your margins because you could be bleeding yourself dry if you don’t calculate prep, you don’t calculate freight into Amazon and you don’t calculate freight to your facility. All of that are actual costs and if you’re using a repricer that’s especially reporting on your profitability and performance, you better be factoring those in because there are sellers that don’t factor those in and uh I’ve literally seen them going. I know the names and I know the numbers. We get it from the same spot.

24:19
And I’ve seen them go under because all of those were just overlooked and not factored in. So you said a couple of interesting things earlier about owning your own warehouse. And I’ve seen your warehouse and you had this cool forklift that I’m really jealous of. I know most people don’t want a warehouse and everyone preaches three PLs, three PLs. I’ve actually talked to a couple of three PLs because my students always ask me for recommendations. And I’m like, because I run my own warehouse, I’m thinking to myself, this is really expensive.

24:49
Right? mean, for a for larger goods, I should say, if you’re just selling jewelry or whatnot, I think it makes complete sense. walk me through actually just tell me like what your savings are. And I’ve seen your where it’s much bigger than mine. A lot to deal with. Yeah, I mean, we have we have a couple we have two locations, one in Brooklyn, one in Westchester, New York. The it’s it’s

25:17
Okay, so before we went into it, we priced out a three PL and I think I was paying maybe like 30 cents a unit. And then I also had to pay from the unload of the trailer to the reload onto a pallet. And then they actually had to touch the goods per unit. Our unit cost is about 30 or 40 cents when we do it ourselves. And I’m talking just labor, not the cost of maintenance, electricity, taxes, utilities. Um,

25:46
But that’s a lot less of the calculation that I put into it. The more of the calculation I put into it is I can go downstairs and touch my goods. I don’t have to wait at the mercy of some 3PL that may not answer my calls one day, that may undergo a flood and not tell me that my goods are damaged. especially, I just spent the past 25 minutes telling you how lucrative the resale business was and you know,

26:13
Colgate toothpaste could have three different pages, that means three different FN SKUs. Not every 3PL can handle that level of nuance. So if one page gets shut down, I don’t have to go ahead and coordinate with a 3PL and explain to them how each sticker has to be redone and so on and so forth. I could just do it myself. We run the staff. Yes, I have to deal with HR. Yes, I have to deal with handling. I have to deal with three sets of parents dying when it’s nice weather outside.

26:42
All of those are number one skills. Number two, exposure to real America. And number three, I’m building an American workforce that I can take into any capacity as a business owner. I think that’s priceless. Not to mention the, if the facilities like ours that we, that we bought are also viewed as investment real estate. Sure. um All of that, all of the, both of those facilities were improved and those facilities

27:12
are actually located in areas where I know it’s industrial and it’s gonna only become more industrial. That’s the nuance of it. And then of course, top it all off. It goes back to the margins that I said earlier. All that works into our margins and is our basically competitive edge. I mean, these warehouses were relatively recent, right? Yeah, one of them was in 2020. Okay. There’s a funny story behind that.

27:39
And the most recent one was actually in November of 24. So almost coming up on a year now. So before the 2021, were you just using FBA? AWD didn’t exist back then. No, it didn’t. You know what we were doing? So we started this business in 2016 and coming up on 10 years now. Next year will be 10. And we were working out of the second floor of the storefront.

28:06
And we couldn’t palletize things. couldn’t, well, we, the way we palletize things was we, we basically, we had a conveyor belt from the second floor to the first built 26 pallets. Cause that’s a full trailer on the sidewalk and then loaded and then hoped. then, oh no, and then we loaded that onto a 26 foot truck rental that had a lift gate back to that 26 foot truck into a 53 foot trailer. We hoped Amazon sent us that day.

28:35
And then, uh, and then shipped it off to Amazon. Now I hope, I hope that was clear enough. Any clarification because it gets better. Uh, I think, I think it’s probably enough for the audience. it necessary to understand more? Okay. necessary to understand more. Okay. Long story short, I had 26 pallets sitting on the sidewalk one day. Amazon’s trailer did not show up and it just, and it was the end of the workday. We sent all the employees home.

29:04
My brother and I, we said, what are we going to do? We have all this merchandise and we can’t put the pallets back inside and close the door and go home for the night. We both, uh, I took a chair. He took a chair. We took, we stood on, we sat on both ends of the, uh, of the pallets on the sidewalk and you know, was a pretty ghetto area. So it wasn’t even exactly safe either. And, uh, we just said, we’re just going to sit here and hope for the best. And if Amazon sends us the trailer, they might, it started to rain.

29:33
At 2 30 in the morning, Amazon’s trailer decided to show up. Him and I did what our entire staff should have been doing and loading that trailer. And then we both looked at each other and we said, you know what? We need a spot where we could put stuff back inside and close the door. So that was the 2020 location. that’s and then that was able to fit pallets as recently as last week. Last week, our Brooklyn location is able to actually fit a trailer.

30:02
so that Amazon can drop off a trailer. We load it, a tractor comes and picks it up whenever it’s ready. So we graduated to, we could put the pallets back inside, close the door. So we could put a trailer back inside and close the door. So that was really cool. Okay. Your operation is much, your warehouse is much bigger than mine by far. Hey, no, no, This is, and this is an evolution and this is, um, I’m very hands on. I mean, I’m, I’m nothing like the conventional Amazon seller or, or what

30:29
Most people are at these, you know, DTC conferences where they sold multiple brands, they never touched their goods and stuff like that. I am really hands on to the point where I was at a conference less two weeks ago and people mocked me for driving that forklift saying you, the owner operate the forklift. Listen, the truth is I have somebody else who could do it, but it’s not as fun. know, I don’t like people that do that actually, because they this is just my experience.

30:58
They’re all like high level guys where if you just start asking them detailed questions, like low level questions, they don’t know what’s going on. em Yeah. So I totally, this is one of the things I appreciate about you Charles. Like you get your hands dirty. Actually, I appreciate it about anyone who gets their hands dirty with stuff, you know, instead of just kind of out trying to outsource everything kind of unknown. mean, like think of it just outside of, outside of e-commerce and Amazon DTC stuff. You’re a business owner at the end of the day.

31:27
I mean, that’s my engagement with having employees. It’s hearing what they have to say, hearing their perspective on things, hearing what life is like. mean, how isolated can we get? mean, us, us too know, and I’m sure most listeners know, how lonely it could be running the business in our field. I mean, some level of interaction is also good for the soul, I mean, in today’s day and age.

31:55
So with the AWD, I know they’ve had their share of fair disasters. Like, uh, so you, did you even consider AWD? No, I actually, left when they launched. Okay. I, uh, I thought to myself, wow, they’re really, because it was either simultaneous or near simultaneous with their product placement fee restructuring. And, uh, I saw, I saw it what it was. It was a strong arming into Amazon to own more of the supply chain than they already do. Yep.

32:24
For now, mean, people know that they’re trying to be the Alibaba of India. They want to own that part of the supply chain. They want the AWD to be the part of the supply chain and FBA so that they have basically all the data they need and they could do whatever they want with that data. However, that makes you feel. uh looked at AWD as a, just sort of a relief valve for the placement fee restructuring, but it didn’t end up being that complicated for us to just learn and manipulate our advantage.

32:54
that’s and actually when AWD was launching, it was before we bought the second warehouse and the second warehouse was purely a move to scale. uh I’m actually gonna be giving a presentation on that uh in a few weeks on how to scale through investing in yourself and your own operations. yeah. Cool. ah Okay, so let’s go back to the original premise of the episode like

33:23
If you were someone new, wanting to get into selling online, would you go the online arbitrage route? Let’s say you have 10 grand. Sure. Or 15 grand. Would you jump straight to private label? Cause I know you have a couple of private label products yourself. Yeah. Um, it’s, it’s amusing actually. So we, like, like I, like I said before, we, we specifically invested in scaling our resale operation this year and it has scaled big, but.

33:53
The same thing is with private label. has to and sort of unintentionally again through owning our logistics. uh There were a few other things that we did as far as refining our PPC, leaning a little more into the whole branding aspect of it. uh The A plus content, our storytelling ability and so on. But the 10 grand I would say is much better spent learning the private label route.

34:21
not investing in the resale route. Like I began with, the only adjustment I would make to that response is if you have those relationships to begin with. If you do, go ahead, by all means, God bless you. em But it won’t be easy. It won’t be easy. And there’s a lot less of a support system out there because most of the Amazon and DTC orthodoxy is based around private label, is based around branding. uh

34:50
there’s a lot less people and the market is thinning. There’s a less people in it. The market is thinning and um more sophisticated resellers are really the ones that are going to make it. And eventually I think they’ll be cut out, but there’ll always be a market to resell stuff. Yeah. Just on Amazon, it’s harder. I know it still happens on eBay and whatnot all the time. Yeah. Yeah. But eBay is story of its own. has nothing of the volume Amazon does. Correct. Correct.

35:19
Charles, let’s switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about Charles the seller. So you’ve been making quite a name for yourself uh in the Amazon space and you mentioned you’re speaking uh pretty soon. Did you say at Prosper or? No, so actually I’m giving so it’s funny on that on the whole warehousing topic. I’m doing a debate with Rob Hahn from Pattern. It’s up there. They’ve done over a billion on Amazon and they’re going public soon. uh They’re their own warehouse. uh

35:48
3PL operation and the big resolve is should every seller have some logistical capacity of their own? I obviously say yes, of course, they should have some operating capacity on their own where an emergency happens, they need to house their goods for some period of time, they should have that option. They shouldn’t be bound to a 3PL like handcuffs. um I’m doing that. There’s just so many horrors since we’re on this topic. There’s just so many horror stories from.

36:16
several of my friends where three PLs are always great until they fill up or if there’s some catastrophe over the holidays. I’ve had several friends these aren’t isolated incidents instances where they’ve had to rent a U-Haul fly like fly somewhere renting driving that far and then hunt go through the warehouse and hunt and peck for their stuff among these boxes among other companies doing the same thing. I mean,

36:41
I have a 3PL that if people ask me, I automatically refer them to because they’ve been great with everybody I know. Of course, I don’t use him, but I know him and I know people who do use him. And that leads into what I’m doing. I the beginning of this year, I thought to myself, listen, Charles, you’ve been in this space for 15 years in this specific business for nine. And I know a fair share of what’s going on in the world of Amazon, at the very least, e-commerce at the most. I mean, I attend 20 to 30 shows a year.

37:11
I have, thankfully I have partners who let me do that. And um one of them is merchandise heavy and other one is logistical heavy. And if I need to go out to a show, oh they hold down the fort while I do that. I build up those personal connections. I’m very, very, very up to date on the trends and I intend to be. If this episode didn’t prove it enough, I love being social.

37:36
I love learning how different people operate things. love learning about different people outside of business. And I said, let me just at least put it out there. I’m just a seller. Everybody else and their mother have a newsletter that try to get you on some sort of discovery call to retain you to some agency. I said to myself, but there’s no seller out there just saying what it’s like to grind your teeth and go through it. So I decided to put together that just a seller newsletter and um

38:05
So that’s justacellarnewsletter.com. Yep. That’s where you opt into it. Justacellarnewsletter.com. And I put out what it’s like to grow just as a seller. mean, in there you get, you’re automatically opted into my value welcome sequence with who I use for logistics, how I get certain truck loads out, how I run my operation, who I use for payroll. That’s cloud-based and not clunky old retail stuff. um

38:32
And I update you on what I think is going on in the industry. And the number one thing that I learned I have to do is deliver value. That’s the number one thing that keeps people coming back. That’s the number one thing that keeps people opening your emails, keeps people respecting you and you’re not devaluing their time. So that’s my North Star when it comes to that newsletter. And is it regular? No.

38:56
I mean, frankly, I say that in my welcome sequence. I run a business. not there to land you on some sort of discovery call. there to update you on certain things that are going on in the industry. But what is guaranteed is I’m not going to be selling you on anything. Something that I’ve been thinking about is maybe offering coaching, but that’s really it. mean, that’s something that crossed my mind. It does seem pretty regular. mean, yeah.

39:23
I make sure not to be completely absent in people’s inboxes. I don’t want that to happen. Yeah, and it takes a fair amount of discipline. it’s funny, Euderian can never do it for the life of you. How many times has he he’d taken it seriously? Yeah. Well, okay, so you’re providing a lot of value with your newsletter. With your arbitrage business, what do you think is going to happen? Because the value that you’re providing right now is

39:50
I guess packaging and you’re very efficient, would imagine, on the margins, which is why it works. Yeah. Right? But I guess what I’m trying to get at is, do you lose vendors on a regular basis and have to acquire new ones? No. No. Okay. No. I lose listings on regular basis and have to acquire new ones. Like I was telling you, the GS1 suppressions that are happening. mean, Amazon combing 400,000 Asins a day.

40:21
I was talking to a reseller yesterday on a mastermind I have with other resellers. They know sellers that lost up to 300 SKUs in one night. One night. woke up and the ASIN was suppressed. They could basically kiss a goodbye. I haven’t been that unfortunate, but that’s really the scary part.

40:44
Yeah, okay. So I guess my opinion of arbitrage hasn’t really changed much then. No, it’s really specialized, Steve. It’s really specialized. And what you do can be, it’s also considered wholesale, right? I mean, you have wholesale products also. Is that a different thing? Some people differentiate, they say retail arbitrage is going into the store and selling it online. Resale is just in general selling other brands and wholesale means

41:11
getting things on a case or pallet basis directly from the brand. I don’t distinguish between the three. I think it’s all the same stuff. I use it interchangeably. It seems like the wholesaling based on your definition seems a little bit more stable since you are essentially a distributor for a brand. And then what Amazon views as the Holy Grail is a letter of authorization directly from the brand. And if you’re

41:39
engaging directly with a brand and you’re able to secure something like that, that will be your sort golden ticket. But even Amazon doesn’t always honor that surprise, surprise. ah If you have a brand contract or some sort of licensing agreement, it’s a little better. If they’re able to authorize you on their brand registry, good luck finding a brand that knows how to do that. Yeah, I mean, very specialized, very lucrative. And once you have those relationships, they could be really, really fragile.

42:09
The relationships can? The relationships can, especially if you say, hey, I need you to delegate certain permissions to me on your brand, on your brand registry. Right. People get skeptical and then the brand may wake up one day and say, hey, I can just get another reseller and why do need you? Well, you got a track record and you know what you’re doing. guess that’s yeah. Yeah. The brands, the brands don’t really, and then you have brands that wake up one day. uh

42:38
happened to me, oh my God, I didn’t even, I actually told this to you at seller summit one year. I was using a brand to manufacture certain goods and they manufactured my goods up to 90 % of my catalog, my private label catalog decided to cut me off the next day. Not only were we acting as a reseller for that brand, we actually use them to manufacture our own goods. They said, huh, you’re having all the success? Cut off, we’re gonna do it ourselves.

43:09
That brand is now in multiple lawsuits and struggling to stay above float. Yeah. I, uh, I sort of relish and, uh, I’m waiting for them to come back. What percentage of your business is reseller versus wholesale versus just like liquidation arbitrage? So big picture, it actually fluctuates from 60 40 private label to resale to 50 50.

43:38
And if I were to break down the resale into wholesale retail arbitrage, it’s about 75 % resale and then 25 % retail arbitrage. Okay. That’s good to know. Dude, Charles, I feel like I’ve known you for a long time now. You know what it is? One, it’s on my bucket list one day. I need you to go back into like your Clavio or whatever it was and see how I engage with you at the beginning. I’m sure it was like 2020, 2021.

44:07
You know, our relationship goes back to 2018, 19, whenever Scott Volcker did brand accelerate alive. I saw you and Tony do a presentation. did it on, uh, of course your Bumblebee, of course Bumblebee. Yeah. Like how you sold the same thing on two different listings. One men. yeah. Same item. Yeah. And, I remember that. And then I remember once I bought your course, I was like, all right, this guy seems pretty cool.

44:37
I like to think I turned to something more than a teacher student relationship, maybe more of a friendship. Oh yeah, for sure. Because like you show up to everything, right? Yeah, I intend to. I call myself a serial learner. And again, it’s my partners that let me do that. You know, they tell me, don’t forget us when you’re rich and famous and you know, we let you do this. like, yeah, you did. Yeah, you did. And you know, I aim to return whatever I gained back to the business.

45:06
you know, be it my network or a sort of connection that can help out the business in some way. And you’re actually one of the few people also who I, you know, I see you at Seller Summit too, we hang out, right? So of course, like it can’t help. Yeah, it’s been good Charles. I’m glad that I’ve met you over the years. And honestly, you know more about like the little intricacies of Amazon because you’re in the day to day, your hands get dirty. Well yeah, it extends beyond that. I mean,

45:35
And I know plenty about, let’s say, the e-commerce side of things. I’m talking D2C, I’m talking Shopify, I’m talking uh DKIM, SPF. Amazon sellers generally don’t know that kind of stuff. Of course, because they don’t need to deal with it. They don’t need to deal with it. Right. And if you ask me, mean, yeah, it’s not directly in your field, but you should definitely be familiar with that. And it’s something that I make sure to stay up to date on as well. So yeah, I definitely know the intricacies of Amazon, but…

46:03
knowing how e-commerce in general works and what other people are using and other marketing tactics and other AI tactics, they’re not directly related to Amazon. Just broaden your horizons and may enable some creativity that other Amazon sellers in their Amazon bubble won’t be exposed to. So I try to stay within the Amazon field, but branch a little further and look at it from different angles as well. And Charles does share all this information. Did you want to just give your…

46:32
your newsletter URL one more time Charles? Sure, Justicellarnewsletter.com. ah It’s my pleasure to give any presentation, any value add that people would ask of me, be it resale, retail arbitrage, private label, even putting together a Shopify site, anything like that. I’m more than happy to give some time and value add. Well Charles, thanks a lot for coming on the show man. It’s been a long time coming. It is is an honor. It is a pleasure. uh to the listeners out there, it’s possible. It’s possible.

47:03
Hope you enjoyed this episode. It’s been a while since I’ve heard about anyone making money with retail arbitrage, but clearly there are people out there making it work. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 616. And once again, tickets for Seller Summit 2026 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 over to sellersummit.com.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I share everything we’ve learned about running Black Friday sales that actually make money instead of killing your margins. We break down the exact strategies we’re using this year in our own e-commerce stores to build hype without discounting the brand. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at.

00:30
Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people,

00:56
so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest ever gonna be, so if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket.

01:28
Welcome back to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Can’t believe it’s the end of the year and Black Friday, Cyber Monday is right around the corner. Yeah. So we’re going to talk about what we’re doing about it, I guess. Yeah. So what’s interesting is we’re in mid-November right now and I have already seen stores pushing it. Have you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Actually, there’s place. early this year. Like beginning of November. Yeah. Early. Yeah. Yeah. I think Black Friday is no longer a thing.

01:58
to be honest with you. Back in the day, I used to wake up early, go to my favorite store at like 5 a.m. and then rush through and try to grab as many things as I could. Right, so when you and I were probably like teenagers, early 20s, like that was the thing, right? You got up at four in the morning, you went to the mall or the Best Buy Plaza, whatever it was, Circuit City, Circuit City back then.

02:22
Right. You waited in line because they had the big screen TV. I remember one year like we were trying to get a router. Right. Because it was like the 90s. Like, you know, because it was like they were that stuff was expensive. But on Black Friday, you could get it for like 19 dollars or whatever. And then do you remember the progression of when stores started opening on Thanksgiving night?

02:47
Yes. So like I think Kohl’s was one of the Walmart and Kohl’s like started opening at like 4 p.m. on Thanksgiving and people threw a fit, right? Because it was just like you didn’t care about people’s families and the alternate argument was there’s a lot of people who don’t live by their family. So they were very happy to come in and work and have something to do, right? As opposed to being forced to take a day off. So that felt like a creep. But now I feel like I mean, you said I feel like

03:16
I walked into Sam’s Club November 1st and it was like all Christmas, right? Like just nothing but Christmas decorations. I’m just trying to think like the last, as long as I can remember now, you can walk into a store on Black Friday and it’s not that bad, period. No. And I think part of the reason for that is like Amazon has introduced prime days like multiple times. Everyone’s just kind of desensitized the whole thing now.

03:40
So let’s just back up a little bit about these prime days because I noticed this year for the prime days that happened I think in October, ah Target had their Target days, Walmart had Walmart days. So it looked like all of the major retailers were competing against Amazon this year, which I feel like that’s also crept in, right? Like think last year Walmart went head to head. I don’t know if Target did as much, ah but this year it felt like all of the big retailers were going

04:09
head to head on Prime Day, which happens in October. And to me, I don’t know. I’m also, I’m the person that shops on December 23rd and 24th, unfortunately, but I can’t imagine like Christmas shopping in the middle of October. Yeah, I mean, I hate shopping to begin with. Yeah, me too. But yeah, I mean, it used to be fun for me when there were actual deals, but. Yes. Well, we can talk about, we’re going to talk about it from an e-commerce perspective, I guess. Yeah.

04:37
But overall, the holidays for as long as I can remember, and this has been happening for like the last decade, it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Yeah, I feel. Yeah. So I feel like you and I are in an interesting spot because um Bumblebee and then one of the clients I have.

04:56
We don’t really sell giftable. Yours is a little more giftable. Mine are totally giftable now, actually. We started a whole Christmas Well, because you did your whole Christmas line. But before that, Black Friday for us has never been a huge… It’s always nice. It’s a bump, right? But it’s never been this massive driver of sales because people don’t give other people curriculum.

05:17
You know, as again. Well, no, Asian cultures, you do get Yes, yes, math. We need to come out with a calculus for Asians. Merry Christmas, SAT. SAT prep. College essay 101. But before you had the Christmas line, you were in a similar boat where it wasn’t like people were flocking to Bumblebee at Christmas time. But you actually I think you did something smart where you created something to sort of I don’t want to say drive false

05:46
you shopping. like you gave people a reason to come to the store over the holidays when typically maybe that’s not where they would shop. Yeah, I mean, thanks to Hallmark, there’s a million holidays and we them all covered now because we do print. Yeah. Which is I mean, that’s a pretty big change for you guys. It’s actually not because I mean, with the printer, you can print anything, right? Well, yeah, but like it’s a pretty big change in what you offer. Right. Oh, the offerings. Yes. Yes. Our skew count blew up.

06:15
Yes. As a result of that. But not from an inventory perspective though. Right. is nice. Yeah. So how long has it been? I can’t remember when you did that two or three years ago. So do you see a much a different Black Friday now that you have these giftable Christmas items? OK, so I think Thanksgiving has always been our biggest thing, not the actual Black Friday. Yeah. Because everyone comes to us and they buy like napkins and towels and everything. Yes. So our

06:43
Black Friday actually happens leading up to Thanksgiving. Yeah. Which I think is something to think about depending on what your brand sells is that your Black Friday might not be the day after Thanksgiving, right? It might be leading up to or around, know, so I think first of all, you got to get out of that whole like Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving because honestly, no one cares about that anymore. People are Black Friday sales have already started.

07:07
Yeah, and I think the idea was you don’t want to be like one of the inbox emails on Black Friday. So everyone just started staggering everything to the point now where it’s not really Black Friday. Now in July, we’re getting the Black Friday email. But the other thing about Bumblebee, which I’ve always been very impressed with, is that you guys do not discount steeply. We don’t. And I think we’ve done the math or at least I’ve done the math. I don’t know if I’ve done on the podcast yet.

07:36
But whenever you discount, how much you lose is dramatically more than you think that you’re missing out on. And in general, if you’re gonna do a 15 or a 20 % discount, you better make sure that you can actually double your sales as a result of that discount just to break even. We’re not gonna do public math on the pot. Okay, we’re not doing the math, okay. No, we can, we can if you want, but.

08:01
Well, the other thing that I think is interesting and I was just having a conversation with our ads person about this is that ads are more expensive over Black Friday. It’s because there’s a lot more competition. so if you think about this, if you think about how you acquire your customer and maybe let’s just say you get 60 % of your customers from ads, which would probably be pretty normal for a lot of e-commerce brands. So you’re paying to get the customer, right? You’re paying for the ad.

08:28
you have a discount, so let’s say you’re discounting at 25%, so you’re losing money on the sale, you’re paying to get that person, like the actual cost of that is pretty significant, where you might think like, oh, look at us, we’re up 50K over this Black Friday period, but then when you look at your ad spend and the discount amount, you could be actually down when it comes to just pure profit. I mean, here’s what I’ve just come to know from just going to

08:58
various e-commerce conferences and talking to people who just run Facebook ads for a living. A good return on ad spend is like 2X for old customers, right? One and half to 2X. Well, if you tack on a 25 % discount, those type of funnel ads probably are not gonna be profitable. So you gotta make it up on the backend. Actually, even at like a 2X return on ad spend, chances are you’re probably breaking even, right? And so already, you need to make up for it on the backend.

09:27
Depending on how much your product is obviously. The other thing that I’ve noticed, and this is just from my own personal experience looking at, from when I had an e-commerce store and then from other people that I’ve worked with, is that a lot of times those customers that you do acquire on Black Friday through the ads are not sticky because they’re either buying a gift for somebody, they’re buying because they saw the ad and it’s a promotion, but they’re not like your standard customer. So you can’t also afford to spend extra money.

09:56
to get them because the chances of them coming back and making another purchase are probably lower than someone who finds you throughout the year. And I know your store, you obviously, not everyone gets married multiple times. So you have some general issues with, and a lot of people do, right? They sell one-time products. I think about Mike who used to sell treadmills. I’m sure people aren’t buying two treadmills, right? You’re buying one treadmill.

10:22
more places to hang their clothes. Yes, yes. They need more closet space. get to. But there are there are products that like you probably don’t buy again. But for companies that do have like repeat customers, I feel like those Black Friday customers that are acquired through ads actually aren’t the best people to come back and buy again. It’s really hard to you have to work to nurture those people to get them back. We see that a lot because people are buying stuff as gifts.

10:51
And so, you know, if they buy a true giftable to give to someone else, chances are they’re not going to come back and buy homeschool curriculum. They probably don’t even homeschool, you know. So what do you guys do? Do you turn off ads over the holidays? We don’t, because I think the owner would murder us. But uh no, I mean, I’m sorry. Not not turn off. But do you dial down like the top of funnel stuff? We’re dialing down this year for the first time because of some really. Yeah. Traditionally, we just up the retargeting and we kind of dial down the uh

11:20
Yeah, the cold, the cold ads. And then it’s just all email and SMS for us. Same for you guys in general. ah I’m not sure exactly the percentage versus like cold to retargeting, but I know this year we’re trying to do a better job with that. However, we just launched a whole set of games and we launched them last month and they actually did really, really. In fact, we sold out of a game, which.

11:46
I don’t think we’ve ever really sold out of a product during a launch. That’s pretty crazy. What type of game is this? You will not be able to relate to this at all. It’s actually a really cool product. I don’t know who on the team came up with this, I think there are, e-commerce, you get these products where you’re like, this is a winner. This is gonna crush. And so this was one of these. And the creatives on this were fantastic. So it’s a magnetic bookshelf. So it’s a…

12:15
picture of a bookshelf that’s magnet so it can stick anywhere. And then it has each book of the Bible and they’re color coded by like where they would come in the Bible, like as far as like the Bible has different labels for the books. I know you don’t know any of this. And so kids can basically, well, I would say most people probably don’t know this. It’s not you. So basically, know, like Old Testament, New Testament, but then within the Old Testament, there are different like categories. And so kids can basically put the books of the Bible in order on this bookshelf.

12:44
And it helps them learn basically the books of the Bible, the order, you know, kind of gives like an overview, but it’s really fun. Right. And all of our creatives, they did stop motion photography for these. So it basically shows the little books like climbing into the bookshelf. so it’s like the creatives were like, it’s like one of those things where the product is great. The creatives hit the copies good and it doesn’t exist. Right. Like this product is not out in the market. Right. So people went.

13:12
Like the first day I saw the numbers and I was like, we are running out of this. Like we are, and I was like, if we can keep this until the end of the launch sale, it’ll be a miracle. um So we kept it to the end of the launch sale, but we’re out, we’re basically out right now, which means we don’t have it for Black Friday, which stinks. Cause I feel like this could have carried like the whole company. um And then after the game sale ended, we actually increased the price from the retail price, like to see.

13:41
So it was regularly $20, it launched at 14, we put it to 25, sales didn’t really decrease. So I was like, oh, maybe we can keep this at 25 when it comes back in stock. Because it’s a little more expensive to make. Magnets aren’t cheap to make, I don’t know if you know this, but they’re a little bit more expensive than just the standard paper type stuff. But yeah, so.

14:06
But we have some other pretty fun games that we’ve released in the past year. And so I think that that will actually help get people to the site because the games are interesting and fun and the creatives this year and the photography uh really make it look, I don’t wanna say better than they are, because they are fun, but like it really tells the story a lot better because I think with games, right? Like that’s kind of tough. It is tough because you gotta educate them what the game is, right? Yeah.

14:32
And so I think just everything was in a really good spot. The listings were good. The creatives were great. The products are fun. uh And typically we don’t like what like no one wants math for Christmas. So now we actually have products that people would buy and put in their kids stocking or under the tree and stuff like that. So I’m just curious, how much AI do you guys use to create these things? Or is it just still all old school?

15:00
I don’t know who listens to this podcast. We do not use any AI. I have been pushing for AI actually for the last several months. ah I think after talking to Ritu, our friend Ritu um at Seller Summit, and then once again at ECF and seeing what she was creating and then also all the stuff that Dana Michelle is doing.

15:28
I so on my list of things to do is actually create some like I’m not sure if we could have done the stop motions really fun. I’m not sure how great that would have done with AI because there so many like there’s 66 pieces right of the magnets. But I do think there’s a lot of things we could do with AI that we’re not doing right now um that would one free up like creative designers time and. um

15:56
You know, I do think that this this comes down to probably some hesitation on the team’s part about like one, the quality, which I understand that because there was a time when, you know, you try to make a dog and it had five paws and two tails and all that stuff. But also, like, it’s changed so much in the past couple of years. And then I also feel like there’s the like, I don’t want it to take my job kind of feeling.

16:25
Well, it augment your job. So I actually used VO3 for the first time yesterday to do some B-roll for one of my YouTube videos. And it got it right on the first try. Yeah. Which I was shocked at. Yeah. I think it’s at VO3.1 at the time of this recording. Yeah. So my son is actually super into creating AI cartoons.

16:48
that basically are like funny and or they they’re either making fun of one of his siblings like he makes a cartoon about something that they had happened to them in their childhood um or he makes them based on something else that I can’t talk about. But um anyway, I told him he said he sends them to me like all day long. And I was like, do you not have a job anymore? Like, what are you doing with all your free time? But I told him last night, I was like, make a TikTok account and put these videos on there. And so he did ah because they’re actually clever and

17:16
Anyway, so we’ll see where it goes, but it’s all cartooned. You know, it’s not real people or anything like that. But I feel like we that’s like something that I will push for huge in twenty twenty six because I feel like watching Dana Michelle, I know we’ve talked about this before, watching her give that lesson on how to create this. I feel like Dana Michelle knows how to do this in part because she worked for the movie studios. Right. And she is a.

17:43
video editor and so she understands all the components you need to make it look great. And so I feel like that’s the same thing with design. Like I need a designer to tell me, to give me the idea to make it look better. A designer is always going to create something in AI probably better than I can because they understand the language, right? And I’m not a designer. So for me, I don’t see this as a threat at all. I see this as a way to create so much more assets, right? And not…

18:13
you know, not have to do stop motion photography for everything and things like that. um 100 % agree. 100 % agree. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials,

18:40
that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. 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. So one thing that we’re doing this year, so we always do a 12 days of Christmas sale. m

19:08
This is we should be doing this in prior years, but I’ve actually gone back now since I have bumblebot Did I tell you I created bumblebot? Yeah. Yes for my store It’s basically an AI that knows all the sales and everything So I went through and I looked to see which of those so each day for the 12 days of Christmas still we heavily discount one item Yeah, every day for 12 days So I went back and I looked at the sales of some of those items and some of them didn’t do that Well, some of them did fantastic

19:37
And so what we’re doing now is we’re taking the ones maybe that didn’t do so well. And these are all items that we kind of want to liquidate anyway. We’re thinking about creating 12 days of Christmas bundles with those to boost up the average order value. And for the ones that do well, uh we’re actually raising the prices on those and then discounting them. I mean, we raised them a while back already. yeah, so we should be able to make more money off of that 12 days of Christmas sale.

20:07
but just looking at what happened the prior year. Yeah, so I love bundling. I think that’s a really great way to uh improve your average order value. But also the one thing that I’ve found with bundling for us is that we have most of our margins are insane, right? 80, 90 percent. They’re really great. But then we have these kind of products like the bookshelf, right? The Bible bookshelf where the margin is not as great, right? Because we can’t sell this thing for $40. Maybe we can at this point, but like uh

20:35
You know, we know our customers are price sensitive. So what we found is if we bundle a, you know, item that has a worse margin with something that like we have this, actually it’s a really cool Bible timeline. And it basically goes through the whole Bible and it’s like, also you can kind of understand like chronologically, like what you’re reading. And it’s super popular. It’s one of the most popular products on our site. But the margin on that thing is like 98%. It’s like insane.

21:02
Right? So you can bundle them together and give a small discount, right? Like for bundling, but then you sort of even out the margin on the bookshelf product. So we’ve been doing that with some of the games because like board games are actually really expensive to create. I actually don’t understand how like Target and Walmart can sell board games at like seven and $8 during Black Friday because our cost of goods on a board game is like $9, right?

21:30
I mean, obviously, Monopoly. all it’s all volume. Yeah. Jesse was on this podcast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The price breaks. Yeah. I mean, once you start creating, I think at Target’s levels, it’s like dirt cheap. Well, yeah, yeah. But it still shocks me that like the board itself, you know, the whole thing, the shipping, the space it takes up all that stuff, which is why we like to create card games because they’re very affordable. They’re like 40 cents, 50 cents, you know, kind of thing. um But.

21:58
So yeah, so we’ve bundled to sort of offset the costs on higher products, which people really like because they still are getting a deal, right? But then it’s helping us sort of balance out our costs with that. So I like the bundling. think it’s great. um We keep doing it more and more because it keeps working. And people, what we found is when we start promoting those bundles, people are like really interested in them.

22:27
I didn’t even know you guys sold board games. We just started, like this is very new. Ah, okay, okay. I’m actually the voice in the back going, can’t do board games, they’re too expensive. You know what’s expensive about board games is the little pieces that you use to like go around the board. Those things are like really expensive, um which you know, it’s funny, like it’s really expensive, but it’s like $2, right? Like it’s not, it’s expensive when you think about selling it.

22:57
The other thing when you were talking about the 12 days is one thing that I’ve learned about these customers that I’m dealing with is that um they love that flash deal. So where you discount, um let’s just say the Bible timeline, we’ll say that. That’s like $9. We sell it for five. So it’s like almost 50 % off. Crazy, crazy deal. Even if they don’t want the timeline, they click over.

23:25
Like the engagement rates on those emails and SMS is like so much higher than other ones because and they don’t necessarily like one time I actually went and like looked at how many people actually bought that exact product versus, you know, a bunch of other products. Most of the time they buy a bunch of other products. They actually don’t even buy that one product. But they’re so like, you know, oh, my goodness, what in the world? Five dollars, you know, five dollars is like our our

23:54
Email point, if we can say $5 in an email, people click, we know that. um And so for us, having that one item discounted is actually really profitable because people might buy that, which is fine, but they also buy a bunch of other stuff because we get them on the page and then, you know, they convert. Here’s a tactic you might like. I actually stole it from Mr. Beast. OK, so what he did was he sent out an item for a discount.

24:23
And in the email itself, he had five different images. And he said, if you click on the right image, in this case, I think it was a cup of coffee. Only one of the icons holds the discount. So what ends up happening is everyone clicks on all of them, right? And you have them go to different pages, but then your click through rate for that email and the engagement goes through the roof, which improves your deliverability for the rest of the year. Yeah. Oh, I’m trying to think of a way to do that without angering.

24:52
Well, there are people. mean, they eventually get the discount. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. We just have we have an audience with like a little bit of a less sense of a sense of humor. OK. But I think that’s fantastic idea. Like I do that a lot with. So I do it differently where it’s like, hey, are you having a great, you know, Thanksgiving season and it’s like a thumbs up or a thumbs down?

25:15
They both take you to the exact same page. But like people click, right? Like they think they’re voting, right, on the thing. But I love the idea of like the discount takes you, because that would definitely get people to click. And they eventually get the discount. And then the follow up email is how many tries did it take you on the last one? And then they give out something else after that. That’s genius. So I like that one. Yeah.

25:42
I did try it once and the click through rate on that email went through the roof. It’s not something you can use all the time, you got to pull that out. But if you pull it out on Black Friday, you know, right before you’re going to send 12 straight emails. Yeah, you know, that’s a good one. We do the another way to not discount. We do discount at Black Friday, so I don’t want anyone to go, you do. I mean, we do. But one of the things that I really like is the free gift with purchase.

26:10
um So we do this in two different ways. So every month we actually have a free gift. And what we’ve moved to this year is basically these gifts are exclusive to that month. You cannot buy them. You only can get them if you make a purchase. And they’re pretty fun, right? Like right now our free gift with purchase is a New Year’s Eve countdown pack. And it basically is…

26:32
balloons and confetti and little pieces of paper and you write things on the piece of paper and put them in the balloons and then every hour up until midnight you pop a balloon and confetti and whatever you’ve written on the card, know, whatever. um that’s one of our most popular ones that we’ve done. But they, you know, we’ve done things like lunchbox notes for your kids, right? Little love notes that you can put in your kid’s room or in their lunch or, you know, in their backpack or whatever. um

26:56
Last month we had, it was like a gratitude jar kit. So it was basically, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the gratitude jar where like people, they just take like an uh old pickle jar or something and they put things that they’re thankful for or grateful for people, things like that. And then they like read them out at Thanksgiving. um So we had like a fun kit where you could like decorate the jar and it was, you know. So you guys ship out an old pickle jar? we don’t. You have to provide your own jar. it had everything. So they’re all like, and the goal is the goal for these free plus purchase items is

27:25
that they cost less than 20 cents to make and that they’re flat pack, right? So that if you put them in a box, you’re not having to like have this, you know, thing that’s gonna change the shipping size of the box or the shipping side, shipping box size. ah So anyway, these have been really popular and what we found is at first we started this to liquidate stuff, right? Like we can’t sell stickers. Let’s give everybody a pack of stickers with the purchase. But then we really pushed towards like, let’s create special items that

27:54
will really move the needle for people. um So, you we have some really fun ones coming next year, like one of the ones next year that I think we’re launching over spring break is like a car bingo. So basically if you’re traveling for spring break, there’s like all the things that you X off and try to get bingo. And it comes with like 20 sheets of bingo cards. So like, you know, it’s enough for a road trip. But these have been like, we have people, one lady was doing local pickup. She literally made like 10 orders.

28:23
to get like 10 of the gratitude packs. 10 separate orders? Yes. Were she paid for shipping each time? Well, no, because she picked, she was local pickup. Oh, local pickup, got it, But she wanted him to like give them to all her family members. So she went through, which, know, I mean, that’s not exactly how we want it to work. But we know that tells us that like, hey, we’re on the right track with, you know, the products and getting people excited. So do you do it with no threshold whatsoever or? We do it with, it’s any purchase.

28:53
Not digital, just physical products, obviously, because we do have digital products. But then during certain months of the year, specifically like Black Friday, and then we have a big back to school sale in the summer, we offer a $100 or more, you get a tote bag. And it’s our custom tote bag, people love them. And so what it does is since stuff’s on sale, it boosts their order value, right? Because what would be a $75 order is now like a $50 order.

29:22
So this is getting people the incentive to get to that $100 threshold. So I’m just curious, during Black Friday, do you do that in addition to the free with purchase? Yeah, so you get both. So you get two items. nice. I mean, you gotta spend 100 bucks to get the tote bag. Oh, no, no, I know, but for the free with purchase, like we have some stuff in our store that’s like two bucks. Yeah. So it wouldn’t matter how much they spend to get that free item? Yeah, yeah. mean, they have to pay shipping too, obviously. Sure, yeah.

29:52
So, but we know that the tote bag, um had a different, we’re doing a custom tote bag now every year too, to just add to the value of it. um We have people ask if they can buy it all the time, we don’t sell it. We’ve kind of gone back and forth on whether we should. Next year, the tote bag’s really fun. This year, I felt like it was a little boring, but people still really like the tote bag. um

30:14
People do anything for free bag and the bags are pretty inexpensive to create. Like if that’s something you’re thinking about, like tote bags are kind of the way to go. For the high threshold. you guys have those separately made then just for this? You don’t sell them normally, right? No. No, just for this. She also uses them at convention for people who buy over a hundred dollars, which is really nice at convention because you can put everything in the bag and walk around with it as opposed to like the cheap plastic bags that you normally get. So that’s why. then so that’s a really good one.

30:44
that we, you it started with us just trying to get rid of the extra things, right? Kind of like with you with the one day sales, but then it’s now moved into like a full strategy of, you know, how do we create these like exclusive items that people can only get that month and just to get people to shop more frequently, right? Like, get people back to the store and, and spending money. Yeah. I’m trying to think. So you guys aren’t heavy. What’s the biggest discount that you guys give?

31:14
It’s very heavy. Oh, it is heavy. Yeah, very heavy. It’s the early bird discounts close to 40 percent. Wow. OK. Our biggest discount is only 15 percent. I know we are never. Yeah. I know. Actually, on that day, like a whole bunch of people buy because they’re like, hey, this is the only time this ever going to happen. Yeah. And that’s probably a whole other conversation about discounting. um I don’t love that. But I also know that it like we do have margin to do that. And.

31:42
it does move the needle. We do double the sales, right? So we hit that. So yeah, but yeah, I would love to have less of a discount in general, but that’s not my call. I think for your products, it works. Yeah. But there’s people out there where their margins might be like 50%. Right, that does not work. And if you give like a 20 % discount off of that, that basically kills your profits. Yeah.

32:10
We can go to about 35 % off and still be at an 80 % margin on most products. That’s right, because it’s just paper, right? It’s paper, yeah. So anyway, I would like to maybe have a slightly different strategy, but at the end of the day, you know. I mean, it’s working. It’s working, yeah. Yeah. And it’s growing the sales. You know what’s funny is I always think about it

32:38
maybe in the wrong way, but I think about it as you’re doing a lot more work for less money, mainly because we run the sewing machines and everything. And I’m just thinking to myself, yeah, this, cause I actually hate, every season I hate Black Friday. I hate the holiday season, cause that means I gotta go in, everyone’s on deck. And then like, it’s just a madhouse for like two weeks straight. And then we to relax afterwards. Yeah, you know, it’s kind of funny that you say that.

33:06
Of course, when I was in e-commerce, really liked Black Friday because it was like, this is a trip. The sales on Black Friday pay for my entire family to go to a tropical island. the one thing, like this year, I have a doctor’s appointment on Black Friday, which was, that’s not a big deal, right? So was like, no problem. And then in my mind, it’s like on this part of town that I really like, and it’s like kind of close to my house, but I don’t go there a ton. And so was like, oh, I could go to my doctor’s appointment. Then we could go get brunch or blah, blah.

33:35
I’ve got this whole idea in my head and then I was like, I can’t go anywhere on Black Friday. I got to get right back home to my computer and make sure that nothing’s broken and that the emails are going. I was like, oh, why did I think that I could do anything fun on Black Friday? So now I’m like, oh, I hate Black Friday. Let me ask you this. Do you guys text every day? We don’t text every day because our people are very personal privacy. Yeah.

34:03
So we text, let me see, I just did this yesterday. I think we sent four texts over like nine days, which is a lot. That’s what we started doing. like last year, I remember for the first time, I was like, yeah, what the heck? Let’s just try texting every day and let’s see what happens. People started getting a little annoyed. Yeah. Yeah. I think if I had giftables, 100 % I would text every day. Like I would I would probably be much more aggressive. But because I know that people, if they’re shopping on Black Friday, they’re just stocking up to get a deal.

34:33
Right. It’s not because they’re going to give, except for like the games, the few things that we have, they’re not going to give someone a P.E. workbook, you know. Right. Hey, kid, looks like you put on a few pounds from Thanksgiving. Here’s a math workbook curriculum. Maybe only text the Asians like the math workbooks or whatever. Can you segment for that in PostScript? Oh, just all the California area. Northern California. That’s how I know. So are you guys doing anything different this year?

35:00
You know what’s funny is like I listen to a lot of e-commerce podcasts and everyone always does like a big BFCM thing leading up to it. But yeah, really it hasn’t changed that much at least from what I can notice. What about you? We are doing some different things this year. uh So the first thing we did last year, but we’re continuing on it this year. And I got this idea from Laurie at Passionate Penny Pinscher, where I think she’s the one that I saw doing it years ago where it was like.

35:26
you send an email out and you’re like, there’s 22 codes of this, there’s six codes of this. It’s basically the Mr. Beast strategy just in a different way. Let’s be honest, I go adjust those codes all day long. No, no, no, I know exactly. You don’t want people to come in. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So we’re doing that. That worked very, very well. The other thing that I started doing, think sometime this year I tried it and I was like, oh, adding this to Black Friday is sending an email out at like 7 p.m.

35:55
basically saying free shipping till midnight, right? So it doesn’t kill you with the shipping, but people go bananas. Like I think the last time I did that in an email, the email made like $30,000. Really? Okay, so just free shipping for that one day? shipping, but like literally five hours of free shipping. So it’s not like you have, because I feel like the other problem with this time of year is that if, and we send emails in the morning, so I’m not saying not to do that, but you send an email at 6 a.m.

36:22
it’s competing with every other email that got sent around that time. And so people are like, they see your email, they go to the store, they look, they don’t do anything, then they see the other email, and then they see another company, and then they see another company, and then by the end of the day, they forget. And so maybe they come back and buy later, because they get an abandoned card or a browser abandonment, but the urgency of this deal only happens for five hours has actually been super effective for people. Even on days where we don’t have like,

36:48
great open rates, because certain days are just not as good for us. It still converts really, really well. So I’m curious about the codes, because this is something that I think I made it a lesson for profitable online store, but I don’t do it myself. Do you let people enter in a coupon code that doesn’t work? No, because if it’s sold out, yeah, I do. That’s what I meant. So let’s say you’re down to the cheapest one now. You want people to actually enter in.

37:16
Yeah, you actually want people to enter in three coupon codes incorrectly. You know what I’m talking about? I mean, I guess I do. Yeah. OK. And it’s been fine. We get like, OK, so we have a huge email list close to 300 K when I don’t send that email to everybody. Actually, that email I send to a very specific segment of people. So let’s just say I send it to 50,000 people. We probably get three people emailing customer service complaining, which seems like that’s worth it. I don’t know.

37:43
The only reason why I ask is like people can’t spell like I track every time a coupon code doesn’t go through like it literally emails me. Oh, interesting. Okay. And so like if I get like a whole flood of emails, like people can’t spell like the easiest coupon codes and then they get frustrated sometimes and then they leave.

38:00
One of the things that I did to because I go back and forth about the coupon code thing a lot because part of me wants to have like the coupon code that’s like Z 7 6 7 X P whatever. Yeah, because that feels like it’s because whenever I say this is exclusive to you, people feel like that is exclusive to them because it’s like this jumble of letters and numbers. also no one like especially on mobile, it’s harder to copy and paste and all that exactly. um So I always make sure the coupon is you know how in Shopify. Well, in Shopify you can link that they can click on that and it

38:29
automatically applies the coupon. Correct, yes, yes. Yeah, so that kind of helps with the, so when they get to the cart, the coupon’s already been applied if they click on, so I try to make every link in the email that link. However, when you do the five coupons in an email, right, you can’t do that. So I try to make the coupons as absolutely basic as possible. It doesn’t, it’s not foolproof, right? But like if it’s additional 5 % off, the code is add five. If it’s an additional 10%, it’s add 10, like the number 10. um

38:58
If it’s free shipping, it’s free. Literally, the code is free, right? Like I try to like eliminate because I know people don’t people cannot spell. cannot type it all. One time our coupon code was like Mother 25, right? Yeah. People were like, M-U-T-H-E-R. Yeah. Mother MTHR Mothers 25. was like, Oh my God. Yeah. Anyway, that’s why I was curious about that strategy. Yeah.

39:26
So the other thing that we’re doing this year that’s brand new, we are totally, I have like, this is gonna flop, but you have to try it, right? We’re live selling this year. Oh, who’s doing that? The owner’s doing it, yeah. So she’s great on camera. it’s not, that’s not gonna be an issue. um There was, it’s not playing out exactly how I want it. So how I wanted it to happen is,

39:55
She live sells, there’s 10 items. Those items have better pricing, like basically during the live sale and throughout the rest of the day. Okay, walk me through this. Are you guys using comments sold or? No, we’re literally like just sending people to a landing page with those 10 products on it. Oh, I see. Yeah, because I don’t want to try to integrate comments sold. I mean, that would definitely be the easiest way to do it. But also, I don’t know if her customers know how to do that. So that’s true. There’s one link. The link has the 10 products on it.

40:23
So it’s not the main sale page, it’s a secondary page, which also I’ll explain that fiasco in a minute. um So she’s gonna do this the Friday before Black Friday. So it’s like the 21st. So basically we’re hyping it up in social, we’re hyping it up in email, click here, she’s gonna go live, she’s gonna have the 10 products. They’re all products that you can give as a gift basically. So we’re not really promoting anything that’s like, and also get your,

40:51
a handwriting book for your child with their terrible penmanship. um What I wanted was this special code that basically was only good that day. However, we want to run ads to this because it will actually probably do really well with ads. And so if the code’s only good for that day, then that’s not, we can’t do that, right? Because it can’t be time sensitive. So we can’t really have a code.

41:14
um Which is the part that I think is annoying however I do understand the component of running the ads to it because we’ve had a lot of success when She goes live for anything running ad set especially to get people to opt in and things like that So I understand like the pros and cons of doing it each way um However, I would like to do it at some point with a code Because I do think that would be really effective and also a really great way to track like exactly people who came from the live

41:42
Okay, walk me through this. You go on this page with her face on it going live and then there’s 10 products. Is she gonna be out, can anyone just buy the product at any time at that big discount and just leave? Or do you have to wait for her to say the code first? nope. Because there’s no code now. It’s just at the Black Friday discount. So she’ll go live, she has 10 products, she’ll talk through each product. The goal is to get the live to about 45 minutes.

42:08
talk about why you should buy it, talk about how giftable it is, they’re all sitting there, it’s all branded, it’s in the warehouse, which I actually think is a huge selling point, right? Because people will be shipping, uh all the products are behind her, like on warehouse shelves and things like that. uh One of the big things if you’re gonna do this, this might impact your customers, we cannot have any boxes that say China on them.

42:30
Like, you know how those products come? So it’s a part of the warehouse. doesn’t have the shipping boxes in it because people get really been out of shape if they see China on the boxes. However, I’m like, do you not think everything comes from China? I don’t know. But that’s neither here nor there. um I kind of like this idea. And I’m wondering if I can get my I guess I could. You could. I want to try it because I know it works. We have friends that are very successful at this. Right. Like, yeah. um

42:59
I think of like, even like, we obviously talk about Paul and Tiffany a lot and they’ve made their whole livelihood on live selling. But think about like Kelly Snyder, right? Who has a digital course and product but sells accessories, right? She goes live multiple times a year and she calls them trunk shows and she sells jewelry pieces and accessories and things like that. And it does really, really well. uh And she’s also, once again, great on camera. So I think, you know,

43:27
Having Kim, the owner, which I think is another big thing, right? You’re the owner of the company, you’re telling people what to buy. That’s impactful, right? You’re talking about why the products are great, you’re talking about your value prop. So what are you doing? You’re helping your social media, right? She’s gonna be live on Facebook and I think on YouTube, right? So you’re helping the Facebook algorithm, which is where we run all our ads, right? So then we’re gonna run ads to it. It’s gonna improve that. You’re gonna get people commenting, interacting.

43:54
We have people that will be on Facebook, like monitoring, responding to comments, answering questions. um And then that video can live throughout Black Friday, right? It’ll live for the next week, all with these giftable products, right? So the exact thing that we think people are probably gonna be wanting to buy from us. um So I’m excited about it. I would like to, at some point, try it again with a coupon code.

44:20
to like special discount off those products so we can really track who came from the live. But the problem is, that’s not as evergreen. um I think the coupon code is gonna be problematic unless the link, I can say like, I can see her just spouting out the coupon code and then people using it. But again, like the same issues, there’s friction. Yeah.

44:42
So and then the other strategy, so we’re not doing the coupon code. So that’s out for right now. So the strategy is talking about it on social media, letting people know she’s going live. We’ve talked about throwing in a free gift if you buy that day. So basically just having them throw something in the box. Like mystery, right? Not. And then you could probably pack, how fun would it be, you can just pack it on the fly. Ooh, that’s a really good idea. That’s a really it into a two hour live or three hour live. Yeah, I like that idea.

45:11
I’ll have to add that to our list. So if I were to do this, I would have to do this though. You would have to do it. So then the other thing is so, you know, promotes on social promotes on email. It’s also a way to like talk about stuff on social and email that’s different. Right. We’re not just like discount buy. It’s like, hey, I want to talk to Kim about what to buy for Christmas. Like, here you go. Well, plus you can actually give a demo of the product and like.

45:36
Yes, especially since it’s a lot of games and stuff, like the demos are good. And then basically what we’ll do is look at email stats from the emails that talk about her going live and then basically send like a watch the replay, um you know, basically retarget people who clicked on any on that page. Right. So if they went to that live sale page, you know, retarget them an email. So I think there’s like a big strategy around this and I’m excited about it because it to me, it’s like different than what

46:06
99 % of people do, right? There’s obviously clothing boutiques that go live all week, right? I think Tiffany and Paul are giving away $50,000 on Black Friday. It’s some insane thing, right? All I know in my feed is Tiffany holding up wads of cash all the time right now. I was like, don’t know what promotion they’re running, but they know what they’re doing. But in our space, in curriculum and homeschool products, nobody’s doing this, right? So it’s completely disruptive.

46:34
knowing that Kim is good on camera, that risk is kind of removed. She went live the other day to test it, basically talking about some new products. So she didn’t sell anything, but just kind of tested the setup, tested the camera, all that thing. I don’t know. I’m excited about that. think that’s gonna be… If nothing else, I think it’s a good practice to do it and see how people react and potentially…

47:02
What’s your tech setup gonna be? Is it just gonna be like for the chat? It’s just gonna be Facebook chat. Oh, Facebook chat. Yeah. Okay. So that’s the only place you’re broadcasting live. I think we’ll also broadcast to YouTube. That’s a separate chat then. Yes. Yes. But we have people to monitor that. Oh, I see. Oh, so you’re not gonna let them see the chat on this on the page. It’s gonna be wherever they’re watching. Yeah, wherever they’re watching. Yeah, I see. I see. It’ll also probably be embedded in the page.

47:31
When like both chats, YouTube and Facebook. No, the video will probably be embedded on that sale page. Right. But, you know, I would say the chat, like I said, this is a very janky setup for the first time because we haven’t done this before and also didn’t want to invest too much resources in it if it completely flops. um It’s not going to flop. It’ll do fine. I don’t think so. But you know what I mean. It’s like this is the beta. Yeah. Oh, these are things I wanted. I guess if Jen and I went on together, we could play off each other.

48:00
But I’m pretty sure she’s not gonna be on board for this. I think she would maybe do it with you. Maybe. I think that’s fun. Yeah. Well, fun for me. She doesn’t like doing these things. No, I know that about her. But I think any time the owner or the head of a company, whatever it’s if it’s a figurehead or like the brand face, I think any time they can come on and talk to the customer is really impactful.

48:30
for people. No, agree. 100%. Yeah. It’s like I fly Delta a lot now and that one of their videos, it starts with the president of Delta right now. Obviously he didn’t find found Delta, right? Because Delta’s been around for 100 years. But just the fact that he like starts the video off like.

48:49
For some reason, I immediately, do you ever watch the safety video? I don’t. I don’t, I don’t. I’m like, I know how to work the life vest, I know, blow, pull, activated light with water, I know how to get the slide out, whatever. But he starts talking and I was like, oh, it’s the president of Delta, I wonder what he’s gonna say. It immediately changed my perspective. And I actually watched 90 % of that video, because they start the video off talking about they’ve been it now, they’re the oldest airline. So there’s a good story.

49:17
You know, he’s he’s he’s looks like your typical CEO of a big company, right? So he’s not super relatable, but like at the same time, you’re like, oh, it’s interesting, right? So I feel like it’s just a disruption and you got to do something during this time to get people’s attention. All right. I know we got to wrap it up. I’m going to bring I know I’m going to bring this up tonight. OK, good luck. We’re cheering for you. But I like that idea, Adam. Actually, it’s it’s one of the newer things that I that I’ve heard this year, like going live. So cool.

49:47
See if I’ll let you know how it goes. Hope you enjoyed this episode and best of luck on your Black Friday sales this year. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 615. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at seller summits.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 over to seller summits.com.

50:15
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, I have Brandon Harahoe, who is the VP of an eight figure made in the USA brand called Montana Knife Company. And if any of you out there listening are doubting that you can create an eight figure brand without Amazon, this is the episode for you because this company has been killing it with Shopify from day one.

00:24
But before I begin, want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses.

00:53
no corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people, so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if you’re doing over 250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers.

01:22
Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:36
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m excited to have Brandon Harahoe on the show. Now, Brandon was introduced to me by my good friend Kurt Elster from the Unofficial Shopify podcast. He is the co-founder of Montana Knife Company, an eight figure e-commerce store where all products are made in the USA. The company was 100 % D2C from day one. I don’t believe they’re on Amazon at all and they are killing it in the space.

02:05
And I wanted to have Brandon on for two reasons today. One, I wanna talk about the challenges of Made in the USA. And two, I wanna talk about how he scaled his business to eight figures 100 % with Shopify. And with that, welcome to the show, Brandon. How are you doing today? I’m doing great. And thank you for having me on the show. it’s cool to connect through our mutual friend, Kurt. He’s been a long time friend and he’s actually helped our brand a ton too on the e-commerce side.

02:32
when he reached out, says, Hey, I got a guy who has an awesome podcast. I was like, count me in and I listened to a bunch, know, you know, getting ready for this podcast. And it’s like, this is spot on with like what we’ve been building and how we built this and everything. Awesome. if you guys like Montana knife company’s website, Kurt Elster actually designed it over at ether cycle. Just give giving Kurt a little plug there. Yep. So, Brent, I know you’re the co founder of the company.

02:58
but you’re not like the main guy, like the face of the company, but what is the story behind Montana Knife Company? Yeah, so Montana Knife Company has an absolutely wild story. I mean, to the point where we’re actually trying to like, appropriately like, you know, film an actual documentary around it, especially with the phase of growth that we’re in right now, it’s just a really cool time to actually film something as like things are going on. But, you know, to kind of give you like the quick story is, you know, this, company, you know, started with Josh Smith.

03:28
You know, he actually started making knives at the age of 11. And then then he became then he became the youngest master bladesmith ever in the history of master bladesmith. And he achieved that level at the age of 19. You know, and he’s had that title for almost like 20 something years and no one’s no one’s been able to become a master bladesmith at a younger age. And some people have tried and failed. But, you know, Josh is a, you know, a true craftsman, a true artist. And, you know,

03:57
He is just obsessed with making the best knives. So, you he started as a really, really high end knife maker. mean, literally the show like Forged in Fire um is based off of what Josh has been doing, you but he was doing it 20 years before the show. ah You know, Josh is actually, think, on season one and two, too. they like just to understand like how he’s kind of like in this ether of, you know, knife making community and all that. um

04:22
You know, and then, you so that was, you know, his teens and then his twenties and thirties, you know, he became, you know, actually one of the best knife makers in the world. He was really known for like his high end Damascus work. But the problem was, is that all the knives he was making, they were like expensive pieces of art. Like people, you know, when they commissioned a knife from them, they’re like, I want a $15,000 dagger or I want like a $30,000 sword.

04:48
He has stories of him making knives for sheiks in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and getting flown over to the London archives and looking at all these historical swords and building replicas and all that. But at his core roots, he was born in Lincoln, Montana. He’s been a hunter since day one, but he’s always made the best hunting knives. But the problem was that for him to make a hunting knife for somebody,

05:17
You know just to justify time and material and all this stuff He had to charge like $3,000 for it, you know or even on the very lowest end, you know a cup like a thousand fifteen hundred dollars and then promise like people weren’t using them they would buy them and they weren’t being used and the reason why they weren’t using them is because like a the price and they were just so beautiful and it’s you know, so his thing was is like I make the best using hunting knife

05:43
you know, on the market. There’s no question, you know, I’ve made thousands of knives in my life. I can distill this down to this one knife that every hunter can take on any hunt anywhere in the world. But I’ve got to figure out how to do it in mass and get that cost down. So people actually use them like these aren’t meant to be collectors items like we want people to use these in the field. And our one of our early sayings was, you know, used, abused and passed down. That’s the goal. We want that knife to be used and we want you to pass it down for generations. um So like that’s kind like the backstory and where like

06:12
you know, Montana Knife Company was born and a couple of really cool things happened is, you know, his mom and him had like the foresight to actually go and register the trademark name Montana Knife Company and buy the URL in like 2000. Which is just crazy. Yeah. So when I came on board, I had to go find this, you know, URL that was owned by some little web agency in Montana, which you can understand was hard to track down and find and get it linked to our Shopify site and all that. So.

06:41
So that’s kind of like the prequel to what True MKC is right now. And then we launched the brand in 2020. And I’m talking height of COVID. The first time Josh and I met was almost right before the lockdowns, the country-wide lockdowns. It was like, yeah, should we start this? We’re like, well, might as well. Because he always says in 2008,

07:11
He kind of listened to the news and all this stuff and he actually stopped being a full-time professional knife maker when the economy crashed in 2008. You could probably understand the budget for a $15,000 knife kind of shrunk on most people’s P &Ls. he actually became a lineman for 10 or 15 years making really good money. But this has just always been kind of like eating out. I’m like, need to do this Montana Knife Company thing.

07:39
But then, you his thing was like, I just don’t have the marketing guy or like the business guy, you know, set up the business in the back end and the funnels and like just the advertising creative. in and that’s that’s where like Josh and I met and it’s like the rocket fuel, you know, we got the product, we got marketing. And that’s where it started. Okay, okay. So you know, what’s funny here is I have a couple colleagues that sell blades, not not knives per se, and they get all this stuff from China. Maybe it’d be heresy, I guess, if Josh did that. But

08:10
China seems to be significantly cheaper. The labor costs are 4X lower. And then even like the steel costs, I think are 15 to 40 % cheaper in China. and I know cost is like a big factor here. Can you just kind of comment on some of the challenges of USA manufacturing? And why did you guys decide to focus on Made in the USA? No, that’s a great question. And here’s the thing is like, you know, when we started this company, you know, it used to be easy to say that like, oh,

08:39
Chinese knives are cheap and they’re not that good and like all that stuff. The truth is, that knives coming out of China, knives coming out of Pakistan, Taiwan, like some of them were awesome. They were great knives. were very well manufactured. know, it took them, you know, they had 20, 30, 40 years competing with some of American brands, you know, to refine their stuff.

09:01
So we couldn’t say that like it’s a superior product. do think now we are a superior product, but at the time, like there were still good products coming out of China. But you’re right. It’s cheaper and you can just, you know, you can order 100, you can order 10,000, you can order 100,000 and they just show up in, you know, six months. but our biggest thing was, that like, you know, we’re watching this thing happen during COVID.

09:29
we’re watching supply chains get shut off, we’re watching all these things happen, and we’re just like, if we’re gonna do this, let’s do this the right way. And honestly, American manufacturing has been always true to my heart, it’s always been true to Josh’s heart. So it was just in our ethos to wanna do it, especially with him being an actual maker. And the other thing is too, is that so many things went right for MKC. One of the other things that went really right for MKC is that the entire knife market, I’m talking every company,

09:59
in the early teens and early 2020s, everyone was trying to race to the bottom of the barrel and make the cheapest knife possible. So they can just go sell it like a bella’s in a bubble blister pack for $20. And then it dolls and you just of like hock it in your center console or you put it in your closet and then you just go buy a new one because it’s not worth the resharpening. um And that was just kind like the mentality of the industry. And then we came in and we’re like, like

10:28
There’s not a lot of things that men pass down anymore, you know, from father to son to grandson. You know, it’s usually just like, you know, a watch, maybe some firearms and like the knives, you know, like no one’s going to want your iPhone 13. Like my kids aren’t going to want my Apple watch. My kids aren’t going to want the iPad. They’re like, no, that I can’t even open the iOS now. It’s 2050, you know? So these things that we carry on our body.

10:52
It’s different than what men used to carry on their body in the early 1900s and the 1500s, early like the 1950s, like watches and knives and wallets and things like that. like I said, there’s a lot of things that just kind of like, we’re like, it’s all just focusing on making the best product possible. And for us, that was making it ourselves. Would you say Josh is famous in this niche, even before when you guys first started? Absolutely. buy knives for him?

11:22
You know what’s wild like at the very beginning I would definitely say like our first like, you know, hundred customers were definitely fans of Josh and knew his pedigree and things like that What’s wild now is like it’s crazy because like there’s times that were like, oh, I don’t even know who Josh Smith was by own like five nights It’s just like the brand itself is just getting you know, big Okay. I mean, I don’t know anything about knives, but I do know that it’s pretty competitive uh so

11:50
You mentioned like these knives are heirloom quality, right? But when you’re first starting out in your marketing, can we talk about how you guys got your first sales? Like how does one scale a knife company? It’s a very competitive niche. Yeah, so it’s very competitive. um And also to like, it’s probably the oldest, like, I have a buddy that owns a seasoning company. And I always joke that him and I are in the oldest trades possible sharp objects and seasonings. Like it doesn’t get much older than that. So like,

12:20
know, there’s a lot of companies, I mean, if you just think of USA made companies, you know, lot of those guys have 120 years on us, a lot of them have 7080 years on us, they have government contracts, you know, they’ve perfected their manufacturing through mass quantities. mean, we didn’t know how to do anything in 2020. So like, that’s where it’s just like, so you know, we’re like, it’s just not like American made, like, we also had to figure out how to manufacture ourselves. And like, that’s what we’re doing. You’re like,

12:48
You might even hear the CNC machines like downstairs buzzing right now. You know, so it’s again, like it’s not like we’re placing an order with another factory and just hoping those knives come and we sell them. I mean, we’re literally making them. And like our first drop, like our first real drop, we we like, you know, I was like, hey, you know, we’ll probably sell like 25, 30. We ended up selling all 150 that we had cut ready to make. And literally the next day when we were packaging them.

13:14
I had to go to Staples and get a printer for the hook up to Shopify to print labels. Josh is in the other room, literally sharpening knives. His wife is helping us package them. Like I said, it’s not just building an e-comm brand and doing drop shipping. It’s like, we have to make this product. It adds a whole other layer of complexity. We have 90 people in our company and 65 of them on the manufacturing side. There’s only 15.

13:44
people on like the accounting and CFO and growth and you know, so yeah. So when you first launched, were you guys just running it out of the house or? Yeah. So it was Josh’s two car garage and then my bedroom. I was, I actually lived two hours. Yeah. I actually lived two hours north. You know, I was shooting all the product photography in my garage. I was going, and that’s a beautiful, you know, I was living in Montana is like, I could just go walk out in the woods. got the best landscape in the world. So, um,

14:14
You know, and I still want to answer your question, like how do we get those first like couple of sales? ah know, like we, so, you know, obviously like Josh, you know, he kind of had his, you know, his connections, you know, I’ve been in, you know, the marketing e-comm space for, you know, almost 15, 18 years at that point. uh I had a bunch of connections and we literally just relied so hard on our network for that first couple, you know, sales, you know, and then what we did is we just, just focused on two things. We focused on,

14:43
you know, just Instagram growth, because at that time that worked out really well for us. You TikTok wasn’t really around. So we put a lot of focus on Instagram. ah And I’ve been a photographer for 10 years. So I had like, you know, terabytes of all this beautiful Montana landscapes and like all this stuff. So I ended up dumping my catalog on there just to start getting followers and things like that. Well, because we didn’t really have knives because we’re still making them.

15:08
So we couldn’t even talk about the product. had nothing to sell for the first three months because we had to make the knives. So there’s a lot of just preloading that funnel before that first drop. was almost like doing a Kickstarter without actually taking pre-orders. Okay, so you built up an Instagram account and then you used that to launch. I know you guys have a pretty cool model and I definitely want to hear about it where you literally drop new knives every single week, right? Right.

15:38
Yeah, and the drop model’s wild. you know, I came, I spent five or six years in the apparel industry. You know, that company did a lot of drop models and stuff like that. But this is like totally different because it’s the same model, but there’s like, everyone’s like, oh yeah, Montana Nightclub is just good at like, you know, doing manufactured scarcity. Like they’re just manufacturing scarcity and they’re like dropping five knives and like, like no. I mean, literally, so we have our largest drop tonight. We’re dropping thousands of knives.

16:07
And I can tell you right now, I went downstairs and the entire shop is buzzing right now because they are way behind. And like we can only drop on the website what we can ship tomorrow. That’s always our commitment. So as many knives as they get built this week is how many knives get launched on Thursday night. And that’s always been our been our model. So from day one, you know, Josh and I put all this stuff on credit cards. We bought that first batch.

16:32
you know, of raw steel, we turn them into knives, you know, we got them assembled, sharpened, know, clean sheath packaged. And then, you know, I remember it just like it was yesterday, it was December 18th of 2020, we launched the first, you know, Speed Goat. And we sold them all out in like 14 minutes. And we’re like, oh, and then it’s like, we don’t have anything, we literally don’t have knives. Like we don’t have anything else to continue this business.

16:59
And we can’t call someone to make them because no one else knows how to make them. So we rushed, ordered more steel, we got them through the pipeline, and I think we had another drop within like a month, month and a half. So that’s what started creating this drop model naturally because I had six weeks as a marketer, I had six weeks and I made a commitment to post on Instagram every single day and send out emails and stuff like that.

17:27
I had six weeks where I couldn’t actually convert a sale. So I started pulling on some of my older backgrounds that I started coming up with apparel for the brand. even launched, in this time I even launched a Montana Knife Company coffee, uh like coffee, because I went to the local roaster and was like, I need something to sell. So we make a Montana coffee and we just white labeled some coffee and we did a drop for that in between the knife things.

17:55
But like that continued on for three or four years where it’s just like, you know, we sold them, we bought more, sold them. And we kept on expecting to never not sell out. like, our goal is to be in stock. We want to be a mass knife company. Like we don’t want to be a drop drop model company. Like that’s not our thing. But we just kept on selling out and we just kept on ordering more and ordering more. So when you’re talking about bootstrapping, I mean, like we literally just sold it, bought more, sold it, bought more. And then we started getting into a little bit of a cadence of like, all right, let’s

18:25
order in between drops so we have more frequent drops. So I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of if you are interested in starting your own online store I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out it contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online

18:54
Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. 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. So for the audience who doesn’t know what the drop model is, it’s basically you make a set of knives and then once they’re sold, that’s it, right? For that, for

19:21
And then so that for that first drop, you relied on connections to get those sales, but you can only rely on like your audience and your connections so long. So by then was the word of mouth good enough for subsequent drops or had the Instagram account and everything caught on? Yeah, so no, this is a great question. And I love these questions. It helps me like kind of like go back in time and think about like what worked and why it worked and stuff like that. so before Montana Night Company, um

19:50
you know, I owned my own agency and I specialized in linking Klaviyo and Shopify accounts. So if you’re a big Shopify account at the Klaviyo, I’d come in, clean things up, help you with your campaigns, help you with flows, things like that. It was really successful at the time, but it was cool because I got to go look in the back end of like 20 different companies and see what they’re doing, see what you’re doing wrong and see what they’re doing wrong. So I got to build MKC’s like email list from scratch. And I’m talking I build it like and it was just so

20:21
I was just so obsessed with building the highest quality engaged list possible. And that’s what we did. like, you know, for those first like six months a year, the main thing I focused on was email. Like I used to tell Josh, I don’t care if your grandma buys a knife, she has to do it through a Shopify website and I want her email. know, so like, just being really strict about that because with us being a knife industry, you know, we couldn’t figure out how to do paid advertising until about year three or four.

20:50
because everything was so restricted because everyone considered us a weapon because they just lumped everything that’s hunting into weapons. I’ve had calls with Google Ethics and Meta and all this stuff and they’re just like, it’s a slippery slope, we let you go, it lets the door open for other companies and we’re like, I understand. But it also kind of keeps people out of our field too because you can’t just rely on paid ads. And it’s something I’ve never relied on.

21:19
um for building this company. Now it’s just gasoline on top of our organic. Right. Okay, so email lists. uh How did you get people on your list in the beginning? It’s hard to get people on Instagram onto your list, right? It is. It definitely is. I mean, and that’s where like the drop model thing kind of worked was just like, if you want this knife, sign up for an email. Like, simple as that. Like we’ve never done a discount for an email.

21:44
You know, I and I’ve played all those like, you know I’ve done all those different things like, you know build an ebook and you know exchange that for their email and like those things work those things are great but We had a certain type of energy at the beginning of the company where people wanted our knives so bad They are willing to give it their email and text message first time they visit the site to get this knife because they saw him sell out and in the knife industry it was absolutely wild for Someone to do drops without pre-orders

22:14
I mean, we had some of the CEOs of the biggest companies in this industry being like, you guys are crazy. If you just took pre-orders, you can leverage that pre-order database and go get bank notes at a cheaper rate and all this stuff. And we’re like, we’re like, we are not gonna take anyone’s money that we can’t ship the product the next day. And I’m talking since day one, I bet you 99 % of all knives have shipped the next day. And the reason is A, that, but then also two is like,

22:43
we were still learning how to do this manufacturing thing too. So we didn’t want to take someone’s money and promise them like, you’ll have a knife in three months and that batch come in wrong or get lost, you know, in between heat treat and blade grind or like there’s all these like, there’s a bunch of risk involved with that. And we just never wanted to take someone’s money that we couldn’t give them the product the next day. so like I said, there’s a lot of

23:09
We really went a lot against a lot of norms in a very, very old industry. like I said, it just worked out for us. Walk me through, like you said you have a big drop coming. Walk me through the preparation leading up to the drop to make it the most successful drop ever. Yeah. this drop is fun. So this is our Blaze Friday. uh so what Blaze Friday is, like,

23:35
When I’m setting up our marketing plan and everything like this, I obsess about uh repeatable successes. So like that’s why we do a drop every Thursday. And then we actually started adding um in-stock drops on Saturday. So we’re almost doing like a hundred drops a year just for knives. And we’re also dropping a piece of peril every single Tuesday and now Friday. So we’re dropping two pieces of peril a week plus two knife drops. But then.

24:02
to make it different. if you pull back and you look at your full year marketing plan, ah everyone’s so focused on uh quarter four. Everyone’s so focused on Black Friday. I’ve been through like 18 Black Friday cycles for D2C e-comps. I know the playbook, I know what’s going on. I’m just starting to realize, especially with Montana Knife Company, our customers aren’t buying because it’s Black Friday.

24:30
they’re buying because we’re putting all this freaking energy into it. like, you know, like we’re throwing everything at the wall. We’re coming out with new products just for Black Friday. And I’m like, why can’t we do this in quarter three, quarter three, sorry, quarter two, or, you know, or quarter one, like when we’re, you know, traffic’s a little lighter on quarter two. So what we started doing is like doing a Black Friday event every single quarter. So it’s the same playbook as Black Friday, but we’re doing it on August, you know, 14th.

24:58
um And you know in though, you know the two-month lead-up to it just like you would start in October, you know Facebook ads, know emails Captures and then the good thing is too is like we we talked to our customers and we’re like, what do you guys want? They’re like we love the blaze knife So we made that a big event. So all of our knives that dropped tonight are blaze orange. So You know, it’s so when you’re answering that question, like there’s there’s different types of drops we do and The ethos of the company is this just work

25:28
put in more effort than anyone in this industry has ever done before. So when we restock a knife, we actually act like we’re relaunching that as a product launch. Like we go through the whole thing, like a brand would, what most brands put in effort of launching a product, when a knife restocks, that’s how much effort we put into it. And when we launch a new product, we honestly act like we’re almost relaunching our brand from scratch. Like, so it’s just about the effort that’s being put out there because like, again, like,

25:58
you know, only up until about a year, a year and a half ago, we were able to run paid ads. So the excitement had to come from us from the inside of the business. So does this mean that the knives once they sell out, you don’t sell them again, but occasionally you’ll bring them back but then you relaunch them in a drop? Is that how it works? Well, no, not actually. So so this is another thing that is so wild about our company. So opposite of the industry. There’s a lot of other name companies that do drops now. But what they do is they’ll

26:27
come out and they’ll drop like 30 super custom knives that are all different and they’re like, this is the only time you get this. MKC is the complete opposite. You we have our, you know, our 20 different models and we rotate them and they’re always in the same six colors. Like I’m obsessed with like our branding. Like when someone sees our knife hanging on a hunting pack, I want that person to be immediately like, oh, that’s a Montana knife company knife. And you can’t do that with all this like crazy customization. And I think that’s where the knife world

26:57
got a little crazy was just like people were just so obsessed with trying to look like a custom knife company. It would have been easier for us to do that with Josh’s pedigree. Like, he’s designing these custom knives and everything’s different and everyone’s individual. But it’s more of like the Rolex model. It’s like, oh, he has a black foot. That black foot is kind of the equivalent of like the Submariner. Like, oh, he has a stonewall. That’s like a Daytona. And it’s like.

27:23
They don’t change, and there’s slight variations as we grow, but they’re not blatant variations where we’re gonna come out with pink handles or we’re gonna put jade in it or stuff like that. But then when we do do an event like this, Orange Knives, it’s insane because this is the only time you get it. But we only do that four or five times a year. So you have your staples that are always available on your site.

27:52
you do drops every single week and those are variations of those or. So yeah. So I mean like right now we have I think we have like 28 different models. So I mean like if you think about it like you know like we’re just going to make like for example like OK we’re going to chef cleavers this week downstairs. They’re just making as many chef cleavers as we can finish in that week. And that’s all we focus on marketing wise. We sell those those sell out. And then like next week we’re going to focus on

28:21
you know, a large skinning knife for hunting. And those knives just like rotate. it’s like, so there’s no reason to really like do like, like sit down the pipeline, like we’ll probably have to start doing some crazy custom stuff. And like, like you’re seeing Yeti now, like Yeti’s been selling the same cooler for 15 years. And now they have to sell it in like, they like green and they have to sell it in lavender this and match this persona. And they go after, you know, you know, know, Duck Hunters in the South want this camo.

28:50
And like that’s probably like a part of our evolution. But as of right now, it’s just about like my biggest thing is just getting as many new people into our brand as humanly possible just to buy our basic products. So I think I understand now. So you have scarcity because those cleavers that you mentioned, I’ll have to wait for the next cycle of manufacturing to get my hands on those. Right. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So it’s like you’re buying now or, you know, it might be another year.

29:17
It might be six months, it might be three months. Yeah. So you mentioned at the beginning of this interview though that you didn’t, you don’t want to sell out, right? Right. So how do you determine the quantities? I mean, you could just make a lot more and not sell out, right? Or. Yeah. And that’s, well, that’s also the balance. Like, you know, with our, you know, with the current building in right now is around 10,000 square feet. Like there is a manufacturing limit.

29:44
Like there’s an actual limit. So we have to like, what are our drop knives? What are in stock knives? And like, we have to have that balance of, you know, like what knives. Our goal is to make as many knives as we can possibly think and sell, but there is like a give and take that we have to account for. ah And, you know, so like, you know, there’s like five products right now on our website, you know.

30:08
that are in stock, that we’re trying to keep in stock at all times. Those are what we call our annuities, like the Blackfoot, the Speed Goat, the Stonewall, and a couple of our MiniBlades. so our goal was just get as many of those out into the public as possible so that our current funnel is saturated with those knives so that they’re just not selling out. Because if a new customer comes to our website, they have nothing to buy, I have nothing to convert to. So the idea is just like, okay, just…

30:35
almost get these guys sick of hearing about Blackfoot. They’ve had enough and now when a new customer comes in, they’re like, oh, there’s a Blackfoot available, cool, I’m buy that. Or my dad’s birthday’s coming up, I need a gift. Like I said, there’s a lot of things we’re doing that not a lot of companies get the chance to do because A, they’re either omnichannel through wholesale, where like, oh, it’s not on your website, but I can just go to Amazon or I’ll go to Cabela’s or I’ll go to there. So we get to control that narrative a little bit more.

31:05
So you don’t do any wholesale, is that correct? That’s correct. We have a couple stores in very select towns. There’s a small store oh in Jackson Hole right next to the Antler Arch. It’s more about foot traffic advertising than it is needle mover. And it’s literally then less than a half a percent, maybe even less than that, versus our competitors that are 60%, 70 % wholesale.

31:35
Right. So it seems like you are selling at the capacity that you can make these knives right now. So there’s really no reason for you to go wholesale. Is that accurate? Right, right. And the goal down the road is like, we want to be able to that point where we are wholesale. But even if Cabela’s came to us and I mean, we have big box stores knocking our door all the time and say like, hey, we need 60,000 knives for 2027 or 2026. We’re like, like is that worth?

32:04
cutting down on our capacity to D to C to supply wholesale. But we wanna do wholesale down the road because there are people who are not buying online, especially our knives, the older generations and things like that. They wanna see it, they wanna feel it, they wanna buy it from their local shop. We are missing out on that. And we see that and we know that. uh But it’s just something that it’s, we just have to have the responsibility of just understanding that’s an opportunity that’s.

32:33
this is down the road. Sure. You know, what’s funny is I looked on Amazon for Montana knife company right before this interview. A of people search for it. I know on Amazon. But yeah. And so I guess like if you had the capacity, would you guys be on Amazon or is Amazon something that’s not in the cards? No. So Amazon, Amazon’s fun because like I actually hired someone who was on our marketing team was specifically hired for us to onboard on Amazon. And we hired him and we hired him three years ago.

33:04
So we still have it. But he’s also amazing marketer too that helps us with all of our DTC and all that stuff. And then also to our COO, Andrew, we actually poached him from Amazon. So he was in charge of the entire Spokane packaging and shipping fulfillment thing. So we have the full system. We have the dude that knows, because a lot of companies where they fail Amazon is the shipping and the packaging and getting everything right the first time.

33:33
So we have all the right components for it. um We’re just waiting for the right time, you know, in our life cycle to actually onboard that. But it’s something I’m super interested in and like, yeah. So yeah, that makes sense. It’s not really compatible with the drop model, I guess. It would have to be with staples, right? It would be. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of brands that do that where there’s just like their core products are on there that are on their website. And then the idea is kind of get them to bite.

34:03
on that one product, the product is so good, they come back and they want another one, but it’s not on Amazon. So they have to go to their, you know, their, their, homepage. because these knives are, are what I call, I guess, heirloom knives, do people buy a bunch of them? Yeah. So if you said like, that’s the wildest thing is like our return rate is absolutely insane to where it was my, it was actual metric for me to decrease our return rate.

34:33
which is very untypical for a lot of companies, but it was like, do I get new people into our funnel? So we have a lot of people buy them, we have a lot of people to collect them, we have a very, very ravage Facebook group that buys, trades our knives. It’s really cool to watch, and they’re some of the best dudes ever, and we use them, and we’re in that group all the time, Josh and I, and we use that as quality control, we use that as product design. We’re asking them always, hey, what do you guys wanna see next? What do you like?

35:02
Don’t you like, and then like we also. No, we didn’t. Oh, you didn’t. Okay, wow. No, okay. I know. So some other fans created it. um We feed it, you know what I mean? Like we definitely promote it and let people know that it’s there. But you know, it’s up to I think six or 7000, you know, people in there. And it’s like, there’s probably a post every 10 to 15 minutes, which is just crazy to us. It’s so cool. It’s so cool to see.

35:30
Can we talk about your social media efforts? I know you have a YouTube channel. I was watching some videos there. uh Is that a big driver of business or? It absolutely is. Yeah, so our social is, you know, we put out a lot of content. I’m still personally running our Instagram. So I use the Instagram as like, hey, this is the voice, the brand and all this stuff. So what I post on Instagram, like then we’re able to distill that down over the other channels. ah And so, but like our YouTube is a little bit different.

35:58
because like, a, you know, it’s not photo based. Like our Instagram actually has always been really good with photos, not that great with video. Our YouTube is really good with video. And to me, our YouTube channel started as just a part of our big SEO hack, like our big SEO plan of like, how do we just like, we’re looking at all our competitors, they’re kind of sleeping behind the wheel, let’s just like day one was the first contractor ever hired was my buddy Joel from Flux.

36:26
and he set up SEO, I’m talking day one. We were paying this contractor before we were paying ourselves a salary, because I was like, there’s this massive hole that these people are just ignoring because they’re so wholesale focused. I was like, we’re gonna come in and now like Montana Knife Company is ranking better than companies have been around for 100 years. literally 100 year head start and just focusing on the boring thing. through that we were writing weekly blogs about knives and then every blog had a video.

36:56
And that video was the information, it was just like the digested video version of the blog to kind of help with everything that Google’s algorithm likes for SEO. So that’s where the YouTube channel started. It started as extremely informational. And then every once in a while, one of those videos would pop off. How to sharpen a knife correctly, sharpen a knife like a master bladesmith, how to field dress a deer, how to go elk hunting, how to do this. So that’s how it started. And then we started doing the behind the scenes, like the old school Gary V days where it’s like.

37:24
a weekly vlog of like what’s happening downstairs. We have a very, very eclectic group of people downstairs, a lot of personalities, they film really well, they love being on camera, they’re a bunch of goofballs. And like that to me is like, so our weekly vlogs are like our, is that middle funnel, we get you in and then you start watching our vlogs and stuff like that you’re like, oh, these are guys just like me. And that’s the thing about American manufacturing is like, you can go have a beer, you know, with like the guy that sharpens your knife.

37:52
So YouTube, A, has been amazing because A, we finally figured out how to do paid advertising on YouTube. what’s crazy is we’re getting a much greater return because of how good our organic content is. So they’re seeing our ads and our commercials, but they’re staying and subscribing because of our content. So it’s something we’re really proud of. It’s been really working. We only just started putting true focus on it for about the past year, year and a half. And it’s one of our top

38:22
four to five converting things on our exit survey, just YouTube itself. Are you guys doing short form videos also? on TikTok? We are, yeah. And of all those, would you say, like if someone listening to this is trying to prioritize what to do, what would you prioritize? So I get that question all the time. It’s so dependent on a product. Like right now, like, you know, some of my friends have some of these companies that are just crushing on TikTok shop.

38:50
because they have a product that is in that price point that is, that you’re able to go trade, you know, to a, you know, influencer for a commission. Like we don’t have that. Like for us to send a $1,300 chef set is a big gamble. Yeah. So like, so we don’t even have that option. So like, I can’t say like there’s this one specific thing. It’s all based off of a like product fit. And then B is like what you’re good at. Like one of the,

39:18
co-founders of the company was amazing behind the camera. So Instagram was just like natural and know, TikTok was not, cause it’s like turning the camera around and at that time it was just dances and like all that stuff. so what I would always, what I always advise people is like, whatever your strongest suit is that you’re able to do every day. Like if, if it was like that, that’s why we have no Twitter. Like I’m horrible at writing. I’m horrible at copywriting. Like I don’t want to, you know, like, our Twitter has been ignored for the past like five years.

39:48
It’s just because it’s like we don’t have someone who has that, you know, that verbatim flow just to sit there and tweet all day. Yeah. Actually walk me through your posting schedule. So Instagram you post every single day and like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I’ve posted every single day for the past five years. I have not missed a single day uh of posting on Instagram. uh

40:14
And most days we post two or three times depending on the content that we have or what type of drop it is and things like that. So like that’s the nice thing now is like the new algorithms, you it’s so favorable to just getting as much content as possible before, you know, they use almost like, um like hurt you, it almost used to hurt you to post twice a day because you know, like it just had to sit in the feed and finally get seen. Now it’s, you know, fed to new people. yeah. And you’re in there answering comments and everything on the Instagram as well.

40:43
I do a little of that, it got to a point where we actually had to hire someone. So we have someone that handles comments and our DMs, just to make sure that we’re… Because there’s a lot of really big names that slide into our DMs and stuff like that, so we want to make sure they’re getting addressed as fast as possible. And then even more importantly, our customers are using that as a form of customer service. And then our DMs, our comments are very important because we want to respond to every single one.

41:10
And then are you guys still blogging given the changes with AI and like the Google search landscape? Yeah, this is the this is the I cannot take any credit is just pure luck. But like, yeah, we’re still doing one to two blogs every single week. We’re doubling down on it. We’re actually creating video series that we turn into blogs. Now, here’s the wild thing that we did not see coming in 2020 when we when we set up this SEO program to like break down everything about

41:40
every knife, every steel, every blade grind, every handle, every, you know, cause like when you, you know, when you do the SEO thing, you do the spoken hub thing and it’s just, eh so over the past five years, you know, we have, you know, blog a week, you know, so, you know, and we’re using gorgeous AI and we had five years of training. We dumped that into our AI agent and it knows our company better than anyone else. Like,

42:05
That’s the thing. That’s that’s like I said, there’s so many things that just worked out for us that like so like so we’re definitely not slowing down because like because like and then you know, then we obviously index it with all the you know, the the chat GPTs and grunks and stuff like that. So and they’re pulling information from our website as a trusted voice. OK, I think this like answered all my questions because I was originally I was like, OK, well, you guys are probably significantly more expensive than like a Chinese competitor.

42:33
But it sounds like you’ve created this community and this cult following for your knives back by Josh’s background and you’re just killing it on the social and community front. Yeah. And the biggest thing is we just show up every day. If I had to give any advice to any marketers, it’s just like, the only thing that’s gonna beat AI and really good paid ads is you being excited about your brand yourself. I can’t tell you how many marketers I talk to who just

43:03
don’t care about their company, they care about their bonus at the end of the quarter. Like I care more, like this is our lifestyle. This is the company we’re growing. We’re trying to grow it every day. Like we’re taking pictures of our new building, get built. Like if you’re not excited about your company, why would your customers be excited? Like that’s like, I think that’s the hack in 2025 and six and seven is just the human element of this whole thing.

43:28
I mean, you guys are doing everything right, documenting everything, putting out tons of content. mean, I think that’s the way to go. I mean, that’s how to get indexed. And that builds the personality for you guys. mean, content is like the backbone of what you guys do, right? I mean, the drops are cool too. I mean, what I like about the drops is you have scarcity, like every single day. It’s every other day, it seems, right? Yeah. So what’s it look like going forward? It seems like you guys are building a new facility or something, right?

43:57
Right, right. So, I mean, you know, the building that we built now is still on Josh’s property. It’s literally right next door to the two-car garage that we started on. And the goal for this was like, this building was supposed to keep us like in motion for about five years was our plan. Ten months into us moving into here, we started the building of the other one. So it didn’t last us that long with our growth. our next facility is, you know, 51,000 square feet.

44:23
It’s gonna have full retail store. We’re gonna have a Black Rifle coffee in the building itself. So it’s gonna be a destination right here in Montana. It’s right off of Highway 90. And um then like I said, the goal is to be 100 % self-sufficient in our manufacturing, even all the processes that we would use to have to outsource heat treat. Almost every, I I can only say this, every knife company right now is…

44:49
outsourcing, heat treating, and bevel grind, and all these things to people who just do all the knives. So now it’s like our goal is like, okay, let’s roll the dice and start bringing all that stuff in house and just be 100 % self-sufficient. um So we’re self-sufficient on our marketing, the DTC, our massive email list, text message list, and then we’re self-sufficient on our own product and being able to make it and things like that. I love it, man. Especially with all these tariffs going on, you guys are well positioned for everything.

45:18
And I love how you’re self-sufficient. You’re not really depending on anyone. And so you’re in full control of your own destiny. So Brandon, uh thank you so much for coming on the show. Like if people are interested in your knives and just checking out some of your content, where should they go? Yes, just Montana Knife Company. You can Google it MKC, Google and just Montana Knife Company. uh Check those out. Follow us on Instagram, DM us, pop in the comments if you heard it from this podcast.

45:48
We’re extremely accessible. can literally DM Josh anytime. can DM me anytime. uh That’s our goal is like, we wanna take this back to the older times where like, you used to know the person who owned the business and it’s uh just not a boardroom looking for bigger profits. it’s us and I think that’s what people like following us is like, we’re figuring this out. We make mistakes. We’re very transparent about it, but we also have a lot of wins.

46:17
Dude, I love it, man. Thank you so much, friend. I’m so glad that Kurt introduced this. Yeah, absolutely, Steve. This has been great. Hope you enjoyed this episode. The way Montana Knife Company markets their products is pretty cool. Go check out their website and sign up for their email list. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherejob.com slash 615. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

46:44
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 SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife QuitHerJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, Tony and I share what we learned at E-commerce Fuel Live in Bozeman, Montana. Now, it is rare for Tony and I to be in the same room together and we both took great notes. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at.

00:26
Unlike most ecommerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches, people who are running their own ecommerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I personally hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate.

00:51
We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, And if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be. So if you want in, go over to SellersSummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:27
to a special edition of the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Tony and are together in Bozeman, Montana of all places. And we’re here for ECF. So what I thought we would do today is do a little bit of a breakdown on what we’ve learned. I’ve learned quite a bit. We both went to separate sessions. So we’re going to do a little recap here. I’m a little like my knowledge is like, I feel like I need like three day vacation after this to process everything that I’ve learned this week.

01:56
I know that I have a bunch of action items that I need to do when I get back. I think mine, I have two massive takeaways. Really? Like two? No, but like two that are like the ones that… Because I think one of the things when you go to an event, you are hit with so much information and you’re meeting people… Like I literally had a conversation in the parking lot on the way up here to record, right, with our friend Alan. And it’s like, how do you decide what is the priority, what you need to start now, what you need to like…

02:25
put on a shelf for later. So for me, there were two things that I felt like these are things that I need to start doing today. Okay. We’ll go into number one. Yeah. Well, yeah, you only have two. Well, like two for today, right? Two that it’s like next week, these two things need to be on my list to start working on. So the first one is the automations, AI automations. Like I went to Kevin’s talk, I think that was yesterday. Right. And then I went to another one this morning that was way over my

02:55
You would have liked it. Zach Plansky’s? Way more technical and basically talking about building your own apps for Shopify, like for internal use, right? Right. But I just realized there’s so many little processes in business every day that you do that could be automated. And I know you’re really good at this, but I think now with all the AI tools and yesterday, um I think they were using N8n for theirs. I have a little bit experience with make. so that’s probably the same thing. Right.

03:22
Yeah, so I’ll probably I think that’s one of those things they said yesterday like use what you already are using don’t like switch because we’re using something else but to me I started thinking about everything that I do that like is a like I uh Repetitive and I was like those things need to be automated like tomorrow, right? So and just watching and like Kevin did a live demo where he showed how to actually take something I think it was from a Google spreadsheet and you know kind of automated and it was actually an automation to slack

03:50
Which I thought was pretty cool, right? So like when certain things happen, then there’s a Slack notification that goes out. So that was my first one where it’s like I need to start evaluating tasks. And if it’s a task that is repetitive and done over and over, like it needs to be automated because someone shouldn’t be in there doing it every single, multiple times a day. So tell me then which tasks are on your radar first. So the first task that came to mind, which I think is if you’re in e-commerce, this is a big one, um is when we get an order over a certain dollar amount.

04:20
Like I feel like, especially because we sell low value products, they’re high value, but like low price products. Your average value, I think, is higher than ours, right? Yeah, actually probably. But like our product costs, like we’re selling items for $10 and $15. So if someone comes in and spends $800, they are probably a group or a church or a co-op.

04:39
So we want to have a personal relationship with them just like you do with wedding planners. And so they need a phone call or a personal outreach email. They need to get in the Klaviyo automation, but they don’t need just a series of emails from Klaviyo talking about our other products. um So you can create an automation where when an order is over x amount of dollars, whoever your customer service person is or the person who manages those relationships, they get a notification in Slack. What’s been happening to this day is

05:09
I look at our sales, when I see like an abnormal shift in the numbers, I look through the orders, I see the order that’s, you know, $1,000, I point at it on my computer screen, I take a photo and I upload that photo to Slack.

05:24
Not efficient. Yeah, I mean, we were doing it the same way. I mean, this is a recent automation that I made that scanned through all of my orders ever created. Yeah. And then it gives a probability, whether it’s a wedding or an event planner on a scale of zero to 100. And it’s all in this database. I wish I could have showed it to you. don’t have my laptop handy. But yeah, I went through my entire database. And what’s cool is we do personalization, right? So depending on the personalization, let’s say someone just ordered like three handkerchiefs.

05:52
that might not be enough to trigger an event planner. But if that person has made several orders, but with different names and different dates, chances are they’re a wedding planner. So Chachu BT actually takes all that into account. So that was my first, because that’s the one that I feel like is the most ridiculous of like times. Like that’s not a good process, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, Everyone looking at my bad nail job is not like… What are you talking about? Look at these suckers. look how good those look though. And then the other one that I thought was…

06:22
something that I’m pretty sure can be done, because a lot of people are already doing this, is basically doing some inventory forecasting. ah And that’s a little more common. The first one is like, I think I could set that up in a couple of hours. The next one, I also feel like I could set up, but it would definitely take more knowledge and I’d have to get a little more in the weeds. But I think a lot of people that I’ve talked to here and in the sessions are doing successful inventory forecasting with AI and automations. And it’s a matter of like,

06:51
you know, taking the time to build that, but that’s one of the things that we really struggle with. So it’s like, that’s a huge pain point that I think we could maybe not solve 100%, but we would definitely get further along than we are today. Yeah, I was just thinking about this because you brought this up to me earlier. I think a lot of those inventory forecasting SaaS software, I mean, it’s really easy to just pipe in all of your orders into AI and have it tell you. Yes. And then you could guide it along.

07:20
I know a lot of the inventory software is incorporating that in, but you’ll be able to do it. I’m not calling out anybody on this, but those are really expensive tools. They are. I mean, to the tune of thousands of dollars a month sometimes. And also, a lot of them provide so many features that you don’t actually use in your business. Most people, unless you’re a trained person on that tool, you’re probably using 10 % of what that tool can do.

07:47
So it’s like, then why don’t we just take the 10 % and just get the information we need for free or for $20 a month, right? Or whatever the cost of the AI tool, which is usually pretty inexpensive. So anyway, that to me is like one of the bigger, like that’s a bigger project, but also one that I feel like can be solved pretty easily. Like… It can, yeah. Once you have it set up, it’ll be all good. Then you can query it and whatnot. And for those of you guys listening, we were talking about N8n and Make.

08:15
Those are two programs that allow you to just connect all different softwares together, like Shopify to AI or ChachiBT, Claude, whatever. And uh the trade-off here is NAN is free if you install it your own server, is something I love. I love free. And then Make costs money, but Make is actually pretty inexpensive. I think what Kevin recommended is as soon as you exceed 10,000 operations a month, then it makes sense to go to NAN.

08:41
Otherwise, you can stick with make.com. But Zapier is just ridiculously expensive. Like I moved off of Zapier a long, long time ago. Yeah. Well, and you said the words install on your own server. So that was like immediately 50 % But it’s literally one click. Is it? Yeah. OK. There’s like an option to click on most servers. So yeah, that’s exciting. So are you going to take over that as part of your organization? I feel like I will. There’s nobody else that knows how to do it in the organization. it’s a useful skill. Yeah. For sure.

09:10
It’s one of those things where I feel like back in the old days of blogging when something came out and you were really excited about, that’s how I feel about this. I went to that other session today which was much more advanced. Going to it thinking I’m never going to build a SaaS product, but I want to be educated about how it works and the tools and things like that. I was just talking to Alan about Reclit. Reclit. Reclit, yeah.

09:39
Sorry, it’s written down. I have it on my phone. um But I really want to dig into some of those tools and just feel like, understand how they work and how we can use them and how I can use them in other things, right? Like I feel like they translate throughout businesses. It’s not just specific to e-commerce. Well, you know, NNN and make.com is a gateway drug to… I know. So before you know it, you’ll probably become a developer.

10:05
Well, was interesting. can’t make fun of you anymore. know. you can’t make fun of me. What was interesting is in the higher, you know, more complicated session, there were several developers. Oh, nice. And like our friend Carson was in there. Oh, yeah, of course. And of course, as the guy’s talking and presenting, I want to see what he’s… I want to see his response because I often feel like with AI in general, that people get very sensitive or protective of like their job as if like…

10:33
Well, if we can code everything with AI, then we don’t need Carson anymore, right? You still need Carson. Yes, you still need Carson. You still need Carson. So I always like to see those reactions like, he in agreement? And like he was nodding through most of the stuff that was said and the guy that was presenting even said, have two developers in Latin America that basically, but they don’t ever, they don’t code anymore. They’re just instructing, right? Yeah, Carson doesn’t get his hands dirty. I don’t No, not anymore.

11:03
Which leads me to the next takeaway that I had was like hire a developer in Latin America. um That seemed to be a lot of people that I spoke to after that talk were like, I need to look into this, right? Because he said he was paying, I want to say like 30,000 a year, 40,000 a year for a Latin American developer and was very, very happy with like the results, the quality, you know, all that stuff, which to me, I mean, I know a US developer is significantly more expensive. So here’s actually a shocker. uh

11:31
You know our friend Jeff Oxford. His whole team, had like I think over 100 people. It’s all gone now. moved to Kenya. what’s going on right now is the Philippines is just popular, right? Everyone here has employees in the Philippines. We have employees in the Philippines. So now it’s gotten to the point where a worker there, they don’t care if they lose their job because there’s so much demand, they’ll just get another one. Whereas people in Kenya are…

12:01
hungry, they speak English and they’re very, uh you know, they really want to do a good job. who knows, maybe that’s the next spot. Like I’m going to get in touch with, I think Katrina has connections over there and I’ll see if, you know, I look at Kenya for my next hire. Yeah, that’s, that’s, I didn’t know that. That’s really interesting. I mean, not a single person left on his Philippines team.

12:26
Wow. It was just crazy. It was interesting because we were all three talking and then as I was walking away, you said something, he’s like, I don’t have anybody in the Philippines. And I wanted to like turn back around but I was trying to get… But it was already past nine o’clock and you had to go back. It was 8.59 and I was like, I turned into a pumpkin. But no, I was really interested. I wanted to find him tonight and ask him about that because I was curious as to why. But that makes a lot of sense. Although I feel like on the Latin American thing, we also heard from, I think it was Lisa who has the 50 flowers.

12:55
Oh yeah, yeah. And she has her business in Ecuador and she’s telling how horrible it was to have a business in Ecuador because of all the labor laws. Yes. Right? So I’m always fascinated by… I always learn these types of things at ECF, right? The labor laws in some of these countries are ridiculous. I think what she was saying is once someone works for you for a certain amount of time, they’re on your payroll forever. You’re not allowed to fire them. Yes. Yes. So it’s like the government of old. The government of old.

13:24
Anyway, I always feel like there’s like these little tidbits of information that we get here. So I want to know one of your takeaways, other than Kenya. That sounds like a pretty good one actually. got a little thing here. Okay, all right. So this is something that I had been making a mistake on without even realizing it. So I went to a Facebook ad section run by Andrew. And Facebook ads like changes like every three to six months I feel dramatically. uh one thing that I was doing

13:51
just out of laziness and also because I heard from other people broadcasting this was I would take an ad and I would just change up the hook or the headline and just publish it. now uh it turns out Facebook looks to see if the ad is similar to something you’re already running and if you are, it instantly just nerfs the reach. It basically picks one and then just runs that. oh

14:20
I think the guideline that he gave was it has to be 70 % different. But what a lot of people were doing is as soon as you find a video that works and you know it works, you just change up the hook and then mass-reduce it. That is not an effective tactic anymore. those days are over. I mean those days are over. Here’s the other thing I was stressing. So I gave a lecture at Seller Summit, was that last year or two years ago? want to say it was two years Two years ago because Kelly Dream picked it all up.

14:48
Yeah, so ah the way I was teaching it, literally two months after I gave that presentation, it changed. ah Anyway, what Andrew was saying is the way I used to teach before is you test a bunch of creatives and then you can see which ones work and then you put more ad spend on this. Well, now his philosophy is the message is everything. Interesting. And the way he runs his ads, he doesn’t actually care which ones perform of the individual creatives because it’s all about the message.

15:18
each one of his ads where he puts like 10 or more ads in there because Facebook wants you to put more creatives and have less ad sets. um anything with the same message is within the same ad and then it doesn’t matter which one is working, you’re testing based on the message and not the actual creative anymore. Because he showed examples of like really horrible ads that like when you look at it, it looks horrible.

15:43
But then when he ran them, it did really well because of the message. So when you replicated that message across different creatives, they all still work. Interesting. That feels like a big change. The other change also, which I was surprised, is he’s kind of waffling now on… know, before his philosophy was just create as many creatives as possible. But he kind of backtracked on that now. He said, doesn’t need to be that way anymore. You don’t need to pump out as many creatives.

16:12
You just need to find the messaging that works and then just make variations on that. And with AI, it’s so simple. Like just changing the image on a different background with the same message is good enough. Which we learned today and Reto’s talk is very easy. We can talk about Reto’s talk next. ah I got a lot out of it because uh I had played around with those apps, but I didn’t.

16:34
Sometimes it’s hard, like you know you can do something, but you don’t realize the applications of something until you see someone just spell it out, like this is how I’m using it for one. And so one thing that I picked up is she was creating all these little apps that did all these things to your image, and these are all things that I was doing in Photoshop mainly after the fact. So just to be clear for everyone listening, she gave a really good talk on all the different AI tools.

17:01
and how she was focusing on Nano Banana, which is Google’s latest. And within AI Studio, you can create little programs. for example, you can uh write a program that says, I want to remove the background for this image, which is a function that all tools have already. it literally will modify, it create code for you on the fly. And you can modify it to do whatever you want.

17:27
You can say remove the background and then remove the watermark also, something like that. Or the other thing, I like the example where she’s like, crop it, but then expand it and then blur it. It was like all these different things. And then remove it, remove the one image off because of the layering. So the one thing I loved about that talk was that she basically gave us all the cheat codes for the terminology.

17:53
Because if you’re not a creative and you’re not a graphic designer, I think one of the reasons why people think it doesn’t work well with images is because they’re not giving it the right prompts. They’re not creating the correct, they’re not describing it right. And so she basically gave us the cheat code for a lot of different things. um I was, every year when people give the AI talk, wherever we’re at, I always am impressed with how much better it is. The stuff that she was showing us today.

18:21
was ridiculous. It used to be like you and I would be like, that’s AI, right? And it was very obvious. There are stuff that she showed today that I don’t think we would know. I mean, here’s the takeaway for everyone listening. If you can’t get AI to work, chances are it’s your fault. You’re not describing something very well. I think of like, so I run a class and sometimes someone will email me and say, hey, I tried this, it didn’t work. And that’s it, right?

18:51
And like if I was the AI, I would have no idea how to answer. And so I usually, you know, ask more specific questions. Well, the AI is not going to ask you those specific questions unless you ask it to. And so the more descriptive you are, and it actually boosts like human skill sets, the better you can explain exactly what you want, the better your results will be. And that’s why Ritu’s framework was excellent because she outlined, if you want to create an image, for example, what you should put in your prompt to get exactly what you want.

19:20
Yeah. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free.

19:47
and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. 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. One of the exciting things about her talk for me, like practical application, and this is like actually my second takeaway, is that um when you sell products, right, you get your product photos. And those are pretty specific, especially if you sell on Amazon, they have to be a certain way.

20:15
And you obviously want to present things in a certain way in your listings, but you also want those lifestyle images to use sometimes on your listings, but also on social media, any other place that you’re using it. And the lifestyle images are really hard to come by, right? Because you can hire any photographer or even yourself can like take product photos with the right lights and white background and all that stuff. But like um if you sell, I don’t know, tactical gear and you’re not tactical, right?

20:43
It’s really like, if you don’t live here in Montana where you’ve got a mountain in the background that you could use, right? You’re like, how am gonna get this the right background type of thing? Or if you sell a kid’s product and you don’t have kids to put in the photo. um And so one of the things that we had talked about with the store for the curriculum was, should we make like Christmas type themed photos for the holidays? And basically we had to veto it because it’s like, we don’t have the bandwidth. It’s gonna cost so much money to do like Christmas photo shoots, right?

21:11
And after watching that today, I was like, we can put everything on a Christmas background, right? Not everything, but like the lifestyle photos just got so much easier, right? I don’t think we need to be investing a lot of money into having a photographer do this. I think if we have great photo, product photos, which we do, it wouldn’t be hard to create some lifestyle photos from what we already have.

21:34
including like Christmas or anything, right? It could be for your store, right? You could do 4th of July or you could do, you know, New Year, whatever it is. um I think creating those backgrounds where you’re not actually shooting them and they actually look real. They don’t look like you went into Canva and put in some clip art like what it used to look like. I don’t know. That to me was like, this is a huge money saver. But also it didn’t, I mean, obviously she’s got so much experience and she was like whipping through things, but I feel like once you do it a little bit,

22:02
you get pretty fast at it as well. forgot, I’m drawing a blank now on the site that she told us. Something with a llama. Do you remember what I’m talking about? I think I took a photo of it. Let me check. Okay, so there’s this site, Something Llama, but it’s basically a llama on a whole bunch of different backgrounds and whatnot. And what you can do is you can get the prompts for those llamas, replace the llama with your product and whatnot, and it puts it on all these different backgrounds. One of them, the examples that she gave was a Christmas theme, right? Yes, prompt llama. So prompt llama.

22:32
promptlama.com. So instead of the llama being there, you say, put a wedding handkerchief in a Christmas theme. It wouldn’t be a wedding handkerchief. It be one of our Christmas handkerchiefs in a Christmas theme. It could be. You could get married to Christmas. That’s fine. Yeah, exactly. And so that was really helpful in case you love one of those backgrounds already and you have to think about the prompt. Yeah. So that was to me really… And I liked the Google Studio, which the other part about that that I thought was really great was that you can share it across your Google.

23:01
So if you’re using Google for your workspace, it works exactly the same way. So if you have a Google Drive folder, like that’s what we use, we use Google Drive for everything, um then it works the exact same way. So one of the things I think gets tricky is, especially if you do have a lot of employees or contractors and you’re trying to introduce a new thing, if it’s too many new things at once for people, sometimes they can’t, so even the login becomes a problem, right? So this has just felt more seamless for people that are already using that.

23:30
So let just reiterate how cool this is. So you can essentially write your own version of Photoshop in Google AI Studio. So if you have a very specific way to process your images or whatnot, it literally writes the code and you have your own private little Adobe Photoshop that does whatever you want. And I was thinking to myself when I was watching her talk, Adobe Photoshop is, I think it’s pretty much done. Because I’m already using Nano Banana more than I am Photoshop. So like the other day,

23:59
I was sending out an email for some promotion and I was feeling lazy. So I took one of my old creators from an old email and I just plugged it in a nano band and said, can you just change the year of this to 2025? And then I sent it out. In Photoshop, because I didn’t have like the PSD file anymore, I just had the JPEG, I would have to erase it and then find, you know, it would have taken forever. Well, not forever, but… But I mean, think about it. If you’re doing that 10 times a week and you’re saving…

24:29
10 minutes. I mean, it adds up over time and in continuing to find other processes like that. ah And I also think, and this is where it gets tricky, right? Because I feel like maybe you don’t need the same amount of design team, right? Or maybe you don’t need, like we use illustrators. So you’re able to be more efficient and you’re using them now as more directors as opposed to like the creator part. Like they’re telling.

24:58
AI what to do, but they’re not spending two hours creating an image. um So I think there’s a lot of use in that. Well, what blew my mind also was uh I just got out of the Facebook talk when we went to the AI talk, and one thing that’s been a struggle for us is getting videos done, right? And so Reto had this flow where you generate the image of a person holding something, and then you replace that something with your product, and then you put it into Kling or Sora, and then you animate that.

25:28
So you can have like a supermodel modeling handkerchiefs or something like that in a video. he’s taking a whole new turn. Right. And I guess the next step for that might be to put words in that model’s mouth. I don’t know if I’m going to go there yet, but one thing that one of my buddies was advising that I do is take a lot of these mini movements of people holding your product and just put them in a montage because it really catches the eye because there’s slight motion and then pump out a bunch of ads that way.

25:59
Well, you showed me a model that was talking a while back. Yes. And it looked really good. Yeah. I can’t remember what I used that for. I think I used that for one of the Facebook ads creatives. The other thing that she mentioned is that I can’t now I’m to have to play on the Sora 2. Sora 2, it’s not out yet. Yes, it’s in. You have to have an invite. She’s like, she hadn’t gotten an invite yet. surprised she hasn’t gotten an I was too actually. who she is. I was like, if you’re not getting an invite, I’m never getting an invite.

26:26
I think that’s another thing to think about is every single, I mean almost every day, right? Stuff’s getting better, things are changing, they’re coming out with new levels of products and I don’t know, it’s almost like it just feels like too much sometimes, right? It just feels like everything’s just rushing by because everything’s changing so quickly. I mean the list of AI tools that she gave was ridiculous. I want to say there were 15 things on there. Just for creatives.

26:52
Just for creatives, I think for me, like the stack is Nano Banana, Kling, and then Sora. I just canceled my Mid Journey membership. Well, she mentioned Mid Journey today too. She did, but it’s like behind now. And they just take turns leapfrogging each other. So you basically have to just check back like every month or whatever. So, and speaking of that, were you in this conversation, I think you weren’t here this morning. We were talking about Claude versus Chat versus Gemini and who’s going to win.

27:21
There are no winners. They’re just going to keep leapfrogging each other. I’ll tell you my favorites, but go No, tell me what. Who do you think is going to win? So Lars had an opinion on who would win. I mean, there’s no winner because they’re all good at different things, right? And we’re all winners. No, we’re Gen Xers. Everyone’s not a winner. Here’s what I was shocked at. I was shocked by how many people use Gemini. Here? Yes. Because I don’t know anybody in my other life. Gemini has not been on my list, but…

27:50
Someone told me that Gemini, the coding is amazing. And I’ve been getting frustrated with ChatGPT. I don’t know if you noticed this too, but as soon as it got upgraded to five, it got a hell of a lot slower. So not only does it think slower, but it also writes text a lot slower. Yes, definitely seen that. To the point where I feel like I can type faster than what ChatGPT is outputting. So I’ve gotten really frustrated with that. But you’re still being nice to it, right?

28:16
I’m not nice to ChachiPT anymore. See, that’s why mine’s faster probably because I’m like, thank you so much ChachiPT. So Gemini is lightning fast because I think Google prides itself on speed. And then Claude is very fast. I use Claude for creative writing. I’m back on the Claude van Wagen for creative writing. It is so much better than ChachiPT now, again. Whereas ChachiPT in the last iteration caught up, I felt, but then Claude released another one. Anyway, this constantly happens. m

28:43
Gemini, I think Google’s making huge strides in just video and, not audio, video and image generation. Lars is betting on Gemini. He feels like Google has the most to lose by not winning, basically, is his philosophy, in a very, very small nutshell. He’s probably rolling his eyes me right now. I Google has all the data. It’s got the distribution. But then again, OpenAI has Microsoft, right? Which Microsoft has huge distribution. Everyone’s on Windows for the most part.

29:12
But I was amazed at the amount of people I’ve talked to in the last two days that use Gemini. Because I don’t normally…I mean, we don’t really use it. know, but I’m going to jump on the…I mean, I have used it. I’m going to jump back on the bandwagon for Gemini. I’m going to try it. I mean, like, why not? And I know Gemini is so much faster. You know, here’s the other reason why I didn’t use Gemini in the beginning. It’s because I was using AI to generate blog posts. And I was thinking to myself, huh, if I’m using Gemini to generate the blog post, won’t Google know that it was AI generated because I use Gemini?

29:42
And so that’s why I was using ChatGPT for a while. yeah, ChatGPT, guess, is just the general purpose. I don’t like the image generation because it just takes forever. Yeah, I never use it for image. I can’t stand it. The speed really matters. Well, and here’s the problem too. If you ask chat to create an image, it takes five minutes. Yes. And then if it’s not right, you’re like, I don’t want to iterate. It’s going to take me two hours to get, you know.

30:09
And obviously, I laugh at ourselves for being irritated that we’re mad at a computer for creating an image out of Milly. It’s like, you’re too slow. But yeah, we’ve gotten used to a certain standard. Well, I know Google Nano to Banner, you’ll get something in five seconds. When Ritu was doing live demos. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, in five seconds.

30:32
I don’t know if I have anything else to say about AI except I just gotta go home and start playing with this stuff. want like a month to just do nothing but AI. That’s like my dream right now. You’re not gonna be able to do that. No, I’m not. You have like fires every day. I know. That’s why it’s a dream. It’s not a reality. I have more time. That’s why he’ll always be better than me in AI. But I will tell you one little nugget I got from Ezra. So our friend Ezra Firestone spoke yesterday. um

30:59
The one thing, and I’ve heard him say this over the summer because I saw him at the Barcelona event, but he talked about building wealth. And the one thing that he said was, one of the best ways to build wealth is through building businesses and then selling them. And that just kind of stuck with me because I was like, you’re right. You have to grow something and sell it, and then you take that money and you invest. m

31:23
And I was like, you know, that’s really true. And he’s trying to build, I feel like, a very large He wants 100 million. Yeah. I have no- Yeah. I’m fine with 10. But I started thinking about that. was like, you know you’re right. And we know a lot of people who have built their wealth that way, right? Owning businesses, selling them, investing. And sometimes they go and do it over and over again, like our friend Dana, right? She’s done that multiple times. And sometimes you only need to do it once or twice.

31:52
But I was like, you know, that’s really true. you’re never… I somewhat disagree with that. Really? you like to the stock market. Well, no, no, no, no. The mentality of a lot of people here is you just got to go pedal the metal, uh you know, just build up that revenue and then go for the sale. Like the exit is the final destination, right? But like let’s say you’re making a decent amount of money every year, why not just milk it? Right? Yes, yes. I agree with that. And then just keep making money and don’t stress yourself out by like…

32:22
scaling like 10x every year or whatever it is, right? Yes. I wasn’t looking at it that way, but I can see. I was thinking like you build your business to whatever point. I mean, think Dana is a perfect example of this, right? Sure. Yeah. She said, like to sell at this point. She doesn’t want to build a $20 million business to sell. She wants to build a $3 million business or $5 million business But let’s say you get to $5 million and you’re netting a million dollars a year. Why not just chill and pocket that a million? I mean, it’s hard to spend a million dollars a year. Yeah.

32:52
I mean, couldn’t, I can’t, because I don’t even know what I would buy. No, I guess I’d, I guess if you buy real estate or cars, but that’s not, I don’t know. We’re not car people. Yeah, and you travel, there’s no way you can spend a million dollars traveling. Plus it’s not fun if you’re not doing it on points. It’s only fun if it’s a game. So that’s where I differ. I think the mentality here is like scale quickly, scale, scale, scale, scale, and then like the…

33:16
The goal is the sale and that’s the finality of I was kind of looking at it more in the Dana way of like slow and steady. Sure. Just repeated like build, sell, build, like not this. And we do know a lot of people who just grow, grow, grow. And that’s not that, I mean, to me those people always seem burnt out. So that always leads to depression. Actually, so one of the themes of ECF actually… Was depression. Was depression because, you know, the tariffs, a lot of people are having a hard time, it seems, uh you know.

33:43
And so what Andrew did is he had a lot of people tell stories of their lows. And there’s a lot of those stories and I felt like most of them that presented, they had their lows because they scaled too quickly. They get in over their heads. Right. A good friend, I think he spent like $5 million of his own money into his business because he took out this big loan.

34:11
where he was the personal, he had to pick, he was responsible for it, His personal guarantee. Yeah, that’s what I was looking for, personal guarantee. I would never in a million years do that. I know, I was thinking that. Right? Yeah, and we know other people who’ve leveraged their homes, and I’m like, no thank you.

34:32
I don’t know. Because Tal’s goal was to create a hundred million dollar company. Because he had had a bunch of good success with smaller businesses, like seven and a figure business, and he wanted the big one. And so I’m actually an investor in his company and he did a Were you at the revelation? Actually, what’s funny, and Tal, I don’t know if you listen to this podcast, but he gives out quarterly reports and then he goes up and he’s like, oh yeah, we were like two weeks away from going back home. like, what?

35:01
That was not in the quarterly report, Yeah, that was the… I don’t want to invite that kind of stress into my life. Oh yeah, definitely not. Definitely not. For sure. So that’s why I always say, you know, sure, the sale is good, but I mean, if the thing is milk and money, and there’s several people at ECF who I’ve talked to, they generate like five million revenue and they take home like a million or two million. That’s great. Yeah.

35:29
I mean, as long you can keep that up, why not just milk that money and pocket it? Well, it reminds me, uh many, many years ago, you and I had dinner with a native deodorant guy. I can’t think of his name. Moist. Yes. And he had given a talk about basically growing and selling. Right. And when he talked about those couple of years to the sale, he was miserable. Yes.

35:53
And like the whole time I’m like, who would ever want to do like to me it was like, this is a deterrent. any of them didn’t give me any sort of goal to try to do this. But it feels like everybody that we meet and talk to that has a similar path. It’s like, it’s like, is it worth being that miserable for however long and the risk and the stress on your body and your life and your relationships, right? And a lot of these people went through like divorce and you know, all these different things.

36:19
And it’s like, yes, at the end of the day, you had to exit, and that’s fantastic, but I don’t know if it’s worth it. There was a speaker who uh took out a whole bunch of loans to import masks during the pandemic. Yes. I can’t remember who it is at this point, but then all of sudden, there was plenty of masks. So he was stuck with all these containers. It was very stressful because he had all this inventory that he couldn’t liquidate. So again. uh

36:48
You know the big winners, they do take those big bets. It’s just not my personality. I don’t need to take those big bets. I don’t spend that much money. I’m very happy what I’m earning right now. We don’t need a yacht. We need a with a yacht. I don’t need a private jet. I just need a friend with a private We need to make better friends. That’s our problem. You know it’s funny because someone has asked me, hey, why don’t you buy properties in your favorite vacation spots or whatever.

37:15
I don’t want to take care of a property. I’d rather just go there and rent something for the period that I’m there. not worry about it for the rest And not worry about like the water main breaking or something like that. Well, the guy who closed us out, I’m completely… I can’t remember his name, but he was a good speaker. We can look it up. Hold on. um You talk while I look it up. What did he talk about? He’s a Portland Leather… Okay, hold on. I have some notes here. Okay. Yeah, so was a guy. runs Portland Leather. Curtis.

37:42
Curtis, I believe he is the largest seller of leather bags ah in the United States or something like that. He’s based in Mexico. And once again, he had a crazy story too. He was down to his last $100. I’m not sure how he got the last $100 to his company. Did uh he gloss over that part?

38:01
No, remember he got like sent out on the streets and they literally pulled him into a detox center. Yes. And then when he got out of the detox center is when he realized that he might need to make some changes when he was living out of his car. um But the one thing that he was talking about that I thought was really like a really good takeaway is that to move from like the five…if you want to move from five million to 10 million, right? You have to do something different. You can’t continue…

38:28
on the same path that you’ve been on. And I see so many people on the same path. he was like, someone who was a great marketer, this what I was really interesting, someone who’s a great marketer in 2017 is not a great marketer today if they’re still doing the same things from 2017. And I was like, you know, that’s so true. I see that with a lot of people. not to criticize anybody in your mastermind group or bloggers we know, but the people that didn’t pivot when things started changing.

38:59
Most of the bloggers that I knew in 2013 are not bloggers anymore, which is… Sometimes they just went on to bigger, better things and that’s great. To be fair, they were milking tons of money for decades. Yes, they had it good for a long time. But I do think that’s true. If you’re not willing to make changes and pivots and do try new things, and I think that seemed like one of things he was really good at is taking…

39:26
They didn’t seem like crazy risks, like doing things like he said he left. of them was pretty crazy, I thought. The warehouse? I thought the warehouse was kind of crazy. The warehouse was, go on. I’ll let you explain. The Etsy one. Did you think that was crazy? I thought the Etsy one was crazy. So he was making like a good amount on Etsy. And if any of you guys have ever sold on Etsy, you know that Etsy likes to like screw over their sellers basically on a monthly basis. And he was getting frustrated and he said he was a top Etsy seller. And so he decided to go to Shopify while still on Etsy.

39:56
He made one sale on Black Friday and he was like, we’re done with Etsy. Right. He jumped straight to Shopify. Which yeah, that was a little bit of a risk. Yes. But you know, I also feel like it definitely paid off for him. And we see this a lot with people too. Like you can’t always have your feet in two pools, right? Sometimes you have to make a decision and take that risk. And a lot of times people try to straddle for a long time. And sometimes that hurts you because you don’t.

40:22
commit one way or the other. reminds me of the Warriors, the two timelines, Draymond Green, Steph Curry, and then the young guys. But the other takeaway of his was also, like, if you want to double your business, you’ve got to think 10x, right? Yes. And so you’ve got to do those things that have outsized gains. Like, tweaking your website is not going to take you there. Running the same ads are just the same way as probably not going to take you there. So you’ve got to do something outsized.

40:51
I remember I went from six to seven when I introduced I think two things, uh meta ads and email marketing I think took me there. I think you need like three sources or something like that to take you to seven figures. But if I was just uh doubling down on SEO and Google, I don’t think I would have reached it just on that. I’ve also realized the reason that we’re not more successful is we never had like an alcoholic period. never hit rock bottom. That’s the problem.

41:20
That’s true, our lives are pretty cushy and I think a lot of the people who do really well, they’re willing to take those bets because they got very little to lose. Yes, yes. We have a lot to lose. We have a lot to lose. I think once you have a family, yeah, I’m not taking any those risks Well, it is interesting too that most of those stories come from single men. It’s true, they’re all single. Yeah. They’re all single guys. Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know, you can take with that what you will. Yeah.

41:46
I didn’t go to this talk but I heard nothing but great things about it was going from founder to CEO. Aiden’s talk? Yes. Okay, I didn’t. Yeah. So one of my friends went to that one and she was texting me during the talk. And one of the things he said was, um if you brought your computer to this conference, you’re not a CEO. Basically, if you can’t go for two days without doing work and just being able to manage it on your phone, you’re not doing the right stuff. Like you’re not there yet.

42:15
And my friend was like, she’s like, I had my computer open and I just closed it. But anyway, like, I’m like, yeah, you know, and it’s, see, I see people struggle with this a lot. And I think it’s tough, right? Because, you know, the founder mentality is different than the CEO mentality and you have to shift a lot. I remember Bill D’Alessandro talked about this years ago, where when his business grew and there was someone who had been in the business from the very beginning and he had to let him go because he wasn’t…

42:44
the right fit anymore, right? The company had outgrown this, but this person hadn’t grown with the company basically. And how he considered him a friend, even though they weren’t, but he had been there since the beginning, and he had to make that decision, and it was really hard on him. And I think there’s lots of things like that. As a founder, it’s like you and your bros, right? You and your friends, and you’re all having a great time, and you’re all working in the garage, and it’s fantastic, and the next thing you know, you have a 20,000 square foot warehouse and 50 employees.

43:12
And you’re still in the mentality of like, we’re all friends, we hang out together on Friday nights and you don’t. And so apparently that talk was fantastic and I think anyone in that position should probably start educating themselves a little more in that area. I had a great lunchtime conversation with Jordan and uh he belongs to EO and he was telling me like every person in his EO group

43:34
should just run each other’s companies and make the hard decisions without emotions, right? Like Bill should have let that guy go probably a long time ago. A mutual friend of ours should let someone go, but there’s emotions tied to it, right? Because you interact with this person and it’s hard.

43:53
Maybe something to try, right? We just trade businesses for like a week and then do the hard firings and whatnot and then switch back. and also like if you founded the company, most likely you did everything by yourself in the beginning. So when there’s a problem, right, you’re like, let me just go in and fix that, right? It’s much harder to create the process to train somebody so that you don’t have to do that. But at end of the day, that will save you so much time later on.

44:17
But it’s like as a parent, right? You should teach your kid how to unload the dishwasher. Well, you probably don’t use your dishwasher, do you? No, we do. We’re not one of those Asians. You’re not one of those Asian families? But when my kids were little, they wanted to unload the dishwasher, and they would just throw all the silverware in the drawer, but not in the correct cubby. And you’re just like, let me just do it, as opposed to like, here, knives go with knives. But it’s the same just at a much greater scale. um And so anyway, I think.

44:43
Those talks are always interesting to me because I do feel like it’s a really hard shift for most people and why some people I think should actually hire a CEO, right? Right. They still own the company, but they’re not the one doing the day-to-day running. It is expensive to do that though, so you have to be a good… I mean that’s really hard to do, but yeah. Yes. But the people that I know that have done it, we’ve know a couple people, like they’re happy. Yeah. Well, yeah, because they’re not… They don’t do anything. They’re doing what they like to do and someone else is handling all the stuff they didn’t like to do in the first place.

45:14
But uh I think today’s the last day, right? Yes. We only have the closing party We have the closing party tonight. So it was a shorter ECF, but a lot of key takeaways. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Conferences compress years of learning and networking into a single weekend and it’s well worth the time. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 612. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

45:44
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 SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife QuitHerJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, I sit down with Kurt Elster, host of the unofficial Shopify podcast to talk about how AI is shaking up e-commerce and changing the way Shopify brands grow. We discuss the new AI tools that are actually moving the needle, boosting conversions, streamlining operations and increasing AOV. And it doesn’t matter if you aren’t on Shopify, you will get a lot out of this episode. But before we begin,

00:28
I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. NOAA corporate execs,

00:57
no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if you’re doing over $250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high-level sellers.

01:25
Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever going to be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now on to the show.

01:39
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter job podcast. Today I’m excited to have Kurt Elster on the show. I’ve known Kurt for over a decade now. He is the founder of EtherCycle where he helps Shopify owners grow their businesses. And he is also the host of the unofficial Shopify podcast, one of the best and longest running e-commerce podcasts out there. Now it’s been a while since I’ve had Kurt on and with AI shaking up e-commerce so quickly,

02:09
I wanted to bring him back on today to talk about the strategies some of the biggest brands and his clients are using right now to increase average order value, boost conversions, and grow revenue. And with that, Kurt, how are you doing? Good. I’m happy to be here. You know, first interview of the day. I think I have known you for over a decade, right? 2014, I want to say is when… Yeah, know. We were at like pre-pandemic. I know the first time I met you in person, pre-pandemic, it was Klaviyo, Boston. Yeah.

02:38
Yeah, was that 2016 or something like that? I don’t even remember. I don’t know. It’s been a while. But it’s great to have you. In all my years running my e-commerce store, this is my 18th year. I would say outside of COVID, this year has easily been the most tumultuous with crazy changes across the board with AI and tariffs. So my first question for you, since you have a lot of clients, what are your clients doing about tariffs right now?

03:07
through the grade buy. This is what’s crazy. The tariffs really a lot of it is just about communicating it. And so the the practical change I’ve seen is if you’re on Shopify plus adding checkout messaging where it’s like you know that based on address or the product that this order will incur some kind of know tariff duty or tax potentially and just surfacing that upfront. It’s like hey you know this isn’t us but this is what you’re going to be looking at. ah

03:35
Or helping people try and get like delivery duty paid set up DDP with international shipping. Or even just getting HS codes harmonized system which is what like tariff tax tariffs use to identify what kind of product they’re looking at. Just getting those set up so that people could pay the appropriate taxes like just being prepared for it is tough. I mean the really tough part is like day to day even like between now and this recording and when it airs.

04:05
It’s chaotic. know, we don’t know. At no point have I been able to tell you what tariff you may or may not pay on what order when. Like that’s what’s so confusing and concerning about it. I’m pretty shocked. So you’re saying some of your clients are in the checkout, letting people know that the prices instead of just increasing prices across the board, you are indicating like a tariff fee? That yes, some have done it that way.

04:34
where they know that like, all right, we’re not covering it, but you know, the country we’re sending it to, like especially international orders. Yeah. Like, oh yeah, you’re going to end up paying, very likely you may end up paying this. so like, in general, people are going to be upset about unexpected surprises. Yeah. And so informing them upfront, like, hey, this is what you should expect. But you may or that’s the problem is like, you may or may not have to pay this. Who knows?

05:01
I’ve just been silently increasing prices across the board just a little bit here a little bit there and just kind of gradually doing it and I Mean so far so good. I don’t think anyone’s like outright complained about the prices yet You know we’ve seen that too, and that’s probably like the easiest way to do it right is absorb the cost and then up average order value Generally through you know increasing prices across the board and it’s fence. You know what you’re selling what the inputs are yeah, it’s difficult

05:31
If you’re like selling knives and your input is steel, you would be very familiar with what tariffs on steel are right now. Exactly. It’s nuts. So Kurt, so much has changed in Shopify land. Actually, they just made an announcement five days ago, I want to say, about their new agentic flows and whatnot. So what I want to ask is, what are some really cool features that your clients are using right now to increase sales? OK.

05:59
So for sure Shopify has really been investing significantly in AI. being Toby Tobias Lutke very much a developer first, the CEO of Shopify. And the initial things they did are really all about framework and tooling for other developers. And so I think we are very much just at the beginning of seeing an explosion of these AI tools.

06:29
before Shopify are about to pop up. with, you know, and the very first AI tool we saw in Shopify was Shopify Sidekick, which it just answers questions inside the admin. And I gave, you know, last year when it came out, I played with it and, you know, I gave it a hard time because it, I would ask it questions that I thought should be simple to mess it up. But then recently it’s getting significantly better. I gave it a question. like, there’s no way it’s going to get this right. But it did. I said, hey,

06:57
go in an apparel store that had hundreds of listings. I’m like, we just need a breakdown of what sizes sell. What are our colors that sell? What are sizes that sell for inventory forecasting? And it did the analysis and it nailed it. And of course I didn’t trust it. So when I did it myself, it had gotten it right. I couldn’t believe it. So it’s like that as far as Shopify’s own AI tooling, number one, it’s just being able to immediately answer your questions, especially around analytics, right in the admin. That part’s really cool.

07:28
That is really cool. actually recently started playing around with the website design. How do you feel about the AI site design? Well, there’s two parts to it. There’s one where in the theme view where it shows you, here’s the themes that you have published and unpublished. There’s an option where it’ll be like, we’ll generate a theme for you. You just give us a description. That I thought…

07:54
I’ve tried it several times and as far as I can tell, like you just pick something at random. really, that doesn’t make much sense to me. um But as a starting point for someone who’s never used it before, you maybe it’s helpful. The one that’s insanely cool is in the theme editor, so like your visual editor where you’re not doing code, you can add, you add a section to a theme, let’s say. And that’s actually could be like the product form or on the product page.

08:23
And the blocks would be like title price, you know, our buttons. But the wild thing Shuffle.ly could do now, right in there, no extra fee that is built in your plan. You can give it a, you could generate the additional blocks for a section by just giving it a prompt. And it does it. I’m sure this is what you tried. you know, it’s the same AI coding tools we all use, but with that complete integration in the theme editor.

08:51
You could just be like, hey, I need this kind of slideshow. Hey, I need this item’s on sale and I want to present it in this way. And it’ll just generate it. And then it’ll ask you if I got it right and can give it revisions. It’s really cool. You if you’re not a developer or even if you are developer and you’re like, you know, it’s something simple, you’re like, I just wanted to see this. Like, let’s just show them this idea. You know, type one sentence, wait a minute, it pops back and it often it works. It’s really cool.

09:19
Yeah, I had the same experience with you. Like when I did the whole website design, it’s like, okay, you gave me something and how do I change it? And then you basically have to regenerate. But the block level you write, if you plop down blocks and have AI generate each block to your liking, yeah, that works pretty darn well. It’s very nicely integrated. Yeah, it’s cool. know, just like a person writing code or, you know, using one of these tools directly, like in chat GPT or Claude or whatever. uh

09:47
It’s going to make mistakes. And if it like the more complicated it gets, it becomes more likely. But like a simple widget in a theme, it’s not terribly complicated code. Shopify’s code is well documented. Shopify’s code is made available in a specific way for AIs to understand it. So it really it does a pretty remarkable job. Now, I’m sure, you know, over time, you can get yourself into trouble with it. Right. Whereas like it’s going to generate bigger code than a person might or

10:16
and it might have bugs that you don’t necessarily realize until later or things where it’s like, well, I added three items and now they kind of interfere with each other. I’m just giving examples. I’ve not actually seen that. For the most part, it has worked just fine. think most people focus on the aesthetics, not necessarily functionality, right? So that’s probably why it’s a little less prevalent. But yeah, I agree. Maintenance is always the problem, I think, when it comes to AI generated code. Yeah, it’s like, go back and update this.

10:43
Like sometimes it’s easier just to go, you know what, we’re gonna start over. I like claw it a lot. And so I’ll give it a script I wrote and I’ll say, easier than having it revise it sometimes is just you give it the code and go, analyze this, tell me what it does. And then when it understands it, you go, okay, well, let’s write our own version of that and this is what we’re gonna change and have it start over. So outside of the design features though, what are some things that you’ve seen with your clients that have moved the needle in terms of sales?

11:13
Okay, the thing they want us to be using is live chat sales agents. And some of them are proactive, where it’ll pop up on the store. um It’ll pop up and be like, hey, we saw you’re looking at uh this particular product. Other customers had this question, or other customers also looked at this, where it’s gonna preemptively try and engage with them and try and get them to ask a question about it.

11:43
operate in the way if I walked into a retail store, a person might come up to me. And I think like that style of live chat, that’s the thing that Shopify provided us the tooling for. We’re going to see a ton of those. And we have that, like a particular one of those running in one store where it does its own conversion tracking. And according to the app that we’re paying for, has remarkably boosted sales and the people who interact with it have a higher AOV, which that I believe.

12:11
I’ve been working on that for my store. haven’t put it live yet because I’m a little fearful of it, right? You gotta stay on top of it. So can you walk me through the one that has boosted AOV? Does it just say up front, I’m a bot and I’m just here to answer your product recommendation questions? Or is it proactive? Like, I notice you’re looking at this product. Might I suggest this? It’ll be… Well, all right, so I loaded it up. Okay. Yeah, it’ll be like, hey, this product title is…

12:40
A perfect treat, know, with it like kind of parrots the description back to you and then it asks I think what’s clever about it is it asks you a question that it thinks it has the answer for would you like to know more about the ingredients? Because like ingredients is that there’s probably a meta field where ingredients is set right knows and it’s just like hey Did you want to know that and so it’s just kind of like trying to prompt them into a conversation and I’m on this the site all the time So I like just looking through this thing

13:07
And I’m looking at one product and it’s like, well, this is our most popular flavor. It’s got no added sugar. Would you like suggestions on other packaging options or pairing ideas? it’s the packaging, it’s because it just comes in different packages. Right, right, right, right. But it’s like, you know, it’s calling out the things it knows. And I use AI enough where I like try to think through what the prompt is. So it’s like, OK, this is probably like, here’s all the details of this product. A person is looking at the product, you know, try and engage them in a conversation.

13:36
only using what you know about the product. And then it comes up with this, like, oh, you want to know about packaging options? Because it just read the variants. But I think it’s very human-like and it does not identify itself as AI up front. Oh, interesting. does. So the title we gave it is Virtual Sales Consultant. Oh, okay. Yeah. But I think out of the box it doesn’t. You know what? I’ll just ask it. Are you AI?

14:06
See what it says. Hey buddy. What is considered… No, it doesn’t. Oh, it doesn’t say that? I said, are you AI? And it says, I’m here to help with any questions. Oh, naughty boy. So how does it calculate a conversion? Is it any interaction with the bot that leads to a sale? Is that considered a conversion? That would be my guess. It’s like, did they click on this at all and then bought it? Take credit. Okay. Yeah. See, I don’t know about taking credit for that.

14:33
I will tell you one thing that I’ve done with my shop recently that really moved the needle was, know how mostly there’s frequently bought, know, most Shopify stores have that or Amazon has that. The problem is, is that 20 % of my products yield 80 % of sales. So a lot of products don’t have well populated recommended fields. So what I did is I scan in all of my images and create this database of related images from AI. And so now every product has a recommendation now that looks

15:02
aesthetically similar to what they’re looking at. And then now every time, you know, recommended products is populated and that has boosted my AOV, I think by 17%. Oh, I’m interviewing you now. How many products in your store? We have over we have almost a thousand products. OK, so that’s the problem. like batch this in some way. It’s all AI. It’s all scripted, right? How do you do it? Right. Like what are we using for?

15:30
All right, so in a typical Shopify store, there’ll be a meta field that’s like related products. And I could surface that in search and discovery or might be pinned on the page. So I have to populate that some way. How do you get the So I’m not on Shopify. oh I have my own site, I have my own database. So what I do is I run it through this OpenAI uh embeddings, it’s called CLIP, I think. And it turns all the images into a vector format. so now for each, and then I pre-do this ahead of time.

16:00
populate this ahead of time. I store in a database so that when they’re looking at that product, it looks up in my database, all the similar products and then populates them under recommended. That’s wild. Yeah. I do the frequently bought first. It’s a hierarchy. if the freak, cause the frequently bought is, a better measure. I’m using FP growth for that. That that’s an algorithm. And then if there’s not enough products there, then I do the similarity search for my other database.

16:27
I’m just writing down keywords because I bet I could figure this out. Yeah, you can. You can totally do it. can. is great. Yeah. OK, so sorry, the bot. So OK, so the reason why I’m apprehensive about the bot is because I don’t know what it’s going to say sometimes. Right. So it sounds like the one that you described is kind of canned in a way. Right. It’s not going to screw up. So no, I think this one is just it’s just thrown out ideas. I do.

16:57
And because what’s ah we’ve also seen the word they’ll charge you by like problem solved. They’ll be like, oh, well, this could like we don’t charge you a monthly fee. Just a customer had a question and we we resolved it correctly. We charge you a dollar and you could see the conversations. And so that particular scenario, we’re looking through the ones where it’s like, you know, didn’t solve it. It’s like people asking really esoteric questions where it’s like, OK, a person would know that. And then the ones it’s solved half the time, it was like

17:25
One was like, the person was like, well, can I, you know, I bought this jar. I want to return just the lid. Can I do that? And the AI was like, sure. I bet you could return just the lid. Just reach out to a sales consultant. Okay. And then it was like, the, get that it considered that resolved and you could charge a dollar for it. We’re like telling it to go talk to a person that does that really count as resolved? Also, no, they’re not going to take back just the lid from a jar. Right. Exactly. Okay. All right. But they let the AI decide if it resolved it or not.

17:53
Okay, that’s nuts. See, this is the exact reason why I’m scared to release mine. Mine is just meant to be a product recommendations and a product lookup. Like if they want to check on their status of the order or if they want recommendations on what to buy. That’s easy stuff. It sounds like that you could do. Like you’ve got that figured out. order status for sure that like, the ones that are limited to just order status are pretty easy. They just open with like, hey, you know, where you did you need help with your order? Like it can see if the person’s logged in. It knows.

18:23
who they are. Those I think have been pretty safe. Where it gets weird is when it’s like open-ended. Just like, you know, they could just ask questions. Yeah. And so you got to make sure it doesn’t respond like you can return the lid without the jar type of thing. Okay. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course

18:52
on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. 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. The Shopify is done is kind of clever.

19:21
They have anyone can install an app. It’s called Shopify Knowledge Base and it will show you uh how many times your products on Shopify got recommended by AI because like perplexity chat GPT have are integrated into Shopify’s catalog. Now they have access to it and I believe everybody by default has their products in this. uh And so you could it’s kind of neat to see that. But then it also has what’s called an MCP.

19:51
model context protocol. And if you’re into AI, you start to see these pop up where essentially it’s just like a structured way for the AI to ask a question and give an answer of another database or AI. And Shopify now has that built into your store. And in this free knowledge base app, you can set up FAQs where it will show you like, here’s all the questions an AI asked the store. And so if I’ve yet to see one, but this thing just rolled out and then you can also set up

20:21
your questions and answers in there. And then it has like pre-populated because it knows what your source policies are. It grabs those and like tries to use that to answer questions out of the box. So I think that’ll be there. It’ll be interesting. This is all on the premise that browser usage starts to go down and maybe app usage starts to go down. But the thing that goes up is just asking AI questions.

20:47
Right. Whatever format that takes. Like I use perplexity often that has replaced Google search for me. And so perplexity could be like I have a question about a product. It finds the product on a Shopify store somewhere. Ask the question to the store. The store returns the response and then perplexity tells me the answer. So all I had to do was ask the one question and then the agent the fact that this thing is doing like some kind of activity out on the Internet for me goes tries to come up with the answer and brings it back to me.

21:17
Is that live yet? The chat GPT native Shopify integration with MCP? Yeah, it would have to be because we in this knowledge base app, you can see it’s like, you know, any store I load up, it’ll be like, you know, your product appeared in AI searches X many times. But can you like check out perplexity to where it’s like, does checkout occur on the chat interface or does it occur still on the website? I believe it still occurs on the website. In the interface is coming. That was announced uh and

21:46
in June at their developer conference, this big unified experience, and then I just saw last week an announcement about it where it’s like, think we know what this looks like. I’m gonna guess this is in early developer preview. This stuff is early, early, but moving fast. I think it’ll really be a game changer if you can just hit a button and instantly checks out within ChatGPT assuming they’re having your

22:15
they have your payment information, which I think they already do. yeah. Or if it, like with Shop Pay, a lot of people, if you’ve bought on ShopPy once, it’s like already stored, so it’ll just work. I think that’s what they’re going for. You know, of course for them, it works out very nicely. You get a percentage of transaction, but everybody’s life gets made easier. The convenience is what we’re after here. And I’m all for it. I will, if I’m playing devil’s advocate, the case against is we had a similar conversation years ago.

22:44
You know, the Royal we in that we thought apps apps were going to add their own checkouts. And so it’s like you saw an ad on Instagram. And then instead of going to the store on the click through it, you make the purchase through Metta. Yeah. they met a shut it down. It’s gone. You know, and Tick Tock was going to do the same thing. You where’s that now? Right. And so some of those native checkouts like didn’t quite work out. But at the same time, shop pay like there’s more ubiquity to it than

23:14
you know, meta pay. Sure. Yeah, I guess the disadvantage is all your other flows and tracking, everything wouldn’t be there anymore, right? Because it’s like TikTok shop, right? It just shows up. Yeah. But at the same time, like, you know, I want all those flows and tracking for my online store because I almost certainly had to pay to get the person there or put in like some some great level, some extraordinary level of effort digital marketing wise versus. You know, I think the idea is.

23:43
I do SEO, the AI recommends me because of those SEO efforts, and then I get the purchase. All right, well, for sure the AIs, they gotta monetize these things. think ads and promoted products are gonna start appearing in those feeds at some point, right? But until then, we’ve got a much more organic approach to these things. Before we started recording, you mentioned that a lot of your clients are focusing on SEO.

24:10
again, like it’s a hot topic. Can you talk about that a little bit? SEO Renaissance this year, I think you see that AI future coming. How do you optimize for it? And I think the answer is traditional SEO. You number one, when these AI, you ask an AI a question, often it just goes searches the web to get the answer. And I like that. You know, I’d rather it go search the web than just trying to like hallucinate the answer. And so

24:40
But it’s not going to go deep in those search results. Just like a person, it’s going to look at what’s in the top five, top 10, who knows. And so regular SEO will benefit those AI answers. OK. And then on top of it, technical SEO, where you do, I’m sure your site, have like rich snippet data. Where you’ve got, it’s just a way in the code to kind of describe what the product page is to Google search.

25:09
Well, it turns out that that structured data is really good for AI. And so if you’ve got that structured data, well, number one, you make sure you have that structured data for the benefit of AI. And then number two, if you’re really good at it, maybe expand it. Right. There’s all kinds of schema you can add into it. But then the SEO, like just regular traditional SEO. OK, that gets us to appear in more AI search queries and more organic search. I love it. But also, the you feed the beast with AI.

25:38
AI has made a lot of SEO efforts quite a bit easier. Right. I have Python scripts that I wrote for me that connect to a Shopify store via the API and then do a lot of the heavy SEO lifting. it’s like, oh, check any find where I someone forgot to add SEO title and description, then write it. And here’s the best practices from Google shopping for those titles. Right. Oh, man, for accessibility and SEO, we really want alt text on all of our photos.

26:08
Well, turns out you can get Chia GP to do that. It’s really good at it. Right. Hey, check, find all the files that are related to a product, then send the product description in the photo and a prompt on how to write great alt text to Chia GPT. Chia GPT returns it to me. We upload it to the Shopify store. then, all right, a human needs to check all these things. Give me a spreadsheet at the end to scroll through. And so it’s like this work that people would just skip because it was hours of data entry.

26:37
the whole thing, including running it, babysitting it, then reviewing it, it’s like an hour at most. That’s incredible. And so I just do that on every store I ever touch. Totally, I actually did that recently, because we have almost 1,000 products. Right, it’s not realistic. So our product descriptions were horrible for a long time. So you’re right, yeah, you just write a little script and it populates all of the descriptions, meta tags, everything. And then I still hand looked at each one.

27:06
right where I hit made them live. But actually, our SEO traffic is up at all time highs in the 18 years that I’ve been doing this, because I finally had some time to do that. That’s what we’re seeing. Although on the flip side, I do you know, traditional searches going away, and traffic like they’re just not sending you traffic anymore, right? People doing the research on AI, and then maybe doing the final click on AI. Don’t get me wrong, Google Search is still the leader, I think, as at this point. But I see that as

27:36
completely changing. Yeah, so I’m a little apprehensive, like, sure, the SEO efforts, you’re right, they do look at like maybe the top 20 or 30 pages, they took this away recently, I don’t know if you noticed, but back in the day, if you did chat to BT, this number would scroll up really quickly, looking at all the search results, it’d be like scanning the top 30 pages or something. And then it would give you the answer. They took that away recently. Same with Gemini, you know, it’s a hey, I’m looking at seven pages, seven results or whatever. And yeah, they took that away. But

28:06
The point is that I don’t think you need to be on the front page per se. You just need to be within the pages that they’re looking at. Absolutely. Yeah, because it’s going to go through all like, you me as a person, maybe I go if I’m really interested in struggling, I’m going to go through the first 10. But that’s a rarity. Right. Whereas they I for it to do it is much simpler for it, you know, and it’s pulling like it’s less effort for it on their side. It’s more about like resource cost.

28:36
Right, how much energy does it take? Well, the AI thinking is the resource intensive part. It’s called a curl request. It’s like pulling in the webpage. That’s the easy part. For it to pull in 30 web pages, it’s really probably not a ton of effort relative to them generating the summary. Yeah. I mean, that’s actually made a huge difference. So my product descriptions are very descriptive now.

29:01
details of the images, everything. And then I turned that, I put that into a RAG database and now my search always returns something that’s relevant. oh my onsite search engine was horrific before because people misspelled their synonyms. They type in like sentences and whatnot. So that’s been another growth driver. Yeah. Yeah. That onsite getting onsite search to work well is always powerful. How about, uh, do you do like any filtering, like sidebar filters?

29:30
No, I don’t do that. I don’t need it anymore. Oh, the AI search works really well. So I should just look at my stats. It’s like 66 % of searchers result in the click. And the conversion rate after a click is like 23%. I don’t know what the industry standard is actually for that. But I asked you at GPT whether those were good numbers. And it said, yes, they are exceptionally good numbers for search.

29:56
I don’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe it said it to make me feel better. Yeah, maybe it told that to make me feel better because that’s what it does. That’s why I switched to Claude. was like peak when ChatGPT, no matter what you said, it was like, bro, you’re a genius. They’re like, I said I was going to drink Cyanide. I run out of credit so quickly on Claude, especially if I’m doing code, whereas I never ever ran out of credits on ChatGPT, ever. Yeah, they’re different approaches for sure. I subscribe to both.

30:24
I never thought I would leave Chat Cheap PT. And now I was like, well, I’m switching to Claude. And now I end up using the both. Yeah, I have them both too. I have them both because Claude I use for creative writing. Interesting. what are, okay, so we already talked about chat. What are some other things that your clients are asking for that have moved the needle? Well, all right, so the SEO efforts for sure. But within SEO, what’s kind of interesting, the pages that are easiest to rank

30:53
in Shopify and I would expect that this might extend to other e-commerce stores. I don’t think this is like a Shopify specific thing or what Shopify calls collection pages, a category page or uh a product listing page, know, a page that has a grid of your products. Those seem to be the pages that are the easiest to get to rank. And so we’ve got these clients who like some of them were the SEO people. Sometimes they have an SEO consultant. Sometimes they have an SEO team. I absolutely I love those folks. I absolutely pay attention to what they’re doing.

31:23
and what they’re saying and then I try it. And the thing that we found is like you go in it’s like let’s say you got an apparel store and your collections are like men’s men’s shirts you know men’s bottoms right. You’re doing it that way. What these SEO companies will go in is like they’ll show up and then they’ll try and really slice those collection pages and those categories into subcategories because they’re trying to make long tail keyword phrases. So now suddenly instead of men’s

31:51
men’s and men’s tops being the two categories that have the men’s shirts. It’s like men’s polo, know, men’s performance polos, right? Yeah. And it’s like, you know, make this very specific collection. And then for the, you know, where AI helps us is if you have a big catalog, like you have a thousand products, the big pain to have to go and tag, filter, adjust all those products. It’s nice just to have the AI do that spreadsheet work for you, like fill in your columns with

32:20
the things you would need to filter those collections and categories. But like that seems to be what they’re doing. You someone’s going to have this exact match phrase in mind. You like I’m looking for a specific, I’m a golfer and I like there’s a very specific kind of shirt, a polo shirt I want. And so I’m going to type that in. And then because we have like an entire collection page of these, the AI is going to be like, hey, here you go. You know, this is what we found. uh That seems to be working well for us.

32:51
And then, you know, still staying on heat mapping and screen recording. Microsoft Clarity now has an official Shopify integration. Microsoft Clarity is free, wonderful tool. And they even have an MCP and they have an AI built in where it’s like, even if you don’t know what you’re doing with the thing, it will try and help you. It’ll be like, OK, here’s what we’re noticing. And about half the time it’s right. But as a person going through it, it’s easy for you to identify like, oh, yeah, this is an issue. that’s interesting.

33:20
wouldn’t that get out of control? Like what I’m seeing now is like hundreds of categories that might have only like a small subset of products. Are those just not visible or are they just they’re just there for SEO? Yeah, they’re essentially you’ll see like anything, any modern commerce platform, you’re to create all these these pages, you don’t necessarily have to link to them from anywhere. Your search, your on site search can can recommend them and Google can index them.

33:47
No matter, they’re going to get dynamically generated into a sitemap file that you have given to, submitted to Google Search Console. And so it’s always going to index all these pages. And so, yeah, we end up with too many collections, but just because we have them, we’re not putting them into the main menu. Got it, got it. Unrelated of AI, the thing every merchant struggles with is like, taxonomy, is merchandising. It’s just trying to figure out what the heck do I put in my main menu, right? Whether I’m on mobile or desktop.

34:15
Realistically, there’s like seven things I could put in at tops before it just becomes an unwielding mess. So how do you arrange that? That’s you know for years that’s Yeah, you know one of my my pet peeves is just like when you could tell no one knew what to put in that main menu and it either ends up with like too little or too much is that I think there’s a lot of gains there that happened there too So one question I wanted to ask you Kurt is since I mean you’re only you’re an only Shopify shop

34:45
plugins have gotten a little out of control. So what would be like your bare bones? Like if you were to start your own shop, what would be the bare bones Shopify apps that you would install? Interesting. you know, it’s funny, a lot of, would do like the first party Shopify apps that aren’t necessarily uh touching the front end of the store. Cause my fear with apps is two things. One, they bloat load time on the site. Yep.

35:11
If they’re on the front end of the site, potentially they could create issues. It’s rare, but it can happen. it also, I got to pay for them. They’re not all free. And so my preferences always start with like the first party apps, the Shopify official apps that only are essentially admin utilities. I mentioned the knowledge base. I can see my AI search and search and discovery. can control a lot of the inbuilt search in Shopify and Shopify flow. One of my favorites, this automation tool. It’s great.

35:41
That’s only for plus users, right? No, Shopify flow is for everybody now. Originally, you’re right, it was plus only. Now everybody, I try to turn everyone on to it. We touch a store, I can see they haven’t used it. I’m like, hey, here’s a screencast about Shopify flow. Nice, okay. I didn’t know that. So outside of those, because they’re low risk and they’re still more admin utilities. Like my next one, Matrixify.

36:11
pretty much everything that’s in the store as a spreadsheet so that you could modify it. Also great for AI. You could feed spreadsheets into AI and then import it back into Shopify and then update everything in bulk. And so it’s just a fabulous tool that could save people so much time if they knew it was out there. that a paid tool or is that? That one you gotta pay for. Yeah, Matrixify. You gotta pay for. But beyond that, there’s not a ton of front end like

36:41
customer facing must have apps that I would say like I absolutely have to use it. Because there’s so much that I could try to build in the theme that I can get clever with just asking Claude to code a little widget for me that I could copy paste. You’re also asking a developer too. that’s a little different. that makes sense for you from a developer perspective. but non-developer apps.

37:05
Well, let me ask you this. Do you think the Shopify app store is in trouble because of that? Because every time I look at it, there’s all these apps that do practically nothing that you could probably just have Claude code code up in probably an afternoon. So how do you feel about just the app store in general and doing it yourself if you are reasonably tech savvy? Yeah, I think if you’re comfortable with it, you can. I think the trick is you have to know both your limits and the limits of

37:34
the of the tool. You know, I think the risk with those those vibe coded applications is security. Right. Like I would not want to vibe code something that involves authentication. You know, I don’t want to have to do store user names and passwords. That’s where I draw the line personally for vibe coding. But, you know, other people have different risk tolerances for simple for scripts, for simple widgets, for stuff that, you know, I’m babysitting. It’s not going to run all the time. That’s where I love it.

38:04
and that’s where I get the most use out of it. Going back to that app question, I would look for apps that, I always look for apps that solve pains or problems. And so anything I could do to simplify workflow life for myself and the customer. so often, sometimes, that might just be a really good order tracking app that I get plugged into the store. And once I’ve got that stuff down,

38:33
Really what I want to do is increase average order value. And so that’s where now I want to start looking for, like once I solve my inconveniences, you know, with like an order editing app so customers can edit their own orders. you have one of your favorites? Oh, cleverific order edit. All right, they do sponsor my podcast, but like, that thing’s been around forever. It’s really good if you have this issue. You it’s like, you get all those customer requests where they’re like,

39:02
Like just let them fix it themselves, right? Right. Okay. other, like from there, I’m, it’s funny, it’s like as someone who is well-versed in conversion rate optimization, I’m not going straight to conversion rate optimization. I want to optimize for AOV. You know, I know how many people could come to my site. I know how many people are going to typically buy. If I could just get everybody to buy a dollar more, you a little more, it pays dividends on every order. And so I’m going to focus on AOV next, right? Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

39:32
I want upsells, like Zipify one-click upsell. uh You could do that throughout the site with something like Rebuy. My favorite kind of promotion, Free Gift with Purchase. And like I admittedly, I love it so much, I have a Free Gift with Purchase app that will be out there in the Shopify app store soon. Oh, you’re making apps now yourself? Yeah, we have. I didn’t know that, okay. We’ve had an app called CrowdFunder for years that does, um like,

39:59
a Kickstarter style widget on a product page. I’m always setting up these free gift with purchase promos and the apps that are out there are decent, but I’m always like, I bet we could do this better. And so finally we did it. And really I’m like, I’m building it for myself first and then we’ll Well, that’s the best way you can test it and iron out all the kinks. I was thinking to myself, it’d be so easy for me to create apps on everything now, because with AI, it’s so easy to code these things.

40:29
My fear has always been the support. So I guess you have a team to do it. You know, in our case, you could preempt a lot of the support. You could just keep working through onboarding and problem solving and identify and having the system flag issues up front. Like a free gift with purchase promo. What happens if someone picks an item that’s out of stock? Now the free gift can’t add. Well, you’re to get a lot of bad people if you don’t make that dead obvious that that’s the problem. So thinking through that stuff really helps.

40:59
And then we have a dedicated support person. Like eventually I was tearing my hair out with the support requests. But the advantage to getting the support request, that’s really the best way to get positive reviews. If someone presents you a problem, you are there to solve it promptly and then say, you know, and what did I solve? Would you mind writing us a review? That’s always been the number one way to get reviews.

41:26
When you’re in an app store, Shopify or any of them, you really live and die by reviews. So free gift book purchase, what other AOV apps that maybe you might have quoted but people would want on their store? How’s that for a question? Yes. Well, I think you want similar to Amazon or your store, want frequently bought together on the product page. I want to show other related items. That’s also, people may not realize that’s good for SEO, that internal linking.

41:56
So I want those across sales. I cross sales on my product page. And then ideally I have a drawer cart, add to cart and then a drawer slides out from the right in that drawer cart. I could probably put uh a free shipping progress bar. In theory, that increases average order value because they want to hit the free shipping threshold. I could show related items there. If I’ve if I’m running a free gift with purchase promo, I could have a progress bar. Hey, you know, add another twenty five dollars and unlock a free gift. That works well.

42:25
And then once they click add to cart or once they could proceed to checkout. OK, now I can have a pop up. Hey, did you forget this? And that’s not always necessarily just trying to sell, sell, sell. It could be about that preempting something. We have a client who sells backpacks and they sell patches for those backpacks. And they saw an issue where people would email afterward. I forgot to buy a patch. Can you just add it? Because they don’t pay the shipping. So that we’re like, well, make that that’s a pop up now. It’s just like, hey, did you forget the patch? And it’s got the patches.

42:55
And then again once I hit the checkout again I could do upsells and cross sells right in that checkout And if you are go really wild after I place the order you could do it on the thank you page too in Shopify Or it’s like, you have like you hold the order for fulfillment. Actually, how does that work compared to just regular pre checkout cross sells in your experience like post purchase purchase pre-purchase It is so dependent on the store and the offer

43:22
I think what’s wild to me, like the most successful ones we’ve seen is where you just go, you offer them the same thing they already bought, especially if it’s a consumable good. And you’re like, you could just add another one, we’ll ship them together and it’s 15 % off. That of like post purchase cross sells we’ve run, that’s the one that always did the best. Isn’t that crazy? Just buy two of it. Yeah, that is the most common post purchase upsell that works actually from what I’ve heard also. I’m just curious though, that kind of like trains the person.

43:51
to know that there’s gonna be a discount. I guess unless you mix it up, but yeah. Good point. And I think with that one, you limit it to high sale periods. don’t do, like that one you don’t run 24 seven 365. Right, okay. And we’ve seen so many of these stores where it’s easy to get addicted to the successful promo, but then it becomes the expectation. Yeah. So for your heat map tools, you said you’re using Clarity.

44:21
And it’s free? Okay. Yeah, it does heat map and screen recording uh and it’s got like a little AI tool. I’m going to hypothesize Google Analytics is free probably because Google wants their analytics on everybody’s website. Of They want this data. I would expect that Microsoft Clarity is a similar play. No evidence of that. That’s just my theory. it. It’s definitely it. actually don’t even use… don’t like…

44:50
analytics so much. hate it now, the Google analytics ever since they went to four. don’t know how you feel about it. GA4, like, this is the way I use it now. First, someone has an analytics question. Even if they tell me, hey, can you check a GA4? I’m checking in Shopify analytics first. It is not as powerful. It’s also like 10 times easier to use. And now I can even just ask this, know, Shopify sidekick, like, hey, can you figure this out for me? Right. Then when that doesn’t work for me, then I’m going to my AI tool, chat GPT.

45:20
Hey, you’re a GA4 expert. I’m not. This is what we’re trying to do. Tell me exactly where, how to do it in GA4. I’m not wasting my time hunting around a GA4 anymore. I’m going into it with step-by-step instructions. And then, once I did that, usually I do okay in GA4. But no, like you, really, truly, it really soured me on the product. Yeah, to the point where I only look at it really if I’m just looking at where my traffic is coming from.

45:48
because it does a better job at that, obviously. Okay, so last question for you, actually. What would you say is the most overhyped AI feature that you see that Shopify store owners are chasing right now? That’s a really good question. For as much as I love AI tools, I really do approach them with eh a lot of skepticism. And my skepticism really is largely that so many of these tools are just

46:18
they’re wrappers for ChatGPT. And to the point where when you use ChatGPT enough, you recognize its syntax. And when you know how to use it, you can write the code. You’re like, why am I paying for this stupid tool to just act as a middle man? That’s how I feel about a lot of AI tools. There’s plenty I described, you and I both, you’re using uh ChatGPT in the same way to automate SEO tasks. Well, there’s also tons of apps that’ll do the same thing.

46:47
and they’re going to charge you 10 times what those credits cost. That’s where it me nuts. It’s like you’re really not adding value beyond the interface and the wrapper. But I also get that not everybody wants to get dirty with the code like me. That’s where I think it’s overhyped. It’s like all those apps will come and go as these AIs get more involved, especially if they ever crack the code on some the actual like agentic concept. Like the dream here is I have an AI and I just go, hey, chat, GPT.

47:17
go in my Shopify store, figure this thing out for me. And then it literally just takes control of my browser and does it the same way I would. We’re at like proof of concept with that right now. I don’t know you’ve played with any of those tools, but they’re a little rough. See, I don’t want them to take over. Maybe this is just neither. I don’t like it. Yeah. I don’t think I will ever get to that point. Just because there’s always bugs and people hacking things. So that’s just me though. I’m sure. I’m sure. act a little weird.

47:46
You know, they’re not like, they’re not really thinking, they do some strange things. I’m gonna wait on that one. Definitely too. I’m generally not an early adopter actually. I wait till things settle down and then I go all in. It’s for the best. So Kurt, if anyone needs Shopify help, uh tell me about your company and where they can find you. Sure. So we, one of the first Shopify experts, we’ve got a consultancy, a small team of seven called EtherCycle where we do

48:16
Shopify store migrations, Shopify store setups, and lot of custom theme dev, design and dev. That’s our big thing. um of course, I’m best known for hosting the unofficial Shopify podcast. If you want to Google that one, or just Google Kurt Elster. I’m big on Twitter, or grab my newsletter. Cool. Well, Kurt, it’s been a long time coming. Thanks for coming back on the show. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Shopify has come a long way in the past few years.

48:45
Go give it a test drive if you haven’t done so in a while. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 611. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 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’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

49:13
Head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, I sit down with Ritu Java, founder of PPC Ninja, to talk about how AI is completely changing the way e-commerce businesses operate. We’ll dive into how sellers are using AI to automate ad campaigns, streamline operations, and make smarter data-driven decisions without adding more staff. So whether you’re a small shop or an eight-figure brand, this episode will show you what’s actually working right now.

00:29
But before we begin, wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses.

00:59
No corporate execs, no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold that every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high-level sellers. Right now,

01:28
Tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:41
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I am super excited to have Ritu Java on the show. Now Ritu is the CEO and co-founder of PPC Ninja, a company that helps brands scale with data-driven advertising, AI and cutting edge automation. She’s an award-winning speaker who has spoken at over 100 plus industry events. And most recently, she actually took the stage at my annual e-commerce conference, the Seller Summit.

02:08
where she delivered an incredible presentation on how she uses AI to grow e-commerce businesses. Now, since I’ve been doing a lot of AI myself, I am super excited to chat with her today. And because AI is moving so fast that I myself am struggling to keep up and just to keep my head above water really. And so I’m really happy. Ritu, welcome to the show. How you doing?

02:32
Hey, Steve. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited. Yeah, this is gonna be fun. It’s a topic that is really close to my heart and you’re dabbling in it. So I’m excited to talk about this stuff. Yeah. Actually, before we dive into the AI part, I know that you’ve helped thousands of Amazon sellers to scale at PPC Ninja. In the current landscape on Amazon with the rising fees, tariffs and competition.

03:00
Where do you think the biggest opportunities are right now for sellers to stand out? Yeah, so I think definitely the tariffs have been a big blow to a lot of businesses and they’re still trying to figure out how they’re gonna deal with it, whether they’re gonna change their uh pricing structure or they’re gonna make fundamental changes to their supply chain. And of course, those things take a lot of time. uh But I think for now, uh

03:30
the sellers that we’re dealing with are extremely conservative about their ad spend and they’re just being very, very cautious. That’s the best I can say. It’s like so cautious that they’re not sure should they change strategies, should they keep holding onto their prices or should they experiment with any kind of pricing tools, et cetera, to see what others are doing.

03:57
there’s a few different approaches. But for the most part, people are just staying where they are. That’s what I’ve observed. No, no one’s drastically changed their advertising strategy. uh You know, yeah. And their prices also or I am surprised like literally less than 5 % of our, um you know, agency clients have changed prices. Everybody else is holding on to their prices. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And in terms of uh AI,

04:26
what are some of the opportunities that you’ve been implementing with some of your clients? know, AI gives you speed and it gives you uh efficiency because you can get uh creatives created like very short periods of time and very cost effectively. So we actually help our clients uh with AI listing optimization. So the first part of that is Rufus optimization for if you’re selling on Amazon, then

04:56
you want to get your listings ready for AI, so the AI era of conversational e-commerce. And so your listings need to be written in a certain way that these LLMs can actually understand and recommend your products versus some other product that’s just been optimized for SEO. So SEO is slowly being replaced by this generative AI.

05:20
uh enabled or AI ready listing and it’s got to be structured in that way. So that’s one. The second is uh video assets. You can now create so many video assets in the shortest period of time without needing any kind of fancy equipment or models or even the product. You can just superimpose layer and just very quickly and rapidly test a lot of ideas, do A B testing and then uh it’s a much better uh

05:49
know, way to kind of do kind of mass expansion without spending a bunch of money. And so we help with with that. And uh I think we’ve seen a lot of like positive response on the AI offerings that we have right now. And uh hopefully it’s going to grow. It’s going to go get better and better over time. For the audience members, what is involved with Rufus optimization? Specifically, Rufus.

06:19
Yeah, so Rufus currently is uh kind of in a primitive state, but it’s only going to get better from here on. Rufus is currently giving you prompts and answers. So if anyone discovers the Rufus button, which is a little hard to find, but it’s kind of on the left bar and the top left side, if you click on that Rufus button, you can start having a conversation about the product detail page.

06:47
you can ask questions or proofs about that page because there’s just so much clutter, would say. A lot of it is useful information, but a lot of it is like other sponsored ads and then there’s reviews and Q &A and things like that. if you actually want to see, if you want to know if this product is actually good for you, if it meets your needs or not, you can just ask some basic questions. Is it good for my skin? I have dry skin, for example.

07:15
Like without having to read the whole listing, you can have a shortcut way of knowing everything about the product that you care about in a few words. so Rufus currently is doing some sort of pre-curated list of prompts. I think I’ve seen 15 or so, if you keep clicking or keep asking, it gives you more and more and more, but like five at a time and then up to 15 questions and answers that are kind of uh already uh

07:43
kind of pre-curated for you to explore. Now, what we do with those Q &As is that we extract them. And the way to extract them is to basically use a tool, and we use a tool that we created, and that extracts all the questions and all the answers and gives it to you in a easy to use format. Now, what we do, my team does, is we take that and put it into our own custom GPTs, and we generate content with it. And sometimes we generate…

08:11
uh images that uh speak to certain negative aspects that Rufus is highlighting and you don’t want that. You really don’t want Rufus to say something like, customers think that this product will fail on these points, you know? And so you proactively, you you want to proactively address those very prominently so that even if someone were to discover those negative questions and answers, they would know that, oh, this is probably because

08:40
the whoever bought it made a mistake on their end, it’s a misunderstanding or whatever. m So we like to kind of improve listings in a way that proactively address anything negative being flagged by Rufus. um And we also like to provide comparisons with other products, similar products, because one of the questions that you can ask Rufus at this point is how does this product compare with that other product from that other brand? And if you have something ready,

09:09
uh in your listing, in your uh images or anywhere in the A plus content, it will be picked up by Rufus. So for example, the kind of most direct way of addressing those sorts of questions is to have an us versus them comparison uh image on your listing. And it can be kind of further back in the gallery because you don’t want to clutter people with too much like text heavy.

09:38
content like right in the head of the gallery, but it can be something that you write for Rufus. And then we actually do another thing, which is uh we create an FAQ image. So the image itself has questions and answers and Rufus is picking up all of that. It’s getting everything from your listing, including the text on your images and the meaning of the image itself. Like the image uh is understood by that LLM.

10:07
So those are some of the main things we do with Rufus and then there’s a whole bunch of other kind of minor and more sophisticated steps that we need in order to get it completely ready for Rufus. Do you find that the images work better or just spelling out like the FAQs in the text or do you do both?

10:28
So we’re limited on text space as we know, right? But the images tend to be uh more kind of forgiving of like dense, heavy text on uh that amount of space that we have. Whereas, yeah, a bullet point can only be a certain number of characters, 500 or whatever, depending on your category. And then of course, A plus uh can be used, but you want to make it pretty, right? A lot of people focus on the aesthetics versus…

10:55
the detail and yes, you need both. So it’s kind of a balancing act of like, where do we put what in order for it to look pretty as well as, uh you know, very, very educational as well as ready for an LLM to act on. You know, what’s funny is in D2C land, I’ve been optimizing for LLMs also. And just one example of something I did recently was on a category page, I said we’ve shipped over 1 million wedding handkerchiefs.

11:25
Right. And then now if you ask Chachi BT, who’s the leader in this area, it’ll say our company, like things like that right now. Uh, and it’s just Amazon, you’re more restricted obviously in what you can say, but it seems like you’ve gotten around that with, with images and, answering all these questions ahead of time. Cause you can reframe the narrative. would imagine Rufus gets a lot of these opinions from like the reviews that have been left, right?

11:51
You know, even one review, one negative review can influence roofers, uh you know, to say something stupid, literally one review out of 1000s can be can be the make or break. So yeah, you got to really pay attention to the negative ones. But you can reframe the narrative, it seems right? with images? Yes. Yeah. So just an example. You know, if let’s say you have a product that requires

12:18
um some amount of care, like for example, a necklace or a pendant, something that falls off easily. uh know, roofers might say, oh, the, you know, customers have complained that the pendant falls off or something. And so if that’s the complaint, the number one complaint, then you can basically put it on them. You can put it on the shopper to take care of the product and you basically add a care instruction or a care page that says,

12:46
don’t take these delicate pieces to the bathroom, for example, or don’t use it in the shower or keep it away from shampoo or things like that, so that they know that they need to do something to make it last longer. It’s like, it’s a treasure that you treat with care. And then Rufus will include that in the answer, hopefully,

13:10
You know, it will eventually. uh And the thing is, one point here, which is different from SEO, the traditional SEO. Traditional SEO kind of has a shorter window to kind of change, whereas Rufus takes a little bit longer because it has to be proven over time. Customers actually need to change their opinion over time for Rufus to give you different answers. So we haven’t seen those answers change overnight.

13:39
But over time, yes, they’re going to be different. It’s going to start absorbing some of the content and providing those as responses. And I that tool that you said that scrapes like the Rufus Answers. I remember like at least at Seller Summit, you give that tool out for free, right? Yes, yes, I did. Yeah, yeah. It’s a very simple tool. And um all it does is it just kind of

14:08
simulates clicks and uh makes the questions, basically it simulates a click on a question inside the Rufus panel. It opens all the questions up one by one by one, and then it goes and reads those questions and answers and gives it to uh you as a copyable clipboard kind of text. And so that’s just a simple JavaScript code that just sits in the browser and just reads whatever you’re doing on the browser itself.

14:38
So I remember we just had a conversation before I hit record. You said you don’t consider yourself a programmer. Is that something that you created with AI or? Yes, I created that with AI. I am not a programmer. uh you know, I mean, I have kind of a basic fundamentals of programming nailed because I went to, you know, uh I did my engineering a long time ago, but

15:07
it’s not like I use programming on a day to day basis. If you were to say, hey, write a piece of code in JavaScript, I’d be like, I don’t even know where to start. Like I do not know how to start. But ah because I have that high level understanding of, know, this is how programming works. I can actually ask uh any LLM, especially cloud, which is probably my favorite for any kind of low code, you know, kind of task. So I can ask cloud to generate a

15:37
browser bookmark lit and then it’ll do it. Or I can say create an HTML page that I can download and use interactively. So I kind of know a little bit of that in order to give it instructions, but that’s all you need to know. You just need to know what’s possible and then the LLMs do the rest for you. So in terms of the people listening, and we’re assuming that most people listening are not technical at all, uh

16:03
What are some of your favorite AI tools right now from a non-coder perspective just to do what you want? uh I guess just without any code really. What are you using it for? What are your favorite tools? Right this second. Yeah, so um of course, chat GPT for any kind of brainstorming, any kind of high level. uh

16:27
planning around certain tools and things like that. can do that high level programming or planning with ChattGBT. Then the actual programming I do with Claude, because Claude understands code better than any other, I think, any other LLM at this it seems to be the best right now, It seems to be the best right now, yeah.

16:48
The only trouble with cloud would be that it runs out of, I run out of credits very quickly on cloud. Even though I have the paid plan, I keep hitting those limits and I’m not ready to upgrade to the $90 plan yet. So I’m kind of trying to make do with, you know, my chat GPT subscription. And so I do it in two parts, like the planning here and then the execution in cloud. Now I also

17:14
to like perplexity if there’s a research project that requires any kind of live web-based search. Perplexity seems to shine there. um then Gemini is good for… I think Gemini is… We use a lot of Gemini for uh our Google workspace. It’s kind of integrated into Gmail and BigQuery and Looker Studio and things like that. those are… That’s where…

17:43
I use Gemini the most for those sorts of tasks. I haven’t found Gemini. I don’t know. There’s something about Gemini that makes me not want to use it. Yeah. I don’t use it either. I’m just curious. Yeah. You don’t, right? OK. So I’ll give you an example. It’s like a very stupid, basic example. When I am chatting with ChatGPT,

18:08
I don’t care about spellings. Like, I don’t care. Like, if I make a mistake, I’m not going to go back, back, back, back to correct it because I know it is so good with understanding what I meant. Like, even if it’s completely off, really literally looks like a cat walked on over my keyboard. I don’t care. I just my fingers are flying across the keyboard. am like constantly in AI land, like I have multiple tabs open and multiple things happening while one tab is working on one operation, I open another and do another. So

18:37
I don’t have time right? Chagypd never makes me feel stupid about my spellings. I’m like, okay, this is great. I just understand what I’m saying. Just keep going. You know, my shorthand my, bad spellings. Go ahead. Gemini rubs it in the like, literally rubs me the wrong way by showing it to me that Oh, you said this, you probably meant this. Yeah, right. I Amazon, A-M-A-X-O-N. Don’t remind me about my spelling.

19:07
So I somehow yeah, somehow um Gemini rubbed me the wrong way by just reminding me of my spelling mistakes and the way I had said something and you probably meant this and yes, yes, yes, right. And then Claude tends to have a different personality. Claude seems to be like this very um gosh, these guys have personalities anyway. uh Claude tends to be this quiet

19:35
super smart, intelligent being that will only give you as much as you need and nothing more. You know, it’s not super chatty or anything like chat GPT is chatty. Like when you do the conversation more, it will talk to you like a human, it will put the earth and the hours and arms and everything. Whereas Claude doesn’t do that Claude will stick to the work. And when it’s done, it will give you helpful suggestions. Do you want this, this or this? And then you can pick from one of the options that it suggested. the conversational

20:04
naturally flows to the next step with cloud. So somehow for coding, I don’t know that that frame of mind where you’re really thinking about uh how you want to proceed, you don’t want chatty, you want you want the thing to understand what you want. And then without distracting you too much, give you the next couple of you know, best next options for you to keep you know, like small talk to you, I get it, I get it.

20:33
Yeah, maybe what I did want to ask you though is that what are some of like your most impactful automations that you’re using or you’ve developed that just make your life so much easier? Oh my god, there’s actually so many but let me uh share a secret which is that even prior to getting into AI, I was uh very very automation focused. So I used to use uh Apps Script. So Google Apps Script for all kinds of things and uh chat GPT just are

21:03
OpenAI just came along and made my life easier. So it enhanced my kind of style of working by shortening the duration of creating these projects. It just takes sometimes just an hour or two to put together an app. I’ll give you an example. This is really, really uh simple, but it saved me. I guess it saved my team a little bit of time, but over time, all this kind of adds up.

21:32
We have um this, what is it? Gosh, Walmart. Okay, so Walmart, we have a login for Walmart. And every time my team tries to log in with our uh email that the client has given us and given permissions to, it generates an OTP, right? It says, okay, now you’ve got to go, now you’ve got to get the OTP and then put that in and then you can proceed and log in. That OTP comes to me.

21:59
because that email is an alias of my email, right? Now my team sitting in somewhere in Philippines or India or wherever, they’re like, oh, can you send us the OTP because we want to log in? So I was like, oh my God, I want to fix this. So I figured out a way where as soon as uh the OTP is emailed to me, right, it comes into my Gmail, right? And I have this, uh you know, this Google app, Google apps, um

22:28
email watcher. I have lots of email watches, but this particular watcher is only watching for an email that comes from help at walmart.com or whatever that link is that addresses and then it’ll scan the email and find the OTP. Now it’s got to do something with that. It’s got to send it to, you know, the group. want it to be sent to all the people in the, the, I don’t know which of my team members asked for the OTP. I want to send it.

22:56
to them all at once in a group. So the best place for me to send that information is in Google Spaces. So Spaces is this very cool, it’s almost like Slack, but in the Google ecosystem. So you have Spaces and we have like 45, 50 Spaces right now, one for each client plus there’s other small ones that we have for internal purposes. So these Spaces, I created a space just for Walmart.

23:23
And every time my email hits an email like that, that OTP is sent to that space and everybody who’s on that space just picks it up. Whoever wants it can pick it up from there. um This took me, I would say like 30 minutes to an hour to create the app script that does all of this. And I got stuck along the way because I needed something called a web hook, which I had to generate from within the space. And then I had to give that web hook to the app script.

23:53
so that it would kind of give the final output to a particular place and that was my spaces. um So gosh, this project has been saving me time. It’s been mostly saving my team frustration because I’m not awake when they’re awake and stuff like that. So I would say such automations, there’s like hundreds of them that we’ve created to save time.

24:18
And I generally follow this rule of if something is happening more than three times, if you’re having to do a task more than three times, consider automating it. And we find these opportunities everywhere in our operations every single day, like so many of them. So I think the combination of existing automation tools like Apps Script and the power of AI to generate those JavaScript code pieces that I can just quickly plug in.

24:47
play uh is helping me so much right now. I’m saving so much time. That’s my AI world, you that overlap of like automation and AI right now. about people who are just afraid to touch any JavaScript or whatever? I know, like, I haven’t tried this yet, but I know Claude’s integrated into Gmail right now, for example, right? And have you tried that? Yes. And then you can go and you

25:13
Yeah, I tried the, what is it, calendar connect. So it tells me when my, yeah, it basically reads my calendar and it tells me, uh you know, when my meetings are or things like that. But I haven’t really needed to go there because I have my own system within the Google ecosystem. I did test it out though. And yeah, I think that might be a good alternative for someone who is afraid of um programming in general or touching JavaScript.

25:43
It’s always going to be this question of build versus buy. Should you buy a ready-made solution to your problem or should you plow through the details and have more control over it and just build it yourself? uh Or you have this middle ground of you want to build it, but you want to do it in a low code, no code sort of way where you don’t need to understand the coding piece. So yes, I’m sure there’s…

26:10
So many different ways you can go about it uh that work for you. So it seems like you opt for the code method in general. that accurate then? Yeah, because of the flexibility and the control and the fact that it’s free. I’m already paying for the Google Workspace system and I’m familiar with it. Familiarity is one of the most important things actually. If you’re used to doing things a certain way, if it’s just an extension of that, it’s always easier than switching to something totally new, which gives you

26:39
Maybe a little bit more, but I’m actually fine with this, comfortable at this point. Let me rephrase the question then, just because I think the audience is probably afraid of code. I’m just making a guess or assumption here. Yes. What are some of the most impactful automations that you use that didn’t involve any programming? We can talk about your creatives, anything that you do. Sure. Yeah, I agree. So the creatives definitely, um I have

27:09
like this whole, you know, creative stack that we use internally, right? There’s lots and lots of different apps that we use for different things. But at the end of the day, we compile everything in Canva, which is our assembly uh platform. um So all the pieces like the, let’s say you have like a foreground, a background and text, we basically look at things as layers. And then we put everything together in Canva and give it some basic um

27:38
transitions and animations, can do that in that final space. Do you do everything in then? Because Canva has… At the end. Oh, just at the end. Yeah, because I think Canva has a bunch of AI tools. Yes, we use those AI tools where we need to, for example, Text Anywhere. It’s an AI tool within Canva. There’s actually 200 or 300 AI tools within the Canva apps set.

28:06
that we use from time to time. We also use Canvas own kind of uh native apps like Magic Expand, Magic Grab, Magic Erase, ah things like that, that can help to extract foreground from background, or it can help to fill in the space. Like if you have a small image and you wanna actually grow the background so that you can position it correctly, you can actually say Magic Expand and it fills the whole space.

28:36
a bunch of those different tools um in order to get the final look that we’re going after. But that’s on the creative side, right? I think your question was also more about the low code, no code programming side. So I’ve actually had success with make.com quite a bit of it. to give you an example, um and I think I might have shared this at your summit as well, but let’s say Facebook posting, right? You start with an image.

29:06
ah that you upload into a Google Drive folder. Let’s say your graphics designer just finished their image, they’ve uploaded it to a designated Drive folder. Now you want that to be picked up automatically, and then you want to send that to ChatGPT via an API connection. basically ChatGPT will read and understand that image and generate a nice Facebook caption in text with emojis and hashtags and all that good stuff.

29:36
and it will also post it to Facebook. Simultaneously, you can post it to other Without your review or? Up to you. If you feel like you want to include a review cycle, then you can have a human in the loop and break the automation there, or you can take it all the way to Facebook and maybe correct it later after the fact. For the most part, it’s been working fine with the direct as well. Interesting. Okay.

30:03
Yeah, this is a post for a brand or for for on behalf of you. Yeah, so this is uh basically for my own brand. Like I have a jewelry. Yeah, I don’t operate it uh much these days. Like it’s not an active thing. But I use it for like demonstration purposes as well as for my own, you know, testing and things like that. And so that basically posted to my live audience that that actually views my page and stuff like that. And it’s got

30:33
almost perfect captions. Like literally doesn’t default from my prompt. The prompt is most important, right? Because if you put enough clauses in your prompt, you should get a fairly reliable response. Okay. You know, like I mentioned before we started recording, I’ve been working on Stevebot and it’s written everything I’ve ever done and it gives replies and uh

31:03
it sometimes is like off the wall. I mean, it’s the answer is correct. But the way it answers it is like all over the place despite my best efforts. Right? Yeah. Yeah. hallucination. You know, losing context, all of that is real. I struggle with it too. Like, especially when you’ve

31:26
let’s say in OpenAI, you’ve listed some custom instructions and you’re expecting it to follow all of those. It often deviates from those, especially like M dash, like those dashes that get added to send it. Oh my God, that is so annoying. Because it’s a dead giveaway that this post was written by. Yeah, right. It’s like, oh my God, you didn’t write that.

31:50
ah So, you know, so it’s funny because I actually created a shorthand to speak to my LLM. And every time I do a post, or I ask ChatGPT to write something for me, I just say that one code word. It’s just, it’s an instruction to it to go back and clean it up, remove the dashes and a few other things. ah So it’s like shorthand between me and the LLM, because it does not remember, it forgets.

32:20
So this is a shorthand that you’ve created in a custom GPT, I guess, that you’ve No, no, no. So yeah, I just trained it over time. So I have it in the custom instructions in my user preferences settings and stuff like that. I have mentioned that this is, you know, I don’t like the M dashes and stuff like that. But then I also have it in memory, which is another area that you can

32:50
keep stuff, right? So those two, the combination of those two pretty much guarantees that if I say that word, it’s going to do it. And it’s basically gobbledygook. It’s not any word that makes sense in the English dictionary because it’s a made up word that only I know and I understand that when I type it, it knows to do that. So it’s like shorthand. For those of you guys listening, actually what I’ve discovered is a lot of people don’t know about all these extra chat GPT features.

33:16
So uh memory, in case you guys are listening, is where it’s basically all it knows about you personally. And you could add memories, you can delete memories. ah I think it’s under settings. And it’s just something that you should look at to see what it thinks of you, because it has all these defaults there. uh Yeah. Yeah. Steve, in the memory, I also wrote, I’ve also given it

33:45
a few people and their styles of writing as reference. I’ve said, ah because I don’t like to write, ah you my style is not very like hypey or like click-baity or I don’t like that style of writing. I tend to be more like Seth Godin, for example. So I’ve actually put Seth Godin in one of my instructions, like write in the stable and… uh

34:12
what is it? A stable and calm style of set coding, because I don’t want to ever be kind of too overhyping and stuff. So yeah, you can put a bunch of stuff like that in your custom instructions and uh in your memory. So how do you trigger memory? The easiest way is to say, remember this. That’s the code word that gets things straight into memory. And then it will give you a little confirmation that says memory updated, like right away. And if you see that,

34:41
you will be able to check it and it can be, ah you know, you can’t edit a memory. Unfortunately, I tried to edit a memory. The only way is to delete it and start over. can delete memories. Yeah, yeah, I’ve deleted plenty because like every it, I don’t even know exactly how it ends up in there sometimes. To be honest, sometimes right? Yeah, when it’s when it thinks that you’re going to use this again, then it just puts it there. You know, like if you’re working on this big project and you

35:10
maybe try to describe it in a lot of detail, then it assumes that this is something that’s useful to you. And so it’s going to add it to the memory. But yeah, you can delete it. you use any, it’s so it sounds like you’re mainly in Claude and ChachiBT. And then use, it sounds like you use Claude more sparingly because of the credit usage. You know, I’ve never ever run out in ChachiBT ever, but Claude, happens all the time. All the time. All the time. Yeah. Yeah.

35:39
Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. don’t know how that happened. Do you use any of the other ones or like Grok or? No, I don’t use Grok. Gemini, I know has plenty of memory space. they give you, I don’t know how many tokens, like I’ve lost track of a million tokens or something. I’ve never run out. Yeah. Gemini gives you insane amount of tokens.

36:07
And I think I like to use Gemini for transcribing videos, which I don’t think any other tool is doing right now. So if I just upload a video, it will transcribe it for me, like every single line. Oh, okay. So the way I do it, well, I do it two ways. One, Riverside offers free transcription. You just upload it and it’ll transcribe it for you. The other cheap way I do it, since I had to do this with like 500 videos,

36:36
is uh OpenAI has open sourced their whisper model. And so I just run it on my own computer with as long as you have a good video card. It can go through all that because I’m cheap. guess. But Gemini is free. I haven’t tried. I didn’t know about that. It’s free. Yeah, yeah, it’s free. Yeah. You can actually upload like pretty long videos like I’ve uploaded an hour long video and it does a very good job of transcribing it. And

37:03
Now when it comes to YouTube videos, I don’t bother. I don’t download and upload and stuff like that. There’s another tool that I use with YouTube videos. Gosh, I forgot the name of it. It’s installed and it’s I forget the name. But anyway, that tool, as soon as you open a YouTube video on the right side, there’s like a little browser widget.

37:25
or you could just click on that and download the transcription. that’s easy for that. Chatgbt YouTube transcription or something like that. I use that too. it? Yeah. Oh, there’s different ones, I’m sure. That’s the one I There’s different ones. Yeah, there’s a few different ones. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it’s fun. One thing I also want to ask you is, I know at Seller Summit, you had some of these really cute videos uh that you created for brands.

37:52
And I want to know what you’re doing to create those little videos because they were all AI generated. Are you using Kling or are you using like Google’s VO3 or anything like that? is your method? So initially I was using Sora because it’s unlimited as well. Yeah, it’s like kind of being a little realistic about the cost of all of this.

38:19
Sora does a pretty decent job. It’s no longer the top model out there. There’s so many much better ones. And then there’s a bunch of services like OpenArt that give you access to other models, like including some of the Chinese models, including Kling. Kling’s model is called Colors, spelled with a K. I think that’s Colors 2 or something like that.

38:45
and then also gives access to Vio3 through that. So there’s different ways to access all of these models without paying for them individually, you know, and because costs add up when it comes to AI creatives. What is that tool that you’re just talking about that allows you to use all of them? Yeah, it’s called OpenArt. can double check that real quick. Okay. Yeah, it’s called OpenArt. So does it work if you…

39:15
you pay for that subscription, you get access to all of them? Yeah, in fact, they have a few credits for free. So yeah, it is open art. you can, you can, there’s, yeah, there’s a bit, huge library, and then you can pick models. And then you can also train your own models and stuff like that. So it’s a bunch of like flux, you have flux, you have…

39:39
Gosh, VO3, there’s so many and you can immediately get access to all of them. think including MiniMax, which is China’s, one of China’s leading ah video models. ah And now I think Mid Journey has also come out with their own video creation. was always just I haven’t tried it yet actually. Yeah, I mean, you need to pay for it. Like Mid Journey will not let you in without paying for it. Like they start you on the paid plan. So…

40:08
You know, I’ve been debating whether to cancel my mid journey lately, because I feel like chat GPT for what I use it for is actually quite good for the text and everything. That’s the most important part for me, the text. The text. What is the catch with that open art or that tool? Because I imagine you don’t you get limited credits for everything, right? If

40:31
If you’re paying. So yeah, I’m looking at it here. So it’s $14 to get started for 4,000 credits per month, which is almost 40 videos per month. That is a huge number of videos. Like even if you were to discard like 90 % of them, it’s still pretty good. Right. And mostly, I mean, this is what happens, like nine out of 10 videos we throw away because they’re like garbage. And the thing is the prompt is something that you evolve as your

41:00
you know, evolving the concept like with the tool and you may not get it right. You know, it might end up in a particular direction. You’re like, no, no, no, this is not what I want. And then you end up discarding that. So often I find myself using multiple tools just to get to the final prompt that I will then use in the final good tool that I actually rely on. I think we’ll do a good job like cling, for example, or VO3. Yeah.

41:30
I watched this presentation of a guy who made like a five minute video on VO3, like piecing together different scenes and everything. And he showed off his prompts that he used to generate it. And it was literally like a book. Yes. I believe that. believe that. I mean, it’s almost faster to film the video than like, look at all the instructions that he gave. Well, maybe not. But I mean, to me, it was like, that is overwhelming.

41:59
Which just shows if you were right, you have to be explicit about so many little details. Yeah. And the thing is, I bet he didn’t write that prompt because you use AI to generate the prompt to generate a more detailed prompt, which then goes and generates a more detailed prompt. So it’s like multi-step and then also multimodal because you will from time to time insert reference images and reference any details that can be integrated into the prompt itself.

42:30
angles, lighting, style, this and that. So there’s like whole frameworks around AI generated video that touch on all these aspects so that you get a high quality output. I did want to ask you some of these questions also, switching gears a little bit. I’m worried about all this. Do you feel like AI is replacing, I don’t know, replacing a lot of these services? Like, do you believe that

42:57
a small brand now can do a lot of things themselves with all these tools and basically displace a lot of players in the entire industry. Yeah, so my thought on that is that AI is first of all, going to take away a few jobs, but it’s also going to add back another few jobs because now you’re doing more things with it, you’re doing different things with it. So it’s not like

43:23
you’ll suddenly lose all your people, like people who are worried that their jobs will be gone. The nature of the job will shift. You’ll probably have to use AI internally to kind of do your job better and then more. ah But I think what AI is unlocking is stuff that was never possible before. And I think there was inefficiencies in the way we operated, whereas now it’s going to be highly efficient. You’re going to be using the people for

43:52
the things that people are good at and automation for the things that automation is good at. Whereas previously it was mixed up. People were doing stuff that should never be people jobs, like downloading files from a particular place. Those should not be people jobs at all. Those should be just streamed in or whatever. So yeah, think uh as to the question of whether agencies will be wiped out, I don’t think so at this point.

44:21
because you still need to give it business direction, you still need to give it context, you still need um human oversight. Like earlier you were saying, are you sure that you can just take the make.com output and just flush it out to Facebook? Perhaps not, you probably need some spot checking mechanism at the end where someone goes in once a day maybe and looks at and maybe cleans up the posts that were posted. Like if you’re doing volume work, you will need…

44:48
humans somewhere in the loop. that’s not going to go away. But the nature of their work will definitely shift over time. And anyone who is in the creative space, I would say embrace AI and leverage it to your benefit rather than be afraid of it or try to oppose it because opposing it is not going to get get you anywhere. You know? uh Yeah, yeah. And then uh last question for you is, if you’re an e commerce brand right now and

45:18
you’re still kind of on the sidelines of AI, like where should people learn? Like, what do you think that people should learn first about AI? Or what should they start with? Right, yeah. So, you know, um there’s a bunch of news that you can follow. I have one, there’s a few others that are out there. I mean, there’s superhuman AI, there’s, gosh, there’s a bunch that I subscribe to. get first of all, get into the mindset of I gotta learn this thing, because you can’t ignore it.

45:47
That would be foolish to, you know, close your eyes and, and yours and say, okay, I’m fine where I am. You’ve got to learn, right? That’s the first step. So subscribe to a bunch of newsletters. I could share mine if you’re interested in sharing. yours. think it’s an excellent newsletter and Ritu, you’re always so, uh, non-promotional. You know what I mean? Yeah. What is the URL of your, of your newsletter first? Yeah. Yeah. So mine is a PPC dash Ninja.

46:18
So you’ll have to put a www in front so that it doesn’t go to the wrong place. I need to fix that, but www.ppc-ninja.com. And that should get you the um entire one year’s worth of newsletters that I’ve just dropped up one year off of writing. So all of those are there, plus all the new ones that come out once every Tuesday. So that’s one starting point. Like get into the mindset of…

46:47
you know, being on top of news, you don’t have to know everything about everything, but at least you need to know what’s possible. Once you know what’s possible, then you can hire people who can help you, you know, as a first line, you could get people as consultants to help you out with like just structuring your AI automation, internal AI automation or AI efficiency. I’ve been hired by like two

47:13
uh agencies, in fact, who want to do what PPC Ninja is doing. And that’s interesting because they feel the urgency. They know that they need to be AI savvy or else they’ll lose their jobs. uh So I’m helping them. But then, the next step from there is to get smart people who will actually do stuff and

47:38
and actually be the prompt engineers or the AI creatives in your organization that will take you forward to the next level. start with the education, bring in some consultants and then start training or hiring for talent in-house. And just keep a note on the fact that this talent is not readily available. So if you can find someone who is good, grab them early. Yeah. I think what I found at least with the students in my class is like,

48:08
You have to realize that almost anything is possible. if you wanted to, like if you’re doing something, I think the example you gave was if you’re doing something more than three times a day, chances are it can be automated away. And the first time you do it, it’s probably going to be a little bit more intimidating, right? You’ll make lots of mistakes and you’ll get frustrated. But if you can just break through that initial barrier,

48:33
then literally because you can use AI to make decisions for you on a lot of fronts, which you couldn’t do before. I think that’s the biggest benefit and you can automate practically any stupid thing. I agree. Practically any stupid thing. totally agree. It’s just a matter of priority and also cost. think that’s, that’s, are the only two things that come to mind. But other than that, you can automate anything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

49:02
I think I’d mentioned this in prior episodes, but I’ve been working on something where, you know how you have to rotate out Facebook ads all the time? Well, you just list what you want in a spreadsheet and automatically generates, you know, the Facebook ad for you. Or we probably both get tons of emails. can have ChatGP go through like last week’s worth of emails, for example, make its determination on whether you should respond or not based on whether it’s promotional or whatnot.

49:31
automatically create a draft. Like those are just some simple examples. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. Yeah. Love it. And Ritu, so if people want, uh you know, PPC and Amazon services, can you just kind of describe what your ideal client looks like? Yes. So we work with, with, you know, clients that have at least a million dollars in sales.

50:00
So we start there, that’s kind of our cutoff. It’s not like we don’t work at all with smaller sellers, but uh just understanding that we may not be the right fit at that early stage because we have our service fees and things like that. And we do a high quality job and so we do have a slightly higher entry point for that reason. The other criteria we have is um the conversion rate on their listings.

50:29
we generally look for 8 % and above. why is that? Conversion rate is a leading indicator of how efficient your ad performance is going to be. So for example, if you have a high conversion rate, let’s say 20%, you only need five clicks to make one sale. That’s just the way the math works out. And if you just take an average cost per click of let’s say a dollar, that’s basically you’re spending $5,

50:59
to make one sale. Now, if your sale price is, let’s say $50, then at $5 to acquire one sale, your ACOS is already decided. It’s 10%. Right? So we know from the conversion rate what your efficiency is going to be. Now, take another example of a horrible conversion rate of, say, 2%. Now you need 50 clicks to make one sale. And at $1 per click, you’re spending $50 to earn $50. That’s 100 % ACOS.

51:28
we can’t help you. So basically you need to fix your conversion rate first, get it up to a point that’s decent. That’s why our cutoff is like 8 % ish. Now there might be some products that have a very high price point in which case also your conversion rate could be low and that’s fine. Those cases are fine because then the ratio of spend to sale is not that bad. You’ll still make a good ACOS even if your number of clicks is high.

51:56
Those are the two main ones. And yeah, we don’t really have any other blockers to kind of do a free PPC audit. And then if we are a good fit, we can start working with you. We also offer like DSP services for slightly larger brands where, um you know, there is an element of repeatability. So there’s a initial customer acquisition cost with DSP. uh

52:24
And then you can basically remarket to those people over and over again. And that way you can kind of stretch out your dollar so that it kind of has a longer lifetime value versus, you know, uh products that only have a one time and it lasts for two years. is not for you, right? So supplements is good or consumables or anything that needs people to come back for more. That’s good.

52:48
a good candidate for DSP. So yeah, those are the two. And then we also do Walmart in case you have a Walmart um account and we can manage that as well. And I just want to say that I’ve known reach. I think I’ve known you for over a decade now or almost a decade, I want to say, right? Almost a decade. Yeah. And what I like about you and both Bernie is, you know, you’re you’re like a you say it like how it is. And there’s no like you said earlier, you don’t want anything hypey or anything like that.

53:18
Because I feel like you’re because you’re both engineers right and and you’re like my people like who I relate with personally because I feel like we have some personalities so I just want to say like I trust you. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, that means a lot. Yeah. And you know, I trust you because your content is so good. Like I can listen to you for hours. I literally have your

53:43
voice, it runs through my head sometimes when I remember something. I’ve listened to uh some episode of something, you’re maybe talking to someone or just your videos are so good. And it’s like, so logical, so methodical, you just go from point to point, like your text flows seamlessly. It’s really amazing. So here’s our fan club guys.

54:11
And oh, and I do want to just plug your newsletter real quick, like all these automations that we didn’t really get a chance to go into depth, like retool gives out a bunch of these three automations, like the one that scrapes Rufus, for example, which is highly useful in helping you figure out your Amazon listing. So as soon as you stop listening to this, go sign up for the newsletter. I sign on and I learn new things every week because I feel like you are in the AI.

54:36
probably 10x more than I am, because I feel like you just wake up and it’s AI, AI, AI. Whereas I’m a little more casual about it. Like I need some for my store, so I’ll go do something about it. yeah. Burcu, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Steve, for having me. Appreciate it.

54:57
All right, well hope you enjoyed that episode. Make sure you check out Re2’s AI newsletter for the latest AI tools. And for more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 610. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 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’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

55:27
Head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and ascended the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, I sit down with Norm Farrar, one of the most respected voices in e-commerce and Amazon selling. We dive into what’s actually working right now from building brands that command higher prices to avoiding the traps that cause most sellers to fail, whether it’s DTC or Amazon. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

00:29
And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches. People who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate.

00:57
We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be so if you want in, go to SellersSummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:32
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I have Norm Ferrar on the show. And if you sell physical products online, he is someone that you absolutely need to know. He is a legend in e-commerce and the Amazon space. He is an entrepreneur, business coach and host of the Lunch with Norm podcast and the Marketing Misfits podcast. I’ve been on that show before and he’s interviewed some of the biggest names in e-commerce.

01:59
Now over the years, Norm has built, scaled and advised multiple seven and eight figure brands, both on and off of Amazon. And he’s an expert when it comes to branding, influencer marketing, logistics, sourcing. He’s helped hundreds of sellers. Now in this episode though, we’re going to be talking about how to grow an Amazon business through community and how to stand out in an oversaturated marketplace and the real strategies that people are using today. He doesn’t hold back and uh welcome to the show, Norm.

02:29
you doing man? Hey, it’s great to be here. And you’ve been on both podcasts, by the way. I have been on both podcasts. And thank you so much in 2023 when I was helping to you helped me promote my book, which I’m very appreciative of. No selling books is difficult. It is tough. I don’t recommend it to anyone. Yeah. Okay, so one thing that I want I’ve been on both your podcasts before and

02:54
You have a lot of things going on. Like I was just kind of looking on your site. Where are you personally focusing your time today? And one thing that I wanted to know also is are you still selling at Amazon actively? I am. uh I really love working with brands though. Like I’ve, I see so many opportunities that people are missing. So many of these niches that are sub niches, sub niches of sub niches.

03:23
that have opportunity nowadays. And it just takes time. But when I, when I, like I talk a lot to different people at events and people come up to me and they’ll start talking to me about their products or send me over their products. used to have something on our lunch with Norm podcast called trash my product. People would send me their products and I would just trash them. But, but I mean, I would say the good, the bad and the ugly. And people still don’t get it today.

03:51
They’re just not marketing properly. They’re using 2017, uh, you know, techniques, long keyword titles, horrible bullets, just keyword stuffing. That’s what it comes down to. They’re not understanding or keeping compliant with Amazon. And so I kind of lean that way because I see that there’s so many opportunities to help people. And, um, I think if the opportunity arose, uh, oh, by the way, like we have our own.

04:21
factory in China. So my family has owned this factory in China for about seven or eight years. And we had two factories in Taiwan. yeah. Yeah. So we were doing subcontracting, uh not subcontracting, but contract manufacturing. had our own private labels. And to this day, we have our own private labels uh in the PPE space on Amazon. And then I have some in the beauty space and pet space.

04:48
Okay, I want to dig into this a little bit. How does one start a factory in China? Well, technically, technically, I cannot start a factory in China, but we have general managers in China that are working the product, the manufacturing component for us. But you own it, right? Meaning like you spent the money to develop the factory. We developed everything we built the machineries, we the machinery, we did everything.

05:15
In fact, I’m going to tell you, if you don’t mind, I’ll tell this really crazy story about an eight figure business that started with my mom going to CVS in the States, coming back with cosmetic foam. And she said, you know, I hate when this foam turns yellow. And my dad said, oh like, what do you mean? It’s not white and it’s not white all the time. It always turns yellow in the bag.

05:44
And she says, you know, you should do something about that. And my dad said, Oh yeah, do you think, do you think that would sell? And she goes, every woman needs cosmetic foam. So my dad’s very entrepreneurial and he went out, he hired a chemist. He built this machine in the middle of this factory in Auburn, Maine. Then that machine ended up in Taiwan and we had produced, we became the probably the number one.

06:12
producer of EVA foam and cosmetic foam in the US and globally. And we did all sorts of things with it. It started out with cosmetic foam. It turned into wooden stamps, that little EVA part where we started manufacturing the whole wooden stamp. Like overnight we became the number one, the largest uh child’s uh wooden stamp manufacturer. We opened up another factory, but this all started from my mother saying, oh, can you turn this yellow? uh

06:42
turned this white and my dad just taking that opportunity and just saying, wow, this, could be something. So that’s how it all started. It went from Auburn, Maine, like he had a place up here in Toronto, family business. worked with my dad for a long time in Auburn, Maine. He had multiple companies already under his belt, but then the opportunity came to go to Taiwan in 19, in the 19 early 1990s, had the two factories there and then went over to China.

07:10
because it wasn’t cost effective in Taiwan anymore. Are either your parents, do they speak the language? No, no, but my brother really like he does bunkerisms in Chinese. Interesting. Okay. That’s amazing. That’s an incredible story, Norm. Seriously. Wow. Yeah. And you know, so I come from an entrepreneurial family, but if I see an opportunity, I jump on it in a second.

07:40
And that might be a problem. You know, I see shiny objects. I like to get rid of those shiny objects. And when I find something I like, I like to hop all over it. Like right now, um I’m finding an opportunity. Now, a lot of people are going to go, Oh God, but I found a huge opportunity in the cigar market and like having a proper database where you can find the information and the paraphernalia. So there’s not a really great online source for that. So today,

08:10
One of the things that I’m working on is is building out sort of and I’m hoping to do this the world’s Best cigar database. That’s what I want to do. See that’s enough to actually work and I think you know Cuba hasn’t been open all that long, right? Is that why no one’s done it before or no like manufacturers have done it and cigar aficionado They started the rating system back in the 90s and they’ve done an excellent job, but I want to I think

08:40
there is an opportunity to dumb it down enough for the average consumer who doesn’t, they just want to have a smoke and then to the more enthusiast and the area that’s missing is to the cigar lounges. So if I can market these to the cigar lounges and or the, like the, the cutters and all the other things that go along with it, I think there’s a good opportunity there.

09:08
You know what, Norm? This sounds like the perfect niche for a community. So this is a good time. I am very curious what you’re doing to build that community. I mean, that was the original, what we kind of agreed upon when we, before I hit the record button. So let’s get the perfect case study of yourself. Okay. Well, like building a community. So you have a community and I have a community. So

09:36
My community started with something. There has to be something unique for the community or something that everybody just loves. And that starts like for me as a, not a service provider, but as a speaker, I wanted to, I, I grew a beard, simple Roy Orbison has glasses. I grew a beard so people could recognize me and

10:01
The reason it wasn’t for speaking engagements for I went out to every event there possibly was. I wanted, I wanted to be a sponge and I wanted to absorb as much information back in the day. And when I reached out to speakers afterwards, cause everybody would gather around them. I’d reach out later and they wouldn’t remember me. say, Oh, I was the guy in the, you know, jean jacket. I remember going up to the Wolf of Wall Street, you know, uh, Jordan Belfort sitting in the third row back. wrote him.

10:29
And I said, oh, hey, I thought your, uh, your presentation was blah, blah, blah, blah. have a question about this. I was the guy with the gray beard and I remember you and those are the, so that was the start. I, I started a community by doing something unique. Now, if you’re a brand, it’s the exact same way. You might not want to go and build a community around your brand, but you might want to build a community around.

10:57
something that everybody likes. So let’s, for example, I’ll give you an example of one of one of my clients. He, he has a knife and he was, he had no followers, nothing. And so what we looked at was first of all, the packaging, the packaging suck. We changed that. We changed the perceived value. It looked great. Then we said, how do we get people to, how do you get their email address? Well, we put a lifetime value on. So this was a start.

11:26
So QR code over to a page, lifetime value. But then we added more. We went around, we gave all these knives out to chefs all around the world. And they provided us with a recipes, enough recipes to put into a book. But that also gave us enough UGC that we could start to put into all these different social channels. And they gave us videos. But the next step, and this is what really started. Oh, we’re skipping ahead, sorry.

11:52
You gave it all these knives to chefs and then you had them create videos for you. photos and provide a recipe. Okay, was that easy to do? I yeah. Do you just send it to them or? Well, no, we did have an outreach program and we also, so we had to say like who uses chef knives, right? Well, outside of the consumer. Well, you got the chefs, but there was a culinary schools. So we reached out to culinary schools. We said, Hey,

12:22
We’ll provide all these, but we want recipes. And at the end, we want your students to hold them up, showing that they use their knives. And so they did. And that’s where the whole content trail started. So we got the lifetime guarantee that was enough. But then we said, hey, here’s a book. Now we have three cookbooks, by the way. But the final step on that landing page, which nailed it for us with this community,

12:51
which is the weekly meal plan. So every week we created a meal plan. We sent it out to each one of these people in the community and it went to this, um, just as Facebook group at the time. And that grew to 7,000 people. So the ability to have 7,000 people get a meal plan every day or every week. And then in your group, you’re not,

13:19
you’re not promoting anything. Your goal is to get them to come from that group to your brand. And then you can promote and then you know, you can have a whole different way of talking to these people, but the, the, ability to go out and grow your brand, go wide. Now the person has 11 knives and every one of those people see those product launches when they happen and

13:49
you don’t really have to discount. So you’re getting them to buy your product. They’re posting. We run contests. So it’s on their Instagram accounts or wherever they’re posting, which is gathering more people to come in. So that’s step one. So, on. have questions about step one. So you mentioned a Facebook group. I’ve actually recently started migrating my Facebook folks over to discord. Do you still find Facebook groups?

14:17
effective because I feel like the reach is not that good. We’ve our group. uh So for us, and this is a whole other topic, but it’s building different types of community like do blitz marketing for community. So we do have a Facebook group and they still have a Facebook group. We’ve transferred a lot of our uh our community over to our WhatsApp group. So yeah, we found that WhatsApp

14:46
was a lot more engaging. here’s when you know, and I’m gonna come back to the other group in a second, but here’s when you know that you’ve got a group, like a community. And we kind of joked around just before we came on here about uh moderators, but you can build a group, you can get that group going, you get really involved with the group, you’re actively involved with the group, and then as people are coming in, they’re asking questions.

15:15
And you start to see other people answering the questions. And then you can see like there are going to be people that come in spam and you got to get rid of them quickly. So you get a few moderators. Well, I can go for a week without even checking on the group and I’ll come back and there’s like 50 questions or 50 conversations going on. That’s when you know it’s successful. There’s a lot of people that mix up, um, engagement and followers with vanity.

15:45
And so you might have 400 people in a group and that group is just moving and shaking while you have 10,000 people in this other group because you bought a whole bunch of followers and all you get is a whole bunch of thumbs up emoji, emoji, emoji, uh, and it’s nothing. So it’s worth way more at the end of the day to have a group that’s engaged and you have to prompt sometimes if you start to see the group kind of, you know, going into a law.

16:14
Ask a question, have a survey, but keep them engaged. And uh like for us, our engagement is it’s been there for about three or four years and it’s steady. Sometimes you’ve got to give it a pat on the butt and maybe run a contest or do something, but it works. then to get more people into that group. uh Like for me, it’s easy with the podcast. uh If I, or if I go on other people’s podcasts, people might hear me.

16:44
then they might go over to the group. But for a brand, they should do the same. They should check out a podcast. You know, if it’s a pet product, go on other people’s podcasts, write a press release, do something, drive content. And here’s something I think we might have talked about this. uh When people are writing content nowadays, lot of it is just press a button and that shouldn’t be. uh Some of it’s got to be unique. For me, like I have a content uh company,

17:14
And that company, it writes press releases, but I have to have that sort of senior editor position that makes sure that the content is correct. They fact check it and then they send it out. And then if we’re writing a blog article to go around with that press release, it’s gotta be something that we can change up. And we change that up every, it could be every quarter. We try to change it up a bit just to kind of get Google going, aha, it’s, know, we got some more.

17:43
contact, but what they content, but what they miss. Most people take a look at it, Steve, you go to a blog, so many people write about blog articles to get keywords, and then they forget to put in a call to action. Sure. You know, so how that can build a community. So back to that knife community. Yeah. Like, how do you get people talking? Like, presumably people were there for the recipes? Is that is that accurate? Or

18:13
What were they there for? Yeah. Well, we ended up putting out three cookbooks. So as soon as we put out the cookbooks, that’s great. Hey, we could do a refer a friend. So there’s a refer a friend campaign. uh Just as we’re speaking right now, we’re doing something very different, which is one of the best things that I love to build a community. And that’s the newsletter. So.

18:41
I’ve got more response and more leads off of my newsletter than my podcast. And I thought it would be the other way around. Uh, Kevin, uh, Kevin King, same exact same thing with the brands. think you can do the exact. And we just started working on two different ways to build out your community. And that’s going to be the newsletter and that’s going to have recipes. It’s going to be probably be talking to.

19:08
chefs or you know, people in the business bloggers, people that want to add content and we’ll have a really nice, not a newsletter that sucks. It’s gotta be good. It’s gotta present value. And, um, so that’s going to be our next step. And we think that we’re going to be able to at least double our community fairly quickly. And we’re doing a referral contest and we just like anybody buys the product. We always ask them if, if they want to, uh,

19:38
we generate different types of contests for different products that we use or different times of the year. And sometimes we’ll get swamped with content just because people, you know, wanna, and we’re not giving them anything. They just wanna put something up showing that they’re using the knife. We have had a uh contest where we’ve given out, you know, four or five different products, or we’ve given out something completely different.

20:08
Like, um, what are they called? Apple iPod, not the iPods. That’s the big thing against your head. AirPods, AirPods. That’s what I I’m old. I, know, I I get a pass. Uh, but you’ve got to just keep changing it up, seeing what’s different and for us. So in our newsletter, how do I do it differently than the next person? I have a personal story that I have a business twist every, every, uh, once a week.

20:38
And then we have something that you’ve experienced it called the wheel of Kelsey. And that’s a contest that anybody can enter for whatever was on the podcast that week through the newsletter. And that just keeps people coming back and you can see where the engagement is. And you’ll see that, you know, if people like the article, like there’ll be a poll underneath it. And that’s just different. So we have to find that for each brand. And if you can do that, you can have that.

21:07
newsletter go out and you’ve got all those, let’s say 7,000 emails. Now you can do other things. You can do an email campaign. You could just do a fact of the day. You could send out a recipe a day. And you know, if you think that, Oh, you know, I’m going to be annoying people. Well, they’ll unsubscribe. Then you got nothing to worry about, you know, get them out of there quick, you know, and, and the people that want to see your product and a lot.

21:34
or your service or whatever it is, they’ll continue it. uh Kevin King was telling me, like I was talking about this yesterday. said, you know, I want to put out the newsletter. I’m putting out a couple of other emails. You know, is that too much? And he goes, no, you do this every day. says, I know people that email people six times a day. said, well, that’s completely annoying. I mean, I would unsubscribe and says, well, it wouldn’t be suited for you.

22:04
I said, yeah, I guess you’re right. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free.

22:33
and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. 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. You know what, I guess my definition of community is slightly different than what we’re talking about here. um For me, a community is a place where they can interact with each other, right? What you’re describing is like a newsletter where you’re building a community of people who follow you.

23:03
uh So for that knife brand is the Facebook group is it like poppin? It’s it’s it’s doing there’s two different groups. The one is really popping because it’s about recipes and then they start sharing their own recipes and cooking ideas and you know, just just different ways of doing things. You know how to heat a potato, uh you know faster, you know, just really cool little

23:32
bits of information. Then you have the other site, which still provides value and they have the, they have a recipe of the week. Uh, they have value added products, but the real community is the community that’s talking about the niche. Okay. Okay. And like for, for example, with, with you, if you want to have a community popping that, that newsletter draws people, it’s a funnel. It draws people into the community.

24:03
And then you can start talking like we’re, we’re one common value, right? So like-minded individuals and that could be either brand or it could be niche. So yeah, it, it, it’s all just different ways that you can funnel down. I guess one of my problems in the past with communities, like a Facebook group, for example, is that you need to jumpstart the engagement somehow. So it sounds like what you do is you do contests.

24:32
and you do giveaways and whatnot. How often are you doing those? And do you need to have a moderator in there in the beginning? Like in the beginning, jumpstarting it? Are you posting every day in there? I’m trying to put, yeah, at the beginning, a hundred percent, maybe even more. Uh, like for the WhatsApp group, we were posting and we were sharing, uh, we kind of got away from that because we had all the moderators and there was a lot of questions coming in then.

25:02
I started to notice that there was a bit of a drop off. So, and I’m by drop off, I’m talking about like 2%. And then I thought, okay, got together with my son said, what do you think we can do to keep this thing going and build the group a bit bigger? And so what it was, was taking uh any Amazon updates or AI updates and posting them into the group. And we asked the group, I said, would you like us to provide

25:32
More content here, or would you like us just to back off a bit and you guys just ask the questions, answer the polls? And it was, yeah, don’t go crazy. This is exactly what was said. Don’t go crazy with updates. But, you know, so we started doing, yeah, here’s one a week or two a week. If something really interesting came up and that got people talking. So, uh, like just the other day, uh, a big one that came out was that big hack on Facebook.

26:02
Oh, yeah. So we noticed that that was happening. And then we put it right onto the group. And okay, that got people talking. You know, how do I check this? And so that was that was great. And we’ll probably do another one next week. But between that, there’ll be 50 to 25 chats going on. Okay. What so on WhatsApp, that’s not like, let’s say you have like 7000 people on WhatsApp, isn’t that get a little out of hand? Oh, yeah.

26:30
But that’s not that’s not where the the the knife brand is. That’s where our brand is. OK, but even for you guys, like even if it’s like a couple hundred people, that’s out of control already, isn’t it? No, not at all. Because yeah, because you’re going to have your main contributors, you’re going to have those, you know, that 10 percent. So let’s say let’s say there’s 50. So you have 500 people in a group. So you got 50 people that are going back and forth. Or there might be that next.

26:59
step down that next group that might add engage, you know, once in a while. Well, it’s those 10 % that are asking, uh, answering the questions. So you’ll see the same names coming up and they’re, they’re helping, they groom, and you’ll find out that, uh, a lot of those people will actually act as your referral model. And this is where that newsletter comes in. So out of our newsletter, we’ve got

27:26
we’ve got around 11,000 people on the newsletter right now and all organic, all organically grown. And you’ll find out that I wasn’t really paying attention to referrals. And then we started doing it again. And I think last month, I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think we got like three or 400 referrals. So I would have, I would have grown this a lot faster if I would have done this a lot earlier.

27:55
How do you implement the referrals? So just to be clear, there’s a link, right? If someone clicks in, refer someone, they get credit for the referral, right? They get credit. And what we did, we made it really simple. A lot of, uh, places that are building communities say, give us five of these five referrals and you’ll get a cup of coffee. just say, Hey, give us one, give us a referral. And we’re going to give you this really cool prompt. Uh, it’s a PDF.

28:24
And then the next one is a small course um that we talked to. One of the guys over at him. Oh, Mark Degrass over when Mark Degrass went on his own. We asked him if he had a course or anything we could use. Well, you get five and you get this course. And it’s, you know, starts to build up in value. We, you know, Honu is one of my companies. We gave a tariff Terminator. That’s a $400.

28:53
product or service. So we grew it out. And I think Kevin even gave us a virtual summit ticket. uh Anybody who gets to, I think it’s a hundred referrals or 250 referrals. They get that, but you just build it up. But the first one is just make it easy. And then they, the person that gets referred, typically you’ll see that they refer somebody. What, uh, what tool do you use to keep track of the referrals?

29:23
We use Beehive. So Beehive is, yeah, yeah. It’s perfect. it’s built into Beehive, right? It’s built into Beehive. Yeah. Okay. I see. Okay. So referrals is actually a pretty good contributor to your newsletter. sounds like it. It is. Yeah. And then you’re incentivizing. Actually, I don’t think I’m on your newsletter. I’m on Kevin’s. What? Sorry, Norm. I’ll join it right now. You know how that hurts? uh I thought it was on, but I don’t… I hear that all the time. Oh, I’m on Kevin’s. uh

29:53
It’s and it’s simple lwn.news. There’s a shame. Yeah, lunch with norm.news. Okay. No, no, no. Yeah, it’s just the acronyms. uh Okay, okay. I will join I want to see how you do. So you give out prizes after one referral. And then based on more you give away even more goodies. Sounds correct. Yeah. Okay. Love it. Okay. And I guess you could do that with e commerce as well. Right? uh Perhaps you could give away

30:24
I don’t know, perhaps free product maybe after referrals and whatnot. You can, I just, have a rule of thumb. I don’t know if you do this or not, but I don’t like giving away my own free product. I’ll give away other things. I’ll give things that are related to it. But by giving away my own price is just marketing, you know, from back old, old school marketing. Don’t give away your own product. And so

30:50
Ideally, I don’t want to give away any of my beauty products or the um pet products, but I would give related or added value products. Interesting. Well, what’s the rationale behind that? Cheapness of the brand. I see. Okay. Even if you have just like, Yeah. And you know what? If you give away a $10 bar of soap, not a lot, you know, I can’t see, like you say, I can’t see how that’s cheapening the brand.

31:19
But if you don’t see that soap or you keep that soap at, you know, a higher dollar price point, I don’t know. It’s just something I learned, you know, just through the years. makes sense. If you see it for free somewhere that instantly devalues that particular product, at least in the eyes of the consumer. Like we give out this free handkerchief for a text messaging number, for a phone number, but that

31:47
handkerchief we don’t actually carry in our store. I see that’s different. Yeah. And then usually, uh what we give away for free is just excess stock of our supplier who just wants to get rid of it anyway. Yep. And that’s perfectly fine. Okay, so okay, great. You’re building up the newsletter, and then that’s funneling people to the group and back and forth. In terms of the group, then

32:11
What do you do there to generate sales? Like whenever there’s a sale or promotion, do you just post in the group and it just kind of naturally goes out or in the uh niche group, you can do that. Like you can say that you have a new product coming out. Uh, one of the things is there’s gotta be a lot of value there. So I don’t know if you know Wilford Lightheart, but he always said, um, a great guy. He, uh, he always says you have to be engaged before you get married.

32:41
And so lots of value, lots of value. Maybe there’s nothing. mean, maybe, maybe there’s a month go by and there’s nothing in there about anything. All of a sudden you have a pre, uh, prime day sale just for the users of that group. If you want to check it out, you can come over to the brand or yeah, over to the brand. So you get them to shift momentum, come over to the brand, buy the product there. And you still got a few things going on over there. You’re still.

33:09
you know, giving some facts, recipes, whatever it could be. Um, but you’ve got them now on into that group and that’s going to be more promoting the product. These is, this is how you’ve gone from, Hey, this is cool. This is a group to starting to create raving fans. And one of the other things I should have mentioned, um, is when you start to see a repeat customer, that’s a raving fan, right? Or you can turn that person into a raving fan and

33:38
You can take that person segment segmented in your, you know, if you’re like for us with the newsletter, we can see people that are giving us lots of, um, lots of referrals. Well, I think that’s a fan, uh, for a brand. If you see that somebody in Amazon is buying a lot of your product or they’ve got repeat purchases or in your Shopify store, that’s a fan. And now you can reach out to them and see if they want to, you know, do more of a

34:07
brand ambassador role, where you’re gonna give them a discount if they can help promote your product. There’s a lot of different things you can do with loyal uh fans, and that’s the basis, that’s really the basis of building a good community. So one thing that we haven’t talked about is, are you building this community, I guess, how do you build this community off of the people who buy your Amazon products, or is this just something you’re doing independently that boosts your Amazon sales?

34:36
They can do both. So if I’m doing anything on Shopify, I’m getting their email. If I’m on Amazon, I’m using a QR code with a dynamic QR code so I can change whatever the promotion is. that landing page will, that QR code goes over to the landing page and it will be the lifetime warranty, the cookbook and uh the weekly meal plan. So that’s where we get them.

35:06
That’s how we’re building the initial community. What platforms? mean, I’ve been very dissatisfied with Facebook groups just because I feel like Facebook doesn’t really do a good job of alerting people when there are new posts. I mean, once upon a time it was good. Now it’s not so good. You mentioned WhatsApp. What other platforms did you consider and why did you go with WhatsApp actually? Cause there’s a bunch of, there’s like circle, there’s discord, there’s a school.

35:35
I imagine you’ve evaluated a lot of them. Yeah. And I am like, I have a circle account. I’ve got, I have done blitz like blitz marketing. I touch a little, I, I give people the opportunity to join a community that they want to join. So as little or as much as they want, I don’t have discord. Um, that, uh, that still kind of goes over my head, but, uh

36:03
And maybe we can talk about that because maybe I’m missing a really good opportunity on discord, but, uh, you know, we’ve, we’ve gone into tick-tock. Uh, that’s a newer venture, uh, which I thought was kind of cool. Telegram is another area that I like. I was talking with Gracie Ryback the other day and she was saying, you know, how her big group, like she loves telegram. I know a few other people that are on telegram that really love that. I had to shut it down because.

36:33
I use something called Ram Box, by the way. don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. What is that? It’s a lifesaver. So you ever feel like you’re answering or trying to navigate all these communication channels? Yeah. Ram Box puts it all into, like you put all your social into one area. You look at one area and I have my assistant go into the accounts and anything that’s kind of generic answering. Boom. If it’s a

37:00
You know, it’s something I have to answer. She lets me know, but it’s all there. One simple. I love it. App that is that a paid app? Yeah, it is like three bucks a month or something. That’s it. Yeah, it’s cheap. It’s cheap. OK, so basically all your social media gets piped into one location. All your communicate you so you could break it into. Let’s say you have a ton of Slack groups, all one your messenger. You could have anything.

37:29
that you’re communicating with, then you can have another icon that you click and it’s all your social media and their channels, or you can have them all in one. It gives you the opportunity to take almost anything and put it into an icon where you just have to click and it’ll show you those annoying, you know, the red dots. Oh, you got a message. Well, I don’t like looking at those, but you know, if something’s urgent, I got to respond. I got to respond. love it Norm. Okay. That one tool reference.

37:58
could have saved a lot of time for everyone listening. Because it is a hassle, right? The way I do it is everything gets piped into gorgeous, but still it misses stuff from time to time. And like Discord doesn’t go in there, for example. yeah. Yeah. And it does circle. It pretty much takes care of everything. I don’t think I have Discord in there, but I’m sure it would.

38:24
filter your messages. I’ll definitely check it. So it’s called RAM box. All one word. Okay. Now in terms of managing community, you mentioned like now you can step away for a little bit or you have moderators. So two questions. One, how long does it take before you can step away? And then two, how do you find your moderators and are they paid moderators? Are they volunteers? I think at the beginning when you’re building a community, it’s your baby.

38:55
So you want to make sure that the culture is there, you you’re on track, that people aren’t abusing it. And that is a problem upfront. So one of the things that, you know, we try to do is express, uh, like going into WhatsApp, you know, they, well, here’s the interesting thing. You want to make sure that you don’t have these jerks that come into your community and are spamming and just trying to promote. And, uh, one thing I learned.

39:24
And Kevin does this on his newsletter to get into his group. You have to uh become part of the VIP. Now that VIP, how do you get there? You have to refer five people. So you actually are into, you know, whatever he’s doing. And so you refer five people. Now you have a private group. That’s a whole different ball game than kind of what I have right now.

39:52
which took a little bit and we could have changed it, but we wanted to keep it open. So there’s four questions that got to be answered. If they’re not answered, they’re automatically, you not allowed. uh But right off at the beginning, like people would post events or they would post kind of more salesy promotional material. And we had to get it where we get the, we contact the person, just let them know, Hey,

40:20
Don’t want to offend the person. So yeah, I gotta be a politician, but we don’t really want this. If you have any content, uh, that’s that you want to post from your company, that’s one thing, but don’t put the sales or promotional material. And we started showing people like, just DMing them, not really, you know, knocking them on this directly, but, uh, we DM them, we let them know. And then the, the real bad spammers, just.

40:49
kick the heck out of there. And we made it where we have to approve them. So if we see some funky number, uh, boop gone, boop gone. And if they, if they reach out and they, um, DM me and they start explaining themselves, like why the funky name or funky number, uh, then okay here, I’ll invite you, re-invite you. But we get rid of a lot of the riff-raff that way. And all of a sudden you start to see people, Hey, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got this problem.

41:19
And what we noticed is that putting everybody into one group didn’t work. If you wanted to have the general group, okay, great. We have a sourcing group. have the lounge where it’s just general stuff. Like, you know, people are talking about something funny, a game, uh, like uh a soccer game or whatever it is. They’ll just put it in and they can start talking about that. But we have five different groups. One of the.

41:46
Uh, one, and this is all under the one WhatsApp group. The one is just events. So, Hey, if you want to post your event, you can post it in here. So that helps, that helps a lot sort of streamline, you know, the each group, each group kind of has its own, uh, do’s and don’ts and culture, but, uh, that’s one way. And we had to work hard at that upfront. had to get people engaged. So that required questions.

42:15
or answers or statements, um, facts and just getting them to start to engage. And then afterwards, I would say a few months into it, um, we actually had somebody reach out to us and say, Hey, would you like me to help you be a, um, administrator? And another person did. So now I think we have five people that are doing it. And when people kind of sneak in there, people can be sneaky and all of a sudden start to spam. They’re gone in 30 seconds.

42:45
Got it. OK, it sounds like there’s a ton of work up front, right? There is a bit of work. depends on how much you want to put into it. Yeah. But it seems like you have to put the work into it if you want it to start popping without you, right? You got to create the engagement, even artificially, a little bit early on, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you know what’s interesting is the newsletter. So let’s say I have a webinar. I can put that into the newsletter.

43:13
People come on to the webinar. Other people promote the webinar. They don’t know about the group. After the webinar, you’ll notice that there’s five to 20 new people that come in from that webinar, which is from the newsletter, not the group. Right. No, I get it. I totally see the value in all this, especially in a world where uh email reach is getting reduced just because like the ISPs are more strict. Even SMS.

43:42
is getting a little bit more strict. There’s actually spam in boxes now. Yeah. Whereas if you have a community, it’s people who are kind of locked in. They know who you are. And it’s a much better way to reach people in the long run because it’s not gated by any ISP or anything like that. Right. Right. And if it’s a brand, oh those raving fans, that community really wants you to succeed. Yeah. It’s and one thing we never talked about, but another area oh that’s

44:12
big for helping to build a community is also your Google business profile. Talked about that for years and now Google maps, Google search, but that is an area where you can drive all your reviews and you can put in these shoppable images. And it’s a great source of, oh well, first of all, uh if you are, if you’re running any keyword phrase, longterm long tail keyword phrases,

44:42
and you’re number one, you’re going to take up that space. But man, it’s just, it’s such an awesome uh area to be able to really share everything about your company. And the other thing, by the way, if you are a, um, if you’re an authority for, so either authority on your brand, or if you have a profile brand company, you should have your Google knowledge panel set up and your Google knowledge graphics set up. And that way that’ll really help.

45:11
make you stand out on these searches. Okay, so that’s actually one thing that’s been tough, like getting a knowledge panel in Google is actually difficult. uh I’m curious what your procedure is. And by knowledge panel, I mean, like when you Google yourself, the panels pop up, right? Yep. What is your strategy for getting a knowledge panel? So what I did, so different keywords will generate different panels. Like right now, I know I have 12 panels out there.

45:40
Okay. Aren’t merged. And I’ve tried to merge them. Some have some haven’t, but, uh, when you go, when you, when you type in your, your name and whatever it is, you could type in your key, just your name. And for me, I’m lucky. don’t have a name that everybody else has, but, uh, you’ll have the three dots. You click on the dot and it says claim your knowledge, uh, panel and you need to click on that. It’s not easy because they want to make sure.

46:10
that you’re actually a verified uh authority figure. Yeah. So, you know, for you, Steve, that would be easy. You just have to click on it. You’ll, they’ll see that you, that you’re a podcaster, um, that you’re an entrepreneur. From what I’ve seen, I’ve either had to be an entrepreneur or a podcaster. Um, they, keep switching it. Google loves just to keep switching. So one time I see on that the other time I see them a podcaster. Um, and then once you do that,

46:39
You’re going to have to go through a series of questions. Uh, they’re going to ask you to open up your passport or some sort of government ID, take a picture, send it in. Then they manually will go through and check you out. And so within a day to five days, uh, you’ll get a verification saying, yeah, you did, you are, or you’re not. And, um, anybody who has a brand, like I was talking to somebody at an event, they’re very, they’re very well known.

47:09
And they were rejected. And how did you get rejected? And I think they just sent the wrong information over. If they would have come in, shown that they were a public speaker, that’s an authority. That’s an authority. They should have got it. And I would just retry. But I’ve tried different keywords.

47:36
And I see like for Amazon, for lunch with Norm, for marketing misfits, and different panels will come up and it’ll claim your panel. Boom. So to merge the panels, it’s a different process. You’d have to go through and uh inform uh Google to merge the panels together. I have been lucky with it on some occasions. I haven’t with others. OK. By the way, if you guys are listening to this, uh

48:06
these knowledge panels that Norm and I are talking about is the way that Google knows whether something you put out is authoritative or not. Because if you don’t have a knowledge panel, your chances of ranking go down dramatically. Oh, yeah. And, I was talking Dennis, you was the one that told me about him and, you know, started talking, talking to him and then really getting into it. uh And what was it going to say about Dennis? Oh,

48:35
the graphics, so the knowledge graphics and the webbing of the graphics, which I’ve found to be extraordinarily valuable. And, you people wonder why I’ll take a shot or, you know, if you’re on the podcast, so you’re on the podcast, Steve, and we’re at an event, I’ll say, Hey, Steve, let’s have an event. Yeah, let’s have a, yeah, let’s have an event. Let’s have a photograph together. Boom. And so it’ll pick up my metadata and it’ll show that

49:04
your name was on the podcast, and now it’s going to go in and we’re going to show that we know each other, I’m going to get into some of your followers. So it’ll spread Norm Ferrar with some of your followers. So can really grow. Do we want that to happen, Norm? No, I’m just kidding. I want to give you a chance to actually to talk about some of the services that you offer, because I know you do work with a lot of brands. uh What is what is that? I thought it was is that Dragonfish?

49:33
Well, I have a company that services under a million dollars. So this is like, Hey, you you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re just getting out there and you want to get to, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a month. I have a service that will help build a website, get it all optimized for you, take your brand and do as little or as much as you’d like on Amazon and get you to a point where it’s a million dollars.

50:03
Then we take it into what we were calling the farm leagues and also your, your get, or the minor leagues. And that’s dragonfish. Dragonfish will take a million to a $5 million. We’ll take a million dollar in account, $3 million account, bring it up to five plus million. And then we’re going to take you into the pros and we’re going to hand it off to another company that can get you worldwide distribution. So that’s what dragonfish does. So we’ll do, um, know, Amazon, um

50:33
listings, uh like the optimization, the launch and rank, uh, PPC will take care of that for you, but in a smaller scale. Um, we’re very, really great with content, press releases, um, building out content with AI and with human, like both working together. Uh, so that’s another thing. I have a logistics company called Honu worldwide and that’s out of, uh, Pennsylvania and

51:02
It’s fantastic. It’s a 3PL. Okay. Nice. Yeah. 3PL, which is also getting into uh print on demand and we have a bottling facility. you know, we will, you know, bottle. We’ve got about 72 different uh formulas that we bottle over there. Yeah. So a few things. Oh, plus the podcast. Yeah. Plus norm. This is ridiculous. Where can people find you?

51:31
for all these services. So Dragonfish is 1 million above. What about the sub 1 million? Where can people find So that’s Dragonfish. And you could just reach out to me either way. So the easiest thing is just norm at AMZ like Amazon dot club. OK. OK. So uh yeah, that’s the easiest thing. You can reach out on any of the social media networks. uh That’s probably the best thing. And you know, if you if you want to see a

52:00
different kind of newsletter. LWN.News is where to check out a newsletter that’s not will join as soon as we’re done. not Kevin’s. Yes, that is not Kevin’s. Well, all right, man. Thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you, Hey, it was awesome.

52:19
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If your business has been on autopilot, now’s the moment to wake up and start steering before someone else takes your spot. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 608. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 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.

52:48
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife QuitHerJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, we’re diving into Vibe Coding and asking the big question, will you ever need to buy a Shopify or a WordPress app ever again? Vibe Coding lets you build custom features on your store without stacking endless plugins, and it could change the entire Shopify ecosystem. We’ll cover what it is, who it helps, and whether this is the beginning of the end for paid SaaS apps.

00:28
But before we begin, wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches. People who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses.

00:58
no corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years and I expect this year to be no different. It is happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers.

01:27
Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever going to be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:42
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. We have Tony back after a long, I don’t want to say vacation, a long break. A from you. A break from you, correct. And I’ve been insanely productive. You have actually. We’re going to talk about vibe coding today. And I think I’ve been talking about this for a long time now. I think the Shopify app store is in trouble.

02:13
Yes, you have been talking about this and I’ve been playing around with it a little bit. Our friend Liz has been like that is her new hobby. She says is vibe coding on the weekends. I’m hearing a lot of buzz about it on TikTok. Are you are you in that TikTok algorithm? I am. But like I actually this is the first time I actually sent a comment to some people who were I was was like, I would like to see some of your vibe coded apps just to see because you can’t create anything super complicated just yet.

02:43
because you can create something, you can get it to work, to first order. But once it works, anytime you want to add anything or change anything, it often ruins what you’ve done so far. We’ve used it, um which is pretty simple, is we used it to create a quiz on a WordPress site. Pretty simple stuff. um

03:06
Well, actually, no, let’s think about that for a sec. Before, you would have to sign up for a service to do a quiz. Yes, pay for a plug-in. Pay for a plug-in. think Octane made a lot of money doing this. It was a quiz. So this is what I mean. These simple apps where you can get charged like 50 bucks a month for, now you can just vibe code yourself. How long did it take you guys to make that app? um I want to say we probably did it in a weekend.

03:34
Yeah. Because there’s basically the two and I would assume this is I’ve I’ve only worked like peripherally on developing like apps and things like that. So I’m not on the technical side. But I would say there was two main components of it. Right. The information that we wanted right in the quiz. So coming up with all that stuff, which is what you would do on your own, you’re not going to. I mean, we did use AI to help us like narrow down some quiz answers and stuff like that. And then the secondary part was building the actual quiz.

04:04
Right. And having the code and then where it lives and then connecting it to obviously we wanted to connect it to ConvertKit. um So that way, you know, it’s all automated once people take the quiz. But I would say it was probably a full weekend of, you know, one, figuring out what we wanted to do and then two, being able to tell AI what we wanted, how we wanted it to look and then, you know, installing it. you know, the one thing that I think is cool

04:33
that I saw happening when we were doing this was when it didn’t, like when we would put something in and we would see it and it didn’t look right or it didn’t work right, then you can ask AI to find the errors for you, which is nice because as someone who doesn’t code, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you unless it was like a really obvious like HTML sort of thing where I’m like, well, that’s not how you code that. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how to code a quiz, right, without the use of AI.

05:03
What platform did you guys use? curious. Um, that one was in Claude. Oh, Claude. Okay. Okay. Nice. I was just thinking to myself, uh, just the other day, like, I feel like I am all powerful right now. Like anything that comes to my mind right now, I can just instantly code, even if it’s like a complicated app. Uh, and if you just even know like a little bit, I think like, if you know nothing and you start vibe coding,

05:32
That’s the equivalent maybe of like a first or second year computer science major, like right at the bat. But if you know a little bit about coding, like you can pretty much become like a master coder almost overnight. Yeah, I think having a little bit of knowledge is actually really powerful. um Liz having a little bit more technical knowledge than I do because she built her extension, was able to troubleshoot some stuff pretty quickly.

06:02
where I think as if it had just been me working on it, I think I would have still gotten to the same finished product. It probably would have taken me a little bit longer because I don’t always know the terminology or… You know, it’s like you see something and you’re like, that looks cool, right? But behind whatever you’re seeing is all this technology, right? And all this code that built it. And if you’re not quite sure what that’s called or how, you know…

06:28
it’s gonna be recognized, I think that’s where it becomes tougher for people who have zero knowledge. I mean, that’s what I like about AI because I know nothing. I knew nothing about the underlying technologies of what I was developing. And so I would ask stupid questions like, what is that? What is that? What is that? And if I was asking my friends helping me out on the app, they’d probably think I was the biggest idiot in the world. And I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of AI. They’re not gonna judge you or they might be judging behind the scenes.

06:57
We actually had this debate this weekend, actually with my kids, about being nice to AI. When you said AI won’t judge you, I’m always very polite when I ask questions and I’m always pleased and thank you. I found out one of my kids is kind of a jerk. And I was like, oh no, no, you gotta be nice. I feel like it remembers that you weren’t a nice person to work with and they’re not gonna give you what you want.

07:25
When I get frustrated, then I start like, if it makes the same mistake like three times, I’m like, look, okay, I’m paying you 20 bucks a month here. I deserve better. Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s been fascinating. Although I will say like my biggest use of AI still is I use it as a cheat sheet. Like I needed to find something in Google Analytics yesterday and I…

07:51
was like, I don’t know how to find this, because I don’t know Google Analytics 4, and I made ChatGBT walk me through the entire process to get what I needed, and it worked. So that’s my biggest. Anything that’s a little bit, I wouldn’t say Google Analytics is technical, but how do I operate in this system? I’ve been using, same with a Shopify report, that it’s like, hey, I need to find this really specific thing. um I love that it will take you step by step through stuff.

08:19
which is similar to the coding. It’ll walk you step by step how to build something. I’m uh back on the Claude Van Wagen actually for writing. I don’t know what happened when ChatGBT5 came out. I hate it. Interesting. One, it takes like 10 times longer to get an answer. Then two, the answers are just much more verbose or something. I’ve been actually using ChatGBT4.0. oh

08:47
Again, I just don’t like five. Then Claude just writes so much better. Something about five made the writing worse or different, I should say. Interesting. For what I was expecting. Kind of back on the Claude bandwagon. Let me just talk about some of the- I haven’t played with the writing side on five yet. I’ll let you know because I do a lot of the script editing with ChatGPT. I’ll see if I hate it when I get back into it. Everyone seems to praise Claude code.

09:15
To me, Cloud Code and the ChachiBT coding, so the way I do my coding is I scaffold the whole thing and then I have AI fill in all the functions. Scaffolding means like you break an app down into separate functions, like really small functions, and then I have AI write the functions. Gotcha. So it prevents it from just like going off in the total weeds. It’s not like code this app, right?

09:41
Instead, I just kind of break it down. need this function, this function, this function, and then I have it fill in these small blanks so that if it goes off the weeds, it’s limited to that like small function that I had it right. To me doing it that way, Claude and Chachi Bti are, I mean, they’re pretty much identical. So I can’t really tell the difference. But let me tell you some cool stuff. So now that this has opened up everything, like my wife had this huge to-do list for me for the longest time where I was like, you

10:11
Could you tell me the priority of that and whatnot? The priority talk. But now I have time to do all this stuff. recently I wrote this warehouse tracking app because we got all these boxes in the back, right? But they keep disappearing or someone takes down a box and they’ll grab something from it. And then that box just, the inventory was done on a piece of paper, basically the boxes in the back and

10:40
I remember in the beginning, was like, well, why don’t we just pay like $20 a month or something like that for an inventory tracking system? Turns out none of them, I shouldn’t say none, but very few apps actually track like a box. And the ones that do where you have a scanner and everything, literally hundreds of dollars a month for something like that. But this thing, I vibe coded in like literally four hours. So now when someone,

11:09
when a box comes in, you just take your phone, it’s a QR code, and then you scan it. Whenever you take it down, you scan it. And then whenever you’re done emptying that box, you scan it again and then toss it. And so all these boxes and everything are completely tracked. Here’s the other thing that uh I’ve always been curious about, but since I’m not in the office day to day, I wanted to know what the productivity is like, right? People listening to this are probably like,

11:39
Don’t you track your productivity of all your employees like regularly? Actually, one person said that, was like, actually, no, like should I have been doing this whole time? Okay, but can you just clarify what you mean by productivity? Because my mind is racing right now. Okay. What that would be. Okay, so we have an embroiderist who stitches orders. We also have packages that go out the door, like how many can go out the door? And then we also have print orders, like how quickly are those being?

12:09
Fulfilled, right? So that means actually being printed, packaged, out. Yeah, okay. Correct. And I’m not in there day to day, so I really don’t know what the output is. I just see like a stressed wife sometimes when I do a good promotion and a whole bunch of orders come in, which has always been this tug of war actually. Yeah. Because my wife has always wanted to just keep the business as is because we make enough money.

12:35
And just growing anything and hiring more people just always leads to more headaches. So she doesn’t want to hire anyone. But since I’ve been, you know, growing the business or trying, I’m always a hesitant to grow it too quickly. If that makes sense, because then I get an angry wife, right? Right. Because she doesn’t want to hire, but I’ve always wanted to know what the limits were. You know what saying? Yes. Yes. Like how many orders can I generate where?

13:05
we could actually handle it comfortably or whatnot. In order to do that, you gotta track it, right? And then sometimes I’ll look and I’m like, why are there so many outstanding orders? Like what’s going on? This isn’t a hard problem to solve, right? Anyway, so I talked to a buddy of mine and they’re like, oh my God, we have this complicated scanning system where they take when an order is being packed, they scan the order.

13:34
And then they have a photo booth where they photograph the contents of it so no inventory is lost. Right? So they literally photograph the contents of the order, who’s actually fulfilling it. And then they scan the order, they take a photo, and then the person’s logged in to the system. So they know which person is fulfilling what. And I was like, oh my God, that sounds amazing.

13:59
Yes, think about it. Restaurants do that. You’ve got to log in when you cash somebody out. That’s pretty normal tracking that you haven’t been tracking. Yes, does that work for you? Do you guys do that for your client? I’m not sure, actually. As you’re saying this, I’m like, oh, we should be doing this if we’re not. I think they know who packs which order, but I know Paul and Tiffany track who packs orders. ah

14:27
So I know it’s definitely a common thing. I like the photo though. Well, cause the inventory, okay, here’s the other thing. Like sometimes customers, I hasn’t used the word malicious, but they lie, right? Hey, you didn’t ship us this. And then Jen goes back and she checks the weight of the package. She’s like, it’s the exact weight of all the items. And then sometimes she actually packed it herself on certain occasions. She knows it was all in there.

14:57
But what do you do? You just give the customer. Yeah, you obviously, you don’t really have a choice. them the benefit of doubt. But now, if you have this photo tracking system, whatever, know, hey, here’s your photo right here. Well, anyway, actually, I only talked to a handful of people and it was two out of half the people had a similar thing, mainly because I think employees, when it comes to just picking and packing.

15:25
tend to be just all across the map in terms of how responsible they are. And I get it, right? It’s not like the most glamorous job in the world. But anyway, so I started implementing tracking of all that stuff. And I don’t know how annoying I am. You’re annoying. I’m gonna tell you right now. It’s gonna be annoying. There was one day I was just shocked by the variability in production. Yes. Yeah. Right?

15:54
Some days, insane productivity, certain days, really, really bad. Could you track it to the day of the week? Was it like corresponded with like Fridays are not productive versus Tuesdays which are super productive? I track every single day and then now because I can vibe code this, I can put graphs. I can annotate what happened that day and whatnot.

16:22
and then create a nice report out of it. anyway, so I saw like a whole bunch of days were in a row that were low and the person doesn’t know that we’re tracking all this. And so we mentioned it and then all of a sudden everything was good again and it’s been good since. And we did it in a nice way, you know? And then in terms of orders out the door, same thing. uh

16:51
So I created this dashboard where like we do personalized items and they take, sometimes they take five days. We, we allow up to five days for them to be filled, but then there’s orders that can be filled next day. So what you end up having is a whole bunch of orders that need to go out on different days. And then we also have rush shipping where, you know, you can bump up the queue for a personalized order and shipping pass. So you’ve got all these things. And then before we, had no idea when.

17:21
you know, how do you track something going up on time? Right. So now I have I’ve coded this dashboard where everything goes, you know exactly what needs to go out and win. Yeah. And so we can track the productivity. I don’t know. This is just all fun stuff that’s probably boring to anyone listening to this. I don’t think it’s boring. Actually, I think this is something that’s really important because we got into this issue um in August where we had a promotion and it did better than expected.

17:49
Right, like it didn’t like, it wasn’t like a unicorn, but it was, you know, probably performed 20 to 30 % better than all of our expectations, right? And the warehouse actually couldn’t keep up with the shipping. And so when I went in and looked at something, like a week after, there was stuff a week old that hadn’t been shipped out. And we don’t personal, there’s no personalization aspect or things like that. And I was like, hey, the week is not acceptable. Not in the days of Amazon Prime and

18:19
Walmart Today and all that stuff. And so it led to a greater discussion of like, what’s the capacity of the warehouse? Because we need to know that on the marketing side, that the warehouse is only capable of shipping 8,000 orders or 800 orders a day or 200 orders a day, whatever it is, right? So I think knowing that is actually hugely important for your entire team, right? Because if you know you’re only capable of doing 200 orders a day, then you maybe can’t have a sale.

18:48
at a certain time or promotion or send that email out because your warehouse isn’t capable of, and what’s the point of having a promotion if you have a bunch of unsatisfied people? I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials,

19:17
that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. 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.

19:40
True, although you could argue you just apologize profusely. Sure, sure, but having a grasp of like, I think now that you know, like, okay, Bumblebee’s capable of 100 personalized orders a day or whatever it is, right? Proud is probably high. But then you know, like, hey, we’re not gonna feature personalization in this promo, but we are in this one because of time and bandwidth and everything else.

20:08
You know where it gets really complicated where people don’t think about these things? And maybe this is just unique to my industry, but there’ll be people who get their address wrong and then you can’t ship it out. And so you got to put them in this separate bucket, but still get tracked. Yes. Right. And then you have to track whether you called them or reached out to them. And then there’s another bucket of people who like spell something wrong in their personalization. But you know, technically you’re supposed to

20:36
Yeah. Stitch what they wrote, but if they spelled bride wrong. Right. You know, but, but no, but we got in trouble for that once because they spelled something wrong, but it turned out that was how they say it. was slang or their own way of spelling it, you know, just for fun. And so we no longer just make blatant corrections. We contact them. Yeah. And then sometimes these people have wrong phone numbers. They have wrong email addresses. And so these orders go into the ether unless they’re completely tracked. Yeah.

21:07
That’s a good point. That was one of the issues that we were having too when I saw all these backlogged orders and the warehouse manager was like, the ones from this day are all incorrect addresses. We’re waiting on them. In Shopify reports, it’s just showing up as an unfulfilled order. I think that’s really important. Anyone in e-commerce would not be surprised, but it always was surprising to me how many people got their address wrong.

21:36
in an order because like, don’t know, you’re probably more secure than me, but like my address just automatically populates like into everything. Like it’s saved on my computer. Oh, I don’t do that. Yeah, I know. I do. So it’s like if it’s if it’s wrong, know. Well, I mean, Google populates the address for you. Right. You start typing and then Google. Yeah, exactly. I don’t know. I don’t get it. So nobody knows you’re tracking them.

22:04
is the other part of this. Yes, that’s the fun part. Jen’s like, you’re being really annoying to me right now because I’m like, can you talk to this person? I really need to be in there more day to day. You do. uh To do stuff like this, you need to be in there more. Yes, it’s actually really fun. Whenever Jen goes on a vacation, I actually go in and I’m like, okay, let’s make this place more efficient. What do you hate doing? What’s annoying?

22:32
And then when she comes back, I’ve usually written something. But now that’s like 10x what it used to be. Because now I can pump out this code. Well, now it’s not like a three week project for you. It’s like, I can do this on Saturday. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so fun. uh And I will say that’s something that I think is so exciting about AI is the efficiency, like the improved efficiency on things. Like we were talking before we recorded that

23:01
I have someone who’s doing all their illustrations with AI now, right? Whereas before they were having to wait on illustrators and one, the money savings, but two, the time savings, right? Is that an illustrator could take two to three months to churn out that many illustrations where you’re getting them in a weekend using AI. Although I did see a flub up yesterday. There was a man with a tail. So it’s still, you still have to check.

23:30
to check. So we’re talking about images. So Google just released what they call Nano Banana. It’s actually, this has already been out for a long time. It’s called like the tech, they had the worst names. The technical name is Flash Image Generation Experimental 2.5. Oh, good. When you select it. Yeah. They had 2.0. 2.0 was already pretty good. Yeah. But 2.5 allows you to take any image and alter it however you want. Ooh.

23:59
So I’ll have uh a picture of a woman holding a handkerchief. I can tell it, hey, can you make this person cry into the handkerchief? And it instantly does that. Now, like just the other day, I was just being lazy and I sent out a sales email and it was last year’s sales email. And the graphic said 2024, right? I just uploaded the image to Google and I said, can you just change all this stuff and make it 2025?

24:27
And it did it and then I just cut and pasted it back in. Whereas before I’d have to bust out Photoshop, make a couple edits and whatnot. Are you happy with the images? So it’s not as good at just generating images from scratch. It’s good at editing. for the editing, yeah. Fantastic. I think it’s going to put Photoshop out of business.

24:49
Yeah, I mean, because what I’ve been using it for with images is giving me ideas. And then I send the idea to the graphic designer and she takes it and makes it, I think, significantly better. But I feel like there’s a day coming when that’s not going to be the case. Yeah, I’m just talking about like the editing here. Yeah. Like you can take, uh let’s say you did a photo shoot with a model, right? Let’s you sell clothing. Yeah, you can literally just take this outfit and say, hey, can you put this outfit on the model?

25:19
and it does a pretty good job of it. That’s crazy. So if you guys haven’t tried it yet, I think you’re going to be pretty shocked. You can put yourself up there and say, Hey, let’s see you going shopping for clothing. we always do a family photo shoot every year. You can literally just take photos off of the stores and put them on yourself to see how they look without even actually Google’s had this technology for a long time, but now it’s easy for just anyone to do it. Yeah.

25:50
It’s freaking amazing. I like the idea of removing the 2024 and putting it in 2025. That’s just me being lazy. but no, but I have a lot of lazy projects like that that have just been sitting there because I didn’t want to do all the work. Just take this front splash image and can you just replace the product with this one? Yes. Then it’ll just do it. Yes. I don’t know.

26:19
I’m just amazed by how powerful everything is right now. And this is why, back to the old Shopify app store and trouble thing. I remember when I implemented the loyalty program back in the day, I think the provider that I was looking at wanted $500 a month for my sales level. We had talked about this, but it took me what, a week to do that, but now with the way the tools are now,

26:49
I could probably put that thing out in a weekend, maybe even less and not have to pay any fees whatsoever. Well, that’s the I mean, that’s the good and the bad, right? Because these apps like it’s a great it’s a great business model in the past, right? Where people are paid monthly, they get like it’s hard to change, right? Like if you sign up for that loyalty program.

27:12
So we had the one that you were referring to. We switched to a less expensive one because the cost was insane. It was like getting several hundred dollars a month. um changing over, even though the company that we changed to was like, we’ll do all the work. They don’t do all the work. It’s not bad, but it’s like you still end up and then not everybody’s points moved over correctly. So then you’re like doing manual uploads. And so what happens with all these subscriptions is they get you in, right? And then…

27:39
you’re never going to stop using them unless the pain is too great, right? Like the price becomes ridiculous. So you’re gonna stay and pay the $99 a month, $149 a month, even $27 a month, right? You’re just gonna pay that forever and ever because it’s too painful to switch. But now that some of this stuff can be done fairly easily, I mean, I agree with you. think it’s gonna put, especially some of the real simplistic apps.

28:08
that are 9.99, 29, I mean, think the ones, the less they do, the quicker they’re gonna be out of business. I mean, the most recent one was that AI search thing that it made. Actually, I made it first and then I realized that there were apps out there. But something like that where they wanted $50 a month to do an AI on-site search is just ridiculous to me. Yeah. Because you do it once,

28:38
And that one was super fast to code up. And then all of sudden, you don’t have to pay. On the flip side, I was also thinking to myself, hey, why don’t I just create these apps myself and then sell them? It’s hard. Actually, I can’t really relate though. Can you tell me, like, would you still just pay for an app if you had a means to just code up something in a weekend? So I think how the apps will still work is that there are so many people out there and we know these people, right?

29:08
running like a one or two man show, right? They’ve got a business, they’re doing half a million a year, 750,000 a year, and they have one contractor. So like the thought of like, oh, spend the weekend coding up something or spend the weekend redoing my ads or spend the weekend shipping out packages. You know what I mean? Like I still think there’s a bucket of people who just don’t have that weekend to code it up, right?

29:37
So that’s where the rub still is, I think. There’s a lot of people out there that are already spending 60, 70 hours a week on their business and they don’t have any margin to do something like that. I would think the opposite actually. Like if you’re small, you have more incentive to do it. But if you’re like this big gigantic company, just throw an engineer at it and you’re done, right? But I think, you’ve got to, I mean, you have a different mindset too, but like you’ve got to remember back like when you were

30:03
working full time, shipping Bumblebee out at night, embroidering, and maybe you had a baby, right? Are you gonna spend the weekend coding something up or are you gonna be like, well this is the only time I get to see my kid? I feel like, and for you, already having some base knowledge, it seems less intimidating. Because we have people in the courses, right, who don’t have any knowledge and it seems, when we talk about it with them, they still seem very intimidated. There’s other people in the class without.

30:32
that knowledge that aren’t there like, no, I want to try this and I’m okay messing up. So I just think it depends on like where you are. Yeah, I guess I mean, it’s still not at the level where anyone can do it. Yeah, just yet. But I mean, with every new release, it gets easier for me. Yeah, which means it’s got to be getting easier for everyone else to totally agree. Yeah. And I and I think the best thing that people if you are in this position where

31:00
you don’t have any experience with this and you’re wanting, mean, just have like ask it to teach you. mean, that’s lot of the stuff that we were doing when we were trying to build this quiz is like, well, tell us what are the components? Like, what are we forgetting? I was just like, educate me on how to do something like this, right? And I think it does a fairly good job, um especially if you’re polite.

31:24
But I do this. I do the same thing with like every time I’m like going on there, I try to at least get some like, hey, show me how to do this. Tell me how to do this. Show me this that I don’t know yet. Right. So I feel like every time I’m on there, I’m trying to at least learn one or two things that will help me, you know, overall. But I feel like not everybody has that extra time. Well, let’s switch gears and just kind of talk about tools. uh I OK, so

31:54
I have a vested interest in this right now because uh I want, my son wants to make this app for this game that he just loves. And he wants to just have a contest with like all of his friends online. It’s like a card game. And so I was like, okay, well, if you want that, why don’t you code it up yourself? Right? He’s not really a coder. I mean, we did send him to a computer science camp once, so he kind of knows the basics.

32:21
He went to one week of computer science camp. He’s fine. So I’ve been looking into all these tools and that’s why I kind of asked you that question in the beginning. uh I think jumping into cloud code is a little intimidating for people. like if you want to create like a simple quiz or a web app, I think lovable is a pretty good start. If you want to create a game that has like a database,

32:48
where you’re storing the scores of your friends and whatnot. What I think I’m gonna pull the trigger on for my son and then just kinda hopefully guide him to write it himself is this tool called Replet. It’s basically, I think it uses Claude code behind the scenes, but it has the database and all the stuff that you need to just literally deploy a fully functional app. And if you’re just doing stupid stuff like,

33:15
kind of what I do, where you’re willing to scaffold out everything. And then I think any AI tool will work, honestly, to do stupid stuff. Like the amount of stupid questions I ask ChatGPT on a daily basis is just incredible. This is why I don’t like Claude. I always run out of credits on Claude. Yes, we’ve talked about that lot. I never run out with chat. I never, ever run out with chat. Actually, there was one time I did uh when I was using the video generation. But that’s a different.

33:45
I think that’s a different tool altogether. Yeah, I’ve never run out. My chat is funny because I always have to remember to start a new project when I want because sometimes I’ll just ask it like really dumb questions like if a banana is, you know, X, Y, Z, is it safe to eat? You know, like I’ll like ask those types of questions, too. So I’m like, oh, new chat. can’t put that in my Google Analytics tutorial bucket. uh But yeah, I ask it a lot of dumb questions as well. Well, here’s a quick tip also ah for chat to be T at least.

34:13
Under personalization, you should say always give a contrarian answer, be contrarian and always give the pros and cons. Because otherwise it’s just going to tell you what you want to hear. And then you’ll end up just feeling good about your decision, even though it’s a bad one. Like what they suggest. Has that ever happened to you? I always say give me the pros and cons, so it’s probably the same. OK, but this is like an implicit for every query that you give. OK. And then I also have a rank

34:43
all the answers it gives me on a scale of one to 10. That’s a good one. And then that way I can just kind of determine which one’s the best. always. So one of the tips that I use for whenever I’m looking for it to create pieces of content. So I’m like feeding it some content and then I’m like, hey, turn this into something else. Right. I always have it do three. I say, give me an emotional response, give me a logical response and give me a humorous response. Interesting.

35:13
Oh, wait, explain to me how that works. Basically, so like I’ll feed in like, I can use type A because that’s what I use it for primarily, right? So I want to create a piece of content about the hustler, right? The personality type, the hustler, right? So and I want to talk about why busyness has become such like an idol, right? Like that’s kind of the topic. So I feed it in some information about that, like.

35:41
some paragraph of content and I want it to give me more information. I want it to turn that into something bigger. um I’m always like, give me three different options. want the logical, so I want to appeal to someone in a logical way and then I want to appeal to a different person in an emotional way and then I want a humorous one too. So sometimes on their own, they’re really good.

36:06
And it does a really good job of like really keying in on emotions or whatever it is you ask. But then sometimes I take all three and I’m like, okay, let’s put this into one, right? Like let’s touch on all three types. Let’s try to hit them everywhere. But sometimes I just want, like especially when we’re doing scripts and TikToks, like I just want the logical script. I just want the emotional script because it’s gonna be two separate things. Interesting. I would think that the emotional one,

36:34
should be like the only one that you do, right? Well, not every I mean, emotional stuff doesn’t work with you. That’s not true. Yeah, I know you cried during the Michael Jordan 30. Are you convincing me to do something every time I every time I see a Michael Jordan club, I think of you now. uh No, but like, I think when you’re

36:58
because we’re talking about marketing, right? We’re talking about marketing to a specific group of people, but for me, usually the logical is much more appealing than the emotional. If I see an emotional appeal, I’m like, you’re manipulating me. But I’ve read scripts on the emotional stuff to other people who I know are much more impacted by emotional arguments, and it works, right? I watch them get teary or I watch them like,

37:24
swallow, right? Because they’re like, oh, I’m really, this is resonating with me. Whereas like, I can listen to that same thing and maybe be like, okay, yeah, that’s good. Like, I think it’s a good piece of content, but it doesn’t resonate with me. But the logical side of it is like, oh, yeah, 100%. um So, but I think when you do it that way, especially for copy, like you get a really good blend that you can use overall, like even if you combine them into like one, you know, so that you can.

37:52
I don’t know, I think you got to hit people in a lot of places. I’ll have to use that one for my scripts. you use it? This is for Mostly for scripts, yes. Okay. Interesting, Or web page copy, any sort of copy that you need. um Right. I’ve tried a little bit with the curriculum stuff and I think it doesn’t know, it knows the type A stuff back and forth now because it has so much type A content in it. It doesn’t have like…

38:20
store content in there enough to do as good of a job. I also think the more content it has, the better it does. The more you can feed it, the better it gets, in my opinion. Yes, I can see that. There was just a stat that I came across because I was going to use it in my YouTube video. was something like 23 % of people shot based on logic and the rest is all emotion. Yes, but that’s still 23%. Yes, I guess.

38:49
Yes, I guess. You’re not always logical, Ms. Toomy bag. Would you pay 10x for a bag that doesn’t- I’m in a fight with them right now. Are you really? What happened? Yes, I am. My backpack, the dog chewed the leather strap at the top, the little top handle, and I sent it off to them and they’re like, we can’t repair this. I’m like, it’s a handle. What could you possibly repair on this bag if you can’t repair this? Right.

39:16
They offered me 200 bucks and they would throw my bag away. I was like, you can’t even buy a backpack for under 400. It’s in my backpack. I’ll take a broken bag. It’s still usable. It just doesn’t have the top handle. They just don’t sell the handle by itself. They won’t repair it. I could take it to a leather shop here and they would repair it. Did you want a free repair though? No, I paid to have it shipped out. They were like, can’t repair this. I was like, well, you suck. I see.

39:46
Like, Osprey has a lifetime guarantee on their bags. That’s the other bag that I let all my travel stuff, but. I see. OK, so you weren’t asking for anything unreasonable. No, I just wanted it. I was going to pay for it to be fixed. Right, right, right. And they’re like, no, we don’t fix straps. I’m like, what do you fix then? Like, what possibly could you fix on this backpack? um So, yeah, that’s like time to buy time to be loyal to another brand. I don’t know.

40:14
But here’s the other thing, so that’s a good example. So when I was on the Toomey site, because I knew I was gonna get $200, when I was like, well, is it worth it just to take the $200? And then I was looking at the price of their backpacks and I was like, well, no, because I still have to pay another $250 to get a back, basically to replace my backpack. But then I started looking at, I always click on the sale button, right? Because I wanna see what’s on sale. And they had a bag that I really like in a color that I didn’t like, but it was really clearanced.

40:43
And so like I spent like 20 minutes like thinking about like, well, like that’s a really great deal. And I’m sure I could give it to somebody who likes this. Like I had a whole like logical. was no emotion at all. It was all price based. Right. Like it was like the value for the price. then I’m mad at them. So don’t want to buy anything. And anyway. So, yeah, I could be logical, but the emotion gets me, of course. I can’t watch the what is it like the Apple commercials at Christmas time?

41:11
Actually, I just want to end with this and this just kind of popped into my head. You know how all those uh tools now interface with like Gmail and so you can look up. You have to be careful with that now actually, because there’s been some security issues recently where they can inject. I can’t remember how it works exactly, but let’s say someone emails you an image.

41:39
that has like a hidden prompt embedded into it. And Google reads that back. There is a loophole where one of the LLMs was actually running that prompt and giving out sensitive information in the email. I need to find the article. It was from a reputable source. So like I’m a little hesitant now to connect all of my stuff up in that regards.

42:07
Well, that’s that’s shouldn’t we shouldn’t end on that. We shouldn’t end on that. It was just like a word of caution, though, like when you’re when you’re connecting up anything sensitive. But well, I I think that’s that’s a big lesson, though, is when the more people start doing this and the more people start connecting things like you do have to be careful with your information and what you’re choosing to allow. But on the flip side, I do want to end with this is

42:35
even if you do not know how to code, go up and then just sign up for lovable, they have a free account, and then just ask it to create something for you that you might need. It could be a quiz, it could be a little app that tracks what you eat, something simple like that. And just prove to yourself how easy it is. Right? And if you want to do anything more complicated,

43:03
I think the right way to go about something complicated is to just spec out in a document what exactly you want done and pretend like you’re a user and this is the functionality that you need and then ask AI like, okay, what are the different components of all this that need to be implemented? And then just try to break it down to as small of pieces as you can and then use AI to code each small part one by one.

43:33
I don’t know if that’s clear to someone who doesn’t code, but I think the problem with most people who use AI to code an app is they’re just like, give me an app that does this. Right. Right. When there’s a lot more deep, like if you told that to a master coder, let’s say a human. to do it They wouldn’t be able to do it, right? Because they need all these details. Yeah. So that’s why you need to provide all those details. I’m willing to bet that most people who can’t get what they want out of AI, it’s because they’re not good at explaining what they need. Right.

44:03
And so this is kind of like an exercise in understanding what you want and being able to communicate to a real person, like pretend AI is a real person and communicating to a real person what you need. And I’m sure you’ll get a lot more results, better results that way. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Before you buy your next app on Shopify, go and ask Claude or chat GPT to write it for you. And I’m pretty sure you’ll be shocked at what you can accomplish. For more information and resources, go to mywife.com.

44:30
quitherjob.com slash episode 607. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 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’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email.

44:59
and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I am joined by Kevin King, a veteran Amazon entrepreneur, mentor and educator you probably already know about from the Freedom Ticket course and his two podcasts. Kevin also runs the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and a popular newsletter where he shares insider strategies with some of the top minds in e-commerce. Now today, we’re diving into where Amazon is headed.

00:27
the future of D2C and what these shifts mean for anyone selling online. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches.

00:56
people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. There are no corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It is happening April 21st to the 23rd in Fort Lauderdale,

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And if you’re doing over 250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever going to be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. That’s sellersummit.com. Now on to the show.

01:49
Welcome to the My Wife Coder Job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Kevin King on the show. Now Kevin is someone who I met a long, long time ago, but we didn’t actually really have a conversation until we both got booted off the live stream to tens of thousands of viewers at the Alibaba Co-Create Conference. Kevin is a veteran entrepreneur, mentor, and educator. And if you sell on Amazon, you’ve probably seen his face from his Freedom Ticket course.

02:18
which I believe is still given out for free by Helium 10 if you have a subscription. He’s the co-host of two podcasts, the Marketing Misfits podcast and the AMPM podcast where he shares insider strategies. And he also runs a conference called the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And finally, he runs this amazing Amazon newsletter, which I recommend that everyone subscribes to. Now, today I invited Kevin on the show to talk e-commerce.

02:45
and where he sees things going with Amazon and D2C. with that, welcome to the show, Kevin. Hey, I’m glad to be here, Steve. It’s nice to nice to see you again. So I actually didn’t really want to mention Alibaba. I was debating myself whether I should mention Alibaba because you know, they’re so sensitive about that sort of thing. But uh it really was the first time that we got a chance to connect, right? Yeah, it was. It was, you know, that was kind of weird. They I was in the

03:11
taxi on the way to that show in the morning. think we were on the stage that afternoon and the organizer lady is coordinating us. She and says, Hey, Kevin, I want to switch this around. had Tim kind of hosting your panel. This is the three of us, me, you and Tim. And she said, want you, I’m afraid he might say something. So I’m going to have you uh host the panel. That’s okay. I’m like, well, I guess you don’t know me because I might say something too. But, uh okay. I didn’t say that to her. I swear I’m thinking.

03:39
So I was like, yeah, sure. So we get up there and beforehand they come to us and they said, hey, you can’t talk about solar panels. You can’t talk about there’s, there’s a few things you had to be careful about it because this has been live streamed back to I think it was millions of people. I was like, okay, I didn’t know that it a lot. Yeah. And so we go up on stage and we’re doing our bit and talking about the Alibaba and Amazon and sourcing and all kinds of stuff. And then about, think, I think we had

04:07
25 or 30 minutes total and there’s a little countdown timer. And so as I’m asking you and Tim questions and going back and forth, I’m looking at the counter and I saw at one point it was like 16 minutes left. And then I asked a question of one of you two and then I looked over and it was almost, it was at three minutes. I was like, man, in my head I was like, did I just black out? I think I asked you guys that at the end when we got out, was like, did you all see that timer jump down or what happened? That blackout or something on stage?

04:36
And are like, no, we weren’t paying attention. And then we get off and then we go down and we’re like, what? Someone comes up to us and says, hey, we had to cut the feed because y’all said something you’re not supposed to say. We’re like, well, what we say? And we couldn’t figure it out. And we thought maybe it’s because we said YouTube and YouTube is banned in China. But it turns out that ah a few, about a week later, the lady calls and said, don’t worry about it. You guys were voted the most popular panel at the event, ah despite this. And it was because… m

05:05
you weren’t talking enough about Alibaba, you were talking about Amazon stuff and other things. like, okay. um Tim got invited back the next year, so they weren’t too mad. Oh, okay. Well, uh did I get invited back? I don’t remember. Probably not. Anyways, okay, so what did I want to talk to you about? So first of all, uh you got a lot of things on your plate.

05:31
I’ve always been curious, like what are you actively working on right now? Are you still actually selling on Amazon uh products that you actually directly manage in addition to everything else? Yeah, we I do have a seasonal business on Amazon. I mean, when I first started selling on Amazon 10 years ago, I had five different product lines and multiple skews on each of those. Five different brands, one in pets, one in fitness, one in beauty, um one in electronics and one in kitchen. um And

05:58
I launched all five of those and ended up narrowing that down to a couple. But since, don’t know, 1995 or something? I know, that’s not… I’ve been producing wall calendars, seasonal wall calendars. And we had a DTC list on that that we did a lot of direct mail and we still do direct mail. For those of you young ones listening, direct mail means you send something with a stamp to the mail and it goes in a mailbox. No one knows what that is, It’s a physical mailbox. Yeah.

06:28
And then people send checks and money orders. Those are little pieces of paper that say pay to the pay to the order of. A money order you can get at 7-Eleven. You pay like 79 cents or something for the fee. uh Takes cash. Anyway, uh so I’ve been doing that for a long time. So I still do that with Amazon. uh And we wholesale into like calendars.com, which is the big kiosks in the malls as you see pop up during the holidays and a few other places.

06:56
That keeps my hand in the Amazon business. So we have 10 different SKUs that we do there. ah So that way I’m still selling. I’m still familiar because I think you can’t teach if you’re not doing it. mean, you get out of dates really quickly. know, things change rapidly and they’re changing even more rapidly now. So the law that was a long answer to say, yes, I still sell still sell. And then I mentioned the two podcasts and I know you’re launching something else.

07:26
right now right? Yeah I have the two podcasts which you’ve been on the marketing misfits podcast is great to have you on that was an awesome episode that I do with Norm Farrar and then I do one for helium 10 called AMPM podcast which is that’s pretty much all Amazon focused and the marketing misfits is general marketing focused and then I have the newsletter like you mentioned billion dollar sellers that comes out twice a week I’ve been doing that been doing the

07:54
Marketing Misfits podcast a year, the AMPM podcast about three. I took that over from the founder and I’ve been doing the newsletter for two. And then yeah, I have something else called BDSC about to come out that I’m not announcing. Oh, you’re not announcing? Okay. We don’t have to talk about that. can talk about that. I’m teasing it right now getting people to to figure out what does that C stand for? Because I have my events BDSS, billion dollar seller summit. Right.

08:21
And then I have the newsletter BDSN billion dollar seller newsletter. So now I have a C and people like, is this club committee conference crypto? uh I don’t know. It’s something left. So I’m just hyping it. All right. This is what I wanted to talk to you about. So Amazon has directly and indirectly implemented a ton of fee hikes in just the past year and a half. And clearly, at least in my mind, the Amazon gold rush where anyone can do this successfully is is over.

08:51
So my first question to you is, would you say are the prereqs today to start selling on Amazon? And what should people be mentally prepared for? If you’re new, I agree with you. The gold rush is over. You don’t see all the guys with their Ferraris nearly as much on social media trying to sell courses. Courses, because of AI, becoming, know, a lot of people have been making money off selling courses, and a lot of that’s going to go away because of AI.

09:22
to get into today it’s a real business in ten years ago you could just pop on and find something on olivaba, oh a brand name on it that you made up and put it on there and go sit at the beach and listen to your phone ding all day and make a lot of money and get lots of reviews. Those days are long gone. Now it’s a real business. gotta wear a lot of hats. You gotta know logistics, sourcing, inventory management, uh finance, marketing. uh

09:51
customer service, I mean the whole range, it’s become a big, it’s a real business now and so it’s, the people that want to get into it and they say, how much do I need to get into this? I used to have a rule that when I would tell people, you need two and a half times your initial landing cost. So if your life savings was 10,000 bucks, let’s say, and that’s what you had to invest in this, you needed to find a product that you could get landed for four grand maximum.

10:18
and you not run out of stocks. There’s a lot of various math formulas you got to do and I show that kind of stuff in the Freedom Ticket. That way you have money to actually buy the next round before you get paid for the first round, you’ll be able to continue. But I think that number depends on your goals. If you’re in Pakistan and you’re making six or six hundred dollars a month is the decent wage or the average wage or some of the Latin American countries, if you could make a thousand or fifteen hundred on Amazon, you know, you could change your life in theory.

10:48
And but for me and you, that’s a side hustle that’s not even going to pay much at all. So it depends on your goal. So if you’re from one of those countries and you just want to check, you could do that for less money. But if you’re like from the West, you’re going to have to put some serious money in and be prepared to put more money in because it’s a very cash intensive game. And what a lot of people sell is they sell this dream.

11:12
And they sell that, yeah, buy it for 20 bucks, buy it for two bucks, sell it for 20, you got an $18 profit. And they leave out all the stuff in between. the margins are getting compressed, like you said, with the Amazon fees continuing to rise. And it’s squeezing the people who are not good operators and good at math, and it’s squeezing a lot of people. And a lot of people are, you know, we have the gold rush of the aggregators, a lot of those guys.

11:40
that were around in 2014, 2015 that started selling Amazon, they cashed out for good multiples at the peak. And most of those guys, some of them retired, some of them tried to do it again, and most of them are failing because they don’t have the skill set. They were right place, right time. uh And the aggregator thing bombed as well. And so now it’s more about, for me, Amazon should be not, it’s a great place to launch and to prove something because the eyeballs are there.

12:08
but it should not be your only focus. should be maybe your first focus if that’s the direction you want to go. But then you need to be a true brand. Trying to develop a true brand and not just looking for product opportunities. That was the old model is find a gap in the market, sell spatulas and sell radios and sell car chains and whatever else. Wherever there’s an opportunity. I think that’s much more difficult now you need to actually be building a true brand and in your master plan you need to get off Amazon.

12:37
Amazon this needs to be the shopping cart of choice for some people, but you need to be DTC, you need to be Shopify, but that complicates it. Tick tock shop and Walmart and whatever. But that complicates it more because that’s a whole different skill set. There’s some overlap. But that’s what bogs a lot of people down. So I know you run an agency or you’ve helped a ton of sellers in the past. And I know for myself, people ask me, hey, I’m doing okay on Amazon, but I want to get off.

13:08
Like what do you tell these people on how to proceed with the DTC shop like a Shopify store? Because sometimes products don’t even match, right? Yeah, I mean, I don’t have an agency. um when people want to do that, I usually tell them if they started on Amazon before you go to DTC, you might want to go set up a Shopify store just to have some credibility. But really, you should actually maximize Amazon first if that’s where you started. So go expand to Canada.

13:38
And then consider expanding to maybe Europe, but that’s a whole other animal with, I mean, you understand the systems, but you got to have a whole other set of inventory and a whole other set of logistics uh that go with that and a few other things. If you’re going to go D to C, the difference between the two that most people understand is on Amazon, the traffic is there, you’re just maximizing the traffic. just like, how do I, you got, uh it’s like a freeway.

14:04
of people driving by at 60 miles an hour with the window rolled down the credit card out. All you got to do is stand in the right spot and swipe as they go by. If you know how to do that, you can win on Amazon. On DDC, that’s a whole different thing. You got to drive the traffic. Either you got to have a list or you got to know how to run meta ads or TikTok shop or cold emails or whatever the flavor of choice is and drive that traffic there.

14:31
There’s advantages to both ways. mean, DTC, you control the whole customer experience. With Shopify, you have all the plugins where you can modify it you can do a lot of cool stuff that you just can’t do. And you can do up sales and you can do retargeted abandoned carts and all kinds of stuff uh and control the look and feel a lot more and get the customer data. But you can’t do most of that on Amazon. there are two different animals. And I think a lot of people don’t understand that when they

15:00
They go, I tried Shopify, it didn’t work. was like, well, what did you do? Well, I put up a site and sell much. Well, what did you do to drive traffic? Oh no, I sent a couple of emails. ah You know, that’s two different things. I think, you know, if you have the money and the capacity, if you know how to drive traffic or someone’s on your team to drive traffic, I think what I would do right now if I was just brand new and starting is I would start D2C if you know how to drive the traffic. Because then,

15:30
have a pop-up or something and let Amazon be the overfill. Drive that traffic and then awareness yourself, either on TikTok shop with UTC creators or by whatever means you want by other kinds of ads. And then let them come to Shopify, let them experience it in the way that you want them to experience it. And you control the messaging, control the whole experience there. And if they still, if they don’t trust you, that’s okay. uh

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you have a pop-up or you even have an option, buy this on, you know, buy with Prime or buy this on Amazon, and go where they trust it and go over there. And that’s, think, how I would approach it. And I would approach it as like, let’s build a brand, not just a little store or a little thing. And like you, like what you do with the linens and stuff is I would be looking, if at all possible, trying to get into recurring sales of something where there’s the chance of a repeat order. It’s not just a one time. I’m going to buy a ladder.

16:25
For the house and only need one ladder every 20 years. Yeah I mean I know you talk with a lot I mean you interview a heck of a lot of people every week and then you have the billion dollar seller summit What are some of the more popular strategies that either you’re implementing or that you’re seeing other people implement right now in the space? Probably the most popular silver shiny object right now is tick tock shop for a lot of people. Okay, and tick tock shop can be really good but

16:53
It’s not as easy as a lot of people think and everybody thinks that they could just they want to hire an agency or hire UGC person and they’re go viral and there’s a lot more a lot more to it. But what I’m seeing right now and the whole e-commerce space in general is a mix where the savvy people are on top of three things and on top of marketplaces and that could be Shopify has a marketplace where they tie stuff together. mean so it could be marketplaces. It’s social commerce and AI.

17:22
those three, if you can get your head around those three and how to intermingle those three modalities together, I think you have a really good chance of winning going forward. And I think that’s where people should be looking at uh right now. And if they’re going to sell ecommerce. Let’s peel back the onion here real quick on TikTok shop. Like, uh can you just give an example of what someone’s doing? What type of products work well?

17:49
that you’ve heard or have experience with? Tick tock shop. mean, yeah, the electronic products can work well. Little gadgets and stuff can work well. And beauty products work exceptionally well. Some supplement stuff uh works really well. I know a woman, we’ve had her on the podcast. She’s doing 21 million dollars a year selling pants for women on Tick Tock Shop. OK, and I know someone else that’s uh doing artwork stuff and doing like six million.

18:18
on tiktok shop and then you know you get the halo effect of some of that stills or amazon does not everybody buys on tiktok shop the thing about tiktok shop is is is i’ve bought stuff on tiktok shop and it’s brilliantly integrated so you just in there watching they know who to target they know based on your history based on other people and they they’ll just pop something in and you can scroll around live if you look at it’s really easy to add to cart uh… by it and a matter of

18:44
five or ten seconds and then continue scrolling and there’s no interruption almost really in it. And so it’s impulse buys things. So you’re not going to sell a $10,000 thing on there. It’s going to be very difficult. But for top of funnel and for impulse buy, know, sub $100 items, those can do very, very well on there. Pet items can do very well as well. So there’s a handful of categories, but

19:13
those will be the ones that I’m probably seeing people doing the best with.

19:18
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

19:47
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. What I like about TikTok Shop is I actually just recently started actually being a customer on there. The video continues to play actually while you’re all checking out. So it literally is really seamless. And that’s why I think it’s just doing really well.

20:13
I mean, if you put it in perspective, though, I always like to tell people is people always like get their eyes real big when they hear TikTok shop. I’m going to go crush it there. It’s great. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s I think their total GMB last year, it depends on who there’s different reports that come out, but somewhere between 50 and 20 billion was their GMB, which is that’s not chump change. But that’s a weekend for Amazon. Yeah. Yes. During one of their sales, Amazon was 700 billion when you add the one P and three B to

20:42
together, uh 1P and 3P not B, together. So it’s still extremely small. And I know they’ve been having some troubles. They gave away the farm, free shipping, and all kinds of promo discounts and everything for a while just to get people in. And now they’re tightening that up. And they just did a big layoff recently. They’ve just replaced a lot of executives from the US with Chinese-based executives. Because you guys are, you know,

21:11
We’ve to actually make money now. We can’t keep bleeding money. There’s some changes going on and who knows what’s going to happen with Trump extending the ban and who knows what’s going to happen there. It may just be status quo or there may be an algorithm shift if someone buys it and that could affect things too. But social commerce is not going away. You know it’s funny, I actually just got on a meeting with Tmoo recently and you know because they’re struggling because of the Trump changes.

21:41
and they’re trying to recruit sellers in the United States. uh First of all, do you know anyone who’s selling on Tmoo successfully? Just curious. uh One person I knew that they were selling sinks, like uh construction stuff. Interesting. Yeah, like big heavy duty sinks and stuff, but no, that’s the only one. And they’re doing a lot of drop shipping. And this was about a year ago. But other than that, no. uh

22:09
That’s not a Chinese based seller. I’ve heard of nobody doing from the US, from the West doing well on, on Tmoo. Not to say that someone’s not, but Tmoo is having, yeah, they’ve lost, you know, they’re like the number one or number two app for a long time. That’s way down now. They’ve lost, what is your series? I’m like 60, 70 % of their sales because of the- lost 50 % of their traffic. The de minimis rule. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right after that. Yeah. So I was just curious. Shane’s having similar problems too.

22:39
for some of the same reasons plus some other reasons. Yeah, so Tmoo is trying to attract sellers by saying that there’s no fees, but once you get into like the nitty gritty, you don’t even get to set your own price. They set the price. Yeah, no. I had a meeting with them in Seattle during, they did a little restaurant party pop up right next to the convention center when Amazon was doing their big event last year in Seattle called Accelerate.

23:06
I went on and talked to him. The guy was exactly that. said, look, we get all these sellers. come over and this business development guy is like, we have no fees. I’m like, well, explain this to me. And he’s exactly what you said. Yeah, well, we set the price. We tell you we’re going to pay you this. And then we decide what we’re going to sell it for. was like, nobody’s going to come from Amazon because they’ll lose their buy box. Yes. As soon as you do that, they’re going to lose their buy boxes. I’m no, no, we have this and that. Dude, it’s not going to work. It’s simply not going to work.

23:36
uh You’ll get a few naive people, but that’s about it. Or desperate people, I think they’re having trouble with that. Unless Amazon gets busted for all this. mean that’s like anti-competitive activity if I’ve ever, it’s like blatant, right? Yeah. Well Amazon does things until they’re forced to change. I mean, back seven, eight years ago, there was a big industry of buying stolen data from China, from people inside Amazon in China, so we could get

24:06
you know uh… reports on what’s working on ppc for your competitors or what’s their backing keywords and all this people paying good money for this black market seven and amazon that threatened and i know we better start actually given people uh… so a little bit more dad so it doesn’t look like we’re just using this all for ourselves so they have the sqp now search for performance report may have uh… opportunity explore a lot more tools a lot more they’re much more loose with the data but they won’t make that change until it looks like they’re going to

24:36
in trouble. The same thing happened with taxes. If you remember, weren’t collecting sales tax. And then they went after states were starting to go after sellers and then that got changed. this thing with the pricing, think it will eventually, it’s going to be a case that it’ll come down where that changes. But I know like right now, and what they do is buy with Prime. A lot of people don’t know this. If you have the buy with Prime on your site, um

25:03
you won’t get penalized. if you on your Shopify site, if you have a buy with prime as an option and Amazon comes and and things are scrapes your Amazon or your Shopify site and sees that you’re selling it for $5 less than your own Amazon, they’re not supposed to actually penalize you on Amazon. That’s that’s straight from someone at the buy with prime team. That’s not something I read somewhere or in some form that’s straight from one of the top people on the team. She told me that it was in my newsletter a while back, but that’s

25:33
the only workaround I know on that right now. Yeah. Well, mean, with BioThePrime, you’re giving them all your information anyway, so I guess throw you a bone, not penalize you. Yeah. Okay, let’s talk about AI because I mean, that’s the hottest topic, at least that I’ve been spending most of my energy on. What are some pretty cool ways that people are using AI for e-commerce that you know of? Well, a lot of people, here’s my take on AI and e-commerce is

26:03
You got a lot of people that have played with OATCHAT GPT or played with some AI stuff, but I think most sellers are just touching the surface. They’re barely doing anything. They’re having to rewrite an email or marketing email or they’re having to maybe analyze one of their PPC reports or something fairly basic or help them write to try to get a bad review taken off. That’s like fundamental kindergarten stuff for what AI can actually do. Most people don’t understand

26:32
where this is how fast this is moving and where it’s going. And I think a lot of e-commerce sellers are going to be caught with their pants down. And I believe that there’s sellers on Amazon now doing five million a year, that two years from now are to be doing 500,000 a year and going, what the heck happened? Because people that are using AI are going to have such massive, uh AI correctly, they’re going have such massive competitive advantages. And if someone in their category starts doing that, they’re going to crush them. oh

27:01
And so AI and agent, agentic AI is I think where it’s at right now. And a lot of people that go, well, what’s agentic AI? Agentic AI is where you can have automate things. It’s an advanced form of automation where you have specialized. So here’s an example. So if I want to hire a PPC agency, I can go out and hire one of the top agencies in Amazon space. There’s about 800 of them that do PPC, literally about 800.

27:31
have a list of them all. People always say, what’s the best PPC agency to use, Kevin? I was like, I don’t know. It depends on the person you get. This person at Clare Ads, if you get the right person, you’re going to rock and roll. But if you get employee number 27, they’re still learning. And they may mess up some stuff. So someone goes in, they get employee number 27, and they’re like, ah, Clare Ads just doesn’t work. This other guy offered it cheaper over here. I’m just going to bounce over here.

27:58
And what happens is people end up bouncing from agency to agency agency. What if you could take that number one guy, Clear Ads, that’s crushing it for his handful of clients, and basically duplicate him in an agent. Everything he knows, it into an agent, it’s only LLM, and have him then manage an account, but he’s getting data from other agents. So you have a series of agents. You have a PPC agent that’s basically a mirror of this stud PPC guy. You have another agent that’s a mirror of a sourcing person. Another agent is a mirror of an image creation.

28:27
listing creator another one is a good keyword researcher known to the trend and each one of those say specialize in the best of the best and they’ve been trained and coached up by uh… by real people to actually know what they’re doing and then they they take the a i the vast knowledge out there and then these things all talk to each other in a in a way right now they can’t really they can’t really think on their own completely think on their own but it’s going to get to the point where they can so they still needs to be a human in this loop

28:57
but you could take what maybe took twenty or thirty people or a month to do and now do it in hours with one human and a bunch of agents and by layering these agents together and having them talk to each other they can execute twenty four seven three hundred sixty five days a year that no one, no humans ever going to be able to do and can do complicated math and a lot of stuff that where if you overlay different components together you overlay the PPC and you overlay the

29:26
Some of these big data look at a company like pattern that has massive amounts of data points and lay all those data points you can really hone in on what you gotta do to a minute level to actually get that little extra CTR or to see what’s trending and I think it’s going to get to the point where if you see there’s good agents are monitoring tick-tock and they see that I don’t know baby at the time of this recording you know just a couple weeks ago these little baby photos of baby videos were very popular people are taking like me and you

29:56
Yeah. …putting baby faces on and doing little things. And they could see something like that as hot. the agent, there’s a video creation agent, uses maybe VO3 or one these other tools. It could come in and actually do that on the fly for me and you and actually have something out in hours to take advantage of that trend and ride that wave. um That kind of stuff is going to happen. You’re have stuff where they see someone’s, yeah, they’re all talking about some new cooking thing. ah

30:24
It’s going to see that and it’s going to be able to talk to the sourcing agent, the sourcing agent through MCP, which is a way that agents can talk to each other. There’s a couple of different modalities in this, it’s kind of a common language. It’s kind of like a translator where they can talk to each other. So you’re have a sourcing agent that’s going to talk to Alibaba and say, hey, we need to make a spatula or whatever. And which factories can do this with this kind of handle and this kind of thing because this is what people are complaining about, all behind the scenes without human.

30:54
And you have factories, it’s going come back and say, these three can do it. Oh, here’s a rendering of it. AI is making a rendering. And then the human looks at it and goes, yep, I like that. like that. Nope, let’s change this a little bit. Makes a couple prompt tweaks. And then you have it being manufactured almost instantly. And then you can do 3D printing. let’s test this spatula. OK, here’s the CAD stuff. Here’s all the STPs files. There’s everything. Let’s make 100 of them and test the market.

31:23
and we’ll have this out in a week or you order it and just give us, you you put a seven to 10 day delivery on there and then holy cow people love it. Now let’s go to mass market on it, mass production on it. So I think you guys see, start seeing more and more of those kinds of things happen. Yeah, I mean we’re not quite there yet. I’m just curious how are you using AI or some of the people that you know directly using AI at the current state it is right now?

31:51
Other you start to see like companies like triple well use this agent stuff. So what I just talked about is not science fiction five years from now. It’s happening now on a basic level by the most advanced people like triple well is a perfect example with their movie agents. um They’re doing this right now to not quite the example I gave but 70 % of that. But the average seller is using it um to help them create video content or ad content to help them come with avatars.

32:19
to help them come up with angles, uh positioning angles, know, and test different positioning angles. Those are the most common that I’m seeing now and then writing emails and customer service and trying to get rid of reviews. A lot of people have little chat bots where you can do that. um In the education space, um I see this is something that I’ll be, I’m doing, I’m doing at BDSC, we’ll…

32:49
I a hint of this, but where I see an education is, you know, if I go and I take the Freedom Ticket, if you take the Freedom Ticket course from me, that’s one course that was made for a mass audience. And maybe it’s not particular for you, but I think it’s going to get an education where I can take my content and maybe, and mix that with, it could be with you, it could be with somebody else or it could just be mine. And someone comes in and says, oh, I want to sell this. I have this much money, answers four or five, six questions.

33:18
and the course is automatically recreated on the fly based on my knowledge base specifically for that person and people don’t want to do a ten module course they want quick wins, want something fast so it’s like here the next three hours we’ll teach you everything you know to do specifically what you want based on that knowledge base I think you’re going to start seeing that type of stuff happening and I know a few people that are messing with that now I mean Jason Flatlin a lot of you may know the GOAT of webinars like

33:47
best webinar guy in the world. just finished a tool that writes webinars in his style, which is a really good style. And he says it’s actually writing better. He’s not putting it out just yet. He’s doing some beta testing with the beta testers. know I’m a mastermind that he runs. They’re like, holy cow. And even Jason himself says this is doing a better job than me writing and he’s the goat. So there’s uses like that. There’s a tool that I use.

34:16
called copy coders from Genesis. It’s a $10,000 tool. think he sells it sometimes for five. But this tool has got what he’s done is he’s created his own basically LLM. He’s gone and he’s taken all the greatest marketing minds and copywriters of all time, Ogilvy and all the guys back, you 100 years and dumped into this database and then taught it. And so that I can go in there and he’s got something called a prompt called click drivers. So I can go in there and I can just give it a link.

34:46
I can give a link to your website and it’ll go suck in all your website or I can give it an email that I’ve already written or I can give it just an outline of here’s kind of what I want to do. Hit a button and it instantly will write uh what’s called a click driver’s email with all the hooks, all the everything in it. It’ll give you 20 different versions in about five seconds of the email depending on which angles and which positioning statements you want to do and then you can mix and match them. The thing I started using it for some of my advertisers on

35:15
billion dollar solar summit, dollar solar newsletter and on my emails that I send out, it’s doubled and tripled my conversion rates. Interesting. Because it’s so freaking powerful. and some people are, yeah, Kevin, I don’t need some tool. I just use chat. It helps me do that. Yeah, chat. You can definitely help you if you know how to prompt it. But this guy’s prompt is 19000 words, 19000 words prompt. And it goes into PO to do it. And that’s powerful. And so that

35:45
I think that’s the thing is most people, it’s garbage in, garbage out. If you know how to prompt and you know how to write it, you can get amazing stuff. ah But I think you’re see more isolated cases where you can take your content, all your podcasts that you’ve done, all your trainings and everything that you’ve done, all your seller summits and put that into a custom LLM that people can query. It’s isolated. It’s just you. It’s not polluted.

36:15
by stuff that’s on the internet that may or may not be true because there’s people that are espousing ways to do things, know, teach course guides and YouTube videos and whatever that actually doesn’t work or it’s outdated or whatever. You can control that whole ecosystem and so I think you’re see a lot of that and that’s happening right now. I have something coming out two weeks that does that oh on my content. I tried to do that a year ago. I don’t think it was ready to go back then because it

36:43
It’s still kept kind of hallucinating stuff and extrapolating stuff that I didn’t say. Maybe it’s a lot better now. Maybe I should revisit that. Yeah, I would take a look at that. I have something launching in two weeks that has two versions. One’s a free version that has it scaled back a little bit. And the other one’s a complete custom LLM with all my content. Every podcast I’ve been on, every one I’ve ever hosted, all my newsletters, all my BDSS content, Freedom Ticket.

37:13
um for getting some, whatever webinar I’ve done. And you can go in there and you can, it’s not just a, it’s not a search engine where you just type in like, tell me what’s where Steve talked about PPC. Oh, it’s this episode, go listen to it. It’s not a directory like that. It’s like, what does Steve Chu think about blah, blah, blah? And if you’re in there, it’s gonna pull it from it. Or what are the top three people think about this?

37:42
and who are they, it’ll pull it all from there. You’re talking to it conversationally. Nice. That copy coders tool, is it like a one-time fee or? I think it’s an annual. I signed up for it in January, so I’m not 100 % sure on that, but it’s worth every freaking penny. Interesting. So the back end is probably one of the popular alums, right? He’s just composed a really Yeah, he’s using Claude.

38:09
Yeah, it was just Claude on the backside, but he’s got all these custom products. mean, another example is a VSL of a buddy that’s launching some stuff and he hired this company. It’s like 40 grand for this company to help him set everything up. And they have a VSL and they gave him the VSL to use to do some recruiting and stuff for people for the site. He’s like, this is not bad. So he threw it in chat, GPT gave it some prompts. He made it a little bit better because he kind of knows the audience a little bit better than the

38:38
company agency does and so he then he said Kevin can you throw this through copy coders I was like yeah sure so I threw it through copy coders and we did a series of variations on it and then he sent that to them so here use this one instead of what you guys wrote and the people you know the Filipino VA’s are like oh you sure you want to do that we are how is it like a buddy Mark’s like yeah no do it so they’re like okay and then about two hours later the owner of the company texts him and said where the heck did you get this

39:08
I said, I told you I know what I’m doing. I’ve got some access to some special stuff. He’s like, this is brilliant. You mind if we use this as a template ourself? And so that’s the power if you know, you got to know where to go and know how to look. And that’s the dabblers don’t know that. With Lovable right now, you can do some amazing stuff with N8n and make, you can do some really cool stuff. ah But a lot of people, they’re just playing and they’re not actually. ah

39:37
using it as a tool and the people that in e-commerce that understand how to use it as a tool to save money, to save time, and it’s not necessarily that I get rid of a bunch of people. I mean, that’s gonna happen by default. There are gonna be people losing their jobs, but those people hopefully can be retrained or they’ll just have to adapt into something else. But it should make the people that are on this, it should make you more productive.

40:02
Do you think there’s the future is a market of people who just create these prompts really well? Where do see the market going? I think we just had Jordan Hall on the marketing missets podcast a couple of weeks ago and he’s big time affiliate marketer, big in the space, done very well. And I asked him what’s going on here with AI and what’s your take? And he said he thinks there’s a two to three year window right here to make a lot of freaking money.

40:29
uh… as any commerce or education or and anybody that’s on the cutting edge of a i but that the rate a as changing some of that advantage is going to go away because it can be easier easier for the average joseph button and does everything right now it’s still mind-blowing to the average person uh… you know when you when you talk about this copy coders and i see it like holy cow it’s mind-blowing and they don’t have access to it but they they will down down the road a much cheaper price lead that

40:55
in any said as a what’s gonna happen all these people you know those always talk about people losing their jobs and all this is a you know in the future there’s gonna probably be a universal uh… income uh… because this is with robots and everything going on it’s gonna be difficult for lot of people to make a decent living or life might go up for people but he said the ones that are gonna make the money and i i just been thinking of this the day before he said it entrepreneurs entrepreneurs are sitting in the driver’s seat of this if you have a entrepreneur mindset

41:25
or entrepreneur abilities, you can see these potentials you can see this and you’re willing to take these risks. You’re willing to go out there and he said, and I believe this too, that the entrepreneur mindset type of person is going to thrive in this new AI economy and it’s going to put a distance between the worker bees and the entrepreneur types more of a distance. And so that’s why I tell everybody just start dabbling in AI just so you can understand the basics.

41:53
i mean i’m not a coder i’m not a developer i can’t despite understand the logic of it so because when i was in back in the eighties was no late yeah this is the early eighties when personal computers were just coming out my parents spent like four thousand dollars to buy this is the rocks here that the rocks the copy coming here uh… and said four thousand bucks and it was a little floppy drives you know it would do anything a little basic screen but one summer i taught myself how to do basic basic

42:24
And because of that, and I did some Pascal and a few things in college, but because of that, I understand the logic and the way of thinking. And that’s the problem that a lot of people have and the prompting is they don’t understand how to tell it what they want. And that’s why photographers and creative people right now are like, they’re not as worried. People are like, oh, you’re a photographer. Aren’t you going to be worried about your jobs? Like, no, this is the most powerful tool ever. Now I can tell it, I want this.

42:50
this f-stop and this lighting and this lens and this and this and it creates a beautiful right there if I don’t like it. Hit a couple buttons, does again. I don’t have to go spend $100,000 on a photo shoot and props and sets and deal with humans and all this. They’re the people that are going to win. So if you know how to do that and you understand the logic of how to talk to it, that’s the power. And that’s going to be the power for e-commerce people too is for whatever your goals are in e-commerce, knowing how to combine these things and how to talk to it to get the results that you want.

43:19
I was just having a conversation with a buddy the other day about the Shopify app store. Like I was going to give it two or three years until all those apps, which a lot of them don’t do much, people can just hit a couple buttons and generate something that’s very custom to their shop going forward. No, I think you’ll be able to do that. I mean, there’s some tools. What I just see that actually does that right now was it? ah There’s somebody already kind of doing something similar to that, or you just type in

43:49
And it basically creates, mean, the basic apps you can do right now with Lovable and some of these other vibe coding things. You when you start, you got to tie it in a database like SuperBase, or you got to start tying in NAD, and it starts getting a little bit more complicated. But I just talked to someone yesterday that’s using Lovable. And Lovable, for those that don’t know, is a vibe coding. It’s uh where you just go in and instead of having to type in all the coding, you know, the programming side of things, you just tell it what you want. I want to create an app that looks like a uh

44:18
Airbnb and does this and this and does these things but I want to change this and in seconds or under a minute it creates the entire thing and then gives you the code to take it to chat GBT to create like uh Graphics for the interface and all kinds of stuff, but she’s like, you know I come from the background of coding So I understand how to talk to it. So what she’s conversationally telling me what to do, but she understands what to say and once and

44:45
when does it does one thing say no it looks like you’re missing out whatever the comments here all you know you’re so right uh… let me add those for you real quick uh… you know so that’s that’s the best as a commerce as we know what works and what doesn’t even doing this for a while so use that knowledge of conversion rates in psychology and marketing and and upsells and everything to actually even massively better results and the other thing i think it on

45:13
E-commerce and I think you guys start seeing a lot of people not going to Shopify first or not going to Amazon first it’s going to be going to the AI engines you know chat GPT’s and Gemini’s and whatever emergence as a dominant if there’s another Google that comes out of this right now it’s chat GPT’s the dominant one but they’re going to be start searching in there and if you look at what Jas Andrew Jassy said just recently released a document to internal and basically say hey generative AI is coming

45:42
or embrace it, it’s going to change everything. so you’re going to search is going to change the way people discover products can change. And you just think about someone like Google or chat, GBT, even, or, and Amazon, they have massive data on you. And they have mass, they can customize specifically do what you want. mean, tick tock is the pre is the early preview of this. Well, tick tock knows how to target you with what, what are you most likely to buy on tick tock shop?

46:11
I mean, you’ve seen probably uh a lot of stuff that’s come through TikTok shopping or scroll. You said you bought a few that you like. That looks cool. No, I’m going to have a restraint. I’m not going to buy that, but that looks cool. No, I already got enough stuff. The wife will get mad at me if I put this on the credit card. And you’re also frugal. you’ll be um maybe, but you probably see a lot of stuff like, man, that’s kind of cool. That’s kind of cool because they know how to target you. That’s going to put on steroids when you put a whole bunch of big data that

46:40
Amazon’s been collecting on you for 20 something years and knows everything. Have you ever requested your, what Amazon knows from you? No, I haven’t. No. Did you do that? Yeah, I did that like a year and a half ago. It’s like 780 pages PDF. Okay. It’s every video I’ve ever watched on Prime, where I paused it, where I, how much of it I watched. was everything I’ve ever put in my cart, everything I ever bought took out, everything I ever looked at.

47:07
Everything I ever listen to, how many times I listen to Taylor Swift, you know, song or whatever, everything is in there. It’s eye opening what they got. And that data is worth a lot. And they can use that now with AI to really highly customize the experience for people looking to buy in e-commerce. Yeah, that is nuts, man. uh Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this because people like I think most of my colleagues

47:35
have just been seeing traffic steadily decline over the years. And it’s because people aren’t doing research on Google anymore. They’re getting all their information from chat or any LLM. And then when they’re ready to buy, they’ll just Google the brand name and then go to your site and buy it there. Or they go straight to Amazon. So you’re right, I think. Or they still go to the store. mean, retail is not dead. That’s correct. They go to the store.

48:00
They’re not doing the research on websites anymore. Right. Right. Doing all the research and you might get like a branded search and then a click to your site for the part. remember I was at the uh the pattern pattern. If you don’t know patterns based in Salt Lake City, they’re the number one seller on Amazon. One point eight billion with a B dollars per year. Sixteen data scientists working for them. Amazon comes to them sometimes when they get questions on logistics and stuff. And I remember the CEO was on stage talking about

48:29
power of AI right now. He’s like, look, in my family, I’ve got six kids. Every time they turn 16, we offer to buy them a car, their first car. And we tell them like, hey, you might like a Toyota Corolla. You might like this. And we recommend a few cars that they might like. in the past, they’ve always picked one of those. And that’s what we got from them. They said, but our youngest that just turned 16, when we told her what to

48:55
we recommend for she’s a little on the middle as the and us to gbt she goes to check you can type and i’m a sixteen-year-old girl i like this like this i don’t miss with my friends and blah blah blah blah and came back and so you you should actually look at the jeep uh… whatever chair here or whatever whatever was this will be the perfect car so she goes back to dad and says i want to keep your key i want you recommend she trusted that and i gave her the answer

49:21
of what she wanted. You’re see more and more of that. And that just illustrates your point on what you just said, is it’s already happening. Hey, Kevin. I did want to get a chance to talk about some of the things that you’re working on. Billion Dollar Seller Summit, that’s twice a year. Do you want to tell the audience what that’s all about? Sure. I appreciate that. one time it’s virtual. So I do once a year virtually.

49:48
Next one’s coming up in August, August 19th to 21st. And it’s not just a, you see a lot of virtual summits and lot of Zoom calls and stuff. It’s not a Zoom. We use a platform that actually has like 3D renderings of the exhibit hall. It’s like, like it has breakout rooms. It feels as close to being at real conference as you can with ah just being at your desk. So it’s not a, it’s very interactive. It’s all done live, no prerecorded stuff. ah So that one’s coming up. And then I have one, the next in-person event.

50:18
is going to be in Nashville in April of next year. I’m changing the model in that it used to be exclusively a high ticket event. So there’s about $6,000 to come. then plus your hotel and airfare. So you’re making a pretty considerable investment to actually come. Last one was in Iceland, before that, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. But I’m changing the model in Nashville where there’s going to be a high element of it, but it’s going to be three grand instead of six grand. And then there’s going to be tickets as low as $497.

50:45
And I’m actually hoping that you’ll be out there because at the event I have a podcast row. So if you go to Super Bowl and always see at the Super Bowl there’s always this media row. All the ESPNs and Foxes and all these guys go and they interview all the celebrities and everything. So I’ve got 20 booths set aside for podcasters. It’s totally free as a podcaster host. Or you can have my wife quit her job booth and you can man it as often or…

51:14
as little as you want and can interview people while you’re there at the show and create a lot of content. uh So I’m doing cool stuff like that and we make it a make my events are an experience. They’re not a it’s not the same as this. Just go in a uh call uh conference hall and listen to some talks and maybe have appetizers at a mixer. We do full on experiences like in Iceland. We went snowmobiling on glaciers and we went create do crazy stuff in Hawaii. We did an amazing race type of event with

51:43
Everybody competed for a whole day racing around the island and 28 different rental cars wearing like jerseys that sponsored Jersey It looked like f1 Hawaiian style shirts and so we do a lot of cool stuff like that to make it a total experience and not just an event so those Billion dollar seller summit comm is the you want to find out more about those nice man And then I know I really like your newsletter also. I appreciate it anyone listening to it. You should go sign up It’s it’s over at billion dollar seller summit comm also, right?

52:11
You can get there or billion just go direct at billion dollar sellers.com. Yeah Well Kevin, uh, thanks a lot for coming on the show man. Um, this is a great conversation And it gave everyone a peek to what is coming in the next year or two and it’s happening fast It’s happening fast. So hold on. It’s going to be a fun ride. It’s an exciting time to be alive It’s like exciting time to be in e-commerce. Um, it’s it’s cool, man. I appreciate you having me on dude. Thanks a lot, Hope you enjoyed this episode

52:41
The e-commerce landscape is changing quickly and every marketplace is squeezing both sellers and shoppers. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 606. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 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.

53:10
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I am joined by Chris Schaeffer, a longtime friend of the show who always brings a fresh, no fluff perspective on what is working right now. Chris is known for getting his hands dirty, testing strategies himself and sharing insights from the trenches. With AI, TikTok shop and social media reshaping the game, we are breaking down exactly how to build a content strategy that drives growth in 2025 and beyond.

00:30
But before we begin, want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most conferences that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses.

00:59
no corporate execs, and no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people, so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers.

01:28
Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Once again, that’s sellersummit.com. Now onto the show.

01:44
Welcome to the My Wife, Good or Jot podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Chris Schaeffer back on the show. Chris is someone who I’ve known for almost a decade now. He’s helped run the Seller Summit for as long as I can remember, I think the first year. He just spoke at the 2025 Seller Summit a couple months ago. And if you don’t know Chris, I he’s actually been on the podcast a couple of times. He consults for dozens of companies. He’s got a bunch of his own brands as well. And what I always like about him,

02:13
is that he’s opinionated and he brings his own unique perspective on what’s working in e-commerce. He’s also the type of guy that gets his hands dirty. He actually does the real work. And right now in the midst of AI, TikTok, shop, social media, content I would say is pretty much becoming a requirement to run an e-commerce business. in this episode, we’re gonna talk about how to formulate a content strategy for your brand. What’s going on, Chris?

02:43
You give me all these compliments, you bring me on the show, and then you’re like, yeah, he gets his hands dirty. Are there people who don’t actually do this stuff? Well, I’m thinking about your old buddy Scott. I always felt like you did all the work, and he was the hype man. That’s not true. does a heck of a lot. But I happen to have done a lot more on the e-commerce side of stuff, which is why we’re here.

03:12
Yes. That’s why we’re having and I making fun of Scott. No, no shade to Scott. I know he does a lot of work, but you know, when you guys were together, it’s much more fun to pick on him. Uh, especially when he’s not here. Anytime you can get that chest. If you guys don’t know who Scott is, he’s talking about Scott Volcker, who was the original host of the amazing seller podcast, which was the most popular Amazon podcast on the planet at the time. Yeah. You know, I, know you and Scott recently stopped brand creators. How are you spending your time now?

03:41
that you’re not spending all that time creating content for that business? The thing that I’m very confused about is how I should have more time and somehow have less. I managed to fill that time with a whole bunch of new clients and a whole bunch of other things to do. uh So I’m doing a lot more client work than I was even last year, which is great. um But yeah, I mean, it’s just…

04:10
problem solving, right? That’s realistically how I get hauled into things. I think you and I talked about this a little bit at Seller Summit. We have a client that we’ve had since 2015. We started with them just doing Amazon consulting because I heard the owner on a podcast went to buy the product on Amazon, saw that it wasn’t there and wrote an email and was like, hey, you should probably sell your stuff on Amazon because that’s where I went to look for it. And I got an email back five minutes later that was like, hey, do you know how to do that? And that has turned into now a

04:39
uh Ten year long contract where I’m running essentially everything for the business with the help of AI and a little bit of human content creation So but you’re not an employee, right? You’re a consultant and an owner now and an owner right part owner, right? Right. Right. Wait, how do you get your clients? I’ve always wondered is it just word of mouth or For the most part, I mean Way back in the day. We did some outreach like 2013 2014

05:08
But a lot of it since then has come from doing some work for somebody and then leveling up inside of that contract. And I think one of the things that we did, if you’re looking at this from an agency perspective or you wanna do some consulting, and I know Alex Hermosy talks about this all the time, create an offer that’s irresistible, right? The irresistible offer, an offer they can’t say no to. The way we did that on the consulting side was by using commission or above board.

05:34
So when we initially brought in a lot of our clients, instead of charging a monthly retainer, we would charge a commission on the additional sales that we brought in. Whether that was additional revenue through email marketing, additional revenue through content creation, or launching a new channel for somebody like taking them over to Amazon and say, all right, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take the total amount of money that we make somewhere like Amazon, we’re gonna subtract your product costs, and then we take a percentage of the profit of that. No one says no to that.

06:03
Because if you don’t do anything, it’s not a problem. Yeah. And it a lot of pressure on you. Yeah. Which I like. And then that over time turned into, Hey, what do you know about like email marketing? What do you know about content creation? What do you know about running ads? And with a lot of that kind of stuff, once you have that trust built and you’re like, Hey, here’s, here’s what we’re going to do on a monthly basis. We can either do it the way that we did before, or we can do it as a flat monthly contract. And what we’ve found is.

06:33
most people at that point will go to the monthly contract because they realize how much they’re paying you on commission. So we were able to kind of really ramp those numbers up, especially with something like Amazon. If you go from zero to a half a million dollars in the first year, which we did for that client, 10, 15 % of that starts to add up. So you go, hey, let’s just make this eight grand a month and we’ll lump everything in. It becomes a lot more appealing of an offer. Right, but not in the beginning. In the beginning when you had to prove yourself.

07:02
Performance is what matters. Okay. Yeah, I like that model. I like that model So I know you work with a number of brands. It sounds like you’ve expanded your client pool With given what’s everything that’s going on with AI? uh Zero click, know less clicks to your website. Where are you advising them to focus their efforts on the marketing end? Are you having them do video written content tick-tock IG? I know you’re gonna say it depends

07:29
So let’s pick an example and build a strategy around it for the audience. It depends. ah No, I think if you guys are listening to this, I have a giant sign mounted on the wall behind me. That’s as it depends. uh It doesn’t really depend because if people are selling and most of the people that listen to your podcast are in the e-commerce world or want to get into the e-commerce world, there’s really two or three places to focus on.

07:59
Written content for the longest time was the starting point. But with how terrible Google is these days, like quite frankly, Google is kind of a shit show. um I don’t know that I would start there. It is something you still want to have as part of the content mix. And I actually spent the last week building a fully automated content flow for somebody. So all they have to do is type in a keyword and it generates blog posts and the images and all of the stuff in their brand voice.

08:29
because that’s so easy to do now, content, written content specifically has become kind of a diamond dozen. It’s still something that you should mix in, but focusing, I think on the video side is going to be the last bastion for that. And I’m a fan of longer form video, at least to start with, because we can chop it down into other things. If you shoot a 60 second TikTok, you can’t really use that for other stuff.

08:58
Steve, you know this, but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google itself, right? And so focusing somewhere like YouTube and then figuring out how to repurpose that content other places where you don’t get as much long-term value out of it, I think probably makes the most sense for people. The reason that I like YouTube is at least as of recording this podcast, it’s still evergreen, right? So I know you have a YouTube channel. uh

09:26
If you look at your views in any given month, unless you have some sort of a freak video takeoff on something, you’re gonna have a huge chunk of your views for that month from your catalog of content. And people will watch the content that you put out all year round and far into the future. And if you actually look at when stuff is published in your YouTube feed, a lot of times when you refresh that homepage on YouTube, you’ll see two, three, four, five year old videos pop up because it’s something that YouTube thinks you are interested in.

09:55
even though it’s older content. You don’t really get that anywhere else. You don’t get that on Instagram, right? You post something on Instagram. If it doesn’t go viral right away, no one will ever see it again, except for the one weird person who looks at every single post that you put up on Instagram. TikTok is a little more like Instagram than it is like YouTube, but it seems to be changing a little bit. I know you’ve played around with TikTok a little bit. What is your experience with kind of the back catalog on TikTok? Yeah, I’m back all in on TikTok.

10:24
I would say a video can last a couple weeks, maybe a month if it’s like really good, but then it drops off. And you’re right, YouTube is just like the good old Google search days, right? You do something once, you get traffic forever, that’s what I love about it. And that’s why I view my YouTube channel as a stock that can only rise. Every video that I add to it will increase the traffic over time.

10:52
but it’s not true for like TikTok and Instagram in general. Yeah, and I think that’s one of the biggest things that people miss out on is they’re creating content in the wrong places. And we’ve heard since 2008 that we need to be on social media. You have to be on Instagram, right? If you listen to somebody like Gary V, he’s like, post a hundred times a day on Instagram, right? Terrible Gary V impression, but you understand where I’m going with that. And the problem with that for most e-commerce businesses,

11:21
is they don’t have a dedicated content team. So even if you’re leveraging AI to chop up those things and maybe even to post it, if you’re real fancy, you still have to have content to pull from. And if you’re running a one, two, or even a five person e-commerce businesses, which is probably most people listening to this, you don’t have the time to do that. And I don’t know, also run the business, like find new products, source your products, go back and forth with the manufacturer about when they’re actually going to give you your stuff, deal with customer surveys.

11:51
deal with the website stuff. Like you don’t have time to do all of that. And people get spread really, really thin and try to post on Instagram and Tik Tok and Snapchat threads and all of these different places instead of spending the time, energy and effort one place. And so somebody was to ask me which place they should focus on. It would be, and we don’t have to say, you know, long form content. It doesn’t have to be an hour long, but 10 to 12 minute videos on YouTube tend to lead to the best results.

12:21
Not only can you get more eyeballs faster somewhere like a YouTube, not only do get the evergreen benefit, but you also get to see really quickly what’s working and what’s not. Take the stuff that’s working, chop that up, and then put that somewhere like your Instagram, your TikTok, wherever. All right, so walk me through this because whenever I talk about YouTube to someone who has an e-commerce brand, creating a 10 to 12 minute video sounds very intimidating. So let’s walk through

12:51
creating the ideas for that content and how to make it less intimidating. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they try to create content about their product instead of thinking about who their product serves, right? The niche, the niche, the nacho, however you wanna classify it. um That I think is the key to understanding and creating good content.

13:21
Right, so if we look at somebody like Black Rifle Coffee, if you go look at their Instagram, you go look at their YouTube, they don’t create coffee content. Who are their customers? Right, it’s really hard to make a 12 minute video about how to French press coffee, because unless you’re sitting there boiling the water for eight of those minutes, it’s really not a 12 minute long process. Black Rifle Coffee does this really well. They don’t create coffee content.

13:47
They create content for first responders. They create content for military people. They create content for their actual audience. So the first thing before we even sit down and get into the content creation stages, we need to take a step back and say, who do we serve? Who is actually using my products? And what are the kinds of things that people would want to see? Right? So we do have to take that step back and first find a niche. And I know the logical question that’s going to come out of this is what’s a niche?

14:16
The definition that I like to use is it’s a group of people who identify as something or say that they love something. So if you were to say, I am a fisherman or I love fishing, that would be a niche. Right. And if you think about your product, you’re not selling a water bottle. mean, literally you are, but if you’re selling water bottles, who is buying them? Are they using it for camping? Okay. Your niche is camping. Are they using it to go on long runs? Maybe your niches runners or people who are doing stuff outside.

14:45
but you need to take the step back and figure that out first. If you can figure that out, it becomes very easy to find those content ideas if you leverage the platform. So something like YouTube is great for this. What’s YouTube’s goal, Steve? Keep you on longer watching videos. Watching Google is the, Google is the only platform who considers it a win. If you don’t go back to Google, I know you’ll be familiar with this term.

15:15
pogo sticking, right? It was something that Google specifically looks at as a metric. What that means is if you click on one of those blue links in Google, you go to that website and then you hit the back button and click on another link, they consider that a loss, right? They consider that something that’s not a good outcome because you had to come back to the platform. Every other platform on the planet, whether we’re talking about YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, is designed to keep you on that website as long as possible. How do they do that?

15:43
The word that everybody hates to hear, the algorithm, right? But the algorithm doesn’t need to be a scary thing. And this is something I think once you wrap your head around it, it makes it a lot less scary. So everybody hears the word algorithm, they’re like, oh, the algorithm hates me. Whatever. We need to start replacing that word in our vocabulary with the audience. YouTube’s goal with their algorithm is to be a proxy for your audience.

16:12
If you create content that the people you are trying to serve, whether they’re fishermen or coffee lovers or whatever, are looking for, YouTube will show it to people. And it’s one of the reasons I love YouTube. You can have a four-year-old YouTube video that finally takes off because YouTube found the right audience for it, finally. We can use that algorithm, whether it’s YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, in our favor. We just have to act like our customers. It’s the reason I’m a huge fan of test accounts.

16:41
And I know this is something I talked about at Seller Summit and it’s one of my favorite tricks for figuring out, finally to answer your question, Steve, how to create the content that our audience is already looking for. We waste a ton of time trying to brainstorm and think about the things that our audience might look for. Why? If we can use something like YouTube to just show us what our audience is already not just looking for, but consuming on that platform, that’ll shortcut that process for us.

17:09
And so if you’re thinking about starting to create some content, my number one recommendation would be to start a test account. Basically create a new Gmail address or a new YouTube account with whatever email that you’d like to use. You go in, you can start with your main keyword, phishing, and just start watching some of the videos that YouTube suggests. If you know some of the big creators in the space, that’s usually a better place to start because

17:37
They’ll know immediately that you know about the niche versus just having a passive interest in bass fishing. But when you watch as few as three to five videos, they start to get an idea for who you are and tailor the algorithm to you. And if you continuously consume the content that peaks your interest in that space, they will show you the exact content that is already performing well. And then all you have to do is figure out how to create your version of that. So obviously we’re not just gonna rip off somebody’s video.

18:07
but we’re gonna sit down, we’re gonna look at the titles that pop up. And you say, okay, that’s a really cool bucket. The 15 fishing lures everybody needs to use. uh How to catch more fish for $5. Whatever the things are that you start to see coming up over and over again, jot down some of those title ideas and then go into the content planning process to say, how would I approach this topic? Because we know that this video is already working. We know that this title and this.

18:34
idea generally is already working to go to our niche, how can we create our own version of it? I’ll have to go watch Black Rifle Coffee’s channel, but are there videos like 10 to 12 minutes? Some of them are, some of them aren’t. Their Instagram is also really interesting because their Instagram is all just like weird, what’s the like meme videos about the military. But the other good example of this

19:04
And it always gets a laugh when I bring it up because it’s the nerds know uh Linus Tech Tips. Are you familiar with Linus Tech Tips on YouTube at all? Steve, you know they’re not a media company anymore, right?

19:20
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

19:50
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. I think they sell their own stuff and they do a lot of affiliates, right? So in 2020, they made 23 % of their revenue from ads, 13 % from e-commerce, 12 % from sponsored videos, 24 % from in video sponsors.

20:18
and 23 % from affiliates. Last year, 55 % of their revenue came from Ecom. They’re not creating content about screwdrivers, right? They sell a really cool, what’s the word that I’m looking for? The like screwdrivers, like a ratcheting screwdriver. They sell IT guy apparel. They sell a lot of those kinds of things. That’s not the content they’re creating. They’re creating content for the audience. Now they had the benefit of starting.

20:47
as a YouTube channel. And so they knew that’s how they had to create the content. But because that is the audience that they have attracted, they then built the products around it. We can do the same thing in reverse. If you have the products, you just have to figure out the content that people are already consuming and then do that. think if you guys, even if you’re not into Linus Tech Tips or technology at all, go check out the channel. They’ve done six figures, Steve, on a single live stream. And they do just a Friday show and it wasn’t them promoting.

21:17
It wasn’t them doing anything other than what they normally do. They have their show, you know, it’s tech news of the week, whatever. And they say, oh, here’s the special for this week. Go check it out. Right. That’s their pitch. It’s not like, it’s not rocket surgery. They’re not going through a whole giant marketing funnel. They’re like, Hey, if you like our stuff, if you like our content, maybe you’ll like our products too. And because, especially with something like YouTube, you build trust fast. Steve, do you know if I use the word parasocial relationship?

21:47
Does that mean anything to you? It actually doesn’t. does that mean? you have probably had a lot of people come up to you and say, man, I feel like I know you from the podcast. I feel like I know you from the YouTube channel. My favorite experience with that was in 2015 or 2016 with Scott. We were sitting in a restaurant and somebody walked up and said, I know your voice, right? Which is probably not the right way to approach someone, but still sticks in my mind. So I remember who that person is.

22:15
But when you consume content from somebody, you’re consuming content in different areas of your life. So podcasts are a great example of this. You’re listening to podcasts when you’re at the gym, you’re listening to podcasts in your car, maybe you’re listening to podcasts when you’re in the bathroom, right? In those private intimate moments, it’s just you and that other person. The same thing applies with YouTube content, whether you’re sitting there watching it or you’re listening to it. And I actually listen to a lot more YouTube content than I watch.

22:43
because I’ll turn on an hour long video and throw my headphones in and walk to the gym or walk to the store or do whatever I need to do. But because it’s just you and that other person’s voice, you actually build a really deep connection with that person because they’re literally sitting there talking to you for 12 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour at a time. And so above seeing something funny on Instagram, you build that relationship with people very quickly.

23:10
And so then when you recommend something or you say, Hey, go check out my stuff. They have that relationship with you. And instead of you having to build out the giant marketing funnel or do any of the things that we should still do on the back end. All you have to do is say, Hey, go check out our screwdriver or Hey, go check out our coffee or Hey, go check this out. And you will get a huge number of people to do that because they’ve built no like and trust with you through the content that they’ve consumed.

23:37
I think most people listening understand the theory on why it works. You take a channel like Linus Tech Tips, their production value is incredible now. So yeah, if I were to go, I haven’t seen that really videos actually, but if I were to watch it now and say, okay, I want to start a YouTube channel. It’s pretty intimidating. Right? You have a brand and let’s, let’s just call it a water bottles or something like that. It seems like production value is a huge hurdle.

24:07
like in your mind at least. Do you see e-commerce channels where it’s just like a talking head and do well? As long as they’re creating niche based content, yes. And so I think the thing that most people misunderstand is that they think because many channels that do well on YouTube have high production, that you have to have high production to do very well on YouTube.

24:36
That’s not the case, right? You look at somebody like Mr. Beast and you’re like, okay, I need to edit my videos like that. Like I need like 48 people to work on it. And the answer is no. The content is what speaks to people, not the production of the content itself. So I think Scott is actually a good example of this. I don’t know if you’ve checked out any of the content on the channel he’s doing with his son right now. I have not actually, maybe I should. But almost all of their videos are shot with an iPhone and

25:06
the road, or no, it’s the DJI Bluetooth mic. Yeah, the light, I have them right here on my desk actually, these light ones, right? Yeah, that exact set, almost everything that they’ve done is done using that. And in fact, they did a 24 hour content challenge back in August where they wanted to do 52 videos, shot, edited, thumbnails done, so they would have one video a week for the next year.

25:36
in 24 hours. They did every single one of those videos with that setup. And you can’t tell the difference between that and $4,000 camera. So there’s no reason not to get started that way. You can always up the production value later. But what people are really concerned about is the quality of the content. So if you do something like build the research channel to get all of the ideas, then you just go, how do I do this with an iPhone? And

26:03
not have to hire a camera person and 14 editors and build a server in my house, right? You just have to figure out your way to do it. The biggest hurdle for people is normally recording that first video. And I think this is where people make a lot of mistakes. And I love using my fiance as the example of this. She’s probably gonna yell at me because she’s gonna hear me say her name and a whole bunch of mean things. ah But I can always tell when she’s recording a video. Because I’ll hear

26:32
eight and a half minutes of her talking and then a whole bunch of Spanish profanity. Right? Because people get really bogged down in, need to say every word perfectly. I need to be able to not have to do any editing. And if they say um or uh, or they mispronounce a word, instead of just taking a breath and keep on going, they’ll stop and start the video from the beginning.

27:01
Cause they want one nice long take. That’s nice if you can do it, but it’s not mandatory. People like ums and uhs because it’s how real people talk, right? If you mess up a word, just fix it. I’m sure I’ve said something incorrectly or pronounced something incorrectly through the course of the 25 minutes we’ve been talking so far, but I’ve done it enough now that it doesn’t stop me from moving on and messing up a word is not the end of the.

27:30
Right? You just pronounce it correctly or make a joke out of it or do something and then you keep moving. And I think the easiest way to get trained with that is by doing it live. I’m a huge fan of either doing live content or what I call one shot content. So you’re never hitting pause. You’re never hitting stop. You’re never starting over. If you’re too scared to get on alive, that’s fine. Just keep the camera rolling, take a breath and start where you screwed up. If you do it that way,

28:00
you force yourself to create the content, it still comes off naturally. And yeah, you might have to go in and trim out a few sections where you’re just rolling your eyes at the camera or screaming 15 Venezuelan profanities, but you get it done. And the thing that I think stops most people isn’t even the production value, it’s just getting through the first recording of the thing. I would agree with that. uh Tony and I, teach a class on that. it’s almost always psychological for people.

28:31
Are you allowed to talk about your clients? have you helped? Do they have YouTube channels? Do any of your clients have YouTube channels? Yeah, I can’t share any of them publicly, but I can tell you. So we’re in five different spaces on YouTube right now. Okay. One of them is doing it with just a podcast. Oh, the only video content they’re creating is their long form podcast. Some of them are shooting shorter form videos and

29:00
part of my team is about to go out to one of our newer clients to shoot the first few videos. And they’re gonna use exactly that strategy, right? We have the test channel built so we know the ideas that we think will resonate with the audience, because YouTube is telling us, here’s what’s working in that space. ah She’s great on camera anyway, but even if she wasn’t, it’s all right, let’s just do this in one take. Get as much of it out as you can. If you screw up, we’ll stop, we’ll take a second.

29:29
and then just start from where we left off. Steve, do you still script your videos? I do, I do. They’re loosely scripted though. They’re not like word for word. uh Sometimes it’s like the intro can be word for word because that’s the most important part. But the guts of it can be bullet points, sentences. I know you and I have had this conversation a little bit in the past and I thought I remembered that. I’m a huge fan of either no cards or

29:59
literally pen and paper with the bullet pointed outline of what you’re going to talk about. If you’re going to script something, the intro or the hook is usually the place to try to get it word for word, right? So here’s what we’re going to do today uh or you know, whatever the reason is that they’re going to stay to the end of the video. That’s what would be referred to as the hook that you want to think about a little bit. But if you know anything about your niche, you should be able to talk

30:28
pretty well off the cuff about the different fishing lures or the different ways to brew coffee, that as long as you have that bullet pointed out, you can fill in the rest of that. And that’s the other big trap that I see a lot of people make. They will say, okay, I need to get this word for word. And that was something that I noticed with Michelle. She went through, I think, 20 takes of the same video and there was just a word that she could not pronounce. She says it all day every day.

30:56
but every time she got to that word, she screwed up. It’s in the script, so she needs to read it, in her mind. Just put a different word in, right? And when you are sitting there trying to read the script, one, it doesn’t come off as naturally, and two, you’re kind of a prisoner to that exact structure and it feels less natural. So if you can script less and bullet point more, that gives you more authenticity and it also makes you feel less like you’re screwing up.

31:25
Because as long as you’re making your way through the bullet points, someone will understand it. And I don’t know if you feel this way, but one of my rules, uh like if I’m giving uh a talk at a conference, like at Seller Summit, if I hate it, people will generally like it. Like, no one’s gonna understand this, it’s not gonna make any sense, because for the vast majority of people, you know substantially more than your audience about your product and about your niche, right?

31:54
And so the things you think are silly or repetitive or don’t need to be filled in are exactly the kinds of, or the things that you hate talking about are exactly the kinds of things that your audience needs to hear. And so if you get done with a video and you’re like, who would watch this? At least for me, as long as it’s not who would watch this because you’re getting hit on the head by a flying bird or like who would watch this because the camera’s upside down. It’s, I don’t think this serves any value. A lot of times those are the videos that do the best.

32:23
because they appeal to the broadest number of people. It’s things you think because you know a lot about the space that everybody knows. But most people don’t know those things. You know, I think it would really help the audience listening to this. If you could record your wife screwing up and cursing, and then I’ll post it. I think that’d be really helpful for that and your, you know, your relationship. Yeah, I think it would definitely build a lot of know, like, and trust between the two of us.

32:53
I have couple questions for you though. Regarding the brands that have YouTube channels, you mentioned a podcast. That’s actually quite interesting. I never would have thought to create a podcast to promote an e-commerce brand. That sounds pretty easy. All you’re doing is talking about the space. Right? And so if we go back to the Linus Tech Tips example, their Friday live show is their podcast. They just put it out in an audio format afterwards.

33:23
Now, they’ve filled in medium and long form content throughout the week. But as long as you’re speaking to that same audience, anything you do in that space works. And in the case of that client, he is terrible on recorded video, but can talk off the cuff for hours about the niche. And so if you can get him on camera, either by himself or with a guest, and it’s being recorded.

33:52
It comes out really well and it’s very high quality content for the audience. He tried to do some shorter form stuff, you know, less than an hour long and absolutely hated it. Ironically, some of those videos have done much better than any of the podcast episodes because that’s what YouTube tends to favor. But it’s that easy and their entire business was built off of the podcast and YouTube channel that is just the recording of the podcast.

34:18
reason why I’m asking all these questions is because these are all reservations that I had. uh You know, I mentioned this at Sello Summit, hasn’t launched yet, it’s probably gonna launch either end of this month or next month, but a Bumblebee Linens YouTube channel. And for me at least, it’s all low energy, right? Like if I have to go on set, film, know, uh move around or whatever, it’s probably not gonna happen. And that’s just me and my mental hurdles and the production quality. uh people listening,

34:48
I’m starting to tell the we sell wedding handkerchiefs, right? And there’s always a story behind the handkerchief how these couples got together and that sort of thing and all I’m doing is just telling those stories and I’m telling them by AI generating, you know cartoon likenesses of them and I’m usually changing their names unless they give me permission to use their names these first couple they want to remain anonymous and whatnot and That’s gonna be it telling stories because everyone loves a good story. But the way I’m doing it is

35:18
Like I’m literally just behind a green screen talking, because I can do that in my office. And then I can generate the images to generate the scenery behind the story, because I can’t get all those photos from a customer, right? At best, I could probably just get a photo of the couple together. And that’s how I just kind of rationalized the ability to maintain this forever. Do your clients have these same reservations? Like I can’t be the only one.

35:45
Everyone does. actually, because I spoke about content at Seller Summit, I had a lot of these conversations. And Steve, you told me before we got on that you watched my Seller Summit session yesterday. um I actually used you and what the idea that you had for the Bumbabee Linens channel to answer a question during that session. eh Because a lot of people are afraid to be in front of the camera. Or they don’t want to have to sit down and record.

36:12
And so one of the questions I get all the time is like, I do a faceless YouTube channel? And the answer is yes. Like you’re a prime example of that. And I think the main thing that people screw up with that is they miss the storytelling element. Stories will always sell better than anything else. If you have the ability to jump in front of a camera and create content about your niche, you can create the story, right? That’s what you’re doing through the arc of the video anyway, when you’re showing off the 15 different fishing lures that everybody needs to have in their town.

36:41
or whatever the topic of the video is, you’re going through the journey with people. But you can also do that without jumping in front of the camera. We had a conversation with one of our newer clients, actually last week, uh and they’re in the cooking space, right? The food and cooking space. And they were talking about an idea that they had for bringing in some additional revenue through subscription. And it was all about trying to go out and

37:11
find like classic versions of stuff and share that with people. And I said, I like that idea, but it’s really about the story behind the thing. It’s not about the thing. Like no one cares about the, it’s cool to see the 150 year old popcorn maker or whatever it is, but the story behind that specific piece is much more important. And that’s the thing that people would resonate with. And yes, if you created a YouTube video about the 150 year old popcorn maker,

37:41
you’d get some views on YouTube. But if you tell the story of that specific piece and tie in the history of it, you get way more views. Somebody who does this really well is uh Max Miller, I think is his name on YouTube. So there’s a million history YouTube channels out there and there’s a million recipe channels out there. The problem with cooking on YouTube is that

38:11
unless you have high production value in this specific case, like it looks really good, right? You don’t want potato quality camera stuff when you’re showing off food and the food is the hero of that. And most people just want the recipe. So if you look at a lot of the food channels on YouTube, you’ll see that they’ll do like 15 sauces I could never live without, right? It’s not the recipe itself. They’ll have a video about a topic and then maybe link off to a recipe.

38:40
History channels, they’ll cover 15 videos on Napoleon or whatever it is. What Max Miller does is it’s a history of food channel. So he gets to tell the story behind a dish. I think his last video as of the time of recording, this is all about spotted dick, which is that weird English pudding that no one actually knows what it is. um It’s an English dessert with currants or raisins in it. um But he starts…

39:08
basically starts cooking the recipe at the beginning. And then through the whole middle of the video, he’s sitting there telling the story of how this came to be a thing. And then at the end it’s done and he can try it. So he’s not actually cooking the recipe on camera. It’s about the history of the dish. And so he’s able to hook in an entirely different audience than he would have been able to otherwise. And instead of people skipping through the video, because they don’t need to watch you chopping carrots for the hundredth time, they consume that entire piece of content and build that relationship.

39:38
So I think the storytelling aspect of this, whether you’re doing it yourself or what you’re talking about doing with Bumblebee Linens, I think is what people really need to start to wrap their head around. It’s not about you, it’s not about the niche, it’s about the story, right? And if you can figure out a way to keep people engaged, the content creation portion of that becomes easy. Yeah, I mean, I don’t think any of this stuff is really easy and it is all in your head. Like this Bumblebee Linens channel was actually supposed to launch earlier this month.

40:07
But I went back, I actually have 12 videos stored in the bank. I went back and just watched them after not even thinking about it for like two weeks. And I was thinking to myself, ah I don’t like the way these turned out. And so I’m making tweaks and whatnot. It probably doesn’t even matter. Maybe I’m just doing things. Steve, you’re falling victim to the second trap that I hear people fall into all the time when it comes to content creation, right? Especially in the e-commerce world.

40:35
The first trap is the only content they ever create is content about their products, right? We’re not focusing on the products, we’re focusing on the people, we’re focusing on the niche. The second thing, and it’s a question I get every year at least 10 times, somewhere like Seller Summit, is how many videos should I have before I launch? Or how many blog posts should I write before I create my website, right? And the answer is if you have one that’s done, put it up and you’ll start to see the results from it. You will never be happy with

41:04
the first video you create, you will never be happy with the hundredth video that you will create. You will be when you finally hit publish on it and you go, okay, that’s cool. A year from now, you’re gonna look back at that and go, that was terrible. Why did anyone watch that? I guarantee you, you still do that with your content on this channel. You look back at videos you shot six months ago and you’re like, I actually don’t even watch the old entire time, how did anyone watch this video? Right?

41:33
you have to get over the fear, and I think you said it perfectly, this is all in your head, right? You have to get over the fear of the constant tweaking and just publish. If you can get it 80 % to where you want it to be, that’s good enough to publish because it’s not about you, it’s about the content and who the content can serve. And one thing that you will find, and comment sections on social media are generally assessable, but.

42:02
you will find both positive and negative critiques of what you’re doing and that will help you improve the future content. Right? Maybe in the case of something like the Bumblebee Linens channel, you’ll get a few comments that are like, oh, I tell, can tell you used cling one for this or whatever, right? Like if they’re a giant AI nerd ah and then you’re like, oh yeah, maybe I should change the model that I’m using. Maybe I should change the thing that I’m doing and you can start to build from there. But if you never publish, you’re going to be stuck in that constant cycle of

42:32
tweaking and making it a little bit better, one more edit. And so that’s kind of why I like the rule of if it gets to a point where I kind of hate it, that’s usually when it’s done. um Or it’s like, don’t want to watch this anymore. I know I can make it better. I know I could tweak it a little bit more, but I’m done with it. Let me move on to the next thing. If you publish that, you’ll start to get the feedback. And the feedback is the thing that matters more than you getting it perfect.

43:01
Because if you wait another, let’s say you wait another three weeks to launch that channel, Steve, how much do you think the, and I don’t know what your tech stack is, what tools you’re using to make these, ah but how much do you think the AI assistance that you’re working with right now will change in that three to four week period? How much better will it get? It’s got nothing to do with that. It’s probably mainly the fact that it’s a middle-aged Chinese dude hawking hankies or talking about this stuff, because my wife doesn’t want to do it.

43:30
If this is my other channel, the My Wife Quit channel, no problem. I’ll polish whatever, right? I just think I have a complex because my brand, like my face isn’t reflective of the type of person who would start this brand, which Tony says will work to my favor actually, in the end, we’ll see. The other thing is I’m launching a huge contest to launch it. And I’m going to be posting one per day for the first week and then thereafter. And since I, I always like to have a buffer also, just the way I work. Like for my other channel, I’ve got like

43:59
five videos in the bank. That way I’m not pressured to create from week to week. Like I can take a week off. So that’s how I operate. And you’re right, I think for most people, I would tell them to just publish right away. But for someone with my personality, the pressure of having to create again, consistently, makes me anxious. That’s why I like live. Like if you are going to be the face of your channel and…

44:27
you can get on and do it live, then you don’t even get into the editing process. Like there’s nothing else that’s involved in that other than hitting the button. And when you hit done, you’re done and the content is there. Yes, you have to come create more content later, but you’ve gotten it done. And I’m a huge advocate of done is better than perfect because it will never be perfect. Yeah. And so if you can get it to a place that’s not hot garbage and it’s good quality content, get it up.

44:54
Don’t wait for next Thursday, don’t wait for Christmas, don’t wait till you have 15 in the can. If you have two or three, get them up. Now, in your specific case, because you like to, so are you batch creating these or are you sitting down I just film like five in one sitting. Yeah. How long is that taking you? It’s quick. The hard part is coming up with the idea and the story. The filming is super quick. Like I’m really good at filming.

45:22
Like if it’s a 10 minute video, I’m done. It’s a weird humble brag. So good at filming. Like the film I used to suck at it, but now that with the toilet prompter, it’s easy. Like that, that’s not the hard part. You know, I remember having this conversation with you or Scott. can’t remember. It was either. I think it was two years ago and you guys were making most of your content live on YouTube. And I was saying, I think that hurt you guys because live video on YouTube doesn’t do as well.

45:52
Well, so do you know the rest of that workflow, though? Yeah, you broke it apart and then republished it, right? Yeah. But still, yeah. You get the live and you get the algorithmic side of that, right? And so what we found was, and the concern that people had with that kind of a workflow was they’d say, oh, if they came for the live, why would they watch the video in

46:17
two and a half years of creating content that way. I think we had one person who was like, I swear I’ve seen this video before. And it was somebody who was on every single lot, you know, like the top commenter on our live streams. And yet they were still watching the content because we would structure it so that it was, know, whatever the main topic of the week was, which then got cut into the podcast and then three or four videos that we would release throughout the following week. And

46:45
As long as you can transition through those things, which we could do in a live environment because it’s just us talking like we are right now, you can move into the next thing. No one really notices the difference. And then when you go into edit it, you can cut that up and use it short form. YouTube didn’t seem to, didn’t really seem to care. They never flagged us for duplicate content. Like nothing showed up in our content ID.

47:12
but it may limit your reach. Did any of those ever hit like a million views? Or? No, but nothing on that channel necessarily would have given the niche. Even the top, like the top long-term videos in that niche were between 80 and 100,000. And you know, like four five years old in a lot of cases. So for us, if we were getting 10 or 15,000 on one of those repurposed videos, that was huge.

47:41
I think that’s other thing, especially if you have the e-commerce business on the backside of this, you don’t need to get 100,000 views on a video. Like the ad revenue that you get is nice, but every single person who watches your video is a potential customer because the only people clicking on a fishing lure video are people who are looking to buy fishing lures anyway, right? And so even if you only got 500, a thousand views on a lot of those videos, those people,

48:11
are the most likely people to become your customers anyway. So if we’re looking at this from a pure content perspective, if we were starting with content first, like Linus Tech Tips, we would wanna have as broad of a reach as possible. But we don’t have to worry about that if we’re monetizing primarily with the e-commerce side of it. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. I can see that. And I think you’ve probably experienced something like that on this channel. um Like you’ve had some videos that have done very, very well, but

48:41
A lot of those people are not really my wife, create your job listeners or people who would care about the other stuff that you would want to watch. That’s always the case. But I do notice that whenever I have something go viral, uh tons of email subs uh and you’re just casting a wider, you know, I had this talk with people in my YouTube mastermind group because I was like, should I be creating focused content?

49:09
where I know that people are really interested in the stuff they have to say or should I cast a wider net? And the consensus was always cast that wider net. That’s interesting. guess it depends on… It depends, there you go Steve. I finally squeezed one. It’s waiting, it’s been 50 minutes, you haven’t said it yet. It depends on how wide that net goes. So we’re thinking about something like Bumblebee linens. It would be weird for you to start talking about…

49:38
Well, maybe not. I was going to say baby stuff, if you were only selling wedding handkerchiefs, it’s kind of weird for you to go beyond like wedding related content. Yeah, we actually don’t. I mean, it’s not. It’s actually not a wedding thing. We actually have stories of friendship. have. Yeah, yeah. We sell more than that now. But yeah. So you can go. You can go wider with that. For my wife, quit her job. You probably don’t want to be talking about AI. But unless.

50:08
unless it’s linked back to e-commerce or leaving your business, you’re not going to create a video about the new Claude update unless there’s a specific way to tie it back. There’s probably more people interested in the new Claude update than there is in how to use it for e-commerce. And so you don’t want to go that way, but as wide as you can in the niche. Does that make sense? So we don’t have to create kayak bass fishing content.

50:37
we can create fishing content. And that’s literally a wider net than the kayak bass fishing equipment that we sell. But if they’re interested in fishing, there’s a good overlap. Obviously everybody who’s interested in kayak bass fishing is interested in fishing. We don’t wanna go to hunting wild elk in Alaska, even if there’s a broader audience there. Does that make sense? Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines.

51:04
This is like a huge skill that I’ve been struggling to like, if I have, I have content on the My Wife Quit channel that is very specific and very actionable for people who’s selling, who are selling, but I’ve just been practicing tying it to, it’s hard to describe this on the podcast, but I’ve been just trying to tie it to more people who might not even be running stores who just want to make money and just framing the content around it.

51:33
This is why I’ve been scripting a little bit more lately because the ability to tie to a broader audience is just a skill that just takes a lot of practice to do. For example, if I had a video on effective ways to email market, if I were to produce that video, like five effective ways to email, they would get no views, right? But if I could somehow target it towards, uh I don’t know, something political or even wider than that.

52:02
and then tie an email marketing aspects into it to make money, then it would get a lot more. Yeah. I think that’s a good example because the thing that people miss with email marketing is people just assume it doesn’t work. So instead of saying, you know, this email marketing flow that will change your e-commerce business as the title, it would be the number one return on investment marketing strategy you need to pay attention to this year. Right? Right. Something like that. That’s broader. Correct. Email.

52:31
even in 2025 is the highest return on investment marketing activity that an e-commerce business can do. Somewhere between 36 to one and 72 to one, depending on which survey that you look at, right? So every dollar you put in, you get 36 or $72 back out. By broadening it out and saying, this is the thing you need to pay attention to. Only marketers are going to watch it anyway, or people who are interested in performance marketing, but you get out of the email bubble.

52:59
even though that’s the thing that you’re teaching. Does that make sense? So you are casting a broader net than people who are already on board with the email train. And the only thing you have to do there is make that transition or make the explanation at the beginning of here’s why, right? It’s 36 to one or 72 to one, which is way more than you’re ever gonna get out of running ads or even TikTok affiliate, know, any of those kinds of things. Here’s how to implement it, if that’s the video that you’re gonna create. So you can cast that broader net.

53:28
just by slightly changing the title. And I think this is probably a struggle that a lot of people have for those of you listening. Keyword research I think is overrated. uh Like in that case, like the keyword would have been email marketing and maybe it has some sort of search volume. But I think wrapping it in something that’s much more enticing and broader based will almost always do better, at least in my experience. The reason for that, especially somewhere like YouTube is even though that YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet,

53:58
the vast majority, think it’s 60 to 70%, it might even be higher than that, I have to go look, of all of the traffic, all of the views on YouTube don’t come from search. They come from suggestions. And it’s because people go to that YouTube homepage, and unless you’re trying to figure out how to fix your inline water heater, you’re probably not searching on YouTube, right? You might get to YouTube through a search, or you’re like,

54:24
dang it, they’re just not showing me that channel that I wanted to find. You go type in the name of the channel or something like that. But the vast majority of views come from that recommendations feed. And so if they have an algorithm that’s tuned for cool marketing tips, you’re gonna show up there. And by using that slightly broader title and not sticking to the keyword research, you can actually attract more people through the thing that YouTube is getting the most views from anyway, which is the recommendations and suggestions.

54:54
So if we look at the My Wife Quit Her Job channel, right, like two months ago, Trump’s tariffs hit me hard, but China, they’re collapsing, right? You didn’t do a bunch of keyword research on that. You said, what is the topic? How do I make it appeal to my audience? You’re like, I got hit hard by the tariffs. Here’s the bigger picture. You’re not like, why Trump’s tariffs are terrible for China, right? That would be the keyword research version of that versus here’s.

55:22
uh a much broader appeal just thinking about the topic. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well, someone’s been watching my channel. didn’t. I’m flattered, Chris. I’m flattered. I watch almost everything you put out. Usually the ones that don’t have many views just, uh, just, uh Hey, Chris, uh, I know you never have anything to promote, but, um, if anyone wants your services or, uh, are you, are you taking on new clients? We are not, uh, we are full, but

55:52
If you have a question, come to Seller Summit. We’ll hang out. We’ll chat through it. Look at these guys helping promote Seller Summit. Yeah, Chris is- I’m assuming there’s going to be another Seller Summit, but- uh There is another Seller Summit. There is another Seller Summit next year. Yeah. I think that’s the best place, And uh not to patch you on the back too hard on your own show, but it is one of my favorite places to go every year because of the way that you set that event up. Even if somebody’s coming in new.

56:22
or they have a $25 million a year business, they get to learn not just from the speakers, but from everybody else that’s there. And so events like that are great specifically for that reason. If you find me at Seller Summit, you have a question, we’ll find a time, sit down, we can build out an email workflow or we can build out an automation or we can just talk about how to do Facebook ads. That’s as valuable to anybody uh as any conference that I’ve ever.

56:52
been to. So you guys do a killer job with that. think the social events that you guys do are great. uh And just the ability to actually learn from everybody because everybody has something to teach and that environment gives people the ability to do that. So that’s why I keep coming back. mean, I’m one of the few OGs I think that has been you are definitely an OG. Yeah. They didn’t have to print stickers for me this year, though. So they had they had a sheet of them. ah But I think if you want to get a hold of me, uh Chris at brand creators.com

57:22
Oh, it’s still, the email still goes through. Okay. Yeah, it comes right to me. And that’s probably better than my actual email because I miss two thirds of what comes into my actual email because I’ve had it since 2006. So that’ll come right to me. If you have a question, shoot it that way. If it’s something I can help you with, maybe I’ll shoot you a loom video, whatever that is. I’ll send that back to you. Or if you’re saying, Hey, you know, I need specific help with ads or I need somewhere to look for content creation. I’ll point you in the right direction.

57:51
And if there’s something I can help you with directly, I’ll let you know that way as well. Chris, man, thanks for coming on the show again. And hopefully I’ll see you again next year at Seller Summit. Oh, I’ll see you next year.

58:03
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re not creating content for your business, you’ll eventually get left behind. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 605. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2026 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.

58:33
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.