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, Jeff Oxford and I tackle one of the biggest shifts happening right now. How SEO is evolving in the age of AI and chat-based search. We break down what’s changed, what no longer works, and what you need to be doing today to make sure your business actually shows up. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

00:28
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 the 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, no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate.

00:58
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 the 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 sellerssummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:35
Welcome to the My Wife, Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Jeff Oxford back on the show. Now, Jeff runs an SEO agency called 180marketing.com where he teaches others how to get their sites ranked in search. And he recently spoke at my annual e-commerce conference, The Seller Summit. Now we all know that the traditional search with those 10 blue links has been getting disrupted by AI this year. So in this episode, Jeff and I are going to talk about how SEO has evolved.

02:04
and the steps you need to take to improve the visibility of your business in the age of AI and chat-based interfaces. And with that, welcome to show, Jeff. How are you doing, Steve, always a pleasure. Thanks again for having me. So I really loved your talk at Seller Summit. I was actually there live. And I wanted to go into more depth since I actually got a chance to re-watch your presentation again last night. So let’s start with, you for the listeners here.

02:31
who obviously didn’t get the opportunity to listen to you talk live. What is the current state of search and traditional SEO? It’s a good question. And what I’d say right now, there’s two ways of looking at it. We can take a snapshot of where things are right now, and then we can look directionally where things are going. Let’s do both. So first, where are things right now? Google is still the 800 pound gorilla. Google search, the 10 blue links on page one. This is still where

03:01
You know, Google’s market share really hasn’t been disrupted. I’d say chat GPT might be taking like one to 2 % market share from just like the typical search queries. So at this point in time, right now, you know, June, 2025, it’s Google is still killing it. You know, we’ve looked at analytics accounts for multiple e-commerce sites. Organic search is still the number one driver by a lot. You know, referrals from AIs is just, it’s, it’s growing, but it’s minuscule. So first part of it.

03:31
You know, yes, we’re seeing some progress, but right now SEO Google search is still the king. Now, directionally, where are things going? So we’re seeing some interesting things now where there’s a lot more referral traffic from chat. You’ve never before. We’re seeing more and more people use chat CPT than they ever have before. So while yes, there’s still a lot of value in SEO. The question is.

03:58
what will look like in three years, five years, or 10 years from now? Right. I actually just saw this article in TechCrunch. I don’t know if you saw it, but it said that the Google search AI features are killing traffic to publishers by 36%. Yep. So if Google still is as powerful as it is right the second that we’re recording, it doesn’t seem like that traffic is getting to publishers as much.

04:27
Yeah, not a good time to be a blogger publisher. AI overviews are just eating a lot of those informational queries and just kind of back up for a second. And the world of SEO, we have different types of keywords people use. If I search how to start a drop shipping site, that’s an informational keyword, I’m looking to learn something I’m looking for information. If I search by linen handkerchiefs, that’s a transactional search. That means I’m looking to purchase something.

04:55
So these informational queries that used to, you you could have a blog, you could have AdSense on it, you could have affiliates, that kinda got killed. I saw a similar study from HREF where they looked at whenever there’s an AI over you on the page, the traffic from that page was down 34%. So it was very in line with the 36 % that you quoted. So.

05:19
SCI, I mean, I’m almost safe saying SEO is dead for informational queries, especially if you’re kind of a standalone blog. it’s, it’s really these AI overviews have taken so much. It’s just, it’s dead in the sense that the ROI and the numbers just don’t make sense. Like they used to, you have to spend way more effort to get less traffic. However, you know, I would imagine most people listen to this are probably in the e-commerce space. And that has not been touched. In fact,

05:47
H refs, which is this big SEO tool provider. They did a study of I think it was like a million million different keywords and what they found is these AI overviews. They 99 % of the keywords that trigger AI overviews are informational keywords. So if I say again, if I search, you know, how to maintain linen napkins, like, yes, there’s going to be an AI overview. But if I search by linen napkins, there are most likely will not be an AI overview. So

06:17
Luckily in the e-commerce space, we’re safe from those AI overviews, at least for now. mean, this stuff is changing month by month, so I could be eating my words in a few months. So are you trying to say also then, or implying that content related to your products, like you mentioned buy linen napkins, but what about the benefits of linen napkins over cotton napkins? Is that content that should no longer be written on a store blog, as an example?

06:46
So if we look at the customer journey and you have the awareness stage, the research, and then you have the purchase stage. we’re gonna simplify to those three stages. So we’re at the top of the funnel. If someone’s searching like, what is a linen napkin? It’s probably not worth spending the time to create a really good article about that. Because even if you get there, there’s gonna be an AI overview, the clicks from that query are gonna be so low. And even if you get there, the conversions just aren’t there. If someone’s searching,

07:15
is a napkin, they’re probably not even close to whipping out their credit card and making a purchase. But if we go a step lower to that, then we have like the research phase. If someone’s saying like, what’s the best type of linen napkin or linen verse, what’s the other type of linen verse cotton napkins for dinner party, something like that. Now they’re, you can tell by the query that they’re looking to make a purchase. They just have to do a little bit more research first.

07:43
So I’d say those are probably still worth going for just because the conversion potential is there where you can actually get some revenue from it. But even a lot of those, they’re still gonna be like, I’d say it’s not as frequent, but you still see AI overviews and some of those. So again, it’s one of those things. You can spend all this time making a great article, optimizing it. You could rank number one, but if nobody’s clicking on it because of an AI overview, then you’re kind of screwed. I guess what I’m leading towards is

08:13
will AI, because it sees that type of content on a certain page, be more likely to show your products in AI search? I was talking like if someone types in chat, GBT, how that content. Okay, so now we can shift more towards away from. We’ll get into the SEO stuff and just. I just. We’re going down this rabbit hole right now. So the AI, so we’ve done, you know, we work with only e-commerce sites. So this is something very important to us. And we’ve specifically been looking a lot at.

08:43
know chat GPT specifically the product carousels. So if I type in best protein powder, sorry, if I I search like what is the best if I asked chat GPT, what is the best protein powder, it’s gonna have a product carousel and it’s actually going to show images of products and it’s going to have links to purchase those products. So that that’s like what I’m really focused on what I’m seeing is chat GPT is often citing sources and it’s pulling in like product reviews like I have one client

09:13
that sells indoor fireplaces. And they wrote an article of top five indoor fireplaces. And that article, when I went to chat GPT and I said, you what are the best indoor fireplaces, it pulled up my client as a source. It looked at that product roundup, that buyer’s guide, and those products had influence on the final output. So it’s interesting. This is the first time really talking about creating content not necessarily for driving traffic in Google.

09:41
but creating content for large language models to see it influence the chat GPT outputs and get more people to your products that way. So does that imply that we should start making reviews of our own stuff? I, you know, I’ve been asking myself this exact question this past week. I think anyone that wants to have more exposure from chat GPT, there’s two types of pages you should always have. One is a, you know, so we’ll stick with like protein powder.

10:10
what if you had a, I would highly recommend having a best protein powders page, but I’d also recommend getting specific. like the way people use chat GPT, it’s very specific. Like what’s the best protein powder for a beginner male age 37. Yeah. It’s like that. So, you know, I, I, I’m finding that the people that are getting sited more often that are winning and chat, you’d be thinking the most referrals have more specific content.

10:38
It’s not just best protein powder. It’s like best protein powder for beginners, best protein powder for men, best protein powder for seniors, but you you, you name it. It has it. That will have a higher chance of getting picked up. So should you go off and create this? Um, if you’re just doing it for chat GPT, probably not yet. Oh, I got a, kind of thinking this through as we go. Here’s the thing. There’s just not enough referral traffic and revenue from chat GPT yet.

11:06
to justify the amount of time and energy it take to do it if that’s your only reason. However, if we look at the growth rate of chat GBT and referrals from chat GBT, it’s growing at a rate where it’s not a bad idea to make a bet on chat GBT as like a major traffic source and get into these LM’s early, kind of build like a little bit of a moat. So I wouldn’t expect the positive ROI from doing it now.

11:34
but I bet a year from now it’s probably gonna be one of those things where you’re glad that you did it. So let’s kind of revisit the original topic then. What sort of content should you be creating for an e-commerce store or is it more just about optimizing your category pages and your product pages at this point? I would find, you know, we work with lot of e-commerce sites. I’d say 80 % of the time,

11:58
Blogging is not worth it. It’s not gonna be a positive ROI exercise. I know this goes against a lot of Things you hear online like you have to have fresh content You need to keep putting fresh content on your website Google loves fresh content and there is some truth to that but You know a lot of times those those blog posts that we talked about people are gonna have like very top of funnel Topics like what is protein powder? That’s not gonna drive any revenue but if it’s you know anything that has like best like what is the best protein powder or?

12:27
a comparison like versus, you know, linen verse, um, uh, clot linen verse. What was the one you said, Steve cotton cotton linen verse cotton napkin shirt you’re wearing. It’s probably made of cotton. know I wouldn’t be surprised. So that’s why I say like for most clients, there’s just not enough high converting keyword. Sorry. There’s not high converting topics to justify creating blog posts. I’d say maybe only 20 % of sites that I come across. There was actually a lot of opportunity for it.

12:56
So I don’t think you really need to create content specifically for blog traffic. But again, like with the way things are going with large language models and chat GBT, I think it’s still worth creating like a buyer’s guide. It’s still worth creating like a product roundup or maybe a few product roundups that are even more specific. And the other type of content format that still could be helpful is a glossary. Now this has kind of two benefits. One is just if we get in the SEO world of topical authority and

13:25
making sure Google fully understands what your site is about, identifying all the common terms in your industry, having a clear definition for them and having that on your site. Not only does that help with SEO, but we’re also seeing that get pulled in a lot to chat, GPT and large language models. In fact, one of my SEO director, he shared with me a fascinating case study that we haven’t shared with anyone else. So he lives in Maine.

13:54
And there’s this little kids dance studio that does like tap dancing and jazz dancing for kids. And he built their website for them using AI. And as part of this, he created a glossary is a super in depth glossary that had like, you know, different pages for each keyword. And again, this is just like dance terminology, you know, dance styles, different like fourth position, tempo, beat rhythm, like everything you could think of. This is a brand new website has a domain rating less than one. It’s

14:24
This glossary is already being cited in AI overviews. It’s already being pulled into chat GPT sources when you search for like dance terms. So it was just fascinating to see that you could have a site with zero SEO, no backlinks, nothing. But if you have like very in-depth content that’s defining terms and explaining those terms in a clear way and it’s all interlinked together, that can get picked up.

14:51
very quickly in AI overviews and then also chat GPT sources. Yeah, it’s funny. I just told you before I hit the record button that I found this article about, it’s not an article, it’s a paper. It’s very hard to read, it’s very dense. But it was saying basically that all the AI, it has all the content already. So it knows what’s, in a way it knows what’s good and unique and it knows which is kind of regurgitated stuff to a certain extent at this point. So I suspect that that

15:21
glossary is very comprehensive. And so it became like a trusted source. The domain authority doesn’t matter as much. Yeah, in that case. So let me ask you this question, though. He has he’s showing up in a lot of AIO reviews. Has that led to more business for that? It was interesting. This literally just happened the last seven days. Okay. Okay. So this is like a brand new website launched it.

15:48
and within seven days, they’re now showing up in the AI overviews for dance terminology. Okay. Yeah. Would you recommend that for an e-commerce store? And do you think that would lead to sales? I would say

16:05
I think if you’re putting a lot of time and effort into this and it’s gonna take this big cumbersome project, maybe not. But I would say if you can use AI to scale the process in a way that’s not too time consuming, and AI is very good at like define this term, what is this? This is where it really shines. There’s not a lot of places to mess up asking about dance styles.

16:30
So I think it’s worth doing that, like take the LLM chat GPT out of the equation. If it’s just SEO, like a lot of top SEOs swear by this, but like have a glossary page, define your terms, build your topical authority. Google can see like, oh wow, this site has full coverage of this topic. Like there are SEO benefits alone that could make it worth it. It’s not like this direct thing like building backlinks, but there’s some indirect things going on that can help. Add in the chat GPT, LLM, AI overviews benefits.

16:59
And yeah, I’d say it’s probably worth creating a glossary on your site. Okay. And then a lot of these things that we’ve been talking about, the content, should that go on your product pages, category pages? You’re recommending not putting it on a blog anymore. So this will be the one exception to my don’t create a blog post. Like I’d say don’t create blog, don’t spend a lot of time blogging except it’s probably worth creating a glossary on your page and it’s probably create worth creating like a buyer’s guide that like lists the

17:29
the best protein powders, the best gaming laptops, or whatever you sell. And this is purely for topical authority so that you’ll rank higher in Google? This is primarily for topical authority rank higher in Google, but there’s also a side benefit of getting more exposure and more referral traffic from large language models like ChatGPT. Okay. What other strategies are you recommending for ranking products in the e-commerce store? Because there’s not a lot of content

17:58
in a store if we’re not blogging, right? I always recommend like on your category page, try to have a few hundred words of content. So don’t just try to don’t do fluff. Don’t just put in like AI garbage, you know, ask yourself what like here’s a prompt sequence I use if I want to create content for category page, I’d ask chat GBT, were the common questions someone might have before purchasing protein powder. Now create a category description that answers all these questions in an easy way a beginner would understand.

18:27
It’s like that right there. You’re making content not necessarily for search engines first, you’re making it for users first, but it happens to have your keywords in there, which can have a positive impact on rankings.

18:40
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19:10
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.

19:21
Right. And should we be mimicking like an Amazon page where there’s like an FAQ section and, uh, you know, bullet points and all that stuff. I’d say, um, do what’s best for users, which usually means having an FAQ section. I think a lot of you will find that helpful. mean, there’s, there’s Amazon tests, everything. So my, my theory is if you’re seeing something on an Amazon page, there’s probably a reason why they’re doing it. So if they’re, if they have FAQs, there’s a chance people.

19:51
you have the conversion benefits where maybe your copy or your images didn’t answer a question. Having additional content in there might be able to save someone who would have exited out and found another product. But also the SEO side, I think provides a really good experience. It makes your category descriptions more thorough. So yeah, there’s definitely some benefits for having an FAQ section. Do you recommend putting it above the products or below the products?

20:19
So yeah, I get asked this a lot on category pages and collection pages. I’d say have two or three lines of the category description shown with the read more link and then have that expand to show the entire category description. That way you’re not having this big ugly block of text pushing down your products. But if someone maybe they want to read a little bit more before they purchase something or click on something, they’ll have that information there. So it’s kind of a good hybrid between UI UX and also what’s best for SEO.

20:49
Okay. All right. So let’s move into some other topics that have been on my mind. We all know that getting backlinks is a strong ranking factor. Moving forward, when you see AI come into play and maybe where Google’s going, where do you see backlink generation? I think the foundational approach of reaching out to other websites, building relationships will be the same.

21:20
The difference is the focus will shift. It’s gonna be less on have a link to my site and more of make sure my site is mentioned. So it’s less about is the text hyperlinked versus is the text even there in the first place and what’s the sentiment around when my brand is mentioned? Is it positive, is it negative? What are the words that become, that happen before or after my brand is mentioned? Is it talking about products, is it talking about a lawsuit?

21:48
I think that context is gonna be a lot more important. And I think it’s gonna be a little more targeted. So right now with SEO, if you do link building, you just wanna find, like let’s say I sell furniture. Well, I’ll probably wanna find some interior design blogs that I can write a guest post on or I can review my furniture to get back links from them. If I’m doing this type of outreach for chat, GPT and large language models, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go into chat GPT, I’m gonna type in,

22:18
what’s the best protein powder for beginners? I’m see what are the sources that chat GPT’s citing. Very good chance there’s gonna be some product reviews, product roundups. And I’m gonna reach out, what I wanna do then is reach out to all those sources that are applicable and pitch my products to them. So it’s a lot more targeted. I’m not just finding any type of fitness blog or weightlifting blog. I’m finding the ones that I see chat GPT citing and that will, if I can get my products included,

22:48
and those roundups that will have a big impact on my product showing up in chat GPT and how high it shows up in chat GPT. So does that apply to Google like the old school Google search now? Even you don’t get a backlink? Yeah, if you I mean, if if you find if we stick with protein powder and let’s say you find some fitness blogs as a weightlifting blogs and they link to you. Yeah, those links are going to have a huge impact on on your ranking. So if you get relevant site linking back to you is always going to have

23:18
strong impact. I kind of wish it wasn’t as powerful as it was in 2025. You know, could have the best content, you could have a really well optimized site with a good user experience. But the sad part is, if you don’t have enough backlinks, you’re just not going to rank as well as your competitors at end of the day. So it’s an unfortunate truth about where Google is now. And there was actually a study that hrefs did recently that kind of confirmed it, I think they found that backlinks to a page is still one of the top highest correlated ranking factors.

23:48
Wow. Okay. So Google isn’t just crawling the source page and looking for the mention. It’s still looking for a backlink and it’s important. If you’re looking at those 10 blue links on page one, you need the need back links. And one, one interesting way I like looking at it is if we stick with like, if I want to rank for protein powder, there are thousands of protein powder brands out there. Yep. So, you know, all those great ranking factors you hear about, like, you know,

24:18
time on site, bounce rate, are people staying on your site or are hitting the back button to click on a competitor? That only applies to the site’s ranking on page one. So your UI UX does not even, it’s not even taken into consideration until you get to page one. So you need backlinks to get you into the competition for page one and then your awesome prices and great product and UI UX can help get you even higher.

24:47
Are you seeing that’s the case for getting mentioned in AI for Gemini, let’s say? I don’t use Gemini, I, yeah. You’re talking about like AI, getting mentioned in Either in the AI mode or the overview if it shows up.

25:03
I’ve found less correlation with backlinks for AI overviews and chat GPT surprisingly. Okay. Which makes sense. If you look at how these large language models work, they’re not really factoring in a website’s authority or links. It’s just taking in a bunch of data from a bunch of data sets. And like the example I shared, there’s a, a brand new dance website, a dance studio launched one week ago.

25:31
is already showing up in AI overviews for the term dance terminology. Right. We’re talking zero authority. So when it comes to getting cited in AI overviews and chat GPT, I’m seeing less of importance on backlinks and more of importance on how thorough and comprehensive the content is and how simple and how guess how boring it’s written. the unfortunately the Wikipedia style of writing

26:00
is favored heavily by these large language models, it’s really easy for them to understand it. If you just say, this is this, and this is related to that, that matter of fact style of writing makes it way more likely that your content’s gonna get cited by these large language models. Whereas if you’re telling stories and using anecdotes and weaving it all together, it’s gonna provide a great user experience, it’s gonna be great for your brand, but unfortunately you’re probably not gonna get cited in large language models as much.

26:30
Are you implying then that the topical authority matters for showing up in AI? I’d say so. Yeah. A lot of the things that you would do to increase your topical authority, you know, answer very specific questions on your site, have very concise answers, have it all structured in a way that’s easy for a search engine, a large language model to access it. That’s working really well with getting cited for chat, GPT and other AI platforms. So does that imply then?

26:58
that perhaps hiring a PR firm that just gets you mentions, not necessarily backlinks, might be a worthwhile investment? I would say so. I would say if you have a PR, because if you look at these sources for, if I search what is the best protein powder, and it’s gonna be like bodybuilder.com, Forbes, it’s gonna be very large publications, most SEO companies don’t have the capabilities to do those pitches properly.

27:28
For that, you probably need a PR firm or maybe a PR firm that specializes in the fitness industry. Okay. Yeah, I was just looking at my site the other day and there’s a couple of these sites that are not authoritative at all outranking Bumble Bee Linens. Right? And I remember going up to you and you said, hey, you know, it’s probably because these category pages don’t have links to products. So I changed that.

27:56
And that actually helped a little bit, I think. But these sites are still outranking. Some of these sites are still outranking me because they got like a mention in some really authoritative publication. And so that’s how I was thinking to myself, huh, OK, maybe if I hired someone who had contacts into these larger organizations just to get a mention, I don’t even need a backlink. That might make a difference. But then I was questioning myself also, like, if the fundamental way

28:25
search is gonna change going forward, should I be investing in this? That’s a tough one. I think it depends on your industry. So for example, if you’re already just breaking even ROI wise, you can probably anticipate that maybe a few years from now, it’s gonna be a little bit less of an ROI. But if you, so like if, I know for your keywords, like maybe people are searching it a few hundred times a month, maybe a few thousand times a month for some of your top keywords.

28:54
Yeah, that, know, you can make a case where like, you know what, I’m not going to put too much effort into this. I’m to focus more on long-term and go more of like, how do I get more exposure and large language models and, and other places like that. know, but if you’re in an industry where people are searching keywords thousands of times or tens of thousands of times, and it’s not too competitive, I mean, it’s probably still worth doing where not only can get lots of revenue now, but you’re still probably going to be getting lots of revenue in the future. So.

29:24
Yeah, for if you have just a little bit of search voluntary keywords, you know, you can make an argument that maybe it’s not worth investing in SEO, which is a long term approach. It’s going to take six months to get some momentum anyway. Maybe that budget could be better spent somewhere else. So what’s the playbook? Let’s use protein powder since clearly you’ve been taking it because I’ve noticed your muscles. is your what is your strategy for protein powder? Let’s say someone’s selling it.

29:53
e-commerce store, what is your strategy? Are we talking about ranking higher in Google? We’re talking about more exposure from our we’re talking about ranking in Google and looking forward into the future where you think things are going. So we’ll start with the Google process first, if you if I want to rank number one for protein powder, which is a very extremely competitive keyword. Yeah. But here’s what here’s what you do. First, you want to figure out which page are you going to push for protein powder. So for that, I’m to search protein powder into Google.

30:21
And I can see that mostly Google is ranking. see Amazon product page. I see a category page. Okay, I’m seeing like all category pages. So that tells me that I should be pushing a category page instead of a product page. So I’m gonna find a category page on my site to push a protein powder. Once I have that in there, now I wanna optimize that page with the keyword. I wanna put the keyword in the title tag.

30:48
the meta description and the header tag. And if you’re not familiar with that, what that is, if you go into Google, there’s that blue link that’s pulling from the title tag. It describes what the page is about and you want to put your keyword front and center, make it the first phrase of that title. Meta description are those two lines of black text and Google search results that show up below the title tag. It’s not really a ranking factor. It more so is just your, your, it’s kind like your ad copy for SEO. You know, it’s your opportunity.

31:16
tell people why your product’s better and get a higher click-through rate. So you’re wanna have a well-written captivating meta-description that, know, mention your keyword at least once, you Google’s gonna bold it so you can get a higher click-through rate, but the most important thing is put your unique selling points in there, put a call to action in there, try to get more people to click on your listing. So we’re gonna optimize our page, but we also wanna optimize the content. So on that category page, we’re gonna have a few hundred words of content about…

31:42
Why are protein powders great? Where we source the whey from and how we don’t use any chemicals or whatever it is. And we also want to answer any questions that a new bodybuilder or someone who wants to buy it might have in the content. make it user-first content. We’ll also want to include related keywords in there. So if I go into Google Image Search and I type in protein powder, I’m going to see keywords like…

32:10
see here, I’m going to see keywords like muscle, way, chocolate, weight gain, nutrition, body, vanilla, gym. These are all keywords that Google is associating with the term protein powder. So the ones that are applicable, we want to include those into our content as well to make our content seem like a more comprehensive overview of protein powder. So once we’ve done that, now we have we have the right page, we have, of course, everything you’ve talked about, right?

32:36
Yeah, this is all kind of standard stuff. We want to do some internal linking. So make sure your homepage is linked into your protein powder page. Make sure any blog posts that you’ve done in the past or will do in the future, those have internal links that are relevant to your protein powder page. Make sure your products have breadcrumbs so they point up to the protein powder page. All those internal links are going to help. And then next is going to build backlinks. So maybe you find some

33:02
fitness blog, some bodybuilder blogs, you send them some free product for them to review and try out. And they write about on their site and they have a backlink on your site. That’s going to help a lot. Maybe do some guest posting you offer to write an article for them. They and you can include a link back in the article to your site that can still thing Jeff guest posting. know, Steve, I wish it wasn’t. But unfortunately, even in 2025, we see really good like, okay, I will tell you my theory about why

33:32
people are pessimists about guest posting. There is so many guest post providers out there where you spend X amount, you’re gonna get a guest post link, it has a high domain rating, high traffic, maybe get 10 of them, maybe get 20 of them, and your traffic is just flat. It doesn’t go anywhere. This happens all the time, and people are like, hey, guest posting doesn’t work anymore. Well, I’ve looked at a lot of these sites that people, you know,

33:59
When I, whenever I see it, I look under the hood to see, well, let’s see these sites that the guest posts are on. They have a high domain rating, maybe in the fifties or sixties. They have high traffic. If you look at poem up and H refs or S M rush, they have very high traffic, no thousands a month. But if you look at what keywords and pages are driving traffic, they’re artificially inflating their traffic. They can spam certain queries to make it look like they’re getting searched thousands of times. The H refs.

34:26
But really they’re not getting searched at all. So a lot of these sites that you think you’re, you’re getting a guest post from that are really good sites. Like, it’s got great domain rating. It’s an authoritative site. It’s got great traffic. Google must love it. It’s all artificial. The site is just dead. It might be hurting you. So like what we sound like our guest posts, like our, our website screening process is really intense. Like we built a proprietary tool that yes, so pull the domain, ready to pull the traffic.

34:54
It’ll pull the year over year traffic to see has this site been penalized by Google. We have the tool take a screenshot of the page, feed it to AI to do like a visual inspection to see if anything looks off. But the main thing we’re looking for is we’re gonna pull the top pages from hrefs and the top keywords from hrefs to see are these keywords in line with the focus of the blog or is it clear it’s just spam that’s just getting through.

35:20
And those are the ones you want to skip. But honestly, I’d say most people, in fact, most agencies don’t even go that depth with their link screening. So they just keep buying these garbage posts that aren’t going to do anything. But if you find ones that are qualified, are good, are natural, yes, guest posting still helps. You know, what’s funny is I used to get requests for guest posting on my blog multiple times a day. It’s pretty much dried up now, actually. I might get one a week at most.

35:48
So you’re saying now’s a good time to pitch you for guest posts. We’re going to get to the top of your inbox. Okay, so backlinks seem to be a fundamental theme here. What about looking forward and where you think things are going at the rate that they’re going? The big question mark is AI AI mode. So like right now in Google, like you, it’s kind of in this experimental phase where Google is testing out AI mode, which essentially makes

36:18
AI look like it will make AI look, make the Google homepage look more like chat, GPT and Gemini and less like the 10 blue links. So that they just, I think they just put that out like a month or so ago. Yeah. Yeah, they’re doing some testing. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what Google comes back with. If this is something, a feature they want to make, like they want to push more, make it the default, or do they just kind of keep it as an optional way of searching for things? Now the one

36:48
thing that we’ll have to consider that I don’t hear anyone talking about is just the financial viability of Google search. So to run a regular web search versus an AI result for Google, it’s like 10 times the processing power and 10 times the processing cost to serve that query. Then you also have to look at the revenue side of it. Right now, you know, we…

37:12
Google ads is making a lot of money off those sponsored links. You you ask businesses that are advertising, they’re spending fortunes every single month on Google ads. So we know they’re making a lot of revenue, whereas with AI mode, we’re not seeing any sort of revenue potential yet. So even if it provides a better user experience, I’m sure Google is gonna have to be weighing how much is it gonna cost us to serve all these queries and how much revenue are we gonna get from it.

37:42
and are we shooting ourselves in the foot by pushing this? So that’s kind of the whole balancing act that is it even gonna be worthwhile financially for them? Yeah, so in terms of the 10x argument, I always think that that’s generally not a factor. It’s 10x right now, but in the future, it’s not gonna be, right? It’s go towards zero. But at the same time, and I haven’t used AI mode that much actually for shopping.

38:09
Maybe I should try it, but I’m wondering if like the Google shopping ads that I’m purchasing and performance max will just start more actually showing up in AI mode. I’m sure they’re going to find a way. I mean, this is this is their I think 50 % of the revenue comes from ads. So 56 % or something like that. Like there’s no ads right now in AI mode, but you would think they would need something if they’re going to make AI mode the default.

38:35
All right, so we’ve already talked about like kind of like the fundamentals of ranking an SEO today. What would you do to the site to kind of future proof it? So backlinks is one thing we already kind of talked about PR agencies and whatnot. What are you advising your clients? If you want to future proof UI UX is having a bigger role than it has before, you know, Google’s looking heavily on are people clicking on your site and staying there? Are they hitting the back button going somewhere else? So like

39:04
You know, in the SEO world, people don’t talk about UI UX as much as they should, but I think it’s very important. Um, it makes you have a good user experience. Uh, I’d say also just brand like brand building. We’re seeing having more and more of a fact in the SEO world, but there’s also a lot of overlap between brand building and exposure and large language models. So, you know, a lot of SEOs see correlation where the sites that get more branded search were like, if I’m searching for starting a drop shipping site and I’m typing my wife quit,

39:35
what is drop shipping. That’s a very strong sit on that. Oh, my wife quit her job provides really good information. People are searching for that. So build brand building initiatives, you know, getting your name out there, getting press, all these types of things. That’s going to help a lot. I’d also say on the link, and that’s also going to have additional benefits of just showing up more in large language models. And I’d also say link building wise, I think there’s going to be more weight.

40:03
on backlinks where Google can tie it to an author. like, Steve, if I go into Google and I type your name, Steve Chu, you have this knowledge panel. It knows that you’re associated with my wife, quit her job, knows that you’re a real person. So if anywhere you link to from my wife, quit her job, that’s going to have a lot more SEO value and backlink juice than just some faceless blog. And I think it’s almost like a tiered system where every site that you would link to, you know, if that site linked, if that webpage link somewhere,

40:32
it’s also gonna get some benefits. So I think Google’s gonna look at more of authors who are authors linking to versus just who’s this faceless blog linking to. The other thing I’ve been reading lately also is perhaps the death of the website. Like if people are doing shopping within these LLMs and whatnot, including Google AI mode or Gemini or whatnot.

40:56
Like are people even going to bother going to the website? I mean, TikTok shop has been really successful because people are buying in platform. Same with Amazon. So I, and I know you’re not going to know the answer to this, but where do you see things going in terms of just shopping? I have heard rumors that chat, GPT will experiment with like taking people directly to the checkout page and throw the product page. Like there’s been some stories about possibly doing that.

41:23
Instead of just taking that, cause what I read was different. It would just take the transaction directly in chat GPT and then the order magically shows up in your Shopify store. So I haven’t heard that then, but that’s like, wouldn’t, the technology that is there and the user experience is there where chat GPT has a map, has a big partnership with, um, Shopify. So they, they could easily have something like that where you can just purchase it. yeah, it could work very similar to how a tick tock would work. Um,

41:53
I would, I, I, I five years from now, I don’t know if I’d be surprised if that, if it had that capability. Cause chat GPT wants to provide the best user experience possible. You know, typically it’s a better user experience if it takes fewer clicks. So if you already trust it, you know, why have, why did you have to go to all these different websites, enter your information, create an account, whatever it is, when you can just push one button and it shows up at your house in a week. I mean, where do you see these 10 blue links going? I mean, how much time do you give it? Or do you think it’s longer than you think?

42:24
It’s a big unknown. It’s a tough one. Because we don’t know what Google is going to do after this big test with AI mode. Maybe it’s something we’re not even picturing. Maybe it’s not a chat GPT interface. It’s not 10 blinks, but some type of hybrid model. We might be seeing something like that. So it’s difficult to tell for sure. a lot of the stuff that you do for SEO, there’s a lot of overlap with chat GPT.

42:52
getting your products found. And again, like we know that a lot of the sources chat, GPD is most likely pulling from like Bing results. So if you’re nowhere to be found in Bing, you’re going to be a hard time being sourced. So there’s a lot of overlap. I would say if SCA, as long as SEO is providing a positive ROI, it’s probably worth continuing. If you know, you people are searching your keywords a lot, but if you’re just kind of on the edges, like where there’s not as many people searching it you’re kind of on the fence of SEO is worth it. You know, it might not be worth pursuing.

43:23
It’s funny because one of my key takeaways from your talk was that everything that you do for SEO is kind of like brand building, right? Like the way we always refer to it as backlinks. mean, that’s not really what it is anymore. Really. It’s about getting mentioned, building the brand, getting people talking about it, which will get absorbed into AI. So it seems to me that the benefit is always there. It’s just hard. might be hard to measure going forward.

43:51
Right? Yeah, it’s like, it’s the same work. It’s just, you’re just slight, you’re just nudging in different direction. You’re not just doing link building for just any old site. You’re not doing link building for the sites that are getting picked up as a source. Um, you know, you’re not, like, you’re, you’re optimizing page. You’re not just creating any type of content. You’re creating content that large language models would like, like glossaries or product roundup. So it’s, it’s taking the fundamentals of SEO and just

44:19
nudging them and pivoting them a little bit so it’s more optimized for these large language models. And I think what’s frustrating to me as I’ve been reading a lot more out of this is like I could do the same query in chat GPT 10 times and get different answers. Right? Yes. So it’s, don’t see how you can measure that. Like whether it’s working. That’s what I’m saying. There’s all these like tools coming out now, like track your LLM visibility and we’re going to track it. It’s like, you know,

44:47
It’s what imagine doing SEO where every time you search the keyword the 10 blue links were completely different like yeah, it’d be impossible. be almost impossible to SEO. So that’s why it’s kind of hard to put marketing dollars towards something that you can’t fully track and that changes so much. You know, this is in its infancy infancy. It’s still evolving. We’ll see kind of where the dust settles a bit. But but yeah, AI optimization LM optimization. There’s for sure some best practices but

45:16
you still have to keep in mind whatever you search is gonna be different and all the more like the more you it’s gonna use what you’ve searched in the past influence your future results from chat GBT. So Steve, if you had a lot of queries about my wife quit her job, then in the future when you ask, you know, what’s the the best site for drop shipping knowledge or e commerce knowledge, it’s going to suggest my wife put a job more often only because it’s looking at your past conversations. Yeah, yeah, actually.

45:45
It knows a lot about me. and it actually is. This is what I don’t like. Actually, I’ll ask it a question now. And it’s the answer that gives me is now bias towards what I’ve liked in the past, which is what I don’t want. Right.

46:00
All right, so one thing that we haven’t really talked about, and this is like the last thing I want to touch on since we’re running out of time, is the role of like we’ve talked about written content already. What about the role of like video content? short form? What does it have any effect on SEO as you can, as far as you can tell right now? The only way can see that having effect is if you have a video and you’re putting it on a blog post or a piece of content, and that increases the engagement metrics where now you have lower bounce rate, more time on site.

46:27
that can help SEO that way, but I’m not really picturing any other way you can leverage video for SEO. Okay, but it probably has a profound effect on AI LLMs, which are reading all that stuff in perhaps. For sure Gemini. mean, Google’s using the YouTube data set very heavily in its training data. I don’t know how much, actually I think chat GBT is also using It does, it does for sure. The chat GBT, so yeah, it’s for SEO, pure SEO.

46:56
extremely minimal for this kind of new way we’re seeing of using large language models and AI platforms, I think that is going to be helpful.

47:09
All right, Jeff, we talked about a lot of topics here. If anyone is interested in getting your help for both SEO and just getting more brand exposure, where can they find you? Yeah, our website is 180marketing.com. It’s just 180marketing.com. Or you can just shoot me an email directly. My email is jeff at 180marketing.com. All right, once again, Jeff, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Maybe like one year from now, we should revisit this.

47:36
and just see how things have changed because things are changing literally every month as far as I can tell. It’s going to be a whole new ballpark. I wouldn’t be surprised.

47:46
Hope you enjoyed this episode. The days of traditional search are numbered, so you have to take these steps if you want to generate sales in the future. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 599. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email.

48:16
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 share how I built Stevebot, a custom AI assistant powered by a rag database that mimics my brain. We break down the tech stack, the biggest mistakes made, and how this changes the classes that I teach forever. But before we begin, I want to let you know that the session recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are available over at sellersummit.com. If you missed the event,

00:26
You can now get instant access to every keynote, workshop, and panel. Go to SellersSummit.com. Now on to the show.

00:40
Welcome to the My Way, Quit or Job podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about a couple projects that I’ve been working on and I was a little hesitant to talk about this because I hope it doesn’t bore you guys. Tony says it’ll be interesting. Well, we’ll see. It’s just a selfish reason. I wanna know about SteveBot. My first concern is do we need another Steve? Okay, wait, we didn’t even tell people what I’m working on. It’s called SteveBot. It’s SteveBot. Yes.

01:08
And I have to say that I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have in probably like the last year. This is completely new to me. How all this stuff works and everything. But I did create Steve bot. I did this for the course because I kept getting questions that were already covered in the videos in the, the class. But since there’s like 450 videos, I get it right.

01:37
you probably didn’t watch the one that yielded the answer. Right. And this is a common problem that, that I’ve been having actually in the last few years with the class, probably the last two or three years. Yeah. When the volume of videos, even though I’m pruning them, I’m also constantly adding new ones every single week. Yeah. And the level of information is, is overwhelming for a lot of people. Cause so I always say upfront, you shouldn’t watch everything. Yeah. Just watch what you’re actively implementing anyway.

02:07
You know, I’ve just to speak on that for a minute. I think that’s the case for both courses because I know that we have been on lives and doing, you know, office hours and things like that. And someone will ask a question. And I know we’ve done a lesson on it, right? Because I know that I did gave the lesson or we did it together, whatever. But, you know, I can’t remember which lesson it’s in because a lot of times, too, I think for the courses, we get so granular in the information. like the lesson is really specific on one thing.

02:37
It’s like, well then is it in that one or is it in this one? Because they’re both talking about, let’s just say lead magnet and welcome flows, right? So which one, so I actually think this is gonna be good because personally for me, like I need it just to keep up with everything that we’re doing. Yeah, so that was the goal. And then I had to run down this whole rabbit hole of implementation, learning how to train AI models and all that stuff.

03:06
It is so fascinating. But at the same time, once you get down to like the nitty gritty, it’s actually very basic what it does. okay, so the overall goal was so that instead of asking, hey, you what lesson is this in or whatever, you just ask Steve Bot, and then it gives you the answer to that question. And then it gives you a link to the video that covered it. Okay. Right. And so,

03:34
If the answer didn’t answer it thoroughly, you go and you watch the video. Right. That sounds fantastic. So it’s like a much better version of search. Uh, in practice doing that is a little bit more difficult because you can’t literally, you can’t just shove all of your stuff into AI. kind of doesn’t work that way. So the limitations are, so there’s, um, like I said, there’s like 450 ish videos and the first tall task actually.

04:02
was automating, generating transcripts from all the videos. So the first thing I did is I downloaded all of the videos into a directory, just the ones that are active, because believe it not, there’s like close to 800 videos, I think. I mean, I believe it. The course is what? 13, 14 years old at this point? is 14 years old. Yeah. Right? So I had all these videos in there that were taken down, right? Cause they’re obsolete or whatever. Right. But they’re still, so I had to find the ones that were active.

04:32
which meant writing some WordPress routines to just grab the active posts. That wasn’t that hard. And then downloading them to a directory. Then you need to grab transcripts of all of them, right? And this is where I went a little cheap. So the transcripts, you can feed them into OpenAI and get them done. But OpenAI actually open sourced a model for free and it’s called Whisper.

05:02
You can run all that locally on your machine if you have a good video card. Actually, it’s still running right now. I was hoping to launch SteveVot today. It’s only at video 300 right now, and it’s at the rate of three minutes per video. When you think about it, that’s really fast. Yes, it’s fast. If I didn’t skimp on my video card, it probably would have been done overnight.

05:30
But I don’t play games. I didn’t really have a use for a video, a good video card until. You needed Kevin for this. Where’s Kevin? I did. I’m sure Kevin has a really nice video card. So just I want to ask a question about this. It’s slightly unrelated, but so I don’t know if you know this, but if you have videos on Facebook that were live, so anything to any time you go live on Facebook, right? Facebook has said that they’re taking those down now, like after 30 days. Yeah. So what we have done is downloaded all those

05:59
videos that we wanna keep, right? Because some of them are good, right? And like for us, we don’t do a ton on Facebook Live, so it wouldn’t be like as important to what you and I do, but like for Happy Housewife, I did a lot of live recipes, I’ve done a lot of live tips, you there’s a lot of content. I think about someone like Laurie from Passionate Pennypinscher, who has tons of live content on Facebook. So step one was download it all, right?

06:25
But now we want to be able to possibly like re-record those, right, on YouTube and stuff like that. So my issue is the transcript side, right? Because they’re not already on YouTube, right? Now they’re in my drive. So what’s the best? That’s the easy part. Is it? So what’s the best method to get the transcripts? Because like I tried ChatGPT, that was an absolute bust.

06:49
Whoa, why? Oh, yeah, you can’t you can’t just feed it in chat. Yeah, and it’s like it’ll do it in 30 second increments. And I was like, this is not going to work. Yeah. The way you do it is you can probably use make doc. Like if you don’t want to code, I assume you want to code. No, I’m not. And you’re willing to money, right? Yes, but like not a ton of money, right? So I started researching. Yeah. So what I was thinking, though, this is going to happen to a lot of people, right? A lot of people have videos that they need to probably get now because of Facebook’s new policy. What do we do?

07:19
By the way, is this only for live videos? can’t remember. It’s just for live videos. videos. That’s what they’ve said so far. you know. Okay. So what you do is you can use make.com. Okay. Throw all your videos in Dropbox and then create an automation that feeds it into the OpenAI Whisper model. And if you guys are listening to this, you have no idea what I’m talking about. Make.com is like a workflow type of tool. Okay. The hardest part about creating any app is making things talk to each other, right?

07:47
So essentially you need to make Dropbox talk to OpenAI. That’s exactly what this does. You drop down a Dropbox widget. It feeds the files over to OpenAI, the whisper model. It’s super cheap. It’s like 0.00001 cents per token, which works out to be, I don’t know, like 50 cents maybe for a… So you have to use the token model. Gotcha. Yeah. Anyway, and then you just have it drop those transcripts.

08:17
transcriptions into Dropbox again in a different folder. Okay, that’s a good tip. So just talking about the transcript side of things because I looked and I started doing some research and you know, you can there’s a lot of services are really expensive or okay. Wait, if you want the free model, that’s even easier than that. Okay, Riverside FM offers a free transcription service. Interesting. You just have to drag it over manually though. Yeah. So when I when I asked Chad GPT, you know, how can I do this for free?

08:46
Their top tip which I actually you know This is something where I think if you have an overseas VA or something like that This would be probably worth doing is basically upload them all to YouTube and have YouTube do the transcripts privately This is way better than that. Yeah, I don’t know your idea sounds way better. I’m saying that’s what they gave me Oh, no, no, no, I meant the free riverside method. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. That sounds better than Because obviously you don’t want them public on YouTube. So I mean how many videos are we talking about here?

09:15
I don’t think, Happy Housewife probably only has, it has under 50. Oh, okay. Then just do the hand drag method. Yeah. One of my clients though, I think we have over a hundred. Okay. hundred even is also borderline hand drag. Yeah, cause you’ve got thousands that you’re dealing with. Oh, and it’s not even, if this goes well, I might do this with a podcast and every blog post on my So that people can find something quickly if they have a question.

09:42
Yeah, because sometimes there’s something in the class that was covered actually in a blog post, but I didn’t do like a whole video on it. Right. Right. I feel like that happens actually a lot, especially when we do our webinars, people ask a question and usually the answer can be found in one of the blog posts that you have. Correct. YouTube at this point. Now it’s YouTube for you. Really. I was debating whether to to include my blog post in it because Google has kind of already done that for me.

10:11
You know what I mean? It’s already been read. The YouTube videos is also another avenue. I don’t know. I just want to get the course videos here first. The goal also was to consider just charging for the bot. I don’t know. Charge for people to be able to use the bot. Correct. But not people in the course. No, obviously not people in the class. Just like a…

10:39
It’s like a stepping stone into joining the full class, so to speak. Got you. You did the next step, got the transcripts. You get the transcripts. Here’s what’s-

10:49
Here’s what like confounded me about the whole process. I was under the impression that you could just throw it all into OpenAI and it just magically trains it. Right? That’s what we’re led to believe. Yes. I I believe I’m a believer. There’s a couple of limitations though. One, you can only feed in so many, so much information at one time. Yes. Cause all these models have context windows, right? And so what you have to do is you have to break up

11:19
each of these transcripts into blocks. Individual transcripts have to be broken up as well. Yes, think about it. If you have a 20-minute video, the context window might be like a thousand words. I don’t know the exact limit site. I just ask you GPT for what a good block size was. A good block size is 500. I don’t know where that got that from, but basically you need to break these into chunks. If you can,

11:49
you summarize each of those chunks and you tag them. think about like a video, let’s say we do a podcast. We talk about a lot of different stuff on this podcast, right? Yes, we do. So you can’t just shove it all in. And since we skip topics all the time, a podcast ironically is probably the hardest thing to train the AI for. So what you need to do is ideally you give it, you break it into chunks that are all about one topic.

12:16
and then you name the topic and whatnot, and then you feed it in that way. Now, ironically, and this gets really, you can actually use AI to pre-process the transcript into these chunks before you train the AI itself. Okay, because that was my next question. Yeah. I didn’t have time to do a really thorough job of that in the first iteration, but the way my videos are laid out in the class, it’s already,

12:44
pretty good, right? I only cover a very specific topic and I cover it for 10 to 15 minutes and then I move on. So in itself, each of my lessons are already kind of pretty good to go. Whereas with a podcast, especially if it’s with you or any guests, we talk about like 10 topics. Sometimes we skip all over the place. That’s harder. Okay, so.

13:10
My next question is, you’re doing this in reverse right now, right? All the content’s already been created. Moving forward, as you create, you’re giving a lesson today on Stevebot, right? In That’s not the lesson, actually. I have to work on the lesson right after this. I’m going to introduce Stevebot if it’s ready. Hypothetically, you’re giving a Stevebot lesson today in the course. Moving forward, is there another way to do it so that you’re not doing all these sort of

13:38
Because right now you’re going back and getting all the stuff that’s already happened. Moving forward, is there a way to do it where you don’t have to, you can skip some of these steps? No, you always have to do these steps. What do you mean? I don’t understand. So like right now you had to take all your videos, download them, get them and drop. You had this whole process, right? To get the transcript, to divide the transcript up. But like today, as you give the lesson, is there any way to do it as you’re giving it?

14:07
Oh, as I’m giving the lesson. So yeah, like pre and I guess not pre because there’s nothing pre done about it. But like, you know, so you’re maybe skipping being able to skip some steps.

14:18
No, I mean all the steps are gonna be there. And in fact, what’s unfortunate about Stevebot is like when a lesson comes on, I have to manually retrain the model again with the new lessons so that it knows how to answer stuff in that lesson. So I’m probably only gonna update Stevebot like once. It doesn’t take very long to be fair. It literally takes, I don’t know, probably 10 minutes. It’s not all automated right now either, right? Because I’m just trying to get the thing up.

14:47
So there’s like several manual steps I’m doing. But yeah, once it becomes all automated, in theory, once the video is there, I just throw in a directory and it automatically updates Steve. I’m not there yet, obviously. Yeah, yeah. So when you say, you give a lesson today on Stevebot, you have to train it, what does that entail? That’s what I was just talking about. You gotta break up the transcript into logical blocks. So that’s all that is. There’s nothing else after that.

15:15
Yeah, I mean, so the more information and context you can give it, the better the training will be. right now what I do is I give it a title, like of that chunk, and then I tag it with the URL and then the title of the video so that if it ends up grabbing from that chunk, the URL is automatically embedded and it tells you which video it’s part of. And then it gives you a little mini title. So that Cbot will send people to the correct.

15:43
location to get the rest of the information. Correct. Correct. I’ve only tested this on like three lessons so far and so far it’s pretty good because I got to upload the rest. mean, it takes time to run all this stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like through AI. So here’s where it’s like so simple and kind of brain dead. The way it works is and I kept asking you, is this really the best practice that everyone’s using? And they’re like, yep, this is, this is what all these companies are doing.

16:13
What’s dumb about this whole thing is you ask it a question. Here’s how it works. And I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible. You ask it a question. OpenAI turns that question into math. Okay. Right? A vector or whatever. And then what happens behind the scenes is it takes that math vector and it compares it to all the little chunks that you’ve broken up. Right? For similarity.

16:41
Right? Whether basically whether that chunk will answer that question. And then it returns a bunch of chunks. And then based on the chunks that are returned, AKA parts of the transcript, that gets only that little chunk of 500 words gets fed into AI to summarize the answer. Interesting. It’s not like AI knows all of your stuff and you’re loading up everything. Right. You’re doing most of the work.

17:10
and feeding AI only the portion that you believe answers the question. Okay. So how do you see this as a obviously,

17:23
Obviously for your students, this is a huge value add. Yes. Right. This is I feel like this is going to be such a game changer for the course, because I remember when I first met you and you had had the course, I don’t know, maybe four years. Right. But you already had several hundred lessons in the course. Yeah. It was really it wasn’t well organized because you had asked me like, I’d like some feedback. And I was like, I can’t find anything. Yeah.

17:46
And then you did a really good job of rearranging everything. when you get started, start here. If you’re here, go here. You took people on a trail. So to me, the value add for the students, phenomenal. The ease of getting information. I think this on the flip side for you, the cut down on customer service, answering questions that are available for people to find on their own is the other benefit, the cross benefit.

18:17
If you don’t have a course, right? Like how do you see this benefiting you outside of the course? I haven’t even thought that far ahead, Tony. I’ve been head down trying to learn all this stuff. There’s a lot of technical pieces involved. Oh, I’m sure. Yeah. But going forward, I was going to do a trial. Here’s what I was thinking. Like I’m going to build a community in the end, right? Yes. I mean, I have ideas for you. That’s why I’m asking. want to see where you are. do. OK, so I’ll tell you mine. I want to hear yours. OK, yeah.

18:46
I want to build a much bigger community that obviously goes beyond the course. The course members will always be the top priority. But a tripwire, so to speak, would maybe be to give them access where they can ask questions to Steve Bot for something ridiculously cheap, like $5 a month or something like that. I don’t know. That doesn’t include any of live portions. I think the live office hours and the live Zooms are always going to be the value add in the Discord group. And then once they’re in the Bot, if they like,

19:16
the questions and whatnot, then they can consider joining the full class. Plus, this makes great content. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But as far as after that, I’m going to do it for profitable audience. And that, in theory, should be faster because I know what I’m doing now. And there’s a lot less content in there. There’s only a couple hundred lessons. And then maybe I’ll make a Tony bot where the bot responds and like… With hugs.

19:46
I haven’t even done the fun stuff yet. I can make it like reply as me and use Steve-isms, you know what saying? Yes. See, I think that’s really fun. I mean, this is dumb. We were talking about this with some friends last night about how we’re talking about like AI and chat GPT and how my son-in-law was saying, like, I’m always really nice to chat GPT because when it takes over the world, I wanted to remember I was one of the good guys. Right. Like, and I was like, yeah, there’s, you know, there’s this

20:15
I think people can have fun with it, right? People like, I mean, I remember when I was planning my trip and I was like, hey, this is what I’m thinking about doing. Can you give me some suggestions of places to go? Here’s a little bit about myself, right? And I kind of gave like my little personality thing and it came back with, wow, aren’t you a fun and exciting person? And you’re like, I am, you know? But I think that part of it actually really adds to the value. Like I think people for the most part like those little quirky

20:43
things that you can get out of it. so I think making it more personable is like a huge value add, right? Even though it’s kind of silly, but I do think people enjoy that.

21:11
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.

21:37
So I’m logging every question, every answer, and then who asked it. Just so I can see what’s going on. Because one thing I didn’t want to do is hallucinate, right? Yes. Yes. So I’m very strict. And we’ll see how well that works. Like, if you ask it a question that isn’t covered in the transcript, it will say, I don’t know the answer to that question, instead of just making something up. Right. Right. Yeah. So is Christina going to get the award?

22:04
for the most questions she gets. I have no idea, but it will be. Shout out to Christina. Just for fun, like I was abusing Steve Bot, like you stuck. You got to be in high school. You were only second chair on the clarinet. to see what it would say. So so far it’s it’s working. But you know, the true test will be. Oh, here, this is the other interesting part. So I’m logging all the questions.

22:31
So I know what to cover going forward. I never really had this real-time feedback before. Yeah. Yeah. So my thought was similar to what you’re talking about as far as how to make this work on a bigger scale. I I think if it was just for the course, it would be worth it. Right? I think it’s such a value add to the course that even if that was where it ended, it’s something worth doing. However, if you’re going to go to the trouble of building it, why not figure out a way to monetize it in a bigger way?

23:01
And so to me, the value definitely is giving people some sort of access to that, right? Because I think one of the reasons why people do buy the courses is because it gives them the access, right? Now with the Stevebot, they’re not getting the same type of access, right? But they are getting a lot of information that realistically, if you wanted to go find all that out, it would take you a good amount of time, right? And you might not know, like I still like,

23:30
get information back from AI and I’m like, is that really true? Is that actually what, because I was actually when I was looking for the transcript stuff, it gave me six suggestions, but one of them was wrong. And obviously I double checked those things. So I think for people to know, hey, I can ask these questions to Steve, but I know the answers are all generated by something Steve said. So I do think that’s a really nice $7 a month.

24:00
you know, value add. I think if you could get your YouTube videos included in that, that would be… the YouTube videos are always less detailed versions, much less detailed versions, the lessons, right? Yes. But I think, mean, to me, it’s like, OK, how do you leverage this with YouTube? Because you have so many subscribers, right? You’ve got a huge channel.

24:24
You know, I don’t even know, like YouTube offers all those subscription models, right? And like, to me, it’s always like kind of foggy what you get when you pay for a subscription with YouTube. You when you read like what people offer most time, you’re like, eh, is that really offering anything? But like to me, if you could figure out some way, because I do think, I do think that would be nice because now you’ve got, I don’t even know how many videos, several hundred, right?

24:48
It’s a ton. Yeah, I was shocked by how many there were in there. You’ve got five years of weekly video content, right? So, yeah, I mean, to me and I’m a math there. You do public math. OK, go on. Five times five, whatever that is. but yeah, I think to me, if you could figure out a way to leverage that, I think about Kellen right in our class that has the huge Pokemon channel.

25:15
You know, and he’s always trying to figure out ways to monetize the channel outside of just the ad revenue and brand deals and things like that. Like somehow getting people because I think like for his stuff, because I know he’s teaching people, I believe, to play a game or showing people like game strategies or something like that. I’m not a Pokemon person, so I it’s like watching something in another language to me. But like being for people to be able to like type something in and being able to get directed to like this video.

25:43
will give you that, to me that seems like really, it’s like a directory, right? But with instant answers and everything you need. I think I was going to keep them separate for now, like the class lessons bot, maybe a YouTube one. I might combine the blog post one with the, the problem is there’s some blog posts that are out of date because I haven’t been updating it. regardless, there’s a lot of potential there.

26:10
What I was also thinking, and I brought this up to Jen, she did not like it at all. I was going to do this for Bumblebee for product recommendations. Just feed in all the products, all the descriptions, all the policies, and then just have this bot here, like a product recommendations bot. I’m curious as to what, because I know her pretty well, to me that doesn’t seem, that actually seems like a pretty good idea without

26:39
Invasion of privacy. Well the problem and we didn’t even have a talk about this because you just got the axe I just got yeah, I just got the axe You know, what’s funny is I always put it on a priority and then she always just gives my ideas an axe Like right off the bat. It’s like the first reaction. I Think if customers like I think you just have to make it obvious that this is a bot. Oh That people would think they weren’t we’re talking to a real person, right?

27:08
Like this is a bot. It’s only here to help you find the product that you’re looking for. That’s it Yeah, okay, and I answer common questions like delivery and whatnot. Yeah, I do get that side of things for sure Yeah, and then you also have to worry more about it hallucinating Right. Yeah, so let’s say it says oh no shipping’s free always free, you know, it makes up something like that. Yeah

27:37
then that’s a problem too. Yeah. Okay, I definitely see that if there’s a way that you can avoid those pitfalls, that seems like a genius idea because I’ve been talking to one of my clients actually all week about how do we get people to buy either more things in their order, making, and we have like one click upsell and we have other things on the site that make recommendations, but like where people could actually type it in, right? Like I just did this.

28:06
I did this, what should I do next? Because we have, we know what it is, we know what people should do next, right? But I do see what you’re saying where, I mean we had that issue happen several years ago where it wasn’t, it was actually with our texting service where basically people could text in something and then they got a free shipping code. Well, the texting service only,

28:32
it didn’t allow you to segregate your free shipping. So like you only got the basic free, like if you wanted basic parcel post, whatever, that was free, but like nothing else would, you couldn’t get overnight free, right? Like no one gives away overnight free shipping, but the SMS service didn’t have the ability to distinguish the two. So when it went out, you could get any kind of shipping, international, whatever. And it took us like 14 hours to realize that people were getting like $50 shipping for free.

29:02
Right, because they’re overnighting stuff to themselves. So I can see like a bot doing something similar where it’s like, shipping’s always free or, you know, buy one, get six free monograms. You know what I mean? Like I can see that. So don’t get me wrong. This is going to be implemented. Yes. You just have to figure out how to avoid that. Well, no, no, no, I’m going to do it. But I’m going to start by replacing the search bar with this. OK. Right. Because my search bar is something I actually wrote years ago and it works kind of well.

29:31
It presents the products in the search based on, obviously, keywords, but also what was bought along with it in the category. But this AI one would be way better. And then the goal is, this is all in my head for Bumblebee. I have to go through all the products again, and there’s almost 1,000 now. I was going say you have lot of products.

30:01
The key is figuring out what occasion each of those products are ideal for. So I’m gonna go through and I have AI generate all the possible occasions that a handkerchief that particular style would be good for. And it’s not obvious. Like some of these handkerchiefs, and I just wrote a little routine to do this. There was this red handkerchief that had something on it or whatever. And it suggested some real esoteric, well, not esoteric, but.

30:28
Say Tana, is that what you’re looking No, no, no. you’re like a bird lover or for bird, stuff like random things that you probably wouldn’t have thought of, right? Yes. Or this red one would be perfect for Valentine’s Day because of something obscure in the embroidery. I wish I had examples ready to go, but find out all the possible use cases for a particular style of handkerchief.

30:57
feed that all in, and so when someone asks, hey, I need something for a baptism or something, it automatically pops up all of them. Bright red. Not for a baptism. Don’t do that. Okay, so here’s That’s an easier project, actually, because it’s all text. Here’s the bigger question. You’re doing this all yourself. Most of the people who listen cannot do it all by themselves.

31:26
Is this something that you think people could one figure out how to do with, you know, maybe some research and like how much technical knowledge do you truly need to have to do this? Or do you have to pay somebody or is that is it going to be you have to pay someone to set it up or you’re going to end up using a subscription tool that’s going to cost you? I think for most people you can’t set this up. Like I literally you should see my chat to be T thread learning this stuff.

31:55
I literally spent probably six hours straight just reading all this stuff just because I was interested. Like I asking little questions which actually brought me up to the way we teach stuff in schools is all messed up, right? I was just thinking to myself as I was doing this, I remember when I was in school, and this is completely random, I remember I was in school, I was afraid to ask questions sometimes to the professor because I thought I’d come across as dumb.

32:24
Or like if I asked a friend how to do this, I might be afraid to ask certain dumb questions that showed my friend that I was dumb. But with ChatGBT, I was asking all the dumb questions and it was giving me answers. So I actually ended up learning things a lot more thoroughly. And so I was going to the real nitty gritty. Like how does this technology even work? Like what’s the math behind it? All little questions like that. And so that’s why it took me a long time.

32:54
If someone were to just try to plug and chug this, I still think it’d be pretty overwhelming. I was actually considering offering this as a Shopify plugin, because it’s actually useful, right? It reads all of your descriptions and it’s like a recommendation engine. I’m sure something like that already exists, to be honest with you. Probably, yeah. But this one would be like dirt cheap, I think. Yeah. And I probably wouldn’t, maybe I would just do for the class. don’t know.

33:23
If you were to have to pay for it, what do you think it’s worth? Not like to price something, but like if someone’s like, hey, I think I would really like to use this in my business. There are some services. Like what do you think the value is of this? Because most people aren’t going to be able to do it on their own. Well, I will tell you that a friend of mine offered a service like this two years ago and she was ahead of her time. Yeah. But she was charging $500 a month. Wow. OK. So expensive. Yeah.

33:53
But realistically, once it’s all set up, it’s like pennies to run. So really the hard part is the setup and the maintenance. How do you retrain it again with new things that you have? But in terms of the value, I don’t want to jump too far ahead because I haven’t tested it enough. But I think if it even works 75%, it’ll be a huge value to the course. No question. Yeah.

34:23
Even at five, let’s just say $500 a month. Let’s just say if you’re cutting down on customer service time and you’re cutting down on your time, you know what I mean? If you’re increasing your average order value, let’s just say in your store, because everyone’s adding an additional product to the cart, it doesn’t take very much for it to pay for itself. Yeah. Like if I were to productize this, you have to make sure that you track all the incremental revenue from the service, right? Correct. Yeah.

34:51
and then show the customer that it’s worth it. Like I said, I’m sure all this has been implemented by somebody already. No question. But they probably want a couple hundred bucks a month for it. When in fact, the code is not that hard. I mean, actually I think about this for any app in the Shopify App Store. Most of the code in the App Store is not hard.

35:15
Yes. Which is why I think the Shopify App Store will probably have problems in the next couple years as more and more people don’t need code. Like everything I had to write for this AI was written in Python, which is a language that I did not know at all. I did not know a lick of it, but all programming languages all kind of blend together after a while if you’ve been doing it long enough. And so I could get through it with the help of AI without knowing how to write it at all. And so I suspect that’ll get better in a couple of years to the point where anyone

35:45
we’ll be able to tell it what it wants and then debug it and make their own stuff.

35:53
I mean, I think it’s pretty exciting. I mean, I was giddy. My wife, like I told her what I’ve been working on, she’s like, oh, great.

36:03
I think literally nothing else for the course members, it’s awesome. It’s going to cut down on their time, it cuts down on your time. Then if you can leverage it further and earn some additional revenue from it, I think that’s really valuable too. Yes, we’ll just have to see how it goes. Yes, see how good of a job it does.

36:28
See how good of a job it does, yeah. I mean, for the first two or three videos that I did and I was just asking questions about it, it knew, I mean, it has the entire transcript, but I would ask it stuff that wasn’t covered, and it would give a pretty good answer around it, and then it’d provide the link, which is the important part to the actual lesson. Yeah. So, okay, I guess my last question would be if…

36:55
So let’s just say Steve says, I don’t know the answer. We don’t have content on that, right? Like whatever. Then what happens to people? Do they get funneled into like an email form or is it just like this is dead? Is this for the class you mean? Yeah, let’s just say for the class. For the class, I’m logging all the questions. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to do a search for anyone who got an I don’t know the answer to that question. And then I’m going to see how many times that form of question was asked and then I’ll make a lesson on

37:25
You didn’t know I get that part. I’m saying like, so let’s just say I’m in. Well, I am in the course, but I log on. I want to know something, you know, can I link my Amazon and TikTok shop? Something like that, right? Like it may be surprising that you haven’t covered. you know, and it says, hey, that’s a great question. You’re such a fantastic student. A plus, you know, all the compliments. And then it says, says, I don’t have the answer for you. What what next happens in that chat? Does it say right now? Nothing. Yeah, but what is going to?

37:55
Because then do they have to go back and now email support or is there a click to a form? What’s the next step? The next step would be just email support. It’d be cool if you could integrate a little click here to email. You know what I mean? Just get that integrated too. It’d be easy. Yeah, that part is easy. Just email and then the email address, right? Yeah. No, I’m saying that’s super simple, but just that little feature would be a great.

38:22
Because I can’t stand when it’s like email support and then they just put the email there and then you have to copy and paste it especially if you’re on your phone. Oh you want to click I want to click and it opens everything which that every a lot of people do that for other things so it could be done in this too.

38:37
I’ve actually never done that, but how does it know which email client to open up? I don’t know. It always opens up the default one on my computer, so I don’t know how it knows. Oh, I see. So if you click, it’ll open up Gmail, for example? Well, on my desktop, it opens up the Mac Mail because I’ve never uninstalled it. But when I don’t have it on my phone, it opens up Gmail. I see. Send me an example of that. I’d love to see it. I’m sure it’s like a line. Yeah, I was going to say, this doesn’t seem like a very complicated but I

39:07
What I can’t see is when they just give you the email and then especially if you’re on a mobile device, you’ve got to copy that, open up your mail app. I mean, the easiest way is to just have a little box where you just type in the question right there and you hit submit. Yeah, that would be that’s easy. That’s easy to do instead of opening up an email client. Yes. Add that to your priority list. OK, I will write that down. That’s probably a good suggestion. Yeah.

39:31
I am very curious to how people are going to treat Steve Bot though. Are they going to be rude? Are they going be polite? Are you going to track that? Who’s a bad tipper? Well, I’m obviously not going to manually track anything. I’m going to shove all that stuff in and then have it tell me what are the common questions and who’s asking the most questions. Then when someone logs on and they’re like, this is your 32nd question this week, Kathy. You need to take a break.

40:01
It’ll cost one point per question. Yes. Oh, that’d be hilarious. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of uses for this. I think it’ll be interesting once you get it up and running. Um, I’m, I’m curious, like how often is it going to get stumped? Like, don’t know. Well, I mean, obviously I don’t cover every topic, right? Right. Right. So it should get stumped if you ask it anything that hasn’t been covered. Hopefully it won’t make anything up. That that’s my biggest worry actually.

40:30
Yes, and someone sends you an angry email saying they have $130,000 of trinkets that they’ve ordered because Stevebot said, go for it. I’m sure someone’s going to ask, should I sell this item? I was going to say that’s probably going to be the top Stevebot. Then it’ll probably reference all the niche research ones and tell it, if it follows under these guidelines, that’s what I hope it’ll answer.

41:00
Yeah. Okay. We’ll have to do a follow-up episode. everything’s, I mean, like I said, it’s still transcribing and generating like the files for the, to train the bot right now, but should be done by today. And I should be able to release this bot by tomorrow at a bare minimum, I think. So yeah, I can’t wait.

41:20
Hope you enjoyed this episode. At some point, I’ll release part of this bot to my Discord community, so stay tuned. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 598. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejob.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 have Brett Curry back on the show to discuss YouTube’s answer to TikTok Shop. We dive into YouTube’s latest push into shoppable video content and how it’s reshaping the way creators and brands sell online. But before we begin, I want to let you know that session recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now available over at sellersummit.com. If you missed the event, you can now get instant access to every keynote, workshop and panel.

00:30
go over to sellersummit.com. Now on to the show.

00:39
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Brett Curry back on the show. Brett is someone who I’ve known for almost a decade now. He recently spoke at my event and I think he’s spoken there, I don’t know, every year for like the past seven years, I want to say. Has it been seven years? He runs OMG Commerce, which is an e-commerce agency that has helped hundreds of companies with their pay-per-click advertising. And we all know that social shopping is all the rage right now.

01:09
And just a month ago, he gave an amazing talk on shoppable YouTube ads, which is Google’s response to TikTok shop. And I did not get a chance to see his talk live, even though it was my own event. But I did catch the recording last night and I had so many questions. So today we’re going to dig deep on how to leverage YouTube for your e-commerce business. And with that, welcome to the show, Brett.

01:33
How you doing Steve? What’s up, man? I am thrilled to be back. I think this may be, is this round four probably for me appearing on your pod, which is great. I love this pod. Love chatting with you and yeah. Hey, solar summit for those that have not made the trip to Fort Lauderdale yet. You got to do it. It’s one of my favorite communities or my favorite events. And yeah, the pack that the talk that I gave this time was packed and was back. Yeah. People want to know about YouTube, right? People want to diversify and understand what’s cooking there. And so

02:02
Yeah, we got YouTube ads and we got YouTube organic and we got YouTube affiliate, which is kind of their answer to TikTok shops. so lots of fun stuff we could dive into. So what’s up with OMG. So are more and more clients asking for social promotion now and TikTok YouTube help? Yeah, it’s really interesting. So, uh, we don’t do TikTok shops directly. We do pull in a resource. If a client really wants that and they don’t have a solution for it. Uh, people are talking about TikTok shops.

02:29
regularly, although it is a bit split. I’m not sure what you’re hearing, Steve, but, like we, uh, it kind of runs the gamut. So a good friend of mine, actually, you know him too. I didn’t get approval to mention this. I won’t say his name, but he’s literally five X his business was not a bad business, but literally five X growth on Tik TOK shops. Just talk to, uh, um, another brand that everyone would know here. They’re in the food and Bev space and they’re like, yeah, tried to talk shops, did nothing like we’re, we’re abandoning it. We’re doing other things. Right. So.

02:58
It does seem to be hit or miss. does seem to apply to certain categories and maybe not as well to others. Uh, but people are still interested. but yeah, the, the interest in YouTube over the last quarter, uh, has really ticked up. And I think there’s a few reasons for that. One, there’s just a constant drive to diversify. So still most DTC brands, the majority of their ad spend is on meta and that’s fine. Uh, probably rightfully so for most brands.

03:26
But that’s an uncomfortable place to be in, right? If I’m spending 70 % of my ad budget on Meta, I feel like Zuck has got a little bit too much control over my brand, and so I’m looking to diversify, so that’s a piece of it. But then there’s also, did you see the House Analytics incrementality study done on YouTube? And it’s H-A-U-S, but that the one you referenced in your talk? It’s the one I referenced in the talk, yeah. Super interesting. So my friend Andrew Ferris, awesome podcast. He interviewed Olivia Corey from House Analytics, but basically,

03:56
You know, what they did is they studied like 190, they did 190 incrementality studies involving YouTube, 74 brands. So these are big brands like AG1 and Ridge and stuff like that. And they found that, that YouTube is wildly more incremental, wildly more impactful. You’re have to define all these terms by the way. will. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So it’s wildly more impactful in terms of real results than what you see in platform. And I think a lot of us are used to platforms.

04:26
over-exaggerating, right? Or like platforms taking credit for everything. For a few reasons, and I can unpack them here as we go, YouTube is the opposite. YouTube is going to under count, under report. So it’s going to look bad in platform, but the real results are quite positive. And so we can unpack that, but that’s just kind of ton of coverage in the space. And so a lot of people are like, Hey, I need to give YouTube another look. And so, so we feel that a lot of conversations because of that. Let’s take a step back.

04:52
Just in case the listeners have no idea anything about YouTube, but what are shoppable YouTube ads? Can you just define that first? Yeah, yeah. So there’s a few, there’s a few ways to look at this. So, um, shoppable YouTube ads, um, those can just be like the pre-roll ads. So I’m on YouTube. I’m about to watch my Mr. Beast video or a, you know, cooking video or whatever. There’s a pre-roll video that pops up. Usually they’re skippable. So I can hit skip after five seconds.

05:18
And they either have just a call to action button around it, or it could have your products listed right beside that video. So that would be a true shoppable ad where it’s like, your product feed for relevant products that you talk about in that video, they’re right there by the video on YouTube. So can click and buy there. There’s certain cases we use those in certain cases we don’t. And then, and then you’ve got the opportunities to take creators content. So, so people that.

05:47
have a following on YouTube, they may be talked about your product and you can turn that into an ad as well. And so that there’s opportunities there. But YouTube is, it’s an interesting beast, right? There’s so many different platforms. Like it’s wildly popular on connected TVs now. It’s most streamed connected TV channel. It’s, you YouTube shorts is growing, things like that. Yeah. I was just looking at my channel statistics for YouTube.

06:16
And it was something crazy, like almost 40 % watch my videos on a TV and not on a phone. Yeah. I’m sure that I’m sure that surprised you, right? Like really people are watching e-commerce news and events and stuff on, on TV, but exactly the answer is they are. just shows like TV is hurting. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, so get a little of this. YouTube has been, uh, and this is not just YouTube TV. YouTube TV is thrown into this. So like we, use YouTube TV.

06:46
As a family so that that’s our cable subscription. So I watch ESPN and all the sports program and I watched that through YouTube TV, but, uh, this is way more than that. So this is, know, the good old fashioned YouTube app, but on connected TVs, it’s bigger than Netflix. It’s way big. it’s bigger than Netflix. Netflix is number two, but YouTube is bigger than Hulu. It’s bigger than Disney plus it’s bigger than Peacock and it’s bigger than one other, a prime video, all of those combined.

07:14
Meaning more people stream YouTube on their connected TV than all those other platforms combined. Not more than Netflix. Netflix is number two. But yeah, people are just consuming YouTube on connected TVs. And it’s a great experience, right? Like when I let my kids watch TV, they’re oftentimes watching YouTube and consuming it that way. So it’s a great user experience, but it does feed back to the tracking issue that we had before. that’s what I was getting watching on TV, there’s no clicks.

07:43
Right. can, you can send to phone, there’s QR codes and stuff like that, but most people don’t do that. Right. You’re, you’re watching, you’re watching TV. And so, um, there are essentially no clicks from there, but those ads can be very, very impactful. So in your talk, you mentioned like if the YouTube dashboard for your ads says a one X return on ad spend, it’s really equivalent to three and a half or something crazy like that. Yeah.

08:07
And then so one of the tenets of your talk was stop paying attention to ROAS and start paying more attention to IROAS, which I wanted you to define real quick before we go into depth. So the, the I and IROAS, it’s not, it’s not an Apple product, right? That’s kind of what it sounds like, but it’s, but it’s a, it’s incremental ROAS, meaning it’s the cost for sales you wouldn’t have gotten anyway. And that’s, that’s the essence of incrementality. Right. And I think a good example to use here.

08:37
Let’s take branded search and we don’t want to make this podcast about branded search. I’ve definitely got a point of view there. I think you should do it, but you should, you know, temperate. Don’t want to spend too much, but it’s probably one of those things where if you turned off branded search completely, you might not feel the impact, at least not right away on your business. Right. So that that’s not incremental, meaning you turn it on, you turn it off. Yeah. Not really getting any additional sales. However, for a lot of brands, if you’re spending 70 % of your budget on meta,

09:06
and you shut Meta off, I promise you, you’re going to see a decline in sales and not just a decline in Meta sales, but you’ll see a decline on Amazon and other places and stuff like that. Yep. So that’s, that’s highly incremental, meaning, uh, you, you got those sales because of the advertising and you wouldn’t have gotten them otherwise. So that that’s true incrementality. And so, uh, what Google does now and Meta does this and stuff too, is that they’ll, they’ll do incrementality studies on your behalf where they’ll look at,

09:36
Hey, these are users that saw an ad. These are users that didn’t see an ad. What was the purchase behavior? How different was it? And so that’s going to give you kind of this IROAS number to say, what’s really going on with my advertising? Is this really working or is it not? Do they do that for everyone or just the big guys? So it’s becoming more and more accessible. And we actually just did a training with our Google team earlier this week.

10:01
where there’s, three types of studies that we try to run on a continual basis for our clients. Uh, one is called brand lift. And you’ve probably seen this, Steve, if you’re on YouTube, sometimes that pre-roll ad that you get served is a survey. Like, Hey, have you seen an ad for Geico and Allstate and, uh, you know, progressive this, this month or whatever. And so you click yes or no or whatever. Um, so that that’s part of brand lift. Uh, so, so Google is.

10:29
conducting those surveys on behalf of their advertisers and then feeding that information back to advertisers. So what you can do with brand lift is you can see like, Hey, are my ads causing an increase in awareness? Are they causing an increase in purchase consideration? But it’s all survey based. think those are mildly beneficial. I think you’re spending a lot of money. They can be. And if you’re definitely, if you’re progressive or if you’re all state or something like that, you probably want that data.

10:54
I think for a lot of our clients, for a lot of DTC brands, you eight, nine figure brands, it’s, it’s somewhat helpful. Um, so that, that’s one thing that we do run just, just in case there are some good insights there. Uh, the next thing is search lift. I love this one. So this is where Google looks at, Hey, people that saw your ad, people that didn’t see your ad, how did they differ in their search behavior? So basically what this is trying to understand is if someone saw your YouTube ad,

11:21
Are they more likely to search for your brand and specifically how much of a lift did that create in searches? I love this metric because I think this is what YouTube should do, right? If I’m on my TV, I’m watching the latest Steve Chu video. got popcorn and a LaCroix whatever I’m, you know, whatever I’m consuming and I see this ad. I’m like, Oh, that’s interesting, but I can’t miss Steve Chu. Like I got to stick around and watch this. So, but afterwards I’m to go search right afterwards. I’m going to go search for whatever ad I saw and that’s how I’m going to do it. And so.

11:50
That search lift super, super important. So we run those continuously. And then the third one, and this is newer. This is like the IRO ads, what I was talking about. It’s called conversion lift. And basically it’s similar to search lift. It’s like, Hey, here’s a group of users that didn’t see your ad. Here’s a group of users that did see your ad. What was the difference in purchase? they split test out. Does that happen automatically when you run YouTube ads? It does not happen automatically, but you can set these up to be running.

12:19
continuously. And so then you can constantly be measuring it. So then it’s like, okay, I can see click data. I can see conversion data. I can see view data. All that is automatically there. But then these are additional things to layer in because we’ve seen this a lot, like, you know, big, advertisers, Arctic, uh, they’re more than coolers. We did a big push for them last year for coolers, their Yeti competitor. And our, our whole goal was can we drive sales to Walmart? And it was a, it was a considerable lift. It was like range from

12:47
15 to 25 % lift in Walmart sales because of this ad campaign. We won an agency excellence award for it. But those were like, you didn’t see those conversions in YouTube, right? Cause those conversions were happening on Walmart, but we were able to kind of see search lift and brand lift and some of these things that helped, you know, inform, are we on the right track as we’re going here?

13:11
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13:41
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13:52
So here’s my problem. Like I’ve been spoiled with ads, right? Where you get a click and it leads to a conversion and you can tie it. And if you use tools, you can see the whole click path, right? My problem with YouTube ads is it’s kind of like TV, right? In the old days, Where you run the ad and you might see a lift, but it’s not really easily measurable. Right? So as a small guy, like a little guy, and I want to run these YouTube ads,

14:22
how am I gonna prove to myself that I’m not just flushing money down the drain? Yeah, yeah. It’s a great call out. And so I think that there’s a few things to keep in mind here. That analogy is really sound. Now I think YouTube isn’t just like TV, but I think it’s like this generation’s TV only, way better in a lot of ways. Yeah. But you got YouTube shorts, which is a little more social and things like that. But.

14:46
But yeah, back in the day, if I was running a TV ad, I got no click data. I got nothing, right? I could just see did the cash register ring a little bit more? Did I get more cash coming in? But we’ve all been spoiled, right? Cause we’re running sponsored product ads on Amazon, running Google shopping ads on Google. We can see click keyword, purchase. can see all that stuff, right? And I do think all of those things are the best place to start, but here’s how I would, I would look at YouTube if, if I was smaller and even going back to like that house analytics study.

15:17
That was AG one and Ridge and you know, eight and nine figure DTC brands. So what they do isn’t necessarily what the rest of us would do right out of the gate. So I’ll give you an example. Um, got a client, they they’re in the pickleball space. So pickleball apparel, pickleball paddles, awesome, awesome brand. So they’re like, Hey, we’ve got some pretty cool YouTube content. How do we get the most out of that? How can we lean in and start getting traffic? So here’s what we recommended to them. This is one of those categories.

15:47
Where if someone is into pickleball, they are really into pickleball, right? So it’s almost like golfing or, or, you know, camping and outdoors and fishing or about a four by four truck a couple of years ago, I got really into it for a little bit. Um, I’m into Blackstone, you know, griddle cooking on a griddle now. Someone’s watching Blackstone videos. so pickleball is like that, right? Like you, when you are interested in pickleball, you start watching content for fun about pickleball.

16:11
So here’s what we did. We’re like, Hey, let’s, let’s get some of your review videos, your, your reviews about your paddles and their paddles are unique and they’re, they’re awesome. And like the founder of the brand was a championship pickleball player or whatever. so like, Hey, we’re, we’re, we’re going to run some view based campaigns, meaning we’re running these campaigns to get views, to get engagements, just to show up, you know, in front of people. We’re not going to see probably any conversions really not, not directly attributable conversions, but that’s okay. We’re not going to spend a lot of money on it. But then what we did is we Hey, let’s target.

16:41
these pickleball channels. So these are our favorite pickleball tutorial channels, people learning how to improve their serve or improve, you know, whatever their doubles game or that type of thing. Or there’s also some channels where these are all pickleball paddle reviews, right? So someone is watching a review on pickleball paddles and that’s something that’s really been growing over time where, people will use YouTube for years, like for product recommendations and product reviews, but we’re seeing that trend line increase.

17:10
Where people are looking at, this product versus that product on YouTube or this product review, this product demonstration, they’re looking for that on, on YouTube. And then in fact, saw a stat recently, it was kind of interesting that, that 80 % of, uh, users on the internet say they trust YouTube creators more than other influencers or more than other creators. And so I that was, thought that was kind of interesting, but people go to YouTube to look for these recommendations. So we’re doing for the pickleball companies were saying, Hey, let’s just run your.

17:38
pickleball paddle review video and some of these educational videos on your paddles, let’s just target all these channels. We won’t spend a lot of money. You know, maybe it’s, I can’t remember exactly what we recommended for them, but maybe it’s 20 bucks a day. Maybe it’s 50 bucks a maybe it’s a hundred bucks a day. We’re just getting views. Just getting views. Now you’re not going to get conversions there directly, but over time you can start to see, are more people searching for my brand on Amazon or more people searching for my brand on Google? Am I seeing a lift in?

18:05
unattributed sales, right? Where maybe I’m getting like a lift in direct sales, you know, through Google Analytics for things like that. So you have to just start do a little more sleuthing or a little more looking for, okay, where could these sales be showing up? So that’s the that’s the way to get started. Now, if you want to go hard on like, conversion focus campaigns, I’m bidding to get customers and acceptable CPA or acceptable CAC or whatever, then you got to kind of shift gears into a conversion focus campaigns and those

18:35
They don’t technically have minimums, but like there’s some kind of rules of thumb you need to use to get, to get the algorithm enough conversions where it actually is going to work. Um, and so that does often take minimums. Like you probably want to be in the three to $500 a day, maybe a thousand a day is even better. Like to get, get those campaigns going. Can you set some expectations with the first method that you described? Like how much time should you give it minimum? Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a couple of things you can look for here. I would, I would totally look at that as a long-term play. So set a budget where it’s like.

19:04
I could spend this for three months and if nothing happens, I won’t be excited, but it won’t kill me. But what I would look at immediately then, so start running those campaigns, look at what is my view rate. So with all of these ads, someone can choose to skip if they want to, The pre-roll ad pops up, you’re like, curse you ad, I want to move on. So you can see what the skip rate is, what the view rate is. Generally speaking, I like to see a view rate that’s north of 20%.

19:32
If that can be north of 40 % even better, if it’s on a connected TV, it probably does need to be like 50 % or higher to show like, Hey, this is good content. People like it and I’m reaching the right, the right audience. So I would look at view metrics right away. You can look at things like, um, uh, views that happen after they watch that. So if you’ve got a channel, like I know you’ve got a channel, this, this pickleball company has got a channel. So did somebody see the ad and then did they consume more of my content?

20:00
That’s a good signal that hey, okay, they’re kind of my content and checking it out. And then what I would look for is, okay, am I seeing a lift in branded search? Am I seeing a lift in direct traffic and things like that? But I would definitely run it for several weeks, but just know you can get that view data and that engagement data really quickly to show, I reaching the right person and is my creative striking a chord? And it sounds like branded search is a really good indicator, right?

20:29
It is, it is. Yeah, because I mean that that’s generally the next step, right? Occasionally someone’s going to click. You’ll get click data in these campaigns too. So even if it is a view based campaign, you’ll see click data. It’s just not that many people click, right? It’s like half the click through rate of meta. So it’s not that it’s not that much, but you’ll see it. But then it’s like, yeah, are people searching for me? But I would also, I would look, you if you’re selling on Amazon and you’re selling on your own.com, look at branded search in both places. We ran this for, you know, we ran YouTube at the

20:57
got to almost a million a month in spend for big haircare brand, their Amazon just took off like a rocket. we determined over time they had a data scientist team. pretty, pretty advanced, pretty sophisticated, but they determined for every one sale we were getting D to C from YouTube, they were getting two on, on Amazon, uh, just kind of based on the way they backed into the numbers. So, uh, you do have to look at, at both places, both

21:22
and on Amazon if you’re selling in both places. Yeah, I think the numbers for TikTok Shop are similar. Yeah, I bet they are. and maybe like 30 % on your DTC store. Yeah, yeah, so it’d be almost exactly the same. Yeah. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit and just kind of talk about YouTube’s answer to TikTok Shop. And it’s pretty new. It is. Not a lot of people know about it. So give us a scoop, Brett.

21:49
Yeah. So one, I’m really excited about this. I don’t know that this current iteration is going to be the thing or the answer, but I am optimistic that YouTube is going to be able to figure this out. And honestly, if they don’t figure it out, that’s on them, right? YouTube, YouTube’s got the viewers. YouTube has the creators, you YouTube has the format. Like this should work if it doesn’t, that’s just cause YouTube drops the ball. Right. So I do want to make a couple of comparisons here where, um, you know,

22:19
TikTok I think has the ability to go viral quickly, right? Like the right creator, the right content, it can go from zero to off the charts viral. YouTube doesn’t really do that, right? It’s, know, yes, there’s viral content, but a lot of times the content gets better over time, right? You post a video that’s a review on, you know, the latest Toyota Tundra or you post a video that’s the, know, this new Blackstone accessory or whatever, it’s probably gonna grow over time and maybe.

22:46
two years from now, it’s getting more views than it gets right now. Whereas, know, Tik Tok, it’s dead and you know, a week or whatever. So it’s just, it’s just different. But the way this is working now is Google has created a portal where you can connect your brand with creators on YouTube. And this is all kind of done through merchant center now. So if you’re running Google shopping, you’re running performance max, you’ve got a merchant center account.

23:13
That’s where your, your, all your product data, your, your, this where your product feed lives is inside a merchant center. need to have a feed in order for this to work, right? You do need to have a feed in order for this to work. You do. Yeah. And so, so then the way this works is basically you get signed up for the program. It’s, it’s an open beta now, so anybody can, can get involved. Um, you set a commission. So you’re like, Hey, I’m willing to pay 15, 20, 30, 50, whatever the percentage you’re willing to pay to a creator if they sell my product. And then creators can, can see that.

23:42
You know, they sign up for the program, they select your brand, they start tagging your products in their videos. Let’s say that I’m doing a makeup tutorial and, uh, you know, boom, I, Cindy Joe’s or boom beauty. mean, uh, as a fire company, we’re like, Hey, I love the moisturizer. I’m a type of moisturizer. Right. And so you tag that. And then in the video, we’re talking about moisturizers that shoppable clickable, uh, product listing pops up.

24:08
they’re right adjacent to the video. kind of below it, if it’s on mobile, beside it, if it’s on desktop, type of thing. And so then if someone’s watching that organic piece of content and they see the tag for that boom product, they click on it, they buy, now that affiliate gets a commission. And so it’s pretty slick. There’s still some bugs to be ironed out. Like right now you can find creators that you want to reach out to, but you can’t reach out to them in the platform, right? You got to like…

24:36
You can find them inside of a YouTube affiliate, but then you just got to manually go reach out and find them. People can find you and that’s what we’ve seen. But I’ll give you some numbers here that kind of paint, think the potential here. So we have a client in the sleep space, a really cool brand, fun brand. So we set them up here. We didn’t do a lot to promote it. We’re like, Hey, let’s just see. They didn’t do a lot to promote it. Well, a handful of creators like, we love this product. We’re going to tag it and start trying to sell it. And so.

25:04
I think this was over like the last six months or so they’ve gotten 20 million organic views. Uh, they’ve sold, I don’t know, 20, some thousand dollars worth of products paid out like four to, I don’t remember maybe $6,000 in commissions. Um, I think the CPM worked out to be like 15 cents or something crazy like that, right? Where like, you know, a good, a good CPM on Google or on YouTube ads is like from

25:29
You know, $18 on down and a medic can be kind of all over the board, but yeah, it was like 13 cents cost per per thousand. Right. And so, yeah, I think there’s, there’s real potential here. As long as Google can make this easier for creators to find products for brands to connect with creators. I kind of think they need to solve that communication piece eventually. That’s gonna, that’s going to be really helpful. Uh, but that’s, that’s basically it. It’s Hey, creators can tag your products in.

25:58
their organic videos, they’re in a commission, you get, you know, the exposure from those organic videos. And so it’s pretty powerful. Then similar to TikTok shops over time, you can say, oh, wow, these three or four, 10 creators, like their videos really took off. So I’m gonna take the clip of them talking about my product. I’m gonna turn that into an ad. And so that’s called… Walk me through the process because I’m pretty familiar with the TikTok shop process where you…

26:27
have to get a certain number of sales and then you can message, you know, 7,000 creators a week and whatnot. It’s all built in. Is the affiliate program at least built into YouTube directly? So you don’t have, does YouTube handle the money? Yeah. So YouTube will handle the commissions. Yep. They can handle it. you or the communication is up to you, but basically this is all set up in, Google merchant center. And so there’s, there’s a couple of caveats here. Uh, one in order to participate, you have to either use the Google YouTube app.

26:56
by Shopify, so it’s the Shopify app. A lot of brands are using that anyway. If you’re not using that though, there is good news in, let’s say you’re using like Data Feedwatch or Channable or Feedonomics or something like that. You can keep using that solution for shopping and PMAX and stuff. You’ll need to add though that Google and YouTube app for Shopify for the YouTube affiliate. So you’ve got to have that so that’s a must or.

27:23
You gotta be using a CJ, which used to be Commission Junction. Yeah. Impact. And there’s one, there’s one other, I’ll look it up here in a minute. That’s okay, yeah. While you’re talking. But there’s like four options. So you gotta have that set up. If you have that set up then, then you know, YouTube can handle the commissions and stuff like that. I see. So YouTube, if you’re using like CJ or whatever, you’re using CJ’s affiliate, or YouTube is using CJ’s affiliate link. Yeah. And it’s all tracked. You connect the two.

27:51
So whichever those you’re using, you’re connecting that to Merchant Center and it’s a YouTube affiliate. And basically then in your Merchant Center where you see like promotions and products and stuff, there’s going to be a section that’s YouTube affiliate and you’ll click in that and then you’ll see all your data. is not collecting the money in this case. Correct. Oh, okay. So the reason why I’m mentioning all that is that means the merchant is responsible for paying the commission. Yeah. So if they choose not to, I mean, in theory they could screw over their

28:21
affiliates, which has happened in the past. It’s happened to me a bunch of times, actually. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So I’m not sure all the remedies that Google has in place, you know, to protect creators and brands and stuff like that. But I do think there’s going to be a solution where people can just check out. know, I mean, there’s I there’s some options that the Google’s played with in the past. I it’s great for brands, right? The checkout happens on their site, right? And they all information. You own the customer at that point. All of that. Fantastic. OK, it’s great for merchants. OK, I like it.

28:50
Okay. Walk me through the process of outreach. Like you worked with this brand, right? You have to get people to promote your stuff. do, you do. there’s a, one of the easiest things to do is you can, there’s like this, um, uh, this way to promote your offer to creators. And this is something you sign up for inside of merchant center. And so basically it’s like, say, Hey, this is our normal commission rate. We’re doing a deal where we’re doubling the commission or whatever for this period of time. Here’s why here’s some messaging, stuff like that. It’s basically a form you fill out. That’s like a promotion.

29:19
Google then will send that to creators and for them to say, oh, cool, I like this. I’m going take advantage of this. So that’s probably the clearest, easiest thing to do. Also, if you have stuff built and you’ve got a bit of a brand anyway, creators will find you, right? I obviously wouldn’t lean into that. It’s like your, the field of dreams strategy, right? If we build it, they’ll come like that. lean on that. But that does happen if your brand has got some traction.

29:47
But then the other piece is like, it’s just super duper manual right now. So what you can do, and this is helpful-ish, you can start searching within the YouTube affiliate portal inside of Merchant Center and say, okay, I want like plant-based diets or I want, you know, black stone griddle cooking, or I want fly fish, whatever the case is. Then it’s going to populate here the top creators.

30:11
You can start looking at filters for like, Hey, I only want people that have gotten, you know, 50,000 views in the last 30 days, or I want people with a certain subscriber count. And so you can start to filter those. You can then build a list and you can save that list, but then it’s, up to you to just go knocking on those doors, right? you can reach out through like their YouTube channel and stuff, but you can build, you can build the list and you get the stats and you get all the information. Um, you can also then decide, okay. Uh, it’s like, this is my.

30:39
top tier of affiliates I wanna go after or creators I wanna go after. So I’m gonna build this list and all of these people, they get a 30 % commission, right? Everybody else gets a 15 % commission or whatever. And so then you can reach out and tell them like, hey, I really wanna work with you. I love your content. I’m doubling your commission, whatever the case is. And so then that makes that outreach a little bit easier. So yeah, it’s pretty manual at this point, but you at least have a few options that makes it a little bit easier. So right now it’s basically the old influencer model.

31:09
with the exception that they can easily grab your products and tag you in there. That’s the new step. Super easy. It’s like, yes, great. I love this makeup brush or this whatever, this Blackstone spatula. So I’m just going to tag it in my video and boom, now I’m done. Now Google tracks it. And only approved affiliate platforms are allowed. Yep. Yep, exactly. So you can’t It’s really just those that I mentioned. Yep.

31:35
Oh, just as, so you can’t take like a refversion or something like that, which you already have on your Shopify store, for example. No, no, you can’t use it. Okay. You can’t use that. So yeah, it’s gotta be that. It’s gotta be that YouTube app. Um, so it’s gotta be the Shopify YouTube Google act, uh, app. can be impact Rakuten or CJ. are the only options. Like those are like the biggest ones actually. Biggest ones. Yeah. Okay. I get it. Yeah. This is a lot different than Tik TOP, which manages everything. Right.

32:04
And you would think that with YouTube’s resources, they could easily replicate this. would think so. And I think they’re going to get there. We’re connected to a couple of the global product managers that are running this. And so I’m talking to them all the time. I they can’t be like super open about what’s, what’s on the roadmap, but I think they’ve got to get there just because then they’ll never be able to compete. Right. The beauty of TikTok shops is you can do it all there right now. can’t inside of YouTube, but I still think it’s worth.

32:31
test it out because they’ve got all the ingredients to make it work. Yeah, I like the idea, but just think about it from a creator perspective. Now I need to go sign up for CJ or Impact, which I guess isn’t a big deal. I already have accounts of both of those. But the fact that each one could potentially have a different one, Yeah. like the idea. Is this mainly for long form or does it apply to short form as well? In terms of the creator content, longer, form content?

32:58
It can be either. Yeah. So that this can apply to, to shorts. They can apply it to long form. You know, it does seem like a lot of the videos that get traction from creators are, are longer form, know, five minutes, 20 minutes, things like that, somewhere in that range, but it does depend. And this can work for shorts. Okay. So let’s tie it back to our original conversation now with IROAs. All Yeah. Most of these people are watching stuff on their TV, tick tock. Everyone’s on their phone, right? Yep. So

33:24
If this shows up on the TV and there’s products there, there’s no click, that means the affiliates don’t get paid out, right? And then the brand equity is, for the seller, it’s great, I think. You get the brand equity no matter what. It’s a great question. mean, so I think one of the things that Google is trying to solve, and they’re talking about this, they’re talking about this a little bit at Google Marketing Live recently.

33:49
is depending on the kind of remote you have for your connected TV, you can navigate to click on that or whatever. I don’t know, that seems a little bit cumbersome. I don’t tend to do that with my remote. I don’t think a lot of people do. You’ve also got the QR code that people can scan and stuff. But yeah, it does create a bit of an issue, right? So yeah, is Google gonna be able to attribute that back to the creator?

34:14
That does that does create some challenges seems like Google needs to use Google pay for all this stuff and not take to do the transaction on the On the Shopify store. Yeah, potentially and then maybe maybe that’s quickly on the horizon I’m not I’m not sure but that that in a lot of ways that does make sense

34:30
Yeah. Okay. All right. So it seems at least to me, and I know you’ve gotten results with your clients. It seems to me it’s not quite up to par with TikTok shop. Just not for sure. Not no, it’s, it’s in its infancy. Um, so this is more like, Hey, do you want to be an early adopter? Right. Do you believe in YouTube? Does your product really fit with like YouTube creators? I think a lot of products do. think there’s creators for almost any, any niche, but, but yeah, it’s not built out in the same way where like,

34:56
you’re not gonna five extra business with YouTube affiliate like you might with TikTok shops right now. But getting in early may cause you to be ahead of your competitor. Yeah, okay. So it seems like what we talked about in the beginning with YouTube ads is completely different than what we just talked about. It is. Right? It is, yeah. If you already have an influencer marketing strategy, this is just like one extra piece to it where you’re saying, hey, now you can tag the product super easy and this is how you do it.

35:26
Yep. Whereas before you’d have to put the link in the description and, and whatnot. Right? Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So some other way. like, you know, uh, know Sean from the Ridge, brilliant guy, you know, one of the ways they really grew the Ridge in the beginning was they reached out to a ton of YouTube influencers, like Fortnite, uh, creators and, know, just men’s fashion and whatnot. And they’re like, Hey, just, you know, talk about, a live read of Ridge in the middle of the video. We’ll pay, we’ll pay you for.

35:54
pay commissions, then yeah, then you’ve got to like give them their own link. They’ve got to, know, reference that in the video. Sometimes you’d like, we’ll just pay you for views type of thing. uh, but that’s all, that’s all very, very manual. This at least is easier in that tag a product, track it, you know, it’s pretty, straightforward. walk me through the negotiation then. So can you pay a creator less to make the video now and include the commission since it’s in theory, more commissionable. Does it change the negotiation?

36:23
Yeah. So potentially now, uh, I haven’t talked to Sean about this specifically, I hear using YouTube affiliate and you’re doing your old outreach. I’m not really sure what he’s doing, but, for the brands we’ve helped so far, they’ve kind of created treated. This is just separate, like, Hey, just tag the product. We’ll pay the commission end of story type of thing. Okay. So I know, I know other people just talking to another agency owner recently and they’re, they’re looking at, let’s reach out to a creator. We’ll pay them for the first 30 days of the views. We’ll pay them on a CPM basis.

36:52
So I think you got stuff like that. You could layer that. You could say, I’ll pay you a CPM and I’ll pay you the commission on the product. So I mean, think there’s a variety of ways you can go. But most of the people that we see testing this right now, they’re just saying, hey, tag the product, we’ll pay a commission and it’s a win-win at that point. Got it, got it. I guess the hard part is always to get them to make the video, right? Yeah. They have to feel incentivized that they’d be able to do this.

37:20
And that’s where I think, um, cause we had a conversation about this just recently. Someone was like, well, I want to pay like a 10 % commission. I’m like, wait a minute. What do you, what’s, what’s like your customer acquisition costs? Like what are you paying? You know, meta or Google or like a, you know, two, 2.5 ROAS. like, so you’re giving up almost half the sale to meta, but you only want to pay 10 % to the, they’re not going they’re not going to do it. Like why, why want to pay them the same or, know, anyway, so, so you got to think about it. It’s psychological. It’s totally psychological.

37:49
Well, that’s different. Well, I mean, okay. But, uh, and so I’m not saying you have to give away half, like incentivizing, like the, the, some, good affiliates are good and they’re, they’re going to go after they’re going to lean into the products that they pay them. And so, um, yeah, that’s how it’s going to ask you actually too, cause at least on Tik TOK and whatnot commissions are typically, you know, 15 to 20, but you’re right. Like if you’re, if you’re paying 50 % on meta, like,

38:18
For some reason there’s this psychological barrier. There is, there is physical products where people don’t want to go beyond 20. Yeah. Right. And that’s, that’s a five, that’s a five row as you’re paying 20 % five row as you’re probably not getting that anywhere. I, Hey, listen, I’m a huge fan of testing. Like if you start running a 20 % commission, you start getting results or 10%. Great. But I would just challenge that thinking of, what is my acceptable cost per acquisition? And I’ll pay close to that.

38:45
to an affiliate, to a creator, right? Because it’s the same. All right, so we actually talked a lot in a lot of broad categories in this talk. So give me your perfect customer or store that would want to try YouTube ads. Like how much are they making? How much are they willing to earn? It’s a great call out. I think

39:08
The easy answer is like if I was a, or the broad answer is if I owned a brand of my own, I would almost certainly try YouTube to some degree. So I might do that first strategy. talked about like the pickleball company where it’s like, I’m spending 20 bucks a day, 30 bucks a day targeting these types of channels and stuff, just because I think it’s going to have a little bit of an impact. Now that’s not like the best client for us necessarily. And so let me kind of differentiate that and let me talk about.

39:36
who do I think can really scale on YouTube? Who are the brands like in that house analytics study that are, oh, and also those brands were spending about 30 % of their meta budget on YouTube. So they’re spending a million a month on meta, they were spending 300,000 a month on YouTube or more. So that was just kind of as a comparison or as a point of reference. But basically what I’m looking for there is one, I do wanna be comfortable with knowing I’m gonna have to kind of triangulate.

40:05
the performance of YouTube, it’s not gonna be quite as clear or cut and dry as it is inside of Meta. So you gotta be comfortable with that. Also, I’m looking for either something that’s high LTV, meaning it’s a subscription-based product or multiple purchases, or I know I’ve got a doubt then how much I’m gonna earn from a customer, like in the first 60, 90, 180, that type of thing. So what’s that LTV? Or it needs to be a higher ticket item product. So like higher consideration set and things like that.

40:35
If this is a commodity product, a lower price product, I may not lean into YouTube unless there’s a ton of volume. Some exceptions would be like native. ran natives YouTube for six years. They grew tremendously with it and stick a deodorant, it’s 12 bucks or whatever. It’s a consumable though. It’s a consumable and you know, like, Hey, that’s a high LTV. So I get someone trying native. They love it. They’re going to stick forever. we, you we ran their direct response, uh, YouTube. ran YouTube to drive retail sales.

41:03
in, you know, Target Walmart, CVS, things like that. But generally, yeah, I want someone that’s got a higher LTV or a higher AOV. And so generally, like, if I am looking at a direct conversion campaign in YouTube, meaning I’m bidding on conversions, I’m training the algorithm on conversions, it’s pretty rare that you see a cost per conversion under 50 bucks, right? You just rarely see that. Now, generally, there’s gonna be other conversions happening that you can’t track, so it’s probably lower than that.

41:32
But just know in platform, that’s probably what you’re to see, but it may be pushing like 80 or a hundred. So you’ve got it. You got to kind of understand that that’s what it’s going to look like. And so am I, am I comfortable with that? And, so, so generally that’s what we’re looking for. And then I want, I want something that’s, it’s also lends itself well to visual storytelling. Um, and this can be about anything, right? We, we partner with the folks at Raindrop Raindrop creative. they did a lot of work with native and we were working there.

41:59
Uh, but they’ve got like laundry sauce, which is laundry detergent, right? They’ve got a Dr. Squatch, which soap, uh, shady rays, which is sunglasses. So it can be about anything, but can you lean into some good visual storytelling? That’s important too. I did kind of wrap that thought. I like, Hey, basically I talked about LTV AOV, you know, 50 to a hundred dollars CPAs, which are going to see in platform. And then said, it’s got to lend itself the price of lending itself well to visual storytelling. So I kind of wrapped with that. So.

42:28
So let’s wrap this up then. It seems like a few things are a no-brainer, right? It seems like you should hook up a merchant center account, no matter what brand you are, and just get your products, and at least you have that worst case scenario, you just start making your own products and your own videos. Yep. Right. And then if you do do influencer marketing or outreach,

42:52
you should just consider telling them, like if they’re YouTubers, hey, now you can easily tag products where this one’s available. Exactly. So you’re doing TikTok shops, you’re doing other affiliate outreach. Yeah, just share with those affiliates, hey, we’re on YouTube affiliate as well. Here’s how you tag it. And we’d love to pay a commission on YouTube as well. Yeah. And then for the other ads, it sounds like you said you should just dabble with just getting your brand out there in the beginning. And then if you’re seeing traction, maybe it might make sense to do a conversion. Yeah, I think so.

43:20
The nice thing is if you start kind of small and you’re just comfortable with, with view-based metrics and not seeing direct conversions, that’s at least going to show you like what hooks resonate, what are people engaging with? You will see some clicks. I don’t want to say there’s no clicks. And you can also see, okay, I ran these five videos. These two had the best view rate and the best click through rate. So, okay. I could probably do something with these. Right. And then you can lean into a conversion based campaign, but you probably need, know,

43:49
three to 500 to a thousand a day to really get enough conversions where you’re feeding the algorithm where it can go find you more conversions, that type of thing. Yeah. And as far as you know, outside of what Google can do for you or just looking at your branded search uplift, really you just got to look at like the halo effect. I mean, think that, you know, the search list inside of Google is really valuable. Their IROAS or conversion lift studies.

44:15
seeing the direct conversions and then, then yeah, looking, looking for this direct traffic up on my.com and it has branded search up and there’s brand a search up on, Amazon. it is a little more work. That’s, that’s for sure. So you gotta, you gotta be up for that. Okay. Well, Hey, thanks a lot for the overview, Brett. Uh, if anyone needs help on this stuff, uh, where, where can they find you? I mean, we’d love to connect with anybody, uh, uh, that’s looking at, YouTube or Google or Amazon. help with, with all those, but

44:43
I’m on LinkedIn, if anybody wants to connect on LinkedIn, I try to post pretty regularly. Brett Curry on LinkedIn, but then omgcommerce.com. If you have questions about YouTube, reach out. We love the chat, talk strategy, talk shop, show you what might be possible with YouTube for you. And so that’s the best way to connect, omgcommerce.com. But you’re right, Brett. mean, you got me thinking, like, TV is pretty much dead. Like, only people like my mom have cable.

45:10
All the young people are watching YouTube and TikTok and whatnot. Totally. Yeah. So it’s like the old school TV on steroids. new TV. Right. You got to be honest. And people are watching content like yours, but like my 14 year old daughter, she loves watching YouTube shorts on TV, which believe it or not, that’s correct. Which that seems silly to me, but she loves watching YouTube shorts on TV. Yeah.

45:36
Well, thanks Brett. hope this, I hope the listeners appreciate you. And if you ever want to see this guy in person, come to the seller summit. He always has a crowd around him though. So you might have to take a number. Awesome. Steve always great to chat, man. Thanks so much for the invite and look forward to chatting again.

45:52
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Are you going to try shoppable YouTube? Let me know in the comments. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 597. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejob.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, Tony and I share what we’ve learned so far about building a community from the wins to the awkward missteps. We’ll talk about what’s worked, what definitely hasn’t, and some of the little moments that have surprised us along the way. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that the session recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are available over at sellersummit.com. If you missed the event,

00:27
you can now get instant access to every keynote, workshop, and panel. Now on to the show.

00:40
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about communities because this is something that has been very heavily on my mind and I actually just implemented a Discord community for my class members. And I’m thinking in broader terms now because email is getting less delivered, SMS is even getting less delivered. And so what’s the best way to get people to listen? It’s by building community.

01:09
It’s about being a part of a community and this is all new to me. So I’m just kind of winging it as we go along. So, yeah, let’s talk about the community you just launched. First of all, we’ll talk. go granular and then we’ll get bigger picture for people, because one of the things that you did that I think is super interesting is that even though you’ve had Facebook groups for people that are in the course and then like the general population, you created a community on Discord. Why Discord?

01:39
So honestly, Discord is like the platform for geeks. Like they have an awesome API. You can make bots, you can code in all these features and it’s free. So I think the free part is what appealed to you the most probably. Actually, the extensibility is what appealed to me the most plus the free made it a no brainer. Plus my friend is pretty high up at the company. So I know initially because this community just launched very recently and

02:07
Initially, I know you had some people who had trouble getting in. So I do think there is a little bit of a tech barrier for people. How is that going now? It’s been about a week. Okay, so that’s an exaggeration because any time you have any new platform, there’s always going to be someone who cannot do it. could be Gmail and they can’t get Gmail working. So to be fair, I did a very soft launch just to people who actually attended office hours live. And we had two people

02:37
say that they couldn’t get on and whatnot. Whereas the other, think we attracted 45 members that day. And of that two people could not get on due to, one, we kind of narrowed it down to an email deliverability issue. Like they couldn’t receive the password email, which I think is on their end. And the other person, we never figured it out. Cause I didn’t want to spend the whole office hours. Did they ever get in the community or are they still in limbo?

03:04
That I don’t know. We actually have office hours today and we’ll find out. Okay. So how do you have it structured inside Discord? Right now? Right now, it’s, I mean, it’s literally a week old, right? So there’s one room for discussion. So let’s talk about why I hate Facebook groups first. That’s more fun. Facebook groups suck. Like people would tag me on there and let’s say I was like in the car and I couldn’t get to it.

03:33
later on when I was not in my car, sometimes I wouldn’t be able to find that message again. It’s just not laid out well. then the fact that it doesn’t show you everything in your feed just kind of defeats the purpose. would also say the search featuring groups is terrible on Facebook. like, because what I found is that you, same thing, right? You’re somewhere, you see, you get a notification that you’ve been tagged in something.

04:00
you don’t have the ability to respond. Maybe you even take a peek at it, right? And you’re like, oh, this is gonna require me to sit down and think, right? And then when you go back to find that, and it’s not readily available, right? Because there’s activity in the community, it gets pushed down, whatever. Even when you try to search, it often, you can’t find it, right? Because the search is so janky, I think, in Facebook. So for me, that’s a huge negative. The other huge negative for me in Facebook groups is it requires getting on Facebook.

04:31
And so for someone like me who I don’t like to spend time on social media, especially not Facebook, once you get on to go into the community to answer a question, then you’re on Facebook, then you’re like, oh, someone tagged me in a photo from high school that I don’t want on the internet and someone did this and now someone sees that you’re on, so they try to message you, right? So then what becomes a simple answering a question now turns into 30 to 45 minutes of time wasted.

04:59
on social media because now you’ve been sucked into the Facebook vortex. I don’t know if that’s fair to say. Well, first of all, number one, you love Facebook because that’s your demographic, Tony. We all know that. Second of all, I think any community platform requires an app or something to get on it, right? That you have to have on. And then it’s pretty easy to get lost in like a Discord community also, because then you end up looking at all these other questions. that’s different. That’s different, right? Because if I’m

05:27
So the only thing I know on Discord is your community. don’t have any other, if I do have a tie on Discord, I don’t know about it, right? It’s something from like five years ago. So when I go on Discord, I’m only interacting with that community. I’m not being distracted by like, are they getting divorced? Because he’s posting all these pictures with this. got it. Oh, look, oh, look, she’s lost 100 pounds. And oh, look at this. oh, you know, there’s none of that, right? I’m only on there to look at the community. And then,

05:56
I’m done, right? So I think I’ve checked into your community maybe four or five times for about a week. And so I go in, I answer, if someone’s tagged me, I try to answer that question. And then I look through the other questions and see if there’s anything and then I’m done, right? There’s nothing else to distract me except for the stuff inside the community. So if you’re the community owner, I think it’s great because you go in, you deal with the community. If you’re using a separate platform, doesn’t have to be Discord.

06:24
And then and then there’s nothing else to take your time away. I can see that. mean, granted, right now it’s literally 45 people out of 6000. Right. Once it goes out, I don’t know how many people actually have discord. I was actually shocked. I think I can’t remember how many people are in office hours that day, but I think a good two thirds had discord, which shocked me. people that come to office hours, though, are a little more nerdy.

06:54
in general. Maybe. It’ll be interesting to see when it goes out to the whole group. But that brings up, I think, the first important point about a community and one that I don’t think that you’re actually prepared for, if we’re going to be honest about things today. Sure. Tell me. Tell me what I’m not prepared for. time it takes to run an active and healthy community. You joked right before we started recording, maybe ChatGPT can run the community for me.

07:22
Well, like we were joking about other things that Chad is doing very well. And while I think there probably will come a point where that is going to be a component, right? Where it can, there is some AI in it, right? And I’m sure like, especially with Discord, if you have the ability to like code things in, I can see maybe some like canned responses, things like that, the ability to sort of implement things that we do with email and customer service.

07:50
I have a solution to this problem, by the way, and it was not chatty. That was just a joke. But I do think one of the tough parts about a community, and I know a lot of people who’ve grown huge communities, right? Think about our friend Jen Garza, who had her, you know, 100 plus thousand keto community. Tiffany Avanosky had 70 plus thousand, you know, fashion based. It takes a lot of work to be in those communities, keeping it from getting spammy, making sure the discussions are

08:20
productive and positive, especially like right now, 45 people, that’s not that hard, right? But for most people, 45 people in a community is not going to move the needle in your business.

08:32
I’m not even thinking about the business part yet, but the moderation part is actually fairly straightforward. that I can see, this is why discord is valuable. I can write a little code that pipes in certain responses directly into open AI, get a sentiment analysis and then automatically ban someone or put them in like a suspension. don’t know if you can do that with any other platform where you have access to all that. Maybe you do, maybe it’s possible.

09:00
And then for the moderation part, I think once the community gets going, th there’s students that come to office hours like every week and they’ve been coming every week for five years. I would just ask them for help. Like if they want to moderate it. And I’m pretty sure I can find someone to help with that. Right. I can think of one person in particular who’d who’d love to do it in particular. Uh, once it gets off its feet and whatnot. So.

09:26
So back to the platform, like I think I was originally gonna do this on slack. Yes, because I love slack I have it on and it’s the search is great The huge disadvantage of slack is you got a paper member Which is ridiculous Granted I guess that’s probably not what slack was designed for it was probably designed for small teams You know working together but yeah, those those caught like if you had like a 5,000 member community be like

09:56
$50,000 Which is absolutely nuts. I actually asked ChatGBT, I said, hey, give me some places to host a community. Because I know we know of some, but I was like, there’s probably some that we haven’t heard of. Of course, their number one answer was Facebook groups. I think that’s been where communities have lived for a really long time. think the problem is, the other problem is you’re still relying on Facebook. You were saying,

10:25
You don’t see everything, not everything shows up anymore. And I mean, know people who’ve just been, their groups have been banned, right, or disbanded, right? So they’ve had issues with Facebook sort of just locking them out of their own. It’s not theirs, obviously, it’s Facebook’s. But, you know, so I think Facebook groups are still, they’re still popular, but I think there’s a lot of downside. And as these other platforms continue to become more popular and grow, I think Facebook groups are gonna become

10:54
less ideal, but they’re free. And that’s, think, the biggest draw. I mean, that’s the understatement of the century. I think Facebook groups suck. Once upon a time, they were great. And actually, grew mine, my regular, wife quit one to, I think it was like 14 or 15,000 people. Spam got out of control. Like they literally nerfed the reach, like in your feed, because they want to run more ads, right? And this is a long time ago.

11:23
That My Wife Quit group of 15,000 people is pretty much defunct. And it was defunct as soon as Facebook made those changes. Well, and it used to be one of the benefits of the groups was that when someone joined their group, if they were just casually on Facebook, they would get notifications about the groups. And that doesn’t happen anymore either. I think you’re right. It’s a lot of downside. They also talked about Discord, which we’ve talked about. One that they talked about that I’m not familiar with, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of, is called Geneva.

11:52
Never heard of it. It’s apparently free. It has chat, video rooms, all that stuff. So I don’t know if it’s even worth checking out if people have heard of it. It was one that was a complete shock to me because I had never heard of it. And I feel like I’ve done some research on this. So I think the important thing is that whatever platform you choose is kind of mainstream. Like I know you guys are starting a circle community. I feel like it’s not mainstream.

12:21
Meaning, like if I were to ask like a friend who’s not in the industry if they’ve heard of it before, they would probably say no. But you ask them if they’ve heard of Discord before and they will say yes. So I would agree with, I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know because most of my friends are in this world so everyone knows what Circle is. So I don’t have a lot of friends outside. Well, no, no, no, your friends like- have many friends outside of people in the internet space. No, no, no, the ones that you hang out with that I met, they’re not the only people I can ask.

12:50
Right, exactly. Whereas here, all my friends aren’t in this at all. So here’s what I think about that, though. So Circle is one, School is another one. That’s a really popular one. Mighty Networks is another popular one. Those three, think, are probably the most popular paid versions. They all have the free trial, but I don’t think any of them allow you to do anything that’s long-term free, like minimum sign-up type thing. So I think it doesn’t necessarily matter if people have heard of it because

13:21
I know a lot of people who are in communities and they don’t necessarily know what the platform is. They just know they click here to log on. So I think as long as you make it easy for people to join the community or to get into the community, the hosting of that community is probably not as important if it’s not a tech-based group.

13:44
This is what I mean by that. A lot of people already had Discord apps on their phone, surprisingly, right? So it makes it less friction. It’s kind of like joining an affiliate network, right? It’s like, oh, do I want to join another affiliate network or do I just join the one that I’m already on that I know about? I think it’s similar, but yeah, you’re right. Once someone’s ingrained in the community, the platform doesn’t matter. And I think for you, it’ll be really interesting if you open this up to everybody in the course.

14:09
how many, like, because right now you’re dealing with such a small sample size and I would say these people do lean tech heavy based on like who I know is in that group. It’ll be interesting when you open it up to the 6,000 if you’re still seeing that level of like, oh, I already had Discord. I think a lot of people are gonna be like, I have no idea what we’re doing, which is fine. I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out for sure. Well, I’m doing it slowly because I wanna see what the moderation is like and that way I can write those routines appropriately.

14:39
Not that anyone is like rude or anything, but people do occasionally post like self-promotional stuff, which sometimes is okay to me. Like I don’t usually care. But then there’s people who try to sell services, you know, or tools that I don’t want happening. Like of their own, of course. So I guess the next question is, your community is going to be free. No, it’s just a course. Oh, I thought you were going to open it up to anybody who wants to be.

15:09
Oh, okay. no. So first of all, this is only going to be course members for a long time, not for a long time, but for at least the rest of this year once, because I got to get to know the code base and what I can do and what I can’t do. And, you know, it just makes sense to roll it out slowly, especially since I’ve never done this before. Like, I don’t want to get destroyed, you know, inundated so far, and it’s only been a week.

15:37
Like people have already emailed me, know, of those 40, I would say 10 or 15 % have emailed me saying, hey, this is great. Like I can just message someone. I can message someone easily. messaging me. get an answer. So let’s cut this I said, it’s been great for me too. So I guess that’s my next question because I think a lot of people, I think this seems interesting to a lot of people and it’s actually on its own, a standalone business model.

16:04
You can have a paid community. But I think the gateway is to have, there’s a free level. Now for you, you’re kind of doing it the reverse way. You have a paid product, the community comes with the paid product. But at some point, you’re probably going to use the community to convince people to upgrade to the paid product. So people that aren’t in the course, to get them in. So what’s the strategy for that?

16:34
Is there strategy yet? I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. I seriously have not. Like the goal of this is not lead gen at the moment. The goal is to just make make a community of students that can ask questions and interact with other people easily. So here’s why I think that’s valuable for you and anyone. Right. So like we’re reversing this. Right. So instead of having a paid community, you’re having a free community for people who’ve already paid. I think the community will help people make progress.

17:03
Right, so it’ll help people continue to move forward with finding their product, getting sales wherever they are in that funnel. And I think anytime you can show success when you sell a service, you sell more services, right? So the better success stories you have, the better you sell. And so for this case, I think the community becomes a great marketing tool for, you know,

17:30
people seeing better success, being able to use that in your case studies, as well as just another selling point for being in the course, right? It’s not just a bunch of lessons, it’s also this community that’s very active, people are getting their questions answered within 48 hours, whatever it is, and being able to continue to make for progress in their businesses. Yeah, yeah. In terms of opening it up, I think I will need a lot more code in place to moderate stuff.

18:00
If anything is like the Facebook groups where every other comment was spam, that’s going to be infinitely worse on Discord. I will need to… There’s already a bunch of code written actually. I probably just need to adapt it to do the moderation. Which actually brings me to my question. Why are you guys on Circle? Is it a paid community only? So we are building a paid community. There will not be a free tier.

18:29
We’re doing the opposite. We’re bringing people in on a very low-priced offer with limited, I don’t want to say limited, but you’re not getting 450 lessons. The community is the lower hanging fruit and getting people in and then upselling them within the community to higher tier offers. We’re reversing what you’re doing basically.

19:00
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.

19:30
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
Well, I mean, I might just charge like a buck. Yeah. So our right now we kind of have our entry price at nine dollars a month, which is ridiculously cheap. Probably not going to be that way for very long, but that’s I mean, I’m probably going to do that, too, just so it vets like the outright. And that’s where I think, you know, I actually went back and forth on the free paid. How much do you charge kind of thing and did a bunch of like forecasting models and things like that. But I think the one thing about people

20:09
that makes a difference is that it does keep out a level of spam. It’s not going to be, I mean, unless you’re charging $500 a month or something like that, you’re still gonna get problem people, right, at some point. But I think even at $1, $5, whatever, you’re going to minimize that from the start, which is why I think charging like a very small amount is not a bad idea. And honestly, for like a my wife quit her job community,

20:39
I think the charging is actually pretty smart as well as here’s my worry for like my wife quit her job because you already have an established group is that the new people coming in will annoy the old people. know, actually the old people, it’s all locked like the course members have their own. that’s what I was saying. If you’re doing something like this, you do need to have that locked area where the premium tier, whatever you want to call it. Right.

21:09
that they have a space to go to where they’re not. Because we’ve found that when we, every once in a while, we open up our Friday check-ins to all of YouTube. And all of our paid course members get annoyed at the questions that come in because usually they’re new, which is fine, or they haven’t gotten started, or their questions are very basic. They haven’t watched even a handful of YouTube videos, right? So you’re getting sort of this like hodgepodge of people.

21:37
Not all the time, but definitely happens. And so you want to make sure that you have like that safe space for paying customers to be able to have those higher level conversations. I mean, I want to save space myself. Opening this up. This is why I’m curious. I mean, you’re going to have this problem at a low price point. You’re going to have a moderation problem. Yes. Right.

22:01
Does Circle have built-in ways to moderate sentiment? It does. I’m still digging into everything that Circle has to offer. One of things that I say is a huge downfall of any of these paid products, School, Circle, Net, all those people, all those network type things, is that the more you’re willing to pay, the better the features are. Right? the basic plan is garbage. so the higher, like we were setting it up yesterday. Actually, we were getting

22:31
a few people into the community yesterday and realize that there’s nowhere to put if you have, like, is it, you you fill out your bio when you join the community and there’s nowhere to put like a YouTube handle, which to me is like a huge fail, right? Like most people are working and growing on some sort of like YouTube type platform. Yeah. And that wasn’t an option. was like Instagram, Facebook, whatever. So it’s not until you go to like the two hundred dollar a month option that you have

23:00
Shut up, you have to pay. So I was like, that’s garbage. Shame on you, Sturkle. To put it, that’s ridiculous. I know, further entrenching you in your Discord love. yeah. No, no, actually, I’m not in love with Discord. I just think it’s a great tool for the price point.

23:22
Right, and the extensibility. and I think if you have the ability to do some of the coding and technical stuff, either you personally do or you have someone on your staff or team or you can hire someone on Upwork, whatever it is. I definitely think it’s a great option. If you don’t want to do that, then I think something like a school or Circle, you know, one of the things that school does really well and Circle has the same component, I just haven’t used it yet, is that ability for people to see what’s locked.

23:52
which I think is like one of the greatest incentives to get people to upgrade is seeing what they can’t have. And I remember Digital Marker, I don’t know if Digital Marker still does this, but remember when you would buy like one of their $9.95 mini courses and then when you went to log in, it showed all the courses, but they were all grayed out so you couldn’t click on them.

24:16
And then you could always upgrade or you could get the package and get like 10 of them or whatever. But like to me, that was genius because it’s like you’re on there for 15 seconds and you’re like, oh, they have a YouTube tutorial. Like so to me, like I think and probably Discord has some ability to do this. But I think Circle and School do it really well is you can see like what you can’t have. And then also basically earning like it’s sort of the gamification.

24:44
where you earn points to be able to unlock different things, right? So based, yeah, you can do a Discord. But I think those types of things in communities are very effective is, one, for getting people to interact because there’s a reward system built in, and then two, I think for you, especially if people that come in and aren’t a part of the course can get a little peek at what’s happening and…

25:11
sort of like the next level stuff. To me, that’s obviously your course is expensive, so it’s not like a spur of the moment purchase, but I think people seeing that will be effective in getting people to convert at some point. Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. Like, I’m not even thinking that far ahead, like for the randos, so to speak. Just because I’ve just had this horrific experience with Facebook groups in the past with spam, right?

25:38
And there’s no real easy way to moderate that outside of going through each comment and saying deny, deny, deny, or whatever. Uh, this is one of the reasons why I like discord because of all the hooks. Like even if circle was free, I’d probably still go with discord actually, uh, based on the, I only took a very limited trial of circle to be fair. Uh, and then school, I actually didn’t try that thoroughly because

26:05
You guys had said some things about it. think Circle’s better than school. They’re priced about the same. I’ve worked now in both. I think Circle just has some better features. But I also think it’s one of those things too where, I mean, we’ll use Liz as an example. She started the Fluencer Fruit on Discord because that’s what the company wanted it to be on. And they were supposed to help with some things. And it ended up that they didn’t really have the bandwidth to help.

26:33
do some of the integrations and so she was kind of stuck and not able to do some of that so she ended up moving over to Circle. So I do think a lot of it is just personal preference and what you’re comfortable in because if you are gonna be the one managing and running the community, you have to wanna log in and deal with it every day. It is not intuitive, Discord. Some of the things are not intuitive. Like you’re attaching bots to what, mean.

27:02
Like I had to watch some videos just to even understand what the heck was going on, you know. But once you get it, it’s cool. It’s like anything in life, I think. I also don’t love that Discord is black.

27:14
Is there a way to change that? That’s just like, that’s just such a I wouldn’t even put brain power into that. I don’t really care how it looks Well, because I don’t like the black screen with the white text personally to read. That’s just a personal preference, which I don’t know. I’ve never seen a way to have Discord not look like that. And maybe that’s just the interface. I’ve not spent any brain power looking at that, but it’s probably true because black on white saves power on your phone.

27:43
That’s probably why they do it, yeah. Right? For certain screens, right? Because black doesn’t use power. I got these old eyes. got to.

27:55
But you’re right about the platform risk also, right? We’re beholden to Discord, Circle, and whatnot. And we’re beholden to Facebook. So unless you want to start your own platform, which is ironically something I had with the class before, that was a big time pain in the butt. I won’t do that again. I would say, unless you’re just so geeky and love

28:24
doing those things, coding up your own community. I didn’t code it up. It was just a standard off-the-shelf platform. didn’t Oh, I thought you did. Was it Andrew who coded his up? Somebody. No, no one’s coded theirs from scratch. They’ve modified what’s existing, which is what I did. There’s just all sorts of issues with that. It was also very ugly. You have to host it yourself. Oh, yes, I know it was ugly.

28:52
So also, I don’t know if you know this, but LinkedIn actually has a community option for LinkedIn groups. I did not know that. I’m new to LinkedIn. too. I just I’ve I did a deep dive into LinkedIn after. So last week we did a hot seat with Charles. And one of the things that he has been having some success with are these like many LinkedIn newsletters, which I was.

29:21
very interested in and so I basically spent the weekend sort of digging into like what can you do on LinkedIn, know, what ability, once again, you’re still building something on another platform, right, you don’t own anything on LinkedIn, but they basically do have little private groups where you can invite people in to chat and build a community. I’m not sure like what the limit is on it, like how many people can be in the group or anything like that, but.

29:48
That might be something too, where if you’re just getting started and you don’t want to invest any tech or anything like that, it just like, I wonder how many people would be interested in this. I think that might be an interesting option. doesn’t seem like it’s too difficult to set up. It’s basically just you just create the little group. So let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about nurturing the community and keeping it up.

30:15
My experience with that was I remember, like I was one of the first members of Andrew’s group over at ECF. And I remember in the beginning, Andrew was posting every single day in that group. So what are you guys doing? You have people paying 10 bucks a month, but even at 10 bucks a month, people expect value, right, as soon as they sign up. So what are you doing? So one of the things we’re doing is we’re actually holding a 45 minute like office hours every week.

30:43
in the community. That’s the bigger benefit. Obviously, the community will have conversation, but that’s our big draw is this 45-minute accountability session, a weekly accountability session. However, I think as we stand up this community, I do think you have to be in there every single day. I don’t think there’s a way around it, especially if-

31:13
Yours is a little different because these people already were in a community before you just kind of moved locations. But when you’re starting from scratch, I think you need to be in there or you need to have a dedicated person. It doesn’t necessarily have to be you on a daily basis, either starting a conversation every day or replying to conversations that will continue to grow. Right. So sort of open ended type things.

31:41
You know, the person who I think is so good at this is Tiffany Ivanovsky. You know, she’s done this in Facebook groups for years. And of course she’s got a very different type of group, right? It’s all clothes and fashion based. So it’s really about building like friendships and trust. And so she posts, you know, crazy things like when Paul goes to the store and buys 500 poinsettias, cause she said she wanted some color on the front porch, right? So she’s able to put like any kind of thing in there to drive engagement.

32:10
I think if you’re trying to build a business-based community, which we are both doing, it needs to be pretty focused on the types of business. So for you, obviously lately it could be anything involving tariffs or trade or stuff like that, stuff that just engage the people that are in there and start conversation. One of the things that I think we had someone post yesterday, basically like, hey, here’s this really great podcast. If you start listening at 40 minutes and whatever,

32:40
There’s a really good commentary on XYZ that we had talked about previously. So I think anything where you’re just like adding value, educational content, and then making sure that you interact when people post is really important, especially in the beginning when you don’t have like self-appointed community leaders. So right now, presumably you don’t have a ton of members and you’re doing these office hours for accountability. What happens when it gets to even like a hundred members?

33:09
That model will break down, right? For accountability? Yeah. Yes and no. I’m not sure. I mean, the community is not live. only people in there are invite only right now. But yeah. I mean, just looking forward. I think it’ll change a little bit. Either there’ll be multiple accountability times to accommodate, and it won’t always be run by us. So the goal would be to raise up people within the community to lead.

33:39
not for free, either for an exchange for community access, things like that. I’ve seen that work successfully in a lot of other groups. A good example of this is Ezra had a Facebook ads group for a long time. I don’t know if it was exactly Facebook ads, but it was some sort of ad-based group.

34:07
Was it Molly’s or? I of theirs. They were both attached to it. And it was pretty expensive, like several hundred dollars a month to be in the community. you know, and I think this is good and bad, like Molly wasn’t in it a whole lot. It was other people sort of leading the group. Now, I think the problem becomes when you sell it as so and so is going to be in here giving you advice versus like because. Right. And the crazy thing is that it’s not like the people that were in there.

34:36
didn’t know as much as anybody else, they did, they knew a lot, but when you pitch it one way and then deliver something different, I think that becomes problematic. We’re never pitching this community as Liz and myself, right? This is always a group type thing. So I think that’s important too, and I think for you, with the community, same thing, right? I would never pitch it as Steve answers all your questions in the group, right? Definitely not, not for the.

35:04
Well, for the course, yes. not for the like, it’s it’s a you really have to pitch it as a community of people like and I think I don’t know, like real life, like I used to be in a runners group. Right. And when I had a runner question, we had a group text. Like I wanted to know, certain pair of socks. Like I didn’t care who answered me in the group text. I just wanted. So I think you have to build it in that way where everybody in the community is going to add value and help other people in the community.

35:34
Yeah, that all sounds very idyllic. I think it’s maybe my space, but as soon as like I go live to everyone, I’m sure all these people want to use it for marketing. Right. And that’s where it’s just going to go to hell. So this is why I’m not going to do that for a while, because I need to research all the anti-spam bots and everything that I can implement first, because that’s what it’s going to be one big Festivus.

36:03
of spam. I can definitely see that. think another tip for people who are thinking about doing something like this is to join some communities, even if you have to pay inexpensive, and see how they manage those types of things. Everybody has different ways of managing. I know when Marie Forleo does B-School, there’s a pop-up community that lasts during the B-School period. Amy Porterfield does similar things where she has these pop-up communities.

36:32
And they seem pretty good about not having the spam. And obviously, I’m not in there 24-7, and I’m not monitoring them that closely. there’s clearly something that they’re doing to keep it. Well, yeah, it’s called, I bet it’s one person watching it all day. Not even joking. I’m willing to this is where you hire an overseas VA, honestly. This is where you pay someone overseas to monitor that.

37:01
Honestly, if if chat GPT can handle like 80 % of it, that’s it’s pretty easy for AI to spot like whether it’s going to be promotional. the other thing I think is and this is why I do think you should consider charging something to the non course members is that I think when people pay, they’re less likely to be when there’s like clear parameters set up before beforehand.

37:31
they’re less likely to do that because they don’t want to get kicked out. So I, yeah. Plus they’ve skinned the game. So I do think even having people pay something is worth it because, you know, I think it just clears out a lot of the problems. But yeah, I do think you have to monitor it pretty closely, especially with what you’re doing. The other thing that everyone has to deal with potentially is

38:00
You know, once you start charging monthly, like people’s credit cards, people complaining like, oh, you know, I couldn’t get into discord for like the last week and I get a pro rated. It opens yourself up to that stuff too, which is fine. I don’t know. I’m not even thinking that far ahead. Like if I can get my class community up and, and then I’ll consider looking at the moderation first. And then once I get the moderation down, then I’ll open it up. That, that, that’s my sequence.

38:31
I’m genuinely curious to see when you open it up. You’re just going to sit there with popcorn and laugh. I’m going to start drinking martinis and just sit there with a dirty martini. Even with ECF and Andrew, he has flare-ups happen all the time. These are people paying a of money. don’t know how much it A couple hundred dollars a month or something. A couple of hundred dollars a month.

39:01
Yeah, and I think, I don’t know, I’ve been following all the WNBA drama, so I’m all drama filled right now. I think sometimes drama’s okay as long as it’s moving towards a productive resolution. There have been some things in ECF that I did not feel were very productive and that were really, and I think that’s where as the community owner, you have to judge, is this in general going to make the community better or worse? And

39:29
even though some of it might be painful and might be hard, some of that’s okay to have happen because people do need to be able to have a place where they can speak, especially like a community like ECF where it’s a space where a lot of people don’t feel like they have anywhere else they can have these conversations. But there comes a time when it’s just bashing or just something that’s just really negative. And in that case, to me, you just have to shut it down, that conversation, that thread, whatever.

39:59
Well, one of the negatives of Discord is it’s hard to have dynamic threads. It’s basically one long chat, right? That’s a big negative. You can create separate rooms for certain topics, but it’s not like a forum where you have individual threads where people can comment. So I don’t know. have my only experience with all this is with course with courses. And I think for the course, having one long

40:29
thread works because oftentimes there’s not enough interaction with individual threads. Like when I had my other forum with threads, it just wasn’t that dynamic. So the conversation is better. when, but when you open it up to, don’t know how many people, let’s just call it like the size of my old Facebook group. Let’s say it’s like 15,000 people. Good Lord. I can’t even imagine.

40:59
what that’s going to be like. Yes. I’ll be interested to see if you decide at any point to open it up and you get to that point, does it work as a funneling tool? There’s so much work that’s involved in that. One is the moderation and then the payment processing part. Then there’s onboarding. Does Discord connect directly with a stripe or anything like that?

41:25
I’m not worried about that if it doesn’t. I’m sure it does because people have charged stuff like mid journey and whatnot. That’s all. I don’t fear that. Like writing code now is a snap because of chat. So anything I need, I can probably pump out really quickly. I don’t fear that at all. Like I don’t even have to read the documentation anymore. I was asking more for the general public, not for your own fear of that one. I’m sure there is. The answer is I’m sure there is.

41:52
Any platform will have an integration, for it to do exactly what you want, there’s some intricacies with payment processing. You might want to give them a 10-day free trial just to check it out before it kicks in. Some of those things might not be… I haven’t looked at it, so I didn’t want to comment.

42:19
Well, we’ll see the types of questions. It can be annoying. Like even then those Friday check-ins that we’ve done where we’ve opened it up to the YouTube channel. What’s annoying about that sometimes is that people are just asking very basic questions that are literally covered in like the first couple lessons in Some of them are covered in the free mini course. That is correct. And of course, if you’re a paid course member where you’ve already done the work, you know that

42:49
That can be negative. It’s almost like you need to have a beginner area, an intermediate and then advanced topics only. There’s a lot to think about here, which is why I’m not prepared to unleash it to the rest of final thought before we wrap this up. As we’re talking through this, I’m like, what if we just opened the community for webinars and put all the chat for the webinars in the community?

43:19
That was my next step actually. Because those people are already engaged. I’m not even there yet though because even those people… You’ve seen some of our live chats on our workshops get out of control. That would be the next step of It’s an interesting component to add to a webinar. I wonder if it would increase the sales.

43:50
Oh, you mean for people to ask questions? they, they not during the webinar, obviously, because you can’t monitor a chat and like discord more on the webinar. But I’m saying like for that, you know, let’s see, say webinar pitch starts on Wednesday, you get in the community on Monday, you’re in the community until Sunday, and then you’re out if you don’t buy the course. You see what I’m saying? I see. I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was thinking about having them as permanent.

44:19
unpaid members of the discord doing the moderation that you just suggested of kicking people out is tough unless you just destroy the discord server after you’re Cause then you need to know everyone’s handle and then you need to write a routine that fishes those people out and make sure and make sure they’re out. I don’t, I don’t know if that’d be worth my effort to do that.

44:48
Anyway, there’s a ton to think about. And if you guys are listening, we’re just at the beginning stages here, just talking things through. I think your community will go pretty smooth, right? Fingers crossed. it doesn’t get out of control quickly, right? There’s worse things that can happen if it grows quick, I would say.

45:07
I’ve been growing quickly, honestly has always been a problem for everything, for, for, for everything that I’ve ever done. Right. When there’s anything that grows like seven X like that one time we went on the today show that sucked. Um, and then that, when I got an influx of course members in my first, first webinar, that was kind of painful too.

45:32
because I realized I didn’t have good onboarding or anything. It’s nothing like the influx that shows you everything that’s broken in what you’re doing. Well, yeah, it’s stressful. Then you got to scramble to get it up. So we’re in the beginning stages, folks. We’ll report back. And if you’re listening to this and you’re interested in a community, let us know. Send us an email.

45:56
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Send me a note. At some point, I’ll be opening up the Discord to people who are actively selling right now. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 596. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at 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.

46:24
and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome 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, Ian from Bullseye Sellers and I dive deep into how regular people with zero followers are building $75,000 a month businesses on TikTok Shop. We’ll break down exactly how this is happening, why it’s working right now, and what it takes to launch successfully without a big audience or ad budget. So if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by all the noise online or unsure where to start,

00:28
This episode is a step-by-step, behind-the-scenes look at a strategy that’s actually working right now. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that session recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now available over at SellerSummit.com. If you missed the event, you can now get instant access to every keynote, workshop, and panel. Now, on to the show.

00:55
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Ian Page on the show. And Ian is the founder of Bullseye Sellers, where he helps e-commerce sellers launch on the TikTok Shop platform. And right now TikTok Shop is hot. It’s exploding with an expected GMV of over $50 billion this year. And it does convert four and a half times higher than traditional social media.

01:20
In this episode, we are going to break down Ian’s strategies on how to successfully launch your brand on TikTok, what it takes, what products work well on the platform. And with that, welcome to show Ian. How you doing today, man? Thank you for having me, Steve. I’m doing well. I’m in beautiful Pennsylvania. Where are you? I’m in California where the weather is perfect. I think I’m going to go for run right after this. I had the same thing. It’s like 75 degrees and sunny outside, so maybe I’ll go for a run with you.

01:49
So Ian, many the listeners I know you were at at seller summit, but many of my listeners probably do not know who you are. So I want to know how you got started in e commerce and how did you end up specializing in tick tock shop in particular? It all started with a back brace. In 2015, a back brace, a back brace. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I did a SM five. For those who don’t know, it’s an amazing selling machine. I know you know, Steve. Yep.

02:18
And it was one of those, it felt like a multi level marketing scam because all my friends were trying to get a commission off me and sell me the course. And it was like overpriced. And I was like, I don’t know about this, but you know, I had that entrepreneurial itch and I had a day job and pretty much in a cubicle and kind of that nine to five lifestyle. And I just wanted to get out of that. Um, wow, that was 10 years ago and, um, I bought the course. I just gave in. was like, all right.

02:46
screw it, I’m just going to give it a try. I’m to learn Amazon. And the course after completing it led me to a clavicle support brace. You know how you pick your first product that you. yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, I did some custom designing on it because when it, when it came from China, I was like kind of unhappy with it. It felt uncomfortable. So I actually like did a bunch of like custom designing on it with the manufacturer and it took off the clavicle support launched selling like a hundred, 200 units a day. And I was like, man, this is easy.

03:16
And I later to find out it’s not that easy for everybody, but I got, I got lucky. I had the right product at the right time. And I actually had a really early exit because what happened was I had a, a competitor that reached out to me that was a little annoyed at my presence and made me an offer. And I actually sold the brand, which at that point had a few skews in 2017. So I wasn’t actually in the e-comm space personally for too long. had immediate success and a quick.

03:45
exit. And then what happened in 2017 2018, a lot of my friends were asking me for advice. So you know, that’s just so common in the e commerce space of like, know, you know, guy who knows a guy and he’s in they stumble over each other to get your phone number and ask Ian because Ian is an e commerce expert or whatever they think I am, which I really wasn’t, I just knew a couple things. So I started doing a lot of like free consulting to friends.

04:15
And then, um, one thing led to another. And I was like, maybe I could charge for this, you know, maybe I should just sell my time. So I started selling hourly packages of consulting. And then one thing led to another. And I was like, I can’t scale this. Like I can’t scale my own hours in the day. That’s not possible. So I think maybe I should like start an agency and see what happens. And that was 2018, 2019 bulls eye sellers was born. So that’s where bulls eye came from really is all came from a back brace.

04:45
How did that lead to tick tock? Yeah. So the way that led to tick tock was in 2020. God, it was only last year. I was looking for an old number and it was only last year. Last year we went to prosper. My agency, uh, um, staff and I, think there, think eight of us went from bullseye and tick tock shop had a big booth there at prosper. And it was the coolest booth at prosper. mean, it was like lying out the door. People trying to talk to tick tock. Um,

05:14
And I already knew there was a TikTok shop. already knew viral on TikTok was always a thing and everyone wanted to go viral, but I didn’t really know like the weeds of it. Like what does it take? So I met with TikTok shop and the first thing they said is you have to become a TSP. was like, what is a TSP? They’re like, it’s TikTok shop partner. You have to become a TSP and before you can really do anything. Once you’re a TSP, you can, you’re in. And I was like, okay. So I applied and um,

05:43
supposedly it was really hard to become TSP. didn’t know. Um, cause I had a lot of peers that were like still waiting for their approval and I got approved within a month. Nice. And then, and then I was like, well, what do we do now? You know what I mean? Like, you know, I’m a, I’m a TSP. I’m an official tick tock shop partner, but I don’t know tick tock at all. And what do I do with this new found, uh, you know, license as a partner. And, um, so here’s what we did. We basically,

06:11
called all of our existing Amazon clients. had all my, all my account managers literally reach out to every single one and say, Hey, we will manage your tick tock shop for free commission only because we need to learn how to do this. And we already manage your Amazon. have asset. have all your assets. We already have this communication and this connection. Can I, for 8 % of your sales on tick tock represent your account? And of course everyone was like, sure. Because they were like sales.

06:40
It’s free sales. Like if you guys can get it and we give you 8 % and there’s no retainer, we’ll take it. Um, so we did that from right when I got back, uh, from prosper last year and I got that TSP official, whatever, which ended up not really helping me in the first year. And it’s helping me now. And we, uh, we got about 12 of our clients on Tik TOK and it was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare. Okay. We, we got rejected like 15 times and

07:09
documents never worked. And it was like, driver’s licenses were rejected, we just couldn’t get a break. It took six months, from March to October, to actually learn how to get a someone on TikTok shop in a reasonable amount of time. So I’m so glad I didn’t charge a retainer. It would have been such a nightmare. My turn would have been terrible. So was like, so happy. I was like, there’s no pressure. It’s commission only just figured out, you know, yeah. And then in October, we made our first sale.

07:39
Literally it was like middle of October, we had a skincare client and they’re now my number one client on Tik Tok actually. And they sell an eczema product and we got our first sale on Tik Tok through an affiliate video. And we were like, Oh my God, we, we are Tik Tok talk shop experts. Like literally right at that point, I was like, yeah, man, I’m an expert. Um, and then October led into the holiday season.

08:08
And that same brand did like 10 G’s in December. And it was like, wow, like this is something we can scale. That same brand did 25 G’s in January this year. They did 35 or maybe 38 in February. They broke 50 G’s in March. They broke 75 G’s in April. And right now they’re hovering at that 75 mark. Um, so they’re my biggest brand that we started from $0. Without a takeoff presence. would imagine.

08:36
from the first sale. They actually, they were banned on Tik TOK. They handed us over the account and they’re like, we actually banned ourselves because we didn’t know what we were doing, just getting it approved. So they were like negative, you know? Right. So yeah, that’s the journey of Tik TOK. It’s not this like, it’s not this like beautiful romantic story. It’s like us just like knocking our heads against the wall for six months and figuring it out. And I think that’s what a lot of people are still doing. And that’s why there’s a, there’s a big industry here now in the agency space.

09:05
manage the TikTok shops. There aren’t too many of you guys out there just yet. Maybe it’s because it’s the wild wild west so far, but it’s the wild west. Yeah, I am interested in seeing what you had to say about it. Now I know Amazon has been squeezing sellers and buyers more than ever before. And a lot of sellers are looking for alternative platforms and marketplaces to sell. So in your mind, if you’re already selling on Amazon in your own store, where does TikTok shop?

09:32
fall in the overall strategy and the priorities of selling to you? To me, it’s about timing. And what that means is where you’re at financially, because I don’t believe that a brand should stretch themselves too thin when they’re in the startup phase. And I would call that in the six figure a year phase. Okay. So if you’re a quarter million dollar seller on Amazon, I wouldn’t spend half your time trying to crack tick tock, I think you’ll go broke. I really do. Because you’re not getting enough profit from your quarter million.

10:00
to also seed samples to also pay for maybe expensive early ads on TikTok. And I think you’re going to stretch yourself too thin with your inventory and you’re not going to succeed on either platform. Okay. So what is the range that you recommend then? Seven figures on Amazon. And it’s very rare that we don’t take a client that’s not seven figures. The only times I won’t take a client that’s under seven figures on Amazon is if they already have other brands or they, just know that their capital.

10:29
infused and they can support the tick tock journey. If they’re not, and they’re bootstrapping the hell out of it. I wouldn’t recommend anybody hire an agency to do tick tock. And I say the same thing with meta Steve, like, I don’t, I don’t believe that a new seller should be like dabbling in meta dabbling in Google ads dabble. You know, I just feel like people get overly excited about all these different places that they can sell their products. And they’re masters of none, really, at that relief at that early stage.

10:58
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. Just pick one medium, master it, and then move on to the next one. Make your money, pull your money, put it into other places once you’re ready. So what I would like to do first is to get people excited about TikTok. Tell me about some of the big wins. You already mentioned that eczema skincare company. What are the expectations here on the growth that you should see? Well, let me go back to that because that that eczema skincare company, when I say $75,000 a month on TikTok, it might sound like it’s not a lot, but what

11:27
what it really is, is five to 8 million impressions a month. That’s what they’re averaging. Wow. Okay. So five to 8 million impressions a month. Going to your Amazon store. And the reason I say going to your Amazon store is we found that 50 to 70 % of people with intent to buy on tik tok will actually prefer buying on Amazon. So they’ll, they’ll get inspired by a tik tok video, they’ll search the product on Amazon, and then rather prime it and get it the same day.

11:57
Okay. I’m sure most of our listeners here, you’re going to agree if you find something on Tik TOK, what’s more convenient than buying that same product on Amazon. Right. So that eczema skincare brand is seeing success that they’ve never seen before. They’re, they’re listing on Amazon for the same product is three X from when we started. Wow. Okay. Okay. Um, and it was actually kind of a dying brand. This was a brand friend of mine that for the last two years was just losing market share every single year, slowly to more competitors.

12:27
their cost per clicks were basically out being, they were like being bit out because they couldn’t afford those costs per clicks. So they were in that situation where just slowly losing market share on Amazon. And then we reversed that with this TikTok strategy. So there’s a halo effect on Amazon. What about their store? Did it have a hell effect as well? Yeah. Yeah. Their, their DTC saw a 25 % increase.

12:54
What we surveyed is 11%, which I think is probably more accurate. So, um, let’s say a hundred people see your video on tech talk and they all want to buy what we’ve surveyed to our audience. Uh, we have a huge shopper network that we surveyed regular people. And we said, where would you go? 11 % said, I’ll go to the website. 62 % say I’ll go to Amazon and the other what? 30%, 28 % or whatever that number is said, I’ll just buy it on tech talk.

13:24
So we are seeing that spillover on their website and on Amazon and their overall lift on e-commerce is way up because of that 75 grand off TikTok. So that’s the bigger reason why you do TikTok. So of those sales on TikTok, because I know you had to give away a commission and then there’s fees and whatnot, is the TikTok sales itself profitable or are you mainly relying on the halo effect for this whole operation to be profitable overall? Barely profitable.

13:53
I think their profit now is about 10,000 a month. so 10,000 on 75,000 in sales. Yeah, so that would not be a great contribution margin with Amazon if someone’s doing that. And so when you’re measuring the halo effect here, you would just kind of extrapolate out the sales that you would normally get and everything else. I assume this brand isn’t doing anything else, right, except for TikTok Shop. Okay. That’s it, that’s all we’re doing. Nice.

14:23
Yeah, okay. They even they even showed out on their Google ads. And they actually like have, you know, taken some of their Amazon PPC budget, Google budget, and they’ve given it to us. So I do know since I’m on TikTok, there are certain things that work better than others. And I just want to, I want you to just tell the audience here, what products work well, I know you have a screening process involved with the product, and you kind of describe what that is. I want brand focused products. So what that means is like, let’s just take

14:51
you know, any old product like this, you know, that this charger here, this is not a brand, this is a charger, right? Okay. So if someone even if it’s a cool charger, if someone watched a video, and this was like a unique charger, but it wasn’t really brand focus, like didn’t have like the branding all over it, the box wasn’t heavily branded, what’s going to happen is people are going to watch the video, and 60 70 % are going to go off tiktok platform, and they’re going to have a difficult time finding you and identifying you versus the other competitors on Amazon.

15:20
That’s going to be like a Swiss cheese situation where you’re basically just paying to get sales for everyone else. And maybe you get a little bit. I don’t want that. So what I would rather have is brand focused products where it’s very easy for the consumer that’s watching the video to be like, Oh yeah, brand blah charger. And they only go to your listing. So that’s the first thing that we filter out when we’re talking to people. Cause we talked to a lot of Amazon sellers who just sell stuff. Right.

15:51
I don’t really want people that just sell stuff. I want people who are building a brand. So what is your definition of brand here? I mean, you mentioned having a box and you know, with your, I mean, that’s like par for the course today, right? So what, what, what else are you looking at? Yeah, I’m looking at a shop with consistent products, not just a bunch of products that you sell because they have, okay, that all fall under like the same niche and they’re okay. Trying to build a portfolio. Okay. Got it. Okay. That’s right. Okay. Um, yeah, so that’s number one. And then number two, and

16:21
This doesn’t disqualify you, but this just highlights the type of client that does better is a high LTV consumable for sure. So if, if, know, if you have a supplement brand, a skincare brand, a haircare brand, something like that, you can absorb those costs, you know, for the affiliate commission, the Tik TOK commission.

16:45
the ads, all that are much easier for you to absorb because you get the repeat customer and you know that your LTV is, let’s say it’s 15 % of sales is going to result in two more orders or whatever that metric is. So that’s, that’s number two, it doesn’t disqualify you, but I would definitely say if you are in that category, you’re already on you’re already like on my radar is a great prospect for TikTok. you have an example of a product that is not a consumable? That’s one of your clients that has found success? Yeah.

17:13
We have a toy brand that sells bath toys for kids light up bath toys, little squeaky bath toys. They had this great product. That’s like a mold free. It doesn’t have that little hole in it. Right. So it’s like a mold free light up little squeaky bath toys. had a viral video back in April that just went nuclear and they completely sold out on Amazon. Um, and the ROAS was awesome. I think their cost per order was like a buck 50 for like a $12 product. So they were like,

17:42
thrilled and they didn’t care that it wasn’t a repeat customer because it was a profitable sale every single time for that product. So and they were very well branded. Again, that’s one of those things where a squeaky bath toy could easily just be a product but they definitely have a good brand and they really made it branded so people could could find them on Amazon. do they have cross sells for other stuff related to bath products or whatever that they’re taking advantage of or is it just that main product?

18:07
Mainly because you know, I’m sure they do because they have other fun bath products. But we definitely on tik tok shop saw that two of their products were really just getting 90 % of the sales got it because on tik tok people are pretty impulse by right like they’re they’re not they’re not hunting. They’re sitting on a couch and they’re being hunted for you know, it’s the reverse right? Right. So they’re just going oh, that’s fun. I think my little toddler is gonna love that I’m gonna buy it.

18:36
And maybe three months down the line, if you’re lucky, they might think what was that brand about the bath toys from because I want to get something else. So it’s a little bit, a little bit I personally think that their memory on tik tok is going to be not quite as loyal to a brand as it would on Amazon. Sure. Because they’re being hunted in the initial in the initial sale. Okay.

19:03
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.

19:32
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.

19:43
Yeah. Okay. So consumables is a plus. What else do look for? So obviously, I look for someone who can afford to talk I like to say eight to 10k a month. Okay, and that and that would include my retainer. And so if you’re doing it yourself, I would say six to seven k a month. Because if you can’t afford six to seven k a month for six months, knowing that like, I literally mean, like that money is going away.

20:11
So you are investing six to seven K for six months. So that’d be like, what $42,000 $45,000. If you can handle that, and you’re, it’s almost like don’t invest money in the stock market that you’re not willing to lose that same concept. Sure. Right. Okay. We’re to be much more successful because you’re not going to squirm or the moment we get a 1.2 ROAS or the moment something doesn’t go right.

20:40
So I would say if you’re doing yourself six to seven K, that would include the cost for you to sample your products out. That would include the commissions to the affiliates. And if you are including an agency, I would go up to 10 to 12 K because I would also pay for the agency as well. What is the timeframe that you expect to get a better ROAS? I can understand burning cash in like the first X number of months.

21:09
What is the expectation? Six months. Six months, okay. And the reason being, and I say that more of like, you can expect to be at a profit in six months if you have the right agency partner. Okay. I see guys doing it themselves that are eight months in and they’re still losing money. So I’d say if you have someone that knows their stuff, you can be profitable in six months. Okay, so the expectation here is be willing to lose, let’s say 10K a month for six months, $60,000 investment.

21:38
This is no different than meta ads, for example, in the beginning, you’re just panning for gold, right? Yep. You’re gonna lose money in the beginning. Yep. Okay. And a big part of it’s the sampling. Okay, so we just did a webinar with Mary Ruth, the CRO, his name is Jay Hunter, I recommend checking that on my on my YouTube, I’ll shout out to my YouTube, just type in bullseye sellers, you’ll find it. It’s a great webinar because they’re doing they’re projected to do 70 million this year on TikTok.

22:07
So they’re in the top 10. They’re like in that they’re they’re hanging out with tick tock corporate at the office. They’re at that level. So but they started at zero January 2024. They were at $0. within only 16 months from zero to 70 million on a year is insane. Yeah. They told me that the reason why people fail this what Jay said the reason why most people fail on tick tock is they just don’t continue.

22:35
They squirm, they send out 100 samples, some videos come back, the videos suck. This is what happens, right? And they put a little ad dollars behind the videos, they spend 500 bucks, they get no sales, and they’re like, screw TikTok. I’m just gonna go back to Amazon. I think that can be said about any content platform, right? If you start a YouTube channel, you gotta keep with it for at least a year. Same with anything, right? That’s true. That’s true.

23:04
And it’s no different on Tik TOK. So what, what Jay said is they’re sampling. They really ratcheted up their sampling and they just got less picky about who they, you know, sent them out to. I asked Jay point blank on the call. I was like, you guys are the big dogs. Who are you sampling? Just, you know, are you looking for those Kylie Jenner influencers? Are you sampling plain old mom and pop affiliates? And he’s like, if they have an 80 % post rate, meaning for each sample they receive, they post 80 % of the time of video.

23:33
or higher, I will send them a sample. I don’t care about their GMB history. I don’t care anything else. I’m like, wow. You mean 80 % of the people that receive a product actually do at least one video? Is that what you mean? The the post rate is a metric on TikTok for the affiliate. Okay, so that’d be I received 100 products and samples this month and I did videos on at least 80 of them. Okay, basically you’re measuring whether they’re going to take action.

24:02
That’s exactly right. Okay. So he said if they have an 80 % or higher, I don’t care about their GMV, which is their sales metrics. I will send them a sample. Interesting. Okay. And they’re huge. So the point is, is they’re not getting pickier. They’re getting less picky as time goes on. I mean, I’ve noticed, uh, tick tockers make a ton of money when they have like hardly any subs. Uh, there’s been a lot of case studies on that. So maybe that’s why the theory like it’s panning for gold, right? It’s like playing the lottery in a way.

24:32
And he knows that he knows his cogs. So he knows that he’s sending on a sample to get 300 impressions. Like he knows that that’s what he’s factoring in. I’m getting 300 impressions. Okay. Okay. If I get more than that, that’s a bonus. And if I can get a spark ad and turn that 300 impressions into a monetized sponsored ad and it does well, great. That’s a bonus too, but he just factors in cog sample out equals 300 impressions.

25:04
Let me ask you this, and I’m sure you don’t know his numbers, but of those 300 impressions, what would the expected conversion rate be or just a ballpark? What would you expect to be a good conversion rate on that? Yeah, I don’t know those numbers, but, um, I mean, is it higher than Amazon or is it much lower? I would imagine it’s lower, right? Yeah, it’s, definitely lower because it’s not, it’s not, it’s not bottom of the Yeah, no, it’s not. But what happens is, and what Jay was saying on the call is.

25:33
If you do that enough times, you appear to be everywhere. And the average person starts to see your videos that that eight to 10 times, which is what they need to see in order to be like, okay, I’m going to buy the product. Um, and you have that appearance. See of just being everywhere. it. Okay. That’s like Alex Hamrozi strategy. A hundred percent. Yeah. And you can’t, you can’t be everywhere on Amazon. You can’t write the platform doesn’t allow you to be everywhere. You’re only with intent. That’s it. And

26:03
The other downfall of the Amazon strategy is you are as good as your, as your competitor to your left and to your right. If you’re a little bit more expensive and you don’t have enough differentiation, you’re losing. If you’re a little bit cheaper, um, but your reviews aren’t as good, you might still be losing. So you’re only as good as the guy to your left and to your right, or, if it’s mobile above you or below you. with tick tock, you don’t have to worry about your competitors. There are no competitors.

26:32
It’s just between you and the person watching your video at that moment in time. Okay. Got it. All right. So now, now that at least I have a better idea of how this all works, what is the process that you guys take to take a brand with zero TikTok presence and then grow it to, I guess, break even within six months? Yeah. I like to say 50 K within six months. That’s what we always do. Okay. Sure. 50 K a month in six months.

26:58
So the first thing is we have to cut out the shop set up time. We’ve gotten that down to under a week. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Because if we spin our wheels on that time is money. That’s an upset client. We don’t want that. So we got it down to under a week, unless you’re in a really tough category, like weight loss or something. And if there’s FDA approvals, it might go to 10 days, but for most products, it’s under a week. Um, and then right after that, we’re using a, our sister company, sell a code to basically do giveaways.

27:27
So we’re actually in the giveaway business too now because, um, tick-tock is aware that there’s this cold start period where they don’t allow you to do much. So it’s kind of a catch 22 because as soon as your shop is live, they’re like, good, you can only outreach to 2000 people a week on the affiliate network and you have no sales. So those 2000 people are probably going to ghost you. Right. You have no reviews. So the consumer is not going to buy any of your products.

27:57
And we’re going to limit the amount of people that you’re allowed to talk to because you haven’t made any sales, you haven’t proven yourself. So it’s kind of an impossible situation. So the way we get out of that is we have our own shopper network that we created with the seller, seller Co. And we basically just pay for our own GMB. So we say, we tell our clients upfront, you’re going to give away a couple hundred units. And you’re going to basically, we’re going to pay upfront for those units, full retail price, and then we’re going to send shoppers to your shop.

28:27
And they’re gonna really make a purchase, check out the products going to be shipped, that’s going to increase your shop score, it’s going to show tick tock that you’re making sales. And then we’re gonna ask them to write reviews. Okay. So that’s the first 30 days usually, this is like old school Amazon, dude, it’s right back to where it was. And I was so nervous about doing this because Amazon’s been so hard on this. And then I talked to guys at tick tock corporate, and they love it. They love it so much.

28:57
We’re that we’re in the tick tock, um, Lark channel, which is like tick tock Slack. So we can actually talk to people at tick tock. We love it so much that they’re like tagging my name and tagging other people’s names and saying, Hey, can you show the seller your, uh, your, uh, cold start solution? Because they constantly getting that type of messaging from sell it from, from other agencies. So like, I’m actually like getting leads from tick tock for this other service.

29:26
Hilarious. Okay, so you have this database of shoppers who want free stuff, right? Just like the old days of Snag Shout. Yeah, or like Rebakey. It’s kind of like that. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And so you’re basically just jump starting the reviews on your shop. That’s right. Right. Okay. So that creates the necessary social proof for the other people want to jump on board. That’s right. Okay. And we’re getting through the $2,000. What’s called the $2,000 GMV threshold. That’s what it’s called.

29:56
So you have to sell $2,000 with the stuff for TikTok to, to allow you to expand. Yep. I have it right here. If I can share my screen, I’ll show you, but I, uh, yeah, I have a good old chat GPT for everybody here. So here are the thresholds. I’m going to have to do entire screen cause it’s not finding my chat GPT. So if you haven’t made a single sale, you can’t outreach to anybody.

30:26
Wow. Kind of weird, right? You can’t do anything. Can you buy your own stuff though to jumpstart that? Yeah, but it has to be through an affiliate. Ah, okay. So take tax gonna have to do something about this. But because it’s a little bit of a cat. It’s really the definition of a catch 22. Right. Once you get $2,000 in sales, then, or once you have a single sale up to 2000

30:55
then you’re allowed to reach out to 2000 creators a week. Okay. 2000 creators is nothing. sounds like a lot though, but it’s nothing. Okay. The reason why it’s nothing is because you’re going to get ghosted because you’re a brand new product. Okay. Then if you have 2000 to 50,000 sales, it over three X is your outreach per week. So that’s why I, that’s why we’re always like focused on that two K to get right here. Got it. Okay.

31:23
And then obviously once we get to 50 K, which we’re not going to see products for $50,000. No one’s going to pay for that. That’s when it’s just complete unlimited outreach at that point. me an idea of how many creators you guys typically reach out to in a given week, because even 7,000 sounds like a ton. Yeah, we usually max out. Okay. Yeah. We get about five process or is that a manual process? It is a, um,

31:52
A little bit of both, a little bit of both. Um, we, we use some really good software partners that help us automate it because we’re, we’re managing 38 shops right now. So obviously like with 38 shops, we’re not going to be doing it all manual, but there are some components that have to be manual. Um, especially when we have a video that performs well, we manually reach out to that person and invite them into a discord channel where we can have much better dialogue with that individual and like do more long-term strategy with that affiliate.

32:22
But I’d it’s like 90 % automated at this point for us. But for the individual, not you guys per se, like, do you typically have to go through each creator and hit like the invite button? Or is there a software? Unless you sign up for a software. I’ll do some call-outs. Uptick.io, U-P-T-K dot I-O is great. There’s another one called Reacher, ReacherApp.com.

32:50
These are softwares where you can basically set thresholds and parameters. Like I want people, I want females. want, um, you know, um, people that have dog channels or whatever, right. For dogs or, know, whatever threshold you want, or you can say, I want people with 80 % or higher post-rate, or I want people that have their GMB levels here. So we will usually max out that 7k and we usually get about a 5 % response rate.

33:19
out of 7k so that’s 350 people responding saying yeah I’m interested to work with you and out of those 350 we’re gonna we’re gonna probably distill that down to about 200 affiliates that we work with that week every single week. So of those 350 who respond you you distill it down to 200 before you send out samples or are you sending out same usually usually because we let them respond and then sometimes it fizzles sometimes just you know they they never take the sample.

33:48
other times, we, we, we, we only have a limit or a budget with our client of 200 samples. So if we have more people than we need, we’re going to pick our favorites out of those 350 for the week, and then they bench the other 150 for next week, right? Right. Because none of our clients tell us, Hey, you can send out unlimited samples. That does not happen. Everyone has limits. Yeah.

34:16
But it seems like in the beginning, you’re pretty much constrained to 350 at most, right? Based on the percentage. It’s just a numbers game, right? So it’s a numbers game. Yeah, you are. You are pretty much constrained. So at most 350, it sounds like samples every week. At most and in the early stages. Yeah, right. In early stages. Like Mary Ruth, for example, is doing about seven to 10,000 samples a month. You know, they’re at that level where they can manage that. Right. Yeah. Okay. That’s crazy.

34:46
So when you’re talking about profitability overall, you’re factoring the cost of those samples, right? 100%. Okay. All right. We’re tracking sample cost MCF fulfillment. If you’re using MCF, if you’re doing a three PL, we’ll factor that in. Um, if you’re invited by tick-tock for FBT, which is another subject we can talk about, and it’s really exciting. Um, we factor that in and, um, now another thing you should know, and I want, I want people to know this. You don’t have to pay the same rate to the affiliate. If you’re running an ad on their video.

35:16
versus if it’s an organic video. Okay. What is, how does the rate, you can set your own rates for ads or that’s right. You can, you can negotiate with them and say, good. I know you were at 20%, your video is doing okay organically, but I really want to try it with ads. Okay. In order for me to spend my money on ads, I need you to go down to 5%.

35:40
And then they’ll send you what’s called a spark code, which gives you authority to run ads on their content. And then they get that automatic 5 % commission. So that’s how we can afford to fit in an advertising budget and a video. What is the typical affiliate rate? Typical is 15 to 20. That’s the expectation from the creator. Okay. That’s pretty high actually for physical product. I know. Yeah. I know.

36:05
All right, so walk, let’s continue on the process. You’re sending out, let’s say 200 based on the 7,000, you’re sending out 200 samples. What is your expected hit rate on that? 80 % will make a video, right? Yeah, 80 % will make a video. So then we’re at what 160 videos a week, right? And then we don’t expect any of those videos to go viral. We don’t, we don’t have that expectation whatsoever. Okay, we expect the videos to

36:34
potentially perform in an advertising campaign. And then what we do is we put we get the spark codes for all those videos, we negotiate the 5%. If a video is trash, we’re not going to offer anything that video is just going to sit on the page and just die. Okay. But if the video has any glimmer of hope, and we are in our thresholds are low, Steve, because we know we’ve been wrong. Okay, we have had times where the videos did not look great. And we were wrong.

37:02
We did not think that video was going to perform it and ended up being a $10,000 video in sales, right? You just don’t know. So unless the video is absolute garbage, the captions backwards, I didn’t even mention the brand. They’re in a cave. Can’t even see their face. We will offer them. We will negotiate a spark code 5 % commission and we will put it into what’s called GMV max ads. what are your thresholds? You said they’re low. What are your thresholds? It mentions the brand name.

37:31
it at least goes over the features and benefits of the product. Maybe it identifies the problem and solution, right? Okay, that’s a pretty low bar. It is like my baby had eczema. I rub this on the baby, the baby no longer has eczema. Okay, cool. Maybe the video quality isn’t great. But it looks super raw and it might work. You don’t care about the view count. No. Okay. Interesting. All right.

38:01
So here’s why we’re only going to put five, 10 bucks on that video, Steve. Okay. You see, we’re just going to see if the video can get a little bit of little action. One sale. see, okay. I would think that if it didn’t do well organically that it wouldn’t do on the video in the ad, but I guess that’s not the case. You’ve the case at all. Okay. Yeah. And that I thought the same thing. I had the exact same assumption as you. was like, let’s, this is how we did it at beginning. Let’s see which videos perform well and only run ads on those.

38:31
Okay. And guess what happened? We had nothing to run ads on. then, you know, it’s like, and then what do we do? Like, you know, and then, you know, we wasted all those samples. Like, why would you do that? That’s a lot of money the client paid to get samples in our hands. We got to do something. So we just went, screw it. Let’s put a little money on everything. And it worked. And GMV Max is a genius program. So here’s why. Just because it doesn’t go viral doesn’t mean that

39:01
The ad platform can’t turn it into a performing video. And here’s why the ad platform actually is good at identifying the avatar. It’s actually really good at finding the right people for the video. matches up the, the, the, the shopper to the video. So if the person has a thousand followers and you know, the video doesn’t have a crazy hook or something like that, just cause it only gets 300 videos doesn’t mean that the advertising console can’t find the right shopper for that video.

39:31
and get it into the right impressions. Okay. You only pay per click. That’s it. So you’re just, you’re just trying to get enough of the right impressions to the right avatar. And then once you start getting a few clicks and those clicks are, you know, buck 50 buck 25, okay. Way cheaper than Amazon 75 cents a lot of times. So yeah, you’d be surprised how well those perform on ads. can see tick tock knows who shops a lot on tick tock shop. they can easily just, okay. I get it. All right.

40:00
Yeah, it’s smart. Their AI is extremely intelligent. I think their advertising console is probably a couple years ahead of Amazon. Because I would think that this is one of my questions for you, actually. I would think going viral would be bad because then you run out of stock and everything. But I think this way, it seems like you’re getting consistent sales as opposed to waves of sales. Is that accurate? Yeah. And I wouldn’t say and it’s never bad to go viral. It’s awesome. Because at the end of the day, you know,

40:28
All the expenses are covered now, right? They’re like, great, that first four months was painful and now it’s all kind of paid back because I got a shit ton of organic sales and Amazon and I paid nothing almost for those sales. Right. But you’re right. It’s not controllable. It’s not something that I can scale. It’s not something I can promise or something I can predict. And I don’t like that. You know? Yeah. Well, what percentage of your videos have you seen go viral just in your experience?

40:55
I don’t even know at this point because we have 38 accounts with more videos being added every single day. But I can, I can count on one hand, the amount of videos I’ve gone viral. Wow. Okay. And most of your people are probably having 200 new videos added every single week. So, right. Very, very rare. Now here’s another reason why you’re less likely to go viral talking about a product than you will just making a funny video of, your dog farting in the background or something like that. Right. That’s, that’s different. You know, people are going to share that.

41:24
But people aren’t necessarily going to share a video that talks about how to cure your eczema to like all their friends. They might share it to one person that they know has eczema. You see the difference? So it’s situational. of those five that went viral, was there some crazy hook involved? One of them was a doctor that was talking about the dangers of parasites and it was terrifying. Okay.

41:51
Okay, so his hook was scaring the living crap out of you that your body is full of parasites. Okay. It worked. I mean, people were buying that product left and right thinking they were gonna drop dead with parasites. And he was a doctor. So he had some clout, and we were lucky to get him. Okay. Another video that went viral was the bathtub video. And it viral because it was really pretty. The lady turned off the light, she turned on all their little toys and the kid was in the bathtub and the whole bathroom lit up. It was awesome. So just it was kind of a spectacle. Okay. Yeah.

42:20
with the eggs in our product, which is our top selling product we have in our portfolio right now. They’ve never gone viral. It’s been $1 out $2 in $1 out $3 in the whole time. It’s been painful. Videos have performed well, meaning the ROAS has been four and half five cost per order has been reasonably good. But it’s been one of these brands where like we’ve had to work for every single every single impression. reason why I’m asking this

42:48
Is because can you provide guidelines for your people to go viral? Yeah. No, you can’t. And Jay, I’m glad you brought this up. Jay Jay talks about this. He’s like, don’t try to chase for reality. It’ll actually happen less often. If you try to, if you try to rinse and repeat and repeat, repeat, like find that formula, you’re actually going to end up having worse performing videos. You have to let people do what they’re going to do. And that magic quality is only in the

43:15
idea that that person had at that moment in time. Now you can give them basic parameters like this is what my product does. And you know, they have to make the proper claims and they have to not say things that they shouldn’t say. But outside of the basic here’s what it does. And, know, you know, just the basic description of the product. It’s up to that creator. And you want it to be up to that creator to find a exciting, fresh, inventive and personalized way to communicate it.

43:43
And then you have better chances. Cause I was asking Jay the same thing. I was like, man, my percentages are really low. It’s like your percentages are on par. was like, okay, wow. That almost makes me depressed and also makes me happy at the same time. It’s like, So give the creator total freedom. You tell them basically about your product and just let, let it run. Let it run. Okay. Yeah. Amazing. Because there are some, there are certain things that do matter. Like.

44:13
the watch time, there’s a six second watch time that TikTok looks for. So if your video never gets past that six second watch time, the odds of it going viral are zero. But if your video can hook people and keep them on the video for over six seconds, your odds are actually higher. So we do know that. We do know that that first six seconds really matters. So you don’t want to start your video of a, my name is Joe. And you know, let me tell you about my, you know, that’s too slow. Okay. There has to be a hook.

44:42
you know, the famous concept of the sure. Yeah. But we don’t want the hook to be the hook. We want it to be the hook that the person comes up with on their own. We want it to be organic. Got it. Yeah. I know a lot of people have gotten banned from TikTok shop. Like, can you just provide some like things not to do? At this point, it’s getting better. It’s actually getting a lot better. That was a lot of that was a problem with TikTok last year.

45:10
Everyone was getting banned left and right and they were getting banned for no good reason. They were getting banned for just trying to submit this the same document multiple times. It’s like, come on, man. Like, that’s the only document the guy has like don’t ban him because he tried three times he only has that document. That’s the invoice or that’s his LLC document for crying out loud. So it’s gotten a lot better. But I would say if you do have that problem, reach out to me and we have people on the inside. Most of time it’s stupid and we can we can get it fixed.

45:40
There was a people getting banned for false claims and whatnot too. Are there any guidelines? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s in the supplement world. More than anything, you know, there at the end of the day, there is something called the Federal Trade Commission. Well, I thought incentivize reviews as part of that too, but apparently not. Right. Well, it is. And we figured out how to make it compliant. So there’s some very nuanced rules to reviews. Okay. Reviews.

46:10
are actually totally legal. If they’re incentivized, they’re totally legal. As long as you claim that it was incentivized in the review. That’s how Amazon’s allowed to sell millions and millions of billions of dollars with the vine reviews. Right? Because it says free product. Got it. Okay. Okay. So I actually, I have a lawyer, an Amazon lawyer that I’ve been working with for years and I said, how do I sell reviews and not get in trouble? And he said, here’s what the FTC law say. You have to say this.

46:38
So we actually distilled it down to a very simple sentence. Every single review at the end of the review says, I received this product for free. Okay. And we’re clear. Now every marketplace has its own rules. Maybe Walmart doesn’t like it. I don’t know. I can’t speak for Walmart, but just know that you are 100 % in the clear with the FTC and you’re not committing any federal law breaking any federal laws by incentivizing reviews. As long as you have that disclaimer. I guess what I was trying to get at is what if your affiliate just starts

47:06
making wild claims about your product. happens? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the affiliates going to get banned or they’re going to get a strike. So there’s like a three strike system and your account’s going to get the same strike.

47:21
Even if it’s not your fault? Like you have no control over the affiliates, right? The only control you have is to make sure you send them the proper information in advance. what, what, uh, what Mary Ruth says is don’t say it and they have a list of sentences. Don’t say these things. But if they do, you still get in trouble. Yeah. If it gets, if they get them, if they get the strike, you get the strike. Okay. See, that does not seem fair because you have no control over your affiliates, right? I know.

47:49
So like if I wanted to take any of your brands down, you and I would just sign up as an affiliate and just start spouting nonsense. Oh, hell yeah. Right. Just right. You know, be like, this cures every form of cancer I’ve ever seen. And it’s just, it’s a cure all for all diseases. And yeah, for sure. It would be a terrible thing to do for a for a shop. They got to fix that. Right. I mean, you know, the reason why they do it is they do it so that the shop is very mindful and

48:18
If the shop didn’t get that mark, or whatever you call a flag or whatever on their, you know, on their point system, they have a 24 point system every shop. If they didn’t get it, the shop wouldn’t be constantly reminded to do a better job at getting the right product briefs out. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it’s up to the shop to properly educate the affiliate and go ahead. Yes, this is a weight loss product, but you are not allowed to say that it’s going to guarantee weight loss, or you’re not allowed to say the even the word weight loss.

48:48
So what you can say is pant sizes, I now fit in this dress, those kinds of things. People get the idea. I mean, this just makes negative, like you thought negative review bombing was bad on Amazon. This could take down entire accounts, right? This is much more severe. Yeah, but you’d have to have a ton of like, you know, if you wanted to be one of those guys, you’d have to take, you’d have to have like a ton of TikTok accounts and ask for a ton of samples. You know what mean? Probably true. But it…

49:15
It’s not as bad as you think like we we have a lot of supplement brands. And we also try to focus on products that are less risky in the portfolio. So like, like the the parasite cleanse I was telling you about, you know, it’s less risky because you know, but but we don’t say guaranteed to kill parasites. We don’t say stuff like that extreme. just say, parasites are really bad for you. Here’s some signs that you have parasites.

49:43
And here’s a great product that if you feel you do have them could help you with that. And that’s fine. But there are certain areas like weight loss.

49:55
just catch all medical claims that yeah, you gotta watch out for. So I wanna switch gears and talk about your services here. Do your clients typically use you for the launch phase and then feel like they can handle themselves in steady state or do they tend to stay with you in the long run? Cause you’re constantly getting new affiliates, new leads. Like what’s the life cycle like? They all stay. They all stay with me. Yeah. And I think it’s just because a lot of our sellers are a lot more mature. They’ve been on Amazon for a long time.

50:25
They have a DTC presence. A lot of them are working on getting in a lot of stores. So they’re already stretched pretty thin between like meta, um, um, Amazon, Chewy or whatever other marketplaces, Walmart now. So they’re usually just like, screw it. Like if you can just do your job and talk to me every two weeks, give me reports. I know where things are at. And in six months, it looks realistic that I can make a profit. Great.

50:53
That’s true. guess if it includes your fees, your retainer fees and everything and you’re making a profit. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe at some point, maybe it’s early, right? Maybe in six months or a year, some of my clients will be like, you know what, we’ve learned a lot. You guys got us to this place. Now we’re doing 150,000 a month. We want to take it in house and that’s going to happen. But right now, Tik Tok is such an anomaly. And another thing, Tik Tok is, is so much more work than Amazon that

51:22
Like think about on Amazon, you just list your product, send it into FBA, and then you run acts. Right. I might be oversimplifying it, but it’s really, mean, there’s more to it, but yeah, at a basic level. Yeah. At a basic level. Right. Yeah. On TikTok that does nothing for you. Like you have nothing with those things you without affiliates, you have nothing. And without affiliates, um, that’s where all the work is, is all those negotiations, all those conversations, the sampling, um, pulling those.

51:51
affiliates over to discord, getting them on, you know, running games with them, getting them keeping them engaged with the brand, building up that discord community. Come on, how many people want to spend time doing that? So what is expected from the client? I just want to get an idea of the workload for the client. Stay in stock. Okay. All right. So it’s just like selling an Amazon. Stay in stock. Don’t handle the rest. Stay in stock. Okay.

52:17
Yeah, stay in stock. And when we slack you a request for increased budgets, please respond, right? Just simple stuff like that. Like let us know. Let us know that, you know, we just need that cooperation on ad spend sampling. And if there’s any documentations we need, just be available. okay. What percentage of that 10k we were talking about earlier is towards product versus services? Mostly, mostly product and ad. So

52:46
Our retainers 4k, we’re very, we’re very open about that on our website. We literally have like a deck with our pricing. So I I’m very open about my pricing structure. Uh, we charge 4k. Um, so you’re looking at that additional 6k is in sampling and ads. Okay. Yeah. Unless your product is like an $800 air filter, then we have a different conversation to talk about. course. Of course. Yeah. Hey, so Ian, where can people

53:13
find you and get an idea of whether this will work for them. So I actually recommend that people go to the YouTube channel, watch, watch the Jay Hunter webinar first, because he breaks it down, I break it down, it’s the best place to get out, basically a long format pitch of if tick tock is for you. Okay, because we have a we have a 25 minute live q &a on there with a lot of sellers asking those tough questions. So watch that. It’s great. And if you still are interested after that, and you feel like you’re you kind of

53:42
you’re ready for that TikTok investment, financially speaking, and you want to outsource instead of doing it yourself, you can find me at bullseye sellers.com. Um, and if you book a call right on bullseye sellers.com, I will actually be invited to the call and I will meet you on that call. So then we can just talk about it and see if it’s a fit for you. And I will turn you away if I don’t think you’re ready or I don’t think your products, if it will be super honest with you. Yeah, I don’t want to fail. hate failing. Plus you don’t want to deal with someone who has

54:12
the wrong expectations, right? That’s even. Yeah. Like, yeah. How is it going to benefit me? if month three, we’re doing exactly what we said we’re going to do in month three, but you’re like tapping out because of the finances. It’s like, I don’t really want to play that game. I don’t want you as a client for three months. I want you as a client for years. So I’m in it. I’m in it for the long haul. Sounds good. Ian. Hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I learned a lot and I’m sure the audience did too. So thank you so much. You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. Hope you enjoyed this episode.

54:41
If your brand falls under the guidelines discussed in this episode, then you should definitely give TikTok Shop a try. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejobe.com slash episode 595. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejobe.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.

00:01
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 the other day, a student asked me how I felt about Amazon Buy With Prime and whether to add it to your Shopify store. So in this episode, I give you the unfiltered truth about what Buy With Prime actually does behind the scenes and why it might be hurting your business more than helping it. You’ll learn how this seemingly helpful feature could be quietly siphoning your customer data and handing it over to Amazon.

00:30
But before we begin, I want to let you know that the recordings are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at Sellersummit.com. If you missed the event, this is your chance to catch every keynote, every session, and every strategy that was shared on stage. These recordings are packed with actionable insights from 7-figure sellers and ecommerce experts, so don’t miss out.

00:57
Welcome to the MyWifeCouterJob podcast. Today’s episode is a little different because I need to warn you about something that’s quietly undermining your business. Amazon is stealing your customers and you’re the one handing them over. You built your brand, you paid for the traffic, you earned that sale, but somehow Amazon got it. Well, here’s what no one is telling you. While you’re busy scaling your Shopify store, Amazon is quietly slipping into your checkout flow with a feature that looks helpful.

01:25
but it’s actually a data siphoning Trojan horse. It’s called Bywith Prime. And yes, it offers faster shipping. And yes, it can boost your conversion rate. But the customer you just paid to acquire, you don’t own them. You don’t get the real email, you can’t retarget them, and you can’t build loyalty. Amazon owns the data and Amazon owns the customer. And you, you just get the bill. And if you think Bywith Prime is helping your business, you are not seeing the bigger picture.

01:53
Because Amazon doesn’t just want to help your store, they want to be your store. So in this video, I’m going to show you exactly how it’s happening and what you need to do right now before it’s too late. Let’s break it down. Buy with Prime is Amazon’s move to extend its reach outside of amazon.com. It lets you, the brand owner, add a little Prime badge to your product pages. Shoppers can then click the Buy with Prime button, breeze through checkout using their Amazon account, and get access to that sweet two-day Prime shipping.

02:23
Sounds amazing, right? You don’t have to handle inventory. You don’t have to handle fulfillment. You don’t even have to earn their trust because Amazon does all that for you. And Amazon claims that it works. They say that brands see a 25 % increase in conversions just by placing the Buy With Prime badge on the page. But here’s what they don’t tell you. That conversion, it might be the last time you ever hear from that customer again. Because the moment they click that Prime button, it’s no longer your checkout.

02:53
It’s no longer your funnel and it’s definitely not your customer anymore. Sure, Amazon says that you’ll get 25 % more sales with Buy With Prime and it sounds great, right? But let me ask you this, can you email that customer again? Nope. When someone checks out using Buy With Prime, Amazon gives you a masked email, something like abc123atmarketplace.amazon.com. That’s not their real address. You can’t send them a thank you note. You can’t check in on their order.

03:22
And you definitely can’t upsell or launch new product campaigns. And this matters a lot. Email is how DTC brands survive. It is your direct line to the customer. You don’t have to pay for ads and every email can drive revenue. Think abandoned cart reminders, restock alerts, VIP early access deals, sales, coupons. It all starts with an email. No email equals no relationship. Just a one-time transaction you’ll probably never see again.

03:53
And if you think you’ll retarget Buy With Prime customers again later with ads, think again. Buy With Prime moves the customer off of your site and onto Amazon servers. That means your tracking pixels on Facebook, Google, TikTok, they’re never going to fire. No retargeting, no lookalike audiences, no attribution, no follow-up. And here’s why that’s a massive problem. I run a seven-figure store called Bumblebee Linen’s, and we sell personalized handkerchiefs for weddings. Now you’d think,

04:22
that we wouldn’t get that much repeat business. I mean, sure, the divorce rates are on 50%, so maybe there’s a second chance market, but here are my real numbers. Only 12 % of our customers come back and buy again, but that 12%, they generate 36 % of our total revenue. And we’re in a niche with low repeat customer rates. For most stores, the numbers are way higher, which means that if you can’t follow up, if you can’t retarget or email again,

04:51
You are leaving a huge chunk of money on the table. And this is not a fluke. This is how running a successful brand works. Your first sale is just the beginning. The real profit comes after the first order if you can get them to come back. But with Buy with Prime, that door slams shut. No data, no contact, no chance to build loyalty. So sure, Amazon might help you close the sale, but they’re stealing the relationship. And without that, you’re not building your business.

05:20
you’re actually building theirs. Now let’s switch gears a little bit and talk numbers because Buy With Prime might look like a conversion booster, but under the hood, it’s actually a profit killer. Here’s what you’re actually paying for with every order. First off, Amazon takes a 3 % cut of the order subtotal just for using the Buy With Prime service. This is their platform fee, basically a toll just to get access to their checkout and the Prime badge. Then there’s the Amazon fulfillment fee.

05:49
This is what you pay Amazon to pick, pack and ship your product using their warehouses. Now the exact cost depends on the size and weight of your item, but for most standard size products, it’s around five to six bucks per unit. And that’s just today’s rate because Amazon keeps raising prices. In fact, fulfillment fees have nearly doubled since 2020, a 96 % increase. But it doesn’t stop there. Since Amazon controls the checkout, they also charge a payment processing fee of 2.4 %

06:19
plus 30 cents per transaction, which is similar to what Stripe or Shopify payments charges. Now 2.4 % might not sound like much, but for comparison, I only pay 2.1 % to process credit cards on my store. So even that adds up fast. By the way, if you’re interested in learning how to start a brand without Amazon, make sure you sign up for my free six-day e-commerce mini course below. It’s 100 % free and I guarantee you’ll learn a lot. Let’s break down all those fees on a $50 product.

06:49
your buy with Prime fee is about $1.50. FBA fulfillment is around $5.38. Payment processing is around $1.50. That is $8.38 in fees for a $50 product just to fulfill and process a single order. And that’s before you factor in your product costs, your ad spend, your team, your rent, all the things you need to actually run a business. If you’re operating on a 30 to 40 % margin, like most DTC brands, buy with Prime

07:18
is eating up 25 to 30 % of your profit every time. And what do you get in exchange? No email address, no retargeting, no brand loyalty, no second sale. You’re literally paying Amazon to take your customer and your margin. It’s like hiring a middleman to show up at your own checkout, close the sale, and walk away with the customer data while charging you for that privilege. So yeah, your conversion rate might go up, but if you’re losing money on every order, what exactly are you celebrating?

07:48
Now at this point, some of you might be thinking, all right, I lose a little margin, maybe some data, but if it helps me grow, isn’t it worth it? Well, here’s the part that no one’s talking about. Amazon is not just helping you, they’re studying you. Every time a customer checks out with Buy with Prime, Amazon learns what’s selling on your store, what kind of customer buys it, what price points convert best, and which products are selling fast away from the Amazon marketplace.

08:16
They’re collecting data on your product market fit, your positioning and your brand story. And they’re doing it without taking any inventory risks themselves. And that should terrify you because this isn’t speculation. Amazon has a long track record of spotting wing products and then launching their own versions. One of my friends used to sell emu oil and she built a solid business that is until Amazon stepped in, launched their own emu oil and undercut her price by 30%.

08:45
And to make things worse, Amazon started running ads for their product right on her product listing. And needless to say, her revenue tanked almost overnight. This isn’t just happening in niche products either. Not long ago, I was shopping for garbage bags. And as I’m shopping for GLAD bags, which is what I typically buy, up pops Amazon’s own branded version of bags at 30 % cheaper. Now let’s be honest, I’m just going to throw them away anyway, so I actually bought Amazon’s version.

09:14
And this kind of thing happens way more often than you think. Amazon has done it to luggage companies, battery brands, fashion labels. Even household goods with millions in revenue have gotten cloned and crushed. And now, if you use Buy With Prime, you’re handing them the blueprint voluntarily. Buy With Prime isn’t just a checkout button. It’s surveillance software disguised as a growth hack. You’re feeding the algorithm with your best data on your dime. And if you think Amazon’s not planning to use it,

09:43
you haven’t really been paying attention. Because Amazon doesn’t just want to support e-commerce brands, they want to replace them. Now look, I’m not saying you should never use Buy With Prime. There are situations where it makes sense, but if you’re going to use it, you need to be strategic and not blind. Buy With Prime can work well for impulse buy products, especially those under $30. If you’re selling something quick and giftable, and you’re trying to convert cold traffic, people who have never heard of your brand, the Prime badge can

10:13
absolutely lift conversions. And if you’re already fulfilling through Amazon FBA and your margins can handle the fees, it can be a useful short-term tool. But here’s when it becomes a problem. If your business relies on repeat purchases, email marketing, or loyalty flows, Buy with Prime breaks that engine. You don’t get the real email, you can’t retarget, and you lose the chance to build a real relationship. And it’s not just the customer data. It is the entire Shopify ecosystem.

10:42
Your discount codes, they’re not gonna work. Your subscription plugin, it’s not compatible. Any post purchase upsell or cross sell apps you have will be completely bypassed. Buy with Prime is a black box. It takes your customer out of Shopify’s checkout flow and then breaks the tech stack you spent years optimizing. And let’s be honest here, you can’t build a sustainable DTC brand on one-off sales. In my own business, only 12 % of customers are repeat buyers

11:10
but they generate 36 % of my total revenue. Our top 10 % of customers generate nearly 50 % of our overall sales. That is where the profit is. That’s where the scale happens. So if you’re gonna use ByWith Prime, use it surgically. Use it on cold traffic, on low margin, one and done products, where customer retention doesn’t matter. But when it comes to your core products, your VIP customers, and anything you’re trying to grow long-term, keep that checkout in-house. Own the customer.

11:40
own the data and own your future. Because if you hand Amazon the keys to your checkout, don’t be surprised when they drive off with your business. So yeah, buy with Prime might boost your conversions in the short term, but you have to factor in the risks. Whenever it comes to business, I always ask myself, what are you really building? You didn’t start a DTC brand just to hand your customers over to Amazon. You started it to build something you own, something lasting, something that grows with every sale,

12:10
not resets to zero. I’ve been running my seven figure e-commerce store for 18 years now, and Amazon is only a small fraction of our sales on purpose. Don’t trade short-term wins for long-term control. Don’t give away your most valuable asset, your customer, just to get a couple more checkouts today. Because Amazon isn’t here to help your brand win. They’re here to replace you the second you become profitable enough to matter. So use Buy With Prime if you must, but do it with your eyes wide open.

12:40
And remember, in e-commerce, whoever owns a customer owns the future.

13:10
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 of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I sit down with Isabella Ritz, founder of Ritz Momentum and one of the sharpest minds in e-commerce to break down exactly how to find high margin profitable products that actually sell. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now available over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit

00:29
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. The talks this year were incredible with tons of actionable advice and behind the scenes insights from every speaker. If you want to catch the recordings, head over to sellersummit.com. Now onto the show.

00:54
Welcome to the My Wife Quoter Job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Isabella Ritz on the show. Now Isabella is the founder of Ritz Momentum, where she helps Amazon sellers find and validate profitable products to sell. She’s very well known in the Amazon community and she just spoke at my annual e-commerce conference called the Seller Summit, where attendees really raved about her talk. So in this episode, we are going to break down Isabella’s strategies on how to find and validate profitable products to sell online.

01:23
without spending any money upfront on inventory. And with that, welcome to the show Isabella, how are you doing today? Thank you very much. Thank you for having me at the event. I had so much fun. And when I saw that, I believe Tony put me first right after your speech to talk, I’m like, oh my God, that’s a lot of pressure, but I’m glad everyone had fun. And I am very happy to share today everything you want to know. That’s great.

01:52
We put you against Tony, I think. And I think that might have worked to Tony’s disadvantage because, you know, a lot of people did attend a 10 year session. So with rave reviews. Great. I’m glad that I made other people happy, but I really wanted to be at her talk because I’m like, well, last time when I was at your event, her talk was the most impressive for me. And she was talking about all these crazy funnels that

02:22
pretty much every single business, not just Amazon sellers supposed to do like if you’re not doing funnels, follow ups, sending out the emails to those that clicked and didn’t approach you like you’re losing you’re losing so much money on the table. Oh, definitely 30 % of my businesses email. So. So Isabella, many of my listeners probably do not know who you are. So how did you get into e commerce? And actually, are you currently selling on Amazon today?

02:52
I do sell on Amazon today and I want to say it’s very contagious. Like the moment you stop selling, it’s, it feels like you’re missing something. And I know it because we exited three brands in 2021. And then mine, and I will get back to the story, how I started and the brand we’re selling right now, it’s a Japanese brand. We started because it was out of principle. We.

03:18
We had one client, he came to the agency and he said, find the product for me to sell. We did find the product that was extremely advantageous and he didn’t have a huge budget. He had like probably like 20 to 25,000 to launch his brand on Amazon. And then he said, you guys found a shit show. It’s not the product that I will be able to sell. And this product doesn’t have any opportunities. And I got so pissed. And I said, whatever, I will launch this product myself.

03:48
And I did and it became bestseller and would you have time like during Q4 this product is making like 60 to $80,000 a month. And then it’s like, it does have consistent sales because it’s a niche niche product. But at the same time, like, okay, so now we have to create a brand around this product. So we created a brand around this product. This it’s mid six figure right now. So we’re

04:14
I don’t know if I want to grow it to eight figures or something, but this probably will be like low one, low seven figure brand. But this is how this is to the point that selling on Amazon is contagious. And this is something that you just want to continue doing it. I got into the Amazon space back in 2015 when I moved from Russia to live in United States. And I just

04:43
I was already serial entrepreneur, so I knew I’m going to do some type of the business, but I didn’t have language. I didn’t know culture. I didn’t know anything. And I was just Googling like, what should I do in United States? What kind of business should I do in United States? And everybody was talking about Amazon. And if you will look at the space right now, a lot of sellers started back in 2015, 2016. just, it was a boom. And I was probably one of these people that was in the

05:12
wave of this 2015. And I did start and I think I was super lucky because a lot of products I was launching, they’ve been just very intuitive, no validation, generic, didn’t even slap my log on it. It was just let me launch a product. first product was… Back in the day, it was like that, right? Just throw it up. Yeah. Yeah. And I launched Silicon Wineglass and I made…

05:39
$14,000 on top of my investment month one. I still don’t know how it happened, but it happened. I was very happy about it. And this is where I realized, Amazon works. guess I just will stick with this. And I just continued with a lot of mistakes after then this product became unavailable for me to sell because someone patented. I didn’t know at the moment that patents are territorial.

06:05
And this patent was filed in UK, not in United States, but you live, learn. If we would know better, we would do better. I’m curious, that client who got angry, did you show them the product that they could have launched? Oh, no, I didn’t. Because I was proven to myself. I’m like, no, I’m good. But if you would ever reach out, I will make sure to punch him in the face by seeing. I know it seriously. So the last we mentioned that I actually started, I think, in

06:35
2016 or no, 2014. I can’t remember, around the same time you did. It was a lot easier back then. But just in the last couple years, Amazon’s been squeezing both sellers and buyers more than ever before. So I want your opinion real quick before we get started. What do you think about selling on Amazon specifically today and how have your strategies adapted as a result? Because obviously you can’t just buy something unbranded and throw it up anymore. No, you definitely cannot. Some people still do and some people still

07:04
doing it successfully. I think it’s just the lack of first time mover. Like I will try first time and let’s see how it works. For some people it still works, but I don’t see much success in it. I never believed in cheap products. It’s just the nature of my personality. I never believed in low ticket prices. Even this, my silicone wine glass, was selling at $39.99 back in the days and it was set up for, and I was, my cost of goods was

07:34
five bucks, I believe, or something like this. So I stick with the theory that we have to sell high ticket products, products that actually have margin. And if you’re based on consumers’ demand, consumers’ avatar, shoppers’ experience, and you develop the product the way your buyers are ready to pay higher price,

08:02
you will be successful. like, don’t go out after the BSRs and like all this craziness, just going after margins. And I do agree Amazon is squeezing everybody. And I just believe that we have to be not in the crowd of people that are talking and squealing, but we have to be on the side where we can win. So

08:26
if it’s an opportunity for us to win, how we can have it as an opportunity. Where is the opportunity here where everybody suffers? So you’re just finding it and you’re bringing it to the market. So how do you define high end? Like, can you just throw some numbers? Like, what do you consider a high ticket item? So let’s just go with another example. We did have a client coming to us to sell blades. most of the blade blades is kind of plate.

08:56
but at the same time it’s in between plate and the bowl and it does have a keyword, blades. So it’s kind of deep plate. The average price for this product, I believe is $39. If I not mixing out, we launched his product at $89. And it happened because we’ve been learning customer demand.

09:25
and what are they ready to pay for? So people didn’t like that this product is breakable, is not dishwasher safe, and like a lot of other features and benefits that other sellers were not able to provide. So we really developed the product the way where customer will be happy to pay higher price because this product has an opportunity. And the reason this product has an opportunity, again, we find out about it because of the customer feedback.

09:55
This product has been purchased primarily as a gift. So when we’re given a gift, we want to look good. If I am given the gift, that means I want something that is more expensive and at the same time people will use for a long time. So, and when you do this discovery of the product, this is where you’re able to find out if people are willing to pay higher price. So if I’m selling vitamin C,

10:23
I have doubt someone would want to pay $20 for product that you can buy at $6. There’s just no opportunity for this. But there are a lot of products where it’s a huge opportunity to sell at the higher price because of different reasons people are purchasing this product. So in your plate example, though, I am kind of curious, and you don’t have to reveal the actual plate, but to charge two and a half times more than the market, it sounds like it was a completely different

10:53
I’m just curious. didn’t see this guy continue selling. I don’t know why, but when he launched it was a hundred thousand dollars launch. Wow. It was huge. It was like amazing. And but like just I’m just trying to get an idea though. Was it did it look completely different than all the listings out there? It

11:22
didn’t it didn’t look completely different. I think my husband actually just heard me and I think I was gonna go get it. I will not be surprised if he’ll bring this blade and I actually hear his I think he’s taking this blade. Okay. It did look different at the time. I didn’t analyze this listing for this market for a while but we made it wider. We made it a little bit deeper and we literally went through the supplier and created the sample with completely different design.

11:49
And we didn’t just test the design against each other. We tested pricing structure as well. So would you purchase this product that looked like this as $39 or will you purchase this product that, oh, I actually, yeah, I’m about to show you guys. It’s right here. So, will you purchase this product that is like handmade and hand painted on a different way?

12:18
That’s pretty cool. Thank you. Yeah, that’s great. I wish my wife was here to help me out with these podcasts too. Yeah. Well, you never know. thought he’s in his headphones, but he wasn’t. But yeah, this is like how we really structured the product. And this one, we use it for like over two years. Dishwasher safe, never broke one and you know, sometimes things break. So you just develop the product the way your customer is asking for. And then you sell it at the price.

12:48
I’m glad you brought the plate up as an example, because that is an item that I would think would be saturated. So what I want to do next is talk about your process for finding a good product. And I know you rely heavily on AI these days. So just walk me through your process. I would love to hear it. Yeah, this AI process. Because of the AI process, everything changes literally every day. So if in the past I was just

13:18
Not even in the past, a year ago, I was taking the data sets from Smart Scout and I was uploading these data sets into GPT, which was also with the HubAVI and I was going through this data faster, help me find the product that has these requirements, ABCD. And I was going through like a lot of products at the time. Right now, I’m structuring prompts for the clients. So for example, and this is the starting point.

13:48
Right? So we, for example, we have a client X that has 40,000 budget for lunch. He has cost of goods. doesn’t want to sell in certain categories. And I want to find a product for him that he’ll be selling at, I don’t know, $89 with a cost of goods of 15, 20. So now I’m structuring the prompt with the requirements. Find for me the…

14:16
not saturated niche products that I will be able to upgrade and redesign on the way like my customers would want to purchase with the approximate revenue per month. And I’m doing it without deep search first. And then if I’m finding out some certain ideas, I’m adding also deep search, so I will be able to get some links to make sure AI is not giving me like, hey, you can sell a book at $2,000.

14:45
but just because I decided to. So, and then we’re adding some deep research into that and we’re going through the process. It’s it’s coming out these days to the structuring correct prompt based on what you want. It’s not like, Hey, find the product without electronics that they want to sell $20,000 a day. So it’s not, it’s like you’re really going into very deep prompting, but you save yourself so much time.

15:14
And then you’re already going from there. Before we get into the prompts, what are your requirements actually that you’re feeding in? Requirements really depends. like we have clients like Charles is one of them, right? yeah, Charles is a in my class for people listening. Yeah, so he’s, he’s great. But he said, I don’t really care about over saturated or heavy products. And he’s an experienced seller, right? So he wants profitable

15:44
revenue driven, profit driven product. And he doesn’t care if it’s oversized. So we found product for him that is a little bit oversized, but he can make seven figure of just this product per month. So would I recommend this type of the product to the new seller or not really experienced seller? Never, ever, ever. But he is capable to handle this type of the product. So and that’s why we are

16:14
that like the process, the process is being tailored for every single client individually. So it’s not like it’s a recipe for everybody. Of course, is lot of variables for each individual seller. And sometimes we’re finding products that are maxed out at 10 to $12,000. But we know that this customer will be able to handle this product and they will not fail. Let’s target a complete beginner.

16:41
Okay, so complete beginner comes to you and let’s say they have 10, $10,000 or something like that. Or we can walk through your plate example, whichever you feel more comfortable with. Yeah, can go through the plate example. Yeah. Because that person’s not even selling that plate anymore. So it’s probably not a big deal. So how did you? So for this one, first of we found an advantageous keyword at the time. That was 20, I would say 2022. Okay. I think so.

17:10
So this keyword’s very, very advantageous now. And at the time it’s been only, I would say seven or five, it was below 10 competitors. I remember that for sure. So we had a very low amount of competitors for this keyword. And sometimes products are being ranked for the different keywords. And we were trying to find how many actual sellers with this product are on Amazon. And it’s still,

17:39
It’s been below 10. What is your threshold for that? Like, let’s say there was 50, would that still been okay? It depends on the search volume of the aggregate. It’s supposed to be the aggregate of the search volume. So what is the potential for us to reach, right? Because I don’t want to create a demand for the product. I want the product to be in demand and I want to sell something people are searching for.

18:07
So what would be your threshold for the ratio of demand versus number of sellers? Just trying to get an idea. I will be looking, for example, like at least $100,000 a year with a very low purchase rate slash conversion rate. Like if you’re going on Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer, you’re able to see their conversion rate, and I want this conversion rate to be below 1.5%.

18:32
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.

19:01
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.

19:13
That’s what I’m want you want a low conversion rate because that means people are not selling this very well or there’s a lot of okay. Correct. Because that means market is not satisfied with the offer. And market is leaving Amazon to look for this product somewhere else. Okay. And it was a tool. It for my god. I think it was viral to viral viral. I don’t watch

19:41
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

20:04
It’s very sad that like I don’t have access and I don’t know if they’re there yet. mean, the Amazon tool space is super competitive. wouldn’t be surprised if they ran out of money. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And you were able to pull if people are purchasing this product off Amazon more than they’re purchasing it on Amazon. Oh, okay. Nice. Yeah. So now it’s not really available, but now you’re able to see if this product has been advertised and promoted by influencers, which is a bigger deal.

20:33
Because now if I have this product, if I have any seller that launched this product with the high margins and higher revenue because of TikTok video or because of Instagram video, like you are the one of those that is buying toothbrush with toothpaste. That’s my wife. I saw this page.

20:57
That means I can create, I can hire influencer that will create for me the viral video for this stupid blades. And if someone created this demand and not demand like the sales, we can create the same cash flow, right? Right. So this is where we’ll be looking at. And if this again, if this purchase rate coming back to the purchase rate, the purchase rate is low, that means market is not satisfied. So let me find out what market doesn’t like about the product.

21:26
So I will recreate the product the way the market will be happy and my conversion rate will be way higher. Right. Okay. So walk me through that process. How do you discover what the market actually wants? These days is actually super easy. In the past, if you remember what we were doing, like we’ve been reading reviews for days and taking notes and like it was a huge

21:54
It was a lot of work and a lot of it was time consuming. Now I’m using Voke AI. There is some other tool that is doing the same thing, but Voke AI is really the best. That’s voc.ai for anyone listening. Yes. Thank you. And you are going into the customer reviews, think. Customer reviews or marketing insights, like it’s on the left side.

22:19
And you’re pulling ASINs with a high amount of reviews. They just have to be very relevant to the product you’re planning to sell and redevelop. Your scraping these reviews takes up to 90 seconds and you can scrape 15,000, 20,000 reviews, whatever you want. And you’re able to see all the customer feedback. And again, and it’s already EI’d, right? And we’re still super lazy. So what I’m doing, I’m just downloading all these reports.

22:47
uploading them to chat GPT and asking GPT to create customer persona because that’s a big deal. A lot of people still don’t do it. Please, when you go after the product, develop your customer persona first. So you have to know who your product will be talking to because we’re not going after anymore. Oh, my product is temporary. Dishwasher safe, something safe, something safe. We have to go after the benefits for the customer. So no need to.

23:17
hand wash, ready-to-go plate or ready-to-go bag or something like this. It’s supposed to be with the benefits for the customer. Then after you develop customer persona, you are reverse engineering the product. How can I do this product better? You’re reverse engineering the product after you did that. Now,

23:40
you are developing the product the best way your customer would want to purchase this specific primary customer persona. You can have three customer personas. You can have two of them. You can have one of them go after the first one first. And then when you did the reverse engineering, can ask chat GPT depends on the product. You can ask to create a mockup. It doesn’t mean GPT will do a really good job. So in this process, when you reverse engineer, first you’re asking to create the

24:10
perfect design task for your graphic or product designer. So you’re not going straight to, create a mock-up. No, it’s not going to work. Now you’re asking to create like very, very detailed, specific description of the product you’re planning to develop. And only then you’re asking Chad GPT, or you can go to Paul, you can go to Majorne to create the product based on the specific requirements.

24:39
And now you’re going through the like a refined process. One of the easiest way to do it is to simplify it first and then start adding feature after feature because GPT is still not at the point where you can just go after a complicated product. So that plate example that you’re holding up, I don’t think vogue.ai was around in 2022. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.

25:06
But what were the criteria to make that particular plate that you showed me better compared to the competition, just as an example for the listeners? For this one, it was reading. We read through so many reviews back in those days. And we just read what customers want. And we’ve been doing the designs from scratch, which we still do a lot. But how did you change that particular plate to make it so that you could charge two and a half times more?

25:33
This one, this particular one was based on the sizing, size, like this diameter, height and color. So apparently this product has been purchased a lot design wise because people want to fit it in their interiors. Okay. And this one was one of those. And this one we developed, if you look at different patterns, but they match. So it’s set of

26:02
four with completely different patterns on each of them, but at the same time, they have a match in between every single one of them. I see. And then the other ones at the time were smaller and they were a different color and that’s why people didn’t like them as much. They still buy them. It’s just their conversion rate was very way lower. And I’m just curious, since this product’s not being sold anymore, what did you boost the conversion rate to on that particular one?

26:30
That was a great, very well developed listing. that was pure PPC campaign launch. That was a wine reviews, PPC, high converting listing and product. Like I do believe that you have three primary components is product, conversion and traffic. If conversion traffic are not in place, like you can fix those, but if

26:58
you have a very bad product, cannot fix the product. Right. And if you have three components, then it’s just working out. How did you decide on 89.99 versus whatever was being sold before, which was 20 something? I think at this moment, the highest price for similar product, not for the blades, but for similar products was something like $70. And we’re like, let’s see if 89.99 is going to work. Interesting.

27:26
We just tested with PickFu or with the product Pinyin. I don’t remember which one of them. We tested the price and this price worked. Okay. So PickFu for everyone listening is a polling platform where you can upload images and get feedback from real people who are unbiased. regarding that plate, so $89.99. The thing is, it’s like the way I shop on Amazon, I never buy the cheapest thing anymore.

27:55
because just my assumption is it’s just this cheap thing from China. these days, whenever I advise any student of mine to sell anything, I always have them target the high end because chasing the low margins, especially since Amazon is squeezing everybody, makes it a lot more difficult. I do remember in your presentation at Sellers that anything you’d generally advise people don’t use anything that requires a mold, right? Yeah. So does that imply that,

28:24
anything plastic is kind of just not in the cards, especially if you’re a beginner. I would say complicated mold is not something I would be going after. But for example, this is clay, right? So you don’t really need mold for this because people it’s a handmade product. I am not really against the mold. It’s just for the beginners. It’s a little a little bit overwhelming. Right. That’s why I am

28:53
probably just recommending going after clay, after wood, after glass. And metal doesn’t need a mold. Metal doesn’t need a mold because you just cut it. Yeah, so I would just probably go after materials that don’t… Sewing, things that don’t really require… Chinese will tell you that like, yeah, you still need the mold, sure. But it’s not actually mold. It’s just some shapes that they’re creating.

29:24
The world of molds is actually kind of complicated for anyone listening here too. There’s different grades of molds that you can buy that last a certain number of runs. And once the mold is in the factory, like it’s really hard to move molds as well. So I tend to agree with you on that. thank you. So I think, okay, so up until this point, we’ve already used voke.ai to figure out how to change the product. And then…

29:50
What I heard you say is you then kind of feed that information into chat GPT and you actually have chat GP make a mock-up for you? Yeah, these days with you. We don’t usually finalize mock-up with chat GPT, but we usually have a direction for our designer to go after. And this is how we’re able to simplify.

30:11
speed up the process and not make it so expensive for our customer that are coming and paying us these days. Because in the past, we were doing, designer was going after sketch. Then we were checking if the sketch will be able to sell. And then we were doing the mockups and testing mockups and et cetera. So now with GPT, we can have this basic mockups, test them against competitors.

30:37
with BigFoo or even simulate those polls inside of the ChatGPT. I was going over like, on seller summit, I was showing how you can simulate the poll when you guys, we will come back for like 10 minutes before when I was talking at this podcast. You can take your customer persona that you created with Voc.ai and then you ask ChatGPT to create, to simulate the poll based on the

31:05
I mean, based on the 100 similar personas. So simulate 100 seras that we just created with you. You means ChatGPT. And test these three designs against each other. Make sure you provide me comments so I will be able to improve the design I want. And if you do it right, ChatGPT will actually tell you if your design is losing against your competitors. And then, of course, after you

31:34
achieved certain amount of improvements, then you’re going to pick for your actual spending money and investing into your final polls. So just to be clear here, you’re having chat GPT or whatever image generation tool that you want, create a mock up. And then you’re literally pulling the product image from Amazon. And you’re having chat GPT just kind of run an AI sort of poll telling you based on your avatar, which one they would buy. Yeah, I’ve actually never done that before.

32:02
for how does that compare to actually a real PickFu poll with people? It fluctuates. Again, it really depends on your process, depending how you structure the question, and if you’re not priming ChatGPT to vote for your product, right? So you shouldn’t be doing that. But it’s very close. Some polls, GPT is pretty much the same as PickFu. Because ChatGPT, feel these days, just tells me what I want to hear.

32:33
I mean, that’s why you have to ask him right away. I guess the difference also is in chat GPT, you’re feeding in your customer persona on pick food. I don’t think you can filter down to that level. Like you can’t have it. You can do it by age and, and gender and whatnot, but it’s not as granular, right? Is that, is that why you start out with chat GPT first? We actually started with chat GPT because people were complaining that they don’t want to spend that much on

33:02
polls and I’m like, make sense. Yeah. You have to. And I’m like, okay, let’s do this. And I was just thinking how I can simplify it for them and make it cheaper. Like let’s do just polling first. And then when you’re getting closer, you will go and invest into a peak form. And that’s why peak was not paying me great commissions anymore because people are going through chat. Okay. No, that totally makes sense.

33:30
And then once you’ve gone through that process and you find it and you think that you have something, is that when you actually look for suppliers and make that final thing or do you start that process even earlier? We look at potential cost of goods at the moment we’re making the decision to move with the product. So we like, for example, for our clients, we never ever provide a report for the product.

33:57
unless we shopped a little bit on Alibaba and just asked our sourcing agent, listen, what is the ballpark? Just give me the ballpark. So if I understand like, okay, we’ll be able to fit into the budget and be profitable, then yeah, let’s move on with this product because no matter how badly on a good way we will improve the product, we will still be able to sell profitable. Okay, so based on sourcing agents that you’ve worked with, they give you a ballpark.

34:25
And it just sounds like from talking to you so far, you’re shooting for five to six X margins. Is that accurate? I mean, from cost of goods, would say four. Four, Because we, and it’s also cost of goods or landed cost. And these days it’s also confusing because now we have tariffs that we don’t know if we’ll have because maybe we will be get refunded for these tariffs because now people can apply and refund. It’s just a lot, you know.

34:53
Uh, at seller’s time and you’ve been like, Hey, Trump just said, Oh, now we have this. So it’s just, it’s very confusing right now. We’re trying to aim at like. Four. Four X. Okay. Yeah. Four from cost of goods and, uh, From landed costs of goods or no from cost of goods. Okay. From cost of goods because,

35:18
not because of the tariffs, like I would say landed cost, but because of the tariffs, I can’t even tell you if it’s four and when people will be listening to the podcast, they will tell me, oh, you said five or six, but in your reality, I have 15 % margin after all my tariffs I’m paying. So that’s, that’s why I see you have PTSD like I do. Like when I say something publicly, people call me on it. But things Yeah, The funny story about the same publicly, I did my first

35:48
podcast in US with Bradley Sutton back in 2018. I was still not sure in English what means margin and what means profits. When Bradley asked me what margins are you looking at? I said 100%.

36:11
And then Kevin King listened to this podcast. can you imagine, I would not even imagine that Kevin King would listen to this podcast. And then Kevin called on this Bradley. He’s like, who is this lady? She’s talking about a hundred percent margins. Like what BS is that? And Bradley like, know, I know. And then when I met,

36:33
Couple years later, I met Kevin King and like we spoke and my English was already better and I’m still working on my English. Of course, I know I’m making like grammar mistakes and I’m foreign your guys. So, and Kevin said, yeah, I actually called Bradley on that. I’m like, Kevin margins and profits for me a little bit confusing at the time. So I learned my lesson. Now when I’m speaking in public, I’m trying to be as cautious as possible. 100 % margin sign me up.

37:02
Sign me up. So Isabelle, I want to switch gears a little bit and just kind of talk about what you do with your customers. So it sounds like your primary service is helping people find profitable products to sell on Amazon. Is that accurate? validate? And develop. And develop. Okay. So does that imply that you actually help them find the suppliers and make everything as well? Yes. That’s how.

37:27
I’m showing you this stuff. That’s why I have it in my house because we’ve been checking the samples and my family just keep using it. And so what is your target customer, if I may ask for your agency? For my agency, first, it’s supposed to be right mindset. people can’t come to us and say, Hey, I just want money to flow into my bank account tonight. want 100 % margins, right?

37:56
Yeah, 100 % margin. This person is supposed to be as reasonable as possible. So we have to understand that business is a risk. Race momentum is mitigating the risk. We’re not eliminating the risk. We’re helping you out to reduce your risk and improve the quality of your life while you’re working with product research, validation and development because it’s a complicated process.

38:24
People that understand that they will become break even, not profitable, break even in about six to eight months from the start. That’s the expectation that’s supposed to set. And every single business is about investment. So you’re not going into business waiting for the cash back. You’re going into business as an adventure, your venture, your future opportunity, because you want to escape nine to five or start something new. It is not.

38:53
a cash back and so the cash back on spot. So that’s kind of it’s all comes out to mindset. So that’s good. You set the proper expectations before you begin. I guess that’s to your advantage too, because then people don’t get mad at you like the like that other person. Yeah, like, oh, you develop the shit show. like, no, we did not. One thing actually, I forgot to ask you about is you help with the launch as well. Right? What is your go to launch strategy these days?

39:23
We don’t really help with lunch because we, do believe that every single one of us, uh, means expert. We have our expertise and we have our strength and I do refer to people that will help lunch. Okay. And it doesn’t mean we disappear. We are there to help. So we also work on listings, but only for lists, primarily on listings for the product we develop, because we understand how to present this product.

39:51
to the audience, I would love to keep it in house and I want to continue doing it for our customers. But when it comes to like, here’s your lunch, we refer to the best PPC guys that can only imagine and to influencers and we do provide the strategy. We have it in our blueprint, but I don’t hold the hand there because my strength is product research validation. Well, that’s what I do.

40:21
You mentioned earlier that when you’re talking about customer personas to choose two or three of them, but in the final listing, you kind of have to tailor the copy and choose one, right? So are you just kind of testing the different avatars? That’s have variations. Okay. Oh, okay. I see. So you sell the same product under multiple listings with different copy? that what I’m For example, let’s say,

40:46
one child and nobody is going to sell socks right now. Okay. So it’s just an example. So one child likes Mickey Mouse and another one likes, uh, dinosaurus and another one like woodland themed something. But, and for example, for Mickey Mouse, we’ll have 50 % of audience and for two others, we’ll have 25 and 15, something like this or 25, 25. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to sell a product that has only 25 % out of a hundred.

41:15
of my target audience, because at least I will still make some money. will just develop this product as the second choice or some customers. They’re coming to us and we are, usually develop two to three variations just because we need to test ideas against each other and against competitors. And if we develop the ideas that really good enough and they’re going with like 49 51 or 30 70, we still have this split where customers want to buy this product. They really like it.

41:44
So we just recommend our clients to create this product as the second variation because there’s still the audience for that one. That makes sense. And the key takeaway of the audience is sell socks. Isabel, you heard it here first, sell socks. No. I’m just kidding. But that makes total sense. So as you’re doing your research and you find out different avatars, you’re to want to think about variations that you can make to tailor the product to each individual avatar. Is that accurate?

42:14
Okay. is accurate. also have to think what is like, uh, how you’re going to treat this brand because if it’s going to be just one product you launch and that’s it, or how you’re going to expand on how you’re planning to work around it. Right. Because if it will go deeper, can you create community around it? Right. Will this community purchase it? Will this community come to your meeting, meetup? Will they pay you for memberships to learn more about the problem you’re solving? Because this one is clearly.

42:42
cooking community of whatever kitchen you can. It can be for lo mein or it can be for pasta or it can be for some bowls, healthy bowls and yada yada yada, right? Well, that’s great, Isabella. If anyone wants to hire you for your services, where can they find you online? They have to text you. They have to text me? You’re doing it against me.

43:10
I have Isabella’s cell also. I will be posting it right beneath this episode in case you… So I’m pretty open guys. My phone number is 904-609-4748. Feel free to text and I will just join you to my WhatsApp chat and I will link you to my sales team and they will start the discovery. And I learned this tip from Perry Belcher when I heard him, like I’m part of his mastermind and one day he just like…

43:40
He sent out his text, his phone number and I’m like, and I checked my contact. I’m like, that’s his phone number. I’m like, Perry, what are you doing? He said, yeah, why should I hide from people? This is my phone number. Like, you know what? I will just start giving people my phone number. So yeah, 904-609-4748 just text me guys. his cell phone number is actually in every email that he sends. Did you? Yeah. Yes. He’s crazy. Yeah. And I’m like, you’re like, he’s like, yeah, I have it in the pocket. I’m like, Perry, you’re just crazy.

44:10
Well, Azul, thank you so much for coming on the show and I’m sure the listeners will get a lot out of what you had to say. Yeah, thank you so much for having me and it’s always fun to chat with you. Thank you.

44:37
Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at 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 and I’ll send the course right away via email.

I Need Your Help

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00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I do a full recap of Seller Summit 2025. While it’s still fresh in our minds, we’re breaking down the biggest takeaways, behind the scenes moments and the strategies that had everyone talking. And just a quick heads up, the full recordings for every session from Seller Summit 2025 are now available at sellersummit.com. So if you missed the event,

00:29
you can still catch all the valuable content online.

00:38
Welcome back to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. We just had Seller Summit 2025 last week and I thought what I would do today is Tony and I will highlight some of the greatest parts of the event and what people learned. Yeah, I always say like this was our best year yet, but I do feel like this year stood out. I don’t know. I’ve received a lot of feedback from attendees. Obviously,

01:06
I feel like when attendees give us feedback, it’s probably a little biased because most people don’t complain to your face. I had a couple of people that I ran into after the event and I must have looked pretty haggard because they didn’t recognize me in the elevator. I asked, how was the event? They’re like, oh, it was great. They’re like, how was the event for you? I was like, I think this is our best year. Then after I said that, realized who I was. They clearly didn’t know who I was, which is

01:32
I’m like perfect. I don’t want you to tell me like you know who I am. I want you to tell me like I’m a fellow attendee because I am a fellow attendee. I know for me this year, I had a bunch of people come up to me and say, hey, how come next year’s tickets aren’t for sale yet? Yes. Why isn’t it up yet? I’m like, whoa. So I’ve received some panicky texts actually, like from people that I know personally who were at Seller Summit and they were saying,

02:00
I’ve been talking to my, everyone kind of makes friend groups while they’re there. They get their community and their networking. And I had a text the other day from somebody who said, hey, people are really nervous that you didn’t announce tickets yet. I was like, don’t be nervous. It’s just a very detailed process to secure hotels. All that has to be worked out. And we don’t like to blow everything out of the water when stuff is still like in mid negotiation for sure.

02:28
Yeah, I think last year we sold tickets and we had no idea where it was. So that’s what we wanted to avoid. This year we know exactly where it is. We’re just finalizing the dates and so the tickets will be on sale. Don’t worry. Actually, by the time this podcast gets released, you will be able to buy a ticket, I think. Yes. So I don’t want to make too many… Steve’s like looking at me like, you will? The checkout page is up, right? Yeah, the checkout page is up actually, but we’re making some changes to the sales page.

02:58
Anyway, let’s get to the fun stuff. You know what’s funny is I was very worried about this Seller Summit. Very worried. Mainly because at the time, the tariffs were at 145%. So this is actually the first year where we literally had three sessions to address tariffs. And what’s hilarious about it is as soon as the Seller Summit ended on Monday, they had talks and it dropped back down to 30%, which

03:27
Doesn’t make it a non-issue, but it certainly mitigated a lot of things. Yeah. One of the things I think was interesting about this year’s Seller Summit is that there, would say in general, the mood of the attendees that week was stressed. A lot of people had containers that were sitting in China. A lot of people were at the point of, in fact, I had a longtime attendee and good friend of ours sit in the mastermind with me and say, I don’t know if I’ll have a business in a year.

03:57
Right? So I felt like a lot of people came into seller summit this year with that apprehension and sort of down on e-commerce in general, as well as people who didn’t attend this year, like long time attendees, because their business was in such flux. And to me, like, this is when you need to be here. This is when you need to be talking to other sellers. This is when you need to be networking and learning from some of the best of the best, because there always are things you can do in your business to keep it going.

04:26
Yeah, so we had Annette talk about sourcing from the United States, which was a hot topic. And then we had Jim talk about ways to mitigate the tariffs. And then he actually specializes in sourcing from Vietnam also, which is a place that many people are going to. And they have been going to for a long time. I will say about Jim, I want to interrupt really quick. I did not know him before Seller Summit. I know he was an acquaintance of yours.

04:54
Absolutely fantastic. Like I cannot wait to watch his session. I wasn’t in his session, but I cannot wait to watch it Super nice guy, but also knows his stuff. I had dinner with him one night Cannot wait to hear that session. It’s I really looking forward to it. No, absolutely I mean all the sessions were great. I sat in on his and I sat in on Annette’s also So for Annette’s in case you guys are interested in sourcing textiles from the United States It’s actually quite viable

05:22
And when you take into account like the lead times of manufacturing, which are like three weeks versus like three months, it can actually make a huge difference to your cashflow. Yeah. And then in another session, which we didn’t record, was secret was, yeah, because I didn’t want it recorded. We were just talking about all the black hat ways to get stuff in without actually having to pay the tariff.

05:47
Why you need to be there in person because every once in a while we have these little secret round tables that uh We can’t we just can’t record. So yes you and Ming Mercer. another seller summit attendee basically Opened the book on all these other things that you can do. Well, okay So, you know It was grey hat and black hat and just all the sketchy things that you could do at your own risk in case you desperate Let’s just say absolutely at your own risk. We don’t endorse any correct

06:16
That’s why it wasn’t recorded. We don’t endorse these things. This is what’s happening right now. And this is how you can actually avoid terrorists altogether. And I got a lot of feedback on that from people who were like, Stephen Ming just like told us everything that was going. mean, they were like very excited. I think they felt like they got like the secret room. And so that was actually that actually ended up being a pretty popular little part of Seller Summit. Yeah, no, I was going to say is like the terrorists aren’t

06:46
over. So just to be clear, so he dropped it down to 30%, but that’s also in addition to the old Trump tariffs, which in a lot of cases puts people at around close to 50%. And then who knows what’s going to happen at the end of 90 days, right? If there’s no deal that happens. Trump said they won’t 145 % won’t come back, but it’s going to be significantly higher. So we’re not out of the woods yet. Let’s just say. Okay, should we talk about your talk? Because I missed it.

07:15
We can’t talk about my talk. So I gave a talk on how to, as an e-commerce brand, build your YouTube channel from zero. So saying that you have no YouTube presence at all to getting to monetization. And I presented a case study with one of my clients who went from zero to monetization in about three and a half months. And

07:36
I mean, obviously people had good feedback for the session. You who knows when they get the anonymous survey, if they’ll think it’s as good as it was. But what I personally liked about the talk was that it wasn’t, and I said this in the talk, it’s not a Ferrari and money gun type of talk, right? We’re not talking about being a YouTube influencer with 2 million followers in six months. It’s truly about why, number one, why you should have a YouTube channel for your e-commerce store. And I think I built a pretty strong case for that.

08:03
And then I walk people through step by step exactly how to do it from, you know, processes with your team. If you have a team creating the content, what you should create content about. And then basically the different types of monetization that you can leverage on YouTube, because obviously the number one goal would be to sell your own products. Right. So how do you do that in organic way? How does YouTube help you leverage that with their product feed? Right. That connects into Shopify. But then there’s other monetization ways as well. And I actually showed

08:32
people, fashion e-commerce person who has subscriptions, right? So she’s not only selling her products, she’s actually selling subscriptions as well. So there’s a bunch of different ways to monetize. And then I referenced our good friend Jake from Creator Hooks, because we didn’t really get into the nitty gritty of YouTube itself, like thumbnails and titles and things like that, although I did show them how bad our thumbnails were at the beginning, which…

08:57
Kellan was in that session, which made me super nervous because he’s one of our students with a half a million YouTube followers. He’s like, when you showed that thumbnail slide, I was worried those were your current thumbnails. I was like, no, no, no, that was that was a mistakes we made in the beginning slide. But basically reference Jake’s talk as well from twenty twenty four, where he gives a lot of pointers, which you can sign up for his newsletter at creator hooks dot com. So definitely if you’re thinking about that, sign up for his newsletter. And think there was a slide I just saw like you were referencing, Kevin also.

09:26
I referenced Kevin as well because I think the biggest hurdle people have with anything in their business is the longevity and keeping going when things aren’t great. And Kevin’s a perfect example of this. He’s been building his YouTube channel for about 18 months. This past month or in April, he had a video hit, right? And now all of a sudden it’s catapulted his channel. It’s funny as the week, actually the day I was giving the talk, we had a video hit on the e-commerce channel.

09:52
Oh, nice. Completely organic. So it was kind of cool to see like that. I didn’t notice it until after the talk, but I also referenced our good friend Eric from Beardbrand because I think the other issue people have is no one makes good videos when they start. Beardbrand now has two million followers. It’s a great YouTube channel, but I found one of Eric’s very first Beardbrand videos, which was quite awful. Poor lighting, poor audio. I mean, it’s still Eric, right? It’s still the brand. It’s a great brand video because

10:22
their representatives, but it was good for people to see like, hey, this is 11 years ago with 10,000 followers. This is today with two million. So everyone’s going to start out in the beginning. know, so anyway, I thought it was a fun talk. I was kind of nervous to give it since it was more of a case study and not something I’m like fully an expert in yet. But honestly, I think if you’re not on YouTube as an e-commerce brand missing a huge opportunity right now or just being out there, period. mean, really making sales is about being likable.

10:51
and standing out and basically putting a face to the actual brand. So whether you decide to do YouTube or TikTok or whatnot, it doesn’t matter. Speaking of TikTok. Yeah. Well, I didn’t get to watch Tiffany’s talk because I was giving. Oh, yeah, you put me up against Tiffany. I’m still mad at that, by the way. So Tiffany, mean, if you guys know Tiffany Avinosky, Imelou’s boutique, she is crushing it on TikTok, about a million dollars a month in revenue.

11:19
And she actually brought her entire team that manages TikTok to give, and each of them, it was kind of cool. So she started the talk with some general TikTok best practices, and then each person on her team, her affiliate manager, her ads person, and then her coupon and discount person all talked about their specific roles and how they did it. Really interesting what’s going on on the back end of TikTok. How to contact influencers, how to…

11:48
how to, they gave us some tricks, not tricks, because I mean, you figure this out when you’re doing it, but like how to actually decide what influencers are worth working with, all the different things you can do by increasing their commission, increasing the discount they offer. So there’s so many things you can do in the TikTok dashboard. And it was really interesting to hear it from the people who are literally doing it every single day to generate that million dollar a month revenue. Yeah. And then it was actually fortunate because we also had a sponsor Bullseye that offers just to do it all for you.

12:17
Yes. If you don’t want to learn any of stuff. Tiffany’s team is not for hire. A couple of people asked and Tiffany was nervous about putting them on stage for that reason because she’s like, I don’t want to end up poach my team. was like, I wouldn’t either. They’ve done a really good job. What’s funny is I asked Paul, so how much you pay them? And he is like, I don’t know. And I was like, OK, well, I was going to pay them double. And he’s like, well, I pay him a dollar an hour. I was like, OK. Yeah. So Bullseye is a company that does all that for you.

12:47
super knowledgeable about TikTok. I think once again, it’s like that in YouTube to me. Like if you’re not leveraging that right now, it’s definitely something you should explore for your brand, really important. I mean, I think they were showing us the stats in Tiffany’s talk. Like basically everyone’s on TikTok. It’s not, it used to be like it was just the younger generation. That’s not the case anymore. It’s pretty much all ages, all demographics are consuming content on TikTok.

13:14
I missed that one because I was giving mine. I was actually worried no one was going to come to mine, but fortunately, the room was full of mine It the minimum requirements for you to give a talk. Yes, it met my final… Yes. That’s an inside joke. I talked about all the different ways that I automate my business. What’s nice is back in the old days, I used to say, that just requires a little bit of code. Well, actually now it doesn’t require any code at all.

13:43
you can automate a ton of things in your business, just by using AI and some off the shelf tools that require no programming or coding skills whatsoever. And I literally videoed in my office all the things that we automate and then I literally just taught the audience how to automate all that stuff on your own. Yeah. I heard really great things about your talk and I got a personal complaint from Paul letting me know that

14:11
half the reason why they decided to bring their whole team was to hear your talk. And then I put you guys at the same time, which I did not know that. yeah, they actually, Paul texted me on Monday. He’s like, can I just get like the bootleg copy of Steve’s recording? I like, I don’t have it yet. Well, it’s funny. know, a summit, seller summit wouldn’t be the same without AI talks. So we all split it up into different categories of AI. So I talked about automation and I got into the nitty gritty, like literally how to do it.

14:41
Ritu gave an excellent talk about how to use AI creatives and imagery and then also how to optimize Amazon listings. So she took a more Amazon bent and just the overall creatives. then Bernie’s, didn’t attend. Were you at Bernie’s? I missed the first part of Bernie’s, but once again, his whole premise was basically like, do you create a billion dollar business with no employees leveraging automation’s AI?

15:07
And he actually, so Bernie and I joked afterwards, like you can’t let a bunch of e-commerce entrepreneurs like free in your session. So at the end of his talk, he had them do an exercise where they broke up into groups based on like the type of business and come up with a billion dollar business idea. And then you presented it from the stage. So I know. So the problem was he let him talk to each other. Right. So it immediately descended into like, but people didn’t want to like break up.

15:36
the conversations when it came time to present. So actually the person who presented was Ivan, who is Isabella Ritz’s husband. Yeah, He yeah. So he basically came up with an idea for a charter school taught by AI agents. And basically it was a great presentation. He talked about how he would, you know, basically be able to do it with just like three, like co-founder and two other people and basically revolutionize our education system in the United States. And of course,

16:05
Like I don’t, met Ivan at seller summit for the first time, but the funny thing about him is he’s actually a really great presenter. So he started his pitch with who’s happy with their kids public school education right now. Right? Like, everyone’s like, no, no, you know, and then he pitches his idea for this, you know, charter school program and all these different things. So anyway, it was a really fun exercise. People really got into it. Um, and Bernie just is such a wealth of knowledge. Like every time I talk to him, I’m like, do you

16:33
know everything about everything and not like in a conceited way. He’s the most humble down to earth person, but he can basically we were at dinner and having a conversation about the Roman Empire and it’s, you know, similarities to like what’s happening with technology today and the changing of our culture and like all these things. Right. So he always delivers a fantastic talk and just such a brilliant business mind. Yep. I think I mean, it wasn’t that talk.

17:00
but I talked to Bernie about it beforehand. He was gonna give more like a high level overview of just automation and that sort of thing. So it worked all three talks worked well together. Yeah, for sure. And then along the same vein of starting a YouTube channel and doing TikTok shop, we had Sally Wilson. If you guys listen to this podcast, she’s been on twice. She came on to talk about how she built a community.

17:25
I think it’s actually very important these days, especially for repeat business. Sally sells cross-stitch supplies and cross-stitch kits. And she’s built this community where once she grabs a customer, they ended up just keep buying over and over and over again because they belong to a community that she’s created. She’s held live events and whatnot. And she just basically taught the audience her entire community building strategy. Yeah. I loved her. She was very fascinating.

17:53
And so interesting about the live event component to the whole business, because I have many people that ask me about that, mainly because we run events, right? So I think that’s super interesting. I also know of at least three people that immediately set up a Facebook group after her talk. Oh, is that right? Yes, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like you got to put some it’s not just you can’t just set up the group. People will not come. There’s a whole strategy, which, of course, she talked about.

18:20
But yeah, she was very inspiring for people and people were taking action literally that same day Setting up groups. It was hilarious is after the talk There’s a bunch of people that went up on stage to take pictures with her and I was like, do you know these people like are they fans of your? Your business and she was like no, I I had never heard of them before so Okay, never met them before. Yeah total side note, but

18:46
Annette and I joke that she measures how successful her talk is and how many hugs she gets afterwards. this year, I just got a report from her this morning. It was a 14 hug talk. So she exceeded her hug percentage last year by like 150 percent or something like that. So, yes, I it’s funny because our our speakers are e-commerce sellers, right? There are people in the trenches doing the same things that we are. Yet sometimes they get.

19:14
they get mobbed, right, by the audience, which I always think is really fun.

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.

19:49
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.

20:00
Speaking of mobbed, Neil Patel gave one of the keynotes at the event and I actually had never seen him speak before. Me either. But he’s really good. He’s good and he’s funny. Yes. He’s got this dry sense of humor, very smooth and he actually incorporated stuff that happened. So for example, Charles actually before he spoke said, hey Neil, know, I hired your company and I was disappointed with such and such and such.

20:31
Usually you might say, hey, I’ll take care of this offline because I’m about to go on stage. But he just whips out his phone, texts the VP and said, OK, I want you to take extra special care of Charles, blah, blah. He took care of it right on the spot. And we were literally walking him up on onto the stage. And then during his talk, he incorporated elements of that interaction into his speech in real time. Yeah. So his talk was interesting because I don’t think we.

20:59
had a ton of conversation. mean, he knew what the event was about, obviously. He knew what we talking about. But his talk managed to incorporate just about everything that we taught at Seller Summit in one talk. It was such a great overview of one, the state of e-commerce. He had so many great statistics in that talk about who’s doing what online, which I found fascinating. Also, his ability to do math in his head was really cool. I’m like, he’s Asian, so. He’s a numbers guy, He’s a numbers guy, yeah.

21:25
knows his stuff, but also at the same time, one of the most genuine, personable people, sometimes when you get speakers like Neil who are very, very in demand, they’re not super personable with the audience. They want to be ushered off to the back and no contact. He was literally all the way up to he walked on stage taking pictures, talking to people, talking to Charles. And then basically we had to delay the event because- Yes.

21:54
He had a line of like 40, and he basically talked to every single person, answered their questions. mean, really fantastic guy. I was beyond thrilled with his presence there. And I was excited for our attendees to get to learn from him and meet him in person. Yeah, what was funny is he was mobbed and we had to delay it because no one was going to go to the sessions after. Yes. The sessions were empty. I was like, just give him five more minutes.

22:23
Neil’s got the Chick-fil-A drive-through equivalent line out in the hallway. Speaking of one of those sessions, our friends from Quiet Light, unfortunately had to come right after Neil. Right. So I walked into the room and I was like, oh, no, everybody’s still in the hallway. But they’re so professional. Like, I love that team. They got started. I sat in that talk. I’ve never been able to sit in a Quiet Light talk before because I’ve always either been in the other room or running around.

22:53
And I’ve always thought my next move would be to buy some kind of business. And I learned so much in that 50 minute talk about like just real practical. And the talk was for people who are selling their business, not for people who want to buy, but just like learning everything that goes into it, what you need to have in order, all the things that they did a cool thing where it’s like all these things that people don’t think about, right? That will trip you up at the end and mistakes people make.

23:22
that basically can cause deals to fall through, right? So deals that are like basically done and then the seller does this one or two thing that just basically the buyer’s like, nope, I’m out. They did such a good job and I sat with Ian at dinner and I was like, I learned so much today. Like I feel like I’ve been so educated on doing this. I don’t have a business to sell, but like when I buy, like I would obviously totally use Quiet Light anyway, but.

23:49
just the amount of knowledge and then the fact that like they’re so available the whole event to like answer any question, look at your business. I know a couple of our attendees are very interested in selling their business. And in fact, I just texted someone Chuck’s email this morning about connecting with him even further. such an informative talk. And I think the other thing is if even if you’re in the beginning stages of your business, there’s a lot of mistakes people make when they’re starting.

24:17
that come back to bite them in the butt basically later on because they don’t set things up the correct way and they’re not doing things in a way that makes your business easier to sell. So even if you’re in those beginning stages of your business, it’s really important to know this information. What I appreciate about his talk was that he gave a very candid state of M &A. Yes. Right? Is it a good time to sell? Is a good time to buy? And I feel like most brokerages would not be so straightforward and honest about it. Yeah.

24:47
for sure. So one talk that I missed that I really wanted to attend was Andrea’s meta ads talk, because I gave the meta ads talk last year and I was just curious how our strategies coincide. Were you at that one? I was. It was a great talk. Andrea, what I love about Andrea, she doesn’t hold anything back in her talks. She’s basically showing you dashboards real time.

25:10
obviously blurring out client info, but you know, she’s giving you the down and dirty and basically focusing on the metrics that really matter with ads. And she even shared one of her super, I forget what she called it, super secret hack that she has for getting the virality on ads that you see. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these ads on Facebook, but like they’re ads, but they have like a thousand comments.

25:35
And it doesn’t, you’re like, why in the world does this ad have a thousand comments? And she showed the trick to make that happen in her session, which I knew that, I didn’t know it was a trick. I just thought everyone did it, but they don’t. And so it was really interesting as well as just talking about all the things that you should be looking for and measuring outside of what the normal like Facebook gurus talk about. Nice. Well, I’ll have to catch that one on video cause I’m very curious.

26:00
Along the same lines, I miss Brett’s talk also. He talked about shoppable YouTube ads. So we already talked about how social selling is the next big thing or is currently the big thing. And in YouTube, you can actually have your products alongside your videos and where people can instantly check out. I really wanted to go to that talk. I was given the black hat talk in the room next door. Were you at Brett’s? I was, I was actually front and center. And I’m in Brett’s talk almost every year.

26:30
We always joke. So this year I said, you I had little time cards for him to hold up and he said, I think I’m going to have time for Q &A this year. said, Brett, let’s not kid yourself. You have so much information that you give people. You never have time for Q &A. You get that at the roundtable, right? So sure enough, once again, he didn’t have time for Q &A except for we have roundtable. So technically he does. So one, I was fat. I didn’t want to do my roundtable. I wanted to sit at Brett’s roundtable because

26:57
He mentioned a couple things. So I don’t know if you know this, but YouTube has the affiliate program very similar to TikToks. It does, but it’s not popular. I have not tried it. OK, but like that’s the thing. It’s not popular yet. Right. So like that alone to me, like just the information he gave on that was worth going to that talk for because I didn’t even know that was an option.

27:20
And then he talked a lot, which I love that he does, is he talked a lot about the types of ads that work on YouTube. And then he does this really cool thing, he does it most years when he talks about this kind of stuff, is like, why did this ad perform well? Why didn’t this ad perform? And so basically you just yell it out from the audience. And so basically seeing the types of content that perform well versus the stuff that does not, as well as like, a lot of these ads were not high production ads.

27:47
So knowing that as a e-commerce seller with maybe a very small team, two or three people, you can probably start leveraging this. And he used, I think it’s a brand that he works with, Arctic Coolers. If you’ve ever seen any of their ads, go check them out actually, go check out their YouTube channel. They’re actually a great example of someone who’s really doing it well and crushing it. And they’re like a direct competitor to Yeti, right? Which Yeti’s got the crazy brand affinity.

28:16
They and what I really liked about his example is that Arctic Coolers like slams Yeti in basically every ad, but so subtly that you you unless you’re like a big yeti, I’m a big yeti person. So it’s like, that was that was nice. That was a nice little dig. Right. So he gave a lot of examples of basically the types of content on YouTube that does work when it comes to advertising. Nice. One talk I can’t remember which. Oh, no, no, I was overlapping with Brett, but I did get a chance to attend Jeff Oxford’s talk.

28:46
And he covered SEO, but we all know that Google is hurting because AI is taking over. However, one of the key takeaways was that all of your efforts on SEO are going to go towards AI because guess where OpenAI gets all their ranking stuff? It’s from Bing, right? And likewise. And so he talked about how SEO is changing, how to rank not only in SEO or Google search engines, but also how to rank in the AI search engines.

29:14
And the timing was great because the week before, ChatGPT announced shopping directly within ChatGPT. And then Shopify had an announcement that you can now check out directly from ChatGPT. So imagine typing in, hey, what’s the best, in your case, like what’s the best handbag or whatever. And then just being able to click a button, automatically check out and have the order go directly to the Shopify store. Very powerful.

29:42
Well, and this is where I feel like too, the YouTube makes a difference too, right? Because it’s also a search engine, right? So just having your brand out there in as many places as possible, I think is really effective. It was fun to see Jeff. I didn’t get to sit in his talk, but I was a little worried because I was like, everyone’s so down on SEO. It’s like, I hope he has some positive news to report for our attendees. No, it was a great talk. I mean, he tied in the AI perfectly. Yeah.

30:10
And one of the things that I think is Jeff’s superpower is that he takes complex things and makes them very easy to understand. And he and I were actually talking about this at dinner one night and he said, know, the most favorite talk I ever did was at the first content mastermind where he took basically a full SEO overview of how Google actually works and broke it down into this like very easy to understand presentation. And I was like, you know, that is actually one of the most favorite talks I’ve ever listened to.

30:36
because you took something that no one gets, no one understands, it’s such a mystery, and you made it to where when I walked out of there, I was like, I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes. Jeff always does a good job. Yeah. Yeah, that’s why we always have him back. Same with Chris Schaeffer. I was just about to talk about Chris Schaeffer. I missed his talk, but you were at it right now. Yes. I love Chris because it’s like, I feel like if we just…

31:02
did like a round wheel and said, we’re gonna spin it and whatever comes up, you have to give a presentation on, you could get up and do it. He has so much experience and he talked about content and how content, once again, another content talk, but so important for brand building and basically talked about all the different ways that you need to leverage content to build your brand and basically how they all connect with each other, right? So.

31:26
It’s not just about email, it’s not just about social, it’s not just about ads, it’s about this full kind of robust content plan to get your brand top of mind for people. And he just, knows it inside out, backwards, forwards. I don’t think you can stump him on a question. And he’s another one those people that will talk to you till two in the morning, you know, and just, he’ll analyze your business, he’ll give you ideas, he’ll, know, whatever you need, he’s always someone that’s available for people.

31:56
Yeah, I’m gonna definitely check out his talk. I was just kind of curious, because the title of his talk was the ultimate content shortcut. And I was presuming that it was a system on how to create content at scale. It was basically, and I guess I’m not explaining it very well, but it was basically like, you want content from all these places, but how do you do it in a way that actually, you know, a solopreneur could basically run on their own. So, but basically talking about how it all works together, because I mean, in his

32:25
mind, which I do agree with, you do need everything working together to really elevate the brand. And so he talked about ways to do that in a pretty streamlined fashion. And then I also want to mention Isabella, Isabella Ritz, first time speaker at Seller Summit. She did a fantastic job. She talked about proven strategies for discovering and validating untapped Amazon product opportunities. It was an important talk because because of the tariffs,

32:55
Everyone was kind of at a standstill, right? And I know for my business, my periods of greatest growth came during times of uncertainty. So just because there’s tariffs and whatnot doesn’t mean that you stop launching product. And what’s cool about Isabella’s talk, I sat through the whole thing, was that she uses AI now to research product ideas, how to improve them. And then she merges that with real data that you’re getting from Jungle Scout or Helium 10 and whatnot. And she has this system.

33:25
for basically discovering and launching products. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, first of all, I had never met her before either. Absolutely adored her wealth of knowledge. I had at least two people come up to me. It might have been more and tell me that her talk was worth their ticket. Nice. They learned so much, which I always love to hear. I also had a couple people say that about Andrea’s talk, which we have people say that about your Facebook or your meta ads talk last year. Right. So I do think that one talk can be worth

33:53
worth your ticket just because you get something that revolutionizes your business. A perfect example of this is our friend Kelly, who went to your ads talk last year and basically qualified for a mastermind this year, right? After being in business for seven months, right? Just by leveraging what she learned at your, I mean, she leveraged everything she learned at Seller Summit, but she implemented, she basically took your talk last year and did every single thing you said to do, which I’m like, no one does every single thing.

34:20
But she did and is six figure plus business already. after less than a year. Nice. I also want to talk about Klaviyo. Now normally, I’m not excited about talks given by service providers, but Klaviyo just released a ton of new features that essentially make it like a salesforce.com for e-commerce. Yeah.

34:48
there weren’t a lot of people there who actually knew about these features. So we had Elvis Greer from Klaviyo give a talk on how to leverage all these cool new features. And I think we did a prior episode on all the new features. maybe I’ll link to that in the show notes, but it’s one thing to hear about them. It’s another thing to actually learn how to execute and actually use those features. Yeah. they, so they did a nice overview of all the things that you have access to now in Klaviyo. And then the other thing they did, which I thought was really great and

35:18
Klaviyo is so good about this every year, but they had basically product team people, right? And I don’t know what they’re called, products success, or they have a catchy name. But basically they took questions for a good portion of their presentation, and then obviously they had a booth and were available like the whole time for people to bring their computer. But what I love about them is that Klaviyo never shies away from a complaint.

35:45
Kind of like Neil was like, let me get on this right away. Like, I will fix this and make your experience better. We had someone in the Klaviyo talk basically say like, I hate your interface. Oh, really? It’s so difficult. I can’t find reports. And she’s like, and you know, one of the Klaviyo team members was like, okay, give me some specifics. I will talk to our development. Like they were like, we’re taking this feedback back to the team, right?

36:10
And I know that they do this because we used to bug Joe from Joe McCarthy from Klaviyo all the time about stuff. And then these features finally get implemented after I complain for long enough. But I love that they’re willing to hear feedback that’s not always glowing and do something about it or show you how to fix it or work with you on it.

36:29
So many times I feel like brands are like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, right? They don’t wanna listen to stuff where people aren’t thrilled. And for the most part, everyone really enjoys and likes using Klaviyo, but it can be clunky at times, right? And especially if you’re not in it every day, I use Klaviyo every day. I don’t find it clunky at all, but I can see how someone who logs in once a week could get frustrated with certain features. So I love that they’re willing to like one answer any question you have and they have the people on site to answer those questions.

36:56
and then they take that information back to their team and make Clavio better. I mean, I personally think Clavio is pretty easy to use, but they did add a whole bunch of new features and those all have new menu items that can be intimidating, And I think with any tool, right, if you’re not in it every day, it’s difficult. It’s difficult to remember where you click and what to do. And speaking of someone else who’s willing to answer any question above and beyond, Pam Kale, RPC, she was mobbed.

37:27
Yeah, she’s always mobbed. She’s always mobbed. And this year she was mobbed more because of the tariff situation. Yes. But she’s another one that is just… And she’ll even say, I don’t care if you use me. Right? I don’t care if you use my services. I just want to help you get the best deal, get the best, you know, get the fastest shipping times. Like she works so hard for people. And I know personally of people that she has helped that aren’t her customers. Right?

37:50
So love that she was there. I think she snuck in your black hat. I was thinking about pulling her up, but I didn’t want her talking about the black hat stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Just because. But she’s such a great resource. you know, she eats, sleeps, breathes freight forwarding, which to me is like so boring, but she absolutely loves it. And, you know, once again, another year of her.

38:17
Someone else who’s going to be very sad this morning, Stephen Weigler, because the nuggets did not look good last night. They might be out by the time this airs. One of the things that he does that’s so awesome is he sends out a calendly. I never know how to say that word. His calendar, basically. And you can book 30 minute sessions with him all throughout Seller Summit for free legal advice. And I think his rates like 500 bucks an hour or something like that. mean, every attorney’s rates that.

38:46
And he basically will sit with you and answer any questions you have. And he does it throughout the entire event. In fact, this year he had someone book over lunch and he left lunch to come have the meeting. So we ended up bringing his lunch downstairs. We’re like, you’re not missing lunch. Like you need to eat something. So we brought his lunch down to his booth and just so generous with his time and information.

39:09
I wanted to say hi to him the whole time, but he was literally book solid. I want to say the entire thing. can’t get to him. It’s like, I feel like I have to see him on the first day because as soon as people find out like what they can learn from him, you can’t talk to him after that. Yeah. I also wanted to give a shout out to Capec. Yes. And usually I don’t allow any funding sponsors at the show. And in fact, I said no to them immediately. Oh, yeah. She was telling everybody B was was

39:36
that gave her a nice story to tell people because she’s like, Steve even didn’t want us here in the beginning. I was like, well, that feels harsh. Well, it’s actually true. It’s true, though. was true. Because there’s been a lot of predatory lending companies, right? What’s nice about CapEx, and I want to see if I can try to explain this in 30 seconds or less, but basically there is very little risk in getting a loan from CapEx because you’re basically putting your inventory up on the line as collateral, not money.

40:06
And that does two things. One, it incentivizes CapEx to actually make sure you succeed because they don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of inventory at all. Yeah. And, and two, uh, because you guys are working together, that actually allows you to be more successful because they essentially become your partner because the collateral is not the money itself. It’s the inventory. It’s in both parties, best interest to do well. And that’s why once they explained that to me, I was like,

40:35
I really liked this model a lot. Yeah. And they were another, in fact, B is a seller summit alumni and came as an attendee a couple of years ago and was like, we need to sponsor this event and went back to her team. And it’s interesting because I remember her from 2024. And once again, I couldn’t get to her. I didn’t actually get to talk to her until the last night after the event was over. I saw her at the Mexican restaurant that’s attached to the hotel. And I was like, I didn’t even get to talk to you. I was like, you were so busy the whole time.

41:05
just talking to people and that was really nice too, because we do have attendees that are looking for solutions for those types of things. And it was nice that they were there to give people an option. And then of course, I want to mention our final keynote speaker who closed it out, Liz Saunders. She did an incredible job.

41:30
Liz is someone who actually helped us run the first couple sellers. Yeah. She was our registration and sponsor liaison back in the day. And then she started her own company. Well, she first out started out as an Amazon seller. Yep. And she had a good amount of success with that, but then she decided to go and launch her own company called Fluencer Fruit. And I want to say she was one of the very first Amazon influencer software companies, right?

41:59
I want to say she might be the first. have had some copycats, but yeah, she I think was probably first to market. And then she had a good, a successful exit with that company. And her talk was just about how the people that she’s met has really shaped her, her success over the years. And you never know who you’re going to meet at any event.

42:22
And Seller Summit was, believe, where she met Greg, where she became chief of staff of Jungle Scout, which again was a sponsor of the show this year as well. And I think that the good what I mean, obviously, I was very excited to have Liz on stage. She’s a longtime friend and I’ve known her since the very beginning. Yes. And we sort of started an e-commerce together was that, you know, she said the road to success is not straight. Right. It’s often curved and you know, you have to just take each curve.

42:52
and leverage that for the next step. And her life is a great example of that, of all the different things and how each thing that she did in her life led her to where she got, to where she built this company and exited. And from selling on Amazon to helping us run Seller Summit, all these different things. And I think for a lot of people in the audience, they’re on that windy road right now and success feels far away.

43:18
Right. Or this their goals feel far because things are not going how they want it to go. And this moment, especially a week ago when the tariffs were. Yeah. Like especially, you know, when everything was completely different seven days ago. But I think that really resonated with people because I think a lot of people this year came into seller summit really down. Right. Yeah. Looking for answers. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think her talk was a great way to close out the event because well, one, we’ve heard for

43:46
many years, people are in masterminds all year round with people they met at Seller Summit. People have found business partners at Seller Summit. People have made lifelong friendships at Seller Summit. So I think it was a great reminder to people that it might feel like you’re not where you’re supposed to be in this moment, but you never know who you’re gonna meet, what’s around the next curve, and you’ve gotta keep going.

44:11
And she did a great job and it was really fun. Her parents are live in the area. So they came to hear talk and and of course her husband is an AV guy. So she got to bring her own camera crew. So she has it. Listen, she’s going to leverage that talk in a million different ways. And I hope she does. She’s actually going viral on TikTok right now. I don’t know if you know this. No, I didn’t know that. Yeah. Her son just the content she’s creating. She’s making she’s if you’re not following her, I don’t know. I think just look for Liz Saunders on TikTok. OK.

44:40
But yeah, she’s making some really creative content. And one of the things that she talked about in her talk, but she talks about this a lot if you just have conversations with her, is having that playground. So something that you’re doing totally for fun that’s in your niche, but not totally. So right now she’s basically, says TikTok’s my playground, right? And so she’s just creating all sorts of content on TikTok. And she’s had a couple go, she has one right now with three million plus views. Wow. Yeah.

45:09
So anyway, it’s really cool just to like know that as an entrepreneur, you have to still keep that creative side open. You still have to be like trying, even though it has nothing to do with what she’s building right now and the project she’s working on, it’s fun to see like, you know, other things happening. And I think as entrepreneurs, we need to have that outlet or that funding that we can do that, you know, we learn stuff in the process, but it doesn’t necessarily directly connect to our business. Yeah. And,

45:37
Right now, we record everything every single year. Except for the secret session. Except for the secret session this year. That’s correct. The black hat session. You’ll have to come live for that session next time. But the recordings are being edited right now, and they should be available for sale in a couple of weeks. Of course, if you’re an attendee, you get access to all the recordings for free. Well, you can buy the recordings right now. They just won’t be delivered. Oh, that’s correct. Yes. Sorry. Yeah.

46:04
They won’t be delivered for another couple of weeks, but yes, you can grab the recordings now over at SellersSummit.com and just click on the big virtual pass button.

46:15
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Would love to meet you all in person someday at my event. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 591. Once again, the Seller’s Summit 2025 recordings are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejob.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’m diving into something that might surprise you. Why people who don’t seem particularly smart or qualified are building multi-million dollar businesses. Success isn’t about being a genius. It’s not even about having the perfect plan. A lot of the time, it comes down to taking action, embracing risk, and thinking differently. Enjoy the show.

00:33
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today’s episode is a little bit different. It’s a personal story that perfectly illustrates just how unpredictable the path to success can be. So about 20 years ago, I went back home to visit my mom over the summer and I happened to run into an old classmate of mine from high school. And back in the day, this classmate of mine wasn’t known to be the brightest guy in school. I remember one time, a group of us were discussing our SAT scores and he blurted out that he got a 700 on the test.

01:03
And when we asked him whether he got a $700k in verbal or a $700k in math, he just said, yup. Anyway, I naturally assumed that he was working in some dead-end job making minimum wage, but I was shocked to learn that he owned multiple apartment buildings and his own construction company. This guy was loaded. And even though I was doing okay, making about $100k as an electrical engineer at the time, I was a popper by comparison. And at that point, I remember thinking to myself, what the hell is this guy’s secret?

01:31
How did he start a successful construction company? Because it was dumb as rocks in high school. And this threw me for a loop because my whole worldview at the time was that you had to be smart to make big money. But the truth is, the richest people in the world aren’t necessarily smarter than you or me. And in fact, according to a Swedish study, the top 5 % of earners in the world are slightly less intelligent than those just below them on the economic ladder. So let’s start with reason number one.

01:58
Many smart people rationalize that they don’t need much money to live. They already have a decent paying job, go on a yearly vacation, own a car, and can afford to go out to eat every now and then. So why rock the boat? In fact, this was my exact thought process back when I worked my day job as an electrical engineer. Back then, I thought that the only people who cared about getting rich in business had to sacrifice their social lives, their family, and devote their entire future towards the pursuit of wealth.

02:25
And this is one of many excuses that I had to not start a business or try to make money outside of my day job. And the result was that for nearly a decade, I lived a listless life without purpose. I basically woke up in the morning, went to work, came home, had dinner, watched TV, rinse and repeat. Now I had money to provide for myself, but I was living life like a zombie with the exact same daily routine. Now it only after my wife became pregnant with our first child, did I realize a fundamental truth. In order to have freedom,

02:54
to spend time with who you want and not have to go to an office for eight hours a day, making money is important. Like it or not, you need money to improve your life, which in my case was spending time with my newborn child. Once I had a purpose for the money, I was able to unlock my full earning potential. So the first question I encourage all of you to ask yourself is, is if you weren’t limited by money, what would you be doing? Now my answer to this question was to be present with my kids every day.

03:22
and have the freedom to coach their sports teams and help them out with school. Now your definition of winning might be different, but the goal for most people is to get to the point where money is no longer the limiting factor in the decisions that you make. However, to win, you’re going to have to put yourself out there. You’re going to have to take some risks and actually try. Which leads me to reason number two, why many smart people can’t get rich. Even if you have a purpose, you’d be surprised how many smart people I know

03:49
aren’t willing to try to start a business or go out on their own because they are afraid of looking stupid. Now I used to have this mentality in high school. When I grew up, I was regarded as one of the smartest kids in school. In order to maintain that reputation, I didn’t want to fail. I couldn’t fail. So what ended up happening was that I often stuck to easy things that I knew I was good at rather than push myself to my limits. I was reluctant to try anything new because I didn’t want to fail and ruin my image. But for dumb people,

04:17
They don’t care because they are already being underestimated. Now remember my high school friend who I thought was dumb as rocks? Well, dumb people have two huge advantages over smart people. First off, being constantly underestimated puts a chip on your shoulder to prove everybody wrong. And that can be a powerful motivator. Second, you’ve got nothing to lose because who really cares if you fail? People have already written you off. You’re like the eighth seed in the NBA playoffs. Nobody expects you to win. You’ve got nothing but potential upside.

04:47
Smart people on the other hand, have the opposite problem. They have nothing but downside because everybody expects them to be wildly successful in everything they do, which is impossible. If a smart person tries something outside of their comfort zone and then fails, then their reputation as a smart person is at risk. Now the path of least resistance for a smart person is to follow the traditional path. You go to school, you get your job, you spend the next 40 years in an office and then you retire.

05:14
Now I used to think that my job provided everything that I needed. And for most people it can be, but if you want to achieve financial freedom and do whatever you want, you can’t follow common wisdom and expect to get uncommon results. You have to do something different. Now the other thing I noticed about dumb people is that they tend to underestimate risk, whereas smart people tend to overestimate risk. Now I’ve mentioned this in the past, but the most problematic students in my Profitable Online Store course are engineers. Whenever I try to teach an engineer,

05:44
how to start an e-commerce business, they are always running mental simulations in their heads to predict the probability of failure. They want all the answers before they start. And I’m not criticizing engineers because I am one, but the problem with trying to overanalyze everything is that that turns you into a pessimist. You start thinking about everything that could go wrong instead of the opposite, thinking about everything that could go right if you succeed. By the way, if you’re interested in learning how to start your own e-commerce store, make sure you sign up for my free six-day e-commerce mini course below.

06:13
Now for this behavior, I blame Darwinism and evolution. Back in the stone ages, it was all about survival and being cautious otherwise you could die. And being smart was valuable because you could calculate all the things that could potentially go wrong and avoid the risk that could get you killed. But today, no one’s gonna die from making a wrong business decision and being your own boss isn’t about life or death. Maybe you lose some money or some of your dignity. Maybe you have to move back in with your parents for a while, but taking risks to make money.

06:42
assuming you’re not doing anything illegal is unlikely to end in anything that you can’t recover from. But what about dumb people? Most dumb people are completely ignorant of all the things that could go wrong. Meanwhile, smart people are busy analyzing all the potential pitfalls and it stops them from ever getting started. One time, and acquaintance come to me for help to start an e-commerce store and the problem was that he had no money. Heck, he didn’t even have enough money to buy a sample of the product that he wanted to sell. So what did he do?

07:12
He took pre-orders for his product, collected money from customers, and then bought a bulk shipment of products from Alibaba, sight unseen. So many things could have gone wrong. He could have been shipped junk from Alibaba. The shipment could have arrived late. It might not even have arrived at all. The product might not have functioned as he intended. But luckily, everything turned out fine, and he ended up making multiple six figures in profit in his first year of business. Here’s the thing. As a smart person,

07:39
You’re probably very good at imagining all the things that can go wrong. But the reality is that people are terrible at calculating the probability of those events actually occurring. The worst case scenario almost never happens. And you spent all this time worrying that it keeps you from taking actions that could change your life and lead to something amazing. Now I still struggle with this today and I constantly have to remind myself of my overarching goal. I want to make money so I can do whatever I want and hang out with whoever I want without worrying about the money.

08:09
and I never want to spend 40 hours a week in an office. Which leads me to the next limiting belief of smart people. They never think that they know enough to be successful. Now there’s an interesting aspect about people that I’ve learned over the years that is just so counterintuitive that I still don’t really understand why it happens and it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low ability or knowledge in a particular area tend to overestimate their competence.

08:37
People who are less skilled or knowledgeable mistakenly believe that they’re more competent than they are due to a lack of insight into their own limitations. But the opposite is true of smart people. Smart people rarely think that they are the expert in any given field and therein lies the problem. The reason smart people struggle to make money is because they get hung up on the fact that they know that they don’t know enough to succeed. For example, I have a friend who’s an amazing engineer.

09:03
And he’s either built or been the lead developer for many famous apps that we all use today on our phones. He clearly has the skills to start a very successful company, but he’s terrified about the business aspects of running his own company. Now, because the relative gap between his extensive knowledge of engineering versus his lack of knowledge for business is just so large that he’s discouraged from taking action. Meanwhile, a dumb person who has very little engineering or business experience usually thinks to himself, I don’t really know anything.

09:32
but how hard could this possibly be? And then what happens is that the dumb person takes action and gets into the ring while the smart person is busy second guessing himself on the sidelines. Now in general, things really end up as badly as we think they will. And there’s so many external factors outside of just knowledge and strategy that the dumb person stumbles upon success because he tried. So bottom line, if you take anything away from this video, here’s what I want you to remember.

09:59
When I first started my business and I followed a bunch of experts and gurus to learn, I was under the impression that all these successful people knew what they were doing from the start, that they never made mistakes. But I’ve come to learn from interviewing over 500 successful entrepreneurs in my podcast, that almost everyone had no clue what they were doing in the beginning. They didn’t have a concrete plan. And if they did, it never went as expected. Most successful people are just going with the flow and solving problems as they arise. And the main reason why they are successful

10:29
is because they are too dumb to quit. Hey, the reason I started an online store selling handkerchiefs was because I thought to myself, how hard could this possibly be? You just buy stuff at a low price and sell it at a high price. Simple, right? Well, I overestimated my abilities early on and didn’t understand all the subtleties of selling online. I didn’t understand everything that could go wrong. And the first three months after I opened were horrible. I didn’t make any sales. Hell, I don’t even like handkerchiefs, but I stuck with it.

10:58
because I wanted my wife to stay at home with the kids. And believe me, I was teased by my friends all the time for having a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford and selling handkerchiefs for a living. For most of my first year in business, I felt like an idiot. I felt like I was wasting my time until things started to actually work. After we made six figures in our first year and then seven figures years later, all of a sudden I look like a genius, which I am not. I just kept with it until it worked.

11:27
The same goes with my YouTube channel, my blog, my podcast, and everything that I’ve ever done in life. Remember, you can’t win if you don’t start, and you can’t lose if you don’t quit. This is all you need to know. The goes with my YouTube channel, my blog, my podcast, and everything that I’ve ever done in life. Remember, you can’t win if you don’t start, and you can’t lose if you don’t quit. This is all you need to know.

11:52
Hope you enjoyed this episode and that it gave you a fresh perspective on what’s really possible regardless of credentials or experience. more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 590. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejob.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 of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I reflect on YouTube’s 20 year anniversary and why not doing video is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in 2025. We share personal regrets, real success stories from our students and the exact strategies we’re using to grow new channels from scratch. Whether you’re selling physical products, digital courses, or just building a brand, hopefully this episode will be a wake up call. But before we begin,

00:30
I wanted to let you know that this is the last call for tickets for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business.

01:00
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the seller’s summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year,

01:27
We also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellerssummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:50
Welcome back to the My Wife, Put Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to talk about YouTube’s 20 year anniversary where over I think a trillion videos have been uploaded. No, 20 trillion videos have been uploaded. Which is crazy. And yours could be one of the 20 trillion. One in 20 trillion. I think I have like 500 videos uploaded or something crazy like that at this point. Maybe more than that actually. I haven’t looked. So it’s 2025. So it’s the 20th. So that means…

02:21
2005 was the start of YouTube. I guess so, yes. Your math is correct, Tony. Congratulations. Right, I had to think about it for second. Well, because I think I put my first video on YouTube in 2008 or nine, and I will say this until the day that I die, not continuing with YouTube is one of my biggest business regrets.

02:44
that I have because when I started doing it in 2008 or nine, like people, wasn’t like it is today obviously, right? And pretty much anything you put up on YouTube got a decent amount of traction. it wasn’t, you didn’t have to play the game that I think you have to play with all, you know, content creation these days. It’s like if you just put up something that was interesting or you taught people something, people watched it. And…

03:10
to this day, I’m like, why didn’t I keep going? Why didn’t I keep posting in my pajamas? Like, big mistake. I mean, it’s evolved so much. Like, back in the day, your subscribers meant a lot more. Yeah. So if you had like a huge subscriber base and you would put out a video, it would probably do well no matter what. But, and people were just putting out these short little clips, right? Right, right. In a lot of cases, and they were doing well. Now it’s all about watch time and

03:39
And I like it better because it’s merit based, right? Your subscribers don’t matter as much. If you put out something good, it’ll do well. And I think TikTok helped to transform this model. agree. And actually we have the perfect example of this that we just learned about last week. I know we talk about Kevin a lot on the podcast, but Kevin is a student in our courses and he has been just churning away at YouTube for probably, I want to say we’re like 18 months.

04:07
Yeah, it’s been a year and half, I want to say. And putting out content consistently has dabbled in the long form, which we’ve been encouraging him to. And a couple of weeks ago, he had a long form piece of content go viral. And just to show you like the impact of that for him, it doubled his subscribers.

04:30
and it put him, I forget what it did for his watch time, but I want to say it doubled or even more his watch time from this one video that he put out a couple weeks ago. That’s exactly the pattern that I saw with my channel. I was getting 1,000 views or less for probably a year. Then I remember there’s one video that got like

04:56
20,000 views and I was like, oh my God, what’s going on here? And then I remember when I hit 100,000 views, like that next video hit a million views. So I think it’s almost like YouTube needs you to prove yourself first to show that you’re gonna be consistent. And during that time, as long as you’re consistent, one of those videos is gonna pop. And then once one pops, it’s almost like YouTube gives you this momentum.

05:26
where all your subsequent videos will do well. So I think the first question is, and we’re gonna talk primarily about physical products, but let’s talk a little bit about the digital side, because I think, first of all, if you are selling any sort of digital product, course, membership, coaching, you should be on YouTube, right? This is an absolute no-brainer. You have to be on YouTube, I would say. Or you have to show your face somehow. You have to be on some sort of video platform. Yeah.

05:54
To me, if you’re not doing this, it’s a big mistake. I know who talks about this is Tay from Financial Tortoise. He talks about the same thing when he got started. The first, I think he said year to 18 months, it was like 100 views, 500 views, 1,000. Step one is how do you keep going when, like Kevin, right? You’re getting 100 views and you feel like you’re putting so much time. Kevin’s videos are good.

06:23
Right. He does great editing, really good content. If he talks about like computer and technical stuff. So it’s not my cup of tea, but like it’s good content, right. That you can learn from. So how do you keep going when you’re on like month nine and you’re still getting a hundred views, a hundred and thirty views? I mean, this is my mindset for everything. And I don’t know if we’ve repeated enough on this podcast, but don’t do anything unless I’m going to like do it. And I give myself a five year time frame.

06:52
Yeah. Like if I can’t get it any traction in five years, then something’s wrong, I think. Well, five years is we’ve talked. Now, I know we’ve had this conversation. Well, so let’s not do five years. Let’s say three years. Let’s just say three years. Right. I think anyone can do something for three years. You disagree? Maybe not in this day and age when Gen Z feel like yes, if you’re a Gen X or you can. But then I feel like it might lose its momentum for.

07:22
the Gen Zers, I don’t know. You know what I hate? It’s like all these stories have spoiled it for everyone. Like there’s of course there’s gonna be outliers, right? That get successful within like two months or three months or six months. But those are the only stories you hear out there, pretty much. And so everyone thinks that it’s gonna happen fast, but I would guarantee you that 99 % of the people out there takes a long time for stuff to happen.

07:47
So it’s so interesting that you say that because I think it was last night you were messaging me or it might’ve been sometime this week and you’re like, know, we’re, I’m doing a talk on YouTube at Seller Summit and I’m using one of my clients as a case study for e-commerce and you were like, well, what’s the big, you know, like you wanted like a big, you know, showboat moment. And I was like, we don’t have one. We have slow and steady growth. have email list growth. We have sales, we have subscribe. You know, it’s like,

08:14
But nothing has we have not had a home run. We actually haven’t had a video go viral. We just have slow and steady growth every single week. OK, so let’s put this in perspective, because I looked at the channel before I emailed you. And you’ve only been at this for what, three months, three a half months? yeah, right, three and a half months, right? You already have videos consistently doing one to two thousand views. Yes, I definitely did not have that in my first three months.

08:43
I was lucky to break a thousand. Yeah. Well, we had a real like a real strategy. And obviously, I’m not going to give away my talk. But so you’re still time to buy a ticket. Come here. Wednesday, May 7th. I’ll let you on all the secrets. We had a real strategy to the growth. And I will say I am very pleased with how the channel is coming for a variety of reasons.

09:10
But I think the biggest one and moving into e-commerce a little bit, I think this is one of the best ways to help people bond with your brand, right? Now we have the founder of the company who has, it’s a curriculum company. So she’s written a lot of the curriculum. Like she’s very involved, not as much today, but still very involved in what is published. And so I think, and I actually was looking through the comments earlier.

09:38
this morning and it’s like people really, really identify with her, right? And they really, so it’s like it takes what, mean curriculum, right? It’s very competitive. There’s a lot of curriculum out there that you can buy for your kids if you’re homeschooler. But like how do you set yourself apart from all the competitors? This is a really, I don’t wanna say easy because it’s not easy but it’s a simple way to do it, right? Because all you’re doing is getting on camera.

10:06
See, I would argue that if you’re selling curriculum, you have to have content. So prior to this YouTube channel, which is only three and a half months old, how was she selling her curriculum? Through blog posts. Blog posts, okay. So just written, no video at all? No video. She had some video. So whenever she launched a product, there was usually a video of like how to use this product. So if you purchased the product, you got that video in like a post purchase flow. But really that was the only video content out there. And then we did challenges, right? So it’s like,

10:35
a homeschool planning bootcamp, a chore challenge, things like that. So there was some sporadic video content, but it wasn’t that consistent weekly content that’s getting put out today. You know what’s funny about that is no one reads anymore. No one in, I should rephrase that, no one in the younger generation reads anymore. Like my kids, like if you have them read something, they inevitably miss like these little details because they just scan the thing. But you put a video in front of them and they watch the whole thing. I’m the opposite. I much prefer reading.

11:05
Me too. Than watching a video. So yeah, it’s great that she decided to start the channel because I mean, at some point, I think the whole blogging method is not nearly going to be as effective. Right. And I would say the good news is if you are an e-commerce brand and you have a blog or a content site that you’ve been building, I mean, a lot of people that have been in the e-commerce world for several years have a blog, right? They have some type of content that they’ve been using.

11:35
So when we started the channel, we basically took some of the most popular blog posts and turned them into, using Claude, turned them into scripts. So most of the content on her channel, because she does have the blog, is based in content from the blog. So I would say that’s another benefit if you’re in e-commerce and you do have some content that you’ve already created.

12:02
It even makes it easier to turn that content, especially today with all the AI tools, it makes it really easy to turn that content into video. Actually, when I started my channel, I did it like the super lazy way and I literally just read my blog posts. But I mean, it got me started. It got me on this consistent clip. And then I slowly made modifications first to the intro to make it more enticing. And then later I would cut the content down to make it less verbose.

12:31
but it’s a process, like whatever it takes for you to get started is what you gotta do. Well, and I think that’s a really key point is that it’s more important to get started and put out beginner type content, right? Probably not your best content because no one’s gonna be watching you initially anyway, like you’re not gonna have a lot of views. So it’s better to get all the kinks out early and sort of find your footing and figure out how you’re gonna have a brand voice on video.

13:00
as opposed to what I see some people do is they spend so much time planning and they come up with this elaborate package to put out there and it’s actually not what the brand needs. And then you’re fumbling, you’re trying to redo and figure it out. I would say just start putting the content out there and see what resonates with people. Yeah, mean, totally. It’s easier said than done. So I’m about to launch

13:30
a YouTube channel for Bumblebee linens. And I had dragged on about this for probably two or three years, I would say. It’s been a while. For doing it, mainly because I didn’t think that I should be the one on camera. But finally, I was just like, okay, I got to be the one on camera or and you suggested I remember hiring someone. Yes, I did. Right to be the face of the brand. And I was against that because I mean, just I think of what happened to Ezra, like the face of his brand.

13:59
She died. Passed away suddenly, actually. He was scrambling to find someone else. I don’t I was available. I was available for middle-aged makeup. What are you talking about? I think just to find someone reliable that will stay with your company for a long time, it’s just a risky thing, in my opinion. A perfect, yes, you’re right. Ezra had that experience. I look at someone like Tiffany Ivanovsky who

14:27
has tried for years to find people who can do live selling. So similar, a face on a video. And she has run into a lot of issues with that. The main one being once people learn how to live sell and get good at it, they want to sell their own stuff. They don’t want to get… And I think she’s offered fairly lucrative packages to people. They’re getting paid an hourly plus they’re getting some commission.

14:55
But what happens is people think, oh, this is so easy. And don’t realize, especially today, all the risk. And dealing with now tariffs and all the uncertainty and even things like shipping container. It’s like there’s just so much stuff I think people think, oh, this is so easy. Look at me making videos. But she’s had that happen several times where she’s basically raised, trained up people. And then they leave and think they can do it themselves better. Yeah.

15:25
Which is a risk if you hire someone to do that for any, you know, even making your content, right? Well, the only reason I bring this up is because I’m pretty much starting on ground zero again with Bumble Bee Linens. Like my wife, Critter Jai, was well established. I have this flow. It kind of works like clockwork. But Bumble Bee Linens, though, I need I pretty much started from scratch and I needed a method. And so what I decided to do was tell this like reach out to customers and tell their stories since we sell

15:54
commemorative handkerchiefs and linens. Like I want to hear the stories behind those products, like how people got together, know, stories of friendship and whatnot. And so that’s the route that I’m taking. And this is so much easier now because I can take like a form that a customer fills out about their story and turn it and fill in all the little blanks and whatnot and make it sound really good with AI. And this is something that I probably would not have been able to do until AI came out.

16:24
True. So I would say, this is actually, this is a great question for you because there’s probably a lot of people, like you’re a middle-aged man selling lace handkerchiefs, right? It sounds so terrible. It does sound terrible. a white van luring children. That’s what it sounds like. You could have made me sell candy. Hey little girl, you want some candy? He has puppies and ice cream in the back of the van. But no, like I think there’s a lot of people out there who have

16:53
successful e-commerce stores that are looking for another channel, looking for another avenue to build their brand, but they’re like, hey, I’m a middle-aged guy selling hair accessories, or something that you just feel like doesn’t match. So you came up with this angle of storytelling. What would you say to people? Because I know that was one of the biggest struggles for you, and you and I talked about this all the time. It’s like you were like, I don’t want to be the face of Bumblebee.

17:20
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 obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

17:49
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.

18:01
You know what’s funny about this is I’ve been doing a lot of research lately for e-commerce brands doing short form content. And there are middle-aged people out there selling effectively. It’s not all Gen Z is basically what I’m trying to say. And you know, I’m starting to talk like my kids now, but I actually find a lot of the Gen Z content cringy. Right? It’s like the selling content cringy. Like just a short form, like

18:29
how they gush over the whole makeup. That does not appeal to someone my age. Incidentally, for our products, people who are buying it are my age. I would say women over the age of 40. I don’t think that that Gen Z stuff will relate to them. I don’t think it works. I don’t think it works for everybody. Another example of this is Paul Ivanovsky, Tiffany’s husband.

18:58
So back when they first started making video about their products, right? Selling online, selling live, which is a little bit different than creating YouTube content, but still the same like middle-aged man selling women’s clothing, right? So he had a, I mean, this is brilliant, right? This, mean, I don’t wanna give Paul a lot of credit, because I know Tiffany is definitely the backbone of that business, but, and Paul will take it and run if he hears me say these things, but.

19:26
He got on live video and put the clothes on. He was trying on dresses and shirts and cardigans. It was fun and it was funny. People tuned in. I would tune in just like it was like, I could watch an episode of Friends or I could watch Paul try on a dress. I’m watching Paul try on a dress. Obviously, Paul’s got a great personality.

19:54
But the other thing that Paul figured out really quickly, which I think this is important, right? Find your angle is that Paul realized that a lot of women that were shopping were lonely, right? They’re up late at night because they’re going live at like 1030 at night, right? So these women are lonely. They don’t have anything to do. They are replacing Netflix for these people, right? And so when Paul sees their name up and he’s like, Rachel, beautiful, how are you doing? Right. Complimenting them, calling them by their name.

20:23
Some of these women probably haven’t been called by their name, right? Like he, I mean, seriously though, like it was such a genius idea, right? To basically become this person’s like companion virtually, right? And I mean, I’ve seen their numbers and some of those customers have spent, like, I’m like, do they have another house for all this clothes? Right? Like where are they storing? Cause they have customers that have spent six figures.

20:50
and their clothing is not expensive, right? But that angle worked, right? He found an angle for the business where he could be the, I mean, they both are the face of the brand, obviously, but where he could go on and do that and it worked. So I think sometimes you just have to think out of the box like you with the stories, right? It makes sense and it’s something that would appeal to the demographic of who buys your products. Well, so the way I’m approaching it is we’re going to have three different types of content. One is going to be a story. I don’t know which one’s going to work.

21:20
Yeah, but another one is just gonna be like life running a business as a husband and wife and those are probably gonna be mainly be shorts. Those are the ones I gonna do the best. I agree because they’re gonna be off the cuff. I’ll bring something up. Yeah, I’ll something stupid The only question really is whether you know, she’s actually gonna be really mad at me which could could happen. Yes, we’ll have a calendar day Steve sleeps on the couch

21:47
But I think it’s gonna be a combination of both. There’s gonna be some people who wanna hear the stories. There’s gonna be some people who wanna see behind the scenes. So you just gotta throw things out there and see what works. And Paul, wearing women’s clothing is what worked. the other problem that I think people have aside from feeling like I can’t be the face of my brand, which I think you just have to get creative with that. The problem that my client had was the technology problem, right? And she just couldn’t.

22:16
I mean, and I like some people just don’t, you know, I’m the same way. Like when I film video, I have Brian set everything up for me. I mean, can I do it myself? Yes. Do I want to? No. And is that a hurdle for me? Absolutely. So like that’s the way I’ve overcome the hurdle. Right. He’s my tech guy. And that was her problem. Right. Like she was just like, I don’t know what kind of camera I need. I don’t know this. And I sent her all of our YouTube lessons. Right. Like which I feel like our YouTube lessons in profitable audience are

22:45
10 out of 10. If you know nothing about YouTube, you could go through those 20 lessons and you could absolutely start a YouTube channel tomorrow. Bench watch, start the channel. It has equipment, outlining, how to film, everything. She was like, I can’t. There was this huge hurdle for her. So she hired someone to basically come into her house and set up a studio and set up a…

23:11
So it doesn’t ever move, like it’s in her office, it’s, you the camera’s set up, everything is, so all she has to do is go in and turn it on. And that was her hurdle. So yes, it costs money to have someone come in your house and set up a studio, obviously, but it was worth it because that was what kept her from making, because we’ve been talking about this for over a year, right? And it just wasn’t happening. She didn’t know, she didn’t have this, blah, blah, blah.

23:36
And then as soon as our friend is our friend, Leslie Samuel, I don’t think he does this for everybody. So don’t don’t message him. He went up there and basically gave her like a two day boot camp in YouTube. He’s a YouTube expert and then set everything up for him, basically told her this is exactly what you need to do. Here’s how you and then showed her how to use a eye to help her with scripts. like basically, I think he just taught her everything we teach in the course, but she didn’t have to watch the videos. Right.

24:04
That’s another option for you. There are people that will do this for you. If you have children, they will do it for you for free. I don’t think tech is the hurdle for most people though. I really don’t think tech is It was a hurdle for a lot of people in our course. Are you kidding me? I think just the act of filming is the biggest hurdle. Like being on camera and then editing is the other big hurdle. Editing is one of those things where

24:34
I don’t think we have a great answer on this. You edit yourself until you want to pay someone else to edit for you. That’s kind of the solution. That is the solution. Yeah. Yeah. Or you just don’t edit like our friend Rob Berger, who still does not edit. he has 200. Actually, he’s catching up to me. think he’s at 300,000 views right now. So I would say we always joke about the Rob Berger method of no editing. I would say it’s a little harder if you’re a brand, like if you are selling a physical product.

25:03
I think you might need slightly more edit work than what he does, which is nothing. You know, I was thinking about this because I want a low energy way of doing our short form. So I don’t think we’re going to edit those. Like one question would be like, what do you do? Do enjoy working with your spouse in this business? And we’ll just give our answers off the cut. I don’t think that requires much editing. Oh, it will once you hear her answer. Well, no, that’s the beauty of it, right?

25:34
You’ll have to edit out all the F-bombs.

25:40
I think to an extent, yes. I actually think that if you’re struggling with an angle, the behind the scenes, real life, that content is very popular right now. I would say it’s definitely trending. I think that type of content is a great way to talk about your business even if you don’t fit your customer avatar.

26:06
I think that people get very interested in like the inner workings of small businesses. I mean, I’m just following the model of some other companies and what they do also is they’ll call out customers in their videos too. Just like what you said with Paul, except not in a live environment. Yeah. They’ll just bring up an order and this our products are perfect for this, right? Because if it’s someone who is like, you know, has a special message and provided you get their permission, of course you call out their personalization and you know,

26:36
You talk about, this such and such has embroidered a handkerchief for her wedding. Best of luck. I hope everything goes well. Shout out. That works really well. There’s a lot of videos on this one store that I watch where those videos are the ones that perform the best. Or someone just had a baby. Or maybe even someone passed away, actually, and they embroidered something. Those stories do the best. Are you doing the Pope’s hankies?

27:06
Did you get that order? No? No? No, unfortunately not. You’ve had some famous clients, but I won’t name any names, but I wasn’t sure how famous we were getting you over there at Bumblebee. We did have Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I know. She was a client of ours. I like the call-out idea. That works because if people see that they got called out, they share that with everybody they know because they’re excited about it and it helps.

27:35
you know, sort of boost the virality of the video itself. Not just that, but people will buy because they want to get called out. Yes. I think that’s the idea. that they will get. Yeah, it’s that whole concept of like, which I still to this day find absolutely absurd is on like lives and stuff like that where you can send, basically you’re paying people to say your name on a live, right? Which I think is absolutely crazy, but it’s a big deal, right?

28:04
But yeah, it’s the same concept. You’re just not asking people to pay you in that way. They’re buying from you. I speaking of lives, I follow this guy. He covers like Warriors basketball live after every game. And people are literally tipping him like 100 bucks, 20 bucks just so they answer his. He answers their question. Yeah. And it’s always some stupid question like, do you think Steph shots were lucky in the Houston game? I don’t know. But you know.

28:34
Someone will pay that amount of money just for the attention. Yes. Capitalize on people’s need to have attention. The crazy world we live in, I wouldn’t even pay a dollar for that. No, I wouldn’t either. I remember back in the day, you could call into the radio. That’s really dating myself. It was free. You could call in and ask questions I used to dedicate songs to girls I liked. Yes, song request. goes out to you, Justine.

29:04
It was always like a heart song. I think anything that shows, if you have an interesting process, so you have an embroider machine, I think that’s interesting. I realized last year we went to the Yingling Bottling Factory in Pennsylvania with my sis, we did a tour. I could have watched that bottle machine all day long.

29:31
It was just fascinating to watch them come off the line and everything, all the little things that have to happen for it to be bottled and packaged up. But I think if you have any production or something like that that’s really interesting, making that type of content, really, and people will watch that forever and ever and ever.

29:51
They will and you know what’s funny is we were eating at this faux restaurant once and there was this camera on the fish tank, live streaming the fish tank all day long. And I was like, what’s up with that? He’s like, oh, you know, get money from this. I’m like, what? You just set up a camera on your fish tank? He’s like, yeah, people like the fish. Yeah. So our friend, don’t get it. I don’t get it either because we were, this was a couple of months ago and she’s like,

30:21
have you heard about the eagles? And I was like, of course I watched the Super Bowl, right? And she’s like, no, no, no, the eagles, their eggs are about to hatch. She had like on a separate screen on her computer was like watching eagle eggs that were getting ready to hatch. And she was committed to these like eagle eglets, right? I think that’s what they’re called. And I was like, no, I haven’t heard of the eagles that are.

30:47
about to have baby, I don’t know. But it’s true, people remember when that giraffe was pregnant and like millions of people were waiting for this thing to have a baby. I’m like, that was I don’t understand, but it definitely works. And I would say if it works, try it and see if it works for your business. So my wife buys a lot of stuff from video and she’ll buy stuff just because she likes the creator. Yes. I mean, yeah.

31:16
Like I remember one time she bought this makeup that she didn’t like 100 % like, she just wanted to support the creator. And that’s what it’s come to, I think, in today’s day and age. This is why you can’t just list your products on a store, because, and you know, maybe these tariffs will turn the tide because there’s always these Chinese knockoffs. Maybe that’ll be mitigated going forward, but you still need to stand out somehow. And oftentimes the way you stand out has nothing to do with your packaging or

31:47
know, images or ads or your website anymore. It’s really from people wanting to know who the owner of the store is and what they stand for, what their personality is like. Yeah. Okay. So next, changing gears just a little bit, but I don’t want to not talk about this. One of our goals for my client’s channel is to get emails from the videos. Okay. Because I think, I think in general, especially for something like curriculum, which people do

32:16
think about, right? They don’t just buy, it’s not like an impulse buy, right? There are definitely products out there that are impulse buys and I think you can probably do anything, right? Or the price point is right. So we wanna get emails from people. Is that your strategy for Bumblebee? Like do you have an email strategy or what are you thinking when it comes to that component? I’m not sure, like I don’t wanna put multiple calls to actions in the videos. Right. However,

32:44
I think our products kind of fall under that impulse buy. They do, yeah, for sure. So like having a link directly to the site might make sense. The other thing I was thinking was including a form where you could just tell a story, period, right? And that would get email addresses as well. I’m torn because, mean, we haven’t launched this all yet. And so I think depending on what happens is going to change the trajectory of what I actually do. What do you think, actually?

33:14
Yeah, I feel like for you, could probably do a link right to the store. That makes sense. I mean, that’s what Eric Bandholz does. Yeah. And we do link to products all the time in videos because usually the video does talk about a product in some way. It’s not the main part of the video, but there’s a reference. We still use a lot of lead magnets. So like I think there’s a video that just came out or it’s coming out. It’s about like teaching your kid to read, right? Phonics, which is a hot topic.

33:43
This is surprisingly surprising to you. But a lot of people freak out when their kids aren’t reading right at kindergarten. And it’s like, oh, what’s wrong with my kid? Blah, blah, blah. So it’s a whole video on like, hey, this is actually the true statistics on kids reading and what it means if they read later or whatever. And we obviously have a reading curriculum that we’re selling, but it’s actually not here yet. Right. So we’ve been seeding it with this reading content. We’ve been starting to put reading content on YouTube. So we have a lead magnet.

34:12
that’s basically like a sight word game that you can play with your kids. So we try to come up with ideas that correlate with the video so that, you if you want to learn more, if you want to test your kid, if you want to see where they are, like, you know, download the lead magnet. And obviously that directly gets people on the email list because that’s how they get the download. But that’s been our main strategy. I think for curriculum, that has to be the way you go. Right. People aren’t just going to buy a curriculum after they see one video, right?

34:42
Absolutely not. I they buy a hanky, but yeah. I would question their parenting skills. Do some research. And just for the record, people get worried when their kids aren’t reading by age three, right? Yes. I think it’s at one. If they’re not doing multiplication tables by age two and a half, something’s wrong. Yes, exactly. Yes. We have all the all the warning signs. Our video has bright red flashing lights. So that’s been our main

35:12
our main mechanism for getting emails. And it’s worked, I would say it’s worked okay. I don’t really have a lot to compare it to, right? Because I don’t, I actually don’t only know one other curriculum company that’s making a lot of YouTube content and they don’t seem to be asking for emails at all. So I’m not quite sure, like they have a large following and things like that, but I don’t really have a bar to measure it with. But.

35:39
To me, feels like the people that are getting on the list are eventually making purchases. So to me, it’s a win, right? We’re getting the right people on the list and eventually they’re making a purchase decision. I will say that one of the areas I think we need to improve in is we separate people who come from YouTube versus people that come from an ad or finding us through search or referral type thing. I think we need to do a better job talking to the YouTube people in a different way.

36:09
Because when we got started, we kind of just cloned a bunch of things and it wasn’t we didn’t really do like a full like this is a YouTube customer. And I do think if you’re going to take all the time to do that, that’s definitely something that you should think about doing is talking to those people a little bit differently, because they might have found a lot of their traffic actually comes from YouTube recommended videos. Right. So, yeah, which is interesting to me. Like that was actually a pretty surprising statistic.

36:38
So to me, they probably follow other homeschoolers or other curriculum type companies and got the video recommended. And so they might not know at all who this company is. So we need to do a better job of letting them know like the credentials and why you should buy from them and why their curriculum is different and better. Yeah.

37:00
I think I would have a lot more problems marketing a religion. Maybe it’s because I’m not in that industry, but I wouldn’t be able to… You kind of have to be a little bit more straight-laced, right? I want to buy a curriculum from someone who’s competent. Yeah. And I think that is important, making people aware that credentialed people are writing this curriculum, right? It’s not just bunch of people in the basement putting together…

37:27
Correct. Stuff from a high. can’t act like a goofball like what I plan on acting like for my videos to a certain extent. No. And so the last thing I’m to say on this, which is sort of like, this is not a way to get emails, but it’s a way we use the emails is, and this is actually a great way to get your watch time up, is doing webinars on YouTube. Now there’s a bunch of negatives to this, right? Because

37:54
like you’re not using a webinar software, it’s public on YouTube. I mean, we’re running it public on YouTube, but what I saw when we did this was the watch time went up pretty dramatically overall for the account, not only that, YouTube favors live streaming, right? So it looks good to YouTube. And then as well, the average watch time went up. So the average time of most of our videos are between 10 and 13 minutes.

38:23
Well, the webinar was an hour, right? There were, think, about 100 people on the webinar live. was about basically homeschooling through high school. But the average view time on that webinar was in like the 15 to 20 minute, the view time, whereas her average view time normally is like four and a half minutes, right? So the view time went up pretty significantly because of the webinar. So boosted the overall average as well. So that’s another thing that you could think about doing

38:53
if you have any type of product that needs an instruction. I think about actually the person who came to mind with this is Meg, who sells hermit crab food or something like that. That’s something where you could do a webinar on how to set up a hermit crab tank. You could do a whole instructional and you would get people watching a lot longer because they would be learning about the environment and what they need and like

39:23
you know, use this, don’t use that. And then obviously talking about your own products in there. But anything where you need to give an instruction on something, I think you can figure out a way to make a free webinar, right? And just, and then you get people that come into the webinar because it’s live. So it’s available on YouTube. So people that don’t know that you exist, right, can find you as well. I mean, I do live webinars on YouTube. That’s the only way that I do them. And what my buddies have told me is in general, if you’re live,

39:52
You can do it to the public, but as soon as it’s over, you make it unlisted. Because the metrics for someone coming into a live video, especially in the beginning, when you’re waiting for people to come in and whatnot, the drop off rate is huge. So I would say if you’re going to do it, go live and then make it private later. Not private, but unlisted later. Yeah. Is that what you guys are doing? She actually didn’t get the drop off at all. Afterwards? Yeah.

40:21
I mean, people are still watching this video and I think it’s the topic, right? Homeschooling in high school. People are very intimidated about homeschooling in high school or it’s where you, it’s actually where you see people drop off homeschooling, right? They homeschool up until high school and they put their kid in high school because they wanted to do athletics or something like that. I thought, and I thought about making it unlisted afterwards, but we’re still getting a lot of traction on it. So I’m like, huh, maybe. I can see why that is because my wife was watching this,

40:51
live presentation on how to get your kid into Princeton or an Ivy League school. with that big of a topic with such wide interests, you’re probably willing to slog through a webinar, even if it was previously live. Yeah. And I think that the information, it’s pretty evergreen. I mean, at some point it’ll probably go and I’ll probably put it to unlisted. But for right now, we’re just still seeing people on it. So it’s kind of like, oh, I don’t really want to.

41:19
The reason why I put mine unlisted is because I give the same presentation like a month later. It’s never the exact same. It’s altered depending on what the environment is like. But I don’t want people mixing the old with the new. So are you guys planning on giving this one again? Probably not for a year. Oh, not for a year. Oh, I see. see. OK. one definite advantage that we have is that the owner of this company is also a speaker. She speaks at conventions.

41:48
And so I actually, after, this was sort of a test, right? Because I was like, this is either gonna be really great and people are gonna be excited about it or it’s gonna be an absolute bust, right? And it’s just people don’t have the attention span. And I wasn’t sure where we would fall, but because it worked so well, I said, you you have all these talks that are already done, right? because she does, she speaks at like probably 10 conventions a year and it’s the same talks, right? At almost every convention. Because it’s a different audience, it’s all geographical.

42:17
And I said, we need to do at least one webinar every two months, right? On one of the topics that you talk about, because you already have it. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to prepare. Right. Everything’s already done. She’s already given this talk 10 times. So and she’s like, well, do you think that will cannibalize me speaking at conventions? I’m like, these conventions are big enough to cannibalize. 100 % agree with that. Right. Like, I mean, I get I get the concern and that would be something to think about. But I’m like, but if you’re speaking like right this week, she’s speaking in like.

42:45
Podunk, or something, I don’t know, some tiny Massachusetts town. I’m like, I don’t think those people are gonna be like, well, I’m not subscribing to your YouTube channel, you know, or vice versa, you I heard her in Massachusetts. Okay, well, those 22 people will be fine. So yeah. You can also tell her that there’s some people that come to my same exact workshop like eight times in a row, and they tell me that they learn something new each time they come.

43:10
I honestly, so the first time I saw that with you, I thought that was absolutely insane. And then the more webinars I’ve done over the years, I’m like, you know what, that’s actually true. Like, feel like, because like when I watch a webinar, I have all intentions of like paying attention, but it never fails that like someone comes to the door or, you know, I have to take a phone call or like I miss something, right? Or I have to leave early. And so I do think that like people will watch if you are a good,

43:39
content creator or a good presenter, and she is, you will watch the same content a couple of times to get things that you’ve missed, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve got nothing to worry. She’s got nothing to be worried about there. But anyway, the key point in all of this is if you’re not doing video for your e-commerce store, and especially if you’re trying to sell anything digital, I would say it’s required now for anything digital.

44:07
some sort of video content, YouTube long form is still the best in my opinion. And then short form is good too to kind of supplement it. Yeah, I think you need to think about it as if you want people to become loyal to your brand, right? If you want people to build that know, like and trust factor with you, then video content is the quickest way to build that for your company.

44:38
Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you wanna 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 and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. this episode, Tony and I break down how tariffs and trade wars are quietly reshaping global commerce and what that means for your business and your wallet. From rising costs to supply chain chaos, we unpack the billion dollar consequences no one’s talking about. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that this is the last call for tickets for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com.

00:29
The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

01:00
I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:29
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:43
to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. I go on a week vacation with my daughter to tour colleges and I come back and I feel like the whole world, all hell is broken loose. Yeah, you missed a crazy week. did miss a crazy week and I discovered that my daughter likes the East Coast, which makes me very sad because I want her to stay in California. Listen, you didn’t have to take her on a

02:09
tour of the East Coast, you could have just said, this is the only thing that exists over here in California. That’s where all the Ivies are. Now she just has to get in. That’s right. Which is the hard part. So I figured today we we talk about tariffs, trade war and what’s going on on TikTok with all the Chinese vendors and everything. Is it so is it just me? I feel like I can’t keep up.

02:37
I feel like every time that I try to like check the news or, you know, get into a TikTok algorithm, the information is changing, like the tariffs and then there’s not tariffs and there’s tariffs on this and then there’s like, it’s like to me, there’s not even like a true, like what’s actually happening. That’s actually the topic of one of my next YouTube videos, because you’re right, it changes like every week. And like I was literally gone a week and

03:07
You know, it’s on, it’s off, tariffs are on, off. Oh no, there’s some exclusions and whatnot. It actually already made the script for that. And who knows, it might be obsolete by the time I publish it. But it actually, you got to take some time to compile all the information because it’s changing. Yeah. So here’s my first question. Because I and I also doesn’t help that all of our friends are sellers, not all of our friends, but a good amount of our friends have e-commerce stores. And so they’re all posting on Facebook. They’re frustrated, understandably so.

03:36
fully can empathize with them. But so if you have a container on the sea currently, right? So your container was shipped, let’s just say last month. Are you paying the new tariffs or are you under the old like, is there a grandfathering period? How is that working? There was a clause where if your if your goods were already on the water before the reciprocal tariffs, they didn’t apply.

04:01
That was an old statement that was made. I’m not sure about the new reciprocal ones like the 125 % one or the 140 % one. The first set, there was an exemption. I’m not 100 % sure about the latter ones because I couldn’t find any written documents on that one. Yeah. And then my next… So I’m in full on tariff TikTok right now.

04:26
OK, with all the Chinese suppliers, which is it’s kind of interesting since I’ve actually been to China, which is like I’m seeing them walk through stuff and I was like, oh, this is legit. Like they’re really in China. Like this isn’t a this isn’t an AI generated scene. This is legitimate, like factories and stuff like that. But I saw this one guy on TikTok, which to me sort of embodied what I’ve been thinking about everything is, you know, because we’re doing reciprocal tariffs, right, which means we pay, they pay.

04:56
kind of thing. this guy is in he’s in China and he’s like, let me show you everything that I have in my home that was made in America. And he opens up both of his hands and they’re empty. Right. And then he’s like, what in your house is from China? And I was like, I don’t know everything, everything except for the people. So it seems to me that like. Are we exporting a lot of stuff to China? I I heard about the whole Boeing thing that just got China just canceled the Boeing order.

05:26
But I mean, it’s mainly like soybeans and some other stuff from from what I understand. Yeah, I do know this and I can only speak for the textiles, the textile factories. I think they’re hurting big time because right now we actually have an outstanding order where we put 30 percent down and we’re just going to delay it. Right. Yeah. And I know other people who are actually people in the class.

05:55
they’re not placing their orders right now. And, and there’s all these like leaked tick tocks from Chinese factories. saying everything’s empty. You know, um, you know, the, the, the workers have no work. Uh, they, or there was this another tick tock and these get taken down instantly, right? I guess by the Chinese government, there’s this one factory full of down jackets, cause the person who ordered them just canceled the order altogether. Yeah. And we have a mutual friend.

06:24
Brandon who ordered a container of shoes and I think his margins are only like 50 % or something like that. With 125 % tariff, what’s he going to do? Is he going to take it and lose money or break even or lose money? Or is he going to just refuse the shipment altogether and just lose all the money he invested into it? Yes, it feels like there’s no winning in that situation. Right.

06:54
But the factories are hurting. I’m almost positive. And even the messages from our vendors have sounded a little more urgent. Like place your order now. I’m like, I’m not gonna place order now. Right. So they’re hurting. And I’m pretty sure that the other countries like we, didn’t realize this, but I think we consume like a third of the world’s goods or something crazy like that. I’m sure we do. That feels low. So you cut that out.

07:21
Yeah, drastically reduce it. And then all these factories who’ve invested all this money in machinery, like the machinery has got to run. Right, right. There’s lots of issues when you shut the machinery down. And you know, they’re probably still paying bills on that. And so it’s got to keep going. Yeah. And so it’s a big game of chicken right now. Yeah. Yeah. I personally think we’re in a better position because the last time Trump came into office, we already kind of found

07:49
vendors in India and even the US and Europe, different parts of Europe. it costs more, but we’re shifting production and our stuff’s easy. Like we’re probably like a special case because we’re basically selling pieces of fabric, right? Right. But I imagine for someone where, you know, only China can make their product, it’s tough. You can’t just shift production really quickly either. Well, that’s the thing that I think is so fascinating is that

08:18
It’s not like if, well, all of a sudden it becomes unaffordable or not, it’s cost prohibitive to import from Asia, right, because of the tariffs. It’s not like you can just throw up a factory in Wyoming, right? Like there’s all sorts of things that go into that. And the other thing that I think is in this, I don’t want to get political, but like, have you ever lived next to a factory? I have not. So I live next to a paper plant.

08:48
Um, it’s just, it’s everything smells. It’s disgusting. um, like there’s a lot of, like, I don’t think people really want to live next to some of these production facilities, right? Like a lot of them are dirty, you know, the, the environmental impact is huge and it’s not like you can just throw up a plant.

09:08
and then get it staffed, Like you’ve got to, people have to relocate. There’s just like a whole big, it’s not like this can be solved in like 30 days. This is like a one to two year like process if you want to start manufacturing something somewhere else. I mean minimum. Like I think the Tesla factory took three years, something like that, the one in Austin. Yeah. So it’s like, well, even if you’re like, fine, that’s fine. We’re going to manufacture, you’re going to manufacture your own linens, right?

09:38
Well, that doesn’t you can’t just like all of a sudden put up a factory in your backyard. You know, it’s it’s much more complex than that, which I think makes things even more complicated for people. Although you were able to move some of your suppliers or you moved to different areas. Right. Like how realistic is that for other people like for you textiles? There’s definitely I feel like a bigger. Yeah. I mean, every country does them. It’s just right.

10:05
to varying degrees and we don’t even do anything fancy. It’s not like we’re making clothing or dresses or, you I mean, it’s literally a piece of fabric with lace around it. Right. So for us, it’s easier. And the last time this happened, you know, we were like, okay, let’s just make sure we have alternative sources in case stuff goes down. So we’re okay. I think, I mean, you know, it’s going to hit our margins, right? But our margins are pretty high anyways, so we’ll just make less money. But you know,

10:35
Even if we were to pay the 125 or 40, whatever percent it is right now, it wouldn’t affect us that much because of margins. I’m just thinking about the people who have like 50 % margins or 60 % margins. Like essentially, if you double the cost of the good, then you’re not going to be profitable. Right. And so here’s the thing, like these tariffs just hit so sudden without warning.

11:05
that you can’t even prepare. You can’t all of sudden charge double for what you’re selling, right? Right. Yeah. And you didn’t have time to like. So we say sudden. mean, I do feel like Trump campaigned on tariff. So like I think you could argue that you knew it was coming. I think we’re talking about 60. Well, right. No, no, I’m not like saying that. But like even even if you knew in November, that’s not enough time to change anything. Right. Like you probably already have stuff in production.

11:34
You know, like I know the timelines that we had, it was 60 to 90 days from like deciding. So even if you want could pivot, you can’t pivot that quickly. Oh, yeah, for sure. You can’t. So where I see this being hugely problematic is that so for you, for some of my clients, if this was me back, you know, when I have my e-commerce store.

11:59
You have you already have a customer base, right? So you can kind of leverage the fact that you have a customer base to continue to stay in business. But if you’re trying to launch a business, right, and all of a sudden your margins get chopped, right? So you are already probably I think when we when you first start out, your margins probably aren’t as great as they can be because you’re new and you don’t know what you’re doing. And and then you have to pay advertising costs, right? Because there’s no way you can just start a business and not spend money to get customers. Right. So

12:29
You’re spending money on people. That’s not true anymore, actually. Well, people are just launching on TikTok and so right. Right. But TikTok, mean, TikTok’s not cheap. Like if you’re using affiliates and coupon codes and things like that. just mean organic. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I don’t think that’s everybody. Yeah. I think you have to understand TikTok to be able to do that well. And so I’m like, how do you even get started in e-commerce today? Because.

12:58
I was thinking it’s easier now. It’s easier to start than it is to have already had something running and have this thrust upon you. Interesting. I think the opposite, but maybe I’m not thinking about Well, I’m giving a workshop this afternoon, right? Right. And every time I do these workshops, I find a new product. Right. So this time, instead of going to China, I just clicked on India and the US.

13:25
Because when you’re first starting out, you have the option to shift your production right away from the start. Yeah. Right? Whereas if you already have stuff and you’ve already worked with this vendor for years designing something, then you’re in trouble. So, oh yeah, yeah. Our vendors had mold, stuff like that. We weren’t going to switch. So if you’re brand new, I wouldn’t say it’s easier, but like you have options. It’s much more flexible. Yeah. It’s not like you’re locked in. That’s a good point. Yeah, didn’t. I wasn’t really. I was thinking about it just in the like hard cost to launch.

13:54
Because it’s not like these tariffs affect only one person. They affect everyone. Yeah. And it’s just a matter of time before they run out of that inventory. And then everyone’s going to have to jack up the price. So if you’re starting out now, you have more flexibility over vendors and the playing field’s level, essentially. Yeah, I can I can see that. So. If you were thinking about like, OK, I guess the next question is if you have an existing business.

14:22
How do you jack up your prices without sending your people into a complete frenzy, your customers? So what I’ve seen so far, and I’m not sure if, actually you probably have noticed, I’ve been getting a lot of emails from stores that have said, hey, the prices are going up, this is your last chance to buy. Yes, I’ve seen that. And whatnot. What can you do as an existing vendor? You just have to…

14:51
What we’re doing is we’re actually going to be increasing the prices just gradually. You know how you go to your favorite restaurant and you notice your portion sizes are smaller but the plate is getting bigger? Yes. It happens gradually, over a year or so, a couple of years. That’s how we’re going to do it. You’re doing the boil the frog technique? Yes. Slowly increasing There’s different schools of thought though. Some people will say just rip the bandaid off.

15:21
Yeah. But we have enough skews. Like we have like 600 skews or something like that at this point. Yeah. Where, you raise them kind of gradually in different categories. I don’t think people really notice. Interesting. So you’re doing a slow, slow roll. Slow roll across different categories. one thing I’ve noticed that the auto manufacturers are doing is they’re they’re actually dropping their prices. Have you seen this?

15:50
No, I didn’t see that. So robbing or maintaining? Well, it’s dropping in the marketing sense, right? So I know Ford recently rolled this out and Hyundai is doing something similar is they’re doing employee pricing. So basically they’re charging you the price that if you were a Ford employee, you would pay to buy a car from. OK, Hyundai is a special case because they manufacture their cars, I believe.

16:19
in the US, right? Yeah, I think in Kentucky or one of those places. Yeah. So of course they can afford to do that and that’s a good marketing strategy for them. Yeah. So it’s interesting because I think some like the card manufacturers are are trying to get creative, right? Like with oh, but like it’s interesting because I read an article about it and it was like, yes, Ford is giving employee pricing, but they’ve upped their interest rate. Right. So like they got rid of their

16:47
2 % finance, know, it’s like, they’re gonna make it up on the other end, you know, to some extent. So they’re not like truly just giving things away. And I noticed that Hyundai, like not only are they doing some like employee pricing type stuff, they’re giving like, if you buy one of their electric cars, you’re getting the free, they’re like during a free installation of the power pack, whatever that you need in your house.

17:12
So there, you know, I think some people are trying to capitalize, since everyone’s talking about how expensive things are going to be, I think some companies are trying to come in and like, oh no, look at us, we’re still gonna give you a good deal, right? So I think that’s another way people are doing it and they’re gonna make it up on the other side, right? Which if you’re a car manufacturer, you can do that because you tend to finance everybody.

17:35
Yeah, I know here because my sister-in-law just bought a car. I mean, they’re jacking up prices not on the sticker, but what the actual price is when you actually try to buy the car. Yes. So it’s like one price. then when you I yeah, it’s like an extra six thousand dollars of who knows what. Yes. Of some markup that they make up. But the MSRP stays the same. Yes. Yeah. Because Toyota manufactures a lot of their cars in Mexico, I believe. Mm

18:03
And Mexico, there’s a 90 day reprieve on the tariffs right now. Right. So it’s really just China really. And the textiles and. And I think there’s a reprieve on the electronics now, right, that Trump just imposed. Yes, which I find interesting. Can we talk about like all the TikToks? You mentioned you’re on like the. Yes, yes. So if you guys aren’t on TikTok and I know

18:32
a lot you guys listening probably aren’t on it. What Chinese manufacturers have been doing to fight back is they’ve been like talking about how all these luxury vendors like Ferragamo, Hermes, Gucci and all them do in fact manufacture all their bags or a large percentage of their bags in China, whether they’re sent to Europe afterwards to just get rebadged. And what they’re doing is they’re offering these links to buy these bags direct.

19:01
at like 10 % of the cost. and they’re actually so I’ve I fought I’m in luxury bag TikTok. I don’t own any luxury bags. Let’s be clear. Steve’s gonna make it sound like I do. You do you have a Kate Spade bag. That’s not no and Hermes bag is $35,000 and they don’t even let you buy it if you want it. You have to like get their good graces to purchase something. Do you consider Gucci or Coach a luxury bag? Coach I would not say Gucci.

19:31
probably is like on the border, right? So. Okay, Miss Toomey, do you consider Toomey a luxury bag? No, absolutely not. Wow. Oh my God. No. Okay, well go on. Anyway. I’ll let people in the comments like. Yeah, come at me. Come at me today. But what I think is interesting is that they especially so like Hermes, I feel like is the one that they’re really going after, which is so interesting because Hermes has like worked really hard to build this like. Yes.

20:02
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.

20:31
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.

20:42
absolute like gated brand, right? Like if you have the privilege to purchase an Hermes, right? Like it’s like a big deal. So they basically are showing like people stitching together these bags, right? And I mean, I don’t know if they’re Hermes bags or not, cause I’m not like an authenticator, but they look like the bags, right? They’re the same. And he’s like talking about the palladium hardware and he’s talking about the type of leather and he’s showing all the different things and they’re showing people stitching it. And you’re like,

21:12
Oh, yeah, those are those are made in China. Right. And then they’re obviously promoting the link to purchase the the fake. Right. The the dupe. But to me, it’s like it’s a great strategy. Right. Like if you can take down some luxury brands like there, it’s like going to send this. like a domino effect to me of like how

21:36
people are gonna start reacting to what’s going on. And they’re also doing it with furniture. Have you seen the furniture? Yes, I have seen the furniture one. Yeah. I actually think this is the dumbest strategy ever personally. Interesting. OK. And I’ll tell you why. Like, let’s say I am a business owner. Right. Yeah. And I make stuff over there. Like, let’s say I’m Hermes and I see China is doing all this stuff. I am never, ever going to give my business to China ever again. You say that, but where are you going? India.

22:07
It’s not like so India is probably poised to be the next China right now. Yeah, because they were the first to say, hey, you know, we’re not retaliating. Let’s negotiate. Yeah. And there’s other places to do this. I mean, it’s going to be painful. But like they basically just pissed off all the luxury brand manufacturers. Yes, they did. And they just pissed off anyone who’s even thinking about making anything in China now. Yeah. So I definitely was like, whoa, this is but to me, this feels like you cornered like the lion.

22:36
Right? like we, we made these decisions and China is like, you want to mess with us? Like we’re coming after like, they just want to blow everything up. Like figuratively speaking. Right? Sure. But I mean, it’s dumb in the long run. Yeah. I think overall it’s dumb. And I also dumb. I’ll let you finish. Well, no, I also wonder, who are these people making the content? Is it truly that because they’ll say, like, in my factory, I’m like, that’s not your factory. Right. Like, that’s not the factory owner.

23:07
having these conversations. So like who’s giving permission for this content to be put out there? Yeah, I don’t know. You know I mean? sanctioned by the government to a certain extent. Yeah, for sure. OK, so this is why I think it’s also dumb. And granted, like these fakes have been around for years. You go to China, like every street corner you can get them. Right. The people who are buying these Hermes bags, the Birkin bags, they’re not going to carry the fake. Right. Right. The whole point of it is status. Right.

23:36
And if you’re someone of status and you want to show it off, you’re not going to carry a fake. No. Right? So the people who are buying these cheap knockoff bags are people who probably wouldn’t buy the real thing anyway. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Right? So it doesn’t really technically hurt the big brand outside of causing this huge commotion that’s pissing off every person. Basically, they’re just telling the world that if you give us your IP, we’re just going to copy it and sell it for pennies on the dollar.

24:06
But also I feel like they’ve already been doing that. They have but not overtly, right? Right, yeah. I mean how many Asian brands, Chinese brands are on Amazon right now selling and undercutting? I mean that’s the whole strategy right now, right? Is they put 15 Chinese sellers on one product, right? And put the other person out of business. They’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s just now they’re flaunting it. Okay, so they’ve been doing it for a long time but through the Amazon channel,

24:34
where it’s like less overt. Now it’s all over social media. And now like you’re gonna think twice before ever using China as a manufacturer again, because they’re just gonna knock you off. Like it’s overt now, right? Whereas before if you’re selling on Amazon, you might not be aware that all this stuff is happening. And here’s the thing before also, like you could easily police this if you want. And China was pretty good. Like if you went through the measures of trademarking and-

25:02
Copywriting or whatever in China they could they would actually shut down the factory But it seems like they’re removing that restriction now, right? And so what large companies gonna want to manufacture in China with these risks ever again? Yeah, no, I think I think it’s Like to me it just feels so chaotic Right now and it’s like okay. We can’t stay in this level of chaos long term Can we I don’t think so, but maybe maybe we can maybe this is just like the new

25:32
the new world we live in, right? It’s just absolute chaos. And how are they getting away with this? Actually, so so they’re not using the Gucci or Louis Vuitton, right? But if you click on it, it’s the exact same like it’s like you’re buying a dupe in China, right? Yeah, yeah. How can they get away with this on TikTok shop? Why? It’s like blatant trademark and copyright violations that so I don’t know. Have you clicked on any of the links?

26:01
I have. Okay. I haven’t clicked on links because I was like, I don’t know. So it’s being sold directly through TikTok shop. Yes. Okay. So some of the ones that I have seen have not been so the I’m not in that side of TikTok. I’m in the side where it’s like click on our like bio and there’s a QR code and the QR code takes you somewhere else. Like it takes you off of TikTok. So that’s what I’ve been seeing. And they’re like, don’t

26:27
Don’t DM us because we get so many messages. Make sure you just use the QR code to go. So they’re not doing it directly on TikTok, the ones that are primarily in my feed, which makes more sense to me. I can’t believe they can get away with that on TikTok Shop. This is just an aside, but if you’re on TikTok, how do you scan a QR code? I know. They were like, screenshot it and do this. And I was like, what? It’s too much for me. Yeah. But yes, on TikTok Shop.

26:57
Okay, that’s blatant. that to me, that feels like it will be taken down sooner rather than later. I mean, it’s already been, you know, three, a week, pretty much. Yeah. I usually it doesn’t take this long to take things down. And it tick tocks a Chinese owned company. Right. So maybe they’re not allowed to have to talk in China. They have to use a VPN to get on it. No, no, no, no, no. I’m saying like it’s still controlled by. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. So maybe they’re just a little lax on taking it down.

27:27
Yeah, I could see that. Like, oh, what? I didn’t see anything. No, we’re on it. We’re on it. We’re researching. So who knows where this is going to go? I mean, I just know there’s a lot of colleagues who have shipments or they need the shipments and they need the inventory. Yeah. Right. So what do you do right now? I don’t think we can last that long. I certainly don’t think that China can last that long either. Yeah. So I don’t know what’s going to happen.

27:57
Is there any benefit as a seller to just laying low right now, waiting it out, not really doing anything? Is that like a safer bet or is that more of a risky, like you need to start having another plan and taking action right now? Okay, so I mean, I can tell you what we’re doing, but I mean, I can’t speak for other people. Here’s the thing, like there’s no visibility on what’s gonna happen in the future. Right.

28:24
And when there’s no visibility, you can’t really plan for it. So let’s say you shift all your production to India, for example. Right. Well, let’s say the trade talks with India fall apart. I don’t think they’re going to, but let’s say they do fall apart. Trump issues 125 % tariffs on India. All that work that you just did. Right. Could be potentially undone. Yeah. Right. And for us, like for a small vendor, it’s not as big of a deal. Right. But for someone like Nike, let’s say.

28:50
or Louis Vuitton and they’re investing in factories in these other countries like they all did in Mexico, like they all did in Vietnam actually. Vietnam was the largest investment that Chinese factories have made. And now Vietnam has like a 40, I can’t remember the numbers, it’s like 46%, which instantly obliterates their investments there. Yeah. So how do you plan? In order for things to go back to normal, Trump has to

29:19
gives some sort of roadmap, right? Okay, the tariffs are set. This is a long-term thing. Not this like, oh, you get a 90-day reprieve off the tariffs, because you have no idea what’s gonna happen in 90 days, right? You’re not gonna switch vendors every 90 days. Yeah, that’s really not even possible. This is my fear, and this is just my own personal, like this is not based off anything. My fear is that companies like Nike, big manufacturers, right?

29:48
we don’t compete with in any way, right? They’ll find the loopholes, the tax breaks, the incentives, right? Like there will be provisions made for them to like be able to stay in business, but it’s the little stores, right? It’s the million to $5 million stores that are gonna get just crushed because they don’t have the cash reserves, right? Like they don’t have…

30:15
They don’t have the ability to one get like the breaks maybe that will be given to other companies or they just don’t have the, you know, customer base and the to withstand it. I actually feel the complete opposite way. Interesting. OK. And the reason why is like you’re as a small business owner, like I’m agile, like I got like very few expenses. Yeah. Right. Whereas if you’re a large company like Nike, you got to make factories. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

30:45
huge capital outlay and all that. So it’s a huge risk. So when you’re agile, and you can make these changes, it’s to me, it’s not as big of a deal. And all those breaks that you’re talking about, I actually have a video coming out, actually, I’m doing office hours today, and all the ways to avoid tariffs. Yeah. And they’re available to everyone. It’s not like if you’re a large company, you know, right, you can take advantage of these and the small companies can’t.

31:12
It’s just like the larger guys have more resources to do some of these things. Right. That I’m talking about, but it’s available for everyone. You can’t like discriminate based on size. Well, you can possibly discriminate on is by industry. like right now, semiconductors and electronics have gotten. But something’s going to have to be done about textiles for some of the larger factories. Yeah. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it will trickle down to stuff that we do. Right. Whatever happens. Yeah. I think.

31:41
I know that you guys are agile like Bumblebee, but I think that not all, not that you’re a small brand, but smaller brands, know, not a lot of them are already strapped and tight. You know what I mean? Like you have a business model that is actually has a lot of cushion in there. But some people don’t, some people don’t have that level of margin to work with, to be as flexible. I guess what I’m trying to say is,

32:09
We’re not making like huge capital investments on machinery and people and infrastructure. Right? If a product doesn’t work, we just don’t make it or we stop selling it and move on to something else. We’re a different vendor. So I think the larger companies have a lot more at stake here. No, for sure. Right. Then the little guys. You know, it’s so funny. So this workshop that I’m giving this afternoon, like

32:39
I’ve changed a lot of the content. So before it was an example, how to source from China. Now the examples are a comparison of sourcing from China versus the US versus India. And so I chose a product and I’m running the numbers for all of them. And what’s funny about it is that even with the tariffs, China is still cheaper than the US by a factor of two. Oh, yeah, I believe it. Right.

33:08
And India, it just kind of depends because you can’t find like the exact same thing in India. You’re probably gonna have to do some talking. Like you can get a base price, but it just ends up being slightly cheaper with the current tariff. And I see how this lecture plays out, but it’s just interesting because there’s options for us. Yeah. And that’s why I think that the U S is in a better position.

33:36
because we have the option of sourcing from different places. Whereas if you’re a Chinese factory that’s dependent on US demand, and all of sudden that demand goes away, you can’t manufacture that. You can’t go to other countries and say, hey, can you buy my 100,000 lightsabers? Because the US isn’t buying them anymore. And the US buys so much junk compared to other countries. Yes.

34:02
I don’t think there’s any other place like the US is willing to buy all this junk. That this is my system. No, I totally agree. Like it’s just there’s a lot of stuff. Right. Yeah. So it sounds like you’re pretty like you think this is a great time for people to get into e-commerce. No, no, no, no, no. I’m not saying that for sure. You’re like, no, I’m not saying that for sure. And I’m saying that it doesn’t affect. It’s not as negative as

34:32
as you think. And if you’re starting from scratch, you actually have options because you, you know, you don’t have any ties to any existing factories. In terms of like the best time to start. Here’s how I see it also. AI is replacing jobs right now. I mean, you should see the Silicon Valley. Like, I’ve been chatting with coworkers, they’re not hiring new engineers anymore. Yeah. And a lot of these companies, and I’ll use the example here.

35:01
There’s people in different countries like the Philippines or where the labor is cheaper operating robots in the US remotely. Right. And there’s this whole wave of robots or AI that’s building all our stuff already. Yeah. Right. So the way I see it, like no one’s job is safe. Yeah. Like you to think that if you’re an engineer or whatnot, your job was safe. Right. Because you’re one of very few people that can do

35:31
to do these things. I honestly think thanks to AI, nothing is safe. it doesn’t have to be e-commerce, but you have to be doing something on the side just in case. Because this is only going to get worse. Just wait till Tesla releases their fleet of self-driving cars. And this is already happening across in Waymo, right? Waymo is in all these major cities now. It’s going to Japan, and that’s going to replace all of the Ubers. Right?

35:59
All the Ubers and lifts, Uber eats, maybe DoorDash at some point. So if that gig economy is gone, what are you going to do now? You got to have something on the side. Doesn’t have to be e-commerce. It’s got to be something. I don’t know. How do you feel about that? No, I agree with you. I think I was working on office hours yesterday and I was I was just using AI to I want to talk about lead magnets, right? Because I think that’s

36:28
I think now more than ever, you need to try to be building an audience, right? Getting people on a list so that you can talk to them, even if you don’t quite know what you want to do yet, right? Like just getting the right demographic on a list. So I was like, you know, I wonder how far I can use AI with a lead magnet, right? Like, I’m like, that’s kind of been my little hobby lately is like, what can AI do that that I didn’t think it could do, right? Or like, how far can I take this? So.

36:55
It basically built the entire lead magnet for me, but then not only that, it told me how to implement it and what tools I needed, and then it showed me how to set it up in ConvertKit or Kit, right? Like it basically, I mean, we’re not too far away from it literally doing the whole thing, like where I don’t have to be a part of it at all, right? So when I started playing around with that yesterday, I was like, this is really fascinating because the deeper I get into it, the more I realized that like,

37:22
I think you and I were talking about how graphic designers are going to be obsolete, right? And first I was like, I don’t know, like totally. But the more I like dig in, Canvas about to release some crazy things next week. Like the more I see this stuff, I think, you know, it’s amazing what we’re going to be able to do with with not a lot of people. Right. We without the level of expertise that you thought was like absolutely required in the past. Photographers, graphic designers, writers.

37:52
Yeah. Photographers, models. Yeah. I mean, H &M is already using AI models to model their clothes. I mean, so where does it stop? I mean, these are already thousands of jobs, if not millions of jobs being displaced. Yeah. Already, right? So what is there left? You got to start something on your own. And granted, like the best people, like we mentioned in the last episode, they’re always going to have jobs, right? Yeah. Best people are going to But what about the remaining 80 %? Yeah. Or the remaining 90 %?

38:20
You need to have some sort of income on the side. Again, it doesn’t have to be e-commerce. I don’t think this environment is that great period because there’s just so much uncertainty. Like you need predictability to do stuff, right? Yeah. But that’s the way I feel right now. And I think like since we were talking about e-commerce for most of this episode, it’s not as dire as you think because when you’re first starting out, you have flexibility. It’s mainly the people who are more entrenched.

38:48
who are going to have these, who are seeing all these problems right now.

39:17
go to SellersSummit.com and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitherJob.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 of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I dive into how to make your business run leaner by auditing your expenses and cutting out the fat. From hidden subscriptions to inefficient workflows, we’ll show you what we’re doing to plug the leaks. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com and the prices are now going to go up every two weeks.

00:29
until the event starts. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods,

00:57
and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the seller’s summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.

01:25
The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:44
Welcome to the MyWifeQuitterJob podcast. Today’s episode has been inspired by doge, not in the political aspect, but doging the stuff that I work on right now, like cutting off the fat and really becoming a more efficient business. I feel like you are one of the most efficient businesses I know, so I can’t even imagine what you could cut.

02:12
You know what’s funny is there’s always junk behind the scenes that nobody knows about. Yeah. Right. I think I mentioned this to you last week. Bumblebee Linens has been running on software that is dated 2012 or 13 or something like that. And that software is not supported anymore. And the tools that allow me to run it aren’t supporting more. So if this one PC dies in the office, then we can’t create our monogram designs.

02:42
The whole business will collapse. I guess that’s not considered doge, but there’s all these subscriptions also that I had been signed up for. And you know how much I hate subscriptions. It’s because of this. It gets out of hand, right? You forget about them. Well, here’s here’s the thing like this this one precious computer. I feel like we should steal the Declaration of Independence. This computer is like the holy grail of your entire business. I think that anything where

03:10
When you think about how to doze your business, we’ll just say anything where it’s like, have to fix this, we have to get rid of it, we have to change something about it so that we can continue on. It might not always just be about cutting something, it could be about improving something so that you aren’t at single point of failure kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, I guess the people- What’s that? Which would be you right now. Yeah.

03:39
You know, what’s funny is when you’re like, I’m not in Bumblebee Linens day to day. I pretty much manage the marketing gens in their day to day. Uh, but, but lately, you know, ever since we launched our, our print side of our business, I’ve been going in a lot more. I would say at least, at least twice a week minimum. And every time I go in, there’s things that I notice like, Hey, you know, why are we doing it this way?

04:07
Or not not to say that it’s wrong, you know, it’s the way we’ve always done it and whatnot but even stuff that I’ve written that are being implemented so for example

04:20
What I’ve been working on this past week is when an order comes in, needs to be like a monogram order or a personalized order. It needs to be converted into this file that a machine can understand. And so I wrote this code that literally just takes it from the website, runs all the tools automatically, and then outputs this file. What I didn’t realize, and hence that one machine, if it goes down, we’re dead because it’s using that software that’s obsolete now. Anyway.

04:50
So I discover as I’m trying to make this up to date so that it’s future proof and we can put on any machine and whatnot, I discovered that maybe 20 % of the time it dies. And then someone has to just manually enter in the personalization. Okay. But you didn’t know this. No, I didn’t know this because I’m not running it day to day. Right. Right. Or our VA’s are running it or sometimes our employees are running it. Right.

05:20
The other thing that I discovered that is that we have to rename each file manually before it goes to the machine because the machine can only display so many characters of the name and you know what the personalization is on the machine because you can’t read the file name. Gotcha. So needs to be manually renamed to something so that you can recognize what it is once it gets on the machine. Stupid stuff like that takes hours every day.

05:49
So how did you doge it? What’d you do? Oh, well, now I’ve automated all the code with your stuff, right? So that’s, I literally have been spending probably five hours a day redoing all this stuff using free software. Okay. Thank God for open source software. Because that one tool that we were using to automate everything before, they started charging some insane

06:19
amount of money, like $300 a month or something like that for it, which is ridiculous for what it does. Yeah. And then there’s this free solution out there. So I think that’s why you don’t like monthly programs, monthly subscriptions, because you start and I’ll talk. This is my biggest doge of the year. Very proud of this one. Actually, you start like we’ll say like 12 years ago, right? Because we’ll use myself as an example.

06:49
and you find this tool that does exactly what you want, right? And you’re like, oh, it’s just a yearly subscription, right? I pay once a year. Seems like a good deal, right? Because especially if you don’t have your ability to spend five hours a day coding using open source software, you know, you’re like, okay, this solves my problem for a hundred bucks a year, 200 bucks a year, whatever, right? But then as time goes on, it’s like, well, now it’s $149 a year. Well, now it’s 199 a year or

07:19
Well, this doesn’t really do everything you need to do anymore. You need to get this additional add-on, right? And that’s only $47, right? But then at the end of the day, you’re like, I’m spending 50 bucks a month, right? When you start looking at everything adding together. And so one of the tools, and I still like this tool, is Beaver Builder. And it was a page builder back in the day before it was, like back in the day, it was really hard to build good looking pages on WordPress if you did not code.

07:49
And so Beaver Builder, I don’t want to say made it easy, because I actually thought Beaver Builder was pretty tough to learn. However, once you learned it, you could make really great pages. But then 15 years go by, right? And WordPress rolls out all sorts of, you know, integrated page builders that are free or very low cost, one time fee, right? You buy a theme, something like that. And I was under the impression that I, in order to keep all those pages, I’m going to have hundreds of pages on my site built with Beaver Builder, right?

08:18
And I was under the impression that in order to keep all those pages, and some of them are like decent traffic pages, I had to keep renewing my subscription to Beaver Builder. So every year I was paying like the 147 bucks or whatever it was. Well, then we were on office hours this, you know, the last couple of months and I made a comment about it where we were talking about the subscriptions and how they really add up. And Kevin said, he looked it up as we were talking. He’s like, you, you’ll still keep all your pages. You just don’t get any of the updates.

08:48
And I was like, oh, so I don’t, because I wasn’t, I hadn’t been using it for probably five years, right? Building pages with it. So I canceled it like two weeks ago, like it was my renewal time and I like removed the auto renew and all that stuff. And it felt, it’s like, you know, a hundred bucks, right? It’s not a lot of money, but it felt so good. Cause I felt like I was hostage to it. Cause I wasn’t going to pay someone to build a hundred pages on my site. I don’t have time to redo a hundred pages. You know what I mean? Like,

09:16
That was just too big. It was easier just to pay the yearly ransom and keep moving. I don’t think Beaver Builder is bad company. They’re a good company, but didn’t need them anymore. That felt so good because every year I dreaded that renewal because I’m like, don’t even use this anymore, but I have to keep paying it. That was my big one from a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the problem with

09:39
tools like Beaver Builder. If you ever want to even make the slightest edit to the page, the builder’s code is so ugly, you need the tool to do it, right? Yes, exactly. That felt really good. I want to add a caveat because we’ll probably talk about some other stuff that we cut. Sometimes it truly is just worth paying for a subscription. I will give an example of this. tool that I think until something better comes out,

10:07
you cannot beat this is Canva. Canva has revolutionized graphic design and digital product creation. And it’s like 12 bucks a month, something like that. Yes, all of your assets can be stored in Canva, but you can also export everything in Canva and put them in Google Drive or Dropbox or on your own machine, whatever.

10:33
But that’s what like I think it’s okay at times to pay for things because they add such a value to what you’re doing. And like the time versus money thing is just you can’t put a comparison on it. Like and I know you used Photoshop for a really, really long time with like a one time fee. But I still do. Yeah. Yeah. But once again, you can’t update your Photoshop because you’re using the 2009 version or whatever. I don’t remember what version I have, but it’s the last one before they. Yeah.

11:03
So I think that like, I know when people listen to this and get all cut happy and be like, I’m not paying for Canva anymore. I’m gonna go back to Microsoft Paint. know, like sometimes it’s worth it to spend a little money because you can’t, the technology of the software is better than like hiring someone. I mean, I pay for lots of stuff still just to be clear. Yeah. It was just a matter of going through. Here’s the saddest part. There’s this one software that we’re using for Bumblebee that they discontinued.

11:32
However, it is like the most complicated copy protection ever. Like you can’t just install on a machine, it’s got to get activated on a server which no longer exists. Right? So I was thinking to myself, like normally I would just pay for this, but this is like driving me towards piracy. Right? Because we rely on the software to generate the designs.

12:00
And so I took a little miniature hacking class. It’s actually not that complicated, but just all these little things that companies do, I don’t know. It’s just all these costs can add up. I was using this other subscription that I didn’t even know was active on one of my social media accounts. And I don’t actually check, maybe I should do a better job of this, but I don’t check my credit card statements that often.

12:33
And then before you know it, I’m paying for a whole bunch of subscriptions that I’m not even using. So I did this a couple of months ago. Same thing. Like I don’t we should we now let me just say this is not a good practice. We should be checking our credit card statements every month like a cursory like look over, you know, does everything look right? Did anyone steal my identity kind of thing? Now, I don’t do it because I get notifications of charges like over 25 bucks on my phone. It’s mainly to keep my kids from going nuts. So at Target.

13:03
But I get the notification. So as long as I see a notification come through and I’m like, oh yeah, you know, that’s mine. I don’t really, you know, when the bill comes, it’s like if it’s reasonable bill, I’m like, okay, that looks good. It’s probably about right. It’s what I pay every month kind of thing. You know what I mean? But then when you take a look and I always end up doing this at the end of the year when I’m working on my taxes, right? And I’m looking for things. And then I was like, are you kidding me? Like last year I found that I had been paying for like a Google workspace.

13:32
for a business and account I didn’t own, like I wasn’t doing anymore. So I had paid 20 or $19 a month or something like, only 20 bucks a month, for an entire year and a half since I was like, I’m not going to use that, but I forgot to turn it off, cancel it. So that’s like 400 bucks just sitting there. Same thing with, I used online jobs pH to hire. Oh yeah, I forgot to cancel that.

14:00
That’s 70 bucks. I went an extra four months. That one hurt because that one was just complete brain fog. When I saw that, I saw the charge and I was like, I’m still paying for this and I have not even logged onto the site in four months. That was four months of paying for that. What I try to do and if you are-

14:27
Here’s the other thing is when you sign up for a free trial and it’s one that puts your credit card in and then you forget to cancel, that’s the same thing, which I usually like the free trials where you don’t have to put a credit card in because then when I forget to cancel, it cost me money. I just set Google calendars now for everything. I have a domain that I’m probably going to let expire. I have a Google calendar for July 17th.

14:55
to remind me to go in there and make the final decision of, I’m not keeping this anymore. But that’s I started one of the things I was gonna say. I have tons of domains that I never will use probably that I’m just paying for every So why are domains the hardest thing to get rid of? Because it’s like real estate. It is, but I don’t know anybody personally who’s making money off of domains. I know people do.

15:21
But like, I know a lot of people personally who make a lot of money off of real estate. Yeah. Domains are tough, although I’ve been the past. Ever since, you know, ever since 2020, I’ve gotten a lot stricter. Like I’ve let a lot more things like, OK, I’m not going to keep this. I’ve let a ton of domains go. You know, I just have been more harsh, I guess, with the cutting. Whereas before I’m like, it’s like 10 bucks a month. I don’t care.

15:50
I’ve gotten a lot tighter with the purse strings. Here’s the other thing I started doing. I think every company should do this to a certain point. Every piece of software that you use that needs to be installed on a PC, for example, I now archive that exact version. OK, what does that mean? So for example, if I’m using Camtasia or Adobe Photoshop, CS, whatever, I archive the installer for that specific version.

16:20
Because like I there’s this this is this recently just happened with Bumblebee I updated the version of software all of a sudden all of my automation stopped working Okay Right or just the way we started doing things changed and it just stopped working and there was no way to revert that Version back to the old one. Yeah, unless you had it and I mean one could argue. Yeah, you should be upgrading anyway, but

16:50
More than half the time, I would even say like 90 % of the time for me at least, upgrading is almost never a good idea. I feel like there’s a pain threshold with upgrading and I’ll use Camtasia because I was just in it right before we started recording the podcast. When I opened it up on my computer, I realized that I was like, oh, I have Camtasia 2024 on this computer.

17:18
I thought I only had Camtasia 18 or whatever, you know? But the problem was, and I don’t remember if you remember this, it was probably about a year ago when we were doing office hours and every time I would try to open, Camtasia would crash on me. Like every single time. And it got to the point where I had to re-record like probably three different office hours, like alone because it crashed and didn’t record the live version of it. And so at that point I had spent, you know,

17:46
probably two hours of my time re-recording and every single time I went to use Camtasia, it would crash on me. I lost editing, like I lost editing work. So it was not, wasn’t just the office hour stuff, but it was starting to be a problem. And I did all the troubleshooting and everything and it just wasn’t working right anymore. And at that point I was like, you know what? I have to upgrade to 2024. because this is causing me too much pain to, you know.

18:14
continue to deal with it and just be like, I don’t have to pay any money.

18:44
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.

19:01
I’ve never ever had that problem and it’s probably because you have 10,000 tabs open on your browser leading to memory loss and then Camtasia didn’t have enough memory and then it crashed. Okay, yes. That’s what you said when it was happening, but I did all the things and I actually have it on a computer that I don’t use for very… I usually only use it for recording stuff. So I had even done all of the remove stuff from the computer, pulled everything off into hard drives. I had done all the troubleshooting and then…

19:29
I think there comes a point where when you’ve done all the troubleshooting and you’re still having issues and it’s a really old piece of software, sometimes you do have to upgrade. Here’s another one that might get doged. That’s like typical Mac mentality, by the way. It is Mac mentality. That never happens to me, actually. If I have something that’s working rock solid, it never just stops working.

19:50
on my machine, When I went in all the forums, I was not alone, let’s just say. It probably isn’t maxing. Here’s something that I’m debating, Dojing, and maybe you can help me. I still pay for Jungle Scout. It’s like 500 bucks a year, which that’s a lot of money. it’s 500 bucks a year. I don’t know what plan I have or anything like that.

20:17
Like, I mean, can access everything, right? But I don’t really, like, I’m not gonna sell on Amazon anytime in the next, you know, couple of years. Do I use it for like Amazon influencer stuff? Occasionally, but I really just use Fluencer Fruit, right? Like Fluencer Fruit’s pretty robust. I don’t really need, you know, Jungle Scout. I find myself using Jungle Scout the most when I get…

20:43
Come across a random product on like Amazon or tik-tok and I just want to see if it’s actually Like I use it for my own personal gossip, right? Like I don’t use it in any way for business right now. So it’s like Do I axe it? It seems like an easy no-brainer axe to me really but it just feels I Don’t know, you know, I guess worst case you could use mine. If you know, it’s like it’s like computer specific. It’s a browser. It’s not

21:12
Mine’s in my browser. in your browser, but you got to log in. Oh, I have to log in. Can I log into your browser? I suppose you could. don’t know. Mess up your search history, mess up your algorithm. Yeah, that one’s probably going to get the doge. Yeah, I think you should ask that one. Here’s the other thing that I’ve been kind of doging. And this is probably really annoying to people who work for me.

21:42
But I try to figure out exactly what they’re doing. And then I’ll walk in and I’ll just say, just let me just follow you for a day and see what you’re doing. I bet they love that. I usually do this while Jen’s gone. And then I’m like, OK, why the heck are we doing this way? Why are you using paper? Why is your desk covered and posted? Why are we doing this all manually like that? And then.

22:11
Oftentimes, here’s what my prediction is. Because of AI and everything, I’m predicting in two years, everyone will be able to code these stupid things to automate stuff the way you want. And arguably, you should start doing it now. And this is just like an exercise. There’s a lot of waste. There’s a lot of wasted movements in any business. And a lot of times, automating it actually isn’t that big of a deal.

22:40
And it might take you a little bit. just, so the perfect example is one I already just gave, right? With the automatic monograms, like with the typing and everything. Like when an order comes in, no human should ever have to touch that file before it gets to the machine. Stupid stuff like that. And I wouldn’t even pay for any SaaS apps. Here’s another prediction that I have. You know all those apps in the Shopify app store?

23:07
I was just looking at it the other day because some student asked me about some silly functionality. I can’t remember what it was. Some very basic functionality, something to do with like sales and promotions and whatnot. And she was like, I’m thinking about paying for this app. It’s $50 a month so I can do this like one specific sale. And I’m thinking to myself, $50 a month to be able $600 a year to be able to run one specific type of sale.

23:36
And she wasn’t equipped to do this, but literally you could just go to Claude and say, I want to write a Shopify app that allows me to do this one specific type of sale. And it would give you the liquid code that you could just cut and paste into your theme. Speaking of Shopify apps, my client’s getting ready to doge something, which is this is a big one actually. So we’ve talked about rewards programs in the past. You built your own.

24:06
Yes. And when we talk about accessing things, it’s not because we don’t recommend them. I also want to put that out there. Like I like Jungle Scout. I like the company. I like the work they do. It’s just a matter of is it right for my business right now? And the answer is probably no. So we’ve been using the smile dot I.O. loyalty program. It’s very expensive. How much is it actually?

24:28
So I was about to look it up because the problem with a lot of these apps is not just that they are monthly. It’s like, it’s monthly and you can sign up for, um, know, ons. Yes. $19. So the starter plan in smile is $49 a month. Okay. Um, it does up to 500 monthly orders. like the solid a lot, your store is not very big if you’re in, um,

25:00
you know, starter mode. So growth is $200 a month, which is 2500 monthly orders, which is still like, I mean, that’s a lot, but it’s not really that much. It’s not as much as you think it, you know, right with $20 per additional hundred orders, right. And it’s got, you know, more tiers, whatever, or more, you know, that you can integrate with. The plus program is a thousand dollars a month.

25:30
Woo. Right. So I mean, that’s you better be making a lot of money from your loyalty program. So we just are what we’re going to switch to. It’s like Aptol, A P P S T L E, which is like their top tier, I think is like under 200 a month. Right. That does everything that the thousand dollar a month plan does on Smile. And so that’s the other thing to think about is it might.

25:59
be that you have to use some sort of subscription to do what you need to do. But you you might have signed up for one. Here’s the other thing. A lot of these people increase their prices over time, which I get it. Like they’re trying to earn a living. But like new people come on the market. And you’re right with the ability to like code stuff. Like people are developing things a lot quicker. There’s a lot more competition. Use that to your advantage to find a better deal on a product that usually I mean, usually you can find something that does more for less money.

26:28
I’m not trying to smash smile.io. think it’s a great company. Yeah. But the software they have is so easy to code. I, I seriously told me. I mean, it’s so basic. Yeah. So basic. It was a camera is less than a week project for me. Yeah. Um, to do, and I didn’t even code most of it. Like I had chat, you’d out back back when I was using chat, you’d be to do it. Yeah. Uh, from my own website. Yeah. Um, there was something else I was going to say. Oh yeah.

26:57
Almost all these companies, start out cheap or free. Yes. And then something happens where they decide to triple their prices. Like stamp.io was the perfect example. It was free. It was a review program. Everyone loved it. I was promoting it and whatnot. And then they started gouging people with pricing and they held the reviews hostage if you tried to switch. So that’s why I have no problems trashing that company publicly actually.

27:28
They wouldn’t release the reviews. this is just a trend, I think, with any service. Yeah. Right. I bet Smile.io wasn’t that expensive when you guys first joined. Right. I think it was pretty. I mean, I remember like back when I was in e-commerce, like thinking that that was a pretty affordable program. No, not anymore. Not anymore. And you think like, oh, that’s, you know, thousand dollars. That’s seventy five hundred orders. Yes, it’s a lot of orders every month. But.

27:54
Every single thing eats into your margins, right? Every single thing. And if you can’t show that you’re, and here’s the other thing, if you’re not, this is the other reason why you need to doge something. You have something that you’re paying for, but you’re not using it to its fullest potential. So this is where I see people making a mistake a lot in e-commerce. They’re paying for an affiliate program, like a Shopify affiliate integration, like Affiliate.ly. Affiliate.ly is a good program, right? This is not a trash on them at all.

28:22
But if you don’t have someone emailing your, like if you don’t have either someone’s job or some part of someone’s job is to manage that and to be putting creatives in there, to be putting the copy, like reevaluate, like maybe you just pause it for now, right? Like you don’t have, like until you’re ready to like make the fact that, and I feel at least not expensive, it’s like 10, 15, $19 a month, whatever, it’s in that like sort of doesn’t matter price range.

28:49
But it does matter if you’re not making any money from your affiliates, right? If you’re not actively using that tool, it’s like jungle Scott, I’m not using it right now. I need to let it go. But it’s sort of that like, when we get to the affiliate program, well, okay, when you get to it, but you’re not do it. So quit paying for it until you can dedicate the resources to say, hey, we need to spend five hours a week on our affiliate program. I’m considered dozing my email marketing for my wife quit.

29:19
Not for Bumblebee linens, but for MyWifeQuit. Because at a base level, I have three or four autoresponders, maybe a little more than that, but one main big one. And I broadcast for the most part. So why am I paying all this money for something that’s really basic when there’s actually free solutions out there? There are little, I actually haven’t experimented.

29:45
recently. Remember when we were going to do Go Brand Win? I didn’t build it. It was free and I just tailored it to our thing. It wasn’t bad. It worked. It did work. Yes. And it was a dollar to send 10,000 emails. Yes, I remember that. It was very cheap. Yeah. So here’s the moral of the story. I think there’s almost always an open source solution out there that you should search for first. Take Bumblebee Linens.

30:15
It’s built on an open source shopping cart. And today there’s still a bunch of really good open source shopping carts. WooCommerce is probably the most popular one that’s free. And just think, how many people are on Shopify plus right now paying $2,000 a month? And mine probably has much more functionality than Shopify plus, I would guess at this point. And so that’s a lot of money. Here’s the other thing to think about because

30:45
I know when people listen to this, they tell me, they get frustrated with you, right? Because you’re like, well, I just coded this up. I just did X, Y, Z, right? Which I understand, because I am not someone who can just go code something up and make it work. However, what I have found, and this is a good example with Shopify, and I love Shopify. So, I mean, I’ve paid for Shopify for a very long time. But if you can do something where you…

31:14
You don’t know how to do all these things, right? But you can pay someone a thousand dollars, let’s just say, to set it up for you using software or tools that are free. And then, you know, you have to, you know, have maintenance every once in a while. I mean, what are most even the small stores, what are they paying per month on Shopify? I mean, I think when I was selling, I was paying 100, 200 bucks a month when you added everything in. Oh, when you add in the plugins, you mean? Yeah. Yeah.

31:42
Like a base plan at Shopify is like $39 a month now. So you realize that after a year or two, you’ve basically paid for the investment that you made in the beginning. And that’s something that I think people should think about. It’s like, well, is it worth it to just pay monthly forever and ever and I can never leave? Or should I pay a one-time fee, have someone set something up for me and then basically just worry about maintenance every once

32:11
I mean, that’s always the dilemma. I think that most people have because I fall into this trap too. Like I have apps where I’m paying monthly where I could save 20 % if I paid upfront for a year. But I’m always like, still want the option to cancel. But then I end up using that same software for years. Yeah, the monthly yearly.

32:37
That one always gets me because like I want to do the yearly but then there’s that little bit of me that’s like what if I hate it and I’m like what if I hate it I’ve literally been talking about it for two years. I don’t hate it.

32:50
I think the point here is you have to go through all the things you’re paying for and which ones are labeled each one as whether it’s mission critical, like you can’t live without like usually I’ll go through and I’ll sign a number from one to 10 like how badly do I need this? Yeah. Versus what I’m paying. Like if it’s super cheap. Usually I’ll let it slide. Like I’m paying for some stupid stuff. That’s like five bucks a month. But yeah, I’m willing to let that slide. But if it’s something really stupid, that

33:17
Here’s the problem. I guess it’s hard for someone to tell who’s less technical to to understand what’s stupid or not, you know in terms of how hard it is to To actually implement it yourself But take like that discount example that I gave you earlier Like I want to run like a buy one get one free or something like that That wasn’t the exact thing but it was something a little more complicated like buy something you get something else cheaper, whatever That is a very stupid feature to implement. Yeah

33:47
That’s a very simple feature to implement and you shouldn’t be paying any tool 50 bucks a month to do that. Right. Just get it over with, hire developer to make that part of your store and just call it a day. Yeah. And here’s the other thing I’ve just noticed after teaching my class. A lot of people think short term, right? They’re like, Oh, you know, I’m just going to try this for a year. So I don’t want to invest in all that stuff.

34:15
But that’s not the right attitude. Like you have to go into this thinking that you’re gonna run it for like three or five years. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think I think it’s good rather than doing it yearly like I tend to do is to actually probably go through every quarter. And because if you haven’t used something in three months and it’s not because it’s seasonal. Right. Like you just haven’t used it in three months. It might be time to put it on the chopping block.

34:44
And then, you know, maybe you think, okay, three months, now add it to six, now make it six months, right? like, tell yourself in six months, if I haven’t used it, like it’s gone, right? Like no questions asked. But then, you know, if it motivates you to start using it, then obviously you can keep it. But I think the amount of money people waste on…

35:09
It’s almost always tools you don’t end up using versus tools that are like, it’s just easier not to have this. No, usually the tools that you’re using are pretty good, like Canva. If you use it every day, it’s a great deal. But if you’re like, you know what, I’ve never made a graphic in Canva, then why are you still paying $11 a month? Not worth it. Did you know that Jungle Scott has a lifetime plan now? I forgot to tell you about this.

35:38
since we’re talking about it. It’s like 800 bucks and you never have to pay again. So that might be worth it for you since you’re already paying. It’s helpful to know. I would always rather own something outright than pay a subscription. Even if it’s like a little subscription. I’m like subscription phobic because I don’t check. I think maybe that’s my problem. don’t check my credit card statements enough. Well, and here’s the thing, like with lifetime,

36:03
I think sometimes people get nervous like, oh, lifetime. Well, what if they’re not in business in five years? Well, if they’re not in business in five years, I guarantee you still paid less paying the lifetime than you have paying monthly. Right. You you’ve gotten your money’s worth after five years for sure. Yeah. So my last one where I can’t put it on the chopping block is my Google Drive storage. That I get. That’s really hard to do.

36:32
It’s it but this is one where it’s like it’s the time over money thing, right? Like I’m at 80 % right now on my current plan. So I’m gonna have to upgrade right to the next tier. But if you don’t have a way for you to me to what because I went through this whole exercise. Okay. Most of the time your drive is filled up because of images. Yes, emails like everyone like if they attach an image or whatever that’s all stored in there and it just all adds up.

37:02
Sometimes there’s like short movies in there. You can write a, you can just go up to ChatGBT or Claw and say, hey, write me a Google script, Google Drive script that goes through, finds all of the photos or anything over like a megabyte, lists the file names, and then deletes them if you want. Like gives you a list and then asks you if you want to delete it. My problem is I don’t want to delete everything. Like my Google Drive is

37:31
filled up because of photos and videos, right? In your emails or just in the drive In general. Okay. Well then that, yeah. Then that’s, yeah. But I also have four hard drives behind me, right, that I could move everything to that have already been paid for and are just sitting there living their best life, dusty on my desk. But that’s one of those things where it’s like the process of doing that is just so overwhelming to me that I’m like, I know that I’ll just pay for more storage.

38:00
I’m like that too. mean, for storage, it’s like unlimited. Just like when my VA just told me like her storage had filled up with her with all my videos, not the videos themselves, but like the edits, you know what saying? Like the edit file with the videos. And she’s like, should I start deleting them? Because chances are, we’re not going to revisit them, right? Especially the edited parts. It’s one thing to store the final version, it’s the other to store like the raw off which I was like, no, let’s just keep all of it.

38:29
And so just bought her a new drive, even though I’m probably never, ever going to look at that raw footage ever again. Yeah. It’s just I think this is a good exercise for people because there’s probably so much in honestly, like this says this extends past business, right? Like how many subscriptions are you there’s I always see these ads on like TikTok where it’s like, I bet we can tell you how much you’re wasting on your subscriptions. And it’s like, yeah, I’m sure you can.

38:57
Like I’m sure I’m wasting a ton of money on subscriptions. But I think, you know, start with your business because I think there’s, I think in business too, you get a little like swipe happy with the credit card because you’re like, oh, this is gonna transform my business. Oh, this is gonna, we’re gonna have affiliates and we’re gonna have rewards programs and we’re gonna do, I’m gonna find 15 more products on Amazon to sell with my jungle scout. Like you have all these big ideas and the reality is most people are like grinding away on one thing day after day. And so there’s no point in keeping.

39:26
those expenses when you don’t need them. Yeah. And I think we’re bringing up this topic in this episode because I feel like we’re heading towards a downturn if we’re not in one already. Yeah. Lots of companies, especially in the Amazon space are hurting big time. Yeah. Like the companies. I can tell because we run an event. Yeah. And so, you know, it pays to buckle down and doze a little bit. Yeah. Hope you enjoyed this episode. We’re likely headed to leaner times.

39:55
So it’s time to buckle down and do some cost cutting. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejobe.com slash episode 587. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you wanna 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,

40:24
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 of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I dive into the latest AI image generation announcements from OpenAI and Google and how they are completely disrupting marketing agencies, graphic design, and e-commerce overall. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com and the prices are now going to go up every two weeks until the event starts. The Seller Summit,

00:29
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:59
I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:28
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:42
Welcome back to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. Today we’re talking about AI and specifically the latest releases that just happened with OpenAI and ChachiBT 4.0. I personally think it’s going to disrupt a lot of industries and I’m both excited and scared at the same time. Well, you’re not in the industry, so why be scared? Well, okay. So the reason why I’m excited is because

02:11
Now, as a business, I can greatly lower my budget for graphic design and that sort of thing. On the other hand, I have friends that do graphic design for a living, so that’s why I’m scared. I would like to just talk about this before we talk about all the ways that you’re using it. We were just chatting before we started recording and I said that I haven’t had this much luck and you told me it was user error.

02:38
I was looking at your prompts. There’s five words, right? Well, I had much more prompts before that. Okay. With the new AI tools with image generation, people are saying that this is going to put graphic designers out of business. But if you’re not a graphic designer, part of me feels like some of… If you’re a good graphic designer, one thing you bring to the table is the ability to convey emotion in your…

03:08
designs, right, to evoke feelings from people. And I’m just not sure that AI is, if you don’t have the ability as the importer, then I don’t know if AI is gonna give it back to you. Well, okay, so let’s just take a typical use case here. Let’s say you see a Facebook ad from the Facebook ads library that you really like. You would upload that to ChatGBT and say, hey, I want you to use this style with this product.

03:37
And then here are the value props, here are the whatever. I’ve been featured in these magazines, just put out something in this style and it will do it. And it does a pretty good job. So that’s how I’ve been using it. Yeah. And what’s nice is it literally, so we’ve been featured in Brides magazine, Martha Stewart weddings and real simple. I said, that was one of the things I wanted to insert in the ad. So it actually went out and grabbed those logos and put them on the ad. And then, know how

04:07
I’m not a graphic designer, obviously, but you know how graphic designers, know, they use different size fonts and whatever to make it look good. Yeah. ChachiBD did the same thing. And it looks just like the style of that other ad. Yeah. Except it was for my product. Now I did have to tweak a couple of things because like some of the text value props that I gave it were a little too long. So they were just kind of off center and like the call to action button wasn’t the color that I wanted. And you can iterate. Right. The problem right now is.

04:36
is because it just kind of got released, everyone’s using it right now. So unfortunately right now it literally takes like five minutes an image, which tries my patience right now. feel like it took even longer when I was working through stuff. But so let’s just say you get this graphic and there’s some text that needs to be shifting, there’s updates. Like what is the format of the graphic that, because all I did was go through it in ChatGPT. Like what if you want to make edits, then how do you do that?

05:03
I mean, the easiest way right now is to tell chat GBT to just edit it. Yeah. Right. But I didn’t have the patience for that right now. So I just threw it in the Photoshop and adjusted the things manually. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, right now it’s slow because everyone’s using it. But once all the server, remember when chat GBT was like super slow when it first came out? Yes. It gets better. They’ll add servers and whatnot. And if it gets as fast as mid journey, like mid journey is like 30 seconds. Once it gets to that point,

05:32
I don’t think this is going to be a problem just giving additional prompts to get what you want. Also, Google Flash 2.0 is super fast. You can just take that Chat GPT ad, move it into Google now and say, want the model to be crying or I want the model to be smiling. And it’ll update that in like 30 seconds. I guess I feel like this is really good if you know what you want.

06:03
Yeah, I mean, isn’t everything in life better when you know what you want? Well, here’s the thing. I feel like a lot of people, and I see this a lot with e-commerce and a profitable audience, is that a lot of times people don’t really have a firm grasp of what they want. They have this very abstract level idea. That’s where I think the art-based people can help take very…

06:31
abstract concepts and make them come to life. So I feel like this is as good as the person using it, right? If you’re, I don’t think there’s any like, if you, I think if you’re not great at this, then you’re not going to get the results you want. I agree with that. But on the flip side, you can ask ChachiBT, give me some examples of great ad campaigns over the years for this type of product. And it’ll show you

06:59
Of course, if you’re going into this with no research and nothing, yeah, you’re gonna get crap in, crap out, right? But it’s really easy to find good examples of good ads, for example, that you can emulate. let’s say you have Canva, like even the free version of Canva, you can do a search for e-commerce templates, right? And then just feed those into ChatGPT and have it do all the work. Yeah. So I guess my concern

07:28
I think if you’re a good graphic designer, you’re fine. I agree. If you’re a mediocre, if you’re doing this on the side, you’re probably in trouble. I guess the one issue that I’ve noticed recently is my client started a YouTube channel, they’re using Claude specifically to basically turn blog content into scripts. The content’s pretty much already existing. It’s turning out some pretty good stuff for the most part. The other day, she

07:58
put in some content and she asked for a statistic. She was making a video on how to teach your kids to read. And because she’s coming out, the company is coming out with a reading curriculum and she asked for a hook and it was like the back and forth that people do. And Claude said, the hook was something like 80 % of parents are frustrated teaching their kids to read. And so she said, wow, that’s so interesting. Where did you get that statistic?

08:27
And Claude said, you caught me. I made it up. Well, that’s well known, Tony. You can’t trust any stat that comes out of course. But that’s that’s where I feel like I feel like how often is AI going to deceive you? Like, oh, these colors look good together when they don’t look good together. Like if you don’t have an eye for things, I feel like AI will get away with a lot of stuff, just like if she would have just taken that statistic as like, oh, 80 percent of parents, you know.

08:55
I mean, that was the wrong approach. If she wanted real statistics, she would have used a different version that actually does the deep research on it. Well, she didn’t ask for a statistic. It came up with it in the hook. This was part of the hook. Then she was like, huh, this seems high because she has the knowledge of this. If you don’t have any knowledge, I feel like you can be led astray pretty quickly. This is why I think the industry is in trouble. Sure, there’s people who are

09:25
ignorant, you know, who don’t know anything. Of course, there’s always going to be business for them. Right. But who employs most of these graphic designers that make a living doing this? It’s large corporations or bigger businesses who do know what they’re doing because they’re already making money to a certain extent. Right. Yeah. And I mean, this is just the beginning. mean, it’s going to take time for this to happen, and it’s only going to get better. Yeah. Like I just take mid journey, for example, like

09:53
When that first came out, I signed up and then I canceled because it was okay, but it was just kind of fun, a fun tool. Now I’m paying for it every month because it actually, up until the chat GPT came out, I thought mid-journey was the best and it’s, still is the best for certain applications. And again, of course you have to take the time to learn how to use these tools. And so I guess, yeah, from your perspective, if someone’s not willing to learn how to do this correctly, then of course.

10:22
you can pay someone and there’s always going to be people like that. I also feel like one of the things that I dislike about AI is I feel like it flooded the market with people who don’t really know anything but are using AI to create content, make videos, whatever. A lot of the information is wrong, misleading. I feel like the better AI gets, the more fake people we get trying to do these things, which I think

10:51
We heard, I don’t remember who told us this, we were at a conference a couple years ago and they were talking about understanding how to use AI as like the next skill, right? Being able to put in the right prompts, being able to talk to it correctly. And when I heard that, I was like, yeah, that makes total sense, right? But then over the past couple of years, especially when we do webinars or we’re talking about AI use cases,

11:17
And we share prompts like I shared a prompt at my talk last week. You share prompts and webinars. People are like, give me the prompt. Give me the prompt. Like people are like dying for that information. They want they want to learn how to do this better, because usually, like you said, garbage in garbage out. If you’re not putting the right prompts in, you’re probably not getting the best information. Yeah, I mean, that’s correct.

11:43
You know what I started doing now is once I get ChatGPT in a good place with what I wanted to do, I say, hey, take this conversation and then turn it into a prompt that I can ask you from now on. So I have to go through all this again. That’s smart though. And it works to a certain extent. Yeah. Here’s my long-term worry for all this. So

12:10
There was a friend who posted something on Facebook recently where they said that they just laid off 95 % of their engineering team because of AI. Really? So what’s going to happen going forward with artists and everything is as soon as you see there’s no jobs and no work in this field, less people are going to go into it. And at that point, know, chat, GBT and AI, it’s just derivative works.

12:40
off of what if humans have done. And if humans aren’t doing anything new and novel anymore, at some point it’s gonna get stagnant. It’s gonna take years to get to that point, but I think it’s just gonna pendulum back and forth.

12:52
Right? Like it’s going to get to this point where chat GPT or AI doesn’t know anything new because no one’s putting out any content on the blog anymore. Right? Right. And then at this point, every human who’s creating new stuff, they’re not going to want AI crawling their stuff. So they’re going to create these silos now of data where they charge AI for it. And this pendulum is just going to kind of swing back and forth. We’re right now on this disruption phase. Right. And it’ll probably take, I don’t know.

13:20
years for to get to that point. I don’t know, I’m already very frustrated to be honest with you on TikTok and YouTube. Like whenever I get a piece of AI video, I just stop watching. Like I can’t stand it. What type of AI content are you seeing on TikTok and YouTube? It’s mostly sports for me. Okay, yeah. But every now and then I get a like a personal development one. You know what saying?

13:49
I don’t get those, but tell me more. Maybe it’s because that’s my niche and I browse competitors and whatnot. It’s basically teaching you how to, if you’re stuck in a rut or whatnot, the mindset you have to get. I’m not going to watch an AI video for that. Although there are YouTube channels like Motiversity where they have millions of subs and it is all AI generated. Who am I to know what works in that department? My question would be,

14:19
For personal development, once again, it’s sort of the pendulum, right? The AI can have the information right now because there’s millions of pieces of information on personal development on the web. But in 10 years, where is that information going to be?

14:36
I mean, to be honest with you, think personal development information was way saturated like 10 years ago, right? I mean, it’s the same stuff. I feel like there’s new stuff. There’s new stuff, but I watch personal development stuff based on the person who’s giving it because that person needs credibility. Correct. Right? And so if I see a robot or an AI person doing it, it means nothing to me. I would never take personal development.

15:04
from a robot other than you. You’re the only robot I take personal development. Because it’s just some kid probably. Correct. Just a script kitty. Yep. Pumping all this stuff out. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that I’m glad about and this is, so I go back and forth, right? Because I don’t want to put people out of jobs. Obviously, I have a lot of friends who are graphic designers too.

15:33
Also, I feel like there’s a lot of jobs being done that are so useless. For example, we ran a giveaway and in the giveaway, one of the entries was like, what content do you want to see on YouTube? What content do want me to create? We got over thousand entries. Whoever set up the contest, wasn’t me, decided not to make that a multiple choice, but rather a fill in the blank, which is great until you have to parse the data. Then it’s like,

16:03
You could have 15 of the exact same answer, because it’s nuanced in a sentence, it’s not like, you know, coming together. So the company paid somebody like, I don’t know, 25 bucks, 30 bucks an hour to like organize this data for several hours. And I was like, you did what? Like what? And then they didn’t really organize it in the correct way. It was like this whole big mess, right? Waste of money.

16:24
I took the spreadsheet, uploaded it to ChatGBT and I was like, organize this by category and frequency, right? So like how many times you had the word high school or whatever. And then like ChatGBT gave me like draft one. And then I was like, okay, now organ, like then I kept parsing it down realizing like, okay, let’s look for these keywords and these keywords. And within 10 minutes, I had, you know, a thousand pieces of information organized pretty well. Like I think it could probably be a little bit better.

16:52
I spent 10 minutes doing this with not- I didn’t really know how to do it. I’d never done this before. I’d never asked for a spreadsheet organization from Chagy Pt. versus the three and a half hours someone else did it where they didn’t even really organize it in the right way. I think those types of uses to me are really exciting because that’s just busy work. That’s not skilled labor, I guess. In my first job out of college,

17:22
I was doing board design and there was one lady, her only job was to take a data sheet for like a chip, draw a picture of it so someone could place it in a schematic tool. That was her job. And it was something that anyone could have done or like any software program, like if they just took the time to write it, could have done so.

17:51
You’re right. mean, there’s lots of stuff like that. And I guess I’m not worried for the graphic designers and artists who are the best in their field. There’s always room for people who are the best in their field. Same with engineering and whatnot. But I mean, the vast majority, like 80%, are not the top, right?

18:13
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.

18:42
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.

18:53
I would say the people who are in trouble are the people who learned Canva. They weren’t actually trained graphic designers. They’re self-taught. They’re definitely creative. They have an eye for design, but they rely on tools to implement ideas. when you work with a true graphic designer creative director, they’re going to do a lot more for you than just put together an image. They’re going to talk about

19:21
For example, with product photos. You have regular product photos, which I feel like AI can probably assist with pretty well. Then you have lifestyle type photos where it’s like, what do you really need and want in these photos that will sell the product? That’s right. What pages do you pick out of a book to show? You know how you can look inside or see that? Those types of things, feel like will still be important for humans to have a component in.

19:50
Yeah, I mean, again, you can take something that you like and I’ve done this experiment, not with images, but with words. I’ll have something and I’ll say, hey, using cash for tisings life force eight principle, you know, give me some tag lines, like tell me which life force eight to use and then just give me some really catchy hooks for this product. Yeah. And does a really good job. So presumably, you know, with photography also, you could take something you like and it’s really easy now to just

20:19
put your product in there instead of the one that’s being displayed in the advertisement. And again, it does take creativity to get that initial idea. once those ideas dry up, meaning you just can’t find them on the public domain, it’ll be harder to do. So I’m curious as to when you say, show me the top performing ads or whatever, where is AI getting that data? Yeah. So right now, actually, it’s

20:49
It’s from the web. Okay. Right? So it’ll do web searches and whatnot. And if that once that dries up, that prompt won’t work anymore. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s what I feel like. I feel like that’s it. And the other thing is if this is why we’re like all of our blogging friends have quit blogging, basically. Yeah. I mean, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. And it’s like.

21:16
That’s where the information comes from. So if the information is now just regurgitated old information and then regurgitated information, at some point, the information sort of becomes useless. Yeah, actually, I read some article recently that the next version of ChatGPT, which I guess is five, there’s not enough info. It’s already crawled all the information. Yeah. And it’s actually at the point now where it’s crawling regurgitated information.

21:46
which actually has a negative effect on the quality of the LLM. maybe we’re already at that point. Like who’s publishing, like the whole blogosphere, like the people who just blog for a living, that’s pretty much dead. And so where are people getting information from now? Who’s still putting out information, like the big mainstream publications at this point? Because those are the only ones that can rank in Google search.

22:15
But think about what happens when Google goes away. Like Google starts already dying. I can’t remember the exact stat. You’ll have to look it up after the fact. But the amount of people starting their searches with ChatGPD now is really high. I mean, it’s just gaining ground at an exponential rate. And I remember this happening back in the day when I was in college when Google overtook Yahoo in what seemed like just a year. And the same thing’s happening. Yeah.

22:45
I don’t know. I feel like we’re like old people now. This is probably how our great grandparents felt when the car was invented. Think about it. One day there’s one car on the street and everyone else is still on the horse. Then two years later, everybody has a car. Then it’s like, how do you adapt to life with cars when your roads are built for horses? You have all these new problems that come up because

23:15
the technology change so quickly, right? And ever since that point in our history, the changes have been quicker and quicker and quicker. Like it’s hard for me to believe that like I went to all of school until college without the internet.

23:33
That’s true. I didn’t. You’re not that much older than me. When I was in 11th grade, think it was like… The internet existed, but not for regular people with… The people who had computers in their home were people like your family. I remember my dad got the first computer. I was probably 16. Wow. Okay.

24:02
We didn’t have the ability to Google stuff for school or- Yes, was Yahoo back then and Excite and Lycos. I am like, we had to go to the library. Then you had to look stuff up on Microfish or whatever. You think about, we’re old, but we’re not so old. My kids, they’ve been to libraries, but they have no concept of what it’s like to have to get a book to do a paper.

24:32
Yeah, I know. You know what I mean? And like, go pull old magazines or publications. It’s like, no, you just open your like not even a computer. You open your handheld phone like your tiny little technology piece like that. It’s great. So you think about like that progression to now this. It’s just getting faster and faster and faster. I mean, this is the last skilled generation. Just think of how many students are. I feel like my writing skills have gotten worse because of chat to be because now it’s just so easy.

25:02
for me to just spit out garbage, like just dump my brain onto this thing and have it make it sound better, right? It’s- Yeah, so then are we gonna get dumber? Like seriously. Even coding actually, I’m not getting any, I’m getting worse at coding probably because now I can just tell it what I want. I know conceptually what I want in the, but then I’m having AI do most of heavy lifting. Yeah. Although I have noticed, so I, know, I spoke at that event last week and there were some great talks, great speakers.

25:32
Every single one of used AI for their talk title because you could see the same words throughout all that. If it’s like you say, I’m speaking at an event that’s for people who have pets and they’re influencers and they showcase their pets, you put all that information in there, it’s spitting out very similar. Obviously, the talk titles are different based on what they’re talking about, but it’s like the adjectives and adverbs and things like that that AI uses is

26:00
Like, okay, if you’re talking about pets, you use these six words. If you’re talking about this, use these six words, right? So we were looking at the schedule in the speaker lounge laughing that like everybody had to have put their talk title through chat GPT because they were also similar. Yeah. All right. Should we shift gears now that we’ve established that we’re old? You’re getting older too. I know. So how are people using this right now?

26:25
I’ve actually fundamentally shifted my class now. Like there’s an AI section in there. And I don’t think that any new shop owner really needs to pay for photography at all. Really? Because you can take a photo on your phone, and let’s say it doesn’t look that good. You can just have AI touch it up, put it in different environments and whatnot. If you sell apparel, you can just literally have a model wear that apparel, right?

26:53
And if sometimes AI screws that up, so if you want something more robust, you can pay for a tool that’s super cheap where you take a picture of yourself in the pose or whatever that you want with your product. And you can tell these new tools, like you can mask out, you know, what your product is, and it just changes everything else around it. Like you can replace yourself with a supermodel. Right. And then you can animate a photo for an ad.

27:22
You just upload the photo, tell it what you want to do, and it does a scarily good job. Now, you talked about this in Office Hours a couple weeks ago. What’s the tool that you’re using for this? Kling. Kling, okay. It was impressive when your examples were very impressive. Yes. That was in a different environment too. That was like a cartoon that I animated, I think, for Office Hours. Yes, but just in general. But for real humans, it’s-

27:51
does an amazing job, kind of scarily so. I animated an old family photo just for fun, just for fun. And my dad who passed away a while back, it animated him and I was freaking out. Yeah, have you seen those things on TikTok where they animate people that have already passed away? I’m not on that TikTok, but.

28:17
I don’t know how I got on it, but like it’s basically all like people like famous people, actors and stuff like that. But like, know, Robin Williams and Chadwick Boseman and people who like, uh, John Belushi, like all those, like they show them like as an age progression to how the old they would be today if they were still alive. Um, it’s, it’s kind of scary. Yeah. Yeah. So you don’t have to take photos.

28:45
provided you’re willing to go through the headaches of using AI right now, which it’s not that bad. I mean, it takes a while to get an image you exactly want. But you don’t need to hire models. So maybe like the whole modeling industry is going to decline also. H &M just recently announced that they’re going to be using AI models. It’s a big press release, I think like a week ago or two weeks ago. So I mean, it’s already happening. H &M is a pretty big company, right?

29:14
in the apparel space.

29:17
So that can’t be good for society. Right. It might be good for the models. Maybe they’ll start eating now. They don’t have to be 82 pounds. then product descriptions, everything. I you can already there’s this tool that I just recently came across that I haven’t gotten a chance to try yet, but I looked at the demos. If you see a website, you can literally use it to clone it.

29:48
Every single page, everything. Like it’ll crawl the page of the website and it’ll give you the code. So you can just literally clone that exact website on your server. I hate AI sometimes. So where’s the innovation? Well, no, that’s what I’m saying. Like right now it’s all freely available on the web, right? You, you clone someone’s web. Like if you like a cool feature, you can just clone that feature.

30:14
Yes, and I think that’s great. I think it will give another level of the playing field thing, just like I felt like the internet leveled the playing field for people. Then video content leveled the playing field. For musicians, all these people putting their content out on YouTube or on TikTok or whatever and getting discovered and being able to make a living as an artist through not having to go through traditional record label type thing.

30:45
But also, I think about the people that I’ve admired or followed, it’s usually because they’ve kind of been innovative in the space. They’ve come up with something very different or unique. Their value proposition is different than everybody else’s, which is why I like them. Kind of like your book, right? In the entrepreneur world, the message is almost always hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, right? Work your 90-hour weeks. And then you came out with a book that was like, hey, you don’t really have to be that way.

31:14
Put your family first, you can have a balanced life, it is possible. So it’s like, are we losing all the innovation because everyone’s just like, oh, I like that site, me, like no one’s gonna be different anymore. Everyone’s just gonna be versions of something else. Yeah, I mean, that’s the phase we’re in right now until all that dries up. It’s annoying. Well, once that all dries up and everything else is the same, then people will be encouraged to innovate again and they’re gonna lock that stuff behind a paywall, right?

31:43
because what’s the incentive of doing it? Like right now, I actually haven’t been putting out blog posts because what’s funny is, what’s been happening with my blog is I’ll put out a blog post, which is a derivative of a script that I hand wrote on YouTube. And it’s actually, I think it’s had a detrimental effect on my blog. Really? Yeah, like I haven’t kept up with all the Google updates lately, but maybe that’s just an artifact of just everything declining in the Google space in general.

32:13
I see no reason to do that now. If for some reason there was a way for me to get compensated for it or if it led to traffic, I might do it again, but definitely not if AI is just going to steal it and I’m not going to get anything out of it. That’s what’s going to happen here. I think that’s what’s going to happen with people that are still putting out content. That’s going to decline.

32:43
I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get to that point, but I would imagine at least a few years for that to happen. Before the world ends, before we go into absolute decline, you shared some ways that you’re using AI to streamline, make your business more efficient. I think the photo thing is actually really interesting. I’ll be curious to see how that all rolls out.

33:11
I truly think some people are terrible photographers. I don’t know. Maybe AI can fix the worst of the worst. I agree. I absolutely agree. Even if you take a bad shot, you can have AI change the shot. One of the ideas that I like, which obviously this puts people out of business, is the illustration side only because I work

33:38
with a company that does tons of illustrations and it’s not just a price issue, Like illustrators are expensive, they are hand drawing things. I mean, I don’t have that skill, I can’t draw anything. But the bigger issue that we bump into all the time is time, right? It takes them a ridiculous amount of hours to draw this content. So it’s like, well, if that could speed up production, right, by probably months.

34:05
I mean, that’s a huge advantage in a business, right? Not just financially, but like on the timeline for product development. That’s huge. Yeah. I mean, no question, if you’re a business owner, this is a huge benefit. Yeah. I mean, I’m actually looking forward to robots. And I know I shouldn’t be, but in the back of my mind, I’m thinking how cool would it be for us to be able to fulfill and ship orders without the robot on the weekends without having us.

34:33
having to be there or do anything. When I worked with Valpak years ago, they have a state-of-the-art facility around Tampa, Florida. Basically, it’s almost entirely run by robots. I think there’s maybe one or two people on the floor where they’re printing, stuffing, envelopes. There’s these little robot things that go all around and they’ve got the magnet tracks or whatever. It’s pretty impressive.

35:04
what they’re doing and I’m sure like obviously cost savings and things like that are huge, but also did put a bunch of people out of work as well. You would think that with robots that you have less margin for error, right? There’s probably a much greater chance that a human is going to mess up an order fulfillment over a robot. Here’s where I feel like

35:31
then it goes full circle, right? So like a robot’s probably not gonna make a mistake that a human’s gonna make, but you’re still dealing with humans on the first side of this, right? So like the people that put their zip code in wrong to their order or something, like something that a human might catch the error, because it’s like very gross, a grossly obvious error, but then a robot would probably just process something through without catching it. So it’s like you kind of go back and forth, right? Because at some point, whenever the human’s involved, the error rate is gonna go up significantly. So even if they’re the customer.

36:02
Yeah, but then the robot will learn. There was a recent report that came out, I think Waymo put it out, that said the likelihood of an accident is significantly lower. It was something like 80 % lower when the robot is driving the car versus the human. Well, yeah, because they’re not on their phone. I think Waymo has millions of miles at this point. I can’t remember what the exact numbers were. I just saw the article in passing. But yeah, I mean, it does a better job.

36:31
than humans. Have you been in one of those cars yet? I were in Vegas. The reason why I haven’t, maybe I’ll do so because it started out in SF, but it’s more expensive right now than to get a regular Uber. Oh, is it? Yes. It makes sense. Which is why I haven’t done it yet. I’ve just had a cheapness.

36:54
I still am little afraid to do that, but I don’t know. It’s probably safer than driving with my kids. What else is on the line for disruption? Engineers, like my fellow engineers here, are hurting. I’m glad I got out of that industry to a certain extent because the number of CS majors has not declined coming out of universities.

37:22
but the amount of jobs has greatly declined. Which means that a lot of these people are gonna be looking for jobs that just aren’t there. But on the flip side, a lot of the innovation is coming from these engineers as well. if there’s no jobs, people aren’t gonna become engineers and then who’s gonna advance the AI industry later on? So how are you, since you actually…

37:48
You’re a good case study for this, right? Because you guys create designs at Bumblebee, right? So are you using AI to brainstorm ideas? I know you’re banking on it’s National Donut Day and all that kind of stuff, how is AI doing for that side, the creation side of it? Yeah, so right now I’m not using it for products. I’m mainly using it for social media ideas.

38:16
And one thing that I’ve been using AI for is so one thing that we have on the horizon is we’re to be publishing stories, you know, of the people who actually embroider the handkerchiefs, since it’s always for some special occasion. Right. So I’ve gone through and we have like 17 years of database data of people personalizing handkerchiefs. So I took that database and I just fed it in chat, GVT. And then I had it highlight ones that are just kind of out of the ordinary. Yeah.

38:44
So anyone who’s written something that’s kind of funky or whatnot, like there’s a story behind that, right? And that story is very interesting to be told. That’s a pretty good application. Anything where it has to parse lots of data is like generally a pretty good application for AI. But you’re not using it for any of the artwork right now. So for the artwork, like if we tell someone’s story, we don’t use their name or their likeness, and we’re using AI to generate, you know, mock-up people.

39:14
and fictitious names to tell the stories. What about on products that you sell? I don’t know what it’s called. It’s not heat pressing, but you can put. Oh, yes. That’s a good point. Are you using like, create a menorah because it’s Hanukkah or create, are you using AI to come up with designs for that? Because that’s been a new part of your business. It’s doing pretty well. That’s correct. We are not doing that yet.

39:43
Mainly because the text wasn’t very good until recently. So, because a lot of times, let’s say you have an Easter design, right? Because that’s coming up. You want to say happy Easter or whatnot, and it just totally screws up the writing. And it’s really hard to modify the writing. Like you have to go through work, you have to manually erase it and put font, whatever. But now with the new ChatGPT stuff, you’re right.

40:11
we can just create designs on the fly, which leads me to think that Etsy now is going to be like this flood of AI generated junk. I mean, I feel like Etsy was already getting junky. So now it’s just going to get worse. Well, it was junky because when they let Chinese sellers back in in 2022, that turned into junk. Yeah. I mean, Etsy is basically a poor man’s Amazon now or Tmoo even. Yeah.

40:39
Speaking of Chinese sellers and AI, so our friend Andrea just launched a new product and they’re doing this standard run ads, all that sort of thing. But one of the things that they did is they did like a huge influencer seating.

40:57
with the product and they mailed it to a lot of people with no expectation. I think that’s the big catch here, right? Whenever you’re doing anything with influencers, you can’t be like, I’m sending you this one free thing, please post six posts and whatever. They send it out and it’s in the crafting type space. Several of the influencers posted about the product. They’ve made a sale or two, but more importantly, other influencers have seen the seeding and are reaching out for the product.

41:28
And this is where I feel like you have to stay away from AI because I know people are trying to streamline and a lot of people are like one owner businesses, like they don’t have a team. But I think when you’re thinking about like on the influencer and relationship side of things, have, this is where your advantages over those Chinese sellers, right? The Chinese sellers are not gonna understand even if they speak English or can translate, they don’t understand like how to work with these people, right?

41:57
So she’s really winning this game right now by the interaction she’s having with the influencers and getting more influencers on board. And I think that’s something if you’re thinking about how to streamline and things like that, that’s something I would always keep very personal because, know, from what I learned from TikTok last week was that like influencers are driving the majority of the sales on TikTok shop, right? We’ll be talking about that on Seller Summit. Actually, I’m really excited about that panel.

42:25
I don’t if you saw my email this morning, but it’s going to be amazing. I think that side, like certain things I think you’ve got to stay away from AI to do. And that’s definitely one of them, because I think the relationship matters with people. And that’s where, once again, you’re fighting against sellers that are in China or have big teams or are using all sorts of AI to create all sorts of, right, like flooding the internet with content, right? But you still have an advantage.

42:53
in certain areas and you’ve got to be able to, you got to leverage that where you can. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hope I didn’t bring everyone down or we didn’t get it. I like we did. This was, I it’s exciting and it’s just scary at the same time because I know people who are getting disrupted, right? Yeah. And if we’re not careful, we could get disrupted. Yeah. Right. So that’s why, like, even if you don’t have any interest in this stuff, you should probably get interested in it and learn it because

43:24
Otherwise, you could be left in the wayside. Not a great way to end it, huh, Tony? But go play around with this stuff. Figure out ways you can use it in your everyday life. I think it’s pretty fascinating in general.

43:43
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you haven’t used any of these tools yet, I highly recommend that you give it a try. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 586. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 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.

44:12
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.