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, my buddy Andrew Youderian is back to walk me through his annual survey of 300, seven, eight and nine figure store owners from his community. And honestly, some of what came back caught us both off guard. We get into the stuff every store owner is quietly wondering about, where the smart money is moving, what’s working, what’s quietly falling apart, and a couple of things that genuinely surprised us. But before we begin,

00:29
I just wanted to take a second to mention that I have a free ecommerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free at mywifequitterjob.com slash community and I would love to see you there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community. Now on to the show.

01:00
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my good friend Andrew Udarian back on the show for like the seventh time, I think. And if you don’t know Andrew, he’s one of the OG e-commerce creators in the space. I think we’ve been both doing this since 2009. He’s run a number of e-commerce companies over the years, including Right Channel Radios, Trolling Motors, and an incredible seat back organizer company called Rough Routes. But he’s best known for e-commerce fuel. He has a podcast.

01:30
and his community of seven, eight and nine figure e-commerce entrepreneurs. So every year he surveys his entire community to get a view of the entire e-commerce landscape. And it’s a long ass survey, which I always take. The benefit of putting out such a comprehensive survey is that there’s a lot of interesting data to be gleamed from it. So in this episode, we’re going to discuss the state of the e-commerce merchant from this data. And with that, welcome back.

01:59
Steve, think this is the first time in an intro you haven’t taken the chance to kind of, you know, get a couple of jabs in, which I’m surprised about, man. Usually you come at me a little faster. I’m almost a little disappointed. how’s Roughrout doing? How’s that company doing? It’s great. It’s great. We had a huge exit to private equity, so I keep that down low. Yeah, because paper maps are coming back, I hear. Paper maps are awesome. There’s definitely people out there that know what I’m talking about.

02:27
There’s something about having a paper map that, uh, it just, you know, the analog people understand this stuff. So, but no, thanks for having me back on. It’s good to be here. Yeah. I was, was meaning to ask you, did you skip a year for the survey? Cause you know, I complain every single year when I’m filling it out. I don’t remember complaining about it last year. Yeah. Well, I think what you mean is that normally you just rely on it to help with the keynote at seller summit. You didn’t have it last year. so.

02:52
You were like, I actually have to write this from scratch. What is this you, Darien? Come on, write my keynote for me. So yes, I did skip last year. I’m sorry. Apologies for making your keynote more difficult than it had to be. Actually, why did you skip last year? It was a hard year, I know, but. It was we just had some family. We were taking some doing some family stuff, taking a little time off and just didn’t didn’t prioritize. was your year off. Yeah. Your sabbatical year. OK. Yeah. All right. So this report is 61 pages long.

03:22
I don’t know where you want to start with this. guess let’s just go with the key points here. It would be very interesting for everyone listening if you want to know what the landscape is like. Yeah. Do want me to hit the kind of the four? I have kind of four biggest takeaways, four or five biggest takeaways. You want me to go through those quickly and then we can Well, actually before we even get there, like how many people ticked the survey? What was like the dollar value of the merchants in the survey just to get an idea of what, you know, the data? Yeah. So we had…

03:51
300 ecom stores take this survey. I’d say you’re probably median store owner was probably in the I’d say probably the three to five million dollar range. But we had a lot in the eight. I’d probably say just guessing I can I can follow up with these, probably 20 to 25 percent in the eight figure range and then maybe even five percent in the 50 million and above hand flow of one hundred million dollar plus stores. So, yeah, so 300 and probably represented about three and a half billion in aggregate revenue in GMV.

04:21
Okay, nice. And it’s a good slice of like the small business e-commerce crowd. And then I think in your community you have over a thousand people, right? We do. Yep. E-com Fuel is a thousand, right around a thousand, seven, eight, nine figure e-commerce businesses. I thought this last survey was longer than normal. Do think that’s why 300 out of the 1000 filled it out? It was probably roughly about the same size. It’s about 50 questions. So it’s a big ask, right?

04:50
Right. Yeah. We’ll give away a uh free round trip business class ticket anywhere in the world as kind of a carrot for it. But yeah, in the past, we’ve had a little more adoption of it. But yeah, maybe we got to shorten this up a little bit. It’s so hard to know because that’s where all the good data comes from. it is a of cake. I mean, I curse each time. I’m I fill out 30 questions. What? There’s like another five pages? Yeah. Anyway.

05:16
Okay, let’s get to the data because it’s really good. I mean, that’s the reward, right? You get a lot of good news. So let’s about it. Yeah. All right. So what do you want to start? uh Let’s start. Oh, great. Good. No, was gonna say like, let’s start with trends because I know like in my audience, uh there’s people interested in drop shipping, domestic wholesale, private label, manufacturing and whatnot. Let’s start with that because I think that’s where a lot of people listening. Yes, absolutely. So if you look at

05:45
There’s kind of two things we track. There’s business models and then there’s competitive advantage. And so we track uh both of these. And I think what’s interesting is not even necessarily the where people I think the trends are most interesting as opposed to just the aggregate who’s doing what. And so if you let’s take business models first. So if you we have manufacturing reselling products a hybrid approach private label and drop shipping was roughly kind of the five big buckets we measure. And the big takeaway

06:15
for this year’s report was that every single category decreased or roughly stayed the same in terms of what people were doing as their business model, except for manufacturing. Manufacturing was up almost 50%, like a massive jump. Everything else either decreased meaningfully or stayed the same. So I thought that was fascinating in terms of just huge adoption of manufacturing over the last three years. And this is over a three year period. Can we define a few things real quick? Sure. uh

06:45
And manufacturer like what’s the difference between private label and manufacturing? Because when you have a private label brand, you’re having it made, right? You are. Yeah. So I think I think it speaks to the level of unique proprietary uh value add you’re putting into your product. If private label is like you go in Alibaba, you find an existing product, you slap your brand on and resell it. Manufacturing is like, hey, I’ve got

07:08
Like right, I’m looking at my desk, there’s this thing called the ROOF stand here. It’s this laptop stand that one of our James Olander, one of our committee members makes. That’s proprietary. He built that from the ground up, manufactured it. That’s the difference. Got it. Okay. So your definition of private label is my definition of white label. Where you take something existing, you put your brand on yourself. Okay. Got it. Makes total sense. Yeah. I feel like I’m surprised though. Did dropshipping not fall off a cliff? Dropshipping did too. Dropshipping went from 9 % three years ago to 4%.

07:37
Okay. This year, you know, so yes, took a huge hit private label or white labels, you call it 18 % down to 11 % the hybrid model. you’re reselling existing items as well as your own stuff. 20 % down to 14 % reselling stayed about the same at 11 to 12 and then manufacturing saw that huge jump. Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely the trend that I see within my community. Well, first off, thanks to the de minimis going away, like that basically destroyed all drop shipping in my opinion and the reselling market.

08:07
which is white label, I guess, in your survey. It’s just too competitive now on Amazon to just slap me to products, right? I mean, it’s just a race to the bottom. So private label or in your case, manufacturing is definitely the way to go. Yeah. So you call, yeah. So private label. Okay. think you private label, white label, or we’re using those words interchangeably. So yeah, I white label is when you do nothing. Private label is when you, which is what I call manufacturing, because we’re confusing the audience here. Private label is my,

08:35
My your manufacturing is my private label. Yeah. Oh, interesting. OK, we’ll argue about that off off. There’s no argument. just OK. Well, that’s good to know. So if you guys are listening and you’re thinking about taking the shortcut is what I always think about it and just, you know, taking something from Alibaba and just throwing it up to it’s to be a hard road. Yeah. And I think I think this kind of ties into maybe the next reel me in here if I’m getting way out of line on the leash, Steve. But I think

09:04
One of the other big takeaways was looking at Amazon and we looked at two things. We looked at how many people are selling on Amazon and that is actually at an all time high. About two thirds of sellers are actually selling on Amazon. But when you look at how much revenue is being generated from Amazon, that actually has fallen and cratered back to like 2017 levels almost 10 years ago in the earlier days of the Amazon kind of gold rush. And what that tells me is that

09:33
People are using Amazon as a supplemental channel, as a demand capture channel, but they are increasingly building their business off of Amazon. And I think the reason is because ah it’s like you talked about, it’s gotten a lot harder for private, for white label, for if you’re reselling existing items or very light, just ah repurposing. um Fees have gone up there, competition has gone up there. ah And so I think it’s…

09:58
A lot of people are just looking at it and saying, you know, I’m going to go if people are searching for Bumblebee linens there, it’s great. I’ll capture that demand, but I’m not going to go try to make this the point of my spear in terms of growth. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials.

10:27
that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. So did you say the percentage of Amazon revenue or pure dollar value of Amazon revenue? percentage. So it used to be like

10:57
Yes. So it kind of it kind of back in 2017 was about 20 percent of revenue. It grew to almost 30 percent of revenue back in like early 2020s. And then it’s come back down to about 20 percent again. So like a big U shape over the last 10 years. Upside down U shape, I should guess. That totally makes sense based on what I’ve read, according to like Marketplace Pulse, where it said that the number of new Amazon sellers coming in from the U.S. is at an all time low. Right. It’s actually dropped.

11:25
So yeah, tons of foreign competition and yeah, mean, it’s just got, it’s gotten a lot, it’s got brutal. So I know for me, like we’ve de-emphasized Amazon for several years now, mainly for mental reasons, uh, because you have no control when something bad happens. It’s like a colossal waste of time to get things back. And yeah, I I’ve chosen to just focus on my own brand because I have full control over everything.

11:55
Yeah. it sounds, mean, would you say the percentage of revenue that you get from Amazon is as a percentage of your store sales has decreased over the last five years as well? Oh, it definitely has. Cause we put less emphasis on it, mainly for my marriage actually. Cause whenever something bad happens, is in like a horrific mood cause she’s the one who would handle that. And it’s just bullshit, right? Cause you have to go on support and you have to play all these games, go back and forth. And it’s just, just not worth the headache in my opinion.

12:25
But on the flip side, there’s a lot of people in my community that are doing TikTok shop. just putting out social media posts and getting affiliates has augmented their Amazon sales naturally without them paying a lot more for advertising. We also asked store owners how much they enjoyed selling on different channels. So you look at DTC, 90 % of people of store owners enjoyed their own

12:54
website. think about 20 % of store owners enjoyed selling on Amazon. Significantly lower. The only one that people hated worse than Amazon was TikTok shops. think that was like 11 to 15%. People hate that platform. And the reason is because they purposely make it hard to be successful because when they first started out, they let everyone in and they just got creamed in terms of reputation.

13:22
because they were selling all these spammy products or people, know, something would go viral and then the sellers couldn’t fulfill anything. So they really had to put the stamps down. It’s gotten better now as long as you use fulfilled by TikTok. Oh, that’s good. I didn’t even know. I didn’t know if TikTok had its own fulfillment. Is this like FBA? have their own warehouse. Yeah, it’s called FBT. Yeah. No kidding. Okay. I didn’t know that. But yeah, but there’s also, there’s always a great halo effect because you see something on TikTok. First place you go to is do a search on Amazon. So

13:52
you know, the branded searches on Amazon have gone up for some of those people. So I think it’s still important to be on Amazon, you know, uh but like, you know how advertising and Amazon’s gone up like 20 something percent, you know, consecutive years. So it’s, it’s getting harder. And then Amazon’s done a lot of stuff that’s pissed everyone off. Like they’re blocking AI from scraping all their listings. And so pretty much in order to get Amazon visibility, you have to go through Amazon’s AI search or search.

14:22
Interesting. OK. Although I kind of like that, though, like when I’m on chat, GPT or Claude or whatever doing product research, I enjoy not having Amazon in the fray because I don’t trust the reviews as much. feel like Amazon’s really good for very cheap items or very expensive, like very well-known national brand items. But that kind of middle where you’re looking for unique, interesting quality products discoverability wise, I hate Amazon for that. So I actually like that those results are not showing up in the LLMs.

14:50
Interesting. You know, whenever I do shopping searches on chat, I get a lot of Walmart, which is just as bad, if not worse than Amazon, in my opinion. Really? I never get Walmart stuff. That’s crazy. Maybe you’re just shopping for the high end stuff and I’m shopping. Steve is like, where can I buy the cheapest 10 pack of underwear on the Internet? it pops up Walmart. No wonder you’re getting 15 dollars. That’s outrageous. Where can I get it for 10? I want a dollar pair. Dollar per pair. Come on.

15:20
But I mean, I would like to see the Amazon listings in there too, just for maybe price comparisons, if anything. I don’t know. That move might backfire for them though. We’ll see. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how Amazon works. mean, if you’re not over time, it’s that they’re kind of slowly killing their golden goose or maybe they can, you know, maybe they can just do a great business with those two ends of the market. The very high trusted brands or the, you know, the USB cables you just need tomorrow and you’re fine paying $9 for if it doesn’t work, it’s not a big deal. ah

15:49
But yeah, I feel like discoverability there for cool products is all time lows. You know, I’ve been a member of your community for since the beginning and I’ve always felt like your entire community skewed. I don’t want to say anti-Amazon, but like away from Amazon and more DTC. Right. Yes, that’s fair. And that’s probably is, you know, there may be some component of that in the data as well. We’ve always been. If somebody comes in and so our threshold for membership is you need to run a seven figure business.

16:17
And we have higher thresholds if people are just Amazon. So if somebody runs a hundred percent Amazon or even like a seventy five, eighty percent Amazon business, they have to meet a higher threshold for revenue just because it’s very different. Right. Like what the skills required to run a successful Amazon primarily, know, primary business versus one that’s a little bit more of a good channel mix or more DTC or very different skills. So, yeah, no, I would agree. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. OK. Well, that that’s everything so far is in line with what I’m expecting here. What else we got?

16:48
What else we got? uh So we talked about ah Amazon Slow Fade. This is kind of interesting. This is one of big takeaways. AI adoption. one thing, granted, this is all data from 2025. So we’re looking a little bit behind the curve ball here. um But I still think it’s interesting. I looked at brands that self-reported that they had meaningfully embraced AI for their business versus those that didn’t. About two thirds did, about a third had not. Actually, maybe

17:16
closer to three quarters did. And what I found was that there was no meaningful financial uh alpha that was generated or outsized return from using AI. so fascinating, very, you know, half, know, metrics were half a dozen here, half a dozen there. There wasn’t a meaningful difference. And I think what that said to me was a lot has changed. AI changes so quickly that the cost to learn and implement and see results

17:46
It takes a while. And then also, um I think if you look at like 2026, Q1 2026, we had some pretty big advancements in tech on the AI front, especially in terms of programming and other things. um I also think that lot of people built stuff in 2025 that was not totally necessary. When you can build everything, you have to be really careful. You don’t build everything, right? um

18:08
It’s fun. It’s interesting. We were guilty of this. built a lot of like, it’s been a lot of time and money on internal tools that just didn’t really pay off or that were kind of fun to have, but didn’t move the needle. So, fascinating. And my prediction is going forward is that people are going to get more disciplined about that. And that with the tools improving, we’re going to start to see some alpha and some outsize performance for people using AI. But I thought that was an interesting stat from 2025 and a pretty good warning in terms of being careful what you build and how much time you’re pouring into AI.

18:36
I don’t remember those questions in the survey, but I’ve gotten tremendous alpha from AI. I think when I went on your podcast, I talked about the onsite search, the cross-sells and the upsells, all measurable stuff. uh The little database that I created of all wedding planners where AI tells me, you need to call this person. And I think uh it’s hard for me to remember the timeline of some of these things, but the savings in content creation versus hiring someone I think has been pretty huge.

19:06
I don’t remember what the questions were structured like uh on the survey itself uh in terms of alpha is like is saving money moving the linear consider moving the needle in the survey? yes. But I think what happened, I didn’t ask people if they saved money because I think almost everyone would say that they did. We’re very I don’t think we’re very good at being objective about these things. What I asked was, have you meaningfully embraced AI in your business and invest the time into it? And then I looked at

19:33
the previously I compared the profit margins and the growth and all these other things that they had previously answered before. So I see. see. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you’re right. Like this is not to say there aren’t people you have a programming background. I think you were very pragmatic and pretty disciplined. These are probably the nicest things I’ll ever say about you. So save room. Who is this guy? But I can see I think there are definitely people who have been very

20:01
We’ve been able to use AI in a very high ROI way. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying as an aggregate uh group, uh it’s not moving the needle. But I do think there are people that have been made incredible use of it. You know, it’s funny is in my community, like the adoption has been kind of slow. Like I’m trying to get everyone up to speed on cloud code, but there’s there’s like some resistance there that I’ve been seeing uh because it’s new and like the sentiment isn’t great outside of Silicon Valley for some strange reason. uh

20:31
I guess it’s because like the tech leaders been saying that it’s going to take over everyone’s job and everything, which is kind of dumb, right? They shouldn’t be saying stuff like that. Did you see the did you see the commencement speech from Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona into a Tucson? got booed is all I know. I don’t know what he said. Yeah, he pretty much was telling people, hey, I know you’re scared of AI, but you just got to lean into this. You got to adopt it. You can either, you know, kind of become a highly, you know, from from the club side. Anyway, he was trying to be and I think his points were probably pretty reasonable.

21:00
But yeah, there was not a big appetite for them. think it’s been addressed. Yeah, it’s I mean, I live in a bubble here in the valley where everyone’s like pro AIs as far as I can tell. But like in my classes and whatnot, like the adoption has been a little slower. Yeah, that makes that make sense. Your community is much more advanced, I think, in that 75 percent of people. That’s a lot. Yeah. And people are people doing some really cool stuff with it. I would say for a while there, it’s tapered off a little bit. But when Cloud Code Codex, especially Cloud Code, like really started advance earlier this year.

21:31
Every week we were getting two, three, four people posting, hey, look what I built with Clue. I built an inventory planning system, a demand management system, like a mini ERP, did it in like two weeks. It’s pretty cool what you can build ah if you’ve got the time and discipline to go through it. It’s been great for my marriage. Let me tell you, Andrew. So Jen always wants features for Bumblebee. in the past, I would ask her, hey, how would you rate this on a priority skill of one to 10?

21:57
Right. And if it wasn’t like a nine, eight, nine or 10, like I would just put on the back burner. Now she’s want something simple. I can easily just whip it up really quickly. Like I did her inventory system in like a weekend. So it’s been great for me. That’s cool. Steve, I think you might want to pivot into instead of teaching people about e-commerce, talking about how to help people’s marriages with. uh I mean, this is the second time this conversation you’ve been like, hey, man, this was dropped Amazon. Huge for our marriage. AI.

22:26
Huge for our marriage. Like we’re just in the honeymoon phase. I think it’s going to be a good niche for you. Yeah, well, I I’ve learned that I shouldn’t ask the priority question very often. anyway, moving on. I think Jen might listen to this episode since you’re in it. So then you’re a good woman to put up with this guy. So yeah. Where else? Where do you want to go next year? talk about warehousing.

22:54
uh Yes. Yes, warehousing. So this was probably one of the most interesting stats. ah Let me pull up the data here. OK, here we go. Yeah. So I looked at the performance differentials between people who own their own warehouse and people who at least or outsource their fulfillment, at least a warehouse or use a 3PL. And probably the biggest step that I was the most fascinating.

23:22
was even when we controlled for revenue on this front, owning your own warehouse meant that you were growing 80 to 90 % slower compared to those people who leased or outsourced. So your revenue was about 4 % growth versus 34 % if you leased your own warehouse and 22 % if you were outsourced. Anyway, and I thought this was fascinating. It kind of blew up on Twitter.

23:52
And I think that there’s a couple of things here. It’s not obviously this is not pure. This is correlation, not causation. I think potentially you could have some some elements at play where maybe you grow slower, but you’ve got a really deep inventory and that’s your moat. Right. Like, so you’ve got the durability question. Maybe your business is growing slower, but it’s more durable. Maybe it’s I think there’s probably a component where, hey, we maxed out some of our opportunity. This is the we kind of hit a ceiling in our niche. There weren’t better.

24:20
ROI areas, but the money so we bought a warehouse and maybe there’s a correlation there. But I also think there is an element of like, hey, if you’re managing your own fulfillment, it’s less time to be able to work on product and growth and all these things. And had a number of people who reached out after I talked about this and they were like, I lived this story exactly. Anyway, so I thought that was one of most fascinating stats from from the report. I 100 % agree with that stat because we have our own warehouse and it sucks.

24:48
Just, you’d be surprised how complicated things can get. And there’s like labor involved and moving stuff around, keeping track of stuff, scrapping stuff. The only reason we have a warehouse is because we do personalized items and we have to handle the stuff in house. You know, there are like three PLs now that handle embroidery and whatnot, but I would have a lot of problems. Like if anyone does embroidery listening, it’s actually a pain in butt, like with embroidery even.

25:18
So I wouldn’t feel comfortable outsourcing that. And if I did outsource it, I think it would be prohibitively expensive. So that’s the only reason why we do it. Yeah, I mean, it’s not a mental energy. But wouldn’t you say to that? I mean, that’s part of the moat of your business, right? That like nobody can easily spin up a warehouse that does all the the personalization is a huge, unique selling proposition for your business. And we much. ah How much harder do you think it would be to run your business competitively and defensively if you didn’t have that?

25:48
Yeah. I mean, that’s one of our modes. Yes. But if you’re, if you don’t have embroidered or personalization where you’re not providing much of a value add in your warehouse, then yeah, I think you should use a three PL like maybe like three or four years ago, maybe not the case, but there’s three PLs everywhere now they’re popping up like, you know, everywhere. should see my inbound for people who want me to help promote their three PL services. Right. It’s ridiculous. It exploded during the pandemic. I want to say, right. Yeah. Oh, I can see that.

26:17
Man, all sorts of new little subcategories you’re to be in. The econ marriage guy, the 3PL consultant guy. I’m excited to follow your career here the next couple of years, See, I would never promote a 3PL just because just talking to people, 3PLs are always great until they fill up or something goes wrong. And then then all of sudden you got Mike Jackness having to take a U-Haul over at his warehouse and unloading and taking everything out. I mean, that’s happened to him a couple of times. I feel like if you were going to do a 3PL.

26:46
There’s definitely a number of instances where it’s just a bad idea to do to outsource your fulfillment. Highly personalization is one. If you’ve got a ton of skews or the complex or you have like really high touch or you need your eyes on it. I feel like 3PLs are best if you’ve got limited catalog size, fairly straightforward products and a lot of IP in the actual product itself. Seems like that’s where kind of the 3PL is the sweet spot. Yeah. Yeah. But I would say, yeah, say no to warehousing.

27:11
The other thing we say no to warehouse. The other reason why we did it also is we used to lease and the rent was going up 30 % every year on that warehouse. So that’s why we decided to buy. It was for peace of mind reasons. Like we never now have to worry about, you know, our products. So I guess that’s another factor in there. Yeah. the other thing we looked at was inventory burden versus performance and inventory turns versus performance. And

27:39
This is something I thought was fascinating, being savvy and intelligent about how quickly you are turning your inventory. Inventory turn is how quickly you go through all of your inventory. If you have a $200,000 inventory and you sell, you know, $500,000 per year product, you know, you’re roughly two and a half X is your inventory turn. And what we found was we compared turns per year to average net income growth and to average revenue growth. And it’s tough, right? Like you can speak to this better than I can, Steve.

28:07
But if you have too little inventory, you can’t fulfill orders, Like, you you need some buffer there to be able to have good fulfillment and not miss out, but you have too much, you’ve got all your working capital tied up in inventory. And we found the sweet spot was about five to six turns per year, or turning your inventory every, you know, couple months, was the highest, led to the highest revenue growth and the highest net income growth in the survey. So that seemed like it was the sweet totally see that.

28:33
You know what’s funny about this is we’re in this like pretty bad position with inventory right now. Yeah. We have way too much because our one of our biggest suppliers went out of business and they were like, Hey, do you want to buy us out at like 50 % off? And so I was like, sure. And I didn’t realize how much space it was going to take. Cause I just heard 50 % off. Of course you did. This is how you get to Steve. If you want to do anything, just start, just package it in an amazing discount.

29:03
So we bought them out and now we’ve got like probably like a year and a half worth of inventory. But I mean that probably like it’s still probably a good investment for you because you’re going to turn it is actually a lower rate. But like it’s it’s it’ll work out. It’ll work out in the long run. But it was it’s actually quite painful in the warehouse right now to be fair because there’s like stuff every it’s it’s a lot more cramped than it than it should be. Yeah. And I’m not young anymore. It’s like I can’t I can’t move stuff like we got to

29:33
hire people to move stuff around, man. You gotta get rid of this warehouse for Jen, man. I mean, prioritize your marriage. The warehouse saved the marriage. The warehouse. How does that work? Well, cause it was very stressful dealing with leases and moving. Oh, I see. Okay. Right. Got it. So we have this home base now. It’s like owning a home. Like here, might not make sense to own a home cause it’s so expensive.

29:59
Like you could rent, then you got to find new places every now and then. It is a colossal pain to move a warehouse. Cause we’ve had to do it three or four times already. So, yeah. Can I jump to kind of financial intelligence and implications for us to this? that. Yeah. So this is one, I’m a finance geek. know you are too. One of the things that I asked was I asked respondents to rate themselves on a, you know, one to five stars in terms of their financial knowledge.

30:29
And then we compared that to their average net margins, the average runway personally, they had money in the bank, net income growth, et cetera. And the biggest thing is you would expect there obviously to be the more financially literate you are, the better your business is gonna do, right? So you maybe go from a two to a four, a three to a five that you see some meaningful difference. But the biggest thing that I found was,

30:52
was that going from like a three to a four was a tiny bump. Let’s look at average net margin. So net margin is the percentage of revenue you make as profit, your profit margin. Three out of five net margin. average, had, excuse me, three out of five financial knowledge rating. People on average made about 9 % in terms of their profit margin. Four out of five, people made 9.7%. So a little bump, a nice bump, not huge. But going from four out of five, which is

31:22
reasonably good, right? Like four out of five is like, yeah, I have a reasonable handle on this. Maybe not a pro, but reasonable to a five out of five true deep competence. Average net margin went from nine point seven to fourteen point three percent. So almost a 50 percent bump in profits. so we saw this in some of the other data here. And I think what it it said to me is like the apart from deeply understanding your customers and your product, the next best thing or maybe even tied for the number one position to determine success in your business.

31:51
is to really deeply understand your finances. And that goes all the way from understanding your financial reports to understanding how to take money out of your business to ah understanding debt and risk. Because if you understand, can make better decisions. If you don’t, you’re kind of flying blind. Anyway, as a part of this, put together this whole financial mastery series. If people are interested, it walks through everything from the basics of the financial is on your podcast, right?

32:20
Yeah, did like an eight part series and put together a big guide on it. So ecommercefuel.com forward slash mastery if you’re interested in the deep dive on that uh going through all that. It’s complimentary, but it’s helpful. And I want to give credit to uh Kevin Steckow. He came on my podcast a while ago and we talked about contribution margin. And that conversation changed the way I did a lot of things. uh So if you guys

32:48
don’t, I’ll just kind of summarize in 30 seconds. So basically whenever I sell an item now, I know exactly what the expenses and everything are on that one item. And so now whenever I make a sale, I know exactly how much profit I’m making every sale per item. And it took a lot of time to put that together. But now like for every sale, cause a lot of people just kind of eyeball it. They’re like, Oh, you know, I have like 60 % gross margins. I’m probably okay. But

33:17
by putting this system into place, you know exactly how much profit you’re making per sale, including all expenses. And when you say all expenses, obviously fulfillment cogs, do you also bake into their? So there’s CM1, there’s different levels of that, Where different expenses get added in. you’re talking about like CM1 is like all cogs shipping and you know, packing materials and all that stuff. And then there’s a second level that takes into account advertising. And there’s another level that takes into account like

33:45
how much you’re paying for the roof over your head and all that stuff. Yeah. Most of my calculations are at the CM1 level. And I do take into account like human hours and doing the embroidery and whatnot. gross margins for like an embroidered handkerchief are like 90 plus something percent, right? But when you factor in like how much we’re paying for labor here and how much time it takes per handkerchief and all that stuff, it actually isn’t as great as it sounds.

34:14
Yeah. And I think one of the things too is it helps with thinking through like if you’re running discounts and things like that, right? Like, you know, because if you think like, let’s say you’re 90%, like if you say, hey, we’re going to give run a 30 % off sale, right? Okay. Well, we still have 60 % left. Like we’re giving away a third of our profitability. And it’s like, no, if you don’t understand that you’re paying for advertising, you’re paying for the labor, all that kind of stuff, you’re probably, it’s more like you’re giving away half, maybe two thirds of your profit. You don’t understand those numbers. So the discounts can kill you too, if you don’t have a grip on that. Yeah.

34:44
Yeah, I think in business, like my frugality really helps. So I don’t like app costs, you know, get out of control or I don’t know. I think it helps to be frugal. So here’s a question for you. So one of the there’s like eight pillars in that financial master series. One of them is called evolve your habits. That’s kind of further along. Because I think it really earlier on is much better to be on the more frugal side versus the more, you know, kind of easy spending side of hands down.

35:12
But once you start getting some resources, it can also be like I have in my own business journey, under invested in my business at times, taking out more money from my business than I should have missed opportunities because I was risk adverse. ah Or even like you, Steve, like you are able to code anything. And let’s talk about even pre A.I. right. Like you would spend I bust your chops sometimes. So you’d spend like a weekend building out a full on app that you could have bought for like one hundred dollars a year. And it’s like, do

35:42
So my question to you is, do you think that that has also hamstrung you? absolutely. But I don’t consider it hamstrung because I don’t want a team. Right. So I know that if you want to grow and there’s always this like spot in revenue where it’s like a struggle to hit. I think it’s I think no man’s land is what like five million or something, five to 10 million, something like that. Yeah. Right around there. Probably sounds right. So the way I have it, I don’t spend that much money. And so

36:11
I can run everything by myself if I have to. And that has made things from a peace of mind perspective, really. Like I’m not trying to start like a 20 million or whatever company, because I don’t need that kind of stress. Tony hears me say that all the time. So you’re absolutely correct. It does hamstring you. And arguably, I don’t think I’ve ever crossed that realm of scaling. Yes. But I would say even if you’re a solo operator and you’re solo,

36:41
That still applies because it may be even more so because if you have fewer, if you have less ability to delegate things, you need to be more ruthless about spending your time on the things that move the needle and is the best use of, know, let’s say it takes you 20 hours to build that. And, you know, it was a hundred dollars for the year. You’re effectively making five dollars per hour per year, you know, maybe even even quadruple, know, five X that that’s $25 an hour. Like, is that where you want to spend your time?

37:10
Okay, so the flip side of that argument is I’m in full control. So let’s take uh Zero Shoes, right? Someone in your community. They uh initially created their own app for this one feature and then they moved to Shopify and they purchased an app. And then that app creator decided to make a change right before Black Friday. And they ended up selling a whole bunch of shoes because the app broke the store and only sold small size shoes to everyone. So they ended up losing $50,000 and they got a whole bunch of one star reviews and

37:39
complaints because of that. Right. They’re not in control of the app. Think about Shopify. You could have, I don’t know what it’s like in your community. In mine, most people have between seven and 10 apps. That is seven to 10 sources of failure compounding because it could be just some Chinese dude in a white beater coding up that app. Yes. But I would argue that even with AI coming in and us to be able to custom code things, we still shouldn’t be

38:09
coding most of the apps we’re using. We shouldn’t be coding the shopping cart. Could you? Yes. Does that also make you a developer? Not the shopping cart. OK, so I actually just gave a lecture on this at Seller Summit. 60 % of the apps on Shopify have zero reviews. Right. And a lot of the ones are just stupid apps that don’t do very much. I think if it just takes you like 30 minutes to code up one of those, you should do it. For example, there’s a schema markup app that wants $400 a year.

38:39
Cool. I, I, um, Vibe coded that in front of the seller summit audience and that took maybe 30 minutes to do. Right. That’s a no brainer where, where you do have to think about it some more is like, I probably wouldn’t vibe code a Clavio for example. Well, maybe I would actually, cause it’s gotten really expensive at this point, but there’s, there’s always like some trade-offs that you have to think in your head, depending on how mission critical it is to your business. Right.

39:07
Yes. But I think this kind of goes back to the warehouse discussion, right? Like the reason this is kind of like running a separate version of your warehouse. The more time that you are there, there’s no brainers like you’re, you know, I can close up in 30 minutes, minimum dependencies, not a lot of surface area to screw up, high important part of the business. OK, yeah, code it up. But the more you do that, the more you run your own digital warehouse, building all your own apps, even if you can vibe code it, the less time you can spend on marketing, on product, on all these other things. um Just like the warehouse focus drags on your growth, I think.

39:37
overly focusing on building everything out with AI is going to do the same thing. I would agree with you there. Yeah. There’s a lot of things I shouldn’t be doing, but I like it. Oh, so many. We’re not even going to talk about half of them. We’ll talk about those before we hit record. So yeah, I guess it just depends on what your mentality is. If you’re just like pedal the metal, absolute growth and efficiency, then yeah, uh, I’m not that guy actually. A hundred percent. Not that guy. Uh, I would argue that

40:05
I don’t think you are either. You’re more of a lifestyle guy too, right? I want to build as meaningful of a business as I can within constraints that still let me live a really rich life outside of work. So yes, I would say we’re in the same in the same ballpark for sure. And you’re better at it, man. Like, do you even do anything or not? Oh, man. You just think someday when we actually talk, I am going to actually get a bottle of champagne. I’m going to hire like a masseuse to come and give me an on-camp like

40:34
I’m just going to be bawling out when we do a video call. just want to shadow you one day and just see what you actually do all day. Because I don’t know. The forum was like the best business ever. It’s I love the business model, but I will say there’s a lot more like when you think about things to run a community, there’s a lot of stuff that we do. Like we are pretty heavy on our vetting. We try to do a lot of we’ve been doing a lot more in person.

41:02
excuse me, live virtual meetups for very niche topics. we’ve been doing a lot and the team helps a lot with this, but Dana does a great job of spearheading this. But meetups for people with really expensive SKUs or fulfillment for really uh expensive SKUs or talking about using AI just exclusively for paid traffic generation and creative. And so there’s those things. There’s uh the development side on our own platform. I will spare you, but happy to shadow me for the day. There’s more that goes into running a

41:31
community and moderating it and onboarding and helping then meets the eye. So, well, no, that’s, that’s not what I meant. I mean, you have a team that does all the heavy lifting, right? They, have a great team. have a great, exactly. So, Yeah, dude. Um, how do people join your community? I know it’s very exclusive. You only accept like the top of the top.

41:56
especially when it’s like the first 30 members, like the founding members of e-commerce fuel. Those are like your best members, I would say. Yes, with a couple exceptions. think somebody had to vouch for you to get in early. We had two or three people. know you were desperate for members in the beginning. were desperate for members in the beginning. Things have changed dramatically. Obviously, since we brought you in. um yeah, so quickly before we talk about the community, thank you for mentioning it. If you do want to get this report,

42:24
ah It’s 65 pages. think it’s like 50 plus charts. Each section we break down like what it means for your business. Like not just like data, but like how should you think about this data and in a way that you can position your business to succeed given the implication. So ecommercefuel.com forward slash blueprint is where you can download, see the big takeaways and download the full report. We also have benchmarking data. So if you want to say like, Hey, I’m a $4 million brand. I manufacture. I have no idea.

42:53
if my gross margins are good. have no idea if my net profit margin is good or not good. Like we break down all those financial figures based on business size and niche so you can get a sense of, I’m doing great here. Ooh, I could probably tighten the belt a little bit here. So ecommercefield.com forward slash blueprint. And then if you just want to be in a community uh where you’re surrounded by people that actually get what you’re doing, um that if you have a killer month uh in a great way, you can actually go and post about it and you won’t.

43:21
piss people off because they are excited for you as opposed to being thinking it’s weird. if you have a really esoteric question about what kind of 3PL you want. Like, hey, I’m thinking about going to X3PL versus Y. What are the experiences? One of the few places in the world if only you can go and post and within by the afternoon have four or five or six great answers from people who are doing this stuff. So anyway, ecommercefuel or ecomfuel.com with 1M is how you can learn more about the community and join.

43:50
And what I like is you don’t really let vendors take part in these discussions either, right? It’s all very candid and truthful and blunt actually in a lot of cases. Yeah, we don’t. We are for store owners. We don’t let big SaaS vendors in. We have a very small number, I think probably sub 5 % of our membership is service providers. And those are people that we deeply trust to add value to that don’t sell, that don’t pitch.

44:19
90 to 95 % of our membership is all store owners that are running meaningful stores. So yeah, it’s not a pitch fest that store owners actually talking about what’s working. So I will link all that stuff in the show notes and Andrew, thanks a lot for coming on. It’s been a while. Yeah, Steve, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And look forward to your new branching off. All the things we talked about, man, you get some fun niches to explore in the future. So we’ll do a follow up post on that.

44:48
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Things in ecommerce are changing quickly, and hopefully this snapshot in time was useful for your business. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 645. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free 6-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I sit down with Sohan Senka, head of growth marketing at Reacher, who has helped brands drive over a half a billion dollars in revenue through TikTok Shop. We dig into the real math behind making TikTok Shop work, from margins and affiliate commissions to why the top 0.4 % of creators drive nearly all the sales and what to do about it. But before we begin, I just want to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community

00:29
that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free at mywifequitterjob.com slash community and I would love to see you there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community. Now on to the show.

00:57
Welcome to the MyWifeQuitterJob podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Sohan Sanka on the show. Now, I got a chance to hang out with Sohan at Kevin King’s Market Masters event, and I’m really glad that we met. He is the head of growth marketing over at Reacher app, where he helps e-commerce sellers launch on the TikTok shop and manage creator relationships. And in his career, he’s taught sellers how to drive over a billion dollars in revenue by leveraging creators and affiliates across TikTok.

01:25
And he also runs a podcast called Zero Sum Game as well. Now in this episode, someone is going to teach us how to grow and scale on the TikTok shop platform. And with that, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. So I don’t know if you’ve recovered from, from Kevin’s event yet. It was pretty intense. I was up like, I’m an old man now. So it always takes me a while to recover from these events.

01:50
Oh, it’s, it’s tough. mean, I’ve reset my sleep schedule to just be like up at 530 in the morning and in bed by nine. So even going to these events sometimes takes me out of it, but the Terry blacks, you know, helped me recover quite a bit. So that’s my favorite part. so on most of my listeners probably do not know who you are. How did you get started in e-commerce and specifically tick tock shop? Yeah. So

02:15
My background is quite a generalist background. So I started in paid media doing Facebook ads actually, and then worked at a marketing agency where I built a UGC vertical influencer affiliate vertical for Amazon and then landed in a TikTok shop managed service. So I built that out from the operator side, working with brands that are more SMB level and then all the way up to like, you know, billion dollar ARR brands as well. And then at that point I was seeing

02:44
AI growing a lot and seeing the creator economy grow a lot. And I was like, wouldn’t it be cool to be at the intersect of like both of these things and take my TikTok shop ideas and like create technology that could solve things holistically, rather than like hacking through things like the marketer way, you know? And so that’s how I got into the software space. ah And now I’m working at Reacher, taking that perspective where

03:10
you know, having been on the customer side or having been on the operator side, and then having been on the software side, helping bridge the gap between current day problems and future solutions. So this is comes at a good time because Amazon is squeezing both sellers and buyers more than ever before. And I know at least in my community, a lot of sellers are looking for alternative platforms. Just in your experience, where does TikTok shop kind of fall in the overall strategy of ecommerce right now?

03:40
Yeah, so in terms of like, if we’re looking at things from an omni-channel perspective, I would say TikTok Shop is a great channel for new customer acquisition and cost effective awareness. I don’t think it’s going to have the same overall like purchasing power and scale as Amazon, Amazon being the preferred checkout destination. And I think with D2C, there’s just all kinds of Shopify apps and solutions where you can really get a true like CAC to LTV model and do a lot of work with

04:10
getting more LTV out of your customers and driving repurchase rate, right? But in terms of scaling up with organic creative, testing new ideas and iterating faster to then funnel into paid, working and building a creator community, I see TikTok Shop as an amplifier uh to the holistic business there. Yeah, I’ve heard reports that when you get something viral on TikTok, like everything goes up across the board and especially brand searches on Google, right? Yep, totally.

04:39
So let’s get the audience excited about TikTok Shop first. And I know you work with a lot of brands. Let’s just talk about some big wins first. Yeah, I mean, big wins for TikTok Shop or big wins for Reacher? the brands that you’ve worked with with TikTok Shop, yeah. Yeah, so at Reacher, we’ve been around for like mainly two years and we’ve enabled people to drive over half a billion in revenue alone.

05:06
biggest wins. One thing recently was a case study with Goalie where we sort of created uh a unique solution for them where we put them on their own. Sorry. Goalie Health. Yeah, they have the gummies and they have a few other products, right? So we put them on their own compute where they could send 20k messages per day. Think like 10 automations running. And what this allowed them to do was run weekly challenges across like hundred thousand creators.

05:34
and just test different angles and run these like creative sprints where they could really just ramp up traffic content and get everything out there doing big tent pole events. And so that was absolutely huge. And we’ve been trying to replicate that. So as people grow their creator communities, they don’t have to hire and bring on more teammates, right? And they’re able to still keep testing very quickly. So what types of products would you say are good with TikTok Shop?

06:02
and ones that probably should not be on the platform. Yeah, so traditionally what was working around a year and a half ago was products in like a 30 to $50 MSRP or strike through price on TikTok shop, right? That way there was still like room left in the operating margin after you paid out commissions, after you blend in your GMV max, right? After you put in a promotion on there uh and you could get, they had what was called like a free shipping subsidy.

06:31
Now it’s like co-funded shipping. So orders over $30 got a shipping incentive, right? So you had room there to give back in your promotions and commissions to creators. Now what we’re seeing is that that AOV is increasing. know, people are launching more things like bundles for higher price point products, like ice cream makers, for instance, that might be 200 bucks. People are getting way more into live selling and they’re doing giveaways and they’re really getting creative with how they’re selling these products. So that range of price point,

07:00
is opening quite a bit. I would say your product still does need to have a differentiator. It does have to have a story. I will say products that are organically talked about by creators like that you can find via social listening tools, right? If there’s like certain trends around summer with making ice cream, I don’t know why I keep using that example, right? But ice cream recipes, right? And you know, this is a great time where people are looking for ice cream makers.

07:25
You can contact those creators and get more buzz around a viral trend and then launch thereafter. if your product is not very differentiated, if no one’s talking about it, if it’s very like it’s on the premium end and you know, you don’t really have any angle besides like we’re eco-friendly, like that might be a tougher uphill battle for you. Walk me through. So you just gave an example of like a $50 product. What are the margins that are expected to just make this work?

07:54
on a $50. Yeah. Yeah. So it depends on your goal. I would look at your like blended, blended LTV and what your goal is with having TikTok shop as a channel for some brands who want to have TikTok shop as a profitable channel. Maybe you want to hit, let’s say I’m making this up like a 30 % operating margin, right? What comes out of those costs are TikTok has an in-platform fee, like a referral fee where they take 6 % off of every sale. And then you have your creator commission.

08:22
That can be variable, right? You have your general commission and then you have your VIP commissions that you give to other creators. And then I like to also- give me a range on the affiliate payout that you’ve seen? Yeah, so it depends on the product category, but let’s say 20%, 20 % on a $50 product is $10 in commission. Okay. So let’s assume $10 in commission. Let’s assume a $10 limited cost, right? So that’s cogs plus shipping. Right. That’s about $20 there.

08:51
Right? And then if you also want to have a coupon for maybe another 20 % off or 15 % off, I’m making this up some number that gets you like $25. Now you’re sending it like a, you know, 50%. And then if you want to blend in your ads fee, so GMV max does things on an ROI calculation, not a ROAS calculation. So they’re blending everything together there. So you have to be very careful and leave a little bit of cushion in your margin for those kinds of things.

09:21
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.

09:50
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. No, I was just gonna say, so it looks like at least a four or five X margin, gross margin product. Yeah. Okay. If you’re running it well, think as you’re getting, as you’re launching, you need to be on the upper end of that range to be competitive within the category. Okay. You can build.

10:19
incentive structures from your remaining margin to hit scale and incentivize your creator communities during the earlier days. I wouldn’t try to hit like a 33 % operating margin. I would try to like slim your margin. If you’re not working with an agency and blending in their fee, right, I would try to like slim your margin down to like 15 % just to scale up and do whatever you can to get to like 100k uh in GMV, right? And then from there, affiliates will look at your product as a product that’s likely to sell.

10:49
and they’ll wanna work with them. And then you can sort of taper that margin back a little bit on your commissions, your promotions, um because what you don’t realize is affiliates go through a product selection process similar to how Amazon sellers use like Jungle Scout and all these other tools, like look at search volume and ranking, and they’re evaluating your product as an opportunity cost of their time. So you have to essentially burn cash and get as close as you can.

11:15
to making your product look like a dark horse where it’s fast growing, but it’s not so competitive. you know, like let’s say a goalie, right? Where like any affiliate knows there’s already top affiliates there just like taking all the attention, right? And taking all the GMB max budget. That makes sense. From a product perspective too, are you seeing that almost, or most of your clients are selling something that has repeat purchase value, like consumables. Can you make like a one and done work on TikTok shop? Yeah.

11:44
100%. I think even if you’re selling like subscription, uh, personally, like as a marketer, I wouldn’t launch, I’d rather capture that purchase on DTC just because I get more data into the customer demographics, the purchase history. I have like way more tools I can use with like email and SMS to like drive up that repeat purchase. Right now product subscription on TikTok shop is also just not very customizable. You can’t select the variant you want people to purchase on.

12:12
It’s just like general towards like the listing. ah But yeah, one and done products do work really well. would say if you’re like, let’s say you’re running an organic first strategy where you’re posting a lot on TikTok organic and you have a lot of buzz there for sure. know, run a product there, use that awareness to skyrocket sales and then think about capturing the excess on Amazon. Okay, right. So you’re depending on the halo effect in this case, right? Not necessarily the product profits from like the TikTok shop sale.

12:41
At the beginning, at the beginning, yes. I mean, like it’s just a battle of like, you have to get your product into the eyes and recognized by the ecosystem first. And that involves just not being profitable a bit at the beginning or being break even is a better word to say. So walk me through the process of building and managing affiliates and let’s assume that we’re starting from scratch at first. Okay. So I understand you need to hit a certain threshold to even be able to message affiliates.

13:11
Right. Yep. And then what are the steps after that? Yeah. So after you get over hurdles, there’s like various hurdles based off of GMV. Let’s say you get over $2,000 in the last 30 days. Okay. There’s a lot of different ways to get there. You can use like Celico launch pad. You can use like join brands, TikTok, shop blasts, and have creators buy off your initial listing to skyrocket that value. You could have an employee purchase those. Right. So let’s say you get after that. The first thing

13:41
I would be doing is just putting together a creative testing plan and figuring out who you’re messaging to. Let’s say you’re a brand that is on Amazon, right? Maybe reading through like all your Amazon reviews and figuring out what customers are saying about your product, looking through your demographics and figuring out who is like a persona we’d want to talk to, right? Keeping that in the back of your head, right? And then the first thing I like to do is start very top of funnel.

14:07
I know that’s like very counterintuitive, because most people would be like, hey, let’s just go target our most valuable customer segment on TikTok Shop immediately, and then just try to angle on to them because we know it works. But fundamentally with TikTok Shop, it’s not the same as Amazon, where people have a certain degree of consideration, where they’re searching for products and then evaluating the cost benefit between different competitors, right? People are just scrolling, aiming to be entertained. But what we know is that if someone sees

14:37
your broad top of funnel content. Let’s say we’re talking about electrolyte powder, for example, right? And you’re creating broad top of funnel content around the conspiracies of dehydration. And that gets people entertained. If you start serving the more broad content around dehydration, then maybe you can angle that later, you know, on your third video to like dehydration for woman, you know what mean? Or a woman who are breastfeeding and then there’s some stuff in our electrolyte powder that helps them replenish their nutrients or stay consistent there.

15:06
and then sell them later on the third to fourth piece, right? So we want to target affiliates who can just help get awareness first and start getting an audience sort of interested in our content. So interesting. So you’re saying for like your first of affiliates, you’re not even trying to sell your product. You’re just trying to awareness around the topic. Yeah, because your product doesn’t have that much units sold. doesn’t have that many reviews. There’s not much really credibility behind. And so I think

15:34
it seems a little premature to like just ask for the sale early on, you know? Why would affiliates want to do that then? Because they are probably thinking that they’re not going to get that many sales, right? Totally. It definitely does make sense. Like I would say you can work with creators on a retainer basis, build a relationship up with them first and start with like a smaller creator community, right? Because you do, if you really want to have an army of like thousands of affiliates selling for you,

16:02
They have to like, it’s like a catch 22. They have to see some affiliates really engaged and really taken care of in the community and really starting to see some upside before they even commit to you. So I would start from there and focus on like motivating people through awareness and engagement, giving out some sort of cash reward or incentive system. And you know, you’ll make that backup on the backend when you look at your blended LTV in terms of like how cost effective that awareness is.

16:29
how many new customer segment eyeballs you’re getting on your products and that might pay a over onto Amazon too. Interesting. Okay. So you’re, you’re basically paying your initial affiliates to post content in the beginning because you don’t have any credibility or numbers in the beginning. Right? Yeah, I would, I would recommend so, and you can still seed out samples and you should always be like seeding out samples to find new creators, but your ideal creator that you want to work with when you just start off on TikTok shop is probably not going to work with you, want to work with you.

16:59
unless you have such a unique product that really connects to them, right? So I read somewhere that there’s only a very small fraction of a percent of people, maybe even less than a percent of affiliates actually drive real sales and most of them just don’t even make any money. Is that accurate? Yeah, I actually just made a post on this recently where we analyzed 3.3 million creators and I transed them out by GMB. So I’m happy to share those.

17:27
numbers with you right now. Just let me pull it up. Yeah, it always, it always, uh, cause you won’t believe when I get on calls with sellers, they’re like, let me just reach out to creators who make 10,000 GMV. I’m like, dude, it’s like 0.06%. Um, is it really? Okay. Here’s the stats, right? So 16 % of creators make over a dollar in sales and then 4.6 creators make over a hundred dollars in sales.

17:56
2.3 % of creators drive over 500 in sales. 1.6 % of creators make over a thousand in sales. 0.4 % drive over 10K in GMV. And then 0.09 % drive over 50,000 in GMV. And this is done on a like last 30 day basis, looking at the entirety of the creator pool. Okay, see that doesn’t sound

18:25
favorable to me so on. means like there’s like a elite pool of affiliates, right? That are driving most of it. So that implies, at least to me, that you need to tap into those guys in order to make any money on this platform with TikTok Shop. Well, I think that’s sort of like a, like there’s two ways of looking at it, right? So I think one thing, especially talking to Amazon sellers is like looking at the long-term ROI versus the short-term ROI.

18:53
When I see a distribution like that, that tells me that there are tons of neglected, hungry creators who are willing to work for me at twice as hard with like maybe a fifth of the price that like the top GMB ones would make, right? So if I turn them into my loyalists and I turn them into real ambassadors and I create systems that reward awareness, that reward participation in my community, I should have a very scalable model six to eight months down the line.

19:21
where can just keep adding newer and hungrier creators into there. And that’s really the vision that I see working best for brands and agencies who are trying to layer in community as part of their strategy there. Granted, you might not get short-term ROI upfront, but if you go and try to poach the affiliate that has the highest GMV and they’re getting flat fee offers, they’re in 10 creator marketplaces, they wanna work with the goalies, the Nellows and everything like, realistically,

19:49
how much would you pay to coach them versus how much would you pay to nurture long time ambassadors? I still think it would be cheaper to invest in long time ambassadors than poach those creators. oh So that makes the problem a little harder. So how do you find these people then that could potentially become long term gold mines later on because they’re not in the beginning, right? Yeah. So I would say for that

20:16
You should do some preliminary product research. would say before you even launch your product on TikTok shop, you should try to figure out are people talking about problems around my product? Are there other products doing well, right? Doing basic research using a tool like Caladata or FastMos or Reacher, right? And you’re beginning to see like, it’s sort of like a social listening slash competitive analysis for TikTok shop, right? Is there market potential? And then based off of that,

20:43
I would find creators that are just most relevant to your brand and problem. think looking at relevance first over GMV and performance is the biggest point. If someone’s making a lot of views and they’re in a relevant niche, you can coach them on how to sell your product well with your historical data, right? And so I would be looking for a ton of those dark horses there based off of rising products, creators, and things like that. And then you plug in a tool like Reacher where we can send like 10,000 outreaches a day.

21:12
and you play the volume game and you funnel it into your community. That’s how it would go about the outreach and acquisition. So what you just said kind of contradicts, it doesn’t contradict, but like if you’re going through and looking for these creators, that implies that you need to find like in order to blast 10,000, you need to find 10,000, right? So- Sure. You can use like filters and like look at like we have our entire database labeled for example, right? Where it’s like, let’s say-

21:41
I’m making this up. want to find creators in like the health category who post 80 % of the time when they’re sent products and they make over a hundred dollars in sales. I can start there, right? Or I can use an AI powered search to see what kinds of keywords people are using. Like let’s say I’m a health gummy and I’m looking for creators that are always talking about inflammation. I could type in keywords like inflammation, or I can look at things like maybe like gut problems or bloat, right?

22:10
and then I can find creators that are talking about that and then shortlist and then automate to the culmination of all those shortlists together. So there are ways to like speed up that process and go broad. And then for the highest response rate, what I would do is in your hook, say, hey, we’re offering a retainer opportunity, right? So you can still layer in the quality of the offer with the quantity of the outreach just to maximize during that uphill battle of starting your TikTok shop journey.

22:39
So when you’re doing this search, it sounds like you’re trying to target affiliates that don’t have a huge audience yet, right? According to your strategy, right? Yeah, so, oh God. I was gonna say, can you give me like a typical outreach email that you might send? Yeah, so what I would do one is lead in straight with your offer. Like I would wanna almost see like something in the preview of the inbox.

23:05
that says like retainer opportunity before it cuts off in the dot dot dot. Okay. That gets me to open. And then after that hook where I outline the offer where it’s like retainer amount or let’s say you’re a brand that ran like a $70,000 contest last month. You do something where it’s like, we gave out 70,000 in cash and prizes to our community last month. We’d love to give you free product commission and an opportunity to take a share. Our top affiliate made $10,000. You know, um, something like that, right? Just

23:35
give them the dream outcome, sell them on working with you, and then showcase your brand as a product that’s likely to sell. So affiliates can see the number of sales on your product card when you reach out to them, which is basically just this card that shows your product or price point you didn’t sell, right? And then I would showcase if you’re a brand that’s like an eight figure brand, I’d be like, by the way, we just crossed 10 million in sales.

24:01
We’re growing 50 % year over year. Our products absolutely crush it for X, Y, and Z reason. That comes in after. So it’s your offer, then it’s your credibility. Like why should people even be listening to you? Why should they work with you, right? And then you can have like a little bit of background. Frankly, I don’t think affiliates care. I think they operate more as like salespeople, especially when you’re starting the relationship, little background. And then I like to add a personalized signature where it’s like, hey, dash Sohan.

24:30
founder of blah blah gummies, you know what I mean? Something like that, right? That’s like my overall message structure that I like to use. Of course, there’s like a ton of variations and ways you can A-B test and multivariate test this, but for cold start sellers, I would stick to that structure. So given that it sounds like 90 something percent of people aren’t making any money at all, do you need to bribe them with a retainer or are you finding that most people will just accept a free product?

24:58
Yeah, so it depends. When you filter that number by post rate, the percentage of those that get those products, it’s even smaller. But I would still say like 1.6 % of like 3.3 million is still way more samples than you’re ever gonna send anyways, right? So I think looking at the percentage can be a little misleading. think looking at the cumulative number starting from there would be your best way to go.

25:26
I guess that would really depend on like how much product someone really has on hand or, how aggressive their strategy is going to be. Can you talk about the post-rate number? Like, what do you look for? Yeah. So I typically look for 70 % plus. Um, you can filter by a good rule of thumb is actually to filter by 50 % plus. And then based off of the people who actually request a sample, you can do like a loose 70 % where it’s like, if they’re 50%, but they sell 10,000 in GMB.

25:55
Am I gonna say no to them? Like probably not. Of not, but that’s 0.06 of the population there, right? 0.06, but you’d be surprised where it’s like, if you filter by post-rate and by GMV, then that pool gets even smaller. So it’s more of like an and or situation, right? Where it’s like, if I have my post-rate filter a little bit lower, I leave more room for the people that have high GMV and lower post-rate. And so I would go 50 % plus. If you’re getting this pool of like,

26:25
smaller GMV creators coming in, then maybe you’re more strict on 70 % plus post rate and you accept 60 % of the applicants that come in, right, based on that. Again, I’m making this data up. No, of course, yeah, no, I know. We don’t really have a concrete example here, but post rate is the percentage of people who actually post a video after receiving a sample. Is that accurate? Yes. Okay. 50 % seems really low. I didn’t realize that the numbers…

26:51
there’s a large fraction of people who actually get something and don’t post anything. That just seems wrong to me almost. Well, it’s similar to product seeding. I would say if you’re doing general product seeding campaigns, getting a 50 % post rate is not bad. ah Again, these are based off of like industry averages of people just being like, hey, I sent a very AI powered message to you and I’m selling the everyday product you already see him and I’m making no effort to make a connection with you at all or not.

27:19
not jumping on a call with you, not making it relevant to what you do as a creator. And, you know, some people might just forget to post because they’re not as disconnected with the brand. It’s happened to me. I’ve requested some samples through my affiliate account and I forgot to post and I spend like every day helping sellers get their post rate up. So sometimes it’s also just an honest mistake where they missed that 13 day window and they might need a reminder later or might not have a connection with the brand.

27:46
Okay, so can you walk me through the percentages and let’s just keep it simple. For let’s say you message out 100 people, what percentage of people typically respond to that template that you just gave? Yeah, I would use like one to 3 % for cold starts. The rule of thumb also is like, let’s say maybe like, and then maybe let’s say like 50 % of those one to 3 % actually request a sample. Okay.

28:13
So we’re talking like 10 samples out of 100. And then how many of those you said 70%. So maybe seven, you’re getting seven videos when you mentioned a hundred videos. Sorry, a people. Okay. Yeah. And then 10 to 15 % of those videos generate ROI on the first go around. That’s usually the rule of thumb. Okay. So you might get one less than one from messaging out hundred people. Okay.

28:40
All right, so let’s just talk numbers here. Let’s say you’re a brand owner and for the most part, my audience is mainly seven and a figure people. So what’s my budget for this? Like what should I be willing to give away and spend in order to see this through the right way and actually eventually make a profit? Yeah, so budget on a monthly basis or off of like a project basis for launching your TikTok shop on like three to four months or something like

29:07
Well, one, I want the timeframe and then what the budget might be. Assuming like a Gali or whatever, know, it’s a compliment business. Yeah. And are these people trying to build a creator community as well? I think the goal is for them to create an army of affiliates that sell for them. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. So I would say like, let’s take a budget of like $5,000 for month one, right? Okay. Let’s just, let’s just say that. So I’m assuming like,

29:35
for sampling, I send out 500 samples, I’m gonna assume that’s a $10 landed cost, right? So if we know that I send out 5,000 samples, let’s say 250 posts, and then let’s say 15 % of those actually post, and then 10 to 15 % are ROI generating videos, you’re ending up spending around $200 per ROI producing video, right? Which doesn’t seem like

30:05
a lot more or less, I would say going with a hybrid approach and getting retainers in here, where let’s say you’re doing $200 for like 20 videos posted, right? And there are TikTok shop creators who will do that and marketplaces that will help you get that level of volume. I would say that’s a better way to go. So let’s say $5,000, $200 per 15 videos. I think that’s like about

30:33
375 pieces of content, if you divide the math up um there, 375 pieces of content. And if all these creators are in a community where they’re posting multiple times, you then have the advantage to tell them, hey, this didn’t work from post one, try this in post two, or hey, post two and three are great, keep that hook, but try this different selling point for a new audience. So I can squeeze way more juice.

31:02
per each piece of content that I know is guaranteed to be posted from a retainer and test more angles. I’m gonna stop there and just make sure. Yeah, no, okay, here’s my disconnect with this. Let’s say I post something and it doesn’t do that well. I’m not gonna post again, right? But if I pay you 200 bucks for a retainer. I’m sorry, I see. What is it? Can you define the retainer? it?

31:28
constitute multiple videos or just one? Yes. So I owe for TikTok shop affiliates. It’s always bulk just because it’s different than influencer marketing where an influencer marketing, you’re trying to capture a percentage of their audience. But on TikTok shop about 80 % of users and this is from a survey done by power digital state of the media report, right? About 80 % of the users spend their time on the discover page. So it’s all about creating quality content to attract new users. Right? And so with that,

31:57
we’re gonna need multiple iterations to get there. So I always do retainers on like a 15 or 20 video basis. Because that leaves me enough room for volume and testing more angles and running challenges and things like that. That’s tough. So I’m a TikTok creator myself. I don’t have a huge presence, like 120,000 or something like that. Like if you someone offered to pay me 200 bucks to do 10 TikToks, hell no, right?

32:25
unless I’m seeing some sort of affiliates with that. are you paying that retainer to only the people who are only the ROI positive guys or are you doing it right off the bat up front? I would do it right off the bat up front. Okay. Because you’re not going to know if your first batch of creators produces any sort of ROI, right? But you have to take some sort of risk. And I would argue the number of videos you get guaranteed to get

32:52
is still higher than seeding $5,000 in product, right? Or 500 samples. um So just on like a per video basis, the risk is lower. So I would start there. And it does feel like a lot lower than traditional influencer, but you got to understand these people are posting dozens of TikToks a week. Like they’re always selling, they’re always flooding the content or flooding the algorithm with more content. So they have a different perspective on what volume really means.

33:22
Interesting. Okay. So let’s assume that you get someone to create multiple ones and what are the expectations on like what’s considered a good video? Yeah, that’s like a very, that’s a very complicated question because I don’t have TikTok’s algorithm in front of me. I think there’s like basic video hygiene where it’s like, are you filming in the correct location? Well, don’t mean that. mean from like an ROI perspective.

33:52
from an ROI perspective, I mean, it’s pretty much, if it’s just from an ROI perspective, it’s like what generates sales. uh I would say, it depends on how much you’re paying the creator and commission, how much ads you’re running, right? But I would say there’s two things. Like one, you need to test multiple different angles and testing through multiple different angles has a value in itself, right? Because if you get that one video that creates ROI and you take losses on the first,

34:22
let’s say eight to nine videos with incentives, sampling costs, and GMB max budget. That video can scale like a 3.5 ROI and GMB max and make up for all your losses. Or then you can run that video to meta ads, right? And then you make up the incremental ROAS versus your existing creative there. So like, that’s how I would look at it rather than like, hey, what is the ROI on a video by video basis? Cause otherwise you’re not going to hit the volume you really need to like scale up.

34:50
and invest in the creators. And if you’re too focused on the ROI per video, it’s gonna make creators feel like you don’t really want a relationship with them and you’re just using them for short-term ROI, right? Are you running GMV ads on everything that comes out? Yeah, so GMV Max automatically picks up every single video with the TikTok shop link if the creator has their authorization turned on. It’s different than like a Spark ad where people put like, give the string of characters and letters

35:20
with a certain period of time that they’ve authorized that to do. So it’ll automatically pull it in and it tests like 500 or so creatives a week, maybe plus depending if you’re in some alpha program there. And then from there, it cycles through it fairly quickly. It prioritizes ones that have generated a dollar in sales, AKA have sales potential from TikTok standpoint, and then keeps putting more budget on there.

35:46
I know it’s really hard to give numbers on these hypothetical case studies, but what is considered a good return on a GMV ad that you run? So you can actually set the ROI target on your GMV max campaign before you start it up. this is where your margins and your omni-channel strategy sort of comes into play. If you want to start at like a 1.8 ROI or two ROI after you pay all of your in-platform selling costs and your sampling costs on an individual video,

36:16
You’re essentially breaking even or taking a loss there, but you’re willing to scale up and flood with content because you want to just get volume and you know that you can get credibility and then scale that up to like a 3.5 or maybe a three where you know you are taking home some profit and you’ve lowered your commission. You blended in your GMB max. We’re like, you’re blended in your GMB max budget into your unit economics calculation where that is starting to make sense. So 1.8.

36:45
to like 3.5 later on. Okay. I guess what I’m trying to get at is, brands doing this just for the halo effect and just breaking even on TikTok? Is that the general strategy or is it actually to, I know everyone wants to make money on TikTok, but in order to implement this, I imagine there’s like a tipping point where you get a ton of affiliates and everything just kind of happens by itself organically. Are people just shooting for that point at no mean, you know, at a loss and just

37:13
hoping for the halo effect? Like uh what’s the main strategy that you use when you work with brands? Yeah, so at a certain point, you have to measure the ROI of your community, right? Let’s say everyone’s trying to get to this goal of having a thousand affiliates on standby who produce 10,000 pieces of content a month, right? Right. You have to spend to get there, to spend in investing in the wrong affiliates and sending out products, right? And eventually if you’re able to create this model,

37:42
where I only need to send out one product and like, let’s say I have a consumables product, right? Where I need to replenish that on a certain frequency, right? If I’m able to send one product and get more videos from each creator and then on average, my creators convert at like 10 % off of like the 15 videos they make. And that makes up for all my costs. And I don’t need to spend a lot of money on CAC, like seeding products, running commissions and promotions to get new customers. that’s the point where I want to get to.

38:11
And then even if you don’t have LTV, you know that every single dollar you spend in creator community gets five to $7 out. Like that’s where you want to be. And people can for sure make money on TikTok shop. Is it going to be like the same level of like, Hey, I’m willing to spend the entirety of my MSRP to acquire a customer. Cause I know they’re going to purchase five to six times on meta. Like, is it going to be that level of a calculation and that nuance? No, but does community still work?

38:38
in the long run if people get there and can they make money on TikTok shop? 100%. Okay. Let’s shift gears a little bit and just talk about like all the management here. I mean, you’ve been throwing out some big numbers like messaging, 20,000 affiliates. What, like, is this all automated? Like I know your platform does this. How do you manage all those creators? Yeah. So there’s automations during outreach, but then there’s also like a CRM, right?

39:05
Let’s say you message a creator and you approve them for a sample. We’ll read within TikTok shop seller center for which skew that order has been processed. And you can automate personalized creative briefs to go out for that skew. And you can vary it this across the entire catalog you’re sampling without a human delineating between which product we’re seeing to which creator, right? So that’s already a ton of time saved.

39:31
And then once that sample has arrived, again, we’re reading that status in TikTok shop seller center. We can automate reminder messages, just nudging them to post, you know, throwing an extra incentives if we need to re-motivate someone. And then once they actually post, we can segment based off of GMV. So if we want to find every creator that generates over a hundred dollars and send them an invite to our discord, you know, with a exclusive community offer, we can automate the recruitment.

40:00
of those creators into our community as well. So we’re pretty much automating the end to end and we’re really moving marketers time to focus more on analyzing the holistic data, looking at our creatives and figuring out which ones are working and not. Is this creator profile profitable for us after running community for two to three months? Like how am I doing? How are my top creators doing? Let me go down calls to them. We’re reorganizing marketing marketers time from just general affiliate management.

40:28
to those sorts of tasks there. I see. So you’re automating the majority of everything and then maybe like your top guys, you’ll invite to your discord community and then communicate with them one-on-one there. Right? Yeah. So top guys at the beginning, discord sure. And then as your community grows bigger, all the top affiliates are kind of going to be like princesses. Like they’re going to want an individual text. They’re to want you to like take them out for dinner. You know what I mean? But, but yeah, you should spend the majority of your time talking to those people and doing things that

40:57
AI and automation like, you know, can’t really replace like I would say, VA’s for recruitment is really like no longer needed. know, I assume that majority of these people will hit reply, right? So when they hit reply to an outreach message, for example, uh is it just a canned message back? Yeah, so this is one area where it depends on how you do your outreach. Are you familiar with like the target collab versus open collab?

41:24
sort of nuances there? not actually. Yeah. Okay. He wouldn’t mind to find that. Yeah, of course. So basically there’s different ways you can reach out to affiliates. One is just a message where you send them a chat through seller messages, right? And then they have to go find your product on what’s called a product marketplace and then request a general commission. This is typically affiliates least variable one to do because they have a quantity of sample requests they can use per month. Right. And the general commission is usually the lowest commission offered.

41:54
And then there’s what’s called a target collaboration, which is usually a higher commission rate than what’s available in the public. And this actually doesn’t start a chat with the creator. It’s sort of like a one way email where you can just click the skew you want to uh earn commission on and then request a sample. So that doesn’t actually open up a chat with the creator and that’s the creator’s preferred type of invitation type. Okay. And then thereafter you can.

42:21
Enable a follow-up message to go out with that within Reacher to improve response rate on both ends But we have an AI chat bot with knowledge base right where it’s like hey would love to learn more details about this offer if you have a stored response to that boom, right? What is the typical time my sample is gonna arrive once you guys? uh Approve me boom you can incorporate that right and you can keep adding the most frequently occurring questions into that

42:47
And then you can automate like 80 % of your responses and give 20 % to a customer support rep who also handles your customer messages on the platform too. Okay. And from the creator perspective, let’s say you have an audience, but you don’t have never done this before. How do you get noticed as a creator? So you’re assuming a creator is not a TikTok shop affiliate or they are a new TikTok shop, a new TikTok shop affiliate. Yeah. Yeah. So typically if you’re a creator,

43:17
and you’re not getting noticed right now, there’s a lot of different ways to go about it. You can sign up for one of many creator marketplaces where people are putting out jobs kind of like an upwork, right? You can apply into there and then take like a discounted retainer to get your scale and volume up and create this portfolio and try your shot to get your first preliminary sales. So you can get picked up by an outreach tool where they’re filtering by sales and post-sales, right?

43:46
just to fill that data up. And then another way is just DMing the products that are sort of like up and comers, right? If I look for the top selling products and I’m a low selling creator, am I gonna get accepted into that? You know, probably not. But if I went down to like the up and comer products or the newer products where I really resonate with them and I request a sample, they’re gonna be more likely to accept. And then the last way is like, just buy the product you wanna promote.

44:14
or go to creator events. Like, I don’t know if you went to the goalie or not the goalie, sorry, there’s TikTok shop health summit, right? And every creator was just going through and I talked to one of them. They were getting samples from each booth and they were just like, oh, like all these top selling brands would never approve me for sample requests. So I just have like a hundred products here. I’m actually going to go and create content on. So there’s a lot of ways to get involved there. All right. So uh for this last part, I just want you to walk me through like what you are app.

44:44
actually covers and what it helps you handle. Yeah. Yeah. So basically we’re a TikTok shop partner. We’re an end to end creator matchmaking system, right? We’ll help you connect to over 3.3 million creators in TikTok shops database. And then we’ll help you automate every step of the way from outreach into the crater, responding to the crater, sending a personalized creative brief, reminding creators. And then once they actually post a video or engage with your brand,

45:13
we can set up all kinds of community activations, right? We can collect their spark codes and get ads authorization, get usage rights for their content, and then get their phone numbers and emails if you want around like SMS campaigns, text message, or email campaigns and other things like that, right? And then really we help integrate with Discord. We have Discord APIs. So if you want to send push announcements to Discord or automate creative briefs to go in there sort of like a newsletter, we’ll help there too. um

45:42
And where we’re looking at heading towards is really around more agentic workflows where we’ll analyze what’s working in the industry and what’s working with your content. And we’ll have things like creative agents that help summarize the top 10 % of hooks and selling points that are working and draft new creative briefs and take inspiration from what’s working in the ecosystem. So you can focus on measuring the feedback loops between your ads manager and GMB max, right? And then the top 10 % of your creators on a rolling basis.

46:12
Okay, well cool. So on thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to check out the app or get a hold of you, if they have any questions, where can they reach you? Yeah, you can uh find me on LinkedIn, fairly active on there, try to post every day. And then we also have a link on our website that says book a call. That’ll feed right to me or our co-founder, Boris calendar. And you can get ahold of us fairly easily. Sounds good. Well, thanks again for coming on the show. Appreciate your time. Thank you.

46:42
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re looking to learn more about how to sell on TikTok Shop, make sure you follow Sohan on LinkedIn. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 644. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, we’re diving into a debate that’s coming up more and more with e-commerce store owners right now, whether to keep blogging on WordPress or move everything over to Shopify. We break down why, after years of recommending WordPress as the gold standard, we’ve changed our minds for most situations. You’ll also hear us get into the state of blogging in 2026, what’s actually still working, and why where your content lives.

00:28
matters more than ever for tracking ads in AI search. But before we begin, I just want to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free at mywifequitterjob.com slash community, and I would love to see you there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community. Now onto the show.

01:04
Welcome back to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today we’re to be talking about a topic that’s kind of sensitive for me. We’re going to be talking about blogging, the state of blogging in general, and whether you should still be using WordPress versus the Shopify blog for an e-commerce. Yeah, so this is actually, we’re recording this because this is a big debate right now with one of my clients. So I thought it would be…

01:27
I don’t want to say fun to talk through it because I don’t know how much fun this topic is, but I think it’s important because I feel like if I’m getting this question, then probably a lot of people in e-commerce are thinking about this right now. I mean, the topic is still sensitive for me because once Google released that helpful content update, which was not very helpful at all, it basically decimated my blog over at my wife Quitter job and it decimated all my friends. But like we had this mastermind group where, we were

01:56
doing very well blogging for very long time, like two decades. To the point where some of these people have now released rap albums. mean, are tough. No, I’m just kidding. And then specifically on the topic of WordPress versus the Shopify blog, which we’re going to be talking about today, I have strong feelings now actually against WordPress. uh Did you follow this drama?

02:24
I want to say it was the end of 2024. Okay. uh Matt Mullenweg, who’s the CEO of Automatic, went on this tirade against WP Engine. Do you remember the story? No, actually, I don’t know. I don’t know about it. Okay, so the two CEOs had some sort of beef and you know WordPress is open source, right? Anyone’s supposed to be able to use it. Well, Matt, like abused his power and tried to shut down WP Engine. Oh.

02:54
because they didn’t like each other for some reason. And so basically he blocked WP Engine from having access to any of the plugins and then sued him in court. And it’s an open source platform, right? He was blocking him from being able to access free plugins. Yeah. Okay. That sounds, well, sounds typical. That sounds like girl drama. Well, no. And it left a huge bad taste in the mouth of developers, right? Right. Yeah. And then so Matt,

03:24
like it made him look really bad. It actually made me really not like him after that whole drama because now it’s like an abuse of power. Like, is it an open source platform really or is it something that he can own and abuse? Right. Is it open source just for the people you like? Right. Exactly. Exactly. That that makes me nervous. It kind of reminds me of like, you know, our friend Charles who, you know, spoke out about some things and then got quarantined. And, you know, there was like, is that

03:52
true or not true. It’s like when big companies start doing that, it concerns me. So I don’t actually remember what happened or the outcome of that. think it just kind of blew over and I think WP Engine is still alive. the developers revolted and some of them actually went off and created this other platform. uh I can’t remember what it is, but supposedly it’s gaining traction now. Interesting. Not enough for us to remember the name. Well, I don’t know anyone who’s on it because blogging is

04:21
People aren’t starting blogs these days. Yeah, people aren’t starting blogs these days. Okay, sorry, back to the topic. I just wanted to tell that story. this question came up because one of my clients has a very long-standing blog on WordPress. I want to say 13 plus years old and still gets decent Google traffic to the blog.

04:45
You know, one of the problems and I don’t remember if we talked about this on the podcast that were recorded live in New York or if you and I talked about this outside of that. But, um you know, one of the strategies, it’s always been the strategy for e-commerce is to create content. And we teach this right. You create content about your products, right. But not like a direct blog post, just writing about the pros and cons. You create helpful content. And in the content, you mention products that you sell.

05:13
And then obviously those products are linked to your store, whether you’re on, you know, Shopify, BigCommerce, Woo, whatever. um And you were talking about how that is not a great user experience. And I don’t remember if we did this publicly or not, but you were saying that, you know, your strategy has now been to like build out collection pages and try to get, you know, those pages or category pages um and put the content there. You think that building out all the content on WordPress is actually provides for not a great user experience.

05:42
And that’s what we’re realizing right now is that we have all these pieces of content, most of them, 95 % of them link, they were written specifically to link to products, but to get people over is very clunky. And so I think that’s the first argument against WordPress, right? Is the user experience is not great. You’re not on the store page. It looks like a blog usually, and getting people to click over is just one more step in the process, which makes it harder for people to buy. I don’t remember what I said.

06:12
Or this long goes full week. But yeah, I always try to get people in the category pages. But I mean, you can’t like replace a blog with correct pages, right? Right. I mean, blog covers a whole bunch of topics and there there still are uses for the blog. I don’t know if you want to just talk about blogging in general first before we even get to the subject of WordPress versus Shopify. Yeah, I think blogging from an informational standpoint is

06:42
is gone. the only reason I would ever start a blog today is if I have an e commerce store or some sort of service that takes transactions, all the standalone blogs, I think that business model is dead. You have to offer something for sale on the site. Okay. Because the purpose of a blog now is to get mentioned in AI, right? Right. According to Bumblebee linens.

07:08
you know, these handkerchiefs are commonly used for whatever. And then you click and then you land on Bumblebee Linens where you can take transactions or you have some sort of brand associated with that. And what I’ve been doing, because Bumblebee Linens blog has actually taken off. It’s up in traffic around 40%, I would say since December. So in half a year, it’s up 40%. And I think it’s up that way because Google is favoring blogs for

07:36
that are attached to real businesses. Yeah. Right. Whereas my wife could a job the opposite has happened. It has dropped 40 percent since the beginning of this year. Yeah. So I don’t think I could collapse all of that content that’s ranking into a category page, though. Correct. Right. Yeah. I was more talking about the user experience of someone landing on a blog and then having to click over to buy the product.

08:04
not necessarily the whole, like if that’s one strategy switching for the other. I see. I mean, one thing that’s popular right now is advertorials, right? They land on a blog post, which is really just an advertisement, a long form advertisement. Yeah. And I’m thinking about uh who do we meet that just did this? It was some beauty product. I thought Simon was talking about this. Oh yeah, yeah, Simon was talking about it. Yeah. It was some, I can’t remember, some male beauty product, right? Or something. No, hair product.

08:33
hair product. was, yes, to make your hair look fuller. Right. To make your hair look fuller. And it was just this page that like it didn’t review it, but it just kind of talked about the factors. And at the end, there was like an ad to cart. I mean, that still works very well, obviously. Yeah. So I think back when you and I when we talk when blog before video just took over, when we talked about like, hey, you should create a blog, you should be writing content, all that stuff. And I don’t I’m not we’re not saying that you shouldn’t right now, but.

09:02
We always recommended WordPress because back in the day WordPress was really far superior to Shopify. And when I had my jewelry business, I just didn’t want to deal with WordPress. So I set it up on Shopify. So I had all this WordPress experience and, then I was blogging on Shopify and there were a ton of limitations in Shopify of what you could do. You could basically just type.

09:26
You had minimal option, unless you could like HTML everything, you basically couldn’t do a lot of the things in WordPress, which then gave WordPress a lot of superiority to just the straight up Shopify blog platform. That has changed um over time. Also, I think back then, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, because I’ve never been an SEO guru, but

09:49
WordPress seemed to outrank Shopify even if the content was the same. WordPress just was more favored by Google. I don’t know if that’s true. 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,

10:16
that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. But I don’t think the Shopify blog platform has really come that long of a way.

10:44
Well, used to be you couldn’t even put alt text in your images, right? Like you couldn’t, you really could. Yeah, back in 2015, could really just text, picture, you know, H1, H2, H3 tags. Yeah. I mean, the biggest advantage of WordPress back in the day was the plugin library. Yes. Right. The vast plugin library. There’s a whole bunch of shortcuts for stuff that I was doing.

11:09
Like a table of contents is the example I always use. I could automatically put together a table of contents. And for that reason, it made sense to use WordPress because there was a plugin for everything. There was a caching plugin. There was an SEO plugin, a whole bunch of different things that automated a lot of stuff. Yeah, things like Link Whisper, um know, tools that allow you to. Yeah, just as I think there was a lot of streamlining available in WordPress that in Shopify, if you couldn’t code something,

11:38
you are pretty much stuck with their basic features. Yeah. Yeah. But the other disadvantage for Shopify in particular was that you needed to put a WordPress blog on a subdomain. Yes. You could not. the big one. And that was a huge disadvantage. But, you know, back in the day at the time, it was OK because WordPress had such a huge advantage. Yeah. With plugins. So but things have changed. Dun dun dun.

12:06
Well, OK, so first off, nature of writing, like not not even talking about advertorials, the nature of writing has has changed. Yeah. People are writing for robots now and for robots like nothing needs to be like pretty. Nothing needs to be. uh I don’t know. This this always this always like gets me because I used to spend time writing real posts. I remember that you go to Starbucks or the coffee shop.

12:33
Every Sunday morning, I’d pump out something that I personally wrote. was based on personal experiences and stuff like a uh normal person would like to read. then Google changed that. And now with AI, it’s like question, answer, question, answer, question, answer. So I mean, if that’s going to be the case, who cares what blogging platform you’re using now? Just go with the easier one. I don’t know. What’s your opinion? I don’t know.

13:03
I mean, I’m I’m I’m trying to remove myself from the thought process because I still read content on the Internet. Like I would much rather read an art like I consume a lot of travel content. I would much rather read a travel piece than watch a video because I don’t want to watch through like, you know, 22 minutes of something I want and I want the highlights. So I still there’s a lot of things that I still read on the Web. But I would say from a streamlined perspective,

13:33
But I don’t think there’s any reason to put up, if you’re starting out, there’s no reason to put the blog on WordPress if it’s an e-commerce business. I would just put it on Shopify. Let me ask you this question. When was the last blog that you’ve read? Probably like two days ago. From a smaller creator, not like a mainstream publication? Yeah, from like, know, traveling with the Williams or something. I don’t even know what the URL was. Yeah. Okay. It’s probably been like, I don’t know.

14:03
many, many years since I’ve read a blog post. I read blog posts all the time for travel and I also still read uh food content. All right, second question then. How do you find these? Do you find them through AI? Do you find them through Google or is it just someone you followed for a very long time? It’s usually no one I’ve ever followed. It’s almost always through Google search or AI search. um

14:28
But I just don’t want to watch a full video on something. I want to read about it. OK, so if you’re doing a search, like I don’t know what you use, Chachi BT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, but it rarely links to the article. So I found that to be not true. Huh? I was going to screenshot because I know we talked about this on another podcast. I was going to screenshot it the other day for you because I get links all the time, but I ask for links. So, for example,

14:58
I was doing some research on a possible summer trip and I put in all my information. Now, meanwhile, I’ve been doing this for a year and a half now, right? So like, and I use chat GPT for this in particular because it has all my information. So I put it in, I ask, I put my requirements and then I say, I would like to know the top five, this is the question I actually asked, the top five parts of town. So typically like just, for example, when you travel to like Budapest,

15:27
Budapest has neighborhoods, right? And each neighborhood is kind of its own personality and has its own safety issues or not. You know, like it’s different types of restaurants. So some is like a younger, more like tourists or more touristy or more like older established. So I was like, hey, I want you to evaluate the eight neighborhoods in Budapest. And then I want you to tell me where’s the best one to stay given the parameters that I put in and then give me links to any articles written about staying in those areas.

15:56
Right. OK, so you asked for the articles. I asked for the articles because I don’t I don’t trust chat to just be like, stay in the seventh quarter. Right. Or whatever. Like I don’t like I mean, it’s usually it’s pretty correct. But I like to read art. Then I want to click through and read. OK, who’s the person writing this article? Right. Is it a single female? Is it a family? Is it like, you know, what is their biased? And then I look through the article, I skim it and then, you know, move on to the next.

16:23
So, but I do request links when I’m doing that, which might be the difference between what you’re getting and what I’m getting. So that’s for travel blogs. When was the last e-commerce store blog that you’ve read or visited? Outside of people that I work with. Yeah, outside of people that you work with, obviously. don’t know, for a hundred years, I don’t know. A long time. I don’t know about you, but when I see something in Chachabee Tea or Claude about a product, I almost never click through.

16:52
you have to kind of hunt and peck for the link. Like it’s there, know, is there. Yeah, it’s also very small and like grayed out and hard to see. But plus even when I click it, it’s like a mound of text, right? I don’t want to read all that. Yeah. I’d rather just get the answer. so that’s why I was just curious, like if people even read blogs anymore. think they do. But I think they do. My blog traffic is actually up. Is it really? OK. Yeah.

17:19
So but it’s but it’s very specific posts, right? Like certain posts and the posts solve people’s problems. Like my top traffic post right now is beef stroganoff without mushrooms. So I’m sure. Pretty. Yeah. OK. Not actually. The pictures are terrible. I’ve actually talked about re since I’ve seen it like uptick. I’m like, need to make this again. But I haven’t eaten this in like 10 years. um

17:44
But it solves a problem, right? If you don’t like mushrooms, but you want the creamy beef and noodles, like you have to have a way to make it without the mushrooms, which is a fundamental part of that recipe. So I’m solving like a very specific problem for people. Another one of my posts, it’s backup and that is the ant post, right? Summertime people have ants. They want to get rid of them, right? So it’s all the problem solving posts. It’s not the let me, know, take a, spend a day with me as a.

18:11
person who works from home in marketing, whatever, you um So, yeah, but I think it’s that problem because people want to get the whole story for solving the problem. I think that makes sense. Like the posts that are kicking butt on Bumble Bee Linens right now are all the gift guides. Yeah, because wedding season, the gives to the groom. Yeah. Second year wedding gifts, which is cotton.

18:34
Right. As a second year like they’ve they’re on their second year of like, not second marriage. was thinking I was like, you’ve divorced like four times. Yeah. That’s a good article. You need to write that. What do I get someone who’s on their fourth marriage? So those are good because guess what the top three products are on that? On those? I wonder. I wonder what those would be. And so those steer people over towards the store. Yeah. Although, know what? Come to think of it.

19:01
I just haven’t spent a lot of brain power on the blog part of it, but I should probably make those like direct add to cart links that take you straight to the shopping cart. Yeah. In retrospect. So yeah, I definitely I’m not going to ever argue that like, oh, blogs are on the rise. Like, no, that’s not the case. I think certain things will weather the storm. But I don’t think it’s like, you know, in general blogging. No, make video like period. Actually, let’s let’s talk about that real quick, just in case. I still occasionally get questions about

19:31
blogging. So how would you prioritize the blog? if you, you have clients, right? Yeah. If you were to start today, how would you prioritize this client who now has a YouTube channel versus her blog? YouTube is the, is the highest priority for us. Okay. So where, where does blogging fall in that priority today? Cause you guys have been talking about it clearly.

19:56
Well, we just said this is why we’re having this podcast is that we’re actually not going to write any more blog posts on WordPress. They’re all going to be on Shopify. Oh, you’re switching over. Well, so we’re not migrating. You’re not migrating, not migrating. I so one of the things that’s making me very nervous about migrating, which I I’m I am probably overreacting. But so I’m going to preface this with that. But we have a blog that has 12 years of authority, right?

20:26
um hundreds of articles. The blog drives revenue, right? um But I have read enough articles about AI search not loving redirects that I do not want to move something and redirect everything on that site. Makes sense. Well, why switch to Shopify blog in the first place if you already have a WordPress blog? Because for any new post that gets written will be written on Shopify. Why?

20:53
because of the user experience and because AI is favoring everything consolidated on one platform and for tracking purposes. right now, if you’ve ever seen it, because the blog is set up on actually the blog, unfortunately for us, the blog is the main domain and the store is the sub domain. But so now, like when you look into Google Analytics, you’ve got to switch account, like not accounts, but you have to switch right from the store to the blog. So it’s not all integrated.

21:22
It’s very tricky. It’s hard to measure anything with meta, right? Like to get how the blog or you drive people to the blog post. We’re driving people to the blog post because our blog posts are like advertorials, right? How do I teach my kid to read? Right. Well, here are the 16 steps you need to teach your kid to read. Whatever it is, not 16. But and also here are all of our products that help you teach your kid to read. Right. Here’s because also

21:49
the client is kind of famous in the homeschool community, right? So people would want to know her opinion on how you teach a kid to read. You know what I’m saying? So kind of like if you’re Steph Curry, right? And you want to teach people how to shoot threes, like people are gonna be like, how does Steph Curry shoot a three, right? So the search would be like her feedback and her, she’s also got the credentials, right? A teacher, a degree in curriculum development, like all this stuff, right? So she’s got the authority.

22:19
the degree, the publishing company, you all the things. So we’re starting to drive traffic to the blog to get people, you know, either on the email list to click over them. Like at least we can hit them with the abandoned cart, you know, anything like that. But the attribution is terrible. Right. When you send someone to a blog and then to Shopify to the user experience, like when you land on the blog, it’s really clear you’re on a blog.

22:46
You know, like whereas if you land on a Shopify blog, you’re on a store and everything that I’ve read and everything that the ads company has read is basically like all the tools favor if everything is like in a unified, you know, ecosystem. So they land on a Shopify blog, the stores on Shopify, everything’s together. um You know, you can literally put ad to cart.

23:11
in the blog post basically, right? So you’re like, there’s less jumps for people to do that on WordPress too. You can’t, but it gets, that gets, that gets weird because it’s not like, then it, then it doesn’t look like a blog, right? Like you’re, just, the whole, the, I don’t know, the whole system is not great. So yeah, so that’s what they’ve decided to do. Okay. Are those advertorials on WordPress? Are those ranking? Yeah. Oh, they are. I see. And then

23:40
Yeah, I mean, I agree. Like all future advertorials can go and Shopify just for ease of tracking and stuff. Yeah. But I know for Bumblebee linens that hasn’t been. Oh, you know why it’s not a problem for mine? Because it’s in a folder. It’s not a sub domain. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So then you’re just going to have this WordPress thing that’s orphaned and then just going to leave it leave it alone. It’s not orphaned. I mean, we’ll see the posts that are like

24:06
on that they’re still gonna get traffic. They still get updated like, know, with, you know, if a new product comes out, we’ll update an old post. We’re actually seeing a huge uptick in Pinterest right now. And our, hate to say this because it’s very premature, but our ROAS with print Pinterest ads is like eight. Interesting. Okay. So Pinterest ads are back on. Like I have not, it’s been like,

24:33
Probably eight years since I ran a Pinterest ad. Okay, I feel like Pinterest ads and like do not do my caveat. Do not talk to anybody at Pinterest and let them tell you what to do with your ads. Like do run, run away um because they just want to sell you ad space. If you are in certain verticals, um it makes absolute sense. So we fall into the parenting and homeschool vertical, which obviously is huge. So we’re seeing a great return.

25:03
on ad spend right now. We’re not spending a lot. would like to ramp it up. But one of the things we want to ramp it up with is getting new content on the Shopify site so people land on the store and not the blog. I don’t want to diverge too much. But did Pinterest turn into a video platform? It is turning into a video platform. Yes. Which is great for us because we have a ton of video content now. Right. Like short form video, right? Yes. Yeah. I remember I was posting all of my short form to Pinterest and

25:31
getting no love whatsoever. I thought you were posting like my wife put her job short form. Correct. Yes. My not Bumblebee linens. That’s correct. You’d probably get a lot of traction with with wedding content, but that’s a whole that’s a whole nother podcast. That’s a whole nother podcast. anyway, so yeah, so I think if I was so my thought is if I’m a brand new e-commerce person and I’m just starting out, which it’s a lot of people out there. Right. Yeah. I would put I would put your blog on Shopify. I would not set up a WordPress blog.

26:01
If you’re already word pressing, I don’t think I would, I wouldn’t migrate. I would just keep doing what you’re doing. That’s my like, in general opinion. You know, it just depends because I have people come up to me and say, Hey, you know, I want to rebrand. Like, I don’t want to have to go through all this work. And then I look at their domain and I’m like, Oh yeah, go ahead and rebrand. Oh yes. Yeah. You know, I mean like your, domain isn’t, isn’t strong at all. So you can do whatever you want.

26:31
And so if you already have a blog and it has no traction, I would just keep things simple and just move it all over under Shopify. And I think the main argument for this really is that everything that I’ve seen will one the tracking. So I think that’s the reason number one. But the second thing is that everything that I’ve read is basically saying that AI favors everything in one spot. So they don’t like that.

26:59
You don’t know if that that’s like inadvertent. I think you think I mean, I, just know Google likes blogs that are like I said, right? If you, if you’re selling something on it on that domain, I don’t think that accounts for sub domains because like the main domain is still the same. So it’s probably okay. I mean, clearly it is right. Because that client’s blog is still doing very well. Right. likewise, my Bumblebee Linden’s blog is doing very well.

27:29
It’s just sites like my wife put a job that doesn’t sell anything, which may change soon. Actually, just I’m just going to do an experiment. What are you going to sell? No, I’m going to sell services. Right. Oh, yes. Yeah. So services on there and just see if anything changes there. Yeah. But yes, I would say if you if your blog has zero traction, that’s a different story. I’m thinking of people who have ever like want like if Bumblebee Lennon’s blog led.

27:57
lived on WordPress like in its own sub domain like a completely different experience than what you have right now because the problem is like one of the things that’s now on our list of things to do is make the blog look as much like the store as possible. Oh, it’s not. It wasn’t like that. Well, no, because it was the blog was before the store. So you didn’t make the store look like the blog? No, no. OK. No. I like a WordPress blog, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference like store blog. I mean, it looks the same. Yeah.

28:26
Pretty much. Yeah. And then I guess you could get rid of another hosting bill. Yes. Right. Yes, you could. Which would be nice. Speaking of which, just uh I don’t know if this is like the latest AI people using AI to try to break into stuff, but the number of like hack attempts on Bumblebee linens and my wife could her job has just multiplied greatly. Yeah. I mean, I track all this stuff and

28:56
And I’ve just been getting attacked left or right. So here’s something that’s been happening in my store lately, which I’m still trying to think of a way to solve this, but people come in and they add a whole bunch of stuff to the cart. And by a bunch of stuff, the car, mean like tens of thousands of items. And I track everyone’s cart, but then they’ll check out. Right. Like the bot will check out, which leaves all these abandoned carts all over the place. Also, which.

29:25
again fills up my Clavio. Yeah, at the same time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I know this has happened to uh other people on Shopify. Yeah, based on what I saw an ECF and my solution. I hope no hackers are listening to this right now. But like I spotted a pattern in like the emails that they’re using. Yeah. So I just block them right the source. Yeah. But like, let’s say they I mean, they could easily fix that and just use AI generate.

29:55
real emails and then I have to think of another way to block them. Yeah. By based on IP address or something. I mean, they’re all coming from Lithuania, China and Russia, although there’s a subset that’s coming from Europe and certain parts of the US too. So yeah, that’s not an easy problem to solve. Yeah, I agree. So I got off topic. We were talking about blogging. Okay. So here’s the other thing that we talked about this week with my client, which is

30:24
This is a little bit of a left field, but I think it’s also relevant is because she has a blog that’s popular. And I’ve seen this with other people, especially people who started blogging and moved into e-commerce. There’s a couple of people in ECF who have this issue. They have massive email lists because they offer some sort of lead magnet that isn’t a product. So for example, we’re looking at 200

30:53
80,000 people on the email list. Right. And half of those people are not customers. They’re just subscribers because they came in through some sort of lead or, you know, some of it’s abandoned cart and things like that. But primarily it’s through a lead magnet. One of the things and Cleo is expensive. Right. And it is. And like Omnisend, who was partnered with us for Seller Summit, you know, they are I think are they a third of the price? They’re 40 percent cheaper. 40 percent. OK.

31:23
So they’re definitely a less expensive option. However, email in general is expensive, right? So one of the suggestions that was given to us this week was to actually move all of our non-customers to like Beehive. And then when they make a purchase, they get dumped back into Klaviyo. So that way we’re not paying for and also.

31:48
not sending like those people like all the things that we send. And everything’s really segmented anyway. So those people don’t get a lot of stuff. But basically, because one of the things that I think is tough about Klaviyo is you pay based on the number of subscribers you have plus the aggregate sends. Right. Right. So like we we send so much, but our customers are low. So like we hit the send limit before we hit the customer sent limit. Right. So by like pulling all those people out,

32:17
it’s going to also decrease our sends because these people aren’t just going to be accidentally included. And then, you know, once someone makes a purchase, then they can go into the more expensive email bucket. I don’t know how I feel about that. that’s a tough one, because now you have two email platforms that you got to deal with. Management wise, terrible. Right. Like full full disclosure, like this is a like not a streamlined approach at all. This is a would be a cost cutting.

32:45
And then you would have doubles, right? So if someone bought and they were on Beehive, they would be on Klaviyo. Yes. So we’d have to remove them from Beehive in theory. Or leave them, I guess. Yeah. Right. In case they still want to get the blog content, right? Right.

33:03
Because I assume you’re not sending the blog content anymore to the people on Klaviyo. that would be the thing, right? Is then you don’t really send it. However, I do feel like our Klaviyo, like our customers love our blog content, like our once a week blog post or the once week content based post. It’s usually video now. Like people love it, whether they’re a customer or not, right? They love that educational piece. Here’s what I would do, because I know Klaviyo is really expensive. Like I have friends that are spending almost 10 grand a month on it. Yeah. Right. I don’t know what your bill is.

33:32
But I would use something for the blog. I’ve been considering doing this with my wife, clear job actually. In fact, I already have it implemented. just haven’t moving is a pain in the butt. Yes, it is. uh One, you can use something super cheap like Mailer Lite and Amazon SES. So all these email platforms, all they are like front end wrappers for like email services. Right. There’s like Mail Gun. uh

34:00
Amazon SES and it’s super cheap. Like Amazon SES, I think is like a buck to send it 10,000. Oh, my word. Yeah. And then obviously it’s free to store as many as you want because that’s on your own platform. So there’s an open source platform that I had installed called Motic. We actually use this for Go Brand Win. Yes, we did. 100 % free. Yeah. Very powerful. If you just want to run like a newsletter, it won’t do e-commerce well. But again, we’re writing my blogging here. Yeah.

34:28
So that’s free and the interface is really good. It’s got like a really nice, you know, email editor and all that stuff. you know, you can have, it does almost everything. You can track clicks, can track links and everything. That’s free, 100 % free, very powerful. A little too powerful, unfortunately, like, which is why I didn’t want to use it. Like it’s a little more complicated to get set up and everything, because it supports everything, like all the bells and whistles. Miller Lite,

34:55
is another one which I think recently started charging for, but I think way back in the day you could just pay a small fee. all it is is it, and Sendy is another one. Sendy is another one. A really small wrapper. You just pay for the sends, which is, you know, 10,000 for a buck. And if it’s just a blog, that’s good enough. How hard are those to set up though? Like for a regular person? Mailer Lite and Sendy is pretty straightforward to do. Modic is a little more involved.

35:25
Like it took me like a weekend to get that thing set up. Could you set it up using Claude or Chad as your assistant? Does that make it any easier? Well, Cindy and MailerLite are really easy. Yeah, I know MailerLite’s like we have people in the course use that. I don’t know. I’ve never tried. So I’m wanting is easy to supposedly it just there are just too many options for me to sort through, which is what the problem was. Yeah. Right. Like setting it up and everything, getting it up is easy. Getting it to do what you want. You have to sort through menus and menus and menus.

35:55
And I don’t even understand what half of the switches do, right? Which was the problem. Yeah. So I consider doing that because my my blogging email bill is actually still quite high. Right. And, you know, that’s one of the things is that if you are creating content and I mean, I think if you’re going to create any kind of content, you have to have a lead magnet of some sort. Right. You can’t just rely on like abandoned cart or browser abandonment.

36:21
So you have to have something and it’s like when you’re doing that, what do you start with, right? Because Klaviyo is so expensive and if your store’s not making a lot of money, do you wanna be putting all that money into paying for services? Well, would your client ever sell ads in the newsletter? Possibly. Okay, if that’s the case, I would go with like a Beehive. Yeah, Beehive integrates. That’s definitely not a core business though. Like that is definitely a…

36:49
Oh, yeah, maybe we try it, you know, kind of thing. Well, I mean, two hundred and eighty thousand subs. You could charge a lot of money. Yes, we could. Right. Yeah. That very quickly be a revenue stream that be on the radar screen, at least. Yes. Well, also, like, you know, do we would we sell ads to the people that are because we so I spent a lot of time this last weekend, like deep diving into the list and just trying to figure out like who we need to get off of it and.

37:16
I found a bunch of those spams, right? The abandoned cart bots. um And yes, they do have a pattern. uh Anyway. Oh, you guys had that problem? Yes, we do. Not to the extent that you do. OK, but I did. And it happened all on one day, April 15th of last year. OK, and I actually used uh Claude to help me figure it out. So if anyone wants to this, um I just suppressed everybody. But I didn’t mean that.

37:44
I mean, like how do you block it at the source? I’m not that level, Steve. That’s your Oh, okay, okay, okay. But it didn’t happen again. It happened on one day, which I thought was interesting. So on one day, we gained all these people, right? And which is what triggered me to dive into it. And then I was like, oh, and they all have very similar patterns in their email. So anyway.

38:09
It’s definitely something worth like throwing into like an AI and asking if there’s any like unusual spikes because that’s how I found it. You know what I found out from a friend also who works at Google? They actually Google sends out bots to go through checkout. Oh, interesting. To make sure that like they check, you know, they know, like they check your payment options, they check your shipping and whatnot and that information they use somewhere. Yeah. Somehow.

38:39
So not for a thousand of them. That’s definitely malicious. yeah. See, I it seems like Shopify should be the one trying to solve this problem. I agree. Not you guys. Right. I mean, you can easily fill up your whole entire Clavio quota. Yeah. In a couple of days. Right. If it’s malicious. Yeah. they’re very clever, too. Like every like I was blocking uh IP addresses. have this bank of like a million IP addresses. You can’t. Yeah.

39:09
You can’t block them. Yeah, that’s a whole that’s a whole other episode because I don’t know the episode. I don’t understand what the point is. Like you’re not monetarily gaining anything from this. OK, so the point is to try credit cards. Oh, never mind. So they bought like a huge bank of fake credit card numbers and they want to know which ones work. Oh, which opens up a whole nother can of worms. Another episode, but fake transactions. I don’t know if you’ve gotten that. No, but we had that problem. Do you remember with profitable audience?

39:38
Oh, yes. Yes. Like four or five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We put a squash on that. I don’t remember what I did now. But yeah. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. I was like, someone loves us. Just kidding. It was a lot of money. But then the chargebacks came. Yes. That was no fun. OK. So wrapping up our we went a little off topic, but I think it all is all about content and creating and audiences.

40:04
My stance is if you’re just getting started or if your current WordPress blog is like making no impact, right? You have no authority, you don’t have a lot of content in there. I would just start blogging on Shopify. um to me, and also I think it simplifies so much for people because I can remember a couple years ago, ah like one of the big hurdles for people was setting up the sub-domain, trying to figure out how to integrate WordPress.

40:33
Yeah, like and we would get questions all the time and I’m not sure how to do this, whatever. Like, so I think if this if this is definitely a hurdle for you, like it’s not a hurdle anymore because you will not, I don’t think, lose anything by putting everything on Shopify. um I think it’s actually I would almost say it’s better, especially if you’re planning on running ads and things like that. I guess the only thing you really lose is control because all that content is on Shopify. But I guess you’re probably going to be on Shopify anyway. So.

41:03
Yeah. Migrating is like another story altogether. But yeah, I mean, think blogging is kind of out. I it’s still a strategy that a lot of people use to be mentioned in AI. And for that respect, I think it’s still pretty important. Yeah. It just wouldn’t be in my top priority. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Blogging is not dead. It’s just changed and you’re going to have to adapt. For more information and resources, go over to my wife, quitterjob.com slash episode six forty three. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

41:33
Head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

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 are talking about agentic shopping. And honestly, I’m kind of having a midlife e-commerce crisis right now. We get into Amazon scraping your website and selling your products without permission, why your meta and Google ads might not matter much longer, and what you should actually be doing to make sure AI recommends your store over your competitors.

00:27
It’s a weird time in e-commerce right now and we’re just trying to figure it all out together. But before we begin, I just wanted to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free at mywifequitterjob.com slash community and I would love to see you there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community.

00:56
Now on to the show.

01:04
Welcome back to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about agentic shopping. it’s weird right now. I’m kind of having a midlife e-commerce crisis right now because I’m not sure what’s going to happen next. There’s been talks of like AI doing the shopping. uh I’m going have to be making shifts. Like who knows what’s going to happen to like ads in like the next two to three years. Like there’s a whole bunch of stuff up in the air.

01:32
right now. On one hand, it’s fun. On the other hand, you know, we got a business to run here we got to know which direction to take. Yeah, I often wonder because I think we talked about this on a previous podcast about was it Amazon blocking the link? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And results. Yeah. So I feel like one of the concerns I have and I don’t have my own e-commerce store anymore, but it’s like you invest time into something and then something shifts and changes and all that time is wasted.

02:02
So here’s what got me thinking about this, right? It’s like more and more people are using AI to shop. And then a whole swath of articles came out about like agentic shopping. Like this is where you just have like open claw or a claw do the shopping for you. And right now, like the way I get my business is like word of mouth, email, SMS, but for like new customers, I’m paying for meta ads, paying for Google ads, doing a little bit of social media. But for the most part, like humans need to see the ad.

02:32
Right? They click on it. But if it’s like an agent or an AI agent, they’re not going to be clicking on any ads. Right? No, they’re just going to be comparing the data. Right. So which which makes like ranking in AI crucial if you believe that’s going to be the future. You just mentioned uh when we talked about how Amazon blocked all the agents from calling it. Do you know what they did next? That was like really kind of sleazy, I think.

02:58
Who knows? They’ve done a lot of silly things in the past couple of weeks. They have this program called Buy For Me where they literally just started scraping websites. I think Amazon and these other Chinese agents took my website down one night because they were just crawling so much. So I had to block all of China. But Amazon will scrape your site and will list your products on Amazon where when you click on it,

03:26
it takes them to your website. Now you might think that’s a good thing, right? But it got widespread backlash because it was getting the products wrong. oh You know what I mean? So people were buying from Amazon, getting sent to an external site where, actually, I don’t even know if they were getting sent to an external site. I think Amazon actually makes the purchase on the person’s behalf. And then when they get something,

03:53
that’s incorrect that doesn’t match the listing on Amazon because Amazon’s scraping stuff, right? So it’s not going to be up to date. People are getting wrong orders and the brand was getting blamed for it. Not matching Amazon’s. Right. And subsequent, probably poor reviews. Right. Well, the thing is, that’s the funny thing. Like the reviews, like those listings on Amazon don’t get reviews. But suppose your own website. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Now you’re dealing because I think about, you know, for the e-commerce site.

04:21
We have a customer service person that basically sees all the reviews before they get published. now you’ve increased their workload, right? Because if the problem really isn’t your problem, that you shipped them the right item, but Amazon just listed the wrong item. Now you’ve got customer service nightmares. And for people who are solopreneurs or maybe have one or two people helping them, you can’t handle the increased workload of Amazon making mistakes.

04:48
Plus they could leave a bad review on you for Trustpilot or other things that you don’t have control over. Google, right? The Google shopping review, whatever that’s called. Anyway, the point is, like the discovery is so important because Amazon lost it, I read an article recently that Amazon lost like 10 percentage points in the last couple of years for discovery. Like people used to always start their journey on Amazon. People are not doing that anymore. They’re starting on AI and they’re starting on social media like TikTok.

05:17
So I had a sneak peek of our TikTok talk for Seller Summit. I don’t know if you got a chance to peek at the presentation yet. But um that was sort of one of the points of the talk is basically like people find you on TikTok, right? They see a video, whether it’s your own video or an influencer’s video, right? They don’t necessarily buy immediately on TikTok. They will then go find you somewhere else.

05:45
Right. But TikTok and I think Tiffany is talking about this a little bit too, like sort of the halo effect of that content creation. But yeah, people people are using TikTok. I mean, my kids use it as a search engine. Yeah. See, I haven’t seen that yet. And I’ve tried using it as a search engine, actually. I don’t think the search engine is very good. I don’t have you. I don’t think it’s good for what you and I are probably doing. I think it’s great for what my kids are looking for. Right. What are they looking for?

06:14
like Tmoo type stuff. Oh, okay, okay. You know what I mean? Like, oh, I need like a gold necklace. I mean, one of my kids is going to prom, right? So she wanted this gold necklace for prom. So she totally searched on TikTok, but then she bought on Amazon. Yeah, actually, what concerned me less is about any time humans are in play. What concerns me more is when AI does the shopping. Right. And I was thinking to myself, like, there’s a lot of things that I would just wouldn’t mind having AI shop for.

06:41
Like the necessities. Engagement rings. know, anniversary gifts. Yeah, anniversary Just go buy something. So it’s interesting you say that because I have not used AI in that way. And the only thing that I have firsthand knowledge of is people using AI to buy travel. And I’ve heard a lot of bad things, right?

07:09
Which I personally would never have AI book a plane ticket for me. I’m just too paranoid, right? I want to know what if you had it find to do all the research all the way up until the buy button and then you just approve it. So, yes, but I like to me, I need that like final. I wouldn’t just like say, hey, and I’ve heard of people that are basically like, hey, plan that dinner, get everything and they end up, you know, booked at some terrible place or something like that. So I’ve heard like a few experiences like that.

07:38
I haven’t heard anybody just doing straight up shopping yet that way. Well, this is what I was thinking. Like, let’s say this is something I don’t care about. Like I need an outfit for Seller Summit, right? So I have it go out and then make me like these portfolios of outfits. And then I just click the final approval button. Yes. Right. No one’s clicking any ads. No humans are clicking ads. AI is going on and putting these things together. And so as an e-commerce store owner,

08:06
Like how do you make sure that like if you sell clothes, how do you make sure your shirt ends up in that outfit? Right? Yeah. So how do you, so that’s the debate right now, right? Because I’m spending all this money on ads, but if no humans are looking at it, then those ads, mean, this could disrupt meta. could disrupt Google. And so a lot of things are happening, I guess. I mean, we already talked about Amazon, uh, how they’re trying to become the hub of all of e-commerce.

08:35
So they’re scraping all the products, putting together their own AI, which is called Rufus. Have you used Rufus? No, but it actually got brought up yesterday on a call that I had because it’s impacting the influencer marketing side of Amazon. In what way? In a negative way. I’ve heard statistics coming out from Amazon.

09:00
But if you do some research on it, there was a time where Rufus just popped up. It was like a pop-up window. Now it’s this teeny tiny button in the upper left that you actually have to click on to get it. And I read that there’s a huge backlash when Rufus was a pop-up, because people did not want it. there was a statistic, like 31 % of the time, it provides inaccurate information about the product.

09:27
Interesting, but you would think that it’s only scraping from the product itself. It’s yeah from Amazon products, but that was a stat that I obviously that was an Amazon stat. Amazon stat was something like 300 million people used it. It generated 12 billion dollars in revenue, which in the grand scheme of things is a very small number. Yeah. So I so I had an experience with ads because I’m I know you think I’m a big shopper, but I’m not a big shopper. I don’t buy a lot of things other than groceries. I’m a big grocery shopper.

09:59
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

10:27
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quiet Light has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change, it was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quiet Light

10:57
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. Why is there a box outside of your door every morning? I don’t know. It’s paper towels and toilet paper and stuff. So I kept getting this ad for, don’t know if you’ve seen this ad, it’s for these little charms. And they’re the flags of countries. And basically you can order

11:26
the flags for countries you visited, whatever, and that you can get a bracelet or necklace or keychain. I saw this in my ad for probably six months. Makes sense why I would see it because most of the videos that I watch are travel related. Most of the reels, most of the TikToks are like, here’s how you spend a week in Slovenia, whatever. I kept getting fed this ad.

11:49
You know, maybe like a month ago, I clicked on it because I was like, oh, I actually think that would be kind of fun to have like a keychain with all the countries I visited. Right. Because I love to travel. So I clicked on the ad, didn’t buy at the time. And then, of course, I got retargeted, you know, for the next couple of weeks. And I ended up buying the the little charms because and they actually I was pleasantly surprised because I was like, this is like a tick tock product. I’m a little worried. um But anyway, I got it. It’s great. I love it. I got to put it together. But.

12:16
to me, that’s still an integral part of like a shopping experience, like an experience online, right? Oh no question. Yeah. So I wonder, I would say, I think Google will be more affected than Meta, right? If you just think about like a shopper behavior, because Meta, the ads typically just interrupt your scrolling, right? You’re scrolling, you’re looking at your friend’s vacation photos, you’re looking at the birthday party, whatever, and you see an ad and then you keep scrolling.

12:46
you know, and you keep going. Whereas like when I see ads on Google, it’s typically because I’ve typed something in. Right. And I’ve asked Google a question and I’m getting responses. Some organic, some are paid. And so to me, that’s where the true disruption is going to come versus the just continually like putting something in front of people. I think it’ll disrupt everything. But I think the bigger disruption comes when people have more intent. The.

13:12
Seeing the ads in your feed are more of just an awareness play, in my opinion. So there’s a lot of articles that have been saying like social media will die because if you look at it, there’s a whole bunch of AI generated social media posts now and there’s a whole bunch of bots on social media now. So let’s say the number of bots exceeds humans by like 10 to one. Yeah.

13:40
Are humans going to use social media as much knowing that everything is like AI generated? Because before when social media came out, it was all about human connection, right? Right. For me, at least now it’s it’s less so of that. I mean, my feed is still my TikTok feeds horrible, actually. Yeah. My Instagram feed still OK, because it’s it’s my friends and whatnot. Yeah. But if that changes, then social media could have a big decline also, and it could affect Facebook as well, because it’s so easy to generate content now.

14:11
I wonder because I also feel like we have this like weird perspective, right? You and I are old. We grew up before social media, right? Like we both remember a time when there wasn’t any of this and our kids do not remember a time when there wasn’t social media, right? So like my kids, not all of them, but like my younger kids, their entire life revolves around social media, right? And sometimes,

14:37
It’s funny because sometimes they’ll talk about somebody that I’ve like an actual person that they know and they’ll and I was like, oh, did you go to school with them? Oh, no, no. I met him on Snapchat. Right. Or I met him because they were like in the same proximity to each other or they were at the same concert or something like that. So I wonder for us, because we use social media so differently than the younger generation does. I wonder if there’s also going to be this shift because do based on like where you are in the generational spectrum. uh

15:07
Because I can’t imagine my kids getting off social media. Things change in social media quickly. True. I was all in on Friendster. And then Facebook came out. I had a MySpace page you wouldn’t believe.

15:26
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.

15:55
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. So back to like what to do as an e-commerce store. So Google has this, what they call UCP. It’s a universal commerce protocol which allows agents to buy from your store without like having to click on the web. Shopify has an agentic storefront that’s tapping the chat GBT. So all these companies are going all in on

16:25
AI purchases, right? And then that’s why I’m worried. Like where am I gonna put my time? So it’s a given that ranking in AI is important. So does that mean I start doing Reddit marketing? Does that mean I start going all out on like some sort of media blitz, hire like a PR person and try to get in as many publications as possible? It’s kind of unclear to me at least. Do you think this means that certain things like

16:55
I think we talked about this before, of podcasts having their ups and downs, right? Where everyone was super into podcasts and now it’s not as effective as it used to be. But I feel like is that one of those things where, because I was just talking to somebody this morning and I said, I think you need to go on PR blitz, right? You need to be at the events, you need to be on podcast, you need to be talking about this to get yourself out there in as many ways as possible. Yeah, I don’t know the answer. It’s tiring doing all that stuff, but yeah.

17:23
No, I agree, but what are the other options? There’s other articles. I’ve done a lot of research on this also because I’m putting together a keynote for Seller Summit right now. A lot of people are turning back to retail, like brick and mortar. I don’t see that in my kids because my daughter loves going to the mall, but the selection isn’t great. What she does now is she does all the shopping on her phone.

17:53
Then she just goes to the mall to actually try it on, I guess. This is clothing, obviously, this switch. She loves going to the mall too. It’s like this hybrid. I thought malls were going to die. Now, my kids love going to the mall too. Our mall is so popular now that you have to pay for parking, which pisses me off. What? You have to pay to go to the mall. Oh, you got a fancy mall. That’s a fancy mall thing. Yes. It’s a hassle because

18:21
You have this turnstile and of course the traffic in and out of the mall sucks now. yes. Yeah. Anyway, I malls have made a resurgence, but they have. Yes. That’s a whole nother Because maybe people want to be looking at stuff in person again or it’s a place to hang out. I don’t know. I think it’s a combination of two. And I also wonder like how much I come back to this a lot, like how much of some of this is like a post pandemic? I don’t know. Wave.

18:48
Right. We’re like because I feel like for a while no one could do anything. Right. Everyone was stuck in their house. They couldn’t go out. They couldn’t shop. You know, online shopping boomed. Right. And then, you know, obviously that’s not the case anymore. And so I feel like certain things are booming back. But like before the pandemic, like I used to take my kids for driving lessons in the mall parking lot because it was so empty. Because I can’t remember the last time the mall was empty around here. Yeah. I mean, you know, that’s just, you know, obviously we live in different.

19:16
coast so it be locational too but. I don’t even remember the pandemic now. I feel like it’s like way in the past. It’s like this little blip in my life. I feel like those years disappeared though. Because it was a long time ago if you think about it we’re in 2026 now right? was six years ago. Yeah exactly. So I wonder if those effects are overblown. I think it’s just I don’t know people are just tired and they want.

19:44
they crave like physical stuff again. Yeah. So I think one of the problems that I see with this is that if you have had an e-commerce store for a long time, right, and we know a lot of people who’ve done this, tend to have had, you have a lot of, not everybody, but you have a decent amount of SKUs, right? Yeah. And you have a lot of listings, and this is what I’m seeing right now because we’re doing a major site redesign, and so our code is really bad on the old site, just.

20:11
because we had to basically band-aid together pages and things like that. Also the information on those pages is not great. It was great for 2018, right, or 2020, but now the information, so I can see why AI gets it wrong for products, right? If you have older listings and things like that that you haven’t, I don’t know, done a really good job of updating or even focused on that sort of thing,

20:41
I feel like that’s a huge project. It’s actually not that bad, ironically, if you use AI to generate those things that AI needs to figure out what your product is. True. I went through this exercise last year, actually, when I was revamping my search to be agentic search. I rewrote product descriptions for over 1,000 products. uh It was actually a pain in the butt because you actually have to…

21:11
The closest analogy I had to it was like reading my book 20 times before I had to publish it. So I was reading these product descriptions because you can’t have anything wrong about it. Right. Right. So I was literally read the product descriptions that were AI generated for thousand products to make sure everything was OK. Yeah. And then put it live. So it took a while. Well worth it, though. So so one of the questions I have and maybe it’s different because you sell handkerchiefs, but how do you get

21:39
Because I feel like one of the biggest issues I have with AI in general is that it’s too generic, right? It doesn’t do a great job of giving you that special factor, right? That sets you apart. And some of the times I feel like the output is just, is too high in the sky. So how do you, for listings, I feel like it actually matters that you have that differentiated. Does it? Because if you’re just trying to rank an AI, then yes, you need to,

22:09
point out the differentiators of your product. But the writing doesn’t have to be, it can just be vanilla, right? So one thing that I did with my site was I started gathering statistics and sending out surveys. And I mean, these surveys, maybe 100 people, you know, take part in them, but you can say like 91 % of people prefer this, you know, whatever, and AI digs that stuff. Interesting. And it’s not like a, I mean, it’s a real statistic, of course, but it’s-

22:38
It’s kind of bogus. significant. Right, exactly. It’s a kind of bogus thing that AI picks up on, right? Yeah. Or I just checked the databases and I said, we ship out our products on time like 98 points something percent of the time, whatever. And that was really easy because I use that to monitor our employees, right? We this system. So another stat like that. Just put it on there, right? Yeah. I don’t know. So then…

23:08
I guess my next question is you were saying, it can be really vanilla if AI is reading it, but then what happens when humans read it? Humans don’t read. Well, that’s actually very true. The whole point is I think AI is going to do a lot of shopping now and it won’t make the purchase, but it’ll gather all the information for you. You just have to click that final buy button. I don’t know. On the flip side, there’s

23:35
There’s always two sides to everything, right? Like the Amazon CEO came out and said, AI shopping agents aren’t good right now. But once they are, would you use one? Yeah, I know. It’s funny that Amazon would say that, right? Yeah. But I would totally use AI for shopping. Would you? I mean, you’re more of a shopper than I am. Let’s be clear. I knew that was going to come into play at some point. Especially for clothing. Like I want nothing to do with clothing because it’s just not my thing.

24:04
No, I would not have AI. Really? Okay. You know what? Okay. Recently, Jen is going to sell her something also. She’s just looking at outfits. She started using this service where you take a picture of yourself and then AI puts together outfits for you and you just approve. Would you use a service like that? I feel like that’s what Stitch Fix did back in the day. Right? Sure, but this time you get to see yourself in the outfits. Yes. Right? I feel like

24:34
Yes, I think people will use it. I just feel like it’s probably missing that little What do mean? So, I don’t know like it’s like weird stuff, right? Like I can like there’s just certain things that I hate in clothing, right? Okay, so and I would obviously type I would obviously provide as much information as I could but then like if I but also there’s probably Preferences that I don’t know that I don’t like until I see it. You know what I mean?

25:03
Okay, so if I recall, the way you shop is you buy a bunch of stuff you tried on, you return what you don’t like, right? How is this any different? Like you’re presented with a feed of yourself wearing all these outfits. You proven you hit buy, buy, buy. You get sent a bunch of stuff and you return the stuff that you don’t like. Right? Yeah, I mean, I think so. Right. And so in that case, a human is not looking at ads.

25:30
A human is just getting this curated stuff that AI has curated. And AI doesn’t look at ads. doesn’t do it. It does searches. But a lot of times what it gets is whatever shows up. Right. So does that make optimizing for AI like the future? Meaning like 100 percent outside of maybe some social media? Except for yes, I would say yes, except.

25:57
I also think optimizing to be a brand. Okay, so let’s talk about that because I was thinking about this too and I’ve always been a huge proponent of brand and everything, right? I guess by having a strong brand that makes AI more likely to mention you, right? But if again, if a human isn’t doing the shopping for you, I mean, there’s a lot of generic stuff that I buy also. Yeah, so I think that depends, right? Like there’s definitely generic stuff that

26:27
We all purchase every single day, right? There’s things that we literally do not care who manufactured. But like at the end of the day, I am a bounty paper towel loyalist, right? Like do not give me any other paper towel. I don’t care. All you Viva people out there who try to tell me it’s better, I’m not listening to you anymore. Like I am a bounty paper. I will pay more for bounty. I don’t care. End of Hey, this commercial’s really worked on you, huh? They did. The quicker I bet you’re the type of

26:58
No, but like I just like that’s just like I like the paper towels that they have. Same thing is like I’m a I’m a PNG user. Right. Like PNG has got me. I like Tide. I like Bounty. Like I like whatever their whatever other bounce, whatever they have. um So I think if same thing with Yeti. Right. It does like I have friends you met I’m Sandy and Fete that are like.

27:23
If it’s not Yeti, they’re not drinking out of it. They’re not putting their cool. They’re not putting their picnic lunch in it. Like if Yeti, they have a Yeti blanket. OK, like a blanket. Yeti is not known for blankets. They’re known for coolers. Right. But they bought it because it’s Yeti. So I think having that brand loyalty is like I’m not arguing with that. I’m not arguing at all. I agree with you 100 percent. Yeah. The question is, it’s going to be harder to establish that brand loyalty.

27:52
if AI is doing all the shopping. Right. Like if you’re not familiar with Yeti in the first place and you’re trying to establish a brand, let’s say you’ve been in the press a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if AI is doing the if AI is presenting you with products, AI does not really care about brand unless that brand has been mentioned a lot and it just happens to rank high in AI. Yeah. Same with like uh so. So I use one thing I use AI to and not to book, but basically to get to the booking point is for travel.

28:21
Right. OK. Right. But I will tell AI when I get started, like I only I only will look at Marriott brands. Right. Do not do not tell me to book a Hyatt. Don’t tell me to book a Hilton. Like I have my loyalty at Marriott. Same thing with like I want to see Delta flights first. Now, I don’t necessarily will always. I mean, I try to fly Delta as much as I can. But like, obviously, if it means I have to take two connections, I will fly a different airline. But.

28:45
And I know and there’s a lot of people in that boat, right? Like, you know, other people are like, it’s usually based on where you live to like if you’re next to somebody’s hub, you know, you’re probably going to do that. So I think the brand, the branding, the brand loyalty, that actually is a way to I don’t want to say combat this because I don’t think you should come back. I think you should work with it. Right. I think you should do this. But I think that is a way to sort of continue to gain market share. Right. And build your business is that

29:15
if people like your brand, they’re gonna put that into AI. Like I wanna see dresses, but I only wanna see Kate Spade. um Or I only wanna see these three brands. And Jen might be that way too, right? Because also I think if you have a brand that you like, especially in clothing, right? What’s that shirt, untuck it, right? They’re a really popular shirt. You know, I actually liked the concept and then I walked in and I was like, whoa, okay.

29:44
I don’t like the concept that much. Why, does Brian wear untuck it? No, he wears, what’s the one on Amazon? Oh, there’s an Amazon brand for it? No, there’s a brand on Amazon, they sell t-shirts. You’re not talking about True Classic, right? True Classics. I will only buy him True Classic t-shirts now. If he wants a t-shirt that’s a nicer, not a work shirt, but a nice t-shirt, I will only buy the True Classics because I know the size, I know how they fit.

30:13
They hold up pretty well. um So I think being a brand, having that brand awareness is actually gonna be. I don’t disagree with you at I’m just worried about the future of discovery though. Yeah. What are you guys doing? Well, right now we’re just trying to clean up our listings. So, um But that’s a part of it. Yeah. So cleaning up the listings and then once we get to the new website,

30:43
that will be the next focus. But right now we have, you know, 250 listings that can’t. I mean, I still think the future is content. Yeah. Right. Because that’s what we still have the website where we just got a new social media person who is making some really fantastic reels. And really, that’s what we’re seeing is all about just hopping on the trend. Right. know, it’s funny, Charles,

31:13
emailed me a while ago and he was like, remember like you were going to make these love stories for Bumblebee linens and I, of which I have 10 already edited ready to go and I never released them. And the reason why is like, once you start that, it’s like this other task that you need to do on a weekly basis. And I kept thinking to myself, can I get away with not doing it? And so far the answer has been yes. I’ve gotten away with not doing social media for Bumblebee linens pretty much at all.

31:43
Right. Just by doing the agentic stuff and all these little things that I’ve been doing over the years to tweak everything. Yeah. And we’re already like, if you you were to type in like, who’s the leading provider of wedding handkerchiefs, we would show up unquestionably. Right. Yeah. So the question is, like, I hate I hate social media. I mean, I do it ironically for a living, right? Because I YouTube videos. But for something that I don’t

32:11
Not that I don’t stand behind my products, but I just don’t want to be creating content about the stuff that we sell. What’s your take on that? I think it’s still possible to build a brand off social media. think it’s Yeah, I think people like I mean, I know we’ve had this conversation so many times over the years. Like, I think people like following their favorite. I know they do media like I I’m a sucker for a behind the scenes video. I’m a sucker. Like, in fact,

32:39
I think I told you this, we went to the Yangling factory like a year and a half ago in Pennsylvania. sister, love to go to like how it’s made type stuff. And so they always plan these really fun like outings. So we went to the Mack Truck Museum and we went to the Yangling Bottling Factory, right? Two things that I did not care anything about when we went, right? But I was like, I always love to learn. It’ll be interesting. First of all, I could have spent two more days in the Mack Truck Museum.

33:05
And you know, I’m not into any of that, right? But I was like so fascinated with everything that goes into trucking, right? And like how they manufacture their trucks and how they’re doing like clean technology, right? And you know, all that stuff. And then also the history, right? Fascinating. The bottling company, I will watch bottles come off that line and be packed all day long.

33:26
Like, give me a lawn chair. just want to and watch it. Your favorite show growing up was Laverne and Shirley. know, right? No, but like, I just think people love knowing more about the brands they care about. No, I 100 % agree. Like, and to know that, you know, like when we went to the Ducati factory in Italy a couple of years ago, like just to learn and like watch people literally assemble motorcycles, like in person.

33:51
Fascinating, right? Because you’re like, these are the people that assembled my motorcycle two years earlier or whatever, you know? um So I just think people love that. I think people would love I tell you this all the time. People would love to see. Oh, no, no questions. No question. I’d watch an embroidery machine all day long. Right. And here’s why, because here’s what a lot of people do on social media. Right. They use it as an escape. Right. You’re you need to just escape everything else in your life. So you just open up Instagram, you open up TikTok and you doom scroll.

34:21
And you will doom scroll and watch like I watch these little travel video like these travel flags, right? I watch them beyond bracelets and keychains and like to the point where I was like, I need to have this a couple of months in. Right. Took a while, but that didn’t take that long when you think about like a normal sales cycle. um But I think people want to know about your company. And honestly, I think it builds the loyalty right that then allows you to they’re searching for handkerchiefs. They only want to see what Bumblebee has. They don’t care about other brands.

34:50
I’m not disagreeing with you at all. I just don’t think a middle-aged Chinese guy should be doing this. Yeah, I don’t know. But but then you see examples of this working. Paul Ivanovsky. Yeah, I know. No question. Right. Literally started M.L.U.S. by selling putting on dresses, women’s dresses on lives, selling them to middle-aged women. And people thought he was fantastic. Right.

35:15
Another example that I can think of current day is have you seen the baddie in the Ben’s guy who works at the Mercedes Benz dealership? Okay, it’s a Mercedes. have different feeds. I am very much in a marketing feed. Yeah, he works at a Mercedes Benz dealership. He’s a sales guy, right? In Georgia. And he like he started creating these tick tocks or reels or whatever. don’t know where they started where he’s like, um listen, girly pop.

35:43
got dumped, I’ve got your solution, roll up in a G-Wagon and he’s like literally getting out of the G-Wagon. He’s like custom seats, done. Like he just does all like, and he’s literally like he’s millions of followers, right? Like people go to this dealership to buy a Mercedes from this guy, right? Women, all women, right? Because he’s just like, and most people listening probably have seen him before because he’s very popular. But, you know, I just think like,

36:11
I know I’m never going to convince you to- No, no, no, I’m not disagreeing with you on anything. No, and I teach this stuff in the course, right? I guess it just depends on your motive. My dream is always to do as little work as possible while being satisfied with what you’re making. Right now, it’s pretty hands off. Okay, but you didn’t start there. Correct, did not start there.

36:38
But I’m a big fan of doing a lot of work upfront that can last for long time. So that’s why I’d been investing a lot of time in ranking an AI search. Right. Because that’s something that’s like ranking in Google. It’s going to last a long time. Hopefully. I don’t know. kind of in this midlife ecom crisis, right? Because I don’t know what’s going on. it because I focus a lot of efforts on ads. But like if AI shopping, you know, if it really gains traction.

37:07
I’m going to need another way than paying for ads. And I’m sure Google and Meadow will figure things out too on their end. They’re not going to let their cash cow die. But if anything, the way you advertise is going to fundamentally change. Like as soon as Google search goes away, how are their ads going to work exactly? I might have to learn a whole new way of optimizing these ads, which I guess for me would be worth it. But who knows whether they’re going to work well. And I do have this arsenal of

37:37
content for Bumblebee that I could release and I could start. I think if my daughter has any interest in the business, like she’d be like perfect for making the social media content for all this stuff. So there’s a plan for it. I mean, that’s what we did. We basically hired the owner’s daughter to do social media because she gets the audience. She gets the products like, um I mean, not everybody has that luxury, right? Sure. Of one having a kid.

38:04
Well, no, I’m just saying like I’m always if anyone’s listening to me, like my philosophy has always been do as little work as possible for because scaling something to like 100 million dollars just sounds like a nightmare to me. Well, and I don’t know. That’s the other thing. Like, I don’t think oh we actually I had a call yesterday and we talked about, you know, most people don’t need to get to 100 million dollars. 100 million dollars make you infinitely more happy than 10. They won’t. I guarantee you it won’t for anyone listening.

38:33
Yeah. So anyway, everyone has a number, right? Where they’re like, if I can get to this, you know, a lot of a lot of my everyday problems are solved. um But I think if you’re in the beginning stages of e-commerce and you’re, you know, a year in two years in and your content is the way to go. Content is the way to go. One hundred percent. And we saw this. You know, it’s so funny. We just wrapped up a video challenge in a profitable audience and we saw, you know, I feel like just us watching our um

39:02
Students make videos and the one that stands out to me the most was Mimi’s with the pink sunglasses and Just like you know, she was creating this video about why pink sunglasses are actually better for your eyes, right? like as she’s an optometrist and You know like to me it I just like felt far more loyal to everybody that made videos at the end of the the month, right? Cuz I was like, oh I get what you’re doing now. It makes sense Like I’m I’ve bought in right and and these are like people who have never made video. These are not polished video makers, right? These are like

39:32
people that are new at it. So I do think that it gives that connection point that’s really hard to get any other 100%. Yeah. Yeah. But I also think there is something to be said about working really hard up front and then not, I don’t want say coasting, but like letting your work pay off. Right. um It’s kind of like you building all these apps. Sure. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And for people listening to this, I mean, everyone’s going to have different personality for the people who just want to scale, scale, scale.

40:02
I’ve interviewed probably 600 people on this podcast. Most of them are miserable. Like when I turn, when I hit the stop button, like they’re like, it’s, like this constant, constant moving of the goal posts when you’re like that. So you really just got to figure out what, how much you need, which hopefully won’t change. Like I, maybe it’s cause we’re old that I’m talking to most, most young people don’t, don’t feel this way. I don’t, I don’t think, but, uh, maybe. Yeah.

40:31
do what needs to get done to achieve that goal and then just leave some room in your life to explore other things. Like I actually enjoy doing the content from my wife, Quid. It’s actually not a chore at all, but I have the system down now where I can really literally get it all done in half a day. know? Well, that’s what I think is so fantastic. Like to me, AI has its pros and cons, right?

40:57
And to me, that’s one of the big pros, right, is you’ve used AI to create a system for um content creation, right? So you’re still creating the content. It’s still you talking. You’re not trying to clone yourself or anything like that, which some people are doing. But you’ve used AI to do everything else, like a lot of the heavy lifting. And so now for you, I think you find it much more enjoyable because you’re not doing all the tedious work that you were doing before you could use AI to do it. Sure.

41:25
And that’s how I feel about e-comm also. I use AI to automate all the tedious stuff out and I want as little employees as possible. I can’t wait for the Tesla robots to come out. But yeah, we are at a crossroads. mean, if AI search, sorry, not AI search, AI shopping takes place, then there’s going be a lot of changes across the board. Hope you enjoyed this episode.

41:53
Things are changing quickly and I will keep you posted as things change. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 642. And once again, if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I sit down with Danny Kirk, founder of Reddit Reach, to talk about how e-commerce brands are using Reddit to get recommended by Chachibetee, Claude, and Proplexity. We get into the exact strategy for building up a Reddit presence from scratch, including how long it actually takes and what will get you banned. If you’ve ever wondered whether Reddit is worth your time as a brand, this episode will give you a very clear answer. But before we begin,

00:30
I just wanted to take a second to mention that I have a free ecommerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free at mywifequitterjob.com slash community and I would love to see you there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community. Now on to the show.

01:01
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Danny Kirk on the show. Now Danny runs Reda Reach, which is a company that helps e-commerce brands get mentioned on Reddit and in turn get recommended by Chachi BT, Proplexity, Claude and all the other LLMs. This company has been around for eight years, well before AI was mainstream. Danny is also a member of e-commerce fuel. This is where we kind of connected for today’s podcast.

01:29
And in this episode, we’re going to talk about how brands are using Reddit to improve their AI search visibility. And with that, welcome to the show, Danny. How are doing today? pretty well, Steve. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, so I know most of my listeners probably don’t know who you are. How did you get started in e commerce and then Reddit specific? Yeah, absolutely. Backing up even a little bit further than that. I have no um

01:54
No formal education in business. was a music major in college, actually, but that was never going to turn out into anything. Stumbled into some entrepreneurship about 15 years ago, had some swings and misses, had a couple big wins, grew a SaaS company for five years. After that, I took all those lessons learned in marketing and brought them to this agency, which is about a decade old now, having served close to 600 start-ups brands and SMBs to date.

02:22
um The category we’re in as far as Reddit marketing and AI search optimization is huge in e-commerce, of course, with changing buying trends. So that’s kind how we got involved with a lot of e-commerce brands. Okay. And do you have an e-commerce brand yourself? Because I know ECF requires that, right? No, they let me, you know, our mutual friends let me slide under the radar there as long as I agree to do no sales pitches. So I know I am not an operator. I’m just the guy that likes people’s posts. Okay. Okay.

02:51
that I did not know. All well, let’s start with like the basics because uh I don’t think we’ve covered this on the pod before like why is Reddit just important in the first place? Yeah, Reddit is a very interesting place. I think it’s still one of the most obscure parts of the internet. I say that it’s where passionate people hang out. ah I guess which is not also Twitter, uh or x.

03:14
ah But it is a very fascinating place. You have all these incredibly passionate people organizing themselves by topic matter called subreddits. These places are little nation states with all their own rules. They have kings and queens that moderate them. They do whatever they want. They follow rules. They don’t follow rules. And I think it’s important because it’s where humans still hang out. There’s a good number of bots too, but bots are everywhere these days, but still.

03:39
There’s a huge number of humans on there that are going to have true interactions to get true takes on brands. So that’s why I think it’s still a really awesome place. And then kind of um bring that forward. Reddit’s been unprofitable for about two decades. And finally, they created a business model, which was called selling their data to the AI companies. To Google, right? Yeah.

04:01
Google OpenAI also has a partnership as well, and thank goodness because I’m not quite sure they would have lasted any longer. But now that’s why they’re incredibly important and that’s their business model these days. So the AI companies are looking for that human data and that’s what they’re supplying. So is ads like a part of their revenue, a big part of the revenue, or is it mainly just selling to the big companies?

04:24
You know, I haven’t looked at their revenue split recently. Ads, they are pushing really hard these days. I know my Reddit feed is filled with advertisements about advertising. ah I imagine that’s a growing number on there, but uh still, I do think that this scraping and using their data is probably a meaningful portion of their revenue. Do you use Reddit ads at all, or is your strategy purely organic?

04:49
Purely organic and for the main reason that our brands have the top level outcome of wanting AI to recommend their brand, ads do nothing for that. Ads are still great on Reddit. They could work just from an advertising perspective, but AI is not scraping the advertisements. So for our clients and their outcomes, it doesn’t matter so much. So I know in the very beginning, think Reddit, there was a stat I had, it was like 40 % of like, you when it does a whole bunch of searches.

05:18
And then I read recently, maybe as of like two or three months ago, that dropped to like 10%. Have you seen any changes in the mentions and read it in the LLMs? Yeah, absolutely. Citations, they were even as high as 80 % last September, which I think we can all agree that’s way too high, too much consolidation.

05:39
um They I’m getting my data from probably another mutual friend of ours, Jeff Oxford, 180 marketing and visibility labs. He ran a great study on this. It now makes up around 20 % of citations on average. Okay. Okay. And then I used to be a Reddit user way back in the day, I used to promote my blog with it. And I used to get a lot of traffic from it because I had this group of like people with high karma.

06:07
And then one day, think someone complained that I got shadow banned. And then I so I created another account and then that got banned and I actually haven’t been on Reddit since. It’s very easy to get banned now, apparently. Yeah, absolutely. It’s getting stricter all the time. And for good reason, because there’s a lot of um actors on there that are doing unsavory things, in my opinion. So I think it’s good. They’re tightening things down. Most social media platforms are tightening things down in the age of AI.

06:35
But yeah, the shadow ban is one of the funniest things because most social media platforms just say, hey, we’re banning you. Reddit doesn’t tell you that. uh Eventually, you go to your URL in an incognito browser and it’s like you’ve been shadowed. Exactly. Yeah, it’s crazy. mean, it’s really popular in the e-commerce circles right now. I’ve chatted with a bunch of people who are, I use the term gaming Reddit because I mean, that’s kind of what it is, right? What we do with SEO and whatnot.

07:05
both black and gray hat techniques. Recently, I think it was like a week ago, Reddit stated that they will require accounts to verify that they are run by a human, which in my opinion is a need for every single social media platform today. Are your methods, how would you classify those? White, gray, black? would say white to gray, and it’s also just depending on other people’s perspective on them too. But yeah, I would say

07:34
Um, what is black, um, in my opinion is, uh, false claims of use. Um, you know, fake testimonials, um, sharing, uh, tracking links, sharing links at all. actually just don’t do that ever. Um, influencing, I don’t like the buying of upvotes that is influencing in my opinion. what is it? Sorry. What was that one? Uh, or buying of upvotes or downvotes. Oh, buying upvotes. Okay.

08:00
Right, right, right. I consider that one a black hat one just because that’s influencing without a disclaimer that you’re influencing. To me, if you’re pasting one comment that mentions a brand, there are so many Reddit accounts, that’s not really influencing, you know. So I consider a self on the white area of the spectrum. Okay. All right. So you are, guess, the first pure white hat person I’m going be talking to.

08:25
All right, so I know you run an agency. Let’s say I’m signing up as a client. Walk me through your strategy. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple different things. There’s two major organic strategies on Reddit. In my opinion, the first one is a branded strategy that’s having your own branded account. It sounds like you may have done that in the past with your blog. Just saying, was that what you did? I did. Yeah, it was it was my wife, quit her job. I had my bio and everything and it was going great for about

08:55
two years, I want to say. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I and I do actually think you probably could have gotten it back. I do know some people that have run branded strategies and sometimes people get mad at them and they, you know, message the moderators and get it back activated. But the branded strategy is a great one. I call it the fairy godmother of the brand. If you’re a big name e commerce company, you probably already have people talking about you on Reddit. And this is just like the

09:23
you know, the friendly customer service that floats in. If somebody mentions the brand, like, hey, thanks for being a customer or like, can I answer your questions or here’s some resources based on like what you mentioned. You’re not trying to sell anything. You’re just being helpful and you’re being transparent about who you are.

09:40
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

10:08
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quiet Light has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change, it was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quiet Light

10:38
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. Then the non-branded strategies, that is essentially using accounts that don’t have a brand attached to them. A great one for a lot of e-commerce brands, and I gave a big presentation to the ECF community last month about this, I believe is just merely asking your customers if they are active on Reddit.

11:07
And if they are willing to share their story, you you’re already asking them after the checkout, you know, hey, rate us on Google or Amazon or Shopify or whatever, you’re already asking for those reviews. If they’re stoked to do it, and if they’re also an active Redditor, which is important here, ask them to share their story on Reddit as well. So I think that’s huge, putting it as part of your flow. And then finally, obviously you can, and this maybe gets a little bit into the gray area, but you can do…

11:34
Brand mentions from a non-branded strategy, just going out there answering questions from a general use account. But this is where I think we’re on the white hat side of it. No false claims, no fake testimonials or anything like that. Okay, so let’s say I was a customer for Brand and they asked me to do a review on Reddit. I’d probably say no, it sounds risky, right? Like you post something like that, you’re probably gonna get banned or someone’s gonna be like, hey, this is fishy.

12:03
Yeah, would. Yeah, it’s definitely kind of as far as all of the reviews online that you could ask your customers to do. It’s a tricky one for sure. I believe the most important thing is, A, don’t ask all 20,000 of your customers to do it on the same day. know, triple it out to email campaign that’s partitioned each month. But ask the ones that are already active because they will have a higher chance of… Define active actually.

12:31
Yeah, so they already have an account, they use it every day, they have karma, they have experience probably in your category. So if they’re an active Reddit user and they also bought your product, that means they’re already a part of the subreddit that you want them to mention your product in, in all likelihood. That’s probably a tiny subset of your customers. Yeah, absolutely. Most e-commerce brands have m a lot of customers. So even if it’s a half a percent,

13:00
If you can get some really passionate people talking about it So that’s to answer your question how you de-risk that because I think you’re right You don’t want everyone doing it, but you want those super users that are also reddit users to go out there and do it Interesting. So I guess could you mind these people through AI? Actually, you wouldn’t even know their IDs though. So you’d have to actually ask them right with the black. Okay

13:22
I do believe that yeah, it would probably be in an email, uh email blast or something like that trickled out over the course of a year. So not everyone does it that once something like that, I believe. So let’s say you want to go the founder route that was those option number one, like, I remember back in the day, I had a group of friends, and that’s how I built up my karma because they already had karma, like how what’s the strategy for building up any karma at all these days? Yeah, absolutely. I so

13:50
I’ve got uh kind of a little 12 week strategy, which I’m happy to share with your audience. ah But it really does take probably three to six months to kind of warm up an account in a genuine way. And this is not doing any of these crazy karma hacks, which can get you in trouble. This is just going into those communities that you’re already stoked on. Maybe it’s where your customers are, or maybe it’s just like your favorite sports team and just start commenting on things, answer questions, upvote other things, ask people questions as well.

14:20
Just do it in genuine way. There’s also some kind of tactics that will not get you in trouble, which I always love. One of my favorites is actually AskTO, AskToronto. So, know, Canadians, the friendliest, most helpful people on planet Earth. I went in there one time and I was like, hey, Toronto, what’s the best ramen place in Toronto? And, you know, I had like 100 comments and upvotes and like…

14:48
five minutes because everyone just chimed in and stuff like that. So there are also genuine ways and I believe that’s also helpful to other people that may also have that question that can go in there and see that information. So I think there’s ways to genuinely do it about the topics you’re interested in and also maybe farm some karma in a genuine and helpful way to others as well. 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,

15:18
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15:48
So it’s been a while since I’ve been on Reddit, pre pandemic. How do you get like, what gets you karma? Like, do have to post a topic that gets up votes? Just responding to other people’s comments doesn’t really build karma that much, right? Yeah, it’s, yes, it is all about the upvotes. So either um upvotes on the post that you made or upvotes on the comment you made. yeah, responding in and of itself doesn’t do that, but somebody liking your response or your post doesn’t.

16:17
Okay, and so you’re suggesting to go into these ask groups. I don’t know, like if I if I started doing that with zero karma or whatever, like, does that work? Like, how do you it’s hard, like the start problem is hard. Yeah, the start problem is hard. And some subreddits have a minimum amount of karma to even interact with them. I would go I would go and search for your favorite topic areas.

16:41
um And in like super niche, like I just got into bow hunting this last year. So I am new to the bow hunting subreddit, but I’ve gone in there, I’ve posted a couple questions, people have chimed in, the niche aspect of that really helps. So I’ve like asked questions about carrying one on a plane if I was going somewhere and.

17:04
whatnot. I think the niche aspect of it is going to help you a lot versus like going to those mega ones and just trying to be heard in the sea of people. So would you recommend being a brand in doing this? It seems like it’d be easier with like a third party account, so to speak, then then a brand going in there asking questions, right? It is it is easier with a brand or with a third, sorry, with a third party account.

17:29
Brand is definitely a very long game, but let me tell you about my favorite first party or branded strategy Reddit user. His username is um YourBizBroker. So he’s a business broker. He helps people buy, sell, and value their businesses. Anybody, and he’s got 30,000 karma, and uh it’s incredible. uh And anybody…

17:54
that asks a question about buying, selling, or valuing a business, he goes in and makes a three paragraph long comment answer, giving him his genuine free take. And it has no call to action whatsoever. Like no, like, hey, schedule a call time with me. But there’s no surprise people are like, whoa, that was incredible. ah They go to his profile. It has a link to schedule a call with them. And he gets leads like crazy. But yet again, he gets karma from being helpful. So I do think that, uh and he’s been doing this for

18:23
on the order of years now. So obviously it’s a long game. It’s not impossible, but you have to have that long-term mindset. All right, so walk me through those first three to six months then of just building up an account. You said something about a 12-step plan or something like that? Yeah, for sure. I’d be happy to share a link with your audience so they can grab that and whatnot. But yeah, a lot of it, kind of first and foremost, and we’re talking about brand new strategy here is it’s kind of similar to LinkedIn, know, choose a good username.

18:53
ah One thing to note, you cannot change your username once it’s there. So choose wisely. I would have something as part of your brand name, but maybe like founder in front of it. Like if you’re speaking from a founder perspective, make it a little bit cooler than LinkedIn would do it. ah You know, have a banner image, have links to your website, a little bit about a bio section. ah So optimize your profile. That’s the billboard. ah Then from there, just go join into the subreddits. ah

19:21
where your community’s at. So, ah you know, if it’s a uh foot bed sole for running shoes, go enjoy those communities, marathons, ultra running, you know, whatever it might be, first time runners, and just be helpful. Yet again, just like your bismaraproprit does, just answer really good questions. People are probably gonna have a question about their plantar fasciitis and what sole shoe I get. No sales pitch whatsoever, just answer questions.

19:49
for the first month or so, build up that karma, people will like it. And then from there, you can maybe start your marketing efforts, but only once you’ve got some karma built up. What time commitment are we talking about here? How many posts a day? Yeah, I find this like revolt, you know, I hate, would hate doing it, you know, because it seems so contrived. So yeah, what would you recommend? Yeah, I would call it, if you’re willing to dedicate

20:15
uh 15 minutes a day. And there are some tools out there that can help you. So first of all, always be a human. Reddit has an incentive to knock the bots off their platform. So uh I advocate only for humans owning accounts and acting as a human. No automations. But there’s some tools out there. One that I love uh is subreddit signals. I’m a friend with the founder. And you just input your website and it will like populate.

20:41
that would be relevant to you. So that’s gonna save you a huge amount of time just searching for things to comment on. And then it does it every day. So using a tool like that to do the searches and then 10 to 15 minutes a day, go in there, make a really helpful comment, not using AI or anything like that. That’s how you can start that snowball rolling and be consistent about it. Okay, so posting comments won’t get you karma though, right? So you’re just trying to…

21:08
become a member of the community, like a real member of the community at this point? No, there is Comet Karma and there’s Post Karma. So anything that can be upvoted and downvoted, you can have Karma at. And that happens at the post. And they actually divvy it up in your profile. You can see Post Comet and ah Comet Karma. um That person, George Visbroker, he actually has 30,000 Comet Karma and only like 10 Post Karma because he’s only done Comet.

21:37
And he’s built up his business just based on commenting other people’s stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, a little bit of a a little bit of a bias there. You know, a biz broker, his ticket sales size is massive. So for an e-commerce brand, it’s it’s a different game. It’s more about brand visibility. It’s very much a long game. And maybe you can have your social media person handle all this. It’s a different kind of calculus with the math. But I do still think it’s.

22:06
So in this beginning, you’re not even mentioning your brand whatsoever. You’re just answering questions and whatnot. when does the marketing part start? How much karma do you recommend before you even think about mentioning anything related to your brand? Boy, it would be nice if you had a thousand karma, which is not impossible to Yeah. That’s hard, actually. Yeah, it’s hard, but I think it’s, I believe in playing long-term games. So it’s good if you’re,

22:34
If you’re of that same mindset as I am, I think it’s worth it because we’re building something that’s compounding here. ah But yeah, that might take some time. I I’ve known people to get a, well, what did I do? I can’t remember what I did. I took a picture of something that was kind of news related and I was the first person to post about it. And I got 2000 Karma in like 10 minutes just because I happened to be the person that posted about it first. ah So it is possible to do instantaneously, but.

23:01
ah It’s harder. Yeah, it is harder to do a little bit on the kind of longer term the slow and steady approach So would you recommend like you mentioned you posted something in like news or whatnot? Like would you mention just bill? Would you recommend just building up your karma like elsewhere not in your targeted subreddits? Yes, my names and stuff or what you know, yeah, I I would say yes, it doesn’t matter whatsoever There’s not a quality of karma, you know, or nobody can see where it was built. So yeah, that’s why I kind of I think I mentioned a bit ago I added in there

23:31
things that you’re excited about outside of business, know, your favorite sports team or your favorite hobby, things like that. And it’ll also make your account look more genuine, which is important in my opinion. Okay. All right. So this clearly is a lot. You might even have to enjoy Reddit in order to do this strategy, right? I think so. It’s in the same way I’m active on LinkedIn uh every single day for a year now. And boy, has it been a slog.

23:58
But now I’ve got this daily practice that’s non-negotiable and I’m able to do it every single day. It feels very similar to Reddit. But to your point, I had to have liked LinkedIn first to do it. If you don’t, it might not be the platform for you. Okay. Well, let’s say you have a thousand Karma now. Then how does the strategy shift? Yeah. Still talking about Branded Strategy. The people that are doing it the best on there,

24:25
ah I really love uh them building in public. So sharing their stories, you know, and this could be for like SaaS founders of new companies like, hey, this is the problem we were having. We built this tool for it in the relative communities. Maybe going back to my bow hunting things, maybe you are a manufacturer of releases for bow hunting and you’re like, hey, we just… uh

24:50
you know, we’re new onto the scene, just built this new thing, wanted to share it with the community. Yet again, no sales pitch or something like that. But building in public is super effective on Reddit. So that’s how you would do it. ah You know, I can see you cringing a little bit. That sounds suspicious to me. That sounds like some that sounds like something that is borderline ban material to me, at least. Yeah, it’s um so certain subreddits will not allow it whatsoever. OK.

25:17
I would say that is a very small portion of all total subreddits, but of course, read the rules first, go into your category subreddits and see if they just like, nobody ever does that, all right, that’s a problem. Or yeah, people mention brands all the time and they tell stories in here and whatnot. ah Having the account be from the founder’s perspective is more important than it just being from the company’s perspective, because then that definitely looks like promotion.

25:44
It’s more of like thought leadership. If we were on LinkedIn, it would be called thought leadership where the founders kind of sharing their story. Would you like not even mention your brand then? Like you spent all this time building up this 1000 karma account, which could be taken away in one fell swoop, which would right. Yep, absolutely. I think that’s a great way to do it. I mean, you can certainly I’ve seen people mention their brand. But yeah, you can make it mysterious at the end, like, hey, this was the problem we’re having. We built the solution.

26:11
happy to share it with any of you um if you are interested in learning more. And then at that point, if you go that route and people say yes, then you can tell the moderator like, hey, these people opted in to me sharing more information with them. That’s provable that people asked for it. So that is kind of how you protect it there. Okay, what are just some gotchas that’ll get you banned?

26:34
Yeah, mean, um sharing links not being helpful, sharing tracking links, for sure. uh Being promotional where you’re not allowed to be. uh Well, what are you allowed to be promotional? I mean, there’s no. Yeah. Yeah.

26:51
So some subreddits don’t care whatsoever. They don’t have a rule against promotion. So some of them you can totally be. There’s a couple of SaaS ones actually, and I’ve known a couple SaaS companies to grow that way. And everyone’s just sharing what they built and you’re totally allowed to be promotional. there are places where you can. Yeah, mean, promotion on the kind of other sides of things.

27:14
It’s a little bit trickier. is about storytelling. It is about being helpful and then hopefully people go check out your page and your solution. Here’s a question for you. There’s a million subreddits on Reddit, Is there a tool that will help you find all of the subreddits where you could potentially be marketing in? Yeah, absolutely. Subreddit Signals is definitely one of those. Oh, okay. Yeah, for sure. That’s a really good one. ah

27:41
Mochi Social is a great one for posting. Actually, it will identify the subreddit. It’s very similar to subreddit signals. um It will then um read the rules of the subreddit and help you draft posts that aren’t going to get you in trouble based on those rules. Yeah, we live in an incredible age, don’t we? mean, the fact that all these tools exist means it’s already gamified. You know what saying? Yeah, it’s uh

28:07
It’s yeah, there was definitely a period of time and probably when you were doing it, ah you know, it’s like pay per click ads, you know, reading like, uh for our work week where he talks about pay per click ads, you know, 20 years ago, it’s like, boy, those were the days. Yeah, actually, back in my day, there was really everyone was pretty much a human but like the promotional was very obvious, right? Like you the link or you’d say go here or whatever and then you get away with it a couple of times but yeah, totally.

28:37
All right, so this sounds like a lot of work, right? So using these tools and you’re posting for 15 minutes, what does 15 minutes get you a day? Like, yeah, I think that that gets you maybe, you know, assuming the TAM is large, I feel like you could do five really great comments if you’re focusing on comments. And we always like the ratio of like way less posts to comments. So like 20 comments for every post yet again,

29:05
Posts are inherently promotional. You’re waving your hand and saying, hey, this is me. Comments are helpful. So always do way more comments than posts. Yeah, I think that if it were me, like one post a week, try to do 20 comments a week and use some of these tools to make it real easy to do. And for all your big e-commerce listeners out there, this is a job for your social media person. Yeah, it’s not the CEO. The goal, though, is to get your brand mentioned, right? Yep.

29:35
So do you just, the problem is like there’s an investment to get started here and then there’s always in the back of your mind like this, that you could get banned. uh What’s a safe way to mention your brand? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that this is kind of where more of the non-branded strategy comes in. having super customers and super users of Reddit. um

30:01
that are already in those communities, go in and tell their story or provide some feedback on your product. ah Also non-branded strategy, just sharing information about your brand that’s actually accurate and truthful with no misrepresentations in relevant posts. I think that’s where you really pour gas on the of AI search side of things, because those are direct brand mentions. It’s also hopefully distributed across other accounts too, so there’s less account risk. So the first part you said, get other big Redditors, like how do you meet these people?

30:31
Oh, yeah. Excuse me. I meant from your customer list. trying to have them… list. Yeah. yeah, trying to get those testimonials. Yeah, like we talked about, it’s going to be a tiny fraction of your customers, but it should go a long way because if you do allow them to self-select as a super user of Reddit, which means they’re already in those communities, they’re trusted, which means their information and their say will go a longer way.

31:00
You know, one thing I totally forgot to ask you in the very beginning of this, Danny, is can you just give me some demonstrable impacts of doing this? Yeah, absolutely. So, um yeah, we had one protein bar company that was pretty small, seven-figure protein bar company, but they were going up against the eight-figure incumbent who had already just sold a nine-figure protein bar brand that probably everyone already knows. And ah yeah, the other company wasn’t doing much on Reddit, wasn’t doing much on AI search.

31:30
So we were, they had a really great niche, which is always important, know, protein bars for X, Y, and Z. So we were able to go in there, provide really helpful information. know, imagine you’re somebody that has like a gut issue that can only eat a certain type of things. you also like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or something, you know, like all of these things tied together. That’s a great niche. You know, going in there and providing really great information that’s mentioning the brand. They were getting customers directly from Reddit and then saw a huge upswing.

31:59
In AI search traffic some of our clients. We’ve seen 900 % increase in AI search traffic Recently using some of these tactics so it can have a big impact. What are you using to measure AI search visibility? Just what tools? Yeah a couple different tools out there AI peekaboo.com is one of them. Okay, those guys friends with the founders as well and full disclaimer have no financial relationship to them just good good dudes

32:28
Also, Peak AI is a really great one. the person I respect most in the industry who’s very technical likes that one. I think that’s probably a great one. Profound is a big name, although I think they probably just poured some VC gas money on it. So given that, like even the measurement methods for being visible in AI, I think are just kind of in its infancy right now.

32:55
And the fact that a lot of times they you might do your research on AI, but then do like a Google search for the brand. How is how are these sales being correlated? Yeah, a couple different ways. So I think the kind of most causal thing with Reddit um is having a post sales survey. So just how do you hear about us? Reddit being an answer. You know, not everyone’s going to answer that question, but that’s pretty causal about if you heard about us or AI. um

33:23
AI is a little bit tricky, a little bit trickier. There are these great tools out there. I think we can all acknowledge that the data is as bad as it’s ever gonna be today. And then tomorrow it’s gonna get better and better. So those tools will help you track traffic and mentions and referrals. ah So I think those are some of the kind of best methods on it. But yeah, we’re early on in the game. They’re only gonna get better from here. I guess from like an agency perspective, right? You have to show your customers.

33:51
that what you’re doing actually is leading to sales. And that’s why I’m asking you, how do you show to them that it’s worth the money? Yeah, it really is. ah It really is those two things. Post-sales survey, ah because there’s two different aspects of it, like the AI search optimization and Reddit. So does Reddit really matter? It’s like, oh yeah, post-sales survey, AI search optimization using a peak or peekaboo or profile on the other end of it. OK. Yeah, it seems like a hard

34:21
thing for you to, like a post-sales survey, maybe like one or 2 % might fill that out, right? So. Yeah, for sure. It definitely is. And, um you know, we are a sister agency of Visibility Labs, which is a Jeff Oxford brand. um So we do the full AI search optimization. So just speaking briefly about that, Reddit is one of four pillars. It’s the largest piece, but then you have uh content that AI loves to read in a format it likes, optimizations to the website.

34:51
And also brand mentions broadly across the internet are the highest correlation thing to AI recommended brand. So those other things are important too. And obviously if you’re doing those other channels too, you’re going to have other metrics to measure as well. But I just thought I’d mention that. All right. So I actually want to talk about how your agency operates. So let’s say I hire you and I want to build up my karma. I assume that you have a whole bunch of huge accounts.

35:19
that can quickly accelerate that? what’s your MO? Yeah, for sure. So we focus kind of on the non-branded strategy on our side of things for building up your karma. I’m going to give you the bad news that I think that needs to be done on your end genuinely and whatnot. And I just say this, I say this as a white hat person. Sure. Because

35:44
um If I use my network to help you, I call that influencing and that gets into FTC rules, which yet again, oh it’s all anonymous, but I actually do care about being on the correct side of those rules. um So that’s why we don’t do any of this web of upvoting or anything like that. We try to just genuinely build it by being helpful. Okay. So what is your service then? Like what do you provide?

36:12
Yeah, for sure. um We consult people and help them on the first party strategy, the branded strategy, getting them set up, getting them going those first 12 weeks. And then we also help them kind of pour gas on their brand awareness through a third party strategy using general use accounts, spreading factually accurate and truthful information with their brand name in it. So you are posting on the brand’s behalf? Oh, no, that’s on a non branded strategy. Sorry. So

36:40
uh Yeah, just sharing information in the comments on relevant posts that mentions their brand in a factually accurate way. Okay, right. So like, I would post with my brand and then you’d use your accounts to post comments on that, right? You know, uh we can do that. We also do it kind of more broadly across different topics that are not brand related. uh So just problem and solution, like the person with the gut issue looking for a protein bar for their ultra race coming up.

37:10
We’ll go in there and kind of bring the brand into that from a non-branded strategy. ah So yeah, we don’t usually interact with the brand’s posts yet again, that feels a little bit too much like influencing to me because we know it’s happening, but we’re just trying to help the other humans point them in the direction of the brand and then they can go find out more information about them. Give me an example of that because to me it all, like the line between influencing is very fine here, right? Yeah.

37:38
Yeah, absolutely. And this is obviously just my opinion. I’m not a lawyer. Yeah, of course. But yeah, I think that so yeah, what would be influencing um since Reddit is run off of karma, anything that influences karma, up voting and down voting is a no no to me because that is actually influencing the quality and the ranking and things like that. accounts will never up vote or down vote anything.

38:06
Nope, yeah, we are very much on the content side of things. So just providing helpful comments. Our goal is to provide helpful comments on things that spread accurate information about our clients brand and mention them. And then our comments are so helpful that the community upvotes us. We don’t need to do that. Other people can do that. So that’s our goal. Stay away from the actual influencing itself. uh If you were me,

38:33
And then, yeah, just focus on really great content that you don’t need to have focus other people will. Give me an example of an unbranded comment that one of your accounts would post that moves people towards the brand. Yeah, absolutely. it would, you know, as an example, we did have a foot foot bed or shoe bed company that was well known in the ultra running space. So going in there, somebody asking about

39:01
Yeah, maybe they have a plantar issue or they’re training for their next race and their sole bed didn’t work from their last shoe, but they do like the shoe itself. We would go in there and say like, hey, heard great things about X brand. They do X, Y, and Z, which is all- but you are mentioning the brand in that case, right? Yep, exactly. Yeah. All right. Yeah, sorry if there was confusion. We do mention the brand in those comments. We just try to share really helpful information. The goal is to be helpful first.

39:30
and mention the brand as part of being helpful, but not the other way around. Okay. Okay. All right. So that makes more sense. Okay. So you, you know a lot about the brand. You probably have a collection of testimonials. You know what information is relevant to that particular brand. And then you go around putting, putting comments strategically on all these various subreddits for people that have whatever issue the brand solves. Yep. Exactly. Okay. Yeah.

39:54
that side of things. then yeah, consulting and helping brands stand up their first party branded strategy, which is also important, but obviously kind of a longer time horizon. do you take a hold of the brands account also and post comments on their behalf to? We do not. And I, and for the main reason that Reddit gets very freaked out about username or

40:18
passwords being shared on different screens and IP addresses and stuff like that. That’s like a really quick way to get your account banned. So you can do it a couple times, you know, like share it with your social media person, but it really should live on like a couple people’s devices versus like, oh, it logged in from New York and now it’s in Tucson. Like what’s going on here? uh They are very suspicious of that. ah So yeah, we don’t want to jeopardize those accounts. So it’s best handled by a social media person that we can give a daily.

40:48
You know what’s funny about Reddit is like if you get one ban account, like every account that you own gets banned. At least that’s been my experience. Yeah, that’s why people put them on and we don’t do any of this. um But yeah, people with like networks of accounts on different devices, know, the IP addresses are all different. uh It’s a crazy world out there. Well, I’m trying to what I’m trying to say, Dan, sell me on this because it sounds like

41:15
it would give me paranoia because I’m putting, spent all this time building up this account that could in theory get banned in every account that I ever create by being overly promotional by accident even, right? Yeah, yeah. And that’s why I’m a, that could happen. That’s why I’m a bigger fan of non-branded strategy because you can get brand mentions in it. You’re distributing the risk across other accounts. Now this could just be your,

41:44
customers that are also super users of Reddit, you’re distributing that risk that is high trust. It’s factually accurate and truthful information. ah So that’s why I’m kind of a bigger fan of that. You’re distributing that risk and you’re getting good brand mentions out there. Yeah, it is tricky with uh the first party strategy. I guess why should anybody care? Reddit is still the largest single source of citations. There are strong partnerships in place. uh Buying trends are heading toward AI.

42:11
More and more people are trusting their AI companion to recommend brands to them ah So it’s gonna be a very small portion of your traffic today But I do think this is SEO 20 years ago and you want to get on the compounding train Yeah, even if it’s a little bit painful And then if you’re cuss if you don’t have any customers that have seasoned ready accounts What what can you do? Yeah, you can go out there. There’s platforms like crowd reply is one of them

42:39
that has a network of accounts that people do various things with. So there are networks of Reddit accounts out there that are non-branded. Yeah, I mean, I know I’m asking all these probing questions. And to be fair, my business is built upon all these social media platforms that I have no control over also. I guess the difference is with Reddit, in my opinion, is that Reddit is much quicker to the banhammer.

43:09
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think they are, which to me, and this is the tough part, I think it’s a good thing because it’s gotten kind of overrun lately with um unsavory black hat actors and that needs to be cleaned up. Like you said, every social media platform is having that issue. I imagine they will overshoot it and then have to reverse back on how strict they are, like most platforms do.

43:33
But I uh think it’s a good thing. It kind of forces people to try to be good actors, try to be genuine on there. um But yeah, it is tricky. It kind of forces you to understand the ethos of the communities, which is important. yeah, a bit of a non-answer for you there, Steve. No, no, no. Again, I’m in my mind. I’m weighing in my mind, like, do I want to try this? You know, like if I post content on LinkedIn,

44:01
which is something you’ve mentioned and some I just started doing within like the last three months I post every day. Like there’s very little risk of all the work that I’m doing getting flushed down the drain. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and that’s why I do love that. um Going back to your biz broker. I mean, that guy’s been doing it for years now. People love him. That’s just a great example of how to do it well. And he has told me that he’s run into some issues sometimes, but

44:29
he is such a staple of the community that like he’s able to reach out to the moderators and be like, oh, hey, somebody didn’t like this. And, you know, I got in trouble, like, what can I do? And they’re always being helpful. So I think being a staple of the community, yet again, being helpful, ah you know, to people out there is huge. Which brings me actually to my final question. Is there like a certain point where you have immunity? um I don’t think so. I heard that, um,

44:57
Paul McCartney, think, or no, since one of the Beatles, somebody went on there the other day and did like an AMA and got banned like accidentally. For an AMA? I think it was an accident, but like clearly there was like not immunity there somehow. I don’t know what happened, but I saw an article about that. um I imagine obviously relative to an account that has one karma, an account that has 100,000 karma is a lot better, but. um

45:23
Yeah, I think you kind of got to play it safe forever, especially in this age with bots just becoming incredibly human-like. All of these social media platforms are just cracking down. I I see it on LinkedIn all the time. They’ve banned multiple automation tools actually, and they’re founders. I’m not quite sure if you’ve seen that, but they’ve literally kicked the founders of these tools off the platform. So like I said before this, I’ve talked to other people who do Reddit. And so one of the strategies that I talked about is creating your own subreddit.

45:53
or taking over a dead subreddit. I mean, is that part of what you do also? Because then you have full immunity over whatever you want to do, right? Yeah, creating a good, your own subreddit can work. I’ve seen it work best um if the tribe is strong, if there’s active users in your category on there. And it also really helps if you also have a large customer base that you can just be like, hey, are you on Reddit as well?

46:20
we have our own subreddit. And yeah, that’s certainly where you can make those posts that we talked about in kind of a bit of a promotional way or sharing product updates without them getting banned. Because you’re the king of the castle there. Yeah. So is that like the ultimate goal? I know you a certain amount of karma to even put up a subreddit, right? But if you’re posting all this great content, why not have it be under your own subreddit? Yeah, you certainly can. Talk about a long game, though. So like your subreddit,

46:48
has one member in it to start and your whole tribe is over in the subreddit or subreddit with 500,000 members. That’s a long game, kind of getting them over to your side. I think it’s totally worth it if you’re willing to play that long game, but it is just, if karma is hard to build, convincing humans to come to your little nation state can be tricky as well. So you will, in order to convince those people, you will have to do things in their nation state in order to tell them about yours.

47:18
I guess the question is, is does it matter for LLM visibility? I would say it matters less than all other things on Reddit. you can more easily mention your brand in your own subreddit because you’re making the rules, but AI is looking for human signal.

47:41
So if there’s not many humans in your subreddit, like engaging on things or upvoting it, that’s less signal for AI. So even though you can mention your brand a lot, you’re still going to have to convince humans to come over to your island there. ah I would probably underweight it at the moment, but over time, it could be good. It’s just a very long game. I see. So you’re saying that in order to get mentioned, AI takes into account how lively the subreddit is.

48:09
um Yes, from what we see, and I’ll make the disclaimer that I don’t own an LLM and I have no knowledge of I know, it’s just what you see in the changes every day, of course. Yeah, for sure. The greatest black box of all time. ah But yeah, from what we see, that does appear to have an influence over it. And how would you rate this strategy versus just content creation for the sake of

48:34
Like there’s a lot of methods which we didn’t even get into, right? For getting mentioned the LLMs outside this Reddit strategy. Like how would you weight all of those? I would weight it at 20 % because that’s what it is. Well, I, yeah, I, and that’s a very broad answer. You know, for some, for some companies it’s much higher for some it’s 1%.

48:55
Yeah, we for a lot of our clients these days, we’re doing the full AI search optimization because yeah, their only outcome they want is to consistently be recommended on AI. So they need to be doing 100 % of things. But uh yeah, I would rate weight it as a heavy 20%. Let me ask the question in a different way. What are some great candidates for your service? Yeah, so um companies that have um a large TAN, Total Addressable Market, um

49:24
We’re US based. would say any consumer good is usually large, which is almost all e-commerce brands. I would say that almost all e-commerce brands fit this. And then a really good niche with passionate people is helpful because the passionate people will help you uh kind of build.

49:46
build on that momentum. Yet again, we’re trying to share content that the community lives up. So if there’s passionate people in your market and the TAM is large, it’s usually- Can we cite numbers to this? Like what is a good size community? Oh, usually a lot of the individual subreddits that are the best or, you know, at least kind of 10,000, 50,000 people, which is seems like a lot, but it’s not that.

50:14
large, you know, it’s not small on Reddit, but it’s also like nowhere near that big. I mean, the closest analogy that I can think of is like a Facebook group, right? A Facebook group with 100,000. I mean, I’ve had people in this podcast that build entire businesses off of just marketing on Facebook groups. see Reddit is kind of something similar. Maybe not exactly because the LLMs tie into it. But sounds like 10,000 isn’t that big actually.

50:38
Yeah, no, not that big. Yeah, I definitely like that Facebook metaphor. We have a client that’s in leather goods and they have like a Facebook group with 250,000 customers in it. And boy, talk about being a great opportunity to go on Facebook and say, hey, are any of y’all Reddit users? ah You they’re already active on social media, maybe 10 % or 5 % are. And oh, we have a subreddit now. Go like our page, you know, go join it.

51:05
Interesting. Yeah. So when you onboard someone, I imagine you have your own requirements too, because you obviously don’t want your clients to fail. What are your requirements to even work with somebody? Yeah. First and foremost, are they a good person? I like their like their work with you, Darian? So I mean, yeah, oh for sure. I made an exception once. ah Yeah, I there’s so much business out there that I do try to be picky. ah You know,

51:32
Bad clients are the worst and I’m sure they probably say the same thing about me sometimes, but a good fit is always the best. And then yeah, back to those other items. I was talking to somebody the other day, there was a super niche they were making. They had a new platform to help uh cosmetic chemists create new formulas. And I just told them flat out, we can’t help you that Tam is too small. There’s like two people on the platform talking about this.

52:00
I’m sure I could take your money, but we’re not going to have any outcomes for you. So something like that is probably the opposite of what we’re looking for. I see. So you basically look at Reddit and you figure out there’s a minimum number of clients in that audience, and that’s how you make the determination. Yep, exactly. Just like an SEO agency would look at search traffic for key phrases and all that jazz. Yeah, kind of reverse engineering it a bit. Okay.

52:25
Well, Danny, I apologize for grilling you. I’m very curious about this topic. like any question that comes to my head, but like if anyone needs help with their Reddit strategy, where can they find you? Yeah, thanks, Steve. Yeah, go to our website. It’s ready. R E D D I reach R E A C H ready reach dot com. I’m also very active on LinkedIn. You can find me at my handle is Daniel P Kirk. If you type in Danny Kirk ready reach also find me there. Shoot me a note. Always happy to offer my free advice. Cool.

52:55
And then based on the questions I’ve asked you, think anyone who does contact you is pre-qualified, I think at this point for listening to this episode. Absolutely, yeah. And if any of your listeners want that 12-week free cycle, kind of getting you onboarded on there, happy to give you my document for free. Yeah, I’ll link that up in the notes, just send me that link after. But thank you for coming on, Danny, I appreciate it. All right, thanks, Steve.

53:23
Hope you enjoyed this episode and let me know if you decide to give Reddit marketing a try, because I know for a fact that it works. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequaterjob.com slash episode 641. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

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’m recording live from Shopify HQ in New York City after attending the Merchant Mastery event with my co-host Tony. We cover a wide range of topics, including why unpolished UGC content is outperforming produced ads, how to build a brand story that ties all of your marketing together, and why generic products are slowly dying.

00:25
But before I begin, I just want to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free over at mywifequitterjob.com slash community, and I would love to see you there. That is mywifequitterjob.com slash community, and now on to the show.

00:58
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast New York edition. Tony and I are in Soho. We are attending the Merchant Mastery event, which is actually at Shopify headquarters. And this is the first time I was there. Pretty cool. Yeah, I’m excited because I go to New York a lot. You haven’t been in 30 years. I have not been in 30 years. So I’m taking you for pizza. Yes. as we’re recording. So this is going to be a shorter episode because Steve’s got pizza on the brain. He’s going to go to… For those of you who are New Yorkers, we’re going to Bleecker Street. So those of you who know, you know.

01:28
And I only eat pizza once a year because I’m low carb. So this better be good pizza. It’s going to definitely not be low carb pizza. But anyway. That’s OK. So I’m excited about this event. I came about halfway through the day today. You’ve been here all day. Yes. You were texting me when I was on the plane telling me how great the attendees are. The attendees are fantastic. And maybe I’m just, you know, biased because it’s pretty much the same attendees that come to Seller Summit. I mean, they’re not the same people, but the same type of vibe.

01:56
Yeah. And it’s the same type of vibe of the students in my class too. So I was thrilled to chat with everybody. Yeah. So I got to meet a bunch of people this afternoon, talked a little bit with Scott. So for those of you who don’t know, this event is run by Scott Cunningham. He actually spoke at Seller Summit on telling a brand story, which was, I think, one of the most favorite talks. Probably, I would say so. Yeah. um So this is part of his community. And I want to talk a little bit about

02:24
what makes events great. And you gave away it all in the beginning. It’s the people. Oh yes, yes, yes. And every time we talk to anybody, every time you and I go to events, what we hear from people is the sessions are gonna be probably good or bad. People either love or hate the sessions, but it’s the networking and the people part that either makes the event one of your favorites or uh one that you probably wouldn’t return to. Yep. And…

02:51
I want to say that one of the things that I think Scott has done well, which you were telling me about on the way here, was that everyone is in this community together before the event. Yes. And they’re on calls like every week or sometimes twice a week. And they’ve been on calls with each other twice a week for like an entire year. So by the time they get here, even though they’ve never seen each other in person, they’re all like buddies. ah Because I sat at a table, I didn’t realize that they all had a year long relationship. And I was just trying to…

03:21
There are all these inside jokes and whatnot. But what’s interesting about this event was everyone is so open. I just asked a simple question and then they just told me the revenue and profit numbers without even thinking about it. Yeah, well, and when we were talking to Sharona this afternoon, she was sharing more things and she’s actually a former Sellers Summit alumni. Yes, correct. Pre-pandemic. um Anyway, she’s in the apparel space and she was telling us how…

03:49
ah You know, it’s hard to find other apparel people because everyone tells you when you take the courses or you listen to the free webinars not to go into apparel, which is actually pretty good advice. ah But she has a background in fashion design and so she is in apparel. And so she was saying how it’s hard to find people who are doing the same thing she’s doing. And I think that’s why the community becomes so important, right? Because even if you can find one or two other people that are doing something similar to you or having similar struggles.

04:18
it makes your whole business journey so much easier because you have people that you can talk to. And we were talking to, I think it was Ray, the skincare. Oh, yes. Yeah, Ray. Yeah. Yeah. So he was talking about some of the issues with his products. And I think if you just have those people to like bounce ideas off of, by the way, Ray sells skincare and Steve is- I’m the target demographic. Steve was like, show me your product immediately. I did. It’s a dark spot remover.

04:47
And at first I wasn’t that interested. I was just asking to be polite. But as soon he said it was a dark spot, I was like, oh, I’m on it. Show me the product right now. I’m going to buy it. was like watching someone throw a fishing pole and just reel Steve in. As soon as he said that, was like, oh, Steve’s But I asked him if it worked. Yes. And then he hesitated for just a second. I know. I know. He’s got to be more direct. And he’s like, no, the reviews are all really good. But he has perfect skin. Well, I was going to say, it works for this guy. But he also could have been 22.

05:12
It’s correct. He’s an Asian guy. You can never tell how old those Asian They hide their age so well. But anyway, think like the community part. So one of the things that I think Scott does a really good job at is, so this event is for only people in his community? That’s correct. Okay. So we’re telling you all about it and then surprise, you can’t come. That’s correct. So I’m someone for everybody, just FYI. No, but I think that’s what makes events better. Even if it’s

05:42
Like this one is obviously limited to his community, but if you want to go to an event or you’re thinking about attending something, and we heard, it’s so funny, whenever we tell people we have an event, we get all of the eventee, like people, we’re like event therapists, they’re like, well, I went to this event and they start telling us how bad it was or how great it was.

06:00
And I think one of the best things you can do is if there is any sort of community around the event, whether it’s a pop-up community, right? So whether it’s like the month before the event, they have a Facebook group or a Discord or Circle, whatever, you have to join that community and you have to be active. To not do that is a huge mistake of your financial investment of going to the event. And then even post-event, you should join the community and keep up, which is why we have a Discord group now for Seller Summit.

06:27
What I found interesting, and I know you kind of came late, was the range of products were all pretty cool. So traditionally, let’s say you go to like an Amazon event, people are just kind of buying something in Alibaba and just kind of putting it up. uh Not the case. Not the case here. So I was sitting next to Mary who sells, uh so old fashioned is my favorite drink, right? But I will never make it at home because it’s a pain in the butt.

06:56
Who has like bitters lying around? Maybe you do. do not. I do know people who do, but I do not. So she sells like uh a cocktail tea bag. So inside will be everything that you need to make an old-fashioned and then you just take your favorite whiskey and you just kind of dip it and then it’s an old-fashioned or you leave it in there. It’s an old-fashioned. Well, and that’s what I think about just a few people that I got to meet this afternoon and then also just people we meet throughout the years at Seller Summit.

07:25
is that the people who are, I don’t wanna call them inventors because they don’t necessarily, they didn’t necessarily invent the product. Some of them did. But like we talked to this team towards the end of the day today and they have this, I don’t wanna call it a game. I don’t think game is correct. It’s basically this, oh my gosh, I don’t have my phone on me. We’ll have to put it in the show notes what the name of this thing is. Basically there’s like these series of cards and you pull a card and each card has like things on each side of the card.

07:55
So like bottom top, both sides. And it’s like a place or an event or a description. And you basically build a story from the cards and it’s to help people with their writing. Right. So you basically pull from these six decks, I think it’s six, and you build the story and then you can write the story. So I was like, it’s like a real life prompt. Right. Yes. It’s it’s and it’s really cool. So.

08:22
We’ll talk about this in a minute. Another thing they were doing is filming UGC. So Scott and I were in the UGC for this card play. And basically they had Scott, you know, they pulled cards and Scott picked and he built this whole story. And within like five minutes, he had built this really cool story about a city that had a stadium and there was something violent happening in the stadium. there, you know, there’s all in like.

08:48
it wasn’t hard to do, right? So if you think you have like that creative side and you want to like explore it, this was a really cool way to do it. um And they’re doing really, really well. are. Yes. And they did they tell you about their Dungeons and Dragons product? They started to and then I think we had to film. So what’s funny is uh actually all the products are catered to me. Maybe some old, I think I can’t remember what her name was. I’ll remember it later, but she sells a magnetic pill holder.

09:17
And these days, I like you should see I’m carrying my supplements with me now and I have I’m all kind of disorganized in this tube and it’s the worst and I Might actually buy her product because it’s this magnetic one and then each individual Day is a magnetic thing that you can just stick on your fridge and that’s so

09:38
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

10:06
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quietlight has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change. It was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quietlight

10:36
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. Well, there was another guy who was, I thought it was for dogs, but he said golf. I don’t hear well in like loud spaces. And he, was like this tiny little cup. And I was like, that is not big enough for any dog. And then I realized it’s for golfing and you put like a shot in it, right? I thought you put your, a shot of liquor.

11:05
It wasn’t for your golf tees? I thought it was for golf tees. I could be wrong. No, you’re probably right. But what was really cool about this event so far is that, okay, I think it’s totally fine. And we know lots of people. The first person that comes to mind is Dana Jean-Zemes, right? Like she sold um drug testing kits. I don’t think Dana was super passionate about drug testing, right? But she built a successful business doing that. I don’t think you have to be like gung-ho all in about something.

11:35
But I do think it’s really cool when like most of the people in the space are really excited about their products, right? Like when they show it to you, you know that they actually use it, that they’re actually… That’s actually something unique about this event. Yeah. I would say almost half the people brought their products to show off. uh was sitting next to… I gotta get you better with names, but she sells… Do you know what this is? Do you know what a shot ski is? It’s something I thought you would know. I had no idea what it was.

12:05
But it’s basically a wooden ski board and then shot glasses. everyone takes it off and does. You did know what it was. Well, I was like, maybe they’re all, most people here are Canadian. I’m like, it’s very possible this is something very wholesome in Canada. She’s from New York. Okay. Well, of course it’s a shot ski then. Yeah. I had no idea what it was. It’s all over TikTok. Oh, is that what it is? I mean, people doing it is all over TikTok. Right. And then the idea is then she does personalized ones and then you hang it up on the wall. I want one.

12:33
Right. Okay, introduce me to her. She does very well. Okay. But uh she was so passionate. She was probably the most passionate person that I’ve spoken to in a She was giving everybody shots the whole week. But yeah, that was the vibe I was getting at this event. Yeah. The other thing that was cool is because it’s a brand focused event, there was no generic products and we were all talking about like what our motes were and

13:00
Personalization was actually one of the things that we discussed at our table and I do personalization. So we’re all comparing notes and uh Matt I think came up to me he does personalized cutting boards and he went up to me and said hey Steve I’m thinking about because of vibe coding he’s thinking about creating this elaborate thing where you can take the cutting board personalize and have the image put on it so can see what the preview looks like.

13:26
And I was just trying to talk him out of doing that because that’s something that was exciting for me. But there’s all these like little corner cases and if it doesn’t look exactly like the way it is. And but I told him just keep it simple. Just put the personalization on there. when you were going to do that. I did do it. You did. It was a fun project which we never ever decided to implement. So anyway I think that’s what’s really cool is that when you’re at an event and

13:53
One, there’s like a lot of connection between the attendees. I think like this place, people were just like very friendly coming up. I showed up with all my crap. And so I have my suitcase with me and Mary comes up to me. She’s like, can I borrow that bag? I’m like, sure. You didn’t even know she was. didn’t know she was. It was just like, so anyway, I think that’s really important when you’re like evaluating like, where am I going to go? Where am I going to invest my time and money? I think the other thing that I think is I’m so happy to see because I feel like

14:22
there’s so much garbage out there right now is they’re talking about the storytelling and the brand building. And we talked it was so one big thing that we talked about at Seller Summit was Chuck from Quiet Light talked about your moat and how your moat really determines your multiplier, right? For your business. And if you don’t have the moat, I mean, like he gave us, we talked about this in the last podcast, like a quiz, like which business had the best multiplier. And I was like, totally wrong. ah But it was really the one that had the best moat.

14:50
when everything else was factored in. But the moat was really strong on the one that was. Yeah, I think what was unusual is that this is a Shopify first event. Obviously it’s at Shopify headquarters. Most of these people aren’t even selling on Amazon. Yeah. Right? Which is unusual. I know you missed the sessions this morning, but we can talk about those a little bit. 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,

15:20
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. 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.

15:50
One of the first sessions was Scott going through the exercise of creating your brand story. uh He created this app that allows you to pull out, it’s like a questionnaire where you go through it and it asks you questions and then it puts together your brand story and what your value props are. And this is something that I do with the students in my class because people, like the first instinct when I ask a question is like, I don’t.

16:18
I don’t know what’s great about my product. I don’t know what’s special about my product. Like, I can’t think of any stories behind it. And it’s just an exercise of like extracting all that information out. And that’s essentially what the GPT does that he wrote. Actually, if you have a seller’s summit virtual pass, you have access to that. yes, that’s correct. Because Scott spoke at Seller Summit. fact, that could be yours if you have a virtual pass. But once you have that…

16:43
brand story, which is essentially your value propositions and the story that’s gonna set you apart. From there, you can use that same copy in your meta ads, in your email marketing copy and whatnot. So one of the things that I’ve started doing with one of my clients is before we do any sort of like product launch or promotion, we basically kind of, and we talked actually, it was the lesson that you were uh traveling. We talked about, we create these marketing briefs.

17:12
for our products and in that is a story about this product specific. And so whenever we go to run any sort of promotion or any sort of, whether it’s a launch or a re refresh, we tie that in. And so everything is aligned, right? Our ad copy, our email copy, our social media, copy on the sales page, follow up email, like whatever we’re doing with that product, it’s all.

17:37
Perfect, right? It’s all, everything, the message is this, this told differently, but then the same way, right? And I think that’s something that when I was doing it in the lesson, I did, I used Kelly Dream, one of your students, and it’s really not hard to do. The hard part is like creating, like once you get the facts down, right? Like the main stuff, you can use AI to help.

18:02
build it out, right? You’re not gonna just, don’t think you’re gonna be yourself in like a Word document for 30 pages. Like you basically just need to like brain dump in there and refine it. And then once you do that, you can create, whether you’re using like Claude or ChatGBT, uh you can create all these basically automations that will do it for you again and again and again. And so like, while the first part takes the chunk of your time, the rest of it is…

18:29
really fast and then everything is just so much more cohesive and better. I think that the next talk was about uh ranking an AI search, which is something that I am very passionate about. That’s what I’ve been working on. Their strategy, I guess, is a little different than mine. So it was essentially the same. uh Try to answer every possible question that a customer has.

18:56
But I guess the difference in strategy here is they’re using blogging to do that. So they have AI to help research all the possible questions. And then they were writing separate blog posts that answer each question individually. Each question got its own blog post? Each question had its own page. I guess it’s a blog post. A dedicated piece of content. A dedicated piece of content just per question. And I think what their strategy is you end up with a whole bunch of different blog posts answering specific questions. What do you think about that?

19:27
I mean, it’s everything’s, it’s like the wild, wild west right now. What I found luck doing is putting every possible Q and A on the category page. And that’s worked well for me. Hold on. want to talk me through this. Well, every possible question that a customer could have, I put that on my category page. And my rationale for doing that is I want people to find me. And when they click, I want them to land on a page with

19:56
products, right? The disadvantage of doing it the blog post way is that if they click, they end up on the blog post and then you have to take them from the blog post to your store somehow. Okay. So that’s the extra step. So I don’t know what works better. Like I said, it’s the Wild Wild West. I just know that I’ve had good results doing it that way and they’ve had good results doing it their way. So hold on. I just got to go back to this because I’m working on, I’m assuming we’re talking about collection pages.

20:22
Same thing? Yes, collection pages are category pages. In Shopify it’s called collection, so that’s what you’re using. um So let’s just use Bumblebee as an example. So is there like a standard handkerchief? Okay, so for example, we have a ladies handkerchiefs page, a wedding handkerchiefs page, and like a baptisms. Okay, let’s do baptism. That’s probably the easiest. So baptisms, I’ll just go up to Claude and say, or chat to BT, whatever you want, and say, me all the possible questions that people ask about.

20:52
baptism gifts. Okay. Right. Because baptism handkerchiefs doesn’t have a whole lot of Right. Search volume. And then it’ll write this whole thing out and then I’ll extract those and have it use FAQ schema markup. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically a language that search engines and AI can understand better. And you have that on your collection page. Correct. And do you have it at the top or is it the bottom? It’s at the bottom because you don’t want to push all your products below the fold. Okay. I’m going to do that tomorrow.

21:22
Right. mean, essentially it’s the same strategy except they’re just taking each question. Yeah. And maybe their way might be better for SEO because that’s the way it used to work before, right? Each page was a specific topic. And so I guess there’s just trade-offs. With mine… Why couldn’t you do both? You can do both. If you have resources, obviously most people have limited resources. I’m just not a big fan these days of driving traffic to a blog page.

21:50
The only reason I would have a blog today is to make sure my brand is mentioned somehow. And maybe that’s like a better use case. Okay. What other sessions did I miss? I mean, there aren’t a whole lot actually. feel like I showed up for the fun part. So. the next session was about shipping. I’m pretty forwarding. You would think that it’s a dry topic, but it’s actually not that dry. Actually. I learned a couple things. I was given by Barack. He’s a long time friend.

22:20
He runs a company called Force Get. So what was funny about all this is last year, tariffs were all the rage and everyone was trying to find alternative factories in like the US so they wouldn’t have to worry about tariffs. Well, now that the tariffs got struck down and the recent 10 % tariffs also got struck down, everyone’s back to China, right?

22:46
And then what also happened as a result of the tariffs was everyone was using DDP shipping, which is where the supplier handles all the shipping end to end. Problem with that was that you can’t get tariff refunds if you went that method. But it’s a trade-off because I use that method to avoid paying certain tariffs, right? So I guess it’s a wash. But he was saying that, I don’t know how in-depth we want to get in here, but

23:16
There’s different ways that you can get quoted for shipping. There’s EXW, which means you handle all the shipping from the factory to your warehouse. There’s FOB, which means they pay for the shipping to the port, you cover shipping from the port. And then there’s DDP where they just handle everything. So what I learned was that a lot of these suppliers, if you have them handle your shipping for you, they pad everything pretty heavily actually, so they make money on the shipping.

23:46
And so if you can, always choose EXW and have your freight forward or handle everything. And that way you have a clear picture of your true cost of goods. Because oftentimes when they quote you FOB or DDP, they kind of hide the cost of goods in there and pad in the shipping costs. Anyway, he does it for a living. So I’m taking his word for it. mean, I feel like that kind of reminds me of JK’s talk at Sellers where

24:15
Even if you can take away like two little tips that will help decrease your costs. Yeah. Like it’s worth. Oh, and the other thing, em he kind of reinforced this. I already knew this was happening, but what a supplier will do if you’ve used them for a long time, they raise their prices every year. And unless you go and look outside of the supplier, could be getting really ripped off because they keep adding on the costs and they know that once you’re with them and you have a steady supplier.

24:44
they can get away with raising prices because the cost of switching or the pain of switching, I should say, is too high. So one other takeaway was you always need to have two suppliers. So at least you can go back and forth between the two when you’re haggling. Oh, and the other thing he said too was, and I don’t do this, I probably should, every three months you should negotiate with FedEx and UPS.

25:10
I do it once a year, but he does it every three months. Which is pretty nuts because they’ve been raising prices dramatically. Actually, one of my most recent YouTube videos was about this. I saw it today. Because USPS added like a fuel surcharge. UPS and FedEx raised by like 6 % or something like that. I don’t know. It’s getting out of hand and they’re not getting more reliable either. Yeah. And then after that, I thought this was cool. The UGC part. Yeah.

25:39
So I mentioned before, like probably half the attendees brought their products and then they all just started filming videos for each other. Okay, that, right? That was is when I showed up. I was like, I came for the best. Well, I came and they were working on some prompts and then they started doing the UGC, which here’s what’s really cool. And when I was talking to the people that have the story prompting uh card deck, not a deck, I’m doing a terrible job. This is actually a really cool product.

26:07
They said they have trouble getting UGC, right? Because they go to this like one big con a year. But like if you’ve ever been to one of these like game cons or something like that, or even like a Comic Con, it’s like your booze are packed. Like you can’t really film. you could get like B-roll content, but you can’t get UGC type content at a place like that. And so they were saying that they really struggled with like getting that type of content. And so I was like, this is a perfect place because you have all these people that will make content for each other.

26:36
right and you can prep them, right? Like you can give them information. mean, didn’t really get, Scott and I didn’t get prepped at all to do the game. Like we just- No, you guys are good. I was kind of listening in. But I think both of you, like Scott’s a really good talker and you’re a good talker too. So was actually really good. Cause I think I would have stumbled. Cause you actually created a story right on the fly. Yeah. So anyway, I think that that alone, Steve was like, could we do this at Teller Summit? I was like, we could totally do this at Teller Summit.

27:06
um Because I think that would be awesome, right? For people to be able to even, even if you can get a couple pieces of UGC and once you start to see how well it performs, especially on social, you’re gonna be incentivized. I was telling the people that did this card, the cards, was like, just like, where do you live? Like go pull someone off the street. I was like. I don’t know about that. They’re in Canada. Everyone’s very friendly there. That’s true. Yeah. I’m like, you’re about, can’t pull people off the street here for sure.

27:36
uh But yeah, I think that is really valuable and I think that is something that we’re not doing, like not me, but like I think people do not take advantage of that. And one of the reasons is, and I was talking to the game people about this, is they said they have, they called it something that was like millennial something. And I was like.

27:56
I’m a Gen Xer, so I don’t like what is this disease you have as a millennial? And it’s basically like they don’t want to put it out if it’s not perfect, like perfectly edited. Oh, I miss that part. it was when I was yelling at them. Oh, okay. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. It’s like, are you yelling at people? You know, what’s ironic is like the worse, the less professional looks, the better it’ll perform. And that’s what I was telling them. I said, listen, I understand because we talk about this story a lot. When we first launched Profitable Audience, I was like, what do we call me? Take Tony?

28:26
That’s correct. Yeah, I made the first set of three videos at least five times I think it might have been more like I didn’t even use it. We don’t even use them They were so terrible. They were so bad because in my mind I felt like things needed to be absolute like I would have died if I would have thought we are filming in a hotel Like you’re sitting on like I don’t even know what some sort of like I would be like this is unacceptable We have to have like a backdrop and it has to look perfect and all this stuff

28:54
And what you and I both have realized and the feedback we’ve received over the years is just the authenticity. And today with AI, to have something that’s so obviously authentic is exploding, right? And so the less produced, the more genuine, the more organic feel to it is gonna perform better. So I think a lot of people who have that, and we see people in the class all the time with this, like, I don’t wanna publish the video, it’s not quite right, you know?

29:23
No, just put it out there. I don’t want to say the worst stuff because it’s really the content, right? If the content’s good, it will perform. And so, but that was what they were saying is they struggle because they’ve got millennial something and they want everything to be like perfectly produced. I’m like, we’re just Gen X, we ship it. Like… So what was interesting about this is you missed the table conversation earlier, but I think, who was I chatting with? I think I was chatting with Barb.

29:50
or no, Shining with Mary. And she said that there’s this one ad which ultimately became her best performing ad. She wasn’t even going to run with it. But her group on the zoom call is like, no, you got to just try that one. You just got to try that one. And she resisted. And they gave her a hard time about it. And finally, she said, okay, forget it, I’m just gonna try it. And it turned out to be your best ad, even though she was not happy with that video. So lesson learned, you never know what’s gonna hit. Yeah.

30:18
And I would say it’s better to generate more content and see what works than to spend all of your time on one piece of like perfect content and then it doesn’t hit. So here’s the other thing that I’ve noticed. As I mentioned before, everyone at this event had interesting products and that should probably be a criteria now when you decide what you want to sell. Like how tick-talkable is the product, right? Because if you’re selling something boring,

30:46
And who did I chat with recently? Was selling like office products, just kind of like generic office products. Oh, yeah. And you can’t really, I mean, you probably could tell a story about it, but the product itself is inherently not that interesting. I feel like almost all the products here were either unique or different in a certain way or very tick tockable. that shots key. Yeah. Very tick tockable, right? A bunch of people using it to take shots. Yeah.

31:17
Like she’s killing it on ads. Yeah. And I think like when I talk to people, so I have kids that are like in their 30s. So they have a lot of friends that are like late 20s, early 30s. People in that age demographic are trying to find interesting products to buy. Like they don’t want to just buy any lamp, right? They would rather hunt down the cool, perfect, you know, whatever their style is product versus just, you know,

31:47
going on Amazon and buying like, I need a lamp, you know, order. ah And I think that’s very common in like the, from our age, I feel like it’s a little less common. I’m more of like, I don’t know, I’m not like- Don’t lump me in the same age bracket. We’re the same age. We’re both Gen X. ah No, but I think like, you and I are much more efficient in our purchasing. Like if we need like-

32:11
There are things that you and I both care a lot about and that we will like, like we were like tonight, the Knicks should have been playing, but they’re not. So we’ve been talking all week, like, are we going to go to a Knicks game? We’re like, that’s something that’s important to us, right? So like, but for I think the younger group of people, they’re very into like meaningful products, right? They would much rather spend even a little bit more money to have something that’s unique or meaningful versus just- Or higher quality. Or higher quality, yeah.

32:39
And something that has a story about it, right? Something that actually… I mean, I noticed you stopped buying those knockoff bags and you’re buying name brand bags now, right? So that says something right there. I am. No, but I do think if you’re still in that product research phase, it’s like new things to consider. The days of just throwing anything up, I think are…

33:02
So I just had a video go viral. It got like 1.3 million Oh, I’ve got some tea on that video for you. Oh, do you? Okay. Well, it happened in like three days and tons of thousands of comments. And a lot of them, I actually tried to go through as many as I could just to see what they were talking about. But people are tired of the alphabet soup brands on Amazon. And so if you guys aren’t familiar with the term, you’ll notice that there’s like an array of 10 identical products on Amazon for a given search term.

33:30
And if you look at the company, it’s all just like this random jumble of letters because it’s these Chinese factories just throwing up the same stuff across. Like they might own 10 seller accounts and they’re just trying to flood the listings. People are tired of that now. They want differentiated products. Yeah. So your what’s the T? Your T. So your post got shared in like every Amazon Facebook group on the internet. Really? Yes. Okay. So from Amazon seller groups.

34:00
to it was shared in every Amazon influencer group. And Liz told me that she had to refrain from like, cause the feedback was mixed, we’ll just say. So at first she felt like she needed to get in there and like defend you. We were talking about how this was like, so Liz and I, I just came from recording with Liz and we were talking about how sometimes as like type A, but like.

34:27
mostly female, see this, is like we feel the need to over explain ourselves about things. And so Liz is like, and I stopped myself and I was like, it doesn’t matter. Steve can fend for himself. Because apparently it was shared multiple times in multiple groups over and over and over again, which is, hey, but that’s part of the virality, right? The sharing That’s what happens. Like I got a lot of uh messages.

34:53
They weren’t hate messages. I wouldn’t say they were hate messages, but they were like, you don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. I mean, that’s why I tried to quote as many stats as I could in that video, right? I mean, you can’t refute stats, but. You can, but you shouldn’t. You can, you can, but yeah, I had a feeling that it was getting shared around. Yeah. Cause I had people on my street texting me, go, Hey, I just, you just came up with my YouTube feed. I didn’t even know you had a channel.

35:20
funny today in the shop of I think we’re talking about lady she’s like I know you she’s like you are with him I was like oh well unfortunately so yeah so to wrap it up because I know it’s pizza time yep let’s just wrap up events I think if you’re gonna go to an event and I think you should I love events you don’t love them as much as I do um it’s not that I just don’t feel like I can get out as much right now yeah

35:50
So I mean, I go to like two, maybe three events at most every year. have found so last year, think. is you’re on the tail end of your kid journey. They’re all old. You’re a grandma. Yeah. So you’re like practically an empty nester. I’m practically an empty nester. They just don’t leave the nest, but they all have their own little families. No. So I think I think you should attend an event for sure.

36:13
And I think for one reason is that connection part, right? I think especially in today’s world where like so many people are virtual and I mean, we run virtual classes. Like I’m a big fan of all of that, but there’s something about meeting people in person. I’m very excited. We spun off an Orlando group from Seller Summit. So if you’re in Orlando, you can hit us up. I’m not in charge of it, but I will connect you with the person in charge. But I think finding an event where it’s like the right type of people for you.

36:40
So you’ve got to go someplace where I feel like here everyone has found their tribe. Two, I think you have to be a part of a community. Whether you have a free community, right? I do. Yes. Mywifequitterjob.com slash community if you guys want to join. The only prerequisite is you just have to have a store or a website up. That’s it.

37:00
So, and I think the community aspect, like I’ve been in Scott’s community now for about a month and pre-seller summit, didn’t really get a chance to spend a lot of time in there, but I’ve tried to like go in there a couple of times a week. holy cow, it’s so active. Oh yeah, I know. But like the amount of information being shared is, and his is paid, so obviously, you know, that comes with different things, but.

37:22
There are groups out there that are really outstanding. so, I mean, the free one is really good. And the more people that get in it, the better it gets, right? So the more activity. So I think you got to find a group and get connected. And then I think the third takeaway that I have just from today is like, let’s quote Scott Volcker, like taking action, right? Like old school Scott Volcker. So Sharona asked me about Scott. Oh, really? It’s like, hey, what’s Scott doing? he still in his Nobody knows. No, Scott’s retired. And she’s like, why? He was doing so well. I was like,

37:51
It’s because he’s old. We still have Chris. We still have Chris. Chris is the mastermind anyway. Chris Schaeffer, the brains behind it all. No, but I think that watching people today, like when Scott was like, it’s time to film the UGC, and people were just ripping, all of a sudden all these packages appeared out of nowhere. People were unboxing their products, filming. Everyone had, okay, we’re wearing these little mics. People had all sorts of versions of these. They’re not expensive.

38:21
um Definitely worth investing in to film content. Most people were just filming with their, in fact, everybody was filming with their phone, right? I don’t think anyone wasn’t. um And so starting to create that content, whether you’re creating content of your product, whether you’re creating content with yourself, right? Because you’re the product or service that you’re selling. And then shipping it out in like raw form, right? Like quit trying to overproduce this, the unpolished content.

38:50
performs better most of the time anyway. And so I think watching these people like take action and like get going with this was like probably the highlight of my day to day. So here’s my criteria for an event. At least this is my own personal criteria. It’s got to be small. No, that’s not one of the It’s got to be small and intimate. So you can actually get a chance to speak with everyone. Two, I think the people attending have to be open.

39:19
And this is probably the hardest one. You’re not going to able to tell unless you go to an event. But like I said, like when I sat down, people were just telling me the revenue numbers. I did not even ask. Oh yeah, like even the conversations couple ones I had, was like, oh Or they just started telling me their problems. I did not ask, you know, I didn’t ask, but it’s, you know, it’s refreshing when people are just so open. And then three, I think the event can’t just be a, a session vomit. I don’t know if that’s the right term, but just like a ton of a fire hose of information.

39:49
uh It needs to teach and then you need to have time or a place to talk with the speaker to actually implement. That’s my criteria. You got anything to add on your end? I think that’s good. So I think because of AI and all the stuff that’s being flooding the internet with content and everything, I think it’s going to pendulum back towards community. And I think events are here to stay. Hope you enjoyed this episode.

40:16
Just a quick reminder that the virtual pass is still available for Seller Summit 2026 if you want to catch all the sessions. Go to sellersummit.com. And for more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 639. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I sit down with Dawn LaFontaine, a student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course, a former stay-at-home mom who couldn’t get hired anywhere after 27 years out of the workforce and decided to build her own business selling cat toys instead. Dawn will walk us through the painful years she spent trying to make her original cardboard cat house product work.

00:27
the accidental Instagram moment that led her to a product that actually took off, and her wholesale outreach strategy that closes at 50 % without ads. But before we begin, I just wanted to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free over at mywifequitterjob.com slash community, and I would love to see you there.

00:57
That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community. Now onto the show.

01:07
Welcome back to the My Wife, Quit or Drop podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Dawn LaFontaine back on the show. Now, Dawn is a student in my Creative Profitable Online Store course, and she was a finalist in a game show that I ran years ago called The Five Minute Pitch where we gave away $50,000 in cash to the winning business. Now she runs an amazing cat products company called The Cat is in the Box. We’ve just been featured in Parade.com, NBC News, The Boston Globe, US News and World Report, a whole bunch of

01:36
prestigious publications. Now, if you look at her success today, you might think that everything with her business went smoothly. But I’ve chatted with Dawn on several occasions, and I know that she’s had to overcome many struggles with her products over the years. So in this episode, we’re going to break down her journey, all of her triumphs and her setbacks and how she’s managed to bootstrap a successful business for cats. And with that, welcome back on how are you?

02:04
Well, very good, Steve. Thanks so much for having me on again. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. It is. And I know it’s been a while since we last spoke. And because the episode that we recorded, I think that was years ago, right? So long ago. Just please refresh the audience about your products, your business and how you came up with the idea. Right. So my uh my company is Cat in the Box. I actually started the business after my second kid went off to college. I had been

02:32
a stay at home mother for 23 years, yikes. uh My husband had just been laid off from his job that he’d had for 15 years. I couldn’t, you I was applying for jobs. I couldn’t get a job. And uh I started thinking that if I needed to, if I was going to have a working future that I, you know, I needed to make one for myself. And coincidentally, I was taking my mother’s cats um to her cat sitter with her. And I was looking around her living room, which was just filled with

03:00
you know, old Amazon boxes and I made me think, you know, I’ve already I’m an animal lover. I’ve had cats. I know that they love boxes, but it made me think, you know, why do people put up with, you know, dirty, ugly um shipping boxes in their house? Why not something a little, you know, a little fun, a little interesting to look at? That’s how I started the business. And I remember it. So this is all bootstrapped, right? Completely, completely bootstrapped. And then just some quick facts for the audience. How much did you spend to start this business?

03:28
I spent a few thousand dollars at the beginning just to buy the capital equipment that I needed to make the products that I had in mind. They’re just, it’s really expensive um equipment that you need to um produce these weird shapes of cardboard um that I used to make the boxes. I’ll put some photos of her products in the show notes along with her URL. You guys should check out her site. The products are pretty amazing. Now, last time we spoke, you said you don’t have cats. Is that still the case?

03:57
I do do a lot of cat fostering. Mostly I foster, you know, uh litters of kittens that don’t have mothers. So um I have dogs too. It’s a little hard if you have cats of your own and you want to foster because, um you know, they can catch diseases from, you know, from, and believe me, these kittens have come with all kinds of fun parasites. So, uh so you really, it’s really hard to foster if you have cats of your own. And I really, really want to do the fostering. Okay.

04:27
Okay. So you do have cats to test your products on and everything. All right, last time we spoke and this is a long time ago, I kind of had to refer to some of my notes. We had talked about like some of the challenging economics of making these cat houses to make like the margins work and I noticed you have a bunch of new products on your site too. just walk me through what’s happened, how you dealt with those margins and those problems that you’ve

04:55
And then we could talk about this more too, but I did have to redesign my product several times based on, you know, factors that were outside of my control or even outside of my ability to anticipate them. And so we could talk about that. But the biggest pivot of all was really changing the type of products that I sell. And I really felt like with the cardboard box products and you know this even from when we you may not remember, but from five minute pitch one of the.

05:20
criticisms of the judges was like, how many did you sell? You didn’t sell 50,000 of them like the winner did actually of your products. And they weren’t wrong about that. And it felt like a little bit of a Sisyphusian effort to sell these products. And it finally occurred to me that maybe I needed to sell something different. And so um I did pivot about two years ago to these other products.

05:49
And they’re, I mean, they’re so easy to sell. So, um, and it made me really think that, you know, you can’t sell something that people don’t necessarily want. And I’m not saying that I ended up selling thousands and thousands and thousands of the cardboard boxes. Don’t get me wrong. But I sell thousands and thousands of these thousands and thousands and thousands of these every year, these other products that just, they’re easier to store. They’re cheaper to buy. They’re easier to ship.

06:19
um And people buy them in multiple quantities and then they rebuy them and rebuy them and that’s so different from the other products that I was selling. So that was a big part of my success over the last year was really. Okay, I definitely want to talk about that. um how did you know you needed to pivot? So first off, if you’re in the audience, you don’t know what her products are. sells. The last time I had interviewed Dawn, she was selling these cardboard boxes, which are kind of bulky and they’re kind of heavy to ship and whatnot.

06:50
How did you decide that you needed to pivot? Because if I recall correctly, the boxes is what you got all your press from, right? Because they were really innovative and really cool looking and everything. And I’ve gotten quite a bit of press for these as well. But yes, because there’s two categories of things. One is, do you get a lot of attention for something? I they were really clever. They’re really cute. I’ve even made them more clever and more cute. And that’s one thing. then selling them and being, selling them

07:19
profitably is another. And those are two separate things. And, um know, the attention is a good thing because, you know, well, there used to be more of an SEO benefit to that and, you know, people see it and they buy it and so on. But um it’s not enough to sustain. And uh so my first thought was really just to start adding more products to my store. And I wanted them to be unique. I wanted them to be something that I’d come up with, I designed.

07:48
But when these hit, know, when I got the, I ordered, think 200 of two different designs when I first started selling these wool cat toys and I sold out of like the 400 like immediately. And I thought, oh goodness, well, I better order, you know, double that next time. And it’s just, I mean, it’s just been an exponential growth in sales of these products. Amazing. Are you selling them on your own store, Amazon? Like where are the bulk of your sales coming in?

08:18
It’s really a third, a third, a third I sell. last year may have been, uh we actually talked about this, Steve. I’d had uh completely spontaneous, organic, an influencer with 11 million TikTok followers had posted about the product. I mean, his cat really, really liked it. people bought everything that I sold. I I was completely sold out. So that’s probably where the third on my website came from, because actually I was on vacation at the time. I didn’t have a lot of…

08:47
Inventory in Amazon and people were forced to buy things for my website. They really wanted to buy them from Amazon so it’s a third on my website a third of my business is on Amazon and I would like that to be you know less in the future and a third is Wholesale and that’s the most exciting part of my business for me for a number of reasons and and I really am looking to keep building on that success All right. So how did you come up with these wool cat toys? well, I actually knew this is kind of silly, but

09:16
I got mad because somebody unfollowed me on Instagram. And I mean, this happens all the time. People unfollow you every single day. But I just, the whole Instagram thing is so frustrating and people just unfollowing for no reason. And I just looked to see what this person, know, who this person was who unfollowed me because the name was kind of unusual. And she sold a wool cat toy. And I thought, well, and anyway, that I ended up completely designing the product myself and I have very unique designs. um

09:44
I just put a new one out yesterday that are nothing like what this other person was selling, but one thought leads to another leads to another. And the weird thing is there’s no really good explanation for it, but cats are really obsessed with wool.

10:01
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

10:29
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quietlight has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change, it was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quietlight

10:59
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. And uh it may be due to um the scent of the lanolin, you the natural lanolin. And this is a really nice wool product. But also I these. So the first product was a wool mouse with a six foot long tail and the six foot long tail combined with the wool cats go berserk. I mean,

11:28
Berserk over this thing. So cats are notoriously fussy, difficult to please, not universally satisfied with anything and almost universally cats like this toy. So it’s a rare thing. Interesting. So the fact that someone unfollowed you and you noticed and then you looked at what that person sold gave you kind of like the idea that this might work. Yeah, I’m like, what is this? Why? Why? You know, it just got me thinking. And so that’s where we went from there.

11:56
So before we move on, can you just run down like the unit economics for the cardboard boxes just to refresh my memory? Like you had this really cool milk milk box, right? I don’t sell that one anymore. You don’t sell it anymore. Oh, man. No, I actually just sold out of all of them. Okay. The last of it there. m I actually looked into having it designed differently. I have a different design actually sitting in my house right now. oh They’re really large. m The way I was selling them before and the way people liked them was they were shipped assembled.

12:24
And so um people liked that they didn’t have to put anything together. It just showed up and all they had to do was take it out of the box and ready to go. you can’t, the economics of the postage really, it’s just too expensive to ship. And I do have a far more compact design, but just people don’t buy those the way they buy the other toys. It’s really hard for me to justify spending that much money to store them and ship them.

12:54
even making them I have to order a bigger quantity of them because it’s just not economical to order. I would love to be able to order 200 of them because people would buy those still. But I can’t order two. I have to order 1,500 of them. And 1,500 is a lot. So are you trying to phase out the cardboard part of your business then? mean, yeah, slowly, I think. Because they still produce some revenue for me.

13:24
you know, I’m, you want to what I have and I may still continue to order, you know, the more popular designs, but even a design that I thought I do a haunted house for cats and it is so freaking adorable. But those have just not, it’s such a brief period out of the year when people buy them and it’s really, really hard to then hold on to what you bought for the next year too. So I would imagine the unit economics for these wool toys is way better.

13:52
It is. Okay. They’re just I mean, everything about them. I mean, you know, just they’re they’re inexpensive to make. They’re inexpensive to store. They’re inexpensive to ship um inexpensive to package. Yeah. So uh walk me through like the thought process. You already have this successful product. You’re trying this new one. uh How many did you have to order of this new one? And how did you like what did you do next? Well, I mean, I’d actually tried some other things. I didn’t actually

14:20
purchase inventory. I had other ideas that I developed, one in particular. And I just decided that that wasn’t what I knew about the, this one required some assembly too. It was not cardboard and I just knew people wouldn’t be able to assemble it. I put that aside. I was referring to the wool toys. Yes. I’m just saying that there were some interim things and this one, I’m sorry. What was the question again then? Oh, it was, you know, you have these successful cardboard box toys and then walk me through how

14:48
you you decide to launch the wool toy. Like, did you just look for a factory immediately, buy a whole bunch or like, was it a longer process? I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell

15:17
all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. Right, so um I did start out looking to see if they could be made in China. And this took me down a whole rabbit hole of where’s wool, where’s

15:46
felt it wool made. And I just, I felt really concerned about the ones that were made in China. I couldn’t get them to confirm about what kind of dyes they used. And, and, and they just, it just wasn’t the direction that I wanted to go. One of the things about my cardboard box toys is that they are very environmentally friendly. I make them out of recycled cardboard. They’re very safe for cats and made of inks that are, um you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it was important to me to, to make something that, you know, you know, had some of those sort of social and, and, you know,

16:15
benefits for the pets too. And so I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those wool dryer balls that people have. And I looked into those and where those made, those are made in Nepal. And so Nepal is just a really interesting country to have things made. It’s not like, I have another product made in China. It’s not the same thing at all. They’re not there the way China is in terms of.

16:42
having the infrastructure set up to sell to people in the US is quite the same way. But um it’s a very pro-social way of buying uh goods. For example, I buy these wool toys from a uh craft guild. The felt artisans are low-income women. uh They get a living wage. They’re Fair Trade certified. They get a living wage for making my products. They get health and retirement benefits. They get incentives for keeping their daughters in school. This was something that meant a lot to me. And also the wool. uh

17:11
They import the wool into Nepal from New Zealand. uh New Zealand is known for its laws that protect the sheep in the country. So it’s some of the most ethical wool that you can buy. also some of the highest quality wool. And the items are really beautifully, beautifully made. So very high quality items. I’m really pleased to be able to sell those. Wow. So how did you find these Nepalese? Yeah, I actually ended up, I mean,

17:39
digging and digging and digging and digging. I found some travel website that said, you know, for people who go to Nepal, where, can you buy ethical items? And it was a list of some companies that sold ethical items. And I started calling people don’t respond. You know, that, yeah. And I found actually found two companies that were respond to me and I had them both make samples. And uh this company that I use now is, you know, highly responsive and you know,

18:06
a pleasure to work with. And that’s just how I, you know, I just had them send me some samples. They’re just, um it’s just been a great relationship ever since. In terms of the design, you mentioned you’re designing them yourselves. Are you like a designer or did you work with someone on their end to help you make something that you want? Okay. I don’t know the first thing about felting wool, but I knew it to look a certain way and have certain characteristics to it. so, um and you know, we’ve done this with a few toys now. I,

18:36
I mean, they send you the first one, doesn’t look anything like what you said. exactly. So, you know, keep, well, could you, know, and then back and forth and back and forth. And we just did it through uh videos. They would mail me videos of the thing. uh one of the, I have this felt octopus you probably saw in there. wanted it to really, really, it’s really a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I wanted it to look a certain way. And that took about,

19:01
I think a year of back and forth to get that to just look like that. And, em and so then they send me some and they’re just so easy and nice about it. I mean, they charged me like three bucks for a sample. They send me one sample in the mail, you like just so so you know, and back and forth and back and forth. And so it’s become easier to work with them. um This last design that I did really only took a couple iterations to do. I’m curious since I’ve never sourced from Nepal before.

19:29
are like the unit pricing, is it cheaper or more expensive than China? Because you did research in China also, right? Yeah, I never got to the point of the pricing, though. I would imagine it’s slightly more expensive than China. but but that’s also because of who you know, who’s making it and what what goes into it. These are also like special, azo free dyes and that are more expensive than what than what they use in China. And China wasn’t willing to reveal to you like the chemicals and the certifications and all that. That that was really it.

19:59
you know, that was, I was really concerned. And it just, just weren’t, I was working through an agent and it just, that I’ve worked through before and it just, I wasn’t getting the responses that I needed. I wasn’t getting the product to look the way I needed it to look. And, and I was really concerned about whether it would be safe for cats. Right. What, what about like the minimum order quantities for these factories? they smaller? I could order one. mean, like, they, they, they’re, I mean, and, and I could order

20:29
which I could order thousands, which I just did. mean, they’ll fill thousands. And the infrastructure is all good. Like are these coming over actually for 1000 years of these? Is it still being flown over then? And actually, I’m having them flown over in smaller in smaller quantities. Okay, that is amazing. So these factories must be pretty obscure. And they

20:54
They probably aren’t like full blown factories to like selling the Walmart or something like that, right? No, they’re definitely not. And I think what they actually have are work centers all around the country so that people who are really, really poor and living in these very rural areas, they don’t have to travel to get to work. It’s in their communities. And so, and I have photos of and videos of them making the products and they look like pretty rustic um centers, know, a table, some, there’s not a lot of equipment required to make felted items.

21:23
And the women gather in these places and make the products and then they can go back home to their families. They don’t have to. Amazing. And you did not have to travel there. You did this all kind of digitally or remotely. Right, all virtually. And I would love to travel there at some point to see it all in person, but that’s for the future. OK. All right. So let’s say you get your first sample. Was the octopus your first product? The first one was I had a red mouse with a six foot long tail and a

21:52
a mouse with a rainbow colored tail. oh so how many did you order in that first? Would you just order one? 200 of each 200 of each. Okay, and then what did you do after that? Like you have the product in hand now? did I do with them up on my website? Nobody bought them. I mean, you know, it’s just started to do outreach with em with uh actually my wholesale customers. That was the first way. Okay, so we got a backtrack.

22:20
Did you always have those wholesale customers? I didn’t even realize you had those. Right. So it’s really a growing, growing thing for me, but I had a uh few. So I signed up for fare and I just sat back because I didn’t realize how this whole thing works. I sat back and waited for the orders to come in. And yes, some orders did come in. And then you have a way to connect with people through email and so forth. But then I realized, oh, goodness, I could actually.

22:47
send people to fair and actually get even more profitable business that way. then once that light bulb goes off, I’ve developed a whole process for getting new wholesale customers now. also, posted on social media. People started buying little by little. I have an email list that you helped me with. I have about 5,500 people on my email list. every time I send a newsletter out once a week, I

23:16
people buy them every, week. So that, you know, it trickles. And the thing about it is the cats really like it so much that they people can start buying them for other people. Like they can’t believe like the cat really likes it because cats are so absurdly fussy. And so they buy for other people and then other people buy for other people that really it started to build on of its own word of mouth. Yeah. Amazing. Okay, so you got these couple hundred units of a couple designs, throw them up on your website, emailed your list.

23:44
you had a couple wholesale people inquire about them. Was that enough to just sell out your first batch? I sold those out really, really quickly, actually. Yeah. Amazing. Was it more from the email list or at this point, you didn’t list them on Amazon, right? I think they were yes, and they were on Amazon. that was again, a really, really, and it’s still a slow I mean, I’m not, I’m not doing what you need to do to be successful on Amazon, mostly because I don’t want to and I also don’t know how. But I just don’t. I it’s

24:11
I mean, it’s such a frustrating platform and I know people are so successful on it, but I don’t know that I want to do what you have to do to be successful. I don’t know that my product has the margins to do what you need to do to be successful. I mean, if it does get too successful, someone’s going to knock it off to on Amazon. Okay, great. So that’s all right. So you had it on Amazon, but it sounds like the bulk of your sales was through uh your own channels. Right. Right. Okay. So let’s

24:38
Walk me back. Was this wholesale? that for the boxes or did you start the wholesale? I started it for that. So I really just did not get a lot of orders. The problem with the product is, is that pet stores are really small, excuse me. And even the most compact cardboard box product takes up too much room on their shelves. Okay. And so they were reluctant to buy it and it doesn’t have enough really enough margin in it for them either. So it’s hard when it’s a good product, but it’s not a good product to sell.

25:08
Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay, so were you I can’t even remember how you got business for your initial boxes. Were you running ads? Or was it just all press mentions? And? Yeah, you know, the ads thing I am, you know, much like the Amazon PPC thing. Don’t really know how to do it and don’t feel comfortable. I just the few times I tried it, it just felt like putting your credit card into a black box and sure, it comes out of it. That’s actually how it works now.

25:37
Yeah, so I really like things that I have more control over. I mean, maybe that’s just a personality trait of my my own. And, you know, maybe I’m being ridiculous, and I should just hand over my credit card and let them do all this. But I but I really like when I do something and have a lever to pull and it really works. And I think that’s why like the wholesale business. Most of all, interesting. Okay, so is that like your fastest growing segment, then by far the fastest growing and the most satisfying to be honest.

26:05
So, you we actually haven’t discussed fair on this podcast. You want to walk people through how to get wholesale orders from fair? What things can you do? I think things have changed a lot on fair, but because I think there’s a lot of non-fairish type of businesses on fair, which is my understanding is that it’s becoming harder and harder for new businesses to be discovered on fair because of it’s just too cluttered. Yeah. But for me, em if I sat around all day waiting for fair to find customers for me, wouldn’t.

26:34
I would not have very many customers. The whole idea is to send your own customers to fair because first of all, you pay 0 % commission on those sales. um second, it’s all on you. You get to control how much business you have. so um yeah, it’s been really working for me to drive people to. But there’s a chicken and egg problem there, right? So the people who buy from you as a consumer, are they going to go to fair?

27:01
So what do you mean by consumer? Do you mean a retail customer? Like, yeah, like, let’s say they buy one from you. They’re not going to go to fair and buy right. Yeah. People buying from you on fair are pet stores, gift stores, natural food stores. em Yeah, that’s about those. Those are the three kinds of businesses really. Those are businesses you had gathered from the box boxes, right? No, those are businesses that I went out and found myself. Okay. So this oh is

27:28
I mean, and let me just say, it took me like two years of trying to talk to other people who do sales and figuring out how to do it. And it’s so simple. And I don’t know why I figure it out sooner, but I tried to get other people who had gone before to tell me how to do it. But the key is, the key is persistence. And I didn’t realize how persistent you have to be, politely persistent, of course, but I literally just had somebody buy for me. I sent them a sample of my product a year ago.

27:58
It took me a year of polite full persistence and they bought from me. And now once somebody buys from me, they will buy from me forever. And so they got a business and they will not return anything and they will pay shipping. And I don’t know. It’s a magical, magical thing. Why are we all not doing wholesale sales? It’s, it’s just, it’s very profitable and no trouble, nothing, no, no issues. And it just magically just,

28:28
you know, uh multiplies itself. Okay, so walk me through this, Don. uh Did you just go down the business listings and just start calling pet stores? More or less? I have a there’s an industry magazine that I start with. It’s a it’s probably rare. It’s a really, really good industry magazine and the most cutting edge of the pet stores. And believe me, in this world of chewy and Amazon, it’s it’s it takes a lot to be successful in this in this business as an independent retailer.

28:57
And these people that show up in this magazine, they write letters to the editor, they send in their suggestions. They are really successful, know, really doing unique things in this field. So those are my first targets. And I just keep a running list of those. Every time I get a magazine, I just look through the magazine, write down the names of everybody who appeared in the letters to the editor or whatever. And I just keep a running list. And I just start at the top of the list every time I’ve got time to make phone calls.

29:24
And I call that person and I offer to send them a free sample of one of my products. what’s your hit rate on that? Oh, my hit rate on getting business. I mean, even them picking up the phone. Oh, well, they don’t have to pick up the phone. It is, you know, I mean, somebody picks up the phone as a store. All I have to do is find out, you know, are they the kind of person that wants to receive a free sample? Because some people tell me, right? No, she won’t, you know.

29:51
you have to send her an email first. That’s fine because that’s the first touch with this customer. And maybe they answer my email. Maybe they don’t. Probably they won’t. But maybe they’ve seen it. And I just keep reiterating who I am, my company, and what I’m sending them. It’s a wool mouse with a six foot long rainbow colored tail. And that alone, I think, you said it to one person. They’ll say, some lady is going to send you a wool mouse to the boss. Or maybe I get the boss on the phone. That’s happened maybe, you know.

30:19
25 % of the time I get the boss on the phone. And so that’s just the first contact. I make a call the first time. Then I mail the thing out right away. um And then I follow up the next time, two weeks, I have HubSpot set to remind me to call them in two weeks. I tried this with a spreadsheet. It doesn’t work. You have to use the CRM software. And it reminds you to call. the next time I’ll send an email, if they don’t respond, the next time I’ll call. And I said it just two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, all the way.

30:49
as long as it takes. As long as it takes means until somebody buys from me or until somebody tells me to stop calling them. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s the whole, I wish somebody had told me you have to keep calling because that is the whole, just, and as polite as can be, oh, I’m just circling back to make sure that you, that you got this in the mail. know, I just, you know, things don’t, and they don’t arrive. I mean, sometimes they don’t arrive and I have to send them another one. um Just want to make sure you got it. And then, oh, did you have any feedback?

31:18
Oh, did you let any of the store cats play with it? Did you let any of your own cats in? And just to get them in conversation, whether by email or by phone and until they say, you know, I’ll place an order today or you know, this isn’t going to work for my store. And I will say my hit rate is I’m batting 500. Amazing. Yeah. Okay. That is really high. Half of the people that I start, I sent them a sample and that’s what I count. I sent the sample. Sure. Half of those buy from me.

31:48
Ultimately, so that one who you said it took a year. Does that imply that you were calling them or contact them every two weeks for a year? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I just mentioned to you before the call, we we did a whole house run out. It was very loud in here for like six months, like so. So there was a gaps where I didn’t call people for every two weeks. But if it was in a normal year, yes, I would call every single two weeks.

32:10
Amazing. Okay, you what I love about this Don is because most people these days they just want to feed some money to like Facebook or Google and like not talk to anyone and do anything and expect business to come. I think what you’re doing with calling with the, you know, you’re the owner calling these stores, the conversion rate is going to be way higher than if you just ran some ads. I mean, this might be your superpower, right? Well, the crazy thing, Steve is you probably know this, but I am a raging introvert. mean, come on somebody ask him.

32:40
My something for me is so against my own grain. I mean, really just not something I would ever. And I think that’s why I avoided it for so long. I sent postcards, I sent emails, I’ve sent, I rewrote my emails. I’ve tried so many different things to get wholesale customers. Those do not work. And sending a sample of a very appealing product and very appealing packaging. I don’t mean to sound, you know, not humble about it, but the product is really great and it’s really in cute packaging.

33:09
and they still will not buy from you if you send it to them. It doesn’t matter. You have to call them. And I actually think of that Robert Cialdini book that you read. There’s the one thing that really struck me was the whole thing about em you make people feel like they’re obligated to you in some small way and like be giving them a key chain. Well, I’m giving them more than a key chain or a pencil or pen, you know, with my robot. I’m giving them an actual product that they actually could just sell to a customer for, you know, 20 bucks or whatever. And um I think maybe that

33:39
obligates them in some small way at least to respond to me, I think. And then once I get to talk to, I mean, I’m enthusiastic about the product, I can talk about the product. Yeah, it sounds so Don, I know you say you’re an introvert, but like I hark back to your presentation at five minute pitch and everything, I would not be able to tell and you’re so talkative, like, you know, we’re checking chatting one on one here and you’re bubbling with energy.

34:02
I almost died before that happened. I that was like the worst thing. sat in that hotel room before that. I didn’t even go to any of You invited me to all of the sessions. I didn’t even go to any of the sessions because I just had to sit in my hotel room and suffer. Okay, all right. So great. this wholesale. So right. This is, you know, what’s funny, I just had someone on the podcast. She didn’t just call. She actually took her car and drove to stores all over the country.

34:31
I did that in my area. live in New England and I did that to all the pet stores in the area. It didn’t work because I didn’t have the follow-up. had I, this time I wasn’t selling this particular product and maybe that was part of it, but the real, and now that I know that from this, merely giving somebody something isn’t enough. really, um it’s the follow-up. The follow-up is the whole thing. I’ve had maybe two people buy from me after they saw the product and without any additional touch points.

35:00
All right, so you must have like a pitch down at this point, right? So pretend like I’m the store. Like what do you say to me? Oh, I just say, oh, hi, I’m Dawn LaFontaine. My company’s cat in the box. I have a product sample that I’d love to send to Arlene. You would she be interested in receiving a free product sample? And everybody, almost everybody says yes. Or the first thing I might say, this would be after, hi, is Arlene in? oh You know, assuming they said, I’m sorry, Arlene’s with a customer, Arlene’s not in today.

35:29
So after that, then I just say that to the clerk. And so then I actually send a paper letter, a real, this is paper. This is Like where you hand write something? No, I mean, I have it on, know, just, you know, letterhead paper. You mean with like a stamp and everything? Well, goes with the products inside the product. And it actually says, you know, like, you know, I’m a small business and I could show it to you, but you know, it, you know.

35:54
that marketing is hard for a tiny company like mine. really, I want you to see the product and the packaging in person um and maybe let a kiddie customer play with it. And I have a QR code that goes right to my fair page. I have the MSRP and the wholesale price right in the letter. That’s it. It’s just like three little paragraphs, not a whole lot, but it’s a letter and who gets a letter these days. em yeah. I remember you were very good at writing also, Don.

36:23
This comes easy to me. This part’s easy. And also, just wrote the same letter. Oh, and in the beginning of the letter, so if I’ve talked to, you know, Chris in the pet store and not Arlene, I’ll say, I spoke to Chris in the store today and she said that you wouldn’t mind receiving a product sample. So I’ve made it clear I’ve called the store. I’ve made it clear. I’ve made a real contact with, know, I took a real interest in their business. I mean, they know if Chris works there, it doesn’t work there, you know, so. Okay.

36:52
All right, so at that point, then, do they just go ahead and buy from fair and they don’t contact you again? No, they never almost never almost never ever. But you just see like this order pop up and fair and I mean, almost never like twice. Okay, that happens. Like literally twice out of 100 calls. The rest of them, they they ignore it. They get the product and they ignore it. Alright, so I’ve had other people who sell wholesale on the podcast.

37:18
And one thing that they told me is you might get that first order, but you sometimes have to follow up to get additional orders. Have you? Is that like on your string of calls or do you not have to do that? In my experience? Almost everyone automatically just gets on a routine of buying from me regularly. But I, know, of course, fair has their own email system and I do periodically sent. don’t people don’t like to be emailed too often from fair and fair doesn’t like you to email them too often.

37:49
But I do keep them on an email list and I send out news every now and then. that definitely does trigger some people to buy, but I don’t know if they would have bought anyway. they just, this is what I said about the magic of it, is I don’t even have to ask for any more orders. The orders just come in. They just buy them. It’s unbelievable. I think maybe like the quality of your product or the uniqueness of your product makes it that way. Cause I’ve had other people on the pod where they’re doing wholesale.

38:15
they have to go in and make sure that the product’s being displayed properly and not hidden on some back of the shelf type of thing. But I think for you, seems like these are small mom and pop shops for the most part. Yes, some are small chains, yeah, regional chains. Yeah, and clearly your product is moving, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t be reordering. And so the combination of those things makes it very hands-off for you, which is amazing. These are like the best.

38:42
like this is the foundation of our business, you know that right? Yes, wedding and the event planners, they just keep ordering and there’s more weddings, they don’t even ask for coupons. They don’t even use the coupon we give them half the time, because they forget, right? They just need it. They need the thing. And so yeah, so that provides a foundation. And then are you even actively trying to grow the retail side because you’d be kind of competing against your wholesale people, right? And mean, because also, mean,

39:10
more than 100 stores in the US and some in Europe now. But these are not in every community. And I actually have a store locator on my website now. think it’s good. That’s awesome. It’s two things. It says to anybody looking at it that these are things in pet stores. You’re not just buying from some crazy lady on the other end of the website, whatever. But you’re in all these stores, you must be legitimate. And also it’s a favor to the stores.

39:38
that you know to I can mention that to them when it was actually a store that that asked me to do it and said you know we get a lot of business from store locators would you consider putting one on your website and it was actually easy enough to do I got some free software to do it was super easy. All right, the other thing I forgot to ask you is you’re not like a technical person right? No. Okay. I mean you’re what you put up your website you added the store locator all this stuff I mean you do you do it on your own or do you hire someone? I mean I’m resourceful.

40:07
I’m not. Yes. That’s what I was getting at. I’m not afraid of it. So and there’s always something you can ask. I I could have asked you, I suppose. But then now there’s chat, GPT or all the videos. And most of these things don’t require any of that. You just literally like do it. It’s it’s not that hard to do. All right. So since we’ve spoken twice and then you start out with that first product and now you pivoted towards these wool toys, if you were to start all over again.

40:37
like with product selection and whatnot, what would you have done differently? I would have taken your advice from the start, Steve. I don’t even know what that advice was. Your wasn’t needed to fit in a shoe box. Do you remember that advice? I do, of course I do. That’s what I should have done. So a couple things don’t matter. How clever the product is doesn’t really matter, actually. You know, it only matters whether somebody wants to buy it.

41:04
And then the other thing that matters is, the, do the economics work? And the shoe box thing is it’s because shoe things and shoe boxes don’t take up as much room as the first products that I started with. What were the unit, what were the margins on the cardboard boxes? I was just curious. You know, it’s really, really harder to say cause first I turned shipping and then now I built the shipping literally could be 30, $40. I’m not. Yes. So, so that was not the case. There was no shipping that cost more than $10 when I first started selling them.

41:33
So the first initial ones that I bought cost less than $6 to buy per unit, $5.50 or so. And then the shipping was $10. It was very reasonable. It wasn’t an unreasonable thing to sell. But now shipping one to California could cost me $40. Crazy. OK, if I recall, these boxes were like $30, $40 or something? Well, right, I had to keep raising the prices to accommodate the free shipping. um

42:01
Yeah, and then it was bulky and and they got damaged in the mail too. So and then I you know, as you know, I um actually redesigned them a couple times they’re more compact. Most those don’t cost more than say $12 to ship the more compact ones. um But that’s still a lot, you know. m And uh well, yeah, anyway. Well, for the people listening who are maybe stuck then like, what are just some signs that you need to pivot?

42:27
Does it feel like you’re pushing a boulder uphill to get anybody to buy it? And, you know, is it really, really hard to convince people to sell it in, you know, in a store? Is it really hard to get somebody just to come to your website and buy it even after you, you know, built up some followers on social media or, you know, gotten some exposure in some way? And then try something else. mean, everything that you’ve learned in starting the first product,

42:55
you get to keep all that. It’s not one bit of wasted effort. You just have to try it with something else. And then how do know when you’ve tried everything though? Like, I know some people just kind of say, oh, I tried that and it didn’t work. I guess you tried for like a couple of years, right? Well, yeah, I redesigned the product several times, found a new manufacturer. I addressed all the issues that customers had with the product. Oh, it doesn’t come with a scratcher. Oh, it’s too hard to put together.

43:24
I changed all of those. I addressed everything I did go through. So then try something else. And if that doesn’t work, mean, you have people on your, I would listen to all your podcasts. You know, it sounds like people are successful right away, but they’re not successful right away. They have 17 failed businesses before. And the only thing that separates them from the people who said, it just doesn’t work is that they just kept going back to the drawing board and trying again. And everything that they learned from the first 17 businesses came to

43:53
play in their successful 18th business. that’s okay. So going forward, uh it seems like you got this wholesale thing down. Are you just going to double down on it? Absolutely. And no house project this year, no noise, I can just make all the calls I want. The actual the bigger problem now is I have so many orders is filling orders takes a lot of time. Yes, I have to address that issue to do I hire someone to retire my husband and make him pack.

44:21
box is for me. Or I guess you could hire someone to do the sales also. And handle the film. Maybe like three PL is perfect for you because it’s small and light, right? It is but it’s expensive. They’re expensive and the margins still aren’t. They’re not I mean, yes, I you know, I pay a few bucks to buy the item and it’s, you know, I sell them for 17 to $25. But you know, there’s

44:49
you know, airfare from Nepal, then there’s the shipping, there’s packaging. So the margins aren’t there really for me, I don’t think for a 3PL. But okay. And also, I’m such a control freak that I don’t know if I could. That is the next step in the breakdown of Dawn. I don’t even know if I can let my husband pack it without checking. He caps me all the time too. And I should be, but you make one mistake on fare. That’s not really good for your fare business. You have to

45:17
you have to get your orders 100 % right. Well, Dawn, this was a great conversation. I’m so glad that you’re doing well and that you’ve… uh I always thought that everything that you’ve made has always been clever. Oh, thank So it was just a matter of finding something where the margins made sense for your time and whatnot. So thank you for sharing your story again. Well, thank you so much for having me on again, Steve. I appreciate it. Hope you enjoy that episode.

45:44
Feel free to go check out Don’s site over at thecatisinthebox.com. And for more information and resources, go over to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 639. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day meeting course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, we’re going to go over key takeaways from Seller Summit 2026 in Fort Lauderdale, walking through every session from AI powered ad creative and TikTok shop launches to sourcing strategies, Reddit SEO, and what buyers actually care about in the current M &A market. And by the end of this episode, you’ll have a full picture of where e-commerce is headed and a list of things you can actually put to work this week. But before I begin,

00:29
I just want to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free over at mywifequitterjob.com slash community, and I would love to see you in there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community.

00:58
Welcome back to the My Web Quitter Job podcast. Tony and I just got back from Seller Summit and I’m tired. I’m still excited though. I’m still amped. I know. I love the post conference high. It like you can write it for like three or four weeks if you’re strategic. So I actually didn’t even look at emails pretty much for like the last five days. And then I tried the other day and I think it was like thousand emails or something like that. Pretty crazy.

01:25
Okay, I thought you were gonna say conference emails. like, because I always love reading the post conference emails. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, so this time it was it was gonna be like the last Seller Summit. And so we got all these you saw them, right? We got all these emails saying, hey, don’t don’t don’t stop the event. Which event are we going to go to? Yeah. And it was just this huge outpouring of love. I want to say. Yeah. So what I what I realized

01:54
when I was there is that there aren’t actually a lot of e-commerce events that are like ours. And there are a couple other really good events. I’m not, you know, we don’t like to knock other events and things like that, but we do definitely have a different environment. And I think for a couple of reasons, one, we are not like for only beginners, right? So if you’re a beginner, you can come and you feel absolutely welcome and you will learn a ton and you’ll get yourself a head start in your business.

02:24
However, our attendees are primarily not beginners, right? Most people have a product and they’re already selling. Now, within that window, we actually do have like a huge variety, right? We have people that are, you know, still in those early phases. You’ve got one or two products, you’ve got your Amazon listing or you got your Shopify listing up, but you’re not like doing it full-time. So we have a people that are in that space, but we also have a large percentage of people who this is their full-time job. They are full-time sellers and it varies between like,

02:53
a lot of solopreneurs or people who have like one or two VAs up to like, there are some people that come with like really big teams, right? Have multiple employees and things like that. And I think that is one thing that makes us a little bit unique is that a lot of events cater to like only beginners, only like eight figure sellers and the people in the middle get lost. And I think that is like the people that I heard from specifically were all the people in the middle, people doing a half a million dollars a year.

03:22
Right. Who feel like they don’t really fit in at a lot of other places. And then the other thing I think, too, is that sometimes you can go to these events and they feel very like bro fest. Right. And we’ve talked about this. I don’t know if talked about on the podcast, but we’ve talked about it personally. Our event is definitely 50 50, like 50 percent female, 50 percent male. And so I feel like there’s it doesn’t give that same vibe as some of those events where.

03:49
It’s like, let me get the money gone, you know, and people are like, you know, all that stuff, which I just feel like that there’s a place for those events, right? Like, and if that’s your thing and also there’s a place, I think some of those events are more like motivation and cheerleading. And that’s, I mean, we want to motivate you, but we’re definitely not like on the stage, you know, with a t-shirt gun, even though I want a t-shirt gun so badly, I want to shoot t-shirts out at Seller Summit. But anyway, I think those two things really make it an event where people feel very comfortable.

04:19
And so to me, that was the question I got from a lot of people at the event. Like, hey, I heard this might be the last year. Like, where am I going to go? These are my people, you know, that kind of thing. And I started thinking about it. was like, yeah, you know, definitely is a little bit of a one of a kind in that respect. I want to say the females outnumbered the men. We should we should check. I think they did. I didn’t want to say that. It’s also hard to tell because like we don’t obviously count. And sometimes with names like obviously I have a name that could be either right. um

04:49
So anyway, I think we probably are definitely a skew a little more female, although obviously guys are always welcome. Yeah, so we’ve been running this event for 10 years and I want to say this is among like the top three. Yes. me this past year. I agree. And a couple of things we did to switch it up this year was we made everything single track. Yeah. And we shortened the talks to 30 minutes and we added in more networking time.

05:17
which I believe were some of the gripes about like the prior year, like people did not like having to choose which talk they had to go to at any given time. And you know, it’s I hate saying these things because like I’m the one who schedules everything. So I feel like I’m like, oh, feel sorry for me. I’m not saying that. But what I don’t like is that it’s really hard to figure out what talk you can put against another talk because.

05:42
In an ideal world, you’re like, OK, we have a Shopify track, we have an Amazon track, right? But there’s a lot of topics that really cover both, right? Like they’re really more marketing specific topics or like JK’s talk, right? Sourcing, right? Whether you sell on Amazon or you sell on your own site, that talk was applicable. So it’s like, well, where do you put that talk when you have two tracks? Right. And then what would happen is sometimes you would have a talk that was like. So Tiffany Ivanovsky is a perfect example.

06:10
Tiffany doesn’t matter what she’s talking about. People like to hear her talk. She’s just a favorite. So you got mad at me last year because I put you at the same time as Tiffany. That’s the real reason we went single track. But the problem is even people who will never do what Tiffany does want to hear her talk because she’s got so much energy and she’s really a motivating person just for e-commerce in general.

06:32
So I think the one track definitely solves that problem. And also if it’s a topic that like, you’re just like, I do not care, I will never do this in my whole life, then that’s your time to go talk to sponsors or go time to have like, get a coffee with somebody. It gives you a little bit of extra, check your email, right? Like catch up on a little bit of work. And because the talks are only 30 minutes, it’s not this huge time gap, right? Where you’re like, what am I gonna do for two hours? It’s like, no, you’ve got 30 minutes. Go to the bathroom, check your email.

07:00
talk to Steven Weigler and come back in. And I know the speakers liked it also. Yes. Because they’re speaking to a full room. Yes. And when there’s more people in the room, you just naturally feel more energized talking on stage. At least I do. No, I thought the energy from our attendees was fantastic. Like they were all very much into it. um Yeah, so I thought the one room part of me was like, why didn’t we do this sooner? Yeah, I know.

07:28
And also, I know the 30 minute talk thing was something that I took from a couple other events I’ve been to in the past year. And what I realized was and we have like this is no shame on our speakers. Our speakers are phenomenal. But someone like Brett Curry, who is like so knowledgeable, knows so much and you give him an hour talk, he is going to fill that hour. Right. And he’s going to fill it like he has hundred and twenty two slides.

07:56
it’s all gonna be awesome, but there’s no possible way you can do all of that, right? There’s just no way you can walk away from that and go, I’m gonna do everything Brett said. But when you give Brett 30 minutes, he focuses on one or two things, and then people are more likely to take that action, they’re more likely to be successful. And so I think it helps speakers, right, like narrow down what they wanna talk about instead of saying, hey, you’ve gotta fill a full hour. And it helps attendees where it’s like, hey, I can come away with this talk with two things and be successful.

08:26
I know it helped me out a lot because for some reason I tend to condense everything down naturally. Yeah. So it’s actually hard for me to fill up an hour. Like I can cover like three topics in an hour. I I was like, do you need a little extra time? You were like, no, no, I do not. No, it was was perfect. Yeah. So all right. Should we talk about some of the sessions? Yeah. Well, we already talked about J.K. a little bit, but his talk was one where I was like, I mean, I’m not an e-commerce like I don’t have my own store anymore.

08:56
But I do. But anyway, yeah, I work with e-commerce sellers, though, and I interact a lot with people that are in e-commerce. He gave I think he had five tips. Once again, great. Five very actionable things you could do about how to get your costs down. And some of them were like, oh, yeah, why am I not doing that? Like one of the things was like shrinking your packaging, right? Like changing the way you package your items. And you listen to that and you’re like, oh, yeah, like.

09:24
Like those types of talks are my favorite because it’s like this stuff is so easy to do. I can go home tomorrow and make that change and immediately save.

09:34
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

10:02
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quiet Light has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change, it was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quiet Light

10:32
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. I mean, there was some negotiation tactics too that he went over. Like that are just no brainers. You just have to ask for them. Yeah. So what was funny about JK’s talk was uh last year at seller summit, we had a couple of talks about, cause it was at the height of the tariffs last year and we had talks on how to source from the USA. Everyone, you know,

11:01
the trend was sourcing away from China. Well, it turns out, like during my keynote, I just had everyone raise their hands. How many of you guys changed your sourcing away from China? Nobody, right? It was like two people or something. Because it’s hard, right? China makes everything. And so that’s why I thought JK’s talk was really applicable. Like if you can’t switch or you’re not willing to switch, at least get a better deal with what you’re sourcing. Yeah.

11:26
And I thought what I what I like about JK one, he’s been a long time. I think he said this was his fifth cellar summit and he’s always come to the events. He’s always provided a lot of value to our attendees. And it was really fun to see him up on stage this year. Absolutely. And he’s been in actually my class for a decade almost. Yeah. Yeah. So that was fun. And then the next speaker that we had, it was funny. You told me we were going to have Jeff Skolnick talk about Reddit. And I was like, what? Like, nobody cares about this. And I was

11:56
Obviously, lovely person. I really enjoyed getting to know him. But the whole time I’m like, is this going to be like, why are we doing this talk? Like, who’s on Reddit? Well, let me tell you, I had more people come up to me about Jeff’s talk than any other, even my own talk at the event. People came up to me. was like, you’re going to tell me how great I did. No, you’re going to tell me how great Jeff did. Thank you very much. People were so fascinated. And I think that’s the other thing that like makes us a little bit unique is we kind of go out like.

12:23
on limb with some talks, right? Like, hey, this is something people are doing. It’s a strategy that works. We’re going to give you a 30 minute talk on it. He did an excellent job of giving you strategies of how to make Reddit work. In fact, one of my clients yesterday was like, so I went on Reddit and I was like, oh no. uh But anyway, fascinating talk. Definitely something I wouldn’t say if you didn’t attend the event, you got to get the recordings because that talk alone was really.

12:49
an eye opener on something that I would say most of your competitors probably are not doing. Let me just give the background on that. The reason why I asked Jeff to talk about Reddit is because ranking in AI search is becoming a lot more important. Right. Very few people are clicking on the 10 blue links and more people are looking at the AI overviews when they’re shopping. And so the way you get on AI overviews is by ranking in Reddit or not ranking in Reddit, just showing up in Reddit. Yeah. ChachiBT

13:17
Gemini and perplexity, they all rely heavily on Reddit content. So that’s what the talk was all about. And I love that he just told you exactly like if you’ve never logged in on Reddit, he told you exactly what to do to not be spammy. Right? That’s the other thing. um What’s funny is I used to actually be pretty big on Reddit way back in the day. know Christina. No, no, not as Christina as myself. Actually, and I actually got a large amount of traffic to my blog from Reddit way back in the day.

13:47
Yeah. And then I got banned. I got shadow banned. Right. Because at Reddit, they’ll ban you without telling you. And then all of a sudden, like your your account doesn’t do anything and you you’re still alive. But in fact, you’re not. So, yeah, that was a really interesting talk. And literally, I had more people come up to me about that talk than any other talk at the event, which was shocking to me. But he’s he’s a really good teacher, too. You just kind of want to listen to him and learn. And I really liked his approach.

14:14
And then of course, another Jeff, we had two Jeffs back to back, Jeff Oxford, who talked about SEO and AEO. And I don’t know, Jeff always just does such a great job. And I love that he only had 30 minutes because he’s another one that can deliver a full hour of just like absolute crushing information. But you kind of are like, I can’t do this. But like with a half hour, I walked out of there and I was like, oh, yeah, this isn’t that hard.

14:44
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.

15:14
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. What I was fascinated about his talk in particular is everything he teaches is backed by evidence that he gathers. He doesn’t just pull random stats across the web. He has enough clients and enough, he actually writes all his own apps too, believe it or not. And he gathers these stats and he proves

15:43
everything that he’s doing. So I trust him for everything that he does. Yeah. And he’s so great. Like another thing that I like about both Jeff’s, but Jeff Oxford’s been to several seller summits is that he’s always available, like during the event, talk to you, roundtable, really help people. I especially because he does. That’s what he does for a living, right? He has an agency, but he’s more than happy to chat with people, give them take a look at their website.

16:08
and give them some really good advice. So I felt like that was another one where you left with like one or two really practical things that you could implement right away. So what was funny is he wasn’t sure if he’d have permission to come to Seller Summit this year. So he actually brought his entire family. know he brought his whole family. Yeah, because the the venue is right on the water, like on the beach. So his family went on the beach while he gave his talks. So it worked out. Yeah, it’s definitely like if I was speaking to Seller Summit and I wasn’t like.

16:35
running the event, I would 100 % make it a vacation. Like it’s just so nice over there. The weather was much nicer this time too, because we moved it up a couple of weeks. a little bit, a little bit cooler for those of you who are not from Florida. And then we had Ian Page, who, oh my goodness, TikTok shop. Let me set the stage for that real quick. OK, Amazon is losing discovery and research.

17:01
What I mean by that is people aren’t discovering new products on Amazon anymore. They’re discovering it on TikTok, Reddit, and then they’re doing research on AI. And then when they know what they want to buy, then they go to Amazon. So TikTok shop is a huge opportunity for a lot of people. Yeah. So the one thing I really liked about Ian’s talk, and I feel like some, especially because Ian runs an agency, right? Bullseye Seller is one of our sponsors. They sponsored last year, really great team.

17:31
I feel like a lot of times when you have an agency talk, they like cloak everything with like, well, the price varies, it depends. Like he was like, if you want to do this, it’s going to cost you X amount of dollars. If you want to do this, it’s going to cost you this. If you don’t have an audience, it’s going to be this. Like he was like very honest about like not necessarily like it wasn’t like we’re going to charge you, but like this is how much you’re going to have to spend to get your products out there, run advertising, do all these things.

17:56
And I feel like so many times people that have like an interest in you working with them, which obviously he does. um One, he was like, don’t work with me, work with me. Here’s how you do it. Right. So first of all, like I love that approach. And then two, you know, for like the most extreme tier, I think it was like close to almost 100 grand. Right. Not to pay him, but to like what you’re going to spend as a store to get it up and going. And to me, I was like, thanks for like actually telling us the truth.

18:23
and not making everything sound like this big fairy tale of TikTok, right? Where people are just gonna go and it’s gonna be free money and you know, all these things and everyone’s gonna immediately buy all your products. So anyway, I thought he presented a really realistic view, also a very doable view. um So most agencies go up on stage and they make it sound so complicated that you hire them. That’s the typical MO of an agency. The reason why Ian and I get along so well,

18:52
is because he actually tries to talk you out of it. Yes. Right. He gives you like the nitty gritty of everything. And then he you’ll notice like he provided both costs. Like if you were to do this on your own, which is totally doable, he said, this is how much it’s going to cost you. If you hire an agency, this is what’s going to cost you. Here are the benefits of going with an agency. Here are the benefits of not. Yeah. The whole time he was giving the talk, though, you one of my clients was there and.

19:18
I in my mind, I’m like, don’t don’t say you want to start TikTok. Don’t say you want to start TikTok. Don’t like don’t make it so easy that. But yeah, and I think it’s interesting because I feel like people right now have a love hate relationship with TikTok, right? It’s it’s feeling a lot like Amazon. People either like are like, love it or I can’t stand it. But I definitely think that it’s a place where you need to be as a brand.

19:43
I don’t think you can avoid it for much longer. Depending on what you sell, of course. And he was very specific about that, too. Right. If you sell in these categories, it’s pretty much a no brainer. If you know, there’s definitely categories where you should not be. It’s something you need to worry about. Yeah. And then we already kind of talked about Brett Curry, but YouTube has a similar model as TikTok shop. Like you get creators, affiliates, and it’s just another platform that’s.

20:10
I think they’re playing a little bit of catch up to TikTok, but it’s up and coming. you know, Google and YouTube have a lot of money to throw out the problem. Yeah. And then Chuck Mullins from Quiet Light got up and talked about basically the state, the state of selling your business. And he, you know, I really like I don’t know what is maybe it’s my personal preference, but I love talks when he’s like, have company A, company B, company C. Here’s what they have.

20:38
which one sold for the best multiple? And you have to like kind of I’m like, I wanna win so badly, although I have no idea what the answer is. I’m like so competitive. um But it was really interesting. Like what companies, the company that you like think on the surface sells for the most or the best multiple was like the least. And so just hearing it from someone who does this every single day, day in, day out, um of the things that you.

21:05
need to be thinking about if this is in your roadmap for your business. The other thing, and I loved this analogy, is he said, too many people think about selling your business like selling your house, right? You put flowers in the front, you paint the walls, you repair everything. And he was like, absolutely do not do that in your business because people are looking for a fixer-upper, right? Like that’s what makes your business valuable. If your business is absolutely perfect, people don’t see an opportunity.

21:32
versus what people are used to selling, right? A house, most people have bought and sold a house or two in their lifetime. You’re like conditioned to like, oh my gosh, like get rid of everything, remove all our family photos, paint all the walls, the broken light socket. And he’s like, don’t do anything. Like obviously there’s certain things you need to do to make it sellable. to me, was like the most, uh that was the best point. And then the second best point was make your business um so that someone can get an SBA loan.

22:02
Yes, I was like, I mean, it makes total sense, right? But if like someone can get an SBA loan, the ability, the quicker it sells, the better the multiple like the details were really interesting. So definitely worth a listen, because I even though I’m not selling a business anytime soon, I was like, wow, this is all like really good information to just have if you ever are thinking that that is in your in your path at some point.

22:28
I mean, I think that’s gonna be the end goal for a lot of people’s businesses, selling it, right? And there’s actually a lot of things that you need to do before you’re able to sell or to maximize your selling power. And so if you guys are listening to this and you have a business, I would advise that you go just make an appointment with Quiet Light and just get your business evaluated to see how much it’s worth. Like, I’m always curious how much my business are worth and I’m sure you guys are too. And then they’ll set you straight on like the best practices

22:58
because maybe you’re not ready to sell right now. But if you want to sell within like the next three years, there is a series of steps that you need to take to make sure you get like the maximum valuation. And I’ve talked to a couple of people who have like longtime sellers, some of the attendees who are not ready to sell right now, but are in the you know, it’s definitely something that they are thinking about in three to four years. And they have all met with either Chuck or Ian or Pat was there last year. And basically, they pointed out some like red flags right in their business where it’s like, hey,

23:27
this is something that you do need to fix in order for it to be sold. And so they’re now like basically changing a little bit of their strategy moving forward so that they can do that. So I think that alone is like very valuable to have them there. Yep. And then we have Scott Cunningham. Oh my gosh. Like what is the like I didn’t realize he was such a rock star. He got like mobbed after his talk. You can tell that that guy speaks regularly. Oh my goodness. Yes. Yeah. I had just met him.

23:55
maybe a couple of months prior and we instantly hit it off because we had the same principles and same values, right? Own your own store, own your own email list, the brand, storytelling and all that stuff. So he gave a really amazing talk on how to use storytelling to boost your business, specifically with meta ads, email marketing and that sort of thing. He also gave everybody his free AI tool that basically

24:24
Everything that he talked about, it allows you to do those things within this tool, kind of following the story brand model. Yeah. Now, I have a question for you. We might have to edit this out. I don’t know. If people buy the recordings, do they also get access to that tool or was that a 10 day deal? They do. OK, they do. I didn’t want to like jump the gun. But it’s funny because like as soon as he gave this really great presentation and then he’s like, I’m going to give you the framework.

24:51
you know, at the end. as soon as he put that QR code up, it was like the Wild West of cell phone photos, right? Like everyone’s like whipping out their phone, taking the photos ah anyway, get grabbing that QR code. So that’s exciting. I’m glad he’s given that’s very generous or generous of him to give that away to everybody. Absolutely. Yeah. And that wrapped up day one. Yep. And I will say we uh it’s kind of become a little bit of a seller summit tradition. I don’t remember exactly how it started, but

25:20
We do tacos and margaritas at the Mexican restaurant for everybody. um So I don’t know any other conference that feeds people dinner. So Pat, ourselves in the back for that one. And shout out to Pam and Rick from HYC. Oh my gosh. Shout out to Pam and Rick from RPC. Oh my goodness. We’re going to have to edit that one out. So let me just, just a quick, quick story about that. Like when we first started Seller Summit in 2016,

25:49
It was very hard to get a sponsor. Yes. Like no one wanted to take a chance on a conference that had no track record. And Pam was one of those people who took a chance on our company. And so I’m very appreciative. Yes. And so they sponsored our Taco and Margarita night. um It’s one of my favorite parts of the event because like the first day is over. People have started to network and meet friends and things like that. So everyone is like I feel like Tuesday night it’s a little bit of like.

26:17
You’re trying to figure out who you know, trying to find people. You’re like, you know, people first timers are sometimes a little nervous. And I’m always trying to find first timers to say hello and like kind of connect them. By the second night, everybody is like best friends and I’ve been removed from that. Like no one wants to talk to me anymore. but I love that night. And I will say, Pam, if you haven’t met her, holy cow. Like she just is she just can go and go like I’m like, do you sleep? Do you need to like take a break from talking to people like I?

26:47
I think the very last night of the event, she was like up on the top. We were up on that deck and she’s like has a little circle of like people that she’s helping. And she even told me she’s like, none of those people are going to work with me. And she’s like, but she’s still like, you know, absolutely giving them all the information, helping them out with their logistics. And yeah. And the other funny thing is she brought all this swag this year, like water bottles and all this stuff. And people thought she was selling it. So we had to make a sign that said free.

27:16
Because people thought she was selling RPC swag. were nice. were super nice. Stanley’s? don’t know about water Yeah, water bottles and these little, I love those little clear pouches because you can use them when you fly. so people were trying to pay for them. So Arden had to make a little tag that said this is all free. So anyway, Wednesday night wrapped up with uh a dinner party. And of course, I tried to go to bed at a decent hour. I don’t know what time.

27:44
Everyone shut down the restaurant there, but that was always a fun night. Plus I had to get ready for Thursday because we had another full day of sessions. And yes, so we started off the morning with Liz and Dana. Yes, they were talking about how to take customer feedback and convert those into AI generated videos. I actually ran through their talk yesterday and implemented some of the videos. Awesome. And it works really well. Like this will save a tremendous amount of time.

28:13
for meta creatives, meta videos, or even just like short promotional videos that you’ll have on your website. It was amazing. Yeah, and what I loved about it was they used one of our attendees, Kelly Dream. That’s right. They used, and actually they used some of your stuff too as a demonstration. So instead of just kind of doing all theory and not anything practical, they actually took products that people are selling.

28:39
ran through, got the reviews off the website, ran it through all the tools that they’re talking about, and it really is doable. It’s not something that you’re like, oh well, you I’m probably never gonna do that. Like 100 % you could do this, like you said, you did it in afternoon. People could easily. I mean, I ran through it yesterday. It took about 30 minutes, and what’s nice is I kind of felt like a director. So you produce a video and then you just tell it in just regular words.

29:07
what you don’t like about it and then it fixes it on the fly and gives you a video that you can use for like an ad or or whatever social media. Yeah. So that was awesome. And I have to say, I told Liz this, um you know, yesterday and after the event, I mean, we’ve known Liz for a long time. Last year, gave the closing keynote. She did a phenomenal job. And I hate it. I don’t want to get too far off tangent, but people don’t like to make videos. People don’t like to do the webinars. People don’t like to go live.

29:35
I will tell you the difference in Liz’s like stage presence in the last like 18 months because she does webinars every week. She goes live every week. She does office hours is like she was good before. She’s fantastic now. Absolutely. She’s like a she’s like a paid speaker, right? Like someone that does this for she got up there and she had like this stance and I was like, oh, oh, we’re like big time, right? Like anyway, so I just want to say to people who are like nervous because we’re going to talk about this in a minute with Tiffany’s talk.

30:03
People who are nervous about getting on video, making content, all those things, man, the more you do it, the better you get. you can look at Liz as a great example of someone who started off pretty good and is now phenomenal. Yeah. Which leads us to the next talk, which I thought was phenomenal. Leah Segovio. Yes. He was giving out these automations that allow you to clone any Facebook ad that you see and just insert your product into it.

30:32
Yeah. And he came out with this hat, this money hat, broke the ice immediately. It was hilarious. my goodness. Yeah. It was like this. I don’t even know. was like had battery powered or something. He had like flashing lights. It was. Yeah, I liked it. It was fun. But I thought it was amazing the output that was. So I think he actually went through a complete example where he found an ad.

30:54
for I believe it was a deodorant or something like that. I can’t remember what it was. He’s had a couple. He had a weight loss one and a deodorant one. And then the one I won’t ever, no one in the audience will forget is the baby carriage. Yes, the baby carriage. But what he did is he was like, okay, I sell a product that’s a competitor to this. He took an ad that he found from Facebook ads library and then switched his product in to that ad. And he created this automation in 8N that he handed out freely to the entire audience.

31:24
that automatically generated these ads. Yeah, yeah. Pretty amazing. um And you have to watch his talk because he gave some examples of when AI goes wrong and when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Right. And I will say, like, it’s funny because like some of the stuff that we saw from that, I felt like was like, oh, that’s not that’s good. It’s not great. But also, I remember seeing stuff last year, not from him, but from other people where it was like.

31:49
It’s so much better today than it was even six months ago. I can’t even imagine where it’s going to be in another six months. Yeah. I mean, we say that all the time. It’s been true for the most part. Yes. Were you the next speaker? I I was the next speaker right after the break. I paying any attention. You guys know how I feel about the Shopify app store. I actually had some numbers to back me up this time. Sixty percent of the apps in the app store are very easy to code up yourself. Yeah.

32:18
The remaining 30 to 40%, maybe you should pay for, but there’s a lot of people out there. Actually, in the audience, asked, how many of you, what’s funny, I use these examples of specific Shopify apps that are just total rip-offs. And I was like, how many people are using these apps? And actually, a whole bunch of people were using them. So I taught them how to vibe code those apps, basically, live on stage. Yeah, that was a good…

32:44
I mean, I felt like I already knew the talk only because you and I talk about this like every single week with each other of like, you’re like, what app are you using that I could code this week? And I’m like, try coding this thing. So anyway, I thought it was a great talk. And I felt like once again, it was just enough information so that people can go home and at least replace, at least get started, right? Even replacing one or two one of their $20 a month apps. Yeah. Because once you do one, you’re empowered to then take it a little further and

33:14
do something a little tougher the next time around. And it was a level playing field. Like I went through the whole process without even looking at the code, just as a regular user. And that’s when I need my t-shirt gun and I can shoot out. just a little bit of code t-shirts to everybody in the audience. OK, moving on. So I asked Isabella to talk because she has this amazing framework.

33:42
for doing product research. And her track record is amazing. If you follow her method of product research, you’re almost guaranteed that your product that you launch is not gonna be a flop. And what’s cool is she handed out this AI app that she developed where you enter in some parameters from uh popular Amazon research tools and it will give you a number that’s like a probability of success. And so I thought that was very valuable.

34:10
And I love that she did a live demo on stage. Yes. And the whole time she’s like she had already set it all up and she’s like, I hope when I click go, it doesn’t like reset itself because everything had already been populated in there. But it was really interesting. And yeah, I think if you’re if you’re interested in and launching new products on Amazon or even getting started on Amazon, it was definitely a talk that you need to need to hear. Yep. And then we had another one of our O.G.’s. Yes. Give a talk. Chris Schaeffer.

34:40
He talked about the one-person content machine. Now, if you were to talk to a lot of the larger e-commerce companies, they have full teams that are dedicated to content, right? But thanks to AI, it does not have to be that way anymore. And so you could put out the same similar output to an entire team by yourself now if you follow Chris Schaeffer’s methods.

35:04
Well, first of all, you just loved Chris Schaeffer, right? Like he comes every year. He’s he’s the last person to leave. He talks, you know, he wants to help everybody. His mastermind. I mean, I don’t even know what happened in that room, but like, I’m pretty sure that they’re all now got matching tattoos and our best friends for life. Like they hung that that group hung out the whole time. I don’t know if you saw that. They were like fast friends and they’re starting. They’re going to meet throughout the year. And, you know, he just rocked it in there. And then

35:33
I feel like with Chris’s talks, he does all the content generation for like six companies, six e-commerce companies, he was saying. It’s everything that he’s doing. So you know that it’s possible because he’s the only one doing it. So anyway, that’s what I like about Chris is he’s never showing you something that he isn’t already doing and working through. And so it’s always very practical, useful information that you can. And also piggybacked on some of Dana Michelle and Liz’s stuff with Remotion.

36:02
So anyway, there was like a tie in there that was nice that we didn’t even know was gonna happen. So I actually checked out his freebies, you know, that he was giving out. There was actually a lot of stuff in there and he did not gate it in any way. You click on it and you just get it all. Yeah, it’s pretty nuts. So I guess we’re giving those to the virtual passes too. They get that. They do. OK, wow. They get all the freebies. This is getting to be too good to be true. I feel like an infomercial. And then we had Dave Bryant who

36:31
I had never met. In fact, I thought he was Asian. um I was like, right. Yes. And I also thought he was I didn’t know he was Canadian. So I was thoroughly confused when I saw his photo and realized that uh he was not uh Asian. You disappointed he wasn’t Asian? A little, obviously. But he I told him, said, I don’t know why I thought you were Asian. He said, well, I guess Mike Jackness had had another partner that was Asian, and that’s probably why I was confused. um Did he?

36:59
I don’t know. That’s what he said. Oh, sorry. So just an intro. Dave runs Ecomacrew. Yeah. And he’s been on the pod a bunch of times. So you guys probably know who he is. Yeah. But Mike used to be like the main spokesperson, I would say. Yeah, not anymore. Not anymore. So, Dave, uh I wanted to see him speak. And I actually, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting him to be that amazing.

37:24
No, so I want to say like no one ever can top Tiffany for like laughs and audience like response. He was very close. I mean, he had people like shouting and laughing and yelling. mean, he did talk about his whole knitting.com saga. And um yeah, it was it was a very interesting talk. was about what to do when your audience turns on you and how to basically survive it, which I think in this day and age is something that happens to more companies than used to because of the rise of social media.

37:54
Right? Like one thing on social media can basically take a company out of business. And so he basically talked through the stuff that happened with them and knitting.com and what their plan of action and how they move past that and to build a successful company. But yeah, one amazing on stage to super nice guy. Just like I’ve never met a Canadian that I didn’t like. That’s true. Because also I was like, what is this? The Canadian show we had Scott and J.K. and Dave. I didn’t think about that. Yeah.

38:24
I was like, Steve’s doing something here. I don’t know what it is. But anyway, I was it was excited to finally meet him because I had heard so much about him. And it was also interesting to hear the story from his point of view and not Mike’s because I had only heard Mike’s point of view. Right. And it was a little bit different. But Dave is an amazing speaker. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely crushed it. And then, of course, Tiffany, I know you put her last because just to energize the room. Yes. Yes.

38:53
She’s, oh my goodness. It’s hard to, it’s hard to, like, what do you even say about Tiffany? She just gets up, doesn’t matter what she talks about. ah This year she talked about the halo effect and how it’s kind of like, it was interesting because we definitely try to get talks that piggyback or build, but this year it just worked out so perfectly because it was like, and this was on purpose, is day two was all about like increasing your presence, building the efficiency right with AI, using the tools.

39:21
And then Tiffany kind of wrapped it up with this like, you need to be everywhere and this is why. And showing us how, you know, it’s kind of similar stuff from the day before with like, you know, people are finding you on TikTok, but buying you on Amazon and how you create that content. And once again, just giving people she did a live, she did a big TikTok recording in front of the whole audience, you know, show people how it’s OK to mess up, keep going um and basically explain why it was so important to

39:51
be putting yourself, your brand out there and um really, really like casting that wide net. Like I said, like I could watch her do anything. Right. The prior year, she actually went on with my wife and did some live selling on stage. I thought was pretty amazing also. Yes. And she I think she might have topped that performance with this one because she had all these video examples. Yes. And she even recorded a live one on stage to.

40:19
Yes. And her example, she always talks about one of the things I love about her. She’s just so real. Right. Like and she talks about how if you are making these recordings where your brand and that sort of thing, like if you mess up, it’s OK. You should just keep continue to post and post those things. And she showed a couple of her mistakes. One of the ones is when she swallowed a bug when she was live. Yes. And she was like choke. Anyway, like the videos are so funny. She’s I love that she’s OK to be embarrassed. Like she doesn’t get she’s probably embarrassed, but like

40:48
She’s like, hey, this creates engagement. And so what you want is engagement for your brand. So it’s OK to post those things. And then finally, we had the last speaker of them all. The closing keynote was none other than Tony. Yes, it was so much fun. I had so much fun up there. You were not nervous leading up to it at all. I don’t know why. Oh, I do know why. Why? I do know why. So two things happened.

41:14
So I was nervous. So first of all, I knew that I had to start working on this talk like six months ago, because if I didn’t, I would be a wreck, because I have so much else going on like the week of the event. Like I couldn’t be like working on the talk. So that was number one. So I started it a long time ago, which was good, because it gave me lot of time to like iterate on it. Number two, Dana Jean-Zemes, our closing keynote from 2023, sent me an article that she had written early that week. And basically it was,

41:43
With public speaking, when you get on stage, everybody in the room wants you to succeed because no one wants to sit through a bad talk. And I was like, that is so true. Like, I don’t want to sit through a bad talk. So everybody in this in the audience is cheering you on. They want you to be good because they don’t want to listen to someone who’s bad. Right. So it kind of like calms the nerves a little bit, knowing that like everybody in the audience is cheering for you. And then finally.

42:10
My kids were there, which was really cool. Yes. Not all of them, but a couple of them were there. So that was kind of fun. And also, like my son is like, you know, that wasn’t totally true. You were screaming at us the whole time. We were trying to pack orders. I’m like, everybody in e-commerce knows that. That’s I didn’t need to share that information. um But so that was really cool. But Mike Barnhill had to had to go to a meeting on Thursday. And so when I was talking to him on Wednesday night, he was like, yeah, I got to dip out like at lunch. I’ve got this meeting. And I was like, oh, my gosh, you’re so.

42:39
I had had a conversation with someone previously how having Mike Barnhill in the audience is the most empowering thing that you can have when you speak, because he is like 100 % locked in. He is engaged. He is the person you want to make eye contact with because he is like all there. Right. your biggest fan. He is your biggest fan. No matter who you are, he is your biggest fan. Right. So then he tells me he’s not going to be there the night before. And I was like.

43:03
was planning on locking in on Mike Barnhill and just being like, this is the Mike Barnhill talk, right? And so I was like, oh, are you kidding me? And, know, and we just talked about it he’s like, well, maybe I could. like, but I would have to change my flight because he was supposed to fly out of Miami and all this stuff because his meeting was in Miami. So sure enough, that dude paid money, changed his flight, came back to Fort Lauderdale for the closing keynote. And when I looked out and saw him in the audience, I was like, I’ve already won. Like, yeah.

43:32
This is like, like this means more to me, right? Seeing people that like have been so impactful in my life, like in the audience, either as business friends, you know, whatever. um So, yeah, it was really fun to get up there. I don’t want to give too much away for people, but like I basically said, hey, don’t go out of here with a big list. Yeah, no, there was was more to it than that. It’s really hard to do a closing keynote also. Very hard. It’s very hard. But you you managed to wrap everything up nicely.

44:01
some very good takeaways with your infinite wisdom. mean, we’ve known each other for over a decade now. You’ve been through a lot coping with it. And shout out to Mike Barnhill, lead singer of Hydrofighter. He has an album coming out, I think, in the next month or so. it’s actually I actually really enjoy his music. So I always like giving him a shout out. I wear my Hydrofighter shirt very proudly. I know I need to get a Hydrofighter shirt.

44:28
But anyway, yeah, so and then Mike in that whole conversation, he told me something else that I actually I was like, you know what? This is like some of the best life advice I’ve ever heard. And he basically said, I wake up every day thinking that this could be the best day of my entire life. And I was like, that. was like, what? Like, I like up thinking this could be the worst day of my entire life. It’s true. You’ve been beaten down by the rigors of life.

44:56
He told me that on Wednesday night and I woke up Thursday morning and I was like, today could be the greatest day that I’ve had in my entire life. That’s there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be. Right. Yeah. And I have been like kind of carrying that all since Seller Summit’s over. And like each day, I mean, like every day is not a great day. Right. But like I was like, you know what? You got to start the day that way. If the day beats you down, it beats you down. But like I’ve been kind of on that path in the past week or so. And I’ve like I feel like I’ve been riding like the high.

45:26
because I’m like, yeah, you never know what’s going to be the greatest day of your life. And I joked about it in my talk about like our once in a lifetime, you know, warriors game and how like, you know, business creates opportunities for you. Right. It gives you opportunities to do things that maybe you never thought were possible, whether it’s financially.

45:43
time, opportunity, the people you meet, and you’ve got to take advantage of those things, right? You can’t get caught up in the day to day. So for me, that was the biggest lesson I took away from Seller Summit. All the talks were fantastic, but waking up every day like it could be the greatest day of your life is probably one some of the best advice I’ve ever heard. I think everyone needs a little bit more Mike Barnhill in their lives. Closing keynote for 2027. Actually, that’s not a bad idea. I it’s assuming there is a 2027. But anyway. It’s been brewing. It’s been brewing in my head.

46:14
We are selling the virtual passes for Seller Summit 2026 on the website. And we’ll probably leave that open for maybe a month or so. Videos are getting edited. They should be up very soon.

46:29
Hope you enjoyed this episode. The virtual pass for Seller Summit 2026 is still available if you want to catch all the sessions. Go to sellersummit.com. And for more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 638. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Leo Segovia breaks down the AI powered workflows he built to automate influencer outreach, generate video ads and launch products without relying on giveaways or PPC. He walks through his exact system he used to sell out 5,000 units before Christmas and how he clones winning competitors ads using a chain of AI tools. Enjoy the episode. But before we begin,

00:29
I want to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I’m incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free over at mywifequitterjob.com slash community, and I would love to see you there. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash community. Now onto the show.

01:00
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m excited to have Leo Segovio on the show. Now, I first met Leo at my annual eCommerce Conference’s Seller Summit, and I think he was introduced to me by my good friend, Branded Young. And regardless, we got back in touch recently at Kevin King’s Market Masters event, where I realized that this guy’s got a ton of different businesses all in the eCommerce space, and he’s a seller as well. And so he’s been in this industry for over 15 years, maybe more than that.

01:30
in the Ecom space. In 2017, he was actually the head of innovation for viral launch, which was a company started by my friend Casey Goss, who was actually on the show. And I think he sponsored the seller summit a while back as well. And then since then, he started combo mat, which is a marketing automation tool for sellers, and spliced.io, which is an influencer and affiliate marketing program for creators and brands. But the reason I wanted to have Leo on the show today is because

01:59
He is using AI heavily to automate a lot of e-commerce processes and UGC. And he’s the type of guy, as you’ll soon see, who’s always on the cutting edge. He always wants to know how everything works. And with that, welcome to show, Leo. How are doing? Nice to you. Good, good. How are you? Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Actually, it’s funny because you…

02:21
we met, I don’t know, it probably three, four years ago. Yeah. And I mean, like I’m chasing you. I wanted to like connect with you because I admire you as well. So thank you for, you know, your words. But you know, I just feel the same way towards you. So I appreciate you having me on the show today. I think I was like, when I first met you, was like, who what is this supermodel doing at Seller’s? That’s the reputation I don’t I don’t like I don’t want to have this place. But you know, guess what, everybody introduces me like this guy.

02:49
Okay, you know, I just want people to know there is a brain also here. So okay, so Leo, I know the audience, my audience doesn’t know you that well, just yet. How did you get started with e commerce? Because I know you were in the fashion industry and you were a DJ. So how the heck does that lead into you? Yeah, you know, Steve, I’ve always been very passionate about it. Even when I was working in the fashion industry in Italy and DJing, I was selling shoes on eBay.

03:19
I remember, and then that was kind of like, led me to understand how to import stuff from China. I was probably only 20 years old, maybe younger. That’s also how I learned how to write English very well. Because at the time, I can remember what the chat um tool was. I think it was powered by AOL or something like that. But you had all these chat rooms and that’s where all the Chinese were.

03:44
But then uh what it really took off is when I decided to move from Italy to Canada. And uh because my family there had a really large travel uh business, it was called redtech.ca, similar to Expedia, was obviously privately owned. so at the time they asked me to do some like, kind of did an entry job in the SEO space. They wanted me to optimize.

04:10
title tags, the descriptions, and pretty much make these pages optimized for Google engines. And that’s where I really got passionate about that industry. In fact, they sponsored me. They decided to sponsor me, keep me there, because they liked my work ethic. since then, I never left e-commerce space again. And I did a couple of interesting things. I had a Santa website.

04:39
you know, where kids could write letters to Santa and that was you. Yeah, that was me. Yeah, okay. I’m actually about to do a YouTube video on. Yeah, it’s actually I excuse me though, like I’m calling the video dumb business ideas that made millions. And that’s actually one of them. That was one of them. I was making much money with Google Adsense at the time because you you wrote so the kids wrote this letter or just picked kind of kids they wanted and this script in the backhand was

05:09
creating the naughty or the list of the good kids. Right. And on that page was full of ads and ads, which kids obviously don’t know anything about it. It’s just clicking everywhere. And one of the reasons why I was making so much money is because of the Nord Santa tracker, which is related to tracking systems like the GPS systems in the Google kind of AdSense space.

05:38
All these GPS tracker ads were showing on the Santa site and they were actually paying a lot of money for clicks on these ads. So at the end of the month, it’s like three, four, $5,000 in just ads and campaigns. But then we took it a step further. We started actually printing letters. So I my parents, my brother working on this project from Italy.

06:01
and they were just printing all these papers during Christmas time and shipping it to kids. It was fun. It was fun project. That’s hilarious. Okay. I had no idea. Yeah. I mean, I’ve listened to some of your interviews in the past, Leo, and there was one story I think that you told where your first Amazon product, you actually did not launch with PPC and it was just all influencers. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it’s funny because today is probably the most

06:28
the best, most effective ways to launch as well. um But what we did, this was October last year, um we decided not to do giveaways, anything like that. which is normally what I would do, like to rank uh on Amazon. But we decided to just use creators, um influencers and PPC.

06:53
So a lot of content that was um coming from TikTok and Instagram. And then we just went with this auto and broad, kind of semi-broad campaigns. But the results were like fascinating. Like um I’ve never seen a product, obviously it was a game. So you have a lot of demand during Q4 for games, anything related to giftable items. But that became almost its own kind of…

07:21
you know, strategy for us to launch like right timing when there’s a lot of demand plus, you know, traffic coming from outside with influencers. And yeah, we sold out. We initially bought only five thousand units. So we we never ran out of stock before Christmas. And it was very successful. Yeah. So I I know I’ve had other people use influencer marketing very effectively before.

07:47
But on the flip side, whenever I put out one of those episodes, I always have a bunch of people send me emails saying, hey, you know, it’s great. I love that case study. like, how do I actually get these influencers? How do I get them to follow through? uh You’ve done this many times and you actually have an influencer platform. What I mean, is there an easy way to do this? Or is it always going to be a pain? don’t think there is an easy way to do this. But

08:11
we’ve tried to streamline it so that it becomes easier. Because when it comes to influencers and especially on TikTok, where you deal with a lot of affiliates, um you’re talking to people that obviously want to make money. And they’re also very two different platforms. on Instagram, for example, uh it still matters how many followers they have. And if the audience is kind of resonates with your product. On TikTok Shop,

08:39
the audience, the followers don’t matter at all because any video, you know, the algorithm is very, very interesting from that perspective. Every video can go viral. And so what really matters is that the creator you work with um knows how to create content like the right hook, which is what we try to do. But the way that I think we improved or accelerated kind of this success rate from that perspective,

09:09
is by leveraging AI to not only find the right creators, because it’s a volume game, right? The more people you reach out to, so there are these bots, right? We have an agent that sends a lot of emails to Instagram creators and sends a lot of DMs to TikTok creators. But right now there are three or four platforms known in the space that do similar things. And the problem with most of them is that they spam creators.

09:34
Yes. You can send a thousand messages a day or a thousand emails a day, but they’re not being seen because you’re spamming them. And so they have so many messages. So we partially solved that problem. But if they don’t solve it too, it’s right now a little bit of a tricky situation because we are doing, I believe, a much better job at reaching out to creators that meet certain criteria. And we use a lot of AI, like we have 114 different data points.

10:03
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10:31
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10:59
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11:18
So we know we’re reaching out only to creators that they’re going to like our product and they most likely are going to like our offer. Because if you are working with affiliates today and you send them a 20 % offer, if they are a micro one, they might say, yeah, 20 % is pretty good for me. I’m just looking to make some money right now. But if you’re reaching out with these bots to someone that has already got, know, making a bunch of money, uh high GMVs.

11:45
they’re not gonna look at your message, they’re gonna ignore you, they’re gonna delete it. So that’s how we um became better and better when it comes to outreach and knowing with the power of AI also, when is the right time to send a DM based on all these different factors. Does it make sense? So interesting, so uh you actually go out and you’ve scraped a bunch of creators and you categorize them with AI?

12:14
So we did that. also have obviously creators uh on our own platform. And then when it comes to using the APIs, we sort through them before, right now, I’ll an example, the way that most platforms do it, you go in there, you select some filters, you say, okay, I want creators from US, I want creators that make about a thousand dollars GMB, and then um in the games industry.

12:43
Right. You press the button and now the bot is going out there and sending messages to everyone that is being returned from these APIs. We take it a step further. We analyze everyone that is being returned and see do they actually fit our criteria because the APIs, you know, they work. They just get the database, run a query, they give you responses. But then when you look at all these ones individually, they might not be very relevant. They might not be like maybe in the game industry, our game, perhaps.

13:12
is for five-year-old and up, right? Five-year, five to 12. But they’re being returned because perhaps we search for family games, but they have only toddlers. So they have two-year-old kids. So for us, that’s not good enough, right? So that’s where we step the game up and filter and create our own scoring system instead of relying on what these APIs return to us. How do you know what’s a good offer to offer one of these creators once you find one?

13:41
So it depends on what they are currently uh making in terms of GMV. It also depends on how many brands they’re working with. It depends on how many videos they create, what an average video makes for them. And if what they’re making can be kind of like replaced with uh yours, right, with your product. So let’s say on average they make $10 commission on a product, right? If you are not matching that,

14:11
they’re not going to obviously replace whatever they’re working on today, which is making money with yours, especially if you’re just starting. don’t even know, they don’t have an EGMV related to your storefront, right? So they don’t know what your conversion rate is. So that’s the challenge, you know, the challenging part is, it’s like the cold start, remember on Amazon, but this time instead of showing it to the algorithm that you’re worth it, blanking on page one, you know, you’re showing it to the affiliates on TikTok shop.

14:40
Yeah, so I had heard that there’s only like a thousand affiliates on TikTok shop, for example, that actually make more than $10,000. So it seems like the strategy to find that pool, it’s very small. So is your strategy different to just get anyone based on the type of content that they create? 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,

15:09
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15:40
Yeah, yeah. We adopt, you know, kind of a three-phase strategy, depends on the size of the brand. So if the brand is small, we go after like more the micro influencers just to get the traction. Cause you have to go over the $2,000 GMB in order to get, unlock more messages. So we try to obviously go through phases. Cause it doesn’t make sense for you to work with a, you know, try to work with this super affiliate if you’re not there yet. Right. So.

16:10
That’s what we try to do. I think right now there is more than a thousand. I know a couple of affiliates myself here in Miami that I’ve started like two months ago and they’re already doing about 10,000. So I think the pool is becoming bigger and bigger, but I think there is still a huge gap between the amount of brands that are looking to launch and the number of affiliates that know what they’re doing or they can drive revenue.

16:40
I’m curious, so for the people who use your tool and they have hits on TikTok, is it usually from someone who is relatively new from a perspective, like hasn’t made that much money and then you just find those diamonds in the rough as opposed to finding like the big guys that are? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, m for example, this guy that I just told you is Spanish, right? So what he’s doing

17:06
is taking all the content that works extremely well in English and is just doing it in Spanish. Same script, same thing, it’s just cloning. And it’s killing it. It’s literally killing it. So there’s that, right? We have this AI analyzer that also looks at the videos that have gone viral and tells you pretty much how to replicate that success. So if you find those creators that like your brand, they kind of meet your…

17:33
Feed your brand criteria. I think you can also work with them I don’t want them to do what you want as a brand because you want creators to be creators, but um I Don’t think they they mind if you tell them hey look, this is these guys making a lot of money You know, let’s try to do something similar um Yeah, but most of the time is like from new creators, they’re just grinding right? Yes. Yeah, I’m curious for the people that use your platform. uh Can you just

18:01
Give me some metrics or some ideas, like how many people you have to message, like what the hit rate is, like how much persistence do I really need? How much product do I need to have to give away like the budget, that sort of thing, just some guidelines. Yeah, so at the beginning, you need to unlock the $2,000 G &V in order for you to get to pass the 2,000 messages that you have on a weekly basis. So all the metrics are…

18:29
weekly based, right? Or the limitations. So you unlock the $2,000, you have to keep obviously that. So at the beginning, we’re still doing like friends and family purchases. Last year, a lot of sellers were using also friends and families, but doing like more than one unit per purchase, right? So you get to the number a lot faster with less people.

18:56
But then once you unlock the 2000, you get to the 5,000 messages. And then that is the next year is to the 50,000. So once you get to the 50,000 messages, obviously it’s a lot easier for you to find a lot of creators because you really need to message a lot of them today for the reason that I explained earlier where everyone is kind of a spamming. So it’s hard to be found. The other way is to just create this open

19:25
collaborations if you’re working with TikTok creators, so you let them apply instead of inviting them right through a 2DM. uh That is kind of like maybe a little bit easier. Like everybody’s going to apply. But if you’re looking just to get some sales, so you can even potentially ask them to buy the product and then you do the refundable sample, right? So they buy the product and then you refund them. That counts also for purchases.

19:54
And so I would say the really toughest part is that initial cold start, which could last a couple of months. Are you talking about breaking past the 2000 or getting to the end? And past the 2000 because the good affiliates, want to see that you’re an established shop to work with you. And then budget-wise though, would you

20:22
Let’s say you launched a new product. Would you start with like TikTok shop or? Yeah, but I don’t think I will do on the TikTok shop. Okay. Steve, I would, I will still have another channel. The reason is that today there is this, there is a little bit of confusion and most people in TikTok shop, they don’t really know their numbers simply because the platform has it’s not, it’s still new and it’s not like Amazon where you know what the fees are.

20:52
Like a TikTok shop right now to incentivize brands, they’re giving a lot of rebates and sometimes they do discounts and then there are the samples, then there is the shop ads commissions. you know, most brands they see they’re not profitable. Right. Or if they are, it’s like tiny. But if they sell on Amazon, they see this huge, you know, the halo effect. Yeah, this halo effect on Amazon. If you do Shopify, same thing.

21:18
So I don’t think, think Amazon and TikTok is a very great discovery channel. um But the channel that today is still probably the most profitable is to be Amazon. So if you can launch at the same time on both platforms, think that’s where you have a successful business. Like we’ve seen one of the competitors, when we launched our product on Amazon last year, another guy did it on TikTok and Amazon.

21:47
And he sold 70,000 units in Q4, 70,000 units only because he was very, very active on TikTok Shop. So did he make money on TikTok Shop? I don’t know, maybe not, but on Amazon he killed it for sure. Right. And then somehow you have to correlate the two, right? Because I mean, it’s clear that there’s this huge halo effect. uh Yeah. Which is also what I think most companies right now are not doing correctly.

22:15
They say we have the halo effect, but they say we can track the attribution, but they’re not doing it right because they’re only using the Amazon attribution API, which as you know, it’s not accurate. I mean, is there really a way to track like typically the way my wife shops? Cause she does a lot of these Tik Tok shop. She doesn’t buy on Tik Tok shop, but what she does, she sees something and then she’ll just Google it, find the Amazon ad and then click on it. So there’s no attribution in that case, right?

22:41
In that case, is no attribution. Exactly. That’s why those that are saying, oh, we see the hello effect with using the Amazon attribution API. I’m like, you’re just asking people to get a little bit of, you know, to gain a little bit more business. But truthfully speaking, there is no way you know if someone um goes on Google. What you can see on Amazon, if you go straight to Amazon, is maybe more branded searches, right? But not if they come from Google.

23:09
Right. Yeah, I that that makes sense. Leo, I want to shift gears and because I know you you did a lot of cool talks on uh AI UGC. And that just fascinates me because one I want to know is it legal or a whole bunch of people running meta ads right now with AI UGC? And is it allowed? Is it work? How easy it is to pull off on mass? Like, what are your opinions on it? So it is allowed. But for example, TikTok just announced that

23:37
creators cannot use AI clones to promote physical products. I think there is a shift happening right now where AI is becoming so almost impossible to detect that it is deceiving, right? So I these platforms, I’m not sure about Meta to be honest, but I TikTok for sure announced this like last week or this week.

24:01
They said, even if it’s your clone and you’ve already tried it yourself, m the product yourself, you cannot use AI to say that these glasses are actually very comfortable. So that is a huge, huge shift because using tools to create AI, GCE. So I still think the best way probably to do it or to use AI is for like um general social proof.

24:30
So you’re not really using these AI clones to sell something. I’m pretty sure people will do it the same way they’ve done it, this story, like especially affiliate marketers, know, they use creative ways to scam the system. yeah, like for uh technically speaking, we should not be allowed anymore. Can you elaborate on what you just said though? So don’t use it for UGC, but for social proof. Isn’t that…

24:59
You’re talking about like putting on your website then and not running it on the platform? Yeah, I think you better on your page, right? If you have an Instagram page, TikTok page, you can use AI clones of yourself or influencers. They just cannot promote a product. So they cannot make a claim about a product, whether it’s a skincare or physical product, because technically it’s fake. It’s not you making the claim is an AI clone. So you’re deceiving people.

25:27
But if you’re just using um AI to generate informational content, oh how to do a cleanse for your face, or how to probably like a routine, things like that, you’re not really selling anything, you’re teaching people, you’re informing people of certain things. So that is an okay utilization, like a use case, which today is still okay. But otherwise, on your website, you can use tons of like…

25:55
testimonials. Yeah, they’re not obviously like, I think that you violate other type of laws, but you can still create this type of content, right for I mean, that even seems like a gray area to me. So let’s say, for example, you sell a beauty product, and you just show this AI person going, Hey, you know, I’m clearing my skin, this is what my my routine. And then you casually flash the bottle, but you don’t try to sell it. Is that legal? I mean, that’s an advertorial, right?

26:25
Yeah, it is an advertorial. It’s also legal. Based on the new policies, it’s also legal. which I’m kind of happy about it, though, because I don’t think AI should be used for that. Yeah, I don’t think it’s a very good. It’s a fair use and ethical use um of AI. Everybody was excited about it because I’m not who I can create so many. I can have so many, like thousands of influencers, but

26:54
Yeah, they said, No, this is not allowed. Okay, so even the advertorial is illegal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As of now it is. So that might change because you know, if you go on TikTok, they also allow you to create a lot of AI generated content like they even have tools themselves. My whole feed is AI now actually exactly. Yeah, exactly. So I don’t know how far they’ll push the other enforce um you know, this type of violation. But um

27:22
As of now, they’re saying it’s not allowed to do it. I know before I hit record, you gave a talk recently on how you took an existing ad or commercial and you swapped it with a product. uh Is that was it just a fun exercise then? Or is that actually practical? No, that is practical. I was actually surprised myself of the results and I think they can be totally used for um advertising or meta, for example. um

27:52
What I did, I was able to take a secret, secret deodorant. um I found this ad and it was pretty cool. And I showed secret deodorant kind of like pop up in the first frame. And then the last frame had a lot of like strawberries, raspberries and disco balls. And so I said, okay, I want to recreate these, but with my own product. So I used to sell deodorants when I first started selling on Amazon in Canada.

28:21
So I took one of my products. actually found it on Google. I passed it through NanoBanana and they created a very beautiful like 3D rendering for me. And then um everything is managed on this air table. So in air table, you have the input photo. And then if you want another photo, you can add it there too. But then you just give it a prompt. For example, hey, take this commercial, this ad, and then swap the main secret deodorant with my deodorant, but keep everything else the same.

28:51
And what this N810 flow does, it will use Gemini to uh understand the video, and it will use Asuno to create music for the video, and then it will even create a script uh for VO3 to clone the video. So the end result was better than the original secret video. The music was great. The last…

29:20
frame was kind of the same with the raspberries and the disco ball. But the color I told I told also make make sure that the the colors of the videos are more kind of like in theme with my product, which was green, you with with with some flowers. And it was just outstanding. And then what I did, I took an aloe, you know, aloe right now is like one of the most popular brands, right? For like those leggings, like sports kind of clothing.

29:48
And so I took this other commercial. There’s these two girls. They’re eating popcorn and then pretending to watch TV, but they’re actually like inside a cottage and in the mountains. And I’m like, Hey, you need to clone this with a different brand of these leggings that I found on Google. And on the popcorn box, I want you to print my logo instead, my brand. And then I wanted to swap one of the girls in the video with this one, which is a model for this new

30:17
a legging company and it did exactly what I asked. And then the whole ad was it was almost identical. So you don’t need, you know, script writers anymore. You can just get the best ads and pass it through this any 10 flow and it will you just have a bunch of ads for your own brand. I think that was pretty cool. that’s crazy. Okay. Just for the audience, in case you guys didn’t understand a single thing, what Leo just said, let me just define a couple of things. So NAN is like this,

30:47
It’s like this open source platform where you can connect a whole bunch of different tools together. That’s probably the best way to describe it. And so you use NanoBanana, which is an image modifying tool to insert your deodorant into an image, which you then fed into Gemini. You fed the ad you wanted to recreate into Gemini, because Gemini reads videos. And then you had it generate using VO3 commercial with your stuff.

31:11
Is that the flow? And pseudo? Yeah, you just missed one step, which is after the video was analyzed, it passed the script to NanoBanana again to create the first and the last. It depends on how long you want this video. it potentially depends on the input video. You can have these ads last even like 60 seconds. So you can go past the eight second limit that VO3 has. uh So what NanoBanana does,

31:40
based on the input video, it will just create the frames, the initial frames of each one. And then with the input frame, VO3 will create that part of the ad. So then we’ll stitch it all together at the end using uh FFmpeg. Okay, that steps manual, right? That steps manual. No, I automated even that. Oh, you did? Okay. Yeah, I automated everything. in the air table at the end, you just see the final video. Nice.

32:10
Yes. Can we talk practical applications of that? So what did you do with these videos? Yeah, practical application advertising, like you just take it, you post it on your this is legal, you can post it on your obviously social channels. So it can be a video if you go to see alo right now or a secret Instagram page. That’s what I got these videos from. So you can really do the same thing and post it on your Instagram or TikTok page um and use them for meta ads.

32:40
You can run a meta has a policy where you have to mark whether it’s AI I think I’m not 100 % sure yet because I haven’t actually used them. Honestly speaking, there is no avatar involved in these videos. It’s just product. Okay. Yeah. And animated motion, right. So there is no no one saying, Hey, I like this product. This is really an ad. Oh, yeah. Okay. So yeah, it can be okay. Amazing. your flow now, assuming you run meta ads is

33:10
uh in your air table, are you just feeding in essentially your product images and the ad you want to duplicate? Exactly. Is it automated to that point? And it comes out with good stuff like within one of your tries? Very good. don’t know how we can show some examples to your audience, but it’s very good. Maybe after I send you um a link you can add to the podcast. absolutely. I can upload it on YouTube and then we can show it there.

33:39
It almost seems like Leo, like this service would be something that you could sell also, right? I know. Maybe you either in Splice, you you upload your video and then, and then you just get a 10 different outputs that you can choose from. Well, you know why I was thinking about this is because some of these ads, which, which you say they don’t need like a UGC component to it, but Splice you’re working with influencers from the perspective of a seller, like

34:08
what you just suggested sounds way easier than having to message thousands of influencers and manage and give out free product. If this works also for ads, like I would naturally gravitate towards this, right? Yeah. No, this, this stuff is very powerful m for different reasons, but I’ll give you just a couple of quick ones.

34:31
that I’m thinking of. One is, I was on a call last week with Scott Cunningham. You met Scott? Of course, yeah. He’ll be at Seller Summit. Yeah. Yeah. And Scott, genius guy, he’s got it all figured out when it comes to meta ads, to Shopify. He’s got this long form ads, right? So that video can be used in this long format. So you have the video, obviously showcasing what the product is, kind of like hyping.

34:55
the audience or the viewers. And then you have this long form content explaining why it’s good. You so you go through the problem, the agitation and the solution through their head. So that’s one use case is extremely powerful. The other one, I met these guys at this event that was happening last week in Miami. They started selling last year beginning like January 2015. They only do meta ads to Shopify and there are an eight figure brand today. Eight figure brand.

35:25
To your point, I agree. This stuff might be more powerful than messaging, know, thousands of creators. Because I think you have a little bit more control. And we’ve always known that selling on Shopify gives you a little bit more control once you figure that out. So you built all these automations, presumably for yourself, so you could sell products, right? Correct. Can you just comment on some of the results? Like how are you able to use these and did it lead to…

35:53
meaningful revenue for the products that you’re launching? So last year, the one, um the last product which I’ve used this new strategies, because that was really the first use case implemented, I would say use case of AI, we sold out, we sold out, we ordered 5000 units for a new product. Overall, I mean, in my career, I sold over eight figure in on Amazon, the first brand

36:22
Then I got into supplements. Then I got into the games niche. Now the games do about seven figure and we are looking to accelerate this year. if I want to give you just a practical example of what really happened over the past, I would say four months, which is more relevant. That success was due to, like, was thanks to what I just explained, right? Accelerating.

36:51
um the marketing strategy, leveraging the AI that before, you know, I didn’t have access to. So having more pieces of content, leveraging like different channels, a little bit of Instagram, TikTok, um that helped a lot. um So before it was just mainly me, obviously doing this launches from a marketing perspective, but now I feel like

37:18
I have four or five people working with me because the rest is kind of automated. Was this all posted organically or did you actually put money behind some of these videos for ads? Only on Meta. I shared some examples, not of my own, but I shared some examples of how some of the most successful brands right now are doing it on Meta. But the funnel is very simple.

37:46
It’s literally like made that meta ads to a landing page to Amazon. um And that is working extremely well right now. Because you know, Amazon likes the external traffic um you get. So you send it to a landing page is that presumably to get an email or something before you send to Amazon? No, not even you’re just warming up the traffic before sending it to Amazon. m

38:12
Simply because you don’t want to just send a bunch of traffic to Amazon. They might not be relevant, which means that you’re kind of like killing your conversion rate or, you know, jeopardizing it anyway, um resulting into a potential loss of ranking. But by doing it this way, if someone is clicking on the landing page to go to Amazon, um

38:39
it is most likely to convert. That’s the reason number one. reason number two, your customer clicks are extremely cheaper. Oh, and one thing I forgot, we do Google Ads as well. Right. Always. We always run Google Ads. But when you do Google Ads from m Google to a landing page, you tend to get 15, 20 cents clicks. If you send it to Amazon, you’ll probably be paying triple. Interesting. I was under the impression that uh

39:07
attributed links, external links to Amazon, don’t tank your conversion rate for your listing, right? That’s what I think as well. I just like to be cautious when it comes to these things because I don’t have some papers that have been ever released that I can use to kind of back this theory. everybody, I think we are aligned when it comes to that. They shouldn’t really affect it.

39:34
But I like to be a little bit more careful. Like I like just to be cautious when I run this type of campaigns. I remember in the past, um like black hat people sending a bunch of like bots to specific landing page. And eventually like you will see this in your reports, which will eventually affect your rankings. And so like, yeah, yeah.

40:01
Because in my mind, at least, if you have this really compelling meta ad, and then you send it to a landing page and then to Amazon, it would convert better if you just sent it directly to the conversion page, right? Where you could just do one click checkout, at least in my mind. I’ve never actually run meta ads to an Amazon listing. I always run it to my own site. So that’s why I was just curious. So you’re saying not on Amazon, just, you if you, in this case, if you’re listening and selling on Shopify, you just might as well send it straight there. No, that’s not what I meant.

40:29
I meant, you said that you run a meta ad that goes to a landing page and then they click to Amazon. Yeah. Right. uh But it should in theory, at least in my mind, convert better. If you have a really compelling ad, send them straight to Amazon because that’s one last step, right? To conversion. Yeah. So the reason why it does convert better when you send it to a landing page is because on the landing page, you, it’s like an advertorial. So you, you’re warming up their audience.

40:59
um and explaining why that product is really good for them. um What happens when you send this straight to the landing page, the Amazon product detail page, you have a lot of ads, there’s a lot of distractions. So if you haven’t kind of prepped that uh user first, warmed up that user first, it’s very likely that if they see the price cheaper on one of the other competitors that is advertising on your page, you’re probably gonna lose that click.

41:27
That’s that if you do it. Yeah, if you do it, the landing page first, they already know, okay, this is the best product. This is what I want. They go there. They just check out. I see. Okay. That makes sense. And then the second question to that is, why not just take that sale for yourself on your own, on your own Shopify store, for example, get the emails and whatnot. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.

41:49
The reason why we don’t do it right now is because we don’t have Shopify. We don’t sell on Shopify. I, you know, with my next brand or if I launch the next brand, I will definitely do that because it doesn’t make sense to keep going Amazon if you can just, you know, build your own audience on Shopify and then you have the emails of these customers. Like it’s your business. It’s not Amazon’s business, right?

42:14
Yeah, no, absolutely. I was just curious. So yeah, I know in the past, you’ve been mostly Amazon, right? Just in general. Mostly Amazon. Yeah. What are your thoughts? Just looking forward on Amazon because they keep raising advertising costs and FBA costs and AWD costs. Where do you see things going in future now that TikTok also has enforced that everyone uses FBT going forward, I think in just a couple months.

42:40
Yeah, so quick note on that. I was just on a webinar yesterday with the TikTok team. So they’re not taking uh MCF away. um So I think there was an email sent with the wrong wording. So MCF can still be done. They’re not enforcing everyone to go FBT. um They’re just enforcing a couple of changes to Amazon so that they comply with the um FBT program.

43:10
But as Amazon sellers, we choose to be able to fulfill through Amazon. um Now, when it comes to what’s going to happen with Amazon, I think Chad Rubin, um you know Chad, right? Yeah. I think for the first time Amazon this year reported the lowest amount of new sellers to ah the marketplace. So I think they’re losing some…

43:38
just because Amazon MCF, or I, sorry, Amazon FBA is no longer that opportunity of 2015, 14, mainly driven, I think, by people like ourselves. Now, I don’t want to put myself in that mix because I never said Amazon is not a good opportunity anymore, but there are a lot of gurus out there that are saying Amazon is no longer good. And so people follow what the gurus are saying. And I think for that reason, they just…

44:07
probably are going to TikTok instead because everybody’s pushing TikTok these days. um But it is true that Amazon is increasing the fees. They’re forcing developers to pay $1,400 a year to use their APIs, which I think is a bad idea because they the partners, in this case, the developers that have built this ecosystem. If it wasn’t for companies like helium tan, jungle scout, and all these other companies like that, that spend so much money in advertising, driving people,

44:36
to their platform so we wouldn’t have so many sellers, right, selling on Amazon. They created the product discovery tools, right, product keyword research tools. So I think right now if they limit also partners from growing and innovating and scaling because of all these additional fees, I don’t know really what their goal is. Then you have AI, OpenAI and Google with commerce protocols.

45:05
trying to get the sales straight inside this generative engines, which I think is going to take also some business away from Amazon. So I think the next year or two is going to be probably a decline, well, it’s already declining, but I don’t think they’re strong enough.

45:25
I think they’re figuring out the best way. Like I know they’re trying with Rufus to go off of that platform. They’ve blocked all the AIs from crawling them also. They blocked all the AIs from crawling them. So I think they’re trying to keep the ecosystem pretty strong and protected. um But look, I don’t think that the opportunities is gone.

45:49
um In fact, think Amazon, if anything, is becoming probably a better opportunity because less sellers are joining and so less competition. um But at the same time, you need to figure out a way to be profitable. And that is a different kind of conversation because there is a lot that can be done then. Yeah. You know, on the TikTok front, had, I mean, you talked to TikTok team, obviously, but I had heard that MCF will be allowed, but you might have to use one of these approved services.

46:17
to make sure there’s compliance and that’s an additional fee. And FBA is already like almost twice as expensive as fulfilled by TikTok. Yeah. Yeah. Aftership is one of them. I think they’re working with ShipStation. There are a couple of like vendors in US that are approved. Yeah. But yes, I agree with you. So they do say that FBT has better prices. The good thing is that if you want to work with FBT, you can actually host

46:46
or have the product in your own TPL warehouse and they’ll come, they’ll send the driver to your warehouse to pick it up, to pick up the product. So they’re trying to like, you know, make this transition kind of smooth. I don’t think it’s smooth, to be honest. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be. It’s not going to be. Yeah, it’s not going to be. But we know why they’re doing it, right? So let’s see. Let’s see what happens there. Yeah, Leo, hey, uh

47:14
Thanks, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. Where can people go to check out your influencer platform as well as I don’t know if you’re gonna ever productize this commercial generator, but that I’m sure everyone listening would be on top of that as well. Yeah, No, I appreciate it. the splice, splice.io, S-P-L-I-C-E-D, splice.io for the affiliates, kind of like the automation platform.

47:43
which is also, by the way, I don’t think I mentioned this earlier. I think it’s the only one in this space right now that’s fully integrates with seller partner APIs. So for Amazon sellers looking to go on TikTok shop is probably the most comprehensive one. And then for the NA 10 stuff, just follow me on LinkedIn, because I share a few things there. do sometimes some webinars. So I have a couple of flows.

48:09
that I can share with anyone. Like one of them creates AI UGC. So the typical avatar that says, hey, you know, I just tried this Apple mouse and I love it so much. I encourage everyone to buy. The other one is this, you know, ads commercial kind of a cloner. I have both of them. I’ve been giving it away for free. I don’t really care. I don’t know if I’m going to monetize or make them kind of part of our supplies. And if I do, they’ll be like a professional.

48:38
level so you don’t have to go through the grind yourself. But yeah, if you guys are interested, I’ll talk to Steve eventually about sharing with you some sort of examples so that if that’s something that you like to build, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’ll send you the flow and then you can install it on your own N8n server. Awesome. I’ll post that in the notes underneath this when it comes up. But Leo, you’re not even a…

49:06
You’re not a program or anything, right? This is all just stuff that you’ve done on your own and figured everything out, right? Yeah, yeah. But I do code a lot. In fact, behind the StreamYard screen here, I have my cursor open because I do a lot of coding myself. Yeah, you know, it’s hard when you have so many ideas and then you have developers that don’t like they’re not on the same page. That’s why I think just to close, to wrap this up, AI is just as powerful as the person behind it, right? The brand.

49:35
utilizing it. So at some point I had to learn how to code because I needed to do certain things myself. But it has become a distraction though. I enjoy it too much. appreciate it. I’ll link up all this stuff in the show notes. But once again, thank you so much for coming up. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re not using Cloud Code or any automation platform for that matter,

50:05
you are falling behind. So make sure you set aside some time to just play with this stuff. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 637. And once again, if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I dig into Amazon’s decision to block AI tools from indexing their product listings and why it’s a risky bet. We talked through how AI agents are quietly changing the way people research and buy products and what this means for sellers who are still writing copy like it’s 2015. If you sell anything online, this conversation will change how you think about your product descriptions. But before we begin,

00:28
I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also,

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

01:25
So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now on to the show.

01:36
Welcome back to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about agentic commerce and specifically something just happened pretty recently where Amazon decided to block all AI and then there was this court case between Amazon and Perplexity where Perplexity lost and Perplexity has to delete all of the e-commerce and product listings from their entire database. m

02:03
pretty sure ProPlexity is just like the first AI company that they’ll have to do this with. Yeah, I I don’t want to go to court against Amazon, honestly. Well, no. For now. For now. I was thinking about this because it was a topic amongst some of my colleagues where you would think that it’s in Amazon’s best interests to let AI, you know, index their products so that they get more sales, right? Right.

02:32
But that’s not the case because Amazon’s main business now is not e-commerce. mean, they haven’t been growing for like the last, they’ve been growing, but they’ve been slowing down for the last several quarters now. And their cash cow now is advertising. But if you’re like a seller on Amazon, you just want more sales. You don’t care whether they come from.

02:58
Amazon or an agent recommending something right? Yeah Yeah, so my question is is there not a way for Amazon to work out a deal? perplexity or any other Service to where they can make money This way as well. I mean they’d have to work out something I don’t know the way it works now is They’ll do people do research on perplexity or chat to BT

03:28
And then they just go to Amazon anyway, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then recently, I think we talked about this last week, OpenAI dropped their strategy to allow checkout directly on AI. So I don’t know. It just this this makes me like dislike Amazon a lot. I mean, I kind of dislike Amazon. I kind of already dislike them. But this this makes it worse because this is like a

03:58
pretty blatant way for them to just control the seller. Yeah. At least in the past they could say, oh yeah, we were doing this for the sake of sellers, right? Yeah. Like some of their things. Like when they raise prices, they go, oh, we’re just using it to provide better service. Right. You don’t want FBA. Better technology. it’s like, does not help the seller at all. Yeah. This is just like a blatant thing. Well, but so, cause I don’t use perplexity, but I use chat GPT a lot as we’ve talked about a million times and

04:28
Sometimes what I will is if I’m researching something, right? I want to buy an inflatable air mattress. Let’s just say um I’m thinking about this because our friend Liz has like the best air mattress ever. And I was like, if I have to buy an air mattress, I want to buy this one because it doesn’t it doesn’t deflate while you sleep on it. But I’m probably going to go to chat and like talk through some things. And then sometimes chat will give you a link right to something. Sometimes it doesn’t. It just depends. But Amazon can’t block that or can it?

04:58
Well, that’s the point. the it’ll give you like that little that little bubble. You know what I mean? Like at the end of the sentence, like sometimes I’ll say like, hey, I want to go to I want to take a train from, you know, Spain to Portugal. Where can I where can I find this? And they’ll give me like a little link to like a couple of different train services. Right. So is that getting blocked from what I understand? All information that was scraped on the Amazon Web site.

05:28
is not going to show up anymore. I could be wrong. You know, what’s funny is like I use chat GPT practically every day. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Amazon product mentioned. Well, yeah, I don’t know if I have either because I don’t typically research to buy directly on Amazon. I’m more looking at just like and then I’ll and then I’ll same thing you said, I’ll go type it in. But I do know that I get links from chat GPT all the time to products, websites, all that stuff. Right. Yeah, that’s what

05:57
that will go, if you were getting that, that goes away on perplexity. Because I do these searches all the time just to check where I’m at in there. And I check, I do e-commerce searches from time to time. But yeah, I see Walmart all the time. But I don’t think I’ve seen an Amazon link in like months. So yeah, I think they’re out of the database for LLMs. Okay, interesting. Yeah.

06:25
Okay, so here’s why this matters. I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this question, Tony, but I’m just guessing that you haven’t been playing around with open claw at all. No, but I’m about to. just actually last, so I had dinner with a friend this weekend and he was going on and on and on about how he’s using uh Claude Cowork um and how it’s like the greatest thing, you know, and he’s in like hospital administration, like not, you know, not something that we do.

06:54
So I started playing around with that last night and then I was like, you know, I need to start like broadening my AI horizon. So that’s next on my list to get into. So yeah, um I’m excited. I’ll probably start looking at it this weekend. So the reason why I bring it up is because one of my friends here, in case you guys are listening to this, you have no idea what OpenClaw is. It’s basically like an agent that’s like your virtual AI assistant. Yeah. And you can tell it to do anything.

07:24
and it will go and figure out how to do it. So for example, so one of my friends, like he uses it to put together shopping lists, right? Like I wanna build a computer, find me the best components, and then his agent will go off and find those components using AI or, he has it hooked up to Claude. The point here is that now that it’s been blocked by Amazon,

07:51
That in theory means that no Amazon products will show up, right? Right, right. And presumably this might be like how a lot of people shop maybe in the next two to three years. Yes. So my first question is it’s interesting because you and I have talked about it a little bit on the podcast, but I hear people talking about it on like social media and stuff like that.

08:16
It feels like there’s two buckets of people just in general using this and it’s the people who are like your friends, right? Who are using it and loving it. I was talking to someone the other day and they’re like, yeah, I just say like, I have these four ingredients and I need recipes in a shopping list, know, like stuff like that, right? They’re using it to help them in their everyday activities. But then I’m seeing on social media people like travel agents, which of course this makes sense, who are like,

08:43
This is horrible. You’ll get booked in the wrong thing. Yeah, you’ll pay too much. And part of me is like, well, yeah, but you have a vested interest in this being bad. Right. Because if you can convince people that if they use this, you know, and a travel agent is free to write, um you know, they’re getting no one. They’re not free. Right. They’re getting a commission from the other side. You’re not paying them. Well, you technically are because the prices are more expensive because they have to pay the agent. Right.

09:10
Not no, not really, because like if you book through Expedia or you book through a travel agent, either Expedia has taken the commission or the travel agents taking the commission. You know what I mean? You’re saying it’s all built in. It’s all built in. Right. Because I’ve done like, you know, I love to travel. So I’ve done a lot of like tests on if I booked directly through the the hotel or airline. Right. Versus Expedia versus kayak versus, you know, I have I do have a travel agent that I’ve used in the past.

09:39
She actually usually gets me the best deal. So because she probably has access to sales that I don’t know about. um But they’re all saying, oh, if you do this, this is the one. And I’m apparently I’m friends with lot of travel agents because they seem to be the loudest on Facebook right now. It’s going to, you know, completely screw you over. You’re not going to get to your destination. You’re going to, know, this and that and the other. Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now, I sold one of my businesses through Quietlight.

10:07
And honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business. And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing

10:35
and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at QuietLight has built or sold businesses themselves. So when my advisor told me what needed to change, it was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from QuietLight will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested,

11:05
go over to quietlight.com. So, you know, I wonder, I don’t necessarily think that’s true, but I’m just curious as to whether who’s going to win that. think I think the travel agent loses in the end. Oh, yeah, for sure. All that’s going to get disrupted. I don’t like to sound doom and gloom, but yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think this is going to be interesting to see how it plays out completely, right? Because if you just think about, OK, now Amazon can’t be shown.

11:35
Right, so you’re using whatever tool to help you build a computer, right? And now it can’t show Amazon products, so it’s having to pull from other websites, right? Might not be as good of a deal as Amazon, might be a better deal, might not be two days. Probably a better deal actually. yes, mean, true. you know, it’s like that, does that lessen the ability of these?

12:01
Agents right because it really isn’t I mean Amazon is a huge marketplace and I’m sure there are some things that are better deals um And does it mean that Walmart now, you know if they take the opposite actually, that’s a good point Yeah, you know because I mean I walmart’s like I do Walmart groceries and they are coming so hard for Amazon on Subscribe and save like every time I put paper towels in my cart They’re like would you like to subscribe and save this every time I put anytime I put a non-perishable in my cart

12:29
would you want to subscribe and save? And then it’s also like, and they don’t even, it’s not even two days shipping at Walmart, it’ll show up that day, almost everything, right? Because they’re just bringing it from the store. um So, I mean, does that mean that Walmart has, might have an advantage? I mean, it’s a risk. Have you used Rufus at all on Amazon? no, yes, yes, yes. Not enough to make, other than I don’t think it’s great.

12:57
Yeah, I was just thinking about this other, because that’s what they’re banking on, Right. People who want to shop will go and use Rufus to figure it out. And I played around with it. It’s like kind of hidden, right? It’s not like the default, especially not. I think you have to click this little tiny button. Yes, it’s not noticeable. I think it’s actually more noticeable on mobile, which makes sense. But so this is a huge risk on Amazon’s part, because if people are shopping on the LLMs and not Rufus,

13:26
You got to wonder why Rufus isn’t more widely exposed. I did see an article maybe a month ago saying Rufus was growing in leaps and bounds. Was it a press release? I don’t know. Maybe someone more familiar with Rufus, I should get to come on and talk about it. I’m probably not going to use Rufus mainly because I feel like all the reviews on Amazon are skewed anyway. I wouldn’t use Rufus.

13:55
So here’s the other thing, you and I are like so heavily biased against Amazon. That’s true. That’s true. Right. Because we sell on Amazon or I’ve sold on Amazon, you sell on Amazon and we talk to Amazon sellers all day, every day. Right. And we know that Amazon does a lot of shady stuff. And so to me, why would I use Rufus when in my mind what Amazon is going to do is either put their own products, right, where the margins are the best or

14:24
they’re going to put someone that’s like paid to be recommended. Right. I just feel like I don’t trust Amazon to give me any. I prefer to trust people on TikTok that are telling me to go on Amazon and buy something. You know what I mean? Like that’s that’s the point that I’ve gotten to. Yeah. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of.

14:52
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. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away.

15:20
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. I mean, I guess if you’re an e-commerce store owner listening to this, you need to be optimizing both your website and your Amazon listings for AI now, uh especially on your website. And what does that mean basically? It means uh tapping into the emotions of your customer, right?

15:48
Like back in the day, it was all about keywords and whatnot, so you could rank in Google. But that’s changing now. You have to figure out what the true intent, what the customer is thinking when they’re shopping, and just make sure that is all in your product description, on your website, and read in by the AIs in order to show up. Yeah, in my mind, this circles back to a, your product solves a problem.

16:16
So your copy needs to be the problem solving copy, right? Like they don’t actually want an apple peeler, right? They want a fresh apple pie at Thanksgiving that their grandmother used to make. You know, that’s what you’re selling, right? You’re not just selling the apple peeler. And that’s what this feels like. It’s kind of coming all the way back around to is it feels like how we used to do things in, I don’t know, 2009, 2008, a long time ago.

16:47
Here’s the perfect example, because I was trying to do this little case study on t shirts. And I noticed there was this Amazon listing that said, this shirt fits no matter how tall you are, whether you’re like six, five or whatnot. And I thought that was odd when I saw that. And they said something about being really stretchy and comfortable for tall people. And that’s when I realized that

17:16
their point of differentiation probably is people who are just tall and lanky, right? But they put that in the description. I thought you saying, that’s when I realized I couldn’t buy it. No, my search for t-shirts is I want to look uh more in shape than I really am and hide the Buddha belly. So that’s the t-shirt brand. Oh my gosh, they’re huge on Amazon. can’t, I’m completely blank. I buy them all the time. You’re talking about True Classic? Yes.

17:46
The true class. mean, that’s their whole that’s what they’ve built their branding on. I own several of them and they’re 30 bucks a piece and they are amazing. T-shirt. mean, like shout out to them for actually creating an awesome product that does what it says. And they last. I mean, I have some for Brian that are probably like two years old and they still look brand new. So shout out to true classics. But.

18:08
They do the same thing in their marketing, right? And they do the whole show, the person wearing like a regular t-shirt next to the person in the true classic, and they’re capitalizing on, you know, the non-sloppy look, right? Like that’s what they’re going after. And there was another line in this listing also that said something along the lines of, uh

18:32
you don’t get depressed looking at the mirror. It wasn’t that exact line, but it was something phrased like that, right? Like it makes me feel better whenever I look in the mirror in the morning. And it was a slightly rephrased line. And then I realized that these guys were just pulling stuff from their reviews and putting them in like their description. So that’s so interesting because I think I told you that I’m working with this ads company now who basically uses reviews to help write all the copy.

19:00
Yeah. Right. And they have an AI tool that I think it’s their proprietary thing. But I’m sure I’m sure you could code this up in an afternoon. I actually know because scraping Amazon reviews is like Amazon’s actively preventing that from happening. Yes. Sorry. This person is DTC, so they don’t have an Amazon store. So it’s scraping reviews on their website and basically using all of that copy in everything that we do now. So it’s really interesting to see how it’s even the shift

19:30
I we’ve always, you I think back when I met you, right? Like the whole thing was like, before you research or when you’re researching your product, read Amazon reviews. So it’s always been something that I’ve been ingrained to do is like look through reviews and use that to make decisions. And so it’s always been in copy, but not to the level where now we’re scraping every single review on the website and doing the same thing. Like when you look in the mirror, you know, same kind of thing. This, you know, changed our mornings, whatever.

19:59
the product might be, it’s basically all consumer generated. You know, we’re not at this point yet, obviously, in shopping. Like it’s mostly humans doing the shopping. But I’m just thinking like maybe two years out where maybe you want like an agent or whatever to take care of your shopping list, like maybe not make the final purchase, but just put together the shopping list. And I realized that back in the day, like when we shop,

20:26
we just look at the image and we go, okay, we want that. It’s kind of like an impulse buy. And we as humans just kind of fill in the blanks. We just kind of buy whatever we want. But when an AI is putting together the shopping list, like they don’t shop like humans. They need like all the information in order to make that decision. And so right now, and I was just looking around actually at uh some of the sites of my colleagues.

20:54
some of the sites of my students. And it’s really just like, they do really good job on the images. Yeah. Right. And they have a whole bunch of extra images. But in terms of the copy, well, we can use the t-shirt example, it might say, you know, 6040 cotton, cotton blend or whatever, cotton polyester blend. And they might have like the measurements and whatnot. But that’s it for the description. Yeah. Right. And going forward, assuming, you know, we have AI

21:23
put together shopping lists and whatnot, they’re going to be invisible unless they change that. Okay. So this gets me to another thought about all of this. You were talking about how agents doing your shopping, which I think makes a ton of sense for commodities, groceries, um household items, things like that. But how does that work for items that people buy because they make them feel good?

21:52
So I was thinking it’s not just commodities, right? Like, for example, I went to Claude the other day and I said, hey, do the research. I need a new router. Find me the best router that I can buy. That’s the best bang for the buck. And it went out and just did a whole bunch of research and it came back with one. Yeah. But it wasn’t on Amazon. It wasn’t on Amazon, but I was just looking for like, um I guess that’s not like a commodity. Maybe it is a commodity.

22:22
Maybe that I don’t know but like I feel like that there’s gonna be this huge line right between things like a router things like a ceiling fan um You know, obviously things like groceries uh You know staple goods and then there’s gonna be this whole other bucket of things right that I Don’t necessarily think that that can be bought for you, right? Okay, let’s just take clothing. Yeah, right. Yeah, so right now

22:51
My wife is using this service and I forget what the service is called, but you take a picture of yourself and you describe like your style and whatnot. And then AI goes out and puts together these outfits. And I think the value prop of this specific one is it’ll pick you 10 pieces that you can mix and match and it makes it look like you have this whole. So she’s doing that right now. And technically that’s not a uh commodity, right?

23:21
And it’s going out and grabbing a whole bunch of different outfits. She ultimately gets to choose, but it’s AI that finds the stuff. And if I can’t find a particular article, it’s not going to be part of the collection. Correct. Yeah. So I think I think that we’re going to see an increase in those sorts of things. Right. That’s going to get a lot bigger. It’s kind of like Stitch Fix on steroids. Right. Right. Because Stitch Fix, which I can’t say it Stitch Fix.

23:48
ah I mean, I think I tried it like 10 years ago. I got some stuff, but I felt like because you had like a consultant or a fashion person, like they just didn’t always like get it. You know, it depended on like some people I knew like had great results and other people I know did it. And I think that was really dependent on the quality of the person. Right. Well, AI removes that. Right. The quality is based on you and the input you’re giving to AI. Right. So the problem is you if you’re not getting.

24:16
what you want if you’re doing everything correctly. Actually, what it asks you for also is like just pictures of what you wear, right? So you just submit a bunch of pictures and it kind of gets an idea of what your style is. Yeah. I forgot your original point. You were saying like people. think this is we’re going to see a huge increase in services like this, right? We’re going to see companies that are AI based that are doing, you know, the same thing with like, you know, remember when all the.

24:42
bloggers, you know, built all these like recipe apps and like, oh, you know, recipe, you put your recipe in and it gets your ingredients in your shopping list. And like, you know, now that’s all just going to you don’t need to use an app. You can just literally open up chat, GPT, take a picture of your pantry. Right. So all those things are going to be that’s going to be just I don’t think that’s going to that’s going to get better and better. And I think that it’s actually a really good use case. What I think won’t change is like.

25:08
um And it’s changing and like think about the sites that allow you to try on like glasses Right on like you take a picture of your face and it puts all the glasses on you Yeah, you know so like that stuff’s just gonna get better and better because I remember when that first came out and you like put a pair of glasses on you’re like this doesn’t look good like because it’s just bad quality like it just wasn’t good quality right, but what I don’t think is gonna change is like the luxury side Right

25:36
So and I’m thinking if you sell or you’re thinking about getting into like the higher end products, right, because I don’t know if we always joke, we have totally different tick tock rhythms, algorithms, but I follow the baddie in a Benz guy who sells Mercedes. He’s in Georgia and he his tick tocks are just phenomenal, right? He’s a car salesman, but he has like perfected this like.

26:01
Yeah, people are like going to Georgia to buy a Mercedes from this guy when they could buy a Mercedes down the road in their town, right? Because he’s so fantastic. But there’s something about I think about Hermes, right? Like the handbags. Like there’s something about getting the appointment, going to the store, getting the glass of Prosecco. Right. And so I think some items, especially those higher end, AI is not going to people want someone to like cater to them and

26:31
pamper them and do that kind of stuff and they want that experience, um kind of like walking into the Apple store, right? Where there’s a guy in a blue shirt that runs up to you with an iPad and he’s like, let me help you with every single problem you’ve ever had in your life. You don’t know this because you’re an Android user. But like when you walk into an Apple store, you feel like they could fix your car if you needed to, right? Because they’re just all over you for that kind of stuff. So I think there’s gonna be this like big line where…

26:57
There’s a lot of things where AI is gonna be able to do almost all the heavy lifting and then there’s going to be this other luxury side of things where people want the engagement, they want the interaction. That’s why luxury travel, if you’re a luxury travel agent, you’re fine. Because people wanna be able to get on the phone with you when they’re stuck in the airport this week, right? We had like a million flight cancellations.

27:21
Like they want to be able to call Betty and be like, Betty, get me on a plane to whatever. And Betty’s like, I got you and gets the private jet or whatever. Right. So it’ll be interesting to see how this all like divides, because I think it’s going to be very two very different shopping experiences for people. Yeah. I mean, in-person shopping isn’t going away, but I’m just seeing more and more of a covering.

27:46
I mean, what percentage is the luxury goods market? I don’t know what that is, but it’s low. But if I was going to get into a business, it would be the luxury goods market at this point. Right. Actually, I saw a stat the other day where retail in-store sales have gone up year to year. Yeah. Maybe it’s because people are just tired and they want they crave like real life.

28:06
I don’t know. They want to fight for a card at Ross. What are you talking about? Well, the other part of that is I also saw this other statistic and I don’t want to butcher it because I can’t remember if it was the top one percent of the top 10 percent. But what I remember, I think, was the top one percent are responsible for 50 percent of the retail sales or something crazy like that. Yeah. And so I guess you’re fighting for all like the rich people. Yeah.

28:32
Well, I I saw a TikTok the other day from this guy and it was just like some I don’t know who he was, but it was basically like, don’t sell the poor people like basically they’re the worst customers, you know, and I’m sure I’m going to offend everybody. And I’m quoting him. Basically, they’re the worst customers are always dissatisfied. They want to nickel and dime you. um And he was like, create a brand where you sell to wealthy people and use the money that you make to invest in lower income communities. Right. So.

29:00
Right. You know, not and it was so it wasn’t a negative on people of lower income. was just like and I get that like back when we were like struggling, I was I wasn’t necessarily a picky shopper. But man, I was like, I will examine this jar of beans all day long to figure out if I should pay 68 cents or 62 cents, you know, for black beans in a can, because it was it was an impactful purchase to me. Right. um

29:27
So I do think there is something to be said about that. And you know, when you are, if you’re in the beginning stages of building a business, I also think this matters a lot with brand building. Right. I agree. Because like, I don’t need to research a cooler. I’m buying a Yeti. Right. Because I’m a Yeti loyalist. If I’m going to buy a cup, I’m buying a Stanley. Right. Or like my sister got me hooked on the Odwalla, like water straw bottles. Right. So.

29:56
It’s like the brand loyalty is crazy and I think that’s one way to help your business in spite of everything that goes on, right? Like if you have a lot of brand loyalty, it doesn’t matter how anything works, people are going to like buy from you. They’re just gonna research like, I need the 64 ounce cooler or the, know, whatever, that’s probably too small, but you know.

30:23
That’s where people are gonna be doing the research, what to buy from you, not if they should buy from you. Okay, so this is the part that’s been keeping me up at night. Like if AI is doing all those searches, or the bulk of them, let’s just say, right? Because why bother going through all that? I mean, some people like the research and whatnot, but like for me, I just wanna know what to buy, right? Well, if AI is making those decisions, then like the AI doesn’t care about your story. No.

30:52
they don’t care about any of stuff. And if it’s making decision, like all the work that you do for branding on your site and whatnot, like, does that even matter as much anymore if AI is making the decisions? You know what saying? Yeah. I mean, so how, but how is AI making the decision? Off of the copy. Right? No, but like, so if you wanted to buy something and I wanted to buy the same thing, right? You and I both wanted to buy a router.

31:21
This is actually a fan. just have come up with the best example probably ever on that I’ve ever come up with on the podcast. So you want to buy a router. I want to buy a router. We both go into whatever tool we’re using to buy this router. What you want in a router and what I want in a router is very different. I want a router that literally involves one one action of plugging in. It immediately is set up. There is nothing that I have to do.

31:50
There’s I don’t have to get on the phone with anybody. And you want a router that probably has very different features than what I want. Right. Like you’re you probably care about other things that I don’t even know exist. So are we assuming and I guess we are that AI knows that about me and knows that about you. And so when they go out to do the search and find the information, they are armed with that. Right. Because the best router for you is not the best router for me.

32:18
Right, but again, that’s all gonna be determined from the copy on the page, not some emotional, the router’s probably not a good example for emotional purchases anyways. It is, because I don’t wanna cry installing a router. I would presumably, like, you’ll give the AI the parameters, like, this is what I want, and it’ll go out and find it, right? The point is, is once it finds it, like, you’re not attached to that brand, because who cares, right? The AI’s making the decision, like,

32:47
All the little storytelling and all that stuff on the site doesn’t doesn’t matter. But does it is it the because here’s what I’m thinking. I feel like the brand storytelling doesn’t matter as much. Right. Like why you started the company, you know, who cares? But does the storytelling in the copy right of, you know, I was tired of buying routers that required a chemical or electrical engineering degree to install. Correct. Right. Right. That would work.

33:15
That’s where the story still matters, right? Because whereas your story would be like, tired of your neighbor stealing your internet or whatever, I don’t know. um I feel like the story matters, it just matters differently now. No, I agree. mean, basically everything needs to be AI readable and you need to spill out everything basically. Yeah. Right. In order for things to, for AI to make it a consideration. Yeah.

33:42
But there’s also something we said, like once you actually finally get that router choice and you buy it. Yeah, like there’s like I get attached to stuff when I do the research myself. Yeah. I read about the brand and I fall in love with the founder sometimes, you know. Yeah. There’s there’s actually a psychological word for that that’s completely escaping my mind. But yeah. OK, so you fall in love with stuff and the company and I’ll buy it based on that.

34:12
And I feel like that might be going away. And I know a lot of people shop from Bumble Bee Linens because like Jen is very personable. She handles customer service on occasion. And when she does, you know, it’s people buy because they like her and they know she’s going to follow through and make sure things are going to get delivered. Right. Yeah. It doesn’t care about any of that stuff. Right. I’m just like, I’m just thinking like maybe in the future, there’s going to be a break.

34:40
between it’s going to be harder to build a brand, guess is my point. Yes, I think so. But also this is when you first talked about when we first talked before we started recording that we were going to talk about this. My first thought was, but if everybody is using AI to write their listings like that’s immediately what I mean, that’s what I mean. I don’t know. I’m in like my Facebook feed is just all e-commerce ads right now of like.

35:09
programs and conferences and all this stuff. um So to me, it’s like, well, can’t AI just figure this all out on its own? Like if AI is writing the listing and AI is finding the buyers or finding the products. Like, I mean, seriously, it feels like this weird circle, right? This circular logic that. So does that mean you should? of content today, right? Right. So you should have AI writing your listings or you shouldn’t?

35:37
Right? Does that make a difference? I mean, we can talk about what to do now. By the way, there’s a couple of people covering this topic at Seller Summit, like the type of content you should write and how ranking in AI search works. Yeah. So if you guys are interested in that, pick up your ticket to Seller Summit, which is in April. But what I would do right now is we kind of talked about these examples in the pod already. Go through all of your reviews. Yeah.

36:04
and figure out all of the emotional language that people were using. Like that t-shirt example, right? Yeah. Like if you’re tall and lanky, put that in the description. Or uh that example about feeling better after looking in the mirror. Yeah. I mean, that’s probably something I pulled from true classic tees. I don’t remember anymore. Yeah, I’m sure it is. I’m sure it is. Yeah. Because that’s the type of questions. When I do a search now in AI, I don’t just type in wedding handkerchiefs.

36:33
I say something like I want a lasting keepsake for my wedding that my daughter will cherish and maybe pass down to her daughter or son or whatever. Right. Right. And that type of verbiage in a traditional old school e-commerce site where you just list this handkerchief is 11 inches square. Right. This is the fabric. This is the color. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. um I hadn’t thought this specifically about this, but

37:03
we’re going through like a big site redesign and we’re changing our listings and they’re actually gonna be a lot more like this. So I guess I was knowing it without knowing it. Yeah, like with the curriculums or whatever, like I’m sure there’s a lot of mental stuff. Like it’s a very emotional purchase actually, I think. Yeah, for sure. And right now we really only are like, this is 32 lessons, this is blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, eh, we need more. Right. You know, this isn’t gonna get people to.

37:31
Especially I feel like anything that comes to like with kids, right? Like raising your kids or impacting your kids. People get very emotional with the not necessarily like sad or happy, but like they’re very emotionally invested in what a product can do for their kids. Yeah. So if we were just kind of circle back to the original Amazon story, Amazon is forcing us to do this twice now on our own website and Amazon. Yeah.

38:00
Because I guess in theory Amazon’s not picking up any of Amazon’s stuff. I mean, they’ve already blocked the AI LLMs already. They did that long ago. This core case that they wanted perplexity, I’m sure it’s just tip of the iceberg. I’m sure they’re going to force all the other LLMs to remove all of Amazon’s data. And so we’ll have two silos, I guess, right? One’s your website and one’s Amazon and Amazon’s betting that people will use Rufus. It remains to be seen what’s going to happen there.

38:30
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re not optimizing for AI, you’re going to be in trouble very soon. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 634. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Scott Cunningham and I dive into something that honestly changed everything for me when it comes to meta ads and getting a real return on ad spin. Scott is the creator of the story selling formula. And the moment I came across his work, I knew I had to bring him on to break it down properly. And it’s a simple change. And I know that sounds like a big claim, but I’ve seen it work across so many different campaigns and niches.

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

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

01:26
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 on to the show.

01:39
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today I am excited to have Scott Cunningham on the show. Now, Scott and I, we were on the same panel at one of Kevin King’s virtual events and I’m really glad that we met. Scott runs merchantmastery.io where he helps early stage Shopify stores, actually Shopify stores at any stage really, reach their first 100K month through a strategy that we are gonna be talking about today on the podcast. He’s been an e-comm for over 15 years and his focus is on

02:09
customer centric marketing using human psychology, which is actually one of my favorite topics to make advertising much more effective. He’s spoken all over the place, traffic conversions, Adworld, Affiliate Summit. And in this episode, we’re just going to talk about what’s going on right now, what he’s doing with his clients to grow sales. And with that, welcome to the show, Scott, how you doing? Steve, what’s up? So good to see you again, my friend. Really happy to be here.

02:35
Yeah, I know you’ve been on this tear traveling all over the place like going on tour like a rock star. It’s fun. Yeah, we honestly, you know, yeah, I was telling you a little bit earlier about how we do like this tour, we’re hosting Shopify meetups, we really do believe in community. And like we go to a lot of the same cities every year. And so like, I was just out in like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, I’m going to Montreal tomorrow.

03:01
And we start to like really meet, like we’ve been doing this for five years in these same cities and we build friends and like collaborators and like, it’s been really interesting watching the community grow. yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Probably my favorite part of the business is just like going around all these different cities, learning all these, about what all these different entrepreneurs are doing. And who would have known that Canadian cities have such large volumes of Shopify stores? Never would have thought it. Yeah, it’s like, you know, I don’t know if you knew this one, but Shopify was born in Canada.

03:31
That I knew. I don’t know if that’s the reason. It also surprises me too because we’ve hosted events in New York a lot, which are very busy, very, very active. We’ve hosted them in Los Angeles and San Diego and all over the US, Colorado, Charlotte, Nashville, you name it. And we do recognize when we go to the Canadian cities, it’s I don’t know if it’s equal to New York or even busier than New York. It’s really, really vibrant up here.

04:00
really, really vibrant. So Scott, I know you studied psychology in school. uh How did you get started with e-commerce and do you sell today actually? Yeah, do I sell like my own products? Anything? Yeah, like I’m like, here, here. So here, I’ll basically give you a little bit of history. Like, okay, I studied psychology like way back in the day in university. There was like a class at the end of my degree that was like psychology and advertising. And that’s when I was like really fascinated with how to build a career out of

04:28
like psychology and I always found it fascinating to motivate people and get them to do things that are good for them. So I really believe that selling is like a responsibility. Like you could build the tools to sell, but if you’re not selling something that’s going to help people, then it’s not as good, right? So I really do believe in working with brands that actually have product validation, really good products. And we always tell people, like, if you haven’t sold your products to people and you haven’t confirmed that they like what you sell, we can’t help you yet.

04:57
Yeah, we’re not trying to trick people into selling. We’re trying to get good products in good customers hands and everybody’s happy. So yeah, anyway, I kind of like, you know, I went on to study public relations and then I was working in digital communications. I worked for like a giant brick and mortar store, helping them build their first e-commerce site. And then and then I just became like an accidental entrepreneur at that point. Like someone was like, hey, you did it for this store. Can you do it for mine? Next thing I know, I have like seven clients and I had to hire someone to help me. Nice.

05:26
Right? So that’s kind of how it all started. But yeah, I think the customer centric psychology is still most prominent thing today. So it’s funny what you just said, you know, we’re at this point right now where Amazon is getting way harder. In fact, they just announced price increases for 2026, which is going to hurt beauty and apparel a lot. So it’s more expensive products are getting knocked off. And at least in my community, which is composed of both Amazon and Shopify sellers,

05:54
I’m getting a lot more comments like, hey, I got to focus on my own brand. I got to get on Shopify. uh But know, success on your own store is a completely different ballgame than Amazon, right? And so my first question to you is, do you think that all Amazon products that are selling really well on Amazon can actually succeed on Shopify? Or does your product need certain characteristics in order to succeed? I wouldn’t throw out a generalization, say everyone could succeed on Shopify.

06:24
But if you have a lot of validation on Amazon, I feel like there’s a high likelihood you could also succeed on Shopify. Okay. Okay. But the key is like, you know, the biggest difference between Shopify and Amazon, right? Like Amazon comes with a built in marketplace of shoppers who are looking for products. Yep. So that’s the advantage. The disadvantage is that Amazon owns the customer relationship. So you don’t get to grow your own email list. You don’t get to grow your own life. You’re not in control of your lifetime value as much.

06:53
Right? There’s obviously like subscribe and save and like there’s ways to build repeat customers, but you’re not as in control when you don’t own the email list. Right? And so that’s the disadvantage on Shopify. The great advantage is that you own the list. So you own the entire customer lifetime value opportunity. You own the whole customer journey. The disadvantage is there’s no, there’s no built in marketplace. Right? So you got to go out there and find customers and like get them to your website. And so the way that.

07:19
The way that you do that in the Shopify world, the way that we’ve done it very effectively is like I was saying earlier, is like, or what you were saying earlier as well, is understanding the customers, understanding their pain points, their motives, creating content that like really resonates with the pain points that they’re living with and telling your story and compelling people to say, I got to check this out. And so it kind of forces you to be a really good like marketer, storyteller, like to really

07:47
dial in the benefits of your products. Whereas on Amazon, you’re just like, yeah, here’s everything about our product. Here’s the features, here’s what it does. And you can like choose what’s your best option based on the reviews and a couple other things. Yeah, a lot of it’s keyword focused. Keyword focused, Discoverability based on keywords. And so on Shopify, you’re kind of forced to do the hard thing, which is like sell your products in a really desirable way.

08:11
And if you could do that, like if you could take your success on Amazon and then build a story around your brand, you could probably have success on Shopify too. And it would probably leak into your Amazon sales too. It always does. It always does. So what I want to do today is I want to walk through your process and let’s just make up like a mock product and let’s walk through your process on how someone who’s starting from ground zero can get their first sales. Yeah, let’s do that. I love that idea.

08:40
Okay, so what product shall we choose? Let’s stay away from supplements, beauty, and whatnot. Anything strike your mind? What you’ve been working with the client or anything like that? How about double-sided wooden puzzles? Okay, that sounds interesting. yeah. Okay, this is actually a real merchant I’ve been working with and I’m fascinated by his business. His name is Oleg, he lives in Calgary. He’s got a business called Palmerus Puzzles. Okay. And I was really just going through the process with him and others.

09:08
on how to launch. And I was just really impressed with all the work he did. Okay, so that’s great. It’s fresh in your mind. Okay, so these puzzles just, so I imagine they’re both sides and then do they have to, do they only fit one way or when you finish one side is the other side automatically done also? It is automatically done also. But what you would do is you build the puzzle and sorry, back up for a second. Both sides of the puzzle, he works with real artists. Okay. gets these artists to create the designs for both sides.

09:39
And essentially when you build one, you’re done. You can like break it apart and then do the other side if you want. But a lot of his customers, like he has a really raving fan base and like his customers will buy every puzzle he puts out. And a lot of the times they will finish the puzzle and they will, they’ll hang it on the wall as an artwork. Oh wow. It’s really premium poplar wood. See, I was just going through this process with him, but like they’re, really high end collector type product.

10:06
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

10:34
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quietlight has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change. It was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quietlight

11:04
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. Okay, I can see the value props already. So, okay, so he goes to you, he has these puzzles. What did you, like how did you extract all this information out of him? And what did you do with it? Okay, so here I’m gonna start with, think, if you were, if this is for anybody, hey, you’re on Amazon, you’re going to Shopify, or you’re just only on Shopify. The way to win, okay, so there’s so many like,

11:33
changing variables in the world. You just said it, Amazon prices are going up. Oh my goodness, that’s going to kill so many Amazon businesses. The same thing happens with us in our Shopify world. Facebook ads are going up. Things are always getting harder. There’s economic downturns, there’s tariffs that we don’t know anything about, there’s AI innovations that we feel like we need to get on. There’s all these changing dynamics. The thing that you really need to do to really just thrive in any of these scenarios is double down on your own value.

12:02
Okay? And so if you want to compete in Shopify, it’s all about perception of value. And so the first thing you need to consider is like, how do I position my brand as a category of one? The best at satisfying my customers most prominent desires better than anybody who’s come before me. So it’s like, you know, so it starts with understanding what is your customer’s most prominent desire. Everybody who sells a product helps satisfy like a series of desires.

12:29
You got to understand what’s the most prominent one that they have right now. Because we’re not trying to force people to care about what we have. That’s a long sales cycle to try and get people to care. The fastest way to a sale is to tap into what they already care about and direct that desire on your product. So how did you figure that out in terms of these puzzles? Yeah, and so it’s really like…

12:55
You know, it’s kind of like I basically the first step I always start with is going through the desires. OK, and then once I know the desires, I teach these like four different types of what I call category of one headlines. OK, the position you is unlike anybody else. So when I say category of headline, that’s like the first pitch in the message. So if you if you had a Facebook ad, that would be the first piece of body copy that you would see. And the category of one, I always have this test. like if if a competitor can say it.

13:24
It’s not category one. So you have to say it in a way that’s never been said that’s unique to you. Okay. But it starts with a desire. So you would usually look at like, okay, puzzles. um What type of desire does my customer have? And honestly, a lot of these desire training that I’m going to go through right now, I got from one of the best copywriting books ever written. It’s written by Eugene Schwartz in 1966. It’s called Breakthrough Advertising. Okay. Have you heard of that one?

13:52
I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never read it. Is it uh still applicable to today? Obviously it is actually, otherwise you wouldn’t be saying it. It really is. It really is. And I’ve worked with a lot of my own mentors over the years, like Ryan Dice and Sam Huggins and a lot of these mentors I’ve worked with over the years. oh Almost all of them refer to this book as the best copywriting book. Okay, wow. Okay, that’s quite an endorsement. Okay. It is. It is. It is. And if you go online and look up this book, it’s like a thousand dollars on Amazon.

14:21
but you can find it for $200 from like a publisher that got the rights to sell it. So I was able to buy a copy for $200. It’s very best $200 you’ll ever spend. Okay. But in the book, and I’m not going go through like the whole book, but and I don’t use the whole book’s framework, but I use the part where he talks about identifying the most prominent desire. Okay. And so basically desires come from four buckets. Okay. And so like everybody who sells a product, you, you satisfy many desires for a customer, but we need to like brainstorm what they are.

14:50
So they come from four buckets. Two of them come from permanent forces in the world. The other two come from changing forces in the world.

15:01
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.

15:30
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. And so the two that come from the permanent forces, it’s mass instinct. Okay, so mass instincts are things that humans have had from the beginning of time. Connectivity, love, wealth, health, success, know, family, mass instincts. Okay, the other type of permanent force

15:59
is what he calls it the technology problem, I’m going to call it the innovation problem. It basically means I have a problem right now. Say I have eczema for my skin. I know we say eczema here in Canada, but I like to cater my language to the American. Okay, so eczema, right? I got eczema. I can’t solve it. So it’s like, I will buy and keep buying and buying and buying until I find something that actually has a solution.

16:27
So like he talks about Tylenol in the book where it’s like, you could get rid of your headache in 24 hours. That’s what they could do with Tylenol back in 1966, 24 hours to get rid of your headache. And so it’s like, I have a headache, but I need to get rid of it faster. Like I can’t endure 24 hours of pain. So I’m going to keep buying and buying and buying until I find something that solves it. So those are the permanent forces, massed instincts and innovation problem, as I call it. And then the next two, the changing forces are trends, trends that you piggyback off of where it’s like,

16:57
It’s things like buying face masks during COVID. It’s doing a tariff sale during tariff season. It’s like piggybacking off things that are happening in the world. It’s selling K-pop Demon Hunter t-shirts on a drop shipping website because it’s the hottest movie. And so it’s things like that for trends. And then last category is mass education. Mass education means what does my customer base understand about my product category today?

17:26
that they didn’t know about 10 years ago. So it’s the sum of all marketing, all advertising, all word of mouth, everything that people come to like mature in their understanding about a topic. And so in the book, he talks about like cigarettes where it’s like, when they first started selling cigarettes in marketing, was like doctors selling them like the best, the best cigarettes for doctors. And then, you know, this many years later, we know that cigarettes aren’t that good for you. And so it’s understanding that the evolution of perceptions.

17:55
about your product category. And so what you basically do is you brainstorm all of these categories. so have like, you know, puzzles, what’s the mass instinct, connectivity. Okay, so it’s like connectivity, family, hobbies, memories. Okay, and then you go down to the innovation problem. And it’s like, well, puzzle lovers buy these puzzles, but they like lose pieces, they get soggy, they collect dust on the shelf after they’re done.

18:24
They’re not that excited about them anymore. They’ve lost the novelty. And so now we can say, well, you’re going to get this something you’ve never seen. It’s the best puzzle. It’s double-sided. You can keep reusing it and all these other benefits. OK, that’s an interesting thing that I didn’t actually think about at first glance, which is the community and family aspect of puzzles. That’s a great angle.

18:45
Yeah, yeah, so that that’s the family one. That’s the mass instinct. The innovation problem is like we have a better novel thing that people will actually get excited about. The jaws will be dropping the floor. Okay, and then the next two is the trend where it’s like maybe maybe like these like crafty hobbies are a popular thing that people are doing again or like maybe puzzle makes making a comeback because of screen time. That would be a good trend actually. right. Okay, so it’s like avoid screen time. That would be a trend and then mass education.

19:14
would be something like, that could tie in as well, but it could be just something like, it’s been proven that the benefits of puzzle make more memories and kind of that sort of thing. And so then what you would do is you’d have this list of all these desires from each of those four sections and you would grade them. You would say which one has the most intensity and urgency to solve right now? Okay, which one has the most staying power? Like it’s not just the fat, it’s gonna be something that people need to keep solving.

19:41
and which one has the biggest scope where the most people that you sell to share that same desire. And then you pick your design. Is this something that you can just kind of plug into AI and have them write it or is it always better to just do it from your own personality and your own opinions? Okay, so I didn’t tell you this. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this and I’ve really had some good conversations since we met on that panel. But I built an AI called the Story Selling AI.

20:10
Okay, nice. Nice. And so like, I have the book actually somewhere near me here, the breakthrough advertising. earlier this year, between January and March, I taught a three month course on like how to write copy to sell your products based on the desires, based on the differentiation, based on the category one. And there was a lot of people in our community that went through the training and got amazing results. And then there was whole bunch of other people who were like Scott.

20:39
I can’t do this. Like, I’m not a natural copywriter. English isn’t my first language. You make this look easy. And I was like, okay, I got it. Like my duty to our community is always like, how do I make everything easier, but not just easier, better? Like I can’t have them use chat, GBT, it produces some garbage. Right. And so when I was teaching like the copywriting course, I told everyone, I’m like, listen, if you try to use AI for this, the problem with AI is it’s going to, it’s only regurgitating things that other people have already said.

21:08
And to have a true breakthrough ad, as Eugene calls it, like breakthrough ad, you need to say it in a way nobody’s ever said. And so I was really trying to caution people. like, you don’t, you want to use AI as a brainstorming partner, but not to create your headlines. And so what I ended up doing anyway, so a lot of people were like, I got good results or I couldn’t complete it. So I took the entire course. I spent like six months doing this. I built a custom GPT that interviews you. it’s, so I taught the

21:35
the AI to not take what’s out on the internet to only take from what the participant is sharing. Okay. And so it interviews you. It’ll be like, you know, what’s the top desire? What’s the like, it goes through this like unsolved desire, the final fix, it goes through your unique mechanism, it goes through like your origin story, it goes through like your features and benefits comparison to others. It goes through like all these questions that you answer. And then it mocks up drafts of each section based on like formulas, templates, examples I’ve given it.

22:05
I uploaded like 40 pages of instructions on what to produce once it has the information. Right. Nice. And I imagine that’s proprietary to your community, right? That custom UDPT? It’s proprietary to our community, but I will share it. I will share it with you guys today if you want. Oh, wow. Cool. Awesome. Okay. So, okay. We figured out the desires and whatnot. oh What is your usual next step? Is it meta ads or? Yeah. So,

22:31
I won’t go as deep because the reason I went so deep on the desires is like if you don’t get the desire right, everything else fails. Okay. So that is like in breakthrough advertising, they didn’t have Facebook ads back in those days, right? But they would write these long form ads and they would spend six months making the perfect long form ad that goes out in a magazine and it’s direct response. They’re trying to get people to read the magazine article and go buy. So the desire had to be perfect. In our world with Facebook ads, we can test this.

22:59
for a week and if it doesn’t work, we can test it again, right? So we’re a little bit spoiled now. But the desire is really important. So that’s why I spend a lot of time there. Once you have the desire, you use that to create a five-part messaging framework. It’s the category of one headline where you’re tapping into the raw desire, demonstrating how you solve that better than anyone else. Okay? And then it goes into the origin story. And the origin story, I have this like five-part origin story framework where it’s like the struggle, the journey, the spider bite, the revelation, the impact.

23:29
And what the origin story is ultimately showing, and this is really good for people going from Amazon to Shopify, is showing that, hey, I was just like you. I had the same problem as you. I recognized the problem. I searched the world for solution. I found nothing. I was fed up. I decided to be the person who was going to solve this. I traveled great lengths across the world and climbed mountains, swam oceans, almost drowned, got back up, and I solved it. And then people are like, okay, once you hear that kind of origin story, you’re like,

23:59
I’m trying to solve that. This person did all the research one could ever do. I don’t know any further. And so you’re trying to position yourself in the category nerd who fought the hardest to bring the solution to your customer base. Let’s say you’re interested in your story. Isn’t that interesting? It sounds like with this puzzle person, definitely they probably have some sort of backstory. What about someone who just sells like, I don’t know, garlic presses online? They probably didn’t have this revelation. They probably just noticed that

24:26
You it had good search volume at the time and not a lot of competition. think, I think that that is a formula for eventual failure. Okay. Okay. Like I think it is, I think it is. I just like, you should try and challenge the status quo on your category. Right.

24:49
Okay, I think that’s I started out with that first question. it seems like the people, the brands that you work with are people that are creating something new and not necessarily novel, but something different, right? Yeah. Well, okay. So like I also have nothing against someone choosing to sell a garlic press because it’s trendy. I have nothing against that. But I think that once you get that validation that you’re in the, you’re in the market, you’re a competitor, like you’re selling.

25:17
Do you want a business model that just waits till that product dwindles down and then you go and jump on the next one and you jump on the next one? Or do you want to stay in that category and keep competing? Right. Right. So like, I think it’s always like if you’re just looking for the next hot item and you keep chasing the next hot item, it’s like success one day goes down and you’re just chasing this hamster wheel. Yeah. But I think if you prove, hey, I’m actually pretty good at selling garlic presses, let’s commit to this and make our products better.

25:46
Let’s look at what the competition is doing and provide better solutions. So I like the idea of using that Amazon process to validate, get some momentum, get in the game. But if you want to stay and compete and become a brand, you got to challenge the status quo. You got to figure out what your unique value proposition is. Are you competing on price? Are you competing on the features, the benefits? What is it? Yeah. I’m curious, do all of your clients, are all of them like this? Because I have my own students that I teach Shopify also.

26:16
and lot of them struggle to go through this process because they don’t have like the story. They’re not, you know, you know what saying? So I’m just curious what you do. So if I had a dollar for every time a Shopify store owner told me they didn’t have an origin story, I can actually, wouldn’t even do what I’m Like we wouldn’t even be here today. I would just be retired on an island. Okay. So, so the truth is no one thinks they do, but I could tell you if you have product validation. So if you’ve sold your product.

26:45
to somebody and you’ve confirmed that they like what you sell, there’s a story there. Something must have led you there. Right. Because you’ll be better at selling your garlic press better than I ever would. I know nothing about garlic presses. Right. So something must have led you to that product. No. And you just got to kind of like document the story. I got this guy we worked with. His name’s his name’s Rodrigo. America. American Vinegar Works Vinegar Works. You can check out his website. He’s we met him through this organization called

27:15
uh Shopify for startups where they recruit the next up and coming Shopify like success stories and so they have to meet this criteria of like good merchant good products. He met all that criteria. They used to always recommend people from that community come over to merchant mastery and when I when we met him we were like, oh wow Rodrigo is amazing like he was doing the work he was implementing but then when he launched ads he wasn’t getting like he what he was like 0.5 ROAS is the best he could do so that’s not even breaking even.

27:45
that one row as a break even. And so we audited his ads and we were like, what’s going on here? You’re not doing anything with the origin story. Can you guess what he told us? I don’t have a unique origin story. And this is an extreme example because you’re going to see that we uncovered that he had the most remarkable origin story, but he didn’t see that he did. So we’re like, what led you to selling vinegar, Rodrigo? Because in my lifetime, I would never do that. I would never choose to sell vinegar in my lifetime. So what led you there?

28:14
And he’s like, well, to be honest, I kind of noticed that like vinegar was bland. OK, OK. So that’s that’s a thought. He’s like vinegar was kind of bland. I didn’t really like the options. That’s what he said. Right. And he’s like, so I thought like, you know, I was he’s like, I was in France and I went into this like library and I found this encyclopedia that showed this like old method from the 1800s on how to ferment vinegar in these barrels. And so I consulted the University of Massachusetts to see if they can mimic this process. And we built this facility.

28:43
Now I ferment my vinegar for nine days at a time and it has these bold flavors and all these kinds of things. When you hear that story, like obviously it’s pretty remarkable, I can’t believe he didn’t recognize it that was remarkable. Yeah. You’re like, I got to try that vinegar. Yeah. It’s funny, like when you’re deep in the weeds yourself, you don’t think anything that you do is really special when in fact it really is. That’s it. And he was an extreme example, but I can list a hundred more who are just kind of like, I’m going to sell this thing.

29:12
But it’s still fascinating. Like what in your life made you choose that category? What expertise did you have? What kind of desire drew you to that topic? Okay. The AI tool will really help write your origin story. Okay. With a few inputs. Like it asks you a few questions and it produces something pretty good. So in terms of, so we’re doing all this research right now, coming with the story, the desires and everything. uh What medium do you usually advise people go through next? Organic?

29:42
content, meta ads, is there’s probably more to this framework. Maybe we should finish that up first. The next three are easy. The first two were difficult, right? The category of one headline, we got to understand the customer psychology, the four buckets of desires, like grading the desires. That’s like a lengthy process. The origin story, we got to document how we led to this. The next three are easy. It’s the differentiation stack, which just compares your features, your benefits, your customer support to the alternative. Okay.

30:11
It’s like they do it this way. Well, we do it that way. Most most big box stores that sell vinegar are like not fermented all this. We do nine day fermented small batch like you’re just comparing. And then and then so it goes category one headline origin story differentiation stack testimonial stack where it’s you want to include testimonials that overcome the four biggest objections like price, trust, loyalty. And there’s one more. But then and then the last thing is the offer where you want to reduce risk or add an incentive for them to take action. OK.

30:39
Okay? And so I call this like your master story. If you have those five ingredients, you’re equipped to pitch your product as a category of one better than anyone else who’s coming for you. And so now to catch up with your second question is like, what do we do with it? What do we do with the master story? So this AI tool I’ll share with you. think it’s merchantmaster.io forward slash GPT. That might take you right to the AI tool. Okay. I’ll link that. Yeah. then basically you get the master story and then you want to use different parts of the story.

31:09
on your homepage, on your collection page, on your product page on Shopify. You want to use that narrative in your email flow so that when people arrive, they’re going through your email sequence with the same narrative. But ultimately the way that we’re acquiring customers in our world, like as long as you have any kind of validation, so you’ve sold on Amazon, you’ve sold at a farmer’s market, you’ve sold in person, you’re ready to launch ads, in my opinion, as long as you have validation. And so that’s what we like to do in the beginning. If you were just doing organic social posting, you’re going to be

31:38
spending forever with a lot of inputs for not that many outputs. And so we like organic social, we want to do it, but we want to start getting validation, a little bit of sales momentum with ads. Okay. All right. So naturally with the type of advertising or the work that we’ve done, meta ads is the obvious choice, Not Google ads, which is more keyword and search focus. Yeah, exactly.

32:06
This is a good lesson for anyone. I know you’re a Shopify guy. I know you got your brand and I know you got your community. But for anyone, I know like in Kevin King’s community and Norm, like it’s a lot of people sell on Amazon. And I think this is one of the key things to learn is that when we want to start an ad campaign, we want to start on a platform like Meta that we call like an interruptive channel. So it’s an interruptive channel. People aren’t searching for wooden puzzles or vinegar on Facebook. There’s no keyword searches. Right. So if we can get in front of the right people.

32:36
with the right pitch, like the right messaging, the right story, and compel them to stop what they’re doing on Facebook, which is like liking friends’ photos and consuming news or whatever they’re doing. we compel them to stop what they’re doing and come by, we know we have a good job. We’ve done a good job with our pitch. And then we would add on a channel like Google afterwards, where it’s like, we know we kick butt with our messaging, because on Google, you’re going after that high intent traffic, and if your positioning is not good, you’re going to lose to the competition.

33:05
If we know we can sell on Facebook, we know that that’s going to also do well on Google. Okay. uh I’m curious since uh Facebook recently announced a pretty big change in September, their Andromeda update. So I’m curious like what your ads and your campaign structure looks like today. Yeah, like they got rid of uh interest audiences, right? So that was the big shock to everybody’s system is that interest… I never using them anyway, so yeah.

33:34
We’re just doing open look alike. Yeah. Yeah. And open are great. Like we, we, we use a lot of interest audiences, but, but we know now with the whole meta ads update, all the targeting is done in the creative and the copy. Right. Okay. And so you’ve got to remember that it’s like, is, is my ad creative calling out my avatar and differentiating my product? That’s why this, this master story process that I was introducing you to in our world, we teach people to actually run an ad with the full long form.

34:04
Okay. Okay. And which means video basically, right? Uh, it means like the five parts, like headline, origin story, differentiation, testimony, offer. It’s like, it’s an, it’s a Facebook written ad, like this long. oh really? Okay. That’s very interesting because most ads that you see in the library do not do that. They don’t. And I can show you like, I had like 10 people in the last week tell me they have their best performing out of all time with this long form framework. Oh, that’s fascinating. Okay.

34:33
And it’s basically using the old Eugene Schwartz direct response marketing method, which is like tapping into their desire, heightening the emotion, heightening the urgency, compelling them to take action right now. And so it works really well when people read because it draws them in. It wins their attention, but it holds it. Right. Right. And so it’s a priming them to buy.

34:58
But it also, so obviously it works good when people are reading it, but it also works really well for targeting. Because you’re giving Facebook oh everything they need to know about what you sell to who, how much better it is, what it does. Like you’re feeding everything Facebook needs to know. What’s that going to add? I love it. Actually, I haven’t tried this before. I’ve been, yeah. Because what you’re describing, for me at least, I’ll do like a short video on it or I’ll have like a customer

35:28
you know, read off a script or something. But I kind of like that. I never thought to create long form copy in the actual ad itself. Yeah, and we usually take your so you’re not like we want to do the video too. We want to do take that long format, create a video version of it. But I would challenge you and encourage you to use the story selling AI to create your long form story with it. Okay, let me know how it goes. Does that imply then that like if you’re a brand new Shopify

35:54
store or like videos kind of intimidating. Does that imply that you can get good results with just image ads in this process? Yeah, like, okay, so here’s, here’s the other rule of thumb here. So not everybody’s going to read your long format, right? So it’s going to be really good at selling to the people who do. So it’s a good way to validate, does this narrative convert? So we like the readers are like our sample group, right?

36:18
And if it’s converting it, usually does. I’m feeling very confident that anybody who goes through that process runs a long format, it’s going to convert. If you do it the right way, I’ve had so much success with this long form style. And then we know, hey, this narrative sells. But now we want to capture the people who aren’t going to ever read a long format. And so we like to repurpose the long form into short form story ads, mid medium form, different carousel concepts.

36:48
static image concepts, video script concepts that also carry that same narrative. But I would try and test the long form copy ad with a still image, with a video, with UGC from the owner video, infographic, like I would test different creatives with the long form. I love it. I love it. Okay. All right. And so do you have multiple, I’m just thinking about like the meta ad structure. Are you just testing a whole bunch of different versions of your

37:17
your long form copy. Yeah. Where I what I’m trying to ask is, uh like, what is your ad structure? Do you test three creatives with two two long form copies or each each one only uses one creative one long format copy? Like what’s the testing structure? This is usually how we start up like a first time test like a first launch. We will come up with five versions of our ad copy. Okay. So we’re like, okay, we know we’re gonna get out there. We’re gonna launch.

37:47
And so I like to think about the first five ads as like, I use like a, I’m a Canadian, so I use like hockey analogy. Okay. Right. Where it’s like, that’s the bench. We warm the bench with the five ads that we think are going to perform the best. Okay. Okay. And then to go, to go on the ice, we start with two players on the ice first. Okay. So we’ve got a bench of ads that we think can perform and we’re only going to start with two in the beginning. Okay. All right. So.

38:17
Okay, so two ad copies. What about creatives? Yeah, okay. So we have the five ads we think we’re going to win. We have two that we’re going to put on the ice and we call these our best foot forward ads. Okay. So we have five ads that were pretty good and we tell people based on what you know about your customer, your insights, your instincts, what you’ve seen work before, pick two. If you were going to gamble your business on the two ads that you think are going to perform, pick those two to go on the ice first. Okay. Okay. And so you have your two versions of your copy.

38:46
You want to test each of those with three different creative. Okay. Okay. Yep. So it’s like two versions of the copy each one is and I would usually do like a from the owner video, a UGC and then like a static image or an infographic. Okay. Interesting. Okay. And then uh is this all going in one flex ad or are they individual ads? So this is okay. So now this is where I’m to have to go and talk to our media buyers. So this is like pre

39:16
meta update what we used to do. Okay. Okay. And so what we used to do is we would do it at the campaign level. So it’d be like a CBO campaign where the budget’s coming from the campaign level. Okay. And then we would have three, three ad sets. Okay. We would do interest, open, look like. Interesting. Yeah. think that might’ve changed. uh Yeah. At least for me, I can’t speak for everyone, obviously, but what’s worked has changed in like literally the last two months.

39:46
Yeah, and the advice is to put everything into one ad set. Yeah. Right. So that’s that is the update I was going to give. But it’s like, I don’t have the nuanced data to share with you about like, yeah, no problems. Yeah. Yeah. But like, but that is the advice now is just everything’s in one ad set. Okay. Yeah. And then so you’re running ads, would you advise like new Shopify store owners start on the organic or their resources better utilized elsewhere?

40:15
or just focus on putting out more creatives on a regular basis. Yeah, honestly, I meet some people who are like, I’ve all my sales organic. You know what they also tell me? It took me four years posting every day. Right? And so if you could endure four years of this, I don’t think organic is the best way to acquire customers first. Right. I would agree with that.

40:43
Yeah, and so we, really want to speed up the validation because if you’re posting organically, like not only is it not reaching that many people to start, we don’t know what messaging is going to get people moving. So it’s just like a really slow process of reaching people and validating what gets people to buy. And so ads are the fastest way to test what message compels people to shop. And so we, we, we would always start with like a really small, like $60 a day ad spend.

41:13
where our goal, excuse me, our goal is to break even on that spend within the first week. Yep. Right. then, and then we can stay in the game. But it’s, and then, and then we usually would like to scale that up to a bit. Once we start hitting like 10 K months and higher, then we know we’re like, built the prototype of the sales engine. We know the messaging works. We know we can grow this. That’s when we would start like layering on organic. So I think organic is, you can see my daughter running behind. That’s cool. Yeah.

41:40
There was uh a teacher strike in Alberta. So like all the teachers, all the kids, home right now. Okay. Wow. Because your postal system’s on strike too, you said, right? Yeah. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But the big one for Alberta, not in all the provinces, our schools are completely shut down right now. That is nuts. Okay. The world we live in is like falling into chaos, feel. Yeah. And so, just to go back to what you’re saying, we like to…

42:09
Like if we want to build it on Shopify, we like to get the initial sales engine going with ads. We start to validate our messaging, get the website converting, get email performing, and then we know we have something. And then it’s like from there, we are going to start layering on social. Like social media is really good when you’re running ads for people vetting you. Like they’re like, well, who is this business? And they’re going to go look at your page. They’re going to see if you’re active. They’re going to see if you’re building community. It’s also really good for retention.

42:36
because they bought from you, they follow you on social media, they see that you’re active, that you’re staying top of mind. So it’s really good for like, like when they’re in the consideration stage before buying, and when they’ve already like, and they’re in like the repeat purchase opportunity mode. So really good for that. But then as you as you really start growing and your business is doing like a million and you want to get to 10 million, you need a very active organic social layer on top of that. Okay, so uh

43:05
So we talked about meta ads, we talked about organic, email is obviously a huge portion of all this. Are you guys using SMS in your flows and how does that compare with email for your Yeah, we do. Like our team, because we have Merchant Mastery, like our mentorship community, but I don’t know if you knew this, we also run an agency. Oh, I didn’t know that. Okay. Yeah. So we run an agency called Socialite that I founded in 2011. Oh, wow. Okay.

43:32
And we only work with like higher growth Shopify brands. So like, you know, there’s businesses doing anywhere from like 50 to 250 K a month in ad spend, I think upwards of maybe even half a million million maybe. Um, but so, so a lot of this stuff that we’re teaching at merchant mastery comes from our real world experience in running ads for all these brands. Okay. And so

43:57
We, our agency is like a top 3 % Google advertising partner. So we do a lot with Google. We’re a top Pinterest advertising partner, top meta advertising partner, but we’re also a, one of a few in the world of a Klaviyo like platinum diamond partner. Right. Nice. With exorbitant amount of sales and marketing with Klaviyo with email. And within that is not just email, it’s SMS. Right. And so with, with SMS, obviously you probably experienced this too, if you’re doing any SMS is it has higher open rates.

44:27
higher click through rates. um I think you need to, if you’re going to use it, start building your list as soon as you can. Yes. Right? But yes, I would say it’s been very effective and it’s more like it’s because in Klaviyo you can actually build your flow so that you can send out an email and if people don’t open, then you can follow up with an SMS. So yeah, we’re using both in the same automations.

44:49
Scott, I want to be respective of your time and clearly I didn’t realize all the businesses that you had. So why don’t you tell the audience where they can reach you? What all the different services that you offer? Yeah, I think like the way we really believe is like we’re here to help Shopify stores at any stage, like you said. And so most of the time, like with merchant mastery or socialite, we need businesses who have at least validation, but we even have

45:15
free training that we help people that don’t have validation. Like we try to help guide people at every stage. And so I think if you were a new business, we’d probably have some resources we could share. But if you’re a business who has product validation and you’re doing, you’re doing like sales somewhere, like you’re selling at a farmer’s market or Amazon. Yeah. Merchant Mastery might be a good fit. Merchantmastery.io is our website. And I think there’s like a free training on there in the top navigation bar. That might be a good place to check out. Where I actually go through this like story.

45:44
selling framework in that video. Right. And then if you were doing what was it like 100,000 a month, then the socialite? Yeah, our agency is like, you know how we built Merchant Mastery was because we’ve been Shopify partners since 2014. That’s when we’ve like really started getting involved with Shopify. And we started hosting the meetups and the events. And we started to build a pretty good reputation in the space. And we started to realize that there was a lot of early stage businesses that were approaching us that had no business hiring agency.

46:12
It’s like a lot of strain on a business hiring an agency too soon. So we were like, there’s so many great, great people coming to us. What do we do? Let’s maybe just teach them. So that’s how we built Merchant Master. We decided we’re going to teach people who shouldn’t be hiring an agency. Okay. And so I think when it comes to the agency, you want to be doing at least like probably 50K a month or trending towards that. Right. But I think the best time to hire an agency is probably when you’re closer to like 80 to 100K a month. I was going to say 50 is sounds a little low because you guys have to get paid too. So

46:41
It’s that bit. It’s like 50, 50 K only if we see that there’s like this upward trajectory, we’re about to just keep scaling it. Yeah. But if it’s like sales are declining, and you’re hitting 50 K, that’s a that’s a scary. Yep. Well, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I love everything that you do. I love the way that you presented all the material today. Actually, it was great with the storytelling and the frameworks. And uh yeah, just

47:08
Thanks so much. I’m so glad that Kevin introduced the two of us. Oh, Steve, I appreciate you inviting me out. I appreciate having the conversation with you. And hey, man, we got to hang out some more. Absolutely. Yeah. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re currently running meta ads, you have to try Scott’s method. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 633. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person,

47:37
in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to SellersSummit.com.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, we are diving into the $7 billion micro drama industry that’s already taken over China and is quietly making its way into American TikTok feeds. We break down the sneaky micro payment business model that gets viewers spending 30 to 40 bucks without even realizing it and why the same psychology works just as well for selling e-commerce products as it does for cheesy kung fu movies.

00:28
But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants.

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

01:25
So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now on to the show.

01:36
Welcome back to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about something that has been coming up in my TikTok feed very often, and I’ve kind of gotten sucked in. And so I dug a little bit deeper and it turns out that there’s an industry behind this that is huge and it has ties to e-commerce as well. And so we’re going to be talking about micro dramas today. I actually thought you were joking when you said you wanted to talk about this. Okay. So first off, uh

02:05
for everyone listening, a micro drama. don’t know if you guys know this, if you’re on TikTok, you’ve probably gotten these already, but they’re these like little miniature movies filmed vertically where they’re like 60 episodes long and each episode is like three minutes. And the idea is it’s really cheesy stuff and it’s really meant, I think for women over the age of 35 or 40, but you watch and they give you like 10 episodes, but then they all end on a cliffhanger.

02:33
order to watch the next one, have to download this app where there’s all these little micro payments. Yes. And I feel like all the cliffhangers are the same where it’s like, she’s not the maid. She’s a princess and she’s your sister. I feel like that’s the cliffhanger. And then they’re like, did it insert a coin? OK, first of all, those aren’t the ones I’m watching. OK, that’s one of the ones that’s the ones that are my feed. You’re going to laugh at me, but OK.

02:59
I got sucked in in this kung fu movie. It is so bad. It is so bad because they like the words it’s like film like a traditional kung fu movie like the lips don’t match like the words and that’s what I grew up with right. And it’s like the series of battles like there’s this guy who who has no inner power or whatever and like and there’s a bunch of fights but like it always ends when he’s like in trouble or something. Yes. And then you need to watch the next one to see if he actually beats the guy.

03:29
So you know what these remind me of? And I didn’t, so I have these in my feed, but I didn’t realize until we just chatted that there was actually a whole uh economic ecosystem behind them. I just thought, so these, what these reminded me of, and I don’t know if you remember this, but you remember when like Kindles first came out and you could basically read.

03:51
like chapters of suspense or romance. then in order to like get the entire story, you had to buy the rest of the book, you know, or or or they would drip out like you get chapter one and chapter two, chapter three. And then eventually you had to pay to find out how it ends. So this is what since I’ve been seeing these, that’s what it reminds me of. It’s like the new version of these Kindle micro stories. But these are.

04:19
to me, so much more complex in the economics, right? Because the Kindle is pretty simple. Like if you wanna know the end, pay $1.99 and get the rest of the book, right? And then it’s like the transaction’s done. This is a lot more complicated. Well, let’s talk about the economics real quick before we talk about the Kung Fu movie that I’m… Yeah, that you’re currently binge watching. So this drama app revenue exceeded $7 billion last year in China. All this stuff always starts in China and it’s making its way into the United States.

04:49
And people say that it costs about a couple hundred thousand dollars to make, but like viewers end up spending 30 to 40 bucks because the payments come very gradually. It’s like, hey, 50 cents to watch the next episode or a quarter to watch the next episode. And before you know it, you know, by episode 60, you spent a whole bunch of money.

05:13
So how how’s the chew budget doing with this? How much have you spent? I have not spent any because if you wait long enough, OK, they’ll come out. But oh, so that’s another another feature. If you wait, then it’s kind of like if you want to watch something on demand, you have to pay for like the Hulu subscription. But if you want to wait till the next episode or whatever, you can watch it on regular TV. Well, that’s that’s some of them. Unfortunately, my Kung Fu one does not fall under that.

05:41
The Kung Fu one, you have to download an app where they bill you in order to watch it. I mean, they’re really addictive. Have you watched any? I’ve not watched any. I’ve not watched any to completion because I refuse to Well, not to completion, but have you gotten sucked in and watched like five episodes of Yes, yes. But mine are always the same thing where they’re treating the one girl really badly. And it’s like, you know.

06:07
It’s like, but you don’t really know who I am. And, you know, it’s all that stuff, which I’m like, we’re going to tell her she’s actually a princess of some country that they’ve made up and, know, that stuff. But yeah, so I but I never get to the end and then I get really angry and I was like, just wasted like 12 minutes, you know, clicking through to try to find the next episode. And then sometimes when I’m really desperate, I will search to see if someone’s like pirated an episode and put it on TikTok.

06:35
Like if I think there’s a twist or a cliffhanger. So anyway, yes. But you know what’s interesting is that I think here’s why this works. Well, it works for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons why I think it works is I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but a lot of like regular shows that you can get on TV like Grey’s Anatomy or there’s another hospital one, Chicago Med or something like that. Right.

07:00
Like they play clips of the, like people pirate, I guess they pirate them, I don’t know, because it’s not like the Chicago Med channel, right? There are clips of Chicago Med of like scenes, right? So the pregnant lady comes in and she’s actually not pregnant, she’s having like a fake pregnancy, right? And so that part of the show is maybe 15 minutes of the storyline. So you can watch that part of the show in 60 to second to like two minute increments.

07:28
And then if you click through to that person’s profile, you can watch the next one and the next one and the next one. And then all of a sudden, you don’t get it anymore. Right. And that’s been happening for a lot of mainstream shows. So I think people are starting to view things this way. Right. Like I’ve never seen an episode of Chicago Med on TV, but I’ve probably seen 50 episodes of Chicago Med on my phone. You know, so.

07:52
I think it works in part because people are starting to view things this way. It’s like very normal to watch things in these little increments, which is so weird to me because it feels very choppy and disjointed. mean, there’s at least five movies that I actually decided to watch in full because I saw a whole bunch of clips on TikTok. Yeah. Oh, It’s like the new movie marketing. Yeah. Yeah. So it definitely works. But this is so interesting because the entire

08:17
It’s not like these, maybe it is, but it sounds like this Kung Fu movie. You can’t just go on Netflix and watch it if you wanted to. The only way to watch it is to pay for this app. Okay, so just to be clear, and just in case you guys are listening and you don’t know how it works, the ones that I’m talking about actually is you see this clip, but it’s really just an ad for an app, right? And so you download this app, and then you have the option of doing these micro payments to get all the episodes. Yeah.

08:47
So it’s really just an app ad on TikTok. But the is the movie. The ad is the movie. It is the clip of the movie. right. Because you can’t take micropayments obviously on TikTok itself. Right. And then every episode ends in a cliffhanger. Sometimes it ends, and this is pisses me off, sometimes it ends like mid-sentence. Oh, okay. My wife’s a sucker for this too. She’s a sucker for the ones where the woman is really ugly.

09:17
But she’s like one haircut and one grooming away from being beautiful. Yes. It’s the, what is it, Princess Diaries or whatever? Right. And the cliffhanger is always her getting a makeover, but you don’t get to see what she actually looks like. Yes. And she’s always wearing clothes that are six sizes too big and it’s always frumpy. then she goes, yeah, it’s the same thing. But okay, so do we have a number of how many people are downloading these apps?

09:44
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

10:12
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quiet Light has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change. It was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quiet Light

10:42
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. Well, I mean, this is big in China right now, and so I only have numbers for China, but 7 billion is a lot, and everything in the US usually lags China by like a year or two. And the fact that even me getting sucked into this stupid kung fu movie, maybe it’s because I grew up with kung fu movies.

11:09
that I started watching them. But there’s a lot of implications here and it actually gave me a bunch of ideas. Like you don’t need to spend 100K. Like there’s creators that I’ve watched that do put together these series, you know, that I always just kind of binge watch. And they could get on this app. I’m trying to figure out what the app is called. I think it’s called like Real Shorts or something like that. I should look it up and put it in the show notes. But the theory here is you could create your own.

11:38
and then monetize these little series as well. And they don’t have to be, like the production value doesn’t have to be that great, right? You just need to be really good at storytelling. So this sort of seems like what YouTube did for musicians and Spotify did for musicians, right? Like it used to be that you had to get with a record label, sign a contract, be beholden for the rest of your life, you know, to be able to make music. But now people can just make

12:07
content online playing an instrument or singing or whatever. And they can, it sounds like the same thing. Like you don’t have to get a big movie studio to pick up your idea or TV. You can just create it yourself and start charging people as long as it’s a good enough story. But honestly, I don’t think the stories are that good. The story is compelling because he’s got to this guy. He’s like, and there’s like 10, 10, uh,

12:34
10 Kung Fu experts on this ladder that he must be to prove to his family that he is deserving. Okay, but do think that’s a great storyline? Seriously? No, but it reminds me of my childhood. Yeah, so it’s nostalgia. Yeah. Okay. Well, okay, so there’s this guy I follow and I’m sure you’ve watched some of his stuff. His name is Ray William Johnson. He always tells like stories of crime, know, real stories of crime. he’s like a really good storyteller. I was thinking like, if he told us like really long 30 minute story,

13:03
And he broke it up into clips and then gave like the first ten out for free and then charged for the rest He could make a killing doing this no pun intended Now the only problem I have with this is that like it’s so empty I guess meaning like it’s just like a colossal waste of time. But then again, I guess so is Netflix, right? Yeah, I mean it’s the same. It’s just entertainment Yeah, exactly

13:33
Well, okay, so here’s what actually got me interested in this. uh There’s a lot of implications here for marketing as well. So uh this is still in its infancy, but there’s some micro movies, micro dramas, which I actually started watching for research just for the record. of course. Where they’ll somehow there’s this like product that they keep using. Oh, yes. Or drinking. so once you get big in a drama, it’s

14:01
kind of like has the same economics as a movie or television show where you can actually charge people to include your product in the micro drama. So there’s two revenue streams. Two revenue streams, but right. if you it’s the same as having like a YouTube channel, except it’s like a storytelling one where you’re getting money instead of going to the Hollywood studios, you’re making your own little one, like your own little movie. Okay. Right. And you’re getting people to incrementally, you’re chopping it up and making people incrementally pay.

14:31
and you’re charging for advertising as well. So as an advertiser, right? So let’s just say we’re watching the micro drama where the ugly girl becomes beautiful, right? I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out.

15:00
It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. Is Bumble Bee Linens going to have a hanky placement and like what?

15:28
Like what’s the economics of Bumblebee? For that example, the makeover could be like, I’m using Chanel number five, whatever. Or I’m using this Korean beauty cream. This is why my wife likes it. She’s really into Korean beauty right now. So she’ll be watching one of she’ll be like, hey, wait, what was that cream that they’re using? And then you could probably have uh maybe even a buy button or something. So that was my next question.

15:55
I haven’t seen, I’ve seen all the microdermis. I haven’t really either seen or noticed the product placement. Maybe it’s already there and I just haven’t been paying enough attention. But how do people buy, right? So they’re doing the makeover. There’s the skin cream. Jen’s like, oh, I need to try this because look how beautiful it made her, right? Is there a way to buy it right there? Like on TikTok shop where you kind of click through and buy? So that’s the problem right now.

16:22
In theory, you could do that, but the goal of all these micro dramas right now is to get you to download their special app in order to drip out the content. As far as I can tell, there is no buy buttons on the app itself. So I think maybe, here’s what’s weird. In that Kung Fu movie series, it’s the one I’m actively watching, different episodes have different ads. So for example, one will go straight to the app click.

16:48
and then a different one will go to some other page that tries to sell you on other stuff. So different clips that they’re releasing for free can have different calls to action. So I feel like it’s probably a matter of time before there is just sort of a click to buy because I’m seeing it more and more. So I think you have YouTube TV too, right? I do. To watch regular TV. Have you noticed that like when commercials come on, there’s almost always a button to.

17:17
It’s usually on drugs, like pharmaceuticals. I don’t know. I feel even get me started on that. You should see the ads I get now that I talk you. All the ads I ever get on YouTube TV are like, I didn’t know you could have this many diseases. Well, mine is like hair loss and erectile dysfunction.

17:37
Because I’m at that age now, right? So I get I get a lot of eczema ads, which I think is funny because I’m like, I’ve never really had any skin issues, but apparently they think differently. um So I feel like it’s probably a matter of time before that becomes something that’s very normalized, even within the micro dramas. So as I just am so interested in this as a as a seller. Right. Because I think, you know, we were just chatting about meta ads before we started recording and how, you know, a lot of people are

18:05
are struggling right now with ads. So people are looking for new ways to showcase their products, talk about their products, pay to promote their products. Is this going to be a viable option? I mean, it’s working for Jen, but does it work for is this overall working or is it going to work? I guess it hasn’t really started yet. Well, I don’t think about this in terms of meta ads. I guess you could. I because people don’t really watch these short films, at least

18:35
I don’t on like Meta or Instagram, right? As far as I can tell, this is only a TikTok thing right now. No, no, no, I’m saying for for Bumblebee, let’s just say your ads went in the toilet and you’re like, I need to find other sources, right? I need to find other channels. Is this going to be something where it is as impactful as Meta ads have been for businesses, right? Where like having your product in a micro drama is going to actually drive sales and not just

19:04
I think like traditional TV advertising where it’s like, know, Coca-Cola doesn’t really need to advertise ever again, neither does Nike, right? But they do because they want to constantly stay top of mind. They want to showcase new products, talk about brand values, all those things, right? So is this going to be something where advertisers kind of, it becomes another just accepted channel, right? Where it’s like, well, we do, we run this ad and we do Google ads and we do this and we have our stuff in micro dramas kind of thing.

19:32
I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised. Yeah, it’s still early. So actually, here’s some other numbers. uh Drama Box is a platform that reportedly did over 120 million in its recent quarter, and it’s profitable. OK. Real Shorts, think is the one I was talking about. They sell virtual coins that you can use for transactions and pay for episodes inside the app. That one’s more digital product commerce as opposed to physical.

20:03
But again, this is all kind of new. We’re always like a year or two behind China. So the fact that this working in China implies that it’s coming over here. Because you can sponsor like the entire episode of a mini drama, right? Yeah. It’s kind of like how influencers work today. Like people can pay me to do like a dedicated TikTok, right? Or a short. I could create a dedicated one, but instead I’ll be holding up, you know, hair cream. I don’t know. Something like that.

20:32
Yeah. So I wonder. So another thing I think about is and I don’t know, do you are you an NFL? Do you watch the NFL? Of course. OK. Well, I know you got the 49ers. um But one of the things that I’ve seen all year with the NFL is that people are really getting irritated that you have to have like 20 subscriptions to watch football now. Right. It used to be that you buy bought Sunday ticket. Right. Which is it was expensive. Several hundred dollars. Right. um And you could get all the games.

21:01
But now it’s like, well, Thursday night games are on Prime, this game’s on Peacock, this game’s, you And so it’s like, people were frustrated that they couldn’t just watch football, right? And there was like a lot, like people are on Twitter complaining, they’re on all the other social platform, or X, platforms. um So I wonder if people are going to start getting irritated that it’s like, well, here’s just one more thing that I have to pay for to watch.

21:28
what I’m interested in watching, right? Because I mean, I can’t even tell you like how many things I’m probably have subscriptions for, because like my kids want to watch a certain, just like you’ve got Apple TV and Hulu and Peacock and Netflix and Amazon Prime. you know, it’s just, it’s never ending. All right, so let me tell you why this works. Once you have that app, and let’s say they give you like $5 in credits or something. Yes. Let’s say each episode is only like a nickel. Okay. Right?

21:55
And so you get your whole first series and you pay like a couple bucks. Yeah. But it’s not really your money, but you get in this habit of like throwing a nickel here, throwing a nickel there. Yeah. And then you end up finding this Kung Fu series that, ah, you know, I’ve already done this, you know, I really wanted to see what, you know, how it ends. So you just throw a couple of nickels and, before you know it, you spent like 10 bucks.

22:22
It reminds me of um when my kids were little and m what was the roadblocks, roadblocks. I don’t know how to say it came out and it was like it was free. You could play it right. It was the kids building game. But then like in order to get special building things right for your little city that you made, you had to pay money. Right. And so like all of a sudden one day I got like an iTunes bill for.

22:48
you know, like $72, right? Or something like that, where one of my kids had just like click, click, click, click. is before, like this is before they had to put all these safeguards on it, right? Because when it was early, they were just like, oh yeah, it hooks into your iTunes account. And like when your iTunes account is set with a credit card and you can just buy whatever you want. It’s the same thing, right? You download the app, there’s a payment, you know, processor in there, right? So just clicking, it doesn’t feel real. Like doesn’t feel like real money. It’s why people pay 99 cents in Candy Crush to get

23:18
you know, a power up or whatever. So, I mean, I can see it working because, you know, I’m sure when my kid did it, like they were like, oh, I didn’t like they didn’t have really any idea that it was like real money. Right. Because they were little. um But I can see people thinking like, oh, it’s just a nickel. It’s just 10 cents. I’m, you know, and then the next thing, you know, especially at like three minute increments, it’s like a slot machine. You’ve spent two hundred dollars.

23:44
So my buddy, he always balks when it comes to buying games, like an $80 game or something. He’s like, oh, no, I’m not gonna pay 80 bucks for that. But he got hooked on Pokemon Go. I don’t know if you remember that game. People are still yes, my son still plays it. But he spent over a couple hundred bucks on that game alone on these little add-ons, right? Yes. That you can sprinkle here and there that are just like 99 cents here, 99 cents there. Same principle, and it’s pretty ingenious. Yeah, well the good thing for whoever

24:13
brings us to the States is that you’re training kids from a very young age to behave in this way, Click pay, ad, click pay, ad. I know for some of my kids, when they were younger, wanted, what were they, is it Steam gift cards, right? Which gives you money into your Microsoft account to game. um It’s a very ingrained behavior right now, especially for younger people.

24:40
Right, because that’s what they’ve been doing their whole lives. They don’t know any different. So this is the real reason that got me excited about all this. It’s not like the Kung Fu movies and the empty whatever. I think that all the content that you put out, let’s say you do teaching content like what I do. And I’m not suggesting that I’m gonna try. I don’t know, maybe I’ll try this as an experiment just for fun, just for the content, right? But let’s say you give like a really in-depth tutorial on how to launch a product, let’s say, right?

25:11
And so you give like a lesson, you give like a couple lessons for free, and then the rest of them, you kind of just end right when I’m about to tell you how to do it. And then I put all this whole tutorial on a platform like real short or maybe not the other one, because that one’s strictly for dramas. But then, you know, it’s much easier to sell that than it is like a couple thousand dollar course.

25:39
Right? And so you’re basically nickel and diming your way to a lot of money. Okay, so this got you excited and yet your signature statement in every webinar you’ve ever done is, I’ll never nickel and dime you. Yeah, This business model fascinates me. uh Okay. And then here’s the good part. So once you have this audience of people that throwing you nickels, uh then I bet all of the e-commerce companies

26:07
will come to me and say, can I sponsor one episode of one of your lessons? Yeah. Right. I’ll be like, OK, yeah, that’ll be $500 or $1,000 or whatever. Right. And it’s just like an easier way to sell stuff. So when are we doing it? Are you serious? You want to try it? I don’t know. I kind of do. And I see this right now, especially because

26:32
people don’t have that much money right now. They don’t have a huge chunk of money, but they do have 50 cents here, 99 cents there. And they don’t wanna commit to some large purchase. And this is why this is so ingenious. It’s annoying too though, I we can talk about that. Yeah, so I guess that’s the question is, so it is very easy for people to spend, it’s like why Starbucks is still packed, right? Even though the economy’s kinda crappy right now.

27:02
People think like, oh, I can’t give up on my $4 coffee, right? It’s just part of, it’s ingrained in their behavior. People are still spending money here and there on things. So I feel like, yeah, it would be really easy to get somebody hooked and then, oh, well, if you want the next lesson, it’s 50 cents. Who isn’t doing that? Just because, well, for 50 cents, I might as well see what it is.

27:31
Right? Yeah, and in the teaching space, it would just be like one tip. Yeah. Or one nugget. Yeah. So it’s so funny that we’re having this conversation because a couple weeks ago in office hours, there was a talk about this course and it was like, was it AI in YouTube or something with AI? And it was only $97. And in the course world, that’s really cheap. Yes.

27:58
And so it got brought into my mastermind group, like, hey, I’m thinking about signing up for this course, has anyone heard of it, blah, blah. And everyone’s commenting the same thing, 97 bucks, is it anything, right? And so at $97, it gives you a little more pause, right? So my thought is though, if it’s 50 cents, are people gonna be like, oh, 50 cents, it’s probably garbage? Or is it because it’s 50 cents, it’s like, well, who cares if it’s garbage, it’s 50 cents.

28:26
And then if it’s not garbage, it’s like you’re just perpetuating the… Well, you wouldn’t sell, you would give away like five lessons for free. Right. And then they’d all be in a logical progression. And the sixth one, it’d be 50 cents. Yeah. And it’d just be like a series of little micro tips. Yeah. Right. I don’t know. I think it would work really well. So is the only way to do this that em the app that you mentioned? Well, I mean, you could write your own with vibe coding.

28:54
It’s actually not a whole lot. But for regular people, what could they do? It’s not it’s not mainstream yet. So I don’t think there’s any real app that that does this. Yeah. Outside of the drama, like you can pay for more. Which I guess is the same thing here. Right. Like you would just lock the tips. Yeah, I guess you could use the problem is people are going to those sites to watch dramas right now. But I mean, there’s no reason why this wouldn’t work. Yeah. One of those platforms.

29:24
Well, because but the drama starts on TikTok, like the ad is on TikTok to get people to do it. So like the first visual is not for people already inside the app. It’s for people not using the app have no idea what it is. Probably they’re seeing it on TikTok. They watch the first one. So let’s just say let’s just say TikTok will use that. So the first e-commerce tip is on TikTok, right? Like so you make a TikTok, you give an e-commerce tip, then you make you cliff hang it right.

29:53
Then you make a second TikTok. Once again, tip, cliff hang, right? Like you don’t give the full, maybe you give, you finish tip one, you get into tip two, don’t give tip two. Third video, same thing. Give tip two, go into tip three, don’t give it. Fourth video, same thing. Fourth video, you don’t get the tip, right? Like, and then it’s like download, pay, and I’ll give you tip four.

30:17
Yeah, I think an easier way to do this would just be to just take them to a website where you can watch them like you don’t need an app. Like getting someone to install an app is really difficult. But if it automatically takes you to this video where it’s blacked out, for example, and you click a button and then out comes the credit card thing, buy like 100 tokens. Actually, that’s the other genius thing, right? You’re buying these little yes, you’re buying tokens. It’s not real money. Yes. And so you can only buy tokens in increments of five bucks.

30:46
So you buy five bucks and then you just spend it on what lessons that you want and you’re out of there. does that technology already exist for like regular people today? Well, all it is is a payment thing. It’s just an e-commerce store. part though, like so I’m trying to I’m like actually because I know we have people that listen will they will want to set this up tomorrow. Right. So

31:07
The first part is yes, obviously we have payment processors, we can do that, but how do you turn the payment into tokens? That’s possible because everybody does it with AI stuff is all in tokens, Okay, think about this. This is just a Shopify store with gift cards. Okay, okay. Except- We’re calling it tokens. You’re calling it tokens instead of dollars, right? And so you spend your gift card on whatever’s in the portfolio. Like each Shopify product could just be an episode.

31:36
But priced in tokens and not money. Priced in tokens and not money. That’s the other key. Yeah, tokens is key. Yeah. I like it. So this is all very doable. It’d be kind of fun to, because then, okay, here’s the question I always get asked about my class. Like, I don’t need all the modules. Can you sell them to me piecemeal? Yeah. Well, how about I nickel and dime you?

32:03
uh I mean, I don’t know. um I’m kind of liking it, go on. Well, okay, so let’s say you don’t want to do that and you don’t teach or whatever. Instead of just putting out free content on TikTok, why not just do this? You’re still giving value. It’s kind of like my six day mini course, right? I give out a lot of value. You get those 10 videos and then you decide whether you want to get the class or not or participate.

32:32
This is the same thing, really on a different, like I couldn’t throw out that six day mini course on TikTok because they’re too long. But instead, if I broke it up into very small 60 second nuggets and just put them out there and in like maybe one or two of the best nuggets, I have a direct over, like I’ll pay for ads, TikTok ads or something like that, direct it over to a landing page where they can pick and choose which tips they want to learn.

33:02
I don’t know. I think it would work. Yeah, I think I think what. So I think two keys to making it work better are the token aspect of it. Right. So not not attaching it to real money um as well as the cliffhanger coming in. Right. Where it’s like, I’m going to give you a reason to because like why else in the world when I am like always trying to like maximize my efficiency and like be super productive, am I hunting all over TikTok for like the next

33:31
the next segment of a show that actually exists already like like Chicago med, right? It’s not even like I couldn’t just watch that Chicago med episode probably on Netflix or something But no, I’m I’m going through 20 profiles on tik-tok trying to find the next one I like how you’re using Chicago med as your example when I know you really watch like real housewives or whatever. You’re really hunting for the next

33:54
I’m actually really into the medical dramas on TikTok right now. I don’t know why. I used to watch them like 30 years ago, like when ER, George Clooney ER was out. um yeah, I don’t I kind of like the I kind of. OK, so taking a hard left turn here, how can we do this? OK, OK. I’m getting excited. OK, we don’t have much longer.

34:23
How do we do this as a test? How do we create this, how do we set this up and do it as a test to sell people, but also sell people in the test? What do mean sell people physical products? No, like how do we do info products, which is what we already do, right? We sell info products. So how do we set this up to do it? How do we make, how do we turn our six day mini course into 60 second nuggets with cliffhangers, then,

34:49
push people into buying more 60 to three minute, let’s just say, segments, right, where we literally teach one thing, right? Where they come in, but then we also sell how we did it. This would be really easy to set up, honestly. You know what I’m saying, though? I think it’s fascinating. You’re just breaking up individual tips, and then you just have to make sure you tag them really well, and then you just throw them up on a

35:18
I wouldn’t use Shopify, but like you could throw it up on a Shopify site, right? Or a membership site. Any membership site will work membership plugin on WordPress. And you just give out really good tips for free on TikTok and then just steer them over to this whole array could be categorized where you just pay a buck to learn this, pay a buck to learn that. Very easy with tokens. Very easy to do. Okay. So, um, before we get off in the weeds, uh, I just kind of wanted to talk about like,

35:47
Did you listen to that Joe Rogan episode with Ben Affleck and uh Matt Damon? I’ve only seen clips of it, but once again, I’ve seen clips. Okay, so they were complaining that Hollywood is doing it all wrong now. Like back in the day, you could tell stories and whatnot, but now everyone has such short attention spans that you need to hit them quick. So the whole model is changing. It’s basically what the gist of that episode was.

36:17
Like in the old days, the instinct was to overspend on a big production, market it like crazy and then make a ton of money. Now it’s kind of like flipped, right? Because everyone wants like quick dopamine hits, right? And so you want to put together these quick little clips that are actionable with frequent payoffs. So it’s like the opposite of the way it was before. And that’s where things are going, unfortunately. uh Bedaflic and

36:46
What they were complaining about is they just released this Netflix episode. Yes. Netflix movie, right? Yeah, they’re everywhere right now. And the director was like, you need like hard hitting action from the start and throughout, you know, to keep someone’s attention span. Whereas before you could spend some time building up the characters and everything before. Yeah. These days, I don’t know if you do this, but sometimes when I’m watching Netflix, I’ll have my phone out and I’m like checking email or something during the movie. That’s the problem now.

37:13
So I noticed this because Brian is a movie guy, right? He loves going to the movies, right? We have the like AMC pass or whatever. It’s actually not a bad deal. But anyway, I’ve seen more movies in the last four years than I have in my entire life put together, right?

37:29
But what I’ve noticed is I don’t like action movies. not super into, I already have enough anxiety. I don’t like going to a movie where I have anxiety for two hours. So I wanna see stories, right? I wanna see love stories or even comedies, even documentaries. I don’t care. I just don’t want everyone dies, right? There are no movies where everyone doesn’t die. I was looking last week, I was like, oh, we should go see a movie this week, right? There was nothing. There was nothing to see that wasn’t,

37:59
like absolute action horror, you know, from from scene one to scene end of, you know, guns a blazing kind of thing. um So anyway, yeah, I mean, they’re totally right. Like no one’s making those movies, but they’re all on TikTok, right? They’re all on TikTok with the girl getting the makeover and the you know, she’s really a princess and she’s, you know, in love with her brother. Who knows what it is, right? But it’s like they’re all they’re all being made there now. Do you think people will get annoyed if we

38:29
if we did something like this. I know for the experiment be fun, but do you think people would get annoyed at this type of learning if it was broken up this way? I feel like do people get annoyed in casinos when they put their money in and don’t win? Like, yes, of course people are going to get annoyed, but do the casino people care? No. Yeah, but this is different because it also reflects on your reputation, right? So it’s one thing to put out a micro drama where there’s no human really attached to it, right? It’s all make believe, but it’s another to release lessons this way.

38:58
If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. mean, like, so who was it? John Ackup that said uh people, someone complained about like one of the webinars that he had and he’s like, I’m happy to refund your money for the free met. Right. So like if someone now, if someone’s if someone feels here’s the thing, if how many times do we hear this at Seller Summit where people will say this one thing that you said, right, this one thing that I learned, right?

39:25
I got this, I remember, I think it was Charles said, when I explained how to do like tag people in Klaviyo without having to send them to forms like automatically, like I think that was it. It might’ve been something different, but like I had a couple of people when I shared that tip that they were like, that was worth coming to the event, right? So people paid $800 to hear that one tip. How mad are they gonna be if they paid 10 cents to hear that same tip, right? Or a similar type tip.

39:54
You want me to refund your dime? They even make times. Sure. Are they getting obsolete too? it like just our dimes? Our dimes? Well, mean, in this method, like it’s tokens. It’s token. Refund your tokens. Big whoop. I feel like the the amount is so small that like, I don’t know. I mean, 99 cents. How often do you complain at your value meal? It’s true. I don’t know.

40:24
I mean, so I think it would be really interesting to do it and see, here’s the other thing, and this is where I think people will get, this is where people will struggle, is that yes, this is great, but it has to be interesting enough to get an audience to then have enough people watching it to wanna click through and learn more, right? And that’s where people are gonna have a hard time. Because- That’s where ads come in, right? Yeah, but I mean, I think, that’s-

40:51
Usually when people struggle it’s they can’t get enough eyeballs on what they’re doing. So I think if it’s good enough. Yeah, I mean if you already have, well okay, so here’s the key takeaway for this episode, right? Okay, that we’re gonna do this, you can join and watch us do it You don’t wanna make like just shorter videos, you wanna make them continuous. Yes. Right? And they can just be frequent.

41:20
continuous and unresolved, meaning everything ends on a cliffhanger. So you’ll actually go through and search for the next lesson, right? And then once you’ve established that, then maybe you can try some of these techniques that we’ve just talked about. For sure. And I think even if you take away one thing, you should be making your videos like that anyway, whether you’re going to attach any sort of monetary spend behind it or not. Yeah.

41:49
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Especially if you sell info products, this could be a great way to generate more sales. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequarterjob.com slash episode 632. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person, in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs, and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I sit down with Sabrina Ramanov, a CS major turned social media entrepreneur who walked away from the traditional career track and built an audience of over a million followers across multiple platforms. We get into her exact strategy for growing from zero, how each platform is different and where you should actually be spending your time and why she thinks most people are completely wrong about what it takes to build an audience.

00:29
And then we go deep on vibe coding, how the average person can actually use it effectively and how I personally built a Shopify app in a weekend that saved me 300 bucks a month. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away.

00:57
Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people, so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

01:26
And if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now on to the show.

01:47
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m excited to have Sabrina Ramanov on the show. So Sabrina jumped on my radar screen in just the past year where all of a sudden my entire feed on TikTok was suddenly flooded with her uh content, both AI and non-AI. And you can tell that she’s using her AI avatar because she’s wearing this purple cap. Sabrina is a serial entrepreneur where she started and sold her AI company, Curious, several years ago.

02:17
And since then, she’s been on a mission to teach 1 million people about AI for free. I’m pretty sure she’s exceeded 1 million people at this point. But she also started this new AI company called BlowTato that helps scale your organic social media, which I am actually happily using right now to handle all of my social media posts. And it’s been a game changer for me. In fact, the only negative thing that I had to say about this woman is that she graduated from Cal, but we’ll let that go for today.

02:46
But in this episode, we’re going to talk about vibe coding. We’re going to be talking about scaling out your social media with the power of AI. And with that, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, go Bears. Go Cardinal. OK, so Sabrina, your posts are all over my feed. I saw today, I saw a post from you about skipping out on college to do an apprenticeship or just to create like 12 different projects.

03:12
I’m afraid that I’m going to have to revoke your Asian membership. I knew that was going a little spicy. Well, I know that you went into debt, right? Now going to college. I mean, do you really? I kind of feel the way you do, but I’m not allowed to say that publicly. And the thing is, I do make an exception for the top

03:36
colleges like Berkeley was considered top college. whatever one you went to, I’m just kidding, It’s absolutely insane network. It’s just incredible people you’re surrounded by and opportunities that are incredible. And so there is kind of like a soft spot in my heart for kind of the top universities. But there are many other universities that are charging those price, those same prices. Let’s say I graduated for everybody who knows it was $250,000 in student debt.

04:06
And it was really interesting for me actually when I made the Forbes 30 under 30 list, there was like a private survey of demographics of like who else had graduated with student debt. And it was actually a very tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. And I was like, oh, maybe there’s a correlation between who people who make these lists. And there was a socioeconomic correlation with like how easy some of this stuff is attainable to you if you come from a background of uh where you’re financially well off in the first place.

04:34
And I really love Berkeley because it had that socioeconomic diversity for me. That was like huge, huge. So my co-founder for my first company, and he’s now my husband, George, he transferred into UC Berkeley from a community college in California. And so that was, yeah, that was super cool. Very different worlds we come from. But yeah, I knew that post would be spicy, but I also really believe college, especially today in the age of AI is not really adapting.

04:59
to all of these things you can do now with AI. Most curricula still don’t teach kids how to use AI, not college kids either. And I do think there’s a lot you could learn just by taking initiative and building these projects yourself or apprenticing under somebody that you think is really cool, right? And for a college kid, it could be content creation, influencing, being a YouTuber, it be building apps, whatever it is, just like go apprentice for that type of person and really see how they work, what it takes to succeed.

05:29
in that environment and like try to do it yourself. So I’m a big advocate of just doing that as well, not just studying theoretical stuff in the classroom. I am very pro AI. So I actually have a daughter who’s applying to college right now. And it seems like the schools are almost against it in a way, like they have anti AI too. mean, this is going to be a part of everyone’s lives. So I’ve taken a proactive AI approach with my kids as well. But yeah. And like,

05:57
I made another post on this. I think it’s a shame uh that most schools aren’t teaching kids how to use AI. So kids end up using AI in a cheap way, like just copy pasting and plagiarizing. And then when they graduate, they’re expected to know how to use AI for everything because they’re young. So why don’t they know how to use AI for everything? But they weren’t like trained or educated with this during college. So I think it’s a huge, I think it’s a really big disservice to be honest. I agree with you.

06:26
But uh Sabrina, so it sounds like you had a decent exit from your last company. Why did you decide to create one in the social media space? And what made you want to even reach like a million followers and teach AI in the first place? Well, so when I moved outside of a tech bubble, so I was in Silicon Valley for over a decade. And then when I moved outside of the tech bubble, it became glaringly obvious to me that nobody knows about AI and the things they do know are often driven

06:55
by like fear and anxiety. And that really bothered me when I opened TikTok a year and a half ago and I started creating content, it was like, you’re missing out, also buy these prompt packs for like a thousand dollars. ah It was a combination of like FOMO and ripping people off. And I really did not like that. That did not resonate with me at all. We were just talking about that pay it forward mentality that’s prevalent in Silicon Valley. And I felt like this was my opportunity.

07:22
to pay it forward. I had been in AI since 2013. My first company was also an AI company. We did speech recognition, natural language processing, and I just felt like I was in a position and also enjoyed teaching other people like, hey, here’s all the cool, positive, productive things you can do with AI. It’s just funny because I’m an EE. I have a master’s in EE, and I believe you have a CS major. Social media is not something that I would, wouldn’t be my first instinct, you know, to go into. So that’s why I asked.

07:51
Oh yeah, so I’ve listened to Gary Vee and Hormozi for years, and now I understand what they say. You know, most people are going to listen to this and never take action. There’s this element of fear and honestly insecurity when I started, especially being female on these platforms. I don’t wear makeup, I don’t doll up, I don’t dress up or anything. Really, you are facing a lot of your own insecurities in your mind that first 100 days of posting content. And even for my tech friends,

08:20
They all looked down on TikTok initially. It wasn’t until I started growing on Instagram, they were like, oh, that’s cool. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So I dealt with all of that, but I just feel like my position is I’m an educator. What is the most efficient way to reach many, many people with exactly what I want to say without having to go through some gatekeeper. And so when I thought about it in that way, was like, well, social media makes the most sense. I can talk about what I want to talk about.

08:48
the algorithm will try to find my audience for me, like people who actually appreciate the stuff that I’m saying, and it’s free. Like anyone can get started. You don’t have to like pay for PR. You don’t have to pay for anything to start posting on social media and teaching folks what you want to teach. Yeah, totally. I actually I get a lot of flack from my Stanford buddies. Like they make fun of me nonstop. But hey, I found my tribe, you know, who wants to listen to me. So yeah.

09:14
So what I wanted to do today, since you’ve been very good at growing your audience, primarily this podcast serves business owners. And I want to get your strategy for building up a social media account from complete scratch for, let’s say, like an e-commerce company or a services-based company, using your strategies. Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth?

09:43
Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business. And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix,

10:12
meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quietlight has built or sold businesses themselves. So when my advisor told me what needed to change, it was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quietlight will make a huge difference.

10:39
You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. Yeah, so I can recap at least what’s worked for me and then you can probably take pieces of it. For me, I start with my personal brand and thought leadership. So giving away AI education as highest quality as possible and just giving it all away for free. That builds up my personal brand. And then I sneak in like, hey, check out Bloatato here and there.

11:08
So I’ll make two TikToks a week where I talk with Blotato. In my newsletter at the bottom, it’ll say, hey, I built Blotato for this particular purpose. ah So that organic social media for my brand then funnels a small percentage of my audience who are a good fit to Blotato. They funnel them to the website. And I think just the Blotato website just this year has gotten 1.4 million visitors already. through that funnel. So like my personal brand is probably around

11:37
500 million views. Okay, so but that’s like broad AI education content. And then it’s just a matter of like, you know, inserting it here and there and subtle ways that aren’t pushy and aren’t for me, it’s important like not to be too salesy because I don’t resonate with that. And so I just like insert it in different ways here and there. And that just funnels that initial massive audience at the top of funnels of people who are good fit directly to the website. mean, it works. mean, I fell for that funnel.

12:06
Let’s say you’re selling, so do you recommend that people start with their personal brand first? I think it’s very powerful. I know that a lot of people aren’t willing to do that. I also don’t think it’s necessary for uh anything that’s consumer facing. I see a lot of, for example, like B2C consumer mobile apps on TikTok. Most of those I’m seeing succeeding do not have any face or personal brand at the helm because you want to find some repeatable viral format that you can then hire.

12:35
your UGC army of a hundred creators to then replicate. So if it’s only attached to you, then it’s not necessarily as scalable as having a different type of video that any creator you hire can replicate. So for B2C, I don’t think it’s necessary at all. For B2B though, which is what Blotato is, so Blotato sells to agency owners, people building their brand, their businesses building their brand. For B2B, it’s incredibly powerful. The inbound opportunities you get.

13:03
by putting your face out there, your thought leadership out there, pretty incredible irrespective of whether it generates leads for your business, I think. Like both are incredible. So if you are willing to put yourself out there, I would definitely vote for that for anything B2B context. So you’re pretty well spoken. The videos that we watch now, were you always this eloquent? Did it take practice? Do you have some earlier videos that were just horrific?

13:31
Oh yeah, like I couldn’t watch my earlier videos. Like I cringed, I was so critical of myself. I also felt I was trying different formats. So in the beginning, like you’re trying to find and create your own voice as well. And that’s a very awkward process. So I’d like try to copy someone else’s style and I couldn’t watch it again because I knew it wasn’t me. I wasn’t authentic. Maybe nobody else picks up on these things, but I could pick up on it.

13:59
Articulate, I don’t know. I just try to say something as clearly as possible using simple language. In my mind, it’s much easier to complicate stuff and sound smart than it is to try to actually simplify something, especially knowing that these are very nuanced topics. But to teach somebody, you need to really distill it to the core essence of the material.

14:26
Can I ask how many pieces of content you’re putting out a day? Yeah, yeah. So I actually have my entire social playbook published. So I only make content once a week. And then it starts with a YouTube video in the morning. So that’s my long form. And then I repurpose that into a newsletter and a couple of short form pieces, just kind of announcing, hey, like, here’s my latest YouTube tutorial. And then I take a lunch break and then I film 20 TikTok videos.

14:50
And then when each TikTok video is posted, I have an automation that uses potato to repurpose it to other platforms. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell

15:19
all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. So is that 20 pieces a day? your- Oh no, so that’s per week. So let’s say- Oh per week, okay. So let’s say 21 original pieces of content per week and then that is just repurposed everywhere else.

15:48
Okay, so three pieces a day approximately. ah Would you recommend someone starting out have that frequency? uh Ideally, yes, but I understand like most people don’t have the time. So it’s more a function of like, what can you fit in to the time you have? I do think consistency is the most important thing. So if you can only do one a day, like just go for it and just stick to it for as long as you can.

16:14
It didn’t really become a habit for me until about like 90 to 100 days where I truly felt like it was wrong to not post something. I just felt like it was part of my identity now. Like I just got to post something today, even if it’s just a tweet, one line on LinkedIn and that will count, you know, in my head. But yeah, I noticed most beginners kind of just fall off track. They never actually make it to 100 posts published. Yeah. And to come up with that many pieces of content,

16:43
I imagine you use AI to augment that. Are you eating your own dog food and provide ideas? but I think one of the things people don’t realize is I also source, I use AI to source ideas from stuff I’m already doing. So when I’m coding for Bloatado or answering support tickets for Bloatado, for example, once a week my AI bot goes in there and tries to like look for interesting trends. And that can be a content idea. For example, like a lot of people are asking for a particular feature, like

17:12
uh create carousels with Bloatado. And that was the origin of that particular feature, and that could be a content idea. I also look at things like uh meetings I’m already having. So I don’t have many meetings, but my Bloatado weekly office hours has an AI meeting notes taker, and that is also repurposed into content ideas. my suggestion for most people is to not change what you’re already doing, but just look for opportunities where you can kind of plug in AI to kind of listen.

17:40
extract ideas organically from the stuff you’re already doing. For most people, it’s probably a combination of meetings or maybe emails are kind of the two most obvious places to start and just have an AI flow that’s like, hey, these are like 10 pretty interesting ideas from the stuff you discussed today. And the benefit is like you were authentic and engaged. Like you weren’t trying to force these ideas. They came up naturally in conversation and that’s what makes them like really valuable and interesting.

18:12
I can tell you how I’m using BlowTato. uh So anytime I’m on TikTok or in my emails or seeing an interesting article, I immediately just shove it in BlowTato. And then when it times to create the content, I just put my own spin on whatever that article was. And that has made life just so much easier for me because I don’t have to stare at this blank screen. Yeah, because we get inspired by content ideas all the time. Like I’ll see a LinkedIn post, I’ll have a reaction to it.

18:37
And so like I’ll plug it, I’ll plug the post in Blotato and then I’ll use my voice dictation app. So a lot of people use whisper flow. I use voice sync and then I’ll be like, well, this is what I think. And it’s slightly different. And then Blotato kind of mashes them together, right? Do final edits and then publish it out. And that’s like exactly the core use case it was built for. I know a lot of people ask me for full automation, but in my opinion, most beginner creators should not start with full automation. They should like take

19:05
interesting ideas that they already have or that they see online, add their unique voice and then publish it rather than trying to automate everything from ground zero.

19:17
I’m actually not a fan of full automation at all, because I don’t feel like what’s generated reflects. It’s never exact. I always have to edit. So I’m actually curious. I’ve noticed you’ve used an AI avatar. Do you continue to use the avatar and like, does that flow? I actually only use it when I’m on vacation or out sick and so and always wears a hat. So like my audience knows and it’s transparent and it’s honestly safe. Like there was

19:44
weeks when I lost my voice and it honestly saved me during that two week period. But yeah, there’s still like massaging, like I really care about the script that it’s saying. It’s also difficult to get the avatar’s like enunciation correct and sounding correct. So I’ve sat there for four hours tweaking 11 Labs parameters until I could find something that was 80 % of the time acceptable, right? 80 % of the time. That was like the best I could do. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

20:14
Yeah, you know, I started replacing my outros in the podcast with 11 Labs just so could play around with it. It’s gotten a lot better. Oh, yeah, yeah, the professional voice clone definitely better. Yeah.

20:26
But for you though, uh I was under the impression that everything was kind of automated. So you’re actually going through and tweaking the output before it gets posted. so I think what I’ve kind of learned, so when I initially started making automation tutorials for Bloatado users, I would have them fully automated because that was like the simplest version that I could do. Because once you have a human in the loop step, it’s like, okay, you write it to Airtable, wait for somebody to approve it, then send it back.

20:55
I didn’t want to introduce that level of complexity in a tutorial. What I’ve learned though on this topic is like people really download these templates and just expect it to work out of the box and like go by. And that I did not anticipate. And so kind of my learning from that moving forward is to have a human in the loop QA step in every single tutorial moving forward. Cause I truly believe that’s like the approach 90%.

21:23
of people should probably take. I’m not a fan of using AI to distance yourself from the creative process. And that’s what a lot of people want it to do. Like they don’t want to deal with the edits and the thinking and finding your voice. But I believe the complete opposite. Like the people who are succeeding using AI are using it to go deeper into the creative process. Like find my blind spots, give me five different perspectives that challenge me. And that’s the way to use AI successfully.

21:54
I’m so happy you said that. That being said, though, we kind of glossed over your flow. So from what I understand, you have AI just kind of browse all the different things that you’re doing and does it put it in air table? Yeah, Yeah, so when it comes to ideation, yeah, bucket number one is what am I already doing today? So it’s looking at meetings, it’s looking at emails, and it’s looking at my GitHub projects, which is where I manage like, bloatado tickets, like feature tickets and buck tickets. Number two is AI news.

22:22
So I use an app called RSS.app where you can pay attention to different Twitter accounts, TikTok accounts, Instagram accounts, and just compile what is the most interesting news. For my particular audience, that tends to be tools that are free or resources that are free, like deeplearning.ai just released a free course on AI governance for agents. That’s interesting. I really like that. I’m going to share that. And also new tools that come out.

22:47
um Like the chat, GPD subreddit sometimes has funny stuff, so I’ll include that in there. And then the third idea, the third source of ideas is actually scraping consumer content and just thinking about the different hooks. just niches completely unrelated to AI. So let’s say dating or relationships, but there I’m looking for just inspiration around like very interesting hooks that I could repurpose for an AI use case.

23:14
So these scrapers, are they code or are using something Yeah, I’m using NADN, but you can definitely code it today with a Vibes Coding tool. So I personally use Cloud Code for coding potato.

23:28
Yeah, okay, so N8N, so you have all these things now, then I imagine that’s like a whole bunch of stuff that you have to sift through. And then do you pick one and then feed that into AI to write your script? I imagine you have like a prompt that you use that sounds like you or what’s your process So it will put it in Airtable. So I have an AI agent where I’ve given it examples of previous content that has gone viral. And so that agent scores, like let’s say it has 200 ideas.

23:57
it’ll like score it based on what it thinks will do well. And then obviously I apply my own judgment as well. Sometimes there are just topics I want to talk about that I think are important to talk about. um Like a lot of people overlooked Brave’s initial research on AI browsers. That was like a while ago. I posted about it on TikTok a while ago, but it really didn’t explode until OpenAI released Atlas last week or two weeks ago. And people were like, wait, this is not safe.

24:27
But that’s a topic that my AI system didn’t find. I randomly found it just reading through social media. I was like, oh, I should talk about this. all I mean there is there’s room for human judgment. There’s certain topics I feel are important. And then, yeah, so basically I’ll take whatever the research was for that topic and then plug it into Blotato. I have a TikTok default script that I like to use. And then it just spits it out.

24:51
Sometimes if I’m like get a little low on views the past week, I’ll spend extra time on the hook. So I have another thing in Bloatado called a viral AI coach where you can up you first record your video and then upload it. So I’ll record like 10 seconds the hook, including a visual hook and then upload it to that viral AI coach to get an additional layer of feedback.

25:15
I didn’t know that existed. lot of people don’t. But once you find it, it’s really awesome, especially for beginners. So you can upload an entire video, but it’s really focused on analyzing the first 20 seconds. So it’ll transcribe it. It’ll analyze it visually for the visual appeal of the hooks. And then it’ll give you a scorecard of how was the first hook, how was the second hook, et cetera. OK.

25:42
You record it first and then you use that. I’m feeling like I need to work on the… Like I want more views this week. I really need to work on the hooks.

25:53
Yeah, my ego is like that too. If I’m low on views, my ego needs that fix. So, okay, so for filming, uh do you just kind of add lip based off of notes or do you have a teleprompter? So I only use a teleprompter if I’m literally reading a list. Otherwise, I can’t remember the list. I don’t normally use a teleprompter. So literally what I’ll do, I don’t have it here, but I just have like a selfie stick that holds my phone up. And then my computer.

26:21
with the notes from Bloatato will just be like right there. So it’ll just be like my phone, notes, I can just glance at it and wing it honestly. And then that’s it, that’s the video.

26:33
Okay. And then your routine is, do you do three a day or do you just batch? I batch everything in one day of content creation. Okay. Okay. And then the rest of the time I imagine. People think I create, people think it’s the opposite. Like I must spend all my time creating content. Um, I specifically built Lotato so that I don’t have to spend all my time creating content. Right. Um, but yeah, most of my week is like,

26:59
fixing bugs, building new features and answering support tickets. Like that’s pretty much it for the week.

27:07
And then assuming you follow this process of posting three times a week, or sorry, three times a day, when did you start feeling, traction? Yeah, that’s a good question. So in the very beginning, I only posted one LinkedIn post a day. That was for a month. I actually had one LinkedIn post go viral. And it was about like the new way of building AI startups. um That had a lot of interesting discussion.

27:33
But I didn’t start posting TikTok until maybe like June or July. And then it took like three months to get out of 200 view jail. Like my next milestone was 1000 views regularly. And to do that from, distinctly remember from 200 to 1000, what made all the difference was using hashtags. Just using hashtag AI, hashtag chat GPT. And that was it. Cause I apparently, wasn’t doing that before I didn’t realize that was a thing. Yeah.

28:03
And then my very first video that did well, was because I use creator search insights on TikTok, where it was like, uh if folks aren’t familiar with it, basically TikTok tells you what people are searching for and you can even find content gaps. like maybe people are searching for voice AI apps and there’s a content gap for it. So you can make a video for that. And that was my first video ever that did more than 1000 views. But yeah, but this was three months in already.

28:31
Right. And so if I had given up earlier, then like none of what’s happened would have happened. I mean, most people don’t make it to three months. And that’s why I’m asking that question. Like you got to stick through, in my opinion, you should stick with it for at least a year. in my mind, I was like, this is my five year commitment. Right. Five years. I just think of in terms of years. I don’t even think in terms of weeks or months. Yeah. No, I’m the same way. Three to five years is my thing.

29:00
And and blowtato is like a long-term thing for you too, I would imagine, right? So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about vibe coding because I’ve noticed you talked a lot about it. I’m an EE and I used to design microprocessors for a living. You’re a CS major. I hear you talk a lot about it. So do you think the average Joe can do it effectively? Oh, yeah. I mean, my 22 year old cousin just quit his full-time job, moved in to our house. We call it a hacker house now.

29:27
And he just vibe coded his second app last night, which is, I don’t know if he’s listening, but you basically take a picture of your Instagram post and you get a virality prediction score for it. Because he was marketing his first app, which was a study tool for college students. He was marketing it on TikTok and Instagram. And he was like, oh, it’d be really cool if I also had this tool. And it’s fully functional. You can sign up for it. I forgot the name of his new one.

29:56
uh But yeah, he’s 22 years old with absolutely zero background in technology. So I think vibe coding can work really well for simpler apps. But what I always tell people is like the goal of vibe coding is to hire a full-time engineer. That’s the goal. The goal is to like validate your MVP, get paying users, get it to the point where like people are like, why does this keep breaking? But that means they want to use it, you know? And then you have that validation and confidence and conviction to go hire like a real tech person.

30:26
to the rest out, maintain the code base, probably refactor 95 % of the code base. That’s what I did. uh Bloatato, I vibe coded the first version with Cursor AI. I filmed myself doing it, so it’s on YouTube. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, the MVP, like the version that got my initial set of 100 paying customers. It didn’t even have publishing, by the way. Like that’s how MVP it was. Like it was a social media tool. You couldn’t actually publish it. uh

30:53
social media, but like the very core feature was just that remixing that repurposing, right? In an article, get posts out in your voice or in a viral voice. ah But yeah, you couldn’t even publish to social media at that point. Well, I know I am loving I call it vibe coding, I guess, but ah because I feel like we’re I’m not really a developer. And it sounds like you don’t portray yourself as developer either. I don’t like you know, wait.

31:21
way more to be dangerous. But right now I feel like invincible. Like I feel like I can create anything. And I’ve literally been going down like the Shopify app store and just running a lot of these apps literally in a weekend because they’re so simple. Right. But then again, I also run a class and some of these people it’s hard for them right because it spits out a bunch of stuff. It doesn’t work. then you’re really hearing mindset. Yeah. Yeah. And you can’t really look at it. So what I want to get out of you today is

31:50
Let’s say you are someone who’s not tech savvy, was your cousin or your brother? Yeah, my younger cousin. Your younger cousin, right. So where should they start? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of good vibe coding tutorials online. So for example, this past newsletter this weekend, I walked through how to use lovable cloud to vibe code a lead magnet. And I think a lead magnet is actually a pretty good starting point because you don’t have like a complex backend. You don’t need authentication. You don’t need payment provider on top.

32:20
But this was still an interactive little app, meaning you answered a bunch of questions, it spit out an ROI calculator and a personalized report, and you can even put in your email address so you can capture emails. In other words, it’s a true lead magnet, or people can put in their emails and stuff. And things like that are really good starting point, again. Not a very complex backend, it was really just storing your emails and responses that people put into your lead magnet. No authentication, no payment system either.

32:49
Another example I vibe coded- Does that email go straight to a specific provider or is it just putting it on like a sheet or something? So lovable cloud, as long as you connect to your SuperBase account, it will spin up the database, create the database schema, and then it will just insert the emails into SuperBase. And then you can just click one button, you can grab everybody’s emails right there. For everyone listening, SuperBase is just like a database and from what I’m-

33:14
understanding there’s no hooks into e-popular email providers. It just puts in a database that you can extract and add it to your provider, right? Yeah, exactly. And you could hook it up with something like Resend. So Lovable has a pretty streamlined integration with Resend if you actually want to send out emails from the app itself. But again, I would probably consider that like step two or MVP.

33:35
um The other example I was going to say, just posted a video on this, is my AI agents and automations directory. It had 37,000 visitors in the past three months. It was vibe coded in just a few hours. And obviously I’ll put a couple links there to Plotino so it helps drive. but I’m sorry, what did the app do? So it’s a directory of automations. So let’s say you’re looking for…

33:58
marketing automations in N8n or make.com. can filter like marketing, N8n is your platform, and then it’ll just show you a bunch. You click on one, you can see like who made it, you can contact them for help, and you can download the template. It’s literally like a single page directory and the data is just in SuperBase. But that’s another example of like, you know, start there, start with like something. How come no matter what I type, it always points me to blow tato? don’t know.

34:26
That’s cool. Yeah, I can totally see something simple like that. Absolutely. I didn’t even know Lovable had a database attachment. Oh, yeah, it’s pretty new. Okay. Yeah, it was basically one of the biggest complaints, but it’s called Lovable Cloud. And basically, it’ll manage your SuperBase for you, set everything up, because it was really annoying the way you had to do it before. Yeah, yeah, I thought it was only a front end before. I didn’t know. So is Lovable what you would recommend to someone just completely green to this?

34:55
I think so. um The other ones are strong as well. I’ve been really impressed with emergent.sh lately. I haven’t used that one. What is that? It’s similar to lovable, but it can also build mobile apps. uh Instead of SuperBase, I believe it’s using Mongo, the object storage. uh It’s really neat. Everyone I’ve shown it to has been blown away by the level of polish that you get. With that said, though, my husband and I, on our last livestream, we actually tried

35:24
building a mobile app live and submitting it to the App Store. And we almost got there. However, when we actually downloaded the code base and tried to build it locally before submitting it, there were so many issues with the emergent code base, like out of date libraries, things were missing. And so I would say it’s not completely streamlined for mobile development yet, but it’s a brand new player and it’s incredibly promising. So I would probably recommend lovable.dev.

35:53
emergent.sh or I know a lot of people who also still love bolt.new and that can also build mobile apps. So how do you, how do you distinguish? Cause it’s kind of dizzying. There’s like a new platform every day. So I’ve been trying to train my son to use Replet recently.

36:10
Do you use, what do you use, you use Cursor for Bloatado or? For Bloatado, yeah. mean, a lot of these did not exist at the time. Like, Lovable, I had not even heard of, I don’t think it had launched publicly at the time I was filming me vibe coding. So I was using Cursor AI. Okay. And then, I mean, Cursor by itself is just, I mean, you were just generating code, right? And you had your own platform for, okay, because you’re a CS major. Is your husband tech also?

36:40
Oh yeah, so electrical engineering, computer science. We actually met in our data structures class in undergrad. And we had like one of the hardest professors, everybody at least from Berkeley knows him. And the beginning of the class was like 150 people. By the end it was like 25. I can’t remember if that was a weed out class. I don’t remember. But yeah, for CS majors. All right. So if you’re new, it sounds like lovable. You can make simple apps.

37:09
Lead Magnets is a good use case, I think. uh For you, sounds like you did you end up hiring developers then? And you still get the refactor all your code or are you maintaining it? No, I’m maintaining it. Yeah. And so I don’t use Cursor AI anymore. So I’ve definitely switched to Cloud Code, which I highly, highly recommend if you have a complex existing code base. But yeah, it’s a lot of work, I will say. I think I forgot how much work.

37:36
a startup is. So I’m building my brand solo. I’m also building Blotato solo. um For me, it’s more of like an intellectual challenge. How far can I go solo? I’m not at all saying I believe that’s the optimal approach if my goal is only to optimize revenue. I can definitely see like it would be really nice to have another developer. For example, if I’m doing marketing, then suddenly like product development just stops.

38:03
because my focus is on marketing. I’m traveling to an event next week and I’m not gonna be able to publish uh new features. I’ll be able to barely maintain the code base, maybe fix a few bugs. But yeah, it’s been a lot doing it all solo. Isn’t that your husband’s job? No, He has a totally different set of ambitions. What you’re doing is actually my dream. What I fear is actually the support.

38:33
And I know I’ve asked you a couple of questions on Bloatado and I never wanted to press anything just because I know you’re busy doing other things. But uh that has been my greatest fear because you always underestimate someone’s uh technical ability or overestimate, should say, any tools. What has been the biggest challenge for you with Bloatado, actually? I think it’s exactly that um because I’m in it every day and I don’t see what other people see.

38:59
Like when the remix screen to me made sense, I showed it to some other creator friends. They’re like, yeah, I get it. But the typical person who doesn’t have a strong background in content creation, they’re just like, I don’t know what to do at this step. And so my biggest challenge has just been like, being less technical or like simplifying it or streamlining the flows for beginners to kind of get up and running. um

39:23
Even to this day, I don’t necessarily recommend Bloatado to absolute beginners. It’s really helpful if you have been trying to create content on your own for a little bit so you can kind of understand, like, oh, repurposing it. Oh, here’s, I just add my own voice. Okay, here’s my content calendar. I can schedule it out. But yeah, that’s been a big challenge. Support is also definitely a big challenge to scale. It’s tough. I get 100 to 200 support tickets a day.

39:50
And yes, I have an AI support bot that does it and does a pretty good job, but you still have to update the knowledge base all the time. ah Like I just pushed a new feature where you can now schedule through the API, schedule a post to your next tree slot. I have to update the documentation, update the AI bot so it refreshes its knowledge base, uh look for anything else in the documentation that might have outdated knowledge. And I use Clot Code to help me with that, like identify things that are outdated.

40:19
But it’s a lot of work. Like it really, really does add up. So you don’t have a dedicated support person. Is it a one man show right now still? Literally. Yeah. People are really surprised when I just hop in the support chat and I’m like, okay. Amazing. Okay. So that is one way to reach me. I if you really want me to reply. Yeah. So it sounds like support is really the pretty much the only manual thing that you have to take care of outside of the coding, which is for me, it’d be the fun part. Like,

40:48
uh Well, yeah, it’s mostly fun. I think when I get to work on new features, but it’s honestly a lot of plumbing. Like the social API is change or the documentation is horrendous. Like if anyone here is trying to actually, you know, integrate with the social API, it’s pretty like tedious. I’ll say is a nice way of saying it. But yeah, like that stuff is not that fun for me. Honestly.

41:10
um But I have to do it. And it’s probably like 60 % of the work I do is what I consider plumbing. Like not really that fun at all from a developer perspective. I’m using this tool called Repurpose. Actually, I was considering just writing my own version of Bloatado. But then you’re right, I walked through like all the the documentation and then there’s these tokens that expire and then all of sudden you have to manage it. I’m like, screw it, I’m just going to paste it. Okay, so

41:41
To code something like Bloatado sounds like it’s much more involved for someone. ah I will say, think you could build the same MVP I built in probably a few hours now with how vibe coding tools have evolved. But I always like to caveat people that when it comes to building product, launching it and getting users is the start of your product development journey. So to build Bloatado what it is today would take significantly more work than just spinning it up in immersion.

42:10
But you can definitely build the initial first version V2, V3 in Lovable or Emergent today for sure. Well, it’s all fun and games when you’re the only one using it. Yeah, exactly. As soon as it gets to the masses, all hell breaks loose. uh OK, there’s one more thing I wanted to talk to you about, uh which I’m drawing a blank now. But uh Sabrina, in terms of your marketing,

42:37
What has been your most effective way to just get users actually on the Blotato? I would say tutorials on YouTube. um Long form or…? Yeah, long form. Because I think it’s attracting people who are very much already looking for a solution and already pretty educated on the problem. Especially for the API, would say YouTube long form tutorials with automation templates has been the primary driver of API users.

43:05
um For the non-API users, Instagram has actually been pretty good as well. So posting videos as well as carousels are just different features that I have. I’ve had a few viral videos on TikTok specifically for the faceless video creation in Bloatado. So that’s been really helpful as well. But I can tell it like I had another marketing experiment where just did a faceless channel. It got hundreds of millions of views, had a Bloatado watermark, but a very, very low conversions.

43:33
So like that was, you know, I was really excited about the views and also just proving that Blotato can work for this use case around like face story videos. But terrible, terrible conversions. Like just because you put a watermark there does not mean it’s targeted to your audience. They don’t know what that watermark reference is. Like why should they go there? Yeah. So, so it seems like you’re using short form for awareness and then the long form YouTube videos to actually convert them into customers.

44:00
Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. And that’s how my entire kind of brand funnel is laid out. Like I kind of assume short form content. It’s just not as authority building as long form content. So I want all of my social short forms to link back to my YouTuber newsletter. Okay. And then your newsletter, uh is it once they sign up or no, that’s right. You have an AI newsletter. Yeah, yeah, that’s separate. So yeah, my goal for social is like everybody on my email list.

44:29
It’s by far highest ROI. And I had always heard that as a creator, but I don’t think I believed it until I saw it myself. But it’s really nice having control of your own distribution list and not being at whims of the algorithm every other week. And I know you have a Discord group also, right? um Is that one of your primary lead gens also?

44:55
Is it an email? No, it’s not. Yeah. So I just created a Discord community for women building in AI, just because honestly, it can get lonely and I just wanted to meet more other women builders in AI. But it’s a pretty small group, like a couple hundred women, and we’re testing it out in school as well. We’re trying to figure out, should we stay in Discord or should we move over to school? I love Discord because of the coding aspects. I you too, right? It’s infinitely powerful. Yeah.

45:24
I grew up playing video. I have three brothers. So grew up playing video games and I’ve used Discord for as long as I’ve known. I can tell just by your chairs. But Sabrina, hey, it’s been great talking to you. If people want to sign up for your newsletter or check out your tool, where can they go? What’s the best place? Yeah. So for my newsletter, go to Sabrina.dev and that’s honestly, yeah, the best place. Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

45:54
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re not using Claude or BlowTato at this point, make sure you check out these tools because they will change your life. more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 631. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at seller summat.com and we are almost sold out at this point. 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.

46:23
go to SellersSummit.com.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I break down a series of sudden moves that caught a lot of sellers off guard this past week. Several major platforms quietly changed direction and the ripple effects could impact how products are discovered, sold, and fulfilled going forward. Enjoy the episode. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

00:27
And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate.

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

01:30
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to be covering like all the latest news in e-commerce and online business. And as of right now today, it came out that e-commerce just hit 16.6 % of all sales, which sounds low, but it’s actually like at an all time high right now. More more people are shopping online. Well, I don’t know about you, but the Amazon truck in my neighborhood is a staple.

01:57
I don’t know if you have the, I’m sure you guys do have the electric delivery. Oh yeah, yeah, of course. And I’ll be walking the dogs or whatever and it’s just like, I hear them, you know, all through the, I mean, it’s just, feel like, I mean, I’m surprised that that seems low to me. Actually, let me tell you a story about Amazon. This just happened to my wife. I don’t know if you’ve shot, you’ve probably shopped on Amazon lately. I’ve noticed that they’ve started placing the add to cart button right above the buy now button on certain products. Oh.

02:26
So Jen accidentally ordered three of the same thing because she accidentally clicked the buy now button. Oh, instead of add to cart. Which is literally underneath the add to cart button. And so she adds to cart and she buys now, like she buys now a couple of times by accident. And then she notices that it’s not in her cart at checkout, so she adds it again. But the buy now is like a one click checkout. Yes, yes. So she ends up placing two separate orders.

02:55
individual orders, adding to cart, going to checkout and then placing that third order because you didn’t think the other ones went through. now you have three grand pianos. And so now we have this three three things and they’re not eligible for returns for some reason. Yeah, they’re small items. And so you actually have to go through live chat to get the refund and then you don’t have to return it. Anyway, it’s this whole hassle. Well, I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but

03:23
uh I have prime TV. guess everybody who has prime has prime TV. Yeah. But I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but it seems like every time I watch something on prime TV, the ah the by the Amazon ad in the corner of your screen where you can literally take your remote control and buy now is is on there. Like I feel like six months ago, I saw it occasionally. Now it’s every single commercial break or at it’s not really commercial, I guess ads.

03:52
uh It has one of those add to cart. Have you ever bought anything? No, I haven’t but I’m tempted to just because I want to see the process like can you completely check out on your television? Do you have to add it to the cart and then you have to go to your phone? I’m assuming you probably do everything on your TV. You don’t have to do anything else. sure I mean if you can click on one button by accident Yeah, and buy a whole bunch of things and yes, you can check out from your TV Yeah, for sure, which is scary because that means your kids can just check out on your TV

04:20
That is concerning, right? I my kids are all older, so that wouldn’t happen, but or they would and they would know they were doing it. But yeah, I could see one of my grandkids just all of a sudden getting 50 uh K-pop plus dollars. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I just thought of that because when I heard that e-commerce was at its all time high, it’s like tactics like these this, you know. Well, here’s the other thing. They make it so easy to shop.

04:48
Whereas I don’t see, I don’t shop in stores. So I’m not the best person to talk about this, but when I do go to a store, it’s often very frustrating. Like you can’t find, I mean, the one store I do go to is Home Depot, right? It’s rare that you can find someone that can help you. know, it’s always, you know, someone’s on their lunch break or this person, you have to wait for them to page somebody else. The lines are long, right? If you have to return, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to return anything anywhere in a store, but like the lines are long, the parking lots are crowded. To me, it’s like, it’s not even worth.

05:17
I’ll have Home Depot, if I know what I need, I’ll have Home Depot deliver it. It’s like, don’t even want that experience anymore because I feel like the in-person shopping experience, unless you’re shopping really high end, is not fantastic. Doesn’t Brian go there every day? Isn’t he know Home Depot better than employees? right now. Okay, right. I was about to say. Yes, but sometimes I tag along on the weekends. here’s a big shock to me. Well, maybe it wasn’t that huge of a shock, but

05:46
OpenAI basically just canceled their agentic integration for purchasing. So the idea was that you do a search on OpenAI or a query and the products come up and then you buy right there on the platform without having to go to the website. They decided to back down on that, back off from that. And I understand why actually, because I was reading about it. Like a long time ago, Facebook tried to do this.

06:15
And I actually signed up for it. I was kind of excited about it where you can just check out right there. the the for me, we sell personalized items. And Facebook did like a horrible job with personalized items or any little add ons that you could make on a product. And I think just the intricacies of product feeds, options and all that stuff, major pain in the butt for people. Plus, it’s like this other interface they have to worry about to write where orders are coming from.

06:43
And that’s what I found with the Facebook Instagram experience. Because back in the day, like you could click off to the website, they discontinued that and forced you to use Facebook checkout. And we got a couple orders that ended up being a major pain in the butt, so I just turned it off entirely. And like that whole Facebook shop on there, it kind of died as a result. I heard that OpenAI released this thing, and I heard only double digits worth of stores actually signed up for it.

07:14
Interesting in all of Shopify, right? It was available to all the Shopify people. the fact that people weren’t signing up to it, I think that’s part of the reason why they decided to just shelve it. Interesting. I feel like that might come back. It’s supposed I mean, they didn’t shelve it for good. Right. They’ve just backed off from it because, you know, they got other things to worry about, I guess, like a fight with Anthropic and Google and all this other stuff that’s going on.

07:42
But I was a little shocked that more people, like I signed up for the beta since I’m not on Shopify and I never got any notifications. And then Etsy was already live with it too. And I guess that didn’t get very good adoption either. Well, we’ll see what happens with that. I feel like that might make another round. But it is such a major pain. Yeah, but I mean, at some point I think they’re gonna work out the kinks, right?

08:09
Well, mean, Facebook didn’t work out to kinks. Like, just think of all the different shipping options that you might offer or… uh Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. If it’s more of a pain than it’s worth. Like, to click on a website too, then you get like all the other information, I believe, as well. Right. I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t know. I feel like if an app like Comment Sold can figure it out and how to integrate with Shopify, then I don’t know. Maybe.

08:38
It’s totally different concept, but I feel like there’s other things that are able to figure the integrations out. I think where this is all going is Google put out this new protocol, which I’m going to integrate with my site, which essentially allows like an AI agent to go and shop at your store, not from a browser, you know, program programmatically. And so maybe what will happen is all the AIs will adopt that and not have to browse

09:08
like on a browser to actually buy your products. I don’t know. Maybe. Did you know like right now, when an AI, like if you have an AI fill out a form, the way it works is it takes a photo of the form, fills it out each time, takes another snapshot to make sure it’s correct. And so that’s why it just takes forever for Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. Okay. Maybe that’s changed as of now, but that’s what I read somewhere. Yeah.

09:36
Okay, so that was something that was just kind of shocking to me that that happened so early. We’ve been talking about this internally with one of my clients for the past month about, we need to be, this is on the radar, let’s be ready, this, that, the other, and now I guess it’s off the radar. I think what’s more important is showing up in AI search, right? Yes. I mean, that’s the most important part about I we have a talk about that at Seller Summit. I hope we do too. Do we?

10:04
We do, of course. Jeff Oxford. I’m actually going to touch upon it, too. Jeff is going to do, obviously, most of the heavy lifting. But I’m going to talk about it in my talk. And then I’m going to code a Shopify app that allows you to do what I did, essentially. Nice. I haven’t written the talk yet. that’s part of my That’s part of my talk. So two kind of semi-talks on ranking and AI search, which is very important today. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

10:31
Have you ever wondered how much your business is actually worth? Now I sold one of my businesses through Quiet Light and honestly, just getting that initial valuation changed everything for me. Not because of that number itself, but because of what came with it. My advisor walked me through exactly what buyers would be looking for, how I needed to restructure my accounting, what documentation I was missing, the gaps in my financials that might kill a deal before it even starts, and stuff that I really had no idea that mattered when it came to selling a business.

11:00
And here’s the thing, I wasn’t even ready to sell yet, but knowing what I needed to fix meant that I could actually start preparing and I now had a roadmap. Everyone at Quiet Light has built or sold businesses themselves. So my advisor told me what needed to change, it was actually coming from real experience sitting across from buyers. And by the time I was ready, everything was positioned right and we attracted serious buyers. So if you’ve been thinking about selling someday, even if that day feels way far off, just getting a free valuation from Quiet Light

11:29
will make a huge difference. You’ll learn what you need to fix right now so you’re not scrambling later. And if you’re interested, go over to quietlight.com. It’s funny, I think I was talking to somebody yesterday in one of my communities and she was saying that she got super, she is like a, I think she’s a programmer. I’m not quite sure what her day job is, but she watched some stuff on vibe coding and over the weekend, vibe coded a bunch of stuff for her webs.

11:57
She’s like, oh, it was so easy. I just sat down and you know, and a half an hour, know, half an afternoon and got it done. I was like, yeah, I mean. Okay, so Tony, I have to I’m going to talk about it here. And I wish like I had the bandwidth to give multiple talks at Seller Summit this year. Yeah, but I have been using Claude code for content. And so now I have this like set of agents and sub agents where I have it researched the topic for me.

12:27
and then draft out like the scripts for my YouTube channel and then automatically generate the TikToks and the Instagram reels and the LinkedIn posts and then auto posts the social part. And I have this like really long file that reflects how the content is in my personality and the way I write by training it with like, I have probably like hundreds and hundreds of pages of scripts, YouTube scripts that I fed in.

12:56
Yeah. So it understood my voice and now it is drastically sped up everything. Interesting. And it’s actually not that hard to set up. I’m going to try to give a lesson in the class, but it might be kind of like a long lesson, but once you get this set up, saves a tremendous amount of time. Oh, I only imagine. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s funny that I came up with this because like I’ve been using Cloud Code to code, right? Right. But the fact that there’s code in the name,

13:25
I think scares people into thinking like, oh my God, I got a code, right? But it’s not really like that. It’s kind of like you tell it what you want and it does it. It’s like the spouse we wish we all had, For anything. And I’m not even joking. And most people that I’ve encountered, even in the Silicon Valley, they’re just using Claude or ChatGBT based on the interface, right? Like the web page.

13:54
And that’s the most inefficient way to do it because it doesn’t really remember all the little details of what you need. So by setting all this stuff up in Claude code or Claude cowork, I chose to use Claude code and not cowork. Anything that you do, like anytime I make a script now, it gets better because it’s trained on everything new that I’m working on. And so over time, like I’ll have this

14:23
you know, incredible agent where I hopefully have to do very minimal work to get to get stuff out. Yeah, I think I think this is where this is a whole nother podcast. But I think one of the things that I’ve noticed is that people that seem to hate AI or think it’s terrible or don’t like their results don’t really understand the how to work and really maximize the value. This new ad agency that we’re working with, they have em they’ve built this internally. Right. But it basically scrapes

14:52
all of your content, social, video, blog posts, products, wherever you are on the web. It also records all your phone calls with them. so it takes, which I think is crazy because I was using it the other day and it quoted me in the response. I was like, Tony Hervach says, this is weird because you just quoted Gary V above this. So I don’t know if this is this should not be in the same paragraph. But uh

15:20
It’s very interesting because we’re getting really good results from it because it has all of that information, right? It has conversations, it has videos, it has scripts, has blog, you know, it has all the things in there. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out.

15:48
It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. That means you gotta be more careful about what you say. No cursing, right?

16:17
curse on work calls. Tony gives f-bombs. But no, it does make, because there was one time where, yeah, there was one time it quoted me and I was like, I don’t know if I want that to be forever in AI. But uh yeah, think the fact that they

16:37
record the calls is like the most interesting, because a lot of people can feed in all their information, right? Also scrapes comments on social media and that kind of stuff, which I think is fantastic. But the recording of the calls, think that’s where it’s done, where then now the agent really gets the voice, especially of, not of me, but from me and other people on the calls, it gets the like company idea, right? Of like all those things. But then when they talk to the founder, they’re getting her voice.

17:04
which I think is really important and it’s much better than anything we’ve used outside of that. You know what, I’m gonna talk to Chris Schaeffer. So Chris Schaeffer is giving a talk on the one man content show. Machine or whatever. Machine, yeah. I wonder if he’s gonna be talking about cloud code. I’ll talk to him right after this, but there’s gonna be a talk at Seller Summit about this. Yeah, okay. What else do we have? Okay, one thing, so I got all excited about this.

17:33
six months to a year ago, which was using AI avatars to give testimonials for ads. that? I think it was like last year. Yeah. Is it last year? Yeah. And so there was all these services that were popping up. And what you would do is you would take real testimonials that you’ve gotten, choose an AI avatar that looks really realistic because it’s not you training your own face. It’s like they’re preset avatars that they’ve already trained to recite these testimonials and then you can use them on ads. Yeah. Well,

18:03
New York just passed a law that does not allow AI avatars, especially in testimonials and ads. And I think California had something similar too. I think that’s good. I agree. I think that’s a good thing too. I mean, I think all this stuff is really cool, but I don’t know. I feel like for testimonials, it kind of it reminds me of like to roll back when.

18:27
You know, there were a lot of like bloggers and influencers that were just like reviewing every single product under the sun and just like it was like testimonial to say, but it was like, you’re not really a user of this product. Right. And so it got to the point where you couldn’t really rely on content creators to recommend products because it felt like, you know, if they were just a review machine, you know, it’s like, well, how do I know that you actually really love this and not aren’t getting, you know, I mean, obviously you have to disclose if you get paid, but.

18:54
I don’t know, I feel like the AI is very similar. Although they are using real reviews, it still feels, I don’t know, feels a little sleazy. It does, but if you think about it, what you just said, like half the, I’d say all the creators who are paid, like, I mean, most of them probably don’t really like the product to begin with. actually, one of my upcoming YouTube videos is kind of about this, but the distrust factor,

19:24
for brands is at an all time high. Because of AI, uh every creator under the sun is saying like whatever product is like the best thing that they’ve ever used. And it’s just getting tiring. Like I don’t trust any of that stuff I see anymore. Yeah, so actually this is not about AI but like piggybacking on that is that is why founder content is such a hot commodity right now.

19:50
Yep. And I don’t know, I spent I literally was up till 2am last week, which I could not afford to be up till 2am watching the fast food wars. Did you see any of this? No, we have completely different feeds. No, this. What the This made national news. Oh, you’re talking about the burger? Yes. Yeah, I did. Yeah, that was a burger product. They did it on purpose. There’s a lot of debate whether McDonald’s did that on purpose.

20:15
purpose or not, if you haven’t seen this Google McDonald’s CEO eats a hamburger, basically this was the kickoff video where, you know, he introducing their new hamburger and this man clearly does not eat at McDonald’s ever, right? And he takes, he talks about the product, like the burger as if it’s like a piece of fabric or like a commodity, right? And.

20:37
And he calls it a burger product. He doesn’t just call it a burger. It was so bad. And then he takes this bite and it’s like, I don’t actually think he got any of the burger in his mouth. Right. It’s like the smallest bite I’ve ever seen. It’s like when you ask your kid to eat like a vegetable and they take like just a nibble of the top. um So what was amazing about this is all the other CEOs made videos. in some of them are like the A &W Root Beer guy literally

21:06
looks nothing like the McDonald’s guy dressed up like him and literally did it word for word with his own products. And he’s like, we don’t really call it a burger product around here. We just call it a burger. know, like it was so fantastic. The Wendy’s guy was awesome. He’s like, we cook our burgers fresh. It shows them on the grill. And then he goes and he’s like, we need to wash it down with a frosty. And he’s like, because our machines always work. Yeah.

21:32
Like the amount of shade thrown, also like the amount of like, like there were restaurants I didn’t know existed, right? Cause it’s like, I founded this fried chicken place that doesn’t exist in the South, right? So I don’t know about it. It’s probably out by you. um But I think that founder content, like that’s, I think that’s really a big way to combat some of the AI problems, right? Where like people are like platforms are.

21:58
moving away from like accepting that. was just telling you earlier, my son’s TikTok got demonetized because he’s making AI videos, but they’re like animated, right? So it’s not, he’s not pretending to be a real person. He’s making animation, but he can’t monetize it because it’s AI. So I think this founder content, if you do sell something, anything, digital, physical, um everyone wants to know how they can make faceless content, but like the founder content is what’s really hitting because it’s a way to come.

22:27
combat the this is fake, these reviews are paid. It’s like, well, of course, you know, except for the McDonald’s founder, everyone should love their products uh and should at least be able to talk about them. I think it’s why uh our friend Meg, who sells the hermit crab stuff is her videos are doing really well on TikTok, right? Like they’re getting engagement even for like not a huge account because she’s literally packing snail poop or whatever it is. I don’t know. Like, it’s gross.

22:55
But I think that’s what resonates with people right now. And it also resonates with the platforms, right? So they are giving priority to that type of content and pushing it out to people because it is not AI. Yeah. I mean, just the whole distrust factor with influencers. I mean, influencers still work, obviously. I mean, it’s the foundation of TikTok shop, but I think there’s a growing fatigue for some these. Unless the product in itself,

23:23
is the reason to buy it, like when you demonstrate it online. Okay. The other thing that’s going on is Amazon has just been cracking down like crazy on listings with I don’t want to say false claims, but any claim at all that is unsubstantiated. So you have to be really careful now what you say. Like they’re taking things down for like best whatever or even relief of a certain symptom.

23:53
Interesting. Right. And so, yeah, if you have a listing and it could be like a year old or two years old and it’s been running fine, all of sudden gets suspended. Wow. And uh just be on the lookout for that. And if it’s already happened to you, obviously you’re already on the lookout. But I might preemptively go back to my listings and take a look just to make sure. I wonder, do you think this will help like legit third party sellers?

24:21
versus some of these like, you know, I don’t want to I don’t want to say Chinese suppliers, but that’s really what it is. um You know, putting I mean, we talked a long time ago with someone from Seller Summit that was like, yeah, they they make like 10 different brands. They put all this stuff up. m Do you think that’ll help? Maybe not. I don’t know. I think it’ll be neutral because I mean, maybe they won’t get away with some of the stuff. Yeah. But.

24:50
The way it is now, people are just copying listing copy. Like if they look at the number one of the top five people, and they’ll just kind of copy the guts of their listing. That’s what I don’t like about any marketplace actually. There’s just like rampant copying and one-up-smanship. Because that’s really all you can do to differentiate yourself and your photos, which are now easily copyable too.

25:16
Which I think is why being a brand just gets so much more valuable every day. I 100 % agree. You know what’s funny? Someone asked me about e-commerce versus content the other day and I almost feel like selling physical products is a more secure position today, right? Because you’re not going to get knocked off by a flood of AI. It’s actually something physical and that’s something that I probably wouldn’t have said last year even.

25:45
I think it’s true if you have your own store. don’t think it’s true. I mean, we know a lot of people that only sell on Amazon, and that’s where I think I don’t. To me, that’s not safe at all. And I don’t know if you follow like like the jobs report, but like we all said, it’s not good. And again, it doesn’t have to be e-commerce, obviously, but just any side hustle at all. Yeah, like I’d get on that. Oh, yeah. I just telling you, I was helping my son with his side hustle yesterday. um

26:15
Yeah, it’s you know, it’s interesting to me and I’m not debating the jobs report. It’s not it’s gloomy But why why are all the restaurants packed? Like have you noticed a good question? Yeah, like and I did I have a theory but Usually like and I’m old enough to remember like 2009 right where it was like massive downturn in the economy and Restaurants were not packed right restaurants were closing and there’s still restaurants closing for sure

26:44
But like when I’m out and about and last week I was traveling so I was out almost every meal, like every dinner I was in a different restaurant in a city I don’t live in. you know, every restaurant, every table was full. People waiting outside on, you know, a Tuesday. Right. Which is, you know, probably not a normal restaurant. I don’t know. um I really think this is still a lingering post pandemic thing. Well, I had read somewhere that like the top five percent spent almost all the money.

27:14
In the US? The top 5 % aren’t eating a Chipotle. Well, no, I mean, they do. Yeah. Maybe it was like top 10 % spend like almost all the money. fancy restaurants. was in like Chili’s, you know. Yeah, I know. I know. But I know a lot of the restaurant industry is hurting because there’s only so many times that like the wealthy can go out to eat, right? Three times a day. But maybe that’s not the case for like

27:42
Was it like a chili? Chili’s has a great deal. It’s actually pretty inexpensive to eat there. Yeah, chili’s is great. I told my daughter she’s got some job security. uh even uh my other kid works at like, it’s not Chipotle, but it’s like a Chipotle and they’re busy all the time. So anyway, I don’t know. That’s one thing where I always feel like that’s one thing you can cut really quickly and really decrease your spending, right? As you just make your food at home. it’s so even with the…

28:08
grocery prices being high, it’s still significantly cheaper. Maybe not with the chili’s deal, but outside of that, like you can make dinner for much less than you can eat out with. yeah, for sure. Especially like, I don’t know if you’ve been through Chick-fil-A lately. It’s like I had to buy Chick-fil-A for everybody when we were stuck traveling. It was four people and it was like fifty five dollars and it wasn’t like extravagant. Chick-fil-A is expensive. Yeah, but even McDonald’s is expensive these days, you know. um

28:36
But yeah, that’s one thing that I thought was interesting is that restaurants still seem crowded. But well, I mean, just uh there is a stat. Forty four percent more people are buying secondhand than a year ago. I mean, the economy is is hurting. mean, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t see it that much in the news, but like I can just tell by, for example, like the employees that we have, you know, things are getting tighter and whatnot. So I’ve and I’ve heard that from a couple of people where their spouse works in an industry where

29:06
You know, it’s it’s not like a guaranteed 40 hours a week and their their time is being cut. Right. Well, I miss the time to start the furniture flipping business. Right. That’s your thing. I would never do that. But yeah. No. But like like to your point about side hustles, like this is the time to really be, I think, digging into something like that and seeing what you can come up with. Yeah. In other news, Tick Tock

29:35
rescinded their requirement to use fulfilled by TikTok. Thank goodness. Thank God I got that YouTube video out in time because literally the week later they made that announcement. Because in that video I was like, this is a bold move, but they might be able to pull it off, Forcing everyone. Well, I guess it turns out that they could not pull it off. It’s funny because- tons of backlash. Yes, I just, before they rescinded it, I just told somebody, ah, this is probably not the best time to get on TikTok to sell. Let’s, let’s-

30:05
You know, not if it’s fulfilled by TikTok, like that we don’t want to mess with that. um So, yeah, we’ll see. But on the flip side, and this is coming straight from Ian Page’s mouth, the bullseye sellers, he’s in he’s an agency that specialize in TikTok. If you’re not on TikTok shop, like your leash is super short. Like if you’re fulfilling yourself and you make a mistake, you’re going to get banned. Yeah. Right. Or if you don’t fulfill on time, like. Yeah.

30:33
your seller score is very important. And that was the reason that they wanted people on Fulfilled by TikTok. So think about it this way, you have a video that goes viral and all of a sudden you’re used to selling maybe like 100 units a day and all of a sudden it’s like a thousand units. And all of a sudden you can’t do it. And that actually makes TikTok look bad. It makes you look bad. So. Well, and especially if you think about how people buy on TikTok, right? It’s usually an impulse purchase. And so there’s

31:01
I mean, I think it was Ritu that talked about this last year in her talk at Seller Summit, how she saw the suitcase and she was like, this is amazing. And she bought it and it never showed up. Right. And so like she didn’t know anything about the brand. She didn’t know anything about the company. But, you know, now she’ll probably she probably will hesitate before she buys on TikTok again. Right. Because the order that she, you know, legitimate order paid money didn’t get the product. So I can see why they are strict. It’s kind of like with, you know, when uh

31:29
was it seller fulfilled prime? Right, same stringent rules because Amazon has a reputation. Yeah, I mean, Ian’s going to be talking about this, but I suspect because if you do fulfilled by TikTok, it’s a lot of perks like they’ll make you more visible. There’s a badge that you get also. Yeah. So essentially, I think even though they’re not technically forcing everyone on there. Yeah, they’re kind of forcing people on there.

31:58
It’s like going non-prime versus prime, right? Huge difference. Yeah. So and then for our final topic for today, let’s talk about the tariffs. I hate talking about the tariffs. Remember, there was one episode we recorded where it was literally the day that it was announced that it got struck down. Yeah. And we did like a two minute bit on how it was great and everything.

32:24
I don’t if you remember that part. do. I do. But I feel like I don’t want to talk about the tariffs because every in five minutes, this will be outdated. Yes. Actually, that’s true, because literally after we started cheering, it was literally seven hours later. Yeah. Like Trump did something else. I just wanted to just kind of explain what’s going on, especially with the refunds and whatnot, in case you guys are curious. So what got struck down specifically were the IEPA tariffs. These were like the emergency ones that he issued.

32:54
like the crazy one where you held the board, like every country, those all got struck down. And what most people didn’t realize was that for China in particular, that was just like a part of the tariffs. Like China already had these 301 tariffs that have been around since Trump’s first administration. Those did not get struck down at all. Right. And I did a YouTube video on this.

33:22
which I think became obsolete like a week later also because of the stupid tariff topic. this was like before he instituted that additional 15 % tariff or whatnot. So what ended up happening is those got struck down. And then he used like a different loophole or a different rule to issue another 15%. And so what got struck down specifically was about 20 % worth of tariffs on China. And then he added an extra 15 on

33:52
for some other rule, which will probably get struck down too. But what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to add on to those Section 301 tariffs, which have been around for, I don’t know, over four years now. Getting it onto there requires research, and I think this intermediate tariff is just buying time for him to get that going. Now, in terms of the refunds, I mean, this is probably gonna go again. I don’t think anyone’s gonna get any refunds.

34:22
I really, or if someone gets refunds, it’ll be like the large companies maybe. I don’t think the little guys are gonna get their refunds. um So what often happens or what a whole bunch of people did during the tariff period is they use DDP, which stands for delivery duty paid. that’s essentially when the supplier is the importer of record, right? Not you to save money on the tariffs, because there was some other stuff going on.

34:52
they would get the refund, not you, in that case. Because they’re the importer of record. And I guess the question is, and this is what makes this whole thing weird, do we wanna refund the suppliers in China? With a lot of this tariff money? And the large corporations, there’s like 2,000 of that have filed huge lawsuits, which will get tied up. But then recently last week, some court ruling ordered that

35:21
the tariffs be refunded, but there’s no provision, like the Supreme Court didn’t give any provisions for the refund. So I just think it’s a big mess. Yeah. It’s just going to get messier. Yeah. But I mean, if you want even a chance of getting refunds, you need to fill out, you need to get an account. Maybe I’ll link it beneath this podcast, but you need to create an account with the Customs and Border Control. And that’s how they would refund you.

35:51
should a refund ever to occur. But as of this recording, I don’t know anyone who’s gotten anything yet. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was going say good news, bad news, but it’s just news. Yeah, I guess so. mean, I’ll be here’s the good news, actually. The good news is that since those tariffs got struck down, India and Vietnam are like the best places to source from now.

36:18
The China tariffs are still there. Almost all the 301 tariffs China pays. It’s on China, not those other countries. And it was a crap shoot actually when I invited people to talk about sourcing at Seller Summit. But yes, as long as this holds through for another month, um Jim Keminerer is gonna be talking about sourcing from Vietnam at Seller Summit. I’m using him right now, actually. And I think he’s, I don’t know if he’s gonna be talking about

36:49
a case study that we’re kind of doing together right now. the prices are actually a little lower than China. And you don’t have to pay like the you still have to pay the 15 thing that Trump just issued. uh But it’s cheaper than China and you pay less tariffs than China. The communication and the speed of sourcing is a little slower, but it’s probably worth a look if you’re sourcing from China right now, because Vietnam is so close to China.

37:19
Yeah, literally China just ships all the raw materials and they actually the Chinese vendors, they actually own factories in Vietnam, a lot of them. And so it’s almost like getting the same product for less and avoiding the tariffs. Well, that’ll be an interesting talk. I know the tariffs are always a hot topic at Seller Summit because at least for the past couple of years. Well, just one year. Last year was the most miserable uh time for e-commerce, I want to say, right?

37:47
Especially around the seller summit time. So the seller summit last year was in May, right? And that’s when like the tariffs got to 120 % or something. people that couldn’t get their stuff. Right. So, yeah, this year at least people might be happier. Actually, I think one of my slides on like the keynote last year was I had a friend who paid those 120 % tariffs because he sells bobbleheads to the Warriors and a whole bunch of teams. Yeah, you don’t have a choice. And you don’t have a choice. You have to deliver or you ruin that.

38:16
that relationship. Yeah, right. So this year will be a lot better because the terrorists are way more under control, I think. Yeah. And well, at least for now. Yeah, crossing my fingers that nothing will change in like the next month. For sure. But yeah, yeah. Oh, and yeah, free Amazon PPC. Seller Summit. Oh, yeah. Free managed Amazon PPC for three months if you guys decide to come.

38:44
The amount of emails I’ve received about that. Oh, is that right? Yes, people are, well, I mean, we sold out one of the masterminds right after we announced that. So, um yeah, I think people are very excited. Because that’s what, I don’t know what you said it was worth, because I’ve never paid for It’s probably worth around 10 grand, it was my estimate. I don’t know how much they charge, but like I have used managed services in the past. Yeah. Yeah, and that’s how much, it’s about three grand a month. Yeah.

39:12
Yeah. So good deal pays for your ticket. Yep. So, all right. Yeah. We’ll see in Fort Lauderdale.

39:38
If you want to hang out in person, in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs, and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to SellersSummit.com.