00:26
Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and I depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought.

00:55
Piece of cake and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my effort on SMS marketing.

01:21
SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source from my e-commerce store and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript which is my text message provider. Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

01:48
So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S U I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts that are released by partner Tony. And unlike this one where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app.

02:18
Now onto the show.

02:25
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I have my buddy Nick Loper on the show. Now Nick is the founder of the Side Hustle Nation podcast where he and I share similar goals. We try to highlight entrepreneurs who run businesses on the side or full time. And one of the common complaints that we both get are that people can’t figure out what type of business to start. So in this episode, both Nick and I brainstorm potential million dollar business ideas. And I want to lead off with one that is a frustrating business of mine.

02:55
And that is, you know, when you’re checking out on any e-commerce store and maybe you have experience with this from Bumblebee Linens is, you know, you see the promo code box and so naturally you open up a new tab and you start searching for store name, promo code or store name, coupon code. And invariably, you know, the same sites show up at the top, like the retail, me nots and the coupon cabins of the world. And none of the codes ever actually work. It’s so frustrating. So my idea number one is the coupon.

03:24
code site where only codes are verified and they actually work. And I know affiliate marketing enough to know they just want to set their cookie. They just want to get the last click. So they get their commission. It doesn’t matter if the code works or not. But as a user, it’s so frustrating. think Google would start to reward the site that actually has a decent user experience and actually delivers what they promise in those headlines. So that’s idea number one for me. What’s your take on that?

03:51
So I love how you started with this one, because I do have lot of experience with this. So first off, to prevent this from happening, I usually actually hide the coupon code field. You actually have to click on it to even display it. So it prevents people from going off. But in answer to your question, we have this issue all the time. People go off to coupon sites, and they’re bogus coupons, and then they get mad at us as a store when that happens. So my solution to that problem, and it’s tangential to your solution, is I have a special coupon page for my own store that I put out.

04:20
that ranks number one for coupons for our store. And it says real coupons for Bumblebee linens that will actually work. So that’s how we solve that problem. But in answer to your question, there’s all these tools, right? That it’s like a Chrome plugin. It literally tries like a million coupon codes kind of on the side. I think Honey is like by the most popular one, right? Yeah, I use like Capital One shopping for that. And sometimes it…

04:46
actually does save you money and then get you a little percentage cash back sometimes too, which is cool. But that’s almost what you need is like the programmatic solution to see what what’s actually going to work. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s the first thing that I do when I check out at a site too, and I see that coupon code field. And I’m pretty sure it can be done. Right? All you got to do is just have a tool that just goes around to all the stores in the database, and then just try all the codes and just make sure they’re

05:14
they’re verified. don’t know why they don’t do that. Those sites like retail me not. maybe the one maybe you start doing it like in a specific niche first and say like, okay, we’re going to dominate real coupon codes for even stuff even like web hosting or something like in something where you know, maybe there’s not that many providers, you don’t have to do this across 5000 different e commerce stores, you can say like, okay, these are you start with a specific niche or something. Maybe that would be

05:44
a compelling offer. Maybe it’s an add-on to a site that already has product reviews in a specific niche or something, but that’s something that is definitely a pain point whenever I’m shopping online. eventually I just give up and pay full price because at a certain point it’s not worth the time it takes to go and dig 20 pages deep to try and find something that really works. You know what some people do is some stores give out coupons if you’ve abandoned their cart. So some people will start checkout and then wait and make the purchase the next day.

06:14
in hopes of getting that coupon code. Yeah, the abandoned cart email automation. Exactly. Yeah. Since you started out with econ, let me just start out with a pain point here. And this applies to anyone who has a website, a WordPress site, Shopify store, whatever. When you install like a plugin on your site and you uninstall it, sometimes not everything gets uninstalled.

06:40
Like, and this is kind of malicious on behalf of some companies. Some companies leave behind this code that allows them to track the visitors to your website, even though you’ve uninstalled the plugin. So, and this recently plagued a couple of students in my class. So if there was some service to just make sure that everything was uninstalled, that would be a pretty, pretty useful thing for anyone who is like doing any sort of online stuff. kind of like a database or WordPress.

07:09
clean up service essentially like make sure you’re running the code as as lean and clean as possible. Yeah, or just when you uninstall something, you just make sure it’s uninstalled. I mean, the unfortunate reality is and most people don’t know this actually, but little bits of code are left behind. Yeah. Yeah. Is that information is actually sold off, which is the scary part, too. All right. So you need another plugin to make sure it’s a true uninstall for that other plugin.

07:39
Exactly. I didn’t mean to start out like with two technical solutions off the front, but I was just piggybacking on your on your e-commerce one. Yeah, it’s all good. I’ll do another one kind of in the online space. And this is something that has been top of mind as my wife and I have recently moved. You know, we’re about a year into our new house. And so she’s like big into, well, you know, what kind of furniture should we need? This this couch doesn’t really do it for me anymore. It’s, know, from 10 or 15 years ago.

08:08
Like how do we upgrade some of the stuff that we have? And so she’s looking at, know, Pottery Barn and Creighton Barrel and like West Elm, which I would consider like higher end stores. And I’m like, we have young kids, like we can’t have nice things. It’s just going to get destroyed. And so like, I want to find the, you know, Ikea or Wayfair or Target like equivalent or alternative to these. So I think this actually could be a compelling affiliate site to say like, here’s the high end stuff or here’s the medium high end stuff.

08:36
Here’s what it costs. Here’s the features and benefits of that. Here’s something that looks similar. And I think you get a bunch of traffic from Pinterest. I think you get a bunch of traffic from even SEO, Google, like this product versus this product, long tail search, and cash in on affiliate commissions, even though on those heights, those programs are typically in the 1 to 5 % affiliate commission range. But still on

09:02
a $2,000 item or a multi hundred dollar item. I think that stuff starts to add up commission wise with some traffic volume. Or you can do what Asians do and just wrap the whole thing in plastic and then it’ll just last forever. In fact, that might even be a good business, right? You want your furniture to last forever, just hire someone to just wrap the whole thing in plastic. But in answer to your idea, actually, there are companies, it turns out, and the only reason I know this is because we bought furniture.

09:31
when we were in your situation, when we had young kids, there’s like a handful of furniture places, I think in North Carolina, I want to say that actually make the furniture for Crane Barrel and those people. So you can actually buy directly from them. Oh, interesting, drastically reduced prices. Yeah. And it’s the same furniture. It’s just not branded under their thing. So yeah, that would be the equivalent of like the private label product at the store or the store brand products at Safeway or something.

10:00
Correct. The only downside, because I think we ordered from there, is that it takes a long time for the furniture to be fabricated. I think we waited like two months for it or something like that. Very good. Well, that was idea number three for me. Kind of in a new affiliate niche, that would be something that would be compelling for me just because, you know, relatively evergreen demand with relatively longer shelf life products. You know, they’re not changing out every season like I was doing in the footwear niche and in high ticket.

10:30
sales. So you know, doesn’t take necessarily a huge dollar volume, you know, we’re selling $80 pairs of sneakers and you know, making a commission on that. I’m selling a $1,500 couch and collecting a you know, maybe a commission on that. So that was something that if I was starting a new affiliate project would be on the shortlist there. That was idea number three. What’s next for you? All right, so I’m going to switch gears in this one since we’ve been talking about kids. And my kids are a lot older than yours, Nick.

10:58
One of my daughter actually just started high school, like yesterday, in fact, as of the recording. there are these consultants, and it’s important for us for them to get into a good college. There are these consultants that will work with your child to plan their curriculum and everything to give them the best chance of getting in the college that they want. Of course, they still have to get good grades on their own and everything, but there is a certain track and way of doing things so that you have a better chance to get in the school that you want. However, these services,

11:28
like this one that we were looking at, costs $12,000 per year. And you’re supposed to start from freshman year all the way to junior year, right? So that’s $36,000 of high school. Yeah, to get into the college of your of your choice. Yeah, right. They work with your kid all those years. Right. So I did some research into this. I think it’d be pretty easy. Well, maybe not easy, but to put together a web service that self serve.

11:57
that just kind of lists like what classes you should take depending on what you want to do and what college you want to go to. And so it’s like this gigantic database. So let’s say you want to go to like U-Dub, right? Is that the college where That’s right, go Huskies, for sure. So U-Dub, and I want to go into biology. What classes should I take? I go to this high school. And then it tells me, and then what extracurriculars might be good? Like what does U-Dub look for and that sort of thing. And then you have this plan.

12:26
And then you don’t have to pay 12 grand to some consultant. Yeah. Interesting. It doesn’t, it doesn’t seem that complicated. It’s been a long time since I was applying to college, but yeah, just, you know, take the challenging classes, do well in them and hope for the best. don’t know, but it’s a hard, it’s a lot harder to get in now. Like where I live, it’s an arms race. Every single parent has paid for this service for their child. Wow. Uh, at least my friend group. Yeah. And, it just sounds steep, right? Yeah.

12:56
Yeah, there’s got to be a way around that. You know, our mutual friend, Dr. Ryan Gray, who runs medical school, HQ.net, I want to say, he’s got a he’s got a whole host of podcasts. And so we’ve crossed paths at lots of podcasting events. He started an app solution or a web app solution for this specifically for med school admissions, to say like, here’s like, how are you tracking? You know, how are you performing on all these different pre-req classes? And so maybe something similar to that just a little bit.

13:25
broader in this case, you know, elite college admission game plan kind of thing. And yeah, there’s if the one-on-one service is 12 grand a year, there’s plenty of margin to come in and undercut that and even have office hours. You can have some level of one-on-one time or group coaching time inside of that. totally. Very cool. Anyone out there creates the service, I’ll probably sign up. There you go. Anyone listening? Yeah.

13:55
What else you got Nick? All right. Number five for me is what I’m calling similar web but for podcasts because as a podcast guest and even as a podcaster, the universe of available stats, how many downloads does the show get? How many people are actually tuning into the show is really hard to come by. It’s really opaque. And that’s kind of by virtue of all the different hosting.

14:24
platforms and all the different listening apps. Like it’s hard to aggregate this data. And I don’t know if it’s something that people would have to opt in for, but you can go to similar web or you can go to hrefs and you can get an estimate of how much traffic a website is getting. And it’s like, I would love to see something similar for podcasts. Like, and even they go down into like demographic data, you know, what are their top keywords and you know, what are the top pages on their site? It would be really cool to see the same thing for podcasts to say what, you know, what are their top episodes, you

14:54
where are people tuning in? What types of people are tuning in? Because I get invited onto other shows and that’s awesome. But we’ve had to start implementing kind of a bit of a vetting process to say, well, you know, has the show published 25, 50 episodes? Like, are they going to stick around? Has this show, you know, do they have a meaningful number of reviews in Apple podcasts or Spotify? are people, you know, is the audience engaged enough to go in and leave a review? Do they have a website? You know, are they?

15:22
or they just host it on anchor. kind of like, certain things might be red flags or certain things might be a checkbox to say, okay, this might be worth proceeding for. So this is something that I would love to see. I don’t know how many people would get used out of it other than podcasters, but it’s a growing field for sure. I think it’s very useful for anyone who wants to sponsor a podcast too, right? I’m shocked that this hasn’t been done yet. I mean, I’ve been podcasting for eight years now.

15:50
And given that all the other online stuff that we do, which has incredible stats, I’m surprised that podcasts are so lacking. Yeah. There must be some reason why people haven’t jumped on this. There must be some like technical reason why it’s difficult or something like that. I don’t know. Yeah, it’d be cool to see kind of a centralized database to say, well, and even for arranging like episode swaps or promo swaps on top of the advertising things, like, okay, you can kind of send a screenshot.

16:19
but it would be cool to be able to line up with a similar sized show and say, Hey, I’ll shout you out. You shout me out versus you know, sometimes you’re trying to do a promo swap, but it’s like, well, if this show is five times the size, then that’s not necessarily an equitable swap. So that’s, guess, where that pain point is coming from for me. What’s next for you? Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. Since we’re talking about podcasts, there’s something that I kind of thought of too.

16:46
The way you traditionally grow a podcast is you go on someone else’s show or you have someone do like a read for your show, right? If somehow that could be like automated and bartered like ahead of time. like I go on a site and I say, Hey, I want to be mentioned on Nick’s show. So you have like just some set thing. And then like, I have like a set recording or like a script and I just pay you the money and then you just read it. You approve it. And then you just read it. And it’s just all automated like that.

17:16
Yeah, have you heard of like that? Have you heard of Audrey? think it’s Audrey dot IO AUD RY. This is a platform I’ve been playing around with a little bit because it does kind of facilitate those, you know, host read promos. And also you can upload your own trailer like your own promo trailer and and buy access to these. they, you know, they do a little bit to verify that this show gets, you know, five thousand downloads. And this is their price to include these. And this is like

17:45
timeline to deliver. So they’re they’re attempting to solve that. The problem is, it’s only a tiny, tiny fraction of the available podcasts in the universe. And so it’s like, well, yeah, this is cool, but it would be awesome to see a broader reach there. It’s definitely like a chicken and egg problem, right? You got to have a lot of podcasts for people to want to join it. And, you have to have high quality podcasts on there. Also, right. That’s a chicken egg. Yes. Yeah, Audrey.io. Yes.

18:16
Audrey.io, okay, cool. In the meantime, you just have to kind of network, right, with other podcasters in order to make this happen. So I’ve been meaning to get out to podcast movement, in fact, and just meet some other podcasters. It’s true. I haven’t been to that event in a long time. It’s challenging. It’s like when you go to FinCon, everybody’s in kind of the personal finance space. And so you have that in common when you roll up to podcast movement, or I went to PodFest this year in Orlando, and it was like,

18:43
Oh, I, you know, the standard conversation, hey, nice to meet you. What’s your show about? Oh, I talk about, you know, true crime for, you know, moms, know, empty nested moms. It’s like, cool, cool niche, but like, I don’t really know, you know, what the next the next question is, like the next step to any sort of collaboration is. So that’s I find challenging. It’s cool because you get you bounce ideas like off a bunch of different people in a bunch of different niches.

19:12
think that’s what’s awesome about those podcast events, but it is a little bit more difficult I found to find the people in your space or even kind of in the shoulder spaces. That’s where I say, you know, I’ve seen some of the biggest benefit and some of the biggest spikes in the growth of the side hustle show is by becoming the side hustle guy in that personal finance space where I never really considered myself a personal finance expert. But a lot of these shows talk about investing, talk about saving money.

19:42
talk about budgeting and it’s like, oh, it’s a natural progression to say, well, at a certain point you got to address the income side of the equation. Maybe we ought to talk about side hustles. Let’s call up Nick. And so that actually worked really well to grow the show. that’s kind of off a lot of tangent at this point.

20:00
If you’re looking to start an online store, you’re probably deciding which e-commerce platform to go with. And the problem is that there’s hundreds of choices out there and they all start to blend together after a while. So I want to save you time today and tell you about BigCommerce, which is one of the platforms that I recommend. And here’s why. BigCommerce does not nickel and dime you with apps like other platforms. Once you sign up, you get a fully featured shopping cart with the features you need built right in. If you want to run a WordPress blog and an online store on the same exact domain for search engine optimization,

20:30
BigCommerce has a nice WordPress integration that allows you to do exactly that to maximize your SEO. And then finally, you have the right to use whatever payment processes that you want without paying any transaction fees, unlike other shopping carts out there. Now for geeks like myself, BigCommerce offers a powerful API which allows you to scale your e-commerce store to seven, eight, and even nine figures and beyond. In fact, BigCommerce runs huge stores like Sony, Casio, and Ben & Jerry’s. So if you’re interested in looking for an e-commerce platform,

20:58
go to mywifequitterjob.com slash BC and check it out for free for 30 days. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash BC. Now back to the show.

21:10
No, no, I love your show, Nick. I mean, I think you do a great job. And yeah, you’re right. Everyone wants to make more money and side hustles are the way to go for sure. All right. So I was number five, kind of similar web for podcasts. Oh, is it my turn? Yeah, go ahead. Oh, that was your thing. Okay, see, let me go down my list. Okay, here is one. And again, these are all parenting because my kids are older and they’re going off to high school and stuff. I want a service.

21:38
that you can hire to give like a pep talk to your kid. So this is what I found. And maybe if you’ve experienced this too, Nick, but my kids don’t listen to me. So if I tell them something, it goes in one ear and out the other. But if I were to get someone else who has like authority or credentials in what I want to give them, you just have them and you just zoom with them. Like you bring them on, say, hey, this guy is like the foremost expert on biology.

22:06
And he says you should do this and then they have a short conversation via zoom and then listen to him and not you. I would love that service. think it would be like cameo but for but aimed for kids like kid celebrities did this need to be somebody they would recognize from YouTube or someplace? I don’t even that would be better but it doesn’t have to be the person just has to be in like a position of authority or have credentials I think okay.

22:32
I don’t know if you would say, I mean, your kids are still young, right? They’re still young. They don’t listen to me either, but I don’t know if they would. I don’t know they would listen to anybody else in a similar way. Well, let me give you an example. I was playing basketball with my kids and one of them is really into basketball and I was trying to tell her how to, how to shoot a little better. And she’s like, did you even play? And I’m like, well, I mean, I played rec and, if I could get like a basketball coach, I mean,

23:00
an NBA player would be awesome. Yeah, but like just basketball coach to come and say the same thing. I think she would listen to him more than me easily. Yeah, I think there’s definitely something to that. That would be kind of cool to build out. Yeah, find your find your network of vetted experts in a variety of fields. And maybe again, you start with one niche and you branch out from there. And then, but again, a two sided marketplace difficult to find the critical math critical mass on both

23:27
sides like the expert side and then the demand side, the parent side. But I think there is something to that for like, you know, how do I, how do I get somebody else to say probably the same thing, but in a different way or from a different position of authority and get people to pay attention to it. Yeah, because it has to come from someone else. And Nick, I hope this doesn’t happen to you. I just have this feeling it happens to all parents. I think so. I mean, I remember going through it as a teenager myself with my parents. So I imagine it’s just

23:57
one of those things. All right, the pep talk service for kids. is number six, expert backed pep talks. like that. Number seven for me is, this could be an e-commerce thing. I’ll get your take on this. So I have a, apparently a abnormally small head. And so I have a really hard time finding hats that actually fit and like don’t come down and hit my ears in a funny way.

24:26
and the ear, I don’t know, my ears stick out. And I don’t know if it’s a factor of being bald, but like I like to wear hats to protect my head from getting sunburned. So too old for wearing like, you know, the fitted new era hats, too bald to wear like trucker hats, because like the mesh in the back would be bad news. I just, feel like, because I’ve seen some, there was a company I came across recently that was doing like, you know, custom fitted jeans or something, like where they take all these measurements and then we guarantee you like the custom fitted, like you’ll never have a better fitting gene.

24:55
was like, okay, somebody ought to do the same thing for hats. I would totally pay for that service. But whenever I search for custom fitted hats, what comes up is like customized fitted hats. And it’s like, well, that’s not really what I’m looking for. I’m trying to find the right keywords to advertise this thing and come up with the manufacturing capability to get it done. But I imagine the technology exists to do this. So the ones that show up right now are ones where you can customize like the design on it. Yes. And not size.

25:26
You know, I’m just thinking, I mean, that would have to be like a custom hat if you want to make it. So would you be willing to pay like hundreds of dollars for it? I wouldn’t pay hundreds, but I would pay probably double or triple what a normal hat would cost just to have something that would be confident that would fit. Cause I mean, I had this Kelly Moore painting hat that I wore like all through college, all through painting and wore for the next 10 years until it was like.

25:54
destroyed, like ran it through the wash one too many times. It just got shredded. And I was like so bummed. It’s like that was my favorite hat. And I was like trying to replace it ever since I have this like keen footwear hat that I got like from a internship in college that fits pretty well. But it similarly like getting shredded. And so it’s just, you know, I have several hats, like not very few that actually fit the way that I like. And so, yeah, I would definitely pay for something to have it in the rotation for the next decade.

26:23
So that Kelly Moore hat was one of the few that fit your head. Yeah. Interesting. OK, so it’s already out there is what you’re saying. Somebody somebody somebody did. I went through I like to I found all these pictures of me like, here’s here’s me in Paris rocking the Kelly Moore hat. Here’s me at Machu Picchu rocking the Kelly Moore hat. I’m like trying to get them to like send me another one. And, you know, they said, oh, thanks for rocking our our brand or something like that. They didn’t give me a new hat.

26:54
Yeah, that sounds I’m surprised that there isn’t something out there like that, actually. Yeah, people are doing it. People are doing it for like dress shirts. People are doing it for jeans. I think there’s somebody out there probably is doing it for hats or will be doing it for hats in the future.

27:10
All right, since we’re talking about, I was talking about sports earlier, here’s one and it’s only because my daughter’s really into volleyball also. And I’ve been working with her, like I act as a setter and she hits. But you notice like almost every other sport has a machine that does stuff like basketball, there’s an automatic machine that returns the ball to you if you make the shot. As far as I know, there’s no like volleyball setting machine. I don’t know how many of you guys listening out there actually play volleyball.

27:39
but you just put the machine out there, you just feed it some volleyballs and it just sets it for you to hit. It would seem like pretty obvious that that machine is needed. They have that for tennis. Right, like a tennis serving machine or like, yeah, just, okay, I’m gonna work on my backhand. So this machine is just gonna spit them at me, you know, for as many balls fit in it. It totally seems like it could be a thing. But I’ve been looking for this volleyball setting machine and I know it’d probably be expensive, but you know, I’m getting old. Like when I play volleyball with them, I try to play volleyball with them every weekend.

28:08
and I can’t walk for two days after. So it’s a lot of wear and tear in my body. It’s definitely a young person’s sport. Oh my goodness. Yeah. This was, I don’t know if you were there. We were playing basketball before maybe traffic at conversion summit or something in San Diego. I was wrecked for a week. don’t know. was just like never play basketball to begin with. And then like just, Oh, I know let’s sprint up and down the court for two hours. Um, but it was, it was good times. Yes.

28:35
That actually brings me to you. don’t play basketball because you’re tall. I am tall. And so I get like picked early whenever we’re doing pickup games and people assume, oh, he’s going to be good. Like, no, no, I guess I can I can stand on the hoop and like rebound occasionally. But, you know, I got to kick it out to somebody else to actually make the shock. And that but being, you know, getting older and being sore from all of these things that shouldn’t make you sore. That brings me to my next idea. This is.

29:02
And this may exist, but I would love to see kind of a personalized science backed wellness service. And I’ll try and explain what I mean by that because I have done like wellness effects, I think like this blood testing service for the last several years. And it’s kind of cool. It gives you a snapshot of, you know, all of your blood levels in certain, you know, proteins and cholesterol and stuff. And now having done it, you can kind of see the snapshot and how things progress.

29:30
over time and then can book a call with a handful of the partner doctors and stuff that they have through the site. But where it kind of stops short is just like the ongoing, I mean, I guess you could do it every month. It would get kind of expensive if you did, but just we have no idea what’s going on inside our bodies. Like how do we optimize this machine that we rely on to do our work and live our lives and be our best selves? It is…

29:58
kind of frustrating in a way to not know, you know, so there’s the testing side of this, and then there’s the like actionable recommendations and plan side of this in terms of diet, exercise, supplements, down to, what is the optimal time of day to be taking such and such supplement if you need them? I just really think there’s something that would be worth paying for on this front. Like after you reach a certain level of.

30:26
financial stability, where do people want to naturally invest next? They want to invest in their health. And I think this is something that would be worth looking into, at least for me.

30:37
Does this involve getting blood drawn? It could, wellness effects definitely does. And so that’s why I tend to do it just like once a year. But if there was a way to, even if it was, you know, my cousin was diabetic and so he’d do like the finger pricks almost, almost constantly. And then he ultimately had kind of like a machine hooked up to him. And so maybe there’s a way to do it now, like through a patch to get like more real time data, or you could see how certain foods impact your glucose levels or something. don’t know.

31:07
I just feel like we probably have the technology to do a much better job. Modern medicine is very good at being reactive and solving problems once they come up, but it would be really cool to see something on the preventative side or the optimization side before those problems tend to crop up. I would totally pay for that. But that company sounds like something pretty complicated to put together. Yeah. Probably take some big bucks, but yeah.

31:34
That would be totally, I would sign up for that in a heartbeat, especially since I have kids, like I want to stay alive for them. Totally. You know, till I got grandkids and that sort of thing. So my next idea is like something on the complete opposite spectrum of that. It’s just something that frustrates me and you can share your experience here. We drink a lot of sparkling water in our house. So we’ll go to Costco and we’ll pick up those giant 36 packs of Kirkland sparkling water.

32:00
And if you look at the can, at least in California, I’m not sure if it’s like this in Washington, but you can get five cents back, I think, per can. Yeah. But we’re always too lazy to do that. And what is happening is we just we recycle them, of course. But in the back of my mind, since I’m cheap, that I should be getting five cents back on all of these cans. So the services I was thinking of is just someone who just goes to the neighborhood and picks up your recycling. And they give you like 50 % of whatever you’re recycling. Oh, okay.

32:30
Like a profit share on the refund. Yeah. Yeah. So they just go and just make the rounds in the neighborhood. You sign up every house on your block and they just pay you right out. They just give you a monthly thing based on your consumption of, of recycling. Yeah. This would be a great business idea for the kids to get involved with. Cause we, we actually did this. I guess we just went to a scrap metal place. Maybe it was a recycling center in Livermore. Cause we would, um, you know, we just pick up the cans that people left on the side of the road or like, you know, out.

33:00
in the parking lots or whatever. you know, save them up and we take them in and they would weigh them. And we had like, you know, just a cardboard box the size of these things versus, know, some guy had like garbage cans full of them. And he’s like, it’s that’s cute. Why don’t you go first with your kids? And so we go in, they weigh this stuff and they gave us like five dollars and fifty cents. The kids were thrilled. It was like free money. We found this money. We made this money. So I actually think this is really cool. I think this would be a great one to do. And that profit sharing angle is

33:29
is kind of a unique way to do it. you look, you’re not going to drive to the recycling center. Let’s be real. Like just put it in the curbside thing. Yeah. That’s what everybody does. But yeah, you paid for it. You paid this, you know, can deposit when you bought this thing. And so here’s a way to do that. I like that one. I was just like Coinstar. Have you ever used Coinstar before? I had this whole article on Coinstar, like in the very, very early days of my blog, you know, pre side oscillation. This is like, you know, an article on nickloper.com like from

33:58
2009 or something. And it was like the beautiful business of coin star like here, you give us $1 and we’ll give you 90 cents like what a fantastic business model. But yeah, no, it’s similar. The same thing you got all this stuff, you’re reluctant to go to like the bank and get it changed for bills, right? Yeah. So you take a little less and and you get bills that you can actually use or gift certificates, right? That’s what I think same principle. Yeah, I think that

34:25
That could be good. I’ll pitch that one to the kids because they could be about that. They’re always like, they’re starting to get to that age of like, well, how do we make money? Well, it’s all fun and games until dad has to drive to the recycling plant every day, though. It depends on what kind of volume of cans that are coming through. It starts to fill up the whole garage. Yeah. Number seven, number 10, the neighborhood recycling service with the profit sharing.

34:56
Yeah, extra incentive. I think that I think a lot of people would do it just to support the kids in the neighborhood. But, you know, if you’re going after, you know, business clients or something, I, you know, may, you know, we’ll give you a little bit of kickback from what we collect from your area than some accounting complexity there. But I think that would be a cool incentive to get people to participate there. Number 11 for me is what I’m calling class pass for golf. So have started playing a little bit more.

35:25
golf in the last 12 months, mainly with my dad. This has been his like retirement hobby. And so occasionally he’d be like, Hey, we got an extra spot in our force. So why don’t you come out and hack it up? Yes. I have. Oh, okay. Cool. What was, what’s kind of surprising is you don’t see so much of like season passes for golf, like you would in skiing or other hobbies where it’s like, okay, I just want to pay once I want to pay my five, 600 bucks at the beginning of the season. And then I’m, I’m good. Like it’s unlimited. You don’t see that so much. And so it’s like,

35:55
Wow, I you know, number one, why that is, and number two, like, could you put something together to aggregate a bunch of participating courses and sell that as a bundle or sell that as almost like a lead gen for these courses? Hey, if you like it, you know, come, come play more. I don’t know. What think about that?

36:15
I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every single year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business

36:44
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets always sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250,000 or $1 million per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.

37:12
Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. For more information, go to sellersummit.com. Once again, that’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com, or just Google it. Now back to the show.

37:29
I like that idea. Actually, I’m just trying to think how it would work. But yeah, a lot of people want to play in a variety of courses. And this would be a great way to just try them out. It’s kind of like movie pass to write, right? In a way. Yeah, I like this idea. I wonder how it would be priced because every course has its like its own price point to write and they’re all across the board, at least where I live. Yeah, yeah, sometimes it can be very expensive courses. And sometimes like the more budget friendly ones. But it’s just kind of surprising to see you

37:59
you know, if I want to like if I want to commit to this hobby, similar to skiing, you know, how do you know what’s the most economical way to do that like movie pass, you know, if I’m gonna if I know I’m gonna do it. And maybe that’s why the golf courses don’t do it because like, shoot, you know, only our, you know, heavy users would do that we’re going to be cannibalizing all the greens fees we’d normally be getting. And it’s, you know, a high fixed cost, high investment business, like to operate a golf course where you have limited

38:28
I mean, similar to airlines, like, you know, if that tee time doesn’t get booked, like that’s lost revenue for them. And so maybe it’s a way to fill up some of that. You see a little bit with like golf now where the courses use that to fill some of their unsold inventory. But I don’t know, maybe another another angle, like for courses that are having a hard time. Maybe there’s restrictions on like when you can use it and stuff like that to say, you know, to not not cannibalize their peak times that they’ve already booked at full price.

38:59
But I definitely liked the idea actually. Yeah, for sure. Because golf is just one of those sports where you, where the scenery matters too, right? And to try to have, you know, a variety of courses to play on would be great. I like that idea a lot actually. All right. I think that would be kind of cool. All right. Number 12. It’s all you. Okay. All right. So this is one that I just recently had a problem with. So I went on vacation to Florida and I came back and my plants died.

39:29
So the idea that I’m talking about is you leave your plants at this place. I don’t know what it like a plant kennel. Okay. Okay. And they’ll just water it they’ll take care of it for you so that when you come back, like not all of your plants die. Because it’s a pain in the butt to have a friend go over just to water your plants. Right. And it sounds like also take your plants to the plant kennel though. I don’t know which is worse. Well, no, they would just come by and pick it up. Oh, okay. Okay.

39:57
All right, they come by, pick it up, they take care of it for you. And then when you come back, you know, your plant is outside your door and alive and well-nurtured. And well-nurtured, well cared for. Well cared for, probably better than you would care for yourself. Yes, the plant, the kennel, that’s a really interesting one. I’m that again, you know, given all the startups in the Bay Area, it’s almost surprising that doesn’t exist yet. So that’s kind of cool. Because my kids, were

40:25
They nurtured this plant for a long time, you know, because they like taking care of stuff. And then we go on vacation because we haven’t gone on vacation much due to COVID. Yeah. And it’s like this first longer vacation would come back and their plant, they took care of for so long just died. was was heartbreaking. The plant kennel, I would have paid the money to avoid the anguish for sure. What would you pay for it? Probably 100 bucks. Okay. To keep it alive. Yeah. Keep it alive for a week.

40:54
or however long. Yeah. Plants. It depends like if the plant has sentimental value, right? mean, sure. Some people treat their plants like family members. Yeah, I mean, we brought ours when we moved. And it’s like, you we were happy when they all survived. I don’t know if they’ve, I mean, there’s all sorts of studies that say, you know, having a house plants makes you makes you happier, helps clean the internal air and all this stuff. So there might be something to that and talk about super low.

41:22
startup costs, you know, just go sign up some customers in your neighborhood will be, you know, watch your similar to watch your house. Yeah, easy to easy to validate that one before without any startup cost. Or the simple solution is just not get your kids plants that require water, like just get them cactuses for now. They can survive a week or two in the in heat without dying. Well, that kind of tees up my

41:48
next one as a new homeowner. I’m thinking of a home maintenance sold as a monthly membership or sold as a quarterly membership or as a productized service. Because think about, I’m thinking like one stop shopping for pest control, for touch up painting, for gutter cleaning, for just little small fixer upper projects or stuff you probably should be doing, but

42:16
because you never lived here before. You don’t really know how to do, know, cleaning the furnace filter, the dryer air duct thing, like all that stuff. I think it would be cool to maybe there’s somebody out there that already does this. But if you are, if you have a handyman business or something in one of those spaces, you know, you could even you could even play matchmaker if you want to say like, look, I’m going to layer my branding on top of this and then I’m going to have the furnace guy come out. I’m going to have the gutter cleaner come out. I’m going to have the Christmas light guy come out.

42:46
And just all that stuff and maybe kind of like combine it with a monthly calendar. Like here’s what you ought to be doing at this time to, you know, best protect your house and stuff like that. I don’t know. I love this idea. I really do. Let me just give you an example. So my mom, she’s living alone right now and all this stuff just breaks all the time. And I keep telling her like, have to do this, you have to do that. But then she never keeps track of it. If this service existed, I would

43:15
totally signed my mom up for it. And even for myself, I think I’d be willing to, I’m just thinking from both sides, like if you’re running this business, perhaps you can sell like monthly credits, so they don’t abuse it. They can use these credits in any given month. Yeah, you know, up to a certain amount for just maintenance tasks. Yeah. And so maybe it’s a couple grand a year, three, five grand, I don’t know how much it would be and how much would have to be to make it profitable for the players involved. But I

43:45
I subscribe to a handful of these types of services for the business that I don’t use every month, but it’s almost like insurance in a way. One of them is like a on-demand IT support for the website. If something breaks or if I want to change something, I can just message this person. feel good about having… That’s my on-demand IT department in a way. And I feel like for a lot of the stuff, I could walk around the outside of house, I could see that that is probably going to be a problem down the road.

44:15
but I don’t really know who to call. Like if I had a one phone number to call or like one person to message about this thing and then they just took care of it. Like property management, this is like so bad. Like I’m just not a handy person. I just, you know, it’s like property management for homeowners, right? Yeah. No, I would totally sign up for this service. I mean, I can think of a number of things with our house right now that I don’t even know who to call. I’ll give you just a quick example. We have this palm tree in our backyard.

44:42
And then recently the palm fronds started dropping. But those are like seeds. So now we have like three additional palm trees just growing in random places in our yard. And we just neglected it for so long that they’re pretty big now and we need them removed. I don’t even know who to call or what. This clearly could have been prevented early on before it got to this point. Yeah, exactly. Like as a homeowner, you expect to spend a certain amount on maintenance anyway. Here’s just kind of a way to make it.

45:10
hopefully more predictable, right? Like just, you know, to buy an item on your budget instead of, well, oh, I had to replace this thing and that was three grand, like surprise expense. I don’t know, maybe it would help people budget for some of that stuff that they know they’re going to have to spend money on eventually rather than just a state of neglect. That was number 13 for me, kind of this home maintenance productized service or property management for homeowners. Yeah, I love it.

45:36
Nick, how much time we got left for for more? Do we do we have time for a couple? Absolutely. We got all the time in the world. Okay. All right. So this one is something that I just kind of came up with out of the blue because when you run any sort of social media site, or you want social shares and that sort of thing, oftentimes, the way you do it is you have a group of friends that just kind of give that give it that initial kick. Or you can have strangers and that sort of thing. But what often happens is people take more than they give.

46:06
So if you had some sort of system where you’re sharing other people’s posts and that sort of thing, a service that kind of keeps track of everything so that you can’t ask for a share unless you’ve given a share yourself and it just keeps track of all this stuff. And this could work for anything. It could be like a social media post. It could be like a blog post. It could even be just any sort of promotion, kind of like a tit for tat sort of thing so that it’s fair across the board. Oh, right. Because you see sometimes in

46:36
certain groups like the share threads, like, hey, here’s an article I’m trying to promote, but everybody’s trying to promote their own stuff, not necessarily go in and share other people’s stuff. So it’s like some sort of platform, like, hey, I could really use some extra eyeballs or some extra likes on this new video or something. But to be able to ask for that, there’s some system where you have to like go and return the favor to a handful of other people.

47:03
I’m even thinking like, you know, Facebook groups sometimes people just take, take, take. Yeah. And, know, they don’t post anything of value, just even some sort of system where you’re providing value and you get points for it that you can redeem later for in case something that you need. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this all happens in the business world all the time, kind of verbally, you know, like the, uh, the rule of reciprocity, but right, you know, it’d be nice to just be able to keep track of this. Yeah, I think so. I have a couple more.

47:33
before we close out, these are both from the site kernel, is kern.al. The first one I thought was really interesting was a reverse job board, which allows job candidates, instead of responding to postings, they, I guess, post a profile of their ideal job. Like, here’s the skills that I have, here’s what I can do, here’s what I’m looking for. And instead, companies can go out and say like, yes, that.

48:03
That’s the person that’s the perfect person that I want for that role. It kind of flips the script a little bit on the hiring equation. Interesting. I like that. I guess you’d have to have some pretty good credentials to pull that off, right? Or is it just, is it like a resume or is it like just what you’re looking for in the job? Yeah, essentially it would be kind of like a glorified resume and skills database. And it’d be difficult, you know, cause the companies are the ones paying.

48:33
the hiring, you know, they’re paying recruiters, like hiring, filling a position can be expensive. And so we’d have to have lots of good search filters and stuff to say, oh, you know, here are the, I mean, I’m probably, you know, zip recruiter and indeed do this to a certain extent, like, oh, here are the people we think ought to be a match. I don’t know how much of that is public, you know, you kind of encourage them to, you know, maybe they send an email on your behalf and encourage them to apply to your posting versus being more.

49:01
visible about it and saying like, hey, these are some people you really ought to be proactive and reach out to yourself. Like you see when you’re hiring people on Upwork, for example, like, these these candidates might be a good fit, you know, based on what you have put in what you’re looking for. And so maybe something like that, but for full time stuff versus freelance stuff like on Upwork. Interesting. So it’s kind like a virtual headhunter. Yeah, maybe so. OK. The last time I hired someone not too long ago, maybe like six months ago,

49:30
and I used Indeed and ZipRecruiter and they do have services kind of like this. I don’t feel like they work that well because I’m pretty sure it’s algorithmically generated somehow. So the people that I ended up interviewing, I didn’t ultimately hire. I mean, they weren’t bad, but they ultimately weren’t the people that I hired. So I think it kind of exists in some shape or form already. Yeah, that’s a difficult one because it’s…

49:57
Yeah, the pool of available candidates is so large. It’s like, if I’m the hiring manager, like I’d almost rather have them come to me. But if you kind of showed me a few like, based on what you’re looking for and the role that they’re describing is what they think would be an ideal role, like, okay, maybe there’s a way to fit that person into our organization because we really like, know, we just, you know, based on what they’re showing in their profile, we think they’re going to be a good fit.

50:27
I don’t know. Maybe it removes one step like removes part of the initial application or something. don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. No, I like it though. I like it though. All right. I’d be curious to see how it works in practice. Yeah. All right. So I think this will be my last one. This one’s a little dark. Okay, so we’ll end on a dark one. Okay. My wife is a little bit just paranoid about, you know, bad stuff happening and just with where the world has gone. And so lately, we’ve we’ve been buying, you know, since the pandemic, actually, we’ve

50:56
we bought like emergency food, emergency supplies, and I shouldn’t classify this as paranoid because I know a lot of people are doing it. You know, just in case something happens and there was a point where we couldn’t get what we needed from the grocery stores because everyone just went and bought it all out, right? So what I propose is instead of just haphazardly going out and buy stuff, there’s someone that just comes by and tells you what you need. And in the event like, let’s say like nuclear war or whatever, like they give you the

51:26
like this plan, like this survival plan, in case everything were to become like the wild wild west someday. I would pay for that service. So it would be the the prepping consultant, the survival plan consultant, like the apocalypse apocalypse consultant. It’s the apocalypse consultant. Yeah, you’re right. That is that is quite dark. Like, here’s what you need to have like here’s, you know, food supply, water supply, you know, here’s how to make sure your generator is going to work like that kind of stuff.

51:56
Well, let me tell you, during COVID, at least where I live, it was really hard to get stuff in the supermarket. And there was people just looting, you know, the mall and houses, like literally like 10 miles away, which is kind of close, right? And so what do you do in that case? Like, what if they make it to your neighborhood? Like, I would like to have some sort of plan and stuff in place in case that were to ever happen, mainly because I have kids, you know, and I want to just make sure everyone’s safe. And in the in the past, I would have thought that

52:25
this could never happen. But during COVID, you know, kind of came close to that. At least, you know, around here. Yeah, there’s I saw a saying, you know, we’re nine meals away from anarchy. And it is kind of scary. So like all the supply chain stuff is very interdependent on a lot of stuff working. And I think the early days of COVID showed what happens when even just a few of those dominoes stop working or a few of those gears stop turning. And

52:55
it can have some, sometimes some scary consequences. So yeah, that is, it is quite dark, but the apocalypse consultant, the prep consultant, definitely some demand for that. Cause like those macro fears, your wife is definitely not alone in that. it’s something that definitely sometimes keeps me up as well. So not that I’ve taken a ton of action on it, but yeah, maybe. I need the consultant to.

53:22
give you a little push. A little bit of hand holding here and yeah like I’m almost embarrassed by it because like it feels like you feel paranoid about it and it’s like well everything’s probably gonna be fine so we’ll just kick that can down the road but maybe you would feel better if you if you did take a little bit of proactive action to say like okay well at least I did what I could do at least I did you know I took I took a few steps rather than just you know kind of blindly keeping my head down.

53:49
We probably shouldn’t end on a dark one. Why don’t you end, do have a positive one to end on? I do, I do have one more. This is also from Kernel. This is number 17. It was listed on Kernel as fractional ownership of cash flowing businesses. And what you’re probably thinking is like, yeah, that’s called the stock market. Like, yeah, it totally is. But they’re describing different kinds of businesses. They’re talking about, you know, kind of a local service based businesses, your

54:18
locksmiths, your laundromats, your quote mom and pop type of businesses that when they sell, they typically sell for, call it a 3X annual earnings multiple versus the S &P 500 trading at a 20X annual multiple. And so this is really interesting because you see this happening with crowdfunded real estate on

54:43
Even now for like single family homes, you can buy like a fractional stake in this cash flowing rental property and stuff, but you can do it for commercial properties through Fundrise and a bunch of other platforms. And so their pitch is, you know, how is nobody doing this for these, you know, local small cash flowing businesses? You can kind of roll these up in a way you buy them and take advantage of kind of these marketplace inefficiencies and distribute cash flow to investors in that way. Lots of

55:13
SEC hurdles and regulations to try and tackle this, but might be interesting to do even on a small scale. If you can pull some cash together and have some management expertise in running these things, that’s the biggest thing is like, well, but that problem has been solved on the real estate front. Like, oh, we have property managers in place. Like we have, you know, deal vetters in place. Like, so it’s been solved on real estate, but hasn’t been solved to my knowledge on this cash flowing local business side of things.

55:42
Yeah, I think with cash flowing businesses, it’s a little harder, right? In real estate, I think it’s pretty straightforward. You get a property manager and you’re all good. With a whole bunch of different types of businesses, you almost need different expertise, I think, for each individual type of business, which I think would make it harder. Yeah, maybe you’d have to roll it up. But that’s what a private equity firm does, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah, it started up in, well, I’m going to aggregate a bunch of…

56:11
cleaning companies, like where the owners want to sell or something and maybe start in one niche and distribute investors cash back to them and keep the operators in place or put operators in place. And maybe there’s even some efficiencies like, well, do we really need three separate owner operators in this one area? It’s going to be in the same geographic area. That was something that I would be tempted to invest in because of those market.

56:40
inefficiencies is like, yeah, they take a lot of time and sweat equity to manage. But if there was a more efficient way to do that, somehow, I think that would be kind of cool. And yeah, so this is essentially like a private equity firm of boring businesses. Yes, non sexy businesses, right? Because those businesses are going to still be around, right? There’s always going to be like the laundromat down the corner, or I can’t remember what some of the other examples you gave were, but

57:09
like the post office or like the the landscaper or cleaning service. Yeah. Those are always going to be around because people need those services. So yeah, I can see that as like a pretty good like way to just diversify your your assets. Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah. There’s, I don’t know a lot of these like crowdfunding sites where they’re trying to do this fractional ownership thing, they can only operate in certain states. And there’s a lot of

57:38
regulatory stuff to combat there. But maybe there’s an opportunity to start something on a smaller scale without raising venture capital and spending an arm and a leg on legal fees. But that was number 17 for me, this fractional ownership of cash flowing businesses. Again, idea courtesy of Kern.al on that one. That was it, 17 startup business ideas. Steve, any parting thoughts?

58:08
Any parting thoughts? No, I think we went through a lot more ideas than I thought we were gonna get to. But I think a lot of these are just doable for anybody, to be honest with you. Some of the more advanced ones like the medical one might be out of reach for a lot of people, but a lot of the ones we named are doable. Like you could literally just go out and try these, test it, see if you can make a couple bucks and then just gradually scale if you want to. Yeah, I love geeking out on this stuff all day. It’s like…

58:36
And I feel it exercises this creative muscle. It’s like, if you told me I got to come up with 10 new business ideas, like, ah, that sounds kind of stressful, but you start thinking about your own pains and problems. Like that’s where most of these kind of came from. And of course you can get some inspiration from that Kern.al site as well. Mywifequitterjob.com. Check Steve out over there. He’s got an awesome podcast for anybody in the e-commerce online business space. One of my favorites. He does an awesome job with it. Mywifequitterjob.com slash free is where you can

59:05
Get yourself signed up for Steve’s free six day e-commerce mini course on how to start a profitable e-commerce business of your own. I have one quick update from the last round of business idea giveaways that we did. That was episode 469. If you like this format, go back, check that one out. One of the ideas that we floated in that one was a service I called Erase Me, which is basically get my information off of all of these like white pages sites on the internet.

59:35
And shortly after that, I can’t remember if this company reached out to me or somebody tagged me and pointed me to them, but I found a service called remove-ally.com, remove-ally.com, that does exactly that. You pay them an annual fee to do that and they scrub all these different sites and directories for your personal information and they submit those requests to get those removed. So I was like, oh, that was pretty cool. This does exist. And somebody is out there.

01:00:05
building it and making money doing that. And actually it was interesting a little, you know, had a little bit of back and forth with the founder and said they started out proactively targeting, you know, YouTubers and influencers like, Hey, you got this big online following, you got a million subscribers on YouTube. Just the law of large numbers, a certain percentage of those going to be crazy, right? You probably don’t want your information out there on the internet. And so was like an easy sell for these people who already had businesses that had established followings. And so I thought that was kind of a cool way they got their first customers there.

01:00:36
I’m surprised you’re not using that service. We’ve been using it for like over five years now. No, I did. Yeah. No, I signed up right away. Oh, no, no. Like before it’s been around for a little bit. Maybe this is a topic for a different episode, but like I’ve had some experiences with, with, the crazies in the past. So, yeah. So it’s signed up immediately. Yeah. There was this Tim Ferriss article from a couple of years ago, you know, where he talked about like, let’s just say you have a hundred thousand people paying attention to you online.

01:01:06
If you think of a town of a hundred thousand people, there’s going to be, you know, one or two nut jobs and you know, what do you do about that? And so that kind of inspired that search because I would like go in and you’ll manually, manually submit them, but like it’s like, it’s a game of whack-a-mole, right? You know, you only need a service to go and do that stuff for you. Otherwise it’s just super time consuming. Um, but yeah, that was one that came up.

01:01:35
Well, thank you, Nick, for coming on the show. And for all of you listening, be sure to check out Nick’s podcast called Side Hustle Nation. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 429. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash d.

01:02:02
That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T.I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now we talk about how I these tools in my blog.

01:02:30
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.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.

00:29
Enjoy this episode. Now, before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash d.

00:59
That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T.I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my eCommerce store and I depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for eCommerce. And here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopping in your store and exactly what they bought.

01:26
So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and this full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I want to mention my other podcast that I’ve released with my partner Tony, and unlike this one,

01:53
where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:17
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Kirk Elster back on the show. And even though Kirk and I have kept in touch, he actually hasn’t been back on the show since episode 118, which was many years ago. So I knew I had to have him back. He runs ethercycle.com where he helps private label sellers launch their own e-commerce websites. He is a Shopify platform expert who helps Shopify users improve their sales. And he is also the host of the popular Unofficial Shopify podcast.

02:46
In this episode, we’re actually gonna talk about counterintuitive learnings that he’s made from running split tests on his client’s site. And when it comes to site design, what we expect to happen doesn’t always happen. And with that, welcome to the show, Kurt. It’s been a long time. Thank you for having me. You know, Kurt, it’s been a while. Anything new that’s up with you since the last time you were on? Like, what are you working on right now that’s exciting? That’s just kind of interesting. I’ve been doing the same thing roughly for 10 years. Helping?

03:16
We were building WordPress sites in 2009. And the only thing that’s changed is like we said, let’s just work exclusively on Shopify and then showed up on your show. We started building apps and I’ve been hosting this podcast the whole time. You know, my own show and that just staying the course, staying steady has tremendously grown things. The big difference now between then and now, a, I have better branding and B I’ve got, uh, I have a team now.

03:45
We were able to hire people full time and part time. It was very helpful. It is helpful as long as you have good people. Like we’ve had a couple of disasters over the years. All right. So I’ve been lucky. I’ve only had one disaster. So we’re talking about split testing today and I have a love hate relationship with it. So for me and I want you to share your experiences also. But for me it takes forever to set up. Then you got to wait weeks depending on how much traffic you have and then

04:15
I would say 80 % of the time the data is inconclusive. So it’s not satisfying. I know you work with a lot of companies and I’m glad you got a lot of successful tests to share with us. So I want to start actually with what your best practices are and what your kind of success rate is for a split test. Okay. Well, so you’re right. Your experience is, is accurate. A lot of people have that experience and I was resistant.

04:41
to split testing. I loved conversion rate optimization, but my experience was like yours. And so I was instead leaning on usability, like let’s do user testing, let’s look at heat maps, let’s do surveys, let’s talk to people and then let’s, look at our analytics and then try and infer update and then go back and check. And that process works. But over time, you know, I started to get a few clients where they had the order velocity,

05:10
where I could run tests and have statistically significant results in two weeks. And the other big change was Google Optimize. Like in the past, you had to mess with these tools that were tough, that were like really very enterprise tools, visual website optimizer, optimizely. Okay, I’m sorry, threw them under the bus. They’re perfectly good tools. They’re also, they are not necessarily for mere mortals. And whereas, and they’re expensive. Google Optimize is free. It is as easy to use as a Google product is.

05:39
which, you know, all right, it’s not like perfect, but it’s definitely easier than those other two. And so the, a lot of the barriers to entry that you described went away for me around two years ago. And I said, all right, I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to get good at this. I know enough to get started and be dangerous. And so I started playing with it. And then I started having the experience you did where like most of the time the test goes, who cares? You know what? That’s a perfectly acceptable answer.

06:08
In which case you go, you know what? It’s preference then. I could decide what to do with this. But what I learned was sometimes it’s because you have the wrong metric chosen for the test. And so it’s nice and optimized. can run multiple objectives. Like it doesn’t have to be conversion rate, which they call transactions. It could be revenue, which that’s going to include average order value. It could be page view. Like, are we just getting them to the next page? That’s suddenly now you can get more significant results more often.

06:38
And the other thing I learned was, you know, the classic split test that we think about is, what color should the buttons be? What’s my end to cart color? And like, of course that’s not a great test. Um, and you end up with that experience where it’s like, nothing mattered. What works better is sometimes you just go, I’m going to try an entirely different template. I’m going to change 10 things about this page, which of these two versions works better. And as long as like, there’s a hypothesis behind it as to like a goal, like

07:06
Does a cleaner version of this work better? Does a more detailed version of this work better? And they’ve got, you know, five to 10 changes between them. Ah, now I’m to start to see those bigger differences where it’s like, yeah, this one is 95 % likely to be better. All right. So let me ask you this then how much traffic and conversions do you need to, run a split test within a reasonable amount of time? Oh, that’s a really good question. You need to be getting

07:37
dozens a day. Hold on, let’s. That’s not that much actually. Well, I’m going to look up a store right now. Okay. I’m going to log into a store. Maybe we have to edit out me waiting. Yeah, that’s cool. So while you’re looking that up. So, so my store gets a lot more than that, but I still found it took a couple of weeks to before like the tool would tell me like I got a semi-conclusive result or the tool told me to just stop the test because it wasn’t going anywhere.

08:07
Sometimes it drags. Yeah. think dozens is the minimum. Okay. Once you’re at like a hundred a day, maybe 150 a day, totally fine. You’re good to go. This is, you’re to be able to run a test. Now the catch is even if you can hit statistical significance quickly, you do realistically need to be running it for 14 days to see a not skewed result. And like here an example as to why is people get paid, typically get paid every other Friday.

08:36
And so you want that like full pace cycle in there. And so two weeks really tends to be the minimum for this. We can think of this as somewhat accurate, a proper data-driven decision. Okay. That makes sense. Cause I remember the first time when I didn’t know what I was doing and arguably I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I would get like a S like a significant result within like the first couple of days and just want to just call the test right away. then the tool would tell me not. Yeah.

09:05
I’ll see that on Twitter. Like I followed a guy who claimed to be like, you know, a stats guy, like a finance econ guy who knew stats, who like had gone to Ecom and he was calling tests in two, three days. So I knew right away, I’m like, ah, this isn’t significant. This isn’t right. And this guy’s full of it. Like that’s just one of those real easy early mistakes. And I did it too. The second question I want to ask you is what like

09:32
Can you just kind of describe for the listeners how easy it is to set up now? You mentioned Google is easy to set up. Can you just kind of describe what’s involved at a high level? Okay, so you probably already run Google Analytics on your site. And because you’re already running Google Analytics on your site, it has most of the data it needs. The part it’s missing is being able to modify the site. So Google Optimize links to your Google Analytics account. Now it’s got all the data it needs, but it needs to be able to tweak the site.

10:01
It’s got a single piece of JavaScript that it’ll give you that it says, put this just on every page. So you drop it in the head of the site. Boom, you’re good to go. And that’s even like the simplified non-Google tag manager version of this. If you’re using GTM by that point, you can already figure this out. And Google has in optimized. It’ll be like, Hey, did you want us to verify the tool is there and everything’s working correctly? Like it will really try to save you from yourself. And then after it’s interested in all your site, you just need to tell it which

10:31
pages you want to test or. So then you got to set up a test and that part. All right. Until you have successfully done it the first time can feel intimidating. I watched a few YouTube screencasts to figure it out and played with it. And once I had done it a couple of times, I was like, OK, I know enough to be dangerous. I could figure this out. Or it’s like you’re going to do just a standard. It’ll give you like several options for tests. You want the first one just says AB and then you’ve got variant.

11:01
A is the original unchanged site variant B. We don’t want to add multiple variants because now we need even more traffic. Variant B is we’re going to modify that site and Google Optimize gives you a visual editor where you could just like click the elements on your site, remove them. That’s often a really like where we start with testing. It’s just like, let’s just start pulling stuff out and see if it was helping or hurting. Remove elements or like text you can rename. Or if you know enough to be dangerous, dangerous with CSS, you could just have it inject

11:30
your own written CSS code and then just restyle, however, however talented you may be. let me ask you this. Does testing on mobile throw a wrench into this? Cause you got responsive. just, are you split testing the mobile site and the desktop site? Or do you do those separately? Hi, this is another good question. Come brings into segmentation. So if I really, I wanted

11:56
make sure either I want to make sure that my test makes sense on mobile and desktop. Cause realistically on my website, I’m getting people on mobile and desktop. And it’s probably like an e-commerce is probably 90 10 split. Yeah. 80 20 occasionally happens, but that’s rare. And like, ideally the test makes sense on both. Like if you’re just changing labels, changing colors, it’ll work on both. But you can segment it. If it doesn’t, you could segment to mobile versus desktop.

12:25
Like the test will only run on mobile. Do you have a separate test just for mobile and a separate test for desktop? Because they are different even if like, because the design is so different, even changing, like removing an element will make a big difference on one and maybe not the other, right? Yeah, yes, absolutely. And with weird unexpected results, I’ll do that. And so like one test that really surprised me is I like on the category pages of your site, you’ve got your category title. Do you have like a really cool lifestyle hero image up there?

12:55
I do not actually. OK, well, a lot. It’s not uncommon. And I like those. You know, I used to be a photographer. I like that. I like the fancy stuff. I like the aesthetic. And I ran a split test where I got rid of that hero image on an apparel site with that’s like style that is driven by lifestyle and aesthetic. And the site performs better without the hero image. And that was just on everyone. And I thought, all right, maybe it’s like it’s because it’s mobile versus desktop. So I ran it as a mobile same test.

13:24
You could duplicate it and go, all right, I only want to show this to mobile and I only want to show this to desktop. Same result. It improves it on both. But I, addition to mobile versus desktop, the other segmentation we need to think about is new versus returning. And so you can do that too. And so I did, uh, not often, but a few times I found like, well, this where you had a mixed result on a test, uh, when you run it again as mobile versus desktop or new versus returning, you’ll find,

13:53
This helps new visitors or this hurts returning visitors. And so then what’s cool in Google Optimize, you can actually deploy these things rather than like go commit them to the website. You can have Google Optimize run that test as what they call a personalization, which is really just like it’s an ongoing test without reporting. Yeah. And that’s just built into it. And again, this thing, I know there’s a paid version of it. I’ve never had to use it. It has always just worked with what I want it to do in the free plan.

14:22
What’s so nice about this is it’s integrated into analytics. So they have all the data already. Whereas in the past it was a pain in the butt. Yeah, you had to go through like adding this whole extra layer onto the site just to support split testing. And it just isn’t the case anymore. Let’s just talk about that test that you just talked about. Like it’s generally best practice to just have your products right there above the fold and not have the hero image. I had pains when I was designing my

14:51
category sites because I want to include content for SEO. And I found that it was just kind of pushing things down. So what I did was I moved it underneath the products and that that was my solution. I had a little blurb at the top, but so it’s good to know that approach. That’s often what we do for exactly the same reasons. But it’s good to know that you actually tested that hypothesis. So no hero image products above the fold as high as possible is what converts the best. Yes. And so this one,

15:20
could translate into a best practice or truism, think scrolling, so it turns out the fold is real, at least as far as it affects your revenue. And so getting the products in front of the person as quickly as possible really tends to be a positive across the board. By the way, for you content creators out there, this holds true for blogs as well.

15:49
Like if your post is about like the top 17 ways to optimize your site, you want to put like the top 17 ways above the fold if you can. Some people don’t even, they look at the intro and they go, oh, this is just junk. I’m not looking for this. And then they bounce. But I never split tested that either. That’s just best practice. You could, you could split test that the way you do it. Like you, you’d publish the blog with the intro that you like.

16:16
And then you could use Google Optimize to either like hide that first paragraph or rewrite it. I like that. Actually, that’d be so easy if you have a high traffic blog. Actually, you’d probably get results right away with that. Now the question there is like, what’s the what’s the goal? And so Google Optimize, you can you can tie it to bounce rate. You could tie it to page views. You could tie it to like if you have subscriptions set up as a goal, you could do that. I love it. I love it.

16:44
There was one thing that we were talking about or that you sent me earlier about category pages removing prices of the products. I’m very curious about that experiment because I think I saw it on the e-commerce fuel forums. There’s a big discussion about that. And I think the consensus on the forum was remove prices on the category pages to get people to browse products more. What did you find with your experiment? All right, this one is a must test.

17:12
In some stores, this will absolutely help you. In other stores, it will absolutely hurt you. And then I think the other thing to consider here is like, does the store have quick view? And that I have not gotten into yet, but I know like this one, if you could support it, absolutely try this and test it. I suspect what’s going on here is pricing psychology. When I see that product in the collection grid, I see the product, I see the title, I’ve got context in my head, whether I think about it not, I have attached a potential price to it.

17:42
And as soon as I click through and I end up, whether that’s like a quick view pop up or I’m on the product page, now I see the price. I suspect what’s going on here is if that price is consistently above what the person expected. That’s going to hurt conversion. If it’s below what they expect, it’ll help conversion. So so much of this is about quality of traffic and presentation. And I think that’s why I’d say a must test. Interesting. So in your case, when putting the prices on was better, what was the price point of that product?

18:12
I, all of these tests we did for apparel stores. So our AOV was always under a hundred. Under a hundred. So not high end then. Okay. This was not, not premium. And so this is where you, I think this is so dependent on audience and product. So what was the, sorry, what was the result of that test? In this case, the test ended up, uh, improving conversions and average order value.

18:41
So we gained revenue by not showing collection or not showing prices on collection or category pages.

18:49
If you’re looking to start an online store, you’re probably deciding which e-commerce platform to go with. And the problem is that there’s hundreds of choices out there and they all start to blend together after a while. So I want to save you time today and tell you about BigCommerce, which is one of the platforms that I recommend. And here’s why. BigCommerce does not nickel and dime you with apps like other platforms. Once you sign up, you get a fully featured shopping cart with the features you need built right in. If you want to run a WordPress blog and an online store on the same exact domain for search engine optimization,

19:19
BigCommerce has a nice WordPress integration that allows you to do exactly that to maximize your SEO. And then finally, you have the right to use whatever payment process that you want without paying any transaction fees, unlike other shopping carts out there. Now for geeks like myself, BigCommerce offers a powerful API which allows you to scale your e-commerce store to seven, eight, and even nine figures and beyond. In fact, BigCommerce runs huge stores like Sony, Casio, and Ben & Jerry’s. So if you’re interested in looking for an e-commerce platform,

19:47
go to mywifequitterjob.com slash BC and check it out for free for 30 days. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash BC. Now back to the show.

19:59
You know, so I was buying a gift from my wife on I think it was the Tiffany’s website They hide all prices. I was just listening your hypothesis now Because if it’s if it comes in higher like every time I clicked on one of those Tiffany’s jewelry pieces it came out higher than I bet it is They have a strong brand So maybe maybe that’s it and they just want to hide the prices to drive people off the site right away because I would have been probably driven away

20:28
Oh, yeah, that’s yeah, because there’s that click that like you have clicked through. You’re more committed. I think that correlates like page views and conversion. I believe they correlate like when you can really get people to spend time on the site. I think they spend more money. Supposedly, Ikea subscribes to this theory. That’s why those places are like labor. And I actually have a question for you. I don’t know if you tested this, but.

20:55
It’s generally best practice if you display the price to list the products from expensive to least expensive, as opposed to the other way around. I’d like the theory here. The theory being like you set the peak price first. That’s the first thing they see. Now everything else seems cheaper as a result, as opposed to if I flipped it the other way. I have not tested it, but testing collection sort order is a really good idea. I’m writing that down.

21:25
Okay, I’ll just tell you the theory for everyone listening. The theory is they see the most expensive item first that anchors the price. they psychologically are willing to spend more or expect higher prices. And then when they scroll down and see everything else is cheaper, they’re like, oh, okay, this isn’t that bad. That first product was expensive. So, these are much cheaper. That’s a theory at least. I don’t know what it is in practice. Well, I’m going to test it on an apparel store. We’ll see what happens. Yeah. Okay. So what else you got, Kurt?

21:55
That’s counterintuitive. Okay. Uh, let’s see what we got here. Okay. Font size. How important is font size? All right. I’ll just give you an experience from my store. It’s huge for our store because we catered a lot of people over the age of 55 who are farsighted and we didn’t do a split test for this, but we had lots of people complain via email that the writing was too small.

22:25
and they would just call their order in and we didn’t want people calling us because that takes a lot of time. So we literally made the fonts pretty big mobile on mobile and desktop kind of actually mostly mobile, should say mostly mobile across the board. And then those calls stopped. Hmm. All right. I like this. So I know the truism here, the best practices and easier to read site performs better. People do not are not going to tolerate your shenanigans with your like light gray font on a dark gray background.

22:55
They’re just not into it. They’ll tiny font. You’re like, looks so sophisticated and subtle. No, it looks hard to read. And so they’re just going to go to another site that is easy to read. And so I knew anytime we make the site easy to read, it performs better. But I said, let’s, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s test this. Let’s get the data. Let’s prove it. And so I tried split testing, just font size and results are like totally inconclusive all over the place. And what it turned out is

23:22
It’s not just font size. It’s more than that. It is about like total readability. so Baymard put together Baymard usability Institute has readability guidelines that they figured out that they recommend. And they’re like, really the thing that matters is line length. And if you’ve ever read a newspaper or magazine, they have those real narrow columns. You never think twice about it because it’s easy to read and it makes sense. And so that’s actually the thing you’re looking for. And so if you have a clever developer, they can

23:50
set this up for you. like the site’s responsive and those columns are always 60 to 80 characters. And then you want to make sure you have a nice line height between them. And that really will make the site much easier to read. When you implement like those quality readability guidelines versus a site that maybe like had full width and tiny fonts and low contrast. Of course, absolutely. It’s going to perform better for reasons you described was it’s easier to read. People are going to quit complaining about it.

24:18
Interesting. So when you did your test, the results were inconclusive. And then you, this, this other study wasn’t your study, right? This was Baymard. The Baymard. Okay. once we, when we, when I did the test again as our, our, just our previous font, which was like, you know, whatever, it was okay. Um, versus like the full Baymard readability guidelines, the thing that changed was bounce rate. Bounce rate went down.

24:47
That makes sense. That makes sense. You know what’s funny, Kurt, I know you have a couple more tests to talk about here, but what are some of the best things to test and what are some of the worst things to test since you’ve been doing this for a while? think the worst things to test are like subjective styling. And that’s where a lot of people start. I think the best things to test really are content. Like every element on the page should ideally be serving a purpose.

25:17
And if it’s not, why is it there? It’s just getting in the way and split testing often reveals that in stark data. So, uh, I oftentimes like phase one is use it as a way to clean up the site without being emotional about it. Like a website is our baby, right? And there are reasons that we did it the way we did it. But when you have the data going, well, here’s what it costs you to have these trust badges jammed in right here.

25:46
Suddenly the trust badges seem less attractive. It’s interesting. I had a friend who is split testing his landing page, which gets like hundreds of signups per day. And he had this landing page where he’s explaining it was a lead magnet landing page where he explained exactly what people got with that lead magnet. And he was testing it against his one where he’s literally a sentence. I will teach you this email form. And that one can perform.

26:14
way better than the one where you actually explain what you get, which kind of blew my mind. And it was ugly. It was ugly, So he’s he’s to this day, he still uses the ugly landing page for him. It doesn’t make sense. Ugly converts is what I’ve learned is some of the ugliest sites I’ve ever seen where we’re like, this thing seems straight up broken are the ones that print money to this day. The most the highest revenue side I ever worked on was

26:44
Also the ugliest. Really? Yeah. I don’t know what the deal is. And highest converting by what metric like compared to just the other sets of users. Not necessarily highest converting. was highest revenue. It remains. is the highest revenue. And I’ve since then I’ve seen other beautiful sites that are high revenue, but that one stuck with me and that I know good design is not a requirement of high revenue. Sure.

27:13
I mean, I got a story to tell here. A long time ago, I had my site over Bumblebee Linens have left side navigation because it kind of made sense, right? You look from left to right and all my product categories on the left. And I was in this mastermind group where literally everyone there said your site is heinous. You need to be redesigned. And I ended up redesigning the entire site. Problem is, I changed like 20 different things, but it ended up converting like almost 50 % better.

27:44
So when you’re talking to someone about split testing, do you recommend changing one thing at a time or just making like a big change in testing at all at once? Like how have you been conducting your experiments? When you test one thing at a time, you it’s way more often that you end up with the inconclusive results. Test, doing like, we changed this entire site. That’s not that useful. Focusing on like, I think the, the middle ground.

28:13
The thing where like you’ll see the fastest, most consistent results, where it’s easy to wrap your head around it, where it’s just more practical is redesign a template at a time. Like this is, going to, we know the cart page is this bottleneck, you know, cause we could see like how many people viewed a product, how many added to cart, how many reached checkout. Maybe we know the cart pages are bottleneck. All right. So let’s come up with a theory and make three different versions of that cart template. And now we’re going to test.

28:43
systematically test those against the original and see, all right, which one performs the best art? Let’s implement that. That seems to be a better approach. And when you have multiple versions of entirely different pages, yeah, you don’t know what the individual thing is that perform better. But as you’re iterating through tests, you start a picture starts to emerge of this is what my audience likes. And that’s, think one of the other like real learnings I’ve discovered here is it really comes down to

29:12
Well, what does this audience expect? What do they want? What do they prefer? And it often does not have anything to do with what you as the brand owner, what like design trends, like what everybody else likes. It’s the people who you’re asking to open their wallet is their opinion is what matters. You know, it’s funny is I used to be really into split testing or not, not doing them, but actually just reading up on them. And I remember there was some statistic like

29:42
I can’t remember the exact percentage, so I don’t wanna screw it up. But the majority of the successful split tests are when you remove stuff from your page, not add to it. Because ultimately every page should just have one goal where you want people to go and the more things you have people look at, the less likely they’re gonna do the one thing that you want. At least that’s the theory. I agree with that. Yeah, so I’m curious, what other split tests do you have to share? I think the other one that’s worth looking at again with new eyes

30:11
is free shipping. I’m no longer convinced that we have to have free shipping. Really? Okay. There’s always, there’s been this idea that the number one unexpected, there are unexpected shipping expenses, the number one conversion killer in checkouts. I don’t think it’s true anymore. So you could, depending on the platform, there are ways to split test shipping results or shipping rates. for us, it’s like, is you have to be on Shopify plus.

30:41
And there’s a couple of apps, IntelliGems or Ship Scout. So that’s what we’re using specifically. I don’t know how to do it with Shopify and Google Optimize. And with these apps, we can offer different shipping rates and they’ll have an announcement bar on the site itself. like before they hit checkout, they’ve seen what the free shipping threshold is. And it’ll tell you like, this is the conversion rate with these different checkout thresholds. And if you give it the, like your average cost of goods sold,

31:09
and your average shipping expense per package, it’ll also figure out profit per visitor. And once you start doing that, suddenly you discover, oftentimes offering no free shipping at all ends up being way more profitable overall. And the impact on checkout conversion with different thresholds is significantly smaller than you’d think. All right, give me some numbers here. I’m fascinated by this. All right. So we tried this in a store.

31:39
Um, and I’ve run this test now and in four separate stores and we’ve gotten similar results every time. Let’s say no free shipping. This is check our conversion rate. No free shipping will be, uh, about 70 % free shipping at $25 at checkout. They’re going to convert closer to 80%. And then at $75 free shipping threshold, they convert at 75%. Okay. So that’s in line with what you would expect, right?

32:10
Yeah. It’s a 75 is like the ideal balance, but really what matters is profit. so at profit, like for this particular store, their fulfillment cost was 750 in order. I don’t know where that falls in with yours. know, fulfillment costs are all over the place, depending on how heavy your goods are. Yep. But like for this particular store, uh, the $25 free shipping threshold profit per visitor, 13 bucks.

32:37
the profit per visitor at $75, $16.50 profit per visitor with no free shipping, 20. So the chances are, I probably want to not offer free shipping at all is going to result in the highest revenue and profit. Interesting. Yeah. Most people don’t think about profit. They think about conversion rate. I will add a wrinkle to that though, because once you get someone to open up their wallet,

33:05
then you can probably sell them a whole bunch of other stuff. So maybe it’s a little more complicated than that, right? Now, yeah, I could do cross sells and use free shipping as a nudge. What I like about not offering free shipping all the time is that that can then be one of your promotions instead of having to rely on discounting or new product development. You know, yeah, you know, I agree with you. I hate discounting. And whenever I think about discounts, I think about Bed Bath and Beyond.

33:35
Oh, right. Are they still in business? The local one closed like the two Bed Bath and Beyonds by my house closed because I would never shop there without that 20 % coupon. I suspect other people were too. But yeah, profit wise, I can definitely see why that’s the case. We do a shipping threshold and we set it at just a threshold where we try to get someone to add in one more item. So what’s the best practice then, Kurt? What do you recommend here? Well, so the issue here is

34:04
Without this, like these very specific tools, it’s really hard to test. And even within that, like, depending on how your, your fulfillment is set up, testing these can be really hard. So I would still say, Hey, you probably want to offer free shipping. I would make that free shipping threshold higher than your average order value would be my, my safe starting point, but don’t.

34:31
don’t sell yourself short and have like an unnecessarily artificially low free shipping. Cause it’s just a tremendous cost center for most people, especially shipping is getting expensive. It is getting really expensive. In fact, we had to jack up our shipping rates cause yeah, it’s like a loss leader. Yeah, it’s bad now. I mean, it’s going up like all the time before like USPS used to raise their price once a year. I feel like it just creeps up like every time I check now. we did, uh, was working in a store that had

35:02
heavy items. ended up being like six pounds shipped and it was glass. So you had to like really pack it carefully. And it was, it was like, Oh, it’s shipping, you know, from the like Northwest to Wisconsin to the Midwest. And it was like, think it was 30 bucks and like the item itself, you know, with like 40, 50 bucks, like the shipping was over 50 % of the cost. was crazy. It was, what do you do? I don’t know. Do you really, once the item hits a certain weight, like there’s only so much you could do.

35:31
to minimize shipping costs. You know what we’ve struggled with? When people need it overnighted, it’s often really difficult. Like we have table rate shipping. It’s often really difficult to predict because it depends on where they are geographically also. Oh, you got to get that carrier calculated shipping. That makes life so much easier. don’t like that? Because sometimes it goes down and then you don’t get any shipping costs. It actually happens more often than you think. When anything is tied to another service, I don’t like that.

36:01
a buffer to it to make up for that. You know how often it’s low and by how much. And so add either a percentage or a fixed dollar amount to the carrier calculated rate to try and balance it out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s technical ways to solve this. I just haven’t expended much brain power on it, but occasionally it’s a problem and I get pissed when it happens. Let’s just say the worst is people pay for the overnight. It’s expensive. And then the item does not arrive overnight.

36:28
That’s another story because it’s gotten much less reliable to like FedEx. That’s my resistance. And then you have to be like, all right, well, we’ll refund you the cost of the shipping. And so now, like all of the profit on that order is gone. Well, actually, the carriers started reimbursing again for late. Oh, all right. They stopped doing that during the pandemic, which really was annoying. But they it’s come back, although they make you jump through more hoops now to get it. So anyway, that was just an aside. Sorry about that.

36:58
guys are listening. Do you have any more split tests to share with us? These are really fast. By the way, yeah, one one last quick one. If you you know, on Amazon, it’ll be like your recently viewed products. Yes. I think those are those are neat. This is a good personalization one. We ran this on a for new visitors, the your recently viewed items decreased conversions by nine percent.

37:27
For returning visitors increased it by 33. And so this is an example of like, wow, testing the different audiences and displays can be hugely beneficial because you definitely want that recently viewed items widget. And I like to put it on the cart page. You definitely want that on the cart page, but if you’re there a new visitor, you actually don’t want it.

37:53
If it’s a new visitor though, they presumably don’t even have anything populated there, right? They won’t. And then they’ll have like, you know, as soon as they view something, it’ll show them like the one item is usually how those are set up. Can you explain why you think that’s the case? No, this baffled me, but it’s all like, all right, we’re going to try this again. And so I ran it again and I also did it mobile versus desktop and the results with this were consistent. Really? I guess it’s just more things to click on then, right?

38:21
I assume it’s it goes it like when you’re new it starts as a distraction when you visit the site leave come back a few days later then it’s helpful. That makes sense I guess because if you leave and you come back you probably already know what you’re probably ready to buy or more ready to buy. Yeah I think I’d stop for most stores on subsequent visits like if you’re returning there you’re much more likely to buy than when you’re first poking around. Whereas I guess when you’re first there you’re looking at something and all of sudden you got like 10 choices you’re like forget it I’m not.

38:51
I’m just not buying here anymore. Oh, choice paralysis is totally real. I have not worked out a test for this yet. Yeah, I guess I could hide like total number of items displayed, but that would be an interesting test. It’s like, let’s figure out is paralysis analysis real? And I’m convinced it is.

39:08
I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every single year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business.

39:37
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets always sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250,000 or $1 million per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.

40:06
Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. For more information, go to sellersummit.com. Once again, that’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com, or just Google it. Now back to the show.

40:22
So one of the things on my list to implement on my site is frequently bought together. I’m very curious how that performs. Cause I see it on Amazon. Generally I get these ideas when I shop on Amazon, I go, Hey, that’s a nice feature. Let me try that. Which is absolutely the wrong thing to do by the way, if anyone’s listening, like Amazon is not your site, obviously, but that frequently bought together. I always think of ways to just try to increase the average order value. Have you ever tested that with any of your sites? Frequently bought together, well, could

40:51
Assuming like the merchandising makes sense, it does consistently help to boost average order value. And this is another thing with split testing. Like you really don’t necessarily, we’ve implied it here, but you don’t necessarily want to just strictly have conversion rate or transactions as your goal. You can look at revenue. So that includes average order value that could be helpful or.

41:16
a lot of these other items like, all right, does this decrease bounce rate? Does this increase page views? Can I get people on the site longer with this? So once you have like pages instrumented, you can literally test all these variables all at once, right? Without any extra work. Yes. I don’t know what the there’s a limit in Google optimized, but you say like, this is my primary goal. And here are like, I could choose secondary goals. And I think it’s limited at like two or three, I forget which. So that’s really helpful.

41:46
And then you could run multiple tests at once, assuming you have the order volume to support it. But as you add them, it really starts slowing things down because you’re dividing up your audience. Right, right. You know what I have always wanted to know? You know that certain sites have that slide up? Like when someone buys something, it says, this person just purchased that. Oh, the FOMO pop-ups. The FOMO pop-ups.

42:15
always been curious whether that increases the conversion rate or not. I think that’s another one where it depends on the brand. At this point, when they happen, I’m so blind to it. I don’t even see them anymore. And I’m just like, well, at least it’s not the spin to slide out. You know what’s funny about all this is I almost feel like you have to split test often because things tend to work when they’re new. But then, like you said, once people become jaded to something,

42:44
It probably doesn’t convert as well anymore. A hundred percent. Yeah. What works now may not work in 12 months. So what is your strategy then on keeping this up with your clients? Are you constantly running a split test of some sort? Yes. I wish I had some like formal approach to like, all right, you know, we implement this and then we’re going to set a reminder. We’re going to revisit this. It’s more like, um, for the people we’re doing split testing with, we have regular recurring meetings.

43:12
And it’s like, we’re just always going through KPIs. So guess it’s data driven and then trying to identify like, these are our opportunities. And if it comes in, if we get to a point where it’s like, all right, well, suddenly the cart page is our bottleneck again. Often I’ll revisit tests just to like, Hey, let’s just, let’s verify that it is what our belief is still the case. Yeah, absolutely. Nothing wrong with like, let’s run that test again. See, you know, maybe that was a weird outlier.

43:40
So we’ve presented a number of tests to the listeners. Let’s say you’re just starting out and you want to try this. What is like some low hanging fruit that you should test? For sure. I would. I would. You’re going to look at like, what are the prime pages here? It’s going to be homepage category product cart. Look at me. One of those four templates. And I like to like cart is a really good place to start because you get yourself in less trouble. And.

44:10
Cause like cart, we know the very next thing we want people to do is proceed to checkout and make a purchase. So you set that as your goal, uh, go on the cart template and then within it, a lot of times over time, like the cart develops a lot of cruft. And so I think the ideal Google optimized split tests, and this is, this has come up, this has been kind of a minor theme here is what elements. Aren’t aren’t doing us any good. What’s cruft at this point, you know, can we just shave off some of this stuff?

44:39
And so just like Google split tests where we go, this is the original version and this is the cleaned up version where we pulled all the garbage off. And that’s like such an easy thing to do and optimize, select the element, hit remove. It’s gone like magic. Give me an example of cruft, just hypothetically speaking. All right. On a cart page, I often see like, um, a shipping calculator. And I always think this is so weird. Like you’re going to get your, your shipping rates in the cart just to go to checkout and then get them again. I get you like, well.

45:09
We doubled up on steps here. So if I see one of those, like I’m immediately testing it by just like original versus we got rid of this thing. I would actually, now that you think about it, there is a lot of cruft. There’s like some people have coupon codes on there too. Yep. And apply the coupon code. And I bet that always hurts because if they don’t find a coupon that works, they might leave, right? Yes. I actually hid my coupon code field for a long time.

45:38
From people because they I found that people were just going off and going to like whatever those coupon sites were So I made them like it was just a link they had to click on it to expose the field and I think that mitigated that problem a little bit it still happens, but But having on the cart page, I personally think and again, I don’t have any data for this I personally think that’s a no-no along with the calculator. Oh, yeah, calculator drives me nuts Yeah, okay. So start with a shopping cart and then what would be your like your next page? I would then do I’d work backwards

46:08
Then I go product and like the product form specifically tends to pick up a lot of junk. And that’s a thing that’s like usually above the fold or near it. And so that’s a good place to test. That’s also one where I’ll test appearance, like on the product form, like, all right, what happens if I put like a light background and a border on this to call attention to it? Sometimes that helps or it makes no difference in which case, like choose which one you like better aesthetically. And then, all right, collection page, like hide show price.

46:37
is a common one. Hero image collection description, filter sidebar, and then work back to homepage. And then homepage is just like, there’s so many weird random sections on a homepage. Yeah. All right. Which of these help or hurt? If you really want an exotic test that makes everybody nervous, get rid of there. I guarantee the first thing on your homepage is a hero image or a slider video. Hide it. You don’t even replace it with anything else. Just hide it. What happens? That one often the site performs better without it.

47:07
Really? Okay. Yeah, that’s fascinating. Okay. Here’s why I I’m skeptical, but I mean, obviously you have data and I don’t oftentimes if it’s someone brand new and again, I guess you have to test returning versus new if someone’s brand new landing on your site and it’s not clear what you sell or what you’re good at. I feel like they’re to leave because you have to kind of prove to a new a new customer that I agree with you, but I think often brand owners wildly overestimate

47:37
how good their hero slides, et cetera, are at explaining that. That I can believe. That I can believe. Okay. That is very interesting. That test would scare me, actually. But I’d be very curious. It scares everybody. Okay, yeah, that’s good. So I guess there is a distinction between you and returning visitors that you have to worry about when you’re… I’m running a test on a site right now. It’s four days in, so it’s not statistically significant, technically.

48:05
And we’re doing it’s their homepage. And I got three versions, the original, has like hero content and shopping a version that’s anything that’s non-shopping is gone. So this thing is just categories and products. And then a version that does not have the hero slider. That’s the only thing I took out. The shopping only site has a probability to beat the original of 96 % and the version with no hero image, 90%.

48:35
Sorry, you lost me there. So what’s in the lead right now? The shopping only site. is purely, we took out any about, any blog posts, hero sliders, all the content, gone. It is just, these are the departments, these are the products. That’s for the board. That one converts at 2.3%. The version of the page that is just the original page minus the carousel slider converts at 2%.

49:03
And then the original with all the junk in it is one and a quarter. So based on that, it sounds like it’s the hero image and it’s because it’s similar to what we talked about with the hero image on a collection page. You’re pushing so much stuff down the page. Right. Yeah. And I agree with, uh, it makes intuitive sense. Also removing all navigation outside of like finding the product that you actually want to buy. I move all that stuff in the footer usually a captive.

49:32
Captive page. Right. Dude, Kurt, this is awesome. I’m actually very curious about all the split tests that you’re running and especially the one about like the reversed price order. I’ve always been very curious about that. That one I’m going to run in my, I figured out how to do it in my head. It’s going to be a redirect test using query strings. Yes. Yes. That would work. Yeah. Cool. Kurt. Hey man. I should have you back more often. This is, this is interesting stuff.

49:59
If anyone needs help with their Shopify store, if they have any questions for you, where can they find you? On Twitter at Kurt Inc, K-U-R-T-I-N-C, or grab my newsletter at curtlster.com. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming back. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

50:16
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now this just goes to show that before you make any assumptions about your business or your customers, you have to test everything. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecourterjob.com slash episode 428. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecourterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

50:47
Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash KLA VIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform, a choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

51:15
Head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:26
Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake.

00:55
and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used. You can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscope for sponsoring this episode. If you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source in my e-commerce store.

01:25
and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce, and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price-well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your audience. So head on over to postscript.io slash dv and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv.

01:55
And then finally, I want to mention my other podcasts that are released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

02:24
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Drop podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Alicia Reynoso on the show. Now, Alicia is the founder of Live Iffinitely, which is a brand that sells water bottles and outdoor gear online, which she grew to eight figures before selling it. Now, selling water bottles is a tough business. It’s commodity. Tons of companies that sell them, but Alicia succeeded by building communities. And these communities gave her exposure and loyalty from her customer list, which allowed her to charge

02:54
premium pricing for her products. So in this episode, Alicia is gonna teach us exactly how she built up her eight figure water bottle business. And with that, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It’s so funny that you say that because my boyfriend was actually the one that was like, we should sell water bottles. And I was like, are you crazy? Like that just sounds so competitive. We had started off with like, like a cooling towel or something like that, but it didn’t work out. And then he’s like, let’s do water bottles. And I was like, you want to compete against Nalgene and Nike and

03:24
So it’s just funny you mentioned that because it was it’s it’s it’s a silly competitive market to enter for your first product for sure. There’s like four or five big brands just wrapped up my head. Yeah. Yeah. I’m very curious. mean, well, okay, let’s let’s start with that. Like, why did you choose water bottles? Are you a boyfriend? Yeah, so well, we got started back when it was just like Amazon FBA. That was like what year was 2014 15.

03:51
So 14 is when the cooling towel launched. was a failure. 15 is when we picked the water bottle. So really 15 was like the birth of it all. But we were like trying in 2014 too. But it was 2015. We did like the amazing course and everything like that. And we were just looking at the seller ranks. I knew from the very beginning, like LiveInfinity was my brand. I knew from the very beginning, I wanted to create a brand. I didn’t want to just like pick products and sell them.

04:20
I wanted my brand to stand for like live infinitely. The name means to live your life with infinite possibilities. Like you can do or achieve anything. So that was the message that I wanted to share through my brand. So I wanted it to be like something like fitness outdoors, like getting out there, like being healthy, living your best life type thing. And so he just like was going through, you know, the whole process back then, best seller rank and saw a fruit infuser water bottles and like water bottles are super broad and competitive, but like through water bottles.

04:50
was like a little bit like, like niching down into it. And that’s what we decided to go with as our first product. And because it was a little bit different, we were actually able to be successful out of the gate on Amazon because it wasn’t just like a normal water bottles. So let’s start there. you brand registered on Amazon for that first product? Yes, but it took a while. for the first few years, like we were just kind of, no, we weren’t. think honestly, didn’t get brand registered probably till 2016.

05:19
Actually, back in the day, was super, it was much easier on Amazon. Yeah, 2015. Okay. So you made some money off of that first initial water bottle. Yeah, did you have your own website at that time too? Or the first year? No, it was just all on Amazon. Amazon just like really got us out of the gate. And then that’s when we joined

05:41
blue ribbon with Ezra Firestone and we’re like we should get on Shopify, diversify revenue because we knew eventually that we wanted to sell the business too. And so that’s when like probably 2018 or so we built out the website to try to like diversify that but originally it’s just on Amazon. We were just trying to pick any products that kind of fit under that branding that we were going for but really made no sense. Like we had like hand-mixed backpacks.

06:08
water bottles like it was kind of all over the place. Originally on Amazon to get us out of, you know, just get us started. Was it profitable though? Yeah, was profitable and much easier. Okay, then our website, as soon as we like launch your website, so worth it. And I love it. And now that’s what I geek out over. My boyfriend eventually just took over Amazon, and like ran our pay per click and everything like that. And I just went full on into Shopify.

06:36
and I learned the email marketing and Facebook ads and everything like that that we needed to learn for that side of the business. But then it just also just required so much more work and learning all of those different things as well. Yeah. So basically you validated that these water bottles were a thing on Amazon. And then do you remember at what point you needed to decide to start your website? Was it because of the mastermind that you went there or was that always in the plan? It was kind of because

07:05
mastermind and just not being able to sleep at night, knowing that all your eggs were in one basket. You take out half a million dollar loans to fund Amazon and you’re like, if something happens, you’re like, if, because Amazon, just, they do it all the time. They pull your listing because all of a sudden it’s categorized for synthetic urine. And you’re like, how is this? that really happen? Yeah, that happened to one of our products once. And you’re like, how is this synthetic urine?

07:34
And so you’re just like, always at the mercy of Amazon. And so that was when like, was kind of the mastermind, also just because we wanted to sleep better knowing that like, if Amazon, if anything happened, we’d always have like our website and kind of control of our revenue as well. So when you start your own website, though, you have to drive your own traffic. So what was your strategy there? Yeah, at first, we didn’t know. like, we just had like Google set up and we had like kind of the halo effect, honestly, from Amazon of

08:04
people knew us at that point. We had been around for a few years and we had people searching for us and going to our website and stuff. then it was in 2019 that I took the time to learn Facebook ads myself. And that was when we were able to change our revenue from like 99 % Amazon to eventually 50-50 of our revenue was around that time, 2019, when I learned Facebook ads.

08:33
Can we talk about Facebook ads real quick for water bottles specifically? Like what were your ads, like what were your highest converting ads and what was the return on ad spend? Yeah, so honestly a lot of the challenge like when we go into a little bit more, that was like the biggest thing for me when it came to my creatives and my copy for my ads was because like,

08:54
We never ran ads, like ads initially when we first started was like, look at this cool water bottle. It’s BPA free. It’s 32 ounces. Like it’s so cool. And then like, nobody cares. And then eventually like when we had our community and like our differentiator of like what our brand stood for and what we were there to help you achieve in your life. Like all of our ads became that, you know, like our, our copy was like, one of them was like, this water bottle changed my life. And that was like the headline and it’s like a water bottle. And then people start reading.

09:24
And most of our creatives were women holding the water bottles or sharing their experiences and stuff like that. So 99 % of our ads besides our retargeting and bottom of the funnel campaigns were focused on the transformation that our business helped to achieve over the product. So the community came first before the successful Facebook ads? Actually, no, that’s a good question.

09:52
had some good success, mainly because honestly, as being in that mastermind, I learned a lot of just using native content. And so we already had some pretty good reviews and testimonials. And I used those initially advocate for, cause we didn’t launch our community and challenge until 2020. And so all of 2019, I just used like previous customers and their experiences and stuff like that as our ads. And it was testimonials and that sort of thing. Yeah.

10:21
Mainly, and then it was a combination of, we always laughed that we were a water bottle company that made money on straw lids because we sold water bottles, but then that’s where we lost money to acquire the customer, but we would make money because we could upsell them on products like a straw lid, a brush set, a carrying case, all these things that, that’s what turned us profitable from our ads. And so we always just laughed at.

10:47
We’re a water bottle company that makes money on straws. Wait, interesting. the straw lid is literally what it is. It’s a lid with a hole for a straw? Yeah, it looks just like this one. This is one of oldest water bottles. And we’d sell this thing to our plastic versions for whatever. And they were like 70 cents or a dollar and we’d sell them for $7. Interesting. margins are huge and that’s where we end up making money.

11:16
That sounds funny. So the water bottles were actually not not profitable, but then you would upsell them on a bunch of accessories that would make it profitable. Cool. So what was the return on ad spend then before the communities and that sort of thing? Was it just majorly profitable or? Yeah, it was profitable. And as we always said, like if you’re breakeven, you’re winning. And we were stoked because we were really profitable. For us, we needed like a one point

11:44
five to six return on ad spend to break even and we were usually like two to 2.5 return on ad spend. Okay. Just top of the funnel cold traffic was usually what we were. And then when the community came around and we started leveraging that as like a lead acquisition. I didn’t know this when I was writing my business because we were kind of getting close to selling and I was just so busy.

12:08
but like analyzing those campaigns a little bit more. We ran a few and those ones were like four to seven return announcements for that. Did the upselling happen in your email list after they purchased or did you do it during the purchase like as an upsell? On the listing, On the listing we had the upsell options and then also post purchase like right as a we used the zipify one click upsell. So post purchase and then also

12:38
my email flows. I set up my Klaviyo account. Eventually that was like 40 % of our revenue and a lot of it was after they purchased and we took them through a customer journey as well. Nice, nice. Okay, so let’s just jump right to the community part then. How does one build a community? Yeah, so that was the biggest thing. So I kind of explained a little bit earlier like how I was all over the place or we were all over the place with our products like hammocks, backpacks, like we just thought

13:05
We thought we knew our customer. was kind of making the products around me, you know, of like, I am this outdoor girl that like loves to be healthy. But then once we like really kind of started, started getting to know our customers, like that wasn’t who we were actually selling to at all. And I realized like, we kind of hit this pivotal point that we were like, okay, we want to sell our business. But we’re kind of plateauing. Like every year we were growing like really rapidly. And then like 2019, 18, we were like stalling around then.

13:35
And that’s when I like, listened to this one podcast that kind of talked a lot about the relationships of your customers and like, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do was like provide, you know, my brand was built from day one to like help people like remind them that they can do these things and achieve, know, become whatever they wanted to become. But I was like poorly conveying that poorly helping people. I thought I was doing a good job, but I wasn’t. So I spent a lot of time like near the end of 2019, like

14:02
just mapping out our customer and their customer journey of like, okay, this is our customer. This is their before, say after state and the objections that are standing in their way from achieving that. And then I was like, what can I do to help them get from the before state to the after state without them even having to pay us? You know, like just bring them into our world and just help them and get them there without even having to pay us.

14:26
That’s when I was like, okay, I could come up with eBooks, videos, like all these things, like healthy recipes, all these things that I love to do anyways. But I just like couldn’t cause I was like in charge of our marketing or like emails, Clavio, web design, all that kind of stuff. There’s no way I could do it all. I kind of thought of bundling into a challenge. So the whole concept of that was our customer wanted to be healthy, happy, loved, like they want to be seen, heard, appreciated.

14:55
And so I thought of like a 60 day hydration challenge where I could get them in. Of course, like, like drinking water and stuff is like the, the core concept of it. But I broke it down into like many weekly challenges to focus on all those other things as well that they wanted to achieve, like loving themselves, being, you know, healthy eating, moving their bodies, gratitude, all the things beyond just being healthy because in the longterm, like people would come to us.

15:24
for a water bottle, but that’s not exactly, that’s not really what they’re trying to achieve. They’re trying to achieve those deeper things like that. So that was kind of the concept of the challenge. so, as January- So let’s back up, before we get into the challenge, I wanna know that you were selling a bunch of products and you were targeting people like yourself. How did you even figure out that you were targeting the wrong audience? was mainly, we had these few customers that had been around

15:52
Like I feel like from the beginning of the days, even on Amazon, they emailed us and just said how grateful they were. And, and I just like looked at that and I was just like, I’m kind of, I kind of feel like I’ve been making this about me and where I’m like, these are our customers. I, and kind of that first year of running ads on Facebook in 2019, we started getting more customers that weren’t me, you know, like my email lists were growing or it was growing with like these older women. And that’s kind of like how I realized.

16:22
this whole time we were just scared. You know, we trying to know they were older. Did you hop on the phone with them? Were you sending out surveys? Any surveys and feedback? Yeah. Like we would do we would try to do a lot of fun things like on our Instagram or Facebook or try to get them involved and communicate as much as we could. It was very little like our our social media engagement stuff like that was was really little comparatively to like now. But that was kind of like the initial

16:52
feedback we would try to get. And then when we try to send out a hammock email, and also that’s exactly it. Our email marketing was the biggest indicator of what was working and what wasn’t. I’d send out an email about being outdoors and here’s a hammock and stuff. And those always had the poorest response to our audience. And then I’d send out an email about gratitude and stuff like that. those always had a lot more response. when we set up our blog, we finally set up a blog post for our website.

17:22
And those were the blogs that would get comments and people like engaging with and stuff like that. So we could see the interest in what people were doing. And that’s when we decided to delete half of our products and just get rid of them. Interesting. Which ones did you delete like that? The hammocks and that sort of thing? Yeah. Like all of our outdoor stuff, we just got rid of that and just kind of focused in on, you know, this woman that wants to be healthy and not like that. Okay. So it started out as like an outdoors brand and then you just kind of focused in, you found out

17:52
there were older women, and I don’t know what your definition of old is, because I’m old, but let’s just call it over the age of 50, 60 maybe, I don’t know. Well, you’re right, the older women, it’s more just like, I’m more mature, I suppose. And their kids are growing up, but we’d even still have 30 year olds and stuff like that, but are in that next phase of adulthood.

18:18
Okay, and it sounds like those other products probably weren’t selling that well regardless, so it wasn’t really hitting your top line by removing those products. No, no. They were profitable and we loved them and I had such emotional attachments to them. when it came down to it, if we could take that cash and invest it into the products that we’re selling faster, and that was just smart. We were all around to not have to spread ourselves.

18:46
So let’s jump to challenges now. In order to run a challenge, you need to have people to join it. So how do you get people on it in the first place? Yeah, so for us, we had at that time like an email list of like 70,000 people. yeah, because of 2019, legitimately our business had like two phases of like Amazon and then 2019 turned on Facebook ads. And that was when our email list went from like 10,000 to 70,000 in just one year.

19:16
But then in 2020, we used that list to launch the challenge and we had like four or 500 people sign up for that first round. And then it was just a snowball effect from there of just like getting people enrolled to the concept. It was a completely free challenge. So a lot of my clients that I help now are starting from zero with no email list. And we just like run Facebook ads to get them to join the free challenge. And the whole concept of it being free is

19:45
You want the right people, not as many people, but the right people in that group to know, like, and trust you and go through this experience with you as a brand. And then ultimately they become like loyal customers for life. But that was initially how we got ours off the ground. Okay. So to run Facebook ads to join a challenge sounds really expensive for a free challenge. Like I run my own and I know the niche really depends on what it is, but we’re talking like maybe four to $6 per lead, at least in my industry, which is

20:14
Right. It’s kind of like ecommerce. I’m kind of curious with your clients that are starting from zero, how much are they paying per lead? Right now we’re getting around $3. Then the average Yeah, I think that’s kind of the average three to $4 for for ecommerce products. But um, and then like my what I tell them is you want at least 100 numbers, because you have it’s like a game of percentages. I tell them sure, I’ve like you have the percentage of people that are lurkers.

20:43
the percentage of people that engage, the percentage of people that just like forget, you know, that they even join. So you like, at least a hundred gives you a good like base to test the concept and see if it’s really what your audience wants.

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22:08
So if you’re running these for an e-commerce product and then the challenge is related to the product that you sell, but it might not directly convert into products right away. So you’re kind of taking this leap of faith then, let’s say you’re paying, it sounds like 300 bucks to run this challenge, right? For a hundred people, let’s say. So the goal is to just build up your email list and your nurture list, right? And then…

22:36
Can you just walk me through maybe one of your challenges? Like what was one of your ads look like to get them to join the challenge? Yeah, so for ours initially, it was it was just a like a customer kind of sharing her experience with using our water bottles and our products. And you know that being a customer of Living Flee was much more than just you know, getting hydrated and kind of just sharing her whole spreading ads is like just sharing her story. They go from that ad to the landing page that we build.

23:05
And then opt in. And that was the biggest thing that I like to kind of kick myself in the butt for is, is I didn’t realize that these were profitable. It is a much longer customer journey. And so that’s why when I was running our business and doing these ads, I didn’t just throw a budget at it because we were like getting ready to sell and I just didn’t realize that. But my cold traffic campaigns,

23:31
would convert within seven days to a two return on ad spend. And so I knew it was profitable. I could scale it, but these ones, you put money at it and it takes like 30, 60, sometimes 90 days for that full return on ad spend to like come to fruition. But at that point for us, it was like between like four or five return on ad spend. know now, um, the new owners have even seen 7 % or seven return on ad spend with using the challenge as a lead acquisition. So it was much longer.

24:00
So it’s like, it’s kind of that risk of getting them, of putting your money towards that and getting people into your community. Yeah. All right. So, so walk me through it. So the ad is literally just a story where a water bottle changed their life. They click on that, takes them to a landing page. What’s on the landing page? Just the benefits of the challenge, essentially. Like, so a lot of, like we’re doing an outdoors workout outdoors challenge for one of my clients.

24:25
And you just go to the landing page and it’s just like, welcome. And you talk about the philosophy of the company, try to get people, try to get people that share your same values of like not just a fitness company or water bottle company, we’re a company that helps you live your life with infinite possibilities, or we’re a company that’s like all about being wild outside, know, like sharing the philosophy of who you are, that’s different from, you know, the water bottles or a fitness company type thing. And then like, here’s the challenge, like it’s free to join, you know, here’s

24:54
we make challenge packets. So when they register, they get this packet that has the pledge card Like a physical packet? Just a PDF. Or a downloadable PDF for them. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So they’ll get that that has their pledge card, calendar, all the information. So they register for free get that packet. Then we walk them through the steps of, know, step one, join a Facebook group. Step two, make your pledge, like introduce yourself to the community. Step three,

25:25
um, buyer products, you know, we usually, but, um, we usually at the end of those steps would, uh, try to get them to convert as well. And a lot of them would initially, but it’s just like step one, step two, step three, uh, this product would help you. It’s not mandatory. Like obviously our water bottles were helpful in a 60 day hydration challenge. And like for our workout outdoors challenge, we have products that help you work out outdoors.

25:52
And then like different challenges that we do, or like we have a pet company and we sell the pet products that help you have a better like bond and relationship with your pets. So a lot of times it’s not the highest conversion from like a top of the funnel, cold traffic campaign to product listing, but you can get some right then and then they go through the whole customer journey and that’s when it cleans up the rest. So let me just kind of break down what you just said. So landing page, you tell them the benefits of the challenge and then they sign up.

26:22
you you launch a Facebook group, private Facebook group, it sounds like you them introduce themselves. What’s this pledge like I promise to take part in this challenge and fulfill the whatnot? Okay. Essentially, my thought with that is just like an icebreaker. Like sometimes people join, they don’t know what to say. So it’s just like, here’s your first post written for you. Got it. Got it. Okay. And if they don’t do it, do you encourage them to do it later? Or? Yeah, yeah.

26:50
But it’s not like mandatory. You can still participate and win prizes and everything. But the whole idea behind it is that like some they join and it’s like, what do I say? You know, you’re just like, here’s what you say. Introduce yourself. right. Oh, I like that. I like that. OK. And then you say, you know, for this hydration challenge, using your example, you need a water bottle. Here’s ours. You don’t have to use it. But, you know, if you still need one, buy this one. Yeah.

27:19
And then after that, the challenge begins, presumably, Right. OK, walk me through running the challenge. Let’s use your hydration one since you’ve probably run it a million times. Yeah. So what’s day one like? So day one, we have like a whole kickoff party. Every week, so birds eye view real quick, we have weekly challenges with weekly live videos. And then on a day to day basis, that was the best part for me is I was just too busy to like post and do things every single day.

27:48
I was one of the super engaged Facebook group, but I was like, I just don’t have the time. So for me and my requirements was pretty, it was just to show up once a week for the live video. And it was like, and then like one post to like ask them like a roll call to like submit their calendars to show that they were participating. But, but day one we’d have a kickoff party and like,

28:11
we’d have is scheduled in a Facebook event. People would come, we’d introduce us, the brand. We were always transparent that we were a brand. know, you know, we are living from, this is what we stand for. This is me. This is why I started the company. This is like what our values, everything like that. This is why hydration is so important. This is what you can expect for the next 60 days. Meet with us once a week, all that kind of stuff. And then we like give out prizes. We make it super fun and like have timers that go off. And if you are the most recent comment, you win.

28:40
prizes. So there’s like always very fine, but always like the way to introduce yourself and your values and what you stand for and what products you have to offer and what they can expect. And then from there, we just announce like the weekly challenges. right. So what’s the first weekly challenge? So literally you’re just getting on Facebook live once a week, it sounds like, right? Work-wise. Yeah. All right. So can you just walk me through one of these challenges? the hydration, what is like the first challenge of that?

29:10
So I always tell people that your first weekly challenge should be something that helps your customers get set up for success for the whole challenge. like whether that be like we have a meditation challenge and it’s like make your space, you know, this week we challenge you to like create the space that you will like meditate in for 60 days or however long or ours was to find like fruit infused water recipes. So like changing from soda and juices and stuff to water can be boring and hard.

29:40
For some people, so this week we challenged you to find some like yummy, natural things you can add that will kind of make it more delicious. So that was always like the very first week every, I personally ran 10, 60 day challenges before we sold. And now I think they’re on a 12 or something now, but every single time was the same one for the first week to help them like get set up for the whole time. cool. And then, you go on live and then you mentioned something like roll call. Is that like just,

30:09
having people tell you what they’ve done or? Yeah, so I would go live every Sunday evening and every Sunday morning I’d do a post that says, roll call, like share. Because in that challenge packet we talked about earlier, I had a calendar for them so they could check off that they drink their water. And so on Sunday mornings, I said, you know, in the comments here, post a picture of your calendar to be eligible for prizes. So it like did two things that like helped me easily pick winners because

30:38
instead of going through all the posts and stuff and trying to figure out like who was who was doing it. They could tell me right there and then to give them that weekly accountability that they knew was coming. Cool. So they’re like, okay, this is going to come up. I should be drinking my water and stuff like that. And were the people just naturally communicating with each other on the Facebook group or? That was the thing that like blew my mind. And what I’ve seen in like all these challenge groups that I’ve helped create is

31:05
is that like, if you can get the people, if you can get people that are on like the similar or same journey in that group, going through a shared experience, the conversations just happen naturally, which is why I didn’t have to like do all these posts and like facilitate the conversations as much, because they would come in and say like, oh, I’m just trying to drink water because I want to lose weight. I want to give up soda, all the, whatever their reason was, they’d share those reasons. And then the other awesome thing that

31:34
was unintentional, but worked out so well, was that by changing up the weekly focus, 60 days, they have to their water every day for six days, but the weekly focuses would kind of change, or they would change. And that changed the conversation and kept things fresh. Because six days is a long time, and people might lose interest of just doing the same thing for 60 days. But every week, we’d be like,

31:58
gratitude or healthy eating and so like people be like, oh I love healthy eating, here’s all my recipes or I love gratitude and so the conversations just naturally always happened because the topics were being mixed up by just the weekly challenges. All so this goes way beyond water bottles obviously right? So essentially you get them in with the hydration challenge that they’re signing up for but really it’s more of like a lifestyle thing right? You talk about gratitude, you talk about healthy eating.

32:27
exercise maybe, and it just transforms into this, you how to live a better life challenge. Yeah, yeah, essentially. Exactly. And that’s what was that’s what was so fulfilling honestly was from day one on Amazon. That’s what I wanted the brand to stand for. And that’s what I wanted to help people do. But I just never could. I never like figured it out until I was able to do this challenge. And then that’s when like, honestly, it was kind of hard for me to sell it at some points because I was like,

32:55
This is so fulfilling. I feel like I’m changing people’s lives and helping them achieve these things. And the stories that would happen after 60 days, it was well beyond that they just drank water. was that their whole confidence has changed. Our whole life has changed. And I was able to actually make the impact that I wanted to with my business, which was really cool. All right. So, I guess a question that the listeners are going to have is I saw something super boring.

33:25
how do I develop a challenge around that?

33:29
I know, let’s say I sell office supplies or something. Help me come up with a challenge for that. Yeah, so it all starts with your business. Like every business needs to have a story of what you stand for. I think like that’s the brand. Otherwise, you’re just a product business and that’s just not going to go far. water bottle business could have had any story, you know, like any mission or purpose.

33:54
but mine specifically was to remind people that they could do anything and become anything. So I think starting there is the most important thing of what your brand is, if it’s an office business, and you wanna support aspiring entrepreneurs that are working in the office day to day or whatever, and you’re gonna help them with mindset or something like that. You become this mindset business that is all about motivating and encouraging, educating your customers.

34:24
So starting with your brand and what your brand stands for, your values and like what you actually want to achieve with it goes well beyond any product that you choose. If you got that right, you can do any product, you know, and then you just align that mission and those values with that product and you can create that challenge. And then of course, your products can fit into your challenge. Like if you’re doing an office supply and you’re selling paper or something like that.

34:52
organization. exactly. And you’re going to do a challenge that helps people be organized, get focused, get crystal clear on their goals as an entrepreneur, or even just a business professional on like what they want to achieve. Then that’s how you can take any boring product. But as long as you have like the brand and the story that you want to like align it with. Yeah, I like that. And then once people join your challenge, they’re

35:19
like your company name, like they might not be ready to buy like a hammock or something, right? But they’ll remember your brand. And so when you do send out emails or run ads, they’ll remember that challenge they took part in and they’ll want to shop from you, right? Like I’m not going to buy a water bottle from Nalgene anymore once I’ve gone through one of your challenges. Exactly. Exactly. Cause then you’ve, you’ve done more for them than any brand. Like that’s the biggest thing is that a lot of brands, a lot of just companies don’t.

35:47
That’s why I make sure it’s free. The whole challenge is free. I’d rather get them in and get them into my world and learn how much we care about their experience and then lock them into any product launch. Because at that point, like you said, we really could have launched anything. I want to keep it along their journey. And was also just a side note of the best thing ever was that we never knew what products to launch until we had this community.

36:16
And they were always like, we want this, this, this, this, and this color and this size. And so like everything was so much easier and just like, okay, we’ll launch that now. And then it wasn’t a flop because you know who your customer is and what they want now. Right. That’s cool. I like that. So do all these challenges have to be so long? You mentioned yours are like days. That’s a long time, but do they have to be longer on the longer end in general?

36:41
So there’s pros and cons for sure. And a newer brand just starting out, I just say do a shorter one, like 21 days is the shortest I’d say to like 30 days, just because you want to like test the concept, prove it, get some social proof and use that to like build. But in 60 days, it just take a while to like get all that built. But for me, the pros of a 60 day is one, the transformation is much deeper for the customer. So you get the testimonials and the stories.

37:10
And the loyalty that you build out of that is like next to nothing. It’s just really cool. And then two, as a business owner, it’s so much easier for it to manage because the hardest or the most time consuming part of running it is launching it. And that’s like, it’s really great because you can get some more leads and everything.

37:40
Honestly, I loved launching them, but then once I launched, I was like, okay, I got like nice to kind of just let it run and let it like nurture my customers. And I could show up once a week and I had other parties too, but like that was like check. And then I can move on to the next big project. So it was really, really nice for me as a business owner to not have to like redo it all the time. And then just the stories that would happen and transformations and it goes by so fast.

38:09
like so fast and you’d be surprised at how many people stay along for the whole 60 days. Like, um, Are you emailing them every day by the way? Just. Have I done them every day? No, no, no. Are you emailing them every day? Are you contacting them every day? No, just once week. Just once week. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So I, we’d have our live videos on Sundays and on Mondays I’d send a recap of like, here’s what happened. Here’s one. Here’s the new weekly focus. Um, all that kind of stuff. Okay. So correspondence wise, it’s actually prep prepping. doesn’t.

38:38
I mean, coming with the idea is the hardest part, but executing it, it’s once a week live and then it’s maybe a couple of emails in the beginning to get them set up, but after that it’s just one email a week? Yeah, exactly. I set up a flow that I would just duplicate. So I set up one time and that’s the whole part that I help my clients do is conceptualize the strategy, then build out their landing pages, the emails. And then once you have those backend emails when somebody registers, you can just keep duplicating it.

39:08
for future rounds. I like this. Okay, so it doesn’t even sound like that much work. No, mean, that’s the thing. Coming up with it is the hard part. what to do. with it and building it. So for me, I built out my assets over 10 challenges, so 600 days. So like the challenge packet, my landing pages, and made it look as professional as it is over that much time. But that’s how I tell people to get it set up is like that.

39:37
And that can take some time to have it look as professional. And I didn’t do that straight out of the gate. It was just done over time and revised and changed and optimized to what it became. But then after that, that was the best part because we were just a small team of three people. I just, couldn’t have something that took up a lot of my time, but then also just provided immense value to our customers and didn’t really take much time.

40:08
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40:37
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.

40:48
So let’s enumerate what you need here. It sounds like there’s this challenge packet to get them started, right? And then for a 60-day challenge, that’s five emails and an autoresponder, essentially, right? Like a flow. Yeah, five to seven. Seven is usually the sweet spot. Five to seven, then you’re just going on live once a week and getting people on, you’re having conversations and whatnot, and maybe the next day you can do another post that just outlines the accomplishments that people had.

41:16
Like I’m sure there’s more to it, but that in a nutshell is the preparation that you need. And the landing pages. Sure. to get people on. And then occasionally not for all the challenges, but some challenges, I provide like weekly templates. So if it’s like a healthy eating, here’s a template for you to keep track. So then, but not all challenges. Some people like them and some people don’t use them. Like if you have a group of men, a lot of times they don’t like to use templates and stuff.

41:46
I don’t know. But like women love to color them and decorate them like creative and stuff like that. And so so there’s just like the small assets. But yeah, in a nutshell, that’s pretty much the gist of it. Cool. Okay, I can see this working really well builds community and then you can actually probably use these stories and future Facebook ads too. Right? I mean, people are telling their stories. Okay. That’s the other huge thing was that I was in charge of our marketing.

42:15
And I was like, what should I write? What blog article about this? Should I do this? And as soon as I had this community, was like all of my content was made for me. And that was like the best part. was like, they became my emails. They became my organic social posts. They became all my ads. Like all of marketing just became easy for me because they made my content. And before this group, we just like, we begged people for user generated content.

42:43
like, you please send a video or a picture? And we’ll send you something and after this, like, we had like, we didn’t even tap into like a 10th of the content that was in there before we sold. Yeah, no, that’s amazing. I guess this can be kind of intimidating for someone starting from ground zero, right? Because I guess you’re putting down three to 500 bucks for something that you might not see paid dividends for potentially a month or so or 60 days, however long the challenges, right?

43:11
Right, right. And that’s why I say like for new brands start off as a shorter challenge, not like seven to 10, like more like 21 to 30, because you still want to like go through a whole experience with them, excuse me, and like the weekly challenges, if you only have like one or two, like people don’t get the rhythm of what you’re trying to establish. So like within like a month’s time period, people are like, oh, there’s like, this is the cadence, this is like, they go live weekly, they do all these things. So like,

43:39
a newer brand starting off shorter, but still enough time to kind of show them what you’re trying to achieve. I know for me, when I first started doing these lives, I’d always be like, okay, what if no one shows up? What if no one shows up? What if no one shows up? And I remember my first lives that I did, I think I got like five people to show up or maybe less than that. And I was like, oh, there’s only five people watching me. How did you get over that part of it?

44:06
Yeah, that’s a great question. So my boyfriend made fun of me because I would try to go live when nobody was going to be on. At first, I nervous. I was so nervous to go live. And then he’s like, no, you need to tell them and set a schedule so people come. So the first few times, was kind of happier if it was a little bit less people to kind of warm up. But then once I set my schedule, like 7 PM Eastern Sunday, that’s how it was like a year and a half, two years or whatever.

44:37
And originally at first we only had like 10 people or so on the live videos. like, to be honest, you just treat those 10 people like they’re like the best thing ever. Like you didn’t say them by name, like, oh my gosh, hey, Kim, thanks for so much for showing up. How are you? And that was the biggest thing is that like, I took a lot of time because like, I really did care about these women a lot of just like getting to know their names, their families, their stories and stuff like that. And so

45:05
Once they feel like, like I said, our community wanted to feel seen and heard, that was a big part of it. They felt like they were part of a conversation building our brand with us, learning from us and like being a part of it. That just started growing exponentially. But at first, like it was totally okay. There was just 10 of them because they were, they just became like your 10 best friends, you know? then eventually people catch wind of that and like see how much you actually really care. And like they want to come in and like talk to a brand and

45:33
be a part of something too and be part of the conversation. So then it just grows from there. But just treating those first five to 10 people like they are your best friends and really caring. It’s it fun. Then get to conversation with them. They’ll stay online with you and it’s a good time. Let’s set some expectations here. So if you’re doing a live and let’s say you get 100 people signed up, like how long does it, I imagine this is like a snowball thing, right? After a while, people share the challenge because they love it so much. What

46:01
what timeframe would you start seeing? What time is the inflection point? Like, what was it for you when things started really taking off? Yeah, I always say hundreds, like a really good base level just to see, like it was like, cause we, but we started off with, and that’s just what I’m seeing from like other groups. Cause we started off with like three to 500 for something in that range. And even at that point we had just a few people showing up live, but I feel like as soon as that first,

46:30
few weeks of just three to 500 people and they started getting the cadence of like what was going on. That’s when it like snowballed. Like, so I always tell people three to 500 people is such a sweet spot of just like, that’s really like all you need to like have this like mass power behind this group that you can like take all of those benefits that we talked about from.

46:53
because that was like my very first challenge. like the first few weeks, people are like, what’s going on? Like what are these five videos? And then by the end of the 60 days with just three to 500 people, like it was this full community showing up, offering feedback and everything like that. So it really doesn’t take a lot of people at all. I just think getting started at least a hundred, at minimum. And you use the same group each time, Facebook group each time. So it just gets bigger over time, right? That’s the best thing is a lot of, a of people have asked me like, do I need a group for like,

47:23
my brand, and then I grew for the challenge. And it’s like, no, you just need one group because it is your brand. You know, this like this is what you’re bringing. This is the value you’re bringing to your customers. And so everything that I wanted to everything that people try to achieve from a branded community, like customer feedback or testimonials are our product feedback and stuff like that, always achieved there. And, and so you just keep that same group and builds. And then the people that had

47:51
um done the challenges before they know exactly what’s going on and they help indoctrinate the next round of people and they’re like this is what’s going on you know Alicia goes live once a week they have these challenges and so that’s what it became easier because I had my emails to help guide them but I also had this army of people that were just like this is what’s happening welcome yeah I love it welcome and Alicia where can people find more about these I know you help people do these challenges

48:20
I imagine you have a, do you have a challenge that helps you create a challenge? I thought about that. Um, but no, no, we haven’t done that yet. Um, but it’s a challenge makers.com is, um, and so I have like a course outlines kind of stuff, like all the steps of building it, uh, with the templates of like the emails when people like sign up, what usually what we had said, what converted for us, um, and what’s working for their clients as well as like landing page.

48:50
templates, everything like that, the challenge packet templates. it’s all there. Well, thanks a lot for coming on. I think this is a fantastic idea. And I know a lot of people listening, at least to my show, they have like Amazon brands. They were much like you. They’re just selling kind of products that are kind of on the same umbrella, so to speak. But they’re in reality just to spare products. And they’re trying to create a brand around that. And I think this is a great way to jumpstart that for sure. So thank you. I appreciate it.

49:18
Thank you so much for coming on the show and then I will share your contact information on your website in the show notes. Awesome. Sounds good. Thank you.

49:28
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, running a challenge for my eCommerce store is definitely on my list of to-dos, and I’m actually a firm believer in this strategy, and I’ll report on the results when I’m done. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 425. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for eCommerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div.

49:58
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store,

50:28
Head on over to MyWifeQuarterJob.com and sign up for my free 6-day mini course. Just type in your email and they’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

00:59
I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my ecommerce store and it depended on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy.

01:27
Let’s say want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts that I released with my partner Tony, and unlike this one where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce,

01:53
The Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:14
Welcome to the MyWifeCouterJob podcast. Now it’s been a while since I’ve given an update about Bumble Bee Linens, which is my e-commerce store. So I thought that I’d dedicate some time today to tell you what’s been going on over in handkerchief land. Now, first off, from an operation standpoint, Bumble Bee Linens is kind of at a crossroads right now. Living in the Bay Area of California, the labor costs are at an all time high. In addition, rents over here for office space have been skyrocketing like crazy.

02:44
Now our lease runs out in January of 2023. And just to give you an idea, our rent is set to go up nearly 28 % from when we signed our last lease. 28%. That’s ridiculous, right? Not to mention that our current landlords are easily the worst landlords that we’ve ever had ever. Whenever anything is broken, they do not respond. They do not pay for anything and they don’t really care about their tenants at all.

03:13
And I just have to say this, I California is one of the worst places to start a business. Now, if my kids weren’t in school here, and if the weather wasn’t so darn good, and if we didn’t have friends here, we would probably be out of here from a business perspective. And in fact, my wife, I don’t know if I mentioned this on the pod before, but we actually looked into moving to Texas, Washington, and Las Vegas for this exact reason. And don’t get me started on California taxes and laws. Right now, we are actually looking to purchase an office building

03:42
so that we’re no longer dependent on anyone else for rent ever again. Now, first off, before I continue, I just wanna give a quick shout out to Mike Jackness for what I’m about to tell you. And this conversation, it was a casual conversation that I had with Mike since we’re speaking together at the Sell and Scale Summit next month. But what Mike told me could save me hundreds of thousands of dollars in the coming years. So Mike, if you are listening to this, I owe you one, buddy. All right, so here’s what Mike told me.

04:11
Lots of e-commerce store owners are buying their own warehouses right now because of a tax benefit called the Opportunity Zone Program. By the way, before I go on, I just want to say that I’m not a tax professional, so make sure that you do your own research before you take what I tell you today as gospel. Not a tax professional. Anyway, okay, back to the Opportunity Zone Program. The Opportunity Zone Program is a government program that allows people to invest in distressed areas in the U.S. with a huge tax break.

04:40
Now in our case, the office building that we’re looking at is on the fringe of an opportunity zone. I guess the definition of a distressed area is kind of up for debate and it probably just changes depending on where you’re located. this location isn’t bad at all. We scoped out the property, looks pretty good. Meanwhile, you get the following tax benefits. All right, so listen up here because I often get asked this question, like how to avoid paying taxes. This is one way to do that. When you…

05:08
buy a property in an opportunity zone, you can actually defer your taxable income from any gains that you make from your investment. So I’m just going to kind of enumerate these first and I’ll give you some examples. You get a step up in basis for any capital gains invested into your opportunity zone building. And then your basis increased by 10 % if you hold it for five years and an additional 5 % if you hold it for seven years. And again, I’ll explain this all with a full example in just a second.

05:37
But basically you can exclude up to 15 % of your gains if you hold onto the property for seven years. And here’s the best part, it gets better. The best part is that you get a permanent tax exclusion of your gains if you hold your property for 10 years. Basically you don’t need to pay any capital gains tax on the property appreciation if you hold it for 10 years, which is crazy. All right, so if you guys didn’t follow me.

06:05
This might be confusing and admittedly I actually had to read over the rules many times before I could understand it. So what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna explain the tax benefits with an example and I’ll go slowly because once again, it took me a while to get it. And by the way, before I go on, you don’t actually need to buy a building in an opportunity zone to get this tax benefit. There’s actually opportunity funds out there that you can invest in as well. let’s wrap this up with an example here. Let’s say that you make $100 and

06:34
profit from your business, stocks, or whatever. You make some gain that’s 100 bucks. Now if you invest that $100 into your opportunity zoned building, you can actually defer paying tax on that money. Now if you hold that investment for 10 years, your basis is increased by 15%, which effectively reduces your taxable gains to $85 instead of 100. Basically you get a 15 % off of your tax basis.

07:03
Now let’s just throw some numbers in the mix here. I know I probably shouldn’t be doing podcast math, but I’m going to try to do it here so you guys can follow. Let’s say you buy this property and it appreciates $100 in the 10 years that you own it. Well, if you decide to sell after 10 years, you will pay zero taxes on the appreciation. So essentially investing in an opportunity zone property will save you 15 % on your taxes.

07:31
and you’ll pay no taxes on any gains that your property will make in 10 years. This is pretty amazing. So if any of you guys are looking or even considering buying your own office building, consider looking for an opportunity zone as long as you’re in the U.S. All these things obviously apply just to the U.S.

07:51
Okay, so anyway, Jen and I put out an offer for an opportunity zone building and I hope it goes through. We haven’t heard back yet because you can never tell with the Bay Area. I think like three months ago, my wife and I, put a bid for an office building. It was a not a small building. It was 4000 square feet. We’re talking seven figures here. And we put a competitive offer in and then the winning bid ended up going for 10 % over the asking price.

08:20
And it was an all cash offer, no contingencies as is. Now this is normal for residential property, but for an office property, this is actually pretty unusual. Anyway, I’ll let you guys know in an update, maybe in a subsequent podcast, whether we get this building or not, but I hope so. All right, so what else is going on here? A couple of months ago, my wife and my daughter went on a mother daughter trip to South Korea and

08:47
It’s rare for us to not travel together, but it was a great trip and they really bonded on that trip. I’m not going to talk about the trip. While my wife was gone without me, I actually started going into the Bumble Bee Linens office every single day. And normally I don’t go in because my wife handles operations and I handle marketing. Incidentally, if you’re working together with your wife, that’s actually the best way to stay married. If you guys kind of overlap in your business duties, you’ll probably start to fight and whatnot. Anyway, so I largely stay away from the

09:17
because operations is his domain. And here’s what I have to say about that. Sometimes when you’ve been doing things the exact same way for a long time, it becomes a norm, and it’s tough to make any changes to like the standard protocol that you’ve established. And this is often why businesses hire outside consultants to make a business more efficient. When you’re in the business day to day, it can be hard to see things from 50,000 feet. Anyway,

09:46
When I went into work that week, I actually took the time to fix some of the inefficiencies that I saw. And first off, before I go on with what these were, I just want to say this is probably largely my fault. Whenever my wife asks me to do something, especially when it comes to tech and coding, I’ll often respond with, all right, so what’s the priority of the change? Here is what’s on my plate right now. How urgent is this? And with anything that is process related,

10:15
it’s really easy to put things on the back burner. Like let’s say my wife wants a way to do something a little bit more efficient, but it’s not like a fire that needs to be put out right away, right? It’s really easy to put that stuff on the back burner. I actually have a term for this. I call it business debt. So for example, I’m actually sitting on lots of code for Bumblebee linens that works okay, but it’s ugly. Now in the interest of just getting something working,

10:43
I took a couple of shortcuts and wrote code that I would probably be ashamed to show any other programmer. Now, if you’re a coder, you probably know what I mean. When I was at my full-time job, sometimes I would agonize over tweaking my code to provide the most efficient and elegant solution out there, right? It was more than just getting to work. It had to be maintainable. It had to work elegantly and had to be fast. But in business, sometimes I don’t have time for that.

11:09
Sure, you might plan on fixing things at some later point, which never ever comes, and this is what I call engineering debt. Now with business processes, it’s actually not that different. When you don’t get that many orders early on, and some of you guys who are listening to this, maybe you don’t get that many orders right now, it’s okay to be inefficient, pack stuff and ship it by hand. It’s okay not to automate in the beginning because it’s probably not that painful yet, right? But.

11:34
At some point, you’ll probably need to make things more efficient to free up your mind and your time to do other things. Anyway, so while my wife was out, I thought that I would surprise her by automating a lot of things that she may or may not have asked for. And even though I hang on that woman’s every word, sometimes I may not have heard her correctly. So here’s what I did while she was gone. And some of you guys listening to this might think this is a major risk, but I think I was pretty considerate with what I changed and, you know.

12:04
what things need to change. I just want to say this, with our business, it’s a little different than a traditional e-comm because we do personalization and we’re in the wedding industry. One of our biggest problems is prioritizing orders that go out. So for example, we might get a series of orders with different shipping rates. Some of these orders might require personalization, which takes up to five business days. Some people might have special deadlines. And so,

12:31
it can be difficult to prioritize which orders need to be processed first and which orders absolutely need to go out like today, the present day. Sometimes people have special comments that need to be processed and taken into consideration. And so I put together a dashboard that just basically puts all the rules for prioritization into code. Basically, here’s a list of orders that must go out today. Here’s a list of orders that must be stitched today.

13:00
Here’s a list of orders with special comments that need to be processed early. Here’s a list of orders that need to be combined. Sometimes people place orders, multiple orders in like the same day, or maybe like the next day kind of spaced apart and you need to combine those orders so that people can save on shipping. Anyway, here’s what I come to realize after running this e-commerce business for 15 years now. People are careless. Lots of people just type in their address wrong.

13:28
Some people make spelling errors on personalization. I’ve had people spell their names wrong, you know, on personalization. We make sure that they double to have them double check their personalization before entering the order through, but still mistakes happen. And when this does happen, you can’t process anything unless you hear from them. Right. So what do do with these orders? Sometimes you’ll reach out to these people and you won’t hear from them. And then these orders are in limbo. Right. And

13:57
You know, sometimes you forget to email them again if they haven’t responded. Sometimes you forget to call them. So this is what I put into the code. Now the website automatically emails people on a regular basis with a cron job for people who are technical and listening to this to remind them that they need to respond. So basically it takes the burden away from a human and puts it on a machine. The dashboard also indicates when the customer needs to be called again. Let’s say you send out two emails with no response then

14:26
that that order will be annotated with, please call this person over the phone. I also took the time to revamp our inventory system. Our business is different than a lot of other e-commerce businesses because we do personalization. And inventory can be a bit of a mess the way we currently have things set up. Like if I were to start all over, we probably wouldn’t have done things this way, but let me just tell you what our inventory issue is. Basically, when someone chooses a personalized handkerchief,

14:53
they can actually choose from a variety of hankies when they want to monogram it. Okay, but we also sell these hankies in sets of three that are blank. And in the past, there was no real automated way to reconcile inventory from the personalized side from these sets of three easily. And also, I think anyone who runs like a, certainly in a textile business, we often encounter irregular or defective merchandise that isn’t necessarily reflected in the inventory count. So let’s say,

15:23
you pull something and you it might have like a run in the fabric or a mark on it it’s unsellable but you need a way to account for that in the inventory.

15:34
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

16:02
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

16:32
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

16:42
Anyway, so the upshot is I coded up a special inventory system for our store alone. And I don’t want to bore you with all the details, but the key takeaway here is that every now and then you got to step aside and fix some of the inefficiencies with your business. Your business, if you’ve been running it for a while, probably has a lot of process debt. And it’s actually going to make a huge difference and clear your head if you just fix some of these changes.

17:09
Here are couple of miscellaneous things that I’ve implemented with Bumblebee Linens, moving much of the Google ad spend over to Google Performance Max. Now, if you don’t know what Performance Max is, it’s Google’s latest advertising platform that is meant to take your advertising burden off of you. So basically it’s a black box. You feed a product some copy and it does the rest through machine learning. Now, personally, I hate using anything that is fully automated, like if I’m paying money for it, because I’m an engineer.

17:38
Performance max provides very little visibility in what Google is doing But I’ve been running it for several months now, and it’s actually doing quite well So I’m gonna let it slide, but I’m cautiously optimistic and I’m a pretty skeptical guy at heart. So for example Let’s say Google is about to miss earnings on Wall Street What is stopping them from like dialing down the conversions from this invisible black box of an advert advertising platform just to make a little bit of money?

18:07
and meet earnings. Google literally gives you no metrics or data, and so you wouldn’t be able to prove a thing. And this is the biggest problem that I have with Google AI taking over the world. Google basically tells you nothing about your ads except for your return on ad spend. And it’s great for the clueless user, but it’s really bad for people who know what they’re doing. So perhaps someday, I’ll just make a prediction here, Google and Facebook will probably have such good AI that it’s going to put advertising agencies out of business. Who knows?

18:37
Anyway, the other thing I’ve been working on is Google basically forced me to move all my Google campaigns over to Performance Max, which actually inadvertently forced me to optimize my Google shopping feed. Now, I’d actually put off optimizing my feed. So let me just tell you what this feed is. Basically, in order for Google to display your ads and the search results, you have to upload this document called a feed that outlines all of your products, images, copy, and that sort of thing. And the right way to do this, like most tools, if you’re using a shopping cart, will create this for you.

19:07
but it’s very inefficient. And in order to get more traffic and sales, you actually have to optimize your feed. I’ll talk about what that is in just a sec, but I’ve been putting this off for the longest time because it is a pain in the butt to rewrite custom keyword stuff titles for your feed. And literally you have to go into every product and rewrite it, do keyword research and figure out what people are searching for and stuff that in the title instead of the regular title for your product. And we have like 500 SKUs. And so it’s the most tedious work ever.

19:37
But basically I bit the bullet and optimized it while I was sick with COVID on vacation with my family. Not sure if I told you guys about that, but in May, I went to my conference cellar summit in Florida, shook hands with everyone, gave people hugs, went massless, and I didn’t get COVID. But then I go to Orlando with my family. I’m super careful. I wear masks outdoors and indoors, and then I get the stupid disease. Anyway, I was actually the only one in my family who got COVID on the trip, so I actually stayed isolated back at the hotel.

20:06
and I literally had nothing to do but work on the business, so I bit the bullet. And I optimized all the listings for Google Shopping. I literally had nothing to do for four days, so that’s what I did. This year, I’ve also focused a lot of my efforts on SEO. After getting hit with a Google algorithm update in 2020, where I lost almost 50 % of my traffic, I decided to bite the bullet and go all in on SEO. And today, I’m happy to report.

20:34
that Bumblebee Linens is at the highest organic traffic rate that it’s ever been. From the lows in 2021, traffic is up over 5x. Now, if I could just solve some of my inventory issues, I could actually see some of the gains from my SEO. But overall, terms of inventory, it’s been a challenging year for our shop. We survived 2020 and 2021 with almost no issues in inventory, but 2020 actually has been pretty hard for us. Now, I don’t want to ramble too long here.

21:04
since a lot of you guys probably are not that interested in my business. So let’s just end with some key takeaways, shall we? Okay, takeaway number one, with real estate prices getting lower and rents skyrocketing, might make sense for you to get your own building. So do a search for opportunity zones in your area so you can see if you can get a killer tax break. Takeaway number two, revisit your business debt. If there are processes that you have in place that are super manual or error prone, it’s time to revisit them.

21:33
Do not wait too long because it’s going to come back and bite you in the end. Takeaway number three, have someone who is not involved in the day-to-day of your business just kind of look over your shoulder and point out ways that you could do things more efficiently. And then takeaway number four, isolate yourself in a hotel room for four days and you’ll be amazed at how much work gets done. Okay, quick update on the property. It is now three days later after the initial recording of this episode.

22:02
And where we left off, we had put down a bid that was slightly under asking and we were waiting for the owner to get back to us. Now this property has been on the market for 31 days at this point and we were pretty confident that our bid would win. But over the weekend, the owner of the property miraculously got two new offers. Now one was a lowball offer, which the owner ignored, but the other offer came in from overseas for all cash at the asking price, which was higher than our bid.

22:30
Yeah, so not only was this bit higher than ours, but it was all cash. However, the buyer was not in the US, had never seen the property at all. And I guess in the minds of the seller, there was a greater chance the deal would fall through. So at this point, Jen and I had to decide how badly we wanted the property. And after, you know, thinking about it for, I don’t know, I’d say half a day, we ultimately decided to raise our bid to asking. And then we went with all cash. Now,

22:59
This was a very nerve-racking decision, but we are now the proud new owners of an Opportunity Zone property. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now that we have the property, we have to do the part that is not so fun, which is the paperwork to get all this going, and I’ll keep you posted on how much of a pain it is to get this all set up. For more information about this episode, go to mywagputterjob.com slash episode 420. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants.

23:28
You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform.

23:56
and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now we talk about how I these tools in my blog and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywebquaterjob.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.

00:27
But before we begin, want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy.

00:55
Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought piece of cake and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. If you’re in the e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. This is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

01:25
SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my ecommerce store and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript which is my text message provider. Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is the tool easy to use but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that but it’s priceable too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

01:54
So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S E R I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this one where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app.

02:24
Now onto the show.

02:31
Welcome to the My Wife, Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Spencer Jan on the show. Now, Spencer is the founder of Solo Stove, which is a company that he and his brother started and bootstrapped to a $2 billion valuation and multiple eight figure exits. Now Spencer and I, recently met at the e-commerce fuel conference in Norfolk and I’m really glad that we did. He’s got a crazy story and today we’re going to break down and dissect his path to success and

03:00
Just a quick warning to the listeners, the man is probably one of the most modest people that I’ve met. Let me give you an example. At Ecommerce Fuel, he gave an amazing keynote speech. And even though he claims to have never spoken publicly before, I called BS because it was such an amazing speech. Anyway, he’s probably gonna downplay a lot of his accomplishments. So take everything that he says with a grain of salt. He’s an amazing guy. And with that, welcome to the show, Spencer. How you doing? Good.

03:28
Good to be here, Steve. was thinking today too, that like, it feels like being on your podcast out of all of them is like the rite of passage sort of like, you you haven’t finished your journey unless you end up on your path. So I was excited. I was like, yeah, this is awesome. Cause we’ve listened, I say we, me and my brother, right, started our company, but I’ve listened to your podcast for years, like years. And

03:57
I think it’s less about you to be honest. It’s more about like the guts you have on, right? But your story was amazing too, because we started when 2008 blogging. What year did you start doing your blog? Blogging? 2009. Yeah. So we were in that kind of like looking for inspiration and education before you even started. So we saw you pop up because I remember showing, I was like, what a weird title, but it resonated with us because we knew kind of what you were getting at with that.

04:28
But we started like the days of Pat Flynn and Smart Passive Income and him putting out his monthly earnings reports. Remember those? And those were so fascinating to just to see like somebody’s willing to share this stuff. So all of it was so super helpful through the years. So I guess I have to say thanks to you like first off because like, appreciate it. I mean, you know, it’s funny just to the listeners out there.

04:57
Spencer and I, were exchanging emails and then I noticed that your email was already in my inbox and I was so embarrassed. And then, cause you’re like, oh yeah, so you didn’t respond to my email, did you, Stephen? So from here on out, I’m never gonna forget your email ever Yeah, well I was even a little bit embarrassed because I was, you as you’re asking for my emails, I didn’t want to say like, well, I kind of reached out just not too long ago. Not sure if you saw that. So I didn’t.

05:23
I didn’t say it because I was like, oh, whatever. I’m sure he has a VA. Going through his emails, it fell through the cracks or whatever. Because I was like, oh, what’s interesting is as it kind of went on my journey, this is kind of leaping all around, but when the company eventually went public, that kind of freed me up to be able to talk a little bit openly about it. Up until then, I was like, couldn’t really talk much about it. Or I didn’t know where that line was of what I could and couldn’t say.

05:52
But now that there’s a lot of public information, it makes it easier to. And so that’s when I reached out to Andrew first and foremost, because my brother went on his podcast, like in 2014 as like this, I think the title was like, stealth entrepreneur, you know, and he was like working a day job and he didn’t don’t divulge a whole lot. And he was kind of like the secret, you know, I’m doing the side hustle thing. And so he went on that and I was like, oh, I need to kind of come full circle with Andrew. But then my my second thought was like, I reached out to

06:21
your podcast as well. But it fell through the cracks. That’s okay. We’re here. Well, here we are, Steve. That’s what matters. Yeah. So Spencer, I know that solo stove was not your first venture. I just curious how you got into e-commerce in the first place. Yeah. And that’s, yeah, I shared a lot about that at the ECF conference and it is something that a lot of people don’t know because it’s easy to just jump to the headline story and the big numbers that make it make it sound like

06:51
It was a straight shot to the finish line. But it was far from that. I started in 2008 blogging. Found this. What was the blog? The blog was called China Business Traveler. And you could probably find it go on the way back machine and it all had hyphens between it. So it was China hyphen business hyphen traveler. And I think I it. This is going to make me sound so bad. I spelled traveler like the British way because the other way was like taken. This is I had like two L’s or something. I was like

07:21
does it have one L or does it have two L’s? I eventually, and so I think I spelt it the way, I don’t even know if this is right, but to this day I’m like, I think I spelt traveler like wrong. But I did that for like a year through this course that it was a course, it was called SBI, it was called Site Build It. I know that company. Yes. Is that still around? It still is. I think it transitioned to something else called, I can’t remember what it transitioned to, where it is more e-commerce focused.

07:51
But site build, had a lot of blogs back in the day. Like a lot of people were using it and it was a legit kind of slow and steady learn SEO, you know, learn all the keyword research stuff. And so we started, I started blogging in Oh wait, thinking that was a way to kind of supplement my income and did it for a year. Didn’t make any money. I mean, we’re talking less than a hundred dollars of which most of it didn’t get paid out. Cause I had like one affiliate sale for like a plane ticket, but it wasn’t high enough to like reach the pay.

08:21
payout threshold. And so I never even got the money. But I figured blogging wasn’t for me because I hated writing eventually. And then I was working in China at the time for a sourcing company. And we were sourcing all sorts of products for other people, mostly larger companies, not e-commerce sellers. It wasn’t a big thing back in 08. And one of the projects was memory foam mattresses for a retail store in the Pacific Northwest.

08:52
It was called King’s mattress and oh wait hit and there they didn’t pay us for the containers that shipped to them and it just was a mess. And I had spent all this time figuring out how to make mattresses. And so I was like, Oh, I’ll just, I’ll just maybe sell these, uh, is, kind of the, the short story of it. And so I started selling memory foam mattresses to other expats that were living and working in Shanghai. So we’re talking like Americans, Europeans, guys from Canada and Australia.

09:22
And I would, so I use my blogging skills to create essentially a blog that had like a buy button and it wasn’t a real buy button. It was a form builder button or it was called for mail. And so you would click it and then it would go to a form and then they would fill out what they wanted to order. And then it would shoot me an email and that’s how I started. So I use my, I created what was a blog and then started selling these memory foam mattresses. Yeah. So that was my first foray into, into e-commerce, but then it,

09:51
It grew into a whole bunch of other brands. tried a ton of different things, started selling on Amazon, on eBay, doing all of that and kind of through the years, um, did a lot of different brands. I’d probably say 10 or 12 different brands with hundreds of skews. And so try it. crazy. And you were able to do this because of your background, you were living over there or yeah, because I was sourcing over there. had a partner for some of these brands. was, I partnered up.

10:19
The company I was working for eventually kind of earned some equity in that company and so kind of became partners with this guy who had the sourcing company and we were sourcing all sorts of different products. So I kind of got him on this, got him interested enough and saying like, look, I’m playing around with e-commerce. I think it’s like the way to go. We can go direct to the consumer. We don’t have to sell to these big guys anymore and kind of have this 80-20 rule like

10:48
one or two companies make up all your revenue and it’s always a scary position to be in. And so we started taking some of these things that we had access to, or we had found suppliers or we went out and found new suppliers and we started playing the Amazon game. Um, and I think back then, year was this by the way, Amazon was probably 2009. Yeah. 2009, it was so early. It was so easy. It was scary. Easy. We got introduced to selling on Amazon by another guy.

11:18
a friend of a friend and he basically said, I’ll teach you guys. And I think he charged us like $15,000, like me and my other business partner in China to teach us how to sell on Amazon. And we’re like, okay, that sounds like a lot, but so-and-so says you’re reputable and we did it. And he really just had a few phone calls with us telling us, what you got to do is look up keywords.

11:44
find a keyword and put it in your title, put it in your description, put it everywhere. And that was it. Like that was his whole spiel. I’m like, that’s it. But really back in those days, that’s all you had to do. It was like, if you had keywords in your titles, you just shoot up to the top. Was FBA even around back then? Yeah, it barely started. Okay, I take it back. I don’t know. I don’t know when FBA started. I can’t remember if we transitioned into FBA, but I have a feeling like it was already FBA.

12:12
If not, it was right around that time. But yeah, it was really early. There were no paid ads. There was no like, none of that stuff. was just straight, put your stuff up, take some pictures, and that was it. So out of all these, it sounded like you had a collection of brands. When did you decide to just double down on solo? Yeah, that was a long transition, right? Because we started solo playing with Solo like 2010.

12:42
And it was a difficult product to get manufactured. And so we kind of shelved it for a while, to be honest, as all these other brands that we were just selling on Amazon were just like killing it. And my mattress business was going well, like everything was going well. And so it was hard to know like, this, so we were really thinking like, as most people think, oh, if I can do it with one product, I’ll just rinse and repeat with 10 products and I’ll have 10 times the size of a business that I want. Right. And that’s what we did. And so we started having all these different brands, launching all these new products.

13:11
The majority of them all did really well. It was just a matter of how much you made on each one that kind of let some rise to the top and some were, you know, ones that you’re like, ah, it’s good. It makes money, but not tons. So it was a slow transition because it got to the point where there were so many brands. I had two partners, right? I had my partner who I was working with, who was working for in his company. He was a guy out of Washington. And so I was running the China side of it. And then my brother.

13:40
who wanted to get out of his day job, we started blogging together and I had started to sell mattresses online. I was like, we gotta sell stuff. And so I had most of my brands with my other partner in Washington and then my brother and I started this gardening brand of products and we started playing there. And we started to realize, like I started to realize, man, this is a lot of work. it just all started, because it was doing so well, it just turned into a lot of work. Like who knew, right?

14:08
It’s successful. just snowballs into this a lot of work. And I quickly found myself like kind of up to my eyeballs in it. All good problems to have, but it was like just too much, too much stress, too much work. I was just, I felt like I wasn’t giving each partner, you know, the right amount of time and the brands weren’t doing as well as I wanted to because it was hard to focus on one year. I was putting up fires and so I started to have to make like tough decisions and um,

14:35
you know, the eventual decision was to leave my partner in Washington who lived in Washington, and exit out of that company. I was a minority owner in that in that business. And so it felt different, right to be a minority owner, versus with my brother, we were co owner owners, we were 5050 with that company. And, and I had to make the decision I decided, while I tried to make it all work, it just wasn’t and I had to make a tough decision to leave.

15:03
that one partner, was the majority of the brands that were selling on Amazon. And so I was left with just two brands with me and my brother. We had, and we played with yet another brand, which is a funny story, but we had less brands. I cut ties with that. It was tough to do that. It was less about the money than it was the relationship that I had with this guy that I had worked with. My business partner was, we worked together for 12 years. Like, yeah, it was a long time and it was tough. remember actually

15:32
had that phone call in my car and I cried. Like I shed tears. was like, this is so like, why is this so hard? Like, why is this so difficult? I had nothing to do with the money. It had nothing to do with it was just partnerships and people that you work with that you, you know, build relationships. And then at certain points in time, you have to make tough decisions. And I found myself at that crossroad and had to do it. I just knew I had to do it. And so I cut ties with him. And I remember

16:02
Yeah, just telling my brother and I was like in tears and I was just like, I did it. finally did it. Like, let’s, let’s get to work on these two brands that we have. Um, yeah, let me, let me ask you this question. Uh, I know that you originally started this business, not necessarily to make money, but just for freedom. Yeah. Lifestyle. And presumably with all these brands that you were selling, you were probably pulling in decent amount of money. Right? I mean, would you say you, you hit seven figures in profit like net? Oh yeah. Quickly. Yeah.

16:32
Yeah, so that’s more than enough. And I mean, just, I can’t really, I don’t know you that well, but it doesn’t seem like you’re extravagant. I can’t see you driving a Lambo or anything like that. So why did you, wasn’t that enough? did you have this fever to want to make more money? Yeah, so it wasn’t that if you, you, anybody who, anybody knows who starts an e-commerce business that does well, like the money, when you talk about profits, yeah, it’s profits, but it’s not profits in my pocket that I can go buy stuff with, right?

17:02
You have to reinvest in the company and you have to go buy more inventory twice as much before you even need twice as much because you know, and you can see that things are going so well that you’re going to run out of inventory. And so all your money and all your profits after first uncle Sam takes his cut, which I think most budding entrepreneurs don’t realize that 40 % you got to set aside of your monthly profits so that you can pay the tax bill. And then you have to reinvest it all into new product. And, and, and not only that,

17:32
For me, the way I’ve always operated, right, as an entrepreneur, you’re always scared about something. Like while it’s going good, like in hindsight, yeah, I was like great for many years, but while you’re in it, you’re always like, is this like, how long is this really going to last? Do I got one year? Do I have two years? I see more and more people coming on board, selling more things. Like, you know who I didn’t like? I didn’t like the guy who started like podcasting about Amazon. What was his name?

17:58
There’s a ton of was like that early guy and he had great content. Amazing, amazing freedom or something like that. can’t Scott Volcker. That was his name. Oh, Scott. Yeah. Okay. Real nice guy. I don’t have nothing. I have nothing bad to say about him. I just didn’t like the idea that all the secrets were now out there. Like all this education because I was always fearful of like, well, everybody’s coming in now. Like I wasn’t out there telling everybody how to do this. I was like, why doesn’t everybody be quiet? You know, why doesn’t everybody just stay low?

18:28
lay low and we can all ride this as long as we can. And so it was a constant fear of like, this is going away while at the same time having to reinvest in the company to keep it afloat that you we didn’t get any money. Like I never got a lot of money in my pocket. And so it was just, you know, it realization that like, it’s going to be hard to actually pay myself something. We really got to get to big numbers to where I can actually take a six figure salary out of this thing. And maybe it wasn’t.

18:58
Maybe we didn’t maybe we’re really conservative. Think about it. We were coming out of oh, wait, our our source and company almost went under. We had went from like 20 some odd people down to like five because we had to lay them all off because it was oh, wait, it was financial crisis. It was like, don’t take any debt. Debt is bad. Like companies can go under in the blink of an eye. Let’s go really conservative. So all the money went back in. So it wasn’t that we like I wanted to make even more money. It was like, how in the world do I even get paid out of this thing?

19:28
I guess I gotta make it bigger.

19:32
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

20:01
Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

20:30
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. Interesting. The reason why I’m asking all these questions is my wife and I, came to a similar situation at one point, but then we just said to ourselves, you can actually control your growth. It’s kind of, you know what mean? Like you can let those products maybe go out of stock or not.

20:58
place that large bet on inventory. But you know, it’s an ego thing also. And it’s, it’s also, I can’t, I can’t describe it in words, but like you want it to do well, and it’s doing well, and you want to take advantage of it while it lasts. So that’s why you’re investing a lot more. It becomes like, kind like this vicious cycle. Yeah, I think that’s what I would say. And that’s why like, even in my slide, it was like a snowball kind of chasing you down a hill is like,

21:24
I wanted to make a big snowball, but then it kind of starts eating you up. And then you’re like, well, what do I do? And, um, and that was a sense of like, that was a transition of like letting things go and focusing down on solo stove or just focusing with my brother and saying, like, I got to choose one path here because I did essentially what you and your wife did, right? You controlled growth and I did it by, kind of stepping away from one partner and a bunch of brands and then throttling it back down. Um, because we, know,

21:53
went from selling a whole lot and then now I’m with one partner, my brother, and we’re selling less. And so it did throttle it and we did find more balance over the years. I it kind of sounds, you know, short and easy, but this was over a span of like 10 years, right? So we did find good balance. And I think we kind of were seeking for the same thing that you and your wife for the same reasons you guys said, let’s control growth. We did. I did. I mean, I parted with a partner, left a ton of money on the table.

22:20
I didn’t ask for a multiple when I exited. We kind of just looked at book value and then even gave a discount on that because I was like, I’m not out to hurt you and I let them pay over many years the equity that I had in the company. So yeah, I I kind of throw the growth that way. Let’s talk about Solo Stove. Are you a product designer? So no. Well, I take that back, not by education or I don’t have a certificate.

22:49
But think I’m a pretty decent product designer. Like I think a lot of people don’t give them credit for ideas that they might have or creativity that’s within them when it comes to product. I mean, everybody uses something and is like, why in the world do they make it this way? Why? Like they should change it to be like this and it would be way better. Like we all have those experiences. And I think I just went with that. And I just, I think I’m more creative than I am.

23:18
good with numbers, like I like the creative side of things. And so I do like playing with the product. Maybe it’s my generation of like, I remember in your, in your speech, I think you opened with you’re an Asian that’s bad at math. It’s so true. And what was funny is I met a guy at ECF and we were talking, uh, his name’s, I think it’s Sujay and, and, uh, we were talking about our kids’ ages. And I was like, my daughter’s 15 and he’s like, Oh, so like,

23:47
He asked me how old I was and then he asked, and then we were talking about our kids’ ages. And he was like, so what year did you have your daughter? And I couldn’t do the math in my head. And he was like, are you kidding me? You take your age, her age, and mine is down. And I was like, yeah, I’m so bad at math that I’ve just come to accept it. And I just realized that it is just not, it’s not going to happen. And so I surround myself with people who are really good at math.

24:16
and like really analytical who can help me on that. Even my wife, I mean, my kids laugh at me because I can’t do simple math. Like percentages, I just am really bad with it. So for anybody out there who thinks they’re bad at math and can’t start a business, there’s definitely hope. yeah. So this, your solo stove or your first version of that product, it’s a pretty complicated piece of, complicated product to manufacture and design. Yeah. So did you just pick up a

24:45
CAD tool and learn how to use it and start designing? mean, paper and pencil for sure. And we were able to kind of draw things out and kind of from sourcing my experience in sourcing, you know, played a role because I had dealt with a lot of product development. And so I understood how things are made. And I understood how drawings are made and how to call things out on drawings and how to show a manufacturer that like this is the radius I want on this corner. Like I can’t do it in CAD, but I can tell them and I can sure write it on a piece of paper.

25:15
and then have them create CAD drawings or have somebody create CAD drawings off of my rough sketches, you know, my chicken scratches that I’ll just kind of move around or even using, you know, a simple app on your computer to kind of draw things out. So, yeah, it was a matter of sketching it out, drawing it out roughly, coming up with an idea of this is the size I want, this is how I want spacing in there and, you know, these are the radiuses I want. And then

25:44
drawing it out and then getting eventually a CAD drawing made to where we could say, yep, that’s kind of what we want to hear the tolerances that we can accept in these areas and then going to town on it. It was, it’s a difficult product to manufacture. Well, how long did it take you actually to, create that first product? would say it took us from the moment we started like playing with the idea to actually making it was probably close to two years because we shelved it for a while.

26:10
We started trying it. We went down the road, but remember we’re doing all these other products as well. had another partner and we were doing tons of other products and all of it was selling. And so there wasn’t this no like, was kind of take the path of least resistance and this, the solo stove path was a path of highest resistance. Like it was so difficult to make. you think about when you’re manufacturer and saying like, here’s a very difficult product. We got to spend a ton of tooling, right? We got to, we had a tool up. even requires specialized machinery to make.

26:39
and I’m only gonna purchase like $5,000 worth of this stuff. Like nobody wants to take a bet on you at that point, right? They’re like, well, yeah, if you’re gonna buy hundreds of thousands, then they’d probably do it. But we were so conservative and so small that we were like, it’s like most we can buy is like 5,000 bucks worth of this stuff. And so for that reason, it’s difficult to find a manufacturer who’s willing to dive in and do all of that.

27:07
know, development with you side by side to then have what like five grand and have their line run for half a day and then, you know, stop. you know, the tree, people don’t understand like the training that has to happen within a factory for, the workers who are actually, you know, working the machines. It’s a, takes a long time to train people up to tell them what to do and how to do it correctly. When you’re stamping products on a machine or doing deep draws,

27:36
You have to adjust tooling on the machine. And it’s this constant like, okay, set the tools. Now put a piece of metal in there and draw it down. And then it’s totally off and it’s totally bad. Then they have to adjust it. And these are huge tools that have to be lifted with like forklifts and chains. And it can take an entire day to dial in the tools on a machine and a lot of scrap and a lot of waste that has to happen as they’re punching these things down. I don’t know what good analogy for that is.

28:06
But it takes time to kind of dial things into where it can then start pumping things out really good. Well, how did you convince the manufacturer to do all that work just for a small? Yeah, it took. That’s why it took us so long, really, is the short of it. And then when we did find the right guy, we just hit it off. It’s like dating. That’s what I tell people when you’re sourcing and you’re finding a manufacturer like it’s like dating. You have to find people who like you for whatever reason. Like, I don’t know if it was this.

28:34
I don’t know if it was my personality. don’t know if it’s like, you know, this, this, the challenge of seeing if we can get this thing to work that he was interested in, like the dynamics that were going on in his business, in his head. I I’m not sure exactly why he wanted to do it. I think it was more so the challenge of like, this is difficult and this is challenging and I’ve never done something this hard. Um, and I think it’s a cool project and I want to see if I can do it. It was more like a, like a hobby or like a, you know, a challenge for him.

29:04
So we tackled it together and we just built a good rapport together doing this and turned out extremely well for him and extremely well for us. yeah, was extremely difficult. That’s why I say, man, I got lucky a lot of times because I met a lot of suppliers who were just like, nope, nope, nope, or I want to do it, but can’t do it. I don’t have the right machinery and I’m not willing to invest.

29:29
You know, so a lot of stars had to align for me to feel like I got lucky and found a good supplier. Like it really did just come down to luck. Were you in China during the production, like managing everything? At that time when we started Solo, my brother was here in the States, here in Texas where I’m at now. And I was on that side, really dialing in the supply chain and getting things going. Let me ask you that. Did you think that that was necessary for you to be over there?

29:58
this complicated product? mean, I guess if you’re asking, could somebody do it if they weren’t in China? Sure, I’m sure someone could. Is it easy? Absolutely not. Does it help that I was in China? Yes, absolutely. Does it help that I can speak Mandarin? Yes, absolutely. Did it help to have years and years of experience dealing with suppliers and finding suppliers and understanding how to build relationships with them? Yes. All of that played in.

30:27
us being able to kind of dial things. But you look at great companies like, I don’t know, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. mean, I’m sure there’s tons at ECF that were at ECF that never lived in China, don’t speak Mandarin and can still make amazing products. I think there’s, we all have like advantages that we can lean on to give us a leg up. Where I’m bad at math, right? I was good at sourcing products. And where somebody else is a whiz at math, can figure out that

30:56
you know, this is how much you need to save for taxes every month where I faltered in that. And one year I was like, we got stuck with like a $400,000 tax bill that I thought we were prepared for, but we barely saved up enough money for that and almost like dried out our company because I was like, yeah, just going by my gut feel of like what the numbers should be. And obviously I was horrible at that and horrible at planning with numbers. So I think we all have strengths that we can lean on and I think you should.

31:26
double down on what you’re good at and then solve for the parts that you’re not. So you have this product that you took two years to develop. So one, did you know that it was going to sell during those two years? And then two, how did you sell your first units? Yeah, I knew it would sell. I’m a strong believer that like anything can sell. There’s someone out there who will buy it. It’s just a matter of how many, right? And so I think I gained a lot of confidence with all the products that I had launched.

31:56
on Amazon and D2C that everything sold. There wasn’t anything that just like sat on the shelf and was a total dud. And so everything sold and I knew, especially in those days of Amazon, if you played in those days in Amazon, you knew everything sold. Like it was just a matter of how much. Actually, when I started everything sold also, and that was 2015, 2016. Yeah. So it was, it was, it really helped in that, in that, in that area of confidence.

32:26
made me believe like, yes, this will sell. I don’t know how much. And I think a lot of people get stuck on that in terms of like, is there, all the buzzwords of product market fit and like, you know, have you done your research? I was like, what kind of research would you do? Like ask people if they would buy it. Like I don’t even know what you would do to get something of like statistical significance at a small, like you’re just two guys. Like what are you going to do to figure out if this thing’s going to sell?

32:52
In my mind, the best thing to do is just go sell it. Don’t sink in too much money and then go try to sell it. And if it sells well, then just double down, right? Then order more product and then start developing it out. But if it fizzles and dies or you’re stuck with $5,000 worth of product that sells over the next five years, you can still get rid of it all and give it away for Christmas presents throughout the years. so it was never a big risk to me. But no, we did not know how much we could sell or how well it would sell.

33:22
right off the bat. we were, we surprised. How much money did you invest in product development to get like your first? Yeah, so we put in $15,000 to start that company. And that’s it. And so for first, that’s not a lot. It’s not a lot because a lot of it went to, you know, ordering the first product and some of it went to tooling and, and paying for software and paying for, you know, a shopping card and get like all of it together. It was like, we needed to make it work with all that money, all the

33:51
Freight like all the shipping and freight and all that stuff was kind of baked into the fact that like we had 15,000 bucks to work with and that’s it. And that’s that’s how we grew it. Okay, that’s much lower than I would have expected. Okay, wow, that’s amazing. Okay, so you’re you you get your product, you listen to Amazon, it sells like hotcakes. Walk me through the progression from there. Actually, yeah, like whittling down kind of like focus. Is that what you mean? Yeah, so from there,

34:20
You know, things continue to do really well. We started selling other products, gardening products. We had a gardening site. Was this an Amazon only product by the way? The stuff? Or were you selling DTC? Just the solo store? We had set up a website as well. Yeah. So all, so me and my brother were kind of big on websites, like our own DTC sites, like our own .com sites, because I had kind of gained that experience through selling mattresses.

34:46
And I realized early on that you can have your own site and you can have traffic to it because I understood how you can build traffic by blogging. Through blogging, I understood that traffic could be built. While I knew Amazon had traffic and that was a great way to basically print money, I also knew you could have your own site and you can also develop your own traffic. And so that wasn’t foreign to me. In fact, it was more attractive because you can be more creative.

35:14
when you’re driving traffic to your site. And so we had stuff on Amazon and that’s where the majority of sales came from, but we did have our own sites that we would set up because we knew like people would check us out. Like, is this a legit brand? What does their website look like? And so we had from the get-go, me and my brother were really strong in building our own sites. And some of the other products like gardening products just never took on our own.com as hard as we tried. And those did really well on Amazon. And we eventually started selling

35:43
This is so me and my brother are pretty clean cut dry guys. don’t drink, we don’t smoke, we don’t do drugs. But we were thinking as we were selling these gardening products, we got to even out the seasonality of gardening. How do we even do that? And we started researching product and my brother stumbled upon these things called grow lights. And he was like, oh, people grow stuff indoors using these things called grow lights that mimic the sun. And I was like,

36:12
That’s ingenious. That’s so cool. And we’re like, that could even out the winter months. Like people could grow indoors. And so we were trying to even out our seasonality and we ended up like selling grow lights and starting a website called super led grow lights.com. And we brought in like thousands of dollars worth of these grow lights only to eventually find out that people don’t grow like tomato cherries and like cilantro indoors. And we were so naive to the fact.

36:39
that people were asking about what the heat signature is from the roadside. And we’re like, what is that? Why do they even care? Because cops in the days would use a heat gun and kind of see what houses are glowing from the street side to see who’s cooking stuff inside or who’s growing weed and marijuana in there. And so we were like, this is so weird. And so we eventually figured out that everybody was using it to grow weed.

37:07
And we were like, we gotta get out of this. And so we shut that down and we closed it up and we just sat on those grow lights in our garage. I don’t even know what we did with them. I think a lot of them we threw out. But that was another one that we started our own website and we’re selling on Amazon as well and all this stuff. But we started wheeling down because things started going really well on all fronts. The gardening stuff was doing well. Our solo stove was doing really well.

37:37
Oh, and we had started another brand called Fox Outfitters. And that was another camping me too. So you kind of see this, like, do see how like, things are just like, we’re just rinsing and repeating. And we’re kind of like, causing our own problems by doing this, right? We haven’t found out how to find that balance of just saying enough’s enough. Let’s just hold it steady. We’re just in this constant state of like, did you have employees during this time, by the way, or was it just you and my brother the whole time? Wow, crazy. Okay, so we had

38:04
Fox outfitters, had solo, we had at one time super LED grill lights and we had this other one called the garden cloche, which were these bell cover, these plastic bell seedling coverings that would act as like a mini greenhouse on seedlings. And they were all selling well, everything was doing well. Which again, found ourselves, I found myself in that same problem of like, we built something that we didn’t really want. It was like too good, everything was going too good.

38:32
And so we started to try to figure out what the next step was to kind of regain that lifestyle that we were in search of and the reason why we started these companies. And that led us to let’s sell and get rid of this stuff. Like let’s sell it all and just exit out of the company and see if we can’t start again. You know, we were trying to build that four hour work week lifestyle company and we were obviously doing okay, making money along the way, but…

39:01
having a hard time finding that that kind of autopilot mode where it’s a great company that’s going to last forever. And it’s just printing you money every day, you know, that smart passive income, right, that Pat Flynn is I was hanging, what was always the elusive goal of like, he’s figured it out. Why can’t we figure it out, right? ours always end up turning into something way more than we bargained for. And that’s took us to 2016. And we decided, okay, it’s too much. It’s more than we bargained for. We’re working way too much on this stuff. Let’s sell it and

39:31
That’s that’s so all of it. Yeah, we wanted to sell all of it and just start again. I don’t know what we were going to start or maybe it was, you know, if we could get enough money, maybe that would be enough is one of the thoughts. The other thought was like we can start again and build a better business that doesn’t turn into a snowball chasing us down the hill.

39:52
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40:21
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40:32
Let me ask you this question. Was it really hard time-wise because you didn’t have lot of employees? I mean, you didn’t have any employees? it eventually got hard. And I’ll tell you why it got hard is because we were still pretty protective of our time, right? We still were trying to live this lifestyle. We were trying to walk the walk and live a lifestyle that was balanced, that we had enough time for our family. We both have kids. So we both had small kids.

41:01
and you know, in the toddler age and you know, or we want to spend time with the family and with our wives and on ourselves, right is, you know, your physical health and your mental health and your spirituality and all these things that your hobbies like I wanted it all. And, and that meant that while I while I was walking the walk and enjoying this lifestyle, the hours that I was working, which was a, you know, your standard, I would say I wouldn’t say nine to five, it was probably more like, you know,

41:30
eight to six at most. Sure. We had to do more in those hours than ever before. And so it was really stressful, really compact, really like high pressure in those hours that we were working. And then we kind of turned it off and then tried to go do, you know, live our lives. And so it just was this built up pressure because we weren’t stretching out. I take that back. There were

41:56
times where we were working into the wee hours of the morning and it eventually got there, right? Where we were, we were working way more than we wanted to, you know, kids go to bed and then you flip open the laptop and keep going. were doing all our customer service. So that’s like a constant nag on you is like, you don’t want to let those tickets sit for more than they should. And so we’d hop back on, get through customer service. So then the next morning it would just let it pile back up again. And so yeah, it got really, it got really busy.

42:26
I guess my question for you is why didn’t you hire? Yeah. It’s so funny hearing other people say it like, duh. And even in my mind, I’m like, yeah, like that’s how like, that’s how, that’s how like novice of a business person I was, I guess, inserting a company in that, um, we didn’t, I mean, we did think to hire Steve, wasn’t a matter of like, we never thought about it. I thought about it, but I was always under this impression that we wanted to build this company that didn’t have anybody in it.

42:55
Because we didn’t like managing people were not great, right? People managers and you know, the dynamics of people is just difficult. We’re working from our homes and so it’s this big friction to like now we got to get an office and go in nine to five and be there to be with them. It’s like what about our lifestyle business? Our whole lifestyle business was flexibility so that if we needed to pop out in the middle of the day or if we wanted to go, you know, fishing from 10 in the morning till two.

43:23
we could knowing that we could make those hours up somewhere else. And so this thought of like going down that road was going against everything that we wanted to build. Like our ideal company was one that gave us our lifestyle, gave us enough money, and most importantly gave us that freedom and flexibility. And employees just was everything. It was like the, you know, it was everything against that, what we were trying to build. I can completely relate to everything that you’re saying. It’s just funny. Cause I know most people.

43:52
they tend to think that hiring employees is pretty glamorous. Right. That’s the opposite for me. Yeah, and me too. And we’re because even the complexities of it, right is like, I like the marketing, I like making product, I like I like e commerce, I like all the tactics and that stuff. Anything about okay, employees, one, I don’t even know how to do that. Because what do have to do? Do I have to like, how do I even do payroll now? And do I have to offer benefits? Like, and where will they sit? Like, do I have to buy them all their equipment? And then like, what who’s gonna even teach? Like, do I have to teach them? Like,

44:21
All of these thoughts, I think ran through our heads. And it just was a lot of friction for us to be like, that’s the right path. It doesn’t seem like it if it’s, if it feels like a lot, like a lot of friction, but in hindsight, right? Should we have hired earlier? think, yeah, I think we probably could have hired earlier. think we probably could have hired to a point where it was running smoothly and, you know, doing really well. And maybe we didn’t have to go down a path of selling it. I don’t know. I mean, I think there’s a lot of ways

44:51
Skinny Cat. And I think there’s a lot of curvy paths to the same destination. And the beauty of owning your own business is you get to choose your own adventure for better or for worse. And I think we chose the way we did it. And it did eventually lead to building out a team and growing as we figured out if we are to exit this thing, then there’s a clear path that we need to follow, which is a little bit counterintuitive to

45:20
what someone did you enjoy that path of selling? Yeah. Oh, no, I did not. mean, hi. Well, what I’ll you, it’s type two fun, right? It’s type two fun, where while you’re in it, it’s horrible. Like, it’s, it’s, it’s like self abuse, and you don’t know why you’re doing this to yourself. And then you get through the other side. And you’re like telling other people all the cool stories. And yeah, like I did this, I did that. And I think you kind of forget.

45:48
all the pain that you went through or your selective memory. And so when I’m talking to it’s like having kids, well, yeah, I dare I don’t dare go down that route. I’m not I did not give birth to my kids. My wife did that. And I would never say that it was that difficult. Yeah, I mean, I think the analogy holds in that, you know, you forget about some of the pain. But no, I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy it because we’re doing everything that we didn’t want to do that we tried not to do. But

46:16
I did it because it was a means to an end. It was means to the end. in 2016, we tried to sell the company. It had Fox Outfitters and it had Solo Stove. And Fox Outfitters was the majority of the revenue and profits. And Solo Stove was kind of the little brother that had a lot of potential. And that’s really the short story of it is we came out of it knowing that nobody really wanted our Amazon company.

46:45
Amazon brand that was doing millions of dollars and people were more interested in this little brand that we had built that has momentum on its dot com, its D2C. While we were still selling a lot on Amazon, there was glimmers of hope for this brand. There was glimmers of hope in the IP. There was glimmers of hope in product development and what it could turn into. And that’s what we ended up doubling down on and letting go of Fox.

47:12
We actually sold it to some guys in Houston who wanted to get their toe, you know, dip their toes into e-commerce. Um, and we sold it for pennies on the dollar. We just let go of the inventory. I know that’s amazing. That’s a tough decision right there. It was tough. It was a little bit sad to kind of do it that way. While we were selling it, I was honestly telling me and my brother had a conversation of saying like, the people would ask us, what are you going to do? Like, uh, if we, if we don’t buy this and, and I remember telling them, I was like,

47:41
I don’t care if you don’t buy it. It’s a great deal. It’s pennies on the dollar. I just want it off my books because I got to clear up my books and clear up my warehouse and all this stuff for, we’ve to get ready for the dance and the stuff’s in the way. And I said, I don’t care if you don’t buy it because in my heart of hearts, I could go turn this thing into a multimillion dollar business after I’m done and I have time. Like I know I could do that. And so it was this like feeling of, man, this is good for someone. This could be the difference of somebody working in their

48:10
day job hating life and finding freedom. This is a tool that could do that. I just hate to feel like I just toss it to the side. But the truth is, we didn’t have time to sell it the right way. We didn’t have time to try to go through diligence with someone on it. This is what it is. Do you take it or leave it? And if you want it, I’ll give it to you for pennies on the dollar and it’s yours. And that’s how we let go of the majority of our revenue and profits at that time.

48:37
and six in 2016 and then double down on solo stove. Wow, Spencer, I want to shift gears a little bit and I know you had an amazing exit. You probably don’t need to work another day in your life. What are your future plans? So and we were talking a bit about this before we hit the record button, but I’ve really loved diving into like content creation. I think it’s the creative side of me that needs an outlet and

49:03
So, you know, I registered my own company. got a, I got an office space that has a whole bunch of offices and a front room and, know, got a whiteboard and just started thinking about how can I give back and help others like find, find value and find freedom through entrepreneurship. And not that that’s the only way, but it’s the way I know. And it’s the experiences I have that I can give an offer. And so I’m trying to find a way to do that in scale and try to.

49:32
help others explore the path of entrepreneurship as a viable path to one, a career, and then two, a better lifestyle. And while it was a difficult road for me, I think it’s possible. I think it’s a very, think entrepreneurship is net positive, right? Jobs are created. The ripples effect of someone being able to start a company and.

49:57
provide for their family and for other families and what it does in society. think it’s a good thing. And so I’d like to continue to find ways to champion entrepreneurship. I started a YouTube channel that talks about entrepreneurship and e-commerce, but I’m starting to even transition. What’s channel called? It’s just Spencer Jan. So if you just look up my name, you’ll see my mug up there making funny faces as I try to win the thumbnail game.

50:24
but I’m trying to transition to actually just visiting more companies and not in venturing outside the realm of e-commerce. Like I want to go visit a donut shop and I want to go visit somebody who opened a flower shop or somebody who started a car wash because all of these are valid businesses. And I think the learnings that I have while they lend towards e-commerce companies, I think the fundamental principles still translate to other businesses. I feel like telling other people’s stories

50:54
Uh, in, those lights, whether it’s a, uh, a mobile dogwash station or yesterday I was at a skincare clinic of, uh, of a female entrepreneur who started this, this, this company that now has two clinics here in DFW and is making amazing money. want to tell more of those stories. So hopefully I kind of get to that point and hopefully it resonates with people and helps people explore that, um, that entrepreneurial bug or itch that, um, a lot of us have.

51:24
I was just thinking, just listening to your voice right now, I think you should do a podcast too, in addition to your YouTube. Yeah, that might be. think I, I’ve enjoyed being on podcasts and I enjoy talking with others. I think that’s what I get out of it. I’ve, I’ve kind of, I kind of am, am searching for that kind of fulfillment, right? Because chasing dollars and numbers really is a pretty empty thing to do. Um, and so I’ve realized that I gain a lot and I learn a lot and I enjoy.

51:52
talking with others and hearing their stories, um, meeting other people like yourself and all the people that we met at ECF. Like to me, that’s super rich and fulfilling. Um, and then being able to have, find opportunities to help those people and those listening, maybe, maybe I go down the road of podcasts and then I need to pick your brain and figure out how to set it all up. I’ll tell you what I have bought so much equipment.

52:16
that Amazon is about to ban me, because I buy it all and then I return most of it, because I’m like, oh no, I need a different mic. Oh no, that one didn’t work. So just this learning experience of how to set things up properly has been fun for me. Awesome. Well, hey Spencer, thanks a lot for coming on the show. If anyone has any questions for you or want to find out what you’re up to, where can they find you? Yeah, I’m not big on social. I try not to spend too much time on social media. I am on LinkedIn.

52:44
except for that TikTok channel. that has one post. I think I got to hire somebody to build that out. I am on LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also just email me at hello spencerjan at gmail.com or you can find me on YouTube as well. Drop me a comment there. And I think my contact information is in there as well. So I’d to hear from any budding entrepreneurs and anybody who’s looking for a sounding board for crazy ideas, more than happy to kind of try to fit people in and.

53:13
and talk to as many people as possible. Cool. Well, Spencer, it’s been a pleasure. I’m glad I met you finally at ECF. Yeah. And I know you’re emailed by heart now. Thanks, Steve. It’s been fun. All right. Take care.

53:28
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I can’t really express in words how much I admire what Spencer has accomplished and how candid he was in this interview. Go check out Solo Stove when you get a chance. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 416. And once again, I to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned code sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

53:56
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now we talk about how I these tools in my blog,

54:26
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce 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.