00:29
And between the two of us, we’ve seen a lot of mistakes, believe me. So enjoy the episode and be sure to check out the unofficial Shopify podcast. Now, before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text message 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.

00:58
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 div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klavia who is also a sponsor of the show. Now are you working around the clock to build the business you always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it?

01:26
companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion.

01:56
To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit 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 a brand new podcast that I recently 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.

02:23
So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcasts on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:37
Kurt Elster, what is going on? It’s been a while since I’ve spoken to you. It’s been a bit and I regret that. That’s my fault. I should really be following up with someone as fabulous as Steve Chow. Well, it’s funny. Last time we hung out was at the Klaviyo conference and we recorded one of these podcasts. Awesome. It a lot of fun. I was going to say, as soon as you said the last time we hung out was at Klaviyo and the first thing that popped in my head was that was so much fun. Like when I think about that conference, that’s really the memory I have is

03:06
recording with you and you Darian and Tony in that like cool and but weird little recording booth set up they had. It was a ton of fun. And what I remember is you guys like busted on me the entire episode and yet I still publish that one. You know sometimes you just have to speak truth to power. All right so Kurt today’s a really exciting episode we’re going to be talking about common mistakes that store owners make and

03:34
Let’s start out with your number one pet peeve. What is that? Obsessing over page speed and now as of today, Core Web Vitals. Yes. So actually, can you talk about Core Web Vitals first and what they are even just in case the listeners don’t even have any idea what that is? Okay. So originally we, Google said, Hey, you got to look at your page speed. And they had like this arbitrary. What I feel is a largely arbitrary metric that much to its detriment.

04:03
gives you a score, grade, it grades your website. And it’s based on what I think is fairly flawed data. And the implication was always, if it doesn’t perform well, at some point, you’re not gonna rank on Google if you can’t get a good score. And the reality is like that, that is an overstatement of what is really happening. It’s a reason, as of now, coming out a Google update is around the corner or maybe like about to publish.

04:33
in which they’re going to take into consideration three metrics from the larger Google PageSpeed score called Core Web Vitals. And probably the most important one there is first content paint. So really it’s like, long does it take? Not necessarily like how long does the entire website take to load? How long until I could see it and use it is really what Core Web Vitals looks at to like simplify it. Right. Because you could be on a website, it starts loading and you can start using it and scrolling.

05:01
before it’s finished, like stuff can load in the background, that’s fine. They don’t actually care about that part. It’s how long until I can use the darn thing? And so people naturally freaked out. And the reality is when they, what’s really going on is if you look at like the fine print of the description of what Google’s saying they’re gonna do, it’s, they’re saying, hey, if we have two sites that rank for the same placement, the one with the better Core Web Vital rating will take priority.

05:30
We’re going to use it as a tiebreaker. OK, so speed is important, but it is not the be all end all lose sleep over it thing that I think it’s being presented as and people are treating it. And really, my issue is I’m so sick of the anxiety and the hair tearing out that’s occurring with merchants needlessly because of page speed. That’s my problem. You know what the problem with it is? It gives you a letter grade.

06:00
zero to a hundred and agents everywhere are trying to get a freaking hundred percent and it really can’t be done without jumping through a lot of hoops and I think I think it was was it your podcast or one post on Facebook where you actually looked at some of the top Shopify stores and all of them had page speed scores under 20. Yes, yeah, yes, yeah. Shopify is making effort in trying to get people to make to have more performant websites and as part of that

06:28
They said, hey, you could see in your store, like here’s a page speed grade. And it’s a little better than like the regular page speed grade because it’s an average of like a homepage, a product page, a collection page. It’s a little more accurate. And then in my partner portal in Shopify where I could see like these are the stores I have access to. These are my client stores. I could rank, just sort them all and see what the scores are. And what’s interesting is very few people get above 30.

06:57
And the stores I have that get above 60, they’re stores that we built like five to 10 years ago and then really haven’t changed. They just worked and that was the end of it. And so I thought that was interesting. So I know part of the issue here is like, is app JavaScript. We’ve done the research here and discovered largely it’s JavaScript, it’s apps, and it’s not deferring the load on that JavaScript that creates the problem. in our like our seven, eight, a couple nine figure stores, all of them.

07:27
are in the low double digits, like 12 is a pretty typical score. And Shopify will tell you like, oh, you score the same as similar stores. So we know for the highest performers, the teens, so like F minus minus if we’re applying a letter grade is the typical average score. You know what’s frustrating about this is that since I teach e-commerce and teach SEO,

07:53
Like I felt like I had to do it for myself. So all my sites are in the nineties now across the board, but it took me three weeks to do that. And I had to jump through hoops and get into the code in order to do that. And I can’t expect a non-technical person to possibly do that, which is ridiculous. Like Google cannot expect you to do this stuff. Right. Would you agree? Yes. No. And the, I just don’t understand. I don’t understand the initiative. I don’t understand the why this has become a priority all of sudden.

08:23
Like I would love to know internally at Google, what is going on here? Is it some altruistic desire to make the internet more accessible to slower devices? It’s got to do with ads. Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. Like I wonder what the real objective is here. Well, here’s my take on that. You know, one of the core web bottles is cumulative layout shift, which is basically whether your website shifts up and down when it’s loading, right?

08:49
Have you ever gone on one of those sites where like you’re trying to click on the next button, but then the ads all of a sudden appears with a next button and you click on an ad by accident. Yep. I think they’re trying to reduce that and click fraud. That’s their motivation. Oh, wow. I like that theory. Never would have occurred to me. And that’s pretty brilliant. Like if you look at how they generate their revenue, that makes a lot of sense. And also this page speed, like if it loads faster,

09:19
That’s more ad clicks. Oh man, you cracked the case. So that’s what I really think this is for. And so they’re trying to automatically algorithmically take out those people who are just trying to scan the system for AdSense. Hmm. This is really good. That’s my take. That’s my take. All right. I love it. So I think the other interesting thing is Brian Dean from Backlinko published data yesterday where they looked at something. It was like 200,000 sites, something nuts.

09:46
And he said there was very little correlation, if any, between UX metrics, which I think they measured. It sounded like they measured in page views and Core Web Vital scores. So obviously, stuff that was way screwed up, it would correlate. But for the most part, it really did not have an impact on UX. I don’t think the rollout has fully happened here. I think they delayed it till like next month, I believe. So we’ll see what happens. But I suspect you’re right. It’s probably not going to happen.

10:16
of effect. It’ll have a similar effect as to what PageSpeed did when it first got announced. So tell me sir, what PageSpeed is clearly the thing that makes me crazy. That’s my big one is every time someone brings up the ghost of PageSpeed I’m like oh here we go. What drives Steve Chow nuts? Okay you know what drives me crazy is when someone comes up to me and says I tried Facebook ads and Google ads and it didn’t work and then I go over to their site to take a look

10:46
and they’re driving paid traffic to a site that just isn’t ready. And we can expand upon this, because I know this is part of your pet peeves too, but how many times has someone said that to you? You go over their site and it’s just terrible. But yeah, but then Facebook ads gets blamed. You can’t blame the traffic store because your site doesn’t convert. Right. And they spend all their time on the copy and all this stuff where they’re just driving it to something that has poor copy. It actually doesn’t even make sense to me.

11:16
Yeah, often the disconnect there is frustrating. really, how often have I been on, or have you been on, I like Instagram, I’m a millennial I suppose. So I like Instagram, I go through my Instagram stories, and then I’ll see an ad for something that looks interesting, I’ll swipe up on it, and I just end up on, either they send me to the homepage, in which case I’m just clicking out, heaven forbid, do not send anyone to your homepage, or,

11:44
I just end up on like an entirely standard unoptimized product detail page with like a one line description. And I’m like, what did you think was going to happen here? And of course it just bounds. Well, you know what my pet peeve is since we’re talking about product descriptions. My biggest pet peeve is when I see a product that has zero likes, zero shares, zero everything, zero reviews, and they didn’t even take the time to hide the zero part. Cause when I see zero, that indicates to me that

12:11
no one’s buying anything and it’s a brand new site. social proof is what you just advertised. Exactly. That’s negative social proof. It is. It actually causes me to leave because that means no one’s bought that product before, And that’s, funny that product reviews apps don’t know to hide themselves, especially like the review stars widget, if there are zero stars. And that’s for most of these apps, that’s a pretty easy customization that we have to go implement. It’s not hard.

12:39
that should just be an option built into them. Because yeah, zero reviews is just like a red flag. If I’m a brand new visitor. Actually, you know, that’s really interesting. So you actually have to muck with the code to fix that? Yeah. Interesting. And then same goes with social proof, right? Like Facebook likes and shares and that sort of thing you you physically go in. I almost don’t you know what I

13:03
almost always scrub those social share buttons because what are the chances that you actually get someone to share a product page to their Facebook feed? That’s a tough sell. agree with you, actually. I had considered removing those altogether because I know from my own site very few people click on those. However, I will say that people do click on the Pinterest button though, since I guess since I’m in the wedding industry. What have you will say, yeah, for some industries, the pin it button, that’s a win.

13:33
But you need to be in the right niche, and Wedding is perfect for that. But beyond that, like, oh, a product page, I’m gonna share this to my timeline. No one’s doing that, it’s just not gonna happen. Interesting, so do you take away those social buttons, actually, for your clients? I do, yeah. At this point, I just strip them out, and then if there’s pushback on it, I say, well, we can heat map it or split test it. I said, but if I heat map your best-selling product,

14:03
you will get flip a coin one or zero clicks. And sure enough, that’s what happens every time. And it was so consistent that I don’t even think about it anymore. I just strip them out, unless it’s in a wedding, in which case, just give me a pin it button and that’s the end of it. What’s tricky about this is the default Facebook buttons always have the number next to it, right? So unless you know how to manipulate the code a little bit, it’s actually kind of hard. I had to code up my own button to do that, to remove the Oh really? Yeah.

14:32
Yeah, most of the time it’s yeah, it’s just like Facebook share and it doesn’t have the numbers. I mean, if people are actually sharing it more social proof, that’s always going to be my priority. If the question is, should we add more social proof? The answer is yes. I don’t think you could do enough. And here’s like an obvious pet peeve. Like it’s intuitive to me, but sometimes I’ll land on the site and I’ll have no idea what the heck they’re selling or why I should buy from them at all. Oh, the story.

15:02
and the description and the positioning and those are the fundamentals. swear to God, all of the fundamentals are in copywriting and that’s including the social proof. Like you got to nail those before you worry about design and page speed. I think that’s my other issue is like, you know, sites with one line descriptions that in no reviews and like we’re worried about our page speed score. You got bigger problems. Actually, you know, I’m actually curious since you work with a lot of clients, what is your hierarchy of

15:32
priority when you land on a site or what you work on. Okay, so a hundred percent. Number one, it needs to be clear. The positioning or the tagline needs to be clear. Cause you said like, I land on a site, I got no idea what they’re doing, why I’m here. That’s a big problem. And if like you saw it, everybody else did too. So when I land on a site, need within seconds, I need to know

15:57
what they sell, why, or at least you’ve been able to spark my curiosity. know, like I land on doglawyer.com and they’re like, oh, that’s not a real site. But certainly like a name like that, I gotta know more. So like sometimes you get lucky and you can get away with not having more of a story initially. But for the most part, like you gotta have a tagline, a headline. You need something to orient me as to like why the heck I just got dropped in here and what I’m supposed to do next. And so I really like the absolute.

16:25
cornerstone of everything is knowing and nailing and communicating that positioning statement. And that needs to be above the Yes, usually it’s like, all right, I want your logo and can we put a three to five word tagline underneath it? Oftentimes, that’s a great way to do it. Maybe you get lucky and the brand name has what you sell and it is obvious. Like, Harney and Sons Fine Tea Company. I’ll give you a guess what they sell, right? So that one, you get lucky. But yeah, I want a

16:54
a tagline, want a headline, I want something that’s gonna make it really clear to me above the fold what you sell. Alright, and then that makes it easy for me as a visitor, as a customer, to go, alright, I wanna know more. Or this isn’t for me, one of the two. But either way, we’re separating the wheat from the chaff. And then from there, okay, tell me a story. I like stories, tell me a story! I want that brand story. And it’s even like in a product description, you still wanna be able to tell a story.

17:22
on an about page you’re telling a story, on the home page you’re telling a story. If you’re not storytelling throughout this journey, you’re leaving money on the table. Like that is the next fundamental. And that really comes down to, right, all of this falls under copywriting. We’re not talking about design or development. This is just, you gotta type on the keyboard and make it make the click clack noise, right? Nobody wants to do it. It feels like homework. So it gets pushed to the bottom. So our mutual friend, think Michael Jammon, he runs Twirly Girl.

17:51
And they sell kids I love Michael Jammin. Girls dresses, very commonplace, very saturated. But their story is so amazing. It was about how his wife was abused as a child and she just wants to express all the… Of course I’m not doing a good job of explaining this. But she wanted to create these dresses to make girls really happy. And he has just really clever videos on his site that clearly express this amazing story. I’m not doing it justice. And that video makes almost all of their sales.

18:20
It’s on the about page, it’s on the front page, it’s an amazing story. Every time I watch it, I want to go buy a dress. They have, well, there’s quite an unfair advantage there in that Michael Jammin is a actual honest to goodness Hollywood screenwriter who wrote for King of the Hill and Beavis at Butthead. mean, guy, it’s just brilliant and hilarious. And he applied, he knew what Hollywood storytelling worked, like what that looked like, what that process was and when it worked. And he turned around.

18:49
and just applied it to copywriting on this website. And the results are million dollar videos. For most humans though, like you should work on your About Us page a little bit. Tell a story, just something about yourself that’s a little bit more personal. Because you don’t want to appear as like a big faceless, big large company, right? You want to be, you want to play off the mom and pop aspect because people want to shop from mom and pop stores. Well, yes. And especially now the, I think in

19:17
the last two years we’ve really seen the rise of conscious consumerism where people want to know who’s getting their dollars and why. Like why should I care? I have at this point I now have what feels like infinite options for just about anything I want to buy. So being able to tell that story that’s the competitive advantage against Walmart, against Amazon. They can’t compete with that. They’re not a person. They’re, you know, Jeff Bezos richest man in the world.

19:45
going to sp- like the guy feels like a super villain at this point, right? You’re not, you’re a person, you could be their neighbor. If they can relate to you and relate to their story, your story, then you are going to get those dollars. People are gonna vote with their dollars and say believe in what you’re doing. And if you keep your mouth shut and never share your story, you guarantee that that’s never gonna happen.

20:10
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.

20:38
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.

21:08
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. So a common misconception is that people don’t even look at your About Us page, but I guarantee you, and this is for our store, the About Us page is probably the second or third most trafficked page on the site. Because when you’re shopping at an unknown boutique, people actually want to know the people behind the store. Yes. Yeah. Well, think about it. It’s like…

21:36
If somebody jumped out of a parking lot, hey, give me your credit card number. I’ve got these t-shirts. You want to buy them? Give me your credit card. That’s insane. But that’s functionally what a lot of online direct-to-consumer stores do. And so I need to know who it is who’s asking for my credit card number. And that’s why that About Us page is so important. And if you run screen recordings on a site, it’ll probably be true for just about everybody’s. As you’ll see, a fair number of people will add to cart and then go check the About page.

22:05
and then you can see whether or not they’ve made a purchase decision on if they go back to the cart and proceed to checkout. Here’s what I actually like to do. So usually when you ask your friends for an opinion on your site, they’re your friends, right? So they’re going to say, oh, it’s great. It’s great. It’s going to do great. But they’re probably lying to you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. So what I like to do is I’ll use a service like PickFu. It’s basically like a polling service. You can get 50 responses within like 15 minutes. And I did it with my site maybe a year ago and

22:35
You’ll get real unbiased comments like, Hey, I hate the pop-up. I hate this. I hate this. Hello. No, I would not shop there. You just ask a simple question. Like if you landed on this site for the first time, assuming you like the products, would you buy from here? Simple question like that. And you’ll get a lot of answers. How do you spell pick food? P I C K F U. Um, maybe in the show notes, I actually have a 50 % off coupon off of that. Say if you want to try it, it’ll be the best 25 bucks you’ll ever spend. I guarantee you. Sweet.

23:05
No, I know this works because we’ve used, I’m not familiar with PickFu, but I’ve used Hotjar, which will let you do, they call them incoming surveys. Same concept. There’s a lot of companies that do similar things. Yeah. Yeah. lot of like, I don’t use it, but I know a lot of Shopify merchants like Lucky Orange. I think it can do it. Oh really? Okay. I’m not sure. You know what? I shouldn’t say that. I really have no idea. Well, so the students in my class, I have them do it before they submit, before they asked me to critique their site, basically I asked them to do it.

23:35
Ah, and it’s eye opening. It’s eye opening. Well, so this brings me to one of my other pet peeves, not talking to your customers. Yes. Nobody talks to their customers. It’s like, well, in oftentimes you ask, like, oh, why do your customers buy? And they’ll have an answer. And then I’ll say, how do you know? Oh, we just know. So what you just know. That means you that means it’s a best guess and that you might be right. But until you ask, it’s still just a best guess. And that’s what I love about talking to your customers. And one of the best ways to talk to your customers and pick up the phone.

24:05
Call your customer, use phone.app, it’s the best app. Call your customers on the phone and talk to them. And be like, hey, why’d you buy? What’d you hope to get out of this? Tell me about the experience. mean, just talking to a few people’s really enlightening. know, the same, it will have a similar effect to asking your friends. They’re not gonna tell you your face, like, well, it kinda sucked. They might, but they’re less likely. Whereas that instantaneous pop-up, like you’re getting that immediate reaction unfiltered.

24:35
Man, people will tell you the craziest stuff in those pop-ups. But it’s so, it’s incredibly helpful, especially when it’s like, all right, I got a few weirdos, but eight people all kind of said the same thing was their initial impression and it wasn’t great. Oh, all right, so now you know that’s a thing you need to address. You know what I do every time I release a new product? And it’s actually driving my wife crazy. I have an abandoned cart script on my site where if they abandon, like I get emailed saying, hey, this person with this phone number abandoned.

25:04
and I’ll call them up and I’ll say, hey, we just noticed that you tried to check out but you didn’t complete the process. Was there anything wrong and is there anything that I can help you with? And more often than not, they’re actually willing to talk to you and tell you what’s wrong. And then usually what I’ll do is at the end, I’ll give them a big coupon or sometimes I’ll just give them the product for free after that to just compensate them for their time.

25:30
It’s really hard to do this. It’s really hard to cold call. It’s technically not cold calling, right? Because they were on your site and they gave you their It’s not cold calling, but no, okay. But it’s awkward. Who wants to pick up the phone and call a stranger and be like, you tried to buy from my website and you bounced and I want to talk to you about that. Like the first several times you do that, I’m sure was nerve wracking. It is actually, you know what, if you want to make it a little bit more comfortable, what you can do is you can lead to the offer. You can just sit, you can lead with the offer and say, hey, you know,

25:59
We noticed you didn’t check out and don’t worry, I’m gonna compensate with your time with a big coupon or give you the product for free. But I just like some honest feedback on why you didn’t make the purchase the first time. And do you represent yourself as like, I run this site with my wife. Like, do you make it very personal? say, hey, I’m the owner of this business. I run it with my wife and we just launched this product and we just noticed that you tried to check out but you didn’t finish it. And we’re just wondering if you’d give us some feedback on the process. Something very straightforward like that.

26:29
I would say seven times out of 10, someone will probably be willing to talk to you. Interesting. And so, oh, I love this idea. And so when you call them, what kind of objections do you typically hear? They’re like, well, because they’re going to tell you’re essentially saying like, why didn’t you buy? And so that you can then bust that objection for other people in the future. And then you seal the deal with, hey, I’ll give you the thing for free. And now you’ve got a customer for life or like, here’s 50 % off. I’ll just give it to you at cost.

26:58
Right. So I can tell you this because maybe a couple of years ago we launched like a new apron line and sometimes you’ll get a question, you’ll get an answer like, hey, I was on my mobile phone and it just wasn’t convenient to check out, which could be a problem in itself, right? Like maybe you need a better mobile payment system so you don’t have to enter in all that stuff. Like you’re not using PayPal OneTouch or, or. I was going to say, like you need, if you, if you hear that objection and you don’t have an express payment option, now you know what the solution is. Right.

27:27
But so in this particular case with the apron, what ended up happening was the woman was like, know, I, so we sell a mother daughter apron set just to kind of give you some background and there’s sizing for the adult and then for the kids, we just have an age range like two, I can’t remember what the age range is now two to four and six to 10 or something two to six or six to 10. Anyway, the problem was, was that the person wasn’t clear what the size, the exact sizing was for their child because they have,

27:56
like a child who’s larger percentile wise and they weren’t sure that the apron was gonna fit. And we didn’t do a good job of conveying that. And so after talking with her, I was like, hey, so what information would you need? Because we actually have the measurements there, right? We had the measurements in the product description, but what she would have liked to see was like, if my daughter is five foot six or something like that, like a height scale. And so that was something that- Yeah, they want like a table. Exactly.

28:26
Yeah, based on height, not necessarily age because age is ambiguous. Yeah, I don’t like age. You know, like all of my children are tall, but my daughter is in the 98th percentile for height at age four. So people are always like, she’s four. Well, when sizing stuff is based on age, it’s really hard. I found for all of my kids, like just add, you know, plus one or plus two, depending when they use those age sizes.

28:51
And this might be common sense for apparel, but this was the first apparel item that we actually ever carry in our store. So we didn’t know, right? I was okay, because I was gonna say with apparel, the number one objection by far is sizing. Yep. Like will this thing fit me? And then the follow-up objection is, well, if I buy it and it doesn’t fit because this sizing is ambiguous. So I really, a lot of people feel like I’m gambling when I buy apparel online. Still to this day.

29:16
And then so you need to be really upfront with here’s the returns and exchange process if this doesn’t fit. And I flat out like put it in there as what happens if it doesn’t fit? Hey, we’ll pay for the return shipping and we’ll send you a different song. Here’s the rub on this though. So we do personalized aprons. So you can’t return them, which was a further objection. I mean, these are all things that we learned and this might be common sense to people to sell apparel, but we weren’t experienced in that. So these are all things that we learned just from cold calling people.

29:46
Yeah, no, like you, you know, no matter what you do, you don’t know what you don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, and that’s why we’re hammering on. You have to talk to people because otherwise you don’t know. All right. Is it my turn or your turn? Was that yours or mine? I feel like we had the same peeves pet peeves. I have no, I don’t know anymore. All right. Well, so we, made some app recommendations and that leads me to the other issue that I see. And this is like, especially with Shopify stores.

30:16
is people, I call this app roulette and you know, the number, regardless of what platform you’re on, there are apps, plugins and scripts and like tools and there is no end to the amount of really cool stuff you can use on your site. And these are shiny toys and I call it app roulette because it’s like, well, if I just get the right combo of tools, if I have the right tool stack, you know, my conversions will explode. My average order value explode. I’ll make more money. I totally get what’s going on here, but

30:45
I mean, it just becomes detrimental where you end up, you could see the sites that are doing this when you land on it and A, the site takes a while to load. So like, you know that page speed score is tanked. And then it’s like, all right, spin to win, punch the monkey, enter your email. Like I see someone who is familiar with punch the monkey from the 90s. Those 90s flash banner ads, really ages me. And you know that’s what’s going on. Is there like, well, if I could just, you know, more.

31:14
throw more widgets at it, more shiny toys, we’ll fix it. And it isn’t the case, you know, it just, it looks cluttered, it’s confusing. And then, you know, and then on top of it, when they go to exit, my hot jar exit intent survey pops up and they’re like, not another effing pop-up. That’s a real thing that I see when I run those on sites that have a lot of stuff. They’re like, why there’s so many pop-ups? So you probably see this a lot more than I do, but sometimes I’ll open up a student site and I’ll see like 40 apps installed and some of them don’t do

31:43
anything except like install like a small piece of code in there because they don’t want to like touch their theme files and whatnot. Like it literally just inserts a piece of JavaScript. Yeah. Yeah. I edit my theme. Oh my gosh. That’s, know, you may as well it’s like pop the hood and adjust the timing on your distributor. Like it’s a scary thing if you don’t know what it means. So I get why those apps exist. There’s a lot that’s just like, you’re right. It’s just, it, jacks one line of JavaScript code and now you’re paying $8 a month for the rest of forever.

32:10
I do want to say something that I’ve seen and maybe you have more experience in this since you work with a lot of clients, but I’ve seen people uninstall apps thinking that it was clean, but in fact they leave a piece of JavaScript in there and whenever you have a piece of JavaScript in there, they can literally track everything about your site if they want to do that. Right? Have you seen that? Yeah, if they’re in cities. right. So Shopify specifically, when you have an app installed, when you click delete on that app,

32:40
or I think it used to say uninstall, I think it says delete now, but either way it’s a misnomer. Really what it does is it just immediately severs the app developer’s connection to your store. And it’s a security thing, that’s all right, you want these guys out, they’re out, the end of it. And the problem with that is depending on how the app works, some add theme code to the theme. I have four apps and all of them, we just put theme code in the theme. And we do it because

33:09
That’s the most performant option. But as soon as you delete the app, guess what? All that stuff’s still there. we’ll get, our solution is we fire off, immediately we fire off an email, a transactional email to the merchant that says, hey, we saw you uninstalled our app. A, tell us why. So we’re looking for that objection. And then B, okay, if you didn’t remove the theme code, here’s exactly how to do it and you have to do it. And if you don’t want to do it, just hit reply, we’ll do it for you. Like I just, you I don’t,

33:39
want to be part of the problem when it comes to performance. And so we do that. But so you have seen this. You don’t know what your certain apps. Oh, OK. Yeah. Oh, nonstop. And so like when people are called my site slow, former CTO of Shopify, JML said websites get slow slowly. And it’s because of exactly what you described. It’s cruft. It’s barnacles to a ship. It’s this code just accumulates over time. And even though it’s not doing anything.

34:06
You know, the web server’s not smart enough to figure that out, and the browser’s not smart enough, and so it just like, every new site load has to load all this old garbage that you’ve like completely forgot about from two years ago. So let me ask you this, I have students that, like I’ll see this in students’ sites, is there an easy way for them to do it themselves without actually having me step in? Yes and no. you, almost all of this stuff is gonna be sitting either in the

34:35
the beginning or the end of theme.liquid. This is specific to Shopify. So it’s like, I’m just looking for the header and footer that loads in every page and that’s gonna be in theme.liquid. And most of these apps, there’s either gonna be a comment on it or it will be evident from the name what it is. It’s like, well, I installed Acme Widget Popup Builder. And you’ll see a line that says include, single quote,

35:02
Acme widget pop-up builder single quotes. So you know like, oh, okay, that’s that app I don’t have anymore. And so you just safely comment that out or delete the line. A lot of people have theme editing phobia though. They do. But knowing just a little, like you don’t have to be a theme developer, but if you know enough to be dangerous, and that’s the camp I put myself into. So you just know like basic HTML, which is not complicated, and maybe like a little bit of liquid in theme structure.

35:31
you immediately are way better off. There is just so much more you can do that you didn’t realize, especially for like day to day stuff like, you know, add and remove tracking code, verification codes. Like a lot of people recently had to verify their domain with Facebook. So suddenly like you that’s the kind of thing that you would be very comfortable and confident with. Yeah. And there’s plenty of free classes out there like Skillshare has got a ton of stuff you can learn. Just like here’s the basics of how a theme is set up.

36:00
and like I could go learn basic HTML and CSS and you will be in such a better position. Like think about it. You’re a web professional. Think if you are a merchant, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not. And your theme is very much like the face of your business. It’s your full-time salesperson and you want to be able to speak its language. And so if you learn those things, that’ll like, you’ll be able to do this stuff yourself and you’ll be able to talk, uh, have better relationships.

36:27
communication with any theme developer you may hire. You can’t be an online professional without being willing to learn something about the internet or websites. That’s my philosophy. 100%. And like, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up figuring some of this will sink in over time. All Here’s my biggest pet peeve. Going for revenue over profit.

36:52
I once had this student show me their Facebook ads account and they were generating sales, but the return on ad spend was terrible, but they were getting the sales, which was making them happy. But it wasn’t return. Has it happened to any of your clients? I don’t know. Yes, but I think they were more, when it’s happened, they’re more aware of it. They’re like, okay, we got it this far where it’s like, this is a loss leader and we’re gonna make it up on subsequent sales.

37:21
Right? Like, we’ve acquired them as a customer at a loss, which is what like the big DTC brands do, because they’re spending other people’s money. You know, they’re not bootstrapping it. And then, all right, on subsequent sales, we’ll make it up. Or like drop shipping businesses where margins are razor thin and they’re like, well, just revise, revise. We’ll keep iterating. We’ll dial it in. But it’s like, well, all right, how much time do you give it? And I don’t know what the answer is. Well, I think I’ll just tell you story from my store.

37:49
So we’re in the wedding industry, so you would think that we wouldn’t have that much repeat business, right? But 12 % of our repeat business, 12 % of our sales is repeat business, but it actually makes up 30 % of our sales. But here’s the kicker. So our average order value is about 60 bucks, and 50 % of our customers spend less than half of our AOV. But they represent the bulk of our customers. Whereas I think only 10 % of our customers spend 2X of our AOV.

38:19
but they actually make up 50 % of our revenues. So we’re a small business, we’re very small. We have a couple of employees, my wife and I. So where should we be focusing our time? We focus now on those big, we call them the whales. And it turns out that after doing some analysis, that a lot of our cheapie customers were coming from Facebook and we only have a little bit of finite amount of time. So we now focus actually on the big repeat customers that we have in our

38:48
It just made life a lot easier for us. So you’re applying the 80-20 rule, Pareto’s principle there, right? Yes. It’s not quite 80-20 though, but yeah. Right. a similar idea. I love that you’re doing this. I think you could apply that same thinking to all manners and areas of your life. But tell me, when you’re doing that customer analysis where you’re segmenting them, and it sounds like maybe you’re getting to RFM model,

39:18
How do you do that analysis? How are you identifying these customer segments? So we, I can’t remember exactly how we came up with the idea with half the AOV, but we started with the average order value, right? What our average order value was. And then for our business, actually, a good portion of that 12 % that I mentioned are event and wedding planners, right? And as soon as you said we had like 12 % a repeat with a higher AOV, immediately in my head I I bet they’re wedding professionals. And so what ended up happening is,

39:47
We start now looking for anomalies in our sales, and then we pick up the phone, like you said, and we’ll call them up and we’ll say, hey, we noticed that you ordered a lot. Are you a planner? Are you going to order in bulk? I tell you what we’ll do is we’ll give you a special coupon code and a representative from our company that will handle all of your transactions and make sure they arrive at the destination on time. We’ll give you a hand holding, essentially. And after that call, once we have established face

40:16
some rapport, they continue to order from us over and over and over again. And they’re basically a customer for life that orders in bulk. They don’t complain about anything. It’s like the best customer ever. essentially, this is brilliant. So what some people do, they say, all right, I want those wholesale accounts because they have high AOVs. And so they’ll set up a wholesale program, but it’s just like a link on the site and they expect people to go sign up for it. You are proactive about it.

40:41
you’re identifying these people that are wedding professionals. And these are your like, really, these are your ideal customers who have the biggest lifetime value. so, and then, so once you identify them, you call them up and say, Hey, we, we see you and we want to help you. So here’s your lifetime discount code. And we’re going to really like their big fear is a wedding is a mission critical event. So you’re saying, Hey, we’re going to make sure you get yourself. We’re going to look out for you.

41:08
And then as soon as you do that and you were so proactive, I imagine that you just have customers for life with them. The phone call is actually pretty important in this case. Again, real contact. It’s that phone call. it’s like you’re no longer, it’s no longer a brand. It’s, it’s Steve. Steve’s helping me out. Another pet peeve is making a guess at who your real customer is and then writing all your copy to.

41:36
account for that imaginary person when you don’t have any data. I don’t know if that happens. It’s usually like they’re thinking about themselves. Most people, their first customer, they are their own best first customer. And so they’re writing to themselves. The only reason I can talk about all this stuff is because I made all these same mistakes, just to be clear for anyone who’s listening. Yeah, I’m sure we’ve both done some boneheaded things I got an example on this line too. I assume that all our customers are wedding customers.

42:06
The reason I found this out is I was looking at my Facebook demographic data and I noticed that a lot of our customers were over the age of 55. And I’m like, there can’t be people over the age of 55 getting married, like a whole bunch, right? Yeah, this was an outlier. This was an outlier. But it turns out like a lot of those repeat customers are people who just like to collect handkerchiefs, believe it or not. Oh, what? Yes, right? Just like you like to collect old cars. I do.

42:34
Kurt just got a Volkswagen Beetle, 79 Beetle, which is pretty sweet. There’s people who collect handkerchiefs, or they’re crafters, and these tend to be older women who do these things. Huh. And so you had this customer segment that you were not aware of. Did you, once you knew that, was there any like actionable info there? Well. Or anything that you like, you changed? Yes, actually. So in the old days, every single page was about weddings.

43:03
Every landing page was about weddings. And so now we have a special section for weddings now, but the rest of it is just talking about either embroidered blanks for crafting or some of these older ladies who like to collect them. Like the copy has changed, basically. Okay. And so initially, well, we talked about, like you said, the big pet peeve is people just assume they know what the customer’s like, and then they write to that customer.

43:30
What’s the correct method? What should they be doing instead? The correct method is you’re not going to know from the beginning. So you can start with some assumptions. But again, you have to, as you said before, talk to the customer. We have a survey in our post-purchase sequence that asks them what they’re using it for and that sort of thing. And then based on the survey data, we make adjustments. We actually don’t call those customers. I guess it would be just too many. We only call the whales. But yeah, we’re constantly trying to get data about our customers so we can

43:59
do things appropriately. So for SMS, for example, sometimes we’ll ask, what would you like us to carry in our store and what would you use it for? Something like that. And what would you use it for? think that’s the critical question. you like, hey, you’re trolling for product suggestions. Hey, what do you want us to sell? But then like, what, why is really, is the, I think the follow-up question that most people miss. You need to scratch a little bit deeper and figure out what the intent is.

44:28
because that really adds so much, so much info and tone to why they’re making that request. A perfect example of this is my buddy Neville, he used to run an e-commerce store a long time ago and he used to sell rave supplies. So there’s this one product that he sold which were fingertip lights and I don’t really go raving, but supposedly like you twirl these around and you know, whatever. But yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I can picture this. He found that plumbers were buying this.

44:57
these fingertip lights. they could, you know, when they’re under the sink, they have lights on their fingertips. So it’s convenient and they can see what they’re doing. That’s pretty smart. So he wrote, he started writing copy to plumbers and it ended up converting really well, stuff like that. That’s great. Yeah. Oftentimes like there’s things don’t necessarily have to stick to their original purpose. Like you mentioned, oh, Kurt’s got a 79 beetle.

45:24
I have been using, trying to find the perfect mirror to fit behind in this like tight, hard to reach place where I’m adjusting a carburetor. And you know, I bought an automotive mirror, like from an auto parts store, didn’t work. The mirror I found that worked, I’d be using my wife’s compact. I have stolen her compact and that’s actually a much better mirror, it’s much more useful. So that’s like, that’s clearly not the intended use there, but that’s what ended up working.

45:52
Not that I’m gonna go like remarket compacts, like automotive, know, looky-loo mirrors. So you said post purchase survey. What are some of your favorite post purchase survey questions? I’m trying to think. Well, mainly what they’re using it for. then here’s the kicker for ours. This is specific to our business. We asked them if they are a professional in this business. are they buying it for business or pleasure or as a gift? And if they say business,

46:22
then we call those people. That’s actually our primary They have raised their hand as a whale. That’s actually our primary purpose for the survey, actually, for our store. That’s pretty bright. Everyone else has different uses, obviously. But yeah. So I guess sometimes we’ll ask them if they like the product, and if so, we’ll ask them for a review or a testimonial, or have them take photos for social and that sort of thing. That’s what we mainly use it for. Do you do any split testing? No, actually, I was going to talk about that.

46:52
don’t do a whole lot of split testing, mainly because split testing takes forever. It mostly fails. It’s mostly inconclusive. So I’m curious to see what you have to say about that actually. Okay, so you’re right about both things. Any test, like minimum, needs to run two weeks. And that’s a frustratingly long time to wait. And during that time, you know, you’re like sitting there refreshing it, checking it, and you’re…

47:19
your probability to be best just keeps flipping back and forth between the two. So for a lot of stuff, that’s true. really, turns out, I think the conclusion with split testing is for many split tests, design is way less important than we think. The copy and the content and the offer and the quality of traffic, those really are the much more important factors to conversion. And with split testing, I think a lot of people just use it to split test design changes. And that’s why they end up with inconclusive results.

47:49
or either they’re calling it too early or they’re starting them too early where like you just don’t have enough traffic. So one of things that we do is like, I’ll usually use revenue as my primary goal as opposed to conversion. Cause at least now I’m factoring in average order value and conversion by doing that. And I think I’m getting a better signal to noise ratio by using that. I think that helps. Let it run long enough, like two weeks.

48:14
and really try to limit the number of tests you run at once or like the number of variants. Otherwise then the thing really takes forever to get anything conclusive. But for the most part, I think a lot of stuff, you know, really is just like very subjective and that it doesn’t have, you’re just, you need to use common sense on it. But for other things like, man, should we do this? Is this a good idea? Like one phenomenal split testing thing we’ve done is

48:42
figure out what your free shipping threshold should be. And this is a tough one to do. I found an app that’ll do it called Ship Scout and you have to be on Shopify Plus to do it. So it kind of limits who can do this. But it’s really cool where like you’ll, the banner across the top offering free shipping, that threshold will change. And then once you’re in the checkout, the shipping rates will change. And so you could figure out through data, okay,

49:11
Here’s like whether or not you’re leaving money on the table with your free shipping threshold. So like stuff like that, absolutely split test those offers. Cause that’s going to have a real, real difference in revenue on the business. How much traffic would you recommend to even think about split testing? Personally? So our, our sake, I think it’s about 50,000 visits a month. I don’t even think that’s enough to complete a split test unless I do a whole site wide split test in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it’s gotta be, um,

49:39
Well, think the traffic is an issue. And then on top of it, you also need the conversion. So if it’s like a high, moderately traffic site with low conversions, you’re probably not a good candidate. like, yeah, once you get to 100,000 visits a month with at least a 1 % conversion rate. All right, now we’re cooking with gas. And you should be able to split test just fine at that point. I can see the free shipping offer working because that’s like a generic conversion.

50:07
But if I was trying to test some UI change on one page, that one page would have to get a lot of traffic, right? Right, and that’s the issue we get into. I’m running some split tests now, and even on a site that gets, that’s in the 1 % of websites as far as traffic goes, running a split test on an individual product page, it’s never gonna get, it’s never gonna happen. It will be years before I have a statistically significant result. So even on these huge sites, if you make the test too specific,

50:37
you run into issues. So I would say, and you can agree with me or disagree with me here, if you’re running a smaller site, think something like PickFoo is probably better than running a real split. You’ll get results in 15 minutes from people, from random people. 100%. I also find heat mapping. Yes. Where it’s like heat map, scroll map, click map, not click map, movement map, where you can see like where their mouse goes on desktop. Those are very valuable, even on sites that have less traffic.

51:05
Like that, there you go, that’s a heuristics analysis tool you can use way before split testing starts to make sense. And here’s an example of just something, why heat maps and scroll maps are useful. There’s this one student I had which was dead set on keeping their sidebar. Dead set, even though it didn’t look good and it was like compressing like the size of the images on the category pages. And so was like, okay, let’s just run a test and.

51:34
we finally discovered that no one is clicking on anything in the sidebar. No one’s even looking over on the sidebar. And so finally, with that data, they removed it. That’s, yeah. And like we were talking about social buttons earlier. That’s like, that’s a thing that you could very easily use a heat map to figure out like, people messing with this thing or not? Yeah. Well, the heat map says no. Dude, Kurt, we’ve been talking for 50 minutes about pet peeves. You got anything else to add before we wrap this up? You know,

52:01
I think ultimately my pet peeve is not starting. I think you need to get out of your own way sometimes. Ask yourself, what would someone smarter than me do? And then go, turns out you already know the answer, then go do that. I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, the biggest stumbling block is not any of this stuff. It’s just taking action and moving forward. So even if you’re out there making mistakes, that’s great. At least you’re doing something. My pet peeve is not being willing to do like,

52:30
the legwork, the dirty work. got it. Yeah. need to the work. create an online business and think they could just do everything online, but doing stupid things like picking up the phone or actually talking to someone face to face or being a little bit more personal. I mean, these are things you got to do. It’s just like a regular brick and mortar business in that respect. A hundred percent. Mr. Steve Chow, where could people go to learn more about you?

52:54
Yeah, if you guys are looking to get married, can hook you up over at bumblebillins.com. That’s my e-commerce store. But if you want to learn more about e-commerce in general, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com. I offer a free mini course from beginners. It also covers advanced people. If you want to create content, sign up, and that’s a free mini course right there. Fantastic. Thank you, sir. This has been a ton of fun. All right, Kurt Elster, this was a ton of fun. Where can people find you online if they want to learn more about you?

53:23
Oh my gosh, well, I’m best known for my show, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, or head to curtelster.com. That’s got plenty of links to where you can learn more about me.

53:35
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And once again, if you haven’t already, go check out Kurt Elster on the unofficial Shopify podcast. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 360. And once again, I want to thank Clibio, 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 mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO.

54:03
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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I these tools in my blog, and if you were interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com

54:33
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
that I use for ecommerce and it is 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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

00:58
I also want to thank Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of show. Now if you’re working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined, you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business. Now do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information,

01:27
and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing to any business, the relationship between you and your customer and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony.

01:58
And unlike this podcast 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.

02:23
Today I have got my friend Chris Mercer on the show. And Chris is someone who I met at social media marketing world where we both spoke and I was really impressed by his talk. Now Chris is the founder of measurementmarketing.io and he specializes in website analytics. Now analytics may not sound like the sexiest of topics, but I do know for a fact that most people are doing it wrong. Most people don’t know how to use Google analytics and most shop owners have no idea what metrics to focus on in their reports. So today,

02:54
I asked Chris to teach us the right way to gather and analyze your data for your e-commerce store. And he promised to make it sexy at the same time. with that, welcome to show, Chris. How are doing today? I will do my best, man. See, appreciate you having me. And you know what? One day you will start calling me Mercer as all my friends do. I can’t, you know, it’s yeah, maybe once we’re tighter, I’ll call you Mercer. How’s that? Done. It’s a deal. We haven’t hung out enough yet. Then you can call me too. There you go. There you go. Looking forward to it. So Chris, I,

03:22
Mercer, I’ll call you Mercer here in this podcast. How does one decide to make a living teaching measurement and marketing? Like what’s your background? The origin story. Yes. Oh yeah. So the way we started, I actually started teaching people how to develop WordPress sites with a, just a membership site that showed people how to use WordPress. That led into very quickly, as you might imagine people saying, Hey, this is a lot of work. How much for you to build sites? So I started building sites and you building a little agency that that did that. We wanted to differentiate ourselves because everybody was doing that.

03:52
So we said, oh, we’re gonna do websites, but then we’ll help you optimize those websites, right? Make them perform better. So in order to optimize something, you must first measure something. And that’s where we started learning Google Analytics because we thought that’s what everybody else was doing. So we learned Google Analytics really well and then started, know, experimenting with other tools. We started showing clients of ours like, oh, here’s what your goal is in Google Analytics. And what was funny is really quickly.

04:16
the client conversations changed from, let’s talk about the split test and what the website looks like to, okay, go back to the analytics thing and show me where the goals are again. And how do I pull this information? Oh, you can do that. I you could track a button click. And it was like all this stuff. And then we would start getting referrals from our clients, sending us other people who wanted to talk about not websites, because they had website development, but they didn’t have measurement. And so that’s when we realized as a company, okay, we’re going to pivot into helping people understand these tools.

04:43
because there’s just a lot of misconceptions with them that make things a little more complicated than they need to be. So let’s say I have an e-commerce store. I know for a fact, so I teach a class on e-commerce, and I know for a fact that people just open up their analytics and they look at how many visits they have, and that’s pretty much it, right? Right, right. So what should people be looking at? What needs to be set up, actually? Set up is probably the hardest part. It is, because it’s such a great point, because that’s the part that is the fastest thing that is skipped over.

05:11
because there’s a misconception that when you put the code on your pages or when you turn on that Shopify integration or whatever the thing is that lights up Google Analytics, that that is the setup, but that’s not that literally just turning it on. Then you have to actually set it up to get some real usefulness out of it. And that’s where, you know, in the terms of Google Analytics, you would do things like creating. They have the thing called views back there where you can do multiple views and you see different, different, uh, you know, e-commerce settings and all of that stuff. You have to get your goals set up.

05:41
and you basically tell Google Analytics what you want it to be able to report back for you. All so let’s start from the beginning here. So I started a Shopify store and I’ve enabled e-commerce analytics and everything is set up so that Shopify can tell me what people have bought and when people have made a purchase and track all the revenue and that sort of thing. What else needs to be set up? Is there like a list you can provide us? You know what? I am, but I’m gonna give you a formula if I had to think about it. Okay.

06:09
The letters to write down, we always call this QIA, but it’s Q-I-A. And this is the first thing that everybody should be doing. First thing is you go, what questions am I wanting to get answers to? Questions about my store. So questions, for example, might be how many people are purchasing, right? How many transactions am I making? What’s the average dollars per transaction? How many people are seeing my product detail pages? How many people are starting to check out? How many of those people?

06:38
don’t check out, right? Those are examples of questions where you’re just trying to figure out is the site working like it’s supposed to, right? So write down all these questions. Next to those, kind think this in three different columns. The first question, first column is all the questions you want to know. In the beginning, don’t worry about right questions or wrong questions, just any question. You will get better at this. It’s a skill. Like you build a muscle in the gym and you don’t get a big muscle right away after a couple of reps, you got to do that consistently. Same thing with this. So write down

07:06
any question that comes to mind, there are no bad ones. So what if my question is, why aren’t people buying? Perfectly, perfectly fine question to ask. Okay, perfectly fine. Write it down. Write down all questions, right? Next to that, there’s another column, that column is going to be the I column. So QIA, the I stands for information. And here you’re going, okay, what information do I need to be able to measure, right, to collect, to be able to answer that question? So if we go back to the example of, oh, well, how many transactions, one of how many

07:35
many sales I’m making per day, the obvious answer is, okay, I need to be able to measure the number of transactions that are coming. If I need to know the average dollars per cart or how much I’m selling per transaction, I need to know my total revenue that I’m making that day and then how many sales I had that day and I can divide those two out to figure out that answer. So the information is kind of like the how I’m going to get my answer is what you’re doing, but it’s always the behavior, the thing that you’re trying to measure for. So if you go back to your question, you said, okay, well, why aren’t people buying?

08:04
what information would you need to collect in order to do that? And at a certain point you might go like, I’m not sure what I would need. At that point, that’s okay. Leave that question off to the side right now. Go answer the ones you do know how to do first, right? Because that one, what’ll happen is you’re just not quite ready for it yet. It’s kind of like building a house with a foundation. have the foundation first, then you put up the walls, then you do the drywall, right? That sort of concept is what’ll happen with these questions. Because not all questions can be answered immediately.

08:34
because you might need to do some a little bit of homework, right? And and some, understanding more of the foundational levels of how your store operates before you can answer the more advanced questions like that. Does that make sense? Yeah. So given that, mean, that, that’s like the million dollar question I asked, right? How do you, how do you get to that point? So let’s continue the process. So we have the question, we have the information, and then this is the most important part of this Kia process, this QIA model. You have your question, you have your information, you have action. What

09:03
action will I take based upon the answer I get? And all of this happens before you dive into analytics, before you go into your store, before you take it, you’re just doing this on a piece of paper, a whiteboard spreadsheet, notes, docs, whatever, QIA, question information action. So let’s go back to that transaction. Could we say, okay, I’m gonna have the X amount of transactions coming through. I need to know if I’m, or what my number of transactions are. I’m gonna be able to measure that because I’m recording number of transactions through e-commerce or whatever else it is.

09:33
the actions I will take if it’s less than 10 sales a day, I’m going to do this. If it’s more than 10 sales a day, I’m going to do that. And it’s always in that format where there is a number associated to it, some sort of action that’s associated to that number. Okay. So given our store, how do you come up with that number? I guess let’s say typically on average, I get three orders per day or let’s let’s use round numbers, 10, 10 orders per day. So would that number be 10 then? Yeah, exactly. Right. Keep it simple, right?

10:02
Now, as you decide and we’ll kind of walk through the process to get to like your million dollar question. As we decide, we’re like, okay, 10 a day. If it’s less than 10 a day, I’m going to look at my traffic sources and figure out if there’s a particular traffic source that’s not working properly. Maybe my Facebook campaign that I thought was going to bring in those sales didn’t bring in the sales. Maybe my email didn’t go out like I thought it was supposed to go out that morning. It didn’t go out. Right. That sort of stuff. And we look back and we go, okay, here’s why that didn’t happen.

10:31
Now I’m going to go take a different action, you know, and to make it happen tomorrow. So it’ll be there. Right. Now, eventually you get to a point where you say, okay, 10, we’re hitting 10. Cool. Now I know we can hit 10. I know that’s sort of our baseline, our benchmark to your point, the average of what you can expect. Now I want it to be 12 or 13 or 14. And the reason it’s going to be 12, 13 or 14 is because I brought on a new affiliate and they’re going to mail for me, or I have this new traffic source that we’re opening up with Google ads and we’re going to send Google ads. Google ads is going to kick in a few sales. And so.

11:00
Now what’s starting to happen is, and remember you’re doing this before you really look at everything, you’re of planning out in your head. It’s like a role play. Right. But you’re understanding how you’re going to use your Google Analytics and how you’re going to use any analytics platform, Google Analytics or otherwise could be just the reports in your e-commerce platform. But now you understand how to start using them. have context now, they have usefulness. So instead of just jumping into them and kind of like seeing what you can see, which is what a lot of people do initially.

11:28
which is what we call going into analytics unarmed, right? Because it’s just going to batch you around, right? And so you’re going to be frustrated and overwhelmed and be like, okay, I’ll come back to this in a few years. But if you go in with a question, right? You go in armed with a question with this KIA model. You have your question, you know the information that you’re looking for to get the answer. You even know what actions you’re going to take based upon the answers that the platform gives you. It’s a lot easier to use the platforms. And pretty soon, if you can imagine doing that process with transactions, you can imagine doing that process with average order volume.

11:56
Okay, well, my average cart value should be, you hundred bucks. Well, now we just did an order bump. I want it to be 125 bucks. And I want to make sure the upsells that we just put in place, so the related products, which is that I just added should make it so it’s $125. If it’s not, I’m gonna go back and see if that widget’s working. If it is, then I’m gonna, you know, figure out some maybe other related products that might be higher ticket that I can do to make it even go and hire, right? And you just keep rinse and repeat this whole process. When you keep doing that,

12:24
Think about that question. Imagine if you’ve done that for a week or two even, right? Just on a consistent basis for a week or two. Now, when you ask that question of what do I do? Like, why aren’t people buying? You already kind of know that answer because you did all the bricks, right? So that question of like, why aren’t people buying? It’s kind of like looking at the wall or the whole house and like, why isn’t it working? But because you’re in these other questions, right? These questions that are sort of below that question, underneath that question, you’ll know why. Cause you’ll say, oh, that

12:53
that related widgets thing didn’t work or the related products thing didn’t work or the email didn’t go out or the ads, Google ads campaign that we thought was going to do this, didn’t do that. You’re going know exactly what it was that was causing. I want to bring this up real quick. I was going to save this for later, but these days, you know, people might take multiple paths to a purchase. Like they might click on a Facebook ad and then later on kick on a Google ad and then maybe find you via search before making a purchase. How do you distribute all the credit?

13:22
for all those things like you mentioned before, like what if Facebook ads aren’t converting as much for that given week, right? So how does the attribution work? So I’m gonna go in a little bit in marketing heresy. Okay. But I think honestly, I’m just a truth teller when it comes to this. And the short answer is you can’t. So stop trying. Because everybody has this multi-touch attribution question, right? But if you think back and if you Google,

13:52
If you watch videos from the 1840s, like everyone’s been asking this question for a long, long, long, long time, which implies it does not have an answer. Right. No one’s figured this thing out because it’s not able to be figured out. And the reason that it’s not able to be figured out, right. And don’t get me wrong. There was multi-touch attribution models where I could say, Oh, Facebook is first touch. They get all the credit or Facebook is last touch. So they only get the credit if they’re the last traffic source before the thing.

14:21
problem is time. so if Facebook, if I click on your ad on Monday, and then I become a lead on Wednesday from after doing a Google search and coming to your site, and then on Friday, the email closes the deal, right? Was it Facebook that caused that direct purchase? Right? It’s not, it’s the email that caused the purchase, right? Whatever that messaging was. Did Facebook have something to play in it? Absolutely.

14:48
But if Facebook’s job, and this is where you have to get brutal with your ads, if Facebook’s job was to sell me on that day, it did not do a good job, right? It didn’t do a good job. Just like if you think about it when you manage it, if you have a sales team, if you have three different salespeople, and I’ve got Facebook as a salesperson, I have Google ads as a salesperson, and I’ve got email as a salesperson, if email’s constantly closing the deal, and I’m measuring purely for revenue.

15:14
say and then and then we’ll back it up in a little bit because there is there is other place for these sales these other traffic sources but let’s pretend we’re just judging against revenue if email is closing the deal left and right do i pay facebook commission right as a salesperson would that be well i well i also talk to them that’s what would happen and as i say there’s no sales manager in the world that would pay them on that because like no you didn’t you didn’t close the sale your job was to close the sale and this is the key point if that was the job to close the sale there are campaigns and this is this is how

15:43
how we recommend you do it. You definitely need to have multiple touches, right? The whole sexy term is now omnichannel. So you wanna have different traffic sources. You need to have different touch points of different ways that somebody can come and find your store, your presence online. You have to have that, right? Email and Google ads and Facebook and Google organic and everything else that’s out there. So now that we know we need to have that, but not everything.

16:09
in reality. And I know this is hard to think about because everyone’s like, I want to get the sale, I want to get the sale. And you’re right, you want to make sure your store is making sales. But not every interaction with a customer has to be a request to buy something right this second. Sure, right? Not every interaction has to be that. So for example, if you’re doing content marketing and your sort of customer journey for your store might be, oh, we sent them to our blog, which educates them about how to get this product solved, this product, but with natural ingredients and why natural ingredients are so important. And then it’s sort of

16:39
warms them up to the idea that we’ve already done all the hard work in our product formulation. And so then they can buy the thing that they want to buy. And maybe some of them do. But that Facebook ad, its job is not really to sell the product. Its job is to get them exposed to the brand. And that’s how you judge it. And you don’t say like, yes, it might accidentally sell some at the same time. And that’s awesome. But that’s not the point of it. The point of it is to get people to be aware of whatever the product or service is. Maybe, right? Again, depends upon your customer journey.

17:07
But when you’re trying to measure the effectiveness of that though, how’s that done? Because you think about it in terms of a sales pipeline. when, whenever you’re managing a sales team and I always go back to the, managing a sales team, cause that’s my, my experience kind of in corporate world is that for sure. Managing sales teams and getting performance out of sales teams. So the way that you do that is you look at the pipeline and the pipeline is literally just what some people call sales pedal. All people will call it customer journey. It’s the same thing, right? How many phone calls are made? How many appointments are set? How many of those?

17:36
do you show up to? How many of those do you ask? How many are qualified? And how many of those buy, right? It’s just the general idea of that pipeline, of those stages of the journey. So what you do is you measure Facebook for you and you create ads for specific stages of the journey. And the reason we do this is because there’s less time involved. So it’s easier to measure. Less time has passed between the thing that we’re trying, the result we’re trying to get from that ad and them actually interacting with the ad. So for example, if I wanted to measure Facebook,

18:04
and say, okay, I want Facebook to send to a blog post to educate somebody about my content. That’s my conversion. That’s what I’m trying to get it to. And yes, some people will buy and that’s fine, but I just need people aware first, right? And to sort of mirror that with a sales management, it might be like, I got to get appointment dials. I need you to pick up the phone and set appointments. That’s what I need you to do, right? Set those appointments. And that’s what the job is. So Facebook is like, cool, set appointments. I’m going to do that. That’s all it does. Now, if somebody on that appointment says, hey, listen, I don’t need you to show up. I just want to buy your stuff right now.

18:34
awesome, right? But that’s not the point of Facebook. Facebook is to set appointments. That’s what it does. And that’s how I measure it, right? Against that. Then maybe again, Google ads are organic, whatever else, you know, gets them to, to, you know, show up to the ad or show up to the appointments, so to speak. And then email closes the deal, right? Whatever these, these things are, will measure those traffic sources against, are they doing these specific things? Now, remember, I’m not saying just Facebook is setting appointments. I’m saying this set of Facebook ads sets appointments. Then there’s another set of Facebook ads.

19:03
that can get people to come back to the store or to see a product detail page or something. You actually get them to buy. Maybe there’s another set of ads that then comes back and says, hey, listen, you didn’t buy. You had information in the checkout. So why not purchase today? Here’s a 10 % off coupon. So you can use Facebook at all these different stages, but you should also use all the traffic sources at those different stages. So let me just summarize what you just said. So you are trying to pick the shortest time frame.

19:29
because that provides the most accurate measurement. you’re breaking down each of your different campaigns into specific purposes. So that Facebook campaign for eyeballs onto your content, that’s a very quick and easy way to measure that. And so you should have metrics of conversion just for that little thing. Whereas a separate campaign will be responsible for maybe getting leads or getting conversions. Exactly Exactly right. So you’re shortening the timeframe. That’s exactly right. So it’s easier to measure, which makes it more useful because there’s less time.

19:58
Right? Exactly right. And remember, you’re not just doing Facebook to try to, you know, get, let’s say to the content pages or to become a lead. Google is also trying to do that. Organic is also trying to do that. Your, you know, email or whatever is trying to do that. You have all the other traffic sources trying to do that. But so what starts happening is you start to realize when you’re, you’re, because it’s easy to measure, you can now truly compare traffic sources and say, what’s the best at getting people to become leads? What’s the best at getting people to become aware of us in the first place? What’s the best at getting people to actually

20:26
close and purchase things or to repurchase things or to share our stuff on social media or whatever the thing is you’re trying to get done. At that point, then you can take a step back and you’ll see the entire story start to unfold of like, well actually it turns out Google organic is where they are really aware of us the most. We should keep doing SEO because that gets people to be aware, puts them in our pipeline. From there, it’s a combination of Google Ads and Facebook that really gets them to become a lead. Roughly from what we can sell for every 100 people that are becoming aware of us,

20:55
let’s say 30 % become leads, right? And then you can start to say, okay, well, then of those email, once they’re leads, email is really what’s responsible for closing the deal. So email closes 10 % of those. And now you can start to have a kind of a forecast of how your store operates. you will spell out, again, this is a little bit of practice to get there, but this is sort of the Holy grail where you can start to say, hey, next week, I’m gonna have a hundred people come into my store. Of those 30 of them are gonna add to cart of those.

21:22
10 of them are going to complete a checkout for at least 100 bucks a piece. And that’s how I’m to make X amount of dollars next week. And you’ll be able to measure against it to see if you were right. Did the store operate the way it was supposed to operate? And that’s sort of where, but you level up to that as you get these sort of beginning stages down of numbers.

21:43
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22:11
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22:41
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22:51
But at a higher level, something needs to put it all together, right? So for example, let’s say I gather all these leads super cheap for one of my campaigns, but those leads don’t convert to sales. So whose fault is it? Is it the second stage to the conversion or the types of leads that I’m getting? It could be either. It depends how, again, going, think about it, like get out of it. If you can, the best way that I have found it to answer these questions is get out of the digital world because people make up things that don’t exist in the real world, but they, for some reason,

23:19
They think they work in digital world. They never do. It has to work in the offline world too. So pulled out in the offline world and say, okay, I’ve got a sales person who’s getting a lot of appointments set, but none of these appointments are closing. Okay. Is it because the sales person is getting the appointment set saying, no, no, there’s never going to be anybody that shows up for the appointments. So don’t worry about it. You can just set it up because I get paid a quarter per appointment. Right. Meaning they’re setting up the expectation wrong. Right. Or is it, they’re just faking it. Right.

23:49
AKA bot traffic, right? There’s nothing real there, right? Or is it they’re targeting people who are totally happy to feel like appointments, love the product, just don’t have any money, so it’s targeting, right? It could be any of those, but you would test it. And that’s what you would say, yeah, okay, I’m getting a lot of appointments. I’m not moving appointments into shown appointments, right? Or sales or whatever it is. So I’m getting a lot of leads, going back to digital marketing. I’m getting a lot of leads, but I’m not getting enough of those leads to convert. It’s either.

24:17
Because those people coming in as leads are just not our target audience, but they were willing to take our free stuff, right? Or whatever the thing was that you got to become a lead for. Or there was an expectation that wasn’t matched, right? They were coming in for one thing, but not, something didn’t get fulfilled in that journey. So they didn’t naturally progress forward. And that’s, it’s going to be one of those two things. That’s what I would so what you’re trying to say here, I think, is if the data indicates that this one step is in converting, then that A step in your QIA framework,

24:47
is where you run additional tests to find out what the heck’s going on. Yeah. Cause I would say, if we don’t convert, let’s say I let’s think of opt-in, right? Just, just getting leads, right? Where I want to say an average opt-in rate is let’s say for cold traffic, 25 to 35 % of the people that come to the page should opt in for whatever the thing is, right? That’s generally speaking, what it’s going to be. If it’s less than 25%, I go back to the ad and say, is the ad setting the expectation? So when they come to that opt-in page,

25:15
they are ready to opt in or they’re at least intrigued, right? So for example, if that ad says, hey, get 10 % off during our summer sale, click here to get your coupon. And it comes to that page and that thing says, winter sale going on now, there’s a disconnect, right? And that’s gonna hurt my opt-in rates, because it did not match the expectation. So I would go back to the ad and that would change it, or I would change the landing page to make sure it better matches the ad. Because that expectation, that’s something we call the expectation engine.

25:43
at measurementmarketing.io, we’re always like, you gotta have the expectation engine. The expectation that’s set by step A has to be met by step B. And then it in turn sets the expectation for the next step. And if something’s not working, there’s just not a natural progression that you would expect to be there, it’s probably because the expectation is off somewhere and there’s a mismatch. And when you look at your customer journey through that lens, you see sometimes

26:10
laringly obvious things. And I’ll give you an example of that. We expect roughly 10 % of the people that come to one of our landers, and we’re more of a direct response model in our courses, right? So people come to the membership page and then of those, X amount go to cart. We expect 10 % of the people roughly to go from the offer page to the cart page. We expect roughly 35 % of those people to make it through and actually purchase, okay?

26:37
So 10 % and 35 % are the numbers that I judge that journey on. That’s what I expect to happen. So one day we’re making changes and, you know, thinking we’re trying to improve things as everybody should do, as good marketers would do. And we see the numbers, we measure the numbers. And again, we’re not looking at the pages, we’re just looking at, I’m looking at the numbers. And I see that there is a drop in carts, the people that were completing the cart. So it goes from, say 35 % down to, it was something really low, like 10 % of the people making it through.

27:06
which means 90 % are abandoning. Like that was really high. like, okay, this is, looked at the number instantly. I’m like, this is not what we expect. It’s certainly not how this is supposed to be working. Something’s off. So I go to the previous step. And what I see is instead of 10 % of the people that are going from the offer page to the cart page, it’s something like 30 % of the people that are going from the offer page to the cart page, but a whole lot less of those are completing the purchase, right? So I look at this and I say, okay.

27:36
There are people, so what’s happening in a customer journey, I can look at this and tell you the story just by the numbers. What’s happening is the offer page is not quite doing its job. It is sending people to the cart before they are ready to purchase. So they’re not coming to the cart to purchase. They’re coming to the cart for some other reason, because there’s just too many of them doing it. That’s above that number. So there’s too many people going to the cart. They’re coming there a little premature. And because of that, they’re not purchasing.

28:05
Obviously, because they’re not coming with the intent to purchase to the cart as you would expect. Right. So we go to the offer page. Somebody forgot to put the price on the page on the button. So, of course, that’s what was happening. People were going by now, by now, go and get started. Get started. You click on get started because you can’t figure out how much it is until you go to the cart. Then the cart says, oh, it’s, you know, 100 bucks a month, whatever. Then they go, OK. And they would loop back to the sales page to figure out, OK, now that I know how much it is, how much, you know, how do I do this? And then we instantly saw that in the numbers.

28:34
which led us to look at the offer page with that in mind. How is this offer page? It wasn’t like, how do we improve things? That wasn’t the general, we were asking a very specific question, go back to Kia now, right? We went through this process, we said, okay, if this is lower, the action is we’re gonna go to the offer page and figure out how is the offer page setting the expectations so poorly that they have to go to the cart page to find out something else that the offer page isn’t providing? What could that be? We look, oh, price.

29:03
And was a five minute fix. And then all the numbers come back in line. 10 % go to the cart. 35 % of those complete. We net out more buyers that way. And then we can predictably scale our traffic now because we know how our machinery works. I think in the example that you just gave though, the purchases is what matters. I’m, I’m guessing that the purchases weren’t affected as much by this change, right? Important. What I said at the end, exactly net net, had more purchases doing it that way.

29:31
Right. If it was the other way, you could make a use case for that. But, know, because maybe, maybe that’s the thing is like, but at that point, if I wanted to net that out, I would say, okay, well, that means the cart has to understand and be designed to operate in a way where it realizes there are two types of people coming to this car page. One, people ready to buy at whatever cost because they don’t care. Or maybe they already know the price because they’d been to the car previously. Two, people who are seeing the car for the first time because they’re trying to figure out the price.

30:00
So now the cart has to both sell again, resell, right? And collect payment. So I would design the cart differently to do that. But our cart wasn’t designed to do that. It was designed with the expectation that the, the offer page is doing its job. It’s promoting the value. People understand what the next steps are. They understand what they’re about to do. They know how much it is. They know all that stuff. And now it’s just, let’s facilitate payment and go to the checkout stage, right? Just like you would in an offline store where it’s okay, I’m ready to purchase. And I walk up.

30:29
It makes it harder to measure when you have that one page serving multiple functions to right. 100 % 100 % So Chris, I know you’ve worked with a lot of ecommerce stores. What I’m trying to get out now is what are some of the common questions that you feel like ecommerce stores should be asking? And then how do you set things up initially for like a brand new store? So I’ll give you again, I’ll give you another formula. I frameworks are important. People try to get and we’ll go into some specific specific questions too. But the tendency is

30:59
Because you can Google like, you know, questions every ecommerce store should be asking. You’ll see millions of blog posts that are like seven questions every 12 reports, every ecommerce stores. heard those by the way. Yeah, yeah. Horrible. It’s horrible. Partially because mostly because those all of that stuff was designed by somebody else to answer their questions, right? Not necessarily yours. So that’s why I’m a big believer in frameworks. You have to get your hands in the business and you have to think about your stuff, not copycat somebody else’s.

31:28
But the way to do that, you at the same time, you don’t want to be like left alone in the frigid cold to try to figure it out on your own. So the way to get from point A to point B there is you a framework. So the framework for this is very simple. You need to ask questions about what results you’re getting. And then this is the most important one. You need to then ask questions about how you’re getting those results. And that’s how you come up with your questions. And they will be very basic in the beginning. And that’s okay. So the basic question might be like, how much am I selling?

31:58
Okay, great. How many sales am I making? And then it’s how I’m making those sales. Well, X amount of people are going to the checkout and of those X amount actually make it through the checkout. Well, how are they getting to the checkout? Well, X amount of people are seeing the product detail pages or clicking at the card. Well, how are they clicking the card? X amount of people seeing product detail pages. And you start to see a story unfold that is that sales pipeline, that is that customer journey of how your store operates. And at that point, that’s where you can, you

32:26
go and look at it and say, well, based upon my store, I’m happy with this number and I’m happy with how it’s operating. Now it’s, I got to scale traffic, get more people into the store. If you’re not happy with how it’s operating and you think there’s a step that needs some help, like maybe again, the lead step or whatever you have, if it’s part of your customer journey, if less than 25 % of people are becoming leads, you might say, okay, well, I’m going to focus on that step a little bit before we start scaling out traffic, you know? And then you can move into the next thing. But it’s always led by that results and how.

32:55
framework. You gotta know what your results are. You gotta know how you’re getting those results. How does one know whether they’re doing well or not? That’s a really great question. And it’s a lot easier in you have to essentially you compare yourself to what benchmarks are from other businesses. But the e-commerce can be a little tricky though. So specifically we have there’s stores that are very kind of like a mono product where it’s like we sell rings, for example, and they have 45 different variations of rings.

33:25
but it’s just rings that they sell. And they’ve got lots of different variations of that. They’re going to have very different numbers than somebody who is like pet supplies. And they sell like three different dog collars and two different, you know, styles of dog treats and something else, because there’s more variety in those products. And so the browsing behavior is going to be different. But that said, when you, when you’re, when you’re trying to figure out what your numbers are, the first thing you will do is just measure what you’ve got, right? Figure out what you’ve got. If you

33:51
happen to have a network or group or something like that with a store that’s similar to yours, I think it’s worth benchmarking that a little bit. But benchmark everything. Don’t just say, their product detail pages were 47 % converting and mine were only 10 % because you might find there’s 47 % converts, but only 2 % of the people buy. So you have to look at the entire thing. And that’s where a lot of people don’t do that. People will come up to me and say, oh, well, was that a mastermind or was that a group?

34:18
know, such and such said their checkout, they get 80 % of the people to check out. I’m like, I’m positive they do that because it’s returning visitors are coming with a coup. There’s some reason for that because that’s way obnoxiously high, right? And it probably probably isn’t scaling because the number tells me that. So that’s me because I’ve been doing this for so long. I can just tell. But somebody else would look at their checkout doing 40 % and feel bad. Like they’re not doing a good job, but they’re doing a great job, right? And you can, and you can tweak it. So that’s why you have to look at

34:47
everything in a system. And so yes, I think it’s useful to kind of look at what other stores are. But at the end of the day, that’ll just give you an idea of everything. And to be honest, most stores don’t know all those numbers, right? So it’s kind of hard to benchmark against those. So get your own, and then sort of, I would judge it for yourself in the beginning, especially if you don’t have a group, which a lot of people may not, right? Start with where you are. I do know that there are some basic benchmarks of, you’ll say, roughly speaking, at the end of the day, you say,

35:16
1 to 3 % will close. That’s kind of where the overall is. So however that customer journey is, I would expect 1 to 3 % ish to close if it’s less than 1%. There’s something in the customer journey that’s not quite working well. And that’s where I would look at my numbers and say, okay, well, there’s not a lot people seeing product detail pages. Does that make sense for me? Maybe it does. If you have a million variations of the one thing, that’s okay. But maybe that’s something where you’re like, hmm, I need to…

35:41
Take out some these product detail pages. Maybe I don’t need all these variations. I want just 10 variations instead of 50 variations. That’ll give me more variations because there’s less to browse and get confused on, right? But you’ll see that sort of stuff in the numbers. That’s what I mean, but you have to get your hands dirty. There’s not gonna be a simple 30 second solution to create a million dollar company. That never exists. But you do have to understand the results that you’re getting and how you’re getting the results. And to your point, when you talked about earlier, like at the end of the day, what really matters is sales and you’re right.

36:09
That’s where I judge that overall conversion rate. might say, okay, if I’m getting one to 3%, it’s probably working the way I need it to. I just need to understand how it’s working, kind of what we call trust but verify, but TBV, what that process is and is it working in the way that I expect it to? And again, if it is, now I scale traffic. If it’s not, then I tweak the gears a little bit and try to adjust the pages or the ads or whatever else to get the step operating the way I want it to, then I scale traffic.

36:36
I like what you’re saying here. So with my store, I always think of each page having a single action associated with it. So for example, like a product page, I’m looking at the add to cart, right? On the home page, I’m looking at a product view, and then from add to cart, I’m looking at checkout. So what you’re saying here is try to make the conversion as tight as possible, do the measurements, and then just make the adjustments accordingly on a micro level. And the macro level should just kind of work out.

37:03
That’s exactly right. And it’s eerily scary how oftentimes it does because people question all the time, like, really? It’s you do the numbers and it happens all the time. So but that’s exactly right. Your product detail page, depending upon the format, obviously, but most cases, it’s add to cart is the next step. It cannot sell anything because you cannot give it a credit card. Right. So you click on add to cart. That’s what its job is to do. Everything that it’s there for is to get you to add to cart. At that point, your site has to get them into checkout.

37:32
And at that point, checkouts got to facilitate the process. And that’s exactly, that’s how you judge them. You don’t say, oh, my product detail pages aren’t selling anything because again, they can’t sell. They can influence for sure, but they signal that they’re doing their job by those add to cards. And to your point, it’s a lot easier to measure for that. Right. And ultimately, as you get really good at this, you can start measuring. And again, I do not, you’re not going to, no one starts here, right? But eventually just let you know what’s possible in the world of measurement. You can go to the product detail page and say, Hey,

38:02
know, your job is to get at the cards, but I’m noticing you’re not getting at the cards. What’s going on in my head? And I’m gonna use this example a lot, because this is literally what I do in my head. I treat it like a salesperson that I’m trying to coach, right? Like, okay, what exactly you telling people? Right? And I look, and I’ll, I’ll do this through measurement. And what I’ll do is on this page, I’ll look at it and it’ll tell me, well, no one’s actually looking at the images. No one’s looking at reviews. No one’s scrolling down to get into the details of the product.

38:31
That’s why add to cart’s not happening. In fact, they’re only here for about five seconds and then they leave. And I go, okay. Now I have some specific information that leads me to take very specific actions. Cause I got people coming to this page who are not ready to interact where this page is for some reason, not meeting the expectation, right? Could be the wrong product, could be the headlines off or something like that, that I might want to change. Now, if the page says, well, I got people looking at the pages, they’re…

38:57
They’re looking at the images, they’re checking out reviews, they’re spending like three minutes on reviews, they’re scrolling down, but they’re still not clicking on add to cart. Now I’m looking at the design of the page going, am I accidentally hiding this add to cart button? Oh, look, all my, and I’ve seen this on carts, all there’s like four different buttons and they’re all red and they all do different stuff, right? It’s just hard to figure out where the add to cart is. And we’re making people think too hard. So maybe we change the design a little bit because clearly they’re trying, they’re interacting with the page. They’re just not making it to the next step. So I’m going to help build that bridge again.

39:27
very completely different actions based on the same problem of add to cart’s not happening, but because you measure and you can see the behaviors that are happening on the page, you can take those different actions now. That’s why measurement is so important. So let’s take a step back here and talk about setup here. So we talked about a lot of things. So let’s even take the product page to the add to cart. Out of the box, do you need to do anything to measure the things that you might want to measure? So out of the box, you turn on your,

39:56
The way I’m gonna describe this is the measurement journey, right? It’s how we teach it over at Measure Market IO. It’s all about the measurement journey. When you first start out, and this is important, this is incredibly important. When you first start out, you don’t know anything. You don’t know the numbers. If you do know some numbers, you probably don’t trust the numbers all that much, because you’re not quite sure what anything means or how to use anything. The first job that you have is light things up, right? It’s what we call walking around in the cave. You just bounce around in the cave and you just wanna get a flashlight and get the heck out. That’s your job, light stuff up.

40:24
And if that’s where you are right now, where you don’t have analytics turned on or you have it turned on, but you haven’t opened it in a year and a half, just start getting used to it. That’s it. Start getting used to it. Light things up. After that, you will get into what we call the valley of visibility, where you start to interact with these reports a little bit. You start to see some things a little bit. And then at that point, you level up the implementation. That’s when you make it better. So at that point is where you’re going, Oh, I need to set up some goals in Google Analytics. I need to measure for clicks of add to cart.

40:53
because maybe that’s not being measured right now, right? Some platforms will automatically report something like that, some won’t. So, you know, that’s one of those things where you go, okay, now I have clicks being measured that I can see the add to cart. Cause maybe that was one of those key questions you asked, like how many people are adding, you know, clicking on add to cart, the information you need clicks on that button, but you don’t have it. So you have to raise your implementation level up and you get better at those skills. And then after that, maybe it’s, you know, average card or measuring the value of a customer over a certain period of days. And you constantly sort of,

41:23
you know, change the implementation so that it can answer the questions, the bigger questions that you will ask. If you ask a really big question in the beginning that you cannot get the answer to, it’s just because your implementation skills aren’t there yet. And that’s okay. Just leave that there for now. You’ll come back to it, but answer easier questions, because the easier questions to answer build upon that. So back to your QIA framework, what if you don’t even know what…

41:48
questions to ask, like you can’t get granular. What are some of the common ones that you’ve experienced working with the e-commerce people that you work with? So again, I’d say don’t overcomplicate it because the tendency is there is such a thing as a right question to ask and there’s not. So you start with results and how and everybody can do this. What’s an obvious one? It’s how many sales, how many transactions? Start with the basics. It really is. Like it is that simple. You start with the basics and you go.

42:12
you know, what are the results I’m looking for? It’s this, how many people are going, I want to know how that’s happening. Well, how many people go to the checkout? Okay, I need to write that down. How would I know they’re going to checkout? I wonder how many people are clicking on the add to cart button? Well, I’m not measuring that yet. Maybe I could, I don’t know how to right now, so that’s fine. I’ll put that on a someday maybe to-do list, but at least I can measure product detail views or collection page views if it’s like a Shopify site, because the URLs are all sort of structured the same way. that’s, and that’s, and you will naturally, if you just rinse and repeat that process, you will naturally get to that point. Now,

42:41
key metrics, right? That, that, cause that’s again, everybody wants to kind of shortcut it. The problem is when you give somebody the question, they just try to go out and get the answer, but they haven’t done the setup to get the answer. So they get frustrated. Cause like, I don’t know where to find that. So yes, you want to know transactions. You want to know average cart value, right? You need to, you need to know that stuff. I think it’s important to know the difference between the types of buyers that you’re targeting. That were new, it depends upon your business model, but people that are brand new to your brand.

43:10
versus the returning customers, right? And making sure like, hey, can we send another email to returning customers and just net out a whole lot more if we take care of the people who already buying from us versus going out and trying to constantly acquire new customers, right? That sort of model. So looking at that sort of stuff I think is important. But the big thing that I would suggest for everybody is that they sort of pencil out, here’s how they think their store should be working. And it’s what we call forecasting.

43:38
five pillars of sort of learning to measure market. The first one’s planning. That’s that key out process, right? Question, information, action. Then you do your build outs where you’re setting up the integrations and Google analytics or, you know, other tools like Google Tag Manager or something like that. Then you look at the reports to kind of get an idea of how things are operating. Then you start to forecast and you say, here’s how it should be working. In the beginning, everybody, there’s this huge, massive tendency that they have to be right. You do not have to be right in the beginning. In fact, I bet money you’re going to be wrong in the beginning.

44:07
that’s okay. You need to guess. And then what will happen is you’ll guess at how the store is working and you’ll be wrong. And that’s okay. Cause you’re going to have data. have information coming back saying here, well, now that you’re asking the question about how the store’s operating, here are the answers and you’re to get better at asking questions because you’re going to have now it’ll be based on real data. You’ll get better at making forecasts because it’ll be based on real information. And you’ll, and you’ll feel more like your hands are on the steering wheel finally, because you’ll, you’ll tell by the numbers how things are supposed to operate. And you can tell

44:37
what your actions are gonna be based upon the numbers coming back. It takes practice. It’s not a 30 second solution for sure. But it’s that idea of getting your hands in the business, so to speak, through the numbers that will help to guide all of those actions. Does that make sense? Yeah. So how often are you looking at your analytics? Constantly. mean, I look at it. So here’s how I do it. That’s a trite answer, I guess, like all the time.

45:01
But, but I do, I look, so I have like our marketing team. I have them look at our numbers. I look at my level every week. I will look at all of our funnels. So we track all of our different customer journeys. And I’ve got a thing that shows how many people were aware of that product. How many people engaged with that product journey? How many people actually completed the journey for however, what amount is right. But that is literally, as I’m telling you those numbers, it’s literally because I went, what are my results? How am getting my results? That’s how I came up with those, right? It’s results and how, and I do that across our

45:31
across our different product lines. Then I’ll work with my marketing team and I’ll have them go through and show me, okay, here are the traffic sources that we’re running. And then here’s what we expect. Here’s how we’re measuring this traffic source. So for example, for us, we have offsite brand awareness. So for example, you and I are doing this podcast right now. When this podcast goes live, we will send traffic to it because that makes people aware of our brand, but they’re not on our site, right? They’re on your site. So.

46:00
It’s offsite brand awareness. So we create, have campaigns that are measured by that, right? In that case, by the ad platform, right? Facebook tells us all the, they clicked on the ad to go offsite. Great. That’s how we measure it. And did that campaign do its job? It’s got to get X amount of people a week offsite brand aware. At that point, the audience then moves in through the conversation. There’s another set of ads that comes on and says, okay, now we need to get them on site brand aware, which is coming to the measurement marketing to IO pages, looking at our blog posts.

46:25
interacting with free content we have or something else, because that tells us they are engaging more with us as a brand. Now they’re onsite aware. Once they trigger that conversion, then Facebook adds Switch. And all the apps technically platform Switch, all the messages Switch. To now, it’s, OK, let’s go ahead and see if they’re interested enough in our brand to become a lead. So it might be like the free ToolWox membership or something along those lines that they’ll come through. So that’s the sort of process that

46:52
that we follow. what I’ll work with my marketing team is they will show me the numbers to show me what they’re hitting with that. And did it hit their expectations of how they thought that ad should perform looking at, you know, in our case, CPMs and, and cost per action, whatever the action is we’re trying to measure for. So that kind of gives you an example of how we’re doing it again. We’re, we’re a hundred percent more sophisticated than most people. So I don’t think you start here. We didn’t start here. When I looked at it, I might’ve looked at numbers once a week, cause that’s all I had. Didn’t have a lot of traffic. There wasn’t a whole lot of numbers to check.

47:20
Right? So you start with where you are, but, but what’ll happen, you will naturally evolve into other things. I can’t say if there’s, if there’s somebody looking for good dashboarding software, Google data studio is amazing, completely free. And we have lots of data reports that are built out to show us how our funnels perform so that our marketing people whose job it is to, you know, every day they will look at the numbers and say, okay, well, here’s what happened yesterday. Is that a blip? Cause it was just a weird traffic day or is that a new trend? there something that broke? Was there a change to the site that caused this number?

47:50
you know, if it’s not something that met expectations. And of course, if it is something that met expectations, the goal is always get more eyeballs, right? Let’s figure out how we get more people to do that. Let me ask you this, it seems like a lot some of this can be automated, right? So if there’s like a blip, for example, it seems like software would be able to detect that blip and tell you about it, right? So how much of your stuff is automated versus like you have to actually go in and look? Most of it is automated collection. So once we set up the collections, it’s automated. So

48:17
That’s automated, right? So I look at my reports, the reports are automated, they’re built. They are just there. So I have all of those, but the manual part of this is me going to the reports. And for me, I’m a little more comfortable with numbers than the average bear probably. So some of mine are spreadsheets, because I’m just comfortable in that format. But a lot of mine are dashboards that are just data studio dashboards that are literally cool little funnels that are highly graphical driven.

48:42
just show me, here’s how many people made it through and here’s what the percentages are. And they light up of red, yellow, green, if I’m hitting the mark or not at the different percentages that I want. So it’s like, going back to that journey, we talked about the offer page to the cart. Well, if we expect 10%, but it shows 30%, well, that will be lit up in red. Because it’s like, hey, pay attention to this, this is off. This is a little higher than we thought it should be. Let’s go look at that step and see if… And that’s the part that’s manual, is looking at the reports. But the actual collecting…

49:09
Once you set it up, it is automated. takes a little bit of time in the beginning, but it’s worth the investment for sure. It seems like it’s so you do this for a living. So I would imagine it takes a lot of time for someone like me who’s who has less of a smaller team. I just want to be alerted when something’s an anomaly, right? I don’t want to have to look at the report all the time. Is that that are you just used to looking at it or I, so yes. And I think

49:37
I would recommend that you get more involved with the numbers because you start to see trends and patterns that you wouldn’t otherwise see. You start to find other insights that you didn’t know to look for because you were exposed to that information. I would encourage multiple touch points with numbers, right? As opposed to, just bother me. Now, that said, it depends on the role in the company, right? As the investor in the company, if I’m in the investor role, do I need to be bugged every time a funnel isn’t performing properly? Nope, because that’s not my job.

50:06
But the marketing team sure does. They need to know all the time. So they’re in it a lot more than the investor role of these, right? So based upon the role that you have in the organization. So if your role really is like, man, I just send traffic, that’s all I do, then you just got to make sure that the traffic’s getting into the funnel, it’s going into the next step, and then it’s somebody else’s job to fix it. They are the ones that have to be in the numbers more often, right? And they would only come to you if they can’t figure it out and they can’t make it.

50:34
they can’t make it move. It’s whoever’s job it is to make the number move. That’s the person who should have seen that numbers a lot. that makes a lot of sense. So my final question for you is different platforms will report different things, right? So if I’m running Facebook ads, Facebook always tries to claim credit for sales. Yes. is there some central way that you do things to measure everything? And it really goes back to what we talked about earlier, where we have, we require specific conversions, specific objectives.

51:03
from every campaign. And those objectives are very rarely purchase. They are the micro conversions along the way that results in how. So I can tell again, if offsite brand awareness campaign for us throughout it, whether it’s Facebook or Google ads or whatever the thing is that we’re doing for paid media for that, that campaign is judged solely on offsite brand awareness clicks. How many people interact with the ad and went to the place we wanted them to go? That’s it. That’s all I care about.

51:33
Now, if it eventually comes back and says, hey, by the way, I sold 10 things. go, that’s awesome. That’s not what you’re paid for. You’re paid for offsite brand, where it clicks. What I, what I start to notice is I’ll go, Oh, and it turns out 0.005 % of those people will buy right away. Right. Now I start understanding what should happen next week. So if I have X amount of brand offsite brand, where it clicks next week by the campaigns, 0.005 % probably will also buy. Now I can start predicting out sales from that.

52:02
But again, that’s not the point. This is to get them in the pipeline because I have other ads and other marketing, which again, it doesn’t always have to be paid media. It could be email, right? We have an email that is a re-engagement campaign when people have been on list for a while, but they’re not interacting with the brand anymore. They go into re-engagement. Guess what re-engagement’s job is? Re-engagement’s job is offsite brand. So it gets them re-engaged by saying, hey, all these other people are interested in this brand. You are already kind of here. You might want to get re-engaged, right? So it also, we just measure that by clicks on those emails.

52:31
So we have a very specific way of how our machinery, what our marketing machinery is supposed to do. And because that time element, right? We’re not all, yes, the purchase is the ultimate symptom, right? The results are just the symptom of a system. That’s it. So the sales will come based upon how the machinery operates, which is why you focus so much on the machinery, not on the result. Because that machinery is what’s really important for us. So when I know, when I make a sale,

53:00
I know where that sale came from. know how it happened, whether it’s good or bad, right? Whatever that result is, I know how it happened. So I can do something about it. So I can fix it. The worst thing in the world is what I call a curse of a good offer. It’s those business owners that are out there. They’re like, I don’t care. As long as I’m making money, I’m good. That will work until the day it doesn’t. And normally that’s at a point where you scaled so high that now all of a sudden, for whatever reason, now you’re making, you you, you $50,000 day on Facebook and then Facebook just takes the money one day and doesn’t spit out results.

53:30
And then you go, whoa, what just happened? And you look around the company and everyone’s like, I don’t know, cause no one knew how anything was working. That’s a dangerous spot to be in. Cause in reality you’re in the cave. You just have no idea you’re in the cave, right? Cause you didn’t have to go look. So, you know, it’s almost like people that don’t have offers that are working or in a better spot. Cause they are more likely to really understand their numbers, but everybody should. No, that makes sense to just get a lot more granular is the key takeaway. I think from talking to you today, it’s understanding me, Sherry.

53:59
Yeah, because then you can tweak it. It’s literally putting your hands on the steering wheel versus like, I’m gonna sit in the back seat. Let me know when we’re off the road. Right. Like, well, why do that? Like, why don’t you just, you know, keep your hands on the steering wheel and it’d be better. Or again, find somebody that does. It doesn’t have to be like, cause I get it that not everybody is a numbers person, quote unquote, right? But numbers are just telling you a story of the behaviors happening within the store or on your site. That’s all it is. It’s just a story of behaviors. And you can learn to understand those behaviors and learn to read.

54:28
dashboards and reports, you can learn to read those like a storybook, like a kid’s storybook, where you sort of just understand, oh, this is the journey. This is the tale of how my customers make it through my land of e-commerce, you know, and produce this result. And you will just understand that. And it is a lot easier to do than people think because they check out and they see a number and they freak out. But just remember, the number doesn’t mean anything. It’s the behaviors that that number represents, how people are clicking on your ad to cart, how they’re interacting with your checkout system.

54:58
Right? The amount of things that are adding to the cart, all of that stuff is just behavior. It’s just a story. And if you get really good at understanding that story, you can find people who will help fill in those numbers for you. Right? You can find that stuff, but you have to be good at reading the story. And that’s just the skill just takes a little bit. see this as a process, right? Exactly. Right. It’s a journey. Yeah. You build it up a little bit over time, what you measure and, take action on. then get a little bit better because every, cause you know, would you get an initial question? What’s the next thing you do? You ask a bigger question, right?

55:27
And then you just change implementation. Exactly right. So journey. So Mercer, where can people find you if they want to learn more about this sexy topic of measure and marketing? Yeah. The sexy topic. I would, uh, so obviously, you know, shameless plug over at measurement marketing.io, we’ve got a ton of training and services, um, over there. So, and if you just go to measurement marketing.io forward slash my wife quit her job, we have a, an entire, what we call the toolbox membership.

55:56
that has weekly training videos that are free. So you get a new video each week there. And there’s a ton of tools that will help you get started. So things like how to figure out what a goal should even be that you should measure for. So they would call the ACE model. So we have that back there. There’s a whole traffic tracking toolkit. There’s a dashboard building toolkit. All that stuff is completely free. So just measure marketing to IO for slash my wife quit her job and you’ll see it all there. And for those people who just want to throw it over the wall, like you guys offer those services too, right?

56:24
We do we have different different levels of service. We have do it yourself level training where you can just kind of join the membership programs or take advantage of the free training we have back there. We’ve got done with you training for those that need a little more accountability for their teams. Like if there’s an owners like I want my marketing team trained in this. have instructors that are dedicated that will help get their company trained so they have that measurement marketing culture. And then there’s the done for you where we’ll work with some of our certified measure marketers and help you get things measured if you need it. Right. Well, awesome. Hey, really appreciate your time.

56:53
I learned, I gained a new perspective on measurement and marketing and thanks a lot for your time. Yeah. Happy to help. And thanks for having me. Yep. You made it sexy, man.

57:06
Hope you enjoyed that episode and got a lot out of it because the worst thing that you can do with your site is to draw conclusions based on incorrect data. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 356. 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 mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

57:35
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-E-O-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

58:03
head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day meeting course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
to quickly grow an e-commerce business. But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenues. 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’s shopped in your store in exactly what they bought.

00:55
So let’s say 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 there’s full revenue tracking on every single 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 if you run an e-commerce business of any kind,

01:22
You know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, 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.

01:51
Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot IO slash Steve. And finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:17
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.

02:31
Welcome to the My Wife Quitterjaw podcast. Today I have an extra, extra special guest on the show, Eric Strider. Actually, that’s not her real name, but that’s the name that she uses when she sells her products on Etsy. And Eric is only, I have to make sure I remember to say that, she’s only 16 years old. She is a full-time student, yet she has a side hustle that makes over a thousand dollars a month on Etsy. Now I get almost 400 emails per day.

03:00
And a large percentage of those emails that I get are actually from grown adults who claim that they can’t make any money online, that it’s impossible and that they’ll never be able to succeed. And it’s actually quite depressing sometimes for me to hear some of these stories to be quite honest, because I know for a fact that everyone has the potential and they just don’t realize it. So enter Eric. And the reason why I asked her to be on the show is because Eric has no experience running an e-commerce business prior to selling on Etsy.

03:29
She started with no audience and it’s not like she spent years building up some huge email list either. But she has a very straightforward strategy that has allowed her to make over a thousand dollars selling possum pins over at Opossum Rot Studio on Etsy. And with that, welcome to the show, Eric, how are you doing today? I’m doing fantastic, how are you? I’m good. So first of all, Eric Strider, how’d you get that name? Or how’d you come up with that name?

03:56
You know, I chose it, I think it was three years ago that I chose that name and I’ve just been going by it ever since. Okay. Strider is actually this video game that I used to play when I was little. Any correlation? I have never heard of it now. Oh, okay. Okay. So tell us about what you sell. And to me, it’s kind of random. So I’m very curious how you, you know, decided to sell possum pins of all things. Yeah. So my favorite animal is a possum and it’s been a possum for a very long time, but

04:25
Possums, they’re a very small niche, but the people in this niche are so passionate about possums, they’re almost willing to buy anything that you give to them because there’s not so much product out there for possums right now. Yeah, I mean, that’s for sure. I didn’t know, would you consider yourself one of these possum fanatics? Yeah, I’d say so. So do you buy possum products yourself in general? I have a taxidermy possum, but I don’t have

04:54
really anything else as of right now, I haven’t really found anything much. Okay. And I’m just curious because I’m a dad and I have kids that are younger than you are. What made you even want to make your own money with the business? Like, I know your mom told me that it was entirely your idea. You did all the work like she did nothing. And it’s very rare to have kids that just naturally want to do this. So what inspired you to to want to sell online?

05:19
Yeah, so I’ve been doing I’ve been selling things ever since I was so young. I first started out with a child’s entrepreneur event. And I won first place for most profitable. What’s the event? Is it nationwide or? I think it’s local, but I can’t I don’t remember the name of it. Okay. And then I, I used to have a deviantART account. And I used to take commissions on there. But

05:47
something happened with the algorithm and they moved to something called Eclipse, which was this big startup. And everybody was so mad about it because Eclipse essentially, it made smaller artists harder to find on there. So let’s back up a little bit. Let’s talk about your contest first. How did you win this event and how was it structured? It was so long ago, I can’t even remember, but I do remember that there was booths and

06:16
We had, I think it was two to three months to figure out a product. And I remember we made, I think it was chocolate covered marshmallows or something like that. And that was before that those things were even popular. Right. And so how old were you? Do you remember when you entered this contest? Ooh, I think I was like six maybe. Oh my God. So young. this, cause I want to sign up my kids for this. mean, it’s, did it, was this event, what started you off in entrepreneurship?

06:44
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it was very fun. loved it. My thing is I really loved packaging these things and making everything look pretty. So. And then after that, man, six years old. OK, that’s really young. And so you win this contest and then you decide you want to just make some money on the side. Do you get an allowance at home? I do not. You do not. OK, so everything that you spend, do you have to earn it around the house? Can you rephrase that? don’t. Meaning how do you get your money if you didn’t have to make it?

07:15
Let’s see. Oh, so well, I started up with doing commissions, which I draw things for other people and they pay me for that. Okay. This is the DeviantArt? Yeah. How does that work? Exactly? How does that site work? So DeviantArt is a place where mainly digital artists go to show off their artwork and what they can do and

07:40
The platform is a little bit weird. There’s a lot of different people on there. And I wouldn’t say it’s the most friendly site. But essentially, I posted a Google Doc of my prices and people can contact me through there. How do they find you on DeviantArt? Is it like a search engine or? Yeah, it’s it’s pretty much a search engine. Yeah. Okay. How did you even find out about that in the first place?

08:05
So my sister actually, she has been on DeviantArt for a while and she invited me onto it when I was younger. And you’re not really allowed to go in there unless you’re 13 years or older, but it was under her supervision. I see. And then people license your art and then can they use that on their own stuff? Is that how it works? So I don’t really, so there’s a small niche of people that just really, they have their own original characters and they really like.

08:33
to see art of their own character. So I don’t really sell the license to the art, but they just buy it to see their character in my art style. Ah, interesting. And just art is something that you’ve always enjoyed since you were young? Oh, yeah. OK. And what made you actually think to sell your art? mean, usually, like for my kids, I know like they want to buy something, right? And they need their own money to do so. And that provides them the incentive. What was your incentive?

09:03
So I, in this community, there’s so many people selling commissions and I actually started off, I was really inspired by that and I just thought it would be fun. I wasn’t really thinking of it for a profit. I honestly started my sales off of what’s called points on DeviantArt and one point is one cent on DeviantArt and it’s its own little currency there. But I used to only sell my artwork for like maybe

09:32
two or three points. So I was only getting like three cents and then I started to grow and as I grew I hired my prices and then I went from points to making actual money. So the points can be redeemed for actual money is that how it works or? Yeah. Okay and then how did that lead you to Etsy and selling pins? So it’s recent news that DeviantArt is pretty aware of its

10:01
audience and they don’t like it. There’s very, there’s smaller artists on there and there’s some people who are just trolls and they really don’t like that. So what they did was they changed the algorithm completely. They changed the layout completely to something called Eclipse. And what that did was it made smaller artists very hard to come by. And with that, I was getting, I used to get maybe 200, 300 likes on my pieces. And then I got

10:32
only 10 after Eclipse hit. And that’s what it was very discouraging. I went into a very low time when that happened. And I was like, I got to move to somewhere else. I was trying Instagram, I was trying everything else, but nothing else was working. So I found Etsy would be a very good thing for me because I really love to package and stuff like that. So I that would be a good fit for me.

11:00
So Eclipse is like, guess, DeviantArt’s search engine or ranking algorithm, I guess, so to speak. Yeah, pretty much. And then just kind of overnight, you lost all of your traffic and guess your sales. OK. And then you tried, you said social media and stuff and it didn’t work, you said, right? And then you found Etsy, but still with Etsy, it’s still hard to get discovered, right? Oh, yeah, definitely. So how

11:27
How did you get, so first of all, how much are these pins? How much are you selling them for? So I’m selling them for $10 each right now. Okay, so that’s actually a lot of pins in a month that you’re selling. So how does one get traffic to an Etsy site when you have no audience and presumably you don’t have a social media following either, right? Yeah, so what I did was I went on Facebook groups and specifically for the audience that I’m looking for in this case, it was Possum’s.

11:56
So I went to some possum groups and everybody loved the pins. And at first I was only like, hey guys, what do you think about this design? I’m thinking about manufacturing it. Would anybody be interested? And there was a lot of people, probably the most attention my artwork has ever gotten in quite a while. They’re like, oh yeah, I would totally buy this, maybe even two. Let’s take a step back. So how do you search for possum groups? Do you literally just go on the search part of Facebook and type in possums?

12:26
Yeah. Okay. And then are there a lot of possum groups? There is about maybe, I’d say four really big ones with, I think it’s 20,000 people in them. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Okay. So four groups of 20,000. And so do you, are they closed groups? Do you have to apply to get in or? Yeah. Most of them you have to apply to get in. What’s the application process like?

12:50
So it’s pretty basic. They just ask you, you know, do you like possums? You know, do you agree to our group rules and just simple stuff like that to make sure you’re not a bot going in there to sell products that are unrelated. Right. So I would imagine that they get a lot of spam in there. People may be trying to sell stuff, right? Oh, yeah. OK. So you go on there and presumably you didn’t just start posting your art, did you? Or what was your strategy to kind of ingratiate yourself into the community?

13:19
So I didn’t really present myself as a advertiser because that can be a big turnoff to people. So I went in there and I was like, hey, I’m new to this group. I’m really new to Facebook. I’m a small digital artist. And I was wondering what you guys think of this art. Okay. And then you weren’t asking for anything. You were just asking for an opinion and that’s it, right? Exactly. Did you go in as a, as Eric or your, or your real name? I went in as Eric. As Eric. Okay. And then, so presumably

13:49
You didn’t use your picture either, right? So it’s just a completely different picture. Well, my picture on Facebook, so I haven’t been on Facebook at all. My mom encouraged me to go there specifically for this, but my Facebook picture was a picture of my cat. Okay. All right. So you go on this group. And so that’s your first post. Yep. Okay. And then you just posted some of your possum art drawings. Yeah. And then what happened?

14:16
And then so many people were wondering when are you going to get these manufacturers? You know, when can I buy one? And that’s when I started manufacturing. So is that technically selling on the group then or no? So I only asked for opinions. And then once these pins were actually getting manufactured, I asked permission from the group admins to be like, hey, can I give these people this link to go pre-orders?

14:47
I see and they gave you permission to do so? Yeah. Did they know how old you were or just completely anonymous pretty much? No, I actually have my Facebook. My Facebook age is higher than I actually am. Okay. All right. So they think you’re an adult essentially. Yeah. Okay. What did this strategy work for all four of the large possum groups? It did actually for a good majority of them. I posted in not only those four, but also I said I have posted in maybe 15 other groups. Oh, wow.

15:16
there that many possum groups? Yeah, there’s 30 in total. Okay. Is that all you do possums? Because I’ve seen your drawings. They’re really amazing. Is that the only animal that you do? So no, I do a very variety of things, you know, it can. It’s, don’t really have one set thing. If there’s something I like, you know, I’ll go for it. Alright, so you know that people want to buy this. Can you just give me an idea of how many people wanted to buy before you even started manufacturing?

15:45
Yeah, I think there was only like 20 or 30 comments.

15:52
Okay, on that post, okay. Yeah, on that post. But even with 20 or 30 comments, I still would make a profit from selling 20 of these pins. Right, right. Did you gather their emails or did you when you’re ready to sell? Did you just post it on the group again? how did it work? I replied to these people saying, if you want to purchase one, you can find them here. Okay, did you gather emails? Or did you just tell them where they were after the fact after you made them?

16:21
No, I didn’t gather emails, but I am thinking of doing that currently. Okay. So let’s talk about the process of even producing pins. Okay. So, you know, there’s demand. Why did you decide on pins? Number one. And then how did you get them made? So enamel pins are extremely big. They’re one of the top selling things on Etsy right now, actually. And they’re just really small. They’re nice to put on your backpack and they’re really nice accessories and they’re cheap.

16:50
They’re cheap to manufacture and they’re just really convenient. Okay. And so you knew ahead of time that you wanted to make pins? Yeah, I’ve seen, I actually have a few enamel pins myself even before I started manufacturing. Okay. And then you knew on the group, like when they were offering to buy it, did they specifically ask for pins or did you suggest that you were going to be making pins?

17:13
So I suggested that I was gonna be making pins, but they were also like, ooh, this would look good on a shirt or a mug and such like that. Oh, okay. So are you selling any merchandise outside of pins right now? Not right now. I am thinking about it for the future and I’m building up funds for that. Okay. So how does one create enamel pins? Is this sourcing the US, China or?

17:35
So I started out with mine. did not know anything about pins and I went to a middleman. I did not know it was the middleman at first, but after learning a lot more about it, there is no manufacturers here in the USA because I think I’ve heard some rumors that it’s because the same machines that make enamel pins are the same machines that make counterfeit money. they’re banned. Is that right?

18:03
Yeah, they’re in here. Interesting. So how did you even find the middleman? Actually, did you just Google or? Yeah, I use Google. And there was plenty of sites that came up and I just chose the one that was convenient for me. Okay, so can you walk me through that process? So you find something on Google, they might not be legit, right? So how did you figure out whether they were for real? So

18:29
There was this one pin manufacturer or I guess middleman now, but I found them and then I looked at their they had a pin gallery on their page. I looked at that and then I also saw they had an Instagram. So I went to their Instagram and I saw all of these pins and I was making sure these are from actual people and artists and all of it pretty much checked out. OK, and then when you’re buying it, can you buy them in like onesies twosies or do you have to buy them both?

18:59
So I believe that the minimum order quantity for this one was, I think, 50. You had to order at least 50. OK, so not a whole bunch. Not a whole lot. And then what’s the process like for just getting your design and working with the company? So you emailed them, I guess? Actually, they have this little form set up on their page. And I got to pick what type of enamel I wanted, like hard enamel or soft enamel, how big I wanted it to be.

19:28
and then I submitted my art piece to them. then once I submitted about a day or two later, they had sent me back another image file of the exact dimensions and the exact colors, because with enamel pens, there are colors that you have to choose from because those are the only enamel colors available. Oh, I see. So you had to go back into your design and then choose specific colors. Yes. Did that limit your palette like

19:56
if there’s a limited amount of colors and when you’re drawing, does that make your design look a little different then? So not too much, but it can alter the color by a little bit, not nothing extraordinary. Okay. And then is there any protections from your art when you’re submitting using this form? So you, I’m not too certain about that. You worried about that basically though, right? No, I wasn’t. Okay.

20:23
I mean, you’re the producer, Supposedly, I guess you could just continue to produce other ones if they were copied, I guess. Yeah. Okay. So how did you decide on pricing? May I ask how much you paid for that initial batch per piece or you don’t have to share it if you don’t want to. Yeah, no, that’s fine. I believe I paid about $230 for a hundred of these pins. They were one inch pins with, believe, four colors. Okay. Yeah. So two bucks a piece and then you were selling them for $10.

20:53
Yes. How did you come up with $10? So I looked at the other listings on Etsy and what other people are doing and it seems like the most reasonable price was $10. There are some that list them at 13, which I think that’s what I’ll be doing for my future pins because they’re bigger and more expensive to produce. But I thought 10 was a pretty good one for this size pin. All right. And how long did it take you to get your first batch made? So I think it was about

21:23
I think it was a month. It wasn’t that bad of a wait. A month. Okay. So walk me through this process. Did you just make one design for your first batch or did you do a variety of designs? Yeah, just for my first one. So there’s something called, I think it’s a base that they have to make and that’s what costs the most. So with these minimum order quantities, you can only have one design.

21:48
Okay, and then $230 was your initial, did you just kind of have that money lying around from DeviantArt or? Yeah, I had a bit of startup money from commissions I did a little bit ago. Okay, and so you get this and were you confident that these first how many pieces of 50 pieces would sell right off right off the bat? So I was a bit worried, but I just had some faith in it. And it’s really not too much money. It is a little bit but it’s it’s worth the risk.

22:16
Yeah, I mean, for a teenager, that’s actually a decent amount of money. Yeah. Okay, so you got them in hand. And then did you post on the Facebook group once you got in? Got them in? So I posted on Etsy first to make the listing. And then I told everybody that yes, they were available. Okay. And then people just you just drove people straight from the Facebook group over to the Etsy listing. Yep. And did you create a new thread? Or was it did you just kind of post in the existing

22:44
I replied to their comments with the link, but I also did get permission to post another post saying, I have these pins available if you’re interested. Okay. And then how quickly did they sell out? I’d say it was a little bit slow in the beginning, but it started to pick up. Okay. And then, so you sold out of that 50 in what timeframe? So I

23:10
I sold and maybe the first week, I ordered a pretty fast actually. Okay. When did you reorder? So I didn’t actually reorder just yet. I believe I have about 15 of these pins left, but I don’t think I’m going to continue this design. It’s very small. And it’s made of soft enamel, which is a cheaper.

23:36
cheaper option of enamel and they are still nice but I am currently manufacturing another possum pin.

23:46
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.

24:14
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 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.

24:44
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. Okay. And then did you go through the same process? You just kind of posted on the group. Do you guys like this design? Same process? Okay. That’s amazing. So people will actually tell you that you know ahead of time that they’re going to sell essentially. Yep. And have you developed kind of like a fan base at this point?

25:12
Um, so I think I have made a relationship with the people in the group. thank them for, I made a post and thanking them for all their support and how much they put into my small business. And I believe I’ve made a connection with that group. And you said you really like packaging. So are these packaged in a special way? Yeah, I, um, I have, I send out a

25:38
handwritten letter with all of them saying thank you for supporting my business and those things along that along that line. my goodness. Okay, so what’s the response been like for that? So I’ve gotten I think it’s about 18 reviews now and they’re all five stars. So I haven’t had anybody disappointed with their order. Oh, yeah, I know. But I’m just like the handwritten letter. That’s actually quite labor intensive. Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of time on my orders and I

26:07
As a high schooler, I have a lot of time on my hands, so I think I should take advantage of it while I can. I was just about to say when I was in high school, I didn’t have any time. OK, so in terms of the manufacturing, then you mentioned that they were a middleman. Does that imply now that you’re looking for manufacturers in China? Yeah, so I actually have a manufacturer in China that I actually just put in my first payment today to make these new

26:36
possum pins. Oh, okay. And how did you find this manufacturer? So it took a lot of research, I would say I contacted about 30 people from China. I’m very wary about people from China, because not only is there commons, and, you know, you just don’t know what’s reliable, I made sure that they had everything that I needed as a business and

27:04
I also made sure that they were reliable through asking other people in these enamel pin groups what their experience was with this person. I see. Did you find these people in Alibaba or were they referrals? So actually, there is a ton of people on Facebook who are manufacturers and if you post one post asking if there’s any manufacturers, I woke up to about 20 messages. Wow. And these are people in China? Yeah. Okay.

27:34
How’s their English? It’s it’s pretty decent for the most part. Most of them. Yeah. Okay. And so you basically sorted through those 20 people that responded and you chose the one that you wanted to work with. Yeah, I am I gave them a form to fill out my game. Okay, walk me through this form. What’s on this form? So basically, I was asking them for a quote, like what

27:58
if they offer 50 % payment upfront and 50 % after some manufacturing. And then I showed them my design, how many I wanted, the length, the type of metal I wanted, how many colors there were, if I wanted one or two back pins. And I just went through all of the pricing and who seemed more reliable. Oh my goodness. Okay, so there’s a lot to this then, right? You have to know what metal you want. And so presumably you gained all that experience from that first batch, the first couple of batches that you made. Oh yeah.

28:27
The groups on Facebook help out a lot. I’ve been posting, asking so many questions and the people there are very helpful. Okay. And then how did you sort out, like what makes like one manufacturer reliable versus the other? So that was what I was struggling with upfront. I didn’t really know how to determine, but I just saw how many people had ordered from them from the past, how many pins they have manufactured.

28:56
And I was looking for a more experienced manufacturer. you get any samples made? I did not. You did not. Okay. So this first batch actually that you just placed an order for is kind of sight unseen, right? Yeah. Okay. And then how did you have to order a lot more? So for some reason, in China, there is no minimum order quantity. Like I have all of these people that have contacted me, they said there’s no minimum order quantity, but I assume

29:25
that I would still have to be paying for the base price plus the quantity price. So typically for enamel pins, there’s like a $50, $60 base price because they have to make that mold. And then the pin quantity is about like maybe three cents to a dollar. Can you give me an idea of how much it’s cheaper? How much cheaper it is going with the Chinese manufacturer versus in the US?

29:51
So with these pins that I’m manufacturing, these are hard enamel and they are 1.75 inches. And I looked and compared it to these from the USA middleman and their prices were about 400 where this one that I’m ordering from was about 180. Okay. So half the price basically. Yeah. Okay. Wow. And then there’s no minimum order quantity. In theory, you could just order 20 if you wanted. Yeah.

30:20
But you still have that base enamel price or the base pin design that you had to pay for upfront. Yeah. So the more you order, the less each one is going to cost to make. Did you negotiate price at all? I did not because this one was actually the lowest price I’ve saw and the most reliable. Okay. And then are you doing more than one design or is it just one design right now just to test the waters? So I did actually put in two designs. There is one design of the possum pin and another

30:49
that I actually had a Kickstarter up for. Oh my goodness. Okay. We have to talk about that too. Okay. But okay. So you, you placed two designs and then did you invest the same amount of money? A couple hundred bucks or? Yeah, pretty much. And that includes shipping and everything? Yeah. Okay. And what’s the turnaround time difference? So they said it would take about, let’s see, I think they said two to three weeks to manufacturer and it would ship in five days.

31:19
Right. Okay. So they’re doing air shipping basically, because he’s a small mind. Okay. That sounds right. All right. Let’s talk about this Kickstarter. So I didn’t know you could put possum pins on Kickstarter. Yeah. So this one was actually a chicken pin, a chicken pin. Okay. Is that a different Facebook group then? Actually, I didn’t use a Facebook group for this one. People on Kickstarters are very, very passionate about enamel pins and a lot of people have enamel pins up on Kickstarter. Really? Okay. So you

31:49
Walk me through this Kickstarter and how you sold. What were you trying to go for and how much money did you end up making? So I posted this Kickstarter when I was with the US middleman, so I thought it would be about $400. So I put my goal for one pin up to $400 and it made about $550, I want to say. Amazing. So why did you decide to go Kickstarter when the Facebook group was working so well?

32:19
So I looked at chickens in the Facebook groups and there was some, these people, chickens are more popular than possums. So it tends to be like there’s so many product out there for chickens already. They’re so picky about it.

32:38
Okay, so that strategy that you did with the possums did not work in the chicken Facebook groups or? Yeah, it didn’t work as well. There were some people like, yeah, I want this, but not as well as the possums groups. Okay. And so with the Kickstarter though, you kind of have to drive your own traffic, don’t you? In a way there is people that just browse Kickstarter just because, but I also did post these on my social media. I would love to have a link to this Kickstarter. Did you do a video for it as well?

33:08
I did not know. You just posted your artworks on there. Yeah. Did you have the pins in hand so you could take accurate photos of what they would look like? No, so that’s what Kickstarter is about there. You create images to represent what they will be, but Kickstarter is all about funding the projects to get them manufactured. Okay. And then how did you get the sales on Kickstarter? So I don’t really know too much, but there are people that I just

33:38
saw the income start coming in from it. So Kickstarter doesn’t actually give you the money until it’s completely funded. So everybody who is a backer on the Kickstarter, they’re safe. So if the Kickstarter failed from when I started it to the end point, they would get their money. Like they don’t actually send it to me until the Kickstarter is fully funded.

34:06
Did you promote the Kickstarter at all? Yeah, I did on my on my Instagram and such like that. Okay. Is that it? I mean, what were the different methods you use to to promote the Kickstarter campaign? So I did post in some Facebook groups, but instead of like going directly to these chicken groups, I did go to some Kickstarter groups. There are some Kickstarter groups that people really love to fund and help these small businesses make these products.

34:37
So this is a Facebook group you mean, right? Yeah. Is the strategy the same? I’d say so. I basically just put in the link and I said, hey, I’m making these pins. And that’s pretty much it. And then a link directly to the Kickstarter? Yeah. So that’s legal, I guess, in these groups, right? Because they’re Kickstarter groups? Yeah, definitely. All right. OK. So moving forward now, so you have this traffic source of Facebook groups.

35:06
What if Facebook changes their algorithm and all of a sudden, like these groups aren’t as visible? Do you have like a longer term strategy in mind? So I do not actually, I do have a not too much of a following on my Instagram, but I could use that as a backup. I am starting to try to grow my social media, but right now I just started this, this Etsy up like a month ago. So I don’t have any longterm plans as of right now. Okay.

35:35
And are there any plans to move to your own website, perhaps? I have thought about it, but Etsy is working out for me really well right now. I think that’s something I’ll do once I grow a little bit larger. Like how much money do you have to give Etsy?

35:52
And what are like the parameters? From what I understand, you actually get emails and addresses. Obviously you have to ship it to the customer, right? Yeah. So for every listing you post on Etsy, I think it’s like you have to pay 20 cents a month for your listing to be up. But other than that, can’t think of any other expenses as of right now. Okay. And then do you know if you have repeat business?

36:20
I do. I do have a few customers who have ordered from me quite a bit. Yeah. Okay. And then I imagine they really value the fact that you do a handwritten letter each time. And I imagine that’s why they come back because they love your products. And I think so on Etsy, there’s a little star by the order that says, Hey, this is a repeat customer. So I make sure to have a lot more gratitude in the note saying, Hey, thank you so much for being a repeat customer. Nice. So how do you balance all this with school?

36:51
So I’m doing online school right now and it’s pretty nice because I’m able to work while I’m in class. Like most of the time, yeah, we’re not doing much, much anything important. There is some times where I really have to pay attention like in geometry or stuff like that. But in classes that I’m in, like I’m in a graphic design class and typically I already have all my work done for that class. So let me ask you this.

37:21
Do you plan on getting a full-time job or is entrepreneurship something that you want to pursue full-time just like your mom? So I’m hoping, I’m really hoping to pursue this as a job, but I am prepared to get a full-time job if I really need to be. Okay. But you would prefer to do this? Oh yeah, most definitely. Okay. And I kind of, this is kind of funny, but I do get tons of adults that claim that they can’t make any money. They can’t make any money. So.

37:50
As a 16 year old, want you to give these adults some advice on how they can get started, how they can figure it out, how they can get customers. So I would say when I first started, I was really anxious. I really didn’t think that I could do it. And I really didn’t know how cheap it was to start up like.

38:12
I was running off of that $230 that I made and it turned into a lot more and that money that I made, put into more product. And I think the key is finding your niche, finding your people and directly coming to them and kind of displaying your way is not being so much of an advertiser, but more of like a friend. Right. I mean, you never really tried to sell anything in the group. People are just asking you, right?

38:41
for your product. That’s what you want. And would you say that you had a big advantage here because you went so niche? So I mean, would you advise that people go as niche as possible? In some cases? Yes, I think that could work. Definitely work for me. I possums, presumably you chose those because they had demand as well, right? Not to mention that you love them too. Yeah, I haven’t seen too much product. So they definitely had a bigger demand.

39:10
Okay, and then the chickens, which were larger, did you have as much success with that as the possums or? So these are just now being manufactured, but I’d say they were pretty successful given we have reached our goal and made even more off of that goal. So what are your plans moving forward? Are you going to focus more on the possum niche or do you got other animal designs coming up?

39:34
So I think I’m going to focus on enamel pins because they’re really big and people love to collect them from smaller artists. So I think I’m going to do a big variety of pins. And right now I’m thinking of for a future project, I’m thinking of doing like cryptid pins. like Mothman and all of these cryptids. know, I’m going to actually make my kids listen to this episode because it seems like you’re a go getter.

40:04
Like most people aren’t going to go through the wouldn’t think of going to trouble posting the Facebook group, asking questions and going out and finding manufacturers. What kept you going this whole time? And are you just like a naturally driven person? So I do think I am very self driven. I really like being independent with even with my schoolwork. But I think this is something that I’ve always wanted to do. You know, I go to conventions and I see these booths set up with all of these

40:34
amazing products and I’m like, I wish that was me sitting in that chair at that booth and selling my product and feeling so confident in what I do. So I think that’s really what made me want to keep going in this and someday I really do want my own booth, something like that. Did anything go wrong in this entire process? I can’t really think of anything that went necessarily wrong. I do think I also sell things like stickers and those things aren’t

41:03
so popular as the pins, I still have them on my shop. But I think it’s really just a learning experience. Okay. And then last question here is where can people find your store on Etsy? If they want to check it out. So you can search Possum Rot Studio with the uppercase O, uppercase R and uppercase S and you can just find me through there. So just to be clear, it’s

41:39
O-P-P-O-S-S-U-M-R-O-T-S-T-U-D-I-O. Opossum Rot Studio. Yeah, I think there’s only one S in possum though. Oh, is there? Okay, you would know better than me. I guess I spelled possum wrong. Yeah. But Eric, hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show. This is really inspiring. And for even the adults who are listening, I mean, the process that you laid out, especially the one key piece of advice that you gave was to find where your people live. Right? It seems obvious.

42:02
Yeah. But most people don’t think of that, right? They might build a generic social following, but you went to where your people were, which was these possum groups. And these fanatics wanted to buy your products. Yeah. And they have been so passionate with everything that I do. And presumably they’re loyal to you as well. Most definitely. Yeah. Man, great story, Eric. Thanks again. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you so much.

42:32
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now every day I have 30 and 40 year olds complain to me that it’s too hard to make money online, that they’ve tried everything under the sun or that they don’t have enough money to begin. And then here comes 16 year old Eric who simply finds out where her customers hang out and make sales run away. It’s not rocket science and this strategy can be executed by anyone. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 355. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce.

43:02
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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clivia, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

43:29
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:30
So in this episode, you’ll learn how Andrew grew overlander.com to a $1 million run rate within six months. But before we begin, I wanna 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.

00:59
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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who is also a sponsor of the show. Are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories, do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies.

01:28
Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion.

01:56
To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit 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 a brand new podcast that I recently 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.

02:24
So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:36
Welcome to the MyWifeQuarterJob podcast. Today, I have my good buddy, Andrew Udaring, back on the show for, believe, the fifth time. Andrew is the founder of the incredible e-commerce fuel forum and community, and he is also the brainchild of ECF Capital, where he invests in e-commerce companies as well. Anyway, I haven’t had Andrew back in a while because, well, he’s been e-commerce-less for the past several years, and I started to wonder if he had any e-commerce skills left in the tank until now.

03:06
Andrew just completed a six month project where he launched overlander.com and he grew to nearly a one million dollar run rate within that time frame. And today we are going to learn how he did it. So with that, Andrew, how you doing, man? I’m doing well. Thanks for having me on, man. I like how you slipped that you know, that just little subtle dig in the intro. Game on. You know, we were just saying before we hopped on the mic, I showed weakness and gave you a couple.

03:34
compliments and a couple like confidence boosters on some of your work. And I was like, what am I doing? I’m getting preparing for like airtime here. And of course out of the gates, Steve hits first. So well played Steve. Just when I thought you had no skills left, you go and you totally redeem yourself. But no, it’s fun to be back. Thanks for having me on buddy. Yeah. So did I get the numbers right? You grew to almost a $1 million run rate within like five months. Is that right? Yeah. We launched the process. We kicked it off like first day of anything. We had no brand or, or

04:04
We just had kind of a concept, high level concept started July 1st. We launched the day before Thanksgiving, kind of came in skidding, but got it launched. And we, by the end of the year, so kind of that trailing just slightly over a month, we were just shy of that million dollar runway. So crazy. Can you explain to people what overlanding is actually? I don’t even know, but it’s right up your alley. know. Yeah. So overlanding is, I think there’s a lot of definitions about it, but I think it’s probably it’s the

04:36
vehicle-based exploration in remote or international areas is probably a way to best think about it. So if you’ve seen, there’s a lot of people who would argue over this definition that are kind of in the, you know, deep within the niche. yeah, if you’ve seen pickup trucks with like rooftop campers or rooftop tents rather, big, big, know, big tires, light bars, those kinds of stuff, those are kind of oftentimes overlanding rigs. So it’s, we have Jeeps and things that just go to, you know, rock crawling is like, if you have just a really, a very beefed up

05:05
rig that’s designed just for off-road stuff, the craziest off-road stuff you could ever encounter. That’s not really overlanding. It’s more about trying to explore kind of remote wild and international destinations with your vehicle. Would you consider your West Falia like an overlanding vehicle or no? Yeah, I think it would be it’s again, some people in the niche would maybe take issue with this. I’m going to forward this to them right after. I just come out of this whole world for six months, know, so it’s I gotta be careful.

05:32
I would say yes, just because we’ve it’s I’ve done a lot of modifications to it, you know, for off-grid living solar, you know, kind of increased improved suspension and lift ground clearance. It’s a four by four vehicle. So yeah, I would say so, although it’s probably not one of the more kind of traditional overland. I’m going to post on the overlanding forms after this. You daring claims to be the ultimate overlander.

05:55
in his Westphalia. you can also do it like you can also do it in a Subaru, right? Like, you know, or it’s more about I think it’s less about one thing overlanders love is they love geeking out on their their vehicles and their build kits almost as much maybe as traveling, sadly, myself very much guilty here. But I mean, you can you can overland in a Subaru. It’s more about, you know, getting out exploring and traveling and seeing places than building, you know, the sickest race.

06:20
So how did you come across this project? Cause it was from scratch, like you said, and then that run rates just incredible for such a short period of time. Yeah, normally I don’t end up doing kind of consulting projects. I haven’t done one, I think, since starting the business, but it was a collaboration between two people. One, Drew Sinaki, who’s a good friend of ours, who’s the CEO of Auto, anything they had wanted to get into the overlanding space. And then I went to college with a couple of good folks over in Bozeman, Clay and Rochelle Croft, and they’ve built over

06:49
the last 10 years, this really great overlanding YouTube series called Expedition Overland. And so they were partnering up to launch this. Expedition Overland was bringing the audience and also bringing the kind of the creative and the expertise and a lot of the vendor relationships. Auto Anything was going to do a lot of the logistics and the customer service and the shipping and things like that. they were joining forces and they needed somebody to…

07:17
kind of run point on getting the project off the ground. so, yeah, originally just kind of was joking with Drew about it as just kind of a joke, but then he kind of came after me hard and pitched me on it. And I thought, you know, like both these people, I like the space. I’m really tired of Steve giving me a hard time for not actually having an e-commerce project in the works for the last couple of years. I mean, just to get him off my back would probably be worth it alone. so was this considered like one gigantic influencer project kind of? No. So the, the part, I mean, the big roles for me was

07:46
My responsibility was developing the brand. what was, how were we positioned? You know, what would our, was the brand identity, know, logos, colors, unique selling propositions, voice, things like that. Picking out, you know, kind of helping define the catalog and what we were going to sell. Kicking off a private label, a series of private label products. So we ended up, we haven’t got them on the site yet, but they’re, they should be in pre-production or almost very close to that at this point. Probably, you know, about 10 different private label products, helping with kind of the marketing phases.

08:16
and marketing strategy with to kind of help the auto anything team kind of get that launched. And those were those are the big kind of silos that I was and then also the website development. So working with ended up had the chance to work with Kurt over ether cycle to build out the website. So those were kind of my five levels of responsibility. Actually, you know, the site kind of reminded me of right channel. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s you know, it’s almost like it was architected by the same person. It’s crazy.

08:43
Hey, can we talk about product sourcing real quick? how did you get so many products up? I mean, there’s a ton of products up there. How’d you get it up there in such a short period of time? Yeah. How many are there first of all? I think we ended up with like 12. It was probably 1500 to 2000 skews. Right, that’s crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. one of the, you know, we wouldn’t get into this, but.

09:07
Yeah, I mean, definitely there’s a lot of stuff on there. I’d still love to beef up in terms of the product listings and the, the, some I’m not even talking about that. I mean, just getting the sources and the suppliers for that. Yeah, it was, you know, some of it was nice because AutoBuddy thing had existing relationships with maybe half of the vendors. And then the other half we kind of had to had to go out and kind of court, which was sometimes super easy because of existing relationships with the Expedition Overland team. And sometimes it was having to call them up and pitch them and convince them. And so, yeah, but it was,

09:36
It was, uh, and it wasn’t just me doing it. was doing a lot of the vendor identification and the product selection, but then there was also people over on the auto anything team that were able to pick up the ball and run with those relationships. I how do you decide what to carry in this space? Or do you just say, Hey, we may as well carry as much as we can. No, that wasn’t so it was part of shaping like a big push. The brand was thinking about how do you, how do you stand out in this space? And the vision for it was a couple of things. One, be a place where you can go to really.

10:06
long, know, can the intermediate vision is be a place where you can go to get most of the quality items you’d want in the overlanding space. So like a backcountry.com for overlanding, because overlanding the market right now, there’s a lot of little niches like these people do storage really well, these people do bumpers really well, these people do suspension really well, but there’s no destination where you can get a lot of most of what you need from one spot. So that was a part of it. The other big part of it was to focus on quality items. From a perspective of, if I go to the site,

10:36
and I buy anything on the site, I know it’s not going to be garbage. So a pre-vetted process was a big part of the brand selling proposition. And so a lot of the stuff that we have is stuff that Expedition Overland has actually used over the last decade and really can speak to well. Like, hey, we’ve used this in, you know, super long expedition trips. We know it’s fantastic. You can count on it. And we actually put a little star, a little Expedition Overland approved badge on that stuff. surface it to the top. So.

11:03
it’s kind of an automated process. So every category you land on, the stuff that they use and like the most automatically rises to the top based on kind of a filtering algorithm in Shopify that we put in there, or Kurt put in there rather. So, and then everything else, even if it’s not though something that that team has used and maybe it’s something that I just saw, I thought looked like it was interesting and I put on, I decided we want to put on the site, it still meets a certain quality threshold. There are certain brands in the space that I’m not gonna throw under the bus, but just they’re not great. Like they’re cheap, they’re not super well designed, they’re…

11:32
They’re kind of ginsy, right? And that’s the kind of stuff that we just aren’t going to put on the site. that was the filter. Those two things were kind of the filters that we used on building out the product line. So the value prop basically is a curated set of products endorsed by, I forgot who the influencers are, but basically you’re not going to get any sort of junk if you go on there. You have that guarantee in there. Yeah. The tagline for the whole site is proven gear you can trust. Right. Nice. Nice. Okay. And then, are most of these products drop shipped or do you guys carry any inventory at all?

12:02
Yeah, combination of both definitely more drop shipping, but there are some items that the auto anything is is is stocking and shipping as well. Okay, so you keep mentioning auto anything. So auto anything is Drew Sinaki’s company. Yes. And are the resources kind of shared then like he has warehouses for certain things? Yep. Yeah. So they have a warehouse three PL that they use. And it’s a very managing kind of supply chain or fulfillment, all that kind of stuff. So yes, it’s and there’s kind of a there’s a big

12:32
there’s a kind of a split of responsibilities between what both parties do, know, Drew’s Company, Auto, anything, and Expedition Overland. But yeah, they both have kind of their roles and some of that is, you know, like marketing is overlapped. They’re both trying to help on marketing. But yeah. Can you comment on the decision whether to drop ship a certain item versus carrying inventory on a certain item versus even private labeling? You mentioned that in the beginning. Yeah. So, I’m going to private label first. So we looked at the items that the items we want to private label are ones that are

13:01
fairly universal. If you want to be able to build out your own line of suspension for vehicles, that is tough. Because, you know, even in a limited universe of overlanding vehicles, let’s say there’s only 20 vehicles there as opposed to the hundreds or thousands that exist in the automotive universe, that’s 20 vehicles over 20 years, 400 different variants potentially, maybe let’s call it 50 if the body styles don’t change as much.

13:30
But that’s just a lot of skews you have to build out in different unique products based on how things work. So compare that with like a rooftop tent that you can mount on a vehicle that maybe you have a few different configuration of mounting bars, but more or less it’s vehicle agnostic. Those are the kind of products that we try to gravitate towards on the private label side. So that was how we determined, and then just also stuff that people can use on a regular basis. And it is not insanely technical.

13:57
We didn’t want to get into suspension because suspension is insane. Like there’s no way, unless you spend a ton of time in R &D and suspension, you’re going to make something that’s going to rival what people have out there. that’s how we kind of thought for private label. private label is for more broad based items, basically. Yes, definitely. then all super less, know, that are less complex as well.

14:20
For dropship versus inventory, sometimes it would depend on the vendor. Sometimes the vendors would say, we just don’t dropship. So if you want to sell our stuff, you got to stock it. So that’s a no-brainer. just go that route. you comment on what the minimums are? these are expensive items, right? For the most part. Yeah, they are. It depends on the range. I mean, we sell cook sets that cost 30 or 40 bucks all the way up to suspension kits that cost $4,000. So yeah, they kind of run the gamut.

14:48
But in terms of how much they make you buy in terms of minimums, it usually, I mean, is it under like hundred units or? Yeah, we could definitely, there’s definitely some orders that we were able to buy for well under a hundred units, you maybe even, and the more, the higher, I found this the higher price point, the lower the minimums tend to be too. So I didn’t personally wasn’t involved with buying any, and I don’t even know if we’re buying any suspension stuff either, because again, that’s high price point.

15:16
most of the things we had to buy, most of the brands we stocked were on the lower side of that price threshold. Because I think, and I found this in my experience selling higher end electronics in the past as well, the higher price point and the more, the wider the skew base, the more likely a supplier is to let you drop ship. Because it doesn’t like, going back to the suspension thing, how would you expect any dealer to carry 50 skews at

15:44
or $3,000 a pop unless they’re enormous, you national distributor. Like that’s just a tall ask because you’re getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars just to carry one product line. either that or you specialize in a specific vehicle or something on your site, right? Exactly. Yeah. I’m just kind of curious and maybe you weren’t involved in this, but how do you know how much to carry of each thing? I mean, we’re talking like thousands of skews here. So, and each one has to be scrutinized. How do you make that initial order? Yeah. So we, you know, we definitely

16:14
again, so we’re drop shipping more stuff to begin with versus stocking. so that was that made that made it easier. But I will say a couple things. One, it helped a little bit with my industry expertise. I don’t have nearly as much as like expedition overland guys, but I’ve done it enough to have a rough idea of maybe what’s going to resonate more with the audience. So early on, it was partially guessing like saying, Hey, you know, we’re gonna, you know, order these three or four

16:40
coffee kits or mess kits. think this one probably based on my own experience of camping and overlanding has a better fit. So let’s order more of these. Part of it was I would go on amazon.com and I would see what products had the most reviews and seemed the most popular and had the highest sales rank. And that can give you a sense too of like, Hey, okay, this one’s probably going to be more popular within the line. Let’s maybe double, know, double or triple the amount that we order here versus the other ones. And then also part of it’s just guessing. Like it’s, you don’t know when you’re ordering for the first time, you’re

17:10
you’re taking a guess. And when we got to the point where we were considering some reorders, it was nice because you had a sales history, but part of it also is just taking your best guess. also, airing more towards getting data versus trying to make the most money upfront. when I was talking to our buyer, the guidance I gave was like, hey, let’s air on the side of caution early on. I would rather, even if there’s price bakes that aren’t, you

17:38
the price banks are huge, that’s one thing, but if they’re not enormous, let’s just plan on reordering again in a month and get a sense of how this is working versus placing a huge order and being stuck with a hundred of these items that we can’t sell because we were wrong. What about pricing? Are you guys kind of like on the higher end in terms of pricing or are you priced like everyone else? No, kind of. It’s reselling existing items at this point online and I think it’s hard if you have a

18:07
a really premium price, I feel like price parity, especially for for selling existing items is is kind of table stakes for for a lot of niches. And also a lot of the products that we do have minimum advertised pricing guidelines in place. So which actually is nice if you’re trying to compete on quality, having that map pricing if it’s enforced well is a good thing because then you don’t have to it’s not a race to the bottom. So usually we’re in line, I’d say with with most places. Okay.

18:34
All right, so the main value prop really is the influencer aspect of it and the curation. Yeah, main value prop is the curation, the influencer aspect, and also the guarantee. One thing we have is a 60-day trail-tested guarantee. So kind of like REI, if you’re familiar with them, they’re really good about taking stuff back. so same thing, like if you order something, it doesn’t meet your expectations. And even if you use it, you know,

19:02
we’ll take it back for 60 days. And so it’s a little bit of a risky gamut or bet rather, but the thought process that went in behind it is like from personal experience, people pour unholy amounts of money into these types of vehicles, like just insane amounts. And if you can become a source where when you buy from us that you know the stuff is gonna be good and we’ll stand behind it, you maybe you lose $500, you know, on an air compressor that

19:31
technically nothing was wrong with, but people didn’t like it. But if you can gain that trust and that trust to the end consumer, I mean, the chance for lifetime values in the, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 over the of five years is… mean, it’s people spend… I mean, it would be, I think for people not listening, Steve, I mean, what do you think a decked out, if you took a brand new Jeep and decked it out with a lot of overlanding stuff, you could spend $50,000 on the Jeep. You could easily spend…

20:01
$30,000 just on the overlanding upgrades. So you spend more on your Westphalia alone, right? Not quite, it’s, mean, it’s a, people get, it’s like a lot of things. People spend more money than you would, than you would expect.

20:21
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.

20:49
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.

21:19
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. No, yeah. So I just, just to be clear that you’re drop shipping a lot of these items and what are their guarantees? Are they 30 days? And obviously it can’t be used, right? If you return it to the manufacturer. Yeah. And to be honest, that’s, that’s a good question. And that’s not something I, that is not something that I think it varies. I think most places, they don’t have the same level of guarantee.

21:49
So there’s definitely gonna be times where we bring things back, we can’t sell them and that’s gonna be part of, to be honest, kind of, part of my role was to come in, build the concept, architect things, get it launched off the ground, get the ball just moving and then hand it off to somebody shortly after launch. I kind of stepped away about a month after the launch. Right, for the logistics. Yeah, I understand. But Auto Anything, from what I understand, had an infrastructure for some of these things already.

22:15
Yes, yeah, they did. So I think the taking the stuff back on the 60 day time period is probably, I don’t think they had that in place. And I’ve chatted with kind of the new leader over there that took the reins from me. And were talking through some options. But I think yeah, I think potentially doing kind of, you know, used gear sales one off, or contests or giveaways or you know, there’s a lot of options you can do with it. But yeah, it’s gonna, there’ll be some creativity required for some of those things coming back for sure. Okay, let’s shift gears and talk about sales.

22:43
How does one get that insane run rate in such a short period of time? So it’s I mean a big a huge part of it was Having access to auto anything’s at least from the from the beginning their email list So they’ve got you know, they’ve got an enormous email list and the hundreds of thousands and so we were able to go through and pick We were able go through and pick all of the you know vehicles that were very relevant and target those people

23:11
So there’s a lot of immediate crossover there. you just start? This is just I’m just thinking myself how I did this. Can you just start emailing as Overlander? That was so we this is something that I didn’t think through as much as we should have. What we did early on, yes, but what we did is we co branded it. So we sent it from the auto anything address and said, hey, auto anything is proud to present this new brand overlander.com. And so we did that, but it came from auto anything. But we were able to do that for two or three times.

23:41
But after that, it gets harder to do that over and over. We had to start moving more to an overlander list. And we lost a lot of those because I think we were starting to, the email team at Auto Anything was starting to talk with Klaviyo. And you can’t do that, no. So we can’t just move the email addresses over. so that was a part that kind of slowed down our growth after our initial launches because we thought we were going to have access to 100,000s of contacts. But we ended up with a much smaller list.

24:09
Why couldn’t you continue to email as auto anything? Like what were you seeing that caused you to believe that you couldn’t do that anymore? Well, I guess we could, but I mean, to really build an identity, you kind of want to have it be its own site as opposed to always piggybacking off something else. There’s also a fairly, you know, the auto anything email calendar is pretty packed. there was a bandwidth issue. So it was really nice to kind of for that initial push out of the gates, but, yeah, it was.

24:36
it was a little tricky to, it was not quite as seamless as taking all the addresses and emailing them over for the new brand. So how do you move such a large quantity of people over to a different domain? Do you have them opt in again? Yeah. And you know what, to be honest with you, that was something we were kind of in the middle of when I stepped away. I don’t, part of it was looking at, yeah, you have them opt in again or have something very clear where they say, hey, click this link or sign up.

25:04
to be able to reenter your email address or run contests. So we were kind of in the middle of trying to figure that out. We definitely had some opt-ins. We had a list we were building from the opt-in page. We had a contest that we ran when we launched it that was generating a lot of emails. We’re a good number for at least for a new site. So it was hard. We had some ways to do it, but it was, yeah, it was tricky. Yeah, I’m just trying to think. I mean, you can’t like send them to a form again, right? You’ll probably lose like the majority of your people.

25:33
You will. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s it was slower going building that dedicated list than we had hoped. Okay. Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t answer your questions. The way we were doing it or thinking about doing it, kind of a mix of both. Having people click links in an email that was very clear, like, hey, you’re signing up for this list was one having people re opt in was another one having a contest that we gave away kind of like a overlanding trip in Montana was another way. Sales, of course, were one that piggybacked off of the

26:01
emails to the larger lists. But yeah, it’s a lot harder than just, you know, kind of piggybacking off an existing list. So that was a good source of sales. mean, was that a large percentage, would you say? I would say, yeah, I would say probably, I’m just guessing here, probably not as on track with the analytics as I should have been, but I would guess probably 30 to 40 % of the sales were from email, but that’s just a guess. So kind of like on par with what a typical store gets from their email.

26:31
I think that because we had such a large list to blast from the beginning, I don’t think the typical store gets 30, 40 % from their email. If I hear somebody doing 30 to 40 % of their revenue from their email, to me, that’s an outlier. And I think the only reason we were able to do that is because we had such a large list and we were starting from zero. Do you get 30 to 40 % of your sales from email from Bumble? Yeah, actually it’s 30 for me. then think Mike, back when he was running Color, it got like 50%. Wow, well, that’s Mike and Jen.

26:59
Oh wait, did I say that out loud? I’m What was I going to ask you next? What about the influencer side? What were you most involved in actually on the project in terms of getting sales? Yeah, so it was kind of a little bit of everything on the marketing side. The influencer side was harder than I thought. It just took longer than I thought. There was a couple of people I reached out to and it just was trying What about the main influencer?

27:25
Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. So they were they were great. That part was not harder than I thought. They there’s a number of things we did with them. They have an email list already and a great presence in the space. So they sent out multiple emails to their lists. They were really active on social. They promoted a contest that that I put together that was kind of like a become a team member for a day. And so I mean, they these guys have been they have a great following a lot of people follow them. And I was like, Well, how could we incentivize people to sign up?

27:54
for our contest. So was like, well, if these people could fly out to Montana and hang out with these guys for a day on a real overlanding trip, like actually join the team for a day or two, like that would be pretty sick, I think in a lot of people’s minds. Oh yeah. Okay. I was about to say, I hope the contest wasn’t to hang out with you for a little bit. No, no, no, not to hang out with me. No, that would have generated zero, zero interest. So yeah, was, so they, we put this contest together and there’s, we used gleam.io to run it. Nice. Yeah. And so like the way you, the ways you enter our

28:23
you know, visit their YouTube channel, go to Instic, check out their Instagram, sign up for, know, make a purchase, subscribe to the email list, all this kind of stuff. And so get some good traction that way. The big ones were their email list, the contest, and then social media were really the big three ways that they helped promote and launch and push the brand. I’m thinking about this more from like in the future, maybe it makes sense to partner with some influencers. Do they actually have equity in this company? They do, right? So I’m not going to speak to there just between

28:53
Okay, they definitely have a partnership where they’re they they both have a, you know, their partners in this. so I don’t feel like can speak to the other I don’t need the numbers. I was just kind of curious, like if I’m to go all out and promote with my email and all that stuff, I got better have a piece of the company is what I was thinking. They definitely have a they definitely are aligned in interest in terms of Yeah, they both share the upside. I can say that. So okay, I mean, this is actually a really interesting model then, right? If I want to launch a store, it might make sense to just go up to like,

29:21
famous influencer to say, I’ll handle all the ecom stuff. You take a piece of the company, you just help promote. It’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think you think about the future of ecommerce and how, you people talk a more about communities these days talk a lot more about, you know, these, you know, the big companies, three or four companies with a big stranglehold on on traffic and, and attention and eyeballs. And yeah, I mean, they’re, they’re almost like tiny little micro platforms with huge amounts of trust and authority.

29:51
Right? Yeah. So yeah, I mean, think it depends on your structure and depends on you got to make sure you have a good working relationship. And it’s always one thing that I have learned from this project, from the ECF capital deal we did from just from, you know, other things in the past, or just this last six months is that anytime you start having multiple parties come together on a business, you just need to think a lot more carefully about incentives and how people are compensated and

30:18
It just gets more complicated. You gotta give a lot more time and thought to it. But if you can set up a structure that works well for everyone and there’s a good working relationship and like people bring unique things to the table, yeah, it can work well. So yeah, maybe I’ll have Sanaki come on and talk about actually how to align those incentives. That sounds really interesting. Yeah. What would you, what were you saying? That was a struggle with other influencer marketing. Oh, it just, it just takes, you know, so there’s a lot that I was trying to do, especially on the home stretch to get this thing launched. And the, just reminded me of how

30:48
I was trying to do the influencer outreach apart from our main influencer, we just kind of similar influencers, trying to do that manually. And there was two or three people that I took a run at to try to do that. One of them kind of worked out, but it took longer than I thought. The other one we got halfway down the road and then things fell apart because they realized that some of their other sponsors weren’t happy with it. it just, it took longer than I thought and I was trying to do it manually. And so it just, was more of a, you it didn’t go as faster as.

31:16
wasn’t quite as productive as I mean, is there a more automated way of doing it? I always think of influencer and stuff is pretty manual in general. Yeah. And that’s what I was trying to think. And I know there’s some platforms where you can go and like pick, you know, pick a bunch of influencers and, and post your offer and people can bid on it and stuff. And I have no personal experience with that. And so maybe it does work really well, but I just for a small niche market like this, where you want to get good results and you want to have a personal relationship. Like I would personally rather have

31:43
three to four really strong long-term relationships with very on-point influencers in a niche, then have like 20 people tweet something, or post a couple of Instagram posts for something and then to collect $400 and then that’s the end. I just feel like that, I don’t know. You know this too. I model is pretty much dead actually. Most influencer relationships now are a little bit more long-term. Think about us, right? The sponsors for our podcasts.

32:11
Both of our sponsors are long-term prospects that like I would continue to promote Regardless, you know just because I’m a big believer of the product I mean that I think that’s just where things are are going towards No, I think so too like, you know, Clavio the sponsor even a long time sponsor of the ECF podcast and the event and stuff I mean, it’s that was something that Yeah, I mean that took a couple years to really cement that relationship and you know, they’ve been sponsors for you know Three or four years now. So it’s I don’t know when I look back at my business

32:40
career and history online, the real big wins, both both it’s not in the volume, it’s in like two or three or four really deep relationships. So yeah, no, totally. mean, Clavio, Postscript, Emerge Council on my end. mean, I’ve been with those guys for multiple years now, and I feel a tremendous amount of loyalty to these companies as well. Yeah, agreed. So I’m just curious, did the Overlander guys, did they have any contacts? I mean, I imagine they’re they know a lot of people.

33:10
Influencers also. Oh, yeah, they were they were I mean they were great and so I probably again I probably did not tap them as much as I should have on the influencer side Just again because I was trying to do do the marketing. It seems like you had like a huge broad range of responsibilities There’s a lot right? No, I mean to the point where did you have a huge staff under you or we had yeah I mean between and I was so I kind of dropped in and was coordinating with There was a lot of people in the auto anything

33:39
side that we’re doing stuff. mean, all in all, people that were working on this project that I was, yeah, I would say probably wasn’t directly managing, but they were involved. And I was trying to either work with their team leads or manage directly, probably 20 plus people at, you know, when you counted everybody. So, yeah. So you were like the glue that held everything together in a way. Is that accurate? Like the

34:04
kind of non-sticky duct tape that tried to keep everything together. So you’re like Draymond Green on the Warriors. No, no, I don’t want to be related with any kind of relation, any kind of analogies between your Warriors, man. Well, OK, let’s switch gears again a little bit. I want to know what you learned and if anyone wanted to just have some sort of partnership with an influencer and start an e-commerce store this way and kind of ramp it up. What did you have to deal with and what did you learn from this project?

34:33
So I’ll hit a lot of the kind of high level things that I learned and then we can dive into any of these more if you want. I did a whole episode maybe be kind of to link up to do that kind of goes into these. Yeah, we’ll link that up. people really want to, you know, are up for the kind of in-depth story. But I think the things I learned were, I think it’s amazing what you can get done in five months when you have to like Steve, you and I have been doing this a while. You kind of get into a cadence, you get into a rhythm and when…

34:57
you have a limited time frame to execute on something and there’s a level of like, okay, we really have to ruthlessly prioritize. We have to get this launched by this time. A lot of people are depending on it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be decent. Like it’s amazing what you can get done. So that was cool. I think of you as a perfectionist, is that accurate? Yes. Okay. So this must have been really hard for you. was very, it was that aspect was very challenging for me. Yes. What were some of the things you dropped on the floor? The, know, looking at the site when we launched the quality of the listings.

35:25
was not where I had hoped it would be. And that has to do with a number of things that don’t just have to get into, but like you’re selling existing products. It’s really important to have some kind of informational ad, like really good, rich media, great descriptions, details about that overcome objections to people buying with this fit. How will it fit? What vehicles is it great for? And there was some of them, some of the products, especially the ones that we worked with our influencer partner on exhibition overland were really great. They had custom media photography, stuff like that.

35:55
but a lot of them were not where I’d hoped to be. we just, there’s no way we were going to do that for 2000 products in five months with coming up for the brand from scratch. So, so I was going to ask you then, so you took all of your own photography and everything, right? No. So for some of the products we did for a small section of products that were in that kind of upper echelon of recommended products, we used a lot of photography from the influencer, a lot. would say the majority of products have. Oh, that’s what I meant. It’s not the manufacturer’s photography. It, it, well on a lot of products it is. Okay.

36:24
How do you decide which ones to really focus and hone in on versus just using the manufacturer’s photos? Yeah, it’s, mean, it depends on what the kind of going back to that curated approach, the stuff that the influencer had used in the past, like those expedition endorsed product, XO endorsed products, the ones that we were, know, we knew were popular were industry staples, and that they had a lot of experience with. Those were the ones that we kind of dedicated the time.

36:55
to get photography, shoot photography, shoot videos, things like that for. Does the 80-20 rule apply here? Like, did you mostly sell those influencer products? Yeah, I would say it definitely, it helps out there. Another part, yes, I would say generally, yes. I would say this holiday season was a little bit of an anomaly too though, because we had huge supply chain issues. This is another thing I learned is like, okay, doesn’t matter if people want your product, like if you can’t sell it, like it was challenging about Black Friday, because we were putting together some of the big mailers for like Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

37:25
there’s a lot of stuff we wanted to sell that just we couldn’t because the vendors didn’t have it. So we had to go through and like rejigger the products that were on sale a couple of times. And then also there was map pricing on a lot of items too that we couldn’t undercut. So to be honest, like that Black Friday sales email was tricky for both of those reasons. So let me ask you about like being in stock and that sort of thing. Is it all tied electronically like through EDI? In a perfect world. Okay. There were

37:54
That was another part of the process too, is getting this thing launched up and running quickly. The systems were, Auto Anything has some existing systems for being able to manage what’s in stock, what’s out of stock. But we also had some stuff we had to work through, especially launching a new brand on a new platform and tying it into their systems in terms of showing stuff when it was available, when it wasn’t. So we definitely had some kind of road bumps that we had to figure out there the first week or two of launch and had to manually track things more. my goodness, for thousands of SKUs.

38:24
Yeah, there’s some challenges in there. So I’m just curious, what’s the procedure? Like you get a bunch of orders and they’re out of stock. You had to manually contact each one of those people, right? It was for the, especially for the first couple of weeks when we launched where we didn’t have as good a visibility into it as we thought and the systems weren’t kind of where we’d hoped they’d be. Yes, we did. We had someone who was a running point on customer service who was awesome. he was kind of doing a double check manually, reaching out to everyone if it was out of stock to talk.

38:53
get some better, some better stuff launched within a couple of weeks that gave better information pre purchase about how long it would take to get something, especially if it was backwarded for those first couple of weeks. The one thing too, like we talked about a million dollar run rate. It’s and it was, or almost that we didn’t quite hit it, but almost there. The other thing too is like, you’ll give it the other thing that’s nice is, you know, when you’re selling higher end products, a lot of times it’s, you if you’re selling

39:22
Selling $80,000 of Sporks, titanium Sporks, that’s one thing. You got to move a lot of product. when you’re selling $1,000 bumpers or $500 air compressors, it’s not as, when you have a higher AOV, it’s easier to hit that, which is nice. Sure. Sure, I guess. But the expectations are a lot higher also, I would imagine. That’s true. Yeah, there’s a higher threshold to purchase when you’re dropping $1,000 versus $30 for something less expensive.

39:50
So let me ask you this question. Obviously, I don’t know the entire situation here, but given that the 80-20 rule held firm and you said earlier that the majority of the products were influencer products, why did you feel like it was necessary to launch all those extra products? That’s a good question. You know, if we had gone back, that’s a good question. I think if you’re trying to position yourself as the back country of overlanding,

40:18
which was part of what we wanted to do and part of the high level vision. We actually had the guy who ended up coming up with, I worked with him on the logo concept, which is one of the things I’m most proud of, of the whole project. It’s a cool bear and it really has a cool distinct mark. He actually helped do the backcountry logo. If you’re trying to do that, you have to, and you launched with just, let’s say 50 products that have a lot of depth.

40:45
And that’s a great start, it doesn’t kind of, you don’t come out of the gates projecting what you want to project, which is the brand image of you can get a lot of a large selection of products here. Um, so I think that was a part of it. We wanted to be able to come out with a, it didn’t have to be the world’s hugest offering, but it needed to be a somewhat robust offering across all parts of the catalog. And so I think that was one of the reasons why we wanted to have a larger product line from watch. Is this kind of like right channel where you kind of sell them something and then there’s a lot of upsells and accessories that go along with it?

41:13
I would say there’s yeah, there’s some fairness in that for sure. I think the lifetime value possibilities for Overlander is much higher than with Right Channel Radios. Right Channel Radios, people would come back and buy, but if you buy a CB radio, unless you’re like a mining company in Nevada or something, the chances of you needing another one, maybe you’ll need a new one in 10 years when yours breaks, maybe you buy another Jeep. But the lifetime value on a CB radio is much less than on an Overlander. But yeah, I mean, the number of accessories, Steve.

41:42
We gotta get you a rig man, cause I know that you have been Yeah, I’m sure my wife would love if you. Well, we’ve had this like behind the scenes. for those that don’t know, I came over in my van to Steve’s house. I played a song for his wife to try on my guitar, to try in my van with her there to try to convince her. So Jen, if you were listening, I hope that that song has stuck with you. Steve is a good man. He’s a good husband. He’s a good father. You should let him have.

42:09
let him have his adventure. And the whole time Jen was probably like, uh, Andrew, could you move this van to a different neighborhood? Not, not park in front of the house. I saw your neighbors come over and they were like looking in and, actually I should have just camped out there and like, you know, start, I could have, I should have had a lot more fun embarrassing you in front of your neighbors. I don’t know what the correct term with it for this is. It might be cognitive bias, but after, I didn’t think that anyone had these vans before, but once I rode in yours and we went on that road trip,

42:39
I started seeing them all over the place. I think because I’m paying attention to it now, but they’re really popular. Yeah. I mean, well, you live in California. California is like ground zero for these types of vehicles, especially the VW kind of van. it’s the you are you’re in the epicenter of it. So you probably get more of them than most people. So we talked about email retention sourcing. Did you guys run ads and that sort of thing? Were your margins high enough to run ads? They probably would, I would imagine.

43:09
They were on some items, but long-term the ad spend.

43:16
in and of itself was not enough to be able to kind of keep the brand going. it’s at least without kind of proving out that lifetime value, I think a little bit more. yes, did short and long answer is yes, we did run ads, but we were also trying to focus on a lot of other things as well. Okay. So and then we keep talking about lifetime value. Did you already get an idea in that short time frame what that could be? No, impossible. And like in five weeks, it’s really hard to know. So I think I think that’s something that will probably play out over the course of a year or two. Just

43:45
knowing from personal experience, like, if I think about vendors, I have purchased stuff from for my rig, I have probably placed, I can think of one vendor, well, let’s say across two vendors that sell specialty items for my vehicle. mean, I’ve probably placed 20 orders with them over the course of a five year period that are probably there, you in the, you know, they’re over $10,000 for all you know, so it’s so yeah.

44:13
personal experience, I know it’s there, we just five weeks is a short time to be able to get through it. So, but I had three or four more quick lessons if we have time to go through and I’ll just again, I’ll give you a high level and then you can dive into them or not as you see fit. I think it amazed me how having good creative, how much having good creative helps with building a brand. So being able to steal the…

44:38
steals around, we’re being able to leverage the assets, the digital assets of exhibition overland that they’ve built over a decade of overlanding, landing on the website, creating the crop, the category pages, the video assets, the photography, it just brings so much depth and authority and, and to a brand that I have, I’ve never had that access to do before. So I thought that was super cool. And I think in the future, if I build a brand, I will at a minimum, invest heavily into that, that facet up front.

45:06
It kind of reminded me of that one video where you have like on right channel where you drove over and then you put this antenna on just on steroids You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. You know, what’s really funny. Guess who shot that video for a symposium? I have no idea. Was it the expedition overland? It was the expedition overland guys like that was like seven years ago and they were doing this and so we hired them to do that then so it’s the exact same people. Ah, okay. Makes sense. It kind of looks similar like that first front splash. Yeah, it does. So

45:36
Anyway, creative, super helpful. Outsourcing good writing is possible. Like I don’t know about you, Steve, but I’ve always struggled and been very skeptical about any time that I’ve tried to outsource writing more almost always it’s ended in tears. And this is, why did I think I could outsource good quality writing? And I actually found I didn’t find one of the team members at auto anything had had some writers that did a really good job. So that gave me hope that like, hey, it’s possible to outsource stuff and have a decent level of quality. You just sometimes have to dig through a lot of

46:05
have to dig a lot. So that was cool. Were these writers, I mean, these writers would, I would imagine be a lot more difficult to find. It’s so niche, right? Oh, yeah, it’s super niche. But okay, no, one of them. One of them traveled like was overlanded in Botswana and knew knew about overlanding was a great writer and had a, you know, tied in like historical quotes and did a great job. So I thought that was cool. And then finally, this is my last one. And then I’ll kind of turn it back to you. But I think

46:32
anytime, Steve, you’ve done this too, like, I’ve probably been responsible for, I would guess at this point, seven or eight major either site redesigns or migrations in my career. And every time you get to this point, we’re like, you, you get close to launch either your launch deadline, or you’re at a point where like, you’re getting past it. And you have to decide, like, should we push this live? Or should we make it a little bit better, a little bit better. And I think like you every it always, you always

47:01
always makes sense to launch just a little bit earlier than you think. Because if you wait until you feel ready, you’re going to push it out, you know, three, four, five, six, seven, eight weeks takes longer. And it’s obviously you don’t want to put something crappy out into the world. But you learn so much from getting it live. That’s just the start, you can start marketing it, you learn a lot of it’s a great way to start testing and tweaking some of the small bugs. And if you wait until it’s ready completely, it’s just, you know, your timeline is just going to get stretched so much further out. And I have found to

47:29
A lot of times I’ll have a punch list of post-launch fixes. I realize once the site gets live, I often don’t go back and actually fix a lot of them because in ultimately they’re not that important. So I don’t know if you found this too, but I think launching as soon as you meaningfully can and start marketing and interacting with customers like err on the side of launching a little early versus a little late. Yeah, it’s funny. We have kind of opposite personalities. You’re more of a perfectionist than I am. I’m all about just launching. Maybe it’s because we’re

47:59
I was in engineering and you just launched something and then you fix it. So that’s always been my mentality. Like for example, this course that I launched with Tony a year ago, we launched, I wanted to launch with nothing. And she’s like, no, no, no, no, wait, let’s at least get a couple of modules in there. And I was like, no, let’s just do it. And so we compromised and we launched with just a couple of modules. Oh, that’s see. Yeah. We are very different personalities. I am much more like everything buttoned up. Let’s make sure like it’s good. Like I, so that was, you alluded to this earlier, but that was

48:28
It was a good thing for me because I think I tend to err on the side of perfectionism, which is good if you’re a watchmaker. It’s probably not great if you’re trying to launch a project with 20 people. I think as an engineer, you expect to launch with bugs always. So as long as it’s working. But you’re like your background is like in chip engineering. Like if you have make a little error in one of those chips, doesn’t it hose everything up? Like you kind of have to be a perfectionist. Is that why you’re not in the chip space anymore?

48:57
Actually, the real question, Andrew, is why you aren’t still working at Overlander and why the contract was such a short one. Drew and I, we were talking about it afterwards. was like, yeah, you know, it was just a safer way of proposing it. And we didn’t give, we wouldn’t want to give Andrew any equity, you know, because weren’t sure it was going to be a long-term thing. Andrew goes up to one for about two seconds and strikes back.

49:20
I just pulled that one out of my butt too. Well, you know, I think you did a great job. The site looks amazing. Actually, it’s like right channel on steroids, I want to say just because all the videos and everything that you had on there. well, thanks. Big shout out to Kurt and Paul over EtherCycle for designing it and putting a lot of work into that. also for just again, it’s mostly the creative assets from Clay and Rachelle and the team over at Exhibition Overland. if I mean, if that’s what I think.

49:49
gives us that, like I was talking about earlier, it just makes such a huge, huge difference versus trying to have to, you know, not have those professional assets. So thank you, I appreciate it. But I mean, it’s those two teams that are responsible for almost all of it. I did want to ask you this one question. And I was kind of curious about the entire time. Like, what made you take this project? Because you have all these successful businesses. And this one wasn’t for any equity. It wasn’t a long term contract. Like, what made this project attractive for you?

50:18
Yeah, I’ve been asked that a lot of times. So it was it was not for the money. And especially, you know, after the fact, I it was just the answer. The big big question or the big answer is like two, threefold. One, I liked the people involved known and you know, been great friends with Drew for a long time. I wanted to I thought growth was the biggest growth and learning were the biggest reasons.

50:44
I wanted to, I’ve never done something like this with this big of a team. I wanted to see how I could do, how I liked it, how I could grow, what I could learn. I liked the space. I also wanted to see what it was like launching a brand in a space that I really am passionate about deeply. know, and so it’s, know, CB radios and Trilling Motors had zero interest. I was very much a mercenary in those niches. I was like, is there opportunity here? Yes, let’s sell them. Great. And this is very different. So I want to see how that, you know, how I liked, how that changed things.

51:12
Can I ask you a question real quick before you go on? How much was the passion part of it really important? Because I’m not passionate about my products. And did it add a completely different dimension to this? You know what’s interesting is for the first couple weeks it was cool and after that it became just like any other project. And I don’t say that in a way to disparage the project at all. it did help, I will say this, it did help with the learning curve quite a bit. when I’m thinking about products and do we, is this a good fit for the site? Is it not?

51:39
that was much more evident to me. Whereas when I was like launching, you know, CB radio, I was like, I don’t even know what this thing does. Is this thing great? I just, the learning curve was much steeper. But that being said, once you kind of get into the weeds of it, the fact that you’re selling, you know, cool overlanding gear when stuff gets hard, doesn’t really make a difference. You know, it’s still, it’s, so it helped in the first early couple of weeks with the learning curve, but, long, I would say it made less of a difference than I thought.

52:09
Yeah, I thought you would have done it for like some free gear. I can picture your West Folly now with like big tires and like a camper on top of it or something. I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, it’s I’m sure I haven’t actually it’s funny. I haven’t really ordered anything meaningful from the site. I’m sure I will in the future and definitely have some discounts there, which is nice. But but mostly it’s about growth, you know, learning, getting in, you know, like you said, like you said earlier, you’re giving me a hard time about not having an e-commerce project for a while. And it’s true. And a big part of that is been focused on, you know,

52:39
running the community and some of ECF capital stuff, which you can’t do everything well. ultimately I have to, sometimes you gotta decide not to do things. It’s hard to do everything well, but I also did wanna get my hands dirty again with e-commerce from a growth perspective. And also I like the people involved. So the other thing too is like ECF live, we didn’t have an ECF live this year. So I had a little more bandwidth to play with. So yeah, it was kind of all of those reasons. The short answer is growth, trying to learn to grow and be able to get better.

53:07
The short answer is you did this so I couldn’t make fun of you anymore. Well, like I said earlier, that’s a big one. Although I don’t lay awake at night too much about all your jabs, Steve. mean, occasionally, but not too often. Hey, so cool. I’m going to link up. I know you have like a series on this, uh, on your podcast too. So if anyone’s interested in learning more about, guess, the psychological and the more in-depth nuts and bolts of this, uh, I will link up, uh, your episodes that you.

53:36
put out on Overlander. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And we should, we’ll have to do another van trip at some point. That was for people who don’t know, did a, Steve came out to Montana and we did a, I don’t know, was it three day, four day kind of like exploratory van trip around Yellowstone and the area there and visited some very, some beautiful high altitude kind of sand golf courses, which was really nice. was, uh, was, it was we’ll have to do that again.

54:04
Definitely, definitely. Well, hey, thanks for coming on and sharing your experiences and congratulations on no longer being e-commerce-less. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it. All right. Take care.

54:19
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you’re a seven or eight figure e-commerce store owner, you should check out e-commerce fuel, the bedded community for experienced store owners. It’s a great community and you can get fast, knowledgeable answers to your most pressing business questions. So go to ecommercefuel.com to learn more. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 354. And once again, I wanna thank Clabio, 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.

54:48
Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of 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 Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

55:19
Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, 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 the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:27
which is one of the few podcasts that I actually listen to. And because Austin works with and helps a variety of e-commerce entrepreneurs with their email marketing and advertising, he has a wide breadth of business knowledge and he really knows his stuff. In fact, he is one of the few people that I asked for advice in growing my own businesses. So if you’ve never listened to his podcast before, take your favorite podcast app, do a search for the e-commerce influence podcast and go check it out because you will not regret it.

00:54
But 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.

01:25
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.I-O slash D. I also want to thank Clabio, who is also a sponsor of the show. Now, if you’re working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined, you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business. Now, if you’ve ever wondered how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it, companies like Living Proof and Chubbies, well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning.

01:53
while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to do the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo helps you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife.

02:22
That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. And finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently 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 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.

02:57
Steve, man, I’m excited to chat with you. It’s been a little while since we’ve connected. It was pre-COVID, I think. It was, definitely. You were one of the first hit people to have to take down your event. Yes, that was the most miserable event. Thank you for reminding me of that. I was ready to go. I was excited to go to Florida. And then there was an increasing level of emails being like, we’re thinking about going?

03:26
We’re thinking about not doing it. Oh, now we’re definitely not doing it. And yeah, man, we haven’t chatted too much since then. So I’m excited to reconnect. mean, even rescheduling that thing is still a little bit up in the air because who knows when this whole, when people feel comfortable then going to conferences. So for sure, for sure. Well, I’m excited to chat today. We kind of had this idea of doing a joint episode and thinking about some of the things that we both do well.

03:55
and then talking about them and sharing some of the things that have helped us in growing our business. One of the things I’ve always respected about you and from the beginning I was like, wow, Steve is an incredibly sharp guy and somehow he does all of this just by himself with a VA and he’s figured out ways to automate and make things happen and do a lot with a very small staff. So that’s kind of the inspiration for today’s episode.

04:25
which is five or six things that you can automate in your own business to make your life easier. And- It’s funny, we were talking about this earlier and you are the exact same way. You have two people running this vast organization. That vast organization is a compliment for a small organization. But yeah, man. So I think it’s something really cool and fun. And I think as you stick around in entrepreneurship,

04:54
long enough, especially online entrepreneurship, you can come up with ideas of ways to automate things that maybe in the beginning you wouldn’t have thought of. So I can kick off with my number one thing that I’m excited about automating and that we think we’ve done a really good job and that is hiring. And hiring, I think for a lot of people, it’s something that they kind of dread. They’re like, oh.

05:21
I got to hire somebody, oh my gosh, it’s going to take so much time. It’s going to be so frustrating. I’m going to be doing all this work and then maybe get the wrong person. So I kind of take a different approach and this has come from having my first job. hired quite a few people, like over 30 people, and we learned a lot during that. And the way that I look about this automation process is we have really systematized down to

05:51
multiple, like, I guess it’s kind of a mindset. First things first, my mindset is I think about marketing our business to a potential new hire, just like I’m selling a product. So the same amount of work going into like a sales page for a product goes into hiring for a job advertisement. Because I know that hiring somebody who’s incredibly talented,

06:18
and is so valuable to the company, it’s worth my time there. So once I do that, I use Airtable to collect all of the applications that we get. Why don’t you talk about what that is, just in case people don’t know what that tool is. Airtable is one of the things I’m most excited about right now as a tool. It’s kind of like Excel on Google Sheets on steroids, in a sense that you can, it’s,

06:47
all the really good stuff that you get from Google Sheets and Excel, like being able to pull in information, look at it in different viewpoints, and also the ability to then connect it to other apps, applications, and tools, and pull in information and push information. So it’s extremely flexible as well. And so basically the way that we use it is when somebody applies to a job app, they go through a form that we’ve created on our website with Airtable.

07:17
and it’s hosted by our table. And that information is then pulled into our, what looks like a Google Sheet, but a Google Sheet that’s dynamic. And as people come into this, we can move them from round one to round two. We have little tripwires and stuff that we can see if somebody’s gonna pass the round one to round two requirement. That’s something simple like including a word in their cover letter that we’ve specified. Then from round two to round three, we can visualize

07:47
and move people through this whole process almost like a sales funnel. So by the time they get to the round three and four, we, and we’re ready to actually have an interview. We’ve, they’ve gone through these steps and we’re, I’m interviewing basically typically on an average of like four or five people for every 200 applications. it’s really, really helpful. And my time is saved massively. And also we tend to get higher quality people.

08:15
because they go through this step-by-step process. I’m just kind of curious since we’re talking about this. So round one is something stupid like include a word or subject in your application, right? What do rounds two and three look like? Round two and three include listening to a couple of podcast episodes, really episodes that are like very deep in like the ethos of what my business is about. So one with a guest and one with just me talking about our business. if people are really excited after listening to the podcast episode, then they write a blog post.

08:45
a very short one to understand if they can write. So writing, we’re remote team, and I found that the ability to write is incredibly, incredibly important with a remote team. So that’s the next step, is going through a blog post. After that, the next step is recording a YouTube video, introducing themselves for two minutes. So by the time we get to the actual meet them in person,

09:12
We’ve got a YouTube video, we know they can write and we know they can follow it, pay attention to details. So these are obviously for higher paid positions that are very skilled, right? Yes. Yeah. But actually I would do a similar version. I’ve done a similar version of this with less steps for lower level positions. And I actually think that they’re just as important for lower level positions because with a lower level position, the thing that often you really need is someone to follow instructions.

09:42
Yeah, you know, what’s funny about that is we followed a similar scheme for hiring for Bumblebee linens. Yep. But what we found is we got almost no applicants that could make it through that entire funnel. And like literally when one person finally made it through the funnel, we’re like, all right, great. We’re going to, we’re going to interview that person. It’s pretty sad really. So I think there’s like a happy medium, at least in my experience when, when hiring like the lower level types of employees.

10:07
Were you there at eCommerce fuel when I was talking with Bill D’Alessandro about the number one question he asked applicants that determined whether he’s going to hire them or not? No, I’d love to hear it. So he asked them, he says, so he gives them an assignment. Like, let’s say you work for me and I gave you an assignment that was due Friday at 4 30. But then over the course of the week, I gave you a whole bunch of other stuff and you weren’t able to work on that one assignment that’s due at 4 30 on Friday. So

10:36
Let’s say four o’clock rolls around and you find that you don’t have time to finish it before you have to complete your work day. What do you do? Oh, it’s a good question. And so some people might say, hey, you know, I’ll email you and I’ll tell you, hey, I didn’t get a chance to do it, but I’ll get it to you first thing Monday morning. But the right answer to that question is I’ll just stay as long as it takes to finish it up. Cause that was the due date was today. Yeah. Right. And so that’s it. Number one hiring thing.

11:05
That’s great. That’s his number one hiring question that determines whether you make it in or not. It’s really interesting. think I would frame it in a way where if you, the moment that you know that you are not able to complete it, what do you do? And I’d love to hear what people say, how they would communicate that. Right. It’s interesting, right? Cause everybody has too much on their plate at all times and trying to figure that thing out is what’s funny about that is like his best employees. They just say, what do you mean? I can’t finish it.

11:35
Of course I’m gonna finish it. Right. Yeah. Well, Steve, let’s go to something you’re really, really good at. And number two, I’ve got content repurposing. Right, you have a very small team, but you have a big footprint out there of the content you produce and you push out. How do you do Yeah, so every week, you know, for some reason, when we were talking about this earlier, I felt like I didn’t do that much in this area, but you kind of convinced me that I did, so.

12:02
We’ll talk about it now. So every single week I put out one blog post, one podcast episode, one YouTube video. And then I have actually Instagram and Twitter now on autopilot. And I’m going to be starting a TikTok channel in a couple of weeks. Now on the surface, that actually sounds like a lot, but I actually do a lot of content repurposing and it, for me, it always just starts out with the blog. Every single week on Sunday morning while my kids are in Russian math for four hours. Just thought I’d put that in there. I sit down.

12:32
and I write literally for four hours straight and I put out that one three to 5,000 word blog post. And from that blog post, sometimes for my YouTube video, all I do is just take the exact words sometimes, because I write like how I talk. Sometimes I take those exact words and just put out a YouTube video. Other times I’ll just take bullet points from that, just turn on the camera and just riff on it. And for YouTube especially, I think it’s important that you have a setup in your office where all you got to do is click one button and start recording.

13:02
Like the lights have to be set up and everything. If you don’t have that, forget about it. It’s not going to happen. So what I do then after that, so I have this blog post and for the podcast, that’s not really automated because the purpose of the podcast for me is just to get to know people. So I’ll just have someone like my assistant schedule out interviews in advance, which require no prep on my part for the most part. Cause I just riff based on the answers that they give kind of like how we’re doing it right now for Twitter and social media.

13:30
Uh, I actually hired recently a consultant that just consumes all of my content, YouTube, podcasts, everything, and puts together these little, you know, tweets that go out three times a day. And then I take those and I put those on Instagram and those are actually going to be the fundamentals of my Tik TOK channel as well. And so there’ll be the tweets, what do you post the tweets, like pictures of the tweets on Instagram or do you do something different on Instagram?

13:59
So the tweets are actually in this Google sheet, which ones are going out. And I kind of see how they perform on Twitter and I the best ones. And then I, this, this part’s manual. I’ll find like a family picture or some picture to go along with it for Instagram. Cool. Cool. And then TikTok. So how long have you been taking dance lessons to prepare for your TikTok entry? You know, I just finished, I finished a three month series on hip hop dancing, which is going to be the fundamentals of my TikTok channel.

14:29
It’s gonna be good. what’s funny about this is I told Austin this and you actually believed me. I did, I did. Before he went on, he was talking about TikTok and I was like, that’s impressive. Steve’s committed to his craft. Okay, so very interesting. So you’re repurposing everything here and you’ve got now from one blog post, that one blog post turns into Instagram, tweets, a YouTube video, and also an email. Does the email go out as well?

14:58
Email goes out, that, I mean, that part’s not automated, but yes, I email out all these pieces of content to my audience on a weekly basis. Cool. And does that come from the writing or is that a separate email that you’re writing? Usually it depends how much time I have. Like if I’m, if I don’t have that much time, sometimes I’ll just cut and paste like an excerpt from the blog post as an intro for the video. But you got to understand like all these pieces of content aren’t going out at the same time.

15:23
Yes. Right. So I stagger them. So like the YouTube video of that blog post might come out like months later. Okay. That makes sense. feel like it’s all going out at the same time. And how do you manage that? Do have any tools that you use to manage that? Or is that all Google Sheets? It’s all just Google Sheets. I mean, that part is kind of manual and there’s no real method. I just wait and see if it’s been long enough basically that I publish the other post. Cool. That’s awesome. And so you’re doing all of this. you have anyone helping you?

15:53
push, publish, or is it just you? So the Twitter stuff is all automated. Instagram, that’s all kind of curated by me because I feel like my Instagram is a little bit more personal. Yeah. I use a tool called planily to just schedule everything out. So I’m scheduled out for like three months already. Oh, awesome. So I don’t have to touch that podcast. My, my VA handles that. My, my VA actually edits all my videos. Also, she actually edits all my Tik TOKs as well. So that, yeah, she’s been amazing.

16:21
Steve, I can tell already you’re going to be going to have a massive TikTok following. Dude, I’m excited. I just actually interviewed a TikTok consultant this morning on my podcast. Cool. So she gave me all these pointers. think in terms of expanding your reach, it seems like TikTok is probably the best platform right now or the fastest growing one for sure. Cool. So let’s move to the next one here on automations. So outsourcing email.

16:50
And I think we can both talk a little bit about this. I can start and dive in a little bit about how, how I do it. This has been one of the best, the best changes that I made, I would say in the last five years was directing my email to help scout and getting some help filtering through my email before it gets to me. So both Steve and I put out a lot of content. And when you put out a lot of content, you get a lot of responses.

17:19
And some of those responses I really want to see. And some of those are actually 95 % of them are pitches to go on my podcast. I would say you’re probably familiar with that. You probably get the same. And so I’ve got it set up so that my email goes to a help scout. And then I have my assistant who filters through the email and then assigns the ones to me that make the most sense for me to respond to. And sometimes she’ll even include a note. And if I get an email that is important.

17:47
I’ll also just send me a message on Slack saying, hey, here you got a new email about this to go check it out. Saves an incredible amount of time. So Austin, how come my emails have not been making through your filters? That’s what I want to know. That was actually explicit instructions to my assistant. To forward your emails on to a Chinese factory that.

18:13
that is going to be hard selling you widgets for the next. I still get so, guess every once in I still get tons of emails from going to the Canton fair. And they’re usually very hard sell emails about like the newest widget. But yeah, that’s what I do. Steve, what do you do? I know you’ve got your own process here. Yes, I don’t use Help Scout. I use a tool called Gorgias. And the reason why I like Gorgias so much is because you can literally tie in all of your social media channels. So you don’t do as much social, I don’t think as I do, but.

18:42
Facebook, Instagram, every time I post one of those I get comments and I want to make sure that people get responses to those comments. So all emails, social, Facebook Messenger, even SMS, they all come into the same platform. And then my VA goes through and just flat out just closes the one for podcast requests actually, he just closes a whole bunch of those. And then for people who are actually, you know, sending me an email, like there’s canned responses for certain things and

19:09
Just like you, only the most important ones get filtered to me that I finally answer. Yeah, it’s incredible and Gorgias is a great tool. I think I’ll probably make the transition after this conversation to Gorgias because I’m doing more social and we’re ramping that up. Yeah. Does Help Scout not handle social? Doesn’t, it doesn’t. Ah, interesting. It just does email and also like support beacons. So people can click on the support beacon on my membership.

19:38
ask a question, it goes directly in. So yeah, I don’t want this to be a gorgeous ad, but what else? It also does all my e-commerce store stuff comes in and it imports all that information. So one click of a button. It’s amazing. It’s fantastic. There are also sponsors of our podcast, uh, e-commerce. So I, I, I’m a huge fan. I just need to make the transition. Cool. Well, the next one here is something that I think you’re really good at. And as we were going into this episode, I was like,

20:08
You know, Steve, I know you have so much automated and you do so much with such a small team. And one of the things you mentioned was you like to delegate a lot of stuff to the floor. What does that mean? What do you delegate into the floor and how do you think about what’s important in your business? So by delegating to the floor, that’s actually a nice way to say I drop a lot of things on the floor. You know, sadly enough, I don’t really have like a set method, but for me, like I have this

20:37
The way I do this is ridiculously primitive. I actually have a draft in Gmail of all the tasks that I want to get done in a given week, and those are prioritized. So in a given week, if there’s something extraneous that comes up, I always open up my draft in Gmail and say, hey, does it fall under these directives? If it doesn’t, and I don’t think it’s important for the long term, I literally just drop it on the floor. If it’s something that might be longer term, that’s something I need to do.

21:07
I add it to that drafts under the long-term to-do list. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is a lot of my wife’s things fall into that and I get in big trouble. don’t think she’s seen my email drafts yet, but there’s a lot of the stuff that she wants kind of below. Like if she found that draft, I’m sure she’d move them up. Do you do something similar, Austin? Kind of curious. It’s interesting. I don’t use a Gmail draft. That’s a ultra power move. I’ve never heard of that, but that’s for you.

21:36
I definitely, I think the way that we do it is we do a lot of like sprints. So we like to work on projects for like two to three weeks at a time and try to get something like shipped. And within that process, it eliminates a lot. So if we say we have like a hard deadline, we’re like, Hey, we’re to put something out on this day. Then when you look at that and you go look at all the steps, it automatically eliminates a lot of the extraneous stuff.

22:05
because you’re planning on moving something forward. Like when I launched our membership, the coalition, we did it in 30 days from start deciding to do it to launching. And that required us to really limit a lot of the features that we had to get something out. And then on a personal level, I try to limit myself down to like three to five big things a week that I do. And I think there’s also just a mindset side of just realizing that like,

22:35
At a certain point, when you’re an entrepreneur, you recognize that you’ll never have enough time to do all the things that you want to do. So just give up that mindset of trying to check everything off. And I think that that’s been really helpful is just recognizing that I’m always going to have 10 to 20 times more stuff to do than I have time to do. Do you have a running task list though of those things that aren’t as high priority? I don’t, no.

23:02
I don’t. So when you say that, you have like a running task list of things that aren’t high priority. It’s like the things that you consistently. Hey, let me open up my drafts right now. Great. I’m very interested in this. Yeah. Okay. So here’s something that’s been on my back burner for a little bit. Like I actually haven’t converted over to the Facebook conversions API yet. Okay. It’s something that’s on my list, but it’s not something that’s going to directly bring in more sales. Yes. Right. So that’s why I keep pushing it down. I know it’s important, but I keep pushing it down.

23:33
Yeah, so I don’t have a running list, but I definitely run it through like a mental filter around that. at the end of the day, I’ll look at like, we have like our rocks for the quarter and the things that we want to move forward and always be cross-referencing the rocks that we have versus the stuff that I’m doing. And it’s like, is this really related to what I said that I wanted to do 45 days ago? Cause usually the first 45 days of a quarter, it’s like really easy to stick to your

24:03
priorities, the second 45 days, you’re far enough away that you start to like forget, we had this great meeting and we made all these plans. So that’s when I’m more cognizant of looking at my plan for the quarter. I mean, I know one thing that I need is what I call a mind sweeper. I actually had one of these at my last job, you know, when I was working full time, like I’m really excited about the big things like the big rocks that move things. But then like I leave like this trail of destruction behind.

24:33
Right? Where I’m just trying to get things done. Things are moving forward, but it might not be polished. I need someone just kind of behind me polishing everything that I do as I lay my path to destruction. Yeah. That sounds like a great role. That sounds like something you could hire for using my air table set up. Yes, exactly. It’ll be an extensive interview automated process where I asked them, Hey, it’s four 30 and you didn’t get it done yet. What are you going to do? What are you going to do?

25:00
Yeah, and you give them some half-baked blog posts and see what they can turn it into. That’s actually amazing. So people actually write the blog posts. That’s actually more difficult to me than putting out a two-minute YouTube video, actually. Well, yeah, we keep it short, though. It’s like 500 words, like a 500-word answer to some sort of a response and see how well people… And for every role, it’s different. Like, for a customer service role, we didn’t do that. We did a reply to a customer.

25:30
So here’s a scenario, write their email response. That was fascinating actually, because it was like 90 % of people just totally blew it up and then 10 % of people got it perfectly. It’s so interesting. It’s like a very basic email response to a customer who might be frustrated and 90 % of them were just like, okay, even though everything looks good on your resume, there’s no chance we could ever hire you considering your email response for this customer.

25:58
I know your interview question. Let’s say Steve Chu emails you here. How do you deal with this? Do you A, forward to a factory in China? Well, let’s get to number five here. And number five is one we can both talk about, which is running automation for email marketing and SMS and what that means for your business and for also for our clients, the people that

26:27
have gone through our trainings in our communities. This is one, I still think email and SMS, email automation is one of the most powerful things you can do after we’ve both been in this e-commerce space, online space for quite a few years. And there’s always new flashy things that pop up and people talk about. But the end of the day, email is still incredibly, incredibly powerful to automate.

26:55
and provides so many levers for business owners to be able to do more with a smaller team.

27:04
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.

27:32
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.

28:02
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.

28:12
You know, it’s funny you say that over the years I’ve been drawn to new shiny objects. Like for example, I went on this Facebook messenger kick for two years. Yeah. But I just never learned my lesson with Facebook. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like I used to be excited about Facebook pages back in the day, then groups, but they keep just nerfing everything. And then they just did a gigantic nerf, partly because of Apple, think. But yeah. So email is the one stalwart that’s lasted the test of time. And then I think SMS is going to be another one of those platforms that last the test of time.

28:40
What are your, like, at end of the day, what are the most powerful automations, email automations that you have set up? So, I think the most powerful thing that I do is I keep it simple. Really, I had this one sequence where I only have one product, which essentially is to get people to the store and, sorry, not the store, to the course. Yep. And I have different autoresponder sequences depending on what they’re interested in. Sure.

29:09
Like if there’s interest in selling on Amazon, I have them click over, you know, with the drip, think we both use drip. It allows you to send them different sequences depending on what they’re interested in. But I just have forms and all of my blog posts. I have calls to actions on my podcast, my YouTube videos, and that’s how I build my list. The other thing that I do is I like to cross pollinate everything. So for example, one class might only be available on SMS. And so in order to get this, you know, I have them click on this link, which sends a text message and I say upfront,

29:39
you’re going to get one text message per week and that’s how it’s going to be delivered. And so that way I have like, you know, people on both places, which allows me to reach them more because the deliverability for both platforms, at least SMS is really good right now, but I just noticed that there was a junk folder in my messages on my Android phone recently. And I think that it’s going to probably go in that direction at some point as well. For sure. We can already tell that it’s going in that direction, especially as exponentially the number of

30:07
people texting me for random stuff. Politicians usually lead the way on some of this stuff. And if you get on any one SMS list, you’ll just get hammered to eternity about certain issues. And that’s not a good experience. When I look at some of the email and SMS automations that are incredibly powerful. One, like you, have like a onboarding series. So if somebody signs up, they go through a quiz funnel, ask some questions, and then they go into a sequence.

30:37
Uh, that will, it’s designed to send them to the coalition and sign up. Uh, other things that I’ve put in that have been really helpful have been browse abandonment emails related to that. it’s, you know, browse abandonment emails when people are checking around and I always try to personalize those. So it’s like, Hey, I you were on the, all the website, like hit me, hit reply, hit reply and let me know what you’re thinking about. And a lot of times I get interesting questions about whether or not they should join the course. And.

31:07
From a client perspective, those two are easy ones right away, like card abandonment, browse abandonment, onboarding sequences, and then also replenishment sequences. what’s been interesting, I’ve been working with someone for the last couple of months, they came in with zero email. Like they were doing, I think they were sending like one email every two months. And now we’re up over 30 % of their revenue coming from.

31:37
email marketing in a couple of months because it just got, like you said, like kept it simple, but focused on the powerful stuff. It’s an email mark, email every single week that goes out, like a broadcast email featuring some sort of a product. And then we focused heavily, their replenishables business on a repeat purchase sequence that goes on for literally months. So if you buy something and don’t repurchase, you’ll be followed up about

32:07
this for months and it’s crazy. There’s eight or 10 emails and the email like eight or nine is performing almost as good as the first email. They’re just, it just happens to be replenishable that people buy over time. And so it was inspired kind of by a, you, do you wear contacts, contact lenses? do. Yeah. Okay. Did you ever buy from 1-800-contacts? I do not. Okay. Well, if you do, if you want to see an incredible experience, they’re the most relentless business I’ve ever.

32:37
scene with follow-up because they know if you buy contacts, you have to buy more contacts and they know your prescription. So they just continue to follow up with you every two to three weeks for eternity by SMS and email. it usually and it’s like one click experience where I just can click and buy my contacts. It makes it so easy. So I’ve been replicating that. I’m curious since I know you work with a lot of clients, how do people combine the email and SMS experience for an e-commerce store?

33:07
So this is where it starts to get really exciting. And there’s been some like big rollouts of, you can do this now on Postscript and you can do this on Klavia. And if you are trying to combine the two of them, I think from a strategy perspective, something that’s very interesting is I like to think of like upgrading my email flows. So I’ve been talking about like, how do you upgrade your email flows? So if you take what you’re currently doing and you recognize that

33:34
Maybe a good open rate is like 35%. Well, that’s 65 % of the people have not seen this. So if you’ve got an abandoned cart flow and you’ve got people that are going through this email sequence and you’ve also happened to capture their SMS number, well, you can put in something called like a clean up text message. So if somebody goes through the email sequence and they haven’t purchased something, then maybe you send them a text message. So you add a text message on the end of that.

34:04
or on your welcome series, the same sort of thing. Send a couple of emails and then they haven’t made a purchase, send your emails to like a discount or an offer email, then also hit with them with an SMS message. So you’re kind of, you’re stacking these to work together and you’re taking whatever you’re already doing and you’re just upgrading your flows. And it’s the same like the post purchase replenishment flow. If you’ve got emails going out,

34:33
why don’t you pop in an SMS message every three emails so that you’re not overwhelming people, but you’re getting through to people. So just kind of interpreting what you were saying, would you say that if you sent out an email, but it was unopened, you would send a text message to someone who hasn’t opened.

34:53
Yes, I think it’s a little bit harder to do that specifically because the way that the systems are set up, you’re not going to be able to really tell if they opened or not. I was saying more like if they don’t take the desired action that you want them to take and a desired action of an abandoned cart is to make a purchase. Desired action of a new subscriber sequence is to make a purchase. So it’s more like if they’re not taking those actions, then send a message or two, but don’t treat it the same way. It’s a totally different channel, right? Like you can’t

35:22
You can’t SMS text people the way that you email people. It’s just not acceptable. about for like a direct campaign? Like what I like to do is I’ll start out with email. Yeah. And then I’ll wait like several days and then send out a text to the people who haven’t opened or that’s why I kind of brought it up. I was kind of curious if you do something similar for direct campaigns. Yes, I think that that’s a great and I guess I think of that as like a cleanup campaign, like clean up all the people who had not made a purchase.

35:50
That’s what I think about for campaigns. Yes. It’s a great way to look at it. And also, you know, another way to think about SMS from a campaign perspective, this isn’t really automation, but you know, asking questions and I know you are deep into Facebook Messenger. you kind of like, it’s, the same premise that if you’re trying to launch something from a direct, if you’re like a direct to consumer clothing company,

36:15
hey, we’re trying to decide between these two things, this pink or this green shirt, which one do you like? Having people respond back is a great way to drive sales. I mean, that’s actually the most important aspect of SMS in my opinion, the ability for someone to instantly reply. So the way I get people used to SMS is I say, hey, this is an open line for you guys. Anytime you have a question, just hit reply. Yeah. And that way they’re not going to mark my next campaign as spam. You know, it reduces the chances.

36:45
And I’ve actually closed so many sales through SMS. Yeah. Is it getting immediate response? Yeah. But we also did find out today that it isn’t actually a direct response back to Steve. goes through your filter system. And I found out that none of my emails make it to you because they’re for you. Yeah. So, but yeah, those those are great, great, great ways to do it. And there’s a lot of opportunity there. I love just.

37:13
the opportunity around, I think there’s very few things that are more exciting than automating something that you do consistently away so you don’t have to do it again. So fun. I agree with you. Actually, it’s kind of like engineering work. And that’s, it’s kind of like work I used to do at my full-time job. And it just makes things a lot more interesting and fun. Do you have anything else that you’re excited about? Like tool-wise, tools-wise that you’re using or?

37:43
to help you automate stuff or not? Well, you know my personality, right, Austin? I like to code a bunch of stuff up. Yeah, oh yeah. One thing that I, this has been on my to-do list for a long time. What I’m actually really fascinated about is the ability to text to purchase. Yes, it’s cool. So if already someone has an account, I don’t know if there’s tools out there, I’m sure there’s tools out there that already do this. I don’t know if you’re any your There is, there are, yeah.

38:10
But the idea is they have their credit card stored already somewhere and then they just text back a word in the quantity and then it instantly becomes a purchase. I wanted to write that for myself because then I have infinite control over what I can do. what tools are available that do this for you? Oh man, there’s two on Shopify. let me just think, I’m gonna look it up real quick. I think it’s Electric SMS. Have you used it before?

38:38
Yes, I have. your clients, okay. Does it work though? It does. So it’s, they just changed their name now to Recharge SMS, but it’s ElectricSMS.com. this only, so this one works for, I’m gonna tell you the use case of this. This is if people are on subscription already, and helps automate support and prevent churn. So what that means is that you’ll text somebody and say, hey, your order’s gonna come out scheduled for let’s say like,

39:07
May 6th, for example. And you could text back, modify order, and you can change the order by text. And you can, for example, swap a flavor. You could skip it. You could update the quantity, change your shipping address, your billing info, next charge date, whatever. you could also add a one-time item. So you could add another item to your order on a consistent basis, which is pretty cool.

39:37
And that works for anybody using recharge on Shopify. Actually, I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be Shopify, just anybody using recharge. Oh, okay. So it’s another feature of recharge, basically. It’s a feature of recharge, but it’s a totally different company. It’s like an agency built it. Oh. And that’s, yeah, so it works with recharge. And then I’m trying to think of the other one that I’ve heard of. The other one that I heard of was…

40:04
It’s a one, it’s different. It’s a one click purchase from email, which I thought was interesting. So you send an email and it would be able to just go directly to, you just press like, I think it’s called like a one trick pony or something like that. You press the yes in the email and it automatically purchases for you. So the use case that I was thinking of was you get on live and you try to sell something and then

40:33
It’s easier to say, just text this to actually make the purchase. Or if you do some sort of auction like thing. Basically, the whole premise is having their credit card information stored somewhere. So email would work, SMS, I mean, it doesn’t really matter what the use case. should get in the, so Dirty, I think it’s called Dirty Lemon. Have you been to that website? I have not. So Dirty Lemon, are like text first, a text first e-commerce business.

41:03
If you text them, you will have somebody live going back and forth with you and you can start your subscription directly through text. It’s pretty cool. And they do a lot of their sales using this text message thing. So it’s not exactly what you’re saying, but they’re incredibly good at it. You can be able to see what they’re doing and then code it up and then start your next, I mean, start your next multi-billion dollar app here.

41:31
You know what’s funny, Austin? Like I get so many emails now that I actually look forward to getting a text because it actually stands out. If that makes any sense. Totally agree. I texted you to set this up because I was like, probably should text Steve versus email. Well, that’s the only way I’m going to get ahold of you apparently. For, yeah, that’s, mean, that’s, that’s the beauty of automation. But yeah, this is awesome. And.

42:01
I this is a fun episode to do together. think if you’re listening to this episode on my podcast and you have not listened to Steve’s podcast, Steve, why should they listen to my wife, quit her job podcast? It’s because I bring on guys like Austin to talk about, you know, the latest trends in e-commerce or online business. And everyone I get there, they’re in the trenches. They’ve been pre-screened. Usually I’ve met them in person and they know their stuff. So you can actually trust.

42:30
the words that people say. On the same vein, I encourage all of you to check out Austin’s podcast. And Austin, why should they listen to eCommerce influence? Because I am laser focused on helping eCommerce entrepreneurs build more wealth and live a more fulfilled life. And the way I kind of think about that is by bringing in very interesting people that I’ve met that are doing cool things in our industry.

43:00
try to figure out how they’re wired and try to bring some of those nuggets back to you. awesome. Steve has been great and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Yep. Sounds good.

43:14
Hope you enjoyed that episode and once again, if you haven’t checked out Austin’s podcast, it’s called Ecommerce Influence, go over there now and check it out. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 352. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. 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.

43:40
So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. 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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

44:08
Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
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 div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

00:57
I also want to thank Clayview, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build a business you always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories, do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change.

01:22
These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo helps you own your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash mywife.

01:51
Now, finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast 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. Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job Podcast.

02:19
where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Tu.

02:33
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Aaron Rubin on the show. Now, Aaron is someone who’s been a member of the e-commerce fuel community for a very long time. And I believe he’s actually the shipping expert on the forum and he runs his own 3PL or third party logistics firm and warehouse management software company called Ship Hero. He is also a longtime veteran of e-commerce where he started and built an online store at 19 years of age. He grew it to 7 million bucks in top line revenue. Now, so why am I having Aaron on?

03:03
Amazon has been tightening its grip on how many units sellers can send into FBA. And I’ve actually been getting a lot more questions about 3PLs lately. So today what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do a deep dive into Aaron’s experiences with e-commerce, along with every question that I can think of when it comes to using a third party logistics firm to handle your inventory. And with that, welcome to the show, Aaron. How are you doing today? Hey, I’m good. Thanks for having me. How are you? I’m good. So Aaron, I…

03:30
checked out your interview on the Tropical MBA podcast and you have a very interesting startup story about how you got started in e-commerce and eventually had that led to starting your own 3PL. So I wanna hear first about that first painful journey and what lessons you learned first. Sure, so my first company sold apparel for martial arts, started it, yeah, like I said, 19 in college. had sort of the only…

03:56
The last real job, I’m 41, my last real job was when I was 16 working as a lifeguard. So after that I had made money online doing a bunch of different things. The most popular of which was had a website with scanned pictures of Cindy Crawford photo shoot from Sports Illustrated. I had banner ads on that. So that made me like 20 grand or something, which you know, 17 was great. I remember that Pepsi commercial, right? Is that?

04:25
Yes. That was Cindy Crawford, right? Yeah. I think so. Good old days. So, and it was totally like, you know, it wasn’t like Playboy. It was just Sports Illustrated. But at the time, it was popular on the internet. Different era. Yeah. So a family friend reached out, actually wanted to talk to my brother. My brother, my older brother was a computer programmer, wasn’t interested. So he punted it to me and he wanted to, he wanted to buy a website called kickpunch.com that sold martial arts.

04:53
Products and he wanted sort of a second opinion You know my second opinion was like I want to say like $9,000 or something that the guy was asking and like I was like it’s not worth 9,000 You could probably build it for less and he’s like well, why don’t we just build it together and I was like, okay cool I figured it’d be another little side project that had a bunch of these little things I was doing to you pay my way, know sort of pay my bills in college So yeah, I jumped on it figured that’s what it would be and then you know the

05:23
company still exists. That was my primary way of making money for 15 years or so. So you were selling karate geese, was that the one that grew to 7 million? Yep. All right. So can you, how did you grow it so quickly to 7 million? Well, so we had some up and down. So when we started, we were just buying from this supplier in, so I’m like a little bit outside of New York city. There was a physical store in Manhattan.

05:53
that sold these products and what we would do is we would just order from him. He would ship it to our warehouse, which was my co-founder’s father’s basement. And I would pack them because he was 10 years older than me. So he was married, had kids, and he lived a different spot. whatever, he was working a full-time job to make money. I was in college. I didn’t have to actually attend classes. So I would just pick and pack all the orders.

06:23
So that’s how we started and like at the time, this was like 1999, you wanted to buy these sort of products online. There wasn’t a lot of choices. And then also we bought the domain A1MA for A1 martial arts and there was no Google. So this is pre-dated Google. So everything was the Yahoo directory was the sort of definitive source. So we were in there and it was alphabetical order. So A1MA ranked first in our category and that was it. That was the entire strategy at launch.

06:51
Man. Okay. And so people just found you through that directory or did it just later become all word of mouth because Google and the search engines weren’t. Yeah, it was just, I mean, it started with all that directory over time. You Google took off the directories no longer became valid and people did, you know, a one one MA. You know what mean? Like that sort of, that thing doesn’t last too long. And we ended up switching the name to karate Depot because we wanted to rank for karate equipment and you know, having the, the domain.

07:18
have a key, the keyword was important back then. So we switched the name there and yeah, that we were just entirely focused on Google optimization, but it was always SEO focused. There was no paid at the time. didn’t do any banner ads. It wasn’t much you could do back then. was all, it was all search and asked for how much was word amount. was no Google analytics those days. There was no attribution. So we could see the refers, but that was, it was really tough to know where people came.

07:46
So what ended up happening with that e-commerce store? I think you had a falling out with your partner or something like that. Yeah, I I’ll spare you the painful story, but basically the company had grown. growing pretty nicely every year. took a few years to get to a million dollars and then we were growing it like a million dollars a year into the financial crisis. And then when the financial crisis hit, two things happened. Revenue dropped because our

08:15
primary audience was mothers or parents who were putting their kids in karate school and didn’t want to spend all the money that the school was charging because the school would charge full price. We were charging a little bit less so they would buy from us. But the karate schools all had a huge drop in enrollment when financial crisis hit because no one, know, was tough times, right? A lot of layoffs. So the business shrunk and at the same time everyone pulled

08:46
pulled their access to capital. So I had an American, we used a few American Express cards. One of them went from like a $50,000 limit to a $500 limit. And like I would buy on it. So I couldn’t even like, it wasn’t like it was floating. was just like, it wasn’t like it was rolling over month to month. It was just the cashflow, right? Which just wasn’t there. I couldn’t buy anything on a $500 limit. And then also we had a credit line with a bank called Citizens Bank.

09:15
which we had never been late a day on, but they said, you know, it was at will. And they said we had, think, 60 days to pay it off and it was like $170,000. So all that hitting at the same time caused a cash crunch, which we thought would be, which I thought would be fine, but in reality wasn’t because our financials were wrong. So we had more debt on the books, less cash than was on the books and…

09:43
all the profits that we thought we had been making, we thought we’d be pulling half a million dollars in in profit, we weren’t. We were making significantly less than that, because the books were all wrong. So along those lines, what do you do differently today? Were you using a bookkeeper at the time when that happened? Yeah, so my co-found, we had an outside accountant and my partner did the, handled the whole financial stuff.

10:11
So, and the outside accountant was my partner’s friend. So I had no relationship with him and I had no visibility into what was going on. I would just see like a, here’s a PNL, you know, once a quarter or once every six months. And I didn’t have any info deeper than that. And I just trusted it all. Okay. Okay. I see. So if you were to do things differently, you’d hire like an independent accountant and bookkeeper.

10:40
Yeah, exactly. mean, just, you A, just look at the numbers more, right? Not like, just trust the really high level info, sort of dig a little deeper, ask some of the tougher questions. Cause there was in the summer when the financial crisis started, he did tell me there was issues and I was like, okay, let’s, I want to understand everything. I want to dig into everything. And he was super resistant and then came back with like, yeah, everything’s really fine. I just understood anything. Like, don’t worry about it. And like,

11:08
just wouldn’t give me access to see, you know, get my own QuickBooks login and really understand the data. And I should have fought harder at that point. It would have given me six more months of time. But he was super resistant that I didn’t fight hard enough. I don’t mean to bring up memories like that, the disconnect for me is how does that lead to like a warehouse software company? Yeah, so what happened after that was

11:36
So we were insolvent, like we had more debt than assets and like a shrinking business with no profits. But then we also had a lot of debt that was personally guaranteed. So we couldn’t just walk away because that would require personal bankruptcy. I told him that, well, my first, we had started these like couple other side businesses when we were selling like nursing scrubs. like,

12:02
totally unrelated, he had never spent a day working on any of it. I’d just done it all myself. I’d set up the website, got the sourcing and I did it all myself, but it was part of this entity. So I told him, let me have that, you can take the rest of the business, but I don’t want any of the debt. Just give me this business that I started as part of this and let me walk away. He said no. So then I switched to, okay, I’ll even give you that, just take everything, but you need to pay off the debts. I don’t want to up paying any of these debts.

12:30
that are personally guaranteed, I don’t want to have to file personal bankruptcy, to which he also said no. So what we ended up with was I took everything. So I took all the debts personally. And the way I was able to do it is I, my father took out, who is a college professor, didn’t have a ton of money, but he had a house that was paid off. So he took off, took out a mortgage and gave me the money for that. And I used that to pay down the debts.

12:56
to get my partner out and then I, so then I was the only owner of it after that. That seems like an unfair deal to me, but go on. Yeah, it was either that or we were both going down. Right. So like, you know, it wasn’t gonna, he wasn’t willing to take it. So I didn’t have much of a choice. So I had that and then I had this business that was super underwater and I also had the debt to my father. So now I really couldn’t just declare bankruptcy because now like- Right, your dad’s involved, yeah. Yeah, I’d be sailing with a debt that he had no way to pay back.

13:26
because it’s a mortgage on his house. So I had to make it work and it was brutal. Like I worked, like if there was a job that I could outsource for like 12 bucks an hour, I’d it myself. I did it myself. I was just struggled for years to sort of get that company back to zero. And once I did, it got a lot easier. So then I grew it back to the point where we never got

13:52
We got to, I think we had been at, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was like 6 million pre this, and then it was, we got to like 7.3 million post this whole financial crisis thing. And we switched to the customer segment. started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was an emerging martial art at the time. So we sort of got a pretty dominant position in that industry. went out, there was no good, there were good suppliers in Brazil and good brands in

14:22
The UK, no one great in the US. So I couldn’t get deals with any of the people in Brazil. So I went to the UK, made deals with a couple of the biggest brands for like to be their US distributors, started a website which still exists and it’s still super popular, is BJJHQ.com, which is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu headquarters. It’s a flash sale site. What I saw is, do you know back country? Yeah, I do. So back country had this thing called steep and cheap.

14:50
which was like their flash sale thing, which was a deal that they initially, and then it’s converted to like rolling where every 20 minutes was a different deal. But anyways, I was at, I think IRCE, no, I didn’t go to IRCE. I didn’t have the money to go to IRCE. So I bought the DVDs of speeches at IRCE and someone from back country spoke about how they launched steep and cheap and like it quickly became like 50 % of their revenue or something like that.

15:19
I loved the idea because I had no money. I had no money in the bank to buy inventory, but by doing a deal all day, I only had to buy enough stock for a few days ahead. I think at the time, were a lot of these companies kind of folding and you were just buying off excess stock? What do mean? For these deals, like your sourcing. No, no, so we didn’t do it really buying closeouts. We never really did it that way a little bit, but what we ended up doing was just buying totally

15:49
valid popular products, but what we were able to do is, hey, we’d buy a decent quantity, so we’d get a decent price, but also logistics were a little bit easier because it was only one product, so you didn’t have to store and ship a variety. But the biggest thing was cash flow. So I didn’t have any money, but if you got to stock 500 products, you have to have inventory of all these different products. But if you only sell one deal a day,

16:17
just need to buy like the next week worth of products, right? So like, and usually you could buy it on a credit card or get 30 days term. So like sort of was a really good cashflow, which is what I needed because I had zero money in it. had like zero dollars in the bank. So we went all in on that and it worked. So, you know, we ended up launching our own brands and sort of keep, keep going with that. But that was really the way we went from zero to actually like having a real business again.

16:46
And you used the 3PL for your inventory, right? No. we went back and forth. What happened was after the whole issue with my partner, we had no money. We didn’t really have much of a business. So we went with the 3PL. And that 3PL went bankrupt. us and a company called Everlast, which is a large boxing brand, outsourced to these same guys. And then, yeah, those guys went, well, those guys just

17:15
did an awful job, both us and Everlast sued them. They declared bankruptcy to get out of the lawsuit. And then someone else bought them. So they continued to exist, but our lawsuits got tossed or whatever. We had to start all over because it wasn’t the same company anymore. So that was a disaster. So we ended up going back in-house, but we didn’t really have to have a really significant warehouse because we just won item a day.

17:43
But you grew this business back to where it was previously. when did you decide to start Ship Hero then? Because you already have this successful e-commerce business. Why throw that away and do a SaaS company of all things? Yeah, so we had grown it. We grew it back to be bigger than it was and much more profitable. So it got to the point we were making just over a million dollars a year of profit. So I paid my dad back, cleared all the old

18:10
debts because we had credit card debts from they’ve been rolling for the last five years. Cleared everything out. Finally got to a place where it’s a little more comfortable. The martial arts business, I had just backed into it. I started doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu after a while and I actually like it. But most of what I was doing was sort of apparel manufacturing and design because that’s really what we were. that’s not something that I’m at all passionate about.

18:40
Okay. It’s not my thing. I did it because I needed, you know, like I had a wife and kids and know, bills, but it was great. Like I, you know, it, you know, paid for all those things, but it wasn’t something I cared about and would want to do if I didn’t need the money. So, my background is computer programming. That’s where I started. Um, and I always wanted to get back into it, but when I was making like just enough money to live, it, you know, it didn’t really have a luxury of, of doing what I wanted. did what I had to.

19:10
And then once the company got to the point where I was like, okay, I have extra money. Now I could bank some of that, save a little bit of it, and then start investing. And then instead of doing those $12 an hour jobs myself, hire a couple of people, let them do it, stop packing my own boxes, and go after something that I found just more personally satisfying, something I’m more excited about, which was gonna be software and…

19:38
shipping. mean, I’d run the warehouse for so long, done a lot of the work myself. I just was super familiar with it. I knew what I wanted, how I wanted the warehouse to run. I knew how the software I wanted to be. And then once I had this sort of the money, I decided to go for it.

19:54
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20:23
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20:52
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21:03
You know, one thing that I was, when I was listening to your tropical MBA podcast, I was thinking to myself, like SaaS businesses usually, because we have a similar background. I’m an electrical engineer and I was thinking to myself, I’ve always wanted to start a SaaS business myself, but it is very capital intensive and you almost need to get funding, but you bootstrap this whole thing, right? If I recall. Yes. Yeah. So how do you, when you’re starting this warehouse software company,

21:29
And I’m sure the listeners out there who are running e-commerce businesses, they’re thinking to themselves, okay, should I go 3PL or should I run my own warehouse? So how do you know which route to take? Yeah, so well, to make that choice, I would pretty much always go 3PL if you really have to debate it. So back in the day, there weren’t a lot of good 3PLs and it was super scary.

21:57
to outsource to a 3PL, because the standard 3PL business model is spend all your time and energy acquiring a customer and then spend zero time and energy doing a good job for that customer, because it’s super difficult to switch. So once they’re in your warehouse, they’re not going to leave. And all your competitors aren’t that good either. So there’s no one really great for them to go to. So unless you were a top 500 retailer, you sort of were stuck with these crappy 3PL options.

22:26
you got to run your own because you can’t trust your business to a crappy 3PL operator. But that’s changed over the last five years. So there’s a lot of good options. On the forum, we talk about that a lot. There’s people who leave lots of feedback. And sure, there’s still some poor quality ones. even on the couple of guys that are actually on the forum, there’s Big Sky Fulfillment on there. There’s Societa Industries on there.

22:55
There’s Phoenix Direct on there. Those guys are all like quality operators, right? And a bunch of others. So like now you have good choices and like the idea that you should build your own warehouse and figure out how to pick pack orders, hire your own team, you know, deal with all the labor and workforce management stuff that comes along with it. If you have a standard off the shelf product.

23:19
It’s just not worth it. If you’re doing custom products, which I think you might be, right? Do you guys do some custom? we do embroidery. I don’t think a 3PL, unless you guys do custom stuff. That’s funny. actually, in my e-commerce business, one of the big ways we stood out was we bought a couple of Tajima machines and make… Yeah, that’s like us. Yep. So we embroider the back of uniforms for schools. So yeah, I’m super familiar with that. there are 3PLs that will do that. I can actually name a couple, or I can find a couple.

23:48
You know, that’s more niche, right? So that might pay to do in-house, but that’s the outliers, right? That’s like 5 % of the population, 95 % of 95 % of people sit outdoors. What’s funny, Aaron, is I actually never recommend any specific 3PLs to anyone because I’ve been burned many times in the past. Here’s what usually happens. Like a 3PL I recommend because a colleague might use them or several colleagues. It’s always good for a bit, but then when things fill up or when things get busy,

24:16
there’s always some disaster that happens. And then, and I want the listeners to know I’ve never used ShipHair before and this isn’t an advertisement for your company, but I’m being frank here, like what makes like a good 3PL and what’s to stop a 3PL from being what I’ve experienced in the past? Like what makes your service different? Yeah, so mean, certainly that is the norm. We are, like I said, they get you in and then at some point they start doing a horrible job and you…

24:43
as the merchant, you pay the cost because the customers leave you, right? So yeah, totally get it. So just to get a little bit of the history, we didn’t actually start our own 3PLs for a long time. For many years, our approach was we had all these 3PLs, there’s hundreds of warehouses using our software. And we said, you can make deals with any of these 3PLs and use whichever ones you want.

25:10
and it’s all networked. if you wanted to, let’s say you were in one 3PL and you wanted to switch to another one, you could do it seamlessly. You don’t have to change your software and you don’t even have to move your product. You can just send your new product to a new warehouse and just let the old warehouse run out of stock. Cause that’s the hardest part is moving it. So we really wanted to just solve exactly the problem you said, which was the same problem I had when that 3PL went bankrupt. I wanted to solve and I did not want to do it by opening warehouses. I wanted to do it with just the software.

25:40
Which is still, the software still does it and we do still have, we do have clients that have moved between 3PLs and use multiple different ones and we totally support that. So I would definitely encourage people to look at any of the 3PLs that we serve and you could Google it. I think it’s marketplace.shiphero.com. can see a list. Okay. So let me, let me just kind of reiterate what you just said. So a lot of 3PLs use your software.

26:07
and those are part of a network. So the idea is that if one 3PL goes down, in theory, because the other 3PLs use the same software, you can just start using a new one and just pick up exactly where you left off. Yeah, exactly. a customer of ours is Universal Music Group, so they’ve got everyone from Lady Gaga to Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, everyone, right? So they had a couple of their own facilities, but then they also used all these other facilities for around the US and around the world. And if they’re not happy with one,

26:36
They don’t make a big deal about it. They just add a new one and they stop giving business to the old one. And it’s pretty undramatic, right? So you can do that today. It’s actually ecommerce3plfinder.com is the URL. And these are just clients that use us. You’re not using us directly. They’re just using us. And that works really well. And that sort of protects you from that downside. What about when shipments like, let’s say I ship a container in and…

27:02
and they never put it in or they claim they lost it or some disaster like that. Still you’re at a lot of money though, right? Well, I’ve never heard of someone saying they never got a container. That would be pretty awful. Well, not never got it, but like it took forever to get in. They lost parts of it or… Yeah, I mean, so that happens a lot, right? So, yeah, so that’s a horrible experience and hopefully that’s a lot less prevalent these days. You know, the other thing is there are…

27:27
we’ve gone from an era where it was mom and pops, which didn’t have a lot of accountability to being much more established brands. So the same way like, know, Coke can’t put out a really horrible product because like they’ve invested so much in their brand. It’s just not worth it for them. It’s the same thing with a lot of the modern three PLs where like, you know, us as an example, but anyone else, you can just Google

27:54
know, Shapiro fulfillment reviews, right? And like it’s on these platforms on, you know, the Shopify app store where I have no control. I can’t remove them. I can’t block them. I can reply, but if people are not happy, they can make it super obvious, right? So you can go through your top, you know, 10 three PLs and just look at them in the Shopify app store or any of the other trust pilot G2.

28:19
you know, anywhere, right? Or even just go on, you know, e-commerce fuel, if you remember, ask there, ask on Twitter. And like, you’ll see which ones are good and which ones are bad. And they’re definitely good ones and definitely bad ones. And where it used to be really hard to find that these days, I think it’s pretty much out there. You can tell who’s, who’s doing an awful job and some do an awful job still. if you are, if you’re considering a three PL, what should your sales volumes be like before you even consider it?

28:49
to make those numbers work. It’s usually once you’re beyond your sort of available space, right? So if you’ve got a garage, you’ve got a basement, you can ship it yourself, you have the time and space, like do that. But then once you get to a point where it’s like, I got to sign a lease, that’s when you should start looking at, maybe I should just out.

29:09
I’m just trying to think, let’s say, let’s try to put some numbers in the mix. Let’s say you’re selling a non-oversized Amazon product and maybe you’re doing six figures in revenue and you’re trying to make this comparison between 3PL and Amazon FBA. In general, would you say that the 3PL will tend to be cheaper than Amazon’s warehouse? No, mean Amazon, if you’re exclusively selling on Amazon, use FBA to the degree you can as much as possible. It’s going be cheaper than using a third party warehouse.

29:38
Amazon’s expensive if you’re selling like on Shopify and you want to ship directly to your customers using Amazon then yeah, Amazon’s pretty expensive. But for direct Amazon sales, Amazon’s the best option. So for people who have their own store and Amazon, do you recommend a combination of both or or Amazon fulfillment for your own store as well? Like what are the trade offs and when is the breakdown? When does it become when does it make sense to do one or the other?

30:05
Yeah, once you get above like 25 orders a day that’s shipping through your own channels, that’s when people start to send it on their own. Storage on Amazon is super expensive and the shipping’s not cheap for direct sales either. So, but if you’re just doing a few, it doesn’t matter, right? You just need to cost. It’s not worth the hassle of dealing with a 3PL. But once you get above like 25 orders a day that are off Amazon sales, that’s when you should probably start looking at if a 3PL makes sense. Okay. And

30:33
Are only smaller items generally a good fit for 3PL? And what parameters for products work best in terms of like size, margins, and that sort of thing? It doesn’t matter. mean, 3PL is just a warehouse. So every product needs to go through some warehouse, either it’s your own or it’s outsourced. Size is generally not a factor. It’s really if there’s stuff that’s non-standard and small that you can run into issues.

31:00
For example, like we mentioned embroidery or if you write custom notes on shipments to customers or you like to wrap it with pretty paper in a certain specific way. Like if you’re doing a thousand orders a day, you’ll have no problem finding many 3PLs that will be happy to do that. But if you’re doing 10 orders a day, they’re not gonna train someone at a 3PL to be able to handle like, this is how the customer X wants things done. So.

31:28
If you’re small and really custom, do it in-house. But if you’re standard, the 3PL is almost always a good option. And if you’re custom and big, 3PL is also usually a pretty good option. So what are some questions that you would ask for 3PL? I mean, you have the advantage of being a customer at one point for a 3PL. What questions do you ask? And are there any things to just watch out for? Yeah, so the big difference or a big

31:56
thing to look out for is how the pricing works on the shipping. So in general, just to pick round numbers, if it’s gonna cost you $10 to get a package to your customer, about $2 of that’s gonna go to the 3PL and about eight is gonna go to a shipping carrier like UPS. People tend to get really obsessed about the $2 when talking to the 3PL and forget the $8. You shouldn’t do that. You should look at what’s the total cost for me to get this package to my customers. Because what people see is like,

32:25
I’m just going to get this UPS account and there’s this list of pricing and the pricing that UPS provides is, you know, I do this for a living and I have a hard time figuring out what a package is actually going to cost, right? Because there’s residential surcharges, delivery area surcharges and a bunch of fuel surcharges and know, it’s 6 % for fuel and it could be $2.25 for delivery area surcharges. But how many go to a delivery area surcharge? I don’t know. And then there’s zones. There’s zones like one through eight.

32:53
you would think that, oh, well, half of them will go, you know, the same amount of, go to one as we’ll go to eight, but it’s wrong. like 10 times as much goes to zone eight as zone one, because the zones are increasingly large in size, because it works like based on a circle, right? So like the concentric circles get much bigger. So the math becomes, you know, to the point where even doing an Excel is really difficult. You pretty much have to use algorithms to understand what things are gonna cost.

33:17
Which of course is well beyond the scope of what most people can do. So what they do is they ignore that and they just focus out, okay, how much is it gonna cost to pick and pack the order, right? So you end up at a supplier or the 3PL that saves you 15 cents on picking and packing but costs you 75 % on the shipping charges because dirty secret, the 3PLs get kickbacks on the shipping charges. So they might say you can use our UPS account and it’s great, but they get a kickback from UPS off of what you spent, which is highly variable.

33:47
So, and you have, and it’s opaque, you don’t know what that number is, right? So, going in, you have no idea what those numbers are. So, what I would always recommend is get an all-in price. Just say like, I’m gonna give you this product, how much is it gonna cost to get to my customer? Don’t give me a breakdown of like, well, this is the pick and then there’s this UPS fee. Just give me a total amount. Ideally, with no zones. If you need to do zones, give me what the average is gonna cost me so I can know that it’s gonna cost me.

34:15
875 on average to ship this item to my customer in the US, right? If a 3PL can’t give you that, the number’s probably not that good. Otherwise, they’d be happy to share. It’s interesting, because I’ve looked at a number of 3PLs over the years, and some have really complicated pricing structures, which make it really hard to actually estimate what your costs are. There’s pick fees, there’s shipping fees, storage fees. I’m just kind of curious how you guys run it.

34:42
Yeah, so we just provide a… It’s just on the website. Go to fulfillment.shiphero.com, just click on the pricing tab and it’ll tell you. There’s no zones, there’s no multiple fees, there’s no receiving, no storage for the first product that sells within 60 days, no pick and pack shipping separate. just, it’s gonna cost you. It’s like a flat rate, basically. Flat rate, anywhere within the lower 48. Is there any savings on, do you pass any of shippings?

35:11
costs back to the customer? Like you’re getting kickbacks because you’re doing so much volume, right? Yeah, but so we just give you the total price counting everything. So you don’t have to think about like, how much is UPS or how much is FedEx? we’re just telling you what it’s going to cost to get it to your end customer. And what about the cost to like store stuff in the warehouse? Yeah, so that’s again, it’s all right there. I was just asking you just, just so people listening can just get an estimate in their minds, like how much roughly it would cost.

35:38
Yes, I’m just going to website now. So we do the first 60 days free. So any products that turn within 60 days, you don’t pay any storage on. Okay, nice. After that, it’s $5 a month for a bin and which is 4.4 cubic feet and $30 a month for a pallet. Okay. Do you do seller fulfilled prime? So seller fulfilled prime requires that the seller, not us, is certified. So we do.

36:08
but it requires that the seller is certified, which very few are, and they don’t really take a lot of people. I think it’s been closed for like a couple of years from the sign-up. it’s like I have it for my e-commerce business, where it was approved from years ago, and you can take that to any warehouse you want. And we have a couple other people that have it, but it’s a decreasingly small percentage, because they’re not opening it up a lot. And what would you say is your competitive edge, personally?

36:37
for Shapiro. So like me as a person or my company? Your company and you, guess, since you’re running it. I we have, I think we’ve got a pretty good team. It’s pretty, pretty aligned on where we’re trying to go. So like we’re not a venture-backed company like you discussed. So I think you mentioned, so we’re bootstrapped. do it like we’re pretty like blue collar and hands-on. I mean, it’s a blue collar business. mean, yep.

37:06
you’re unloading containers and putting them on shelves and making sure everything just gets there, Yep, exactly. like we’re a software, like I’m a programmer and that’s like we have 40 some odd engineers, but we’re pretty practical in terms of like the job is to put the right item in the right box and ship to the right customer and sort of not that complicated, but it requires showing up every day and doing the work.

37:35
Right? Like you can’t call out a day and not ship the orders for a customer. Like nothing else matters if you don’t ship it. So I think we’ve got the right attitude on that. also, again, not being, you know, venture backed. don’t, like we don’t sell like, oh, you’re to get stock options and you’re going to make, you know, $10 million when we IPO. Like that’s not the pitch we’re giving our employees. A lot of our employees, you know, maybe have had that’s

38:02
engineers or designers have had that experience somewhere else, which didn’t go well, right? Because most venture-backed companies don’t succeed. And even if they do, in general, the employees are not the ones that make out with a lot of money. Their options tend to not be that valuable, except for very few outliers. And they work you really hard, right? So it’s like, oh, work really hard, and then you can get this payoff. And then the reality is you do the really hard work, but you don’t get the payoff. So we pitch a different message, which is…

38:30
Like you’re gonna work hard in terms of like we expect you to do the work, not be delegating the work to someone else, but also like you’ll be done by five o’clock. You’re not gonna be working nights. You’re not gonna be working weekends. And we’re gonna pay you a reasonable salary so you can live your life today, not dream about in 10 years from now, a potential exit that may or may not happen is sort of out of your control anyways. You’re one employee in a fairly large organization.

38:57
I mean, I think we attract the right people there who care about their craft, they care about their job, they do well, and they stick. Like we almost never lose employees, which is super important and super rare, I think, in tech companies. Can you actually just give me an example of what good warehouse software does for you? Like as we talked about earlier, we run a warehouse ourselves, and I don’t want to say it’s a disaster, but it’s definitely not as efficient as it could be. So what are some just typical inefficiencies of doing it yourself that can be optimized?

39:26
So I mean, the first question is, are you scanning products or are you just selecting without scanning barcodes? We are not scanning barcodes. Right, okay. So basically, if the people doing the work in the warehouse are beyond the sort of founder and immediate family members and you’re not doing any scan-based verification, a couple of things happen. One, you make a lot of mistakes and two, so one thing we found,

39:55
at my e-commerce company was our top performing employee was doing twice the work of our lowest performing employee, but was getting paid like $2 an hour more, right? But we didn’t know that until we had put in software because how would you know, right? Just sort of eyeballing it is really tough and really tough to fire someone based on like, it doesn’t seem like he’s working that hard. And know, this guy seems like he’s working harder. Like, so real software will give you that, will give you the accuracy. You’re not gonna make mistakes.

40:25
label items, have barcodes, you scan them, you just, don’t make mistakes. And you see who’s doing a good job and who isn’t, which is super important to making sure you retain the people that are good and you get rid of the people that aren’t. Okay, that makes sense. I remember Kevin Steckow told me once that once he started doing barcoding, he immediately knew and then he implemented some three strike system for screw ups too. You can immediately tell who screwed up with the packing also of a particular order. Yeah, yeah. mean, it’s so eye opening. Like,

40:54
It’s so obvious once you have the data. I’m like, wow, that guy’s horrible. And then you tell yourself the story like, oh yeah, I always knew he seemed like he was kind of maybe taking a nap in the back. you don’t pull your trigger on it because it’s really hard to make those personnel decisions without hard data. Like you don’t want to fire someone when you’re like, I think he’s not great. But once you can see like, yeah, I mean, every day he ships an item wrong. I told him scan it and then he didn’t scan it and he shipped it wrong. Yeah, you have no.

41:22
You don’t feel guilty at all about firing that person. Like I told them to scan. Are you gonna get fired? He didn’t scan I fired him Interesting. So we have a lot of loose inventory lying around because we actually pack on demand So we sell stuff in different sets and then we have the personalized part And so there’s always and then there’s stuff that’s not sellable because there’s like a stain it you’ve done textiles before and so would it be the same thing you just have a barcode for that bin whenever you take one out you just scan it yeah, so we actually have sellable and non-solvable bins as well, so

41:52
you do want to track what you have that’s not sellable. But yeah, you track it and then you can do, like the system will never tell you to pick non-sellable, never tell like Shopify you have non-sellable available, but you keep track of what it is. Yeah, and you just barcode everything. Not everything is barcodable, but most things are. Right. So in terms of customization, inserts, custom boxing,

42:20
What do you guys charge for that? And when does it make sense? Yeah, so mean, a lot of people do custom boxes and do inserts. We include three picks. So if your order has one or two items in it and you want, and an insert is just a pick. So we just count it as a pick. So if you have less than one or two, if you have only one or two items, the insert is free. And if you have more, we charge, I want to say 25 cents, but I’d have to look it up. Yeah, 25 cents.

42:50
for each additional pick. Custom boxes, like that’s just on the merchant to provide that. We don’t pay for the actual box if it’s a non-standard box. But that’s it, we don’t charge extra for that. pretty common. So you also have the luxury of seeing like all the macro trends due to COVID. And what are you seeing in terms of people selling on Amazon, like types of products and people running their own stores? Are most people just kind of ditching their

43:19
their own in-house operations at this point? No, mean, everything’s up. you know, I mean, there’s certain categories that are down, but for the most part, you know, both Amazon, non-Amazon, like everything’s grown a lot. Actually, non-Amazon, we’ve seen been growing faster than Amazon. There’s been a lot of a lot of growth in big companies doing more online. So we work with like Mars, the chocolate company.

43:48
people like that who maybe didn’t have Frito-Lay, who maybe didn’t have a large direct to consumer presence that COVID really pushed them to do that. So that’s been big. But yeah, I mean- When you say you ship, you mean your software as opposed to your three people, right? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so in general, our software a lot is used by larger entities. you know, our largest ones are doing like $500 million a year, like on online sales.

44:16
And then our fulfillment is mostly smaller, so like a million plus. So realistically, to use your software, you pretty much have to be like an eight figure company for it to make sense or? 10 million is eight figures, right? Yeah, yeah. It’s basically where we start. And then from the 3PL standpoint, you’re recommending if you’re getting like 25 orders a day on average. Yeah, that’s basically where it starts, like 500 orders a month is sort of the bottom end.

44:46
our biggest ones doing, well we actually had a cool one, which is a customer called Byte, which does like Invisalign sort of things, which was a fulfillment customer and sold earlier this month for just over a billion in cash. So that’s on the top end of sort of the customers we deal with. So what are you seeing in terms of e-commerce growth right now?

45:12
So any projections for this year? Yeah, I think a lot in the US is going to depend on stimulus and the economy. Like Q4 was sort of disappointing. Really interesting. OK. Yeah. Well, Q3, we were up. I think we’re up 130 percent year over year. And then Shopify was up like they published their numbers also. So I want to say like 110 percent or something. Right. Which is huge. But then Q4.

45:41
We were up, I want to say about 110 % in Shopify. And I could look up these numbers in 70 after Shopify was up like 70 % year over year. like still big numbers, but much lower than the Q4 numbers. like we, we work with Shopify as part of Shopify fulfillment network and awesome. Everyone else’s, you know, their expectations are expectations. Everyone’s expectations were higher for Q4, you know, partially that was just sort of planning, right? You always want to plan for, you know,

46:09
the larger number so you don’t get caught unprepared. But I think we all expected a bit more out of Q4 than we got. And then Q1, it’s been okay. But again, I think there’s a lot of sort of the economy issues, unemployment, and it’s not as, and people are going back to stores a bit more than they were. it’s not like

46:38
the crazy growth that we were seeing earlier in mid 2020. Can you comment real quick on like just Shopify fulfillment network as a 3PL? Yeah, I Shopify fulfillment network is great. They are still pretty limited into a whole they’ll take in. A lot of those products shipped using our software and so we’re super supportive of what they’re doing. Yeah, and if you get in, they do great. Are they perfect? No, I think sometimes that’s…

47:07
In issue where people are just so you have such high expectations for Shopify Which is which is tough to live up to right actually shipping the packages. You’re just not gonna be as successful as you are with with your software because you’re gonna hand your products off to You USPS or whoever and a hundred percent of them are not going to get there on time And you know, you’re like well Shopify’s does great and they should get there on time But the reality is you’re you’re beholden to third parties that

47:36
They’re just going to make human mistakes, right? The warehouse could pick it wrong or USPS or UPS can be late or lose a package. So it’s tough for someone, know, anyone to really fix that. But overall, they’re a great service and they use a bunch of different warehouses and I would encourage anyone who sells exclusively on Shopify to look at them as fulfillment offer. So in terms of you personally, are you putting more emphasis on the software or the 3PL aspect of your business?

48:04
working really hard on both. we’ve got a pretty decent sized team at this point where we don’t really have to do one or the other. They’re both pretty decent sized businesses. So I spend my time mostly on product and engineering, which really crosses across both of those. So I’m working on both of them all day. It’s interesting because we have kind of a similar background. For me, the 3PL aspect of it would not interest me at all.

48:34
Whereas the software company, it’s much more scalable. So it’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s definitely a dearth of programmers with interest in warehousing, which I have. I love the warehousing. I love the logistics part. And I think that’s also been the struggle with outsourcing in the past is the people that the warehouses attracted, they had hard time attracting the really good

49:03
Engineers I think sure I think we got a little bit of an advantage being like we started with the software and then we added the warehouses I was gonna just say that I like how you guys are eating your own dog food so to speak right Presumably a lot of the features for your software come from actually experiences you have running your warehouses, right? Yeah, I mean our software runs. It’s the same software, right? We’re basically a customer of ourselves. Exactly. Yeah, exactly Hey Aaron, where can people find more information about you and your company? I get asked questions about three pills at least like

49:32
almost like every day. if you can just give us information about your company and maybe some other resources where people can do their own research as well. Yeah, so I mean, we’re just shiphero.com. You can find both the SaaS and fulfillment. I’m on Twitter. pretty active at Aaron, A-A-R-O-N and A-N-D-M-L, Larry, Larry. That’s my Twitter handle. I’m pretty active there and happy to sort of, you people.

49:58
ask me questions on there and DM me. I try to be pretty responsive. And then, I mean, for people who have access to the forum, it’s a great resource. There’s so many threads about 3PLs and fulfillment and running your own warehouse. So yeah, it’s a great resource there. And on YouTube is the other thing, like we’re pretty active on YouTube, but there’s also a bunch of other people that are pretty active on YouTube. And you could consume hours and hours of really in-depth content of like, like I did a series where I showed

50:28
Like as we were setting up one of our new warehouses and that’s gotten a lot of engagement and you can see like, it’s just like, it’s not scripted or anything. It’s just like, here’s what we’re doing. And I started going from zero up to a fully running warehouse. And you can see like all the details of like how everything works. pretty transparent. And I can tell you now just for people listening, like running a warehouse is not fun and we don’t do a really good job of it. We just feel like we have to do it because of the personalization aspects. But if you’re just selling off the shelf products,

50:58
I’m just looking at the rent that we’re paying right now for our tiny little place in California where the prices are ridiculous. It really just makes sense to outsource all of that. And it’s just something that we’ve been thinking about. Well, biggest cost you’re probably facing is how are you shipping your products out? What carriers? Mainly USPS because everything’s under a pound. Okay. so you’re able to do like first class. Yep. Okay. Yeah. First class isn’t bad trying to get to New York cost wise, but it’s pretty slow. Yeah.

51:28
I think that the biggest disadvantage people have fulfilling out of their own is they’ve got their own warehouse wherever it is and they’re stuck sending it cross country. I’m in New York and we used to sell to California and it’s either slow or expensive. You can’t get it there fast and cheap versus with 3PLs you can because you’ll be in multiple warehouses. I think FedEx OneRate has been really good for us too. FedEx OneRate is great. I don’t know how they do it but yeah.

51:56
It keeps it last, but yeah, if you could fit it in like that FedEx envelope, it’s what, like 9.50 or something you’re paying? Yeah, it’s dirt cheap. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great service. Used to be USPS flat rate used to be great, but they’ve… It’s got more expensive and it’s not reliable. Yeah, exactly. Double whammy. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s just, I actually get my wife on here to talk about some of these issues that we have. I’m sure it could be mitigated with the software that you were describing, but I think that would…

52:24
require like a pretty large F &R part, we’d have to think about whether it’s really worth it. We don’t have that many packers really. Yeah, the trick is always on the receiving end. So it’s like garbage in, garbage out. If your receiving process isn’t verifying the items, that is, making sure they’re barcoded, you’ll never be able to get your hands around a problem. So I wouldn’t start at picking a packing. I would start at receiving and making sure that’s right. And then once that’s

52:52
gone on for a couple of months, it’ll be very easy to make sure you’re picking up packing is accurate because that means your inventory’s right and you’re sort of, once everything’s right upstream, it’s easy to get the picking and packing right. Yeah, no, that’s great advice. I mean, it’s actually a pain because whenever we get a large shipment in, it’s like all hands on deck and we have everything on a spreadsheet, but that’s really not that efficient, I think. Right, yeah. Excel as the way to run your business is super common, but…

53:21
Yeah, you know not the best workflow. Yeah Hey Aaron, thanks a lot for coming on man Open my eyes for a couple things and and the cost seemed very reasonable Well, I think a lot of people are just afraid about the variable cost but it sounds like if there’s like a flat base cost structure It’s really easy to calculate whether it’s worth it for your business Yeah, the math is easy. And the flexibility is the other part which is like I don’t know how much you’re paying for On your lease if your business doubled you’d be like, yes exactly more space

53:50
And if your business drops in half, which is what happened to me way back when, I was stuck in that lease with, know, I didn’t have the revenue to fill it out of the space, but it doesn’t matter. You sign a lease, you gotta pay that bill. Yeah, I mean, especially for us, I mean, you’d probably be, actually, you’re probably not shocked. You’re in New York, right? Yeah. But yeah, for what we pay, like, yeah, you’re right. If business were to double, we would be screwed. And if it halved, it wouldn’t be as bad, actually. It’s only if it grew too hard, too much.

54:18
Because just everything is ridiculous here. But anyway, hey, thanks a lot, Aaron. I’ll be sure to link up all those resources in the show notes. All right. It was really good chatting.

54:29
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And with the rising cost of Amazon, more and more people are using 3PLs as an intermediary to store their inventory. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 350. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandon 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 KLAVIYO.

54:59
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLA V I Y O. 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 C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

55:27
Head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:26
PostScript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and now for mywebquitajob.com actually, 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 Steve.

00:54
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klabio, who is also a sponsor of the show. Are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning.

01:21
while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business – the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife.

01:52
That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. Now, finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. Now, 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. And 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.

02:21
to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:38
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Mariska Harris on the show. Now Mariska is someone who I’ve known for quite a while and we actually had a chance to meet in person at Brand Accelerator Live last year. Mariska is the founder of Outlinematic, which is a design service catering to e-commerce entrepreneurs. do box design, packaging and logo design, inserts, infographics, enhanced brand content, eBooks, you name it, and they can help.

03:02
In fact, their company Outline Matic is where I refer my students for most of their design needs because of their incredible customer service and they’ll do unlimited revisions until you are happy. I still don’t know how they’re able to do that. In any case, in this episode, we’re going to dig deep into e-commerce package design and the right way to do it to maximize conversions. And with that, welcome to show Mariska, how are doing today? Hi Steve, great. Thanks for having me. I’m doing very well. Thank you. you?

03:30
I’m doing well. There’s a lot of fires here, but outside of that, as long I’m able to go outside, I’m okay. Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. And Florida, we don’t have fires, we just have a lot of water. So in Florida, it’s as if there’s no COVID either, right? Life is normal. it’s like, feels quite normal. So give us the quick background on how you got into design, ecommerce, and why you started OutlineMatic.

04:00
Oh, yeah, sure. So it’s actually a very long story, but I’ll try to keep it short. I used to work for a baby company called Bambo. Is that the chair, the Bambo chair? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I had one. Yeah. Oh, you did? Oh, yeah, those little soft chairs. So I actually studied product design and industrial design. And so I did product design for them.

04:27
kind of took an interest because we had a design studio and we worked along with graphic designers, kind of took an interest in the packaging design, looked like much more fun and it was much quicker than product design because with product design you have to do extensive research and it takes months to take something from an idea to even a concept to development to the final product can take more than a year sometimes. So yeah, and I told my husband,

04:55
I like packaging and he was like, hey, why don’t you just try and design packaging for people on Upwork and stuff like that. And I was like, okay. So I tried it and I loved it. And he was like, okay, no, but Upwork is taking too much of our profit. So let’s start our own website. He created a website for us and he said, okay, if we make this and this much, you can quit your job.

05:24
And then you can just do this because it was taking quite a toll on me because I work like normal hours till like 5 p.m. and then I got home and I worked from around 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. in the morning. And then I got up again at 6 a.m. to go to work at like 8 a.m. So yeah, it was quite something. And eventually we

05:53
just started doing Outlinematic and then we also started adding a few more services and we had to appoint designers because the influx of work was getting so much I couldn’t keep up. At a point I was sitting, at the start I was sitting with like 90 clients all by myself. Oh my goodness, that’s crazy. And yeah, so yeah, then we appointed designers and just so it grew from 2015 to where we are,

06:23
today. Is it a husband wife team? Yeah, yeah. So what does your husband do? What is his role? So he well, it was his brain. His idea from the start. And he gets he does all the marketing and gets all the clients and he does all the finances because he’s like he’s a numbers person. So he does all of that and I’m the creative. So I do the work and I talk to the clients and

06:53
and do that and then he gets the clients and he sorts out all of the financial stuff. am kind of curious, since we’re on the subject and this podcast about growing a business, how does one grow a service-based business? You mentioned you started out on Upwork, you know, with your skills. How did you end up with like 90 consecutive clients when you were off Upwork? Oh, off Upwork? Okay, so it was actually a very funny story.

07:22
We didn’t know exactly how to go about getting clients. So what I did was we went on a bunch of groups on Facebook and we just like kind of promoted me as a designer for people who want to work one-on-one with a designer. And we like pasted the website link and everything there. And one day, you know, these closed groups where you have to like

07:51
get someone to approve you. Yeah. They kind of take you off if you do anything that you’re not allowed to do. So the one one day, one of the people that we worked with, we begged her to just write a review on one of the groups, just tell them that she worked with us and that she was happy and for the price and everything. And she wrote such a nice review on one of Scott Falker’s page groups.

08:20
And that thing kind of went viral. Like, I don’t know how, and it got shared and people just started reaching out. And from that post, that post was what made us like get up from the ground. Okay. Yeah. So, and after that we tried it again, but it never worked ever again. Like for some reason that one post kind of just

08:47
a lot of people saw it and reached out. yeah, after that, we did try it again and it work. we eventually we got affiliates and stuff. So we actually got people who sell on Amazon, but are also gurus and who sell online. And they eventually started referring people to us and referring their students and people like you who refer to their students. So that’s kind of how we grew to where we are now. It’s just like

09:16
word of mouth, people sharing. We never even run Facebook ads or anything. It’s just like people just mention us. Wow, okay. Just in case people are listening, Scott Volcker is a good buddy of mine. He used to run the amazing seller group, but he recently did a complete brand change. I think it’s now called the brand creators group, I believe. Yeah, I think that’s But that group was very large. I want to say it was like…

09:45
60 or 70,000 people maybe? Yeah, yeah. I remember like around 60,000. Yeah. So if you were to do it all over again, you mentioned you tried to replicate this strategy. So you tried doing this in other groups and it just didn’t pick up as well? Yeah. Interesting. And so you have no idea what- And people banned us from their groups. No, but even if you had someone else leave a testimonial? Yeah. Oh, they got you got banned or they got banned or- They got banned, yeah. Oh, no.

10:15
Yeah. So then they were some people got only got warnings. Other people just got like straight out banned. I think at the time I remember vaguely that there were a bunch of fiber people that just bombarded all the posts with comments, their links. And I think it kind of upset the page creators and the group like owners and stuff. So I think eventually they just kind of

10:45
took all of that off. You know, they, if you were from Fiverr or wherever, it was kind of said like, okay, you cannot promote anything on here. This is just to help people out. And eventually people came around the owners of the pages and they were like, they didn’t delete the stuff anymore where people said for packaging, you can go to outlinematic.com. They really helped with this and this. So

11:12
they didn’t take that off anymore. then that started helping us quite a bit. But yeah, we didn’t let people like leave a kind of a testimonial on the pages anymore. Right. So when it comes to design services, it’s difficult to scale. You mentioned you have all these clients and there’s only one of you who’s the brains. How does one scale a design based business? So

11:40
we had to appoint more designers and then the work would kind of be divided between the designers. everything still, I still had to let everything go through me because I was just worried that the quality was not going to be where I wanted it to be. And then, so I would kind of play middleman and just give the work to my designers and let them

12:10
give it back to me and then I’ll send it to the client. So that’s what I eventually did. And is it still like that today because it’s okay. Yeah, it’s in some cases it is for the junior designers. It still comes through me and I would make like adjustments and stuff like that.

12:29
But we have other senior designers that work directly with the clients now as well because it took up too much of my time. I couldn’t handle all of it anymore. So now, yeah, at least now there’s like copy paste three of me and that helped quite a lot. Well, I’ve always been curious actually. I mean, I’ve been recommending you guys out for a while now, but I’ve always wondered like your pricing is very, very reasonable.

12:58
and you also do unlimited revisions. How are you able to offer the pricing that you do? Like I’m looking at competing companies out there and they charge, like for example, if you go with 99 Designs, it’s like 3X more, right? Yeah. Is there anything, like how do you guys differentiate yourself from some of the other services? So, the prices at the start were very competitive and then the other people started increasing their prices and we also increased our prices but

13:28
up to a point where we were like, okay, but we still want to help people who’s just starting out. So with the price to what you get, it’s a bit hard to explain, like with the unlimited revisions, people, some people are very reasonable when it comes to that. They’re like, you know, this looks nice. I don’t,

13:58
want to go back and forth, you know, you can finalize a file within like three back and forth revisions. we, most of the clients are like that. we, you know, we appreciate that, but then you get other clients where there’s literally like probably around 40 to 60 back and forth. They take unlimited revisions to the next level.

14:27
Sometimes it’s not worth it for us, but it kind of cancels out the easy clients, if that makes sense. There’s a nice balance between people who ask for lot of revisions and people who are happy with what we send them within the first few drafts. How it usually works is we send a first draft.

14:53
to make sure that all of the information on the package is correct. And if they like the layout and the design from there on, if they provide feedback and they’re not too sure about what we send them, then we send them more concepts. And usually from that concepts, there’s a final design in there somewhere with just a few tweaks. And that’s usually the way it goes. So obviously in some cases,

15:22
some packaging designs take up a lot more of our time. But once again, it just comes down to it kind of can evens out at the end because some doesn’t some, you know, yeah. So it really depends on the client. mean, one thing I like about you guys is that you pretty much specialize in e-commerce and that’s primarily where your experience is. Whereas if you go out to like a different service of just designers, you know, I guess in a broad based sense,

15:51
you know, lot of those people aren’t going to know the concepts of e-commerce. So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about e-commerce packaging at this point. So first off, why is packaging important? And you’ve done probably thousands of packaging designs. What are some of the most important elements of your package? Oh, yeah, well, we definitely have done thousands. Maybe more than tens of thousands, whatever it is. So first of all, why is packaging important?

16:20
And yeah, you have any stories about conversions and whatnot, feel free to share those too. Okay, sure. Well, there is this one article I read the one time I can remember the website, but I just remember that these people, we didn’t do the packaging, but they mentioned that because of the brand overall that they had and changing their packaging, they had an increase of 200 % in their sales.

16:48
So packaging is important because it sets an image for your brand. mean, you have your logo. Your logo is everywhere. And then you have all of these little elements eventually that tie in together with your overall brand. And packaging is one that’s very important. The one thing that people like to mention if

17:12
If you look at all these influencer videos and stuff on Instagram where people get products from companies, the one thing they love is that unboxing experience. And that’s something that’s very important to people because that excites them in a way that’s almost the same as what the actual product excites them. So if you, for example, get the new iPhone, people are always excited to see what’s going to be new in that actual packaging, you know.

17:42
what’s because the packaging when you open their packaging it almost tells a story like when you open it you look into this nice new screen and when you lift it up it’s everything that comes together with that but just opening that box and the way it kind of feels in your hand that vacuum that it makes when you pick it up that that stuff excites people when you look at these influencer videos on social media

18:09
when people open their boxes and the one thing that they always says, oh, look at the nice packaging. Oh, it’s so nice and colorful. If you look at fat foot fun, yeah, fat foot fun. It’s a subscription box. People love those boxes. They keep those boxes to put the product store, those products or something else back into those boxes because it’s just such a nice design, a nice giftable design. And that’s one thing that’s

18:39
that we’ve seen with e-commerce packaging is it converts very well if it’s like giftable style packaging. You know, it’s not this information overload packaging with all this copy and different images that just overruns you. It’s just a nice looking package that kind of excites you to see what’s inside. It’s almost like you’re gifting a gift to yourself.

19:09
For example, if you order like foundation or something online and you know, you’re like, okay, it’s just foundation. It’s just a, you know, a little bottle full of stuff. But when it gets to you in a nice matte black box with a ribbon and you open that ribbon and you open the box and there’s tissue paper on it. And it just, makes that product feel so much more valuable.

19:37
I mean, even if you look at perfume bottles and things, the perfume bottles cost more than the actual perfume that’s inside. mean, that’s like that for a reason. It gives people that experience and it excites them in a way. So let’s talk about, I you mentioned a lot of things just now in that statement. So when it comes to packaging, let’s say you’re designing a package for somebody, do you usually guide them? Because oftentimes I know like if you’re brand new to this, like

20:07
people often don’t know what they don’t know, right? So you mentioned before, like a package shouldn’t just be a bunch of photos and value props. It should be something that’s giftable. How do you, let’s say I’m a client coming up to you. How do you guide me towards like the appropriate package design? Let’s say I’m selling, let’s say, you know, I’m in the wedding street. So we can use myself as a case study. Let’s say I came to you with these embroidered napkins. How would you suggest that design packaging? How would you guide me? Okay, sure. Well,

20:35
First of all, the product is definitely going to help us guide you into what packaging they’re gonna do. Because if you’re gonna do something like tools, then a giftable packaging is not really the way to go. But in your case, where you’re in the wedding industry of napkins and stuff, having a nice giftable package is definitely the way to go. Because I have seen yourself before and that’s definitely so, say for instance, you,

21:04
order a bunch of stuff for your bridesmaids or something like that and how nice is it to just get a nice looking box with that product, those napkins inside. So I would definitely do something like very clean and maybe like white matte box with you know not necessarily the product name on side but

21:31
you can even say something on that box in a four embossed foil, like something exciting inside or will you be you know, something like that, that will excite them before they even open that box with whatever is inside. yeah, depending on what the product is inside is what you’ll do on the outside. is this a type of box that you designed, first of all?

22:01
or do you do more, I guess, descriptive packaging? What do you guys specialize? Can you help someone design a box that’s classy, that doesn’t really have graphics on it? Except for Lickaloo. How does that work exactly? done jewelry and stuff before. Yeah, it depends on the template. So in your case, where it’s the napkins and stuff, I mean, I’m not exactly sure how it works in your case if people…

22:30
order like because it can be personalized, right? Yes, it can. But the like for a classy box, it would I was thinking what you were just describing, maybe with just our logo on it. And that’s it, right? Or I guess what I’m trying to understand here is like, if I want to do a fancier box, like how does that actually get designed exactly? Oh, I understand. Yeah. So that’s in some cases, people won’t need us.

22:57
for something like that, it really depends on the amount of artwork that you want on the box. So for instance, if you just want your logo on the box, that can easily be done by a supplier. You just send them your logo in vector format and they would probably just impose it on a standard sized box. But in some cases where we have designed jewelry boxes and things before for something that’s a bit more custom that

23:27
you can’t get a standard box for, we would not design the template, they would provide the template and something different will go on each panel. And so you would need someone to design that.

23:43
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.

24:11
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.

24:41
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.com. Now back to the show. So let’s talk about jewelry then. So, okay, so let’s say, so when you say they give you a design file, that’s essentially like an open, unfolded box, right? Yes. A flat template, yeah. So that jewelry design that you were just talking about, how did you work with the client to design packaging for that?

25:08
So in that case, the client had a few Pinterest links of things that she liked. And she said, this is kind of the look that she’s going for. she sends us the template from the supplier. And then we would design on each different panel what she wanted on there and just provide like a 3D kind of mock-up of what the final design would look like. Because you can’t really fold a box like that.

25:37
in our folding program. So you have to do like just a mock-up to kind of give them an idea of what the end result will look like. Because if you just look at the flat template with the stuff on there, it doesn’t look that great. But as soon as you put it on a 3D rendering mock-up file, then it’s easier for them to see, to bring their vision more to life. And yeah, in that case, so that was also actually not a very

26:07
hard project because it’s simple elements, but it’s still intricate in a way where it has to be positioned correctly on those panels because when it comes together being a box that’s produced, if the things don’t line up, it’s not going to look good at the end. we kind of have an idea because we’ve worked with so many templates, we have a very good idea of how a box

26:33
looks like once it’s folded or manufactured so we know where to put what elements on that template. And that’s what’s important most of the time when working with things like these very giftable style boxes. I’m just curious though for this jewelry, like whenever I think of jewelry I just think of literally a plain box. Not a plain box but… Oh yeah, I understand what you mean, So what was actually on this box?

27:02
It was like a golden frame around on the top. Yeah, golden frame. then you are a special or so I can’t remember the wording, but there was nice wording on the top. And then on the sides were these, like curly kind of designs. So very classy design, not graphics or images, right? But just okay, I understand. Very classy design. Well, and then on the inside, there was a little paper that

27:31
like was almost like a translucent paper that was designed to lay on top of the jewelry and give like this effect of so you can kind of see the jewelry jewelry through it but with a with graphics on as well. Oh so you designed on like vellum? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So if you were creating a box for like a non giftable item what are some of the important elements that need to go on the packaging?

28:02
Okay, so yeah, also depends on the products. Say for instance, you have a tool like hard and rugged kind of product. Obviously you can do like, you cannot do something very feminine and soft. That’s something that has to showcase what the product is made of. It has to look rugged and tough. So you’re going to use colors that’s going to

28:32
say that like dark colors and a lot of tools have the black or a very dark color along with a bright color like a yellow or an orange or a green you know your standard two colors and then you would have to say what what the product is what it does top features of the product and something good to always say is that it is a high quality

29:02
rugged tool and people, if you have a warranty, it’s good to place the warranty on there. Think of things that you would look for if you’re looking for something, you would need to put maybe a size on there or how many of what’s included inside of that box. And in some cases, it depends on the product, but an image to show what’s inside.

29:30
is also helpful, especially when it’s like a bundle sort of package. You have to show in some way what’s inside, especially if it’s not something that’s very familiar that you see every day. So people can just see what it looks like. But in the case of a tool or, you know, yeah, a more functional sort of product. Yeah. You would definitely have to say what it is, what it does.

30:00
If it’s a multifunctional thing, the size or the quantity of what’s included, the top features of that product, maybe just a short how to use at the back. So there’s a quick tip guide or something like that on the back. So when people get it, they don’t necessarily always want to go through an instruction booklet, but just maybe a quick setup thing on the box. Yeah, maybe an illustration or something to show.

30:27
if there’s an assembly, just how to put it together or, you know, to show maybe what’s inside with either an illustration or just a few images, but like not too overwhelming, not too much, but just enough so people can actually know what’s going on. they don’t have to wonder what’s inside. Okay. Can we talk about the logo real quick? A lot of people get hung up on the logo. Do you have any like tips on just logo design?

30:55
Because I know the students in my course, sometimes they’ll take a first stab themselves without a designer. And I always look at them and go, oh, maybe you should hire somebody, perhaps, because it just doesn’t look right for some reason. So when you do logos, do you have, I guess, some sort of script or template that you kind of walk somebody through to help them decide how they want their logo to be created?

31:22
Yeah, it always depends on the client in this case. If someone doesn’t have a clue, we’ll just ask them a bunch of questions to kind of get an idea of what it is that they’re looking for because most of the time when people say they don’t have an idea of what they’re looking for and you just provide them with something, they actually have something in their mind and whatever you send them, they won’t like it. So it’s always better to just to get something out of the client so you can have just

31:51
even if it’s just a little direction to base your designs off of. So usually it would be things like if they want it to relate to their product. In some cases, people will sell in a certain category and then they will definitely want their logo to tie into that category. But you get different types of logos. So we’ll ask them,

32:20
if they want a certain type of logo, like an abstract logo where it can be applied to maybe more than one category. If they want something with a mascot, you know, like a little character or something, or a combination with a graphic and a word or a typography style logo where there’s something clever incorporated into the actual word and then they can maybe use that one.

32:47
letter or graphic separately and then also along with the word if they want something minimalistic or playful and then we’ll also ask them about the layout. At the end we do provide different layouts where the logo would be if you have for example a graphic and a word you’ll have the graphic on top of the word on the sides just the graphic just the word like different layouts and then also colors. So yeah we always try and get

33:17
as much information as possible out of the clients. But the thing that I would say people should just look for when they’re thinking of a logo is not to get too personal with the logo and not too detailed with the logo because you always have to think of where this logo will be applied. Say, for example, you have to embroider or emboss or foil this logo onto something. If you have something with very extensive detail,

33:47
It’s going to be very hard or impossible for suppliers to put that logo onto something. And it might even increase the cost. If there’s a lot of detail in that logo, flat, minimalistic logos is definitely what’s trending at the moment. like clever typography style logos, which is also flat and minimalistic, but it’s, there’s maybe like a little.

34:15
clever Easter egg there, you know, that’s hidden, but kind of ties in with the brand. Yeah. Like the FedEx logo. just recently realized there’s a little Easter egg in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is that what you advise in general? I mean, I’ve seen logos with like, like you said, like little stuffed animals and whatnot, but you’re right. It would be hard to put that logo on a variety of different things.

34:39
Yeah, I mean it really depends where you’re going to use that logo. Say you just have a website and you sell, for example, baby products and you want a stuffed animal that has a lot of detail in your logo. You can do that because you’re just going to use it on your website. You may be going to print it on a card or something. But as soon as you have to embroider, emboss or mold a logo, I would just steer clear of anything with extensive detail.

35:07
because it just it makes it very hard for suppliers to do that and to prepare a logo for something like foiling or embossing can get impossible with in cases like that What about inserts? I know you guys do inserts for Amazon packaging as well. Do you have any guidelines on what to include in an insert? Yeah, I would say I wish to thank the client for their purchase

35:33
And then people to help with getting returning clients maybe provide like a coupon or if you want to get emails out of it, maybe have people register their product somewhere, asking to leave you feedback if it’s on Amazon or on Google or on any type of review. But yeah, the most important things I would say is just to thank the client and you obviously

36:00
do an insert to get something additional out of the client, like an email or somethings or another purchase. So definitely think how would you design that? So it’s one thing to like give a discount or one up, but how do you present it in such a way where someone might actually look at it and take action on it? So obviously you want that to grab attention immediately. So you would definitely use words that

36:30
are bold and clear like free gift or something or have like a bow on there or have a star badge with VIP and say like register for this and this. Definitely something to grab attention with like graphic and big words. guess I don’t know if you know the answer unless you talk to some of the sellers like what’s worth the best for Amazon sellers for example.

36:58
For Amazon sellers, they usually do both. They request review. That’s like a standard thing on the inserts. And then they would usually on the one side, they will have thank you and request to review. On the other side, they would have like a coupon code or like a VIP registration, something to get people to leave their email or

37:26
You know, so you have to email them to get a coupon code or register to get a coupon code in that way they get emails. if the one won’t work, they still have a shot at the other one. So that’s why they put both on the insert. think so if you put the request review on the one side and you put the register for VIP coupon on the other side.

37:52
you still have a chance of getting one of those too, at least. So I want to kind of give the listeners a holistic picture of the process. So I go to my factory, I’ve already decided what I’m going to sell, and I want to create packaging for it, custom packaging for it. So what do I ask for? Do I ask them for just like a design template? Or do you interact with the vendor? do you still use the person as like the go-between?

38:21
Do you ever interact with the factory directly or? Oh, no. No, we don’t work with the factory at all. We just work with the client. OK. And then so when people usually come to us, they will have an option for custom packaging, but they maybe won’t have a template yet. But at the end, we’ll need a template or a size. So how the process usually works is depending on what they’ll need.

38:49
We start with the logo. We provide six different directions to choose and combine from. We finalize the logo and then- What does it mean to provide six different directions? Oh, so it’s just, we send them in PDF with numbers one to six and six logos for them to choose and combine Oh, got it, got it. Six versions. Okay, got it. Yeah, six versions. Yeah. And then, so then they’ll provide us with the packaging template or a size and from that,

39:19
we will create a first draft. So obviously the supplier will usually send an AI or PDF. Okay. AI stands for Adobe Illustrator, just in case you get this. That’s correct. Most of the time people don’t have a template yet because they still have to put an order in with the supplier. As soon as you put an order in with the supplier, then they’ll provide you with a template.

39:48
I would recommend people just make sure that they can do custom packaging with the supplier or they’ll have to get a third party company to do the packaging with to print the packaging. I know you get companies that print the packaging and then you get other companies which pack your product into the packaging. And sometimes people think that we do that, but we only create the artwork. Right. Right. Yeah.

40:17
So we create the artwork and then we provide the files that the client can provide to their supplier or manufacturer for the printing of the packaging. So once you get your template from the supplier, it will be sent to us. We create the artwork on that template and we also provide like a folded version of the box so people can see what it will look like. And then there’s like… mean like a virtual model? Like a 3D model? Yeah.

40:47
from different sides and things, so can see what the folded thing would look like at the end. Because you won’t believe it gives you a much better idea of what it’s gonna look like. Because if you just look at that flat design, it’s not very intriguing, but as soon as you see the folded version and the effect it has once, because sometimes you’ll do something on the corner of a template, and as soon as you fold the box, it gives such a nice…

41:15
effect to that packaging and you’re not able to see that if you don’t see a folded version. So that’s definitely why we send that so people can see what that result will look like. And yeah, it’s unlimited revisions until they’re happy with the design. And then we prepare the file for printing, which is creating outlines of everything so the suppliers or printers won’t need the font.

41:45
and linked files and things are all embedded into that file. So they can just use that one file to print the packaging. It’s interesting. I always have my students not pay first, like work out the packaging before they actually pay for that first order, just because like there’s iteration involved in the package design as well, right?

42:10
Like they’ll still send you like they’ll print one for you, for example, and then show you what it looks like. And then ideally you get a sample with it fully packaged before you actually place that bulk order. Yeah, in some cases it does. It does work like that. And then we don’t mind working on an estimate of the packaging size before they have even a final size or something. We can always just change that. So but

42:37
I’m just speaking like what we have in most cases, but yeah, it’s, mean, if people want to do their packaging before they put it in order, that’s not a problem for us. We just change the template when it’s necessary at the end or change the size or something like that. And one thing we didn’t touch on, and maybe we can just touch upon this briefly, like enhanced brand content, you guys offer those services as well. Any sort of design tips or templates that you

43:06
use when just doing enhanced brand content? Yeah, the one thing that I have personally experienced with enhanced brand content is that when it’s very visual and it has some quick points to information that I was maybe looking for that I didn’t see in the listing, that always helps me make a choice when I’m purchasing something Amazon. And even in

43:35
on online stores if there’s that little bit more information. But I would definitely say it should be very visual and very big wording to get to the point, not a lot of copy to read through, but rather just maybe icons to quickly, so we can quickly make that connection between the feature of the product and then this.

44:02
and maybe then a little bit more information about that feature. Things you could maybe not have mentioned in listing images or the listing copy at the top. You can always put that in at the bottom. And which is also helpful is where there is some different images of the product in use and maybe a quick start guide even there. But yeah, definitely just big visual

44:33
maybe some just nice images about the product just to help people make that final choice between yours and a competitor’s listing. Okay. Mariska, we’ve been chatting for quite a while now and I want to be respectful of your time. Where can people find you if they’re looking for design services? Okay, so they can go to outlinematic.com and we have Do you want to spell that for everyone? Yeah, sure.

45:01
It’s O-U-T-L-I-M-E-M-A-T-I-C. So outlinematic.com. Yeah, we have a free consultation so people can book a 15-minute consultation with us and they can run us through their project and we will maybe have a few recommendations for them and help them if they have any questions. But we also have fixed pricing on all of our design services and

45:29
If there’s something that they don’t see, they can just reach out to us and we can provide a custom quote for anything that they might not see on there. Yeah. So, uh, I just want to say a couple of words here too. I personally liked fixed pricing because I’ve worked with people in the past where they charge by time or like they’ll have these little add-ons for certain things. just, like personally to know like how much I’m paying upfront. And I think for you guys, it just kind of balances out, right? Sometimes you have.

45:59
people who are more demanding, people are less demanding, and it all just evens out. But I just like knowing and having that peace of mind from the beginning. Last question, actually, I’ve always wanted to know this. How did you come up with that name, Outlinematic? Whose idea was that? What’s the history behind it? So we registered our company very long ago. We just wanted to start something. So our surname is Harris, and we started our company, Harrismatic LLC.

46:27
We wanted to do designmatic, but the domain was already taken and we were going back and forth between names and we couldn’t come up with something that fits design. And usually when you fill out a brief or you do a scope of a project, you call it an outline and an outline can be that or it can be the outline of the template. we just kind of got stuck with outlinematic.

46:55
And yeah, that’s how we came up with that name. Nice, nice. Well, Mariska, it’s a joy to speak with you today on the podcast. And if anyone’s listening here, if you ever need design services, I’ve worked with them in the past and I highly recommend them. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. It such a joy speaking with you as well. All right, take care.

47:17
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I can’t stress how important packaging can be to establish a strong brand. And I really like the people over at OutlineMatic who are willing to work with picky people like myself. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 348. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

47:46
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. 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 dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv.

48:15
Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog 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.

00:28
My other cousin, Aparke, is an accomplished physician. My brother is a judge in California and my mom discovered the cure for a rare disease. But today we’re going to talk about a different cousin, my cousin Vic. Vic is the founder of Addaday, which is an e-commerce company that sells massage therapy devices. And right now it’s a seven figure business, but it will be eight figures by the end of this year. Now this interview is valuable because if you’ve ever been interested in creating a plastic related product, you’ll learn a lot about the process today.

00:57
But before we begin, want to thank Klavia for sponsoring this episode. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business that you always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change.

01:25
These companies connect quickly with their customers to collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you own your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s klaviyo.com slash my wife.

01:55
I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. This is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus.

02:22
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. 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 a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony.

02:49
Now, 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. Now, 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. Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job.

03:14
podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

03:28
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit a Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my cousin Victor on the show. Now, most of you don’t know this about me, but my cousins are probably the most entrepreneurial people that I know. And Victor has actually started a bunch of companies in the past, but he’s currently running Addaday.com, which is a company that sells massage guns to roll out the knots in your calf, back, shoulder, and fight muscle tightness. And in fact, if you are a runner or an athlete, chances are you’ve encountered his products at your local running store, REI, or even Target.

03:58
Yeah, so that’s right. His massagers are at REI and every Target store nationwide. In any case, I believe this is probably the first guest that I’ve had on the podcast that has created his own plastic molds and everything about his product from complete scratch. So today we’re going to talk about how exactly Victor launched his business. And with that, how you doing, man? Good. How are you, Steve? I am good. I’m pretty sure most of the people out there didn’t know I had a cousin. Give us a quick background. know you’ve

04:27
you’ve done a whole bunch of stuff like including physical products, but how did you kind of get into e-commerce and why massagers of all things? So I have been in the tech business for over a decade and when I actually got into the massage business, I wanted to do something completely analog, something that didn’t have connectivity and that could, that didn’t have an expiration date on it or a need for that product to be updated every six months. So compared to

04:56
tech, how would you compare e-commerce versus like the software stuff that used to work on in the past? E-commerce, have to, the relationship with the consumer is completely direct naturally. And you really have to understand who your audience is for the product to move. Because there’s no one else moving it for you except yourself. So that’s the core difference. What about in terms of investment and difficulty? I mean, raising money for any business is difficult.

05:27
And I think what I’ve learned is you have to raise money from the right investors. And if you find the right investor for your project, it’s actually quite easy. But if you’re raising money from someone who’s not interested in your product, you can spend hours with that person and reach no conclusion. Well, what was trying to get at is with these massagers, you didn’t take investment, right? I mean, this is just kind of your own thing. Yeah. No, no. And so it sounds like to me like

05:55
you don’t need nearly as much money to do an e-commerce thing as opposed to all your software ventures were venture backed, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re right. Yeah. To your point, you don’t, you can start very small and then build as you go. You don’t necessarily have to commit to, you know, millions of dollars for software development to get a product out. No. So why massagers again?

06:25
The core reason was because of my passion for endurance activities. So I run a lot so I found out that Lots of runners get injured. In fact, almost all runners get injured and they need the product So I thought this would be a good product to build for runners if they needed and you know The theory or the hypothesis was correct So you’re doing a hundred mile or in a week, right?

06:52
In a couple days actually. Friday. So let me ask you a couple questions just about product development. Why did you decide, so first off when you started making these, was there any other product like it out there? Because I see massagers. exactly. Absolutely. Yeah, and that’s the inspiration, right? You look at things in the market and you try to make it better. Sometimes you evolve the product, sometimes you come up with something completely new.

07:23
So how did you come up with your product? I mean, I’ve seen massagers all over the place. It feels like a saturated market to me. yeah. I mean, almost all products today are saturated in some way, or form, right? But to answer your question, I was on a trail run in Santa Monica and I had just joined this incredible running group called the SoCal Coyotes.

07:52
I finished the run and came down to run and there was a guy there with a stick roller. It’s like a roller that looks like a stick. And it happened my first time seeing it. And I said, Hey, you know, we, that’s very familiar to me because you know, in Asia, they would have rollers like that, except it was made out of bamboo. And I asked the guy in my K, where’d you get that from? He’s like at a running store and

08:19
I said, which running story he named off, uh, you know, this running story called fleet feet. And I had never heard about a running store before. So, and I asked him, how much is it? He’s like 34 bucks. I’m like 34 bucks for that. And, that’s exactly the impetus for me to kind of go back and, I went on to Alibaba.com and looked for similar skews.

08:45
and then found a product that I thought was comparable and ordered some. And they came to my, and then I had to learn how to, you know, forward, work with a forwarder so the product could get through customs, et cetera. So that kind of was the impetus to that product. Okay. So you ultimately decided to make your own massager from scratch, right? Did you actually sell the ones you bought from Alibaba? I couldn’t sell them actually.

09:12
Okay. So I tried and the everyone that I tried to sell to say, Hey, you know, this is very similar to what I already have. I don’t need, I don’t need to buy this from you. said, why not? I’m giving you a better price and giving you a better margin. And then, you know, they got to the core of it, but you don’t have the brand. And so that kind of woke me up. And I, cause I thought it was very price driven, but you know,

09:39
I’m wrong. There’s a lot of brand recognition tied into these products that help you help separate it from the pact. You know, so I listened to what, when they said no to me, I said, well, how can I earn your business? And a lot of them said, you know, what if you made one that was like this or they gave me some design concept? said, well, if I made it like this, would you be interested? They said, absolutely. So I listened to probably 30 stores,

10:09
across California, give me input on how to design the next recovery tool they had in mind, put that together, created a mold, built the product and then showed them the product in person. And they were all happy when they saw it because it reflected what they told me. And so that gave me a foot in the door. And then I said, you know, you don’t have to pay me until the product sold. So why don’t you just sell it first?

10:38
And they said, so it’s no risk. And that’s what essentially launched the brand. So it ended up, you know, ended up selling really well. And then it went nationwide. So interesting. You decided to go into retail shops before going online. Is that right? Yes. Why is that? That’s all I knew. I really, I really didn’t have that much knowledge in e-comm. So I went where I was most comfortable, which is,

11:07
dealing with retailers. And then from there I learned how to do e-comm really quickly. Did you literally just walk into like a Fleetfeet store and just say, you want to carry these? Yes. Can you just tell me exactly, is that pretty much literally what you said? May I talk to your owner or your buyer? I like to show them some products they would be interested in. Okay. That’s it. But the Fleetfeet, I guess that’s a small running shop. it owner or is it a franchise or?

11:36
Oh, they’re franchise. They’re actually the largest network of running stores actually in the world. have over. I did not know that. Yeah. At the time they were, I think they were 70 stores strong today. They are about 180 stores nationwide. I see. So the person that you’re talking to, is it the owner or is it the. That was the owner at the, the owner of the store at the time. Okay. And then so they each kind of operate on an individual basis.

12:04
So you just gave them a bunch of units and just see how they sold and they just kept ordering more because it sold. Right. They operated, they are a franchise by the way, but they also have company owned stores. I see. Okay. And then after that, are they still on that same arrangement or was that just like a test? Like you give them units and they only pay for what sells. After that, once they know the product moves, then you move into a

12:29
a term basis. So a lot of times it’s net 30, net 60, pending on the store and the relationship. Okay. Let’s talk about product development. Your first stick massager. Can you give us an idea of how much it costs to make one of those and like what the process is like for creating the mold? Yeah, I mean, for a massager, I mean, if you if you want me to get to the pricing, I mean, these molds, so let me let me preface this by

12:58
There are different kinds of molds. There are cheap molds that you can run pop products through that will last maybe 5,000 runs and the mold will go bad. And those are inexpensive. And then there’s good molds, you know, that can last you for a really long time. And when the product comes out, you won’t see the seams, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s very clean. And so those molds are

13:27
generally into five figures. And then you can get modes in four figures. And I would never recommend that. I just don’t. And then you can get like, you know, when you get into electronics, all your modes are in the six figures by default. Really? Why is that? It’s just more components. You know, there’s just so many pieces tied into it. Okay. How much did you invest in your first product? I believe

13:57
300,000 is the starting capital for that business was actually like 80K. We built it off of 80K. Yeah. Is most of that the mold? Most of it was the mold and a lot of it was traveling. Oh, traveling. Okay. Oh, traveling. Right, right. Going to door to door, which is what you’re okay. What about just the product though? Not the traveling costs. Just literally just the mold. you can get it done for under

14:26
If you’re really smart about things under 20 K, okay, you’re good. Yeah, you can get going. How did you find a place to make the mold and manufacturer? That is a very good question. So part of it was luck. I can speak the language fluently. So I was able to get to a manufacturer that could help me build the product.

14:52
efficiently and I was able to qualify that manufacturer actually through some family friends and that gave us some confidence in what they could do. And then we actually moved, you know, I don’t know if you know this, my mom’s side, my grandpa was in the manufacturing business. So we were able to kind of look at some of their old manufacturing partners and ask them for help. Ah, no, I actually did not know that. Yeah.

15:21
So is your supplier in China or where is it? It was originally in China, correct. Okay. then now it’s somewhere else? It’s still in China. Oh, it’s still in China. We’re thinking about another area, but it’s not confirmed yet. During this whole process of making the mold, how important was it? Like, did you actually camp out in China during this process? design process? No. No.

15:50
So it was completely, so you did this remotely. How did you actually convey the design to them? So I would draw that, that part is through iteration. So you would draw something, you would send it to them. They would come back with their like a CAD drawing or yeah, CAD drawing. And then actually it started with pencil and paper. Okay. And then they would CAD draw it for you because it’s cheaper there. Right. So they,

16:19
They would put it on CAD and they sent it back to you and you say, well, this is something I’m interested in. And then they would be fine it. And then they would create a sample around it, like a CNC. And then you see if you like it. And did you have to commit to a certain amount of units to start? Not at the molding. No, the mold is the mold. You don’t have to commit to it. You just pay for the mold. OK. Yeah. And then presumably this mold is really heavy, right?

16:48
Yes. Yes. So the block, it’s a, it’s a block of metal that they carve through. Yeah. So this supplier, they’re making the mold for you and they essentially store the mold for you, Correct. So are you kind of held hostage by that factory? I think that’s a very good question. As you become, you, you need to know where the factory is.

17:18
And we actually, if you’re on that topic, we had one instance where the owner of the factory fled. Oh, really? Okay. Like literally left and the workers went on strike and they wouldn’t let any of the molds leave the factory. And we had the center representative to give them cash to take the mold out and then give it to another factory. This is a true story. Oh my goodness. Okay.

17:47
And those are in October, it was September, sorry, this was August right before delivery for Christmas products. Okay. Yeah, it does happen. So how do you prevent that? Yeah. Do you have two factories that are running the same product? If you have the financial means to do so, I would definitely argue for that. And do we, yeah, and the question is, do we do that? Absolutely. Okay.

18:15
So you do your first production run. How long does that whole process take? Just making the mold. I’m just kind of getting an idea of the timeline here. a good mold, three months. Three months, okay. And then that factory makes it for you. Is everything like pre-negotiated? Like how many units you’re going to get or do you negotiate the mold first and then talk about production? You do the mold first and then in that mold discussion, you have an ideal dollar

18:43
figure you want to hit, right? So let’s say you say, want this product to be 10 bucks. And then they go, okay, well, if you want it to be $10, your injection molding has to be this way, because we only want to shoot it once. And that will add less labor, but the mold cost will go up. And so there’s that kind of negotiation that takes place. I see. Okay. And how big was your first production run? Our first production run was 5,000 units. 5,000 units. Wow. Okay.

19:14
Is that, I mean, that seems like a lot, but yeah, it’s still not that much, right? So 5,000 times 10 is only $50,000. Well, when you don’t know whether it’s going to sell or not, but I guess you had retailers already will. Yeah, we knew, we knew that it would move. We didn’t think it would move in, you know, we knew that over time we would sell through it. Right. Right. So, but we also knew that one of the things that I would,

19:41
There’s a fine line between having enough inventory that motivates you to sell and having no inventory that motivates you very little to sell. Okay. All right. Well, I know for you, 5,000 units sounds low, like for you, because I know what unit quantities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I would, I think you could do it. think once you own the mold, you can do a 500 unit run if you wanted to.

20:11
Doesn’t matter. The problem is the factory is not going to be very anxious to produce 500 units for you, Because they have to produce like there’s different tiers of manufacturers. So you kind if you’re, if you want to be working with a tier one manufacturer, which means generally the quality delivery is the best, you’re going to have to vibe for that space. So you got to make sure you give them enough business to sustain that line. Right.

20:41
And if you ever want to switch suppliers, is moving the mold kind of a pain or? Yeah, I think generally people have this idea that if I’m going to switch suppliers, I’m going to take the mold with me. Generally, what happens is you don’t do that. You just have another set. Oh, okay. Yeah, you have another set. You should always have two sets. Interesting. At the minimum. Okay. All right. So you get your first units delivered to the stores.

21:11
Are you literally… How’s the payment terms in the beginning? do they just pay you? only. Cash only. So, just… There’s no… There’s no… You mean… You mean… Oh, okay. For the stores. Yeah. The stores is… I think when we started, we gave them like net 60. I see. So you just ping them after 60 days and then they just pay you based on the number of units and… And they either choose for you to… Okay. All right.

21:38
And then when could you start going after some of the larger guys? We actually, you know, when we didn’t really go after the larger guys, luckily they all came after us. So we’re really lucky to have REI asked us to pitch them on being a vendor. that was one of our bigger.

22:06
They found us through these running stores. They shop these running stores and they look at the latest trends. I see. we’re, know, once you, the specialty stores represent a lot of times it’s the newest, coolest things come out of specialty. So a lot of these retailers, they go to these stores to shop, you know, kind of for inspiration. And sometimes they’ll see something they like.

22:35
And in this case, they saw something they liked from Adaday and they contacted us and asked us if we wanted to meet them at a show. And we said, sure. And then we showed them some products and they said they were interested and we produced it for them. That was my next question actually. What type of marketing were you doing besides going from store to store? Were you going to like all the trade shows and everything?

23:02
There is a trade show that we would go to once a year called the running event. And that would be the only trade show we went to. And then we started to go to outdoor retailer and other niche shows like the health and fitness shows. I would say no more than three a year. Was there a positive ROI on those shows or was it mainly for networking?

23:30
Those shows are hit and miss. It depends on the staff you have on the floor. If you don’t know how to network or if you’re not willing to talk to people and be uncomfortable in making sure that people who don’t want to talk to you talk to you and so that you could create opportunities for your brand that you shouldn’t bother going. You know what I mean?

23:56
How big was your staff during all this? I remember it being pretty minimal, right? Yeah, just my wife and I were really the core. Yeah, so you guys were manning the booth probably, right? Personally, I’d imagine. Yep. Yep. Did you do any other marketing besides the retail shops and a couple trade shows? Store marketing, you know, we really made sure that we helped the store communicate our brand to the people who walked through those stores.

24:25
and they did a great job and that actually created the demand for our product online on the e-comm. I mean, what’s their incentive? Like, did you have to pay extra to get your products more visible or is there any? Do we have to pay more money? No, we, they, you know, we try to design the product so it’s catching to the eye and, and they have that, you know, they put it in a recovery session section. So that was pretty organic in nature.

24:54
Here’s what I’m getting at. Like when you go into a store, a lot of times the store has to do a good job of displaying or marketing your product in order for it to sell well, in addition to just being in the store itself, right? So did you do a lot of education in that regard? We did, but they didn’t follow what you wanted them to do. They would still do what they thought was best for your brand. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter,

25:21
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25:50
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26:19
That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

26:26
And so the fact that your product kind of was standalone and straightforward, it basically sold without any of that being affected. Yes. Okay. Yeah. All right. And then, okay, so let’s fast forward a little bit to today. You decided to move into electronics again. In the beginning of this interview, you said you wanted something that would last a test of time and didn’t need to be updated, right? Correct. And then you just did a 180. Correct. Okay. Explain.

26:57
So the reason that took place was we had seen the consumer move towards connect connected devices such as the Peloton, know, it’s connected to a treadmill or you have room. We saw a lot of tools that in the exercise and fitness domain offer connectivity and we started to see that in massage products.

27:26
And we knew that we had to be a part of that revolution to be relevant as a brand. And I thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to jump back in and decided that I had taken long enough of break from tech that I’m interested again. And started to create not just one item, but

27:56
a of products, a suite of products that offered connectivity to our app. And we wanted to make those products intelligent and adaptive. that’s what we So why don’t you guys, for the people listening, they probably don’t know what you sell. Can you kind of describe what’s in Target today and what the connectivity and how it works? Sure. There’s three items in Target today. One is a percussive, oscillating, many people call it a gun.

28:26
So it looks it’s shaped like a gun and you It’s basically a massage gun right another product is an oscillating sphere And then another product is we call it call a foam roller that rolls itself So you don’t have to do the foam roller rolls for you. All three products are connected to the app so it learns about what your needs are and through our algorithm administers

28:56
unique therapies through those devices that changes every time you use it. So it’s having like a physical therapist. It’s like having a physical therapist in your home that kind of improves as your symptoms improve. Right. So, okay, so making the leap from just like a static massager, so to speak, to the electronic version, can you kind of

29:23
talk about what the investment was like and what needed to come together for that to happen? That I had to raise money for. Oh, okay. Absolutely. Yeah. I found my cause it’s not even raised money. It’s just you need to raising money means that you’re you needed more capital to do the business. So to get more capital, I actually put more, more money, more of my money in, but it got to the point where we needed more capital to build more products. So

29:53
we had other investors come in to help with that process. But for just that one product, let’s not even talk about money. Like what are the resources needed to make like a static massager into an electronic one that’s connected to your phone and an app and all that stuff? Would be probably 10X more resources. 10X more resources. So what was your first hire? Like I’m just trying to understand the transition. Yeah, we literally hired a

30:23
a app development team. So that’s six people there just to get that started. Is that in the US or overseas? Overseas and the US. Ah, interesting. Okay. Well, this was hybrid. And then we had to add at least four people on product design because it’s far more complicated than a static version because of its percussive nature. know, percussive guns, got to make sure that

30:52
as they percuss, they’re also vibrating the ancillary components. You got to make sure that those stay in place two years, three years, four years, five years down the line. So it’s no longer the supplier’s design team, so to speak. have your own design team. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Cause they, you’re going to know, you’re going to know that process a little bit better than that. I mean, you listen to them, they’ll give you ideas and they’ll give you some experience, some, some pointers based off of their experience, but

31:22
They’re not, the stakes are different. You got to make that investment on your own. Okay. Let’s not even talk about the software part. How about just making the gun percussive, like just a standard massage gun without connectivity? What would be the resource? Can you do that without a team? No, no, no. could go to Alibaba and source out a gun that somebody else has created. You just buy it and put your brand on it.

31:51
Um, the problem with those devices really is, uh, there’s no QC. So there’s no quality control. A high likelihood that battery is going to explode at some point in, in your house because there’s no, there’s no control. Right. You got it. Like we source our own battery. We source our own motor, like everything’s source that qualified from a quality qualified factory. When you get, when you, you know,

32:19
when you get a static stick, it’s not going to explode. The stakes are much lower, right? You don’t need to charge it. I really, I really, you know, there’s so many knockoffs now on Amazon and you know, they’ll, they’ll work for the first couple of months and then, then you, know, I don’t know if you want to use that on your children or, know, have that next in your household. I mean, would you say,

32:44
That if you’re going to do an electronics product or something with a battery, whatever, that you have to do everything in house and you just can’t source some random stuff on Alibaba. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely not. Unless you want to play Russian roulette with your business. I’m not talking about, yeah, just take a liability insurance. No, no, no, no. There’s things that like quality and safety is first and foremost when you get into that kind of product.

33:15
Okay, all right, so you have a team and sounds like it’s getting expensive at this point because you have engineers, probably have, probably, there’s probably a little circuit board in there, right? Yes. And then there’s the mold, there’s the percussive design parts. All right, how long did that process take to get that first gun out? 18 months. 18 months, wow. Okay. Yeah. How did you get into Target then? I mean, there’s no sales history for this thing, right?

33:42
How did we get into Target? Same thing, they approached us. But how did they know about the guy? I mean, it wasn’t even out yet, right? It was out. It was out. It was out. The non-connected version, right? The non-connected version was out and we had a really good business with REI that they knew about. you know, at that time, at that, they’ve been following, according to them, they’ve been following us for several years as a brand. I see. So we were on their radar.

34:12
So it just proves to anyone that if you do a decent job at building your brand, you will get noticed and people will take an interest in you if you do what you’re supposed to do in the marketplace. Let me ask you this. When did the online component come in? Cause I remember when we first started talking, you didn’t even have like a real e-commerce store really, right? No, the online business came when

34:41
We had a lot of people actually emailing us to buy direct from us because they couldn’t find the product on our website at a store because the store may not carry everything you offer in your catalog. I see. So we use that as justification to build our online store. And that’s how it kind of… So the e-commerce component seemed like an afterthought, right?

35:11
Yes, for us it was. Yes, I see. And then when did you start taking that more seriously? And how does that all kind of work together with the retail space? We started to take that well, first, to be frank, we had heard from our partners in our business that how much they were doing online. And we’re like, are you kidding me? That’s how much you’re doing. And so that really put the focus on econ for us. Like, it’s like, wow, we’re leaving

35:41
we’re leaving things on the table, right? So we just started to put more focus on that. So what are your main drives? So let’s just focus on the e-comm side real quick. how do you, what’s your biggest source of traffic on the e-comm side? Our biggest source of traffic on our e-comm side is actually we have a lot of direct searches that are related to people who know of our brand through either clubs

36:11
You know, like different running clubs, different triathlon clubs, these unique community groups that regularly come to us because they’re incentivized to buy from us direct. our second- Wait, hold on. How are they incentivized to buy from you direct? So we give them, you know, kind of group discounts in a sense. Okay. Not a lot, but just enough to incentivize them to come in.

36:40
and buy in bulk opposed to just one off. Almost like a semi Groupon kind of. Does that anger your retailers though at all when you discount? No, because we don’t discount more than 10 % normally. I see. Okay. And it’s very select, right? So it’s not a broad based coupon. No, it’s And you kind of, and it’s direct at these groups of these clubs around the country.

37:10
Okay. Are you doing a lot of paid advertising or social media? Yes, we generally, our paid media is strong. We spend the most Q4. Okay, that makes sense. So and most of the traffic for us, we do very well with Facebook. Facebook is good for us. Instagram is good for us. And

37:38
YouTube is actually not bad for us. I have not seen one of your YouTube ads yet because I actually launching in a few weeks. Ah, are you in it? No, I’m not. Yeah. Yeah. It’s tricky. know, there’s no, there’s you for every business. You just, you have to, you have to learn what funnel works.

38:06
And once you discover that funnel, then you put more resources in that funnel. In some weeks, it could be Instagram and some weeks it could be Facebook. In some weeks it could be YouTube or SEO. It really depends on the message you’re putting out and the product, the price, you know, the four P’s. It’s really dynamic. I call it plastic. It’s, there’s never a day where just like, Oh yeah, we’re just gonna.

38:34
do what we did last year, it’ll be fine. Actually not. Let me ask you this. If you were to start all this over again, would you still have gone the retail route first or would you have gone e-commerce first? I would go e-commerce first. Interesting. Okay. So how would you have proceeded then? If I had built my brand on e-comm 10 years ago, which is when I started, I would probably have a way more substantial e-comm business than I do now.

39:03
And I know that based off of what my competition is doing. Well, okay, let me ask you this. So before, like the way you kind of justified the spend in the beginning was you had all these stores committing to carrying it in their stores. How would you have done the same thing in the econ? How would you have validated this in ecom land? I would have just, um, I would have spent money on SEO way more aggressively than I did.

39:28
in 2010 or 2011. I basically spend no money there. And by the time I decided to spend money, there were other brands that had already cornered that. So when you, let’s say if you Googled massage stick, you know, our brand was nowhere to be found and it would have cost me very little money to make sure that we were one of the first to appear because, you know, because of the algorithm. when you say spend money on SEO,

39:55
What exactly are you talking about? Like what are you investing in specifically? So making sure now, so if you’re bidding for a word, say massage foam roller, that’s a good question, right? Foam roller. Okay. And let’s say 10 years ago, would it cost you like 10 cents to get, to make sure that your foam foam roller is one of the first that appear. Now it’s five to $6.

40:25
You know, it could be that high. And if you had built that base earlier, the algorithm will know that your pages as a foam roller site were the most viewed. And that helps you etch up to the top. So you end up paying less to be at the top of that search query. And then is the same true with social then for you? Yeah, same thing. Okay. Interesting. So when would you have started?

40:54
When is retail, like how does the retail piece kind of come in? Because I know your e-comm side of your business is growing really rapidly. Yes, like super rapidly. I guess what I’m trying to ask is which one is higher maintenance? Definitely. Actually, nowadays, I think e-comm is going to be your highest maintenance. To do e-comm right,

41:24
It’s not easy. Not easy. To get retail right, in my opinion, is easier. I have a bunch of friends who do retail and they’re in a bunch of stores. guess it’s a lot like e-comm in a way because you also have to go around to them and market to them as opposed to like the consumer, Yeah, but in consumer, it’s one-to-one. In retail, it’s more B2B.

41:54
Right. Right. So I mean, for us, it’s we’re making sure that, you know, five of our key customers are are and they know us well enough, they they’re going to execute these top retailers know what they’re doing. Right. OK, that makes sense. Right. You need to hold you. You don’t need to hold their hand. You just make you need to. Your job is to make sure your brand is top of mind when it comes to that category in the nation and they’ll

42:22
They’ll help make sure that it’s in the right aisle, you know, and that it’s presented correctly to their shoppers. mean, they’re professionals when it comes to it. Target knows about how to do that better than anyone. So I just want to give the audience an idea also. You mentioned like a large part of your budget is travel. Like how important is it for you to kind of make the rounds, so to speak?

42:48
I think if you’re, let me put it this way, let’s say you’re making candles and you’re selling candles to specialty shops across the country and these are mom and pop stores that are kind of gift stores and like coastal cities or, and you want to make sure that they sell your product well.

43:15
You should see the owners of those businesses at least once, at least once and get their name. And that’ll make a huge difference in how many candles you sell. Right. For sure. So I would say that if you had a hundred, let’s say if you had, say we had, you know, easily over a thousand retailers that sell our product in specialty, I probably visited all of them once. And some of them

43:45
five to 10 times because it’s relationship, right? Because candles are commodity, you know, so is, you know, a lot of these recovery tools, they’re kind of a commodity. So if you want to develop that relationship, makes a huge, huge difference. You guys on Amazon? Our non electronics are on Amazon. Our electronics are not. Is there a plan to get them on Amazon or? Nope. Okay. Why is that?

44:15
Too many knockoffs and we don’t want to put our brand next to them. Interesting. I view our biggest competition as actually Amazon to be frank. Like the cheap knockoffs on Amazon you mean? Yeah, Amazon itself because Amazon advertises the cheap knockoffs on SEO. Are you scared that Amazon will develop their own connected massage gun? No, no because it’s not their business.

44:43
We do such, what we do, our algorithm, it’s just not something. I mean, for them to do a non-connected device, sure. For them to produce connected device, that’s a whole different area of expertise. I mean, we work for like over 20, 25 doctors. That algorithm built by medical professions, not just like, hey, some guys.

45:09
It’s funny that you say that about Amazon. Like I read somewhere now that almost 70 % of searchers when they’re buying like a something like a massager, they’ll actually go look at the brand website first before making a purchase. I would think that once your brand I mean, it’s in target all across the nation. Now the brand is going to become really strong that the knockoffs won’t be as much of a factor on Amazon. I I would I would love to do a study on on that and see and do a B testing, you know,

45:39
between how many people actually go to Amazon to look for the product at a cheaper price than going there because they went to your brand site first and they went to Amazon to buy that product. Right. You follow me? Yeah. I know a lot of people prefer to just shop on Amazon, right? Because it’s easy. So I’m just wondering if you’re missing out on like 50 % of e-commerce, but by not being on there. That’s all I’m saying. Yeah. And I would dare.

46:09
I would be, you kind of have to pick a lane and then go down that lane. And the lane we picked is to support our retail partners such as Target and REI and make sure that we maximize our business there and have those and leave Amazon alone. Right. Okay. And then, you know, if you go to target.com, you’ll

46:39
you’ll see us having a very strong presence there or REI, know, those, those are, or even Fleetfeet. These are, these are brands that, you know, give us a lot of business. yeah, and a lot of support. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that we didn’t really get into, but this app, just to add, add one thing, like there’s, there’s no curation in Amazon. So in

47:07
If you go to Amazon, you can find a lot of products on there that have not been qualified by a buying group such as Target. There’s no process. Oh yeah, I know. That’s why there’s so much junk on there. Yeah, the junk is, it’s very hard for people to decipher what’s junk and what’s not junk. And there’s a lot of fraud going on there too. There’s people.

47:35
copying your design and then it’s just not policed well. And so to be honest with you, Steve, if they start to police it better, maybe we’ll sell there one day. But right now it’s, it’s like the wild, wild West and we choose not to be part of that West. Yeah, I think that might be smart. mean, I’ve had many people or not many, but I’ve had a few people on the podcast where their entire product brand, everything, the box, everything got knocked off with inferior product, which lowered the reviews of that brand.

48:04
I lowered the brand equity because they literally copied everything. Yeah, it’s ridiculous. And how are they able to sell on Amazon is the biggest question I have. I don’t want to speak for Amazon, but to them, I think it’s just money, If someone chooses not to sell on there, someone else is going to jump right in. And that’s how they run their platform. It’s fine. I respect that, but that’s not our cup of tea.

48:34
So one thing that we didn’t talk about in this podcast was your master plan. mean, connectivity is cool and all, but this app that you have people sign on where you get the information and there’s, can you talk about the recurring revenue component? Sure. So our, our mission is to make sure that that app helps you deal with any ailments you have or your family has. So if you’re, if you’re sitting at the Thanksgiving table this year and your aunt’s across the table and she says, you know, I have this,

49:04
nagging back pain, we want you to download the Addaday app onto your device. And from there, you’re going to discover therapies that help you with that pain instantly, whether it’s with our device or without our device. And we believe those therapies that we show you through the app are good enough to where you will pay us on a monthly basis to use that app.

49:30
I mean,

50:00
Just like when you see a physical therapist, they’re not going to just use one motion on you for the whole duration of the visit. So speed one does not represent good therapy, neither does speed five. know, you need to have a good therapy means that it’s at different frequencies and amplitude throughout the duration of the session. This is actually the main reason why I am a believer in the product. It’s

50:30
You have a moat. You have IP that can’t really be easily copied. No, it’s actually you can have work. We can deliver up to 67 million various therapies through that through that app. Yeah, with the with the bio zoom. And it’s rare that I do this on the podcast. But I think it’s a no brainer because it is really inexpensive as well. Like typical typical massage guns. I was thinking about getting one a while back. And it was like four or 500 bucks.

50:57
I don’t know how, maybe you can come on and talk about this later, but yours retails for what? $150? $149. $149 with all this stuff. And you’re to have to tell me how you got the supply chain down that much. it, is it mainly just like a volume game or? Well, when you start to source the components separately and you have volume, you can get it to where it’s economical. Yeah. It’s hard. It’s really hard. I probably use every

51:24
all the experience I’ve ever had in manufacturing on this project. And you can find these in Target everywhere. if you guys are in the, was it the fitness section of Target? Yeah, you don’t, yeah, it’s a sports section and it’s under recovery and you don’t have to be an athlete to use it. If you have, you know, common ailments like back pain, plantar fasciitis, or just a sore neck, we have a therapy for you that you can use independent of the massage of the bio zoom.

51:53
which is the massage gun, or you can just use some of our therapies that are, will be shown, is shown to you by Dr. Mike, who’s our in-house doctor and his group of medical specialists ranging from MDs all the way to PT, DPTs. yeah, we’re trying to bring, we’re trying to make sure that if you have something that bothers you, you don’t necessarily always have to wait till you

52:23
get to your PT office for some relief to take place. We’re not saying don’t see your PT. The PT is definitely, this is not here to replace your physical therapist or your chiropractor. This is there to help and assist in between those visits. So if you’re doing 10 visits a year, we hope with this tool and this solution and this app, you can do eight visits. And where can people find your company online?

52:53
addaday.com like add a day to your life. So add a day.com. A D D A D A y.com. Correct. Cool. Hey, Vic, thanks a lot for coming on the show. It’s great to have like family on the show. I had my mom on earlier and that episode actually ended up being a pretty big hit. You should have our other cousin on which are Georgia. Nicole, Nicole. Okay. Yeah, actually, he started his company too. Right and got

53:22
which got acquired. yeah, he will have one. Yeah, that’s a good story too. All right, man. It’s been good. right.

53:32
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Like I said, Vic’s company is blowing up and hopefully I’ll have more to report later on this year about the progress of his growth. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequarterjob.com slash episode 347. 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.

54:00
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.I-O slash Steve. 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 KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

54:30
heading over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
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 Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show.

00:55
Now, are you working around the clock to build the business that you always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies? Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers,

01:23
collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to do the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you own your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife. That’s klaviyo.com slash mywife. Now onto the show.

01:53
Welcome to the My Wife, Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:11
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Dylan Jacob on the show. Now Dylan is the founder of Brewmate.com, which is a company that sells beer cozies online. And Dylan grew this into a $36 million business in just three years. And the growth of his company was ridiculous. In his first full year, he made 2.1 million. The next year he did 20 and then last year he did 36. Not only that, but he owns the company a hundred percent and bootstrapped it to where it is today.

02:38
And in this episode, we’ll discover how he grew Brewmate so quickly and his strategies for growth. And with that, welcome to the show. Dylan, how are you doing today, I’m doing great, Steve. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, so Dylan, for those of you out there who have never heard of who you are, give us a quick background story about how you got into e-commerce and then how your experiences led up to starting Brewmate. Yeah, so I grew up in a little small town in Indiana, Greenwood. So it’s like 20 minutes south of Indianapolis.

03:07
And there’s not a whole lot to do there. You’re sort of surrounded by corn fields and, you know, people typically get in trouble. I was one of those people that was like what I did in my spare time. seem to find myself in all sorts of situations. And, you know, over time I sort of grew out of that and was able to turn that energy into something a little more positive. And entrepreneurship was one of those things I always gravitated towards. You know, I grew up fairly poor and I was always looking for like odds and ends ways to make money.

03:36
And I was running a little cell phone repair company, like eighth and ninth grade. So I would buy up broken devices. So like iPods and iPhones, and I would have wore the parts from overseas and then I would refurbish them and then resell them. And then sophomore year of high school, a few repair shops popped up locally and that market sort of started to dwindle away. And so I saw an opportunity, you know, I had already secured really good supplier overseas for electronic parts and.

04:07
I started reaching out to the local repair shop. I went in, made friends with them. And what I found a common thread with all of them was that they were all getting their parts off like eBay and Amazon. And I happened to know that all the parts that were on there were BNC grade parts. So they had dead pixels and dust under the screen or they were, you know, I had already navigated all of that. And so I saw an opportunity and I basically told all of them that I could supply them with local parts, you know, same day, a local delivery and.

04:36
that actually started my first real business, which is called GV Supply Company. So over the few years throughout high school, we scaled to a little over 100 bear shops around the US that we were working with at our own Shopify store. I would scout our Instagram for hashtags and send people samples and drop in their DMs and reach out to people in any way that I could. And then they could order the parts directly online and get them delivered straight to their door.

05:03
Um, you know, he had like a year warranty so they could pass that on to their customers. And it was something that, you know, was, was really challenging for me and really fun. And you did this in high school. You yeah, this was in high school. Okay. Um, and so, you know, senior year is rolling around and, I have a very successful business, at least at that time. Um, you know, I was making well in the six figures and I was still like,

05:31
pretty unsure about the whole entrepreneurship thing. It’s sort of like joining a high school acting class and you’re really good at it, but then trying to move to Hollywood and become a big time actor. And so I really just considered it to be a side hustle. I was planning on going to Purdue for engineering, so I had a full ride there. I also had an internship at Rolls-Royce. So I’d leave high school half day and go to Rolls-Royce for the rest of the day. I worked in their engineering department. That was sort of my

06:01
plan. My plan was to be an engineer. wanted to do product development design. I actually wanted to be an inventor. And, you know, that was sort of the direction I was headed in. But I again, like I grew up sort of in this low income household, and I wanted the stability of like, you know, having a college degree and being able to have a steady job and paycheck and something that like entrepreneurship didn’t really offer. And I was pretty scared of. So I went to I went to college there for a semester, I was running this business out of my dorm room.

06:30
taking 18 credit hours and wanting to rip my hair out. And, you know, I remember Christmas break rolled around, so we had a few weeks off and I was down like 20 pounds, like I hadn’t been in the gym and everyone was like, you don’t look very well. And I was like, I don’t feel very well. Like I’m very stressed out and unsure and I don’t know what to do. you know, my friends and family were supportive and you know, I sort of arrived at the decision that I was just going to take a semester off.

06:58
focused on my business. Like I already had a business that was earning me more than I would have been making as an engineer. And even though I didn’t consider it like a lifelong plan, it was a good plan for the intern until I sort of figured out what I wanted to do. This is still a cell phone business, right? Yep. Okay. So I dropped out of college. And I don’t call it dropping out at the time. I really just took a semester off. But four months later, I did sell that company for $100,000.

07:24
and I ended up fully dropping out of college. And that was sort of the turning point for me where I realized that like, you know, entrepreneurship was something that to me, it was everything, it encompassed like everything that I enjoyed. Like it had the building aspect of like what I enjoyed about engineering. You know, it had the potential for like the product development aspect of what I wanted to do for an actual career anyways. And so, you know, I sort of

07:53
was like, Hey, I’m pretty much already doing this. Why not just pursue it and see where it goes. And, you know, as a backup plan, if it doesn’t work out, then I can always go back to school and I have, you know, a nice lump sum of money in my bank account. And, you know, over a few months period after that, I again was pretty unsure because I had just sold my company. And at this point, I was like, well, I need to like start another company because I didn’t want to get a job. And so I actually bought a house. So I spent a year remodeling this house.

08:23
watch YouTube videos, pull permits myself, did literally everything. And that was a nightmare. I didn’t get into it for like flipping houses. literally just wanted, I thought it’d be a fun project. I like building things, but there’s just a little too in depth and I ended up getting sort of trapped doing it for a lot longer than I would have liked to. Okay. How did you end up in beer cozies though? mean. Yeah, so I’m getting there.

08:52
I, in the process of starting or of remodeling the house, I started another company called Beachy Design. And so it was a high end glass tile company. We would do kitchen backsplashes. And I, again, like just felt like there was something missing in this business too. Like, you know, we were importing and designing glass tile for showrooms and interior designers and things like that.

09:18
But it was missing this like product innovation aspect. And so I had always kept this journal, you know, sort of where I would jot down different product ideas that I would have, invention ideas, whatever. And when I first turned 21, I started getting really into craft beer. And so at the time, you, I was sort of done with my house. I was running Vichy Design, which is a glass style company. But I was also looking for something else to really pursue and something that I’d be a little more passionate about that included like

09:48
me being able to take a concept from pen and paper to, you know, product development and also like being able to walk around and see people using my product. Um, and so, you know, I started getting into craft beer and I noticed that like a lot of those cans came in 16 ounce versions and every time I would drink one, the last quarter would always be warm. And so I had just jotted down in my journal, like way to keep 16 ounce beer cans cold. Uh, and that was actually what sort of started like roommate as a whole.

10:18
Um, so the concept for roommate actually started with one beer koozie. That’s our hops later tree out now. Um, but that was like our flagship product. And, know, as I started to investigate that market and realize like, no one was making a 16 ounce beer koozie that actually kept things cold. also realized that like the insulated drinkware industry as a whole was really focusing on the hydration category. So water bottles and coffee mugs and tumblers, no one was really focusing on alcohol. Um, and so that was where I identified like the concept.

10:47
for Brewmate as a whole, which was a company that was designed to like create a better drinking experience and make products specifically for adult beverages only. Okay. How much did it cost to make that first prototype for the 6-in-1 Spear Can? Yeah. So, you the other two businesses, I don’t typically go super in depth on those, but I think they’re important to mention just because they sort of gave me the fundamental building blocks and understanding of like how to source a product, how to get a product created.

11:16
and also like how to do it pretty scrappy. And so, you had mentioned earlier that like I scaled the company without any funding. A lot of that just had to do with the fact that like I had identified little hacks and ways to create products fairly cheap. And as we continue to scale, you know, we’re able to do so properly. And so with that initial prototype, I invested under 10 grand. It was a very rough prototype. I did not include like our current version has three different components. This one only had one.

11:45
but so it was a lot cheaper than like our current version to make. But I had already had sort of a light digital background and so I was able to, you know, Photoshop the product into people’s hands and make a landing page and sort of do like our own version of a Kickstarter. And runs Facebook ads to that page and basically collect emails and then we did pre-orders for that product. Then once it was created. Did ads to that landing page or how did you get people to landing page? Yeah, Facebook ads. Facebook ads. So what are some of your hacks for creating quick

12:14
prototype. Yeah. So, you know, I think the biggest mistake people make is like, they’ll go to a designer first. Um, so they get, you know, they spend three, four months like designing the perfect product and then they’ll take it to a manufacturer. And then the manufacturer shreds it apart and says like, this can’t be done. This can’t be done. This can be done. Um, and their engineers will like re-engineer it to be manufacturable. And so I had actually identified that like, if you find a manufacturer that has a solid engineering team at house,

12:42
Like typically not only will they do the engineering component for free, but you can get there a lot quicker. So, you know, I was able to go to a manufacturer that again, like had a very strong in-house engineering team. is in the US or in Asia? This is overseas. Overseas, okay. there’s a drink where there’s no state-side manufacturers. Okay. Okay. So you actually physically traveled there, I would imagine, right?

13:05
I did, yep. Okay. So I had sort of created a list of different factories I wanted to visit, went and visited, interviewed their engineering teams, sort of went over the design that we had and then settled on the company that I felt most comfortable with. Did you have to commit to a certain number in order for them to do the engineering for you? No, I mean, their minimum order was like a thousand units. So that was something that, you know, I had to sort of negotiate with them on because I didn’t want to order a thousand units because I knew it wasn’t the final product. Okay.

13:33
I mean, just a higher premium to get a smaller batch done. Sure, sure. And this whole process of design, like, did you stay there for an extended period or did you do a lot of it back and forth in the States? I was there for two weeks interviewing engineering teams. And then once I sort of settled on the engineering team that I wanted to work with, then the majority of it was done stateside. So I worked with them directly through Skype and email to sort of dial everything in.

14:01
Did you do any validation on this product before you decided to manufacture it or did you just kind of go for it? Yeah, so the landing page that I mentioned, so before I had actually created or like placed our first order, I actually ran lead generation campaigns to our landing page and collected a couple thousand emails. I went to a couple of the local breweries here. They all had…

14:29
There were showrooms where they sell branded merchandise and chatting with some of the founders there and was like, hey, I think this would be a great addition to your showroom, like this is something you’d be interested in. So I got a commitment from those guys, Satsang King Brewery in Indiana. It like one of the first showrooms to ever carry that product. So I had had a commitment both from direct to consumer customers as well as wholesale customers on the concept. And that was what I used to sort

14:52
be comfortable to be able to pull the trigger on that product. So on this landing page, presumably there were pictures, right? So did you just kind of Photoshop mockups of what you thought it would look like? Well, we had CAD files for the product. So we just did digital renderings. Ah, got it. OK. All right. So it was basically the real thing, just not real images. Exactly. OK. But yeah, we able to take that and Photoshop it into people’s hands in different scenarios and do cut through so people could see how the technology worked and stuff like that.

15:20
Okay, so you spent under 10 grand, you get your first batch of about a thousand units. How did you sell those first units? So we already had a commitment for 240 of those from Sun King. So 25 % of those were already gone. And then the rest, you know, are from the email list that we had, I would say probably 50 % of the other 750 units we had leftover were purchased from customers on that list. And then I made a couple of giveaways on Facebook and then ran some actual Facebook ads after that. But we depleted inventory in under two weeks.

15:50
Wow. So on that landing page, did you talk about price at all or was it just pure interest? Nope. So it went over what the pricing was going to be. It also went over the fact that the product was not the final version. so it was sort of, you know, this is a product that never existed before. So again, it was like people were basically funny at Kickstarter. Like it was people that were interested in 16 ounce beers had had this same issue and wanted a solution for it and were willing to like invest in the original concept.

16:19
And that was how I positioned it. So a lot of those customers went onto an email list where as we were going through the design process for version two, they were kept in the loop and then we gave them a 50 % off discount code on the newer version when it came out, because they supported the original concept. I’m just curious, what was going on through your mind, whether to do a Kickstarter Indiegogo or versus what you just did with the landing page and Facebook ads? Yeah, I mean…

16:46
I had just interviewed a lot of people that had done kickstarters and IndieGoGo campaigns and like, you know, aside from the fact that they take a platform fee, I just felt like a lot of the marketing that went into, you know, driving traffic to their team and get to like the front page or get any sort of traction could have been better utilized, just doing it yourself. And like that was my hypothesis and it seemed to work. So.

17:09
So what’s nice about your product is it has really broad based appeal. So I’m just kind of curious though with that first Facebook ad, can you kind of describe what you targeted, who you targeted and like what your cost per lead was like? Oh, well Facebook ads back then were like very cheap. I honestly don’t remember like what the cost per lead was or anything, but I know like our return on ad spend was probably seven or eight X in terms of like the amount of people actually converted versus what I spend. Okay.

17:37
In terms of, you know, who I was targeting, was people that were interested in like craft beer. Okay. That was really all I targeted in the beginning. Even though like a lot of the light beer brands have 60 ounce can versions, it’s hard to like target someone, let’s say for like Bud Light, and then target someone that like drinks 60 ounce Bud Light cans. But most craft beer cans do come at 60 ounce versions. So like if someone’s interested in craft beer, the odds of them drinking out of 16 ounce cans are like much higher.

18:05
So in the beginning, like I sort of just targeted like men and women between like 21 and 45 that were interested in craft beer. And like that was sort of my target audience. I think with them too, you know, one of the hypothesis that I had was like early adopters are going to be really important. So like people that support Indiegogo or Kickstarter are like early adopters and people who are into craft beer are also sort of like early adopters. Like they like, you know, working with smaller breweries and like

18:34
you know, getting a variety of different beer and like supporting like new variances of beer and things like that. And so I was like, I feel like this is a really good audience to test this with because I feel like they’d be a lot more supportive than just your average drinker. Sure. It was a new concept and it seemed to work. So a lot of those customers were like, you know, very into craft beer and the product did what it said it would. And so they’re all happy. I guess the actual numbers don’t matter as much, but did you have any goals for how many leads you wanted to get?

19:04
and how did you kind of calculate or was it just, hey, let me just get a bunch of people and then enough to sell out this first batch and let’s go with it. No, you I had a lot of capital expenses at the time. So like I had my house, I had my other business, which I had, you know, warehouse for an inventory and everything else. I wasn’t trying to spend a lot of money. My goal, this was a side project. it literally was just something that I was doing on the side. wasn’t, never thought it would turn into what it is today. And so, you know, I wasn’t trying to garner like,

19:33
10,000 leads or anything. was really just, you know, I knew Insulated Drinker, where was one of the fastest growing sectors of housewares from my research. I knew that people liked the vacuum insulated water bottles and coffee mugs and things like that. I knew that there was a sector of the market that was being largely ignored. And, you know, I guess the point is, is like, if people like cold water, and they’re willing to spend $30 on a product to keep their water cold, why wouldn’t they spend

20:02
the same amount to keep beer cold, which one is more expensive and two is something that is like more important to people than water. Like not in terms of like from a health standpoint, but like people get more excited about alcohol than they do about drinking water. And so I was like, I just, felt like this was a market that was untapped, but I wanted to have some sort of validation. Right. Yeah. I I wanted some sort of validation before I sort of jumped the gun and like spending the money on the mold and

20:30
you know, investing in our first inventory batch and stuff like that. okay, it was. All right. So okay, so you sell that of your first batch, you said like a quarter of it was to already pre committed orders and the rest was to that list. Like, how do you go from there to like your first 2 million?

20:49
So after we sold through that first batch, we actually didn’t relaunch our second version until 2017, like beginning of 2017. So we didn’t do a second batch for the Hopsilator. That first batch was just about validation, getting customer feedback. I would send emails and surveys to those customers about what they liked, didn’t like, what they’d like to see in the next version, stuff like that. So in the meantime, again, I had identified that there was this entire market that was being ignored.

21:19
And I had some other ideas. so our, next concept that I was working on was called the wine slater. So it’s our insulated wine growler. So you pour a bottle of wine inside, insulates, uh, and maintains the temperature for over 24 hours. And the idea behind that was like, you can’t take wine in glass free zones. So, you know, parks, uh, beaches, uh, on people’s boats. A lot of times they don’t want you to have them there campsites. There’s a lot of places that you can’t take class and therefore you can’t take wine. And so.

21:47
If you transfer it into a container that’s not made of glass, it takes care of the glass free zone problem. And then the added benefit is that you don’t need to cooler ice. Like you can just pour this into the wine slater, throw it in a backpack and for over 24 hours, like you’ve got perfectly chilled wine. That product was a little easier to create. I had less moving parts. Um, was a lot cheaper to make. And so did the exact same thing over again. At this time I targeted female only again, sort of same, same age demographic, much.

22:16
broader in terms of like who the audience was. So it’s people that were like interested in voting and outdoor activities and wine and sort of this wide variety of people that all sort of fit into this category that I believe like would get benefit out of this product. And this time we actually collected a little over 7,000 emails. thing I think for the 7,000 emails I probably spent under a thousand bucks. What? Okay. We had a landing page.

22:42
Same exact thing, like I had the CAD files turned into digital renders, which then add Photoshop into people’s hands. They’ve got through, talked about the benefits of the product, everything else. I ordered seven. Okay, hold on one sec. So you’re saying you spent like 14 cents a lead? that? Did I do the math correctly?

23:02
I honestly don’t remember, but I know it was a whole lot of money because again, like I had all my money invested in something else. I know it didn’t spend like five grand to do it. And I’m pretty sure it was probably in the like thousand dollar range. Okay. Out of those customers. So we had again, we seem to see like a 30 like open rates were extremely high. So our open rates for those emails were in the like 50 % range, which was actually phenomenal, especially from like

23:30
typically on Facebook, you’re not getting extremely high quality leads. Yeah. And it’s not even something like now when we ran campaigns like that, like we don’t get anything close to that. So I’m not sure if that was just like the period in time or sure or what. Can I ask you a question about the wine product real quick? So you actually have to pour the wine into the container. Yeah. So it comes with a little silicone funnel and you pour the wine inside. so is it just like a thermos then essentially just market it differently? Okay.

23:58
It’s shaped like a wine bottle. It holds a full bottle of wine perfectly. You know, it serves its purpose. It’s like… 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

24:25
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24:54
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. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s EMERGECOUNSCL.com. Now back to the show.

25:16
Sorry, I interrupted you. So you did the same process, but you got more leads. sounds like 7x more leads for this launch. And then what? Yeah, so same thing. I ordered 7,000 units, seven different colors for the Wine Slater. So we did all the… We tried to do a spectrum. So was like aqua, so blue, pink, yellow, green, black, white, and I don’t remember what the other color was.

25:45
Same exact process. you know, I, this time actually, you know, I had to invest into 7,000 units, which was a bit more of an undertaking, but like the response to the product was actually significantly better than the hops later was. Um, I think part of that was just the fact that one, we invested a little more into marketing and two, uh, we were targeting a much broader audience, but once that product came in, uh, so that came in November 26th, 2016, and that product sold out in two weeks.

26:13
So we did $270,000 in sales in that two week period. Sold completely out before Christmas. All those products arrived to everyone’s stores before Christmas. And that sort of ended our first year and closed us out at around $300,000 in sales for the year. So that was just based on Facebook leads that you generated in that email list that you had, right? No, the leads, like we had probably a 50 % open rate. And I would say out of that, you know, maybe 1500 to 2000 people actually purchased.

26:43
or at least 1500 to like 2000 units. over that two week period, a lot of that we were running Facebook ads and stuff. again, like I don’t remember what our return on ad spend was, but I know it was very high. And yeah, so over like a two week period, you know, between the email list and the Facebook ads that we were running, we sold out. Could I ask you why you decided to do so many colors on that first run? So funny, it ties back into V2 design.

27:11
Um, so whole concept behind VG design was actually, uh, I had like walked into a granite tile showroom or a granite showroom and spent like four hours picking out granite from my kitchen. And then I walked into a tile showroom to pick out a backsplash and for glass style, were like four color options. Um, and there, just thought there was a disconnect. So like our whole thing in VG design was like, we had the largest color selection for glass tiles. So like a little bit of something for everyone’s taste. And so I sort of applied that same concept to drinkware.

27:40
All the drinkware at the time really came in like solid colors or just stainless steel. And so I thought like bringing color into this and like allowing people to personalize and like using as a conversation piece or like match it, you know, to their outfits or like having it be really like a fashion accessory instead of just a product for their wine would make it a little more powerful. And so it’s just something I wanted to test because with the Hoffs later, we only did stainless steel and black for that first version. Okay.

28:07
with this product since we were targeting women, I just thought as an opportunity to like get a little more funky with the colors. And that actually worked really well. And you know, I now we have, you know, 30 plus different colors for the majority of our products. Dang. So you didn’t find that like one color dominated all the sales and then you had problems getting rid of some of the other colors? No, because we didn’t do like different shades of the same color, right? Like, that was sort of what I was talking about, like with the color spectrum. It was like picking like one green, one blue, one pink. Got it. Okay.

28:36
I’m trying to pick something that fit in each category and like was most popular. So for like blue, did like a Tiffany blue, like Aqua for pink, we did like a neon pink, you know, for, for orange, did like a coral color cause like world’s popular. So, you know, I looked at like Pantone color trends and what’s popular and use that to basically figure out like which color I wanted to select for, each part of the spectrum. And that worked really well because you know,

29:03
Again, like everyone has different buying preferences. So when you have, you know, thousands of people looking at a product, like not everyone’s gonna want to have the same exact thing. Okay. Yeah. All right. So it’s the start of 2017 and it sounds like you have two products at this point, right? Yep. Was it just more of the same to get to that first 2.1 million? Yeah. So we had a product that allowed you to bring wine into glass free zones, but there was nothing to drink it up. So February, 2017, we launched our Uncork series, which was our insulated wine tumbler.

29:34
So now we’re able to create like an insulated wine tumbler set where you could get two wine glasses and the wine slater sort of as a set. And that was like one of our most successful basebook campaigns for like all of 2017. Is this all digital marketing at this point to get sales? Yeah. I mean, we had some retailers, like we had a become a dealer button on the website where people could apply, but we probably have like 50 retailers in 2017 if that.

30:00
And we weren’t actively looking for any, yeah, it was all direct to consumer. All right, did you use anything outside of Facebook? Were you using Google, shopping? We didn’t start using Google till the end of 2017. Okay. So I was actually running all of our Facebook ads until October 2017. I did, again, did not know a lot about Facebook ads. I just knew how to run very basic campaigns. And I started to see, as I was trying to scale our budget, it just wasn’t performing.

30:30
nearly as as I wanted to and we’re starting to see diminishing returns. And so that was when I sort of brought on our first hire, which was Mitmar. Can you comment on why you hired someone versus maybe just getting an agency first off? I talked with agencies. So I talked with Talk Media at the time. They were just a little too expensive. had a minimum commitment and we weren’t in their spend level at that time. then I think their minimum fee was like 10 grand or something.

31:00
So it was like fairly expensive for me. And I also just didn’t really like, you know, I had other friends who had started companies and like they had heard negative things about agencies. So I wanted to have someone like working on our account day to day and not just like sort of touching it, you know, for an hour or whatever. And so I ended up just hiring a contractor. So I used up work and, you know, sort of interviewed probably 10, 15 different people that had.

31:26
good reviews and done a fair amount of work. So like over $100,000 earned and had them do like an audit of our account and put together like a of a roster of like things that they would do differently if they were to come on and then sort of pick the best person for that. Is this a full time hire then or just a contractor in the beginning? Just the contractor and a contract at that time. Okay. And then he basically scaled what you were doing.

31:51
Yeah, so we had done a million dollars in sales from January to October and then from October to December we did another million. So he was able to come on and like pretty much revamp what we were doing and get not only better results than what I was doing, you know, at scale he was able to condense what I had done in 10 months into three. Okay. And we’re getting better results. so

32:16
We didn’t start you asked about Google and other so we didn’t start advertising on Google like shopping network and Snapchat and like all other places that we advertise till 2018. Okay. You sound like a smart guy that you could figure out Facebook ads. I’m just kind of curious what they what your consultant did that you weren’t doing that allow you to scale so quickly. So for me it was like look like audiences and segmenting. It just wasn’t something that I was fantastic at. And so he was like really good at sort of analyzing the data that we had and creating

32:45
I was just kind of beating the same audience over and over and over. And so, you know, our, um, like frequency rate was going up and, know, I’ve tried and create other audiences, they wouldn’t work as well. So it always go back to like what was working. And, um, you know, he was able to like successfully create lookalike audiences where we were able to target new people with similar interests. We’re again, like we’re bringing down the frequency that they’re seeing these ads and we’re getting significantly better results by doing that. So.

33:14
I’m not 100 % sure. I would say a lot of it was just attributed to campaign structure and audience structure. Okay. Well, because I know since I run all my own ads also, it’s a pain in the ass to kind of rotate creatives. I was just wondering, since you’re running this other company, perhaps you might not have had just the time to give it your all in terms of Facebook ads. That’s kind what I was getting at. I was wondering if that was the case. Yeah. I mean, probably a little bit of everything.

33:41
You know like our the creators we were using weren’t fantastic The copy was written by me like I’m sure there’s a lot of factors that played into like why it did significantly better after I brought Him on. Okay. Were you still were you starting to run your Facebook ads directly to your products at this point? Or were you still trying to get leads? No, so we only did leads for the initial two. Okay, you would actually stock inventory. We were running acquisition campaigns

34:09
Okay. I’m able to actually directly to like collection pages. Okay. Hey, I just want to make fun of Austin Bronner here because I saw in one of your other interviews that you said the Spindle Wind pop-up increased your signups by 4x. Was it? Yeah, I wrote about that on a blog post and I got a 2x increase and thing but then everyone started making fun of me because I for you, you got 4x right in terms of the number of leads that you were getting versus the old form, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

34:39
There you go, Bronner, Spend-A-Win pop-up for the win. Okay, sorry, sorry to say that. Do you know who Austin is by any chance? We still use our own version of that today. We have different versions. Like we use a text signup form and then we also have, we just do know, but we did our own custom Spend-A-Win version and it still performs extremely well to this day. Yeah, I wrote my own also actually. Yeah, it performs better than the ones that you can get off the shelf. Okay, sorry, I just wanted to, I thought I’d bring that up just in case people

35:09
still doubt the power of the spin to win. All right. Okay, so you hit 2.1 million in 2017. And then all of sudden you like 10x the following year. What happened? Yeah, so a couple things. I in 2017, I sold my house, I also sold my other business. So I was able to like, so towards the end of that year, I was able to fully invest in roommate. So all the money went in towards investing in inventory for Q4.

35:36
And then a lot of the money that we made in Q4 was reinvested back in inventory for Q1 of 2018. like going into spring and summer, we had pretty solid on an inventory to be able to sustain growth. Cause in 2017, like for a lot of the year we would run pre-orders. So, you know, I would literally drive people to the website, they would pay for the product and then, you know, it’d say like 90 day lead time or whatever. And then we’d get the product created and then I would air ship it in instead of shipping it by sea. So we get it quicker and then we would ship out.

36:05
product and do that in batches. Because again, like I didn’t have the money to really invest in like 1000s and 1000s of units to just talk about that real quick, actually, because I run an ecommerce business and cash flow is always a problem. Right? So you bootstrap this you still own 100 % of this, right? So yeah, we actually just closed an equity deal last Friday. Last Friday, but hitting 36 was all on your own bootstrap, right? Yeah. Okay. How do you get the money to fund the inventory?

36:35
Well, so again, like I had sold my first business, I had rolled that into my second in the house on the house itself. Once it was finished, I was able to pull a line of credit on the house. Okay. I able to leverage that and use that for the business. And then, you know, you’re only allowed to finance 70 % of the house value. And the house wasn’t appraising as high as what I actually sold it for. like, there was just a lot of leftover money that was in that house that

37:03
that I can really touch. when I sold that, you know, I had access to like a significantly larger amount of capital. But yeah, I mean, it was something, you know, I was using this line of credit, but you got to remember like thousands and thousands of units, you know, trying to invest the money into having that on hand, plus having like production deposits on future orders. So you’re not like, you know, running out of stock and placing an order and then waiting 90 days for it to come in, like trying to balance all of that was really difficult. So pre-orders was sort of my answer to that. It allowed me to, you

37:33
pre-sell the product and we didn’t even do it at a discount. But again, these are products that didn’t exist and they came in unique colors and like people wanted them. So they’re willing to wait and we would get maybe 10 % of the customers that didn’t read and you know, didn’t know it was a pre-order or whatever. And we’d either refund them or like explain and a lot of times they were okay with it. But I use that really all throughout 2017 to help grow. I didn’t have to, cause at the same time I was also investing money in like molds and things like that too. So.

38:01
You’re trying to balance all that was difficult, but pre-orders was sort of the answer because it allowed me to pre-sell the product. You get the product in after 90 days, ship it out, and then repeat the process over and over again and sort of roll the money back into the company. But 2018 was the changing point because not only did I sell my other business, my house, we also got our bank line of credit because we had had our two-year anniversary. So after like two years of business, we were able to get a formal $250,000 line of credit from the bank.

38:29
And so it was an unsecured line of credit. It wasn’t collateralized against inventory or anything. I was through SBA. And that was a few month process. I started working on that beginning like January 2018. think end of February, we probably closed that. So like right in time for spring, we were able to place some pretty large orders on top of, you know, the orders we had already placed from the money we had made from Q4 2017. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, again, like

38:57
I had brought on the guy that I was using for Facebook ads at the end of 2017. We had started seeing really good results with scaling, you know, the financial aspect of like having a lot more money to put in the inventory. think all those things combined are what allowed us to grow so quickly in 2018. And then on top of that, we added in, you know, Google and Google Shopping Network and Snapchat and Pinterest and Bing and Influencer Marketing, like a ton of different channels throughout the year.

39:24
So we’re just reaching customers in a different way and really finding out and figuring out what works for us and what didn’t. Okay. So outside of Facebook, what are those other channels have worked the best for you? So Google works extremely well. Snapchat works very well for us. Influencer marketing works really well for us. Pinterest is okay, but it’s not super scalable. Snapchat even then we weren’t really able to scale it for a long time. It took a year and a half working with our team in beta programs and whatnot.

39:53
their tracking just wasn’t great back then. like, trying to actually track results from their platform was like nearly impossible. So we would spend a little bit of money here and there, but you know, we can fully invest into it because without knowing where we’re getting out of it, like that would have just been like, it didn’t make sense to do. I think Google would be I guess you’re probably talking about shopping then. Or Yeah. Okay.

40:20
I would imagine that the keywords for your thing would be just really expensive. Maybe you can pull it off, but are you using Display Network at all? Yeah, we are. And out of those, which one is working for the best for you in terms of Google land? Between Facebook, Google, and everything else, we spend $2.5 million a month. Our marketing team is 13 people now. I honestly don’t know. I don’t really have my hands in that. Okay. I’m just curious if you knew. Yeah.

40:48
What would you say I mean, man, the fact that you bootstrap this from the ground up means that you were you probably have working knowledge of all aspects of your business at some point in time. So what would you say were your biggest struggles early on? Yeah, so biggest struggles were definitely fulfillment. You know, with the pre order method, it wasn’t super difficult. So I had a shared warehouse. So VT Design, I stored a tile there, when the product would come in, I’d have it delivered to that warehouse. And then I I’d have

41:17
10, 15 friends come help me package these orders over a couple of day period and get them out the door. But it wasn’t until like we got our first facility and started hiring employees for day to day fulfillment that I really understood just how difficult getting products out the door was on time and how much of a distraction it was for me. Because like I, what I really enjoyed in the business was the product development innovation aspect and like.

41:44
there’s none of that in in order fulfillment. And so it was a huge time stock for me. I spent a lot of my time doing this and I didn’t enjoy it at all. No sort of where like shit monk came into play. So like we use a three PL even to this day, which allowed us to completely free up the fulfillment side of things and you know, really focused on what we’re good at. then the second cheaper going with three PL just kind of when you run all the numbers in terms of headcount and mindshare. I definitely did. Yeah, I did at the time even now.

42:13
at the current scale we’re at, it’s iffy. But if you’re under 20, $30 million in sales, definitely for a variety of reasons, like you obviously have the pick fees and warehousing fees and things like that. Typically, the warehousing fees are just passed on, so it’s going to be pretty similar to what you’re paying in your own warehouse. So really, your additional costs are going to be the initial pick fee and then additional pick fees on top of that. If you look at the shipping rates that you get as, let’s say, a company that’s shipping

42:42
200 packages out the day, 200 packages out the door a day versus like a fulfillment center that’s shipping, let’s say 30,000. The rates that they get offset the pick fees. So, you know, I know like our average cost to ship a product was over $10 because our products are really heavy. Like our average package is almost three pounds. Okay. So really heavy, really expensive to ship. And that dropped by over 40 % when we moved over to a fulfillment center, which completely covered.

43:11
Plus, um, you know the initial pick fee and additional pick use for those orders Nice. So there was also a forcing function right because when you sold that tile business presumably the warehouse went with it or um No, because so we ran fulfillment ourselves for seven eight months Okay, so the tile business went I had gotten a new warehouse and which was just for roommate and then we actually upgraded that warehouse three times in a year period so we went from

43:38
3500 square foot warehouse, like 7,000 to 20,000. And same thing, like it was really in that 20,000 square foot warehouse that, and this is beginning of 2018, that we were just seeing major growing pains. Like we had just moved in there, got everything set up. And I remember we got like four cargo containers then, and we were putting it all up on racks and stuff. And it took up like, I don’t know, a third of the warehouse. And we pulled out of that in like three weeks.

44:07
Oh man, crazy. And I was like, oh my gosh, like what a complete waste of time. Like we just set up this new warehouse and like it’s not even going to be big enough for this next order we’re going to have to place. And I had met Dan who owns Shipmong through Forbes 30 under 30. And you know, pretty early in 2018, I started getting, so I think we gave them maybe 30 % of our daily volume upfront. Just to sort of test the relationship. Yeah. We’re like a two or three month period. ended up moving 100 % of that over.

44:37
And then yeah, warehouse, you know, ended up buying out the, think we stopped, we stood out for a year and then the subway serve, um, sort of bailed on that place. And then I just bought out the contract early. Are you guys on Amazon? Yeah. Yeah. So we’re using a FBA. Yeah. So we did the vendor relationship with them for a while. Hated it. Went back to FBA, but yeah, we’ve been on Amazon since late 2018. Okay.

45:06
So in terms of the way product gets in there, do you just have Shipmunk ship over whatever products are as needed to kind of top it off on Amazon? Yeah, exactly. We warehouse all of our stuff in one place. you know, big retailer orders ship out from Shipmunk, direct consumer orders ship out from Shipmunk, FBA shipments are pick packed and fulfilled by Shipmunk. So they, if we if we send five cargo containers to ship or to FBA, then

45:34
They’re the ones like labeling all the cartons and palatizing it, setting up the pickup and whatnot. Okay. And then you’re in a bunch of retail stores. Can you kind of comment on your efforts there? Like is the retail segment more than the e-commerce segment? Nope. So in 2018 we were diversifying our marketing channels. But outside of that, I really wanted to diversify our actual sales channels and create like a true omnichannel brand. I’ve seen too many companies, you know, I talked about like Facebook ad costs.

46:03
So from like 2016 to 18, the amount that like the cost per click and you know, everything else went up across the board was just ridiculous, especially for us. And I just didn’t see it as being sustainable if we were running 100 % of our sales and 100 % reliant through just digital marketing. And so I wanted to create a brand that, know, I had, again, a hypothesis that there were like three different types of customers. There was the…

46:31
brand loyalist, which wants to shop direct with you and they’re on your email list and text list and like they want to be on the know and limited product releases and all that stuff. And then you have your Amazon customer who like they see an ad or someone talk about the product or whatever. And the first thing they do is just go to Amazon because they want like unbiased reviews in Amazon Prime. And then you have the sort of older, more reserved customer who would much rather like see and touch and feel the product in person before making a purchase. And so that’s been in the three categories. It was direct to consumer, Amazon and retail.

47:01
And we really only had direct to consumer. So throughout 2018, we started ramping up our Amazon efforts. We started working with retailers, you know, and moving into 2019 retail was a really, really big focus for us. So this year, wholesale will probably be roughly 30 % of our business. Okay. Another 25 % of that is Amazon and then the rest is direct to consumer. So.

47:29
roughly half of what we do is direct to consumer and the rest is made up by other channels. you know, if we see a downturn in retail, like it’s not really going to affect the overall business and you know, if the cost for advertising goes up and like we have to pull back a little bit on spend for the month on direct to consumer, then like wholesale and Amazon usually make up the difference. So we’ve created this really cool ecosystem where, um, you know, there’s ebbs and flows, but you know, typically our months always end up very well. Um, just because, you know, we do have such a diversified way of

47:58
of reaching customers and selling to them. So I think I saw in another interview that you’re trying to grow this to a nine figure company. What’s it going to take to get there for you? what’s on the road We’re going to be there this year. So we’re at almost $70 million in sales for the year. Wow, nice. Q4 is our biggest quarter. So we typically do 30 to 40%, if not more, of what we do in Q4. So we’ll be over $100 million of revenue this year.

48:26
But a lot of that is attributed to wholesale. So wholesale last year we did 3 million. This year it’s going to be 20 to 25 million. We brought on 115 sales reps across the US. We got into some pretty major retailers that were in Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s and Bass Pro and Nordstrom and Palmetto Moon and Total Wine and Spirits. We’re in almost 5,000 retailers now. And that’s a big component of it.

48:55
We’ve had a lot of new product releases and our teams continue to grow and we’ve gotten a lot more scrappy. Yeah, it’s a combination of a lot of things, but we’ll be there this year. Let me ask you this question. If you were to do it all over again, would you still go with the digital marketing route followed by retail or would you have gone the other way around? No, absolutely. I would do it the exact same way. Okay. What we’ve seen with retail and why retail is so successful for us is because of direct-to-consumer.

49:24
Think about this, okay, you walk into a store and you see a product for the first time, like you’ve never heard about it, you’ve never seen someone talk about it, you’ve never seen an ad for it. You’re probably just gonna walk by it, right? Like, it’s not gonna stand out to you, because it’s not familiar. With direct-to-consumer, there are, I mean, think about, you know, we reach millions and millions and millions of people every single week, so we’re not getting millions of orders every week, right? So like, people are seeing.

49:51
the brand and seeing the product. But again, they might fit into that category of like people that want to shop direct or like touch and feel the product first before buying it or whatever. And so they walk into a store now and they see roommate and like they’re familiar with the brand. Like, you know, our displays that we have are like designed to stand out and catch your eye. And so we’ve just seen like massive adoption and sell through and a lot of the retailers are seeing something that like they’ve never even seen before.

50:18
just because of that relationship we’ve already built with the consumer before going into retail. Whereas if you do it in the reverse, like you’re really relying on the retailer to like tell your story and you know, they’re not going to do a good job of that. Oh, exactly. Like they can’t tell it the way you can. So if, if you can do that yourself and then just basically use them as a vessel for selling the product, then it’s a, it’s a symbiotic relationship because now they, it’s hands off. Like all they have to do is literally just put it on their shelves.

50:45
And we don’t have to worry about them like telling the brand story wrong or like not positioning the products right or whatever it is because the customer already knows what it is. Like, and now they can touch, feel and buy the product in person. So that’s been something that I think was extremely beneficial. And one of the reasons why wholesale like not only has been so successful, but has been able to scale so quickly. And I think if we did it in reverse, it would not have been that way. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Hey Dylan, if anyone has any questions about your company or

51:13
want to buy your products, where can they find you guys? Yeah, so my Instagram is at Dylan d y l a n dot Jacob. If you have any questions, just drop me a DM. I answer DMs all the time. And if you want learn about the product, you can go to roommate.com. So BRU m a t e.com. And then our Instagram is BRU dot m a t. Awesome, Dylan. Thanks a lot for coming on show, man. Really appreciate it. Cool. Thanks, Steve.

51:41
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I love insane growth stories like Dylan’s when all the pieces just magically come into place. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 346. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon 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 KLABIYO.

52:09
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-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now, if I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

52:38
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.