Month: July 2022

Talk-Commerce kalen jordan cricket protein

That was a joke

Kalen Jordan introduces the concept of a new podcast called “That was a Joke,” sponsored by Cricket Protein Bars.

So far, we do not have the sponsor or the podcast, but this is our first attempt at accomplishing this task. You will learn about surfing in Costa Rica, swimming in Minnesota, and electric skateboards. As a bonus, I have left in our conversation on Employee Happiness.

Brent talks about his new favorite author, Caimh McDonnell, and reads a Love poem from John Kenney

Kalen tells us about his week-long surfing lesson in Costa Rica from Witches Rock

Cricket Protein
Cricket Protein

Kalen: How are you doing? I’m hanging in there, man. You’re look-in fit is a fiddle. Thanks, dude. suns out guns out. Do you know what I’m saying? 

Brent: Wow. I could tell those are some good size guns. You got the, and you’re in Texas. Those are the rules.

Brent: I don’t make the rules. You move from California to Texas because of your arms. So you could be legal in Minnesota. We don’t have li it. Yeah. 

Kalen: Yeah. Those are street legal. Those are street-legal in Minnesota, but yeah, I might run into some run into some snags. How are you doing, man?

Kalen: What’s heck where are you? Hawaii. Min, Minnesota. I’m in 

Brent: Minneapolis. 

Kalen: Minneapolis. 

Brent: Okay. Yeah, as they say, as the credit board, a plane somewhere. 

Kalen: I don’t get, I 

Brent: don’t get, I don’t never mind. It’s a joke. Just ignore me for a while, 

Kalen: dude. If we ever do our own podcast, never mind. It’s a joke.

Kalen: That’s the whole podcast. Oh yeah, there you go. How good is 

Brent: that? Yes. Sponsored by. Somebody funny, 

Kalen: we’ll figure it out. Cricket, protein bars. I, there you go. My whole goal in life is to have a podcast with a cricket protein bar as a 

Kalen: sponsor. 

Brent: Yeah. And those are, I don’t know why. And those are actual crickets, right?

Brent: That use the protein from actually grinding up the cricket powder. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. It’s gluten free 

Kalen: is it? Yeah, that makes sense. 

Brent: There’s no gluten in crickets, right? Unless they’ve just eaten some fresh grain. 

Kalen: True. I’m actually, by the way, I’m using a gluten-free microphone right now. I don’t know.

Kalen: I can tell looks 

Brent: great. Yeah, no it’s yeah. Mine is a paleo microphone. Okay. 

Kalen: It’s non GMO 

Brent: as well. It is non GMO. My microphone was built or was grown in fields in North Dakota that had GMO products next to it. They blew the extra mic. Bits of microphone blew into the field and contaminated it.

Brent: And that’s why I have my stand, which is blue and my microphone, which is I believe a zoom. Is that 

Kalen: a GMO adjacent microphone? Because I can’t do this. I know. Sorry about that. I can’t have you on this esteemed podcast with that kind of a setup. That’s absurd. 

Brent: It is. And I agree with you a hundred percent.

Brent: It’s can we talk about disgusting? 

Kalen: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, which is the gigantic BigCommerce partner award behind you. 

Brent: It’s okay. It’s actually not an award. It’s just that we’re a partner with BigCommerce now because I’m on all kinds of BigCommerce calls and they got sick of seeing the Magento stuff in background did that’s in fact, sums out.

Brent: We did get an award in in. 21 for, from BigCommerce, but it was during the pandemic and they never shipped him out. Oh, I’m gonna call him out right now on this podcast that never got our award. That’s rough, the old that they did send me that in place. 

Kalen: That’s the old partner award trick.

Kalen: Oo, that’s the oldest trick in the partner book. 

Brent: We’re gonna go heavily branding here. 

Kalen: I like, what is that? What is that hat that you got on there? I should have one of those here. It’s 

Brent: called Hoooooooofa 

Kalen: dang it. If I would’ve had that in 

Brent: your video I gotta take off. Cause I click a little kid with a hat on.

Kalen: Yeah. That’s the problem with hats. They can tend to do that, 

Brent: unfortunately. All right. What we’re talking about, some fun stuff today, man. You had some really topics, all 

Kalen: sorts of topics, all sorts of fun stuff. We’re gonna go all over the map. 

Brent: What is the end of your podcast this week? Or is it a video 

Kalen: series?

Kalen: We’re figuring it out as we go. We’re figuring it out as we go. And it will be reveal at the proper time, 

Brent: but I’m gonna, we are in the, we were, we are gonna remix and it is also gonna be a bonus episode on talk commerce. Perfect. Fantastic. Fantastic. So we’re, we’ll see, it’ll be competing and we should release it together.

Brent: Same week, same apple podcast stream. 

Kalen: You’re gonna compete with my own podcast. All I can 

Brent: do is try to keep, I can try to keep up with 

Kalen: that non GMO microphone. 

Brent: Yes. But I do feel like on my stream, I’m gonna put a bunch of beeps in. Just to cover up your swearing. Oh, okay. 

Kalen: Son of a bur yep.

Kalen: Burp. Yeah I do swear a lot these days. just not on podcasts. You’re 

Brent: You’re in Texas. You have to, 

Kalen: it’s a lot, it’s a lot to swear about including. Employee culture and happiness, which is one of my favorite topics. Really. Okay. It really is. I’m big on call employee culture and happiness.

Kalen: I’m surprised that you’re surprised you sounded like you were surprised by that, which I don’t I’m particularly 

Brent: appreciate. I, because I’m not surprised. 

Kalen: That’s my whole, that’s my whole life. 

Brent: That’s your whole shtick. 

Kalen: I have a handbook. Have you read my handbook on employee culture and happiness? 

Brent: No. No, we should read it right now.

Brent: yeah, no, I don’t have a, it could be like an audio book. 

Kalen: yeah, one of these days it’ll be an audio book. No, but that was something you wanted to talk about was employee culture and happiness. 

Brent: So yeah, I think in today’s age, when while we’re here in Minnesota, the unemployment rate is 2% or something like that.

Brent: Oh, crazy. Like crazy low. Yeah. As an employer, you have to go the extra mile to retain your employees. 

Kalen: you have no choice. So is this just a pragmatic, is this just a pragmatic thing? Listen, if the if the unemployment rate were higher, we wouldn’t care about this at all, but because it’s so low.

Kalen: We gotta bite the bullet and be nice to people. 

Brent: yeah. That is a great, that is a great way to look at it. I will answer that in full transparency that that you should not take an employment rate into account. And the reason is what does it cost to rehire the next person?

Brent: The 2% is a hard. Wall for an employer to get over. Because there’s simply not anybody you can hire, right? Yeah. Let’s just say it’s 10%. You get really sloppy and you’re hiring. You’re like, oh, we’ll hire people and blah, blah, blah. And if they leave, who cares? Just because we can hire more people.

Brent: Yeah. But does that mean because you’ve hired somebody new that person is gonna just hit the ground running. like even in the programming world, developers could be the only, one of the, they developers theoretically could be the fastest onboarding person you could have because hopefully your projects is detailed well, and they can come in and they just look at the requirements they’re already qualified.

Brent: They could start working right away. There’s still gonna be a week or two of rampup 

Kalen: Point them at some tasks and have ’em like jump right in, in theory. 

Brent: Yeah. Theoretically, they’re gonna have to learn a little bit, but let’s just say have two weeks or a month to get them up and running. Okay.

Brent: Let’s just say in the US developers make whatever we’ll use a round number, a hundred grand a year. What does that then cost you that one that’s $8,000 that you have to pay that one month of trying to get everybody up and running, onboarding all those other things.

Brent: Yeah, so it’s a lot of money. I think that, that 2% unemployment rate is a wake up call to employers who haven’t been big on employee culture and should be working on that. 

Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No, and yeah, I was just kidding. It’s easy for me to beat, to joke about these things.

Kalen: Cause I don’t have any employees and. And then I give you a heart. You actually have responsibilities over there. So I’m busting your chops. but 

Brent: it is a I appreciate that question and I believe that is a completely fair question to ask any employer. I 

Brent: think it’s a factor for sure.

Kalen: It doesn’t change, like what’s the right thing to do, but it is a factor. But what are, so you’ve been in the. Working world for a long time. Since the Dawn, but so what are some things that are top of mind for you as far as like employee culture, 

Brent: keep people happy.

Brent: think that Time off is certainly a big one. Having well planned and thought out like for a developer, right? want a developer wants to have a project manager that is going to help them be better developers they’re they don’t want help technically, but they need help org or 

Kalen: they things to be organized.

Kalen: They just want like requirements not to change things to be straight forward, tell me what I need to do. I can do it. It’s not gonna change 16 times and then I can get it 

Brent: done. Yeah. They want them to run interference.

Brent: They don’t want the client talking to them directly. Yeah. They, hopefully the project manager can handle all that. So yeah, from a, from an employee stand happiness standpoint, we want to encourage that and support that. Yeah. All those pieces as you come down the whole pipeline of getting work done.

Kalen: That’s really good, actually, because there’s so many different, you could talk about benefits and perks and but I really think the core of what a developer cares about is exactly that make the work itself. Clean to whatever extent, in the real world, things are gonna change.

Kalen: Things are gonna be requirements are gonna be fuzzy and stuff like that, but as much as possible make, the process of getting work, done the project management structure, like straightforward, I think also probably you wanna work on challenging stuff. Interesting stuff too. That’s also obviously gonna be a big component.

Kalen: But like the work itself, make the work, improve the work itself, as opposed to all the things around it that are important. Are. Nice to haves, but they’re not really the core of what your job is about. 

Brent: Yeah. This actually, this whole discussion would be better for a panel.

Brent: If we had say four or five employers, that’d like to just talk about what is it that they, or even employees like are just a regular. Developers. No developers are regular, they’re all extraordinary. Find four extraordinary developers, which are every developer and ask them what makes them happy.

Brent: You’re probably gonna get four different answers, right? Some of them want to get paid. Some of them would like lots of time off. Some of them like flexibility in their schedule, as a edge agile, is all kinds of things. It’s, it is gonna be varied. It’s a complicated, it is a complicated task.

Brent: But that culture that any company embodies would have people that have been there for a long amount of time and they would be the ones driving this culture, the ones that like the culture. So maybe it is about time off or flexibility. Those are the ones that are gonna stick around.

Brent: And if somebody doesn’t care about some of those other things, then all they wanna do is make the biggest money. Then that’s where you see developers jumping from jumping around the agency. And again, I don’t wanna make it sound too general. Like not it just because somebody goes from one agency to the other because they make more money.

Brent: Doesn’t mean they’re jumping because of the money. There’s all kinds reasons. I don’t want to generalize it, but it’s just an example of the different parts of that. That encompass that whole idea of employee happiness. 

Kalen: I think of the dev teams that seem felt to me, the strongest are where there’s this combination of you enjoy working with your peers, you respect them. They help you and also challenge you. So if you have a problem, you can get feedback, get help, get support. The work is interesting. You have a high level of autonomy or ownership of what you’re doing.

Kalen: There’s not a lot of red tape and, nonsense. And and then you get paid well, that’s that never 

Brent: all those 

Kalen: things, right? Yeah. But you’re an employee, right? Are you technically an employee? Yes, I am. Are you ha are you happy? Are you, 

Brent: That’s good. Yeah. I think part of that is autonomy.

Brent: You want to give people a degree of autonomy to to be able, you wanna give them space to make some of their own decisions. Yeah. So that’s huge. Yeah. I think one thing that’s always important is knowing what is that space? And then what is, how does creativity go into that space?

Brent: As an employer, you want to recognize that people need some of that space, right? They, and they, and if you’re demanding so much time out of it what is an acceptable, modest time to for either create creative growth or personal growth or educational growth?

Kalen: Yeah, because like I I remember this one dev team I was on and we were working on a new project. It was interesting. It was fun. It was exciting. And then certain people were building certain components of it. And. When you talk about like creativity and stuff, like they were taking some very creative approaches to the architecture of how to build this thing.

Kalen: And we would talk about it and be like, oh yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna work like this. And it’s gonna be super extensible. And it’ll, the code’s gonna be so clean. It’s gonna be. You could tell they were super excited about it from like a creativity standpoint and it sounded cool.

Kalen: It sounded great. But then, a day turns into a week, turns into two weeks and it’s like the thing isn’t getting done, and it’s oh yeah. And they show, show you all the stuff. And then they have a good explanation for why it’s not done.

Kalen: It’s oh I gotta do this. And then I got da, and I gotta refactor it. And they’re all good reasons. And then sometimes people just get caught in like a loop of things can be complicated. And so that’s the flip side of it, is if you’re too creative, like you gotta get stuff done.

Kalen: Like you gotta get, things out the door.

Brent: Yeah, there’s a in the development world, there’s always a push and pull be between the developer who is a perfectionist. And the developer, who’s just a get stuff done. Developer. In a past life I liked, I did development work.

Brent: I would never say I was a developer, a very good one anyways, and I was a get stuff, done, person because especially if you’re a. Single contractor, or, you are the only person accountable to that customer. And so you’re just trying to get as much steps down as you possibly can.

Brent: I think another good role for a project manager is to be that person who can say this task actually takes this long and to do it right. It’s gonna take that long. And the only way to get around doing it right, is doing it wrong. 

Kalen: Say the only way 

Brent: to get a, if you, the only way that’s not do it right.

Brent: Is to not do it. You can say it in so many words, but if you want it done faster, you’re gonna have to take some shortcuts and chances are, it’s not gonna be right. Like you’re not gonna write your unit tests or you’re not gonna do QA on it, or you’re gonna skip over a bunch of functions that, or whatever it is, there’s just things you can do to cut corners.

Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And that’s. Yeah. And then that’s the problem. Like I’m a get stuff. I’m a get stuff done developer and I can move pretty quickly, but I’m not like the perfectionist. And then the downside to that of course, is that, down the road, you realize there’s technical debt.

Kalen: There’s. There’s limitations to what you built that really can start to compound over time. And I really should. , I really should have taken a little extra time and done it, done it. The fir, but there’s really no such thing as doing it. You want to do it as.

Kalen: As best as you can and then improve on that. And that, and this is why somebody that’s been coding for 10 years is so much more efficient. Somebody’s been doing it for a year because they’ve gone through enough of those cycles that they can see, the problems ahead of them and then fix them, from the get go.

Kalen: Yeah 

Brent: yeah. What, so you had some other topics you wanted to go? I did have some topics I had let’s jump into ’em. Let’s 

Kalen: talk about exercise, man. Cuz you’re a big exercise guy. And what have you been doing to. Exercise. What’s your what’s. What do you do, man? You do a lot of stuff. You do cross country skiing.

Kalen: You do all sorts of stuff. What’s. what’s your latest deal? 

Brent: My goal is not to do cross country scheme cuz I’m very tired of the cold weather. Although I do enjoy it when I do it. Yeah. And it is super fun. Yeah. But it’s also cold enough to. Walk on a lake yeah.

Brent: And in order for the ice to be thick enough for you to walk on, it has to be cold for a sustained amount of time. Wait, just the opposite of being a hundred degrees for 13 days in Austin is the opposite of that is to be below freezing for right a month. So the lake is a foot thick anyways.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. So I, right now I’m running and I’m biking and I’m swimming. , I’m doing a little yoga. oh, nice. When did you start the yoga? I had a pretty significant injury back in February that sidelined me. Oh no. Am I running? And, I think stretching is one of those things that I just have to do.

Brent: And so yoga has been a good thing. I was doing it every day, but I’ve cut it down a couple times a day. Just flexibility as a runner. Yeah. You’re you become very inflexible. Yeah. Oh, do you in the same from running thing all the time. So your hips are super tight and oh, 

Kalen: interesting. Yeah. How did you injure yourself?

Brent: Running on the ice. If you can think about and I’m writing an article about it right now I wanted to detail my injury. There’s Icelandic horse that, that has very tiny little steps, lots of tiny steps, right? Lots of cadence you call it. When we run in Minnesota, because we’re running on snow and ice.

Brent: you change the way you run and that then changes like smaller steps a thing. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s not a bad thing, but if you go from, running in a warm place, , I’m not embarrassed to say that I spent most of my November and December in Hawaii, which was warm. Nice.

Brent: And I came back at Christmas and went immediately to Fargo. And it was like going from 80 degrees to minus 10 and go running. And I was in a running streak. So I had to run every day and I hate running on a treadmill. 

Kalen: Why didn’t you stay out there longer? Why didn’t you stay on Hawaii, longer 

Brent: Christmas?

Brent: We have family, like we celebrate some of these holidays and the family that liked whatever reason they like to have us around. I don’t know. Yeah, so just repeated 

Kalen: stress, just a repeated stress thing of running in a little bit of a funny. 

Brent: Yeah. And then, I think my body reacts better to cold weather, like the cardiovascular part.

Brent: So I feel like I can run a lot harder and I do. It just makes it worse because your muscles are super tight because of the cold weather. Anyways, I ended up with a very bad glued injury. I had a running streak going, I had 683 days of running straight before I stopped. What? Wow. And so you really, why did keep that streak going?

Brent: I really wanted to, and I was on a treadmill and I was holding myself up with my arms. Oh, just trying to let my legs dangle. Oh. Until that one mile I thing clicked around and I’m like, this is so stupid. I’m not really running a mile. I’m barely touching the treadmill. I might as well just call it quits and oh no, I got, so I, I had to heal.

Brent: Yeah. So took a while. I did a lot of stretching, lot of trips to the PT. Oh wow. And yeah, it felt, I started feeling better and then immediately, because of all the different pieces, I’ve had IT Band problems and, tight tightness and my IT Band and I’m about 99% now. Oh, that’s 

Kalen: great.

Kalen: How how long did you have to stop running. 

Brent: I stopped for about six weeks. Oh, okay. 

Kalen: Oh, wow. Yeah. That’s frustrating when you’re doing something and then you have to stop cuz that becomes your whole routine and you start to depend on it and stuff and and then if you have to stop, it just sucks.

Brent: Yeah. So now I’ve started doing open water swimming and believe it or not. Our open water swim club starts. June 14th. okay. Cause that’s June 14th. That’s when the, what lakes are, that’s pretty much warm enough to swim in. The water was still 69 degrees on June 14th, right? Yeah.

Brent: That’s chilling by August. They’re gonna be 80 because it’s so hot here in the summer. Do you ever do 

Kalen: ice baths 

Brent: or cold? I’ve done his best. Yeah. 

Kalen: Yeah. Okay. I’ve been wanting to get, I keep hearing about the benefits of I do sauna and stuff, but I keep hearing about the benefits of ice baths. So I wanna do that, but I gotta buy a bag of ice or something like that and just put it in a bathtub tub 

Brent: or something.

Brent: I think Philip does ice baths does into a very, really long run. 

Kalen: Oh, okay. Yeah, a lot of the people I follow on social media related to Jim and workout stuff. Talk about ’em and I gotta get that going. Yeah. I, what were you gonna say? 

Brent: Yeah, I was gonna tell you my last thing that you asked me what I’m doing.

Brent: I have one more thing that I’m doing. Yeah, what I’m biking. Okay. So I swim, I bike and I run. That’s what I pretty much do on yoga. Nice and yoga. I did my first triathlon last weekend and no, 

Kalen: way’s it. Your first tri your first tri. Cause before it was, you were just more pure running and then now you for this year.

Brent: Okay. I did lunch last year too. Anyways, that’s it first. Oh, what are you doing? Tell me what you’re doing. No. For this year. Cause it’s so cold here. 

Kalen: Okay. You don’t your first triathlon this year, but you’ve done triathlons in the past. right? Yes. Okay. You’ve done a ton of 

Brent: them. No, I wouldn’t say a ton, but I’ve done.

Brent: You’ve done a handful. I’ve done solid. Yep. And I’m a terrible swimmer. yeah. You look 

Kalen: like a terrible swimmer. 

Brent: Yes. That’s what everybody says too. 

Kalen: do here’s do you when it comes to exercise, do you do the things because they’re beneficial for you or do you just do the stuff be like, have you gotten to the point where you just do it because you enjoy doing it?

Kalen: Like you do the running cuz you enjoy running. You don’t do it because. It helps you to be healthier or is it a mix of the two? 

Brent: Yeah, I think I am doing it because I absolutely enjoy it. I am trying to enjoy swimming more. , that 

Kalen: swimming is so boring. I’ve tried to do the swimming thing, but I can’t do it.

Kalen: I just lose my mind. I get too 

Brent: bored doing it. They have headphones you can wear while you’re swimming. But oh, I do mainly open water swimming. So the, in Minnesota here it’s supported. So there’s buoys and they have peak lifeguards on paddleboards.

Brent: Oh, that’s cool. I swim with the swim buoy. So I feel pretty safe. And you have a goal, you go. 400 yards come back, four yards. That’s pretty cool. Too big circle or 

Kalen: whatever it is. That’s kinda of an epic dude when I’m in Costa Rica like surfing. you’ll first of all, like just being on a surfboard and paddling is so tiring and you’ll just like, just going from A to B you’ll be exhausted.

Kalen: But then of course you just lay on the surfboard, and chill out and you’ll see dudes open water swimming in the ocean. And. You will just see a guy just go out like as far as you can see, like he’s practically out past the horizon. Just swimming. No, support. nothing. Not even sometimes they don’t even have a boo or anything like that.

Kalen: I don’t know what these people are thinking. It’s insane. 

Brent: But yeah, there’s people that swim miles and mile. I was talking to a guy last night who is in a swim club and he met a lady that is, he, she, there’s a swim you can do across the English channel, which is like 26 or 30 miles or whatever.

Brent: You get out, you stamp your passport and you swim back. That’s funny. So it’s like a 50 mile or 60 mile swim. That’s funny. That’s not gonna be me. I’m not gonna 

Kalen: do that. You’re not gonna do all that. Let me grab another water real quick. Hold I’ll be right back.

Brent: This episode of Kalen talks is sponsored by. Protein cricket bars, protein, cricket bars, bring you crickets and protein in a nice condensed package. Dude, 

Kalen: let’s start a protein cricket bar brand. How cool would that be? 

Brent: There’s probably one that exist. We could be the 

Kalen: spokesperson. That’s true, by the way. I need to install an AC in the garage but which is on my to-do list.

Kalen: So if you wonder why I’m sweating like a madman that’s the reason why I’m just, 

Brent: and we don’t have our AC right on our ACS, not on right now, but it was on last week and it was like, 90, it was 96 here. and it was 64 degrees in my basement, cuz all the, oh, that’s not bad. All the AC drops, that’s not bad.

Kalen: Yeah. But yeah, I like, I feel like on a, like I, I recently got an electric skateboard because I just, I think it’s a lot of fun and I feel like I’ve been on a path of doing, like doing exercise, cuz you, you have to, you wanna get in better shape, you wanna get healthier and then gradually you start to find the things you really love to do.

Kalen: And then eventually you just do the stuff cuz you like, that’s ultimately where you want to get to where you just do the stuff that you love to do. And it’s not, you would do it even if it didn’t make it’s not about the getting healthier is like the byproduct. 

Brent: You know what I mean? Yeah. I is that I totally get a high from running. There’s nothing more fun than getting up, as the sun is rising and having. Whatever amount of miles in front of you and just having this little adventure of running around. And seeing things like when I travel, I always try to do some kind of extended long run or I’d stay on a Saturday to do my long run.

Brent: I think we were gonna get together last spring. I was gonna come to Austin for some event and I had planned on staying an extra day and that’s when I got injured. So I had to cut that one short, but I had a 20 mile run planned in Austin and I have a route planned out and I was super excited to kinda, ah, that’s a bummer.

Brent: Go see the it’s fun to see that I’ve done the The murals, there’s all kinds of paintings and there’s a walking tour. I did eight miles of just running around, looking at all the great paintings on the side of buildings in it’s a great way to see a city. Yeah.

Brent: I think it’s EXPECIALLY fun. Did I say that, right? It, especially cuz I said, some 

Kalen: people say, EXPECIALLY, 

Brent: I feel like that’s a, and that is pronunciation That the one thing I love to say to my wife is I love to say, Hey, would you like to get an EXPRESSO? Yeah. If she said, do you mean Espresso And I said, oh, she 

Kalen: Expresso She corrects you. No, that’s not cool. Yeah. EXPRESSO that’s valid. Yeah. Hundred percent. valid No. I’m jealous of people that are into running, cuz it seems like a really cool way to, like you said, see a city and I’ve tried to get into it, but I’ve just never, and like my joints drive me crazy, but I’ve tried.

Kalen: But that’s how I feel about the skateboard now is I want is it’s a fun way to like I’ve been exploring different parts of the city where I live in that I hadn’t seen before. And it’s a neat way to get around. Yeah, it’s funny how, when you’re just driving you, you just go through the same route that wherever you’re going and you never really stop to smell the roses, 

Brent: or and did you get a one, one wheel, one of those one wheel skateboards or no.

Brent: So 

Kalen: I got a it’s called an evolve. It’s like an actual skateboard with four wheels. Huh? I did try the one wheel and I rented it and I have a buddy here nearby. Who’s super into ’em, but I couldn’t quite get it. Have you ridden a one wheel before? 

Brent: No, but I have a friend who has one.

Brent: Okay. 

Kalen: They seem really cool, but the problem is that you can also, you can fall on them a lot. And they do this nose dive thing. 

Brent: Where that’s exactly what he just broke his collarbone. Are you for real? Yep. He was going 20 miles an hour and it just there’s something with the battery happened.

Brent: The 

Kalen: battery dies it’s oh my gosh, 

Brent: you’re supposed to get a warning. Yeah. He put little wheels on the front, on the back now. So if it does a nose dive, it can but I still think if you’re gonna nose dive and you’re gonna dig in, you’re just gonna, it’s gonna, yeah. You’re not gonna recover 

Kalen: from it.

Kalen: Yeah. It’s scary. I watched a ton of videos on that and I was really nervous about it and stuff like that. Apparently you learn how to feel when that’s happening and then you can avoid it. And those things that you, the wheels are called fangs, the wheels that you put on the front, and then they make it so that if it does nose dive it, doesn’t like hard dive.

Kalen: It gives you a little bit more space or whatever, but yeah, I was just like, nah, and just riding it. It was just weird. I just more comfortable on the skateboard, but I’m still, I’m super nervous about falling just off the skateboard. Because they go, 15, 20 miles an hour and stuff like that.

Kalen: And, 

Brent: And do you have a remote that you hold because I’ve seen those electric skateboards and I’ve seen people holding it remote and they’re just yeah. Cruising. 

Kalen: Yeah. It’s nuts. Yeah. Okay. There. There’s a little remote and actually right after this, I’m gonna go to this meetup and we’re gonna, I’m gonna cruise around with some people 

Brent: electric skateboard meetup.

Brent: Yeah. 

Kalen: Actually it’s a one little bikers too or not, oh, it’s a, I think any electronic per a transportation device, whatever they’re called, but but yeah, it’s a one wheel group and then there’s some people with skateboards too, but I’m gonna be like the one I’m gonna be like the weird one, cause everybody else is gonna have a one wheel.

Brent: Susan and I went out and joined a new bike group on on Wednesday night and nice. There was an, a and B in biking. And so we, and there’s a 40 mile and a 25 mile. So we joined the slow 25 mile group. And I haven’t actually ridden that far this year. And it was an, a group for us anyways, but I was so tired.

Brent: that’s a long 

Kalen: ride. Yeah. That’s a 25 miles. That’s a ride for me at least. If I ride 10 miles, I’m tired. 

Brent: Yeah but you’re going like 10 miles an hour. So that’s pretty fast. 

Kalen: I get

Brent: I know you don’t even know how 

Kalen: fast you’re going. I don’t know how fast away hours making fun of me, but I don’t exactly know why. So 

Brent: did you take, let’s go. I wanna come back to surfing cuz I took surfing lessons last year. Did you take lessons in Costa Rica? 

Kalen: Yeah, I went to a surf camp for a week.

Kalen: Took lessons, whoa. A week. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then shout out to witches rock and then and then I stayed it by myself for the rest of that month. And then we’ve gone back. This is gonna be like our fourth time going there. We were there for three and a half months last year, total. And part yeah, so we loved it.

Kalen: But that’s kind of thing with the skateboard is that I loved surfing so much and I was like, we need to move here. I was talking to my wife about it. Didn’t you know, then you realize it’s a little more complicated than that when you have three kids and stuff, even though we homeschool. kids have dance, they have music, they have their friends.

Kalen: You can’t you gotta stay put, so 

Brent: yeah. I’m just gonna put out a little shout out for Hawaii because the one thing that a lot of people don’t realize about Hawaii is that it is a US state and getting a house there is far easier and than like Mexico or Costa Rica. And getting the other thing is what?

Brent: Go ahead. 

Kalen: Getting a house there is easier. Is that what you said? Yeah. Cuz 

Brent: it’s a US state. You can get a mortgage. I know you wouldn’t need a mortgage, but people that would need one, 

Kalen: I would need a mortgage but it’s expensive there. It’s crazy. 

Brent: It’s crazy expensive. It is expensive, if you go there as a tourist and go out to eat every day, but if you’re making your own food and.

Brent: you live in a local, it’s not as bad, much more expensive. They have a Costco. So that’s all you 

Kalen: need the houses. The houses are expensive. 

Brent: The houses are expensive, but they’re smaller. You pay the same amount for a house, but it’s not gonna be like, it’s not gonna be, what do you have?

Brent: Like 12 or 15,000 square feet in Austin. It’s you’re gonna, you’re probably gonna have to. For the size of the house you have, you’re gonna have to, yeah. If you settle for 2,500 square 

Kalen: feet. Yeah, no. Yeah. If it’s just the two of you and you’re getting a small house, it’s probably super doable. 

Brent: A big house in Kona is 1500 square feet oh, okay.

Brent: Yeah. And a big house for millions is gonna be anything over three or 4,000. 

Kalen: So did you do some, so you did some surfing out, you did some surfing out there. In Hawaii. 

Brent: Yeah. I only did one day of surf lessons. Which now have hearing that you said a week, that’s probably a really good idea.

Brent: The mistake I made and I went with my son was he said paddle back as soon as you can. And so we would go out, do our little run and then we were just both Gavin and I are just whipping it to get back to the start. And it’s man, you guys have never had anybody get back as fast as you guys get back.

Brent: But what happened I wasn’t used to that motion and I ended up bruising, one of my ribs between the waves bouncing and me paddling so hard. It’s bruised a rib. Dude 

Kalen: it’s. Yeah. And it’s so painful. 

Brent: I don’t know if you’ve heard of persuasive kids. I have a very, I have a very persuasive son.

Brent: He’s dad, we’ve gotta go by. Let’s just go to Costco right now. I know they had surfboards he’s like he, he talked me into going to Costco. We bought two surfboards. So you bought, and then every single day, he’s we gotta get out there. We gotta get, which only makes your ribs hurt more. 

Kalen: So you kept going out.

Kalen: I 

Brent: did. 

Kalen: Yep. Okay. So how how many times did you go out total? Did you get the hang of it? 

Brent: My son definitely got the hang of it. I would say because I was in such pain that I never got, I was never relaxed enough that time that we were just back in May and susan. And I went out and just paddled around and it was so much easier once you’re comfortable and not in pain.

Kalen: To, yeah, totally. I feel like that first week for me was like, the there’s just balancing on the board was super hard, like laying down balancing and paddling for me was like, I was just like, I was a wreck. I was like all over the place. And then the rib pain and stuff like that. And then your arms are so sore.

Kalen: It’s yeah, after that week I feel like I started to get the hang of it, but 

Brent: the first, so I’m not the only one that gets rib pain. That’s good to know. Oh, I’m glad that I’m glad that you had all kinds of rib pain. 

Kalen: Yeah, I had so much. And then it’s weird how the pain just starts to go away. Like I think you’re you’re at your, whatever your ribs get conditioned to it.

Kalen: And then, I don’t know, you probably figure out your technique a little better too, whatever, but. 

Brent: It’s fine. You’re from California originally. So was that part of your culture? Did you, were you a surf kid? 

Kalen: No. I didn’t grow up near the beach at all, but I was always into skating and rollerblading and stuff like that.

Kalen: And then snowboarding. So I picked it up relatively quickly, but yeah, it was a new, that was a new thing, but it’s pretty fun. Pretty fun, man. Are we with our time here? We’re almost at our time,

Kalen: there was a couple other things on the list, but I don’t know. I feel like we had a solid sesh, solid yeah. Podcast sesh. 

Brent: So can I’ve got a good I’ve got a one of my favorite poets. Yes. It’s called love poems for married people. Oh, wow. This is great. Can I read a poem? Oh my gosh.

Brent: As we close it out, please. All right. Yeah. And I got this book for Susan. So this is gonna be a joke you’re setting. No, they’re real. It’s love poems by it’s John 

Kalen: Kenny world in which you’re gonna read a real poem right 

Brent: now. Poems 

Kalen: look at it says poem, you found a poem. That’s gonna somehow be an, a joke one way or another, but we’ll see..

Brent: We’ll find out after I read it right. We’ll find out real soon. Okay. Title the Mo title. Ready? Here we go. Are you in the mood? I am. Let’s put the kids down, let’s have a light dinner shower, maybe not drink too much and do that thing I would rather do with you than anyone else lie in bed together and look at our iPhones.

Brent: that’s so dumb. It’s a real. It’s a real poem. 

Kalen: Yep. Yeah. That’s 

Brent: wow. I find all of his poems completely hilarious. And are they all, 

Kalen: they’re all funny. 

Brent: Are they all if you think that’s funny. I think it’s hilarious. 

Kalen: but they’re not like sincere love poems. So it 

Brent: was a sincere love poems.

Brent: I’m this guy has to be Irish because the humor that comes out of it is very Irish. Yeah. 

Kalen: I like it. I like it. I’m gonna flip. I’ve been thinking about actually trying to read some more poetry. I’ve been trying to read fiction. I can’t read fiction though. It’s so hard for me to it just goes in one ear and out the other.

Kalen: versus mostly I’ve just read like non-fiction books and 

Brent: all I’m reading a fiction book. It’s by comb McDonald, and it’s the dead man sins. And we’ll have to put it in the show notes. It’s completely hilarious. He’s got all these anyways. Nice. I am reading a fiction book.

Kalen: Sorry. You cut out just a tiny bit. What was the, what was that book? 

Brent: It is it’s called dead man sins. It’s by Cole. It’s C a I M H I know it’s Irish. And I should know how to say it cuz they often say it, but Cole McDonald. Okay. On Amazon C a I M 

Kalen: H. And 

Brent: what’s it about? It’s a sort of a it’s a detective novel, let’s say, but nice.

Brent: Quite a bit of Irish humor in it. 

Kalen: Nice. I’m reading the Hobbit with my daughter. Oh, that’s a good one, which is fun. Yeah. It’s yeah, it’s pretty. It’s pretty cool. She reads it to me and she understands it much better than I do. Good. She’ll actually test me. She’ll be like, she’ll test my comprehension. She’ll be like, did you understand that part dad.

Kalen: And I’ll be like she’ll have to explain this to 

Brent: me. That’s good that you have to read the line, the witch in the wardrobe. Yeah, 

Kalen: I think they’ve read that one. Yeah. Yeah. They were 

Brent: contemporaries. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkin. 

Kalen: Yeah. I think there’s some science fiction from CS Lewis.

Kalen: I’ve read a bunch of when I was in college, I read a bunch of CS Lewis’s books on Christianity and stuff like 

Brent: that. Yeah. My favorite book is called the Great Divorce. Yeah. 

Kalen: I think I read that 

Brent: one. Yeah. It’s a good one. It’s not about divorce. Yeah. 

Kalen: But anyways, he has some interesting science fiction too.

Kalen: Yeah, absolutely. Brent Peterson, thanks so much. This has been a lot of fun. Where can people find all your content and links and web links? 

Brent: If we’re gonna put this up, mine will be on talk hyphen commerce.com. Fantastic. And I don’t know, we’re gonna name this episode. We’ll 

Kalen: figure something out for that’s for darn.

Kalen: Sure. All right. Thanks everybody for tuning in. See you next time.

Meet Magento Indonesia

Meet Magento Indonesia 2022

We interview Muliadi Jeo who organizes Meet Magento Indonesia. This is the seventh year for Meet Magento Indonesia.

This is a broader series of interviews to focus on the Magento Association. The goal of these interviews is to increase awareness and increase membership for the Magento Association.

The event happens on August 3rd, 2022 in Jakarta Indonesia

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Magento association or something. We don’t know what to call it yet, but this is promoting the Magento association today. I have Muliadi Jio from Indonesia, and he’s the organizer of Meet Magento. Indonesia 

Muliadi: hey, Brent. Hey everybody. Good to see you all. And talk to you again, Brent

Brent: let’s dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your event, and how long you’ve had it running for. 

Muliadi: This is if I count it this is supposed to be the, instead the six or the seven-year we run in Indonesia. So it’s always been offline, of course. And then the last two years, unfortunately, during the pandemic, we have to switch to online for a couple of years and this year.

Muliadi: So we are so excited. Finally, we were able to do it again as an in person meeting. And so far the respond, at least from the advertising for the sponsor side. They’re so excited. It’s been a while there’s no event and everybody just jump in and join. So we’re very excited. 

Brent: And traditionally, you get a lot of people at this event.

Brent: Tell us about your attendance 

Muliadi: and things like that. I remember when we started seven years ago I think that’s close to about a hundred people which is where we see, oh, that’s a good audience to start at that time. And then as we go year after year, I think the last. In person event on what’s that right before pandemic 2019 that one is actually around 600 people show up on the event.

Muliadi: And we can always unique us. So we have Three different track traditionally, so one track really for business and one track really for a solution. So where the sum of the sponsor can talk in the solution because they’re bringing their solution to it. And then the last track’s really more technical discussion.

Muliadi: And yeah, we have about 50/50 about like merchant versus a engineering dev flow burst kind of audience. . 

Brent: And how about your venue and the location? Tell us a little bit about Indonesia. Why would, why should we all come to Indonesia? 

Muliadi: Why would we want to come? I think most you have to, if you’ve never been to Indonesia, I think a lot of people very funny when we talk to a lot of people, especially from American or from the Europe, obviously a lot of people know Bali more than the Indonesia itself.

Muliadi: So when we talk about, do you know Bali. Indonesia, maybe not but obviously Bali sits in Indonesia and where we are is in Jakarta, which is the kind of the central the biggest city in Indonesia. We are close to two hours away from Bali. By flight.

Muliadi: Yeah. And then we’ve been doing this in Jakarta because like it’s all the business and all the enterprises all have the headquarter in Jakarta. It’s fun. You can fly to Jakarta and then you can, obviously once you’re in Indonesia, you should just explore to any, like to Bali and all the rest of the, a exotic islands on the east part of Indonesia.

Brent: And of course there’s so many exciting and beautiful places to visit in Indonesia. Obviously going to a Meet Magento event is such a great opportunity to travel and meet people. And from the sponsor standpoint maybe tell us a little bit about some of the merchants you have there and why somebody would want a sponsor.

Brent: A Meet Magento event. 

Muliadi: Yeah, we traditionally very very localized as far as like our event. A lot of the sponsor, we get a lot of local sponsor, but obvious some we open up for a lot of international. Businesses that want to get their business exposed to Indonesia market, which is well known for the big population and the opportunity here.

Muliadi: So that’s always the kind of the attractive point to be able to get your business exposure to here in Southeast Asia especially in Indonesia itself. Yeah at our event is always free. That’s the unique part. Compared to any other event around crossroad on the other meet change event I think we are the only one that is free and fully funded by the sponsors.

Muliadi: Luckily and then, yeah it’s exciting. 

Brent: And you have, you said you have three tracks that you’re running in conjunction with the event? 

Muliadi: And they yes, there’s a three tracks. It’s a whole day event. 

Brent: So you have a business track, a developer track. And what was the other. 

Muliadi: It’s what we call it.

Muliadi: The solution track it’s really for people can present their product and basic more like showing kind of solutions. And typically we use that for the sponsor to be able more engaged and able to demo the product and stuff like that. But digital this year seems like we are going to 

Muliadi: blend it together. We have a lot of different kind of speakers this year. Not only just a group sponsor, but as well, like a lot of the business practitioner. So we mix around all inside the three track that we have. We still have gonna have three tracks, but not like really divided that way anymore.

Muliadi: For this year. 

Brent: So part of this is the Magento association now helps to promote these events. And Magento association has paid memberships now. So I’m on the membership committee. And our goal is to increase membership. 

Brent: What would you say to people 

Brent: who that, what would you say to people who encourage them to join the Magento Association?

Muliadi: I think let’s go back with the heart of this Magento is the community and this Magento has been really successful because all those community support. So I think the Magento association is becoming the form of that. And naturally we want to be part and this association and participate as much as we want

Muliadi: and that’s and in the form of the paying membership, I think that’s at least a little bit that you can do as far as participation, and that’s a lot more to participate. I believe you are also involved with much more than just a paying member. You are also involved in the comittee and a lot of the different stuff.

Muliadi: And I, I think that’s what we are looking forward with the Magento association. So we can recreate this vibrant community back where everybody can participate and basically yeah, I think in our maybe like blessing each other, something like that. 

Brent: Go back to the beginning. And why you decided to put on a Meet Magento event, had you attended events in Europe?

Muliadi: So it’s by accident actually, I went back to Indonesia way back on 2010. So it’s almost 12 years now. Initially I just going back here because family reason and I was already have a good relationship with Magento. I was in the states for 16 years and right before I went back to Indonesia, I worked with a company called Guidance, which is.

Muliadi: Partner of Magento. We are among one of the first partner working with Magento directly, still in the Culver City office. Naturally when I went back to Indonesia at that time I’m building the first set of developers for Guidance and really focusing on Magento and it started with only a couple of us.

Muliadi: And then the team grew to five. And 10 and all of a sudden become a full team of I think at that time we still have about 15 people concentrating, really delivering the gentle project for our US clients, a lot of, but then Indonesia eCommerce picking up around 2012 to early 2013.

Muliadi: So then we get a lot more exposure with a big comp, a big company that interested to know more about Magento. And obviously at that time I still go back and forth, always attending the Imagine. We miss the Magento Imagine events. That’s been really great. And I met a lot of people there.

Muliadi: Some of them were was the founder of the Meet Magento association at that time still . And so we have a talk and then we would think, okay, maybe we can build a community in Indonesia. Why don’t we try? And then I talked to a couple folks on the Magento and they also interested to

Muliadi: build exposure in Indonesia. So we just launched our first event out of the blue working with Magento, working with several I’m trying to remember. It’s been so long and yeah, but that’s, it’s turned out really good. The event we get a lot of support from the local company, as well as audience that coming in and show really interest on the platform and interest in the building the community.

Muliadi: So just that’s becoming now every year after that, we just continue to have the events until now, basically. Guido is one of the first person actually flying to Indonesia on our yeah. Guido. Yeah. Guido Jensen. Yeah, he put 

Brent: on the, I think they put the very first event in the Netherlands and I think Meet Magento, Netherlands by far is one of the best ones that’s out there still.

Brent: It’s such a fun event. Yeah. 

Muliadi: Yep. And then the following year or year after two years after that, Thomas also fly to Indonesia. So yeah, it’s been really a good run. All right. Followed them, saying that I need to 

Brent: come one of these years. I’ll come 

Muliadi: next year. You need to, I’m gonna keep saying until you come here, please do so 

Brent: tell us, how do they find an event?

Brent: is it 

Muliadi: your address? It’s re really from information? Yes. So the official website is called very easy to remember is the M A G E dot ID. So it’s a mage.id as. So you can go to the website, you can see the agenda, you can see the speakers that are already set for this event. It’s gonna be on August 3rd.

Muliadi: So not too far, it’s less than two weeks. Their venue will be the venue address will be on the website and you can register there right away too. And like I said, it’s free. 

Brent: So just outta curiosity when you do a free event, do you find a lot of people don’t show up? 

Muliadi: Obviously with the free event typically the, from the registration and the show up is probably it’s a industry stranded around 60% show up or so 40% most likely not show up.

Muliadi: Yeah. But it’s still it’s still good number. We we’ve like we, with all the registration that we have it’s a good turnout 

Brent: for us. Yeah. That’s a really good number. I know that so we organize meet Megento India. and did, have you been to meet Magento India yet? 

Muliadi: Did you come?

Muliadi: No. No, you have to come we’re planning. I only went one time to Bangalore. Oh, that was 

Brent: Magento live. Yeah. Anyways we get we pay, we have people pay, but we do get an incredible attendance. It’s in the 90%, the people that buy tickets come to the event. Yeah. I think all the meet Magento events and I’ve been to meet Magento Singapore as.

Brent: So that whole south Asia , meet Megento events you do such a great job putting those on I tended last year, virtually which was a very good event. , I stayed up late to to be a speaker in my evening. Thank you, morning. It, it was very good. I actually spoke the night and followed watched a lot of the speakers.

Brent: Yeah. Thank you so much for being on. I will put mage.id on the show notes and I wish you all the best in your event. 

Muliadi: Thank you. Thank you, Brent. Really great talking to you as always. Thank you. And good night.

Talk-Commerce Kyle Stout

Learn to Love the Popup with Kyle Stout

Episode Summary

If you can do one thing to speed up the growth of your email list, “learn to love the popup.” Kyle Stout answers some of the most crucial questions regarding your email marketing strategy, such as knowing if you’re sending too many or not enough emails and what to do if you’re still sending every email to your entire list. He also helps us understand some of the common pitfalls merchants fall into with email marketing and how to avoid them altogether.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have Kyle Stout. Kyle is the founder of Elevate and Scale, a email marketing agency. Kyle, go ahead, and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Kyle: Thanks for having me.

Kyle: Day to day is pretty much working with eCommerce businesses, with their email marketing helping them increase sales in their sales process drive up customer lifetime value and also just long term keeping a healthy email list. So people stick around and wanna buy. And then yeah, outside of work, I I’m really big into fitness.

Kyle: I love to get active and hang out with family and friends and get outside. 

Brent: So let’s just dive right into email marketing is email marketing still relevant today? 

Kyle: Yeah. So it’s funny cuz you always hear every few years or so the email marketing is dead thing comes about, but I feel like it’s only marketers that say that as a joke and it never really is something that’s ever.

Kyle: Something that actual users or business owners are saying, but email marketing to me, why it’s always been relevant is because it’s a platform where you have direct access to your customers and you own that platform. And over time, as we’ve seen attention shift from different social media platforms and things go from maybe where we were a lot heavier and blogging in the past, and then it shifted to social media.

Kyle: Email marketing was there was tried and true all along. And right now, especially with paid media costs all over the place and a lot of uncertainty in the market. I really think that over the next year or two, you’re gonna see people revisiting their email marketing strategy because a lot of businesses have I don’t wanna say totally neglected it, but maybe just, didn’t realize that they weren’t doing as much with it as they could.

Brent: And do you think that email is what we’ve discussed? That it’s still important, but so from a strategy standpoint, how much of that should be put back into email and how much should be put onto social and other channels that are out there? 

Kyle: Really, I think ideally you have both. I think of it as email marketing serves as a great function to help you get a better ROI from your top of funnel marketing.

Kyle: So you still wanna have your social media and doing anything you can to bring in new leads, bring in new customers and email marketing, cuz there’s two ways you can look at it. Part of it is just having some automated systems in place to maybe to help optimize your sales process. So help you get more revenue from the traffic that you’re already getting to your site.

Kyle: But then once you’ve got this growing email list, you’ve got this database of people that you can nurture and continue to get repeat sales over time. I really look at it as, partially something to help you get a better ROI from your top of Mar top of funnel marketing today, but also just helps you get better lifetime customer value in the long term.

Brent: Do you think one of the big mistakes that merchants often make is marketing the same email to every single client on their list. 

Kyle: Definitely it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see is that, and again, a lot of times people just don’t know any better. Like they’re just going off of that worked in the past and it just wasn’t email marketing and all marketing, just wasn’t quite as nuanced in the past, especially digital marketing.

Kyle: But yeah you really wanna personalize the content. So you want to be segmenting your list and sending different messages to different people. That’s most likely to resonate with them. 

Brent: From a personalization standpoint. Is there any particular strategy that you. Talk to clients about, and I just I’ll frame that in the sense of, at some point it gets a little creepy when it’s too personal.

Brent: Is there a balance between the two? 

Kyle: So yeah, there’s a lot of new technology where they’re trying to, totally personalize the email and. Talk to you, Brent, specifically about things that I can imagine where it’s gonna get really creepy, like what you’re saying, but really what I’m talking about more is at a higher level, just being able to segment people on your list and there’s different.

Kyle: Ways that you can segment. So you can segment people on different profiles based on if they’re a lead that’s never purchased before. And then you have customers who have purchased one time and then you maybe have repeat customers and then maybe you have VIP customers, and those are different groups that you could segment and then send a different type of message.

Kyle: Because the VIP customer, you’re gonna talk to them very differently. You don’t really need to educate them on your product anymore. They’re like the close friend they’re in on the joke they’re in, on all the inside jokes, they know what’s going on. And you’re also gonna wanna show them more love for being a VIP, whereas a lead, they might be almost a stranger and they might need to be reminded of some of the value propositions and the brand story and all that other stuff

Kyle: that they’re just not maybe aware of. and then there are other ways you can segment so you can segment based another really great way to segment would be, especially for e-commerce businesses would be based on engagement. So breaking down groups of people you can have, you can create segments for example, like a 30 day engaged group, meaning that everyone in that group have engaged with your emails or your website,

Kyle: however you decide to define it in the last 30 days. And you can expand that out to 60 days, 90 days and so on. And every business will be a little different, but after you send emails to these different groups, you’ll get a high level overview of not only how engaged they are, but how they respond to different offers.

Kyle: And you’ll find that the people who are most engaged, they wanna get more emails from you. So you can actually email them more often, or you can send them a more diverse content. Whereas the people who are less engaged, it might not be that they don’t like your brand or don’t like your products.

Kyle: It could just be that they only wanna know whenever there’s a really big sale going on or a new product coming out or something like that. So you might email them less frequently. 

Brent: Maybe walk us through how they test that engagement. Do you look at open rates, click through rates, things like that for the engagement.

Brent: And then if they seem like they’re engaged I know it still goes back to a tipping point where, Hey, you send ’em something every day, pretty soon they’re gonna unsubscribe. And I know there’s a magic amount of time for every engaged customer, as opposed to somebody that’s just wanting to learn.

Kyle: Yeah. So the way I do it is you have your key metrics you wanna track. So open rate, click rate conversion rates, and you can first, let’s just say for an example, send an email out to a 30 day engage group. Actually, one way, if you just wanted to test this, if you just wanted to say over the next week, do a quick test and get a baseline for all of this.

Kyle: You could send that one email out to your 30 day. Engage. Look at the metrics and then that’s, there’s a baseline for you. And then send the same email out to the 60 day engaged group and exclude the 30 day engaged folks, because you don’t want to that to throw off the data and look at the metrics there

Kyle: and then you want to have a certain threshold, like you said, of where you don’t want to go below that. The thing about open rates is they are a little inflated right now because of iOS. But traditionally it’s all the rule of thumb has always been, you don’t wanna go below 20%.

Kyle: If you send out to that 60 day or 90 day engage group, and you see the open rate fall below 20%, then you know, okay, that’s the threshold. I need to pull back and focus more on these groups up to that point. And then maybe only include those people in the big, like the black Friday type of promotion and, but so open rate’s one thing, but you really also wanna look at click rate.

Kyle: And this is gonna vary a lot from brand to brand. There’s industry benchmarks, but honestly it’s all over the place. So you really wanna look at just historical data for your company and compare that. Sending that first test to the 30 day engage group, and you might find that even the click, rate’s not where you want it to be with that group.

Kyle: But that’s a better determinant of engagement right now than open rates, because a lot of times open rates are higher. They’re showing as falsely higher than they really are. And clicks are also not only is it easier to get someone to open. It’s harder to get people to click and we’re not getting those false readings on the clicks right now

Kyle: like we are with opens. So I would wa I would pay a little bit more attention to that as you’re doing that whole test. 

Brent: When you include engagement, do you include social media? Just website visits, if you’re tracking holistically across and you know that this user’s, they’re looked at Instagram, they’ve visited your website but they haven’t opened an email.

Brent: All that goes into the fi the factor of some kind of engage. 

Kyle: Yeah, so you can go, you can get into social media and all that. In general, I stick with email and website engagement. So looking at, if they’ve either gone to the website or you can even create these different segments that are targeting product interest.

Kyle: So whenever someone visits a product page in the last timeframe, or they’ve added it to cart in that time, Then they are in the engaged group, whether it’s based on pure engagement across the board or interest in that particular product 

Brent: You mentioned iOS a few times and there’s the post iOS 14.

Brent: That is blocking a lot of of information that we can see through some platforms. Is, has it changed the landscape on how you measure engagement? 

Kyle: It really is one of those things that’s been blown outta proportion. We were all like bracing ourselves for it. And, and preparing by looking at our engagement groups.

Kyle: And when I say that, the segments that we create and someone’s email account and doing some reporting on, okay, it’s going live now and what’s gonna happen but honestly, the way it’s played out. It’s inflated the open rates. And so we just don’t really pat ourselves on the back as much as we used to about open rates and

Kyle: that’s been the biggest change, I have not seen a significant change in impacting these engagement groups to where or these engagement segments, I should say to where, we’re getting this negative feedback. Like people shouldn’t have been included in there or the conversions.

Kyle: And actual purchases don’t seem to line up anymore with the clicks and everything else with the email. It’s really just an inflation of open rates has been the main thing. 

Brent: Yeah. Maybe explain to our listeners why open rates would go up? 

Kyle: Because it’s showing that the iOS devices that receive the emails it’s showing them as having opened the email, regardless of whether or not they didn’t.

Kyle: So this is gonna be, this is going to come down to your list and lists that have way more iOS users on their list. They’re gonna have more skewed data and if you want to get. Let’s just say, you feel man, this is really clouding my data and I don’t like this. I just want more clarity.

Kyle: What you can do is similar to what I was mentioning earlier, where maybe you run a test where you create some different segments. You can create segments to exclude iOS devices, and then send an email. To you can go pretty wide or, whatever you would normally do, but take out those iOS people and then see what the numbers are.

Kyle: And. . 

Brent: Yeah. And it sounds like the amount of segments isn’t like too many segments isn’t necessarily bad until you get to a segment of one user . 

Kyle: Yeah, exactly and also, so that’s really the thing, the bigger your list is the more room you have to do to create more segments, which gives you more room to send more emails without everyone getting every email. And that gives you the potential to scale up the revenue you get from your email marketing. But like you said, if you try to take it too far, too early, you’ve got groups of, 5, 10, 20 people. It’s probably not worth all the effort. 

Brent: As a new business, you mentioned earlier growing your list a lot of people look at buying a list from somebody and I think that’s not the way to do it and probably illegal in a lot of countries, but, and if you send them email, I should say what do your recommendations around growing that list and making sure that it continues to grow and doesn’t decrease.

Kyle: Okay. Yeah. So regarding buying lists and I’ve never personally done it, I’ve never seen it work. I’ve known many business owners who have shared that they’ve done that, or, and I’ve seen the analytics and I can tell you, I’ve never seen it be a really worthwhile endeavor. And especially if you consider all the risk, but the damage it could do to your domain and all of that potential legal risks.

Kyle: I wouldn’t even mess with. So it’s gonna come down to the type of business. So for e-commerce businesses, oftentimes you’re not going to do the typical lead magnet type of approach, like a service business would. But you definitely can. So the first thing is you wanna look at your website and you need to have some sort of offer to get people in.

Kyle: So I know a lot of business owners hate popups. They just personally hate them. They hate going to a website and seeing a popup, the first thing they land on the site. And. Honestly, I used to hate popups too, but knowing what that popup can do for your business, you will learn to love them.

Kyle: You can create popups in a way that aren’t so intrusive. You don’t have to have the one that pops up as soon as they hit the page. You also don’t have to have it take up the entire page and you can make it very easy for people to leave to exit out of that popup. So in general, I would recommend at least having an exit intent popup.

Kyle: On your website, that fires, when people are leaving and give them some sort of offer to get into your email list for eCommerce it’s typical, but the thing is it works is usually you will see a small discount, a coupon code that they have to sign up for a 10 to 15% discount.

Kyle: The bigger the discount, the more opt-ins you’re gonna get. But ultimately it doesn’t necessarily mean those would be the best customers long term. So I don’t think it’s necessarily the best idea to go really aggressive and go 20, 30, 40% 10, 15% works. It could also just be free content.

Kyle: It could be a free guide. Or it could be, a free trial. So there’s different ways you can do it. Doesn’t always have to be a discount. It could be a value add where they get something extra for free with their purchase, and that’s gonna have high purchase intent cuz someone who’s signing up for that is already thinking well I’m planning on making a purchase.

Kyle: So I want that. I want that free bonus. So you definitely gotta have something. Your website itself, then when it comes to getting people to your site to sign up, that’s where it varies. From what I’ve seen in the last, six months of what’s working with paid media. So a lot of times I’ll be working with the brand and I’m working side by side with whoever’s running their paid media, and there’s always this temptation to have the whole ad campaign be based around, signing up for something free on the list.

Kyle: And I can say that the majority of the time, those freebie seekers. They don’t purchase and they don’t stick around and they really drive down the engagement of your list. I’ve found what’s better, is to go after customers and send ’em to your site and have your site optimized to where they’re going to see these signups.

Kyle: So see those popups or whatever you have in place and get. Actual interested customers to sign up for the offer thing you don’t wanna have your first impression going out to cold traffic or going out to strangers, be some freebie thing. You really want them to be interested in the actual products or services that you sell.

Kyle: And when they get to your site, they just find out that, oh, it’s like a surprise. They happen to get this extra thing that incentivizes them to sign up.

Brent: So I’m gonna highlight two things. So learn to love popups. I like that one, but the freebie seekers, I think, is something I’ve heard over and over again where people think that getting your list bigger is gonna be better no matter how you get that name.

Brent: And I suppose it doesn’t hurt to have that user, but having that pop up or giving him some value is probably more well, is more important than just the free thing they’re gonna get. So just talking about mistakes and I can think of one mistake that’s very annoying that I dislike is when you’re signed into a site and you get that exit intent pop up, or you bought something from them clearly, you’re their customer. 

Brent: Worst case is you’ve signed in and you get a popup to sign up for their email, super annoying. But even if they know your cookie and theoretically cookies are still around, we should block that popup. If you know that person, especially if they’re on the list. 

Kyle: Yeah, and that’s a really easy fix.

Kyle: In your software. We like to use Klavio most of the time with eCommerce businesses specifically. It’s just a box. You check whenever you’re building out your form, there’s an option to exclude current or existing Klavio contact. So anyone who’s already signed up, they won’t see.

Kyle: And it’s actually an opportunity to present them with something new. So maybe it doesn’t have to be a popup now for an exist. Contact but maybe offer something up to get their birthday so you can surprise them on their birthday later, or, just get more information about them to enrich that customer experience.

Kyle: So there are times when you would want to target the people that are already signed up specifically, but, you wanna do it in a way that adds some value to them? You’re no longer just trying to get their contact info anymore. So in general I like to just leave them alone for the most part. 

Brent: So may, maybe you could go over a few more mistakes that companies typically make for email.

Kyle: So first one the biggest one is what you were saying earlier. People just emailing the entire list instead of, trying to. segment and somewhat personalize the content towards people. Another thing is email frequency, and this goes both ways. Cuz a lot of times you’ll have smaller businesses emailing too frequently because everyone wants to grow.

Kyle: So they want to grow faster. Email is a great channel for driving revenue and they just get a little I think in my opinion, they get a little too excited too quickly. They get a taste of the email of, what it’s like to send an email. And all of a sudden you see a bunch of users on your analytics dashboard, on your site, and then the sales come in and you burn out your list way too quickly by doing that.

Kyle: You haven’t even let this list grow and mature and let these people stick around with you for a while. Then on the other. You’ll have big businesses that have a huge list. And let’s just say they’re only getting five, 10% of their total revenue from email marketing. a good gauge of if your email marketing is, doing a good job, at least when it comes to the situations where people can click the email and buy the product, they don’t have to hop on a sales call or any of that would be if you’re generating 30% of your revenue from email marketing, you’re doing a good job with your email marketing.

Kyle: And if you’re below that, then there’s probably either some room for improvement with what you’re doing, or there’s also potential that maybe you’re just not emailing enough depending on the situation. So yeah, it, that the frequency thing goes both ways. And then another big mistake. These are like the greatest hits right here would be only emailing your list when you have a sale or a promotion.

Kyle: And again, it goes back to sometimes people just get, they see what that does. They see that spike in revenue and they don’t like to send an email out that doesn’t get a massive spike in revenue. and I definitely encourage you for the major holidays. Yeah. If you wanna run a promo every major holiday, go for it.

Kyle: If you get into a sticky situation and you need a quick infusion of cash, okay. This is a channel you have available to do that. And if you’ve been taking care of your list, then it’s okay to do that. Whenever you need to, but. But really you want to be showing up. You wanna have different reasons to show up and educate people, inspire people, entertain them, give them other content.

Kyle: And the big thing is try to get them to buy without having to discount, give them reasons to be excited about your product, to care about what your product does, the problems that it solves for them without having to give them a discount just solely, because it’s a good offer. 

Brent: Yeah. I remember interviewing the founder of Gigz.

Brent: They’re a gifting service and instead of giving them a discount, they would give something to somebody based on a purchase. And they always equated discounts with with the decreasing revenue. And if you do too much of it, obviously you get people dropping off. Is there a point in which you send too many emails and that becomes counterproductive?

Kyle: That’s typically what I have seen over the long term. And it’s deceptive because at first you can get away with it for a while, because a lot of times let’s just say, let’s just say, you’ve been running your business for several years. Things are going well. Maybe you switch to a different team or person who’s managing the email marketing and they want to drive up those sales numbers because it makes them look good.

Kyle: And maybe they honestly just have pure intentions and they think it’s what’s best for your business, for whatever reason. And the people on your list, aren’t used to getting these deals all the time. So they might actually take advantage of two to three back to back sales. They might just reach into their wallet several times in a row.

Kyle: And then you would think as the business owner, oh man, every time we do a sale they keep buying, they must love it, but it never lasts. It really never lasts. And then by the time people notice the decline because every email you send out, you’re gonna get some unsubscribes. If you have a big list, you’re, there’s always gonna be, there’s a million of reasons why someone would unsubscribe.

Kyle: It’s just a normal part of email marketing. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong or they hate you. But that you keep emailing more and more. And you keep doing these big promotions more and more. You’re going to get more of that. And eventually if you’re not paying attention, you’re losing more people than are coming in.

Kyle: So that’s one problem. But then the people who are sticking around now, they’ve gotten trained to where I they’re only gonna buy. When you offer a discount. So now the random impulse purchases those go away. And now they know, they always know there’s another sale right around the corner. So why would they, in fact, I’ve found myself as a customer doing that with companies where I genuinely do like their products, but I always get this.

Kyle: It seems every time I would make a purchase, they would have a sale a few days. So I swear it was almost like, I always, I wondered if it was planned or something, and I’d have this regret. I’m like, if I waited three days, I could have saved a lot of money and I got to where I’m like, oh, I only buy whenever they have a sale now.

Kyle: Cuz they have ’em frequently enough. So why not? 

Brent: Yeah, I can remember buying a pair of Cole Haan, and having that exact same experience where they’re constantly bombarding you with emails and then suddenly you buy something and then you get another email. That’s 5% bigger discount or something. It was anyways, I did unsubscribe from Cole Haan eventually, cuz it was so annoying when I got that.

Brent: And I guess that just illustrates the point that there is never. Nobody has it down. And Cole Haan is a pretty big company. And you’d think maybe it was just my own experience, but big companies make these mistakes and they’re still making these mistakes. So it’s always good to be looking at all those numbers.

Brent: What are some of the key metrics that, that a marketer should look at to ensure that they’re not making some of those mistake? Is there leading indicators that say, oh, I’ve sent five emails this week. Maybe that’s too many. 

Kyle: Yeah. So there are, and actually I want to say something really quickly about what you just shared, because this is a really common misconception I think is that when people look at these big brands, you assume that this it’s this big successful brand.

Kyle: I know they’re spending a ton of money on their marketing. I know they can hire the best consultants. They can get the best information they’ve so they must know what they’re doing. And. I see them just making terrible mistakes all the time. My theory is that it’s because when they get to a certain level where they can bring in so many people, they can just, they just have the money to buy so much traffic buy.

Kyle: Acquire so many new people onto their list that they can burn through it. They can afford to burn through a lot of people. I don’t know what’s going on with the overall picture with their marketing, but I would definitely say if you, if your gut is telling you I don’t know, but this big brand is doing it.

Kyle: Definitely question it because what works for them will not usually work for most small businesses. But so looking at your metrics, of course you want to month to month, you should be looking at your averages, open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and also there’s also certain things.

Kyle: So for example, with an e-commerce business, you can have what’s called a welcome series or a welcome series for non buyers. Which is the typical automated email sequence that someone will go into when they first opt in through that popup. That one is very sensitive to the traffic. That’s hitting your website.

Kyle: So that’s one way to look at I know whenever we see the sales. And just actually overall engagement, not just sales deviate from the norm, pretty aggressively, either negative or positive that company has made some changes with their paid media. And sure enough, I’ll have case we’ll have a call and be like, okay, we’re seeing some decreases what’s going on.

Kyle: I I wanna get more context to make sure it’s not just what’s happening with the emails. That happens more often than not it’s that entry level series is a good way to gauge the quality of traffic that’s coming in. So that’s one thing to look at. but you can also run engagement reports on those different segments that I talked about.

Kyle: So having those key segments that you’re gonna be emailing most frequently in Klavio, and in the other tools, you can run an engagement report where you can see the open rates, click rates, and average order value of that particular segment. And you can see. People are starting to disengage more. And if you’re looking at a highly engaged group, like a 30 day engaged segment and you start to see people disengaging in that one, that’s a really bad sign.

Kyle: Okay. Something is definitely wrong. We’re hammering this list or this particular segment way too hard because just by its very nature of how that segment is created, everyone in there should. engaged. And then another thing to look at something that people might have to Google is you can look at the unique reach.

Kyle: So the unique opens the unique clicks on your email list. So that would be the total unique people, cuz it’s one thing to. A lot of times you’ll have the same people who continue to open and click all your emails. You just have a lot of people who are engaged, but you’re not seeing the big picture of everyone on your list.

Kyle: So when you look at the uniques, whenever you measure that, so that’s just a key there. Whenever you’re, if you’re Googling this or you’re talking with your email service provider, then you can see how many unique people you’re reaching on your list. Cuz ideally you wanna be reaching more people month to month.

Kyle: So if your list is growing or even if it’s staying the same. You want to be engaging more total people, total unique people. So I like to measure unique opens and unique clicks as a way to know, okay. You know what? Even if sales were a little down this month, we’re getting more engagement from more people and that’s usually a sign of better, long term success.

Kyle: Whenever you see those uniques going down, that’s something where, okay, if we’re reaching fewer unique people, then the odds are that the sales will come down. Let’s just say sales are, steady. Those sales will come down because we’re just reaching fewer people. And we can’t always rely on the same people to keep buying and buying.

Kyle: Cuz depending on the products you’re selling, you run out of stuff where they’ve just bought it all they’ve bought all that they want or need. So you really want to be looking at making sure you’re actually reaching more people within the list that you have, and also trying to retain more of them.

Brent: And I would imagine that these numbers all flip flop, when you’re talking B2B to B2C, like it’s a completely different arena when you’re talking, how you engage with the B2B customer compared to how you engage with the B2C customer. 

Kyle: Yeah. B2B is very different where. See B2C is I guess what I’m talking about.

Kyle: When I say B2C, a situation where it’s not gonna be like a, a really expensive product where someone has to hop on a sales call or anything like that. It’s something where they can click the email and buy right there. So you get really objective data. With B2B it’s a little trickier because you have more things involved in closing that sale.

Kyle: So a lot of times you’re using email marketing to get people into a sales call. And then from there it could be that you follow up with email after that, and then you get the purchase. So that’s one way to measure it, but you can’t neglect what happened during the human to human interaction.

Kyle: Of the sales call. So you have to be tracking that. So a lot of times you can’t get clean metrics where a lot of times people aren’t just going to click a link in an email and pay the invoice like that. It’s gonna be a manual process where a salesperson emails them an invoice, and then you get that and then you get the payment that way.

Kyle: So from there, it’s really more about mapping out the whole sales process step by step. So looking at each stage of your sales process, adding in automations, when you can so automated email or SMS or whatever you wanna. In between each of those steps where you can in between the human interactions. To try to move people along and you can measure that you can measure opens and clicks and how many people are moving through.

Kyle: And how many people signed up for the sales call, but then how many people actually showed up? So you need to start tracking all of that stuff as well. So it’s not quite as clean as it can be with B2C, but there’s still a lot that you can measure and give you a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

Brent: I think the important part there is putting it into a place where you’re tracking everything. So some kind of a CRM , where you manually put notes in for. Phone call or even better you call directly from the CRM. So that call gets recorded as a call with the client and then that engagement would then just play into your engagement with the customer, no matter if it’s in person or on the phone or through some kind of a service.

Brent: Kyle, we have a couple minutes left here. If you had some great bit of advice in 2022, to give somebody that wants to start email marketing, where would they start? 

Kyle: You need to have an offer and you need to at least have someone on your list. You definitely need to have a way to get people on your list.

Kyle: But’re but really the most important thing that it comes down to. And I think what’s. Forgotten is we look at all these systems and ways to optimize everything. And we need to get back to remembering that there’s another human on the other side of this email and just thinking about, okay, what content are they really going to care about?

Kyle: Or when it comes to my product or my service. What really matters to them, what do they really care about and crafting it around them and having your emails be more conversational. And it doesn’t mean you can be salesy or ask for the sale and all of that. It just means being more thoughtful to what’s going to help them make a buying decision.

Brent: One last question or advice that you could give the client, then learn to love popups, right? And let’s just say you don’t have HubSpot or Klevio or something like that, but you just want to get ’em into, let’s say you’re using MailChimp or whatever it is. 

Brent: I remember hello bars or whatever it was called before. Is there a free tool that you would recommend to get that popup going on your website? That’s fairly easy to install and get running on whatever website you’re running, whatever platform you’re on and you can install your popup and get it rolling.

Kyle: I think MailChimp has the popup capability. But most of them have that built in. And then there’s a bunch of like fancier tools where if you wanna get more advanced, honestly, the free tool that’s within your email service provider, most of the time is good enough.

Kyle: It’s gonna take you a very long way. You don’t need to get any of the other fancy tools. A lot of times those things you it’s just, you don’t have enough traffic. For the small amount of performance difference that you’re gonna get to even matter. It’s just gonna add an extra cost and some of those things potentially even weigh down your site and slow it down.

Kyle: If you’re e-commerce, you can go with Klavio. You can start out with a free account and you can use their free you can, get a popup going. I believe MailChimp has a popup tool. I just haven’t used MailChimp in so long, but pretty much all of ’em have a popup tool it’s already gonna be included.

Kyle: So if you’re, even if you’re paying for the cheapest plan, you already have that. I just say, don’t even overthink it right now. Get a good offer on that popup, get it live and then focus on getting people to show up to your site so they can see 

Brent: it. 

Brent: It. All right. Cool. Love your popup. I’m gonna keep saying that over and over again.

Brent: Kyle as we close out, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you like to plug, what would you like to plug today? 

Kyle: Okay. Yeah. For anyone who’s interested in elevating their email marketing, you can go to elevate and scale.com and there is a link there to book a call, which is not a traditional sales call, even though I know everyone says their call is not a sales call.

Kyle: You will get information prior to that call about our service and everything. But the point of that call is to give you clarity around how email marketing fits into the overall strategy for your business. So we’ll actually break down your sales process on that call. If you have numbers that you can share, that would be awesome, cause it makes it even better.

Kyle: And we can identify where the most immediate opportunities are for you right now to get more revenue from your existing sales process. And then talk about a strategy for you to grow your business over the long term with email marketing. Perfect. 

Brent: And I’ll put I’ll put those links in, in the show notes for this Kyle Stout.

Brent: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation. 

Kyle: Yep. Great. Thank you.

Talk-Commerce Nadav Charnilas

Unlock the Power of Your Customer Journey with Nadav Charnilas

Do you want to improve your conversion rates, decrease abandonment rates improve your acquisition efficiency, and spend? Have you ever created a customer journey? Nadav Charnilas helps us to understand and answer these questions and more.

Nadav is with Namogoo. Namogoo helps to maximize each online journey’s potential for eCommerce brands by experiencing everything through the customers’ eyes. The Namogoo Digital Journey Continuity Platform automatically gathers non-PII data on customer behavior, website, product, device, and environment to give each customer what they came for and get everything else out of the way.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this journey with Talk Commerce. today I have Nadav Charnilas. He is with Namogoo. Go ahead and tell us what you do in a day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Nadav: Thanks, Brent. So like you said, my name’s in Navav. I am the director of product marketing here at Namogoo.

Nadav: We’re located in Lia in Israel. I run all the product marketing functions at Namogoo. So that means all the positioning and the messaging and the sales enablement working with product and working with sales and across all the different roles here Namogoo. So yeah, creating all the all the collateral around our different products.

Nadav: As far as a passion is I used to be a passionate runner. I used to run like half marathons every few months, but then I had kids. Not so much anymore. 

Brent: yeah, kids will do that. There’s always time in your later in life to get back into running. So don’t get me started on that. Good. So let’s dive right into customer journeys.

Brent: For just a little bit of background, let’s help our listeners understand what is a customer journey for a brand. 

Nadav: right. So that’s everything. So if you’re a brand or an e-commerce brand it’s everything that your visitors, your shoppers go through from the minute they see, become aware of your brand to the moment they.

Nadav: Go to your website and browse your product and then go to check out and put things in their in their cart and check out and convert. And then even how do they come back to your website and their journey back? So it’s their entire experience from creating awareness about who you are coming to your website, shopping and converting.

Nadav: And then hopefully coming back and creating loyalty. 

Brent: And I know that if you’ve ever, if you’ve ever attended a tech conference or they’re talking about platforms to do this a lot of times as a merchant, you feel, or you could feel as though this is only for enterprise platforms or huge retailers in the world is customer journey good for anybody? Any size store? 

Nadav: Yeah. Every store has a customer journey, right? Everybody does acquisition. Everybody brings people into their site and you wanna, and your shoppers they have to go through a few steps on their journey until they find the product that they want until they realize that they trust you as a merchant.

Nadav: Until they’re ready to. So yeah, everybody has a journey and everybody needs basically optimization of their customer journey because it’s customer journeys are inherently complex. No matter how big you are, obviously the bigger you are, the more complex it is. But the level of complexity, even for smaller stores is immense.

Brent: And what’s, what are some of those challenges then as you move into trying to find out what is your customer journey? 

Nadav: Yeah. So we at Nomogoo we’ve actually been working with, so we started off working with some of the world’s biggest eCommerce brands. And now as we’ve matured and as we’ve grown we’ve opened up our platform to smaller brands, mid-market brands, SMBs.

Nadav: And what we found is that everybody in the market, in the e-commerce market and more so mid-market and SMBs they face I think basically there’s a couple of like segments of issues that they face. One issue is with their marketing stack. One place is that it’s really hard.

Nadav: Everybody wants to move the needle on the KPIs in their customer journey. We even did a survey a while back of e-commerce leaders. And we saw that e-commerce managers, marketers, 75% of them have tools and data at their just disposal, but they still struggle to, to put it all together to act on their customer journey.

Nadav: They have a hard time maintaining that data stack and that marketing stack. They have to work with a bunch of different functions in their organization. Sometimes they’re not always aligned in priorities. It takes a long time. And even when those things are set up, those tools kind of work in silos.

Nadav: They don’t roar in the same direction. They’re all roar in a different direction. So it’s really hard to align those tools around their segments and the messaging, and it creates problems. It creates a very hard experience in actually moving KPIs in the direction that you wanna move.

Nadav: And then the other set of problems is what every e-commerce manager or whatever marketer at an e-commerce company wants to do, which is improve conversion rates, decrease abandonment rates improve their acquisition efficiency and spend. Create brand loyalty and get people engaged in coming back.

Nadav: And what do you do? What are the tactics that you use? What’s the data that you use? What are the segments that you use to move those KPIs in the right direction? And beyond that there’s a slew of other problems, right? So there’s privacy issues now with GDPR coming up or GDPR existing and the cookieless world coming up and and issues around all of that which makes it difficult to use the data that we’ve all been used in using there’s testing issues.

Nadav: And I think pretty ubiquitous around every e-commerce brand is there’s a blind spots in the customer journey. So we don’t know what we don’t know that’s going on in the customer journey. It’s hard for us to see what our customers see within the journey. 

Brent: Yeah. So I think you the two points are the two main points you talked about the moving, the KPIs, improving conversion, things like that.

Brent: The first part of that is there is a myriad of data. And how can you help your marketing professional or marketing manager harness some of that data and put it into a place where you can actually do something with it. 

Nadav: So that’s why we created at Namogoo, why we created something called we’re calling the customer journey operating system.

Nadav: And the way you can think about it is if you think about your computer, you’ve got a bunch of apps on there. But you really couldn’t use them and take advantage of them. If you didn’t have an operating system, it would just, you’d have to know the code, or know which code to go to, or it’d be very difficult and complex.

Nadav: And that’s why, what’s why window Microsoft and Apple, they created operating systems. So you can have one place to go and you can. Use all your different apps, right? So that’s, if you think about the customer journey, it’s very similar, both whether you’re thinking about the different data points that you need to use and all the different tools that you want to use across analytics tools and personalization tools and customer market, customer communication tools, and all these different tools that exist in silos.

Nadav: You want one place to go where you can activate all these different things. So that’s what customer it is what customer journey operating system does. It. It brings in all these, all the data points, all the events and segments that you as an e-commerce manager has have on your site. It standardizes the data for you.

Nadav: So it’s all defined in the same place and it lets you activate those different data points across your different tools, whether within. CGOS which is what we call customer attorney operating system, or across your own tools. So whether it’s Google ads or Facebook ads or something like a dynamic yield you can use your tools with the data that’s already centralized and standardized within CGOS.

Nadav: And that data is also based on, like I said, Namogoo’s experience with eCommerce, right? So these data points are proprietary data points that are pretty unique, right? So there are things like your shopper that comes to your site. What device are they using? What’s the, what’s their internet connection.

Nadav: What’s their device speed strength. Do they have shopping extensions like honey or Amazon shopping, Simpsons built into their browser? So a lot of these things that we usually don’t think about when we’re thinking about conversion and engagement that we found are actually really important to understand what the customer intent is.

Nadav: The shopper intent is whether they intend on buying or they intend on abandoning and taking action on those things. So we’ve built. All these data points based on our huge network of 1.2 billion unique users that create indications of intent of the shoppers. So basically we’ve created an operating system that is one source of truth for your data points.

Nadav: So your segments, your events, your attribute. You can grab them immediately from CGOS without the need of, to talk to a developer or an analyst or any. So you, as a marketer you implement this tag on your site and you get all those things prepopulated, and you can use them across your tools. And on top of that, we’ve also got AI, which bubbles up different insights for you.

Nadav: Whether they’re correlations between data points and KPIs, or there’re interesting things that are happening within your sites data that we kind of pinpoint for you. So I think to your question it’s a long winded way of getting to your question. We make. Working on that data and moving the needle and understanding what’s important and working across your tools much easier than it was before and much more impactful.

Nadav: So you can actually see the things that really make a difference for understanding when a user is intending on purchasing or when a user is intending on abandoning or anything else that you’d like to know about your shoppers. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Even digging into the extensions that they may have in their browser.

Brent: If you were looking at the customer and you wanna know, or you wanna personalize their journey, how do you balance between. Being a little bit too personal to just being anonymously personal. So we talk about the runner example, that this person’s a runner. You give them a group of runner things rather than giving them specific things that are so to them that they’re like, wow, this they’re like watching me.

Nadav: I think that’s something that we at Namogoo were very aware of. All of the data points that we include in in CGOS they’re all cookieless, non PII, so they’re all GDPR compliant. So what does that mean? It means that the data points that we take are not things that are considered infractions of any privacy laws.

Nadav: And it’s all aggregated, right? So I can create these segments based on these data points that are an aggregated to an aggregated point. So it doesn’t become. Doesn’t become like things that I’m showing you like, oh, Hey Brent, this is the exact thing that I know that you like, the color blue and that you’re a football fan or or something like that.

Nadav: So here’s the team that you like and the blue shoe that you want. It’s a lot it’s aggregated to that. So it’s personalized and it helps conversion. But it’s also still mindful of privacy laws and the general feeling of a shopper that they’re not being followed by a big brother type.

Brent: If you’re a marketer, do you want to rely more on the journey platform to bubble down those those segments? Or do you want to have some of your segments come up because you’ve relied on them over time. 

Nadav: so I think it’s a two way street, right? So the beautiful thing here is that you can actually, with CGOS you can import your existing segments from your tool, right?

Nadav: So if you have your tools in Facebook ads, or in your, a analytics tool like Adobe or anything, any other tool that you are working with, you can import those segments into CGOS and then you can export them into your other tools. If you want to. Or you can take these pre-populated proprietary data points.

Nadav: Explore what’s going on with them create correlations with other data points, create new segments and then push them out into your tools. So basically you can both use the ones that you know, or are successful for you, and you can use them as they are across your tools, right?

Nadav: Create that standardization across your tools, or you can use our AI and the things that we pinpoint for you or the things that you find yourself as you explore the data and export it into your different tools. 

Brent: And do you think that a lot of times marketers get caught up or get caught in what they’ve had in the past?

Brent: And let’s just continue with that without analyzing, looking, what is new out there and taking some of that new data in and maybe creating new segments. 

Nadav: Definitely. I think it’s, I, as a marketer can say that I’ve, I’ve fallen into that. I’ve got my same my same segments that I’ve always created based on data points that I’ve always used.

Nadav: And I try to use them again and again. And then the problem with that can be, trying the same thing over and over again, without working. Is usually not gonna be successful. And also trying to share these segments across tools is also usually unsuccessful because you have to redefine them and they’re defined differently across your tools.

Nadav: So I think both having a tool that kind of pinpoints for you, the interesting things that are happening gives you points of data that are new, that you haven’t used before. And. A company like the Namogoo with the massive network that it has knows are impactful for e-commerce brands.

Nadav: And then being able to use that in a standardized way across your tools is can be extremely impactful. 

Brent: Do you have an anonymous example that you can share about a merchant who found something that was surprising that they wouldn’t have normally have discovered if they were just using their automated marketing platform, that doesn’t track all the different things.

Brent: Cause I can see how, if you’re not putting everything into one big bucket or at least tracking everything holistically, how you could really miss out on certain parts of that data coming through. 

Nadav: Yeah I can think of, there’s a few example. I’m trying to think about which one would be probably the best one to use.

Nadav: I think one of the data points, one of the interesting data points that we have is does the visitor have ad blocker on, right? And AdBlockers can be a pain for marketers for a lot of different reasons. One can be, you can be targeting your campaign at these you can be targeting like a Google ads campaign.

Nadav: Or whatever type of ad campaign at shoppers with a, with an ad blocker. And then you’re basically spending money on somebody who’s never gonna see your ad, or you’re running AB tests on ad and that kind of muddies up your data. So we’ve had customers, vendors sorry merchants out there that, that have used that data point to block out those ad blocker, shoppers and improve their spend efficiency, right?

Nadav: Their acquisition efficiency, or to improve their AB testing ability. And that same goes, another data point that we have is is the user in incognito mode. So that, that can be also very, that can tell you a lot about that user. That user is interested in privacy. They don’t wanna maybe they don’t want to answer all kinds of questions that you want to ask them.

Nadav: So you might want to change the way you have forms for them or the different type of messaging that you show. Another type of data point that we have is is is a weather data point. This is the shopper in the general area where they are like, what’s the weather.

Nadav: And we found that different for different products. The weather can affect their conversion rate. So you can see in real time, by the way, all the data points are in real time. And they perform in real time what the weather is like for that shopper and provide them with a different offering.

Nadav: So if you’re selling hats and you know that it’s sunny, then maybe that’s the time to create ads for your hats at that time. Or if you know that there’s rain. Maybe that’s a time to offer free shipping or a free delivery if you’re sending out food, maybe people don’t wanna leave the house.

Nadav: So these things will let you do a lot of personalization in real time with data points that I in, in the research that we’ve done is not something that most marketers use. 

Brent: Yeah. That is really good though. Just jumping back into ulus and maybe the iOS 14. Privacy, things that have come up, it sounds like a lot of the things that you’re doing are naturally things that aren’t gonna be tied directly to some user’s account.

Brent: So you can anonymize this quite a bit, talk about the challenges that now merchants have, who say relied on Facebook ads for their for all their income and how that has really been hindered through some of the changes in privacy that have happened. 

Nadav: Yeah. So I, as we all know, that’s been a huge challenge for marketers.

Nadav: And I think we’re going towards a world where cookies become less and less available, for across different platforms, whether it’s Facebook or anything else. So it’s becoming harder and harder to personalize messaging and ads and even the actual, user experience on your own. Using the traditional means that we’ve always used as marketers or e-commerce managers.

Nadav: And that’s really why one of the reasons we created this solution is we have the ability to, to both anonymize and aggregate our data. And it’s all cookieless, right? It’s all, we don’t use cookies. It’s all session based data that, that is completely in line with GDPR and privacy regulations.

Brent: Just as a privacy thing though, for abandoned carts, in order for you to know that someone has abandoned a cart, they have to be logged in, you have to know something about them to be able to target them, to tell them, Hey, this was in your cart or can you know that they’ve come back again? 

Nadav: That’s a great question.

Nadav: In our product that still works if you are anonymous. So for, in most, I think in most solutions, yes, you need to know that they’re registered or you need to know who they are and collect that personal data in our solution that, because it’s session based. It’s anonymous again.

Nadav: Now if that user is registered, obviously that’s that you’re probably gonna have that data and you can, by the way, you can import that data into CGOS. If you choose to, if you are a vendor, if you’re a merchant and you’re one of our customers and you want to import that the data that you have, that personal data that you have into CGOS that’s up to you, it’s completely customizable.

Nadav: But the data that we provide that’s, autopopulated within CGOS none of that is, is it’s all cookieless. It’s all anonymized. And we can, because it’s session based, we can see things like cart abandonment, even if you’re not registered. 

Brent: right. And you can target them again when they come back to your site.

Brent: Yeah. Okay. Do you see, I think I see Apple pushing towards this really really private world and maybe Google going the other way. Is there, do you see trends from the big tech companies wanting to push one way or the other. 

Nadav: I think everybody’s going in this direction. I think Apple and Google are setting the kind of setting the scene.

Nadav: And I don’t, I personally don’t see anybody going in a different direction and even the and. And I think it’s a, for the world, it’s a good thing, right? Nobody even we e-commerce even we marketers and e-commerce professionals, we don’t wanna be tracked either. And nobody wants to feel like they’re being tracked on a personal level.

Nadav: And that’s why I think solutions that aggregate. And provide you the ability to personalize without kind of infracting on people’s privacy or GDPR regulations is really important. And it’s something that’s gonna become more and more important as the years go by and as, as vendors like Apple and and Google become more and more privacy focused.

Brent: Do you think there’s a way of ever getting around the fact that you’ve looked at, let’s say a running shoe store and then for the next two weeks, all you get is targeted display ads for running shoe stores, or for myself, I get umpteen million Adobe ads because I’m on the Adobe website. . 

Nadav: Yeah, I get the same thing.

Nadav: I’ve got I’ve as a product marketer. I do a lot of competitive research and then I get followed around by every competitor that we have get, I get their ads. I think as cookies become less and less available, that’s probably gonna happen less but there’ll probably be different solutions that are I assume less obtrusive to your into your privacy, right?

Nadav: So there’ll probably be different solutions that are aggregated and put you into different groups that kind of try to predict whether you belong to a group that is going to convert for brand X and brand y. But it’ll probably be a little less intrusive than it is right now. Is there a way to get around it?

Nadav: Yeah. If we use, if you use incognito mode in everything you do if you don’t use WhatsApp and and you stay off that kind of platform, that probably is gonna, you’re probably gonna get targeted a little bit less. But today in like a world with cookies, it’s still gonna happen, 

Brent: yeah, and I guess I was going down the path with this question to lead into, is there a better customer journey or does a customer journey platform in general kind of alert merchants to say, Hey, dial down the creepiness factor. 

Nadav: I think it does allow it, so it allows it allows you to be efficient with your target.

Nadav: It allows you to actually give your shoppers a personalized and relevant experience. That’s better within their customer journey. It allows you to remove blockers from your customer journey, which is a huge problem for a lot of vendors without, yeah, without being like super privacy creepy, without following people around with. All over the place, but still targeting them when it’s relevant. A lot of times, even with the way things are now with a lot of cookies the targeting that you get just doesn’t seem relevant, right? Like it’s not at the right time.

Nadav: It’s not like it doesn’t talk to really, to the, to what you really want. It’s just dumb and rule based, it’s oh, you visited our site. So now you’re gonna get this ad for the next 150 years wherever you go which is inefficient for everybody, like the customer ends up hating it, cuz they, they get inundated with ads that aren’t relevant for them.

Nadav: And for you, the merchant, you’re just spending a lot of time on hands. And that’s why solutions AI based solutions like ours. They we have a prediction engine that can predict when a shopper want intends on purchasing when they intend on abandoning. And you can create different segments based on the different data points that we do that make it really smart.

Nadav: And you can target in real time. Shoppers or prospective shoppers with targeted ads that make sense for them at the time, instead of the blackening their sky with with ads wherever they go. 

Brent: What if you had some advice to give to a smaller merchant, even as they move into maybe medium size merchants, how would you tell them to start looking at or analyzing their customer journey?

Nadav: I think the important part is understanding first of all, understanding, like what are the KPIs that are really important to you, right? What’s the there’s, there are vanity KPIs and there are important, there are KPIs that are really important to you. What are the things that are really affecting your bottom line?

Nadav: Is it conversion rate? Is it average order size? Is it abandonment rate, like where what’s the thing that’s impacting you the most? And where are you? Where do you find weakness? Like where are there big drop offs? Where is there a number that’s lower than you would’ve expected it to be?

Nadav: Try to see your customer journey, both based on those KPIs and from your customer’s eyes. So sometimes when we see the journey from our customer’s eyes, we discover things that we wouldn’t see as in our day to day. Are there blockers there? Are there distractions are there things that are affecting them that we wouldn’t think of in the day to day?

Nadav: And try to act on those things. In real time. So when a customer is facing a problem when they have when they’re, when they intend to do something that, that is either positive or negative, you can find a way to act on that. An example of that for us at Namogoo is another tool that we’ve that we’ve developed.

Nadav: It’s called intent based promotions is a tool that knows to present promotions, to shopper. Based on their intent to their probability of acquisition or probability of abandonment. So if we see somebody that has a high probability of abandonment, maybe at that point, we’ll show them a promotion of X percent off, or if we see somebody that has a high probability to, for, to, to purchase, then we might show them. A lower promotion, or we might not show them a promotion at all. Even if there’s, in other cases, you’d have a site wide promotion that they see. So solutions like that kind of save you margins.

Nadav: Aren’t like a one size fits all solution. I think that makes sense for mid market in smaller brands, right? Because it really helps you be efficient. And get the most out of each shopper that comes to your site. . 

Brent: How about the idea of reducing friction across the entire journey?

Brent: How I, how much importance do you put on that? 

Nadav: That’s BA that’s basically how we started at NA mobile. The original product that we developed was something called the customer hijacking prevention. And that was there’s something called ad injections that come into e-commerce sites.

Nadav: It’s unauthorized ads from competitors or from other brands. And sometimes they. They’ll be attractive enough to take your customers off of your customer journey and take into their own customer journey. So that’s how we started in identifying those things and blocking them where needed.

Nadav: And we’ve developed that into newer and and a broader use cases. Right? So one of the things that I’ve already mentioned is shopper extensions. So shopper extensions can be very useful for you as emergent or they can do things that you don’t want them to do, they can provide coupons or discounts where you don’t want them to provide coupons or discounts or to shoppers that you wouldn’t want them to get discounts, or it can do comparisons to your competitors and funnel your customers to other sites.

Nadav: So these are all things that we’ve been very focused on throughout our history. and we know for fact that it affects a lot of e-commerce brands. And there’s a lot that you can do. You, one of the first things is identifying these things that are happening in your customer journey. And then you can fight back.

Nadav: You can either block them. Or you can analyze when it’s actually good for you and when it’s not good for you and pick and choose the places you block, or you can do something active and engage with promotions that are personalized or messaging that’s personalized. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can interact and with your shoppers to overcome these blockers and these things that are distracting within your customer journey.

Nadav: And there’s a lot of distractions in the customer journey for, I think almost every. . 

Brent: Yeah, that’s amazing. NAA, thank you. Today for this has been a great journey to go through in 30 minutes. At the end of every podcast to give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug.

Brent: What would you like to plug 

Nadav: today? Yeah, I think I’d like to plug obviously Namogoo and and our platform I mean for if it isn’t clear from from everything I’ve talked about until now, Namogoo is a digital journey continuity platform, and it helps currently over a thousand brands shape their customer journey.

Nadav: And what we do is we make each customer journey fit each and every shopper’s needs. And if all of that has been interesting, whether it’s our customer hijacking prevention, Product our intent based promotion product or our customer journey operating system, which basically provides the underlying infrastructure for e-commerce brands to power their customer journeys in real time.

Nadav: If any of that is interesting to any of our listening listeners and please visit Namogoo. That’s N A M O G O O and learn more and we’ll be happy to talk to you and let you know about our solutions. 

Brent: All right. First thing then, where did the name Namogoo come from?

Nadav: That’s actually, I actually recently found out so Namogoo is, comes from a Hebrew word. Namogoo basically means in Hebrew is a plural of they went away, they disappeared. So basically the solution was for your shoppers, that disappeared because they were taking away because of ad injections or because of shopper extensions and things like that.

Nadav: They went away. They disappeared to your competitors. So that’s the word in Hebrews it’s Namogoo. 

Brent: That’s great. And what is the best size merchant then? What would you like to speak to anybody? Or is there a good fit for your platform? 

Nadav: Yeah we speak to SMBs. All the way up to enterprise customers.

Nadav: If you’re, if you’re a very small brand it, the solution you might not have as much value from the brand because you might not see as much of these interruptions or these things that are coming up. But as, but if you’ve grown, you’re already like an SMB, you have some activity on your site, you have some orders, things like that around a thousand orders, a month.

Nadav: Then you can already start to see value from these products. And we’d be happy to talk to you. 

Brent: Yeah. And I always say in marketing, you don’t get any good marketing until you have some data to analyze, to see what exactly that’s gonna happen. So you can always speculate, but having actual data and volume, there is always a great great thing 

Nadav: to have.

Nadav: Yeah. Yeah. Our data is based both on our, like I mentioned, our huge network of 1.2 billion unique users, but also it. As it’s implemented on your site and the more data you have, obviously the faster it learns and the more accurate it becomes. 

Brent: Nadav thank you so much for being here. Thanks for staying up late.

Brent: And and coming on the show today and I appreciate it. Thank you. 

Nadav: Thank you so much, Brent. And thanks everybody for listening.

Talk-Commerce Evan Padgett

Subscription Commerce with Evan Padgett

Subscriptions are for everyone and merchants need to examine their catalogs and learn what they can be selling constantly month over month. We interview Evan Padgett with Stealth Venture Labs and learn about subscription commerce. Even is a tenured eCommerce executive dedicated to driving performance and growth in fluid landscapes with nearly 20 years of operating and marketing subscription commerce businesses.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Evan Paget. He is the C O of Stealth venture labs. Evan, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Evan: All right. Thanks, Brent. So Evan Paget, Stealth venture labs chief operating officer here.

Evan: Hitting my 20th year in the industry this year, actually. And pretty much the entire time inside of subscription commerce companies or here at Stealth overseeing the acquisition marketing for subscription commerce companies largely. Been around the recurring revenue model for a long time.

Evan: I spent a lot of time in recurring revenue models in women’s fashion running brands, like just fab and shoe dazzle. With unique sort of membership models there and a stint as the chief marketing officer at a company called thrive market online grocery company mixing the the model of annual membership and, really awesome club prices for organics and non GMO, really healthy foods.

Evan: And then here at Stealth, really just running and building this company, we’ve had an awesome run building up a marketing agency focused on. A lot of the team here coming from vertical inside of brands and we’ve just had subscription commerce brands gravitate towards us. They also tend to do really well in acquisitions.

Evan: My job is pretty much managing the entire company bringing in the team, making sure that with a lot of our bigger clients at the higher level strategies are sound and being met and channel expansion, everything like that operations you name it. I’ve seen it all at this point.

Evan: And that’s what we do here at Stealth have a good time doing it. 

Brent: I’m excited about subscriptions. I think that subscriptions at all agencies should be a practice. We’re gonna learn today how much it helps to drive revenue for merchants. And I think that subscriptions should be the basis for a lot of how merchants are gonna grow their business and help them create better ROI on every one of their products.

Brent: And so maybe dive into what platforms you’re looking at and and how you’re helping to enable subscriptions. 

Evan: What I tell people about subscription commerce and how you’ll get this question just generally, how do you, I jump into subscription commerce. Few things come to mind.

Evan: One, you have to create a technology or work with a technology. So Shopify has several different plugins, personally biased towards recharge as a great option for most subscription type platforms. When I say most meaning a routine monthly billing and shipping a product or some kind of or access to a product

Evan: covers that really well, but there are sophisticated subscriptions that exist out there that could be based off of triggers or different bespoke, timings, or variable pricing subscriptions. That maybe you have parts of recharge. You need a little bit more custom work or there’s other subscription technologies out there to jump in, but the beauty of subscription, and you might hear me say this and I’ll switch back and forth between the terminology here, subscription and broadly speaking, creating a recurring revenue stream is actually the goal. Subscription is a recurring revenue stream.

Evan: But it’s also not necessarily exclusively depending on your product, the end game, meaning you might have a service fee, that’s a subscription. You might have a subscription that is for exclusive access, or if you are a scarcity type commerce company, meaning you have rare things, you only get 50 of them in stock.

Evan: And you wanna say. Paying members get an hour head start, right? That’s a recurring revenue model as well. So a lot of that I’ll switch, my terminology between saying subscription or recurring revenue model, but the point being the beauty of a subscription model and what you’re trying to get to is predictable revenue over time.

Evan: And it’s basically a machine that allows you to have with really good accuracy. Predictability in your business cash flow management of your business. And usually not always, but usually higher lifetime values of customers for you to be able to go out and attract more customers with acquisition marketing, the one who can pay more for a customer.

Evan: And has a better product can usually win them. There’s a lot to unpack there, as I look at it once you’ve determined a technology, there’s a lot of them out there. You need to be thinking about what your recurring revenue model’s gonna bring to the customer. And I can elaborate on that some more.

Evan: What you’re looking for, is a few is like five key things. Your subscription’s gotta have five key things that, that pretty much help it be successful. One passion audience meaning a subscription and recurring revenue model establishes a relationship between a company and a brand.

Evan: And that passion goes beyond something transactional. You really gotta nurture that relationship. You gotta communicate with them about their package, their tracking their shipment, why they’re buying what they’re buying and what it stands for. Doesn’t have to be cost driven, but it needs to be something that sort of shows the convenience or shows the value it brings to their life.

Evan: So that’s one thing. Ideally, the number two thing is you want that audience to be as large as possible best example I could give. And we work with a lot of these. Our meal at home companies, everyone’s gotta eat. Therefore you’re addressable audience, pretty much everybody on the internet at any given point in time.

Evan: If you have a really passionate audience, but they’re very niche. if it’s too small, they can be very hard to find any cost effective manner when it comes to acquisition marketing. But not to say you can’t find them, but then at a certain point you hit. Terminal velocity a little bit more quickly.

Evan: So that’s number two. That’s the second thing you need is that audience to be large? Number three is this is the hardest one I think is having a unique value prop. You can make a, me too company, right? You can do a copycat of somebody else doing something that you like, maybe. Maybe you got a better supply chain or maybe you own the factory, or maybe, there’s things like that could give you a little bit of a competitive advantage, but seeking the thing that makes you different and using that as a claim or as something that you could put in front of customers is critical because when they’re bouncing you against your closest competitor, if you guys are copycats of each other, down from your claims, your pricing and everything, Then you gotta coin flip chance of winning that customer and it’s gonna come down to the other things like reviews or credibility or how long you’ve been in business.

Evan: So finding a unique value proposition that, that says we do this, or we are unique because it’s our own brand and we’re not reselling third party product. I don’t know what the answer is there, but finding something that’s unique to you, that’s number three. With that uniqueness, good unit economics.

Evan: This question comes up a lot. What do I need to be doing? What’s my margin need to be when I’m doing subscription on the internet. And I always say start at 50%, 50% gross profit margins delivered to the customer before you’re before acquisition marketing, before your team, before all that, just shipping the product from your fulfillment center.

Evan: Cost of goods with shipping, with the actual product itself, to the customer’s door, 50% gross profit margins at that level, give you room to grow and scale and throw money into advertising lower than that, you’re gonna find that you struggle to scale your advertising because your CAC, the fluctuations in CAC can lead you into really challenging territory when it comes to your overall bottom line margin.

Evan: And EBIDA And it’s also gonna be difficult to scale because media prices tend to only go up over time, as we’ve all seen those number four, the economics and last piece that you were looking for when you’re building out a subscription, is it needs to solve a pain of some kind. It needs to solve something for the end user to make their life better.

Evan: Meaning I’ll use meal at home again, cause again, I have a lot of experience and this vertical. Meal at home. It’s not just food delivered to your doorstep. That’s a feature. A benefit is you’re now not having to spend time going to the grocery store. You’re not having to fight about what we’re eating for dinner tonight because the food your meals were delivered for the next several days.

Evan: And you’re picking which one you wanna do. You are now creating less gravity for that consumer because they now have something delivered conveniently to their door. And that is now releasing them from a pain that they were feeling before. And that’s that’s one example, but you gotta find a reason why your product alleviates a pain from the consumer.

Evan: And once you do that, you have all five of those things. You gotta really great. Subscription model, I think. 

Brent: Those are five great points. So just keying on the number four, you said having that economics on there A lot of subscription models offer a discount on top of just getting that subscription as an incentive to get it a subscription.

Brent: Do you feel as though there’s some built in economics in there for that guaranteed revenue over time where you might want to at some point dip down to some level. I’m not arguing about the 50%. I think that’s a great value. But having that revenue maybe cut into in the beginning where later on, you might get some more margin and then secondly the idea of a recurring service, a long time ago, we did some work for a music company and we did fan subscriptions.

Brent: So from that standpoint the margin is essentially a hundred percent, there’s no real cost to it. It’s just trying to get money or a Patreon or something like that, where you have a subscription. All you’re trying to do is get revenue for something. 

Evan: Yeah. So the the beauty of subscription and recurring revenue models is I’ve worked in subscription companies where the first order that goes out the door with cost of goods.

Evan: And this is an extreme version is actually negative. We’re losing money. We’re losing money by shipping to the customer on that first order, even before customer acquisition cost, I’ve been in a major subscription company where that is how we started. Our goal was like, Hey, we’re breaking

Evan: even before customer re acquisition cost and team and everything just breaking even that was success for us. But the reason why as subscription, you’re bouncing against an LTV you are buying and optimizing your media against an LTV. And that allows you to be, hypercompetitive even unbelievably competitive on that first order, which is very common.

Evan: Huge discounts on subscriptions on that first order. I don’t think that’s a bad thing because look, you need to get people to take a leap of faith on you. If you’re consumable, if you’re something that you eat, if you’re something that you drink they wanna try you out first, before they jump into could be a year or more of commitment.

Evan: You’re buying against an LTV. And when you’re doing that, you’re looking at, Hey, my average customer. And you model this, we’ll probably talk about this in a minute on the on the financial and how to build up a subscription company, but you have a, typically a forecast model looking at your attrition, your revenue, everything over time, and you come up with an LTV and let’s just say for hypothetical sake that your LTV is $400.

Evan: I would always say, Hey look, do you wanna maintain. A LTV to CAGS ratio of four to one for conservative scale and three to one for aggressive scale, meaning you, you trying to lean into that. You’re not maximizing your EBITDA or bottom line profits. You’re reinvesting heavily back in an increase your media spend.

Evan: And that’s with 50% margin. If your margin’s less, that ratio’s gotta be better, but at a 50% margin, you’re basically saying on $400, LTVs. I’m gonna make $200. I could spend $100 to make $200, and then you have team and everything after that. But at least from there you get your ROI. If you’re an e-commerce company without a subscription element attached to it, you have to be getting that ROI on that first order.

Evan: Otherwise you are just literally burning money and you’re waiting for them to come back. And you might know that customer comes back and purchases three times throughout the year. But sometimes that’s two, sometimes that’s four. And you don’t know when they’re coming back, subscription creates predictability there.

Evan: And you’re not just focused on making sure that oh, I got a customer for a hundred dollars and they bought $400. That’s how it is when you’re doing e-commerce. We do a subscription commerce. You can draw that out a little bit, and that allows you to be competitive in the advertising space and also make sure that you’re

Evan: controlling your downstream revenue. 

Brent: You mentioned the media spend, what out of a percentage of that would be your typical media spend or would be a recommended media spend and let’s just let’s compare to the subscription. Like you’d probably wanna spend a little bit more on media for subscriptions as compared to a one time buy type of product.

Evan: Yeah, I think the generally yes. And I think it’s more about the scalability subscriptions, the compounding effect of revenue over time with subscriptions allows you to have money, to invest to, reinvest into marketing. When you are an e-commerce company without a recurring revenue model behind it.

Evan: You might have months where your ROAS is sitting very comfortably at five or six or seven. And then you’re saving some of that for months when that ROAS is two, three or four. And you’re and then your media availability becomes really touchy, but with LTVs generally being hired with recurring revenue models.

Evan: That kind of gives you the ability to. Can continue to create a sustainable growth trajectory as long as your CAC stays within a bigger range and also you can really just hone in on understanding your customer’s needs and desires and improve your product over time. Where. Most e-commerce models,

Evan: they just have a position in the marketplace I’m and I’m not do on e-commerce models. Okay. There’s still a lot of them that exist and they do really well. I say you really want to unlock revenue potential for your company is find a recurring model to go along or be the primary offer and have regular, e-commerce to go along with it, but just the ability to reinvest into media and control your numbers more holistically predictably.

Evan: That’s the big benefit of recurring revenue models on top of, I, generally I’d say higher LTVs customer LTVs, et cetera. The beauty of it is it’s if you do it right there aren’t any surprises with e-commerce. I find that you could be surprised a lot and those surprises are usually not positive ones.

Brent: It’s just a little bit on surprises. The supply chain issue, especially in the subscription market can be very painful, especially if you’ve had a standard product that you’re selling over and over again. What do you recommend to merchants who have something and suddenly it’s outta stock for a month?

Brent: Does that lead buyers to have to look somewhere else? Or do you just try to source something that may be more expensive and lose money for that month? 

Evan: Yeah. This is probably the hardest part about subscription. And it, the hard part is understanding and seeing the cliff coming because usually the beauty of a eCommerce company non subscription is if your inventory is low for the month, you could just pull back your marketing and maybe your website isn’t as fun.

Evan: Are you. You come up with another angle to get people excited. So they’re not coming back to your website and being like, oh wow, this the merchandise this month is not interesting. But you’re not as primed to lose money. You might lose momentum if you’re an e-commerce company, subscription commerce, though, here’s the rub you usually know pretty far in advance.

Evan: If you’re, unless even if you’re manufacturing your own stuff, running your own supply chain, you’re ordering. Four to six months in advance, unless you have manufacturing here in the United States or locally to your country, wherever you’re at. If you’re ordering from anywhere overseas, you’re ordering four to six months

Evan: usually more even in advance. So you’re tying up your working capital in that product. You gotta give yourself a certain amount of buffer, cuz the earlier you procure your inventory, the more working capital you have just sitting on your shelves in a warehouse, which is important when you’re managing your cash flow.

Evan: The other side of that, if you’re cutting it way too close to being like, oh, it’s gonna arrive in the warehouse on the third and we’re selling it on the seventh. All it takes is a little jam up in the port and all of a sudden you’re like, yeah, Hey we know we’re supposed to deliver and unload on the third.

Evan: They’re not gonna get to it until the 26th of next month. It’s Okey dokey. So when you’re a subscription company, you now have to get ahead of that. And you’re doing something like sourcing product locally. If you have a, the ability to get inventory, if you’re in fashion, for example, you can always maybe find.

Evan: More fashion products that you could throw in your box, but if you’re your own supply chain, if you’re your own first party brand, you might just be low on inventory that month, which means you’re gonna have a huge bump in attrition. You’re gonna have to convince your customers to stick around and say Hey, we have some problems here or you’re paying.

Evan: Exorbitant amounts of money to somehow get that date of the 23rd back down to the 15th. And you’re able to say, Hey guys, we just have shipping delays for a week, not a big deal. But you have to scramble. Now, you usually see that coming usually, meaning, if your boat leaves, from wherever it’s coming from on time or early you’re like, okay.

Evan: And I, maybe you build in buffer time look, we’re gonna get this in the warehouse. Gonna sit there for a. Then, maybe it sits there for two weeks instead of a month, you build in that buffer, but that comes at cost. It comes outta working capital cost, because guess what, they don’t let you get your inventory without paying for it.

Evan: So you have the ability to create cash flow models that answer these questions for you and give you the means to, to create alternatives. But. If you’re not planning. And if you don’t have these check downs between how to get my inventory, how to replace my inventory, what happens? I always like to say always think about what happens if a boat sinks and I’ve been in

Evan: that business and I’d had product that was important. That was on a boat that sank. What do you do? And what plan do you put a place to, to do that, between communicating with your customers, finding alternative product, trying to rush something from somewhere else who knows. But everything comes with a calculated and quantifiable cost and risk.

Evan: And you really have to think about that. The beauty of subscription is you usually see that coming. It’s usually not the last minute. You see the horizon of alright, 60 days from now, we’re really low on inventory. We can find things. We have to act quickly, but we can solve this problem.

Evan: But it’s expensive. It is expensive and you gotta be, you have to have rainy day funds for that. 

Brent: Yeah, I think you keyed on two points there. The first one is you talked about the fashion business and maybe the box model. Compare that to just buying toilet paper where you want to get it every week or every month.

Brent: Actually maybe not even toilet paper, something a little more like coffee, let’s talk about coffee. Because somebody really likes some coffee and you need to fulfill that exact same thing month over month or week. Yeah. Week after week where a fashion you do have the option of of mixing and matching and taking 

Brent: what you have that’s most popular, but also what you have in stock. When you’re looking at the strictly subscription call it the pantry business that another big platform uses how do you manage that? If somebody has something that they really want every month and then suddenly it’s gone.

Evan: Yeah. So depending on the timeframe, you have to do that one, one beautiful thing about subscription. If you’re selling the same product one thing you can do is slow down customer acquisition. If you’re paying I, if you’re doing advertising for customer acquisition and it’s the same product conceivably, coffee’s a good example.

Evan: Like your coffee starter box from the company you order from and your recurring subscription. They have the same, goods in them. And what you do is say, okay we’re gonna be short 5,000 units in two months from now or three months from now. What you do is slow down your customer acquisition cost to say, okay, we, I think we can pick up 3000 units.

Evan: We’re gonna get a little less customers. Now, those less customers I get now are also gonna be less customers later. So you work into the number that you. I think above all my opinion on this is do your best to not upset the customers that you have, the customers you’re going to get. You will get them later chasing customer acquisition,

Evan: and I have a big tirade on this one, is what ends up crippling most up and coming subscription companies and consumer packaged goods. A good example, a practical example outside the one I just gave right there. Your company, and let’s just say your customer acquisition costs $50. Okay. Keep it easy numbers.

Evan: And your payback on that, your media payback periods for most subscription companies. Usually around three months, if you have a healthy subscription, you’re getting fully paid back on your customer acquisition cost after about three months time let’s just say you’re spending $50,000 a month to get a thousand new customers a month.

Evan: That’s a again, easy numbers here. What that means in your company. If you have not done this analysis is you have $150,000 in working capital tied up in your media, right? 50,000 a month, three months until you’re getting a media payback. You are always having $150,000 in media working to, to keep your current pace.

Evan: What I see happen a lot of brands jump in, they have some tailwinds, good news. They’re C is lower. Awesome. They think they wanna dial it media. Hey, you know what? We got the cash spend a hundred grand this month. Sound good, everybody. We all feel good. Great. Guess what? A hundred grand a month,

Evan: for three months to maintain. Now you’ve doubled your working capital for media to $300,000. Somebody’s gotta come from somewhere. It comes off the balance sheet, but uhoh customer quality. Maybe you’re going a little too hard. Maybe they’re jumping on because you ran a buy one, get one promotion and it’s dropping customer quality.

Evan: Even though your CAC went down, your customer quality went down. Maybe you have a little bit higher first cycle churn. Now your media payback’s four months. Oh. Now instead of $150,000 on working capital you’ve created $400,000 in working capital to support your current media. Guess what you also did.

Evan: You bought more inventory because you got more customers that are gonna be coming in 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 months from now, from all the new subscriptions that you’re planning on getting that, and you’ve increased your media spend. So now you’ve committed more working capital to your product. and just because you saw tailwinds and you see an opportunity there, you’ve consumed 500, $800,000 of additional working capital out of your company.

Evan: And what happens if that boat sinks? What happens if your product’s just gonna show up late jams up in the port? No one’s fault necessarily. Can’t really avoid it sometimes. The truck carrying your product, got in an accident it’s delayed a week now. You’ve overextended your company

Evan: significantly. And that leads to people having to do distressed fundraising. They have to go out and get desperate bridge capital because their vendors still gotta get paid. Their teams still has to get paid. They have to still order more product down the road. And they’ve overextended themselves on their own working capital.

Evan: This all comes together with planning your subscription business well makes an elegant machine that is controllable. There’s several levers to do that, but being too aggressive when the grass is green could really end up jamming your business up in ways that and I think if you were to.

Evan: 10 subscription company operates successful ones say, sort of 50, a hundred million dollar plus businesses. They all have that story. Every single one of them has that. We went a little too hard and it blew up in our face. So that’s one thing I always tell people, like plan ahead, but don’t stretch too far because unless you’ve got

Evan: a rich family or rich uncle. That’ll just write you a check by asking them, you could end up significantly crippling your business because you cannot control the market conditions. You can’t necessarily control your competitors. You also can’t control the nature and volatility of a boat on the ocean.

Brent: yeah. That’s a great point. That brings up the question. How do you properly measure and forecast your subscriptions? Is there a model to that? 

Evan: Yeah, proforma modeling, subscription waterfalls. These are terms that you usually hear a lot if you’re into the space, but it’s not very hard to do this.

Evan: It’s just a little bit complicated. Meaning there are a handful of key KPIs. You need to know one, your revenue, of course, revenue per box revenue per shipment, whatever that is for your, for every single cycle. And that cycle could be monthly every other month, every quarter annual. don’t really know, right?

Evan: Every business has its own revenue stream. And you need to be looking at, if I just say, if I use this the most rudimentary example of I’m a subscription box company that sends a box every month and it doesn’t matter what I’m sending in it, but just as go with that, you need to be looking at what is typically referred to as a churn water.

Evan: And another term you hear a lot in subscription is cohorts, and this is all very important. If you’re gonna go out and raise money on your subscription, these are the words that the investors love to hear and understand cohorts, cohort being typically defined as new customers. You get in a month or in a period of time, but typically a month, that’s a fixed number.

Evan: That number doesn’t change. You get a thousand customers this month. That is a fixed data point that never adjusts. You’re always gonna get a thousand new customers in April of 2022. And then by cycle usually month again. In this example, you’re looking at what’s called the churn waterfall and you’re applying churn percentages to each month.

Evan: So your a thousand customers after one month might be 800 customers. And then you apply, 20% drop off there. Then that 800 customers, it may lose 10% of that 800. So now it’s gonna drop to 710 customers you’re gonna lose or 720 customers. It’s gonna lose 80 customers. And that seven 20, maybe you apply another 10%.

Evan: And there’s I have a lot of experience on different types of models, but generally speaking, usually in that first cycle, typically the highest attrition, 20, 25% of all your subscribers gonna drop off. after that 10 to 15% on that second cycle on a monthly cycle. Then from there, you’re usually looking at about three to 5% per month.

Evan: If they stick with your product for three or four months, they’re not dropping off at high clips anymore. As long as you maintain quality service. Now, when you have all those customers and then you have the revenue attached to them, you can now plot your revenue over time, what are you gonna collect? You can also project your inventory demand over time, how much product you’re gonna be selling from that cohort.

Evan: And then you layer on multiple cohorts. So you build a model that says, okay, this is what our customers were in April. This is what they were in March. This is what they were in February. And then you get a final total from every single cohort of all right, I’m gonna. 4,000 boxes this month. And I know if I ship 4,000 boxes, I put three things in a box.

Evan: I need 12,000 units plus or minus for this month in demand plus new customers for that month. So maybe it’s 15,000, whatever your new customer rules are. Now you can track revenue, you could track product demand. You could track you could start applying customer service interactions for workforce.

Evan: That a every thousand boxes we ship out, we get 10 tickets, we have this math, right? So then you know that from sending out 10,000 boxes, I’m gonna get a hundred tickets. So then you know, how many customer service agents you need. Now you have your revenue planned up. Great. Awesome.

Evan: Now you gotta plan out your media. Media advertising. If you’re doing direct to consumer advertising on Facebook, Google, et cetera you’re balancing that with a new customer acquisition cost number. So spending $50,000 at $50 fully blended CAC means something at a thousand new customers. And you’re tracking that as media dollars spend over time.

Evan: You used that revenue model that I mentioned to derive an LTV all an LTV is. There’s different versions of LTV that people use. But, generally speaking, there’s two that make sense. You’re of your gross revenue per customer after discount. So just what you’re gross, getting from them, which is typically referred to as an LTV number.

Evan: And many of them apply their margins after that. So they’ll reduce if you have 50% March and it might say, Hey, my LTV is, $400, but my LTV after cost of goods is $200. All that does is really tell you what you’re dropping further down on your P and L sheet, right? So once you have all that, now you’re looking at trying to layer that into cash planning.

Evan: So this is the tricky part, managing your cash flow because cash is coming in when you’re selling product cash is going out for media pretty much real time, not unless you’re a gigantic. Media partner spending tens of millions a month. You’re not really getting terms with Facebook or anything like that.

Evan: You’re not able to get an invoice at the end of the month for Facebook. They’re not floating that you’re, they’re just hitting your card every thousand dollars you’re spending. But inventory there’s long lead on that and you gotta look out and say, okay, Hey, eight months from now, we need 20,000 units and I gotta buy those next month.

Evan: I gotta make sure I have cash for that. And where is that cash coming from? What happens if it’s a little tight, do I need to slow down my marketing? Maybe you do. You run those scenarios. You start having all of these numbers in place. It’s not an incredibly large set of numbers, but the primary numbers being, cohorted customers churn your revenue per cycle for those customers and your media spend.

Evan: And product demand, those five things. When your product’s gonna hit, you can work backwards and build a cash flow analysis you could build and understand all this from understanding your initial cash balance of what’s gonna go out. What’s coming in. And you do that. You can really manage a business again.

Evan: It sounds complicated. It’s really not. It’s just, you have to be planning far further in advance subscription you’re always looking forward. E-commerce you can find opportunities. I’ve, the drop ship, world’s the most prime example of this, but even just anyone else that’s been like, Hey.

Evan: I go buy a hundred thousand of these products right now at a great price. Let’s just sell ’em sweet. Let’s do it. Drop the cash for a hundred thousand units or something. You’ll spin up a website, do run some advertising. You try to make money off of that. And you close that chapter. Subscriptions just require.

Evan: It’s more like a locomotive down the you’re going down the tracks and you gotta keep it going. You gotta keep it rolling. You gotta pay attention to enough things. The moment you disregard a lever you can end up blowing something up and that’s not what you wanna do. 

Brent: So we have about five minutes left today. If you were to give some nugget to a merchant and they would like to enter into subscriptions, or they would like to find some products that may be already in their catalog. how would you recommend they start to find that right product and start doing subscriptions.

Evan: Yeah, one thing I always say is just listen to your current customers. If you’re an e-commerce company, you already got a company rolling. And it is healthy. Maybe you’re doing five, $10 million a year in revenue, have some money on advertising, listen to your customers. They’ll tell you the things they want on a recurring basis.

Evan: They want to get access early. They want to get. Consumable product, if you sell that they wanna be part of a membership for some reason. That’s not everybody, you’re not gonna convert a hundred percent of your existing customers into it, but listen to your customers. If you already have some, if you’re coming into the market with subscription, I largely say, look at what solves a pain the most.

Evan: That’s the biggest one. What would be the thing that if you had it in your life or, everybody, had it in their. It would make their life easier. If it’s getting food delivered at home. If it’s getting toilet paper delivered at home, if it’s laundry services start there and see if you can build up and work backwards.

Evan: See if the economics works, not everything is meant to be in a recurring revenue model, but I do think that almost every business can create a part of their business that has a recurring revenue component to it. So doesn’t mean that, one of the questions I got asked, we put on the spot, which I thought was literally like mattress companies, right?

Evan: Like online mattress companies Purple like Casper, all them. How do you make a recurring revenue model out of that? I said, look like, yeah, then people don’t need mattresses very often, but would they pay more for, would they pay 50 year, $50 a year for no questions asked replacement? If something happens, maybe, but in that guarantee, the warranty of expensive goods is one of the oldest subscriptions that’s ever existed.

Evan: Could they get on a subscription for quarterly bedding? Like people have not a nice bed. If they were to get new bedding every quarter, that’s seasonally relevant. Again, not everybody would want that, but there’s some that would want that if they bought a bed from you, they want bedding, think about that.

Evan: But try to find something that solves the pain for the customer base that you’re going after. And ultimately that has the biggest applicable audience. If you can find pretty much adults, 24 and over to cater your product to, you can find a subscription stream there that will hit on all of those marks to end up solving a pain, have good economics, create a service and a relationship and, make people’s lives better.

Evan: That’s where I begin. And then on that. And then last piece be adaptable. Nobody gets it right on the first swing. You just, you really just don’t like every subscription brand that exists out there today. Right now, if they’ve been around for more than a year, probably year, maybe two years, they are different than when they started.

Evan: They have a different product line they’ve expanded, they’ve changed. They’ve pivoted their pricing, their service, their quality, all that stuff. Usually for the better know that it just don’t overthink about where you’re trying to get to. But if you see an opportunity, it will evolve with the company into what the market needs.

Brent: I think as everybody knows in the marketing world measure test, and then yep. Do it all over again to see how well it worked. And these are great opportunities that everybody has with every product in their. Online store or in, in retail store, whatever that thing is.

Brent: Like you said, with the mattress, there is opportunities for subscriptions across almost every product certainly is gonna be some that don’t apply. But if you look at what are the big box stores are doing, I think the add-on warranties and add-on products, and I the mattress pillows are a great example of how a mattress company would leverage the fact that somebody’s sleeping to the fact that you could brand a pillow that goes along with their mattress anyways. Absolutely. So yeah, this has been great, Evan. As I close out on every podcast, I give the guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like, what would you like to plug today?

Evan: I just say that, if you what I was talking about, curious about how to build out a subscription platform, reach out to me, evan@Stealthventurelabs.com or it’s just Stealth venture labs.com. And see what we’re up to see how we can help. Sometimes we advise sometimes we just jump in and run this business for you.

Evan: Also I’d like to say that we are building out. If you go to our website we have a fully functional 5 0 1 C three, which is really important to us. Something we call our impact lab. where we as a company built a 5 0 1 C three and built a product focused on teaching young entrepreneurs from really tough areas of the country, how to build and launch their own e-commerce business and actually fund with cash.

Evan: Their first $5,000 in media spend After we help them build a website and show ’em how to do all that. So something we’re really passionate about is a developing the entrepreneurial spirit and the bridge to get from an idea to an online presence. So something, if you’re ever interested in donating or helping and mentoring reach out to us about that as well, it said something really important 

Brent: to us.

Brent: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. Evan Padgett from Stealth labs. Thank you so much today. And it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. 

Evan: appreciate it, Brent. Thank you.

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