Podcasts

Talk-Commerce Tom Robertshaw

Building a Big Community with Tom Robertshaw

Brent and Tom (@bobbyshaw) discuss ways to build community and how people can become more involved in the BigCommerce Community. We talk about different channels and how inclusive or exclusive those channels are. We talk about the BigCom DevX event that Space48 recently organized and the upcoming BigCommerce.

Hackathon happening August 15 – August 26, 2022, Starting at 10:00 am CDT

https://bighackathonsummer22.splashthat.com

Transcript

Brent: All right. Welcome to this BigCommerce. Big talk. Hey, that’s a good one. Big talk, BigCommerce, the addition of talk commerce on the BigCommerce community channel today. I have Tom Robertshaw who is a activist for the BigCommerce community. Can I call you an activist? Agitator? Okay. Agitator. Yeah. Yeah. So Tom, introduce yourself.

Brent: Tell us what you do day to day. One of your passions in life. 

Tom: Brilliant, Innovation Director at Space48, and I head up our initiative to build a suite of apps that help the commerce merchants grow their store. Passion day to day two main passions. First, my children about two that three years old and three months old.

Tom: So that’s a lot of time and energy goes into that. And I love it. But my second passion. Probably supporting on Manchester United in the football slash soccer. Although that’s more difficult of late in their recent seasons. 

Brent: Yeah. We have to stay away from controversy or as you would like to say controversy on our podcast.

Brent: Let’s dive right in. Let’s just talk about community. We’ve both been in another community of another platform for a long time. And in our green room talk, we were just going. Some of the reasons and we landed on the word. Why? Like, why are you involved in the BigCommerce 

Tom: community?

Tom: Yeah. That’s a great question. And as you say, we’ve been involved in communities in the past and some, I think when you’re in a community, you think it’s special. And lots of communities are special. I think like for me, personally, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m involved in, I want to give it my all.

Tom: I want to be involved fully. Get the joy out of it, but to make the most impact as well. Like it feels like if you’re gonna be working with a platform to be involved in the community, gives you so many benefits, whether or not that’s learning like from others in the community, rather than just being whoever you’re working with day to day.

Tom: If you can broaden that to some of the best minds in the community, just by being active, whether that be at in person events online events, forums slack groups and things like that. It’s a greater opportunity to learn from others. I also, particularly when moving to BigCommerce over the last couple of years, I’ve loved being involved in answering other people’s questions, because it was the best way for me to learn rather than just what challenges am I taking on day to day?

Tom: Like I’m building this app. Okay. I need to learn this API. And just the problems that I come into. Building that app, if I’m listening to and helping others I’m researching other APIs, finding out about their problems. And for me that for both Magento and commerce has been fantastic ways to learn myself.

Tom: And the old age old adage of teaching is a great way of learning because you really have to put thought into it. It’s not just oh, I know how that works. Once you tell someone else how it has to work, then that the inside out. So those are like a few ways why I really enjoy learning.

Tom: One of our values is we thrive and we learn. And so there’s so much about being involved, helping other people, getting help from other people that resonates with 

Tom: me there. 

Brent: yeah, I like that. So thrive when we learn. That’s a great, that’s a, that’s one of the core values of Space48 and that’s such a great, that’s such a great way to look at it.

Brent: And I think you had mentioned earlier, too, that like maybe 90% of the people that are involved in doing BigCommerce stuff. We’ll just say whatever they’re doing, they could be implementers or they could be a developer. They could be a salesperson project manager. They aren’t involved in the community.

Brent: And there’s not a lot of interest to be involved in the community, which means that we slice up the pie. We have a very small group of people that are involved and out of that pie, there’s people that would be the ones that are. Pushing that involvement or pushing that engagement.

Brent: And then there’s the people that are learning from the broader community itself. How do we get people to be more engaged and I’m just gonna also target maybe the introverts that aren’t, that don’t feel as though they want to be engaged, but sometimes feel left out when they aren’t engaged.

Tom: Yeah, it’s a great question. And a difficult one and I’m sure it’s, sure it’s one that the like developer advocates and community moderators at BIgCommerce are tackling on a week by week basis as well. I feel like inclusivity and making it a, an a, an open plate environment, whichever environment we’re talking about.

Tom: If it’s on the forums or if it’s on the BigCommerce dev slack, which is where I spend probably most of my day to day time engaging with the community. It’s just, I guess the best thing you can do is making it a welcoming environment. So it is answering people’s questions.

Tom: So people see that people aren’t like judged for their point of view or corrected and told that’s not how you do it. And providing and showing that everybody is welcome. And there’s so many different ways to to approach a problem. I think that’s the best that we can do to encourage I do the, there’s a couple of people within the community.

Tom: Andrew Barber in particular, in the BigCommerce Dev Slack like that, we’ll pose like questions each week, then there might be like slightly off topic questions or a bit more bringing any sort of personal lives into it, like music interests or what have you learned this week? What’s your favorite, like local cuisine.

Tom: And I think that’s a great way of building up a relationship with other people. And that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, with everything that we’re doing it’s all about the people, relationships will live on. People will move to other industries, whatever other platforms.

Tom: But I feel being, being real in those communities as well is an important part of making people feel like they don’t have to perform or be particularly as you mentioned for introverts they’re more likely to be nervous about what they’re sharing or if they’re going to be corrected.

Brent: Yeah. And I’ll just say right this morning, anyways, it is gonna be Branston pickle on. Simply because I’m out of Branson pickle right now. Now I’m on a mission to find some more. So I know I can find an on Amazon, but it’s incredibly expensive. Anyways, 

Tom: Beans on Toast for 

Brent: lunch, say . Yeah, it’s also Marmite, which Tom you very nicely gave me a 500 gram jar of Marmite a number of years ago, but I’m sure that’s still going.

Brent: Yeah I ate the whole thing, so don’t worry. It’s been that long. I think one of the things in the community space and we talk about slack, like that is a closed channel. And if people don’t know about it, they’re never gonna know about it because it’s not public. , it’s public in the sense that anybody can join, but if you don’t know about it, you don’t know about, it’s like that speakeasy.

Brent: That’s a great little place to go to, but until you know about it, then you know about it. So maybe from a community standpoint, there has to be some more outward evangelism that helps people understand where the places to go in the community and help them find the places where they fit best, and I think the slack group is great.

Brent: There’s been some talk about a discord group. And because, I set up a Twitter community and again, that’s a closed group. Anybody can join, but if you don’t know, it’s there, you’re never gonna know it’s there. So how can we. Make it more, how can we get our voices heard better through the broader scope of say social media and then invite people to come to these communities.

Tom: Yeah, I think from my experience and so far in industry, it’s been, Twitter has been the place. I dunno if that’s changing, I know LinkedIn has its own sort of place for people to come to and share and build a network. But depending on which role you’re talking about, like from a developer perspective wouldn’t say necessarily like LinkedIn is the place.

Tom: But Twitter outside of groups, I think we are, all we can do is provide many different options for people for their personal preferences. Like you say is slack isn’t for everyone. I dunno if discord is what, like hip young people are using these days. But I was forced to sign up recently.

Tom: So I think to learn about that now. But yeah, and the Twitter community I think is a great. It’s actually new to me in this, in, in general. Like I’ve joined the eCommerce community group on Twitter as well as a PHP one. But I’m, they’re new to me, so I don’t know. How to make the most of them and what other people’s experiences are other than that, it, yeah.

Tom: Feels like for me personally I enjoy sharing on Twitter, as you say, that’s there’s, it’s public. You still need to be following your network. But that seems like the most practical way. The alternative that I mentioned earlier is the forums. That can be a bit more

Tom: transactional rather than conversational. So I have this problem or, critique my site. And so you, that’s another place if you know about it and if you’re in the becomes community, then I’m sure you do. But that would be another one to 

Brent: mention, yeah. Forums is how I got started in the Magento community.

Brent: And just as you were describing earlier, I asked so many questions that I started thinking I can actually answer questions and the, I. Wanna be a teacher in any way, but I answered questions because I knew by finding the answers, it would help me understand the problem better. And I’ll be honest this is 13, 14 years ago I did a lot of Googling and it’s amazing how just some little investigative Googling would help you find answers for that.

Brent: And then getting into a network of people to help you find those answers. which what followed from joining those forums and forums are more of a public thing? I’ll be I’ll be transparent. I’m not part of the BigCommerce forums yet. have to be part of that. And I don’t do much of a technical role anymore, so maybe that’s shows where that pivot comes from more of a architectural thought leadership role,

Brent: you’re not so much in the forums, but I do feel like it’s an important place for people like myself to at least try to answer some of those questions. So tell us a little bit about the BigCommerce forums and why developers should go there. 

Tom: Yeah, and I had a similar experience. I was a moderator on the Magento forums.

Tom: And now I didn’t initially get involved in the BigCommerce forums. I started out with the slack group and then have grown from there. I think one of the reasons I chose to get involved is like you say, it’s, it feels more open. it feels more open and accessible. So there’s a wider group of people that are in and on the forums as opposed to the slack group.

Tom: But also like slack, particularly in most communities, the messages are lost. So it’s again, it’s very transient of the logistic, the experience of being in a slack community, whereas with forums. while we’ve talked about relationships, there is, a commercial and brand building reputation, building aspect to being involved in the community as well.

Tom: Naturally. It’s a kind of a, it’s a strategic choice. And one of the be benefits of forums is the SEO of them. You answer a question a few times. If that question is popular or it’s linked to, then it’s more likely to show up in search results. And it’s there, forever, or as long as it becomes forums and this shape or forum are around.

Tom: So there’s a lot of it’s nice to know that the time that you’re investing is going to be useful to others in the future, not just the person that’s asking it, whereas slack, its, who asked the question and who maybe saw that question at the time after that it’s gone or forgotten.

Tom: And so I think that’s one of the great advantages over a forum. Even over Twitter for the same reason that if you search for a problem, your solution that you posted a year ago is much more likely to be found. And therefore the value that you’re creating is greater. 

Brent: Yeah. It’s of like an encyclopedia, so you can go back and look up things where I definitely agree on slack is something that does get lost even after a day.

Brent: It depends how busy the channel is. And it’s hard to go back and find it. Maybe speak to a little bit about the developer community now and just let’s touch on big Devex and how you are helping to bring those developers together in a place that we can all talk together. 

Tom: Yeah, sure.

Tom: We created and had our first BigCom DevX, which was a virtual event for developers to come together and listen to a few different talks from people within the community, sharing about their experiences, neat ways about solving problems that they’ve tackled or deep dives into things like stencil and handlebar and how to build

Tom: more advanced themes. And the reason we created that is we internally have a dev X every month where given that we’ve been across offices are now like multi, multiple locations for many years, we wanted a way for the development team to come together and just learn about what other projects have been working on?

Tom: What cool things have you been doing? What challenges have you faced that we other we might all want to avoid in the future. And so we were having a monthly kind of an hour to two hour call Talk set up in advance for some people might be five minutes just to share this one thing they learnt.

Tom: Some might be longer if it’s a deep dive on a particular tool of technology and I got a lot of value from it. I learned and met people in the other offices that wouldn’t have got to know otherwise, and after doing that for so long and particularly post pandemic and getting like really involved in the BigCommerce community, I was going through the the process of

Tom: getting to know other people manually reaching out to them, having a catch up call learning about like their backstory, which I’ve really enjoyed so far and wanted to provide something else. And it felt like an appropriate time to, yeah, let’s run this as an experiment.

Tom: Let’s create what we would normally do for a monthly dev and make it. Announce it three months in advance get people from the community to talk. And we’ve got really good feedback from it. So we had about 75 people attend it. It was a free event, as I say, for a couple of hours. And all the videos are now posted on the BigCom DevX YouTube channel for you to find later.

Tom: And we certainly hope to run it again, not sure on the frequency. Right now may, perhaps the next one will be in the new year. 

Brent: There’ll be one in Manchester hopeful. That’s a big in conference developer conference. I think you, you had mentioned a little bit about answering questions helps your, I don’t know if you were used the word reputation, but it does help you create more awareness about yourself in the broader community.

Brent: I think it’s important to note that both of us don’t work for BigCommerce, but we work for places that are BigCommerce partners. But I don’t think your motivation ever should be self-promotion or trying to be commercial and answering a question, cuz you’d like to sell somebody, something I, as a developer a long time ago, always saw through that

Brent: when somebody was saying, you should use this extension because blah, blah, blah. And it that self-promotion in terms of trying to be commercial and selling something is different than I think the motivation to be in a community to help others, there’s two competing factors there.

Brent: Maybe with the few minutes we have left here, we could talk a little bit about why we want to get people to join and some of the big things that they get out of the community, other than just commercial benefits. 

Tom: Yeah, I think it, it comes back to some of the things I mentioned earlier.

Tom: Like I, I really wanna meet other people in the community. I enjoy kind getting to know people like, like myself getting to know you Brent and me visiting Minneapolis. What was it a decade ago now? So it’s amazing what can come out of getting involved and meeting other people, not least, the things you mentioned in terms of how it can be better for you

Tom: personally from a, the knowledge that you can apply at work or the projects that you might win because of it, those things are there, but they’re not the reasons that you go into it. Like you say. For me, it’s definitely been about the people. I think if I, my personally, if I can, if.

Tom: Be brutally honest. If I hadn’t got involved in the first conference that I’d been to, then I wouldn’t have gone on a tour of America and met my future wife. So there’s a good reason to do it. 

Brent: yeah. Your kids have everything to do with the Magento community. We’ll give the Magento community full credit for both of your kids now.

Brent: I’m gonna edit that out. Definitely. it’s a joke, everybody. So you know, the other thing that, that has come up in our past community started with an M ended with an O had gento in it was inclusive versus exclusive. A lot of people saw Magento, some of the community members as being exclusive

Brent: and they felt it was hard to be involved with those other people. How do we stay away from that? How do we stay away from this sort of notion of being a clic or being some kind of in crowd? And if you remember, there was a hashtag called real Magento that was going around and people then started associating that with the in crowd.

Brent: And it wasn’t, it was I think it was meant to be a label of, Hey, this is where the Magentol community. not that there should be a fake Magento, but it also, we have to have a differentiator from the hashtag Magento, or BigCommerce, because that’s gonna be a commercial hashtag. How do we make it inclusive, but also say here’s how you find the content for this community.

Tom: certainly, and I’m probably the last person that should advise on how to be inclusive, but from going through that experience, and I recognize why those kind of hashtags were created, when there’s lots of Twitter, spam and things like that. And I think in some ways it regarded as a time back to your previous point about like being authentic and connecting those that are just there to be authentic.

Tom: So I think that’s some of it In terms of how to continue being inclusive. I think it’s about always being open to new members. I think it can be difficult, particularly if you’re an introvert. Like you’ve got people that, it can be like a little difficult when the new person walks up to the group, whether that be in, in real life or new person enters the slack chat, like I can appreciate like why we don’t really talk about it.

Tom: That is a strange experience that we, we have to deal with on a day to day basis in our modern lives. And I think it’s about recognizing that they probably just have a wealth of experience too. And even if they don’t, they can provide as just as much like value to the community.

Tom: And they’re just as important. I think I have certainly been lazy in the past of not necessarily considering myself in a clic, but trending towards like the same people that I already knew, because it was. And once you have found a group of people or people that you recognize, they are gonna be the people that you are drawn towards, you engage with because you know them, it’s safe, yeah. It’s gonna lead to a good time. And so it takes effort, doesn’t it, to be inclusive. And I think sometimes it’s hard to make that effort. And so I think we can all forgive each other for the times. And we, when we don’t but to continue to try to make that effort to stay as inclusive 

Brent: as possible.

Brent: Yeah. And I think there is a challenge as well. You have to put effort to maintain relationships with the people that, there’s a certain amount of energy that has to go into putting the effort into maintaining a friendship like between you and I, if we both don’t put any effort in soon the relationship falls apart because there’s no effort put in either.

Brent: So the times that we did get to see each other in an event or something, we, you definitely wanna make time to spend time with your other community members and as it grows, and as there’s more people you wanna spend time as many as possible. So there I do see there’s a dichotomy in there between wanting to make sure everybody feels inclusive, but also wanting to maintain relationships within the community.

Brent: And I think. Like the relationship building and relationship maintaining. Like now we’re getting into more psychology and community, but the word is community, we’re trying to build community. And I don’t think it’s ever gonna be solved. I do feel as though the idea of diversity in our community can be solved.

Brent: Like we can invite more women, more people of color, and you and I are both not good examples of either of those. And how can we bring those people in? I feel like both of us could be open about making sure that we’re talking about the fact that we need more people of color and people that aren’t men and, that’s just a simple fact, right?

Brent: That, that has to be talked about. And it can’t be swept under the rug from a community standpoint and from an inclusion standpoint. 

Tom: Yeah. And I think more, even more effort in that case, because, naturally, psychologically we are going to be drawn towards people that are like ourselves.

Tom: And if it takes effort to continue to Welcome by new people. It’s gonna take even more effort. If you don’t anything about the background or than what they’ve been through. 

Brent: Yeah. I think that the perfect place for community building would be a community run together, which I’m a big proponent of changing your life through movement.

Brent: The Big Com Run. Huh? Are you getting it? feeling it now. I want to end, let’s end at a positive note. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you in the BigCommerce world. And is there any, anything exciting that you’re working on right now?

Brent: And then I’ll make sure we put all these links and things like that in the show notes. . 

Tom: Yeah, sure. Our most recent app just launched which we are about to more formally announce, which is a mega menu builder which I would be remiss not to mention on this particular episode we’ve worked.

Tom: with BigCommerce for a couple of years now, and we’re a bit frustrated what you can do out the box. And we know how important, like the store navigation is to draw people in help their product discovery and just simple lists of categories that it’s not gonna cut it.

Tom: And over the years we’ve created solutions with. Page builder, but again, that’s on a project by project basis. And so we’ve now built an app that allows you to manage your menu completely independently of your cater hierarchy, add images, choose your different sort of designs for the flyout menu.

Tom: And so it’s great for people just to install, configure and get working, but also for agencies to use as just to perhaps an admin interface and provide their own front end from menu. So that I’m really excited about.

Brent: Excellent. Yeah, and I’m all, I’m always excited about the concept of open SaaS, which BigCommerce likes to tout and the fact that BigCommerce, even though it’s a SaaS platform they offer a lot of ex extendability to their existing code and allow you to to work within that similar to open source.

Brent: You. Necessarily download it and run it, which would be actually cool if you could do little local instances of it, but I will, I’ll mention that to Brent Bellm. The next time I talk to him that we need local instances of BigCommerce run with warden. Anyways, I digress. 

Tom: I’ll also quickly mention I’m excited for the BigCommerce hackathon.

Tom: That starts very soon as well. A two week event that BigCommerce are putting on to people to create whatever they would like, or whether that’s apps or scripts or demo stores, things that just create something with the APIs, following that open SaaS approach. And I’m excited to see that’s the first time that they’ve done anything like it.

Tom: First time I’ve been involved in that kind of thing with the BigCommerce platform. Looking forward to getting involved there. Yeah. And 

Brent: hackathons are super fun and there’s roles for non-developers and hackathons either. They need creative thinkers. There’s always there’s roles for everybody in a hackathon.

Brent: And I would encourage even non-developers to join hackathons at least to see what’s happening and learn a little bit about that experience hackathons, I feel are most valued in person, but what we’ve learned in the pandemic and in the last couple years is that they are successful online and they build a lot of great relationships.

Brent: And I, I know that from the Magentol side they did some 24 hour hackathons that happened, starting in one time zone and just continually went for 24 hours straight around the world. And that was all done online collaborative. It’s a proven concept that works so great.

Brent: Definitely. Tom, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate all the work you do putting in on the BigCommerce community. Thanks. I enjoyed it. When I finish off a podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today? 

Tom: I will plug our apps. So if you search Space48 on the BigCommerce app store you’ll find a nice long list of apps that we’ve been able to put out now.

Tom: And we’re continuing to add to so check it out. All right. 

Brent: Thank you, Tom Robertshaw. He is with Space48 in the UK. Have a great day.

The 90/10 rule with Jeff J Hunter

I can do it faster myself. It will take too long to teach someone to do it. I don’t trust that the person will do a good enough job. You must learn to elevate and delegate if you have said any of these statements. @jhunter101 Jeff J Hunter helps us to understand the importance of getting S#!t off your plate.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have jeff J. Hunter. Jeff, why don’t you go ahead and do a much better introduction than I just did? Tell us what you do in your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.

Jeff: I’m a huge IT nerd. I’ve always been in IT my entire life started a computer store that I used to work at for free back at my high school days. And then I ended up becoming a it guy for a networking company in a health and wellness center. And then I became an it guy for a school. And then I became the it coordinator for the whole school district.

Jeff: And then I became an it project manager for each fortune 500 Phillips electronics. And I literally build virtual teams. That’s what I’ve done pretty much my whole life and turns out it’s a pretty important thing to do. These days, I was just telling you before the show that back in 2019, I used to have to convince business owners why they should hire remotely.

Jeff: And after COVID happened I got tapped by pretty much everyone to be their kind of remote team expert. I have a column at entrepreneur.com. I talk about virtual teams and personal brand. I’m officially faculty at digitalmarketer.com on how to build remote agencies. And I’ve definitely helped build out teams for, everything from real estate to e-com to

Jeff: every type of business you could think of. I have 170 team members, mostly in the Philippines. We’re a Filipino virtual assistant company called VA staffer which is now up to about 2.7 million in revenue. And that’s me in a 

Brent: nutshell. All right. Thanks for that. So I know that we did talk a little bit about

Brent: pre pandemic. And there was a lot of resistance from employers to build out remote teams. I’ve been in the Magento space for almost 15 years now. And I think there was a necessity in our space that you had to build remote teams because of the lack of talent.

Brent: So maybe go into some of the reasons other than lack of talent in your local area, where you need to build a remote team.

Jeff: I think that’s very valid. I think that, when you hire remotely, you obviously can tap into resources that are not local. For example, I live in a very small 50,000, maybe 80,000 person town in central California, like it’s near Tracy, California.

Jeff: It’s a very small area. The closest, I am an hour and a half away from the bay area, in all reality, like my talent sources are limited. And I think most people actually are now. I also think that there’s another advantage here that we’re not talking about, which is the American work ethos.

Jeff: Where that’s progressed. I think that over time American has become more entrepreneurial. America’s always been very entrepreneurial, but I feel like right now there’s a huge movement in America for like side hustles and things like that. And and especially in a field that we’re not talking about that much, which is personal assistance and executive assistance, which is something that

Jeff: it used to be an incredible career, right? Like in the sixties, seventies you’d have assistants. Everyone had an assistant and nowadays it’s very challenging to find people for those types of support roles. And another reason why I really like the Philippines is because they have a very strong work ethic.

Jeff: They have a very like service, heart mentality. Also in the Philippines, it’s like a really amazing role that people look up to, to become an executive assistant to a founder CEO here in America. It’s like an awesome thing compared to in America, when you hire someone to be a personal assistant or an executive assistant, they say, cool, what’s next?

Brent: Do you think the Philippines are two virtual assistants like India is to technology talent? 

Jeff: I think so.

Jeff: Although I have learned a couple things along the way. Here’s probably a valued nugget for your listeners. One is I don’t hire virtual assistants. virtual assistant, no matter where you are in the world are typically like entrepreneurs, they’re usually. Managing multiple clients, they’re servicing multiple clients.

Jeff: They have multiple retainers. And for me, I want dedicated people that are committed to me. We’re a permanent staffing solution. So like we build teams, we have people that have worked for the same client that have been on my, that have been in my client lists since 2014, we still have clients that have the same VA.

Jeff: So it’s I guess in all reality, what I do is I actually go out to like technical support call centers, like Uber, Microsoft, Shopify, Canva, right? Like I go to these types of technology companies and I find people that are like, Two years, three years of tenure, they usually work in six days a week.

Jeff: They’re usually getting mandatory overtime. Non-paid mandatory overtime, by the way, they usually have to commute. And then I just simply give them the pitch, which is, Hey, how would you like to learn how to become an executive assistant or a virtual assistant to these awesome companies here based in America.

Jeff: And you’re gonna make two to three times more than you’re getting paid right now. And you can work from home. In your pajamas. That’s how we get them to stick around. Cuz I, I think that, I think the real issue Brett is that retention rate. I think that’s the one thing that you really have to think about remotely is the retention rate.

Brent: Yeah, I know that we’ve hired quite a few people in Mexico and it has been a challenge in the developer world anyways to keep people from moving from job to job. In certain markets, there is a strong a strong, I don’t know what, I don’t know what the word I want to use, but, Trying to get somebody else’s talent, nabbing, your talent or whatever you wanna say.

Brent: So I know that recruitment, yeah. Recruitment is a much better word to use. So yeah, I, so maybe some secrets around how do you keep that talent staying there? 

Jeff: Yeah. First off one, one thing’s for sure. You cannot treat people like. A clock in clock out employee. As a matter of fact, if you’re hiring people overseas, you’re not gonna have them be employees.

Jeff: Anyway, they’re gonna be a contractor. They’re gonna be what’s called a W8BEN W8BEN is a form. You have them fill out that they’re not a us resident. or citizen. And thus, they are not held liable or you’re not held liable to us tax law. So another benefit they actually make it very difficult to hire Americans.

Jeff: These days they’re getting so more expensive. just hire, especially the low wage people. If you’re hiring. A tech stack developer, a hundred K or whatever but if you’re trying to find just like low level, I here in California, where the minimum wage where I’m at is about $15 an hour.

Jeff: I. It really hurts the economy in all reality, because, and the sad part is these laws are meant to help people that are the most vulnerable young people in, maybe minority communities, they’re meant to be like, Hey, look, you’re gonna start out great with a great job, but here’s the problem is business owners have to evaluate what kind of return am I gonna get for a $15?

Jeff: They’re not gonna take their chances on some Joe Schmo. They’re not gonna take some chances. They’re gonna find someone who maybe has some experience or whatever else is they’re gonna pay 15 bucks an hour. So the people that need it the most are not able to get jobs. But anyway, the point that I’m getting at is, as far as retention goes, I try to keep things results based, not clock in clock out.

Jeff: So when it comes to results based you say, okay, what does it for? So in the E eCom space, for example, let’s say I built out teams to do e-com fulfillment. We have a bunch of stores. I have a guy who’s got a huge Trump store. Who’s just killing it. And it’s all drop ship. It’s all drop ship, Amazon fulfillment.

Jeff: They get hundreds of orders a day. They have a VA who basically goes in there, gets into their Amazon account, sets up the drop ship orders. Boom easy. Here’s another thing it’s very hard to find Americans that would be satisfied every day, going into an Amazon account and shipping drop ship orders.

Jeff: It’s like very a low level task. So I think that, setting the right expectations and having it results based, how many orders they should be able to fulfill per day rather than, Hey here’s the amount of hours you should work and that’s gonna go a lot.

Brent: isn’t that Amazon model, the exact model that Amazon uses in their warehouses to show productivity. And I know that there’s been a lot of talk about how busy and how that, that you have to be in motion all the time at an Amazon warehouse. 

Jeff: Yeah, they have stories. They have stories about people who like pee and water bottles because they don’t have enough time to run to the bathroom and pack or something.

Jeff: obviously I do not condone that. I’m just saying that obviously they have results based stuff and it’s the same thing with their prime shipping model. Like they have their, like you can see every package, what like the, they know exactly what drivers are doing because they can see it.

Jeff: They got GPS, they got the little blub-blup, they got a picture everything’s results based. And I feel like right now we’re moving into results based, or even a show me economy. 

Brent: Yeah. Do you think there’s a little bit of a trade off between just hourly and then results based. Some people are motivated to work a little too hard even.

Jeff: Yeah. I’ve actually had to have a real talk over the past year with my leadership team. I have nine people that run this company, VA staffer and actually technically have five people. And then four of those people have an assistant. Including my assistant. So I guess that’s 10 people, but what I’ve learned is that there is a little bit of a trade off.

Jeff: And I also learned that I don’t like to have caps on my people. I want them to be able to earn as much as they can whether that’s, if they, what if they need to put in extra time or whatever. I also reward my team. For example, Jacqueline, my assistant, she does a kick ass job. Hey, you did fantastic today.

Jeff: It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve done for the day. We’ve done the to-do list. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s little leadership nuggets like that, that make people like, wow, this guy is really cool to work for. If you’re the kind of guy who has your assistant work an hour, two hours overtime every day and never actually say, Hey, thank you so much for your what doing take the rest of the day off, whatever, like you’re setting yourself up for 

Brent: failure.

Brent: Yeah. That’s a really good point. And having some of those expectations up front and what to expect at the end are so important, especially as a manager. So I would imagine then when you’re helping a company build a remote team, do you have a roadmap you’d walk ’em through to be successful in that.

Jeff: Yeah. So we usually start, and this is it’s funny, cuz it’s backwards. Most people think oh I, when they hire somebody, they have this whole laundry list of things they want them to do. I call that what I call the miracle trap. Like you wanna find this miracle virtual assistant, that’s gonna do everything for you.

Jeff: What that does is it burns them out and you’re also gonna find out they don’t like doing a lot of this stuff. So what I like to do is I figure out like, what is it that this person really likes to do. Like for example, because we specialize in executive assistance. We have what we have something called an experiential hiring process. But experiential hiring process means that we actually have tests of things that they would be asked to do for their real job. For example, one of them is taking meeting minutes.

Jeff: I have my assistant on all my calls. She’s matter of fact, she’s probably feeling weird right now that she’s not on this call because it’s a podcast interview, so she’s not needed. But on every other call throughout my day, I know that my assistant is trained on doing, taking medium. So the experiential hiring process, I have a 15 minute call where we give them a template of here’s the meeting minute templates. I don’t give them a lot of instructions cuz see, I don’t actually hire skill based. This is something that’s gonna blow people’s minds.

Jeff: I don’t care what’s on your resume to me. That’s what you’ve shown you can do. And by the way, I’ve also learned that B and C players. They’re good at copy and pasting A player resumes. I wanna see what you can do. And more importantly, I wanna see what you can learn. So I want adaptability on the forefront.

Jeff: How fast are you able to learn something new? I give them a blank document on Google docs. It has attendees objective of the call. What we talked about. Action items. Very simple. That’s what every call we have, and there’s a call it’s on zoom, it’s recorded and we send them the link. We tell them to listen to the call and fill in the form and we see what they’re able to take away.

Jeff: And that’s a really great way to see what someone’s comprehension is. Comprehension’s key. We hire people based on three things, their adaptability, their work ethic. And if they actually give a damn. 

Brent: Is there a certain type of person that fits that well, or is it pretty much anybody that you can find.

Jeff: I like people that already work for American tech support companies, because half the battle is finding people that work on your time zone. If you’re recruiting from the Philippines, you wanna find people that are gonna work in your time zone as an American, which is half the battle, cuz they’ll fall asleep. So what I wanna do is I find people that already work during American hours at call centers, Uber, like I said earlier, Shopify Canva, and people that have already been trained by Americans because I know American obviously have really strong work ethic and standards, especially in training.

Jeff: And if I hire somebody from Google, Shopify. I know that they’re coming really well prepared already, and that they have good standards of their companies. So I might be one of those culprits recruiters that keeps stealing amazing people. But at the end of the day I have no problems with it cuz I know how much they get paid and I know how much more I pay them.

Jeff: And I’m proud to say that the majority of my team at VA staffer gets paid more than anyone ever has in their entire family generationally. 

Brent: I know that’s it’s a great way to keep retention as well is to pay them a, an extremely fair wage. Yeah. So maybe going back to just the reasons why why an entrepreneur or a business owner shouldn’t focus a hundred percent on clock in clock out.

Jeff: Yeah, I think especially remotely, you’re not able to be there and babysit ’em, you can’t sit there in a, you’re not looking at ’em through the cubicle glass. So you have to have metrics that you can measure to see if they’re actually performing that’s the bottom line.

Jeff: So for example, let’s go back to that Amazon fulfillment, cuz I’m sure everyone listening to this show knows a little bit about, e-com knows a little bit about fulfillment. If you know that someone’s gonna be able to do 10 to 15 order fulfillments in an hour. That’s obviously just a whack number, let’s say 10.

Jeff: So you know that they should be able to fulfill about 80 orders a day. So like order fulfillment, and if they get a hundred fantastic. So as long as you keep like metrics, that people are doing what they’re expected and you also wanna keep people motivated to learn and grow and develop.

Jeff: And I think that’s something that we all have to think about. Remember this the first day that you hire someone is gonna be the least valuable they’re ever going to be. They’re going to grow. They’re gonna become faster. They’re gonna learn more, unlike a computer or a car or whatever else that depreciates, they’re going to appreciate value.

Brent: And how do you give them space to continue to learn? So let’s just say that you bring on new technology. Do you make sure that they have enough time outside of their say 80 orders a day? They’re gonna be able to learn this new part of this piece. 

Jeff: Yeah. So this is a very simple hack. Usually it’s us that figure stuff out.

Jeff: We’re the crazy entrepreneurs in our business. And we’re gonna do the work anyway. I just pop on a zoom call and I say, Hey, come on the zoom, call the suit together. So the only difference is I’m doing the work anyway. The only difference is I’m turning my microphone on and I’m explaining it and I’ll record it if I need to.

Jeff: So they have a little tutorial and then here’s the key that most people forget. Come back on the zoom call. Have them do it and you watch you just flip roles and that way, you know that they’ve got it. And then if they don’t get it, you don’t, they don’t mess something up because you’re watching it. You can say whoa, hold on a second.

Jeff: don’t forget to click that, fulfillment tab, the, don’t forget to turn off the white, to click the white label tab. We don’t want that to know it’s 

Brent: coming from Amazon. I know that earlier too, you had mentioned a 90 10 rule. Maybe dive into that and explain that.

Jeff: Yeah. The nine, 10 rule is something I found out about myself in 2016 when I was actually working at my corporate job. And this was like my side hustle, VA staffer. It was just fun. But when I was working at Phillips I started realizing that as a project manager, 40% to 50% of my time, wasn’t actually managing projects.

Jeff: It was. Doing documentation that sucked. I hate documentation. So I actually ended up hiring somebody to do documentation for me and they were awesome. And I found them somewhere in Pakistan or something like that. This was before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even know about the Philippines.

Jeff: When I hired somebody in Pakistan who actually had a project management certification and I couldn’t believe it actually, cuz I was a project manager and I didn’t have that certification. So to find someone overseas for $5 an hour that had that certification, which requires you to do 4,000 hours of project management documented, I was like, this is unbelievable.

Jeff: I started thinking like, what other things could I outsource? What other things could I. and the documentation came back amazing. I ended up becoming in the first 12 months of working there. I became one of the top five project managers nationwide out of 95 project managers in the company.

Jeff: And that was when I started realizing that, my most effective use of time isn’t doing documentation. So then I started thinking, what are other. That I’m spending my time on that. Aren’t my zone of genius that aren’t really, like basically I felt like I was kicking the rocks instead of pushing the Boulder.

Jeff: So I just started finding ways to maximize what my most valuable use of time is, which I’ve learned over the years now is marketing. And sales. That’s my best use of time coming on. These shows coming on these podcasts, talking about stuff, obviously people are gonna be like, wow, Jeff, you really did a great job on the show.

Jeff: I wanna learn more about getting a virtual assistant. Like this is the best use of my time. This is my only job, my entire company hiring, firing, managing recruiting, training, performance evaluations, video editing, graphic design, web design. I don’t do any of that. I have a whole team of 170 people that do all that for me.

Jeff: And my only job is to show up and talk about them. that’s it. So the 90 90/10 rule is about delegating that 90% of stuff in your life. That is, it is important, but not important that you do it. So you can focus on the 10% that really drives the business. 

Jeff: forward 

Brent: I know that I think it’s Verne, Harnish in Traction has a concept called letting go of the vine.

Brent: For any entrepreneur that is such a good value statement to make that you need to find ways to let go of some of those things and just trust the process that you’ve built. I know you also mentioned just an operating procedure that would help build out that process for a business owner.

Brent: Maybe dive into that really quick. 

Jeff: Yeah. What I do is that anytime I want to teach something new to my team members is I will literally do a zoom call and I’ll record it and then I’ll have them go back and document the process, take screenshots, things like that. And then I’ll review the SOP together with them.

Jeff: We’ll pop back on a zoom call. They lead the call. They go through the SOP and then we reviewed it to make sure if it has any mistakes. And I’ll tell you, it’s funny, cuz you learn a lot about the SOP process. I call them freedom recipes by the way. And the reason why is because it’s like for me I’m a horrible cook.

Jeff: I hamburgers mistakes I can do. All right. I got a pellet grill. I can set the temperature. It’s easy. I set it and forget it. But when it comes to like baking cake or whatever, I’m trash. But, my mom’s got this cookbook. All right. And it tells me exactly what to do. It tells me I need flour. I need eggs.

Jeff: I need sugar. I need cinnamon. I need some nutmeg. I don’t know. I’m making some eggnog, maybe but the point is that I’m putting it in the oven. I got this bowl. It says to set it in the oven, 17 minutes for 350 degrees. And guess what? Doesn’t matter how bad you are, if your ingredients are right and you follow the instructions step by step, it will come out

Jeff: at least 99% of the time, the. You might drop an eggshell or something in there. But for the most part, if you’re doing the, if you’re following the recipe, you’re gonna get the same result. And that’s the key, by the way. That’s the key with delegation is getting reliability and repeatable excellence.

Jeff: Cuz I think that’s where people fall short is they’re not able to have a reliable system in place. And reliable people in place to finally remove yourself from doing something because you don’t trust the people and you don’t have a good process. The people, the process, I’m starting to sound like Marcus Laona right.

Jeff: You gotta have the people, the process and the product . But that’s the key. 

Brent: Yeah. I bet the hardest part is educating the business owner on why they need to delegate these tasks out and even helping them find those tasks to delegate out. Cuz some people think everything I’m doing is so important that I’m just gonna keep doing it.

Jeff: There’s three lies. Okay. I’m gonna call ’em flat out lies that I hear every business owner. Okay. These are the objections. Whenever people come to me like, oh, I really need a VA one. They tell me that it’s faster and easier if I do it myself. Yeah, it probably is. But let me ask you something, you got somebody who’s doing it 80% and it frees up a hundred percent of your time.

Jeff: Let’s say you get two people and they both do it 80%. now you’ve got 160% results. And by the way, did I mention having someone in the Philippines even for us at VA staffer, it’s $1,500 a month for a full time person, what is your time where that’s nine bucks an hour, not even nine bucks an hour that’s insane to think that you are your own secretary for something that somebody could do

Jeff: as effectively if some by the way, I have people on my team that are way better than me. So we’re talking about above a hundred percent because I’m not good at it, period. So I think that, that’s lie. Number one, number two is that no, one’s gonna care about it. As much as me, man, my assistant Jacqueline cares about my to-do list

Jeff: way more than me. there’s she sent me a message yesterday and said, boss, we’re over halfway done with with July. And you still have these things from the to-do lists from last month, we probably should get this done. And I’m just like putting it off ah, like I’ll get around to it.

Jeff: So that’s line number two, line number three is that you suck it delegating and it would take more time for you to teach them how to do it than to do it yourself. Ooh. See that’s the key. And that’s why I say there’s no excuse with zoom calls, cuz you’re already doing the work. Same with emails, like emails and stuff like, oh, I can’t have, that was actually really hard for me..

Jeff: Okay. The delegating emails was actually really hard for me because like I’m a control freak. So I actually, every day for about a week, we just went into my emails and I told her, Hey, here’s what I would do with this. Here’s how I’d respond to this. This is trash, this is spam, whatever. And if they’re not sure about it, message me.

Jeff: If they’re not sure about it message me. And I think that building that trust and having someone who grows with you in the business is one of the most important things you can do. As a matter of fact, the first two hires I tell every business owner should be an executive assistant and a copywriter

Brent: I can say from experience I’m in an entrepreneurial group and one of my forum members has an assistant and she is doing I where’s 10 of us in our group and I swear that this assistant’s doing most of the work for our group. 

Jeff: Truth be told Brent my assistant is the one who set up this call for us.

Jeff: Yeah, she’s on my LinkedIn. She’s sending you the pitch. She said, Hey, this is what I talk about on the show. Like that’s, by the way, that’s a process that I built. I said, Hey, let’s engage with these people. I tell them, Hey, go into people, be genuine and listen to their latest podcast. I actually have my assistant listen to a portion of your show.

Jeff: So she gave you some feedback on the show like, Hey, whatever, you’re. Previous guest was great show. She likes it. She added you a connection request saying that she liked the show. And then after you come back, Hey, thanks for connecting. We should talk about this on the show. And you’re like, yeah, you know what,

Jeff: that sounds genuine. And I think my audience would get something out of it. That’s all stuff that you can build out. If you have someone who’s reliable that you can trust. And I think that’s the real problem today. It’s really hard for people to find. I don’t know if you know this Brent, but right now in the tech space I think you, you already said something about this with the developer, but right now in the tech space, the tenure of a team member is only 1.8 years on average.

Jeff: So imagine dumping all of your time, all of your resources, all your training brain dumping for a year and a half, and then find out at 18 months that person is gone. 

Brent: That’s super expensive to keep hiring. And I know that we’re in Minneapolis where the employment rate is less than 2% right now.

Brent: So talent is very hard to get. So you’re exactly right. And I think, maybe just as we’ve got a few minutes here, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind, not that higher fire mentality, but that trying to keep somebody on consistently is so important. 

Jeff: Yeah, I think that it goes back to what I said earlier.

Jeff: It’s about building that trust. It’s let me give it an analogy here. We are entrepreneurs we’re we wear a lot of hats. Now I’m wearing my VA staffer hat. I’ve got all these other hats here. I have my Savage marketer hat right here. That’s my podcast, which I should have you on my show by the way.

Jeff: And what do we do as entrepreneurs? We put everything on our plate. We have a lot of stuff on our plate. And when you hire somebody, especially an assistant, what happens is you’re gonna say, okay, cool. I wanna focus. Remember that nine, 10 rule. I wanna focus on these important things, these 10%. So what you do is you’re starting to delegate.

Jeff: You’re starting to take your stuff off the 90% plate, and you’re starting to pass it over to your assistant. You’re passing it over to your assistant. You’re passing. Next thing you. Especially around that 50 50 mark. We’re like, oh my gosh. My day is so much better right now. Like they’re doing 50% of the work.

Jeff: I’m doing 50% of the work. What do entrepreneurs do? 

Brent: They work all the time. Yeah. They start 

Jeff: filling their plate back up. So now you got 50% over here and you got 50% over here, but then guess what happens? We’re like, oh, now I have more time to spend with my family. Oh, now I have more time to go to these networking events and masterminds.

Jeff: Oh, now I have time to launch this course. I’ve been putting off. Oh, now I have time to start doing more content marketing and stuff, right? Oh, Hey, I’m gonna start a podcast. So now you’re back to a hundred percent, but it’s all a hundred percent things that you wanna do. And this person’s over here doing 50% now, guess what happens when you don’t have that reliability?

Jeff: And that person goes away. Now you’ve gone from a hundred percent and 50. And now you’re taking all that work back. So now you’re doing 150% and you have to go through hiring again to find someone to train, to do the other 50%. And so you can go back to a hundred percent. That’s the freaking story that I hear every time.

Jeff: And I can tell you this, our client retention rate is 97.2%. There’s not a single time in my entire career of eight years of VA staffer has a client ever come to me and said, you know what, Jeff, I don’t think this VA’s gonna work out because I really miss doing my own emails. And I really miss taking my own meeting minutes and I really miss doing my own order fulfillment, like never

Brent: Actually my name isn’t really Brent. And I’m just Brent’s assistant. So you liar , 

Jeff: I’m a liar. Yes. 

Brent: I do find it interesting now that I know. Because you did said you listened to the episode with Taran Giselle and that you are gonna do an Ironman now. So that’s fantastic. Want my help in doing that?

Brent: So I appreciate that your assistant added all those extra details in oh, that’s horrible. You’re training for your first Ironman. Which I think was Coeur d’alene that they said you were doing so very exciting. 

Jeff: I’ve been to coeur d’alene it’s a beautiful place. yeah. Good. But yeah. But 

Jeff: that’s a great place because see, people don’t know the context of this funny conversation we’re having right now, but I’ve never ran in my entire life, except for maybe when I was in high school. And it was like required physical education class. Okay. And by the way, I grew up in a really poor area called Mooresville, North Carolina, which it’s better now.

Jeff: But back then, NASCAR cap, the world, my school was so poor that they Bused us over to Duke university to do our mandatory physical education, cuz we didn’t have a track but now here I am turning 40 this year and I’ve ran more than I ever have in my entire life. As a matter of fact, I’m looking at my total distance here, which I think you’re gonna be very proud of by the way.

Jeff: Right now, for those of you who are listening in I’ll rate off the numbers. But I have ran in the past 20 days, 54.7 kilometers. I’ve ran 76 times and I’ve ran a total of 9.93 almost 10 hours. And I’ve lost 10 pounds by the way. 

Brent: That’s great. Wow, fantastic. Good. So that, that you’re getting ready for that Ironman.

Brent: And that’s so exciting. So as we close out the show, I always give everybody a chance to give a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug. Yeah, Jeff, what would you like to plug 

Jeff: today? I’d love to connect with you guys on LinkedIn. Jeff J. Hunter on LinkedIn. If you are, thinking about, if you hear this and say, you know what, I probably need an assistant.

Jeff: You can check out VA staffer.com, schedule a strategy call on there. It’s completely free. And by the way, my team’s job is to disqualify you. We’re very picky. We only actually take on about five to 10 clients a month because that’s, it’s hard to hire at the rate as finding really good people is very hard.

Jeff: We’re probably just as picky in hiring people as we are finding clients. I’ve definitely learned that there’s many times in life where I should have never taken somebody’s money. So I always tell people to make sure it’s a really good fit. And if we can really support them because that 97.2% retention rate, I’d like it to be a hundred percent, I know things happen, but usually what happens is when people come with us come and hire with us.

Jeff: We don’t do any marketing and sales outside of doing like this and the shows and stuff. Most of our growth over the past year and a half has actually just been from working really hard on just keeping client relationships. And usually they add on they’ll hire a second VA or things like that. Anyway, that’s my shameless plug for VA staffer.com.

Brent: Perfect. Jeff I look forward to seeing you at the next Ironman event that we’re both attending and I wish you all the best in your running world. I know we didn’t I always end up getting running. Into my podcast. So I’m glad that that we got that in. And I will put all these in the show notes.

Brent: Again Jeff, it’s been great having you on the show. Why don’t you tell, as we close out, just tell ’em how they can get ahold of you. 

Jeff: Jeff J hunter.com has my socials and stuff on there. If you guys wanna learn more about VA staffer or VA staffer.com. Thank you so much for having me, Brent.

Meet Magento Singapore with Sushma Vyas

We interview Sushma Vaya (@sushmavyas) with Ranosys from Singapore. #mm22sg Sushma has been organizing Meet Magento Singapore since its inception. We learn about Singapore’s vibrant and friendly city-state and the great event the team organizes. Listen to the entire episode and give me your feedback on the MA Pledge commercial I created at the end!

Meet Magento Singapore happens live on August 25th, 2022. Don’t miss it. https://meetmagento.sg

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this special 

Brent: Magento Association edition of 

Brent: Talk Commerce

Brent: today. I have Sushma Vyas. She is in Singapore and she is with Meet Magento Singapore. We are going to talk about the event and how fun it was and how fun it’s going to be into the future. Sushma, go ahead,

Brent: introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Sushma: Thank you, Brent. Very happy, feeling really related to be part of this. My name is Sushma as you already shared with everyone in summary. If I would say one liner, my day to day job is to make sure people associated with us are happy.

Sushma: I act as the COO chief operating officer with Ranosys, I’m the organizer also for Meet Magento Singapore. I take care of end to end operations for the company, making sure all the departments meet their KPIs, people attached with us. I really mean it. Whether they are partners, our customers of all important people, team members, employees are happy.

Sushma: That’s the goal. And that’s what I do being in Singapore for past 18 plus years now. And yeah, I think that summarizes that’s. 

Brent: So your real role as a chief happiness. I wish . I went to Meet Magento Singapore in 2019, and it’s such a great city, such a great community. And the event was so well put on, tell us a little bit about the history of Meet Magento Singapore, why you guys started it and a little bit about the event.

Sushma: Thanks. One of my favorite points to talk about we’ve been associated with Magento per se from I’d say it’s childhood days, because we used to do those little Magento meetups when we were very young as a company, Magento also was running community editions and all, and we did see. Real good potential traction people attached around 2016,17,18.

Sushma: We did attend a lot of Magento events globally and that got us excited that let’s have one Meet Magento Singapore itself. And the thought was really well taken by Adobe commerce aka/Magento. And we got this to own and organize Meet Magento Singapore. It was really, it has been an exciting journey.

Sushma: It was when the very first event, what I’d say was the most exciting for us was that Singapore hosts and is easy for people. It attracts people, businesses, retail, commerce, especially a lot more. Easier. Sorry. If I sound biased than a lot of other countries, it has that reputation and comfort as well.

Sushma: The venue has been amazing, I’d say. And we’ve enjoyed. And of course we all know since past three years, the journey we have seen how pretty and commerce has transformed. Likewise has the event itself opening it up for online presence mix of both. So in all, I’d say it’s been insightful.

Sushma: This is something that we ourselves learn from people around the globe when they come here and everyone builds that bond, that community. So exciting journey. 

Brent: If you were to say to someone to attend the event what would be the some of the big draws to attend meet Magento Singapore. 

Sushma: I’ll talk about Singapore, right. First is really the place, because as much as it is a little red dot, a small place, it brings, it offers everything. It attracts businesses. It adopts technology really fast and well. The place itself is an attraction

Sushma: we, I would say people to come and visit and see how this is so well organized, disciplined, yet open for innovation. And it implements that. Of course, because of all these things, there are huge brands companies who have their foundation here who have their offices here. So they can see and communicate, I mean, that community bonding and they can see how these big brands are facing the challenges, implementing it via technologies, solving it.

Sushma: For Meet Magento Singapore, I’ll say, come for our after parties as well. I know after parties are fun everywhere, but I, I really Bo that some of the best after parties we’ve had the venue is great Marina Basin and it’s real fun here. Meeting people from close to a hundred plus countries and connecting, talking.

Sushma: it’s a different mode that you see them in after parties and different insights that you get during the event and talks. 

Brent: I think that we forgot about the importance of meeting people in person and everybody thought, oh, now that everybody’s doing zoom meetings and online that the live event is dead.

Brent: But I think what we’ve found is that, people desire to see people in person. And not only do you get to go to a great event, but you get to see a great city and then you get to see different cultures and all kinds of things that are wrapped around traveling to a different type of place. And I agree that Singapore is very easy to get to for us in the US.

Brent: It’s a long way. It’s halfway around the world, but yes, you know, it’s very easy. It’s very accessible. And I can say that even the customs. Everybody was so nice and it’s so easy to get through the cultures. There’s multiple cultures. We in 2019, we brought eight people from our office in Ahmedabad to Singapore.

Brent: And what did we do as soon as we landed, everybody wanted to find their Gujurati restaurant to eat at. So we all found the section of town that had a Gujurati restaurant and we ate there. So it, there, there is food for everybody. Something for everybody to offer. What would you say to a sponsor who would like to sponsor Meet Magento 

Sushma: for sponsor?

Sushma: See, I think there’s a wonderful mix of audience because there’s a very good balance in terms of merchants, in terms of technology, partners, partners, and end users customers. So with this balance, they get to have their message reach the right people. It’s not lopsided.

Sushma: So there is one real advantageand we take of it. Otherwise, even the ecosystem is such that it attracts all these different pool of people. So that’s one of the biggest advantages for sponsors plus I shared, there’s this very easy ethos reputation of delivery that its Singapore has gained.

Sushma: Its its rapport in terms of making sure businesses are smoother run. The government would say, we’ll take care of the hassle for you. We’ll make sure things are things are not full of bumps for you, and you make sure that the business is flourishing. So that kind of something is a healthy sign for someone to sponsor in an ecosystem like this.

Sushma: So usually this is also something that we hear from our sponsors and, Yes, digital marketing and all there’s a good outreach. There’s a good reach that they get from. So, yeah, that’s what we would tell them, 

Brent: From the event organizer side. So I know renos has been organizing, Meet Magentol Singapore.

Brent: If other organizers would like to organize an event in a different region, a different city, do you have some advice for them that to get started and some reasons why they would want to get started organizing a meat Magento in a different city?. 

Sushma: Why they should or why they good for sure.

Sushma: Organizers do gain a lot of publicity for sure. And learning on top of that, because something that we, even our own customers, our partners, something that we see them when they are there on the stage speaking or discussing, it’s a very different learning and insight that we get, which otherwise in day to day

Sushma: communication or interactions we don’t get each other on that level of thinking or discussion. This is something we must do because meeting and meeting them in a different mindset is together new learning. And we build a bond, a community which is memorable to us, plus helping the overall ecosystem.

Sushma: if there are any tips or anything, that we follow, or we would prefer people to follow is maintain that local touch, what that place is known for, because people would come from far away from different places to also know more about that place as it there’s nothing beautiful or ugly.

Sushma: It’s the combination that makes that place really different and unique. So I’d say maintain that, make sure people also know more about the place, know the local touch, local flavor. So that event automatically becomes very special and unique. There are many things, but this is what I feel we must consider.

Brent: I like what you said about having a different mindset to learn. And I think that oftentimes as we are pushing our whole team to do work that we forget that our team has to also learn about what’s new. If we continue to work on what’s old, then all we’re gonna do is create old things, creating new things requires new knowledge.

Brent: And I agree that you get put into a different mindset and you’re not in front of a bunch of screens. You may be in front of your laptop while you’re watching the speaker speak, but you’re not in front of 10 screens with a dog barking and somebody asking you it’s time for dinner. It puts you in a place where you are in a learning mode.

Brent: Maybe speak to that learning mode a little bit.

Sushma: If I take myself as an example, I don’t come from a technical background. But when I’m there, I listen to those even technical talks or innovations, it makes me more excited to know more Magento as a platform. I would’ve never known otherwise. Except for that. Okay. Customers need this.

Sushma: We fulfill this, the depth of it. I would’ve never known or never have been inquisitive to know that. Okay. Alright. There is this feature. So because when during panel discussions or somebody shares, you can do this, just talking about that specific feature, which to me appears like magic. And then I feel, oh, okay.

Sushma: Then what else does it do? What else does it do? Where else can it be implemented? And it gives ideas. Okay. Not necessarily here. It can be used somewhere else. So I’m a student there. Actually, when I participate or I hear the talks, the speakers talking about it. Likewise, someone whose technical may find interesting business cases, which he, or she, would’ve not thought of while working on that piece of code or that piece of integration. 

Brent: I know that there has always been a developer track or a technical track, and there has been a business track. And that just means that there’s something for both audiences. There’s something for merchants to learn about what are the new things that I can do on Magento or Adobe commerce.

Brent: And I know, especially for the developers, they can learn about the newest technology things that may put a merchant to sleep. Having that ability to see those different pieces of the puzzle and spark some interest. And I’m just gonna say that those new things create innovation because a merchant may say, oh, I saw this at this event.

Brent: I’d like to do it on my site, but I’d like to do it in this way. The pushing the boundaries. I sit on the membership committee and Meet Magento Association is trying to get more members as part of the Magento Association. What would you say to people who not are not sure or don’t know why they should join.

Brent: Do you have any good advice for them? 

Sushma: I’d say definitely join because. I’ll make it a little more philosophical if you hope you don’t mind, because at the end of the day, all of us want to contribute. All of us want to give back. In that effort, what we gain is enormous. When we join our intention was really not, oh, we give back, we do this.

Sushma: You know, okay, it’s a community we want to learn. I’m very attached to this by the way association, because we’ve gained a lot, whatever we’ve gained, I’d say from our years still now it’s because of that and because of the community it creates. So the fulfillment part is huge. In addition to what we gain in terms of repeat learning resources to knowing problems before you face it and solutions, how these get resolved.

Sushma: All this is. I always are like, I’d say golden assets of having being part of a community in which Magento association gives you so readily easily. I would not ask anyone to think twice about it because this is one of the strongest, one of the biggest, and I wish all the best because that shouldn’t die.

Brent: And even at the lowest level, it’s $1 a month, so $12 a year. And I think that allows anybody, the facility to join and they’re coming. We are coming out with some other models where companies can sponsor their employees to join as well. So there’s gonna be continued innovations from the Magento Association to help membership grow.

Brent: Sushma as we close out our podcast every week, I give the guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything promotion about anything you’d like to promote. What would you like to promote today? 

Sushma: Hadn’t really thought about it so much what I’d like to promote, but, since I’m part of Ranosys, I’m part of this whole company that’s one, one thing that I can promote is that explore, recommend, refer, explore services.

Sushma: I think that’s about it. I wasn’t really that prepared about it. What, in my mind. So that’s what I can think is the first thing that’s. That’s 

Brent: Thank you, Sushma. So thanks for staying up so late for me. I really appreciate it. Oh, 

Sushma: it’s a 

Brent: pleasure. Pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the, yeah, go ahead.

Sushma: I was saying you have some really interesting questions there. 

Brent: Good. Yeah. And I, I wish you all the best in your event coming up. I wish I could be 

Sushma: there this year thank you. Thank you so much. 

Brent: I will miss you 2023. Yeah, hopefully, 

Sushma: definitely. Yes. Thank you. All right. Thanks Brent. Have a lovely day. Bye-bye.

Looking for the patterns in your marketing with Kate Bradley

In this week’s episode, we talk about everything from entrepreneurship to employee happiness. (@LatelyAIKately) Kate talks about the pressure on a start-up CEO and how it is compounded by trying to run a successful business and raise money at the same time. Kate reveals one really cool new feature on Lately.ai. (You must listen to the end to hear the big reveal!)

What you will learn from this episode and about Kate

• Passion for floating in a pool and listening to 80s music

• CEO of Lately, an AI that repurposes long-form content

• Focus on making fans, not sales

• Educated on Black American perspectives •

White Elephant in the Room: lack of diversity in podcast

• Advice to never assume what any side wants

• Value of lifting others up

• Making a fan creates a machine

• Marketing is about getting a fresh perspective

• Overuse of words leads to dull communication

• Creative use of language to engage people and make them react

I absolutely think that people who are focused on clock punching rather than performance and outcomes are missing out. Clock punchers are focused on the wrong thing and don’t understand the bigger picture. They don’t see how their work fits into the bigger picture and how it contributes to the success of the company. Performance and outcomes are much more important than just showing up and doing the minimum. If an entrepreneur is focused on performance and outcomes, they will be able to make better decisions and find more success.

Kate Bradley

Kate is the Founder & CEO of Lately. The A.I. that learns which words will get you the most engagement and re-purposes video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts containing those words.

Kate is a former rock ‘n’ roll DJ and served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales, and marketing expertise. What she learned in radio about the neuroscience of music helps fuel Lately’s artificial intelligence.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this wonderful episode of lately on Talk Commerce. I have Kaitlyn from lately today. Kate. Please introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role in one of your passions in life. 

Kate: I formally was a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM. So I have a soft spot in my heart for podcasting, of course. I love the theater of the mind so much. I love radio. I love that you Brent have this I don’t even know if you know that you have it, you have this beautiful power to create what I call a two-way street, even though it’s one way.

Kate: I You wield the microphone here, but people listen and trust you and they lean in because you have this ability to create that magical kind of feeling as though they’re part of the conversation. And so that’s what attracts me to radio and podcasting specifically. And I don’t miss it.

Kate: Cuz can I swear in your show? I don’t know. Yeah. Go for it. I had a shit time. there, there’s great things about radio. I met my husband there and his record was our favorite record of the year. And of course, total job hazard. Cause I dated musicians do not recommend, found the one good one, who’ve cut his hair and wears chinos and now he’s. Sales bless his heart, but radio is a boy’s club, of course. And me too, and all that stuff didn’t even exist. And the rewards you got for participating in sexual harassment were large. It was applauded. And so we all did it, and I, not only, and I was a recipient of course, because, I don’t have a phase for radio.

Kate: Yay. And there’s no women either. So of course, like every day my boss would ask. Bradley or your hands queen, meaning could I hold this Dick while he peed? just, it was just the locker room bullshit. So that. Bizarre because what started happening? I don’t know why I’m going down this thread with you, but Hey ladies, listen up the the sexual harassment turned into a hostile work environment because of course I was great at what I did and I arranged.

Kate: The first ever marketing newsletter for any of the channels, it was ours. And it got all of this. This is before MailChimp. Okay. So I was like in outlook having to send multiple copies because you could only send it to 250 people at a time. Remember that there was like no formatting. And I got us. Just a huge amount of press.

Kate: Just because I’m a bulldog, and I was like I think we should do this. And I’m gonna ask all these people to republish it and forward it, et cetera. And they did. And and then I got shit on for my success. So that was confusing because you’re like, I’m killing it. Why aren’t people excited about this?

Kate: It’s because they’re threatened. And I dunno if that’s why I have my own company and I don’t have to deal with. Ego, except for my own. now , the mountain. What were the other two questions you asked? 

Brent: What is your day to day role and one of your passions in life?

Kate: Oh we might have covered the passion but I think at the moment, my biggest passion is floating. I love the weightlessness of floating in a pool and we have a kitty pool and in text one, thank God for those people democratizing this thing, and we’ve had one for a while. It’s 12 feet by four feet, maybe three.

Kate: And there’s just enough room for two people to float. We built a solar heater out of black hose and a black piece of wood and a there’s a pump. And it does when there’s not a heat wave. It’s usually 88 degrees, which is what I like Brent, and me and my noodles are out there just floating away every day.

Kate: I’m allowed three songs, so I bring the Bose out there and I listen to three songs on the radio. Actually, I can still tolerate live radio and by tolerate, I really mean that cause it’s. Fucking terrible. Really terrible, but there’s this one station here that they mostly play 80 songs with and I’m a child at the eighties.

Kate: So I’m like, Hooters, Eddie grant, Steve Miller. Yes. And sometimes I’m lucky and I get three great songs. Sometimes they throw in some, another seventies, crap like BGS, or I don’t really like Harry Nelson, stuff like that. And I’m just like, I’m just waiting for the next good one. But that’s my passion at the moment.

Kate: And then. Who am I? What am I doing? I’m the CEO of lately lately uses artificial intelligence to repurpose long form content like text and video and audio into bite size social posts that it knows very specifically, which parts will get you the highest engagement. . 

Brent: Yeah, that’s great. And I am a, I’m a user of lately for longly.

Brent: It’s been a great tool for us. I do want to just dip back into podcast guests, because it’s not always a two street. And when people come on as a guest that are, that have an agenda that are trying to. They are not a good guest. And I sometimes just look at the clock and think, oh my God, can this 30 minutes be over?

Brent: And now the 110 guests that I’ve had are thinking, are you one of them? Kate, you are not because this is the second time you’ve been on and I really appreciate you coming on. But it is sometimes difficult and it’s, my, my job is made much easier. when the guest holds the conversation, but it’s not a sales pitch.

Brent: And I, there’s nothing more than I hate in a sales pitch from a guest. But anyways, this is my pitch for lately because it is, it’s such a great product. And I’m falling in love with AI. I just signed up with open AI. I would I want want to get into the Dolly thing and there’s so many fun things happening in.

Brent: That I’m very interested in. But I do wanna talk a little bit about some of the entrepreneur journeys you’ve been going through and also, in our green room, I do wanna just bring up the white elephant in the room, which is me. And we did talk a little bit about, and you brought it up too.

Brent: The fact that there isn’t I don’t have a lot of diversity in my podcast and I would like to work on that. I’m part of the entrepreneurial community here in Minneapolis and Kate. I was just educating Kate, when we, before as well, Minneapolis is a city in the middle of the country.

Brent: And I know people on the coast don’t realize that there’s a part. World that between New York and California, but we don’t have to go into that. So I’m on I do sit on the diversity and inclusion committee. and I always ask myself, why should I be on this? And actually if I had some good guess, and they’ve given me some good answers on why me as a white male should be on this.

Brent: And part of it is just awareness and talking about it, because if everybody doesn’t talk about it, then it becomes something that’s back room. And I think it’s always better if we do talk about it. So not to belabor the point, but I know that there’s challenges in that. There wasn’t even a question 

Kate: in there.

Kate: I have a comment though, if you don’t mind. My friend, please, Jen. God, what’s her last name? Vander something, sorry, Jen. Vander. Awesome. I’m just gonna call her that. So she, we were on a panel once and she. express this in a way that was the first time I got it, which is this, when you are the underdog, you can only be lifted up by those who are on top.

Kate: And the mistake many people make is not including the people who are on top in the conversation and we rely on them to lift us up. So in your case, it has to be white men in the conversation because they hold the power in the world. They. For the most part. And not excluding them is just a stopper right away.

Kate: So I get that on the, just a flip side and we should go into politics cuz that’s dangerous. But I did, I was a marketing consultant for a company called the perception Institute for about a year and their mission in the world or a nonprofit is to change the way that black men are portrayed in the media, black men.

Kate: And. . And so I learned a lot about people, about black Americans specifically and how they feel about white people of intervening in their business. And it was mostly not nice, which was interesting, and the overall reaction was like, stay out of it with your woke perceptions. Because what you think is right is not what we believe at.

Kate: And I’m generalizing. So forgive me there, but just a perspective, like it’s the S U right? You have to never assume what the other, what any side wants. Everybody has to be at the table for the magic to happen for the two-way street to happen. Let’s get back to that. And the second comment I had related to that was.

Kate: You touched on what makes for a good guest, so I believe it or not, I was a terrible interviewer on radio for a long time. I would get very nervous and I was young. And so I didn’t have a lot of experience, doing that. I was, it was the me show. I was great at the me show , I didn’t know how to make people shine or ask the right questions, cuz I was so nervous about pushing all the buttons and getting things right at the same time. Cuz you’re in my day you were managing like the whole show, just like you are with your podcast. So there’s a lot to do behind this in the green room, as you’re saying.

Kate: So to tie in what makes a good guess is when you are able to lift others up. Number one a and that’s I think that goes both ways, but as an entrepreneur. what we say is make a fan. Don’t make a sale right now. The value there might sound corny, but I believe in the long tail, this is the radio that I grew up in is all about the long tail.

Kate: The album cuts, not the hits, right? Get people to buy the records, make fans who are loyal to the death. And I saw the power of those people because when you make a fan, they work for you for free and they can’t help the. And so you get multiple banks for your buck because you make the sale and you make a machine, 

Brent: right?

Brent: Yeah. No. And I really apologize for what I’m gonna say now. because I do feel like now I want to change the name of my podcast to ceiling. Because I would love to get ceiling fans but keep going. I know. I’m sorry, Brent. that was so bad. Hold your nose, 

Kate: everybody. 

Brent: Yeah. So I, my wife and I had this conversation about ceiling, the Mar Marcia Beski talked has a song about a hundred tampon.

Brent: And in, there was there, there was the first lady in space. They gave, she was gonna be in space for a week. So they gave her a hundred tampons and and she has a she’s on Ted. She has a Ted talk anyways. So they, she talked about the fact that she has this song. And then all of a sudden, all these men started berating her about, you shouldn’t make fun of these engineers at NASA.

Brent: Like who knows, like you, you need a hundred tampons right. For a week. And it was, we had a very good convers, my wife and I had a very nice conversation about it. And I, for me, I thought it through and I’m like, yeah, that doesn’t really make sense. I don’t, I don’t know any better, but her point was, there was a lot of men that came out and were.

Brent: Hit Eric making her feel bad that she’d come up with this song or not making her, I don’t know the right words, but sounds funny. They were ham whatever social media, what social media does, that’s what they were doing. 

Kate: I have a segue 

Brent: for this.

Brent: Okay. Yes, we need a segue. Yes, go. 

Kate: So one of my favorite lines is Catherine Hahn in. the, we are the Millers when she calls it a Tanin and she’s from the Midwest. She is in this movie anyways, and so around my house, it’s called a Tanin and we laugh every time cuz it’s so funny to us, but that’s that ability by the way to take so.

Kate: and spin it in a new way, which is really what our jobs are about. This is marketing. How do you get fresh perspective? Whether it’s a hundred tampons in space or throwing a hot dog down a hallway, as she says, right? There’s I love that. I love. we, I just did a post on LinkedIn. I don’t know why I was inspired by somebody on Twitter.

Kate: And I said, words that make you like wanna bar. And I said, I’ll start. And the word was trousers. And so everybody piled on with not only just words that they don’t like the way they sound moist, got a lot of votes. For example, salacious got some. But then also biz lab was all over the place. So people were like partners and utilize at the end of the day, like all that kind of 

Brent: stuff.

Brent: I’ll reach out to you later. Yeah. 

Kate: Yeah. So I was just thinking about the, how we. how we can overuse words to death. So they don’t mean anything like awesome, which I am guilty of as well. All of America overuses. Awesome. But the whole point of communicating well is to don’t only communicate well, but to communicate with meaning.

Kate: and to hear some biz bla drive engagement, to make people lean in is to take something very familiar and just turn it just enough so that somebody is you catch the ear and you make them react. It’s the reaction that we all want. And I love thinking about that. I love so my husband is great at this he’ll he has all these isms one.

Kate: The hammer lane and the granny lane. That’s what he calls the fast lane and the slow lane on the highway. Or dirt nap. That’s like obviously dying 

Brent: dirt nap. Okay. 

Kate: Or booger sugar is cocaine , which we were just watching that Tom cruise movie American made, which is a great movie, by the way.

Kate: Even if you don’t like Tom cruise, it’s a 

Brent: great movie. I agree. I’ve seen it. Very good. Okay. Alright, so let’s move into little, let’s talk a little bit about entrepreneur entrepreneurship. My daughter just got a job with a CRM company called endear and they’re based outta New York, a very young entrepreneur lady who started it with a partner and te.

Brent: Did you have any struggles as an entrepreneur? 

Kate: oh, so many. I think the one that’s ever present for me is it’s, I don’t know if it’s confidence I, I don’t have an imposter syndrome per se, but I take things personally, that, that whole. Bullshit about it being work and business and not personal it’s it is bullshit, to me it is of course it’s personal, it affects people’s lives, right?

Kate: I That’s, it has to be right. And I’ve had to make decisions. I’ve had to let people go. I know how all that, how hard that stuff is. But I,

Kate: the pressure that I put on myself is pretty sprint. I perceive that there’s pressure being put on me by others as well. That may or may not be true, but there’s certainly that there’s that perception whether it’s my customers, like I wanna succeed for you. Whether it’s other women entrepreneurs, my investors, my fam, my family my team, obviously Lauren and Brian and Kristen, Jason and everybody, Kristen and Katie, Greg, I think that’s all.

Kate: Did I forget anyone, Emma Alex , and I, the problem is I don’t know what failure looks like. So let me just put this in the ground for everybody. We’re bringing it down. Brian, my CTO is very good at being positive and PR and practical. He’s an engineer. So he, he, he shoots pretty straight and I’m always.

Kate: wallowing in the negative. And he’s dude, like you have to really understand this, the odds of what lately is. So the chances of startups succeeding at all is already ne it’s negative. The fact that lately still exists. The fact that we have revenue, that we have hundreds of customers, we’ve had thousands before, we’re figuring out how to do it all here.

Kate: He’s like lately should have died a million. So you really need to acknowledge this, but it’s not that I don’t acknowledge it. It’s that the road to getting to the next level, like the levels, the goal post move a lot, which is very frustrating to me. Like I’m trying to figure out Brent constantly not how to win the game, how to beat the machine.

Kate: Okay. That’s all I think about how do I beat the fucking machine? Beat it into the ground. That’s what I. That’s all I see. And it’s not enough for me just to have a nice little business here. That’s not the game I’m playing, right? That’s not this game. And when you do everything that’s prescribed and you do it like to the fucking awesomeness of awesome platinum level superstar, galactic awesomeness, which is what we do.

Kate: And you still can’t hit the milestones. That’s defeating debilitating to me personally. I take it personally, cuz then I think, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I fucking do this? And I hang my head in shame, honestly. The buck stops with me. It has to be me. It’s not I can, there’s all, there’s the great resignation.

Kate: There’s, COVID, there’s the market. There’s all these things to blame, of course. But I don’t think of any of them. It’s always hard. There’s always some shit out there. So it’s me. I’m the one where that can control. What’s happening or figure it out. And, I think just generally that’s the biggest hurdle is my, is myself in a way.

Kate: I don’t have an off button, cuz I want this. It’s not that I want this so bad, but I know it’s I know it’s not even possible. I know it’s probable. I.

Kate: And so I also, that means, I know all the pieces are in front of me here already. I know that they are, this is a matter of assembling the pieces. I have the right. Is which is a blessing and a curse. It’s right here. But the fact that I can’t figure it out makes me feel like an idiot , and none of that’s true.

Kate: I rely on you. I rely on our customers. We’re always asking for feedback. I’m terrible at taking criticism, but my team is great at it, which is why I had them, and we’re always looking for ways sorry for rambling but entrepreneurs, here’s a great tip. Someone told me, and you get a lot of tips that are garbage, cuz everybody wants to give you some advice.

Kate: But a friend of mine said, look for the patterns. So if you can look for the patterns in everything, whether it’s the way the funnel works or how much MRI you’re making or what customers click first, right? All these little patterns are macro and micro patterns. You can double down or then fix them.

Kate: and my, I joke all the time. My, my great skill is seeing the glass half empty. That’s what I do. I look for problems, patterns of problems, so can you imagine being my husband? He’s a nice guy. 

Brent: yeah I am. I am the glass half full and my wife is the glass half empty. So we actually balance each other out.

Brent: We’re either full or empty at the same time empty we’re empty. So I definitely can empathize with your struggle. And I do of want to talk about as a leader that empathy part that you have to have for your employees do you see a difference in differe? Styles of leadership that work or don’t work, or I don’t know.

Brent: I I see sometimes that some entrepreneurs want to like they assume that your employee feels some way and if you feel differently, it doesn’t matter to what it’s not it, the feelings of your employees don’t matter. And I feel like that I’m I believe they matter, but that some of that empathy isn’t there in a lot of entrepreneurs.

Kate: I had a shitty job, so I know what it feels like to have that kind of panic attack and go to work and dread every day. And I don’t want to any make anyone feel that way. I am very lucky because all of those people on my team are very kind and they’re very loyal and they’re also very smart. I forget sometimes.

Kate: That they can’t read my mind. I try to apologize for that. Luckily they have a high tolerance for my bitch. That’s ano very lucky thing, because I can be an asshole. I can be, of course, and I’m so grateful. I have to surround myself with people who have that tolerance because I.

Kate: Always apologize for it. There’s too much to go on, but I have to also obviously reward and acknowledge. And so I need also the kinds of people who either don’t need that all the time can get it from each other. My re I feel my perception is the reward is to provide a workplace that is fun, which it really is.

Kate: It’s we have like unlimited vacation, no one ever takes a vacation. I don’t know why they don’t, but they don’t. You can, you don’t have to ask to go to the doctor or anything. You just, nobody cares. Get the work done. We don’t really care what you’re doing during the day. If there’s. And everyone is very autonomous.

Kate: There’s, some things I’m a micromanager about. I know this, but my aim is to not be that way and to, to a fault, honestly, like sometimes I’m trying to figure out why these people, these two people, maybe aren’t getting along or hearing each other. And then I realize , I don’t bring them together enough.

Kate: cuz we’re all just out doing our own thing. We’re running and running. And one thing sometimes I forget that. Because we’re, know, we are dispersed and we always have been dispersed and I like that because I feel it’s so much more productive. I hate being in office when people are coming in and talking to me all the time.

Kate: I hate that. I can’t get anything done, and. , I will forget how smart they are. I’m like, shit, Chris has really good ideas. I need to ask him these questions more often and then utilize them, or Lauren is, I think she’s 15 years younger than me. I forget, but she’s younger than me.

Kate: And I forget that she is because she’s so 

Brent: she’s 10

Brent: And I talked to Lauren. Lauren is fantastic by the way. Isn’t she great. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. She’s didn’t mean interrupt to you. 

Kate: No, I’m sorry for she’s so smart. And my, for all of them, my expectation is I, these people are on a scale of one to 10. They’re twelves. They’re all twelves. And so when they’re only tens, I get on their asses about.

Kate: Shame on me. Because I believe in them I respect them and I’m so impressed with them. And Lauren is certainly one of those people, and but she can tolerate my shit, which I, that this is also what I appreciate. So the way I try to reward, money is not the thing that motivates my team because.

Kate: We often can’t pay each other or the salary isn’t very high, but I try to create a workplace where there’s like a ton of flexibility and a ton of autonomy, because these are the things that I need personally. And I know there’s people out there like me, and I think to providing a safe place, like I call it where people can be themselves.

Kate: Like we don’t, we don’t really have a lot of rules, the golden rule, our biggest rule. And. a lot. We have two meetings a week, one for sales and one for the whole team, cuz we’re small enough. We can do these things still. And at those meetings we have what’s called the rolling agenda. And so the rolling agenda is a Google doc that goes on and on for years and everyone’s name is on it and you’re supposed to write what you’re doing, what you’ve done and what you’re doing there.

Kate: And everyone reads it an hour before the meeting and at the top of the meeting is the actual agenda discussion items. And the discussion items are the things that we all actually need to talk about together. Cuz I don’t need to have a report of what you’re doing and plus I can see it all in slack. Our slack channel is I don’t I poo threads because I want everybody, I want it to bleed over for everybody.

Kate: It saves me the time from repeating myself from silo to silo and it makes everybody sympathetic or empathetic. And so the rolling agenda what’s so funny is there’s almost never dis any discussion items cuz we’ve already had the discussion. So it’s a hang we get on the phone and we find out that.

Kate: Chris’s son, Zach just performed at a comedy club and killed it with amazing jokes. A couple of Dick jokes, in front of his grandparents, but I guess they were killer. Awesome. Katie’s daughter, Ruby just scored some major role in a play. I think it was beauty. The beast she’s the lead, which is pretty great.

Kate: Kristen’s getting ready to go to Paris with her two children. For the, and her husband. So the first family vacation and maybe the last one, cuz everybody’s going to college, this is what we talk about, I love that about them, Brent, how lucky am I? 

Brent: Yeah. That’s building a team like that is, is like the dream of any entrepreneur.

Brent: It I think you’ve talked to a lot about, about that team building and how you’ve been successful in it. What would you. If you were gonna say something to an entrepreneur who was hung up with instead of that mentality that you have for performance I don’t care what you do all day, just so you deliver what we’re expecting.

Brent: The opposite of that is I, all I care about is that you come in and punch the clock. right there. There’s a dichotomy there and there’s a big swing, right? If you’re just assembling something and you’re punching the clock, you know what you get because you’re assembling something.

Brent: But the same thing is you could come in and assemble something very poorly. Or, if you’re not checking, there’s gotta be a balance between performance. I’m a firm believer in performance and the outcome of that. Do you think people that look at clock punching, miss the outcome part? 

Kate: Sure. I’ve been that I worked in retail in the mall.

Kate: I know what it’s like. it sucks. And I hated it. Sorry, dad. I worked for my dad for a while. I love my dad. I think, so like begets, like when you are around other people who are working at a superior level and you’re not, it’s obvious and you feel bad and you want to catch up. So that’s one thing, right?

Kate: And I’ve surrounded myself. I’m very lucky to have these people who are, these are amazing people. Please never leave me please. And I’m always concerned when, like one of them, if someone’s gonna get married, Girlfriend moves in or something like that. I’m like, is my productivity gonna go down?

Kate: It’s so mean, that’s my first thought. Then my second thought is I want joy for this person. Hello. What’s wrong with you, Bradley. But I think that I think we were saying earlier, like the work life balance is bullshit. Like work is life and life is work. And if you’re not having a great time during what you’re doing, you’re not feeling fulfilled and joyful.

Kate: and like you’re doing something to improve the world or yourself, then you really need a different job. I It’s so important. I think, for entrepreneurs, the objective, I always think, and I think about this, especially when I’m like arguing with my husband is what is money? What is the outcome that I want here?

Kate: What’s the outcome. So let’s back into it is the outcome to make someone feel wrong because they fucked up is that the. that you want, you wanna make them feel bad. So then they don’t sell shit for you all day long. Cause they feel bad and they’re done. I’ve done that before. I’ve done that. I like making PE people feel wrong.

Kate: Like I do. I like calling them out on their shit. I’m trying to go to therapy to improve this, but it’s there, it’s the thing. And I, but I’ve learned not to do that because what is the point now? Now sometimes you have to correct someone on what they’ve done in order for them to improve.

Kate: I’m not great at this, but I, that is my aim, Poor Lauren. She, I like people to write copy for me. So we’re always, we work together on sales. And so she is in charge of the follow up with the sale, right? So we have a call. We have to email them, she’ll draft an email and Google I’ll take 95% of it apart and rewrite it and then be like, okay, here you go.

Kate: Now her feeling can be defeat defeated, like thanks for wasting my time. I explained to her, I was like, you don’t know how much time you saved me just by starting this. And my point of taking a part isn’t to shit on you. My, my point is to give myself something to play, where I can move around.

Kate: And I said, this was a, like earlier last year or something. And I was like, I will do. I promise to do a better job of telling you why I’m rearranging these things and what, why I’m putting these things in here. If you wanna learn how to do it better, but at the same time, I have to remember.

Kate: Lauren came from she. So she has a she’s smarter than all of us. She has a master’s degree in psychology analytics. And she came from working at the cancer ward in a hospital, God. And took the first job at lately as head of customer service, which she killed it at. And then she ran our sales team and now she.

Kate: Chief operations officer. So she has some very deep legacy knowledge of the company, but she didn’t come from sales. That’s not her background. None of us actually have come from sales me the most. I have the most experience in sales and we have a 98% sales conversion. Brent, Kristen come from sales.

Kate: Chris comes from radio like me,

Kate: the reason, of course the product is awesome, but we. Fucked up that demo 50,000 ways sideways to Minneapolis. Okay. I’ve seen it. Me too. And the demo does sell itself, but it’s the people, it’s the people that sell it. And it’s because Lauren, her ability to read the room and by the room, any room in a room, an empty room on a camera, in a zoom call or a room full of 85 people at SAP.

Kate: Like she has those nuances. And that, and Chris has the same thing as well. These guys this is about being nice, right? It’s about being thoughtful. It’s about listening. It’s about they know both of them are, I’m talking about them cause they’re my chief salespeople specifically, but like they can stand on stage any kind of stage, whether it’s just a call or actually on a stage and lead a room, they have that capability to do.

Kate: But at the same time they know when to listen. I don’t have that capability. I just like to be on stage and hear the sound of my own voice. Sorry.

Brent: So what would you say to To an entrepreneur then that is that they’re building this team and they’re, they seem to be getting a lot of turnover. Is there a magic formula in that team building model or is there yeah. Something to create community or is there anything that somebody could start.

Kate: I think the first thing is just to really think about how you wanna be treated. That’s just the most important thing. And that’s very hard cuz like you’re trying to get shit done, so you have to be very reflective constantly and to not just how you wanna be treated, but when you’re at your best, when you’re in the zone, right?

Kate: What are people around you doing to facilitate that for you? And then try to replicate that? I think that’s the first thing I. the second thing is to know this is so important. You have to ask people about their fucking lives, right? There are so many times where I just wanna get the meeting on and get stuff done, but I don’t, I make sure, Hey Brian, how was your trip?

Kate: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, Hey Jason, I saw that me is on Instagram and she’s like doing this whole abs routine. She looks amazing. What is that about? So he’ll tell me. You have to start that way. People want to talk about themselves. Obviously look at me. I’m someone who talks over people, Brent and I have no patience for people who are offended by that.

Kate: Honestly I believe in passion and I believe in the power to express your passion and that an interruptive culture should be celebrated because people are so excited to share their ideas.

Kate: and I don’t believe in democracy. Lately is not a democracy. I’m the leader. Although you have to make people feel as though they bring listened to right now, you can only do that with people you wanna listen to. So if you’re hiring people, you don’t wanna listen to, then you are an idiot, you’re, you have to really think about who you’re.

Kate: And we’ve made mistakes. Lauren will know, and she rolls her eyes and she tells me every time and I still make this mistake. I constantly think we need an experienced salesperson to come in here. And so I hire these fucking dudes. They’re always dudes. And. some dudes. I love they’re some of them are dudes.

Kate: I love some of them are dudes. I don’t love, and it never works out because they’re probably bold 

Brent: white dudes. They’re the worst 

Kate: is that where, how was, yeah. Or so one mistake we made by the way, which I didn’t know, this was, you cannot hire a salesperson to be both a manager and a salesperson.

Brent: Yeah. Very true. Absolutely. You can’t hire anybody to be either to do dual jobs. They’re gonna do two jobs poorly. 

Kate: Yes. And that is a mistake that I made. I didn’t. I do that. So I don’t understand why someone else can’t do that, to be honest with you. And Lauren does that. There are Brian does that.

Kate: I have superior people in the world who can do that. So it’s of like why, but it’s not everybody’s nature, so I think that’s the first thing a very easy tell for us is this is if your company, if the PE, if your employees aren’t saying. you’re doing something wrong. 

Brent: Yeah. If they’re saying you Kate, that then also you, and I’m, they don’t because I’ve talked to your employees.

Brent: If they are though, just always referring back to you, that’s also could be a problem. 

Kate: I do that by the way on purpose. So I rarely, I don’t like it when people call me the boss, I correct them and say, don’t say that I don’t like. I say we all the time, my team I rarely say my employees, I rarely do.

Kate: I need them and I don’t like the word need, this an needy team is needy, but I cannot live without them. And so they know that

Kate: I send them gifts often, like little surprises, even the. Some T all guys like pocket knives, you can give them endless pocket knives. Am I right there? 

Brent: send ’em a box of tampons. A hundred figure out what to do with these . I do, I want to just go back cuz I you talked about re you’re editing Lauren’s copy when she started it.

Brent: And I think that and it sounds like you explained to her. Why you’re doing it, I’m trying. Cause I think a lot of times a lot of times leaders will jump on they’ll just take it and they’ll do it, but they don’t give any feedback on why that happened. And that just leads to narratives in people’s heads.

Brent: And I think 

Kate: I made that mistake actually, because I assumed that she would understand and know right. And I assume that she would take the time to read it and think about it. But of course, Lauren is busy and she’s just trying to check shit off her list and get, cuz she’s the queen of productivity.

Kate: She knows that. I respect that. And so either one of us weren’t both of us, didn’t want to take the time to do what you just said, which is a very important thing to do cuz who can learn if you don’t do that. And. , know, like I said, why can’t someone read my mind? What the fuck when it’s so obvious to me, but I’m sure at the same time, she’s thinking why can’t Kate read my mind. 

Brent: So yeah, I, I have definitely got, I’ve gotten into the habit of explaining I’m always now trying to play chess with Anticipating the way somebody’s thinking. And I realize that people that are happy are more motivated and that they’re gonna be more productive when they’re motivated and that when they’re happy and productive, they’re gonna get a lot of work done.

Brent: So if I’m gonna be critical of somebody, I would like to explain all those reasons why that’s gonna. and I maybe now do it to, is the word in nauseam or something like that where you do it too much. Yes. Ad nauseum, whatever in nauseum I’m nauseous. Just that, that verbal feedback, because I think we do I also suffer from that same thing.

Brent: Of course, everybody should know what I’m thinking and yes, everybody can do this. Everybody can be a great salesperson. They can also be a developer. I fall onto that trap because I used to be a developer and I would. Of course, you can do that in AWS. I can do it in 20 minutes. Let’s watch me do it.

Brent: And everybody’s oh God, this is the worst time of my life. You can see everybody’s eyes are glazing over and pretty soon, like they’re, anyways, so to read the room, right? Yeah. Read the, yeah. And then it makes it worse on zoom, all everybody’s camera goes off and then you get done with your demo.

Brent: And then, so what did everybody think? And nobody’s there, it’s silence. Everybody’s gone to the bathroom. Oh, I’m sorry. And then one person leaves the mic on and the flush sound comes out and your zoom call was ruined or saved yeah. Or saved exactly. 

Kate: yeah, I think I oftentimes I wish people would ask me why I do.

Kate: and they don’t. And so that, that is frustrating to me because I want the initiative to, to be there and that’s, my problem is that’s why I’m the entrepreneur and these other people are not right. That’s a different skill, so I have to constantly readjust my perspective to reality and think about.

Kate: What’s gonna, what’s gonna get the job done. Like you said, like, how do we get people to be happy and motivated and successful all at the same time? I think that

Kate: it’s important to ask people. Do you like working here? Sometimes you, I brace myself for the answer. You still like working here? Are you leaving? I just wanna know. I think that. knowing what your weaknesses are really important. Like I said I’m not a great cheerleader, but Katie Jordan is, she’s amazing.

Kate: She does it for me. And Chris is great at that. Everybody is there everybody piles on, but you need a cheerleader on the team if it’s not you that bubbly. When, when Lauren’s on vacation, slack is quiet. And you feel that energy gone like that. It’s so important. She she doesn’t even real.

Kate: I don’t know. She realizes that she probably does that. How. Much that energy. Slack is our workplace, right? That’s our work environment. And so it’s the, you can see the thermometer of how things going now. When I like last week, an investor who had hard, committed first to a smaller amount, and then to three times an amount hard commit pulled out for no reason.

Kate: I just was like, mother, fuck. I said every swear word of the thing like that could be. And no, I don’t do it in the general channel. I just did it with Lauren, Jason and Brian because I don’t wanna upset everyone else, but I need them to know cuz they’re my they’re. We are running the business together.

Kate: We’re running the numbers, we’re looking at all these things, but Brian and Jason are co-founders like, they do need to know what happened with this investor. And I need the ability in a place to express. Frustration. I also need them to have sympathy for me because like, when I have to ask them to not have a paycheck, they need to know exactly why, and I’m not doing it on purpose and it’s not cuz I’m selfish or I’m money grubber, there’s a real reason and it’s very painful for me.

Kate: So that sympathy, empathy thing here I think is so important. Like I’m just a person, Brent, I’m trying to do this thing. and they are these people’s lives are in my hands a little bit. Cuz a paycheck is a paycheck. I 

Brent: Yeah I want to just jump on that happiness thing. I had a post on LinkedIn recently that I just put out there.

Brent: I meet with every person on my team every quarter. one on one, just for 15 minutes to get to know them. And we have team members in India and Mexico . I do that and I’ve always had this. I’ve always had a question that I’ve asked and I think I’m asking, are you happy in your job or something like that?

Brent: And I been thinking about it and like I was thinking like does anybody ever ask, are you happy? And period, because yeah. Are you happy period? Because there is. And maybe happy in your job or happy, whatever it’s different. And knowing if you’re happy, if you’re not happy.

Brent: Again, people probably aren’t gonna tell me in that short time, hopefully, maybe over time. In fact I recently did have an interview that I did where he said that I’m very intimidating and it’s hard. Like you had said, you want people to tell you the things that like if they don’t understand something and I think people don’t tell people things because leaders can be intimidating.

Brent: I can get very impatient and then become very I can be an asshole. And and especially when something going the way it should go and. I’m gonna assume you can relate with this. This is something that’s so obvious. Why aren’t we all doing this? Whatever that thing is oh my God, this is obvious. We should know this. You always get French fries at McDonald’s what thing? Yeah. Which I don’t, it’s the thing I don’t, I’m just making the insane, but it’s come on, everybody knows that in. As you’re driving on the freeway and you stop and you get a burger, you get fries, right? You get a Coke and a fries. Everybody does that. What the heck is going on with our team?

Brent: You guys are only getting chicken sandwiches. This is ridiculous. Everybody knows it.

Brent: It’s true. So I don’t know, is there, I think it’s a hard that’s, it’s gotta be one of the hardest things as a leader to give that space to somebody to allow to to open up and tell you, cuz it is a little bit of vulnerability from that person. And and maybe that’s I’m dealing.

Brent: Three different cultures. It used to be four. We used to have an office in Bolivia. But we have three cultures now. So I think culture’s a little different, right? 

Kate: Yeah. I think, one thing is I always, and I’ve said this before, like I expect them to go to to complain about me, to each other.

Kate: I expect that happens to all managers and bosses. That’s part of the role that you’re accepting. And so good. Do it complain to each other, get it out of your system, certainly. The same way how many times you be, are you like fucking Brent? I say that of course, about myself, about, oh, whoever it is that’s just your, and it’s not you mean like you, you have to know that, like to and express a frustration.

Kate: because someone isn’t perfect in this second moment. It’s meaningless it’s just this thing, evaporating the world. And when you have people around me sometimes I’ll complain to Lauren about other people and the company and just cause I need that outlet with somebody and the validation that I’m not alone in this thought, and I’m sure they all, I know they all do this to each other, which is fine.

Kate: And I think they’re, that’s part of the culture that you wanna encourage, right? People are gonna vent it’s. This is human nature. And I think of it as if lately if everything about lately was. Just smooth sailing. Boy, we have no fun whatsoever. This is part of the adventure.

Kate: Are we gonna make it, are we not? So it, that ups and downs, it keeps it interesting. Like I, I think that’s why they come to work every day is cuz they’re wondering what’s gonna happen. I don’t know. 

Brent: That’s it’s often said that without stress, without contention, without arguments, that you don’t move anything forward.

Brent: If everyone is always on the same page you could be going in the right direction, but you may not. And having a dissenter, there is always a, it was always, it’s always a having a dissenter there to ask those questions is important. And I think that essential. Yeah, it’s essential, right? We, as a leader we need to make that space.

Brent: I know that we’ve sent people we’ve sent Indian developers to Germany in onsite to work. And one of their, one of their things that they’ve said was that they were surprised that other team members on the German team would. Hard pushback to the boss in the room. And for them, that was an eye opening thing.

Brent: Cause their culture more is more around. And I’m sure I’m gonna get a whole bunch of Indian developers not telling you. No, it’s not like that here. But their culture is more about doing what you’re told. And you don’t often. It’s not a strong cultural trait to question the boss and to say this I’m a white guy anyways.

Brent: I don’t know, concern that because that’s my perception of the culture. I’m gonna I’m making a disclaimer. I’m gonna put a little asterisks in my transcript. Don’t get back to me on this, but I digress. 

Kate: Yeah, I gotta go do shit, Brent.

Kate: I’ll say this one thing, we just released a new feature where the AI is rearranging what it finds to pull out into wholly new content. Okay. it, we just launched it like the other day. We haven’t told anybody. We haven’t even told our customers like so you’ll just start to see it suddenly the surprise you’ll be like, who wrote this?

Kate: Oh my God. The AI. and it’s pretty good. All 

Brent: right, I’m gonna go try it. 

Kate: Yeah. Keep an eye out. Yeah. 

Brent: Kate, I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug at the end of the podcast. So what would you like?

Kate: Oh Jesus, I’m gonna plug forgiveness today. Forgiveness. 

Brent: all right. Thank you. 

Kate: Yeah, I think we all 

Brent: need a little mark. Kate Laly Kate . 

Kate: This is why just so you know, I’m on the air. I stopped saying my name because I mispronounced my own name once in an interview with the guys from we. And so I never said it again.

Brent: Yeah. Did you wean yourself off that? 

Kate: About a thing on me. Oh my God. I love you. 

Brent: Yes, you’re so funny. Kate Bradley co founder of lately, CEO of lately. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Kate: Thank you, Brent. 

Magento Association – Meet Magento New York

We interview Vijay Golani about the upcoming New York event and the Magento Association Events committee.

https://meetmagentonyc.com/buy-tickets/

Here are some topics that were discussed at the event.

Magento machine learning – How Adobe and Magento are dealing with AI and Machine learning.
Magento university – It is now called Adobe Digital Learning Management.
Artificial intelligence – As from above – Machine learning and AI are a big part of what is happening in commerce.
Magento commerce merchants now enjoy fantastic Adobe commerce support.
Dedicated cloud service – Adobe Commerce Cloud is being integrated into other Adobe services.
Magento commerce is now called Adobe Commerce.
AI-powered inventory management and AI search are the new trend for 2023
Adobe Sensi is driving relevant products across the Adobe Commerce Platform.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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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