- Speaker #0
I always focus on the life force eight and I took this from one of my favorite books which is called cashvertising. It is the eight emotions that cause someone to buy. The example that I always love to use is Dr. Squash. They sell soap for men and we're all dudes right like I don't care what soap I use. So how do you get dudes to buy soap? What you do is you make ads with a bunch of hot women going up to their guys and going man you smell so good man you smell what are you using I want to jump you right now. And so what they're doing is they're selling sex, which is one of the life force eight. I think search is dead.
- Speaker #1
You're talking about Google search, like SEO.
- Speaker #0
That's correct. I mean, the writing's on the wall for that, right? Maybe one or two years. And so that is why we're starting up all these other things now. Because for the longest time, search was just killer.
- Speaker #1
You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kev Cade. Mr. Farrar, good to see you again. Another week, another podcast. How are you, man?
- Speaker #2
We are back, and I am fine, except for the weather sucks again.
- Speaker #1
That's because you live up in the great white north up there, where the sun shines. What time does the sun go down? About 11 o'clock at night where you're at?
- Speaker #2
No, it might get dark at around 9 o'clock right now, this time of year.
- Speaker #1
Oh, really? That's about the same. Austin's about 8. 830 or so, 840. Really, I thought you would have more longer days up closer to the end.
- Speaker #2
The only days I have is for you, Mr.
- Speaker #0
King.
- Speaker #1
The only days you have is for me. Well, you know, just imagine if the days and the time you would have if your wife quit her job. Our guest today, that's his slogan. I don't even know if she actually quit her job. I've seen her actually working, I think. We'll find out. We'll find out. But that's where he bursted onto the scene, I think, when he did a podcast and a blog. Actually, a blog, I think it was first. And then that evolved into a podcast, and they run a business together, and it's going to be cool. But just imagine if Connie quit her job. What would you do? What would you do, Norm? I'd eat on this. You would have mac and cheese and Coke Zeroes. Yeah, mac and cheese with ketchup and Coke Zeroes, and you would just be in heaven. Because you'd just be catered to because your wife is so, so nice that you would just be like, what am I going to do now? I don't have to get up and go to the fridge.
- Speaker #2
I'll quit my job. There we go.
- Speaker #0
You quit your job.
- Speaker #1
No, but in all seriousness, our guest today is a really brilliant guy. He runs a conference. He runs a, I mean, we'll find out everything he does, but he's. Runs a very successful econ business, very influential on his YouTube channel and his podcast. And I think it's going to be interesting. I think I'm ready to take some notes here, Norm. I think we're going to learn a few things as well today.
- Speaker #2
All right. Very good. So let's bring him on right now.
- Speaker #1
Mr. Steve Chu. Mr. Steve Chu is our guest today. How are you doing, Steve?
- Speaker #0
What up? What up? Hey, Norm, you don't want your wife to quit your job because then you'll spend a lot of time together and you'll fight a lot. So just kidding. I hope she's not going to listen to that.
- Speaker #1
That's no true, though. No, please don't quit your job. That should be the name. That could be the new name of your podcast. Please, wife, don't quit your job. No, he's a comedian. What's that comedian? I think he's from Texas, actually. Steve something. I see him on TikTok, and he's always talking about his wife. Do you know the one I'm talking about? It's Steve Carroll or something like that. uh and there's a lot of tick tock videos where people imitate him they they like take his voice and like put it on them and they sit next to their real wife like in the kitchen and they just recite his lines it's his his voice and they're just moving their mouth to lip-sync into his voice but he's always about you know my wife all that it's it's funny as stuff it's really really good but yeah every time i hear that i think of i think of you steve i think yeah his wife just quit his job. So actually, how did this all get started? I mean, tell us your story. What's your background? How did this evolve into where you're at now?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it all really got started because we live in an expensive area. So I mean, the weather's nice here. And when my wife became pregnant with our first child, she wanted to quit, stay at home with the kid. I was fully on board because I never really saw my parents growing up. They're first generation Chinese, always working. So I was on board. But the problem is here, and by here, I mean the Bay Area, Silicon Valley. pretty much need two incomes to get a good house and a good school district. Actually, my kids are about to go off to college soon, and I'm keeping their room around because chances are they're going to be coming back and living with us just because of the housing prices. Anyway, she was making $100,000-something at the time. We needed a way to replace that income. And that is when we decided to launch a store selling handkerchiefs. And this is back in 2007. We came up with handkerchiefs because when we first got married, my wife is a crier. She cries at everything, sad, happiness. She knew she was going to cry at the wedding. I'm still not clear whether that was going to be tears of happiness or sadness, but she did. And we spent all this money on photography, so she wanted a handkerchief. Couldn't find them anywhere. We finally found this factory in China, ordered a bunch, used maybe a handful for the bridal party. But then we listed them all on eBay, and they sold like hotcakes. And that's how we came up with the idea. So that store made $100,000 in profit our first year. Amazon wasn't even around back then. And then today it's a seven-figure business. 18 years later, we're still running it.
- Speaker #1
That's awesome. And along the way, you started a blog documenting it, and that led to a… a podcast or something like that as well?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. So what happened was my friends here, and they're all doctors, lawyers, and engineers, because I'm Asian. And they were like, hey, you know, I want to do this too, because I don't want to be a lawyer anymore. And so I just started documenting everything, but they never read any of it. And instead, I attracted like a random audience of people who read the blog that led to a podcast, which led to... A course which led to a YouTube channel and an annual e-commerce conference, which I had the pleasure of seeing you at just a month ago, Kevin.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, I appreciate you allowing me to crash that. That was very nice of you. I was on my way back from taking a little sabbatical in St. Barts, and I was like, oh, there's a conference going on. Let me call up Athena and see if she's going to be there. She's like, yeah, I'm going to be there. I can get you in. I'm like, no, I don't. She's like, no, I got an extra ticket. I'm like, all right. And I show up and Athena's not there. And I'm like, oh, what do I do? And she's like, no, just come on in. Just let him in. Let him in. Come on in. Okay. I appreciate that. But so speaking of that conference, you've been doing that in Fort, it's always been Fort Lauderdale, right? Since like 2017?
- Speaker #0
It's always been in Florida.
- Speaker #1
Okay.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Not necessarily Fort Lauderdale, although it's been there for like the past six years. Yeah. Started in 2016. I want to say you were there one of the years.
- Speaker #1
before pre-pandemic yeah i was there like i know jackness was there and uh i think neil patel maybe had been there at that one too it's like 2018 2019 somewhere around in that time frame okay yeah because i was with my ex ex-wife um yeah yeah i remember um she was going out and getting drunk and i was going to come to the to the conference but yeah yeah uh so why do you do i mean so is that audience that comes to that is that from your, your trainings and your courses or the, you have a couple of hundred people and it's a different audience. I go to a lot of conferences, Norm and I do. And yeah, there's some of the, you know, same faces that you see at some, but you have a quite a bit different dominance. And I know you're pretty careful on like screening the, uh, the exhibitors. Like one of them told me they had to jump through hoops and verify and show you all kinds of stuff. I'm like, Oh, good for Steve, man. That's good. So why do you keep doing that? Or where does that come from.
- Speaker #0
So it's basically because people were asking for it. And it's not course members, actually. We try to screen for revenue and get people who are making over a million and whatnot. And, you know, of course, there's course members that are there. But I would say the bulk of it is just people in my community. And for some strange reason, maybe it has to do with the title of like my publications, but I attract women over the age of 35. And you'll notice that at that event, Kevin. it was probably 60% women this year. I don't know if you noticed that. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
I actually did. Now that you say that, I'm thinking back. Yeah, it was. And then a lot of them were in their 30s or 40s. Yes.
- Speaker #0
And then you'll notice that the line for the men's bathroom is a lot shorter than the women's bathroom line, which is nuts, I think. But it's just the nature of the brand, I guess.
- Speaker #1
Are you able to make money on this thing? I mean, because events right now are like- Oh,
- Speaker #0
yeah.
- Speaker #1
Events are- they they it's difficult to make money and unless you have an ulterior motive like okay we're going to sell a mastermind or we're going to sell something uh there's a lot of them you know everybody wants to do an event it's kind of like uh back in the days when i did a lot of calendar stuff every every uh we had a full-on calendar catalog and i was buying there's some guy in san and on san jose that's like got all these exotic cars like hey let's do a calendar featuring bikini girls and exotic cars and they don't realize it's hard to make money so A lot of people try it, but very few people continue. The fact that you've been doing it now for nine years is not easy.
- Speaker #0
I mean, I'm going to be straight up. I think events suck from the running standpoint. It's much more fun to attend an event, as you know, Kevin, right? But it is very rewarding. And I think in this era of AI and how everything is becoming more personal and automated. I think events and anything personal is going to be where it's at.
- Speaker #2
Is it price point right now? What is it that we've all noticed that events have started to decline? There's a lot more events, but attendance is much harder to find.
- Speaker #0
Yes, it definitely is. I actually have no ulterior motives, believe it or not, with the event. You'll notice I didn't sell it. I mean, you were just there. I don't sell anything on stage. I don't even mention my class, actually. I don't even mention any of the other stuff that I do. It's really just a way to bring people together. And at this point, it's been nine years and we have a lot of repeats. So I think of it like a reunion of sorts. And people just come back. It's much easier to sell tickets this year because we do have that returning audience. To your point, Norm, if I were to start it from scratch this year, you better have some sort of audience behind it. Otherwise, it's really difficult to get someone to make the investment. Actually, this past year was the most difficult year of all the nine years, Kevin, because it was during that Trump tariffs 145% and everyone was terrified and whatnot. So, yeah.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, well, I'm seeing that too. And I'm talking to other event people and other people that have I just had I don't know if you know who Tryon Turku is in the Amazon space. But this is Romanian genius guy that never comes out of his house. but he has a a monthly mastermind is 350 bucks a month. He was doing it with Ben Cummings. And I just got an email today. It says he, this month is the last one. He's closing the bound. Now, some of that could be for personal reasons. Some of that could be, it's just dwindled, but I'm talking to a lot of, it's probably a combination of both. I've talked to a lot of people that are just having trouble getting people to go to events or getting them to join masterminds, especially if they're, now, if you do it low ticket, which I have something coming out that's $99 a month, and I think that's going to be successful. I think that's a sweet spot where people will do it. But you start getting up there in the thousands of dollars for tickets, it's becoming, or for a mastermind, it's becoming very difficult. And for that reason, like my BDSS next year, it's been a high ticket event, and I'm changing it to, there's a ticket that's $497. There's also a $3,000 ticket, but that's half of what I've been charging. And just the market has shifted, and I'm having to make a... making a make a shift in in that space 497 i don't see how you can even break even at that price well i'm going to sell from the stage so so there's a the plan is uh i can't at 497 i i that's it's a very basic ticket so most people are going to probably upgrade to a 1497 or 2997 but if someone wants to come in and they've got they can scrap together 500 bucks and I made sure that there's a Holiday Inn across the street. So if they're on a budget, you know, there's $100. There's a place where you can park your car and sleep in the back of your car if you want to across the street. Or you can spend $250 a night in the Grand Hyatt that we're in. But I had to make sure that it appeals to that level of person. Because if someone, I was talking to Jason Flatland, the GOAT of webinars, I think you know Jason. And I'm trying to get him to do my pitch for me. And he said he'll either come and do it or he'll help write it. They helped me write it. But he's like, if you can get people to pay $500 and don't have more than 700 people there, that's the sweet spot for actually selling in person. And so my rationale is that if I can get someone there for $500, they probably got a credit card that'll go $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. And if I present an offer that will actually, I generally want to help them. I'm not just trying to sell them something. I generally want to help them with something that will convince them to actually. do go forward they will pull the trigger and they're qualified so that's but if i told that same person who has a credit card with fifty thousand dollar credit limit unused hey the tickets are 14.97 i'm not going to be there but i get them there for 500 um so i'm changing the model because the whole industry and it may fall flat on its face and i may but the last ones i've been losing money on them and i'm tired of losing money well how are you finding this steve
- Speaker #0
Yeah, what's interesting is, so my motives are a little different. I'm actually, if I break even on the event, I'm actually cool. And we always usually do, or we make a teeny bit of money, I guess. That's not my main profit center. Okay, so this is maybe just my life. Like, I have kids, and I don't get out much. You guys get out much more. I see you guys partying at events and whatnot, right? I don't get out at all. So, like, my event is my way of getting out. And I don't... I'm a pretty frugal guy, so I don't spend that much money. So the money I make from both the store and the content and the classes that I generate, I mean, that's the bulk of my income. The Seller Summit is just like an excuse for all my good friends to come together at this point. In the beginning, it wasn't like that. Today, it's kind of more like that.
- Speaker #1
That's cool. Yeah, no, that makes, that's why a lot of, some people do events. So that's why some people do podcasts. I mean, one of the reasons you do a podcast, you get to get out, you get to talk to interesting people, you have an excuse and a reason, you know, and you get to expand your network. And it's the same thing when you're doing events. It's almost like, it's not a vacation, but it's a change of pace. And like you said, bringing friends together.
- Speaker #2
So why do events or podcasts? stall. You've got both you're successful with podcasts, like Kevin said, and an event. How come others stall?
- Speaker #0
So, you know what, you're, you're, you're talking about the podcast. And what's funny about the podcast is I only use the podcast to meet people.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
So, uh, the pod, I mean, you, you just talked about like my worst profit centers right there, right? The podcast and the event, those are things that you just do for social reasons. Uh, in my opinion. And it just opens doors. So whenever I want to have an hour-long conversation with somebody, I invite them on the podcast. And more often than not, they actually become a speaker at the Seller Summit. So that's my way of meeting people. Podcasts, actually right now, it actually doesn't make any money. I used to take sponsors a while ago. And it used to generate maybe like $100K or so in just sponsorship money a year, maybe a little more than that. But when I released that book, I went on like 40 or 50 podcasts and I did so many favors for people to come on my podcast so they could help me promote my book that I got burned out from the whole thing. And it was actually only recently that I started interviewing people again. For like the last three months or so, it's just been me and my business partner, Riffin, kind of like you guys, without a guest. So yeah,
- Speaker #1
we do it sometimes without a guest, but I find that the podcast we both have individual podcasts in the amazon space and then we do this one together so we're doing quite a bit of podcasts i'm meeting a lot of people but like you say we get speakers for virtual events and for uh in-person events we make connections with people norm and i will sometimes like hey we want to uh you know i don't know neil patel but i met him at your event and i went up to him and said hey would you come on the podcast and he's like yeah sure uh message this assistant or whatever who knows where that'll go down the road maybe will work into something maybe not but we get to actually we get to pick his brain uh which which is cool uh and then like you said you know we try to leverage it what we're what we're doing it's difficult to sell sponsorships like you said on a podcast it can be done but you need some numbers to really justify it and we're still building this one now it's only a year old but where we think we can do it is like taking this content and turning it into a newsletter So taking like a transcript of this. Creating an article of every episode, creating an article, and then supplementing that with some additional marketing stuff that's not on the podcast, you know, just kind of like I do with my billion-dollar seller. And I think that, in conjunction, because that can actually make money on advertising. It's easy to track results there. If someone buys an ad, we know how many clicks and sales they got. You can track it. It's more difficult on a podcast. And so I think that'll help get the podcast going. It'll help this flywheel.
- Speaker #0
generate leads for what norm and i are doing with dragonfish and some other things so i agree with you though they're they're not profit centers so what is a profit center for you is it is it the because you're always expanding beyond handkerchiefs i mean you're doing a bunch more stuff now right yeah so uh yeah we sell more than handkerchiefs uh we sell uh personalized napkins towels personalized aprons uh i think in this day and age since amazon is getting way more competitive and amazon's really squeezing everyone We've been focusing a lot more on our brand. And I think personalization is something that's a major pain in the butt that people in China can't do quickly and without the personal touch. So we've actually focused everything on custom printing and custom embroidery now. And that's kind of like our moat.
- Speaker #1
Is this mostly wedding type of stuff or is it?
- Speaker #0
It's actually every occasion. So what I did is I chachapied every occasion and we have stuff for every. possible holiday. And I kind of love Hallmark because Hallmark made up all these holidays over the years. So we have something for everything and anything. And our, you know, our theme is, you know, you want to remember those special moments. And what I started doing, and this hasn't launched yet, you guys are hearing about this firsthand is I'm launching a YouTube channel for our store now where we're going to tell like the romance stories, the stories of friendship behind the embroidery. And the goal of that is to just create mindshare for the company. And there's going to be a forum where you could submit your own stories. And so I think in the long term, by featuring people's stories, that's where the connection is going to hit with the brand.
- Speaker #1
That's really smart. That's actually, that's a really good idea. So you're going to start off with like you and your wife's stories or you got?
- Speaker #0
No, we haven't read much. I've got like, cause I've been doing this for a long time. I've got a whole bunch of these stories. The way we're doing it is I wish I wasn't the one doing this cause my wife wants no part of it, but I'm the one narrating these stories. And what we're doing is we are using a cartoon mock-ups of the people. Cause a lot of them, like they're fine sharing the story, but they don't want to be a part of it. Meaning like they don't want their real names used just for privacy reasons. Some of them do, that's fine. But I'm just narrating the story and doing a really good job based on a form that they're filling out and telling the story. And so I'll ask them, you know, how did you guys get together? What is some conflicts that you had early on? How did you resolve them? What's the end story? And sometimes they'll submit a photo and then I just use mid-journey or whatnot to convert that into, you know, kind of like a cartoon. So it's not really described. We'll see how, whether it works or not. Who knows? It might flop, and it probably isn't going to do well in the beginning. But over time, I'm sure our customers are going to want to watch these videos and whatnot.
- Speaker #1
Hey, Norm, you'll love this, man. I talked to a seller the other day doing $50K a month. But when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me.
- Speaker #2
Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded.
- Speaker #1
Exactly, man. I told them, you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's… built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing COGS using FIFO.
- Speaker #2
Aha, but does it do FBM shipping costs too?
- Speaker #1
Sure it does. That way you can keep your quarter four chaos totally under control and know your numbers because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids, it forecasts inventory, it sends review requests, and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon.
- Speaker #2
Now that's... like having a CFO in your back pocket?
- Speaker #1
You know what? It's just $15 a month, but you got to go to sellerboard.com forward slash misfits, sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two month trial.
- Speaker #2
So you want me to say, go to sellerboard.com misfits and get your numbers straight before your accountant loses it.
- Speaker #1
Exactly.
- Speaker #2
All right.
- Speaker #1
How long is the video?
- Speaker #0
We're talking like three minutes.
- Speaker #1
Okay. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
The other goal is to also start a TikTok channel for the brand. And this is one where I'm a little more iffy on. This probably won't launch until later this year. It's going to be what it's like running a business husband and wife style. And you got to understand my wife's a very private person. She doesn't like being on camera. So the deal that we reached was I'll do all the talking and she just gives me a bunch of disapproving looks. And that's the channel.
- Speaker #1
Really? She's going to be like, you're going to be like Penn and Teller. Or she doesn't call it. She just looks at you and you say everything.
- Speaker #0
Well, here's the thing. Like, I'll give you an example. One of them will be like, hey, what is it like working with your spouse on the business? And I'll say something. And then maybe, like, she'll say a few things. But, you know, she might just be like, not be able to come up with anything. Like, what are the good parts about working with your spouse? Which, by the way, if anyone's listening here, generally not a good idea because we used to fight. I wasn't even joking about that, Norm. Early on, we fought all the time until we kind of compartmentalized everything. So she's in charge of operations. I'm in charge of marketing.
- Speaker #2
How do you separate that, though? Like if you have a disagreement, I worked with my wife at the very beginning when we had our first son. It was tough to separate that. How did you do it? Or how do you do it?
- Speaker #0
Uh, it's actually exactly what I said. She's operations. Yeah. And then I'm essentially all marketing and everything. She chooses product and whatnot. And occasionally it overlaps. Uh, sometimes this actually annoys her to no end. If she goes on vacation with her girls, girlfriends, or she goes on a girl's vacation. What I do is I go in the office and I go to my employees and I'm like, Hey, I'm just going to shadow you. And then I'll be like, Hey, why are you doing that? Why are you using paper for that? And then What happened last time is she came back from South Korea and I had implemented a whole new, you know, system of fulfilling orders. And she was not happy. But today it's actually real. I'm a coder, right? Like this is kind of what I used to do, like optimize stuff. Like thanks to AI and everything, like my life is exciting again. And so I've been using a lot of that stuff to automate the internal workings. Like anytime I see a post-it note, I get pissed when I walk in the office.
- Speaker #1
That's great. So that business is thriving. You sell a little bit on Amazon, but a lot of it's straight off your own website.
- Speaker #0
It's actually mostly the website now because this is what happens also. Let's say a product gets suspended. That ruins my wife's demeanor for like an entire week. And we fight because she's so pissed off. And I'm thinking to myself now, like I'm a little bit older than you guys. Like it's just not worth it. So I sell on Amazon so I can teach it. So I still have products up there and I still follow the best practices and whatnot. But no.
- Speaker #1
uh we don't we don't emphasize it anymore i don't think you're older than us i think you're quite younger than i don't well actually you know what you're right you're right i take that i don't think you're older than that but i have to correct that one yeah i just yeah i just know norman's false position yeah have you seen his ankles there's fossils in
- Speaker #0
his ankles are you guys i just turned 50 are you guys over 50.
- Speaker #1
oh i don't know him you are right no no you just said i'm I'm 49.
- Speaker #2
I haven't even hit 50 yet.
- Speaker #1
No, yeah, I think we're above you. A little. Just a little above you. But no, you said earlier that business kind of runs and you make your money. So you're still making money off the course stuff. I mean, that's one of the reasons. Okay. And is that how to what is the course? Is it how to build a D2C business? How to use Shopify or how to do
- Speaker #0
It's really how to build a brand. I mean, it's kind of what you guys teach, right? Both you guys have classes, right? Yeah. Yeah. Essentially the same thing, except mine is much less Amazon focused. So my philosophy is validate on Amazon and then focus on your branded website, get emails, SMS, and that sort of thing for repeat business.
- Speaker #1
Are you doing anything with social commerce like TikTok shop or Instagram or influencers or creators right now?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. So TikTok shop. in my opinion, only applies to a certain subset of products. So if you're selling anything consumable, subscription-based, or anything that really has a strong brand and where you can actually make money on the sale, TikTok Shop is actually acceptable. But in general, I would say 75-80% of the people selling stuff, TikTok Shop might not be the best platform. And we can talk about that if you want.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, let's talk about that. We've had several people that... On the shop, we just had a girl we interviewed recently that's doing 21 million selling pants. There you go,
- Speaker #0
apparel.
- Speaker #1
And she's doing zero on Amazon. Zero. And then, you know, you hear others and I hear stories from the Amazon world, Norm and I do, that I tried this, I reached out to a thousand people and nothing's working and nobody's promoting. And we just recently had Gracie Ryback on. She's like, yeah, a lot of people don't know how to deal with the creators and the influencers. They don't know how to approach this right. There's all the, there's a whole science to it. And, and then it's also like, she even said the same thing you did. She's like, yeah, there's a lot of products. I just like, no, this is not going to work. Uh, it's not, not appropriate. So what are your takes on what's the best way? Cause that's a hot, shiny object right now in a lot of e-com circles. And so how do you go about advising to do it or not to do it?
- Speaker #0
So most people fail because when you start you have zero visibility. You're not even allowed to get affiliates or anything in the beginning. You have to make 2000 bucks first before you can even solicit anyone, right? And you guys are going to love this. I'm sure you guys are familiar with TikTok shop, but the way you do it now is you give away product in return for a review. Yeah. Remember those days?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, like Soko, they're big in that. Yeah, it's the whole, I was like, I heard that, I was like, ah, I know how this model works.
- Speaker #0
The good old days, it's like- November 2017.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
So you get past that 2,000, and it's just a numbers game, right? You've got to solicit affiliates, creators, and you reach out to the creators that have an 80% post ratio, which means that they're more likely 80% of the time they post about whatever free product that they get. And it's just a numbers game. You can reach out to 7,000.
- Speaker #1
You can track, like, how many samples to post they get? Is there tools like that?
- Speaker #0
There's a number. It's called a post ratio or something like that. Oh,
- Speaker #1
wow. I didn't realize that. Okay, cool.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. And then you can solicit 7,000 and maybe single digits will reply back. Let's just call it 5%. And so you give away a ton of product. The goal isn't necessarily to make a profit, but there's this halo effect on everything, right? There's a halo effect on your Amazon store. There's a halo effect in your Shopify store. But you have to have like the funds to be able to absorb all the free product. This is assuming, by the way, you have zero followers and no TikTok presence, by the way. I'm sure your friend who sells pants, she probably has a TikTok presence or is it all affiliates? She has both. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. If you have nothing, then this is the way you got to do it. It's just a numbers game. You're contacting 7,000 people every single week, getting people to create videos, and then you run ads on the ones that are decent.
- Speaker #0
And TikTok is moving. I mean, they were doing a lot of incentives like free shipping and discounts and just to get everything going. And now they're cutting way back on that. They're like, all right, now it's time that and they're moving in the same direction. all the other platforms like amazon have moved it's like all right much less organic reach much more towards the paid side of things and really um so the golden days are almost over uh they're at the tail end right that's what gracie said yeah on tiktok um and i think a lot of people don't realize that yeah
- Speaker #1
i mean everything comes to an end right i mean remember amazon back in 2014 uh it took a while for that to happen right Amazon was still amazing, I would say, until
- Speaker #2
2018-ish, 2019. I'd agree. Yeah. No PPC. Do you remember those days?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I remember everything. I remember where you could leave reviews, and as long as you put the disclaimer in there that I got this product in exchange for my opinion or whatever, all that stuff. Yeah, it was crazy times.
- Speaker #2
You know why I remember November 2017 so well? is I paid $30,000 for reviews on my Dead Sea soap. And I woke up one day, and that $30,000 worth of reviews was just gone overnight. And that was on one soap. That was just on one.
- Speaker #0
Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of people don't understand this, Steve. Can you explain? They don't understand. They come from the Amazon world because that's… where a lot of the courses and stuff were originally gearing everybody the guys with the lamborghini saying oh you can make all this money buy it for a dollar sell it for 20 make 19 profit on every item you know all the misleading stuff then they don't realize you know then it became like everything needs to be on amazon because the aggregators and the aggregator boom all they want is amazon stuff and now everybody's like nope even people like scott deets who helps people sell their business like no you need to be multi-channel amazon just needs to be one of them And that's really... difficult for a lot of people because they think that they don't understand the difference in drive. One is you don't have to drive the traffic. You just got to sit in front of it. And the other one, you got to drive the traffic. And then it's a whole different animal when you go D to C. And how do you teach people to make that mind shift or the differences of how they get approach different channels?
- Speaker #1
So I think the big difference is if you're going from Amazon to D to C, like sometimes your product just isn't good for D2C, right? Like on Amazon, there's a buddy who is selling utensils, right? Nothing special about these utensils, but he kind of got in early, made a moat and started making money. You got to have some sort of angle with the D2C store about why people are going to buy these things, right? And maybe you could have some sort of angle. The way I teach the class is I always focus on the life force eight. And I took this from one of my favorite books, which is called cash advertising. It is the eight emotions that cause someone to buy. All right. So the example that I always love to use is Dr. Squatch. All right. They sell soap for men. And we're all dudes, right? Like, I don't care what soap I use. I walk into the hotel, I'll use whatever's there. My wife looks at me in horror, like, you're going to use the stuff that comes out of the dispenser? I'm like, yeah, I don't care. So how do you get dudes to buy soap, right? What you do is... is you make ads with a bunch of hot women going up to their guys and going, man, you smell so good. Man, you smell so good. What are you using? I want to jump you right now. And so, what they're doing is they're selling sex, which is one of the life force eight, right? So, when you're going from Amazon to your store, you're responsible for the marketing. And it's not just a keyword. It's really just triggering someone to buy based on their emotions because there's nothing really new in e-commerce. Like everything that's being sold out there is basically a commodity. And it's up to you. So take our products, right? It's just a piece of fabric. A handkerchief is just a piece of fabric. But when you frame it like a wedding handkerchief where you can dry your tears of joy, and this is just something that's a keepsake of your wedding day, that turns into something completely different. And all of a sudden, that piece of fabric, you can charge 25 times more than the actual value of the product.
- Speaker #0
So what are some of the other... Do you remember what the... The Life Force 8R? Yeah.
- Speaker #1
There's I don't yeah, you're putting me on the spot here. But there's Enjoyment of Life, Keeping Up with the Joneses. Protection from loved ones.
- Speaker #0
Sex.
- Speaker #1
Sex, yes. How many are we at? Is that five? I already said keeping up with the Joneses.
- Speaker #0
A fear of loss.
- Speaker #1
It's not fear of loss, but that's more. Here, let me just pull it up here, guys. Putting me on the spot.
- Speaker #0
No, it's a cool thing. The audience would like to hear.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, Okay, hold on. Cash, advertising, life.
- Speaker #0
I think it might be the same thing that Anthony Robbins talks about in some of his talks. I don't think he calls it the life force aid. I think he calls it the eight triggers because he always uses an example of a purse. Yeah, go ahead.
- Speaker #1
Okay, survival, enjoyment of life, life extension, enjoyment of food and beverages, freedom from fear, pain, and danger, sex, comfortable living conditions, to be superior, care and protection of loved ones, and social approval. That's the life force eight.
- Speaker #0
Now, in your experience, do you focus on one of those or can you combine them into a same offer? Or do you got to do different positioning? Like in a soap example, the example of the hot girls and get the guy to do that's a sex thing. But can they combine these into one ad or do you need to like, OK, now they have another ad that's, you know, the fear, the social one of fear of being at a party and everybody's running, getting away from you because you stink, your underarm stink or something like that?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. so yeah When you're running ads, so the way I set it up is each ad set targets a different angle. So one angle might be sexual companionship. One might be like you just smell bad and you got BO because the copy and the creative are going to be completely different for that, right? And this way, and meta is really good at finding out who's interested in what. And so what ends up happening is those ads that are targeting one life force, say, will be shown to people who care about that. And the others. who are interested in sex will target a different set. And so you got to target different angles and just see what works. You can combine them. Like if you look at one of Dr. Squatch's really good ads, and you can look at every one of their ads in the meta ads library, they've combined that with smooth skin, no harsh ingredients and whatnot, but they focus on the sex one first, and then they have the other value props.
- Speaker #2
So can you take one of those eight, and let's say you have eight different silos of people, okay? Appealing to the certain emotions. Are you building separate communities around those people?
- Speaker #1
Communities. So there's different landing pages for each. And if you're getting emails, they're going to be tagged differently, right? And so when you send out your campaigns, your copy might be different for each segment. But let's use the soap example, right? Like There's sex and then there's some of the other things regarding the soap. They can be combined, right? Right. It's just really I always think of running ads as like panning for gold. You try different things and you see what hits and then you double down on what works. And so, yeah, you can combine things. If you have room in your ad for something else, you would definitely put those attributes in there. Because just because you care about one thing doesn't mean you don't care about the other. Right. So let's say your primary, the primary reason you're using Dr. Squatch is to attract the opposite sex. You might still care about the fact that it works, that it doesn't have harsh chemicals and whatnot. That's just not the main thing that you're emphasizing.
- Speaker #0
What's up, everybody? Your good old buddies, Norm and Kevin here. And I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to.
- Speaker #2
That's right, Kevin. It's called the House of AMZ. And it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon.
- Speaker #0
Hey, Norm, they do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do, like full listing graphics, premium A-plus content, storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, and guess what? They have nine years active in this space. So you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts. There's no fees. There's no retainers. You pay per project.
- Speaker #0
So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's houseofamz.com. House of AMZ.
- Speaker #2
Now, I see you have huge opportunity, not only for your brand, but for these events that you're building as well. So there... two separate things. The people that are, let's say, buying your linens or your handkerchiefs or whatever they are, the napkins. You've got something set up specifically for them, and then you're targeting and retargeting them with, are you doing the same thing with multi or repurposing of content? You said that you were building up the, what was it, the cartoons, the embroidery, the TikTok. Just curious about what other things are you using? Like you're just repurposing all this content. What about newsletters? What about other forms of social media? What are you doing to build this up?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, so our store is actually going through a transitional period right now because I had focused the last decade on ranking in search. So we were number one for wedding handkerchiefs, ladies' handkerchiefs, a whole bunch of other things. I think search is dead.
- Speaker #0
You're talking about Google search, I guess.
- Speaker #1
Google search, that's correct. Google search. And I think that's going to I mean, the writing is on the wall for that, right? Maybe one or two years tops. And so... that is why we're starting up all these other things now. Because for the longest time, search was just killer, right? And then we have all our email flows in place so that depending on what someone buys, we have separate flows for that in Klaviyo. So, the example I always like to use is someone orders like cocktail napkins from our store, we'll automatically cross sell them in Klaviyo with our matching dinner napkins and lunch napkins. And so once someone makes a purchase, they get automatically guided to related products. Sometimes it's just based on, it's usually based on what they bought. But if it's weddings, that leads to a different set of flows, talking about special occasions, their one year anniversary and that sort of thing. So we have all that set up. It's really like the top of funnel stuff that we're losing with SEO or I'm predicted to lose. It's still actually okay right now. But I think the writing is on the wall.
- Speaker #0
I saw Neil, he just did something recently where he said like, look. the fundamentals of some of the SEO still keep doing it because it, it is read by the AI and still, still used at least at this point, but be prepared because it's, it's changing rapidly and with all the AI overviews and, and where people aren't having to scroll. So speaking of that, I mean, what are you doing like for the store, especially for your DTC site for AI, AI. Commerce, if people are going to quit going and typing in Google saying, what are the best napkins for my wedding? They're going to ask ChatGPT, hey, I've got a wedding. It's 47 people on the countryside. We're doing this, this, and this. What are the best napkins for it? And it's going to spit back and say, here's five, and here's the link to Amazon, or here's the link to their Shopify site or whatever. How are you preparing for that shift?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, so there's two prongs to that. One is content and just kind of addressing those issues so you actually have a chance of showing up. But the second one is a little harder, which is getting press mentions regarding your products. No one knows exactly how AI is going to get optimized, but I'm willing to bet that if you can rank in Bing right now, then you'll probably show up in ChatGPT or OpenAI. And likewise, if you're ranking in Google, you're probably going to show up in Gemini and whatnot. You know, ever since AI created this huge spam problem, like everyone just regurgitating the same stuff online, Google has only been ranking real businesses. So if you have a standalone blog, like mywifequitterjob.com was amazing until like the last two years when basically Google decided to destroy all independent publishers essentially, right? Unless you have a blog associated with the business, like an e-commerce store or a service, you pretty much got decimated. Right. So I don't know if that you have a blog, right? Do you guys have a blog?
- Speaker #0
No, I don't. I don't know. Not anymore. My newsletter is turned into a blog by default on Beehive, but it's not really something. And I get a little bit of traffic off it, but it's not something I push.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Well, I used to belong to these mastermind folks of just bloggers for many years. And these guys were making seven, even eight figures just off of affiliate revenue. And that all went away in the span of one year.
- Speaker #0
Oh,
- Speaker #1
yeah. So now, I mean, to answer your question.
- Speaker #0
Now, do you do a blog for your customized products brand?
- Speaker #1
Yes. So blogging still works as long as it's associated with the real business that Google recognizes as a business.
- Speaker #0
So are you using all the tools of Google, like the Google Knowledge Panel, Google My Business, and all that stuff? Yeah.
- Speaker #1
We're soliciting reviews, real reviews. You know what? Google is so confusing. There's Google reviews and then there's, sorry, there's Google business reviews and there's Google product reviews. I'm doing both. So the distinction is Google business reviews is the star rating that shows up in like Google maps and whatnot. And by just getting reviews there, Google recognizes you as a real business. And then there's product reviews where Google solicits the reviews for you on your behalf. Like you put this little piece of code there and then this pop-up happens and it's Google's pop-up. You have no control over what it says. And if you click yes, Google sends your customer an email where they rate the product. And so you can't game that.
- Speaker #0
This pop-up, it's a code you put on your exit page of Shopify or something?
- Speaker #1
That's correct. As soon as you make a purchase, this code pops up on your success page. And it says something like, hey, would you like to share your experience with this shop when you get your product? And if you click yes, you set this like what the time period is. So like two weeks later when they get their product, they will get an email from Google that says, please leave a review for Bumblebee Linens and whatnot. And that goes on your product review rating, which all goes into your Google trusted store rating. I have it displayed on Bumblebee Linens. If anyone listening wants to go check it out, just click on the lower left. All these things, I believe, and no one knows this for sure, will help to contribute to more visibility once AI completely takes over.
- Speaker #0
It is a problem. I just had on my other podcast, I just interviewed a Chinese girl yesterday. She's like the Chinese are having from the Chinese sellers from China are having a hard time understanding branding and the culture of the U.S. And that's becoming more and more important to your point earlier, more and more important. So she actually is coming to NYU. She's in Shenzhen for the summer right now. But she just finished her first year of two years of getting a master's at NYU in New York and branding to learn like how how to how's the West brand. And she's going back and teaching that. To the Chinese sellers like this is what you got to do This is how the Americans think and one of the things that she said is that I was like So I was pushing her to break down where you how don't just give me generalities, but tell me specifically How are you figuring this out? You tell me the three bullet points, but what tools are you using? And she said what was interesting is she said that there are some tools out there You know You can use chat GPT and to think figure out the avatar and there's all these kinds of prompts that you can do to figure Stuff out or but she's like that stuff is misleading And I was like, what do you mean it's misleading? She said, because here at NYU, my professor told me, don't use the chagittis because it's inaccurate. Because it feeds off of other inaccurate information that's been posted in blogs and other stuff. Or what people think is the truth. You know, one influencer or one guru says something and then everybody just repeats it across other things. And it becomes true when it's not true. She's like, be careful of that. We've got a library here on the campus that we spent $60 million putting books in, use the studies, actually studies of, you know, the psychological psychology studies and all these different studies. And you're going to get much better results of how to actually do this. And it was a very, very good point. And I see that as being a problem just on the ranking side of what you just said is like, what is what is it trust? Because I could throw out use norm service and throw out a lot of press releases. And those could just be... some bogus kind of fluffery but if it trusts those or should it it i see that there's a big issue there like what what are they going to use to actually verify who they show yeah i mean this is one thing that google is doing that you can't really game that
- Speaker #1
that easily and norm i you clearly have experience with this when you lost thirty thousand dollars worth of reviews uh off your amazon listing right i mean people game this stuff uh this is why amazon is is so easy for, it's like math, right? That's why the Chinese sellers have succeeded. So we're stereotyping.
- Speaker #0
The exact same thing. She said it's a math thing for them.
- Speaker #1
It's a formula, right?
- Speaker #0
It's a formula, but it's becoming less and less of a formula with AI and they're freaking out.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, I mean, D to C is not, well, it is kind of formulaic, but just like the messaging stuff is not, right? Figuring out what people want. Instead of doing book, using book, books and whatnot, which is, that's the first time I heard that. I mean,
- Speaker #0
just- Studies, studies. Yeah, like professional studies from MIT and all these top places.
- Speaker #1
Here's a piece of advice that's really allowed vulnerable lindens to do well. And I think we've been around for 18 years. And one of the reasons why is because we have a lot of repeat customers. Now, you wouldn't think that wedding products would have repeat customers. uh despite the fact that the divorce rate in the us is ridiculously high but um every now and then we get some large customers and we actually just call them up And we ask them if they're planners or what are they using this for and whatnot. And if they are a planner, we give them a coupon code and we give them a custom rep, a dedicated rep so that whenever they want to place an order, we take care of it personally over the phone or whatnot. And we make sure that that product gets to that event on time. But over the course of just making these calls, like you get an idea of what your stuff is used for and it takes time for this to happen. We also sent out a survey as part of our post-purchase where we ask questions about what people are using things for. And you just have to bribe them to fill out the survey. Like tell them you gave them a free product or a big coupon code or whatnot. And you can get a lot of information there. One of our key questions on that survey is, do you typically plan these types of events or whatnot? And then those people get a phone call.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, that's the ask method. What's his name, Levesque or whatever?
- Speaker #1
Levesque, Ryan Levesque.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, Ryan Levesque. Yeah, that... And that's what a lot of people, they just don't do that. You don't want to ask people like 50 questions, but three or four questions or five questions. A lot of people will quickly answer those. And but you can get so much insight off of that and tailor to it. So how are you using AI in your business? Are you using AI to analyze your customer profiles and create these audiences on Klaviyo? Or is it still the old fashioned way of just tag them? And are you using anything there?
- Speaker #1
Klaviyo's new AI features are still recent, so I actually haven't really dug in too deep. So AI, sorry, Klaviyo will now allow you to generate automatic segments with AI. The way I've been using AI right now is automating a bunch of different things. Yeah, I haven't really dug into too much of the automated AI for marketing just yet. That's next.
- Speaker #0
But you're a coder, you should be like in there like... This should be like your dream.
- Speaker #1
So my dream is I've been automating a lot of stuff from my wife quit her job, actually. You talked about repurposing podcasts and stuff. Yeah. So every single podcast is like a goldmine of TikToks, Twitter posts, YouTube shorts, whatnot. It's, yeah.
- Speaker #0
So you're going through your old content and having AI slice and dice it and post it for you?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. And then what I'm also working on the marketing front for e-commerce is this Facebook automation where from a Google sheet, you put like your photos and like a little blurb and it automatically generates the copy and whatnot and then automatically uploads it to Facebook ads manager. Because you got to rotate these things. I typically rotate my ads once every week. There's new ad sets. So that's the way I've been using it. Not necessarily on like the creative front, but more the automation. because that frees up my time to do other things.
- Speaker #2
So let's talk about new marketers, new brands. What do they need to do right now? And what are some of the mistakes that they're making?
- Speaker #1
From the D2C side or from Amazon?
- Speaker #2
It could be either.
- Speaker #1
I mean, I personally think Amazon is only going to continue to get worse. So I think everyone needs to focus on D2C. That's always been my opinion for like the last five years, actually. And so when you're thinking about a product to sell.
- Speaker #0
When you say Amazon getting worse, do you mean more competitive? Or do you mean, what do you mean?
- Speaker #1
I just mean getting squeezed, margin squeezed. It's actually less competitive. I think I read that somewhere. Maybe it was your newsletter, Kevin. Was that your newsletter?
- Speaker #0
Did you read it? Yeah, it's Marketplace Pulse. Just put out a study. There's a lot less sellers coming on board now. So it's opening it up a little bit. But yeah.
- Speaker #1
Doesn't mean it's going to get cheaper though. I mean, Amazon's make earnings, right? That's right. Uh, so anytime someone, and I teach this in my class, anytime someone comes up with a product to sell, like I have them to run the numbers and all the standard stuff. Right. But then I have them think about like the angles that they're going to take in order to sell this. And these days I don't, I don't like people just selling individual one-off products. I like people thinking about selling a family of products that you can expand into all using that same angle. because when it comes to D to C land. It's not about like the first purchase. It's about just selling a whole bunch of different products to like the same people over and over and over again. And that, in my opinion, is how you create a business that lasts. So these are just the extra things you need to think about.
- Speaker #0
That's a good point. And I think a lot of new people, back to Norm's question about the new people, they don't understand that they're just looking for that next customer. They're looking for the And they don't understand what a goldmine they're sitting on of current customers. And whether that's you have your own line like you teach to actually extend to that, or if you don't, still use that audience and sell complimentary stuff. Or sell, you know, I do this with a calendar business. I have a calendar business. We print these calendars in South Korea for a couple bucks a piece, selling for $25 a piece on Amazon and our own website and other places. But that audience is also interested in other calendars with a similar subject matter. And so I expand that out to 100 different calendars. And I'm buying those wholesale and reselling them in just a keystone markup. But that adds significant money to the bottom line. I'm using that same list of people. And for that same reason, Norm and I always talk about this, that people are afraid to email their list. They're afraid to like, what if they get mad? They're afraid to send them out. And do you really show people like and teach people like, hey, look, maximize what you got. Come up with ideas to actually sell them something else because they already like you, already trust you.
- Speaker #1
Absolutely. Like one of the examples I give is like over the holidays, I'll email like 15 days straight or every time I do a sale, I email someone seven times. You'll be able to tell what their threshold is based on how they behave. But in general, when I'm running these sales, people are on your list for a reason. They want your emails. So you got to get over that.
- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #0
That's 8fig.co, 8fig.co. See you on the other side. Yeah, yeah. It amazes me when Norm and I would talk to somebody and they got 200,000, 800,000 emails. I'm like, oh, I'm afraid to email them. I'm like, why?
- Speaker #2
That's true, by the way.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I'm not exaggerating. What,
- Speaker #1
800,000 emails?
- Speaker #0
Of customers, paying customers. Yeah. Not like opt-ins for some crazy, stupid thing, but paying customers, and they're afraid to email them.
- Speaker #2
Just recently, there was 280,000 of a skincare company I'm working with who will not send out an email.
- Speaker #0
And I just talked to a guy. I met him at the MDS event in Vegas. came up to our booth and he sells fireplaces like fireplace you know these those electric fireplaces and fireplace accessories and stuff and he got a list uh from a buddy of his of 235 000 distributors of fireplaces or stores of fireplaces and he's afraid to email him because he might upset somebody i'm like dude this is millions of dollars you're sitting on right here um and and it And he, well, I had a call with him and I think I might've convinced him that actually you need to do it. Um, but, but it's, um, it's crazy what people will or won't do with, with that data. Um, and that's how you build companies. That's how you build brands is going back to people.
- Speaker #1
I mean, I get it actually. Um, at least in Asian cultures, you know, you don't want to feel like you're disturbing someone. Actually, this whole marketing thing has always been tough for me because I like hiding behind a computer screen. I don't like talking to people. And a lot of things that are required for running a business involves taking that initiative and actually making contact with somebody. In this case, it's email, right?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. And then some people take it. It took me a long time because sometimes these emails would bounce back to me or the reply would come back to me. And I get somebody on there that's like, you bunch of, you know, they just raving, ranting. Like, this is just a scam. You quit emailing me, you know, go blah, blah, blah on some nasty words or whatever. to your mother and I would take it personal or someone would argue with me like this product doesn't do what you're saying I was like yes it does and that I just had to say all right look I'm just unless I get there's a trend and I'm getting tons of these obviously I got a problem but there's a couple yahoos that are sending this back just ignore them and just move on and that's that's difficult for somebody they take this is their business this is their their pride their passion and they're tied to it and they take it personal yeah
- Speaker #1
I mean, we've all...
- Speaker #0
been public for quite a long time. It just takes a little getting used to. I once pissed off the entire Etsy community and I was getting hate mail from Etsy people every like three seconds and new hate mail popped up. And so I crawled into a corner and it was due to a blog post that I wrote and I ended up taking down the post.
- Speaker #1
Say that Etsy people were evil?
- Speaker #0
No. So I'll tell you what I said since a long time ago. I basically said Etsy is like a goldmine for product research because you have a lot of creative people in there who are never going to scale their business, right? So you can get a lot of great ideas, product research from there. And then that for some reason- That's truth.
- Speaker #2
That's true.
- Speaker #0
It got transformed to, hey, this Chinese guy is telling people to copy our products and mass produce them and steal our ideas. And I was like, what? No, that's not what I wrote. That's not what I wrote.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #2
It's not a mint, but it's not a roll. So what motivated you to do a book? You wrote a book. I put that out a couple years ago. Can you tell us about the book and what was your inspiration and motivation behind that?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it's always been on my bucket list. So my mom, who I'm very close to, she does not understand anything that I do. Like she understands the sales of handkerchiefs, but she doesn't understand the blog, the podcast, YouTube channel. She thinks it's like a waste of time. She does understand books though, because she reads books. And so I wrote the book and my only goal with the book was one to, you know, just to reach out and get my philosophies out there. But two, it was the Asian.
- Speaker #2
The name of the book?
- Speaker #0
It's called The Family First Entrepreneur.
- Speaker #2
Okay.
- Speaker #0
And the premise is, at least for me, because I didn't see my mom or my parents that often, I started a business so I could hang out with the kids more. It's not about scale. Actually, I did fall into that trap where once Bumblebee Linens had some early success, I tried to scale, scale, scale, scale. Ended up driving my wife nuts and we just kept fighting every day. And then she went up to me one day and she broke down and she said, Hey, you know what? like we don't spend that much money we don't need all this money why are we putting our pedal down why are we putting the pedal down to the metal and killing ourselves just for some artificial growth numbers that just because you set some goals and that was just kind of the main theme behind the book so i'm
- Speaker #2
a lot more chill now i've dialed back and uh everything that i do now has a family first motif to it that's really cool because in western culture a lot of people it's just it's about the how much money can you make that's the status symbol that's the the i'm not successful unless i have a hundred million dollars in the bank or i'm a bv in every room but yeah i'm i'm over the i like my my comforts i'll spend some money norm knows he's been to my house i'll spend some money on some gadgets and some comfort stuff but also i i'm not about i don't need a hundred million dollars to do that it's what is figure out what's important to you in your life if it's your family if it's your comfort, if it's travel, if it's whatever. And once you have enough, you have enough. Why enjoy it? You're only here once.
- Speaker #0
It's tough to get to that point, though.
- Speaker #2
It is for a lot of people.
- Speaker #0
Because I'm a pretty aggressive guy. But, I mean, it's been really good. It's been good for our marriage. It's been good for our family. And so now I always ask myself, hey, is this going to take away time from something that I need to be doing with the family before I take on that new project? And it's actually helped me from shiny object syndrome, which I'm I'm pretty sure we all have. I'm speaking for myself. I don't know if you guys have it, but I'm always often, yeah.
- Speaker #2
In our relationship, me and Norm's relationship, I always just ask him, is it going to tickle?
- Speaker #1
Nice. But, you know, just talking about what we were talking about before the tickle, you know, I saw that too back in the mid-90s. No, no, it was in the early 90s. Oh, just one sec. Thank you, Connie. More coffee. So that was a time of learning and also a time of really not keeping up with the Joneses, but you think you have all these comforts. You have the two cars. You have a big, beautiful home, big yard, big everything. And due to circumstances... All of a sudden, I woke up one day and there is a tow truck backing up and repossessing one of the cars. I had to go bankrupt because my two partners ended up cooking two books. So at 28 years old, I ended up with about four or five hundred thousand dollars in debt. the same week my son was born. And all of it, when that happens, you learn that there's a lot of crap that you just don't need in your life. And so once those seven years are over, then you relook at everything. And actually, when you get out of that comfort zone, it gets pretty scary because you never want that ever to happen again. But family first, I can see that. And then living within means. And a lot of young entrepreneurs, especially, don't live within their means. They have one good hit. They think it's going to last forever. And then they get kicked between the legs. And then they have to be a little bit humbled. So just wanted to put that in there because, you know, we all talk about success or, you know, not keeping up with the Joneses, but living too comfortably, sometimes way beyond our comfort zone. And then you find out at the last minute, maybe I'm spending a bit too much money.
- Speaker #2
Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player. Or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #1
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #1
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Yikes! But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. click on it and you'll go to another episode of the marketing misfits.
- Speaker #2
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. Oh,
- Speaker #0
you know, I get made fun of a lot because I hate paying for SAS apps. And, and, and these days, like with AI, like you can literally write all your own apps really quickly. There's all these apps in the Shopify app store that basically don't. do anything. And then they charge 50 bucks a month. I personally think that the app store is probably going to take a huge cut at some point. Once people like I coded up a loyalty program last year in probably a little over a weekend. And this is an app that the only reason I did is because they wanted $500 a month for my store for it. And I was like, well, screw this. So I fed in, I fed in the YouTube video that introduced all the features. They have a YouTube. And then I put it into ChatGPT and I'd say, okay, write me out all the frameworks that I need to make this app, all the database tables, write me the helper functions. And it actually generated probably 75% to 80% of the code for me, and I just integrated it into my cart. It's going to get a lot easier than that going forward.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, that's happening. Yeah, I just saw some stat. People coming that just recently graduated back in May from college with computer science degrees are having trouble getting jobs now because so much of it. is being automated and it still takes a human on that final round but a lot of that work can be they can do one senior programmer can now do five things that by himself that he used to have to have a team underneath him to be doing a lot of the grunt work and um yeah that that industry is changing and the people that have a background in that have a major advantage right now i think and no code software and vibe software and some of this stuff yeah i've given it a try
- Speaker #0
I don't think a regular person can code up something completely from scratch just yet.
- Speaker #2
No, you need a little bit of background. That's what I was saying. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Mainly because it might put out something pretty good in the beginning, but you give it further prompts, it breaks what's already working. Yeah, I don't know. It's almost there, though, I think. 80% of the way there.
- Speaker #1
Okay. It looks like we're at the top of the hour. Steve, we have one question we always ask our misfits if they know a misfit.
- Speaker #0
You know, I was going to say Neil Patel, but it sounds like you guys are already having him on the pod, right? Yeah. Have you had Mike Jackness on your pod yet?
- Speaker #2
Not on this one. I've had him on the AM PM podcast, but not on this one. He's a good guy. I like what he's doing with his little project. I'm assuming he's still doing it with the casinos.
- Speaker #0
Yes, he is doing it. He's getting a lot of traction. He's a guy who's like super intense in whatever he does. I just. saw him like last week and every time I see him, he always injects a ton of motivation. So, for example, on his channel, he's putting out seven shorts and one long form video per day. And here I am bitching about like putting out one video, maybe even two videos a week. And so if Mike can put out eight videos a day, I can suck it up and put out one video a week.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, no, Mike would be good actually. That's a good recommendation. I appreciate that. Yeah. If people want to reach out to you or follow you or learn more about either your brand or your trainings or your events, what's the best way to do that or read your blog? What's the best way to do that?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I would just say go over to mywifequitterjob.com and then just sign up for my email list. I'll keep you alerted of my events. And I always do these free workshops where I literally don't hold back. Three-day workshops. I think the next one is, I don't know when this is coming out, but I have one coming out next week where I just go three straight days, answer questions and whatnot. And the goal of the workshop is for you to have your own website. and a strategy for finding products and making sales at the end.
- Speaker #1
Very good.
- Speaker #2
Awesome.
- Speaker #1
All right, Steve. Well, thank you so much for coming on, and this is awesome. Thank you.
- Speaker #0
All right. Thanks for having me, guys.
- Speaker #2
Appreciate it,
- Speaker #1
man. I did it.
- Speaker #2
Hit that button, Norm. Oh, you did it. Whoa, you did it really well. I think you must have hit another button because I saw you disappear. Did you hit the No, it's called
- Speaker #1
49 Years Old and Having to Pee.
- Speaker #2
Oh, okay. that's a special button that's the big one on the right what's that staples that says it's easy
- Speaker #1
I don't care what you're talking about I'm out of here hey that was good stuff Steve's a sharp guy and
- Speaker #2
I like a lot of what he's doing we didn't even get into the story where we got kicked off we got banned in China uh at Alibaba show for talking too much about Amazon on stage. And we thought it was about solar panels or something, but yeah, no, definitely go check out my wife, could her job and check out Steve stuff and a good guy has really good intentions and a super smart guy. And if you want more super smart stuff, how do they do that? Normally they, they can watch some stuff or go somewhere. What's the,
- Speaker #1
there's a few things. They could go to marketing misfits.co. They can go over to our YouTube channel. We have a Marketing Misfits podcast. And for the shorts, we have the Marketing Misfits clips, which is doing exceptionally well right now. Also, one thing we didn't talk about at the beginning, sometimes we do, and that's the Collective Mind Society that's coming up. You want to talk a little bit about that?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, we've got our CMS3. This is our third year to do this, where this is a trip that there's no presentations. It's not a... It's not a conference. We get about 20 people together and go have a fun weekend. We've done the F1 in the past. We did a train ride across the Canadian Rockies. And this year we're doing cigars in Tampa. And some people are like, Tampa cigars? Why? Because Tampa is the world's number one city for cigars. I mean, it's not Miami. It's not actually Cuba. It's actually Tampa. And so we're getting together a group of 20 people. Come down join us for a weekend in Tampa. We're hitting 10 different cigar bars. We're doing top of the Tampa Club. We're doing top of the top couple of top restaurants a cigar crew sunset cruise with drinks and smoking cigars on a on a schooner. It's going to be an amazing time of networking and even if you're not into cigars as long as you can stay on the smoke you're welcome to come because it's not about the cigars it's about the people. And these are really cool events, networking events. So we're doing that November 6th to the 10th. And you can get all the details and find out more about it if you go to collectivemindssociety.com, collectivemindssociety.com. All the details are there, and you can apply to come join us. And it's not expensive. It's reasonably priced. So love to those of you interested, check that out.
- Speaker #1
All right, everybody. Thanks for coming. We will see you next Tuesday.
- Speaker #2
We'll see you next Tuesday. Take care.
