Advice from our merchant community on growing your business in 2021
Now through January we’ll see an influx of new listeners. (Welcome!)
We asked our new listeners, "what’s your number one question as you grow your Shopify store?"
And to our established merchants, we asked, "what do you wish you knew when just starting out?"
Today, we’ll talk through the top comments and turn those into actionable New Year's business resolutions.
Paul Reda: My question for you, I have a question for you.
Kurt Elster: All right, hit me.
Paul Reda: What’s work?
Kurt Elster: I don’t know anymore. Two weeks… So, like in the beginning of Christmas break, so it was like we really didn’t do much of anything for two weeks, which is great. Felt great, but like at the start of it, I have trouble adjusting. So, at the start of vacation, I need a little bit of time. I get anxiety when you mess with my routine. I’m like no different than a toddler.
Paul Reda: Oh.
Kurt Elster: And then I got used to it, felt great, I’m like playing VR, and doing house projects, and going to cabins, and then now I’m back at work and I’m like, “What am I doing?”
Paul Reda: That’s funny, because I’m the opposite. Like the first week of vacation, I’m just like, “Woo! Doing nothing! Woo! What do we do?” We’re watching L.A. Law. We’re playing computer games. That’s all we’re doing. And then yesterday I was like… I was an asshole yesterday, like I was like in a very, very bad mood, like not good. I was so dysregulated, and I was like, “Man, I need to get back to work. I need to get back on my schedule.” Because just time doesn’t exist anymore.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yeah, so I assume I would get there if I stayed away long enough.
Paul Reda: But I’m like that on vacation. Like if a vacation lasts… If a vacation, like we hit day four or five of the vacation, I’m kind of like, “Eh, we can go home now. I’ve been here too long.”
Kurt Elster: You know, it depends. I used to be that way. I think I’m getting better at taking vacation, but like that, especially when you own your own business, you really have to teach yourself how to unplug, and then work, and then go back to it. It’s a skill we don’t talk about.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and you know, it’s sort of… Things came up. I did stuff over the last two weeks, and so it was just that background anxiety, like I probably should check my email in case something did blow up. And I did do it, and I did get things done, but yeah, my whole family’s like that. We went on a trip to Canada when I was a kid, multi-city, week-long trip, and I remember, and we were in Montreal, and it was just kind of like, “It’s time to go home now. We’re going home now.” Like the whole family just consensus, and my dad Iron Manned it from Montreal to Chicago.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Paul Reda: Yeah. It was nuts.
Kurt Elster: That’s definitely an all-day drive.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It was a long time.
Kurt Elster: So, the hot gift in our house seems to be LEGOs. No matter what anybody got, LEGO was the thing that got played with the most, regardless of your age range. How about yourself?
Paul Reda: It’s funny you should mention that, because I got an Amazon gift card, and obviously I get independent texts both from you and Julie being like, “Check out this LEGO I bought. Check out this LEGO I bought.” Like, “I’m filling up my LEGO building tray.”
Kurt Elster: The infamous LEGO sorting tray.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I made fun of Julie about it, but I shouldn’t have. So, yeah, I was like, “I’m gonna buy a crazy LEGO. I’m gonna buy that A-Wing that I lusted over when we did the LEGO Store teardown.” Actually, I take that back. That was not my thought process. My thought process was, “I’m gonna buy this book I’ve been eyeballing that’s like a fancy coffee table book that’s the…” It’s the branding standards guide for NASA in the 1970s. It’s like, “Here’s the NASA Truck. Here’s how we use the logos. Here’s all the ship logos.”
Kurt Elster: Have you read through it yet?
Paul Reda: No, because I just got it yesterday.
Kurt Elster: Okay. What I want to hear is an update where you go through it and you go like, “Here’s all the logos and brand designs I have seen today that clearly borrowed from this.”
Paul Reda: You think that that’s true?
Kurt Elster: I bet.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Well, we won’t know. You’re gonna be our NASA design influence expert.
Paul Reda: But there’s a company that does this and they do it, they have one for the original New York subway one, and all these other ones, so I was like, “I could never justify buying that book, so I did.” And I was like, “Well, I got like 40 bucks leftover on my gift card after buying that, I should-“
Kurt Elster: How much was this LEGO? How much was this gift card?
Paul Reda: A hundred bucks.
Kurt Elster: All right, and you spent 60 on a book.
Paul Reda: We’ll say 70. We’ll say 70 on the fancy coffee table book.
Kurt Elster: All right, so we got some cash leftover on this gift card. What happens?
Paul Reda: So then I’m like, “Well, I could buy something else.” And I was like, “Ooh, I could buy a LEGO. I could buy that A-Wing. I think I’m gonna have to buy that A-Wing.” And the A-Wing is I think $200.
Kurt Elster: What?!
Paul Reda: If not more than that. So, in order to spend $30, I talked myself spending into $150-plus I didn’t need to.
Kurt Elster: Would this have occurred had you not had the gift card?
Paul Reda: Never in a million years. I wouldn’t have bought either of those things.
Kurt Elster: That’s the magic of gift cards. People who receive gift cards almost universally spend more than the value of the gift card, often significantly more. Somehow handing you the gift card kicks off a new and fun consumption cycle.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And that’s like not just you, that’s everybody. Isn’t that weird?
Paul Reda: Well, I see it as like it’s my scenario, where they got 30 bucks leftover or whatever-
Kurt Elster: Right.
Paul Reda: And they then talk themselves into going, “Well, I could buy this thing that’s $300 and it’s like I’m getting 10% off, so I’ll just buy this thing that’s $370.” And now the merchant got 270 bucks they never would have had in the first place.
Kurt Elster: Oh. I love those Amazon gift cards. So, when you were purchasing LEGO, I’m surprised it was in stock. This was like the super hot item this year.
Paul Reda: You know, it was weird, because I went to the… I don’t know what the term is. I pre-shopped at the LEGO website, because they obviously have way better sorting than Amazon’s website.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You go to the… So, you went direct to the manufacturer to pre-shop it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And everything was sold out on the LEGO website. I mean, they were just gone. And then on Amazon, if I went directly to the product listing, it was like 350 bucks or some insane number.
Kurt Elster: So, some retail arbitrage.
Paul Reda: Yeah. The resellers that had it were like gouging. But then there was a special LEGO-only page on Amazon that was essentially like a collection listing with buy now buttons being sold to you directly from Amazon and that had it at the normal map price.
Kurt Elster: Weird. Sometimes I don’t get Amazon.
Paul Reda: Amazon doesn’t make any sense. I don’t understand the systems. It’s like too big.
Kurt Elster: I was on a client call and the CEO of a big organization said, “Hey, we had a spirited discussion last week. Which is Amazon better at? Logistics or customer service?”
Paul Reda: Oh, logistics.
Kurt Elster: Logistics.
Paul Reda: Because I think Amazon Web Services probably falls under logistics, which is obviously like… Civilians don’t know about Amazon Web Services, but it like controls the entire internet.
Kurt Elster: It does. And when you think about Amazon customer service, consider… Before you go, “Well, it’s good.” Think about this. Is it the self-service or the customer service that you experienced? The self-service is good. Actual Amazon customer service is like non-existent. It’s okay.
Paul Reda: It’s okay. Well, and I think the… I think people talk about, “Well, they’re really good, like I get refunds from them or they just resend it if there’s an issue.” That sort of stuff. They could just do that because they have so much money.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: They could just eat the cost. They don’t even… They’re not really servicing you in that they did like the diabolical thing of just like, “What are the costs to us to just resend it to you? Oh, relatively nothing? We’ll just do it. Who cares?” It’s like not out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s like they did a cruel spreadsheet, figured it out.
Kurt Elster: Was it always this way? I mean, I remember ordering CDs from Amazon 20 years ago.
Paul Reda: I don’t remember.
Kurt Elster: Neither do I. Back in the dial-up days.
Sound board: Dial-up modem connection tones.
Kurt Elster: Oh, God. That noise. Oh! That’s the first and last time I use that sound effect.
Paul Reda: Oh, it makes me feel feelings.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that dial-up noise. There’s something about it.
Paul Reda: Used to go on Prodigy in 1991.
Kurt Elster: Oh, Prodigy. That’s a good one.
Paul Reda: That’s right. On my IBM PS1.
Kurt Elster: Ooh. I hope you still have that keyboard.
Paul Reda: I do not.
Kurt Elster: Darn. Those go for like a couple hundred on eBay now.
Paul Reda: I don’t know if-
Kurt Elster: The keyboard. Not the computer.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I don’t know if the PS1 keyboard is like the classic.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I forgot the name, the model. Anyway, this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster, AKA Tech Nasty. I’m joined by my business partner of many years, Paul Reda, and today we’re talking about new year’s resolutions for Shopify merchants. See, here’s the thing. Now through January, we’re gonna see an influx of new members to our Facebook group, which, welcome, and we’re gonna see new listeners, and so knowing this was gonna happen, I asked last week. I said, “New members, what’s your number one question as you grow your Shopify store? And established members, what do you wish you knew when you were starting out?”
And today, we’re gonna talk through the top comments and try and work that into new year’s resolutions to grow your store. Actually, that resolutions, that was your idea. I thought it was very good.
Paul Reda: I didn’t explain it fully.
Kurt Elster: You just wanted to like come up with like, “All right, here’s actionable resolutions.”
Paul Reda: Yeah, just us telling people what to think.
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay.
Paul Reda: Whereas you’re like, you know, asking the plebs about what their thoughts were.
Kurt Elster: About like the whole thing?
Paul Reda: Yeah. You made it like a whole thing.
Kurt Elster: All right. Well, we can talk through-
Paul Reda: I just figured it was just gonna be 45 minutes of us riffing and then I get to leave.
Kurt Elster: Before we get to that, in housekeeping news, so we talked about Shipageddon. Have you heard of Returnsmageddon? No? No Returnsmageddon?
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: So, this is the idea, is if you send a record number of gifts, packages, whatever, over the last six weeks, you’re gonna see record returns as a result of that. And so, shipping and customer service issues, if you’ve experienced them, if you’re seeing them, that’s gonna continue through January. But it really depends on the category, like apparel is gonna be hardest hit, because they have a notoriously high return rate, so go easy on those. On Shipageddon, did you ultimately, did you get everything you ordered over Christmas?
Paul Reda: I got everything I ordered. I showed you before we started the Christmas present the kids bought my dad is Titleist will allow you to print anything you want on golf balls.
Kurt Elster: Personalization. Always smart.
Paul Reda: Yep, and so we got… We bought my dad a bunch of golf balls with his head embossed on them, and it’s hilarious.
Kurt Elster: They’re really funny.
Paul Reda: It’s hilarious.
Kurt Elster: They’re great.
Paul Reda: The first problem is of course you have to buy like literally 200 golf balls in order to do it, but who cares? And then we paid for the expedited shipping so it would show up before Christmas, and it did not show up before Christmas. It showed up on Saturday, which was the first? The second, I think. Yeah, it was very late.
Kurt Elster: So, my wife ordered a fanny pack from Coach for her mother, and this was like on Black Friday she did this. Not only did it never ship and still has not shipped, if you try and get ahold of them, you really can’t, and they’re like, “Hey, even if your order hasn’t shipped yet, it’s already sent to the warehouse for processing, so we can’t cancel it.” So, she has this zombie order that has been now, like we’re what, six weeks into this thing?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That was the only one. Everything else managed to get here, including international packages. It was weirdly only Coach, which again, fashion and apparel. So, you know, maybe they were-
Paul Reda: Well, and it’s not like Coach is like, “We’re gonna hurt our brand.” No. They’re gonna be fine.
Kurt Elster: They’ll be okay.
Paul Reda: All right. You’re worrying me hitting all those buttons. You’re sure I’m being recorded?
Kurt Elster: I’m quite confident-ish you’re being recorded.
Paul Reda: Oh. We’re gonna have to put on Best of Elster.
Kurt Elster: All right. Questions, advice, and you know what? We just dub your voice back in after the fact. It’ll be hilarious.
Paul Reda: It’s just gonna be Al Roker.
Kurt Elster: I don’t watch The Today Show anymore, but I do love Al Roker.
Paul Reda: He was famously anytime a guest canceled for Conan, it would be Al Roker because he was already in the building.
Kurt Elster: Oh, really?
Paul Reda: Yeah, so like anytime you watch old Conans, if Al Roker’s the guest, it’s only because whatever guest they had cancelled.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Whatever, if you’re Al, take it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Free publicity and you just walk down the hall, effectively. That’s a win. All right, so let’s talk about our questions, advice, and actionable resolutions.
Paul Reda: Simone Agius asks, “What’s the best way to increase traffic without using Facebook ads?” She doesn’t want to spend money, buy them at the traffic store. Well, it’s a long slog.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s gonna… I think the answer here is-
Paul Reda: It’s content.
Kurt Elster: Is content.
Paul Reda: It’s content. You have to create content. You have to Instagram, get crazy on Instagram, get crazy on your Facebook, find influencers, and get them your product, like find reviewers and get them your product, and like you need to generate… I mean, those all fall under the umbrella of the word content.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah, when we say… Often, we say like SEO, that’s snake oil. But content marketing, that’s great! Two sides of the same coin.
Paul Reda: It’s true.
Kurt Elster: And I think the answer here is content and Trevor Crotts followed up and he had an experience share. He’s an experienced merchant. He said, “Don’t ignore SEO. It is easy to be shortsighted and focus on faster ROI channels versus playing the long game. I wish I would have started SEO strategies sooner.” And then I asked him, I said, “You know, like what?” He said, “Consistently creating high quality, engaging content that ranks. We put out 10 blogs a week on one of our sites.”
So, the answer here is content marketing as SEO.
Paul Reda: Yeah. When we talk about when we say negative things about SEO, what we’re talking about is things that are like keyword stuffing, or like weird manipulations, or people that are selling you on like, “Well, I’m gonna get you to rank higher and we’re gonna do all these weird little shenanigans and we’re gonna beat the algorithm,” type stuff. That is the SEO that we are-
Kurt Elster: The snake oil SEO we’re trying to avoid is like-
Paul Reda: That’s the stuff we’re down on.
Kurt Elster: If it sounds like a shortcut, that’s the problem.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Any SEO strategy, there’s SEO stuff that’s like, “We’re gonna make sure your shit’s right on your site so when the crawlers crawl you, all the best stuff is being read properly.” That’s necessary SEO. And then there’s weird snake oil SEO, which is, “We’re gonna manipulate the results in some way and don’t worry, I’m gonna figure it out for you and you’re gonna rank super high, because we know the secrets.” And then there’s content-based SEO-
Kurt Elster: Put in the work?
Paul Reda: Which is put-
Kurt Elster: Publish blogs for two years?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Put in a shit ton of work and slog through making blogs and getting stuff to rank due to the fact that it is linked to from everywhere and everyone liked it.
Kurt Elster: Well, my wife started her site, her content-focused Shopify site, two years ago. This is really like 2021 will be the first year where organic traffic, so just like the SEO longtail keyword phrases, outstrip social and everything else.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s a bit, like I’ve always said you know, it takes about two years to get things going. If you’re doing it without paid traffic, it’s purely like organic SEO play, I think that’s gonna be the answer.
Paul Reda: Well, and the question that… You put these together so well. The question after this is, “What’s the best way to drive organic traffic to your site?” Have a bunch of engaging content.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Yeah. So, I guess our first resolution is put in tons of grunt work that seems like it’s not paying off to make highly engaging content.
Kurt Elster: Well, content, I think I’ve heard this… I’ve heard people say this before. Content marketing, SEO, very much planting a garden. You are going to publish all that stuff, those are your seedlings, nothing is gonna happen until suddenly, like minimum two months later, well, traffic starts showing up from Google.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then you get really lucky if people start sharing that stuff. That helps as well. And Marta, on that end, Marta Skrabacz said, “My experience share: Don’t underestimate the value of investing in good creative, especially when you need it to be curated and used across different platforms. 1 good piece of creative can generate excellent content across organic and paid channels.” So, again, this just comes back to make the good content.
So, I think you have to experiment. You have to find a medium that works for you and go with that, and then publish consistently. Like, so for us, clearly podcasting is the medium that stuck. That’s the one that works. And, like Lorne Michaels, you always say what?
Paul Reda: Oh. The podcast doesn’t go on because it’s good. It goes on because it’s Tuesday.
Kurt Elster: That’s right. And we have published the podcast consistently since 2014.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Right? Late 2014, and I think really it’s like 2015 I figured it out. But for five years, this thing has run continuously.
Paul Reda: We’ve never missed a Tuesday for five years.
Kurt Elster: And now has generated 1.4 million downloads as a result.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, like that’s the magic of just consistently publishing. And they’re not all gonna be winners, but you are… It’s a skill and you’re gonna get better at it over time. I hope we have. Actually, I’ve gone back and listened to some old episodes.
Paul Reda: I know we have.
Kurt Elster: Oh my God.
Paul Reda: I know we have. So, I mean not to derail this, I’m just gonna completely wreck this right now.
Kurt Elster: No!
Paul Reda: But what of the people that are like, “Well, I would like my business to make money before two years from now.” What we can we do about that?
Kurt Elster: See, I think the issue here is like we’re focusing… We’re being myopic and focusing on a single channel. I think at all times, you want to have a make money today strategy and a make money tomorrow or make money tomorrow strategy. And I think content marketing, like you’re going to… You just have to commit to I’m going to publish weekly. No matter what it is, I’m gonna publish weekly or more. And I’ll figure out what works and I’m gonna play with it. But that’s really like, “Okay, that gets me organic content. That gets me my social content. That gets me my SEO content.” But that’s still going to be like 80% make money later and 20% make money now, so I like content marketing for that.
But then we also need like okay, we need to make money today. Well, if we’ve got a newsletter of any size, even a hundred people on it, let’s market to those people consistently as though it’s an email list of 100,000 people. Right? Let’s treat that newsletter and our business like the professional that it is, even if there’s only 50, 100 people on it, because you want to build that habit, and that’s your make money today. We can get those people to buy and get them to talk about it and get them to share it.
And then if you’re even earlier then that, well, you start with friends and family and see if you can get them to support you.
Paul Reda: Well, and I mean I know the initial starting question of this is without using Facebook ads. Buying traffic isn’t cheating. It’s not like, “You know, I did make a bunch of money, but I bought all the traffic and I paid for advertising and paid placement of stuff.” It’s like it’s not cheating, like Proctor and Gamble isn’t cheating by creating soap operas.
Kurt Elster: I don’t think it’s necessarily cheating. I think either they’re doing that activity now and it’s not generating the ROI they want, and so they’re like, “Okay, well, what else can I do to augment this?” Which I think is smart, because if as you have other traffic going to a site that’s already running Facebook remarketing ads, all right, that augments the power of the Facebook remarketing ads and vice versa. Like the whole thing ends up being a force multiplier.
So, it is hard to look at it as like, “Well, this one single channel.” But, so I think when people ask that question it’s either they’re intimidated by Facebook ads or paid advertising, they don’t want to get into it, they don’t want to lose the money on it, so I think it’s like it’s a core digital marketer skill. I think just play with it, whether that’s like spending $50 or $100 at it, but to try and get comfortable with it, and you don’t necessarily start with whole Facebook ads. Start with promoted posts. That’s way easier to get into and to use a smaller budget effectively.
Paul Reda: Or do like giveaways.
Kurt Elster: Giveaways are one of my favorites, but again, you still… To get the reach on that giveaway, you still gotta promote it, and I think a promoted post is like the easy way to do that.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, I’m saying like yeah, giving… We talk about the watering holes. It’s like doing giveaways in the watering holes.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah, when we say watering hole, it’s like all right, where do these people hang out online? They probably hang out in Facebook groups, forums, Reddit, like where are they? Can you get… All right, so then that’s another great organic activity. That’s grassroots marketing. If I can figure out where they hang out, well, I can hang out there too. Grassroots marketing, often very effective. And that brings us to our next question.
Mr. Daniel Mendes asks, “How can I use the voice of my customers to build positioning and messaging on my Shopify store?”
Paul Reda: Ooh, ooh. I know this. I know this. Send out surveys.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Survey your customers. Ask them why they bought, how it makes them feel. Kurt has a survey that he uses.
Kurt Elster: I do.
Paul Reda: And like it’s incredible, because they tell you how to market your product.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: And you’re like, “Why did you buy my product?” And it’s like, “Because it makes my feet feel good.” And when they say that, immediately the H1 on your website should be, “Make your feet feel good. Buy this thing.” Like they tell you the main advertising pin of it.
Kurt Elster: Well, and the thing is like they speak the way customers speak. You speak like a marketer. You speak like someone who like this is your baby, and so you need that natural language, and you need that core benefit from the person who is actually opening up their wallet and paying for it, right? But no, that is like consistently for myself, for other conversion rate optimization professionals, take that voice of customer and paste it into the headline on a website.
Let’s say you don’t have any customers. Oh, what do I do? Start reading Amazon reviews. Start reading forums. Start reading subreddits, Facebook groups. You can start finding the way people talk about a similar product, your product, or a similar pain or problem that your product solves, and then start pulling that language. And you’ll see, you’ll start to notice recurring phrases or phrases you like, and that can really make life much easier, is pulling that stuff. If you want to be fancy with it and you need like a framework for it, assistance, Adam Smith suggests StoryBrand. StoryBrand I have not done, but it has been recommended so many times that I’m comfortable recommending it. It is a book or a course, website, a framework for developing that brand story, and it does leverage voice of customer.
So, if I had to pick as a resolution, like work on your brand story, because that’s gonna become your welcome story. I bet that’ll be one of your most effective email series, email flows, and then that’s also going to become the cornerstone of your marketing and help you work through the positioning, and then get your headline. It all comes back to that story.
Paul Reda: I have nothing to add to that, because that is correct. Todd Steinberg asks, “How important is email marketing to building relationships and increasing sales?” Which I feel like is asking how important is food.
Kurt Elster: How important is oxygen to breathing?
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s food. If you don’t eat, if you don’t have email, you’ll die. If you don’t eat food, you’ll die. It’s literally the most important thing to building revenue and increasing sales.
Kurt Elster: Well, and in digital marketing, it’s often said like, “Well, the value of the business is the list. Is the audience.”
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And so, that email and those email lists just generate money, right? Like we did that holiday email guide. I wonder how much cash that thing through the emails that inspired in total ended up generating. Quite a lot. But for most of our clients, probably most of them, email is the number one revenue channel.
Paul Reda: Oh, without a doubt.
Kurt Elster: And like you’re not paying, like yeah, you’re paying for an email service provider.
Paul Reda: It’s an owned channel, too. It’s not like it-
Kurt Elster: But yeah, you’re not paying-
Paul Reda: Facebook can’t be like, “Well, that email got typed wrong, so we’re not gonna deliver your email.” Or Google’s not gonna say that. I mean, it can if you do a bunch of spammy stuff-
Kurt Elster: I was gonna say, actually, if I type my email in wrong, it probably won’t get delivered.
Paul Reda: Well, you know what I’m saying, is Facebook it feels like makes these arbitrary and capricious choices regarding to how exactly you have formed your ad, and people are like, “What the fuck? How did that one get canceled? I don’t even get it.” That doesn’t happen with email. You control the channel.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. Yeah. I like it. If you’re not doing anything with email, at least be collecting a list and sending out automated emails.
Paul Reda: I mean, and when I proposed this topic to you and I… I thought of it as our things that we tell people their new year’s resolutions should be, mine was focus more on email.
Kurt Elster: Send more email.
Paul Reda: It was like however much you’re focusing on email; you need to focus more on email and less on the website.
Kurt Elster: Resolution: Send more email!
Paul Reda: It’s like once the site reaches a certain minimum competency bar, email vastly outstrips anything extra you could be doing.
Kurt Elster: Well, as a touch point, email’s great. Because email is a to-do list that other people set. So, like I check my inbox. Oh, here’s a whole bunch of stuff. I need to take action on all of it. And so, I have to at least consider the sender and subject line. Email is what keeps you top of mind. So, if you send me an email about… If LEGO sends me an email and I had not previously been thinking about LEGO, now I’m thinking about LEGO. And for a good number of people they send it to, it’s a single digit percentage, but it’s still like that is a non-trivial crowd who’s gonna go, “Oh yeah, I was thinking about ordering that thing.” And then just go do it.
Paul Reda: I mean, yeah. There’s millions of people on the LEGO email list. Come on. Gotta be.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I would not doubt it. So yeah, send more email, man.
Paul Reda: I mean, to say like a single email to the LEGO email list generates tens of thousands of orders, which translates to millions of dollars in revenue for every single email, no part of that statement is absurd or wrong.
Kurt Elster: No. No, and the magic of it is it works the same regardless of the size of the list. Like if I’m emailing a thousand people-
Paul Reda: You’re still gonna get 10 orders out of it.
Kurt Elster: Yes. And let’s say my average order value is 50 bucks. Well, and I got 10 orders, now I sent an email, I earned $500. I can keep doing that as long as I have promotions or products or something to go with it.
Paul Reda: I mean, you even do it. This hasn’t been a problem recently, but I remember 18 months ago, 2 years ago, we’d be like, “Eesh, it’s a little light this month.” And you were like, “Yeah, I want to redo my bathroom.” And I was like, “I’m just gonna email everyone.” And you would just email all of our previous clients and be like, “Hey, got any work that needs to get done?” And you know, five or six jobs would show up. Because they would be like, “Oh yeah, you know what? I was thinking about something. I was gonna contact you guys.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, it works with like… There is no category in which email doesn’t work. That’s what’s so cool about it. Let’s see. There was this great advice from Courtney Powell Hartman in the group. She said, “If you’re launching an apparel store of any kind, you’re gonna need at least five times the number of new releases you thought you’d need in a given period of time. The appetite for new stuff is endless.”
And she’s right. The human brain craves novelty. So, if you can come up with new products and new product launches, or like rerelease products, whatever you could do to make it a new and novel thing makes it interesting, and that’s what gets… Especially like repeat customers to go, “Yeah, I’ll order that. I ordered the first one. It was cool. This seems cool, let’s do it.” And who does this better than anybody? Apple. Apple will resell you the same thing. They’ve been reselling me iPads for how long? Right?
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s Malibu Stacy. She has a new hat.
Kurt Elster: A new hat? I wish I had a sound drop for that. I almost put a Simpsons sound drop on today. I didn’t do it.
Paul Reda: Oh, you’re missing out.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I missed out. Let’s see. And yeah, so I think launching… Product launches can help drive the growth of a business, for sure. And I know Casey Bard at Tacticalories has experienced this firsthand. God, that guy is good at marketing and doing product launches. It is unreal.
Paul Reda: Well, it’s funny, because you’re always kind of like, “Oh, Casey Bard sent me some cool stuff lately.” And I’m like I don’t want to say it to you, but it’s almost like you do realize that every time he sends you something, you blast it out on all of your social media channels? Like you’ve become-
Kurt Elster: Or I talk about it here.
Paul Reda: You’ve become an unpaid influencer for him.
Kurt Elster: Because I love it.
Paul Reda: For free products.
Kurt Elster: Oh, it’s so good. I had the… Oh, man, I had his barbecue sauce last night. Like, “Oh, damn. This is so good.” Helldiver Wing Sauce. That’s my favorite. You need some buffalo wing sauce? This stuff. Damn.
Paul Reda: Frank’s, baby.
Kurt Elster: Frank’s?
Paul Reda: Frank’s.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Frank’s is good, but I’m gonna step up your game.
Paul Reda: All of your hot things are like a dare.
Kurt Elster: You’re right.
Paul Reda: I just want to enjoy flavors, not cry.
Kurt Elster: You know, everyone could use a good cry now and again.
Paul Reda: Well, the problem is-
Kurt Elster: Especially when it’s just searing agony.
Paul Reda: The problem is with you, that’s the only way you could achieve it. That’s your therapy.
Kurt Elster: Correct. Yeah. It’s an addiction, the spicy food. I love it. Very healthy addiction. But, so we’ve got all these ideas. How do you implement them?
Well, Andre Rudnyk suggests there’s a lot of quality Shopify partners that can help you do pretty much anything you want on your store. He’s not wrong. So, a resolution, the way I would reframe this is as a business owner, think of money as a tool to buy back your time. When you are spending money in that way, where you’re using it to in some way buy back your time, whether that’s like software automation, smart home stuff, or like hiring someone, even like hire somebody for 25 bucks to plow your driveway. Whatever it is, that is you buying back your time, and that is almost universally a great use of money when you can buy back your own time.
Paul Reda: I mean, we hire people.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: We’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to handle that.”
Kurt Elster: Like, “Ew.” Let me get somebody to do it. Put Carl on it!
Paul Reda: It’s like we have servers that we have websites on. It’s like we don’t administer those servers. Like oh my God.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No. And finally, Emily Clark had a comment that I wanted to share. She said, “I love episodes that touch on just how much time and effort something takes. It really helps me to set my own goals and expectations.” Well, I think you gotta be patient and I think building any business, regardless of what it is, where it’s starting, between where it is now and where you want it to go, I think it will almost always be 24 months. That’s my rule of thumb. And there’s like edge cases and variation in there, but like if we’re setting expectations, I think 24 months is usually the safe answer.
Paul Reda: Well, and 24 months of grinding it out. Not like-
Kurt Elster: Not like I think about it occasionally.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah, of actual grinding it out, but I was also thinking of like, “Well, on day one I dropped a quarter million dollars into this, this, and this.” And it was kind of like, “Okay, maybe not the best choice, because-“
Kurt Elster: Well, but even that is how you did the business, you started your business and ran it, it’s like, “Whoa! It’s a big success.” But you still need to earn that money back, like it would still probably be 24 months to profitable, right? So, even if I’m gonna bootstrap it and it’s always profitable, but like low revenue, and it just grows incrementally over time… That’s our approach, I like it. 24 months. Took us longer than that.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah.
Kurt Elster: Or hey, I’m gonna drop a bunch of coin to do this. Fine. You can do that, too, but at what point does the business become profitable? Or even like when does it get to a point when I can sell it, and then that’s the payout? So, I think no matter what it’s a two-year time scale.
Paul Reda: Well, and I think you need to take into account two years from now, you’re gonna be a lot less dumb than you currently are right now. Like right now, when you’re starting this business, you’re dumb.
Kurt Elster: You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t have the experience. And that’s okay.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And then two years from now you’re gonna be like, “Oh man, I was so fucking dumb.” And then two years after that, you’re gonna look back on the previous two years and been like, “Man, I was dumb. I didn’t know anything.”
Kurt Elster: And if at any point that stops happening, you’ve stopped growing.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s like that’s just life, man. We’re just dropping life advice now. If every five years you’re not looking back at yourself five years ago and being like, “I was stupid as hell.” You’ve gone down a wrong path.
Kurt Elster: It’s amazing how much things change over time. Well, that’s the end of the-
Paul Reda: The questions.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, the questions, commentary from listeners.
Paul Reda: We still got time. We gotta give the people some more. So, what is… My resolution, my overarching resolution for the people listening to this right now is I want them to care less.
Kurt Elster: Oh?
Paul Reda: Because I feel like a lot of the time they get very myopic about things and like you lose… It’s the forest for the trees, where you lose sight of what’s really important and what’s not important in terms of the business and the store. So, it’s like email, always gonna be more important than everything. Like that weird animation on this image on your store, not very important.
Kurt Elster: You know what? I always think of that as shiny toy syndrome.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, yeah, yours would be, “Hey, look at the bigger picture. Be less myopic. Think longer term.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. I just-
Kurt Elster: And mine would be avoid shiny toys.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s just like look at your actual money numbers of the money you’re making and then figure out how to make more of the money. Not… I feel like revenue becomes a back seat to feelings.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yes. Well, and especially when you own your own business, because it’s like it is so you and the business are so entangled.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s wrapped up.
Kurt Elster: It’s so easy to get emotional about it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And the people who are really successful are like total sociopaths often.
Paul Reda: True.
Kurt Elster: Not always, but sometimes, like it is not unusual to find really successful psychopaths in business. And why are they successful? It’s not because they’re in some way-
Paul Reda: Like immoral monsters. That’s part of it.
Kurt Elster: No. It’s because… Well, yeah. No, it’s because they can divorce themselves emotionally, so they’re able to make better decisions.
Paul Reda: Yeah, they can separate their identity from the business.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: And you know, I mean, I’ve been writing and talking to you about this for over half a decade now, but it’s like people that have that like, “I’m a big boy businessman,” syndrome, where it’s like are you in this to make money? Or are you in this to feel like a big boy businessman?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah, I think you have to consider your motivations. And if that is your motivation, that’s fine, but you need to personally be aware of it, so that it doesn’t get in the way of other decisions.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so I think my key is you really want to look at the… Look at how your money is being generated, look at how your revenue is being generated, where it’s coming from, places where the revenue is falling down or you can increase it and stuff like that, or like how the product is being built. Actual stuff that’s like the lynchpin foundations of the business, and don’t pay as much attention to the other stuff.
Kurt Elster: And I think you should be a psychopath.
Sound board: Psycho theme music.
Paul Reda: And everything you think is really just something to hit the noise button.
Kurt Elster: You know, I did a whiskey happy hour call with my in-laws, and my brother-in-law, he’s like, “All of your questions are setups for the sound board, aren’t they?”
Paul Reda: Yeah, he’s right.
Kurt Elster: I was like, “Yes.”
Paul Reda: I assume that was Mike. Mike’s very-
Kurt Elster: Mike’s astute. Yeah.
Paul Reda: Mike picks up on stuff.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And they did not… They just did not enjoy Yakkety Sax the way I did, and then that was kind of the end of it.
Sound board: Yakkety Sax music.
Kurt Elster: That’s fabulous. Oh. Comedy gold. I don’t know-
Paul Reda: What do you want to see out of business owner customer client people? Client-type people?
Kurt Elster: I want people to be happy. That’s what I want. Truly. And so, the way… What I have been doing and thinking about, and that’s what I want for myself, and my family, and so for the last several weeks I’ve just been thinking about like what do I want, short term and long term, and I think when you’re asking yourself these things, like phrase it that way. Short term and long term. And what stresses me out? So, there’s like two parts to it, it’s like what do you need and what do you need to get rid of? What are those two things?
All right, well, which is the most realistic? What can we do? And then once you’ve generated this list, you gotta prioritize it. I think that’s where people fall on their faces with resolutions, is like I’ve got all these great goals, but if you’ve got a whole bunch of goals, you end up going just a million-
Paul Reda: Yeah. You can’t focus on anything.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You’re going 12 different directions. You end up going nowhere as opposed to like, “All right, you gotta prioritize and pick.” And then that’s when you’re gonna see forward momentum and progress.
Paul Reda: All right. Well, we’re not actual therapists. We’re only Shopify therapists. So, reword that for their stores.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Here’s what you do. You’re staring at your store and you’re looking at other people’s stores and you’re frustrated about something about your business.
Paul Reda: And also, maybe don’t look at other people’s stores and being like, “Look at that. They got a weird little button down there. I need to have a weird little button down there because they have it.” And it’s like, “You sure? Are you sure that that’s-“
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You don’t know why they did it. I once had someone go, “Hey, we have to put this badge for this other business on here or I’m gonna get cut out of the family will.” That’s a real thing that happened.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, like my point though, it’s not to besmirch them, but that you don’t know the reasoning, the real reasoning behind why certain decisions are made on websites. So, like certainly resolution one, oh my gosh, stop looking at other people’s websites and lusting after, “They did this. I need to do that.” You’ll make yourself crazy.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s like you know the reason the button’s blue? It’s not because they did split testing and people trusted the color blue more in relation to this product. It was because the guy’s girlfriend was just like, “I think blue would be nice.” So, now it’s blue.
Kurt Elster: They’re like, “She’s an art therapist and she said blue is healing. We’re like okay, well, that’s what we’re doing now.”
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, you really have no idea.
Paul Reda: It’s like that’s why this… I worked on a site back in a past life that on every… They sold horse-related products.
Kurt Elster: I love this story.
Paul Reda: And on every single page load there would be the sound of horse clip clops. I was forced to put that on the website because I had a boss and there was no way out of that, so every fucking page load, there would be a .wav file that was five seconds of horse clip clops.
Kurt Elster: And this was way back when?
Paul Reda: I would say 2007.
Kurt Elster: 2007. Were people using dial-up modems then?
Sound board: Dial-up modem sound.
Paul Reda: Stop it!
Kurt Elster: Oh, my ears! Oh, what is that?
Paul Reda: We’re on DSL. Come on.
Sound board: Tech Nasty!
Paul Reda: Stop it! But yeah, so I’m sure maybe some of their competitors in the horse space were like, “Oh, man. Dude, they got the horse clip clops.”
Kurt Elster: They got that multimedia sound effects.
Paul Reda: They got that multimedia clip clop action. We need that!
Kurt Elster: Oh, man! We need it! And then they’re emailing their developers like, “Uh…”
Paul Reda: How come we didn’t think of the clip clop?
Kurt Elster: No! They’re probably like, “Please don’t make us do this.” So, the other thing you can do is in your business, review, figure out… Rather than like beat your head against the wall with the stuff that didn’t work, figure out what did work, like what are the channels that generate revenue, what are the emails that get sales, what works in this business? Make an inventory of that and then your resolution should just be do more of that. Like let’s do double that stuff. I want 80% of my time being devoted to the things I know worked and then 20%, I’m just gonna experiment and not be hard on myself for thins that don’t work. We’re just gonna try things.
Paul Reda: Ooh, that’s big.
Kurt Elster: You like that?
Paul Reda: That’s big. I think trying stuff and just being like, “You know what? I’m trying this out. It’s gonna be crazy. Could totally screw it up.” And if I screwed it up and it didn’t work out and it was a bad idea, that’s fine. I did a good job trying something.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Well, you know what’s funny? Like we were talking about this show, we to this day really have no idea what episodes are going to really get people excited and drive a lot of engagement and get response, and the episodes that we’re like we’re really excited about, we publish them, and then like nobody cares.
Sound board: Crickets chirping.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I think… Not to brag, but I feel like that I’m a very good cook, and the reason I’m a very good cook is because I’m just kind of like, “Well, what if I tried it this way?” And you know, you kind of self-teach yourself about what will work and what won’t, and you’ll get evidence in the future when you’re like, “I think that might work because this thing that’s kind of like that worked, and it’s different from this way that didn’t work, and this way.” And it gives you evidence in the future to make better decisions.
Kurt Elster: All right. Let’s break it down this way. Here, famously at 3M, the folks that gave us all kinds of tape, adhesives, et cetera, they would have their engineers do 20% time. So, Monday through Thursday-
Paul Reda: Is that where that came from?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It was 3M.
Paul Reda: I always heard it was Google. I mean, Google was the first one I heard of.
Kurt Elster: A lot of people do, a lot of businesses do 20% time because of this.
Paul Reda: So, 3M started it.
Kurt Elster: And so, 3M is Monday through Thursday, you do your work for 3M. Friday, you come to 3M and then you work on your own stuff. And that’s where Post-It Notes came from.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It was an adhesive that was meant to be for something else and they discovered the thing would keep sticking and they ended up using a paper. Yeah. So, I think you could do… If you really want to take this idea further, you could do the same thing in your own business, like Monday through Thursday, we’re gonna work on the activities that we know generate revenue. Friday-
Paul Reda: Yeah, of like our currently-running business.
Kurt Elster: Friday, let’s throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
Paul Reda: I mean, we do that all the time.
Kurt Elster: Friday is when, yeah, things get weird.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That’s all I got. How about yourself?
Paul Reda: I’m good. I can’t believe I have to do work. I have two assignments. Now I need to edit this podcast and then I have two more assignments at least I need to do this week. This is a nightmare.
Kurt Elster: There’s people with office jobs like, “I hate this man.”
Paul Reda: Yeah, I know. I just want to go home and play Hades. All I’ve done is play computer games for like two weeks. It’s not healthy.
Kurt Elster: You need to go outside. Touch the ground. See the sun.
Paul Reda: It’s cold. The sun. It’s January.
Kurt Elster: I know. It’s just this kicks off three months of endless grey in Chicago.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s just terrible.
Kurt Elster: Let’s go ahead and let’s end things on a freestyle rap that Ezra Firestone recorded for me.
Paul Reda: Is this part of Ezra Firestone’s new ad with us? Or is this gonna be just part of the show?
Kurt Elster: No, this is just part of the show.
Paul Reda: I’m gonna take off my headphones before that happens.
Kurt Elster: I will leave.
Ezra Firestone: Tech Nasty. Oh, shoot. I’m on the Tech Nasty podcast? Tech Nasty, never letting a Shopify store get past me without optimizing and making it flashy. I’m so cashy. Convert the desktop, the mobile traffic. K-U-R-T-I-N-C if you want to tweet at me. The big dog, Tech Nasty.
Kurt Elster: Wow, so if you were wondering where that Tech Nasty sound drop came from, it’s that.
Paul Reda: I wish I had that level of self-confidence.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I know! That’s awesome. The impressive part is… Well, that’s impressive.
Paul Reda: He’s an interesting man.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I like Ezra. All right, let’s end it there. See ya, Paul.
Paul Reda: Bye.