Plus an investment update
We discuss the top mistakes to avoid early in your entrepreneurial journey. Look, when you start something new, you don't know what you don't know. It's easy to make a lot of mistakes early on that become obvious to you only later with experience. I know this because I've been through it. I've engaged in all of the mistakes we're about to discuss.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
4-19-22
Kurt Elster: Hey, you ever do anything stupid? I’m not talking like buy multiple 40-year-old messed up cars.
Paul Reda: I don’t think that’s fair for you to say. I mean, you don’t have multiple 40-year-old cars.
Kurt Elster: I got two of them.
Paul Reda: It’s not 40. It’s only… The Bronco’s only like 37. It’s spry.
Kurt Elster: Well, I’m 39, and I know the Bronco is one year younger than me, so it’s 38.
Paul Reda: Oh. Oh, it’s 38. I’m sorry.
Kurt Elster: The Beetle is 42.
Paul Reda: I’m not here for math.
Kurt Elster: Neither am I. I’m bad at it. Math and geography. That’s why I struggle with time zones. Why would you marry those two things?
Paul Reda: You’re so bad at time zones. It’s the funniest thing in… You live in America.
Kurt Elster: I’m better. I’ve mastered the three U.S. time zones. Are you about to tell me there’s a fourth one?
Paul Reda: God damnit. There’s four, first of all. My next sentence was gonna be you live in America. You only need to know four. And you’re in the middle, so it’s not like even the math is that big.
Kurt Elster: All right, so 100% of this bit was not a bit. That was truth.
Paul Reda: This is not a bit. Yeah. No, there’s multiple times you’ve been like, “Oh, these guys are in Denver. The call’s at three. What time am I supposed to call?”
Kurt Elster: Damn it. I thought I had a sound effect for that, but I didn’t because it was on the other sound board. Wait, hold on. I got one.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: All right, so I’m not working on all cylinders when it comes to time zones.
Paul Reda: It’s that you both… It’s not just you know… You don’t know what cities are in what time zones and then you also don’t know the offset of those time zones from where you live. You don’t know both. You’re like, “Where is LA? I don’t know. Is LA six hours ahead of us or four hours behind us? I have no idea.”
Kurt Elster: Which one’s LA?
Paul Reda: That’s not even a joke. That is not a joke.
Kurt Elster: Okay, that one’s not… I know where LA is.
Paul Reda: Where is LA?
Kurt Elster: Somewhere in California.
Paul Reda: What time zone is LA in?
Kurt Elster: You know, the one to the left of us.
Paul Reda: No. You’re not… Don’t even do a bit. Legit answer this question. What time zone is LA in?
Kurt Elster: Pacific?
Paul Reda: How many hours is LA off from us?
Kurt Elster: Minus two?
Paul Reda: All right, you got that right. See, there you go.
Kurt Elster: Yes! See, I’m getting better at it.
Paul Reda: Good job.
Kurt Elster: Had to really practice to get there. So, my point here is that everybody makes boneheaded mistakes. Myself included.
Paul Reda: Not me.
Kurt Elster: You’re perfect.
Paul Reda: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m not here to dispute that. That’s why I used myself.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Being rude.
Kurt Elster: And so, in this episode we’re gonna talk through some top entrepreneurship mistakes that we see in these eCommerce businesses where people are… They’re new to starting an eCom business. They don’t know what they don’t know. And there’s just some common mistakes that are obvious in hindsight and possibly painful and expensive when you first make them, and so I just wanted to talk through them. But before we got there, I needed to establish like I’m not talking down to anyone because I can’t figure out time zones, so don’t feel bad.
Paul Reda: I’m ready for this topic because I’m coming in hot today.
Kurt Elster: This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: I am joined by my cohost, producer, business partner, Paul Reda, and we are discussing today the top mistakes to avoid early in your entrepreneurial career. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, so let’s save you from those easy early mistakes that will become obvious to you later with experience. And I’ve engaged in most of these that we’re about to discuss, so that’s what qualifies me to speak on them.
Quick housekeeping update, investment update. All right, so we had mentioned at the end of the last show, or two shows ago, we both invested in PostPilot. It is Klaviyo for snail mail was the way we described it. I still like that description. I had also invested in Govalo, but we’ve got Govalo, phenomenal gift card solution for Shopify. We’ve got some more news coming about Govalo in a future episode, but shh, it’s a secret. I can’t tell you right now. I’m just teasing it. God, don’t you hate when people do that? The teaser? I hate teasers and here I am doing it to you. Shh! It’s a secret. Come on, you do it, Paul. It’s fun. You’ll love it. Do it.
Paul Reda: Not doing it.
Kurt Elster: You’re not gonna do it?
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: Shh. It’s a secret. You know that emoji with the guy, the shh face? I hate that thing but I’m doing that right now.
Paul Reda: In case it hasn’t come across yet over these years, I am like radically open about things. Perhaps too much. And thus-
Kurt Elster: You practice radical honesty?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Exactly. And you know, it’s served me great. That’s why everyone likes me so much.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I have essentially… My housekeeping update was I can’t tell you anything.
Paul Reda: Yeah. See? So, thanks.
Kurt Elster: Good work.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Thank you for being here helping the people.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s why teasers are annoying. But when I finally circle back to that, and on the chance that you remember it, I’ll remind you. Then it’ll be funny.
Paul Reda: You know, like when they’re going back through the old episodes and then they listen to this and they’re like, “Oh, I know what happens.” You know-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. All three people who recall. Wow!
Paul Reda: It’s like a Marvel movie. There’s one where there’s like a prequel.
Kurt Elster: I need Stan Lee to pop up in the corner.
Paul Reda: Yeah. This is like a prequel to whatever the episode is where you tell everyone about it.
Kurt Elster: Hey, Unofficialers. Go listen to episode 401, in which he teases it. Shh!
All right, let’s jump into these eCommerce mistakes so I can stop shushing people. I did top eight. We got top eight here. That was chosen arbitrarily. I was gonna do top 10, but I realized we’d be limited to like three minutes per topic.
Paul Reda: I think was just eight was just the most you were able to think of.
Kurt Elster: I could totally come up with more. I’d be like, “Number 10, put everything on a credit card with 23% interest.” All right, there’s number 10.
Paul Reda: Well, and these are like big ones. This isn’t like tiny little ones. Because my favorite one of yours is the shop dropdown.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is more like overall-
Paul Reda: These are like high-level business mistakes.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Not really eCommerce-specific, but stuff I have witnessed while working in eCommerce as an industry. All right, so we’ll jump to number eight here is our first one, and one of my favorites because everybody does it early on. We see it all the time. Keeping up with a competitor. It’s like the keeping up with the Joneses, the grass is always greener, except now it’s you have one single competitor. You may have 200 competitors, but it’s always like there’s one single competitor that for whatever reason you’ve singled out as like, “That’s the one. I gotta be as good as them or better.”
And it starts off as you just need some inspiration, and you like what they do, and then it quickly spirals before you know it into a weird obsession, where you’re just like… You check. You got your morning routine and part of it is you check their site to see if they did anything different, and then when they do, you’re like, “Did they do that because I did this thing two weeks ago?”
Paul Reda: Yeah. You think that… You have decided you’re in a life-or-death struggle with another business.
Kurt Elster: Rarely does the other business know.
Paul Reda: They don’t know that you exist.
Kurt Elster: Occasionally. It really blows my mind when I run… Because you run into this all the time and people usually laugh about it, but if you run into it and the other business becomes aware, like I talked to a guy who was like, “This other…” He had this business he was obsessed with and then on a totally unrelated thing they ended up sending him like a DMCA or a cease and desist, because it turned out they were doing the same thing he was, but to him.
Paul Reda: So, they were both just insane?
Kurt Elster: They were both. Both of them had picked the other as the competing business they’re gonna obsess over and were attributing changes to things they were doing.
Paul Reda: They were.
Kurt Elster: But they were both… Both thought that each one was reacting to the other, and in the reality, they were always like one step off.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We had a client like that, that had a competitor that was called… And it was like a name, a woman’s name. It was like Veronica Jones or whatever and she was just like, “Yeah, I was looking at Veronica Jones’s website. She changed her add to cart button to blue. You know, we changed our add to cart button to blue last week. She’s copying off of us.” It’s like I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
Kurt Elster: And usually what this really… These are more extreme examples. Usually, it takes the form of like it’s always one brand that you’ve picked and then it becomes like, “Well, they did X, so I have to do X too.” And that’s how it starts. And the reality is you have no idea why they’re picking stuff.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah, and the assumption is they must… It’s one, I’m trapped in a life-or-death struggle with this other website who is my arch nemesis, and they are also smarter than me. The assumption is always they’re smarter than me, so they’re doing something and I gotta copy it. Because they’re gonna get ahead of the game. There’s gonna be an eCommerce gap unless I keep up with them.
Kurt Elster: And the reality is they know… They probably know just as little as you do. They’re just… They’re in the dark as well and they’re just trying stuff and seeing what works, and that’s totally okay.
Number seven. I think this one’s an easy trap. Shiny toys. Who doesn’t like shiny toys? You’re doing an online business, you got a website, naturally there’s features and apps and stuff you want, right? So, you make a big list, and you look at some competitor’s website. Keep making lists. Add more to it. Pretty soon this turns into you are trying to hire someone to help you with this site that you have yet to build for a product you’ve yet to launch and you can’t get anybody to work on it because you’ve got a laundry list 50 items long of like, “This is every feature I have to have to be successful.” Why?
You don’t know what you need yet. And why do you need these features? Because if I just add them on, each feature is plus one to success? It doesn’t work like that. Now, my favorite anecdote about this is I was on a call with a prospective client, and they had the giant list of stuff, which that alone should be a red flag, the giant list.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: And one of them, just like out of things in there was Google Amp. And I’m trying to figure out, trying to sort through priority on these things, like what do you need, what you don’t, and I realized they’re just picking stuff. And by the time we got to Google Amp, which is like accelerated mobile pages-
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s a stripped-down version of your page that’s hosted by Google, served by Google, and has like way less functionality on it because… in order to make it easier to load on phones.
Kurt Elster: And if you want to add this to Shopify, there’s apps that’ll do it. I’ve not played with them but there’s one, I always remember AMP Sheriff, because it’s such a great name. AMP Sheriff, right? So, if you really wanted this. So, I asked them, and this is like multiple people of an established business, and their website, their checkout was broken. You couldn’t even buy online from them. But they would not switch to a different website to save their lives because they had this big list stopping them. And I said, “What is AMP? Can anybody tell me what it is?” I’m playing dumb. “Help me understand. What’s AMP?”
No one knew. The people who wrote the list just were like, “Well, that’s a thing we need.” No one could even tell me where it came from. They had no idea why it was even on the list, let alone what it did or why. And so, they’re just adding all this complexity and cost when the reality is I think especially early on, like all that stuff is bloat. It’s gonna slow you down. If I go traveling, I gotta big backpack, it’s gonna slow me down. I want to keep it light so I can change plans, I can change course, pivot, make my life easy, reduce my expenses, not just pile on thing after thing.
Paul Reda: My entry on this for a shiny toy in your tech stack is headless.
Kurt Elster: Headless.
Paul Reda: Which, I’m coming around to the idea. I wouldn’t say it’s a con, but I think it’s been completely missold to people.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: You should not have a headless store unless you are spending six figures a year supporting your store. Unless you’re dropping 100 grand a year for services, and team members, and other people to support and run the online aspects of your store, you should not go headless.
Kurt Elster: KISS. Keep it Simple, Stupid.
Paul Reda: I mean, that’s my-
Kurt Elster: And headless just is not simple.
Paul Reda: No, it’s not. I mean, I guess if you’re making $50 million a year online and you could get a win out of it, figure out a way to get a win out of it, sure. Go ahead.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. At an intense scale that the vast majority of people will never see, it makes sense.
Paul Reda: Maybe.
Kurt Elster: Maybe. Potentially.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Let’s not say it makes sense, that there’s maybe ways that it could make sense for that business if they explore it.
Kurt Elster: I saw in an online forum someone posted, they’re like, “Hey, we moved to headless, and we moved from a Shopify 1.0 theme, and on mobile it’s no faster.” And like that, the subtext was the whole reason they moved was you wanted to be faster on everything, and so you went through all this effort. It must have been very disappointing. But you’ll find stories like that. And then we’ve seen-
Paul Reda: We’ve had people go back. We’ve had people switch back after less than two years.
Kurt Elster: oVertone. oVertone hair care. We just talked to Drew from oVertone. And yeah, it was headless. They moved back to just straight core Shopify. And it cut the load time in half.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Isn’t that nuts?
Paul Reda: Well, because you know, you gotta… Instead of having all of the Shopify engineers doing what they can to make the site, make the Shopify backbone as fast as possible, now you just have your engineers that you’ve hired, and you’ve hoped that they’re making the right choices and you’re paying them a salary. So, it’s like who is smarter? Shopify, doing it for thousands of stores, moving billions of dollars, or-
Kurt Elster: A million stores.
Paul Reda: Yeah. A million stores doing billions of dollars or that dude you hired.
Kurt Elster: That dude you hired. Certainly, I’ve seen fast headless sites, but it’s not a guarantee and it’s also there’s tradeoffs. I didn’t want to turn this into another headless discussion, but it is… I mean, headless is a really good example of like this is the shiny toy example taken to an extreme.
Number six, offering too much. I think you see this with drop shippers, and you see this early, like people who are earlier. It’s just so easy to add. If I want to add product to a physical store, I gotta get it, I gotta find space for it, I gotta stock it, merchandise it, et cetera. On a website, I’m uploading a CSV. It’s too easy to add products to an online store, and so it’s really easy to just bloat your catalog and make it hard to find stuff and hard to manage inventory and stock. I don’t know. I talked to a guy today, he was very nice, and had a successful site selling journals, and with the journals they also sold pens and accessories. A lot of the pens were successful.
Paul Reda: That makes sense. It’s all office-type stuff.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so they’re like, “Let’s double down on pens.” And so, they had over two dozen extremely similar pen options, so now it went from-
Paul Reda: So, now you have a journal website that… How many journal SKUs did they have?
Kurt Elster: Well, it was one journal that came in multiple colors, or a pack of three.
Paul Reda: So, they sold one journal.
Kurt Elster: Realistically, yes.
Paul Reda: And 24 different pens for you to write into that journal.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And it’s not like… These weren’t like fountain pens and like, “Well, which wood and width do you want?” They were Pilot G2 pens.
Paul Reda: So, ones that I could just buy like a pack of 50 of?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The Pilot G2. The classic. One of your favs. Yeah, you got one right now.
Paul Reda: This is a Velocity. I’m sorry.
Kurt Elster: Oh. My mistake.
Paul Reda: 1.6, which is a little too fat for me. I want like a 1.4, I think.
Kurt Elster: You know, I always… I write with a medium and then I think I want a fine point, and then I write with a fine point, and I think, “Man, I want a medium.”
Paul Reda: I mean, I don’t want it too fine. This is-
Kurt Elster: I just go back and forth.
Paul Reda: This is too sloppy.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You don’t want just that sloppy, wide width.
Paul Reda: It’s just a slop pen. That’s what it is outside. It’s real sloppy out there.
Kurt Elster: One of our local meteorologists. Anytime it rains, she’s like, “It’s extra sloppy outside.” That’s what I start my morning with, listening to this woman yell about how it’s sloppy outside.
Paul Reda: That’s another thing you can learn about Kurt. He hates every weather person.
Kurt Elster: Well, it’s like a sport now, making fun of our local meteorologists. God bless Andy Avalos. That’s a real Chicago joke, right there.
Paul Reda: Only Tom Skilling. Tom Skilling and nobody.
Kurt Elster: The issue… That offering too much caution, this is an easy one to get into because it’s so easy to just add products to an online store, especially with drop shipping, but it’s also an easy one to fix, and I think the risk here to be mindful of is simply that you’re introducing choice paralysis to a website. More options is more choices. Those are all places that people will just give up and not buy. Like I don’t want a bunch of choices. I want you to just tell me what the best one is.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, if you only sell one pen, you can really play up in your description, “This is the one true pen.” You can’t… I mean, once you’re selling 20 pens, they’re all the same. I’m selling them. I’m not making any editorial choices about what pens I sell. There’s 20 pens. They’re all the same. But if you sell one pen, man, you could really lean into how Goddamn good that pen is.
Kurt Elster: I want like augmented reality. I want a 360 spinner.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah. You definitely need to see that pen on the table.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I want 2,000 words, the ultimate guide as to why this one $15 pen is the best pen ever.
Paul Reda: By the way, speaking of AR, we mentioned an AR company that did some work for one of our clients and we really enjoyed working with them. They were easy, at least from our perspective. We didn’t do all that stuff with them. But they were Levar.io.
Kurt Elster: Levar. Yeah.
Paul Reda: L-E-V-A-R.io. So, if you’re looking for AR stuff, I don’t know, those are some dudes. They did good work on this thing I worked on.
Kurt Elster: Yes. No, they absolutely did. I have zero complaints. Levar.io?
Paul Reda: Yeah. I think it’s .io.
Kurt Elster: Number five, doing everything yourself longer than you should. So, it’s perfectly fine, you’re bootstrapping. Do everything yourself to start. That’s great. You also learn it and that will help you understand it, hire for it, write standard operating procedures for it, but it’s also really easy to get in this trap, and like this, for sure, I’ve fallen into, is like, “I do it the right way and no one else could possibly figure out how to pick and pack for a box. Only I could do that in my business.” And of course, that’s not true at all. And it isn’t valuable for you to do, and by the time you’ve done the thousandth one, you’re not learning anything new here.
So, like stuff that we were able to outsource, customer support, especially for apps, initial support, or initial inquiries. I just send all those to my wife. She handles it. And bookkeeping, that’s an easy one to outsource. That’s like easy to do early on because you don’t have a lot of transactions, and then later you find like, “Oh, right. I gotta categorize the last six months of transactions. What a pain.” That’s the moment where you go, “Oh, let’s have someone else do this.”
Paul Reda: We did that.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I-
Paul Reda: I’ll never forget that day.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: We had to go through the checkbook, and I had to read out every check to you, because you’re like-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that was years ago.
Paul Reda: Because you fucked up the books.
Kurt Elster: I was like, “Paul, help.” We had to sit down and do an entire… Categorize an entire year’s worth of transactions. And yes, that was the moment when I went, “I should no longer be responsible for this. It is time to outsource this.” And we use Bench. Bench.co. They’re very good.
So, that’s an easy one. It doesn’t have to be, “I hire all these W2 employees.” Which, I hired a W2 employee. I like that too. But there’s a lot of ways to outsource stuff. Ideally, early on in the business, if you can use automation, great. Then if you can do these services like Bench bookkeeping where it’s like automation plus a person for just a little more money, awesome. Then you could start adding remote contract workers for a little more, and then past that is then you’re gonna go to W2. And I don’t think any one of those is a wrong choice. I don’t care which one you pick, so long as you’re not personally doing 100% of everything.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s valuing your time, like what is the best use of your time at this point in your business?
Kurt Elster: You have to be willing to let go of stuff. And for the most part, I think people are pretty good about knowing like, “All right, it’s time for me to not do this anymore.” Now, the catch is you’re like, “Well, that’s a cost, and it’s gonna eat into my profit,” and what you fail to realize is when you free up your time, well, now you can be doing more valuable stuff. And so, that tends to be how I look at it is like, “All right, is this a valuable activity for me to be doing or can someone else just do this and get it off my plate and then I’m not driving myself crazy with it?” I think for me, bookkeeping is a perfect example. I think for merchants, it’s probably picking and packing your own orders.
Number four, and we get… Both of us have fought against this.
Paul Reda: Oh, this is it. This is the entire show for me. I could talk about this the whole time.
Kurt Elster: Perfectionism, where you have people, and honest to God, sometimes I think it is about fear of failure. You’re like, “You know, I could just control for failure if I can get everything perfect.” And I can get everything perfect through excessive fiddling. And the issue is you tend to fiddle in the wrong places and you’re operating in a vacuum. It really and truly does not matter what you think about your own business, because you’re not buying your own product. Your customers are. Whether they’ll buy from you or not, what your customers think, they’re the only ones who matter. And guess what? They’re just glancing at everything.
Paul Reda: Yeah, like you’ve been staring at this for months, so your brain is melted. You have no perspective on this whatsoever.
Kurt Elster: Like a week in, you had lost perspective.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It’s just human nature.
Paul Reda: And so, yeah, the fact that there’s like four pixels of space below this one image and we really need to get that tightened up because I can’t launch with these kind of fit and finish issues on this website, it’s like nobody cares. No one will ever notice it. It makes no difference.
Kurt Elster: I talked to a gentleman earlier this week. They had a website that used the Shopify free theme from 2016. They had not modified it. It wasn’t even a particularly phenomenal design example of the Shopify free theme in 2016, the way they’d set it up. And it certainly had not aged particularly well. That site did $10 million last year.
Paul Reda: I’ll give you a better one.
Kurt Elster: All right, hit me.
Paul Reda: We had someone else this week who is not on Shopify. They’re looking to get onto it. They do $15 million a year.
Kurt Elster: I like that.
Paul Reda: With a website that if you told me it was made in 2002, I would have completely believed you.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I know which one you’re talking about. Yeah!
Paul Reda: It was like it was 700 pixels wide, so it would fit on your 800x600 screen. Maybe 1024 by 768.
Kurt Elster: You’re firing this up on your PowerBook.
Paul Reda: It 100% would have worked in IE6. It was ready to go. Amazon’s only for books, so you gotta buy this product from this website. And they do $15 million a year. Honestly-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That one was a really good example. Obviously, we can’t share it, but wow.
Paul Reda: The first Shopify theme that I built 10 years ago was better than this website.
Kurt Elster: You know, I agree with that.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And that site’s garbage.
Kurt Elster: It’s still around.
Paul Reda: He does $15 million a year. He’s fine.
Kurt Elster: So, I think what goes on here is two things. It’s over-emphasizing. Overprioritizing the importance of pixel perfect design. Which, certainly I think design, good design doesn’t hurt, bad design doesn’t help, but the absolute importance of it just isn’t there. The content, the messaging, the product, the marketing, all of those, the customer service, pretty much everything else ends up being… When it comes to generating revenue for a business ends up being more important than the design. Unless you’re running some modern furniture design business where people expect that, but for like 95% of businesses that’s just not a requirement.
Paul Reda: Yeah. When you’ve reached the point where you’re kind of like, “The thickness on the stroke of that arrow is a little too thick for me,” it’s like you have lost your goddamn mind and you need-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You’ve lost perspective.
Paul Reda: You need to just let it go.
Kurt Elster: This happens to everybody and sometimes what I do now is I say, “Hey, let me record a screencast for you.” And I’ll record a screencast where I screencast from my phone, and so you can see me working my phone. I say, “We’re just gonna walk through trying to make a purchase.” And I start with I Google their site, and then I try to add an item to cart, and the number of like little… The number of obvious, glaring issues just trying to buy something normally on a phone, they’re all there and present. Like the person has become completely immune to those.
Paul Reda: Because they’re used to them. They’re a missing stair. They’re used to stepping over those stairs, so that’s not really a problem.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: But there’s something else that is lodged into their brain that they can’t get rid of.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and then they’ll worry about a whole bunch of other things. I think that’s… The way you break out of that cycle is hand your phone to someone who’s never seen that website before and say, “Buy something,” and watch them do it over their shoulder. And the amount of actual issues that will appear for you that you failed to realize were there, compared to worrying about border radiuses and other nonsense, it just completely goes away.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: This leads into number three, forgetting the customer. And this is a common one we’ve talked about before. People, they get the idea, they develop the prototype, manufacture the product, launch the website, crickets. Who are they gonna sell to? The value of the business is the audience. So, what do you do? I don’t know why this keeps happening.
Paul Reda: Well, to me, I always think of it as part of… They’re always like, “Well, we’re having our new website. Be sure to get that password page up because we don’t want anyone seeing it too early before we’re ready to launch.” It’s like, “Buddy, no one knows that you’re doing this. No one cares.”
Kurt Elster: At this point, I’ll flat out tell people, “Nobody’s looking.” And you can see the analytics for a password… If you have the password page up, you’ll still see the analytics. It’ll be like store visits today, one, and it’s you, right? There’s nothing there to index, there’s nothing to see.
Paul Reda: But we gotta be ready for our grand opening.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah. So, the number one red flag of inexperience there is like, “Gotta have the password page up with a countdown timer,” as though anyone is looking. Because they don’t care yet. Trying to get anyone’s attention so that they care… And you care. The business owner cares and so they think other people do.
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: And no, your job as the business, the thing you’re fighting against is just apathy. Nobody cares. And if you can get them to care about you for a few minutes, then maybe they’ll buy. And that’s the best-case scenario. You got them to care about you for a few minutes.
Paul Reda: That’s so sad. And so true. But you’re like, “If I could only get people to care about me for a few minutes of their lives.” It’s like, “Oh, buddy. You need therapy.”
Kurt Elster: But that’s the truth.
Paul Reda: But it’s the truth. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And so, like once you really… You have to accept that so that you understand, all right, I’m on an absolute uphill battle for getting people to care. And so, day one, you should be trying to build that audience. Whether… And ideally, that’s an email list, because you own that, but however you want to do it. Maybe it’s a Facebook group. We’ve seen people have great success with pre-product marketing using Facebook groups. Get the FORT with Conor.
Paul Reda: Conor had too much success.
Kurt Elster: He did. He sold so much that… All right, still I’m gonna say good problem to have. Yeah. I did not watch his Shark Tank episode. I know you did.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Poor Conor. He’s been on the show, right?
Kurt Elster: I don’t think he has.
Paul Reda: Oh.
Kurt Elster: No.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: I want him on the show.
Paul Reda: All right. Yeah. We did like an initial thing for him. But yeah, anyway, he had a Kickstarter to sell pillow forts. It was way too successful and then all of the-
Kurt Elster: Supply chain issues-
Paul Reda: The supply chain issues hit him and he’s going through some financial struggles right now trying to fulfill all the orders that he had with rapidly increasing prices.
Kurt Elster: Watch the Shark Tank episode.
Paul Reda: Then he was on Shark Tank and the sharks were not kind to him.
Kurt Elster: Oh, he’s so nice. He’s such a good guy.
Paul Reda: He’s a very nice guy. He just-
Kurt Elster: And it’s such a cool product.
Paul Reda: Yeah. He got screwed by-
Kurt Elster: Victim of his own success, I suppose.
Paul Reda: Well, it was stuff out of his control.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Absolutely. So, that’s the mistake, is assuming if I build it, they will come. They won’t. They don’t care, all right? And that’s okay. It’s your job to get them to care a fraction as much as you do. That’s the way to look at it.
Number two, switch, pivot, or quit. I believe that’s the title of a book. Switch, Pivot, or Quit. And so, this is something I identified with. 10 years ago, the first version of our agency business was specific to bike shops, hence the name of the agency, Ethercycle.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It was gonna be-
Kurt Elster: It’s a reference to bikes.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It was gonna be like a bike shop parts platform.
Kurt Elster: An eCommerce parts platform for bike shops.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And what a struggle that was. And so, a year later, like I really didn’t want to let it go, but a year into it… I don’t know, maybe a little more than that. I realized, “Wait a second. We could pivot into the thing where we’re seeing a little bit of success, and that’s web design. That’s professional services. Let’s do that.” And I had to come to grips with the idea of pivoting a business, but like the first time you do it, it feels like, “Oh, did I just fail?” Not at all. And so, knowing A, should I let an idea go? Should I switch to doing something else? Should I tweak this business? So, the pivot, which just means change. Oh, I gotta pivot. It just means change direction. What did I go with? Oh, yeah. Switch, Pivot, Quit. Should I give up? Do something else?
Paul Reda: I think you undersold that because it was the bike shop platform, which really didn’t work.
Kurt Elster: Not at all. It made zero dollars.
Paul Reda: Again, not your fault.
Kurt Elster: Negative money.
Paul Reda: And then, all right, now we’re just general web design. All right, maybe we’re doing general web design for marketing agencies, so we’re not working one-to-one on clients. We’re working with our clients are the marketing agencies.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah, we started jumping through so many niches.
Paul Reda: And then we were WordPress developers. We were doing WordPress sites for the marketing agencies. And then as part of our random side gigs… As part of our random gigs we’d done Shopify, and then we were like, “Well, that Shopify one kind of worked out really well, so maybe we’re just doing more and more Shopify.” And eventually the Shopify pie of our business grew so much that we dumped all the other pieces of the pie and became Shopify only.
Sound Board:
Paul Reda: But there was like four or five pivots in there.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: We just kept moving towards whatever was working better.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, just kept narrowing that thing down, but without experimenting, without really sacrificing a lot of potential earned income if I’d just gotten a job somewhere, I couldn’t have gotten there. It took five years to figure out what we were supposed to do.
Paul Reda: Yep.
Kurt Elster: And then five years of doing that to get really, really good at it.
Paul Reda: To get extremely good at it. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And to get to a point where like, all right, no one can ignore you anymore. You’ve established your reputation and authority in the space. It took 10 years to get there in total.
Paul Reda: It wasn’t that long. I would say like eight.
Kurt Elster: Still, it’s a long time.
Paul Reda: Seven-ish. Yeah, but I mean case in point, the ones we talked about before. You know, those guys with the journal. What if they’re selling the journal, now we’re gonna add the pens, but it’s just gonna be like the super pen? And what if the super pen starts outselling the journal?
Kurt Elster: Oh, I get it, so they design their own pen, and then they forget about the journal and they’re just like, “We make the best pen.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and then like… But there’d have to be reasons behind it, like the super pen starts outselling the journal. Oh, wait. The margins on the pen are better than the journal. Why are we still focusing on this journal? We should go all-in on the super pen.
Kurt Elster: Let’s start sketching out our super pen.
Paul Reda: I’m saying that’s a completely reasonable pivot to be… Now, the smart move is just to only sell the pen, but if you’re all up in your feelings about it, you would kind of be like, “No, but we’re the journal company and that was the whole point of this.”
Kurt Elster: And I built this journal to change lives.
Paul Reda: Yeah, this whole thing. It’s like, “No, man. Just make money on the damn pen.”
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah. And like once you’ve done it once or twice, it just becomes second nature. You don’t think twice about it. You’re like, “I’m here to make money and get an ROI. If it checks all the boxes, legal, moral, ethical, fun, great. Go into it.” If not, figure out something else. Maybe that’s when you quit.
Paul Reda: There’s nothing wrong with quitting.
Kurt Elster: No. Sometimes that’s the best option.
Paul Reda: I’ve quit a lot of things in my life. It’s been great. Oh, jobs, relationships, oof. Delicious.
Kurt Elster: Number one. Not starting. This entire… The previous points, the entire conversation, the effort you’ve put into listening to us… I’m so sorry.
Paul Reda: Nothing but value bombs. How dare you apologize?
Kurt Elster: Oh, you’re right.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: That was the air horn. You’re not wearing headphones.
Paul Reda: I don’t even know what you’re hitting.
Kurt Elster: That’s the value bombs airhorn.
Paul Reda: Oh, okay. That’s the air raid siren for value bombs?
Kurt Elster: Value bombs!
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: The neighbors in our office area always like, “Why is this guy yelling?” If you don’t do anything, if you don’t take the action, if you’re busy stuck in planning, you’re not getting anywhere and that’s the biggest mistake to make. You have to be willing to fail and make those mistakes. And it’s just gonna be a learning experience and you end up doing something else, but I got a tweet from none other than Shopify president Harley Finkelstein.
Paul Reda: I love him in Mrs. Doubtfire.
Kurt Elster: No. No.
Paul Reda: Isn’t he like the brother that helps him dress up like a lady?
Kurt Elster: No, that’s a different guy.
Paul Reda: Oh, that’s Harvey Fierstein.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, they’re different.
Paul Reda: Oh, damn.
Kurt Elster: Totally different.
Paul Reda: They’re not? But I met him, though.
Kurt Elster: Harley Finkelstein does not have a delightful gravelly voice.
Paul Reda: Oh, man. I really embarrassed myself at last Unite, then.
Kurt Elster: You just kept talking about Mrs. Doubtfire?
Paul Reda: Yeah, I did.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, those are different people, buddy. Harley tweeted, “There are so many would-be entrepreneurs out there who aren’t because their fear of failure is getting in the way of starting. Pro tip: No one will see the first thing you do. Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, put it away. But if it does take off, think of where you could be.” And the point is just start. If you don’t start, you guarantee failure. You got nowhere. You have to take the risk. And the level of risk you’re comfortable with, that’s entirely up to you. You decide what you’re comfortable with, and then whether… You know, at what point you switch, pivot, or quit, also up to you.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Don’t overthink it. Don’t get in your feelings. There’s a term called MVP: minimum viable product. And just get the thing out there. Just get it out there. Doesn’t have to be perfect. Doesn’t have to be nice. It being out there is the most important thing.
Kurt Elster: And if you’re like, “Well, how do I… Building the audience is the hard part and I know that’s important. How do I get that?” Start with trying to share your journey of figuring all of this out. That’s a great place to start with the audience. That’s where I started getting my audience, was talking to freelancers about what we were doing. And then eventually was able to move past that, and figure it out, and got to, “Ah, eCommerce and Shopify.”
That was pretty good. I enjoyed that. I hope that was helpful.
Paul Reda: Well, it really would have been something if you ended this and then we’re just like, “Well, that one sucked. Sorry I wasted all your time, everyone. Still gonna publish it anyway, though. Bye.”
Kurt Elster: No. No. This was a great one. They loved it. It was full of value bombs. Oh, wrong one. We’ll just go with that.
Sound Board:
Paul Reda: Goodbye!
Kurt Elster: Just start hitting buttons.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s end it there. Thank you. Thank you for listening.