w/ Jake Starr, Recycled Firefighter
We're talking AI chatbots as a top of funnel marketing medium with Recycled Firefighter founder Jake Starr. Jake spills the tea on turning his unique products (recycled firehose American flags!) into a digital sensation earning 20,000 email subscribers monthly, thanks to his new chatty AI sidekick. Dive into the fun and quirky world of Jake's creation 'Josh' the sales bot, and uncover how AI is the secret sauce to customer engagement and skyrocketing sales. It's a blend of old-school crafting meets new-school tech. If you're looking for a new top of funnel strategy to engage prospective customers, this is it.
Kurt Elster
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Jake Starr
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Kurt Elster
My pleasure. Uh okay. So well before we get into chatbots, give us your background. Who's Jake Starr? What do you sell? What It what the heck's a recycled firefighter?
Speaker 3
Like Yeah, it actually was super painful, but I don't know I don't know how many times I've been recycled.
Jake Starr
So um I was a firefighter for twelve years. I left the firehouse in twenty fifteen and I started a um I guess you'd call it like an online backpack slash wallet company. So our three main SKUs are backpacks, wallets, and then fire hose American flags. Yeah, we've been selling the flags for about a year and the bags for about eight years and then the wallets for about 11 years. So it's going great
Kurt Elster
And this is all this was all stuff that you made yourself. Like your rapid prototyping, your 3D printer was a sewing machine, and you were doing this out of your your garage.
Jake Starr
Yeah, exactly. So I just taught myself watching YouTube videos and started making wallets. I would go to the mall and buy a bunch of backpacks and tear them apart and taught myself how to sew and yeah everything's my original design.
Kurt Elster
Um obviously not the the American flag, but everything else You're no Betsy Ross.
Jake Starr
I am no Betsy Ross. Um, but everything else is definitely um just original designs. I probably got I don't know 150 original designs. I'm more of a product designer kind of hacker type guy than I am a Like a marketer for sure.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, absolutely. Which I think that only makes this the more interesting that you you worked out and had this success with chatbots. Um in the last well, all right, give me the Give me the high level overview before I we dig into a little background. What's a chat bot? What did you set up here? What are we talking about? Why should someone listen to us for the next 30 minutes?
Jake Starr
Yeah, so I guess I don't look at it as a chat bot. The the it's more of a conversational AI bot that works inside Facebook Messenger. And I know that's a mouthful, but most people, like, if you don't unless you're really into the chat GBT stuff, like the way that you interact with the bot through like a brand's Facebook Messenger app or Instagram direct message, it feels like a real person. So you you can train it, you can give it a personality. So um like if you push my bot to answer, hey, are you a real person? Eventually it'll say no, but it like unless you're asking it, you know, five times or so, it feels like a real person. So that's the way that I look at it I guess an automated conversational flow that gets gets your customers or cold traffic to give their email or SMS or do whatever you want to inside Messenger.
Kurt Elster
So years ago when we were talking chat bots, it was like it was they were always on Facebook Messenger. And like, yeah, you could embed it on top of your website with a live chat, or and you could do that with Facebook Messenger too. Um and But it wasn't you know, the idea of AI then was really just like a an if then else statement. It was like if there's this keyword, you respond with this. If X time has passed, send this message. Very similar to an SMS flow. Um, how it might work at Clavio. Today, it's this like dynamic back and forth. You are letting ChatGPT or some other large language learning model um run just talk to your customers and man essentially act as a live chat agent. But it like there's bumpers around it. It's got goals. There's something it's trying to do.
Jake Starr
Yeah, the one of the craziest things that I saw, there's a couple examples, but people will interact with an ad and start chatting with um I guess this bot, if that's what you want to call it. And um I'm giving away like a fire hose flag and this one this one guy was like, I just retired out of the army and said like first SGT, which is like first sergeant. And um and the bot knew what that was, like what branch, and responded like um Thank you for your service in this branch. Like I can't remember the whole details, but the bot knew what his rank was and who like kind of his background and stuff and said, thank you for your service. Are you um like for this many years whatever and are you still interested in this giveaway? So it it's just like a like the personality is just like a really kind person like I don't know how to describe it. It's like the guy didn't did not know that it wasn't me. So the data that this that this um you know this bot as like is just stunning for sure
Kurt Elster
Okay, so you've got well what how long have you been running this this chatbot funnel?
Jake Starr
Um so I s I built out the boss this last December, so December of twenty-three. And then I've been running it January oh I ran a test in January and February. So about three months.
Kurt Elster
And in that time, how effective is it? Like what kind of ROI are we getting here?
Jake Starr
Yeah, so there's a lot of ROI in the email. So the best return has just been the the emails on cold traffic and Facebook. Um it's 25 cent emails is what it did in January, and then it went up to 45 cent emails. Um and then the ROI, let me see here, the ROI just on the retargeting is 7x. Oh but a lot a lot of a lot of the I guess the long term play here is just building your email list for 25 cents. Emails. You know, that's that's what those are the stats that were stunning to me.
Kurt Elster
And these like once you get them in the email flow and you have good emails and your your products photograph well, then you know they're there's a good chance they'll buy.
Jake Starr
Yeah, so I so I put all these emails. I I got tw 19,000 emails in January and February from 18 and up. um US male and female. So literally zero targeting inside Facebook. So I got 19,000 emails. And I've just been putting them in their own clavio list into a Clavio welcome series. Um, and they're getting campaigns inside Calabio as well. But that list for the last three months has just done five thousand dollars a month. So um so I'm hoping like there'll be some trail off, but um if I don't put any more paid advertising into it, um you know, that's fifty thousand dollars this year just in that one list inside Clavio.
Kurt Elster
And so if you keep but it in theory, if your addressable market is big enough that you could keep spending at that same level. month after month and collecting those qualified emails. And it yeah it's not like spin to win, you know, where it lower quality email, less engagement, because they're it's like a drive-by, you know, hit and run, see if they get that discount. Whereas this they int they had a conversation, or at least something that felt like a conversation, which I think that's gotta help. You know, make you more memorable, keep you top of mind, so that when that already effective email welcome series does come through, and then plus like, you know, campaigns after that, there m sounds like there's a pretty good likelihood they'll buy.
Jake Starr
Yeah, I guess the way that I'm looking at it is you you can hit these people. There there is a limit on Facebook Messenger like after 24 hours. But you can you can sync in mini chat where um You can opt these people in as well through mini chat and you can you can continue marketing to them inside Messenger outside of that 24 hour window. So I guess the value that I was seeing was um You're getting these clicks and emails and interactions for 25 cents each. These are people interacting with your brand inside Facebook Messenger and Instagram direct message. So you can retarget them SMS, email, inside messenger, and inside uh direct message for as long as you want if they opt in through minichat. Otherwise you can keep them inside your your email flows. But yeah, like Getting a customer for 25 cents and then just retargeting them across all channels for a year, like I don't that that seems like a big win to me, you know
Kurt Elster
Alright, so you mentioned the tool you're using. You said many chat, and we know we've got Facebook ads here and Facebook Messenger and Clavio. And there's some kind of conversational bot that I assume is ChatGPT in the background happening. How many tools did you cobble together here?
Jake Starr
Um yeah, I tried to make it as simple as possible, but those those are some of the main ones. The the piece holding everything together is an app called Go High Level. So that's kind of um that's kind of home base for everything. You can actually direct message, um, Facebook Messenger, do email campaigns SMS, direct mail, email flows, like you can do everything inside Go High Level. So that connects your Facebook page, your Instagram page, your Shopify page, Clavio, all that stuff. The other part is the Chat GBT bot, but it's actually through another conversational AI bot called Zappi Chat. That's a big one. I think I think that's all of them. I'm probably forgetting a few, but.
Kurt Elster
It's Facebook ads and Facebook Messenger, Many Chat, Zappy Chat, and Go High Level, plus Clavio.
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think that's all it was.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it's quite the stack.
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah.
Kurt Elster
Fair amount of effort to put this together. How hard was this?
Jake Starr
Yeah, there was a there was a pretty steep learning curve. A lot of stuff was breaking right off like um you know within the first couple months of trying to put this together. Um high-level support is pretty good, so I've definitely ironed all out ironed out a lot of that. It wasn't it wasn't super difficult.
Kurt Elster
How would you rate your own level of technical expertise? Like I could I consider myself power user and you know not quite a developer.
Speaker 3
I don't know where to ever I've never been asked that question. I don't know.
Kurt Elster
I learned I think that's our answer.
Speaker 3
Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to rank myself. It's like it's like are you uh 10? I don't want to look in the mirror and be like, oh dang, am I actually that ugly? You know what I mean?
Jake Starr
Um no, I think I think I'll go down a rabbit hole and learn what I need to learn. Um I'm one of those guys, you know, like the ADHD type of just um Dopamine brain.
Speaker 3
So I I don't know, maybe a six, maybe a six or a seven on the tech the tech scale.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it's like something interests me, something shiny. And then I go, I want to learn about that. And then I want to master that. And then at some point I go, I now feel I have mastered that to where I want to be. And then I just move on to the next thing. But like now I have this tool in my toolbox. And I'm always kinda you know, you're jumping between a few things. And so that's sort of you know that stereotype of ADHD, that could there is some positivity. around it, right? There's some some wins there in that personality type. I don't know. I view it as I always say, um, and I pick this up for beef brody, a tactical baby gear. I'm a work dog. Like I just I want to be Yeah, I need to be productive. You gotta put me to work on something, or I'm gonna chew up your house. I'm just gonna chew your furniture. I need I need the work. Hey Shopify sellers, listen up. Get ready to unleash your creativity with the brand new landing page builder from Zipify Pages. This isn't just Zipify's biggest update ever. It's a revolution in building Shopify store designs. Say goodbye to Clunky Designs and hello to Total Customization. With Zippify's new builder, you're the boss of every pixel on your site. Drag, drop, swap elements, it's all in your hands to craft the most effective layout for conversions. Zippify pages come straight from the founder of a $180 million e-com empire. These templates aren't just pretty, they've been tested in the arena with a nine-figure Shopify store. And it's easy to use. A few clicks in your product pages, marketing pages, blog pages, even your homepage will be looking sharp and conversion optimized for maximum sales. And because these templates are tested in a nine-figure Shopify store first, you know they actually work. So why settle for the standard when you can have a site that's uniquely yours? You could try Zipify pages in their brand new builder for free for 14 days when you go to zipify. com. That's zi-p I f y dot com slash k U R T to try zippify pages for free. And if you tried pages in the past and thought it wasn't for you You owe it to yourself to try it again because the new Zipify pages is a game changer. Zippify. com slash Kurt. Check it out. So a fair amount of tools, a lot of stuff that sounds like it's new to you and you had to teach yourself what there that time and effort and money, what drew you to explore this option? Like why go through this effort?
Jake Starr
Yeah, so the the conversion ads on Facebook have just been up and down for recycled firefighter and the the uh the stats inside um ads manager seem to be inflated, you know, 20, 30 percent. So um tracking tracking a lot of that stuff We've done like um we've done trackable codes inside Shopify, you know, buy this bag, get use this, you know, 20% off code so we can track it there. Um, but that lowers the the conversion rate. So what we're doing now is just dropping prices. Like if we're running a 20% off sale, we'll just drop prices on the on the site so you don't need a code. So then you kind of lose a lot of that tracking. Um so the ups and downs with the conversion standard conversion ads, just I was like, dude, there's gotta be there's gotta be something else. So Um, I just started researching. Um 40 40% of our revenue for the last probably five years is from email anyway. Um, so I was like, let's just let's use like a combination email and Facebook ads approach and see see if we can get a big win here. And that's what happened in January.
Kurt Elster
The and so you mentioned like Facebook ads performance. Any anyone who runs Facebook ads, that's it it's an emotional topic. Right? Because you live and die by the Zuckerberg's algorithm and things can feel out of control, especially when you're looking at them short term as opposed to zooming out, as far as costs go. How does this new approach compare to those like traditional direct response conversion goal Facebook ads?
Jake Starr
Yeah, so let me get my stats out.
Kurt Elster
Um Oh, he's pulling the stats out. We're gonna get the KPIs.
Speaker 3
They're handwritten on a piece of paper. That's how Maybe my six tech scale is actually like a one.
Kurt Elster
I i if it's on the back of a napkin with crayon, I'll give you a bonus point.
Speaker 3
Okay, it is not, unfortunately.
Jake Starr
Um yeah, so all in so all in January and and February, um we spent sixteen thousand. That's 8,000 on this um on this AI messenger ad getting emails and then seven thousand in in retargeting and that's probably a little high. I probably spent spent a little too much on that just because Yeah, I think I spent too much on that, but so that's uh three three point six X ROI just in those just in that two months. Um so we spent See here, spent 16,000 and made 58,000. Um, but the thing the retargeting itself was 7x, so spent seven on retargeting and made 51,000 Um we spent 8,000 on the email AI ad and made 6700 just in that first um six weeks or so. But this the emails that this is getting is bringing in $5,000 a month if I don't spend in if I don't add any more emails. So I think that's the play to to get a three and a half X within six weeks return and then just start stacking 20,000 emails a month. for that that amount of ad spin. Like that's not a lot. $8,700. Like yeah, it'll definitely scale. And this is the this is no targeting. Like this is literally just US, all of US
Kurt Elster
Oh, oh, so th this isn't interest based, this is just demographic. You're like, give me people in America over 18, all of them. Bring me all of them.
Jake Starr
All of them, yeah. Yep. So I probably I I wanted to see worst case scenario, what are these emails gonna be? Um and it definitely is offer dependent, but the the ad isn't like you've seen the ad, it's just like a Um like a chat GBT generated fire hose flag.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it's like a dolly image of fire hose flag. I was p we were talking about it like both we were I was trying to recreate your image just guessing at the prompt. And I'm like, give me an American flag man out of firehouses. And mine were very literal. It was like f you know different colored fire hoses with nozzles laid end to end in the shape of a flag. Yours was better.
Speaker 3
Yeah. No, I did the same thing and Dolly just had a good day and was like, let's make this let's make this rolled up flag.
Jake Starr
Like It looks cool. It's not that cool. I mean what do you think? It's not, no.
Kurt Elster
And you have good photos for the product. And like Those AI generated images have that look. You know, and marketers and you know, pundits armchair pundits on Twitter and Facebook commenters will be like Oh I hate that I hate that it's such a turn off. I never buy when I see AA stuff. Like yeah, that's you. Everybody else seems to be fine with it.
Jake Starr
Yeah, I tested, so I A B tested an actual photo of a fire hose flag, which like hung up on the wall. It's it's wall art. It's good looking. It's not like yeah, it's not hanging from a flagpole. But it looks cool. And I A B tested that and dude it was like two dollar emails.
Speaker 3
So I was like, what is happening?
Jake Starr
Like people just love, you know, love this. I mean it it didn't have all the comments on it. I tested it after I ran the other one, so Maybe that helped, but yeah, that AI generated pick, man. I mean it took three seconds to make and it's crushing it, so That's wild.
Kurt Elster
All right. So you've there are a lot of tools stacked up here. Walk me through the the basic setup of this chatbot funnel again.
Jake Starr
Um, top of funnel, square photo. If you want to do the paid ads version, there's a free option. You can do this if you have a social following on Instagram. This this will work just like via a post, a free post on your social channel. But say you're doing a paid version of this. Um Square photo, um, Facebook Messenger, uh the client or the customer clicks message me, that actually goes to mini chat. The first trigger is through mini chat. That sends it over.
Kurt Elster
So the CTA on the ad is message.
Jake Starr
Yeah, message. Yep. Message me. And you can you can pre-populate like a pre-populated message so it just it takes one click so they don't have to write anything and in that message is a trigger you can set up that trigger however you want we have flag one as our trigger So that flag one phrase triggers a mini chat response, and it's just one response, and that triggers the um zappy chat. conversational bot takes over at that point. So at that point you're the customer is interacting with this zappy chat bot and the the bot's like um hey I see you're interested in this fire was flag uh could I have your best email and inside messenger the the customer gives the email and the bots like, hey, thanks, thanks for your email. Um would you like to get into this is all standard stuff, but would you like to get into our SMS list? Um And either they say yes or no. And it goes down like a series, but the way that it works is instead of just one copy and paste option, this The bot writes their own content and it sounds like a person and it's not it's not the same for everybody. So it will copy your type of like if you're like an emoji guy and you're like Here's my email, heart, heart, heart, heart. Like the the the messenger the zappy chat messenger bot will like respond in kind. Um so once you get all that, that's then synced over to high level. And high level we'll add those emails and SMS into Clavio or we put them into like a Clavio list and then um our SMS is uh Postscript. Um I think it's postscript. I think that's kind of where it that's where the tech stack ends at that point. I I'm pretty sure.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, there's quite a few quite a few tools in there. And certainly different than like the stupid posts you see on Twitter that like here's the ultimate DTC marketing tech stack. You know, it's just like whatever apps they happen to have installed. Um all right. All right, so the thing I think I'm fascinated about here is Zappy Chat. You're letting customers interact with ChatGPT as you, essentially. rails off. How did customers respond to this thing?
Jake Starr
I think I've so out of twenty thousand, I probably had a few tricked enough like that that were not tricked enough to ask, hey, are you real? So I would say, I mean, out of the 20,000 emails, like maybe 10 were like kind of smell something off. Um, and you can you can toggle it off when you're interacting with these people, you can toggle that off and be like, hey, that was so I named my bot Josh. I have a twin brother named Josh, so I named my bot Josh. And um so I'll toggle toggle it off and be like, hey, yeah, that was Josh. This is uh Jake, hey, what's up? What do you need? Um, but yeah, the everybody interacting with it, it's a super positive experience. Like Um, I'll tell a quick story. Um, and I've told you this already, but for the audience, there was like a night in late January where this thing was just kick like just kicking off and it was just going crazy. And um I was inside high level watching all these people interact with the bot and it's just it's so hard to keep up. Like it's just like brrrrrrrr, like just insane.
Kurt Elster
Oh, so you can see the conversations happening in real time.
Jake Starr
real time and it's just like it's overwhelming. It it was it was overwhelming. Um and like too much for one person. So I I got in there late at night, I had a glass of whiskey and it was like it was close to midnight and I clicked on this one lady
Speaker 3
that was having a rough day and was interacting with my bot and my bot was like, um you know, it started off like, how was your day?
Jake Starr
And the bot would kind of copy copy their tone and their emotional status. And um and body it by the end of the conversation it went on for like 10 minutes. The bot was like or she was like
Speaker 3
Hey, have a good day. I'll talk to you later, sweetie. Heart, heart, heart. And the bot like said the same thing. Like they were flirting back and forth. And I was watching this thing. And I was like Like I'm so entertained, but at the same time, like um this is a moral question that I hadn't I hadn't considered before. So that was funny.
Kurt Elster
So this thing It someone decided to you know, it's anonymous, it's late at night. Uh someone opened up they were vulnerable with this chatbot and it, you know I assume like the prompt there is like, hey, you know, be professional, cured courteous, responded, kind, something to that effect. And so it did. And she had a little 10-minute therapy session with the chatbot that sells American flags.
Jake Starr
The the Zapy Chat bot can crawl your URL. So it does pick up some personality. Like my brand is kind of based around me. So it picks up some of my personality as well. Well I think that was a part of it. Maybe I'm too flirty, I don't know.
Kurt Elster
Uh yeah. So are do you have are there moral or ethical qualms there
Jake Starr
I don't think so. I I think like there there was definitely more than just that one girl. Like there's it it tends to be kind of older ladies like that will just synth like a five hundred word message, you know? Um, but I think they just find I think they think it's me. So I I don't know if there's any moral there's there's some guardrails that you can put in place. So with those up I I don't I don't see any issues with it.
Kurt Elster
So what are the guardrails you could use with this thing? Because that's always the tough part with chatbots, is like, all right, make it make it stick to the script and not do what you don't want. Like You know I've seen screenshots of people interacting with chat bots on you uh car dealership websites and they get it to offer cars at goofy prices and do strange things. How do you keep the thing acting right?
Jake Starr
When those op when those um those messages come through, what I do is um I'll start I can start that conversation inside high level and then I'll read through it say something broke and something like I I didn't like how flirty the bot was. You can then go in um to high level there's like a little switch that you can train like constantly train this bot like ask it a question. And then give another answer. What I also do is instead of like if if somebody's like, here's a 500 word, how was my day type of person that's gonna send that on Facebook, the bot, if you don't set limits on that, can respond in the same way. So what I did was just a two to three sentence response, no matter what, max And that tends to take away, like that that helps a ton.
Kurt Elster
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Jake Starr
Yeah, so um we were sending these individual emails over to Clavio with a with a zap, like a zapier um integration And we had we hit some hard limits because we were sending over like 2,000, 1500 or so emails. 1,500 or 2,000 emails a day. So what we ended up doing was turning that off because we hit some limits there. Um and I would just go in and bulk, upload those emails like every other day into this clavio list. A couple double triggers like the mini chat was triggering and the zappy chat thing was triggering twice. So people are getting double responses. So um we turned we fixed that. But overall, like it was small things like that, nothing big. Like from the moment that I turned it on, I literally turned the ad on and it was like 25 cent emails immediately Like it was just it just started out at 25 cents and it went up to 45 cents, but it was just like right when I turned it on like literally like Right when it got approved. So the you know, the speed, the speed was just crazy.
Kurt Elster
I imagine there's there's opportunities to optimize here and get that cost down even further. But if it works as is, you know, why mess with success?
Jake Starr
Um Yeah, I think some some um some look-alike audiences probably would have done way better. But it's just it's fascinating. to get that cheap of emails and people interacting with your brand with zero zero targeting.
Kurt Elster
How do you see this evolving? Like right now the nothing does what you're doing natively. You had to plug a a stack of tools together with some workarounds to make it work, but it works. 25 cents, you know, per email capture, fabulous. What do you think the sick the future of this this marketing strategy looks like?
Jake Starr
Yeah, I don't know if all these companies want to like they're all separate. companies. So unless one of these guys makes like an all-in-one type of deal, gonna have to cobble it together. Probably guys that want to learn how to do this themselves or somebody like me that can set it up for for people if they don't want to spend the time. I think that's where the success is. I mean I don't I don't see one company doing all of this because the reason that I picked these different um apps is because they all do their one thing the best. to get one company to do all five of them or six of these things as good. Um, I just don't see that happening anytime soon.
Kurt Elster
And so you want to offer this as a service to other Shopify merchants.
Jake Starr
Yeah, I'm having a hard time with that because I there's I it's so powerful and I'm not a marketer. I'm just, you know, like I'm I'm a maker, to be honest with you. And I've talked to you about this like off air, but it's just so like I haven't had a win this big in a long time. I know other guys can use this. I can definitely set this up. Like, I can set this up for brands. And you don't have to sit you don't have to spend money on it. Like I said, like If you wanted to use your free your channels and just do a post um on your social like Instagram or direct or um or Facebook like you can. You can do a combination of the two as well to make those emails even cheaper. I would love to do that. Adding twenty thousand emails to your email list every month is huge. Like that's that's huge.
Kurt Elster
Man, I want twenty thousand emails a month. That's pretty good. So if someone wanted to hire you for this, how did they get a hold of you?
Jake Starr
Yeah, so I I did start, I guess, my own marketing brand. I don't know if that's what you want to call it. Like Dude, I'm such I don't know I hate I hate self-promotion, but I did do that. Um so it's called jakestar dot AI. Yeah, I've I've actually already started working with three different Shopify brands, so I'm building their stuff out now. Um so that's how you can reach me if you want to, or just you know, ask me a question through Recycled Firefighter. You can email me there as well.
Kurt Elster
I will include I put out links to all these tools in the show notes and I've got uh jakestarr. ai in there. as well for you. In fact, I'll move that to the top of the list. Put it in there. The once I all right it uh I gotta stack all these tools together. What's my monthly subscription cost going to look like here?
Jake Starr
Yeah, so there there are some costs like monthly costs that um so the zapy chat, the tier that you kind of have to buy their higher higher tier conversational bot. So I have some cost there in high level as well, depending on the brand size. Like I've been telling guys somewhere, somewhere between $2,000 a month or $1,000 a month, depending on how how much stuff you need built out. Um but price is negotiable and I'm just getting off the ground, so that's kind of where I'm at.
Kurt Elster
This all seems very reasonable. Too reasonable.
Jake Starr
I think so.
Kurt Elster
Alright, if someone's just considering the tools What's the litmus test for you're a good fit for it? Or like some brands gonna work better than others.
Jake Starr
Have you ever done email marketing? Because this is definitely an email heavy option. Like if you're not familiar with how email marketing can grow over time, it's not just like this straight off the bat. ROI. It might be a harder sell. Like I was I was talking to a brand last week and he had just never done any any email marketing. So he was like, I need to make money. Like day one. Um, I said that that's fine, but your your AOV was kind of low. So there's definitely some brands like um RAOV is around a hundred bucks. Um I'm trying to think just off the top of my head why it wouldn't work. Because if you haven't done any email marketing and your AOV is kind of low, um we can set up all those flows within a high level as well, even if you don't have clavio email marketing. Yeah, I think honestly there's there's an approach for any size brand, um, whether you're small or you're big. You can do the free, the free, I guess I'm calling it free, but just the social posts instead of the paid ads. Um and if you don't have Clavio, we can build out all those like Clavio style flows within high level as well.
Kurt Elster
So Alright, so they need email realistically for this to make sense. To get otherwise, like you're not getting the full the full ROI out of it. I get that this is a method to get people into a welcome series, into a newsletter. If I wanted just to Get my feet wet, test the waters, explore this a little bit before committing. Where do I start? I want to play with something. Like give me one tool to look at, one thing to do, and go, all right, I think there's something here.
Jake Starr
That's a tough one, man. Yeah, I don't know if there would be. You kind of need all of them together to work smoothly. Like, cause guys have been doing the mini chat. Um stuff for forever.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, that's been around the mini chat funnels have been around.
Jake Starr
Yeah, and this is something different. So That's hard, man. I don't know.
Kurt Elster
Will Zappi chat work as like a chat bot on my website?
Jake Starr
Uh yeah, so there's a there's a live a live chat option on your s on your site.
Kurt Elster
I mean that might be the thing to like get comfortable with it.
Jake Starr
Yeah, I would honestly I would do some research on high level. So like if if I was a Shopify store just starting out, you can do so much with with high level. um the the email sms direct mail flow series that you can do inside high level and it's it's like a quarter of the price of the Or even less, ten percent of the price of some of the big email drip campaign companies. Um I might start there, but as far as the the conversational, yeah, zappy chat, but you're just gonna need some integrations to make it work. So that that's the hard part.
Kurt Elster
I don't want to mess with it. I just should pay you to do it. Plus I hear you're very reasonable.
Speaker 3
I yeah, I don't know.
Kurt Elster
Maybe I should raise my price, but didn't you try to hire somebody to do like half of this for you before you did it?
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think I priced myself too low based on that because I I talked to a guy in December and he was gonna do this for me and it was twenty thousand dollars.
Jake Starr
So I was like I was like, oh my gosh. Okay, I can do this myself. I just, you know, I just need to learn. And I did.
Kurt Elster
Alright. I this has been This has been a a good good conversation and fun. I enjoy talking to you, of course. But I love I know you found a thing that works and you were proud of it, wanted to share. Like that's I suppose that that's what makes you a maker.
Jake Starr
Yeah, more than that, man, like I I would like to work with you. Like it it's always been a pleasure just talking with you and working back and forth. Like I've been working with you since twenty fifteen, you said?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3
Just the fact that we're still talking, like you know what I mean? Like there's so many other guys that I've worked with. It's like, dude No, like you're an honest guy. Like I I enjoy you're funny. Like, you know, wait, am I am I flirting right now? Did I turn that off?
Kurt Elster
That's where it got it too. Dang it.
Jake Starr
Um, so I I would love to work with you. Um, like I know you know a lot of Shopify brands, so you know consider that at least
Kurt Elster
Oh absolutely. Uh yeah. No, that'd be fun. Okay. Alright, if I want I want to check Jake out, jakestar. ai. That's uh star with two Rs. If I need fabulous recycled fire hose products, which I have the duffel bag I love. I have your duffel bag. It's like my favorite bag. One of two. Uh that's from Recycled Firefighter. Check that out. And otherwise, what an interesting strategy to keep an eye on. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Jake Starr
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Kurt Elster
My pleasure. All right. Thank you, Jake. Crowdfunding campaigns are great. You can add social proof and urgency to your product pre-orders while reducing risk of failure But with traditional crowdfunding platforms, you're paying high fees and giving away control all while your campaign is lost in a sea of similar offers. It can be frustrating. That's why we built Crowdfunder. The Shopify app that turns your Shopify product pages into your own independent crowdfunding campaigns. We originally created Crowdfunder for our private clients. And it was so successful, we turned it into an app that anyone can use. Today, merchants using Crowdfund have raised millions collectively. And With Crowdfunder, you'll enjoy real-time tracking, full campaign control, and direct customer engagement. And it's part of the Built for Shopify program, so you know it's easy to use. So say goodbye to high fees and hello to successful store-based crowdfunding. Start your free trial and transform your Shopify store into a pre-order powerhouse today. Search Crowdfunder in the Shopify App Store to get started.