w/ Josh Hadley, Hadley Designs
“Most brands just send out samples and then it’s done. We go the extra mile that 99% of brands do not do.”
Building a multi-million dollar business typically involves more than wedding invitations and viral TikToks. Yet for Josh Hadley, it began precisely there. In this episode, he recounts the evolution of his e-commerce brand, Hadley Designs, from a niche stationery shop to an 8-figure operation navigating the complex terrain of Amazon and Shopify. The conversation with Kurt Elster explores how TikTok Shop became a surprising growth catalyst, offering a modern twist on the age-old challenge of acquiring customers. Hadley’s story offers a glimpse into the future of retail, where scaling hinges on the power of social media and the unpredictability of going viral. Tune in to hear how Josh took viral hits and turned them into a full-blown growth strategy
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Omnisend. Do you sell stuff online? Then you need Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend, the powerful yet refreshingly intuitive email and SMS tool that helps you make $73. for every dollar spent. That one's so good it's almost boring. Like watching steady lines go up in charts. And up and up. Just automate your email and SMS campaigns with Omnisend. Set it up once, then sit back and watch the sales roll in while you snooze. Oh, you're still awake? Then give Omnisend a try and start getting sales so steady, they'll definitely put you to sleep. OmniSend! Your dot omnisen dot com slash unofficial shopify podcast. Bye my friends. We're back and we've got another expert merchant with quite a bit of experience to share with us. Today's guest Is Josh Hadley from Hadley Designs. And Hadley Design sells stationary, quite a lot of stationary. They've got 1500 SKUs just on Amazon, and they have a Shopify store. And they went from Amazon to Shopify. And so that's an interesting story I want to get into. What does he learn there? As well as they're also exploring TikTok, TikTok shop. And so let's find out how that's working out for them. I'm your host, Kurt Elster. Jack Nasty. And this is the unofficial Shopify Podcast. So, uh, Josh, how you doing? Where you where are you calling me from?
Josh Hadley
Kurt, I'm doing well. I'm in uh Dallas, Texas. Or if we want to get really specific, Flower Mound, Texas.
Kurt Elster
I enjoy Texas. I have never been. It seems cool. When you started Hadley Designs, tell me, what's the product that this this brand sold initially?
Josh Hadley
It's it's quite the journey. We're actually going on our 10 year anniversary from the concept of my wife and I saying we want to go do our own thing, um, which is really fun to see like kind of like where things have taken us. But this all originally started when I graduated with my MBA at the University of Utah. My wife graduated with her degree in early childhood development at the same time. And I had a job offer in the MBA Leadership Development Program at American Airlines here in DFW. And so thus we graduate and we move down here. And my wife's first question is like, well, what am I gonna do? Right. She's like, I've always loved art and I've always wanted to like explore graphic design and stuff. And I was like, Well that's fine. We don't have any kids. We don't have a whole lot going on. I've got a good paying job. So why don't you go play around with this graphic design thing and just see what comes of it. And so she starts experimenting with it. She has a friend that's getting married. And she's like, hey, I'll design your wedding invitations for free. Her friend's like, these are amazing. Like, I've gotta pay you something for these. These are I've just like keep getting all these compliments. Then she's like, oh, and my friend's getting married, so you'll have to do hers too So then the business, you know, man that I am, I'm like, that's a business. We can do this if you've got that talent. And Then we realize like, okay, this is not a scalable business. Like my wife was literally capped out. Like it was a six month waiting list just to have her design client stuff. And then I stumbled upon an Amazon course, right? Somebody making crazy amounts of money on Amazon. I was like, there's something there to it, right? So we took one of the most random things, like recipe cards. Like these brides keep kept requesting like recipe cards of all things for like their bridal showers. And And we're like, well, we're not gonna custom design a recipe card for you, but you can come get them over here at Amazon. So we sold out of those real quick on Amazon. And I was like, wait, we designed something once And we sold it multiple times, and all I have to do is click the reorder button, and now we've got more inventory. And so that began our transition. That was the fall of 2016. That began our transition into Amazon. So fast forward to today. We have over 1500 different SKUs there on Amazon. We went all in on it and we do anything from party supplies to educational products to calendars, planners, you name it.
Kurt Elster
So you get so the first thing you sell is is wedding invitations, which it worked, but it doesn't scale because they're They're one-off. Every set is custom. You can only sell so many custom invitations, right? How many people do they invite? 100, you know, 50, 100, 200. There's a a finite amount. for the amount of effort that goes into it. It's high stakes, mission critical event, right? You don't want to mess them up. And so that adds additional stress to it. You can tell I've I've had friends who worked in the wedding industry. When and then in once you discover we could sell these recipe cards and design wants and keep selling it. Oh, I like that What is that the turning point where you went, this is a business that can scale beyond just those custom invitations?
Josh Hadley
Yeah, 100%. As soon as we found that like, okay Instead of my wife having to design something from scratch every single day. Like that's literally like she was booked. Like every day there was a new client she was working on their designs for, right? And so rather than doing that, it's like, well, if she worked on a new design for a product that we could just put on Amazon, what type of snowball could we create that way that this monster just continues to grow? And so that's where we kind of said, like, okay, instead of working with these one-off clients, because you're right, like, there's no repeat customers for weddings, ideally.
Kurt Elster
So ideally.
Josh Hadley
Right? There's not very many repeat customers there. So like you're just constantly on the lookout for your next customer. And it was just like very draining. You're time strapped. And like we had literally kept out, like we had made six figures. Um Doing that and it was good, but hitting like a million dollars in that business, and we were charging, by the way, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars just for Becca to design their invitations, right? Like these weren't cheap. And so we were still cat like we were still under a half a million dollars working with new clients every single day, right? And so I knew that there was no chance of getting to a million bucks, which at the time our our goal was like, oh, if we could have a million dollar business, it'd be life-changing, right? And I knew that the only way to do that was like we'd have to go either hire more graphic designers, which then that you have an issue with that. Like every designer has their own style. How do you match that style? And It's like, man, that's I don't know if I like that headache. But my wife and I could keep like I could sell on Amazon. She could keep designing. This is pretty this is pretty easy. And so Amazon has been the most scalable channel for us. Hands down.
Kurt Elster
So once you had that that tremendous success on Amazon, um, you decided to venture into Shopify. How long ago was that? What drove that decision?
Josh Hadley
Yeah, so we had there's a couple times that we've dabbled in in Shopify. I'll save the other random stories. We started doing like printables and stuff like that that we tried to sell. Oh like digital downloads? Digital downloads and then tried to do that with Shopify and very mixed results.
Kurt Elster
Which you could you could do. Yeah, we've we've done it with you know being able to sell sell digital downloads, people print their own stuff. I don't know about you know how successful it is, but it's doable.
Josh Hadley
Yeah, it d possible. We had all the emails flows working, and I mean it's still around today. Like that website You can go check it out Hadley Designs Printables. com. Like it's still around. You could still go buy stuff there from it, but the market for that DIY stuff for that party space It's just extremely challenging to be able to like really monetize that well, right? Because you're talking to people that are very economical. And so it's very limited to, you know. Anyways, long story short, maybe we could have found some gold there, but we decided to pivot. So, and so this started really at the end of 2023. I was like. We aren't even offering our same products that are on Amazon. You can't buy them on Shopify. It's nowhere to be found. So what we decided to do is create that Shopify storefront and we listed all of our products on there. And Kurt, we had 1500 different products. in bunch of different categories and we had very, very little sales. Um because we didn't have like again I knew that I I know the Shopify game, it's not a build it and they will come, right? It is much more like the the name of the game completely flips. Whereas on Amazon I can go into very wide different tangents and You know, and on Amazon, you're not having to worry about any of the traffic. Well, on Shopify, it all becomes like, where are you getting your traffic from and how good is your sales funnel? And how good are you at increasing that AOV? And is that higher than what your customer acquisition cost is? Like that conversation in and of itself. Is very foreign to 99% of Amazon sellers, right? Like you don't have to think about what's my CAC, what's my LTV, what's my AOV on Amazon, right? Um, maybe for some supplement sellers that do uh they they do dabble into that, but for everyday products and consumable items, like Um people aren't thinking that way as much on Amazon. Whereas on Shopify like your mindset truly has to change. So I could go down that rabbit hole there, Kurt, and have uh but don't want to lead you too far astray here.
Kurt Elster
Once you start with your Shopify store, how did that fit into the overall business strategy? You were able to compare and contrast for us a little bit, but it managing the two platforms difficult. Like what was the big struggle here?
Josh Hadley
Well, I think the biggest challenge, I think, A, we had to have like a resource, so we hired like a uh a channel manager that could h that could Upload everything and make sure everything's looking cute and pretty there on our Shopify storefront, right? So that's one thing we had to figure out along with the fulfillment. Um, but then I knew like the the real crux of all of this had to come down to like how are we going to generate traffic? And for us, our biggest problem is like we've got 1,500 different products. So what are we trying to funnel people towards? Right? To one thing on Amazon, the biggest differentiator on Amazon is like it's very search intent, right? You have active buyers. Oh, I'm looking for I'm looking for a Bumblebee baby shower invitation. That's exactly what I'm typing into Amazon. And I know I'm going to be served with that. Now, yes, will people type that into Google? Yes, but you're you don't know how far they are down their journey, you know? If you're on Amazon, you know somebody's wanting something physically shipped to them. If you look up Bumblebee baby shower invitation on Google, I don't know if you're looking for inspiration so you're gonna go to Pinterest. I don't know if you're going to I don't know if you're trying to go find a printable template that you can go design yourself Or I don't know if you're wanting, you know, custom-made invitations, right? Or something like that. So that was our challenge is like, man. Scaling that out amongst fifteen hundred different SKUs is gonna be a real challenge. Um, but the real unlock really happened for us, Kurt, when When we dabbled into TikTok shop. So we launched on Amaz or sorry, we launched our Shopify store in like December of 2023, right? So in February, we're, you know, we hear all these things about TikTok shop. And so we're like, yeah, let's let's dabble into TikTok shop. Let's see what's happening there. And so with TikTok shop, it is 100% just like it a creator play, right? You're only as good, your sales are only as good as like the last viral video that your creators created for you. Or you as the brand are really good at creating videos that can go viral and then you can generate a good amount of sales from there. Well, long story short, we take all like number one, huge advocate for what TikTok shop has built. There is no influencer or affiliate marketing, like site or marketplace or software tool I have ever found that is as easy to find relevant influencers for your niche And then being able to recruit those affiliates and then be able to monitor and then be able to actually monitor the performance of those affiliates very very easily like and I've talked to a lot of like influencer like marketers that like they are influencer marketing consultants and they are like I've never like TikTok Shop has built what every influencer platform has thought they were trying to do for the last decade. Um And it's all inside a TikTok shop. So what we did is we went into our niche. We said, all right, we've got 1,500 different products. Let's choose our top ten for right now. And let's just see, like, let's give out hundreds of samples. And so that's what we did. We gave out hundreds of samples. And lo and behold, um, we had a creator that went viral with one of our poster sets. And And it went viral. She did two million views on that thing, and I was like, holy crap, we're off to the races. This is the thing we need to double down on. So we kept sending out more and more samples. We're like, okay, maybe it's well it's just a numbers game. Keep sending out more and more samples. So right now, about every other month, it seems like right now, we're getting a viral video that we'll do
Kurt Elster
one plus two million plus views right now and then the core strategy here is product seeding it sounds like a hundred percent How many this you've been doing this about a well since February, so eight months. How many influencers have you sent product to at this point, do you think?
Josh Hadley
Probably over 1500 would be would be my kind of guess. And then I know my actual number of like engaged creators. is like 989 right now. Um, and that's because one of the things that we started doing is we actually started to create an affiliate, like our we call them like our TikTok brand ambassadors. And we call it our TikTok brand ambassador newsletter. So I'm sending out an email to these people every other day, talking to them about our newest products. Talking to them about, hey, check out these viral videos that other creators created. Maybe you can create something similar. And then we'll run like a monthly contest.
Kurt Elster
This is the magic. This is the thing that everybody misses.
Josh Hadley
Because most people do this. They send out the samples and guess what? Somebody will record one video. They will post about your product. Done. That's it. Right. And I was like, this is way too much time and effort for me to not be able to like continue to work with these creators on an ongoing basis. This has been like our secret magic, if you will. Is going the extra mile that 99% of brands do not do. So Kurt, do you want to hear my secret hack?
Kurt Elster
of how I've been able to do this. Absolutely I do.
Josh Hadley
Right. Only if you keep it on the down low and you don't share this with millions of downloads and visitors that listen to your podcast.
Kurt Elster
That will absolutely make sure no one hears this.
Josh Hadley
All right. Perfect. All right, so Kurt, here is the magic hack out of all of this. TikTok will not share the customer's information or like the affiliate's information with you. Okay, you can message them on TikTok's platform. That's fine. Okay. But they don't give you access to like their email address or their phone number. All right, here's the hack. Okay, if when you send them a sample, okay, as long as you don't use fulfilled by TikTok. So if you use fulfilled by TikTok, you screw it all up What what TikTok ends up doing is they pass all the like when you fulfill that sample, TikTok will then give you the creator's name. their physical address where they want the product shipped, and then they give you their phone number. Okay? So you take that phone number and it is so easy to go upload that. There's a bunch of different databases, right, and software tools. You can go pay and you can go match these phone numbers to different email addresses, right? So the A, that's a way that you can go get these email addresses for these creators. Or there's about 50% of creators that already have their email address just in their profile because they want people reaching out for like collabs and different things like that. So the secret is now I've got their cell phone number and I can reach out to them and say, hey, want to invite you, you know, hey, did you get the samples? Great, here's our newsletter. We want you to join it. You can subscribe. Okay, so now I'm texting these people. And so for our top affiliates, guess what I have? I have their contact information. I have it saved and on a monthly basis. I'm reaching out to these guys and I'm having personal one-on-one conversations with them. We just had a baby a couple weeks ago, welcomed our fourth child into the world. And like I was, I sent a picture. Hey, just wanted to keep you in the know. Here's our fourth son. Um, and they were great and they replied back. So that's the secret hack is like there's a lot of people that will take that uh they use fulfilled by tick tock and they think, oh, this is great. I'm getting all these cheap fulfillment rates from TikTok, which is true. It will save you money. But if you can either fulfill the products yourself or for us, we just use Amazon's multi-channel fulfillment and we send it out. You get all of the creator's contact info. It's your job to go do something with that info.
Kurt Elster
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Josh Hadley
When we send out, so when we're messaging these creators We specifically tell them we will not send you a sample unless you give us express permission to utilize any of the videos you create with our products on our website, on any ads that we want to create so that we can splice, chop up your video, do whatever we want to do. to run these ads. Okay. Because and if you do that up front and it's just a hard line. It's like, if you don't want it, that's fine. I've got hundreds of sample requests that are coming in. for my products, right? There's there's so many hungry creators out there that it's just a requirement. If you want me to I'm sending them typically like five different products at a time. If you want these free samples, my request like is that you give us unlimited license to use your videos and I'm getting 80% of those creators like they don't even bad an eye. They're like, yeah, sure, not a problem. Okay, so guess what we're doing with those, Kurt? Soon as we know which video is going viral, okay, we then will go create mashups, right? Turn on a Facebook ad. And now what we've done is we've taken whatever um whatever products are doing well on TikTok shop. We create a dedicated sales funnel just for that product. So we actually created So we created another version of like our Hadley Designs website Hadley Designs has 1500 SKUs on it. Then we took the top selling products that are on TikTok shop and we created another website. Okay. And it's and it's more just like a dedicated sales funnel. So the only way you're really gonna access it is like find the ads and go through the funnel. And that has been where we're hitting like already out of the gate. I think we're at a 3-4 ROAS out on the outset. We're already profitable with our first ads on Meta. just by using that strategy of taking already a mashup of good content that we have permission to use, running the ads. And then it's going to a dedicated sales funnel. It's specifically targeting the products that people want. And here's the best part. TikTok doesn't do a good job of upselling, just like Amazon doesn't do a good job of upselling. I'm able to upsell like there's so many different Shopify apps right that you can use to upsell customers. So now I'm able to like upsell. And now we're getting AOVs. My AOV on on TikTok shop right now, 30 bucks. My AOV over on Shopify right now, $75. That's been the game-changing aspect of all of this, Kurt, is TikTok shop. I love it because it's creating some traffic, right? And then people are a searching our brand, but that's not as important as like Literally in the last three days, I think we have 120 pieces of like content that have been created for our brand, not by us.
Kurt Elster
That's amazing. Anyone listening would be thrilled to have that.
Josh Hadley
And then you can d and then as as anybody knows on Facebook and Meta and any of these advertising platforms, like you're only as good as your last kind of like Good ad, right? And the ad creative can die out pretty quickly, right? You should be testing new ad creative, like either on a daily if not weekly basis. And I've got a fresh set of content. constantly streaming in to the business that I don't have to do myself. So I think that's the biggest unlock that I would encourage. um any Shopify store owner is like get onto TikTok shop and just seed the crap out of out of it. And guess what? Even especially if you have a lower cost product, right? And you can afford to do that. The bonus would be the upside is Great. I have a video that goes viral by some of these craters. That's great. I would call that like the cherry on top, right? TikTok becomes like a profitable platform for you, which I would definitely recommend because TikTok shop is giving away all these, all sorts of incentives, right? Right now, they're like they're funding a lot of coupons just to get people to like buy on TikTok shop. So like Take advantage of it while it's in the early days of TikTok shop. It's never going to be as easy as it is now. So get on there, cherry on top as you actually start making a good amount of money on TikTok shop. But Worst case scenario, you've got hundreds of pieces of content coming into your business today.
Kurt Elster
And with that content, you've seen content that mostly doesn't work and you've seen some content that absolutely takes off.
Josh Hadley
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Are there trends? What do you notice about what does and doesn't work?
Josh Hadley
Oh man. That's what so I've I've been trying to figure that out myself and like is it the script that they're using, right? Because there's like viral scripts that people recommend and like if you say this, like this is definitely what will hook the audience. I still think there's like a an amount of like mystery to TikTok that like TikTok just will like light something on fire even though you're like this is the stupid like this doesn't even have a hook And this is, in my opinion, not even not even a great video. Like I've got other videos that I've seen that are like, wow, this this looks really good. Yet it doesn't go anywhere, right? So sadly I am not an expert when it comes to uh viral content or being able to dissect those to go viral on on repeat. And that's why I go back to the creators and I just say like get inspired by these creators and they'll they'll create something similar But I'm not seeing like if you follow what this creator did, all the other creators start to see the same success. It's really interesting. Like every video has been very unique and been very different.
Kurt Elster
I have found, yeah, it is it is so hard to predict in advance what content will and won't resonate with your audience. And then any advice that's like, hey, this is this is absolutely the framework and the formula. Well, maybe. Right? But you never know until you try it. And there's not a ton of consistency. And there's just so many factors you can't control. Now you've got two stores going. There's the the core store, 1500 SKUs, and then you have the sales funnel store, which I imagine is like landing pages. Um, and you said that's got you know maybe 10 SKUs. That reminds me of the importance of focus, of having that that niche narrow laser focus on the product solution audience, whatever it may be. And so, well, if you did it over again, it would you start with fifteen hundred products or start with one, a hundred? How would you do it in an ideal world?
Josh Hadley
Yeah. So Let's talk about Shopify specifically. I think the strategy works great on Amazon, right? Because Amazon's very search intent driven, right? So I have no problem with 1500 SKUs on Amazon But when it comes to Shopify and creating an email, like if you want to create like a customer list, here's a massive mistake that we made, Kurt. I paid a agency that was a supposedly really good email marketing agency back in 2021. And I was like, we have we do 50,000 plus orders on Amazon a month, right? At least right now. And so I've got these people that A come to the website, they'll scan QR codes, they'll get into like our emails flow and stuff like that. But they it like I have a list of over two hundred and fifty thousand people on my email list. But like th that's not really doing me anything. So my whole idea was like Well, we'll just t we'll we'll pepper this audience with a bunch of our different products that we're selling on Amazon, right? I spent I paid this marketing agency six grand a month for twelve months. And that my return on that was like negative 1,000%. Because like I they would the they could not turn a profit. Either Amazon's tracking and metrics is like attribution links are completely broken. or like the audience, how do you market 1500 different SKUs to 250,000 different people? That one person could have bought a baby shower invitation, another person could have bought a chore chart for their kid, another person is a teacher that bought something for her classroom. Like those customer avatars could not be more different from each other.
Kurt Elster
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Josh Hadley
Totally unrelated. And how do you market to that one person, right? You you really can't. So the best how would you do this properly? Well, you break my catalog down into like there's eighty technically different like product portfolios if you want to say like these are wedding, these are baby shower, these are kids party, like 80 different like categories. So what am I gonna do? Light up 80 different email marketing campaigns? Like we're not that big, right? Like maybe if we cross the I don't know, one billion mark one day. But um So what would I do in hindsight is start with one one group product, right? So start with our best-selling product and say I'm gonna do this one thing And be focused, just as you said, Kurt, on this one message, one customer avatar, and this is my one product. And, you know, obviously like correlating products with it that P you could upsell. And I would focus there. And this has been the biggest unlock for our business. Like, I've always been so hungry. to have my own Shopify store. Not to that necessarily just diversify away from Amazon, but I just think like the world of e-commerce gets ten times more exciting. when you can use upsells and you can create membership programs and you can actually nurture these customers and like help them become raving fans of your your products. Whereas like on Amazon Most people just like you ask ask n five of your friends today, hey, what was the last brand you bought on Amazon? They'd be like, I've I don't know. That's the biggest change. And so it's we're now profitable on Shopify for the first time. And then we also have dedicated email sales funnel that for the first time is actually making money. on our products because guess what? It's speaking to one customer audience. And now we've got retargeting and all of that is working because talking to one type of person. I'm serving them one type of product. And this gets a lot more exciting. So what does the future look like for us? My hope is to go say, now can we go create that type of success? for another one of our categories right now, right? So I don't know.
Kurt Elster
Maybe it's weddings, but would you break these into separate sites and brands or I think I but I wouldn't necessarily break it into a different brand quite yet.
Josh Hadley
But I think having just dedicated sales funnels, right? I think for now, maybe caught talk to me in a year, Kurt. Maybe I'll change my mind on the branding. Um and we've thought about that a lot. And that's our challenge. Is like really like Hadley Designs is like I don't know, like it kind of like the CPG firms like Proctor and Gamble, and it has a bunch of different brands underneath that. Like that's probably truly the way our like business should be set up, if you will.
Kurt Elster
Portfolio of brands. But they all can leverage and borrow from each other because it's the same core competencies.
Josh Hadley
Exactly. So I think that's maybe like where the future lies. And so it's doing that with our nut our next best-selling product category. And Seeing that. But we're so we're still early in on this game. We've got a lot of runway to go with these kind of like educational posters that we're super excited about that.
Kurt Elster
Now, all right, so you're selling on Amazon, Shopify, and TikTok shop. So you got an omnichannel presence, it's all online, but also a small business with a lot going on. Any Well, any frustrations or difficulties managing all that? Or you're like, I'm cool as a cucumber, I got under control, here's how.
Josh Hadley
Yeah, with no with uh a new baby two weeks old.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, with four kids.
Josh Hadley
Yeah, no stress at all, Kurt. Like life is just sunshine and rainbows. Um, no, like it's it is, it's very challenging, right? Um, especially when you get into like new ventures. And you know, you know, one thing that we didn't talk about is like we got kicked in the teeth at the beginning of 2024. We had multiple failed product launches on Amazon, and I have never been as cash poor in our business as I was at the beginning of this year. And so it got me hungry to be like, something has to change. Something has to change. And that's why we experimented with TikTok shop and that helped us, right? And then it kind of gave us like the next the next light forward to say like, all right, take this next step. Now take this next step. And we're in a much better position than we are in now. But this is only this can only happen because I've I've been able to build up our team. This is a good and a bad thing. One of the reasons why cash flow was so poor is because like I've got a lot of overhead that we've built up to Manage and run our brand. We have 30 different team members. There's been one team member that has stuck out since we hired him three years ago as our copywriter, and he just has always had a knack for marketing. And I told him kind of this vision with like Shopify and stuff. And he had been doing Shopify courses. So like him and I together, like, he's the one who's executed on all of this. And so What I would say is like a partnering with people, um, experts is a a valuable thing, but also being very clear with like your roles um in the business. The only way that I can manage our brand. is by having 30 different team members. Um, but in my podcast, Kurt, there's one episode that like people continue to like talk about the most. And it's my seven-step hiring process of how I go find A-level, A-level management staff overseas. Okay, so I'm gonna be able to find management level staff, the majority of our staff is working in the Philippines and in Mexico. A lot of these people are very experienced individuals, very smart, very capable. Some of them previously worked at um IBM. We've had um People that have worked at like Coca-Cola. Like they've worked for these large US corporations, but just they're in the Philippines And the cost of living so much lower. And they're just wicked smart people. So that's been like that's been the biggest way I've been able to grow our brand. has been able to be delegating all right our Amazon advertising management this goes to somebody that's a very capable person. Our supply chain operations needs to go to a very capable person. Okay, so being able to hand that stuff off gave me the capacity this year to be able to experiment with Shopify. And I'm a big believer that like You've got to always be like pushing the envelope. You've got to be taking a step in the dark every single day, every single year in your business. Because if you just sit back and you're like, oh, things are all good. And you're not trying to grow and see what the new trend is or move the needle forward, like competition is just increasing faster and faster is like The digital as technology makes it so much easier to just it's laying it's leveling that playing field, right? AI is leveling the playing field, and it is making you as a business owner have to work Two, three times as hard as you did previously, and smarter, not necessarily harder, but smarter by adopting that technology and saying, like, all right, how do we scale up our ads using AI then? Right? Like If we were doing 10 pieces of content a month previously, how do I scale that up to a hundred pieces of content per month using AI in order to stay ahead of the game? Because if you don't You're gonna get your your butt kicked. So there's my two cents for you, Kurt.
Kurt Elster
You know, I I love all of that advice and I agree with it. I definitely I I use AI tools. a dozen times a day every day. And for sure it has made me more productive. It has improved the quality of my output. It has made my life easier. It's also Certainly I I don't think I work any less, right? I think I'm I'm working just as hard as before, but the the output has increased or throughout it yeah, it scales really quick, right?
Josh Hadley
Work hard work smarter, not harder.
Kurt Elster
So I I want to do a a lightning round with you, and I think we should start with favorite AI tool.
Josh Hadley
It's nothing fancy. It's going to be chat GPT, but it's building custom bots for yourself. Okay.
Kurt Elster
Custom GPTs?
Josh Hadley
Custom GPTs, yes. Okay. Because that's where the magic comes in for me. So really good examples of this is we've got like that newsletter that I talked about for our brand ambassadors. Okay. Dedicated custom GPT, you take some of the top marketers that are out there, take like a Perry Belcher, and you go take his um you know email mastery course, right? You download the transcripts of all of those videos and stuff in PDF format, upload them to your custom GPT. Then you take other smart people that you're big fans of, you know, Ryan Dice, take any of the digital marketer stuff. Download anything that they're talking about, newsletters or affiliate marketing. You download it into these PDFs, you now upload it into this custom GPT. Now, what you've essentially done is you've trained this GPT. To focus on content that you already are like confident, like these are experts. I want you to rely on this because if you don't Ca Chat GPT is just relying on like the web. It's scouring the web. It's got it's indexed all of this. And like, do you trust every blogger out there, Kurt? Like sometimes that that information is like sometimes it can be garbage, right? And so being able to take experts' advice, download it into like a PDF, upload it into a custom GPT, and now I'm only talking about very specific stuff, and I can have a dedicated conversation that is really like tailored to what I want it to spit out and it gives me brilliant ideas on a monthly basis what I should be sending um as these newsletters, great email subject lines, all of the above. So my hack is that building expert uh GPT funnels just for yourself.
Kurt Elster
I I love it because what I've learned with generative AI in general is the golden rule is garbage in, garbage out. Right. If you give it really good context and prompting and framework and understanding of what you want it to do, and you can help it with the chain of reasoning and thought. then suddenly it is going to have an extraordinary result. But if you just, you know, start with, hey, I load up Chat GPT unprompted and just go Make me this, write me this article. It's gonna churn out generic salesy garbage, right? Because that's that's what it's good at. That is what it has been trained to do. And then it's gonna use a lot of the same phrases, you know, delve. My my favorite modification to any chat GPT prompt is no yapping. If you these are like magic words. If you tell it no yapping, it suddenly becomes a lot more concise as opposed to like the insane verbose um wordplay it likes to engage in. Okay, uh well, all right, final question. Uh favorite book?
Josh Hadley
My favorite book would be The One Thing, okay, by Gary Keller. And this talks about making the one thing the one thing. You as a business owner can be pulled in so many different directions every day, okay? And you go to a conference or you listen to a podcast like this and it's just shiny object syndrome. You're like, oh, Josh is killing it on TikTok shop. Let me get on TikTok shop or else I'm I'm losing. It's like. I don't know. Maybe that's the right answer for your brand. Maybe it's not. Maybe you need to double down on what you already found a an amazing funnel that's working for you. Maybe that's where you need to double down on. And so I love the book, The One Thing. so many principles um for not only your life in general, but also it business principles. So Making sure that, you know, how important is your marriage? What is the one thing you should be working on with your marriage? What's your one thing you should be working on with your family, your children? What's the one thing you should be working on within your business? And if you can keep those in at the top of your mind every day, you'll be able to look back 30 days and a quarter and six months from now. And see progress because you've been focusing on the one thing that will move the needle the biggest. So not getting caught in the thick of thin things would be the gist of that book.
Kurt Elster
That is that's great advice. I'm gonna check it out. Actually, you know what? I'm gonna ask ChatGPT to summarize it for me.
Josh Hadley
Even better.
Kurt Elster
I absolutely will. Uh Josh, Josh Hadley, Hadley Designs. Thank you so much.
Josh Hadley
Thank you, Kurt. It's been a pleasure.
Kurt Elster
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