How this serial entrepreneur finds balance
Ryan Tarver, a serial entrepreneur with a full-time job, joins us to discuss the realities of what it’s like to start a LLC, design a brand, and launch two shops while having a full time job, a toddler, a newborn, and way too many hobbies in the middle of a global pandemic.
We discuss:
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
7/13/2021
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are talking to a man who as far as I can tell hates free time, or maybe he just loves entrepreneurship so much, that’s how he’s spending his free time. I don’t know, we’re gonna find out. But he has a full-time job, has two Shopify businesses, they both look extraordinary, but he started them very recently. So, joining me today to discuss the realities of what it’s like to start a new company, design a brand, launch two shops, all while having a full-time job, a toddler, a newborn, and way too many hobbies, plus… I think technically, we are more or less still in a pandemic? I don’t know. I was just at the airport, and you could have fooled me. Orlando airport is wild and wooly, I promise.
Mr. Ryan Tarver of Bambino Bikes is our guest today. Ryan, how you doing?
Ryan Tarver: Doing well. Thanks for having me.
Kurt Elster: Run me through some of this. All right, you have two Shopify stores, right?
Ryan Tarver: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Okay. What’s number one?
Ryan Tarver: Number one is 2AMBaby.com, and-
Kurt Elster: And when did you start that?
Ryan Tarver: That actually launched in January, but the idea came-
Kurt Elster: January 2021?
Ryan Tarver: 2021.
Kurt Elster: Oh my. Okay. And what’s the second?
Ryan Tarver: The second is BambinoBikes.com.
Kurt Elster: And that launched…
Ryan Tarver: That was on April 25th of this year, so just previously around the corner.
Kurt Elster: Wow. All right, so you are early in your journey here, and then on top of that you have a full-time job?
Ryan Tarver: I do. Yeah. So…
Kurt Elster: How? What…
Ryan Tarver: Like you said, I don’t like free time.
Kurt Elster: What’s the full-time gig?
Ryan Tarver: Full-time gig, I’m a director of marketing for a consumer product goods company, so my background is in marketing. My background’s in branding.
Kurt Elster: All right, so you bring some skills to the table that make this easier. You have some inherent advantages in this. Your work experience.
Ryan Tarver: I do. Yeah. And it kind of came to the point where I realized like, “Well, I kind of want to do this for myself now.” And these were the first two attempts at doing that.
Kurt Elster: So, you were working for someone else. You were using those skills and you said, “Wait a second. Why can’t I apply this to my own business, build something for myself?” Was there like a moment? Was there something that clicked where you said, “All right, I’m doing this?”
Ryan Tarver: Well, technically this isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Back in 2015, I actually had another Shopify brand that I launched as well, and at the time I was between jobs, and again, I just… I can’t sit still. So, I created a product, launched a brand, went through the whole entire thing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the right time. It was a good learning experience because I went through all the motions, I had the opportunity to fail. I think some people are proud of it, some aren’t. It’s a mixed bag for sure.
But that sparked my ideas for being able to do something in the future. I just didn’t know what it was gonna be yet.
Kurt Elster: Having a false start the first time, I think a lot of us do. I know I did. And now you’re on number two and three. Certainly, I think we can… Would you think of yourself as a serial entrepreneur?
Ryan Tarver: Yes. I just haven’t had my opportunity to flourish just yet.
Kurt Elster: Well, we’ll get there. You’ve got two Shopify stores going at the same time. What’s the reality of that? Does one get… One is always taking priority and the other takes a back seat? You’re conscious of it? You split the time? How do you manage two in addition to the other stuff you’re already doing?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah, it’s a really good question, because since 2AMBaby launched first, it got all the priority, and it got out of the gate first, but the idea for Bambino Bikes was brewing before that a little bit too, and once we had 2AMBaby launched, we learned all this, the ins and outs of Shopify again, all the updates, Out of the Sandbox Turbo theme, we realized that we could do this again even faster. So, it might not have been the best idea to launch two stores within a few months, but we were ready to do it again.
So, now 2AMBaby takes a little bit of a backseat while we’re pushing on Bambino Bikes to get that promoted and out in the world even further. So, there is kind of the juggling act that happens with all of that.
Kurt Elster: So, 2AMBaby, tell me about that one. What does that sell?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah, so that was a thought experiment, was how… What was the minimum viable product that we could create for a website? Minimal investment, things like that, so it’s actually based on a print on demand app, and the idea was… The idea came from just joking around with a total lack of sleep and texting between a couple friends and saying, “Hey, I want to create a satirical baby brand just to vent.” And I had all these ideas, so we thought what minimal investment level can we come into and create a brand, create a product, and sell something to generate income? And that’s when we came up with 2AMBaby, leveraging that print on demand.
Kurt Elster: I love… That’s one of the wonderful things about print on demand, is it’s an easier entry. It’s a lower barrier to entry because you’re not buying inventory. And I like info products for the same reason. So, for a first attempt, that’s certainly a smart way to go. How long before you said, “All right, let’s do it again.” Let’s launch another store.
Ryan Tarver: We started working on Bambino Bikes, I think actually building the brand probably around end of January, February.
Kurt Elster: As you’re growing these, do you have a staff? A team? Have you hired out? Or is this all you?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah, so I am a co-founder in both these companies, so both 2AM and Bambino Bikes are underneath an LLC, and there’s three co-founders total, and we’re all remote, so we don’t actually physically live in the same location. It’s a team of people that I’ve worked with in the past, so I know their work ethic. I know how invested they are already from past experiences. So, that makes a huge difference across the board when it comes to getting things done. Having a full-time job, having kids, having hobbies doesn’t leave a whole lot of time, so that’s a big deal right there.
Kurt Elster: Some people love having co-founders. Others say don’t do it. Where do you fall here?
Ryan Tarver: I’m an advocate for having co-founders. They… You have to be careful, of course, about who you choose and how many and all of that. But I think when it comes to day-to-day life, if you’re trying to actually create something and not burn out, or take a vacation, you need to have someone else there that’s gonna fill in that spot or complement you in sort of way, and that’s exactly how our team is set up. You know, myself, I work a lot in ideation, the branding, conceptual, and we also have a graphic designer who’s a co-founder, and we have a project manager who’s a co-founder, so all of us are complementing each other the entire time, and recently I just went on vacation for two weeks and I felt okay with it because one of my co-founders was right there filling the gap in, answering customer service emails, maintaining everything, keeping social up to date.
Kurt Elster: That’s quite the dream team to have a branding expert, a project manager, and a graphic designer, those three together… You could get a ton done. Where do you feel like you could fill in the gaps? Where do you think like, “Man, this is the one piece we’re missing?” As far as skills go.
Ryan Tarver: Well, that one piece that we’re missing, actually we were super lucky to also have our first employee, technically. When we launched Bambino Bikes, all the photography was done by a good friend of mine, and he posted some of the photos on his own profile, and promoted us a little bit, and the first person to contact us, she reached out, she’s like, “Hey, I really like what you guys are doing. I think it’s really cool. Are you hiring?” And of course, I’m just like, “Oh my God. How is someone already asking me this? We can’t pay anyone. This is impossible.”
So, I was really straightforward with her, and I said, “Hey, you know what? This is a startup. None of us are taking home a paycheck. And you know, we’re super stoked that you’re interested, and we’ll keep your resume on file.” And we ended up talking to her a little bit more and she ended up being this really awesome fit and she’s like, “Hey, I just want to work with you guys. I’m getting my master’s right now. I’m working for another nonprofit. This would be a great thing because I’m super interested in it.” So, she actually is heading up a little bit of customer service. She heads up our brand ambassador program and our affiliate program, as well. So, that was a really awesome piece to add in there for us.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. It sounds like you have found a unicorn dream team. It’s pretty exciting. Now, everybody’s remote, and you’ve got at least for people working collaboratively on two brands. That’s not an easy thing to keep organized, like every time you add a new element, things get tougher. Walk me through your tools, your workflow, like what are the… How are you keeping sane with all this?
Ryan Tarver: I’m gonna give a plug to Asana right now for project management. Been a huge advocate of the program forever and it’s free, so if there’s anyone out there that’s trying to keep things organized, just look up Asana. Start using it. That’s our number one tool for communication. Obviously, we use Slack. We use the Google suite. All of… Those are our core tools, really, when it comes down to everything, so that we can all collaboratively work.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, Asana is pretty sweet. I think… We use Teamwork, but Asana’s great. Monday is good. For a while, people loved Basecamp. I don’t know if that’s as cool anymore.
Ryan Tarver: I don’t know if it’s still around. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: At least like Twitter doesn’t seem to think so. Slack, like totally, we’re all… Pretty much everybody’s using Slack at this point. It’s like par for the course for a remote team. Do you have like a cadence for meetings? Is there a daily morning meeting, weekly, anything like that?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. We’ve got a couple of scheduled meetings a week to make sure everything’s on track. And it sets us up for… Weirdly enough, our week, which is our weekend. That’s when we get the most work done.
Kurt Elster: And that’s… Do you all have full-time jobs?
Ryan Tarver: Yes.
Kurt Elster: In addition to this?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Oh, man. Have you thought about quitting?
Ryan Tarver: Too soon.
Kurt Elster: Too soon? It’s hard to… Do you know? Not everyone knows when. Some people, like they’re like they just realize… They have a moment. I think most people have a moment where they go, “I think it’s time to just go full time with this.” Have you thought about that at all?
Ryan Tarver: It’s always on my mind, right? But we’re in launch phase and we’re gonna be in launch phase for a long time. You know, we’re still trying to make sure that we’re getting sales from people that we don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Tell me about launching Bambino, because this, you know, by this point now this is your third effort on Shopify. In addition to your own work experience. Walk me through, at this point, with that experience, what does launching a brand on Shopify look like in 2021?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah, so taking it from zero and creating a brand to promoting it out there, actually having the product, getting sales, is a huge journey on its own. And just letting people know how to… So, one of the big things I would recommend for anyone that’s attempting this, set your foundation up immediately. Go through the steps of creating your brand identity, and I don’t mean just have a logo and some colors and fonts. I mean set up your brand voice, set up your brand attributes, so that you know what you’re gonna be creating as you go through this whole entire process. You’re gonna reference it more than you think.
So, the whole entire time we were building the website in Shopify, on another window I had our brand ID open the entire time. Referencing it. I was like, “I need a color. I need to make sure that this copy I wrote fits the brand voice.” And that really helps us. And it’s gonna help you in the future too if you ever decide to outsource anything. So, that’s just one small step in the whole entire thing.
And then I mentioned we used Out of the Sandbox Turbo theme for this. This one for Bambino Bikes is the Portland build and we had the opportunity with 2AM to learn quite a bit, so when we took on Bambino Bikes, we actually did a lot more customization. We were… It was another one of those unicorn moments where one of our co-founder’s brothers was between jobs and he just so happens to know like five different coding languages, and we asked him, “Hey, can you fix a couple things on the site for us?” And he popped in, he was like, “Yeah, I’ll figure that out.” And pretty soon, we were just bugging him all the time. We’re like, “Oh, can we create custom pages? Can we build out our product pages like this and this?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ll get in there,” and he just whips it out.
Kurt Elster: It’s so helpful to have someone like that where you can go so far with the theme. You can only go so far with the theme if you don’t like HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. And to have someone that knows that available to you really starts to feel like a superpower at some point. When you’re talking about customizations for the theme, give me a few examples.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah, so our big focus was on product pages. I’m a huge advocate of telling a story through the product page and telling as much about the product as possible, so that you give someone at all points of the sales channel to understand what they’re looking for in there. So, the Out of the Box does a really good job with the product pages on Turbo, but we wanted to make it more experiential. We wanted to add a lot of features to it. So, we actually…
Well, let me back up a little bit. One of the challenges as a retailer selling other brands’ product is that you have a lot to talk about in a little space, and that was actually the key driver for why we put so much customization into the product pages. Because we’re telling an entire story on this single page. So, we built in a descriptions tab to show all the information. We built an entire feature section that has full color images and copy, left, right, all the way through. We have a size and fit guide in multiple places. And we actually have FAQ on every single page. Because we wanted to keep that person there, wanted to make sure that we answer all their questions right there.
And then going down the page, we have a full gallery, testimonials, everything. It’s in there.
Kurt Elster: So, on Bambino Bikes, these are drop shipped. These are not your… You’re not manufacturing these.
Ryan Tarver: We’re not manufacturing, but we do stock them in house.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And what’s so impressive about the site is that it’s so well branded, so well put together, and it’s got these custom product pages. And you’re right, with these great photos, and quotes, and tons of great copy, and a tab description, it really makes it feel… and you can personalize it. Let’s see what this personalize button does. Oh yeah, and I can personalize it. Looks like you cut a custom sticker for it. That really makes it feel a lot more like I’m buying from Bambino as opposed to I’m buying from yet another drop shipper. Like you’ve added so much value here with content and presentation.
Ryan Tarver: That was the big thing. So, when we looked at the space, we looked at our direct competition, and saw what we were up against, it was really bland. It was really masculine. And the sport of cycling has changed a lot. There’s a huge demographics shift in it. There’s a lot more women, there’s a lot more younger athletes getting into cycling, and we wanted to make sure that we appealed to parents, as well as children, when they saw this website.
So, it’s full color, it’s bright, there’s a lot of illustration in it, just more fun things going on, and then of course, like you said, all of this value adds that we tried to add to it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Then all of that put together creates the sense of like, “Wow, this is really… It’s professional. It’s trustworthy. This is who I should buy from.” So, you talked about the importance of brand identity as like the cornerstone of everything you do. Walk me through what goes into developing a brand identity. What are like the… What’s the outline, the bullet points there?
Ryan Tarver: It’s really breaking every single piece down, like you need to go beyond just picking a name. You need to come up with your mission statement, your values, your… Like I mentioned, your attributes. Because all of those are what you’re gonna build upon to actually create your brand voice. To come up with your tagline, whatever it may be. So, it’s really important that those are set up to establish as you move forward. And those typically can happen even before you consider a logo, when in most cases you should.
Kurt Elster: Where do you think most brands go wrong when developing a brand identity? Or maybe it’s just that they don’t do it.
Ryan Tarver: They just don’t do it.
Kurt Elster: Like it’s just a logo.
Ryan Tarver: You get so tied up in doing everything else that really what it comes down to is like they’re gonna go to Fiver or something like that and say, “Hey, I need a logo.” And they don’t think past that. So, I think that could slow you down a bunch when it comes to developing your brand, developing your site and launching it, is because you’re spending all that extra time going back and forth and trying to think like, “Oh, what color should this be?” Well, if you already set it up, then you know. It’s really easy.
And Out of the Sandbox is like… Bless them. They have so many different settings and everything like that, but they have so many that it gets overwhelming instantly.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah. Even as many times as I’ve done it, it’s that colors section, I’m always like, “Which is the one I’m looking for?” And then I end up like… Then I’ll go hardcode it in the CSS, which of course I’ll then regret later when I go change it, it doesn’t work, and I’m tearing my hair out again.
So, tell me how… You referenced telling a story. What does telling a story on a product page look like? What’s the difference between here’s the info you need to buy and here I’ve created a narrative?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. And we’ve of course done both, so we have the info you need to buy, which is like details, essentially. If somebody really wanted to get into that, that was a little more techy. But the story part of it really comes down to appealing to the parent. So, a parent is gonna be more interested in is their kid gonna enjoy this, are they gonna smile, are they gonna use it for a long time, will it wear them out to the point where they actually fall asleep? And we wanted to answer all those questions, so we have a little bit more fun with this copy when it comes to that.
You know, so one of the headlines that we use is, “The Bike That You’d Ride if You Were 3 Feet Tall,” so we’re talking to the parent, but appealing to the child at the same time, and trying to really put both the parent and the child in this situation so that they can see themselves in there.
Kurt Elster: One of the things I noticed on the product detail page I clicked on, the first one I got to, it had two customer quotes. One was from the parent. One was from a two-and-a-half-year-old.
Ryan Tarver: That’s my son.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And I have… You know, I have three kids, so I immediately… and one of them is four right now. I immediately related to it. So, it really, it’s quite brilliant. And she has been talking about how she wants to learn to ride a bike. Now I gotta get a bike.
Ryan Tarver: Oh, we should talk.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s interesting about these two brands you have, 2AMBaby, it’s like onesies. It’s stuff for newborns and infants. And then you’ve got Bambino Bikes, which is for toddlers, and so it’s clever about these two brands is it’s the same customer at different time points. You know, when you have a brand that’s like for kids, it tends to be for a very narrow range. And as soon as they age out, you lose that customer. And that’s kind of one of the tough parts about brands like this, and so it’s clever that you’ve got these brands that occur sequentially as far as age goes. Was that conscious or a happy accident?
Ryan Tarver: I think that was a happy accident but we’re using it to our advantage now. So, you’ll notice in different parts of the website we actually cross promote the two brands. And we do this on social. And we’re gonna continue to do that. But that’s a really good point when it comes to the customer lifetime for these two brands specifically, and that’s one of our big future goals. We’re working on building out our Klaviyo email flows right now, especially for Bambino Bikes, because I am really hoping to leverage email flows for future purchases. So, if we get someone in at the very beginning and they buy something for their toddler at say two years old, we’re gonna eventually have the product offering for all the way up to 10 years old, and we’re gonna carry them through that whole journey using automation.
Kurt Elster: Smart. I’m glad you brought that up because in my notes, the very next thing I had written down was cross promo? And sure enough, you’re like, “Oh, well, we cross promote.” Oh! One step ahead of me. What’s interesting about this is you as a founder have tremendous experience in branding and high expectations, I imagine, and you have access, and you’ve got quite a bit of skill and experience in Shopify, plus you have access to a graphic designer and a web developer. You have very few limitations on what you can do with this brand. And that’s so dangerous. You can spend your entire time just fiddling, just fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, tweaking, tweaking, fiddling, and spinning your wheels. And I’ve seen people do it. So, talk to me about MVP versus perfection, like how do you find the balance? How do you know where like, “Okay, this is good enough for this moment?” And have you struggled with this?
Ryan Tarver: We have. We fell into this both times. Both launches. You know, it was… When we launched 2AMBaby in January, there was probably like three or four hours before we actually clicked the button, and we all celebrated, of course, when we did, but we were just tweaking little things. And our designer was like, “Whoa, we could change this color. We could change this image.” And it was like, “We just gotta do it.” And we got a little better with Bambino Bikes, but at the same time we didn’t, because I was in there saying, “Oh, what if we added this one more feature? What if we added this one more thing to the page?” So that we’d have to go back and code all of that. It would take twice as long.
So, it happens to everybody no matter what. You just gotta try and be conscious of it and not let it get you too far out.
Kurt Elster: For sure. Where that line is, what defines good enough is gonna be different for everybody.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But I think it’s just… As long as you’re asking the question, like am I… Is this bikeshedding? Am I just continuously optimizing so that I don’t have to face launching it? Because I’ve seen that happen. But if it’s in the back of your mind, I think that alone can be enough to stop it.
On the site, on Bambino, do you do anything to increase average order value? Do we have any cross sell or upsell opportunities?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah, so we don’t. This is one of the things when you’re launching, it’s really tough to not want to just go buy all the cool apps, right? So, you’re a huge fan of Bold when it comes with Bold Cross Sell and Bundles and all that, and I wish we could afford that right now, but we can’t. So, we did everything kind of manually. If you’re on a product detail page at the very bottom, we do kind of like a complimentary thing, so there’s two things we do. We do shop accessories, and that’s a pre-filtered collection page just to this brand, so if you were to click on it in this example, it’s Bixby bikes. If you clicked on it, you get only Bixby accessories, so that’s one thing. Go a little further, you get a collection call out for get all the gear to complete your kit. So, we want to get people to buy a bike, a helmet, gloves, a book, whatever it is to complete their kit and get a bundle out of it. So, we promote this idea of getting free shipping on your bundle, but it’s all manual, right? It’s just a setting on the backend that says once you hit an order value of 325, you get free shipping.
There’s nothing fancy going on right now.
Kurt Elster: But you still are, without using an app, you are offering cross sells. And I think that’s the important part.
Ryan Tarver: Cross sells and bundles without apps. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And you’re right. You said, “Well, we can’t afford it right now.” And it’s… You’re right. One app is not expensive, but when you start adding up the cost of 30 to 40 apps, which many stores have, this Shopify bill monthly, this recurring cost can balloon. So, it’s good to be conscious of it, especially at the start. And just regularly audit and review those apps. In your shopping cart, you offer a donation. You say, “Add a donation in support of Grow Cycling Foundation. Donate $1. Powered by Pledge.” Ah, I’ve found an app. We’ve got an app in here.
Ryan Tarver: It is an app. Yeah. It’s free.
Kurt Elster: Tell me, is cause marketing… And that’s what this is. It’s cause marketing. Is this worthwhile? Why do you do it?
Ryan Tarver: My experience shows that cause marketing definitely is beneficial to not only the cause itself, of course, but your brand, as well. There is a growing interest from your customers across the board, and it could be any type of cause that they’re interested in. You just have to find the right one. But that helps kind of close the sale a little bit in a way, because I’m trying to set ourselves apart from our competition, right? So, if our competition is not doing any personalization, or if their branding is a little lackluster, or if they’re not having any sort of a cause but we do, we have a better chance of winning that sale because that person wants to give their money. They put their money where they care.
Kurt Elster: The rise of conscious consumerism, which I think the pandemic accelerated.
Ryan Tarver: Most definitely. It did.
Kurt Elster: We were talking about finding a balance and perfectionism. Was there one specific element of the site you obsessed over versus any other? I think everyone has their own pet thing.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. I think if you asked our graphic designer, she would definitely say like the homepage images or pretty much any of the images. For me, one thing I’m still obsessing over is collection pages. There’s some quirks about… Maybe it’s the template, maybe it’s the Shopify. But there’s some quirks in the collection pages and how they layout and how they look that I’m just not a fan of.
Kurt Elster: Tell me. What is it?
Ryan Tarver: It might also be the case of some of our images, but the way that they layout in that if the image is slightly off size or if you have two different products that you’re trying to line up in a single collection, one image is smaller than the other. It offsets that. And then there’s a misalignment on text. That’s one thing.
Or-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Trying to get a neat and tidy collection grid is a consistent issue. And what I’ve found, the solution here is every product photo, at least the first photo, has to be the same aspect ratio, and that will solve a lot of this for you. That would be my ideal, especially like early on, before the catalog gets huge. Get everything to a single, consistent aspect ratio. I tell people to do square because it just… It works very nicely in a variety of layouts. And in one of the theme settings, you could set like a max product height image. That’ll help also kind of force things to alignment.
And then oftentimes, you give up and you just start like throwing CSS at it until it is customized within an inch of its life, and there’s like… You’re still experiencing bizarre edge cases where things don’t quite line up, but it’s close.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. That was a big one. We eventually got the images under control, but then the other issue we ran into was that the color options, so these… That’s one of the cool things about these bikes, is they come in like six different color options, but as soon as it hits that max and it drops down to the next line, it’s gonna push all of your info down a little bit further and then the product next to it has maybe like one- or two-color options, it’s up a line. And that just drove us all nuts.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Pretty soon… I mean, you could start doing like overflow hidden, and start trying to hide stuff to get it to the same width, or truncating text, or otherwise like at some point you’re going through and editing product titles to keep them from breaking, to keep them all to the same line length. There is no limit to the amount of fiddling one can do.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. And I was at it last night, too. I was doing that. Just checking little things, going through, and maintaining.
Kurt Elster: But all of it adds up to a more consistent professional experience, where people trust the site enough to make a purchase, and in your case, Bambino Bikes, you’re spending $200 to $300 on a toddler’s bike, and that’s tough, so you can’t have imperfections. You can’t have things that give people an excuse not to buy.
Ryan Tarver: No, definitely.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re doing a lot here. You’ve got a full-time job, family life, I’m sure you have some hobbies, two Shopify stores. How the heck do you balance it? What takes priority? How does this work? I mean, having co-founders and a team helps.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. I mean, of course family is the big priority, right? I mean, that’s the whole reason I’m doing this as a side hustle is to hopefully one day be able to do this full time and because my family is involved in this project, the time that I’m “working” is also family time, as well. So, it really kind of helps with the balance right there. But yeah, it’s a busy day. The day starts at 5:00. I get up, work out, get the kids up, make breakfast, and then it’s full-time job. But any break, or lunch break, I’m working on the other jobs. And then we do dinner, and then it’s by the time the kids are in bed, hit the sofa, open the laptop and I’m working again. And it’s just day in, day out, but that’s the thing. That’s why I’m a huge advocate of having co-founders that have the exact same mindset and the exact same work ethic that I do, is because I’m multiplying my efforts by two to three times with their help.
Kurt Elster: How long do you think you can keep it up?
Ryan Tarver: All of this together?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Ryan Tarver: Some days, it feels like I gotta stop, and other days it’s I’ve got all the energy in the world. We’ll see.
Kurt Elster: On the days where it’s tough, how do you manage it? How do you get through it? Or is like… Any answer goes. I think everyone deals with stress differently.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. The big thing for me is that I can’t stop moving, so for me, stress relief is activity, and that comes in the form of biking. And that is actually also when I come up with my best ideas. So, I’ll be out in the middle of nowhere on a bike ride and all of a sudden, an idea pops into my head and I’m jumping on Slack and I’m annoying everyone else on the team and I’m like, “Oh, we should do this and this.” They’re like, “Aren’t you out riding right now?”
Kurt Elster: I used to ride. I’d ride like 50 miles in a day on a Sunday regularly. And you’re absolutely right. There’s like… There is a Zen exercise zone. I’d ride on like a path in the woods, and it’s just you on the bike, and you’re surrounded by nature, which is proven as a stress reliever, and it really… It does. It clears your head, and you have the best thoughts. Also, I relate to you said like, “Man, activity is a stress reliever.” Do you mean physical activity or any activity that focuses you?
Ryan Tarver: I think it could be any activity. It just depends on the person. It’s whatever it takes for your brain to focus on something else so that the subconscious can work on that other problem without being interfered.
Kurt Elster: Oh, smart. I like that. Yeah.
Ryan Tarver: So, for me, it’s mountain biking, and that means I need to keep the bike upright, not crash into a tree or a rock, so I’m focused on that problem, but my brain is also working on something else at the same time, so when I relax and I… You know, the stress goes away. Things kind of start to open up and creativity comes.
Kurt Elster: My wife calls it rage cleaning. When I am like… When I hit maximum stress, I just start cleaning something. Probably cleaning the house. Maybe I’m gonna wash a car. But she’ll like… I’ll start just putting dishes away angrily and she’s like, “Okay, what are you stressed out about?” She knows. But it’s the exact same thing. Less effective, but similar idea.
What was I gonna say? Oh, all right. So, let’s talk about apps. Certainly, you have some apps installed. Do you have a favorite?
Ryan Tarver: It’s so early to know if there’s a favorite. Right now, I think I want to say that Klaviyo is gonna be my favorite just because I know there’s so much potential there. And I can’t wait to get into it. I just… I can’t wait to nerd out on all of the email flows that I have in my head.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, that’s another one where you have to set a limit as to how fiddly you get, like I’ve got a couple clients with abandoned cart flows where it’s like you have to scroll it horizontal and vertical to try and get to where it’s doing what you want, figure out what it’s doing, and like it switches between email and SMS, and depending on cart value, and new versus return. You can get utterly insane with these things. And you know, at some point you hit like diminishing returns, where you can only segment so much.
With a brand-new brand that no one’s ever heard of, how do you announce it to the world?
Ryan Tarver: Good question and I’m still learning.
Kurt Elster: Still in process.
Ryan Tarver: A big thing to keep in mind when doing this is meeting your customers where they are. And we actually kind of kicked ourselves a little bit on the launch of Bambino Bikes because we forgot that fundamental idea. We were so excited with the launch, and we wanted to promote so much, so fast, that we just fell into the bucket of, “Oh, let’s just throw Facebook and Instagram dollars at some of our posts and do that.” We hadn’t even set up our-
Kurt Elster: So, buy traffic from the traffic store via boosted post?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. We were doing that because we hadn’t had time to set up a retargeting. We hadn’t had time to do anything yet. We just were super excited, and it fell flat instantly. And so, we took a step back from that and we reminded ourselves, “Okay, we gotta meet our customers where they are.” We also reminded ourselves like what is our core competency, and for our team it’s inbound marketing practices and becoming a thought leader in our space. So, when we had that kind of discussion, and we came back and realized what we needed to do is we manually started doing outreach.
And right now, we’re leveraging Instagram and brand ambassadors and influencers to get the word out there. So, we found our niche audience, and this was all based off of our customer personas, and again, that’s something right there with that brand ID kit. Have your customer personas built, as well, because they’re gonna help you. And we actually kind of stumbled upon this audience. I like to call it gear junky moms or adventure moms, and-
Kurt Elster: Adventure mom. I like that.
Ryan Tarver: They’re huge. And it’s super awesome to see, because I mentioned earlier that the cycling industry has really changed, the demographic has changed. There’s a lot more women and moms getting into the sport of cycling. And when we found this, it just instantly clicked. We started getting a lot more people to the site. We started getting a lot more conversation on our posts. And that’s really been helping us and that’s the big thing that we’re working with on our launch right now.
Kurt Elster: Because you had those customer avatars as part of the brand ID kit, that… It sounds like that made it easier to identify the influencers and ambassadors that would work. Did you just reach out and develop relationships or did you use any social media tools to try and identify them? How’d you do it?
Ryan Tarver: Yeah, so we’re doing it manually, and I think there’s a lot of value to that because it really creates a relationship early on. After hearing a couple of podcasts about Dovetale, we did add that in as well, and we’re starting to learn how to use that to branch out even further.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that Dovetale tool seems… I have not yet used it, but I’ve heard enough about it. It seems pretty sweet. You had mentioned inbound marketing. What is inbound marketing?
Ryan Tarver: Boiled down, it’s anything you don’t pay for. So, it’s gonna be blogs. It’s your organic social media. It’s articles that you might put out there, press releases, things like that. It’s just anything where you’re generating traffic, so SEO obviously falls into that, as well.
Kurt Elster: This podcast is an inbound marketing effort.
Ryan Tarver: This is.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, 100%. That’s like inbound marketing was like a new thing to me 10 years ago and I struggled with social anxiety, so I didn’t want to do cold outreach, and cold outreach sucks anyway. Nobody likes it. And so, I was interested in inbound marketing, and it’s really like content marketing, inbound marketing, I think it’s probably the overlap there is like 95%.
Ryan Tarver: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And so, I found like, “Oh, content marketing. I’d like opportunities to be creative.” And so, I just started throwing myself into that, and you know, publish 300 episodes, suddenly you get good at it, and you see some results. But yeah, that’s where that came from. Oh, do you have any recommended resources on inbound marketing?
Ryan Tarver: Yes. There’s a book called They Ask You Answer, by Marcus Sheridan, and it is a great guide for setting you up to learn how to do all of this, and his focus originally was blogging, and having articles about specific topics, longtail keywords, things like that, and he’s now branched out obviously into video and things like that. Kind of the same idea, but obviously bringing it to the 21st century. And we’re really leveraging that quite a bit too, so I’ve mentioned that we’re trying to be thought leaders in our space, so we do a lot of in depth, long format, educational blog posts. And we’re getting to the point where we’re also building those into video, but the idea is is that you have this primary piece that’s really big, and long, and then you break it into little, tiny pieces, and you use that across social, all of your platforms, whatever you happen to be using.
You can build those pieces into your product pages. Maybe they’re FAQs. You take those and you use them as many places as you possibly can think of.
Kurt Elster: I love it. Well, and using this show as an example, you can see it happen. So, we’ll do like the Q&A episode with Paul and I and we’ll put it on video, so I’ve got two… I now have two longform pieces of content. The YouTube video and the episode. We’ll then chop those into we call them cutdowns. Those become social media video. And then a copywriter will turn those into blog posts. So, the whole thing breaks down into a whole bunch of smaller pieces of content. You want to create one big piece that really goes in depth and then try and break that down into smaller, bite-size pieces. Heck, I’ve been watching the History Channel recently. They’ve got that show The Food That Built America, which is really… I greatly enjoy it.
They make the same show as a short… It’s like a one-hour show, and then they do the same show as a 30-minute show called The Food That Built America, Snack Sized. And I watched it. It’s the same show edited shorter. Like how bizarre, but it’s the identical idea. So, even TV is doing this.
Ryan Tarver: Yeah. And it’s also, if you’re struggling with social media, or if you’re struggling with being consistent with your postings and things like that, it’s a really good method to follow, is you spend the time doing those big pieces and then before you know it, you’re gonna have all the little pieces and you’re gonna fill out your calendar for two, three months.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m usually about like six weeks out for content. Feels pretty good when you don’t have to worry about it. And it makes it consistent and it’s just one less thing to stress about. So, what’s next? Where do you want to go from here? What are you working on now?
Ryan Tarver: So, along the themes of being a serial entrepreneur, I mean, our goal for the team is to hopefully have three to four brands that we manage one day. So, we’ve got ideas for other stores in the hopper all the time. I’m actually most interested in the business model for a single product website. I think that’s kind of a curious experiment right there and an opportunity to really focus in and have an entire website speak to one single thing, rather than multiples.
Kurt Elster: I love the single product websites. They are… Anytime you can add some limitations to yourself, it immediately… It focuses you. And so, having a single product website, that’s an opportunity where the entire thing can live almost completely on a single page, and then within that page you can really go deep and like we’re gonna tell a story, and we’re gonna really try and make the case for why you should buy this. The single product websites and brands, they’re a lot of fun.
But then at the same time, it’s like okay, it gets tougher with customer lifetime value, and cross sell, because unless it’s a consumable good and they’re gonna come buy it a second time, it can be tough. So, advantages and disadvantages, but no, I like those a lot.
So, Mr. Tarver, if I wanted to go buy a balance bike from you right now, where and how would I do it?
Ryan Tarver: So, BambinoBikes.com, and I think we’ve got a code for you, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: Unofficial15 is what I have in my show notes. Excellent. Let me put that in the notes, as well. And you know, my brother and sister-in-law just had a newborn. I gotta get a onesie for them too from 2AMBaby. Does the code apply there, as well?
Ryan Tarver: It works for both.
Kurt Elster: Excellent!
Ryan Tarver: And congratulations to them.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Oh, super cute. We have yet another cousin, which is always fun. All right, Mr. Tarver. Is there anywhere else we can go to learn more about you?
Ryan Tarver: Not really. I mean, this is my main focus, so if you’re interested in learning about our story, 2AMBaby.com talks about the origin, and then Bambino Bikes kind of spawned out of that, as well.
Kurt Elster: Wonderful. I’m gonna go peruse some balance bikes. Ryan, thank you so much. This has been enlightening.
Ryan Tarver: Kurt, thank you very much, too.