Lee Assoulin is the Founder and CEO of Stonecutter, a boutique Amazon brand management agency that partners with premium brands to scale profitably on the world’s largest marketplace. With over 12 years of Amazon expertise, Lee has guided venture-backed startups, heritage brands, and category leaders through the complexities of the platform, combining strategic depth with operational rigor. He’s currently managing over $220M in annual revenue while building AI-powered infrastructure to redefine how agencies operate. His mission is to prove that premium brands can win on Amazon without compromising on quality or brand equity with an agency they can trust.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley speaks with Lee Assoulin, founder and CEO of Stonecutter, a boutique Amazon brand management agency. Drawing on 12+ years of experience, Lee discusses how AI is reshaping Amazon brand management. Key topics include avoiding “shiny object syndrome,” building solid SOPs before automating, keeping humans in the loop for critical decisions, and developing an “AI native” team culture. Lee also shares practical advice on recording team calls, refining documentation with AI, and empowering team members who genuinely embrace AI tools to drive sustainable business growth.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Timestamps:

00:00:23 Introduction to AI in E-commerce
The host introduces the topic of AI for top Amazon sellers and teases the actionable advice from the guest.

00:01:01 Guest Introduction: Lee Assoulin
Host Josh Hadley introduces Lee Assoulin, founder of Stonecutter, highlighting his extensive experience managing major Amazon brands.

00:02:46 The Current State of AI in E-commerce
Lee discusses how AI is being adopted differently by large, established sellers versus smaller, scrappier ones in the mature Amazon marketplace.

00:04:31 AI and “Shiny Object Syndrome”
The discussion turns to the risk of entrepreneurs getting distracted by new AI tools instead of focusing on core business needs.

00:05:57 The “Aladdin’s Cave” Analogy for AI
Lee uses an analogy to explain the danger of chasing countless small AI tools without a solid, overarching framework.

00:08:33 SOPs: The Foundation for AI
The importance of having proven, repeatable processes (SOPs) in place before attempting to automate them with AI is discussed.

00:10:00 The Right Approach to AI Automation
Lee explains that the best automation strategy depends on scale; larger brands require a more cautious, human-in-the-loop approach.

00:12:15 Can One Person Build a $100M Brand?
A discussion on the future of business structures, predicting small, highly-skilled teams enabled by AI will become the norm.

00:14:55 The Risk of AI Homogenization
If everyone uses the same AI strategies, there is no competitive edge. The human element provides the necessary differentiation.

00:16:27 Practical AI Use Cases for Beginners
Lee suggests starting by using AI to analyze content and rewrite copy based on frameworks like Amazon’s COSMO paper.

00:19:24 The Dangers of Lazy AI Implementation
Warning against the pitfalls of lazy AI use, such as generic auto-generated emails that can damage brand perception.

00:22:23 Automating Your Executive Assistant
Lee shares a practical example of creating a virtual EA to manage his calendar, pre-meeting briefs, and task reminders.

00:24:10 Building a Company “Brain”
A complex use case is detailed: creating a central database that ingests all company communications for deep contextual analysis.

00:27:11 The Power of Personal Context for AI
The idea of feeding personal journals and thoughts into an AI to give it deeper context for decision-making.

00:29:47 How Top Brands Automate Operations
Lee shares a real-world example of automating Buy Box monitoring, where an AI agent detects losses and notifies the team.

00:32:14 Staying Compliant with Amazon’s AI Rules
How to automate safely by using third-party APIs and keeping a human in the loop for actions inside Seller Central.

00:33:55 The Cost-Benefit Analysis of AI vs. Humans
A discussion on whether AI is always cheaper, concluding that building custom AI solutions can be a waste of time.

00:36:01 The Trap of “Sexy Dashboards”
Building custom dashboards is often a distraction; focus on the underlying data and analysis, which is what AI actually needs.

00:39:09 How to Onboard Your Team to AI
Lee shares his strategy of offering to pay for AI tools and courses for any team member who shows interest.

00:41:55 Three Actionable Takeaways
The host summarizes the episode’s key takeaways: document skills, record everything, and enable your team to adopt AI.

00:45:26 Most Influential Book
Lee recommends “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Singer for its profound impact on his mindset and way of thinking.

00:45:59 Favorite AI Tool
Lee names Claude as his primary tool but highlights WhisperFlow for voice dictation as a game-changer for productivity.

00:47:01 Admired Person in E-commerce
Lee recommends following Sean Gill of Triquetra for his methodical, framework-first approach to building a successful brand.

00:48:32 How to Connect with Lee
Lee provides his email address and social media handles for listeners who want to connect with him after the show.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Tools and Websites
“Claude“: “00:08:38”
“Fireflies“: “00:25:48”
“Granola“: “00:25:48”
“Gemini“: “00:25:48”
“Amazon API“: “00:32:49”
“Rainforest API“: “00:32:49”
“Supabase“: “00:32:49”
“Claud Code“: “00:24:06”
“Claude“: “00:46:07”
“Whisper Flow“: “00:46:07″Books and Authors
“Michael E. Gerber“: “00:01:01”
“Brandon Young”: “00:09:37”
“The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer“: “00:45:32″Videos
“Hiring Video“: “00:15:11”Episode Sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Transcript:

Lee Assoulin 00:00:00  Building out like a little tool here and a little tool. They’re very cute and it’s good to you know, my goal is not to fire. My team, my goal is really to enable my team to scale to a bigger agency. Right. Like we have 32 people in house. I want to have 32 people managing, you know, 50, 100 clients.

MC 00:00:23  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:00:37  Everyone’s talking about AI like it is the future, but for top Amazon sellers, it’s already the present. But there is so much noise and there’s not a lot of action and not a lot of direction as to what actually needs to be automated with AI in your e-commerce business. Well guess what? Today’s guest has some answers for you and tactile things that you should be automating with AI in your business today. Welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast.

Josh Hadley 00:01:01  I’m your host, Josh Hadley. I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales, and now my mission is to take it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures. I bring you the unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests include Ezra Firestone, Kevin King, and Michael E Gerber, author of the E! Myth. Today, I am super excited to introduce you all to a good friend of mine, Li Asselin. Li is the founder and CEO of stonecutter, a boutique Amazon brand management agency that partners with premium brands to scale profitably on the world’s largest marketplace. With over 12 years of Amazon expertise, Lee has guided venture backed startups, heritage brands and category leaders through the complexities of the platform, combining strategic depth with operational rigor. He’s currently managing over 220 million in annual revenue, while building an AI powered infrastructure to redefine how agencies operate. His mission is to prove that premium brands can win on Amazon without compromising on quality or brand equity with an agency that they can trust.

Josh Hadley 00:02:02  With that introduction, welcome to the show.

Lee Assoulin 00:02:04  Lee, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Josh Hadley 00:02:06  Josh Lee, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast here today. We’ve we’ve met at multiple events, and every time I’ve had a conversation with you, I’ve always been impressed with, hey, your depth of knowledge on Amazon, the team that you’ve built, everything that you are doing with an agency yourself, and then being able to apply those tactics even to brand owners. So I know that you are in kind of like the rooms with all like the smartest sellers, and you’re going to be sharing like what’s going on today, especially in the world of AI. And honestly, I just feel like there’s so much noise. And, Lee, what are you hearing on your side? You’ve been to a lot of the MDS events. Other masterminds like what’s everybody doing in the world of ecom and AI right now?

Lee Assoulin 00:02:46  Like you mentioned, I’ve been in this space for about 12 years, a little over 12 years now on the Amazon side of things, and it is the most pivotal moment, I think, that we’ve had where it comes to Amazon itself.

Lee Assoulin 00:02:58  A lot of people are automating because of Amazon, unlike 2016, where it was the Wild West, and you can kind of do anything and test every single thing. And it sounds a lot more mature of a platform. So like, you know, step one, step two, step three, step four. Like the SOPs can deviate from one company to another on efficiency, on style. But it’s it’s really relatively, you know, similar as to how things get done. And so if you have a good process in place, there’s a very good chance that you can automate a large portion of that process while keeping the human in the loop, because, you know, you don’t want to just let AI totally take over and run everything. If you’re a large seller, you can do that if you’re a smaller seller and then you know you have a little mistake here or there. But I think if you have 8 or 9 figures on the line, that’s where things get a little bit scary. You know what is very interesting, as I talk to more and more sellers that are larger, is that they’re actually not hyper focused on AI because they’re hyper focused on scaling their business.

Lee Assoulin 00:03:58  AI is so new that the people that are smaller and scrappy are the ones that are really kind of getting their hands dirty and trying to figure out how to save costs and be more efficient, whereas the ones that are kind of eight figures in scaling to nine are the ones that are focusing on their business, on the core of their business, like, hey, a TikTok or or meta and, and there are opportunities to scale utilizing AI. But for now there I think that they’re I don’t say they’re missing the boat, they’re focusing on it, but they’re hiring somebody in order to do that as opposed to getting their own hands dirty.

Josh Hadley 00:04:31  I love that. Well, Lee, I think the bigger question, though, too, is entrepreneurs have the classic shiny object syndrome where, you know, it’s, hey, what’s the latest sales platform that everybody’s crushing it on? And right now the hot girl at the dance is like TikTok. And so everybody’s kind of like pointing their direction over to TikTok. But then you also have AI coming in, which I think is like can be an endless rabbit hole of you just getting lost in sometimes automating things that maybe don’t need to be automated, or automating things that are just like, it’s kind of fun.

Josh Hadley 00:05:02  I had a conversation yesterday with another guest that just said, like, the crazy thing about AI is it’s almost like playing a video game where you get these like dopamine hits on an ongoing basis because you’re like, oh my goodness, I just did this. Well, what about this? What about that? And so like you’re getting like these dopamine hits. So you hear multiple people even you and I where it’s like I just stayed up way too late last night because I was in the AI rabbit hole, and I just kept, like, getting win after win after win. And like, you can see that future. However, my caveat to that, Lee and I think we’re kind of on the same page here is like, AI can be great. And I think there’s a strong use case for it, but it can also be a massive distraction if you don’t use it to focus on the right things in the business. And so, Lee, what would you kind of say? Like, what are you doing and what are like the tactile things that you are using AI to automate in your own business, so you don’t get distracted down the rabbit holes of endless AI optimization.

Lee Assoulin 00:05:57  Yeah, I mean, it’s funny, I actually just gave this analogy to my team the other day because I’m a massive shiny coin guy. I think most entrepreneurs are. It’s like, oh, like, okay, tick tock. It’s like, okay, everybody just jumps to it because it’s an opportunity and we’re all opportunistic, otherwise we wouldn’t necessarily be entrepreneurs. The issue here is, and I assume everybody in your audience has watched the movie Aladdin because like, I mean, it’s classic, but it’s it’s going into that layer and you have these mounds of shiny coins literally everywhere, and you’re kind of stuffing your bag. You’re like, oh my God. Like, there’s rubies and there’s gold and there’s this and there’s that. But really the the prize is the lantern. It’s like, but you’re just distracted. And that’s sort of the biggest problem here, because you hear all of your friends and you’re like, I automated this process. And it’s like, well, I want to automate that process. The question is, is that worth automating in your own business? And so when I tell everybody to do is kind of take a step back.

Lee Assoulin 00:06:52  And that’s what we’ve done at stonecutter is and my agency, we really stopped to say, hey, what are we actually doing that can be automated. And we are very SOP oriented. As an agency, you kind of have to be. So it’s like, what are our processes and then how do we automate from there? So what we kind of done is we scrubbed every process that we have, every audit, every SOP that we have and figured out okay, well what’s the roadmap. And then from there it’s mostly about the framework. How are how are these things going to be knit together in a bigger, you know, grander scheme of things? Because building out like a little tool here and a little tool, they’re very cute and it’s good to, you know, my goal is not to fire my team. My goal is really to enable my team to scale to a bigger agency. Right? Like we have 32 people in house. I want to have 32 people managing, you know, 50, 100 clients.

Lee Assoulin 00:07:47  But with utilizing these tools. And I want to have those people be a players. That’s really like the goal with a faulty framework, with a faulty foundation that all falls apart. And so I don’t think enough people are stopping to actually think about what that framework is. I think they’re just running and saying, oh, this, this person is doing image optimization. Like, I got to do that. And then I also like I also have to optimize my PPC. And then I also want to be automating this like notifications and and meta. And then also like the script writing for TikTok and none of those I mean, those are all very important, but building a system of okay, well, how do these things talk to each other? And then where do they live and who’s using them? That’s sort of I would say like the most important part. But if you want to mature your company, that’s where you’re going to need to be.

Josh Hadley 00:08:33  Yeah. Lee, I think you hit the nail on the head there as you talked about being SOP driven.

Josh Hadley 00:08:38  First and foremost, I want to get your take on this, Lee, because I hear this more often than not. Most people are like, hey, yeah, I’m using Claude to go automate all of my PPC, and it’s like, okay. I feel like what’s interesting, though, about PPC is it’s very nuanced. And as you know this, I don’t think there’s one playbook for PPC that works across the board. I think every brand is unique. I mean, you deal with multiple brands, so you can tell me your take. But I think, like for us, I have taken bits and pieces from Brandon Young’s PPC stuff from some of the other, like the skill insights guys and some other people from MDS. And it’s like I’ve just kind of merged it all together with what works for our brand. So with that being said, like as you look at enabling AI, do you see it as either of these two options? Number one, I personally think that AI is first, have all of your SOPs dialed in and it needs to be a repeatable, proven process already that then you light up with AI.

Josh Hadley 00:09:37  And AI could definitely train itself and get better time and time again. That’s one avenue. Or I just like light up an open car or something. And I’m like. Take the best practices from all the best. Like I can load it with a bunch of the YouTube videos and whatnot. Be like, take these best practices. Go manage my ad account and let it go do its thing. Like which of those is the is the right option in the world of AI right now?

Lee Assoulin 00:10:00  Yeah. Listen, again, I think in terms of scale, if you were a doing $1 million a year on Amazon, there’s not a small amount of money whatsoever. Or are you going to sit and figure out, okay, well, how do I fix my PPC and and be the human in the loop there? Maybe not. You might hear me like, you know, listen, let’s take this person’s best practices and this person’s and I want to light up an open call. And I want to totally automate this because I need to focus on other avenues.

Lee Assoulin 00:10:26  And PPC really kind of like can detract from that. And if it’s 80% done, it’s 100% awesome, right? I think the moment you start to get like we manage brands over, you know, typically our brands do over $10 million on their own. Mostly it’s like 20 million plus. Those are bigger budgets where it’s like, I have never used one of these. You know, I’m not going to say all the names of all these other PPC, AI softwares. I’m talking about before ChatGPT that were black box that we’re like, oh, we’re using, you know, these, these

Josh Hadley 00:10:56  Like machine learning.

Lee Assoulin 00:10:57  Machine learning, algorithmic, etc. I never trusted them. They, they have good results, but they would make 5000 campaigns each one single. I was like, I don’t understand what you’re doing in my software, in my account. And like you said, every account is different. Every asset is different as to like what the goal is. And so in our own framework, we look at every single asset, not by product A, B, C, d like most people do on a on a prior basis.

Lee Assoulin 00:11:24  But we also look at like where is it in the life cycle? Is this in scale mode? Is are we optimizing for profitability? Are we actually are we are we exiting this product. So we have different levels of the life cycle. And then we also take it with a, b, C, d. And then that determines what we should be doing. That’s a again, that’s a framework way of thinking before we implement AI to do anything, which we had to sit and really think about that as an agency, because every client is different and every asset is different. So how do we really manage this across all when it comes to PPC? If you’re if you’re getting in and then you’re you have the same process over and over like okay we’re going to negative keyword this because of this every single week. Great. Get AI in the loop on that. But I always still have humans, at least at the moment managing those agents themselves.

Josh Hadley 00:12:15  Love it. So, Lea. True or false? Within the next 12 months, you see somebody building a $100 million brand with one person and just a bunch of bots running for it.

Lee Assoulin 00:12:26  I will say very potentially true, but like, that person has to hit the right product at the right time with the right, like it’s got to be. I don’t think that there’s going to be five people. I think it’s like one kid that happened to sell creatine when Joe Rogan said, creatine is hot and the guy happens to have all the right things in place, I don’t think it’ll be one person. I think it’ll be a team of, you know, for I don’t say kids, but I do think, like the younger you are, the luck. Are you luckier? You are right now, although a lot of people say that they’re not. But like you’re a native and you’re growing up in this world, I think it’ll be for people, you know, spitting it off and really kind of like crushing all across the board. And it’s going to be it’s a scary time for, like I say, white collar workers. But it’s a scary time for a lot of people. I’m nervous for a lot of people on even my team.

Lee Assoulin 00:13:14  But but I try to and we mentioned this earlier as a leader, I try to lead people in my company and I’m leading them towards being AI native as much as possible.

Josh Hadley 00:13:24  Yeah. And you know, my take on that Lee is yes, I do agree. Like there will be somebody that stumbles in. You hit the nail on the head with like right time, right place. They just rode like some massive wave and they get to 100 million. Do I think it’s a sustainable long term brand? I would argue like probably not. I think that they get to big revenue thresholds, but I don’t think it like maintains, because what I do see in the future is like, look, I truly don’t believe humans are going to be extinct. However, that middle level manager level, I think that definitely becomes really challenging and especially like the VA level. So what I do think the future looks like is I think arguably you have $100 million brands that are run with, you know, maybe it’s 10 to 20 really smart, really dialed in operators that have really good frameworks that like somebody is like the wizard of of supply chain and just has bot after bot after bot that is like super dialed in on all the best supply chain strategies.

Josh Hadley 00:14:19  Then you’ve got somebody on the marketing side, right? Somebody on the op side, and the list goes on and on. But I think what I see right now is like the biggest arbitrage is like, bring in the smartest minds that you can right now, enable them with AI and let them go to town. I think that that always will be. The biggest arbitrage opportunity is like the massive ROI that you can get from hiring the one right person that can go scale things. But again, AI needs feedback and it needs oversight because I would be like, I honestly would not just give it to open Columbia, like, learn the best PPC practices from everybody and go.

Lee Assoulin 00:14:55  It’s insane to do that, right? Like if you think about it, if everybody does that, what’s your edge? Right? Like there is no edge. If you go and you say, okay, I’m going to do a perplexity, you know, deep dive and you have that run. Okay. Well, how do I utilize my scoop data to maximize my PPC? Great.

Lee Assoulin 00:15:11  I can do the same thing. You’re going to do the same thing. We’re all going to have the same strategy. We’re all going to be deploying the same tactic at the same time. And therefore there’s no edge. So it’s it’s you need to be ahead of the curve. And I don’t think that AI is, is really like unless you’re publishing papers and saying like, this is what you’re doing, which people are. And I’m not saying don’t like lean on these deep research in order to educate yourself and educate your team to build the framework that works for you and your brand. But to kind of white label this is is it’s frankly it’s reckless. It’s turning around and saying, okay, well whatever the output is, I’m going to just trust because I don’t know any better. But you should know better because it’s your business and you should be. You know, I know that you’ve you’ve done podcasts on this. I’ve had my HR person watch your your hiring video and it was incredibly impactful. But you know, having the right people, it’s going to be I think unfortunately for them see players and be players are are going to go the way of the dinosaur and they’re going to have to go back to manual labor.

Lee Assoulin 00:16:12  It’s sad, frankly. It’s kind of scary. But if you’re not hungry and you’re not in like, you don’t have grit and discernment. I think that like, that’s really where it’s where the world is going. And that’s what I’m trying to surround myself with for my team.

Josh Hadley 00:16:27  Yeah. Fantastic. You know, foresight where I think things are going now, Lee, let’s turn our attention into like. All right. So our listeners, they’re on this. They get what we’re picking up here. Let’s give them some tactile things like how are you implementing AI. Like give me some practical like are you automating, you know, PPC right now or what are you automating? What’s worth automating what’s not worth automating. Give us some specific use cases.

Lee Assoulin 00:16:53  Yeah. So like it’s depending on the level of where you’re at. And so I’ll, I’ll speak first to the new newcomer into the space. And what I’ll always say is like newcomer for your entire audience. Nobody’s behind. I think that there’s a lot of noise and there’s a lot of, you know, influencers out there.

Lee Assoulin 00:17:08  Everybody’s saying, like, I’m doing this, I’m doing that, and you will get AI anxiety, which I get. I mean, I don’t sleep sometimes and I think I’m not doing enough, and I need to be doing way more. And, you know, you talk to a friend and they’ve automated this part. And like I mentioned before and you, your brain started to turn off like, why have not not done this yet. And if I don’t do this, my competitors are going to eat me. Unfortunately, I do think like it is semi a war like meaning like you. You got to prepare yourself. But that doesn’t mean that it’s too late. It’s not at all. So getting getting started is is the first step. Like literally go watch some YouTube videos on like what a cloud file is or a skill and how to best build those. And really like I said, framework of of educating yourself around AI, which we’ll talk about like some tools later. But in terms of like once you acclimate yourself, I’m a big fan of Claude.

Lee Assoulin 00:17:57  I think most people are at this point, especially in the in the business world, utilizing, you know, AI in order to like, analyze content for me, like, I, you know, sitting and reading the Cosmo paper, I’m not sitting reading the white paper. I’ve done this before for other white papers. And it’s I just don’t have the attention span. But what we’ve done is we’ve actually built out a framework of, okay, well, how does Cosmo run? How is our copy laid out? Because it’s drastically changed from what it used to be, and then rewriting our copy in order to match the framework that Amazon has now laid out for us. So like that was a, you know, pretty massive unlock. And it’s not a Uber complicated one because allowing like AI to help you with that framework, you don’t need to be the rocket scientist that knows how you want it all in, out. Like before when I was mentioning framework, you don’t have to like you don’t have to be a framework kind of person.

Lee Assoulin 00:18:47  You just need to take the time to converse with AI, to say, I don’t know much about frameworks. I need to build a proper framework. What is a good one? And but then when it spits out the answer, that’s what you have to actually sit and read through the answer. You don’t just accept it and say, great, hand it over to your copywriter and be like, I’ve automated this. That’s not the way to do it. People are like rolling out various softwares like left and right. I don’t know if those are all necessary. I think it’s more of like, you know, looking at what what you can do in your own business and not necessarily getting death by a thousand SaaS softwares right now.

Josh Hadley 00:19:24  Yeah, totally agree with that. And I think here’s here’s a big use case that I see a lot of people that I think should be the first place people start anything admin related, right? Like any admin, like some the email management aspect should be good. But like, my goodness, you’re going to have to spend a good amount of time like training it, right? Because like email is extremely nuanced thinking that you can like I read these things and I hear these videos of people like, yeah, AI now manages my email inbox and I’m like, man, there’s a lot of nuances because, like, I have a personal relationship with so-and-so.

Josh Hadley 00:19:55  And so when they email me, it’s a different like rule, like they get priority, like direct direction to me, whereas some of the other people I’m going to be like, yeah, ignore that or that spam or and I think like AI is just it’s rules like, but you have to be able to provide it so much context and but most importantly give it feedback so that it continues to learn and grow. I think that my the danger I think I see happening right now, Lee is like, everybody feels like they’re behind. So they’re trying to adopt AI, and they’re doing it frankly, in a very lazy way. I’ve been actually extremely frustrated with like now it almost seems like emails. It’s like just like the bots talking to each other.

Lee Assoulin 00:20:34  And if I get em, dash, man. If I get in an email.

Josh Hadley 00:20:39  100%, that’s what’s crazy is like, I see that happen 90% of the time. And that’s just like lazy. Like, hey, I’ve trained my AI to be like, never give me a freaking m dash, because like, that is the obvious, like signature.

Josh Hadley 00:20:53  ChatGPT wrote this and like an example is like, I was working with the creator and was emailing them back and forth and every response that I got back from them, they literally copied and pasted everything that chat gave them. So much so that like the subject line, like the subject line at the top was, hey, use this subject line and then blah blah blah. And I was like, yeah, that is that is so bad. Amazing. So a lot of people are taking that option. And I think, like, humans are smart enough, like people are starting to discern that. And I think that’s where we go in the future. And so I think, like people need to be careful with your AI images. I had somebody on yesterday where it’s like, hey, your use of AI in your images actually might be hurting your brand.

Lee Assoulin 00:21:36  And 100%.

Josh Hadley 00:21:37  Because like.

Lee Assoulin 00:21:38  You couldn’t agree more.

Josh Hadley 00:21:39  You’re using all these stupid AI tools that everybody has, and so you’re getting the same look, in the same feel.

Josh Hadley 00:21:44  And now your brand has basically gone into the ether and you don’t have any differentiation. You all look the same. And then there’s just something off most of the time with AI. And you can tell if you really look and at least at least today, that you could even watch AI videos and be like, I’m pretty sure that’s AI. It’s going to be harder in the future, I’m sure. But like, that’s what I’d say is, like, there’s still a very important, like human element involved in all of this. And that’s what I think I want to communicate to the listeners here is like, the world is not just like automate everything with AI, and if you’re not doing that, you’re going to be left behind. It’s like, just use AI to make yourself ten times more productive. That’s the use case right now.

Lee Assoulin 00:22:23  So it’s interesting you said that because there was actually a I think it was a Wall Street Journal article that came out explaining how AI has made us more productive. We’re actually less productive.

Lee Assoulin 00:22:31  We’re more stressed because we’re we’re we’re spinning our wheels. And I don’t disagree at all. It becomes where if you spend the time to build, like I keep saying, like the framework, right? Like I spent time building out my virtual EA and I actually gave my I watched the YouTube video and I can attach it. I can send it to you later, put in the show notes if you want. Great one. It was like, hey, here’s a framework for five minutes. Set up your virtual EA. I sent that to my actual executive assistant, who I’ve now upgraded to my chief of staff, and she she was like, dude, this is this is freaking awesome, okay, please don’t fire me. And I was like, oh, like, I promise I won’t. But listen, every single morning I get my calendar in slack. Every pre meeting I get a message of, hey, you’re going to be talking with Josh Hadley. This is everything. It looks through my email, looks through my firefly’s, looks through my slack to say, what do I know about Josh and it.

Lee Assoulin 00:23:20  It compiles everything. So like five minutes before, I’m not like, wait, what am I doing? Who am I talking to? What is this conversation about? Like that’s what I typically like bother my EA about. And then it goes to my click up and it’s like you haven’t done these things. It’s listed as high priority to me that all of a sudden allows not okay, well I’m going to fire her. It’s like you’re totally not fired. You’re elevated. You’re going from EA to chief of staff. You’re now helping and implement this for every single person on my leadership team. Why do they not have EA’s? Everybody should have this and it’s not hard to set up. It’s daunting. I will say the first time I opened Cloud Code I was like, no, not for me. No. Like I looked at the terminal. I was like, I am not that guy. And then the moment you just play around with it and then you’re like, okay, whoa. I didn’t realize, like, I could go to a website, but it’s cool.

Lee Assoulin 00:24:06  Like, you can everybody can do these things. It just becomes scary to do it. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:24:10  Totally agree. I love that sentiment. So so I love the use case of like your EA becoming like a chief of staff. Definitely like automating your admin tasks. What else are you using it? How are you using it with your team members?

Lee Assoulin 00:24:23  So I’ll tell you one that’s it’s more complex. So just bear with me for a second. But it’s very cool. watch a YouTube video. This guy that I follow and he was talking about something called Open Brain. And the concept is, is that, you know, you you have ChatGPT, you have Claude, you have all these different llms, but they all have different memories of you. Why don’t you create a central repository, like a database of your memory of who you are, that can kind of speak to all different models and whatever you talk to them about, it gets ingested. And and then you have like a brain, your brain.

Lee Assoulin 00:24:54  So I thought to myself, I said, wait, okay, that’s cool. What would be really cool is I record every call on fireflies. Yeah, people use granola. You can use Gemini, whatever you want. I also have slack and I have my emails. I actually then took it a step further. I ingested all of that and I’m talking like three years worth of fireflies now. It’s tons of slack messages with every client. I didn’t do email yet because it’s a little too sensitive. Like, I don’t know what it’s really ingesting there, but I’ve put it into what they call a vector database. Not to get too complicated. And now I actually have a agent brain where I can say, hey, what happened with XYZ account last week? Or like in January of 2025? What, like how are sales or what happened with inventory then? And it looks through all of these conversations and it actually spits out, well, this is what happened. Now take that and pair that with an actual database.

Lee Assoulin 00:25:48  Meaning my Amazon sales dipped in January 2025. And so this year my sales are up 80% year over year. What’s going on? Right. Everybody has that. You forget when you sell out of something for four days, or your logistics manager messed up or your listing went down, nobody remembers every single day. And so if you have this brain that you can pair with your data, it all also makes like the analysis actually way more like it’s not even accurate. It just gives the context. And so everybody’s talking about context is king. And so really record all your calls. Like I tell this to everybody, it’s like you don’t know when you’re going to need it until you need it. And I’m not saying it’s a spy on people. It’s I don’t care. One on one calls. I don’t I don’t ingest those one on one messages, I don’t ingest those. But if it’s in a logistics channel, I want to know everything there so that we can figure out what can we do to be better.

Lee Assoulin 00:26:45  That’s the that’s really the the main crux. It’s a cool project. Took me a while to set up. I will say that that’s that that was a that was a bit of a struggle because I’m also an agency and I have multiple people accessing the brain. And I had to tear out like careful. Yeah. Like, well, you know, like only I can see this and leadership can see that. And then the rest of the team can see this. So I had to like, categorize different things. It was it was complex. But it’s very cool that it’s rolled out.

Josh Hadley 00:27:11  Yeah I love that. So here’s another idea that I had on that. Really, especially as it relates to like just being yourself as an entrepreneur, the goals you yourself as a person, how can you add this might unlock here. So I journal every single week and have been for a decade plus that. And you’re kind of like sharing that. I was like, that’s exactly what I need to do is like, provide that to, you know, that that brain, so to speak, that’s like, here are my personal feelings and my thoughts, like, now you understand who I am.

Josh Hadley 00:27:42  Like in more detail.

Lee Assoulin 00:27:44  Soup to nuts for sure.

Josh Hadley 00:27:45  Like and and so I think like one of the best things that any entrepreneur can do is like, do that, do that practice of journaling and then feeding all of the context that you can. I think that’s a massive takeaway record everything that you can and upload whatever you can so that this AI can truly exponentially scale things for you because like, it’s only as good as, like the information that it has. But if I just go tell it to like, go optimize my PPC campaigns. It will certainly go do that for me today, but it is going to be like, I’m just going to make this decision for you because I have no other context and you didn’t give me guardrails and things like that. And I think that just becomes like the the humans driving these systems need to be like the architects. Like that’s the best thing that I can describe is like, you’ve got to architect all of these agents to be able to design them, to do exactly what you want them to do.

Josh Hadley 00:28:35  Otherwise, you do start having it steer you off into the wrong direction.

Lee Assoulin 00:28:38  We’re now like taking a look and saying, okay, well, I’ve done a bunch of audits. Like I said, we’re a boutique agency. We’re managing 14 brands at the moment, but we’re scaling. But I do audits all the time for I don’t say anybody, but pretty much like people in MDS come to me and they’re like, hey, do you mind taking a look under the hood? And we do that. And so I have a bunch of these audit calls as like, well, what are the common themes with all of them? And eventually, like, I’m the sales person, but I can have somebody on my team do an audit call without me, but they’ll have my notes as if like, how would we frame this account, which is unique, right? It’s what makes us us and not another somebody else, right? So, like, what makes your brand your brand? There’s other other sellers, Chinese sellers, domestic sellers that are selling exactly the same products as you.

Lee Assoulin 00:29:20  But what makes yours yours is, you know, your special sauce. You. So replicating that I think is like a it’s a massive unlock. It allows you to then sit back and people can stop asking you questions. They’re like, hey, what do you think of this? Like, well, did you ask my I call it Brian because it’s like misspelled brain. And I’m like, just go ask Brian. Guys, Brian, come back to me. Brian says, hey, Lee would have thought this. Like I’m interested to see what what it says. So that’s pretty cool. Fantastic fun.

Josh Hadley 00:29:47  Yeah. Now, Lee, you’ve been in some rooms recently with some really smart like brand operators that have been sharing, like how they’re implementing AI into their tech stack and overall brand. What did you hear from those conversations? How else do you hear other brand owners using it? Best worst case scenarios.

Lee Assoulin 00:30:04  Yeah. So I will say a lot of brand owners are not really using it as much as they could should.

Lee Assoulin 00:30:10  It doesn’t really matter. But I think a lot of brand owners are focusing on, like I mentioned earlier, their businesses. But I do think that the ones that are using it, it’s pretty wild. Right. There’s the open call area that is exploding. Not the easiest to set up, security risks, all that. But what is able to be automated using open claws? Pretty sick. And we’re doing that internally as well. We’ve named ours Ava. So it’s like our AI virtual assistant. Right. So and she perfect example is buy box right. If you’re omnichannel and you’re selling whether to distributors or also on retail, we have Ava getting alerts of when you lose a buy box. And if you’re losing it’s like, okay, well then all of a sudden it takes a look at either rainforest API or keeper to say, who are we losing the buy box to? Because I don’t want it scraping Amazon directly get flagged. So it’s okay. Well, you’re losing it to another seller. How many units does that seller have? If there’s a reseller or if you’re losing it because your product is sold on target for cheaper.

Lee Assoulin 00:31:06  We then automatically are emailing or slacking the client saying hey, it’s sold on target for this price, please message the buyer or you want us to match the price. That’s normally a human being doing that process. And when the client responds lower price it again, haven’t fully automated that part yet because I get nervous about allowing an AI to lower price without a human in the loop. It’s more of okay, we’ll now ping the human to go lower that price, but that process is happening instantaneously. Those are things that we can yeah, that’s it’s on 100% of the time. Or really when it gets that alert and that pain. But that’s something that, you know there’s no weekend, there’s no nighttime. It’s just on, which is amazing to have. And it’s accurate again, with the right guardrail, with the right framework, with the right system, which is the most important thing to reiterate for the 13th time, if it has that, then it’s accurate 100% of the time. And when you realize it’s not accurate.

Lee Assoulin 00:32:04  Go and fix your skill, your cloud and file, and take the time to fix these things and not just be like, I’ll get it later because it’ll continue. It’ll continue to make a mistake.

Josh Hadley 00:32:14  What are you doing to you know Amazon’s coming out with like some very strict like AI rules. And I think that will continue to evolve. But like how do you make sure you don’t get caught in the crosshairs where it’s like you do have a bot that’s scanning it and somehow it’s connected to you and blah, blah, blah. I mean, who knows what that future looks like?

Lee Assoulin 00:32:30  But it’s like.

Josh Hadley 00:32:31  What do you do? What are you doing from that standpoint to be like, who’s checking the buy box and how do you know it’s lost or whatever?

Lee Assoulin 00:32:37  Yeah. So so I mean, I think most people, you know, should build out some type of database of their own super bases. Super easy one to to connect. And again, if you’re using cloud, say like, hey, I know nothing about tech.

Lee Assoulin 00:32:49  I don’t know what I’m doing. I need, you know, to connect to Amazon’s API. Give me the step by step and it will. And like just again take the time to do that and ingest your data. But you can get those notifications of when you’re losing a by box through an API. So and then go and take a look. It’s. I already mentioned rainforest API or Kepa. These are external scraper tools. I would not have your bot or agent. Go and scrape Amazon. Like do everything you can to not flag. Don’t give it access to seller central. Somebody asked me recently like what happens if they do get into Seller Central? I’m like, they don’t even have a login. Like there’s no there’s none of that. Instead, what I have is a human being that now has a lot more kind of click work, but there’s still a human in the loop on that front. At least for us, because I just don’t trust the system yet entirely until I’ve truly vetted it over.

Lee Assoulin 00:33:40  Call it six months. So you got to pay another person for six months in order to input and open cases with Seller Central or, you know what, have you. Not a problem. Right? Right now you’re paying these people anyways. They’re just more accurate and they’re more efficient and they have time to think about or do other things.

Josh Hadley 00:33:55  Yeah, I love that. Here’s another thought that I had or a video that I watched on TikTok recently was somebody that had said, great, I fired my team member, but then I spent $5,000 a month in tokens to go to that team member and it’s like, okay, well, if you just if you just spent $5,000 in tokens, yes, that role might be automated. But what if that team member only costs you $1,000 to begin with right now? Will AI get cheaper? Certainly, I think it will. And I think that was like a very extreme example. And you’ve got to be pulling some incredible, like connections to be able to burn that many tokens.

Josh Hadley 00:34:28  But like give me your take on that. Like is there a risk reward and like cost benefit right now where it’s like, is there a world where humans are actually cheaper than the AI itself?

Lee Assoulin 00:34:38  Oh for sure. Yes. On certain instances, you know, even take a look at SaaS as a perfect example. Somebody like, oh, like whether it’s seller board or you can take a hectare automating PPC or scaling sites, like somebody was telling me like, well, you know, SaaS is dead. I can build all this myself. Like, sure. I mean, if you’re talking $100 a month. $30 a month or whatever the the subscription fee is. You’re going to instead of spending $1,200 a year, you’re going to sit for how many hours and try to reconfigure what they’ve done. It’s a massive waste of your time. Like, what are you again? What are you doing to leverage yourself and leverage your business? What’s the ROI? Which I don’t think people are stopping to actually meditate on and say, what’s the ROI on my time? What am I doing instead? They heard that their friend created these automation tools without using scale insights or Hector.

Lee Assoulin 00:35:30  It’s like, well, if they can do it, I can do it. It’s like, okay, just because one guy wasted there, you know, weekend doesn’t mean that you should. But again, also, it’s like, I don’t know if you have kids, you have a wife or you you have no wife. I don’t know what you want to do with your time, but those are the things I think that’s where the four kids making a $100 million brand, those guys are just, you know, literally eating Zen and blasting music and just, like, coding until 5 a.m.. Sure. I but I happen to have two kids and I’m just not. I’m not there yet or anymore, Charlie said.

Josh Hadley 00:36:01  Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And I think that is where, you know, that’s my biggest caveat right here to all the listeners. Like there’s been multiple posts, even in MDS right now, right, where people are saying like, hey, I spent 4 or 6 hours trying to figure out, like creating this dashboard to replace scale insights or to replace seller board or something like that.

Josh Hadley 00:36:21  Like, I want one of those sexy dashboards. And I look at that and I say, that’s great. But like the like it might take you ten hours to set up. Then guess what? It’s not going to set up and run perfectly as soon as the API connection changes. Or you’re going to have to debug this on an ongoing basis. And so what is the real ROI? If you’re just trying to get rid of seller board and save yourself 100 bucks a month. Like man that’s a that’s a terrible exchange of value. Number one, I certainly hope you’re worth more than $10 an hour because it took you ten hours just to set up in the first place, let alone the ongoing cost of that. But secondly, I think the importance here is like automate the things that give you leverage to go create more ROI in the business. Because I don’t think a dashboard, a sexy dashboard, unless it’s helping you make a decision that you otherwise would never have been able to make. I think it’s just wasted time because it’s like, yeah, I don’t love the look of seller board.

Josh Hadley 00:37:17  I could add this extra bell or whistle, but like, does that ten x my business? Arguably that would be a no right.

Lee Assoulin 00:37:24  So you know it’s interesting. Dashboards are human need right. And so it’s like we need to visualize and see a dashboard. That’s not what AI needs. There doesn’t need dashboarding. And so to do an analysis. So I think people are are putting the cart way before the horse. And the horse is the only thing that really matters because that’s what’s actually moving everything. So that’s what I was saying before, is it is important to own your data. It is important to start to download that from Amazon into a database, whether it’s SQL or Super Bass, whatever it might be, in order to create the analysis to say, okay, well, sales are down. Why is that? What. Again, the the ABCs of which skew is it, is it a skew and where is it in the lifecycle, those type of things that will allow you to make an informed decision because it’s really discernment is going to be what wins the game, whether you’re going left or going right, whether you’re increasing your ACOs threshold or whether you’re decreasing it in order to save on profitability.

Lee Assoulin 00:38:23  Those are what’s going to make or break your business. That’s that’s what changes you from the other guys. It’s your decision making that. And that goes for everything from copy to creative to all of that. It’s all decision making at the end of the day, because you’re going to just get AI slop and you can decide whether or not you want to accept that or not. Right. So I think what I mentioned earlier is AI is making it less efficient because we are inundated with decisions every single day already. And now you have to discern whether or not the output is even worth validating. You have to revalidate that which is exhausting. So building up that framework of, of of, you know, data I think is is worthwhile. The dashboarding I’d say it’s just a waste for now.

Josh Hadley 00:39:09  Well, said Leigh, as we wrap things up, there’s one other thing that we talked about that I think would be interesting for our listeners to hear, which is how did you turn your team members, 30 plus team members onto AI? And I think you had a very unique approach where you offered it up and said, hey, I’ll pay for it if you’re interested.

Josh Hadley 00:39:27  Why did you do that? Tell tell our listeners. Like, what’s the strategy behind that?

Lee Assoulin 00:39:31  Yeah. So I mentioned earlier, your job as a business owner and as a leader is to lead. And I think the whole world is changing, right? Every it’s kind, again, terrifying, but also exciting that we’re entering this whole new realm of AI and like what the world will look like in year two years where our kids will go to school. It’s all an unknown. Your job is to lead your team with empathy and and care into this new world. In order to do that. They need the tools to. To succeed your job. You’re not their dad. I always make the joke of, like, we’re not family because you can’t fire our family. But but you. But you are a team. And so as a coach, as a leader, you have to give them those tools. And whether or not they jump on those and use those, that’s that’s whether or not they’re, you know, Michael Jordan on the Bulls in 95 and Scottie Pippen.

Lee Assoulin 00:40:20  That’s how hard they work. It’s all about how hard and what they want. So what I did was I got on the call, I told my team, hey listen, the world’s moving towards AI. This is a few months ago. Who wants in? I’m making an AI channel. A couple people joined, and then I got another call. About a month and a half ago. I said, guys, this is crazy. The moment Ops 4.6 came out, I was like, who wants who wants a cloud account? If you want one, message me, I got you. Don’t worry about it. I’ll pay for whatever course you want to take. Take whatever time you want to take again. I want to be the one that enables them. Whether they go and they start another agency. I don’t care what they do. Go do like. My job for them is to give them those tools to be a better person themselves and survive of whatever apocalypse is going to come. And so a few people did take everybody in.

Lee Assoulin 00:41:05  My leadership team did take up take me up on that. And then a few people took me up and the rest haven’t really. And it’s one where as we automate things and as we go into this next phase of, of AI and of my business of stonecutter as an agency, there will be cuts that are made and those people will be replaced by AI. I call them AI native people who think more with AI than not. It’s like, how do I automate? Or how do I use this tool? Then those that don’t. And so it’s going to be very interesting for the people that haven’t taken it. I hate to say they’re going to go the way of the dinosaur, but I do think like it’s white collar jobs are going to go away. They’re going to have to be Well, I think manual labor and more in person is going to be back because people have to do something. And so it’ll be it’ll be an interesting time for sure.

Josh Hadley 00:41:55  Yeah, I love that approach, especially the fact that, like, you’re only paying for those pro accounts or whatever for the people that actually raise their hands and are interested.

Josh Hadley 00:42:02  So that again, two thirds of your team, that’s not even touching it. You’re not just wasting your money either by giving everybody a paid account. So really well. Well spoken there. Now, Lee, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something. In the world of AI that we are moving towards. There is a lot of noise that is out there, but action item number one is, I think like no matter what happens with AI, this is the best practice that you can do today to prepare yourself and to even begin on your journey, your AI journey, and that is documenting your SOPs and getting your house in order, and making sure every single team member on your team actually has an SOP that they are following and that it’s not just like high level, surface level stuff. I would encourage them to go flush it out in even more detail with AI, and take that SOP and then ask AI, like, what questions do you have based on this SOP so that you could go execute this thing and then answer those questions, upload that as a document and say, all right, this is now hopefully ready when we’re ready to go execute or automate this task.

Josh Hadley 00:43:08  So that’s action item number one AI.

Lee Assoulin 00:43:11  I’ll throw I’ll just interrupt. Sorry. Just because I think let’s just replace SOP with skill because I think SOP is it’s again it’s a it’s a process but a skill is like okay, well how is that process done and what tools you need. And what’s a framework of thinking let’s say replenishment. It’s like okay, the SOP is look at X amount of weeks worth of inventory X, Y and Z. That becomes more of a skill. And the main reason to get that house in order. You’re using cloud right now. What you think Google. Google is not right around the bend and going to come out with a bunch of incredible tools. Google is Google’s going to be a massive player whether ChatGPT comes in or comes in. Back into I think they’re falling from grace. But whether you port it from their clawed elsewhere, if you have these documents, you can move your whole system from LM to LM relatively easily. So that’s really the the most important part there as well.

Josh Hadley 00:44:03  Yeah, I love that mindset shift skills instead of SOPs. Well said. All right. Second action item here is make sure that every call happening in your business is being recorded, especially if they’re team related calls. Even if other team members are having an internal meeting and call and I might not be present, I still want that recorded. So that goes into the company brain to understand, hey, there was this whole conversation about inventory and forecasting and planning, and these were the decisions and thoughts and conversations and questions that were being asked in that meeting that goes into the context so that, again, the AI brain just has more to work with and understands our business in even more detail. And then my third and final action item is to do exactly what you said there at the end, which is to enable your team members be an AI first driven leader and enable your team members. Don’t think that you have to go this alone. You do have to lead the charge. You do need to experiment yourself, but enable your team members.

Josh Hadley 00:45:00  Give them the tools, give them paid access. But I love what you did, which is only give it to those that are interested that will actually do something with it, because otherwise it can get real expensive, real fast. And those are the people that you know are raising their hands. They’re probably going to be your future leaders in the business. Those are going to be the people that are managing all the AI’s in the bots and the agents moving forward. So, Lee, those are my three action items. Anything else you would add?

Lee Assoulin 00:45:25  No, I think that that I think you nailed it.

Josh Hadley 00:45:26  Awesome. The final three questions for you. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Lee Assoulin 00:45:32  It is a book called The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. I must have read it seven times. My dad bought it for me. I didn’t read it. And then he bought me. He bought it again and another one just showed up and I was like, okay, I read it.

Lee Assoulin 00:45:46  It changed my life and the way that I think and I think, I gotta tell you, I have personally bought it for I think it’s over 40 people at this point. It’s it’s the most influential book on like how you think and how your brain works with your soul.

Josh Hadley 00:45:59  So interesting. That’s a great recommendation. Haven’t heard that one before.

Lee Assoulin 00:46:02  Great one.

Josh Hadley 00:46:03  Question number two. What is your favorite AI tool and how you’ve been using it?

Lee Assoulin 00:46:07  Yeah, I mean like the obvious one is Claude and Claude. Code as of late is just absolutely mind blowing what it can do. But to go even more simple for anybody not using Whisper Flow, which is a voice dictation tool in order to use cloud code, it’s just like pressing a button in order to just talk. And it’s not one of these like normal voice, and it throws it through an LLM and cleans it up for you. It is a game changer. I typing these days is like, I’m just moving so slow. As you guys can tell, I talk pretty quickly And so I just I will go on a rant for about 40 minutes, especially when we’re talking about building frameworks and giving context.

Lee Assoulin 00:46:45  I will talk to, you know, Claude and say, here’s what the structure is. Here’s a skill that I want to be building. I’ll just talk and allow it to ingest all that. I would say whisper is my number one, Claude is number Claude number one. But whisper is like 1.1.

Josh Hadley 00:47:01  Fantastic. Third and final question here for you, Lea, is who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-comm space that other people should be following and why?

Lee Assoulin 00:47:09  So it’s a very hard question because I love so many different people. I’ve been in the e-commerce space for so long, but here’s a sleeper that I absolutely love and adore. His name is Sean Gill and he’s not very you know, he’s not on Twitter or anything like that, but his brand, triquetra, is a supplement brand that has done incredibly well on TikTok and Amazon and killing it on DTC. The reason why I say that is I know Sean very well, his way of thinking and his putting processes first and framework first, and building in a responsible manner, and scaling and allowing his team to scale with those processes is just the most admirable thing I’ve seen.

Lee Assoulin 00:47:46  There’s nobody I know that a sat and meditated on various like, books, you know, called copywriting Guy will read four different copywriting books and not just like, you know, skim them. He’ll actually think about, okay, well, how do we make our copy better? So if there’s a brand that I would say it’s not the sexiest brand in the world. No offense, Sean, love you. But take a look at triquetra and what they’re doing in this space. It is. It’s remarkable how much they’ve grown on a brand that is hard to pronounce, hard to spell, and certain products that are not the sexiest in the world, but they’ve they’ve scaled to, you know, high eight figures. They’re going to break nine figures soon. Pretty incredible.

Josh Hadley 00:48:22  I know his dad. And again John Gill is also wicked smart as well.

Lee Assoulin 00:48:26  Yeah John Gill is a legend and definitely a character. Sean’s Sean’s an incredible person. If anybody get to know him. Awesome.

Josh Hadley 00:48:32  Fantastic. Yeah, well, if people want to follow you, learn more about you, connect with you, what’s the best way to do so?

Lee Assoulin 00:48:37  Yeah, yeah.

Lee Assoulin 00:48:38  My email is Lee at stonecutter NYC. I am always available to chat with anybody about Amazon or an Amazon only brand agency rather. And so that’s all we do. I think I mentioned this earlier to you. I interviewed Josh getting into MDS, and I did about 100 interviews in the first year or in one year of all MDS members. I just like talking to people, networking, sort of a super power of mind. So always for anybody in your audience to reach out, ask any questions, happy to help in whatever way I can. And then if you want to follow my social media personal, it’s the stone cutter that’s both on Twitter and Instagram.

Josh Hadley 00:49:14  Fantastic. Lee, thanks again for your time today.

Lee Assoulin 00:49:17  Josh. Absolute pleasure man. Thanks so much.

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