Josh Hadley 22:37

yeah, no, I think those are good. Those are good takeaways. And I agree with you there. I think that, you know, people just need to understand where they’re at in their journey, right. And for us, we are finally at the place where we can make, you know, we just put a Pio in for $250,000, we would not have been able to do that a few years ago, right. And so it’s been building up kind of those cash reserves, so to speak, so that we can go play in some of those big market opportunities. But I think that’s the vision that I would hope the listeners have is that they understand this is where you can go, not just continuing to play in the small space that you might be currently playing in, but maybe being willing to venture it out into those bigger spaces. And that’s where, you know, the returns can be greater, but you also have to get more experienced with running the numbers, being good at math and being able to track like your KPIs. And then that’s a whole nother level of like building out a team of people that can help in in building this and achieving that vision. So I think we could go on and on and on with that there. But Simon, what I did want to dive back into is, so you find you found a product or a company that is in a good market, right, that it’s a big market opportunity that you guys see, they are differentiated. What are some of the other key things that that you look at when you get into the more details of a business that make you say like, Oh, yes, like, let’s move forward on acquiring this brand verse. What are some maybe even warning flags, you know, would maybe even be better ones to say like, if you see things like this, start running for the hills, so to speak.

Simon Hammer 24:19

Yeah. So I think there’s kind of like a bunch of questions with one of the first ones is always like, do we believe in this? Like, are we excited about doing this? Right, I think, you know, as an example, we bought a brand, nature’s Hangout. And, you know, it did a lot of what we call like outdoor specialty. So there were some like bird feeders. There’s like hammocks, hammock straps, it’s kind of a little bit all over the place. It wasn’t a cohesive, like, necessarily brand. We kind of lumped it in this thing called outdoor specialty. And, you know, we weren’t as excited at the time about some of the outdoor stuff. So or what I would consider to be Like outdoor stuff, so like the hammocks, hammock straps were more excited about the bird feeders for a number of different reasons. And, you know, one of my partners, you had a bunch of birds growing up was super excited about it, right, like, and I had few bird feeders before we bought the business, you know, and he was like all gung ho about that side of it. And, and so we’re super excited about it built it up, or it’s killing it. And we’re like, Okay, well, you know, maybe we have a, kind of a little segue into this, like animal space, if you will. And granted, this was also at the time were very early on nature’s hangout was actually the first traditional e commerce since that we bought her and it was called Amazon business that we bought. And so this was more back in the day where we were just throwing up products, and people could just throw up products, you didn’t really need to build brands. And, and that was a long gray, like, you could build a really big business just having ad hoc products. And so we’re like, Okay, well eat. And so like, we could actually have this nice little portfolio of products, that we could maybe turn into a brand, or really build out and it just kind of rebrand nature’s hangout into this and specific company, right. And we looked at bat beaters worldly as a whole bunch of different things. We’re doing some test bys. And, and squirrel feeders ended up bubbling to the top for a number of different reasons. And you know, pretty quickly, actually, we were kind of top of the page, we’re doing pretty well. And, you know, for a number of different reasons, but one of the biggest ones is we didn’t 100% believe in squirrel feeders, right. At the end of the day, it wasn’t really a space that we wanted to play in. And, you know, we had our sights on all these other things, right. And this is also I’m gonna double back on kind of focus and priorities and keeping the main things, the main things here. But I think at the end of the day, right, like we saw with squirrel feeders, was that look, there’s like a nice market opportunity, where we kind of like carved ourselves out or, you know, ranking really well. And we didn’t listen to what the customers were saying, at the end of the day, for a number of different reasons. One, we didn’t believe in it, too, is it’s our fault. Like we should have, like, you know, now this is like a critical piece. And, and when we assess things like what did the customer saying about these products, right, and we just bought out, we’re not doing that, which is a shame to because, you know, bad on us, because we came from software space where, you know, I believe product on a number of different businesses that we built out. And my whole job was just to listen to customers, right, and the way we built our product was by listening to those customers. And we just didn’t do that. And we took our eye off the ball overnight, our rating went from 4.3 to 4.2, which meant that on Amazon, the stars went from 4.5 to right, and sales tanked overnight, you know, long story short, we never recovered from it. And recently, we just made this decision to kind of write down the inventory. So basically considered a total of all the inventory, we had just total loss on our books. And so, you know, lesson learned from that pretty quickly, you know, when when we’re looking at businesses, one, it’s got to be something that we’re that we’re excited about, but he’s not excited about it, well, you know, everything goes out the window, but to a guy got a look at the qualitative stuff too, right? Like, we can look at numbers all day, all day. But again, numbers paint, and especially, you know, the day of these brokers and, and you know, so many people selling their businesses and putting together pitch decks and, and I am set with all these numbers that look really good. And we just come off COVID times where, you know, some businesses just exploded, right? What numbers are real versus what is not. And sometimes it’s kind of hard to differentiate. So that’s why you got to layer on the qualitative stuff. And again, we didn’t do that bad on us should have known better. won’t make that mistake again.

Josh Hadley 28:55

What other qualitative stuff? Would you say that people should be considering then?

Simon Hammer 29:00

So aside from, you know, what people are saying about the product, the products themselves, right, I think what people were saying about, you know, this is from a building brand perspective, but what people are saying about the brand, right? Do they have great? Do you have great customer service? Do people like, you know, are people unhappy with their product for XYZ reason, but then there’s a follow up with man’s customer service was amazing. Yeah. And that kind of brand equity counts for a lot. It’s hard to value. But if you have passionate people, and people who are excited about what you’re doing, well, then you can get them from so do a lot of advanced kind of marketing strategies. Or you can use them for a lot of advanced marketing strategies that you want to do. And you have a platform to then go and launch new products, to test products out with to, to do a whole bunch of different things where, you know, you have a target audience immediately at your disposal, and they already liked what you’re doing. It’s actually really hard to even get people to know what you’re doing. And then get them to like what you’re doing. Yeah, so if you even have that right, well, then you’re a few steps ahead. And then you could do a lot of different things. And so I think, you know, really seeing what people were saying about the product with the brands, and truly listening, right. And then I think that’s really big. And we do some stuff, you know, ahead of time, also, we’re well, like, before we actually get into diligence with, you know, or get under loi with a company, where we’ll go out, buy a few products, and like, literally do like some guerrilla marketing stuff, get some people to come in the door, see what they say. And we’ll do a bunch of surveys. So that’s a little bit, I like seeing people read it again, this is going back to software days, like I liked seeing people interact physically with the product, right? Whether it’s software, whether it’s a physical product, like seeing their eyes, seeing where their eyes go, seeing their nonverbal cues, I think is immensely important. Right? When someone says they like it, but their body language is like this. Yeah, it’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s pretty good. Like, you know, that’s a big difference. Yeah, I think all those little things are things that, you know, again, we do, and we try to do on a non scalable way before we can, you know, do a much more scalable way. And so I think the qualitative stuff, seeing what people say, seeing what, how people react, not just about the product, but about the brand. Those are kind of all key measurables that we look at and that that I specifically, you know, again, kind of some of my background, I, I tend to focus on. And if they are great, that’s a huge, that’s not it could be a deciding factor. If it’s a, if it’s a negative thing, it’s certainly a huge, yeah, you know, winch pin factor. So, yeah,

Josh Hadley 31:41

you know, I think that that’s really interesting, Simon, I think you’ve taken this approach that’s actually a little bit different than I think the typical answer is, right, because I’ve listened to a bunch of other people that talk about acquiring businesses, and I’m looking at these specific numbers. And, you know, I’m trying to draw conclusions and you know, kind of look at 2020. And what happened during COVID, and say, Okay, this was an artificial bump. And it’s all very quantitative, right, I’m looking at the numbers, I’m making sense of this financially, I can see that I could shave off 10% of their cost of goods sold, I feel like I could reduce maybe their FBA fee if we repackage the product differently. But what I love is that you just focused on like the consumer experience and the brand in and of itself, right. And as you go through due diligence of a brand, it’s not just due diligence of looking at the financial statements and seeing if you guys would be good partners, or their good business owner, rather, you’re going through and you’re like, purchasing the product, you’re not only looking at the product, but then you’re sending it to other customers, right, or a focus group, so to speak, right? Alright, to get real feedback, and maybe even open up some customer support tickets, and see what it feels like on the receiving end, instead of just taking people’s word for it. And so I think that’s an amazing, like, mindset shift that I just had is like, go the extra mile. Yeah, quantitative stuff. That should be the given. Right. And I think there’s numerous books and talks about what you should be looking at that way. But what I think maybe, you know, and you have a lot more experience of this than I do. Is that something that most people overlook? Is that qualitative stuff of what’s their brand? What are consumers really saying? How does their customer service actually work? And, you know, what are people saying about that?

Simon Hammer 33:34

Yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s one of the most overlooked things and, and we’re guilty of it too, right? Like, you all that all the quantitative stuff that you’re talking about, like looking historical to give and right, we always do that we’ve always done it. And for the longest time, that’s all we did. And, you know, credit, one of our brands, Crespo right now is going through a major shift in that it for such a long time survived on three products. Basically, there’s a whole you know, there’s more skews, but as basically more reasons, but there’s, there’s effectively three ASINs one of those is basically shelf itself now, and part of the reason why is because it actually if you’ll devote me for a second, yeah. So pre COVID and even through the first couple years of COVID and depending on where you want to start and stop it, I guess, or you know, we’re the beginning till now as I guess, but first couple years of it. It was doing incredibly well. Right. It was something like anywhere between 25 and 35% or it accounted for 25 to 35% of our gross margin that gross margin I’m including everything from wind to cost, three PL costs, FBA costs, advertising marketing, returns all that stuff. Just not just not like overhead and software things like that nature but but gross profit, right? And so it was a large part of our business I’m just one product. And you know, during the beginning of COVID, I got my hands on a competitor, one of our biggest direct competitors, their information memorandum, which is basically like their, this deck, like 50 pages of their business, because they’re trying to sell their business. Okay? And through like, like, you know, my partner, Sam, he has just a ton of connections in the entrepreneur space ton of connections with these brokers. And so we get a lot of deals right across a lot of different industries. And so we just happened to get a direct competitors information memorandum, right. So this gave us everything about their business, right? We knew the numbers, we knew. We knew who their suppliers were, right? What their strategy was, what their projections were, you know, you name it, we knew it. And I mean, we were like, we could look on Helium 10, and know that we’re dominant. But then we saw the real numbers, we were, you know, we were dominant player on the market. And then all of a sudden, right, like, during COVID, you start seeing freight costs go up, you start seeing a lot of sellers into the space cocked, the cocktail shaker space is kind of the space that we’re playing in for one of our brands. And this is where the set, you know, was established. And, you know, was this what’s called roof like 30% of the business. It had basically started having rank we’d write the rank started dropping, dropping, we’re doing all these different things, all these different tricks, hacks, things we learned at pdss. Right, five things we, you know, things we things we heard along the way from different ecommerce sellers, like from podcasts like this, just a whole bunch of different things. We tried everything from like traditional white hat strategies to little like toeing the line, like grey hat strategies where, you know, we were firmly in this, like rebate flow game, right for a long time, and they cracked it down as few different variations of that, right. You can think of it, we were doing it to try to turn around this product. And this competitor had stayed true to what they were doing right from the beginning. We knew that, you know, through this information memorandum that basically, we’re producing the same exact quality shakers, US is certain grade stainless steel is the same as ours. The you know, which you stripped down all the marketing speech, it’s effectively the same product. And however, what they did do though, was they got a couple of patents on like the this there’s a stand, they got a patent on it. For the design, they did a couple other things, and they got some patents, but they built out a product line. And they from the beginning, even though they’re they’re getting way less sales, they were marketing their their products for 10 to $20 more than ours and on a main product compared to their main product, right? I think there’s like a $17 difference at the time, right in the beginning. That difference has actually grown by the way because while they were building that brand and like listening to what the customers were wanting, and and understanding that hey, there’s this like, there’s this story that they could paint, we were just focused purely on the product and trying to do all these things to capture more market share from a qualitative basis. We were focused on KPIs we were focused on conversion rates, we were focused on which hero images were going to perform better I mean, these are great things that you should focus on sure things we were not doing right was the painting a story right what is what is our cohesive story for this brand adding on subsequent products that we can then drive by cross sales into this product or what what things can we do from this main hero product because you cross sales and their price you know, now we’re talking about fast for a couple of years Right? So it’s they their price has never wavered even some of their products are now more expensive right the beings price Yeah, like even more weighing into their narrative of this premium quality right like all this other stuff. And we tried to add that on now later re try to raise price a premium do all these kind of little like marketing tricks, and nothing’s really working now. They still don’t actually have as many reviews as us because we there was just such a big difference. But they’ve dramatically closed that gap. Right there. Their star rating has stayed at five stars. I think it’s like 4.8 right ours estate pretty consistently at 4.5. I think it’s like 4.5 and actually showed, you know, four shows 4.5. But again, like we’ve actually had to come down on price a lot. And now there’s this race to the bottom in the space where you know, if it wasn’t for the fact that we were so diversified, and we had this coffee where side we had a couple other brands. We’re playing in a couple of different markets where we’ve actually grown a lot. We would like it as a shelf itself this product and we would be really hurting if it wasn’t for that, and I say that because this whole, this is a story of us not listening to, again, going back, you know, this world is another one, but going back to this whole asset of, and I call it an asset, because it really is of its qualitative information that you can get from your customers, right? And what is it that they’re saying not just about the product, but about the brand, what they were saying about this brand all along, which we just completely weren’t looking at, because we were so focused on our KPIs, and testing and iterating. Again, not saying those bad, you shouldn’t be doing those things, you should be doing a lot of that. But the I think the qualitative stuff is something that we’ve now find ourselves having to readopt, right, from an E commerce perspective, and really make it a big focus for us when we look at it. Because with that, you can do a lot of things. And it’s become, you know, I think, in terms of a trend, right, a, a, an actual industry trends become a much bigger thing, if you don’t, if you’re not building brands, if you’re not focused on the qualitative side of things, then, you know, you’re, you’re just selling product. And eventually, you’re it’s going to happen, like what happened with us with the cocktail shaker, where you have a business that is effectively suffering and competing on price, and we’re going to lose on price all day long, or a competitor now, is, they’re not competing on price. They’re competing on brand. And so I think that’s, you know, this whole aspect of adding in when you’re looking at, when you’re looking at what product you want to sell, even if you’re watching a new product, right? Like you can get samples from suppliers, where you can see put, you can put the current leader and your sample in someone else’s hand and be like, hey, you know, what do you think about this? Right? We do that now. Right? And I think the amount that you learn, it’s a much harder to kind of like, reconstruct and paint a specific picture like you can with numbers. And so those two things in this day and age. And again, I don’t think this is just applicable to ecommerce, right? I think it’s applicable everywhere across the board. And business is just a critical piece.

Josh Hadley 42:06

Yeah, no, I love that story that you shared there. And I think it’s so important. And it jogging a few ideas in my own mind of like things that we should be focused on in our own brand. Because this entire year, we’ve been so focused on like driving KPIs, establishing a scorecard for the business, where are we at quantitatively all the time. But what we’re not doing a great job of is kind of like what you talked about is like, we do have, like our customer service monthly report. But like, we’re not building that into like, we’re not tweaking our copy or anything like that, based off of what we’re learning. So if you could go back in time, Simon, like, what was it that the customers were saying that you should have done? If you could go back in time? Like, what would you have done? What were people saying? And how could you have changed the narrative?

Simon Hammer 42:55

Yeah, so Well, one thing, people were really liking a different, like shine on the cocktail shaker. And this is not like, not like, we were getting bad reviews, but hidden in good reviews, or, and not just our views. Like we also look at that. I mean, especially now we look at reviews, our competitors, but hidden in a lot of the good reviews, was this concept of like just a different shine on the shaker, right, like ours is not that it’s not shiny, but I would consider maybe a little bit more matte than polish and the look that people like right now. It’s just polished. Yeah. And that’s like a very easy changes, we will heighth wire, like, let me just change it from this low to a little bit more shiny. They can do that very easily. That’s why I know now they could do it very easily. But it’s just not something that we’re like, No, we’re doing so well. From conversion rate, how can we go from 20% to 22%, right, like that’s a huge like that 20 to that 2% increase in conversion rate is X amount of increase in revenue, right, like, great. So that that actually was a really big one. The second thing is, people were really liking the aesthetic of their stand. And we had some stands, but we didn’t, you know, when when we ran some tests, it was never the first thing that people pointed to when we did stuff online. We’ve gone back and we tried to do different things with this product now. But the interesting thing is, when we did stuff in person, people would pick up the stand, and they would play with the stand a lot longer and their eyes were drawn to this stand. And so while you know we ran, you know a whole bunch of papers and we’ve been running pig foods forever, right? We used to do was on dem products. We’ve run five second tests on a whole bunch of different products way back in the day, like landing pages, home pages, different things, or different businesses. So these are things that we brought into E commerce when we did that people weren’t saying that, right? People would say like, Oh, I like The shininess, or Oh, like, this just looks more premium. And so we were focused very much on, like the cocktail shaker and the tools and those things. Because people did like the concept of a stand never came up that much. However, when we got people in person, you could see their eyes like really drawn to the stand. Right? And no matter if it’s the thing was together, we laid out all the tools and standards on the side, people never we inevitably came back to the same but no one verbally talked about it. Right. And so I think, you know, going back in time, we would do a lot of these things that we’re talking about now, right, getting people in front of you, right, doing much more customer, we call customer development, and really finding that like, right product market fit. But to do that is we just, we didn’t and it shows. I think the last thing is being go back, you know, from a like, and this is this is maybe like falls back into a more quantitative a bit. But I think it’s kind of a nice, you know, how this is actually, you know, they’re not two different things, right, I think it should be working as you’re using both in harmony with each other, and one should feed the other, which should feed the other. And you have this like really nice positive flywheel, ideally positive flywheel. But from a from a like iteration perspective, I think it’s important that you know, when you’re doing testing, and I wish we would have had done this, from the very beginning, is when we do some of the PickFu testing, it’s very easy to just stand back and look at, okay, like this one, this image one, let’s throw up this image, right? Nope. And then, you know, go on to the next test and say, Oh, this one, one, let’s do this one, or, you know, you throw up some bullets, and you go, wow, like, right over this period of time is dramatically better than that. When you do some of that, that testing. There’s a whole qualitative component, like even on pick the right like, the bottom is all the written responses. Yep. But there’s, there’s all this interesting feedback. And if you go through and understand why this one, one, well, then it may be winning for reasons that you didn’t expect. And that’s kind of what was happening for us, right? We consistently with Tessa, like hero image and in ours would win. But yet, you know, our click through rate never really got, I mean, it got better, but it never really like got that much better. And ultimately, they improved upon us because there was this underlying, you know, qualitative component to it, where people were starting to say, or through, like, you know, kind of have to parse through that they actually liked the shiny bit more, or they liked certain tools, or they really liked the stand, but that we thought that, you know, oh, like we add some flair, like we make a nod to us compliant hero image. And, you know, we’ll have it up for as long as Amazon lets us and that wins. PickFu. So it’s going to win here. But those weren’t the reasons why it was winning. Right. And, and over time, we started to not win anymore, because those things that people were saying underneath it, you know, ultimately won out.

Josh Hadley 47:59

Yeah, those are those are great takeaways. And Simon, I know we talked about this prior to the interview, but you had a great kind of takeaway from billion dollar seller Summit. Right. And he’s just kind of like getting back to the basics. Is this the brand that you’re kind of referring to? or is that kind of a separate story in and of itself? Yeah, same

Simon Hammer 48:19

brand, same brand. So the beginning of this year was a little bit painful for us for a number of different reasons. You know, I think a lot of E commerce sellers are going through that just industry trends were tough, right? Like rapes going crazy. We’re still reeling from that in number of other reasons. But so basically, for a few months prior to BTSs, we had a hero product on the coffee war side of this brand. And so we talked about, you know, there’s three, historically speaking, there were three products that make up you know, let’s call like 75% of this brands profit. And so one was the shaker that we’re talking to shaker stuff that we’re talking about. And then another one was this coffee, where airpot. So you know, if you ever go into like a hotel conference room, at this thing that holds like three litres of coffee is pointed out, so we sell those and what we started seeing what’s called from the spring was we started seeing rank weed, not sure why. So you know, what used to be a best seller, all of a sudden now no longer has best seller badge. Now it’s the middle of the page that was kind of teetering off falling off the first page even for like a few days fell off the first page and we were doing a lot of different things by falling again, like trying a whole bunch of different hacks, trying, you know, a whole bunch of different what’s called intermediate to advanced level stuff. Yeah. And things kind of worked for a little bit. We even were doing a bunch of external ads and that was that was working for for us little bit, the amount it was working was just a little bit, right. Like we were doing it for a while. And we’re like, oh, man, what is going on? We’ve tried what we felt was like everything under the sun went to the conference. And the conference was a really nice kind of reset. For me, it was really nice. Okay, you know, one of the speakers Anthony, from Data Dive, I thought he did a phenomenal job. And, and my biggest takeaway from what he was talking about was like, Hey, let’s get back to basics, right? Let’s get back to the things that, you know, if you can master the fundamentals, well, then you can start to build again. And so it was a question of, you know, what, we are simply not executing well enough. And, you know, it doesn’t matter what kind of product you have, doesn’t matter how good your star rating is, or the reviews you have, if you don’t execute, right. And same thing in anything, right? Sports, whatever, if you don’t execute, if you don’t execute well, well, you’re gonna have suboptimal results. And I felt like that’s what was happening. We simply, were not doing the basics well enough. And so came back, told the team, okay, we’re going to execute better, right, like, we’re going to get back to square one, we’re going to get back to listing opposition, we’re going to get back to looking at what people are saying, Where, where can we improve our product, we are going to improve our images, but use it but use these tools that we’ve kind of fallen away from right and and because we used to be a best seller badge, we kind of stopped touching it because this concept like oh, well, it’s we don’t want to touch it. Right? Yeah. Don’t want to touch it, right? Yep. Terrible idea. By the way, right? Lesson learned, right? Terrible idea. Like, it doesn’t matter. If you have the best seller badge you don’t like you should be iterating on your product, you should be listening to your customers, you should be you know, that you should be picked for doing right? You should like if you have 25% conversion rate, if you have 30% conversion rate, you can always get better conversion rate use, like if you still have the same amount of traffic, but you have better conversion rate, you have more sales, right? It’s that simple, right? You can, your job should always be trying to get better conversion rate, right. And you do that by you know, listen to your customers, like consistently pick the link, seeing what people have to say why people liked certain things better than others and incorporating that into the next round of iteration. I think Anthony again, did a great job of really highlighting that. And he had his own ways of doing it, which I loved. But anyway, so are our airpot get lost a ton of rank came back. And one of the first things we noticed was like, Oh, my God, some keywords have changed, the the search volume has changed. And Amazon is doing different things in terms of waiting, where the placement of certain keywords, and how much emphasis they placed on that. It seemed like a change. And so we all we did, once we took a keyword that was not in our title, we added it in the title. And it brought it from the bottom of first page, basically up to the top four results on that page for that main keyword. Right, really. And so the story doesn’t end there. There’s there was it was a parent asin right, there’s two, two child variations. Similar like, you know what, Okay, we’re back. Right, let’s break apart this so that we can capture more market share on the page. Yep. broke it apart. The hero fell back again. Almost like within a few days, it was crazy, right? Drop was precipitous. What what what just happened? Interest again, did the same thing got back to the bases, we’re looking at the was looking at the listing. Notice that in the bullets, you know, comparatively, right, we’re just looking at our competitors, but also comparatively, the two child nations ASINs we’re looking at the placement of certain keywords on our key keywords in the bullets and also in the search terms. We played around with that used helped by from Data Dive to do a lot of this stuff. So shout out to those guys to their product. I think it’s phenomenal. Yeah, and and then shortly after that break, start improving, improving, improving. And last I checked, I think within the last week, we had the best seller badge, we start playing around some price. I heard we just possible we’re gonna drop price a little bit. And maybe I think we got a little greedy. But I think you know, we’re gonna get it back again here. But long story short in two months, right since the end of the conference, until you know, two months later, you know, now it’s a little bit more than two months. It went from x in terms of profit, we doubled that. And this was already a like a five figure gross profit product. Amazing. And we doubled that just by these few tax changes. And so right like, I think we talked about some advanced strategies, going from seven to eight figures. This alone kind of did that for us this product, and this one change. So I think you’re never too big to get away from the basics right? Like and I think sometimes just going back to what they are is important. You know Amazon’s changing all the time and buying is changing all the time. So now we’re we’re doing a couple of different things surrounding those things and surrounding our variations because I think we talked about brand building and what people are liking and looking for and satisfying what people are saying. But yeah, that that route change right there, I think was kind of brand changing actually. So

Josh Hadley 55:20

fascinating. You know, I think this is probably a good note to kind of start wrapping things up on here. So when you refer to like, just getting back to the basics, and you’ve been able to make some big shifts, and double some sales on a super high, high volume product, what are those basics? Can you lay out those basics in kind of order of importance that you are now focusing on with your other brands? You have you have established brands? You’re doing? Well, what you’re saying is like, it’s not some ninja hack, or Blackhat tactic that I’m doing that’s driving all these crazy results, you’re like, hey, we haven’t touched our title in X number of years. And we made one change, and we shot from the bottom of page one to the top. So can you articulate to us? What are those basic things that people should be focused on? That many of us have probably neglected? If you have a product that you haven’t touched? In a few years?

Simon Hammer 56:15

Yeah. So I would say the, the the top things, and I think there’s some debate on on, you know, which order you can do them, I think he kind of somewhat do them simultaneously. But I think your images, right, and then your title and bullets, title, then bullets are the most viewed as, let’s say, the image carousel radar, or hands down the most important, and then and then you get into like April’s content, and then description from there, you know, brand story. And then like back end keywords, I think they’re kind of being phased out in some cases, but for us data actually made a big impact still. So it’s not being phased out everywhere yet. Right? Or if it is being phased out, it’s kind of rolling. So you know, some some places still works. But I think that’s kind of the order that I would take things because it seems like that’s the order that Amazon is also taking them. So this is all under a bucket of what I call, you know, just basic listing optimization, right, which, at the end of the day, conversion rate optimization, at the end of the day, what you’re talking about right now going back to kind of like market, and what is your true thing, right? If you’re not going to increase the search volume, right, search volume is the same. And, you know, let’s say you’re gonna get roughly the same amount of clicks onto your page, but you have, you know, 10% conversion rate, and that’s a 2x amount of sales, the only way to increase this number of sales there, because if you’re not gonna have more clicks, right, you have to increase the conversion on your page. And so I think that’s where everything starts, right. And if you if you can nail that, well, then you could do a lot of other things, right? Because then you know, people are going to convert at a decent level. So you’re going to be paying a lot of money, potentially, but at least you’re going to get some of that conversion back. And so I think everything starts there. And that’s why back to basics, least admin, we grew up, we talked about, alright, let’s, let’s focus on the listing optimization, let’s focus on the copy of the keyword research, you know, and with a few elements that really matter.

Josh Hadley 58:12

Yeah. And with the images you listed those was like, number one. And are there any quick tips that you would share about images that you would say that based on your tests, have proven to be successful that like some quick takeaways?

Simon Hammer 58:25

Yeah, so I think PickFu is really good, right? PickFu style, there’s a whole bunch of different services out there that do that. But I think a lot of people forget about the qualitative stuff, right? Understand why certain ones are winning, not just see the numbers, right. Number two, is five second test, you know, Anthony was did a great job touting this was was a good reminder for us that we got to do more of it. But making sure that people just flat out understand what they are looking at. I think it’s kind of like a very basic thing. But, you know, I think sometimes we we forget that when we’re looking at something all the time that someone who’s looking at something for five seconds, may not see it the same way. And I don’t care how complex your product is, there is going to be a way that you can portray that in a manner in which someone who’s quickly going through it can understand it is just not you just need to do the work to find it. Maybe harder may take more time, right if you have a more complex product, but you can do it right. And I think understanding you get a lot of garbage responses on some of these things. But there’s a lot of good ones too. And it’s just about, you know, running it enough to to kind of tease out some of those and to paint a nice mosaic about what’s actually happening with your images, right, what people are understanding what are the takeaways that they’re getting from? What it is that you’ve created.

Josh Hadley 59:43

I love it. I mean, those are some great takeaways, and thanks for sharing your experience with us, Simon. As we wrap learning. As we wrap things up here, I’ve got my three final questions that I will ask you. But before we get into that, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways. From each episode, so here are the three takeaways that I noticed Simon, let me know if you think I’m missing something. So number one, I’m going back to my notes here. So as we go back three takeaways that people can implement, is identifying the market opportunity for your products. Are you playing in a big market? Or are you playing in a small market, and you used a good reference where, you know, the amount of effort and time that it takes to create the listing images, the title, the copy, and all of that for a product that is in a small market is actually the same amount of time that it’s going to take to launch a product in a bigger market? Now, with capital being aside, right? Those, as you look at your return on investment, you need to start seeing like, if I launch this product, what products Am I saying no to? Or if I’m acquiring this brand, what other brands? Am I saying no to? And I think you can use that kind of like big versus small market opportunity. it no matter what business you’re in, whether you’re looking at products, acquiring businesses, or you’re looking at new opportunities for yourself. So that’s TAKEAWAY NUMBER ONE is identifying that. Number two, is actually listening to your customers. And so we talked so much about the KPIs understanding conversion rate, click through rate, impressions, all of that stuff is good. But at the end of the day, get back to the basics of like, do you understand what your customers are saying? When was the last time that you actually looked and fielded some customer service emails, we just had our VP of Operations for our business, cover customer service for three days. And although, you know, you could you could say, hey, like this guy’s pay grade is much higher than, you know, doing regular customer service, cut and paste, you know, remarks, he now understands our brand, some of the pain points that customers are having better than he did before. And so I do at least once a year, I cover customer service, so does my wife. So we can get a little flavor of like, Wait, what are people actually saying. So that’s, that’s a quick takeaway. And then last final takeaway is get back to the basics, and keep testing, keep iterating. Because that conversion rates one of the most important things, whether you’re selling on Shopify or on Amazon, don’t just set it and forget it. Again, there’s a lot of the gurus that preached Oh, Amazon make all this passive income, like, that’s not what ecommerce is about, it is not passive income, you have to be regularly testing, or like you kind of shared in your story there smelled like somebody else is gonna start to chip away at that market share. And you’re gonna look back a couple years later and be like, Oh, crap, where did it all go? We’ve seen that happen in our own business as well. And so this is me talking to myself at the exact same time. So those are, I think, three real actionable takeaways that everybody can apply to their business. Simon is there anything else that comes to your mind that we didn’t cover?

Simon Hammer 1:03:10

I think, I think you got it all. I could see that you must have done really well in school. You’ve you. You’ve listened intently the entire time.

Josh Hadley 1:03:19

Well, thank you, I’ve been jotting down notes because you’re sharing a lot of great value. Simon, as we wrap things up here, what has been your most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Simon Hammer 1:03:31

So I think I’m gonna go a little bit off the map on this one, I think most of the time, probably people come on these type of podcasts and stuff related to e commerce or business in general, are a ton of those are because people use that often, I’m gonna go with something a little different. The book is called The Power of Dreams While We Sleep and Why It Matters. It’s by Matthew Walker. The analogy that I like to give is, effectively, look, if you’re not optimizing your sleep, it’s kind of like you’re stepping over dollar bills to pick up nickels. Hmm. Right? Like, everything stems from getting the requisite amount of sleep. And I think people take it for granted. I think we live in a society in the US here, where, right, it’s like, kind of like, you know, working 80 hour, 90 hour 100 hour weeks getting almost no sleep. Like is often promoted. But I think if you took a step back, and you could experiment on yourself, and you know, I got this Ōura Ring to prove it and you know, productivity, you know, accomplishments approve it, where if you took a step back, you got a requisite amount of sleep for you. The amount of clarity that you have when you’re working and the amount of creativity that you can add to that clarity is incredible. And so I think there’s almost nothing more important than sleep. And this book kind of dives into the importance of it. And to be perfectly frank, I was scared. It’s Hear the crap out of me because of the negative ramifications of not getting enough sleep? Which country’s banking world? I live?

Josh Hadley 1:05:08

Yeah, sure. So, yeah, that’s, that’s great feedback, that’s what I’m gonna have to check out. And I would probably that’s probably going to lead into the next thing, what’s your favorite productivity tool or resource.

Simon Hammer 1:05:21

So I got two for you one is this Ōura Ring lately. Also, as a quick call back to we talked about customer support, right like, these guys have a phenomenal product, I can’t even tell you how great this product is and how much it’s impacted not only, you know my life on a day to day basis, but also some of my close friends and family. Because like, I have not stopped talking about like, how great or is how important sleep is and how they should iterate on it. And like, you know, read this book and all this stuff. But their customer support is so bad. And you can go on Facebook, and you can see it’s illiterate, included with quoting posts from me littered with responses on their posts with people who are irate with their customer support. Basically, they have this problem where they grew really, really fast. And they claim that they didn’t get the customers, they didn’t have enough help. And they couldn’t hire people fast enough to handle all the customer support. Interesting. So take that for what it is. But it’s made me right, like, less thrilled about the brand, like not wanting to upgrade, like I this was like the third ring I have. And I like upgraded a couple times, I almost don’t want to and I still love the product itself. But I almost because I don’t like the brand anymore. Because of this terrible customer support experience. I almost don’t want to level up, right, I don’t want to get the next product that they come out with or the next version interesting, even though I’m not like a lifetime user of this thing. Because of their customer support. And so so that’s one and equipment for the second one, I think from a productivity standpoint, I really like Workflowy it’s really light, easy to use. It’s kind of like a bullet system where or Google Docs is some but then you can like zoom into or zoom out of bullets. And so it’s like a single doc that you can have access to on your phone or your laptop or wherever read this both a mobile app and a desktop app. And and you can just set up you know, your few main bullets and then zoom into each one and continuously zoom in, zoom out what have you. But it’s, it’s effectively kind of starts out on one dock. So it’s a nice little like white thing where I do a lot of my planning, I do personal stop. I have some work stuff. And it’s really easy, and lightweight. And I think for me, simple tools always end up being the best because then they’re easy to use. They’re quick to use, you can have access to them anywhere. And it’s kind of, you know, not a lot of bells and whistles. It’s kind of a big thing for me kind of Yeah. decluttering.

Josh Hadley 1:07:56

So work flow. Lee, correct. Workflowy. Workflowy. All right, yep. Workflowy. All right. Very good. I’ll check that one out, too. All right, last question, who’s somebody that you admire the most or respect the most in the E commerce space that other people should be paying attention to?

Simon Hammer 1:08:14

Yeah. So I actually really, so I don’t know him that well, like we met him, I met him, you know, that chance to talk to him a couple times at BDSS. But I think Kevin King is, I’m really impressed with his ability to grapple with some of the new things out there. And I really like the new thing that he’s working on, where he’s basically, he’s promoting something that’s kind of near and dear to my heart, kind of this eco friendly nature, it’s got this new kind of plastic technology that kind of disintegrates in water, which I think is mind blowing to me. But he’s incorporating a lot of things that is going beyond just traditional ecommerce selling. And that’s really incorporating a lot of stuff that you know, from our roots that I think is really cool. Or from my roots, right at family group is really cool, where he’s incorporating a lot of new technologies into selling product, and he’s selling product that is meaningful to the world, right, it’s meaningful to people is making is trying to make a difference. And I think, you know, that’s kind of everything that we’re talking about here. Right? Like, you know, you look at big market opportunity. You look at listening to what people are saying, right? Where’s this like a wave of people what they’re looking forward and you know, people want to make a difference in what’s happening. And in the environment, right. And he’s kind of bringing it back to the basics and selling but he’s taking all these advanced technologies, and he’s bringing it back to doing that. And I think that’s pretty

Josh Hadley 1:09:47

cool. So yeah, yeah, I’m a follower of Kevin King and the billion dollar seller summit that he put together. That’s where you and I met. We’ve had Kevin Kingaroy podcast before so go back. It’s one of our first few episodes for people to go back and he dropped a lot of great knowledge there, Simon, this has been a pleasure. Where can people reach out to you if they have more questions want to follow you and get in touch with you? Yeah, so

Simon Hammer 1:10:11

you can find me on LinkedIn. Simon Hammer and spelt like Simon have to say that because I always get some, some people who say, Hey, I can’t find you and like he. Or, and, you know, in this day and age, it’s kind of a shocker, but I tend not, I guess I have, I’m on social media, but don’t find me there because I’m never I don’t go on and try to make it a point not to go on. Or you can email me at Simon@VimblyGroup.com. And, you know, I’ll usually get back to you pretty quickly.

Josh Hadley 1:10:40

awesome. Well, Simon, thank you so much for your time. Hopefully, we’ll follow up in some future episodes and see how things have been going for it for you later down the line. But thanks for your time today.

Simon Hammer 1:10:52

Yeah, awesome, Josh. Thanks. That’s a lot of fun.

Outro 1:10:55

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