 It's not beginner friendly anymore, per se. I wouldn't say that drop shipping is not feasible. It's more like you as a business owner, you need to be a better entrepreneur and it's either you provide more value to your customers so you sell more expensive stuff and charge them more so you can basically cover the cost, right? Or you can diversify the traffic source away from Facebook as well. So in terms of biggest industry change, per se, I would say that is the biggest one. Jonathan Ng, you're looking good. You're sounding good. It is good to have you back on Ikemonics. How are you doing this fine evening? All right, I'm doing fine. Thank you, Joseph, for inviting me back. Happy to have you back, really. I mean, not that there's any exclusivatory behavior going on. Happy to have everybody back, but it especially means lots to know that people were happy enough with their first time here that they want to come back and want to share some more of that knowledge. So it's great to see you again. And also, I guess the last time we recorded too, I think that was just when we were doing audio only, but we had all this technical stuff going around in the background. And so taking it upon ourselves to up our game, the connection's good, everything's smooth. And yeah, let's just jump into this. So as always, I like to count how long it's been since the last time that I had my guest on. And it has been six months, give or take. Mass not my strong suit. So, and I wasn't gonna start with a great question about that window of time. And I also want my audience to just keep in mind at no point do I want to use my guest time just to recover the territory that I've recovered last time. So I always encourage people to check out the previous episode. It just all caught up, pausing so you have a chance to do that. Okay, great, welcome back. So in the last six months, on the top of your mind, what would you say has been some of the largest changes or some of the most significant differences, whether it's something that you've identified specifically with your business or even in e-commerce at a larger scale? I think you talked to other people on the podcast as well, right? And then everyone says, a lot of them mentioned iOS 14 and stuff. I think that's a big issue. So I'll be honest with you, some of my clients are affected. Yes, and then it's very scary because if your business entirely runs on paid advertising and then you just wake up and 20, 30% of revenue is just gone and you just don't know what to do about it, right? And because especially if you're selling physical product where there's risk involved, right? And especially if the cogs is very expensive, right? It's very expensive to ship out to the customer. There's no refunds, stuff like that, right? Then your margins become thin. So I think that's the first thing that came to industry and kind of affected everybody. But after a while, you start realizing what works and what doesn't work, right? So I think the emphasis more on understanding that you have a front-end offer that you can liquidate on your ad spend and then on the back end, you know what to monetize. I think those companies will still thrive a lot. And also talking to like very, very big-time guys, right? And what they're telling me is like, okay, we are willing to go 0.5x, 0.6x row as on the front end and basically just burn cash and then just willing to play the LTV back end game. So I think in terms of the industry is getting more, it's not beginner-friendly anymore per se, okay? I wouldn't say that dropshipping is not feasible. It's just more like you as a business owner, you need to be a better entrepreneur and it's either you provide more value to your customer so you sell more expensive stuff and charge them more so you can basically cover the costs, right? Or you can diversify the traffic source away from Facebook as well. So in terms of biggest industry change per se, I would say that is the biggest one. Yeah, and I'm already seeing rumblings of like an iOS 15 update as well. I don't know, I just picked up on that and here or there. It seems to me that this one was a significant change just because it was a whole reconfiguration. It's always almost like gerrymandering but in regards to traffic and how people are using their devices. So I actually wanted to fix it on this for a little bit because I think this is fascinating. So in your position, at what point are you starting to hear from your clients? Is it pre-implementation and people are worried and they're trying to get ready for it? Is it, are you hearing from them? Like you said, they wake up and all of a sudden the revenue has dropped. So what I'm keen to discover about that is really the relationship between how much of that revenue is coming in based off the ads that are currently active versus how much of that revenue is coming in from as you would also describe the LTV and how much activity that their website should already have based off the traffic that they've acquired to that point. Okay, so in terms of like preparation, like I don't think anybody expected it to be so severe but for me, for example, it's like I saw revenue drop. Okay, like this is reality now, right? Like you can't go back to pre-iOS 14 days. So when I basically opted out of tracking just to see it for myself, like see how bad it was, right? I basically, I'm in a marketing niche. So every single day I like receive guru ads and like causes stuff like that. And then after I opted out, basically I started receiving furniture ads. So I was thinking to myself, okay, now this is a situation. How do we actually ensure that like we still can target the correct customer, right? So what I found or like after dealing with it and going through the trenches per se is that the first hook is very, very important, right? So the first five seconds, if you are calling out the correct target audience, usually Facebook can still find the appropriate customer after that. Yeah, but if you're unable to do so, right? Then it seems like Facebook, you will not even get a conversion. So absolutely from the get go, like your ad will flop. Okay, so in terms of preparation and dealing with it, it's just more like, okay, if we are extremely dependent on pay advertising, then we diversify away. And then the creatives, right? You just need to be really, really on point in terms of the marketing side, right? You just need to call out the correct target audience and ensure that, okay, this mail 20 to 45 loves luxury, you know what I mean? And so that the image or whatever hook you're using at the start needs to call out that specific characteristic or trade, if that makes sense. And so the follow-up to that too, was now more just about the relationship between how much the daily revenue is based off the ads. So let's just say, for instance, a business is running for five years and they've been running ads for those five years. And a lot of traffic has funneled into their website where they're now part of re-marketing. So what I'm keen to hear about is why the losses are so heavy when the advertising changes, wouldn't there be enough of a, I mean, I guess this does been a haul and the business has been around for it, but wouldn't there be enough of activity just with their current customer base to keep the losses from being so significant? Yeah, so I won't say surprisingly, but the client that was most affected, for me, for example, they are back and they fundamentally didn't take care of the customer. So once the customer came in, then they kind of treated it badly. And then you just move on to the next one to acquire the new customer. Whereas I have another guy, he's like selling wholesale physical products, stuff like that. So he has a reputation in the industry. So his LTV is very high. And even with iOS 14, he's actually doing better than ever because he's more waiting to spend and then other people in the space who are not established, they can't acquire the customer fast, but then he has the reputation already. So I would say the ones where extremely dependent on pay advertising, then on the backend, you don't actually provide enough value for the customer to come back to you. You get just absolutely destroyed. So I mean, it's like fundamentals of business, right? If you don't take care of the customer, the customer won't stay either ways. And I think what this speaks to in a broader scope is to continue to get the industry away from the gold rush mentality where someone is just trying to set up a website, drop ship or product real quick and then not provide any follow-up, not really be a meaningful brand and not be a meaningful contributor to culture and not have any significance in that way. So I see an event like this as a calling of who means it and who doesn't. And, but it's hard for me to comment on how that might affect say somebody who's dealing in six figure range, seven figure range and so I won't. But one way that I think would be a great way to summarize this and I'd like to get your take on this too is, so let's say for instance, we have somebody now who's actually, so there's gonna be two questions here but I'll do the first one. So the first one will be for somebody who's entering now, as you say, it's less beginner friendly. So what would be some of the key differences between somebody who's starting out post this apocalypse versus pre-apocalypse? Okay, so in terms of what you actually need to do to survive if you are starting right now is that you need to ensure the product quality is like A1 from day one, right? It's okay to drop ship first, but you better get enough pixel data for the purchase to come in so that you know on cold traffic for example at converts. Then once you understand, okay, this thing is going to definitely sell, right? You better make sure the product quality comes in and the customer is very, very happy with their product quality, right? If you are unable to deliver that promise, right? I don't see your brand like living long per se. Yeah, so I would say in terms of, it's not even like a marketing issue, it's more like a fulfillment product quality issue, which a lot of the times it's not even your fault because it's the manufacturer. So I think before selling, you should do more due diligence if that makes sense. Yeah, I agree with that. One thing we're going to do by the way to my audience is we're going to actually take a look at my website just to get a crash course on that. And that's a position that I'm in right now too is I have the product and I'm testing it as if I were a customer and how this thing actually works. And the longer I do that, the more peace of mind that I have, like, okay, well, this thing didn't fall apart after a month. It's been three months, it still hasn't fallen apart. So I take some comfort in that. And I don't know if everyone is going to have that kind of patience though. I think a lot of people are still going to just try to see, hey, if this thing works, it's because I didn't get as many complaints as if it doesn't work and I get a significant amount of complaints and then I just close the shop and move on. But that's all right. So the other follow up question that I had and then I move on to my next points here is in the chronology of your work here, have you seen other events that had an impact comparable to the impact of this iOS 14 update? So pre iOS 14, I mean, there was high competition already but like in every competitive market, like you're going to have the big docs and the small docs anyway. So in terms of like marketing wise, not really because as long as you make better ads and make better offers than other people, you generally can win the market. And then the same principle goes of applying for LTV, like if you can spend more to acquire the customer, then you will win. So I wouldn't say there's anything specific or anything major, but in terms of fulfillment or like the backend stuff, I think the supply chain logistics have matured a lot already. So like more people have access than ever to good fulfillment and logistics. However, product quality is still an issue. Yeah, I mean, even from my point of view, there's really only so many ways that we can test product quality, which is acquire it, use it, see for yourself. And then, and it's not even just peace of mind too, it's also being able to write more descriptive copy, I think too, being able to feel it more intuitively, test out more of its features and then understand, I can understand the benefits better because I'm using it and it's giving me a chance to actually think creatively, which I don't think comes up so much when you're just looking at an image. So the next question that I had in this, it does tie a lot into what we've been talking about so far, but one of the threads that we established and we talked about in the previous episode is dropshipping is a rather problematic business model. Some of the things I remember, I recall you were saying is that if Facebook shuts down the advertising for it, it's not just having to reconfigure the strategy, it's also just the whole thing is not done in the water. And now that it's gotten even more difficult. So has your position on dropshipping changed as a result? Are you seeing that it's still probably the best viable way to get started or has other ways to get started emerged that might actually compete with dropshipping? Yeah, so I mean, since we talked last time, I learned from clients and also people like, I know personally, for example, like they dropshipped directly from the US. So you're taking the dropshipping, the best of dropshipping model and then the 3PL or the manufacturer is directly from the US and then they have just massive white label factories anyway. So you just take, for example, supplements, protein powder, amino acid stuff like that, you just brand it and then you're dropshipping directly from the US. So shipping times, you are taking infrastructure of US companies three to five days plus product quality is like, not bad, you know, and then you can start from there already, right? So I would say dropshipping is not dead, it's just more like dropshipping from China 10 to 14 days is just increasingly difficult. So if there are easier ways to do things, why not do easier ways? My suggestion, yeah. Right, yeah. One of the things is for one, even 14 days, I find that surprising. Like some of the stuff that I've ordered off Aliexpress took me 30 days. So if I get it in 14 days, I'm like, wow, this is actually impressive. I think one of the limiting factors that I would find in dropshipping from US versus dropshipping from China is product variety or product selection. Have you found that for the most part, if I'm looking for something on Aliexpress or another Chinese dropshipping sources, it shouldn't be too hard to find something comparable in the US or is the US still dealing with more of a limited supplier product? And also I suppose, are they just basically shipping it from China and then holding it so in that way as soon as it's ready to ship, they'll just send it anyways? I would say, yeah, definitely maybe US, certain products are difficult to find. But then if you do it from China as well, the problem most of the time is just cash flow, not enough cash flow to buy inventory for the next one. So then you've got a kind of chicken egg problem, right? So I guess best of both worlds is just go to China, like worst case scenario, do your normal dropship stuff. Once you start buying inventory, you buy increasing about so 100, 300, 500. Then you can go and take, for example, like clearco.com, you can go take capitals and loans and stuff and show the Shopify dashboard and say, look at my cash flow increasing, it's fine. Sales at everything, ROAS is fine, right? Then you just get a loan from there and stuff. But then again, it's like most dropshippers don't think about that because there's real risk involved. Sorry about this. Yeah. Is it time for this? No, it's just a bit QC, but yeah. Yeah, but basically that's kind of the model that you kind of have to go to if you want to seriously succeed in this game, yeah. Okay. Well, one of the big things that we wanted to talk about was importance of messaging and the offer and more important than ads. And even just hearing that, I basically agree. But what I really want to expand on here is the significance of it and is the, or how I would see like the ad is supposed to be the carrier for the message and the offer. So it's not like an ad appears that doesn't have the message and the offer. So those are some of my initial thoughts on this, but this is something that I'd like to hear you expand on. So the ad, if you think about it, right? People don't pay, people don't pull out the credit card on the ad, right? People pull out the credit card on the product page. So the ad, like you said, is the carrier. It's just to sell the click. Once they're curious enough about the product, then you sell the offer on the product page. So if you think about it, okay, I am selling, look at this water bottle, right? Everybody in the world, they are like 70 competitors of this thing. So why is someone gonna buy this versus someone like me, right? So does it have a specific unique selling point about the physical product? Does it convey different benefits? Does it water filter the thing so that it's cleaner water? Stuff like that. So that's specific to the product itself, right? Then you can do other value-added things such as, okay, you create an e-book that is specifically talking about water consumption, benefits of drinking water, stuff like that. Or you even throw in something inexpensive, right? Something like a water filter, additional cap, something together with the physical product. And even though from a COX perspective, that seems like it's gonna be more burden on you, right? But to the customer, it's like, I would definitely buy you versus someone else, right? And if you pit it side by side, which actually, if you do Google ads, Google shopping and stuff, you are literally side by side with your customer. So you should think about these things because as your products get more commoditized, people can come into the space, immediately just run traffic against you. There's only so much you can differentiate. And so I really think offer and the most creative marketers will win, per se, because they just understand the game. The nooks, right, will just get crushed basically, yeah. Well, you said sell the click. And that's the first time that I've heard somebody say that and you'll have to forgive me if you said that last time. I can't keep trying a very thing like that. But I think that it's significant and what I like about it is it conditions, I guess the advertiser to figure out the value of the clicks and where the clicks are coming from. So depending on where I'm advertising, if I'm advertising Facebook, if I'm advertising on Google, advertising on Bing, each one of those clicks will yield any amount of results. Maybe people from one source will come into the website, but they just won't commit, whereas they come from another source, same ad, but they come to the website and they don't commit. So when you're using this, whether it's working on your own stuff, which actually I don't know if you're doing at the moment, or if you're working with your clients, is how do you deploy this mentality or how are you helping the business or the brand understand where are the clicks valuable, where are the clicks coming from? So to tap at your point about selling the click and stuff, so you must think about selling the click as the ad is trying to prime you psychology, psychological-wise, like a bias for you to go into the landing page. So imagine if I say, Joseph is an e-commerce dropshipping expert on the end, when I go into the page and expecting a consistency of information. So you can prime someone psychologically, to say on the ad first, and then you deliver that promise on the landing page. So that's basically the first thing in terms of how to sell the click. The second question you said was, how are you seeing what valuable clicks there are? So in terms of generally, we write long-form copy. So we write long-form copy on the ad, there's more commitment to the click, even though the click may be a bit more expensive than 50% off and stuff like that, but the quality of the click on that, we know for a fact it's like, because they are primed already on the ad, they have that psychological bias, once they come onto the landing page, they usually convert because of the long-form copy. So yeah, if that makes sense. So that's why storytelling is very, very important and powerful per se, because if you pit you versus your competitor, you're telling a story, someone else is selling based on discount, you're gonna beat them every single time because you can't quantify story, makes sense. You can't put a premium on story. And so when people see a story based ad, it's when I go to the landing page, I'm not buying based on price anymore. I'm buying based on emotion, makes sense. Yeah, it does and it opens up a through line that not only have I been aware of doing this position, but also in other jobs that I've held too, is story selling is one of the strongest things. And it's kind of funny, it kind of eerie in how for all the data in the world, there is that top 5% in the person's mind that is an emotional thing, is a psychological or even a spiritual thing that has that final result. And that's the kind of thing that is exceedingly difficult to quantify. What is it about a story that resonates with somebody and how does it connect on that emotional level? It seems to me that it's always going to be somewhat nebulous. And it's just not easy to, even if you do collect data on it, it's not going to even reflect the entirety of what happened. At least that's what I think. And in your position, did I just pull it out of thin air? Have you ever been able to assess anything based off the emotional results, based off the spiritual results? Or is that the kind of thing that even at your level is left to the imagination? Yeah, so you can't really quantify that. Yeah. Right. Didn't think so, but it's worth a shot, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that the most powerful thing is like, after they buy, like the click comes in, the purchase comes in, everything. And then the customer actually, we talk to them on Zoom call, right? So for example, I forced my time to like, okay, go and find your highest LTV customers, right? You go and interview them, send them emails, say, hey, can I have 15 minutes in your time? I want to understand why you're buying myself, right? And then when she came on, she was very, very happy. She showed the bag everything. And it's like, okay, this makes me feel really good because there's image representation, something like that. So it's like, in terms of understanding your customer persona is a bit more difficult because data, like digital marketers, you know, they just like sit at their computer and stuff. But once you start talking to the customer, you get a very, very strong sensing of who you're selling to. And that actually helps and improves conversion at the same time, probably because, you know, you know who exactly and what the pain point is and stuff like that. And what resonates with your highest buyers, right? So if you are running e-com now, you probably should definitely do this, right? But go to the top 10 LTV people and then just go and interview them, right? So you don't have to do so many but you should go to the people who have continuously bought from you over and over again because they have indicated with their money that they trust you the most. Yeah, that's actually the first time that I've heard somebody suggest doing that. I think it's a great idea. And it reminds me of, you know, one of the threads that we had talked about previously is, you know, if a person has that kind of confidence to be the face of the brand and they should do it and not rely on somebody else to be the influencer on their behalf. If they're so inclined, not everybody has that skill. So, you know, don't make a square or try to act like a circle. We understand. But I think it's a great idea. And what I think this ties into is part of the user-generated content overall strategy. So in a way, I think that, you know, interviewing the client counts as content even if it's not displayed publicly. Yeah. Because now the, you know, I'm getting this, it's like a private review feedback. I assume that if they have anything negative to say, that's a good chance to do it too, say it directly to the CEO. So is this, are our interviews, are they always remain, do they always stay private or is it, do they ever turn into like a case study or testimonial or in some way that it can actually be displayed publicly? Sure. I mean, if your client is comfortable, then obviously more than happy to do it. But obviously you do it for internal documentation first, right? After you interview, get permission from the customer, say, okay, can we put this on any page? I think it'll make a really good review and stuff like that, right? She can, I recommend some people I coach to do this as well. So it's like you set up an entirely different landing page, you put it at the top bar and then you just put reviews and then you just stack like 50 reviews all in one page. You would significantly see your conversion rate increase overnight. So like it's hard work obviously to get those testimonials, but it's definitely worth it. And it's also assets that you can run as paid advertising on the front end. So yeah, I agree. Yes, 100%. Okay. One more follow up to this is someone on a granular level, what kind of questions do you recommend that people generally ask to get the best answers? So it's like, okay, why did you buy from us? What made you buy from us? What was the like number one thing that if we do, you will be very happy? And then stuff like what else would you like to see from us? Yeah. So it's like, okay, you are trying to identify the positive attributes that your brand is portraying to the customer and then find what those are that identify then obviously ask for improvement in the last one. So what, how can you improve? How can we help you? How we can make your experience better, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. So like all this information you probably put in like a Google form and you ask them, you know, they all compile, see with your company or staff or whatever and then examine and then you know what to do next in terms of what product to build next, what to sell next also. Yeah. Okay, sorry. I said I had one where that was my last follow up but I come from film. So we're used to people saying one more time, one more time, one more time. I also happen to think that this is one of the keyness ways to build out the customer avatar. So if I have, you know, let's just say I do 10 interviews and I'm at 10 of my 10 best LTV customers. I think what I would want to do is try to create somewhat of an aggregate or somewhat of an average based off their answers and their spending habits. Maybe they all seem to be wearing the same kind of clothing for some reason. So how accurate would you say you're able to come up with an avatar based off this information? Based on like top spenders, you should be able to stare at that quite easily. Okay, great. So one of the things that I appreciate this but I also realized that I'm gonna get shellacked here just because there was a few things that were wrong with my website, but that's okay. It's probably better that I get shellacked than everything would be perfect. So Jonathan has offered to have a look at my website and I'm going to pull up screen share and yeah, we'll just run through this. So again, to my loyal audio audience, this would be one of the times where you may want to hop on over to our video which is on the Debutify YouTube channel. I know how this feels. I've been an audio listener for podcasting for 10 years. It happens. All right, I guess I'll just give you the grant tour first so that you can start collecting your thoughts. So it's called second space. I was hoping to be able to just do secondspace.com but that domain was thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. So I had to go with second space shop, that's okay. So the brand is based on, it goes into home living and home working niche. So essentially the more somebody spends in their apartment or their house, the more they're my target market. So right now it's mostly about the remote working position. And the idea was to look for products but also the psychology behind giving people more freedom in their own homes. So products that allow your wall to be able to store more. The signature product that I'm working on right now is called the widget drawer although usually it's referred to as the cell stick drawer. So yeah, so cell stick widget drawer and then a couple of variations of it. Basic ones, one with the lock on it in case you wanna put your keys or your glasses in there. And then these ones over here which are pretty hefty. The pricing is, this one is $51, the only reason why is because my 3PL charges quite a bit to ship this. So I don't actually make a heck of a lot of money out of it, this is one of the ones where I just kind of want people to have it. So that's the image for it. Still working on better copy for it. Obviously this is not story selling but that's fine. And then the other side to it would also be the blog. So I don't have anything written on that yet. So there's obviously a lot of work to do. But what I, and this will tie into a question that I wanted to ask you as well which is if it's possible, not that I care. In fact, I would prefer this, I would prefer to be wrong on this but if you've seen people be able to really run a website, sell products and succeed without any additional content or value on the back end. Like no newsletter, no blog, very bare bones. I'm getting the impression that you see those once in a while but they don't really do much. So that's everything I have to show and I will now take my lumps like a big boy. Okay, this is your real story, right? Yeah. Okay, when you say newsletter and blog, you mean blog, not email marketing, right? So the blog would be here. That's one thing that we can touch on more specifically. There's a blog but the blog is not necessarily what I would send in the email. The email maybe say snippets of the blog but the plan in so far right now is I would not email the blog to people. Okay. So if you don't do blogs, honestly, yeah, you still can kill it though. You can make a lot of money. Well, I wanted to do a blog anyways but I just wanted to ask just for just out of curiosity. Okay. Yeah, I mean, in the future if you need SEO then the blog is useful. But yeah, you can make tons of money without a blog. That's the one. Okay, so question for you first, right? It's like, okay, who exactly are you selling to? Who is your target customer here? Sure, so the clearest avatar that I have would be remote workers, people who are living and sleeping basically in the same room. The more hermits, the more people live at home, work at home, the more likely that I want to convert them. So yeah, that's my clearest avatar right now is the remote worker. Okay, so anybody, 23 and up, I would say? Yeah, I'd say like 23 to 40. I think past that point, I'm not sure if they're, you don't get as many people who I think have glommed on to remote working. And as well, I think because they have had the habit of working in an office for far longer, my assumption is that as they can start going back to the office, they will. And so you go to your product page, scroll down, go to your, have you run any traffic so far? No, not yet. Okay, so you go to the most promising product that you have first. I'll start with the basic one then. Okay, so number one problem with this, right? Is that I do not know who this is for. Okay, so in terms of, like you said, for example, you need to be super sure specific. So for example, if you sell kitchenware, right? You need to identify, okay, house mothers, housewives, 30 plus have kids in kindergarten stuff like that. You need to be like really drill down onto that perspective. Otherwise it's very, it's going to be very expensive to acquire the customer. And then you're going to be bleeding money on ads. Okay, that's number one. So you want to try to identify different personas first, like so specific until then. So for example, that could be one persona. The second one could be like women who are like career women, right? They don't have a lot of time, but then they are still in their early 20s, for example, right? So they can, you can sell kitchen stuff to those people and the messaging for moms versus them is different. So that's the first thing you need to really identify. Then the second thing is also here, right? For example, your entire product page, right? You need to have more lifestyle shots. So I understand the underneath trading, but you need to have like a video showing exactly how do you actually pull this out? How do you actually install this stuff, et cetera, et cetera. Right? If I am going to pay 13 bucks to an internet site to store, I've never shopped before. I need to understand how this works in, how it actually looks like when I unbox it. That's the second thing. Number three, right? If you're actually looking to run ads towards this offer, for example, I think your price point really cannot make it. Okay, a lot of the times I recommend anywhere AOV is more than 60. The reason why is because if you're going to spend for ads, right? You're going to be paying anywhere from like 50 cents to maybe like $2, right? In this town niche, I would say. So in terms of like conversion rate-wise, if you think about math, right? If you have 50 cents, you spend 100 bucks, right? How many people are there? There's 200, right? I'm guessing, yep. If your conversion rate is let's say three to 5%, right? After ad costs and stuff, your profit is going to be very, very little. So you're unable to reinvest into your ads per se. Yeah, so that is kind of the first thing. And then the second thing I think about is like, if you are using this as your front-end offer, right? For example, if this is your quantity number one, are people actually going to buy two, three, four of this? Which means that that $13 price point, if you times four, it becomes like $60, right? So that totally makes sense if people are buying four of it. But I don't see people having four tables, if that makes sense. So I don't think people are going to buy this. Okay, that's the second thing. Do you want me to continue? Sorry, I don't have talking a lot. Yeah, well, I mean, I have a number of follow-ups. So I'm just kind of jotting notes down and then we'll go through my follow-ups. But I didn't want to interrupt your stream of consciousness. Okay, yeah, so scroll down a bit. Okay, stop, yeah. So you can see share and get 10%, right? So the problem with product pages on Shopify, for example, is that they try to get the customer to do too much, right? So the only action that you want the customer to do is to give you money. So if you're asking them to do a different action, you are basically distracting them and you're paying for that $1 click already. So you better not do this, right? So you better remove this stuff. All this stuff here is completely irrelevant. People don't care about this. So you just remove all this stuff, right? Then you scroll down, yeah. So this is, people don't understand, right? If you look at the heat maps, I look at a lot of heat maps in my lifetime. So I know for a fact, people don't barely scroll down below the add to cut button. So if you think about it, this is prime real estate space that you're paying for already. So you need to really try to engage the customer either by a video, a photo, plus like benefit-driven headline, stuff like that. Or you are doing like influencer content, like reviews, right? So like this is missing and this is basically prime real estate. So you shouldn't be wasting it here. Okay, this is also if you actually look in, for example, if you right click inspect, right? You go into the mobile view, for example, it's very, very difficult to read this information. And the reason why is because when you clump paragraphs together, there's too much going on. So what you actually want to do instead is try to do more bullet points per se when you're talking about benefits. So it's easier for the person to see. Yeah, okay, you need to go here, this button. I didn't even know this was a feature. Okay. Yeah, but you can see this, right? If I'm scrolling, if I am, sorry, looking at hot girls or like cars and stuff on Instagram, and then I come to this and then like, hey, this guy is expecting me to read this. I'm like, yo, Joseph, what the heck? Yeah, you know what I mean? So it's like, yeah, this is prime real estate. You definitely want to put in more media, photo, video, sort of thing. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Then at the bottom, okay, this one, every time you upsell something, right? You need to be very, very careful. The reason why is because if you are trying to upsell, okay, so this is your, basically your friend and offer, what you're selling on the ad, right? So the person is expecting this product already. If you're trying to introduce a different offer, right? I need to understand exactly how this ties into my initial purchase to buy. So for example, the first one is like pulling out from the drawer, but from this product itself, this image, I do not understand how this will help me with the same problem here. Okay, so your complimentary offers, right? Your upsells, sorry, your cross-sells need to really, really compliment each other in solving the same problem or being in the same realm per se, right? I have no idea what this means. This looks like Lego to me. So, yeah, makes sense. Yeah, that's the diagram image, yeah. Yeah, okay, so then down below, okay, so the next one, I wouldn't recommend you to put recommended for you so fast, right? I'd rather you put more social proof testimonials. So to actually show that actually people are using their stuff, Lacey from California, Joseph from Canada is using this stuff. So I'm from Canada, California, for example, right? I'm probably gonna trust them. So you probably wanna move your customer reviews up as well. Yeah. And then in regards to getting reviews, is right now the only way to really do that from the resources that I have is importing them from AliExpress or using judge.me. I think that's, I mean, have you, I almost hate to ask this, but have you had to recommend people to say like get their family and friends to, or even like, are there been other routes to get some of those early reviews that you can think of? The fastest way is very sending product to influencers, for example. Right, okay. Yeah, yeah. So, you can do the pit of freeway. I mean, it really doesn't matter, but more like as long as people really get the hands in the product and like there's genuine connection to the brand, I think that's more important than anything. Yeah. Well, I think that's all, that's all fantastic. Yeah, there's definitely a lot. But it's, you know what? If anything, it's better to, for this thing to be in poor shape just so that we can get more from you. So I'm not in any way shape or form diminishing ego. In fact, I actually feel better about this, but I do have some questions. So, one of the things is, so you asked me about, you know, the, what customer am I going for? And I asked, and I say to the remote worker as my answer, but the issue is, it's like, I almost, I'm more, it's like I'm just trying to pass the test rather than really try to answer the question in the most earnest way possible because I don't necessarily want to limit to the remote worker. I just think the remote worker would probably be one of the best beneficiaries. But when you talked about how say some, you know, working mother, these can be useful in the kitchen, you know, they are useful in the kitchen. So what I don't, if I were to say, replace the image right now of the two buildings when trying to convey like the office space, if I replace that with an image of somebody working from home as a remote worker, my concern is that would then limit the results from any other potential customer. But at the same time, having this is rather vague. So I don't think it attracts anybody. So I guess my thought process thinking out loud here is, it's better to focus on targeting at least one person. I get one avatar very clearly and then we'll go from there. Yeah, so I actually can like justify it logically and explain to you why that is the case. So you scroll down a bit, you go to some white space, so I can draw. Yeah, yeah, here's fine. So like why I recommend you to do like very specific person or not in the first place is because usually beginners don't have ads to spend, right? And if you're in a cashman situation, you are very, very stressed. You cannot, you literally cannot think, right? So what happens is in the market, for example, everybody's going after the same customer. So I rather you try to dominate one part of the market, right? You get profitable, you get the first sales first. Once you understand that's proof of concept and on cold traffic, you actually can convert customers at a very, very small target customer, right? Because the big boys are not trying to like stack up against you. Only once you try to dominate this market, right? You try to squeeze all LTV from here. Then if you want to go into a more broader remote worker area, so let me put remote worker, then it totally makes sense for you, right? If you go into remote worker first, you are going to have to spend X amount just to acquire that one customer. Then you might be thinking and discouraged by job shipping is very difficult. If you start off with very, very small targeted, nobody else is attacking the same market as you. So it gives you competitive edge, not only in terms of at targeting and copy conversion per se, right? But everybody in that small little circle is going to go to your brand. Okay. Yeah, it does, except I, if you had asked me who would be in that circle, I would have thought the remote worker would have fit in the small circle. Maybe perhaps for me not understanding the scope of how many people are working remotely. There's quite a bit. So what, if you know, what would be the even smaller market that would fit in that circle? Sure. So remote worker, right? There are different jobs, right? So you could be like a digital marketer, e-com people, right? Then there are lawyers and accountants who definitely are remote working, right? Then there are programmers as well. So each one of these niches, right? They all have specific different pain points, right? Programmers, they type a lot, they use a lot of their keyboard. And they just stare at black screens all day, right? Then lawyers and accountants, they're looking at a lot of people, what they're scanning, they're command effing a lot because they're searching for stuff. So the pain point is super, super specific. Yeah. Aha. Wow. I just, I don't want to spend too long just staring in awe, but this has actually put a lot of clues together. So with this answer, I guess one thing that I'm thinking of, it would also be in the realm of artists. So artists, illustrators, people who have the pencils and erasers and pens and markers on hand. So they have a lot of tools that they would play around with. So just to summarize this, it would be more ideal to pick one of these and even reshape the website so much so that it's like a haven for the lawyers in specific or haven specifically for the digital marketers. Yes, that's correct. So I'll give you an example. Okay, cause I was running traffic from one of my friends. He's selling like a mouse. Okay. It's a drop shipping product, like straight up. And then the competitors, right, are all selling the angle of comfort only. So you put your hand on the mouse and it basically removes couple of tunnel syndrome, for example, right? He's attacking this market and he is skilled to, we saw the video as like what, seven million views already. So I'm no way going to even come close to beating this guy if I'm going to attack the same angle. So what we did was we go to Amazon and we go and find the reviews and then we go and find the exact pain points of specific customers. And from our research, right, we found that a lot of people using graphic design, illustrator, Photoshop type of people all are experiencing this problem. And then they're like, okay, this works for me. I'm a graphic designer, blah, blah, one, two, three, four. Right. So we went to attack this market and from the get go, we are really profitable. That's incredible. Yep. I think for me at this point, I'm just in absorption phase. So with that, so my only other question is, so there is more of a big idea to the brand, like with what I was describing with, wanting to encourage people to be more creative with their space, find other ways to use it. So my other concern, and this is I guess the last one that I really have is, actually no, there was another one I follow up on. So is, I'm not sure exactly how to ask it, but am I going to have to, I guess, restrain the scope of the brand until it expands into more markets before I guess I write about things I want to write about. So for instance, if I'm targeting specifically, I'm going to say illustrators, just because I have more experience in the arts niche. So if I'm targeting them, then when they go visit the blog, the content that they're going to read there should probably be very specific to illustrators. Yes, that's correct. Okay, so yeah, so the other thing that I wanted to go back to, so when you said the average, the AOV would be $60 on this, and these are $13.77. So this is just a really basic question for you, which is, how much would you be charging this? You said, just to be clear, you said it would be $60? No, okay, so I recommend everybody, if you're selling anything, your AOV, like no matter what you do, if you want to run ads per se, be a 60. So this product, of course, you cannot charge 60 for it because you cannot justify it unless it's like gold. So I don't recommend this to be a front end product. So I do not recommend you to run ads to this product specifically. If you want this to be a cross sell or a back end offer, totally fine, fair enough. But don't go and run ads to this. You just get absolutely destroyed in the auctions. Okay, okay, noted. And then I think that's actually everything that I had to say about this, I'm gonna turn off the screen share. So yeah, awesome, definitely a lot familiar in there too. And I know our audience, a lot of them are also kind of like putting these pieces together themselves and trying to come to terms with a lot of it. So the last thing would be is the roadmap for how are you, if somebody chooses to expand their brand kind of like where I'm going with it, but they're focusing very specifically on this one niche is what's the roadmap for branching their brand outwards? And I mean that in the products that they're selling with the brand itself and the ideas that they wanna convey is how does somebody gets to their vision of the end game and how they see it. Can I assume they already have one product? Yes, right. Yeah, yeah, they would have to have at least one product. Okay, so I put it in the story of for example, a client that I work with, right? So the guy, he went Kickstarter for example, and then he sell compression gear. So he actually pre sold the thing on Kickstarter. So we know it works, right? And then he was drop shipping. He's basically drop shipping from China, but send it to the US for example. Then afterwards he transitioned to Shopify and then started selling there and compression gear. So then afterward looking like selling, like spending around 100K in ads afterwards, right? There's a massive database called analysis wise, right? Most of them generally are mail, for example, body ball running, football, stuff like that, right? So we know that audience is there. So how do we sell to this customer base and expand LTV from there? So think about, okay, so if this customer cares about post-recovery compression, what else does he care about? He probably cares about post-workout recovery, feeling good about his body, right? So the potential things that we could sell to, for example, it's like medicinal oil. We talk about compression gear, but for other parts of the body, right? They already literally have given us money for one part of the body. Why won't they give us for other parts, right? Then we can think about, for example, like post-recovery, amino acid, stuff like that, like post-work, those are all shakes, stuff like that, right? So you can think about it, one product, you already have a customer base. The customer base is in sports. You can literally sell them anything as long as it makes sense, right? So the first intention of the product, the core product is recovery. So you want to have a recurring theme of recovery in the rest of the products as well, yeah. And so how do you like de-risk yourself to per se? Because you're buying stock, you're buying inventory, right? So that's real risk there. How do you de-risk yourself so that if you launch a product, it's definitely gonna sell, right? You literally just go and ask your customer on a Zoom call or an email list and say, hey, what would you like to buy from us? That's why the interviews are very, very important. Like also the customer discovery phase, once they say, okay, we will literally buy this thing if you produce this thing, okay? Then you put up a pre-order page, you put up a run traffic, send an email list there. If people legit buy from you, even without you manufacturing the product, you know you've got something already. So that's how you generally like build from scratch. You build from one core product. Even though it's drop shipping first, you got the customer list, you know for a fact that they are gonna love this thing, right? But then after you branch out, you just ask them once again what you want more and they will just sell you more stuff. When you were going on to Amazon, this is following up more of on a previous thread, but so you're on Amazon and you're looking more for the different pain points. So let's just say, for instance, I didn't have any products on there, but at least I knew that I was in the remote working niche and then I'm niching down from there. So how does somebody exactly find the pain point and then how would you know what's the right product to get to solve that pain point? Cause you can find, I think you can find products that might generally work, but they might not be so precise. So can you continue to take us through that thought process? So you're thinking about how can we produce a new product that hasn't been created, is it? Well, I mean that would be great, but not even that. How do I know what product to find to solve the pain point that I've been finding in my research? Okay, so generally a lot of products have been created. So you don't have to research after much in creating something new from scratch, but you go to customer reviews on Amazon of a specific niche or specific product you're looking at, you go and look at the one-star reviews. So what are the promises that this product has given but has not delivered on? And then, okay, the new product is going to be significantly better in these specific pain points so that it's strengths compared to this guy's weakness. Right, this guy does stuff very well already. We are going to do that. We're just going to make it even better and superior. I see. I mean, I guess I take a little bit of sifting through because you have like one-star reviews where somebody just said, oh, it didn't show up or customer flipped me off. So like there's, you had to get through those, but I think that's a keen way to, I can't believe I've never thought of this. I've been doing this for a year and I've never thought about that. Just like looking, like going through the negative reviews and be like, why are people who've paid money, why are they still unhappy? And it might be, by the way, and this is major speculating, but it might be that the product itself is great. It's just that the company stinks. If they treat the customers poorly, if the customer service doesn't come through, if shipping times are unconscionable, then it might be that, you know what, maybe it is just a product that's fine after all and I just need to run a better company and have a better brand. I guess I'll tell you another tidbit in addition to that, right? It's like, okay, you go to Amazon to get the bad reviews. You go to the brand website to get the good reviews. They're only going to talk good about themselves, right? So you go and find the strengths from their site and then you just take the, in a sense, the copy from the customer testimonial and then you go and run that as your paid advertising if you are going to attack the angle as well. See, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, well, that's been a great crash course and we still got to you for a little bit of time. I know it's late for you there, so I'm not going to keep you for the six hours that I had planned, but there's a couple of things I just wanted to ask and whining down just some more granular pieces of info. So one of them is, this is another term, as if you hadn't introduced enough good concepts, new concepts for us today, but you mentioned this way early on, which is COGS, which is cost of goods sold. So we haven't covered that, at least to my recollection. So would you do us the distinct honor of informing us how COGS is a part of our business plan and our strategy? Sure, so if you are selling physical product, COGS is the killer, basically. So COGS is cost of goods sold, it's basically an accounting term for your financial statements and it's measuring how much does it raw material cost to actually manufacture the product. So this is excluding shipping generally. So that's why on the income statement, you see COGS plus shipping, right? And so COGS is very, very important because if you are in a paid advertising environment where you are competing against other people, everybody has a margin, right? And so if you heard this term before, Bezos says your margin is my opportunity. So if you are willing to go and slice your margin very, very low, it's fine, right? However, a real company, you need to operate on cash flow. So you need a margin because you need to pay employees, customers of what, software, transaction marketing and stuff like that. So if you don't have a margin to play with, you are screwed because after the sale, you don't have enough money. So what I recommend to people, right? It's like even at any point in business in E-com, I know it's very, very difficult, especially in drop shipping, but once you go and brand an E-com inventory, stuff like that, you need to try to reduce your COGS to anywhere from 35% and below. If you can take it under 30%, right? It's very, very good. So your pricing in terms of your product is $100. You try to get it at $33 and below. And the reason why is because that's 67, right? Your cost per purchase is fluctuate, right? So you need margin to play with, per se. Well, and I think businesses, they're facing a lot of challenges there. I mean, one solution I speculate would be if you just increase the price of the product, then you're covering your COGS more easily, but then you're now making it more tense for the customer to convert. So that's one solution, but it also has its own problem. The other side of it is if there's anything in the business that can be sacrificed, or say if it comes down to something as specific as reducing customer service hours like 15 a week to 12.5 a week. So in your experience, when people have to figure out how to minimize their cost of goods sold, is how do they do it? How does it work? And then, I mean, because I'm imagining that people have tried to reduce the cost and then end up actually costing them more money in the long run because there was a significant component that they thought was ineffective. And it turns out to actually be very useful. So you might always think, okay, let's go to China and let's communicate and negotiate these guys and then just bring it down. So it doesn't work like that, life's not like that. So how can you factor that and take control of your business basically? The only way is to increase AOV and lifetime value. So instead of trying to reduce cost per purchase, you try to increase AOV. So how can we sell three of more things to the same person? Or you can even go the wholesale route, instead of someone buying three at a time, you buy 500 at one time. It completely changes your economics of the business because how many customers do you actually really need? And then you can think much bigger as well. So a lot of the times, you see a lot of drop shippers, they can get to seven figures. Very few of them get to eight figures. The reason why is because they spend a lot on ads, then the profit is so little, they cannot buy inventory to basically reflect that and roll over to the next cycle as well. So a lot of the times the biggest companies are the ones who just understand LTV and then they can able to extend that. So physical product wise, I'm a very big supporter generally of subscription, recurring, consumables, stuff like that. I know food is very, very difficult to make per se, right? But those are businesses like, they'll win the e-com game hands down, I feel, yeah. One of the things that I've talked about with other, without the guests or the show and also internally with the company as well is there's just certain products that seem to be no-go areas for beginners is, I think like skin cream, consumables, supplements are products like that, at least in my experience, they've been rather difficult to start with. Is that accurate or have you seen a decent roadmap for somebody interested in, say, the supplemented markets at a beginner level? So if it's a beginner level, they're actually US, I know like the US manufacturers, they actually do drop shipping. So they do actually allow you to drop ship supplements, believe it or not. And you don't have to worry because they take care of FDA, I don't know what other certifications are, but they take care of everything. You literally just handle marketing. So if you are like super noob, like pure beginner from get go, like you might want to try organic marketing first, really try to acquire customers organically. Once you can hit like 5K per month, consistently through like, just content per se posting, you should be good to go to use, to go into paid advertising. And then there you are, like I don't know about you, but like I think a lot of people think like the ad game is everything. Like paid traffic is great, but if you don't have organic traffic first, it's just very difficult per se. I mean, I come from the Ricky Hayes School of marketing as king. So while advertising is a key component of that, as you say, organic marketing is also an important component to that as well. So it's not just about running paid ads, it's about finding all the different methods to reach people and in different ways too. Some I think are more cold where some can come across them much more warmly. Even doing a podcast interview, talking about your supplements or your story and why they're useful, that alone can probably get more, I think more invested conversions than they're running ads. So it's all part of a bigger picture. Yep, correct. All right, so Facebook ads, yeah, sorry, good. No, go ahead, go ahead, good. What you have to say is probably more viable. Facebook ads is just like one channel. So like you just think of it as one channel and then you would just have 50 channels, that's all. Yeah. All right, so on the other granular question that I had for you, just a chance to give some other pieces of software and some exposure. So I went through the software kit and for all the ones that I didn't recognize and there was a couple, connect.io, push out, high rows, active campaign and reconvert. So rather than make you go through each one of these and be the ambassador for all of them, I think it would be a more fair word to ask is the overall picture of this, this is a complete kit that somebody can use and it covers all of the bases for their business. So can you just talk about the network or the ecosystem here of how these products are all working together? You said reconvert, right? Is it? I did, yeah. Okay, yeah, reconvert. I actually met the founder as well, Israel. Aria. So reconvert does post-purchase upsell. So they just increase AOV by, after you buy one thing, you can recommend the next thing to buy. And then I think they're building basically like click funnels within reconvert as well. So you can like post-purchase one, two, three, four, stuff like that. So very powerful stuff. That one will automatically give you at least 5% revenue boost overnight. You install that app, right? You basically get 5% increase. So you should probably try that. The other one is Clavio. I think it's quite, you've heard a lot of people with Clavio, email marketing very important. To be fair, it's quite expensive. Clavio is expensive, but they are like 10 billion dollar company. They have a lot of investors and stuff. So it's not going to go down. And email marketing is like so important. You can generate like 30, 50%, more in revenue overnight per se. And you have no ad spanner. So compared to a guy who's like doing one meal ref per year, you basically have like 300K in free cash flow just to play with. So very, very powerful stuff. All right, and so I would, as we're about to wrap this up, and so this would be a good time to remind the audience to go check out your website. I think there it described all of them, gives them a sense of how to put all those together. Then my question about COGS also came from your blog as well. So that's also a handy resource to check out as well. So with that, the last thing that I want to talk about is very open-ended, just more about for your point of view and your aspirations is how do you see things unfolding for you? Do you have visions of like maybe expanding or I guess overall just how are things going with you? Is the kind of question that people usually start with? But I'm just going to ask it now just while we wrap this up. Recently, I've been a little bit different. So it's like, I run the agency. I, we still want to run the agency and stuff, but we realized like we are really good like marketing partner per se. So I recently like taken equity with some brands and it's like, okay, we run the entire marketing show. We take an equity into the trios time, right? Let's see whether we can exit at like crazy multiples. Right? So it's like, okay, we, you've got a product ready, it works. We know you can sell, we just take that and then we just latch on our marketing team, go to you and just like steroids all the way. Yeah. So in a sense, that's kind of what I'm looking to, to be a bit like agency owner, but also like, cause every single day we just do marketing. So it's like, it's just bread and butter for us, right? So we're taking the expertise and then bring it into brands and then we try to do the big boy route, like private equity and finance per se sell out to that. Yeah. Obviously I'm sitting here now into anyone not having be able to do that yet, but probably in like 18 months down the road, then we'll see what happens. The door will, as long as there's a door to open, it will be open. So always happy to have you back and update us on how things are going. And, you know, some of it is perspective too, right? Meaning you're saying, you know, work with the big boys, whereas I'm having this conversation with you. I'm like, oh, it's, to me, you know, we're your assets. No, no, in like three months, you give yourself like three months, right? You can hit like 30, 50 K per month really easily. Don't worry. Yeah. You got it. I appreciate that. If I'm being transparent, I could be a little bit more expedited about this, but, you know, one step at a time for me. So I'll leave it at that. Okay. So final thing is, I mean, I don't know if I want to make returning guests do the whole like words of wisdom thing. I think one time is enough. But with that said, just let the audience know once more how they can find you, check your writing, check your content, even get in touch with you. Go to oxg-media.com. If you want to go to the opt-in, you can just slash process. So it's oxg-media.com slash process. Yeah. If you want to book a call with us, you can just book a call. It's either me or one of my team members who speak to you and then we can see whether we can help you or not. Right. We're not going to take you on if you can't help you. So don't worry. But if we can, then yes, we're going to sell something to you. So yeah. Okay. Awesome. All right. Well, that's everything that we've got for today. So to my audience, thank you all for participating in your own way. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to collect this information, use it for my own good, and then also share it for all of you as well. So with that, one more thank you to Jonathan Ung for the road. And we will check in soon. And we all realize that, well, you know, everyone's a doing e-commerce these days. Hey, this is Joseph from Ecommonix. Just wanted to thank you for being here and for giving me this content, your time and attention. And I hope you learned something. I can say with certainty, I have learned something with every episode that I have done and I don't see that changing anytime soon. It's a couple of things you can do to help us out. If you want to check out the audio content, we are available on all major podcast platform distributors. And while you're there, give us a five-star review. It helps a lot. And while you're here on YouTube, there's a lot of things you can do to help out as well. It's not going to take very long. Subscribe to the channel, hit the like button for this episode, and hit the notification bell. So when we have new content for you, it's going to be at your doorstep ASAP. Lastly, this podcast is created by Debutify, the best Shopify template available. It is 100% free for you to start and it can change your life. It can make you so much more free than you are right now. So if this episode wasn't enough to convince you, I think a few more might do the trick. So have at it.