 what's up guys I'm here in Toronto with my boy Boris Boris is the actually Boris why don't you introduce yourself tell everybody who you are uh my name is Boris I run a website called Soxie.com we the best socks in the world right the best stylish socks delivered to your door without you having to go to the mall and waste time shopping going through store to store finding your favorite designs but sexy socks guys I'm telling you Boris gave me his socks maybe a couple of months ago and I wear them religiously every single day hands down the feel the comfort and above all the designs designs are just amazing yeah that's one way we kind of differentiate ourselves as we try to go for the boldest designs possible so we'll deliver five styles to your door you never have to go to the mall and we guarantee that you'll never get the same styles twice so that's kind of our way up well what got you into the sock game in the first place uh so we were running a different let's go before we get killed oh yeah we're running a different e-commerce business and one of the things that was selling really well were socks and everything else was size and socks are one size they're a lot lighter than most other products and we found that um returns and changes with some of the other products was kind of a nightmare when you're small uh small companies starting out and the cost associated with that was just too huge so we decided to kind of cut everything out double down on socks rebranded to Soxi initially it was S-O-X-Y-Y dot com because the S-O-X-Y was taken and uh we realized when we focused on one product and doubled down our attention uh our audience took us a lot more serious because they thought we were product experts because we were only doing just that one thing so it allowed us to just like uh take control of our market and uh yeah so it's been three years what are some lessons you learned in the last three years about running an online e-commerce biz some lessons uh or key takeaways e-commerce specifically or yeah for Soxi I think one of my favorite things early on for anybody starting like an e-commerce business is to try to avoid going into uh the production state of your product before you actually kind of get a product market fit so for example if we're if we're starting another sock business today what I do is I go to the mall I find uh quality uh a pair of socks I probably strip up the label and try to sell them up with the landing page initially to see if my offering matches uh what the customer wants a lot of people make guesses of what they think uh their customer wants but you know a lot of the times it's it's kind of a crapshoot yeah so this way you know you go to the mall you spend let's say a hundred bucks on product uh you put up a page with Shopify and you can literally test your idea uh in a matter of a weekend without going through you know which sometimes is like a three four week process with uh speaking with Alibaba or suppliers around the world uh so that's probably one lesson I'd say is most valuable and that's one that I give to many others we're looking to get into the product business uh another lesson you know we've noticed that free shipping goes a really long way yeah uh amazon kind of spoiled everybody's uh shipping habits and people just expect their product to arrive as soon as possible especially when you don't get to try it on so I I'd say focus on free shipping early on figure that into your margins and uh the other thing that really helped us grow early on was customer service and customer happiness we doubled down on customer happiness I mean I would spend weekends on the phone with customers uh just hitting them up and saying hey you know this is Boris uh thank you so much for your order what can we do to keep you a customer for the rest of your life uh you know j abraham talks about that is like it's not about getting a new customer it's about having a repeat customers if a customer is willing to spend say an average order size of say a hundred dollars on your product on average that customer will spend roughly 200 dollars in the life uh the lifetime of your company so focusing more on that relationship with your customers as opposed to I need more no you don't need more you need more repeat buyers yeah we've noticed that you know like if you think about your your daily life uh how many brands you interact with uh none of them really give you that personal touch right none of them give you that personal uh feeling like you're interacting with your friends a lot of it's just big box stores yeah you never really know who's behind it so if you take the time to uh personalize that experience early on especially I'd say your first 100 customers those 100 customers will become your brand evangelist tell all their friends first of all they'll be super surprised the amount of feedback that you can get just by being on the phone with them is invaluable would you say your first 100 customers came like that absolutely oh yeah yeah so we took we took a customer by customer uh acquisition approach early on and we literally called our first 100 customers uh so as I said Saturdays and Sundays I'd say our coffee shop pick up the phone and call them thank them and then find out what we could do better and uh what else they wish we could do so and and you know I'd make notes and then we'd kind of iterate based on that and uh go from there beautiful well Boris want to thank you so much you know for giving us value and sharing your story about Soxi if people want to pick up up here at Soxi where can they find them yeah Soxi.com SOXY.com uh and if you want to reach me directly be at Soxi.com and I'd be happy to take care of you for all of your listeners and kind of throw in a coupon code or something sweet awesome brother go check out Soxi peace