Jeremy Weisz 6:55
Yeah, the Ecommerce Evolved. It’s in the shownotes of the episodes to check it out. The next one, Josh, is Brandon Young mindset value strategies, becoming an eight figure Amazon seller.
Joshua Chin 7:07
Brandon is incredibly successful as an entrepreneur. He’s made a ton of money from Amazon natural, obviously. And he has also been a coach and educator in a space for a long time, his birth, a lot of successful entrepreneurs, true his teachings and his coaching. But what interests what what was most interesting to me during this conversation was how much I learned from Brandon, about the mindsets, systems of values and principles that allowed him to not only find success, but find meaning and purpose as he scaled from seven to eight figures and now towards nine figures, and what it means to him, and why he wakes up every single day continuing to work even though he doesn’t need to a fascinating interview. Firstly, to me, I think it is one that you absolutely need to listen to, if you are on the journey to finding success.
Jeremy Weisz 8:10
Yeah, and he’s super, super generous with sharing his knowledge with people. It’s very Brandon. Next one is James the power of native ads to scale ecommerce brands, founder of Symphony agency, talk about James,
Joshua Chin 8:25
James. Now, James has been a very close referral partner of ours, we’ve done a lot of business together, have sent him a ton of business, he sent us a ton of business. And most importantly, he’s done amazingly well on native ads. Specifically. He’s been in the affiliate marketing space, the lead generation space for a long time. His personal story is incredibly, incredibly interesting. He went from being jailed, he coming out of jail, turning over a new leaf, and creating massive, massive businesses around different verticals and industries. Very fascinating interview. We talked about native ads and how a lot of Shopify brands are just missing out on the option of the just because it’s not as sexy as Facebook, and Instagram, and all these social channels, but really one to not miss out on. Very, very interesting. And actually one of our earlier episodes at the in a podcast as well.
Jeremy Weisz 9:33
The next one I have to listen to just to hear about the jail. It sounds crazy. This is one of the very ones Yeah, the most popular ones framework for scaling, a $250 million DTC business in three years with Davie Fogarty of The Oodie.
Joshua Chin 9:51
This is an insane episode. Davie. Davie Fogarty has been a client of ours for a while now. And he scaled The Oodie amongst other brands, The Oodie coming blankets from naps, and a bunch of others, I believe, currently seven brands under his portfolio and then growing from essentially 10 mil a year, when we first started out, working with them 1010, about 10 to 20 mil to 200 mil a year in revenue, purely through direct to consumer channels, specifically Shopify, incredible journey, incredible scale.
Jeremy Weisz 10:38
And it’s really only 25 years old when he started
Joshua Chin 10:42
25 years old last year. Oh, my gosh, yep. So he’s basically one year older than I am. Which is insane to think about. And when you when you talk to the guy and you go watch the watch the episode, and listen to episode two, really understand what I’m trying to say here is that he comes from a place of wanting to learn and grow. And, and he’s, he’s a, he’s very unlike entrepreneurs. My age, where, you know, immaturity is quite kind of rampant. And it’s it’s very different to kind of experience the interview with him because he, he knows what it takes to succeed, because he’s been through multiple failures before finding his first success. So his story is incredibly interesting from from from building a Vietnamese roll shop out in Australia, to multiple other businesses before finding success with The Oodie as his first venture. It’s an insane story, and very humbled you. And I’ve learned a lot in this interview. So one of our most popular episodes actually
Jeremy Weisz 12:06
scaling ecommerce brands through Google ads with Sebastian
Joshua Chin 12:10
Oh, Sebastian is a fun one, though. Sebastian runs a sort of
Jeremy Weisz 12:13
you have the most, you know, the most successful people under 25. Here, I mean, these these, everyone here looks about 18 It’s amazing.
Joshua Chin 12:20
No, I know. It’s incredible. And this is why I love the ecommerce space is non discriminatory. It doesn’t care if you’re old. You’re young you’re what race you are, what ethnicity you are, what language to speak. You can find success. As long as you believe the hardwork, and you continue to grow and learn. Sebastian is a great example of that he is super young. He has incredible YouTube channel, I believe approaching or crossed the 300,000 subscribers mark. Now, based out of Arizona, he has interviewed a bunch of different successful entrepreneurs on his channel, he puts out really really good content all the time. He’s also an ecommerce entrepreneur, and currently running a Google Ads agency called Digital wealth. MB, which is really interesting. We talked a little bit about his journey, how he got his start, what his mindset is, like, thinking about success at such a young age and handling the the wealth and the the network that he has, right now, of course, we talked about Google ads, and what it means for an ecommerce ecommerce brand, and how to find success in that in that channel.
Jeremy Weisz 13:41
Yeah, that’s incredible. I’m gonna pull up his YouTube channel to see here. Yeah, you’re right. Oh,
Joshua Chin 13:46
he’s passed 300 yet. Yeah, 308, you could see some of the well, as well.
Jeremy Weisz 13:57
So check out that channel is really interesting. The next one is how to make ecommerce business sellable with Ben Leonard?
Joshua Chin 14:05
Ben is the only guest that we’ve had on the show twice. Now. The first episode we talked a lot about his business and how he how he sold his ecommerce brand, and how he started his next venture. So we talked about his experience, what the transaction look like, what life is like after selling. In this episode, we talked about the fundamentals of building a business that is sellable, especially an ecommerce space where generally speaking businesses are profitable, they’re fast growing. No one really thinks about selling all that much because there is no need to until you find a plot to plateau, right and you kind of flat out on your growth which is not what you want. You want to be selling when you are on On the, on the rise. So we talked about how he approached el van approaches, building an ecommerce brand that is scalable and sellable. What the process of selling the business looks like structuring a deal for an exit. And what happens after the exit, which is super fascinating. And a great interview for anyone thinking about preparing for a sale or building business, that is, with the intention of selling it eventually
Jeremy Weisz 15:30
the next one is preserving as an entrepreneur, or persevering as an entrepreneur, Kara Goldin have hit if anyone’s seen him drink and it’s an amazing story of growth.
Joshua Chin 15:42
Incredible, Kara’s story is really, really inspiring. She started out in an industry that she has absolutely no clue in. Going into the beverage industry, specifically, bottled water. flavored water is incredibly daunting as a female entrepreneur with no experience. She talks about her entire experience the story in her book Undaunted, which I believe is linked in the show notes as well. And we talked about her her experience in overcoming Yes, it’s in the in the subtext as well as overcoming doubts and Deltares. overcoming the obstacles that many people just don’t see in creating successful business, specifically in the beverage industry, just just how hard it is to package beverages and ship them out direct to consumer. It’s so heavy, it’s heavy, it’s really hard to make logistics work. So we talk a little bit about that and kind of what’s next for Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 16:54
We have Scaling remote teams maintaining culture growing through SMS marketing, Adam Turner of Postscript
Joshua Chin 17:02
This is a fun like postscript is a great partner of ours. Chronos is a Platinum Partner at postscript. And within working with postscript for a long time, pretty much since the early stages of the of their inception. I actually met Adam back in, I believe, 2019 when he was working on his laptop at play vo Boston klavier boss conference. And we we talked about his journey, and how he thinks about scaling, remote teams in a tech environment, which is incredibly, incredibly interesting. And thinking about building cultures that are built to succeed and to scale. It’s one thing to build a great culture but scaling great cultures is something that’s incredibly difficult. And that’s basically Adams full time job right now. We talked about SMS marketing as well. What brands are doing that’s working in the space. What’s next for postscript? I’m super excited about what’s next Postscript this year, actually, they actually raised a ton of money to scale and to grow the product. We’re proud partners. So listen to the episode, and I’m sure you learned a ton of things.
Jeremy Weisz 18:22
We have the stress free way to profitable micro influencer marketing.
Joshua Chin 18:27
Well either this was a really good one. Influencer Marketing is often misunderstood in, in the ecommerce space, where by it’s treated as a sales channel alone. But the fact is that influencer marketing can be so much more it can be used as a content pipeline for ads, it can also be used for UGC videos can be used for creating a much stronger network of buyers and, and, and consumers. We talked about micro influencers specifically in this episode, which is very accessible to brands of any scale. Even if you’re just starting out, micro influencers are way more accessible and surprisingly, way way more impactful than typical large scale influencers with massive followings. We talked about the cheat codes, the hacks and the tricks and all that good stuff. In this episode, David held nothing back and we went really, really deep
Jeremy Weisz 19:35
to check that one out. I remember you know, just I was talking to Ray Krebbs of natural stacks and they did a phenomenal job of getting microinverters sometimes you know, the funny thing is micro influencers turn into larger influencers like over the over a period so when you get them in the micro messes, they may turn into something much larger later on you you kind of help them at the kind of ground floor
Joshua Chin 20:00
Exactly, and you got an early, and that relationship is built from from day one. And you got to remember that micro influencers are humans, they’re people, they’re people that that you get to connect to. And then often people forget that like oh influencers, that’s just a sales channel. Right? But you’re dealing with people, it’s not an algorithm. It’s not media buying. It’s human, right. So when you think about that, it takes a completely different shift in perspective, to the channel.
Jeremy Weisz 20:32
Next, rising above the noise in the ecommerce beauty category with Ric of 100%, pure.
Joshua Chin 20:37
This was interesting, Ric has been an entrepreneur for a long time since 2005, if I remember correctly, and he, he is the operator at 100% pure.com. Very OG, direct to consumer beauty brands, lots of skews, right, a lot, a lot of different categories of products, a lot of products. And his strategy for scaling is very, very different from a typical ecom brand that has just a couple of a handful of skews, if I remember correctly, they have hundreds of variations of your products in your store. And that’s very difficult to manage. So we talked about pricing, the the idea of jumping on to trends, how do you how you structure, a product lifecycle, and the problem of kind of thinking a product of product life cycles in the ecommerce space as you would in the retail space. Typically, product life cycles go from the inception of a product to the end of life cycle of the product and kind of just dying away. But you can’t exactly do that in an ecommerce space. Ric goes into detail about why that’s the case, when it relates to building a strong customer relationship. Because what what ended up happening with with Ric is that he tried just removing products that were not as popular from his from his store. And he got a ton of comments and emails coming in from loyal customers requesting for that one specific product that they’ve been using for years and years and years. So even if it’s, even though it wasn’t as profitable as the other products, he chose to kept those products, keep those products in the store, just because it kept his loyal customers happy.
Jeremy Weisz 22:32
I guess and then they get other products too. Right?
Joshua Chin 22:35
Exactly right. It’s about keeping the customer keeping a relationship, and ultimately helping them discover new products along the way.
Jeremy Weisz 22:44
The next one is getting the most out of your exit with Joe Valley of Quiet Light brokerage.
Joshua Chin 22:49
This is really interesting. So we spoke to Ben from the perspective of someone who sold his business and is now a now helping others go through the same process as he did. Joe concert perspective of years and years and years of helping successful businesses find the exit that they want their dream exits, right. And we talked about what, what it takes to find the right advisor or broker for your business, what it means to work with one and what what life looks like after an exit. So lots of stuff that we talked about in this interview. Very, very interesting. He, we also talked a little bit about his book. I believe it’s called the The EXITPreneur’s That’s the playbook. I’m really cool. It kind of shifts your mindset around building businesses from being an entrepreneur, operating and building businesses to an entrepreneur building assets that are sellable. Very fascinating. And worth a listen.
Jeremy Weisz 24:06
Josh, this was an amazing one. You know, if you haven’t read Harmon brothers, you’ve probably seen their viral some of their viral YouTube videos they’ve created for brands but this is about creating powerful ads for your brand with Daniel Harmon of the Harmon brothers.
Joshua Chin 24:21
This is the man behind some of the most popular internet ads in history that you’ve probably seen cooperia squatty, potty Purple Mattress fiberfix Chatbooks. And many, many, many more. Recently, I believe they partnered up with a deodorant company and took your brand from seven figures to mid eight figures in revenue over a couple of years. And again, kind of looping back into that idea of what what it takes to succeed in ecommerce startups. creatives and Harmon Brothers is exactly that. The perfect example of that. We talked about the history of hummingbird is how it came to be Daniel’s approach to this his creative approach to creating ads, what it takes to make consumers love. And the Harmon brothers ads are popular in a way that it they essentially coined it. It has become kind of like a term on its own. Like a Harmon brothers style ad. We talked about the hummingbird style ad, we’re talking about like a funny video that it’s really engaging, that people want to watch from like, all the way through, as if it’s not an ad that we talked about the challenges that they faced in scaling their business. And we talked about what’s next. So fascinating, fascinating business. And really interesting mind to pick on. Daniel Harmon, definitely check this out.
Jeremy Weisz 25:56
I you know, check out, check out the Squatty Potty video at some point. And I challenge you not to buy the Squatty Potty after watching that video.
Joshua Chin 26:07
It’s dangerous, it’s dangerous. You throw that out of your wallet for sure.
Jeremy Weisz 26:12
So, how to build a highly successful ecommerce brands with Ezra Firestone, a smart marketer.
Joshua Chin 26:19
This is a great one. Ezra was one of the guys that I looked up to very early on my career. And building Chronos. Actually, a big reason why we have been able to succeed in doing what we’ve done, especially in our first year of business has been Ezra’s email course, we took as far as email course, it changed the way that I thought about email marketing for ecommerce businesses. And I actually have a lot of early success to his teachings. And we talked about his mindset around what makes him successful. His vision and his philosophy around building businesses. His tagline is, serve the world unselfishly and profit. We talked a little bit of what that means to him. And we talked about what he would do if yet started all over again. And this was a great episode, lots of details, tactics, and also high level ideas. As far as become a really good friend of mine. He’s also an avid poker player, so they always make things fun. Great episode. Definitely check this out.
Jeremy Weisz 27:32
You know, the final thing I want to talk about Josh is this is a great some great recap of some of the lessons and guests from the year in review. And I wanted to kind of round it out with some tips and some of your favorite you know, biggest tips or biggest mistakes with email marketing, because this is what you do at Chronos Agency. So, I know you have several thought leadership episodes where you’re talking about giving people some gems as far as our email marketing, SMS marketing goes. So what are a few takeaways and or big mistakes people have make with email and SMS?
Joshua Chin 28:12
We’re complicating it. Number one mistake is over complicating it. It happens at every stage of the business. At the beginning, it’s about should I need a really good email system. And I need to have a massive plan that’s charted out for my entire customer journey from start to finish, I need a pre purchase phase and I need it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. It’s a lot of ideas, right. And what people often don’t realize is that the 80/20 rule, the 80/20 principle plays a big part here. 20% of your email flows are going to generate 80% of your revenue, especially in the first 30 days, there is no need to think about what the entire roadmap is going to look like. Because by the time you figure out your entire roadmap, your business has probably changed. ecommerce moves so quickly, your business is probably going to evolve just as quickly. It doesn’t make sense for you to set and set something in stone right now, that may not be effective 90 days from now. So the best thing to start with our tree flows, the customer acquisition series, which is the welcome series, a cart abandonment flow, and a post purchase flow. These three automations are going to cover the majority of what your key interactions would be with your consumers. And that’s going to bump your revenue up significantly as you scale front end, front end traffic sources. We talked about the sales framework as well. This is a really, really simple sales agreement when you think about launching new products. or launching new sales events. This is a really simple way of thinking about building up towards a sale. It’s not just about sending one email, or one text message or one one paid ad and you’re done with your launch, right? Just as you would with launching a series of advertisements on Facebook you need a series of emails to warm your list up and build attention and excitement towards a product launch or sales launch. And we dive into detail in this episode actually, I believe one of the first is this absolute number one and probably is
Jeremy Weisz 30:41
it may be it may be
Joshua Chin 30:42
it may very well be may very well be but this was a really really good one I think that you’re gonna get a ton of value from just listening to this check out this this is the sick this is one
Jeremy Weisz 30:54
of them but six top ecommerce sales framework explode sales and you can use that for new product event holiday. And listen, there’s there’s holidays every month if you look at the month, we were looking at it the other day, it’s a there’s always random like National Donut Day, whatever the holiday is. They’re all over the place. So yeah, make use this six step framework for whatever you want to do. And, Josh, I just want to thank you I want to point people towards going to the podcast and go to Chronos.Agency just to learn more. Are there any other places we should point people online?
Joshua Chin 31:25
Yeah, Chronos.Agency is the perfect place to go to, if you’re interested in having a conversation with my team to see how we can take your business to the next level 2021 has been incredible. We generated over I believe 19 million in that year alone. So I want to correct you at the beginning of the show. But we generate 19 million for our clients across email and SMS. So we’re excited to see what we can achieve with our clients this year. It’s going to be incredible. Lots of new strategies, new insights gathered across the year that we’re ready to implement. So definitely schedule a time with us and we’ll we’ll see how we can help
Jeremy Weisz 32:07
Chronos.Agency. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, everyone.
Outro 32:15
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
