Shopify Unite 2021 Recap | Unofficial Shopify Podcast

[Music]: big day- shopify. it is shopify in which we learn what the new product announcements are. we get like, hey, here is the gigantik list of features coming down the pipe over the next 12 months. right, yeah, is that a good, good representation of what shopify unite is? i just don't understand this room. i'm in right now. oh, what is my place? we, we have left our homes and we are working in our big boy office that i've been paying rent on for a year, 16 months. well, it goes entirely unused. well, i'm not wearing headphones too, which is weird. now, now i'm used to that. i'm wearing the headphones. yeah, you know, i, i have an extension cable. i'm such a helpful, very far also, that now we're recording it like socially distance, where previously we were in your tiny little office in your house. that was a 10 by 10 room. i had to work with what i had. uh, so are our united announcements. yeah, big day. this is an emergency podcast, by the way, bonus podcast. it's an emergency podcast, emergency bonus red alert. please give me a moment to queue up red alert. oh, i don't even have red alert. oh, my god, i told you i was gonna set me up. all right, continue. uh, yeah, they announced changes, uh, and it sounds like, uh, after being burned for years of announcing things that then never happened, it sounds like all these things are gonna happen. that's pretty exciting. well, so what you're referring to is sections everywhere, sections everywhere, sections anywhere, section sections wherever, wherever, yeah, where i believe we're on the third unite that features sections everywhere. yeah, i'm, you know, at this point i feel i'm, uh, a little gaslit. i don't know like. i question reality, but they'll. i think the last three unites they announced, yeah, they did, sections everywhere. yeah, certainly this time it's gonna stik. third time's the charm, uh, yeah, because what they did is they have, uh, rewritten a ton of the shopify back end and they're calling it online store 2.0. yeah, they've so many features. we said online store 2.0 and i mocked the very 2001ness of that, but kurt made a good point, which i don't think they said explicitly. this is me speculating. no, it became the, the terminology they ended up using. later on, the presentation made it very clear in that the line is going to be: oh well, you're running a 1.0 theme, and a 1.0 theme doesn't have all the hookups and all the cool stuff that we just toked about, so you're gonna need to upgrade to a 2.0 theme that's 2.0 compatible. so that's how they're going to get around it, which makes sense. which makes sense- yeah, i mean, in such a complicated transition i don't know how else you do it. yeah, the idea that they were just going to kind of like backport those abilities onto currently existing themes was going to be was a huge lift, obviously, because they've been working on it for years and it never worked out. so they're doing they're kind of reject rewriting the whole thing. so let's let's tok about what online store 2.0 is. to me, it sounded like it came down to two, three major features. number one, of course, we we've been toking about is sections everywhere. tell me what sections everywhere means. well, it's interesting to me. so what it is is that you're just gonna build section blocks, like you have on your home page right now. those are going to exist universally. like right now, we kind of have home page, home page blocks that are like: these are sections and blocks that go on the home page. that's where they live. and then there's like product detail pages where you can have those blocks, but those are all kind of written into that template here, more like it, you are just writing the section or the block once and then it will be available in all of the templates, which is cool and good, uh, but one thing- so this is a little deep in the weeds here. uh, one thing: i feel like i notiked- i'm not sure if i got a clear answer on this- in the presentation they created. you know, they had a store and they made a new product template that was going to be used for handbags, and so then they're like: well, and then we move these sections around and blah, blah, and here's our handbag template for the handbag products, and that's already available in current shopify. the problem is the content you plugged into that handbag template was going to show up on all the handbags, right? so it couldn't be specific to that specific product. it would just have to be about all the handbags. like, all the contents is universal across every single product that's using that template. so, which is the big pain in the butt? because if you want to have special product, specific content specifically on that product, you need to create a new template for it, or do various shenanigans that we have grown very accustomed to right, and it sounds like the way they're getting around. that is actually what we did is we would. one of the ways we would get around it is what is use what is called meta fields, and meta fields are uh, data about your products that live in the back end of the shopify store, but there was really no good way for you, the store owner, to access it. like we knew how to access it and we knew how to screw around with them, but it was tough for store owners to do it, and that's how we would get around. that whole templating thing is that we'd make the template. all the handbags use the handbag template, but then the content for each individual handbag product would be stored in a meta field that's attached to the product. and what they're doing now is they're making meta fields way more front-facing and then when you're moving the section around and doing that stuff, you then call the meta field, use this meta field for this area on the product page, and then the content for that met and the data for that meta field is stored on the product page for each individual product. okay, if you catch my drift, is that too deep in the weeds? it sounds like what's going on here. it sounds like to me that they that sections anywhere is really very much like the current system that existed. they're just making it way more front-facing. okay, so in, in. if we think of shopify as a content management system, cms, which is what it is- the holy grail be all and all in a cms. the end goal is: can you entirely separate style and substance? so content versus design and online store 2.0 is a huge step toward that. anytime you get there, it makes life dramatikally easier, because now you have a lot fewer instances of: i need to change this one piece of content. oh, i don't know how i have to go email a theme developer. yeah, those hassles and headaches go away when you're on a what we're going to call a 2.0 theme. yeah, and then, to make life even easier, the other hassle that you couldn't get away from even if you had this- you know meta fields and really great cms- was apps. right now, if i install an app in shopify and it's got a widget, so it appears somewhere in the theme and i need to choose where that goes. it's either paste this liquid snippet somewhere. hope you don't screw it up and no one wants to. what merchant wants to go edit their theme code? or, uh, go poke around in the, at the app's gui, and hope you could find, you know, like a css selector that can. yeah, like the app does it itself and, fingers crossed, it picks a good spot that you're happy with. so the new system they call- uh, they call it theme, app extensions, whereas it sounded like, essentially, an app can write a section for itself. yeah, they call your theme. yeah, they call them app blocks, and so, as part of sections, anywhere one of the sections, along with, like you know, testimonials or a contact us form or whatever are the various sections, an app will create its own section. that will be in those tools that then you can use to move around your page: the, and then the. the first 2.0 theme is called dawn. that's going to be the new default theme in every new store. yes, and this also is going to. then it will inevitably end up being like the base framework a lot of theme developers will use for developing, uh, custom themes for clients or for sale. yeah, that's the main thing. i'm ex.

Shopify PPC Traffic & Sales Funnels | Unofficial Shopify Podcast ep. 279

(exhales). - Is Hoonigan paying you to wear that? - No, this is not. this is not SponCon. - Is this SponCon? - No, #sponcon. - Mmm God? - No, to optimize my life, I try to plan my outfits out based on the weather and what I'm doing, and I try to do it on Sunday. - Oh, wow, most people usually don't do that. They just wear like winter coats in July and shit. They don't pay attention to any of that stuff. so you're really like optimizing - It's like a. there's a non-zero chance that you wear shorts in January, So I don't want to hear it. (laughs) - I am not a year round shorts guy. - But we're not far off. - No, I get, I get. - You're a three quarters year shorts guy. - I get hot. (laughs) - And I appreciate not wanting to be hot. that's why I can't move to Florida. - Oh, I can't move South of Chicago. This is the line. I can't go anywhere south of here. - You're going to Michigan. - My only direction is North. - I understand, Yeah, no, I don't. no one wants to be sweaty. - FYI, any Shopify Bold. if you want to acquire us, I'll move. (laughs) - As long as it's north. - As long as it's north. - Further north. - If someone in Arizona wants to acquire us, get out. no, the answer's no. - Yeah, ooh, is it a remote position? Much travels required. (epic sounds). (sounds of light and ether). So today on the unofficial Shopify podcast, I'm your host, Kurt Elster. Joining me is my cohost, Paul Reda, and this is a listener Q and A episode. So I had posted in our Facebook group. I said: what can we help you with? What are you concerned about? What's keeping you up at night? We got a stunning. there was 69 comments in there, And so we picked a few that we thought would be good discussion points that we could tok about, and it's a lot about optimizing for the current traffic. you have your current situation and traffic generation strategies. That's important 'cause you know we've been toking feels like for two years now, saying, hey, Facebook ads are more expensive than ever. You know, buying traffic from the traffic store, ie Facebook market player or Facebook Ads- just keep getting more expensive. January, all month long we've been seeing people saying hey, uhs, are your ROAS numbers down? Is your Facebook Ads not working? And that seems to be a common theme among Shopify merchants. so we're going to tok tok about that and it's also nice to see every January our download numbers go up. This January was no different. Last week's Jake Star episode record numbers. you guys clearly liked that And it was cool. the Ponzi scheme episode prior to that one really had a- I'm sorry, alleged Ponzi scheme (laughs). That was a risk. we hadn't done a episode like that. that had like broader appeal. it was more-- - Oh, I love that episode 'cause it was just a fun story that we got to be part of. - Yes, and that one did pretty well. so if you haven't listened to either of those, maybe go back, consider it, check it out, All right. oh, and we got our Unite tikets, Shopify Unite this May in Toronto. - I'm excited, fingers crossed, 'cause I really liked the first. so they moved locations. The first one I went-- - [Kurt] Last year. - Well, they moved locations again this year. - Yeah -, After moving it last year. The first one it was at like is it called the Brick Yard? - Two years ago it was Brickworks - Brickworks, and that was my first Unite And I really loved it. I had a great time, the weather was beautiful, There was a lot of like outdoor seating. It was just the best. and then last year's was like clearly a lot bigger, in like the conference center at like a big event's space, and it just didn't feel as like fun - [Kurt] Yeah - It felt a lot more stayed and wasn't as like freewheeling and like people just kind of hanging out - And it really I think it's the environment - I think it's well, I think it's the environment and I think it's the size. I think you know you can't have like a cool fun event where, like people are meeting each other and hanging out and having a great time if it's like you know - In a conference center - In a conference center - A literal conference center - and it's like thousands of people - Yeah, so going smaller, it sold out, It's already sold out, I think - It's already sold out and they raised the prices to like keep it smaller. - So Shopify United, it's not for merchants, it's focused on Shopify partners, The key word being Unite. We're going to unite Shopify partners. Last I heard there were 12,000 Shopify partners And so we I've been every year, Paul's been going the last several years. It is a ton of fun, but we'll. that's where we get the Shopify announcements for the road map for the coming year, and so of course we'll cover that on this episode. You'll here that in June when we get back from Unite. All right, anything else on your list, or do you want to dive into some questions? - No -, That's a no. - That's a no. - All right, things have been busy Openingm. we have Melita Cyril, who asks: Should we advertise on Pinterest for baby/kids products? Moms hang out there but wondering whether to double down on Facebook over exploring Pinterest - So my initial thought, and this is what we thought a couple years ago, was that Pinterest traffic is purely drive by traffic. It's worthless. like you get traffic from it. It doesn't convert at all. It's like people are just on Pinterest repinning things. they're not actually going to the places where the things are. That was our thought process. Has that changed? - Not really. (laughs). Here's why - I thought you were going to blow me out of the water - No, okay - And be like, actually it's good now - Well, so here they said: should we advertise on Pinterest? I have, yet I'm sure there are exceptions. I have yet to have a client who ran Pinterest ads and I can already like I'm going to get a bunch of emails. I've ran Pinterest ads and I make a million dollars on a dollar investment. No, I have not had direct experience with someone who was successful with Pinterest ads. We don't have a ton of people doing it or trying it or who have tried it, but I've not seen. I've not seen success with it. I have seen success with organic Pinterest strategies. I know it's worked very well for my wife on Double Your WDW and, but that was to drive organic traffic from Pinterest. That was like traditional social media content marketing type stuff. however, in Google Analytiks, in Shopify reports, you can sort traffic. you can divide your revenue up by traffic source. What I found is the, based on that, the Pinterest traffic is very much drive-by traffic. It will. you could use it to drive awareness, You could use it to fill remarketing ad funnels, but those people are not highly qualified, not walling out ready to buy. It's not the same as, like, Google Shopping is highly qualified. Pinterest yeah, okay, it's legit traffic, but those people are not going to convert directly into a sale necessarily - So it's sort of the same thing. when we did like our end of the year traffic breakdown, it was the sort of thing we saw with Instagram where, like the direct Instagram, conversion rate was terrible. but we think that Instagram buyers are top of funnel buyers and that's the first visit of the three visits required for someone to buy something. - Yes, and so one of the thing, like the last thing Melita says- is wondering whether to double down on Facebook over exploring Pinterest. So they already have success on Facebook and they have not. they said double down. That means they don't know if they've hit the limit of what they could scale their ads to. So I'd say, if you're sitting there and you've got one successful ad channel and you're like, wow, should I spend more money on the one that's currently successful or just go play with this one that I don't have experience with? double down on the one you know works. (laughs). I mean, of course, like you know, that's the answer. - Yeah, keep doing the thing that works until it stops working. - Yeah, - Then try a new thing. -.

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Q&A: Online Store 2.0 | ep.363, Unofficial Shopify Podcast

all right. all right, we have big updates and more news about previous previous topic. we've been going over on this uh show that is of interest to all of you. the new mario golf stinks. oh, no good, it's not good. i'm very disappointed. uh, it wrecked my summer. yeah, it's gonna be a big summer, uh, and the worst thing that's going on during this summer is the numero golf is bad. i'm sorry. get new sounds, by the way, i'm not, no, i'm just committed to the old sound five. i was trying to get some sounds uh a week ago and you're like you gotta give it up. i was like going through the sound board because i gotta wade through tremendous garbage just to get these like six good ones. yeah, you need new ones. no, please, god. yeah, i have headphones now so i can hear this garbage. i don't know why i put these headphones on. do you want some more? no, [Music]. what are we discussing today in the unofficial shopify podcast? uh, how mario golf switched from three button hits to swing to two button hits. no wrong show, god damn it. i want that show. oh, no, you, that's your own show. all right, you go start that. we're going through. uh, we're playing 20 questions with our facebook group of shopify merchants, as we posted yet another call for questions and an ama and uh got some good questions and this time we even went through the effort of grouping them. yeah, they are loosely grouped together in two topics. oh, aren't i fancy, would you sure, which you know? the more you knock me down, the worse this gets. i've seen you when you're. i've seen what happens to you when you get too confident and i don't like hanging out with that guy. so i gotta keep you. you know i got to keep you down. that doesn't sound good. all right, my job here is just to keep knocking you down. you know, it's like my girl. she holds me down, like you know, kind of like that. i just wanted to. that meant support, but you know it's keeping you grounded. no, that's not what that means. i don't want you to get lost in the sauce. oh well, okay, that i appreciate. see, there you go. thank you, okay, and do we have, uh, any other non-sequiturs and off topics, or do we want to? no? online store 2.0? uh, matthew stewart wants to know. i started with shopify eight months ago. i have just been using a debut and want to upgrade. should i wait for 2.0 themes to come out and just, or just get turbo right now. uh, you could roll with dawn right now, um, i think, right, yeah, how do you get it? is it available on the app, on the theme store now, because he already has an existing store? oh well, i know like 100, you just go get it from github. yeah, he could download the zip from github and then upload the zip file like any other theme he would have purchased. it's the same thing he would have to do if he bought turbo um, but i know as of like some date that may or may not have already passed. i'm not like spinning up new shopify stores outside of you know, my, my partner account. i don't know if that's the default. currently it is. it is yes, okay, um, and we tok, you tok to some people who know things: yes, in terms of turbo timelines. so currently, with as far as i know, with the exception of dawn, no theme is fully online store 2.0 compatible. okay, that's where we're at right now, but that's what everybody's working toward. obviously, shopify's deadline is: everybody's got to do it before january 1st, you're okay, that's what we're looking at. so the theme developers have to: they're you're. you can't be releasing new themes that aren't 2.0 after january 1st. yes, all right, but we know themes are going to start showing up with 2.0 support, probably next month, okay, yeah. so i don't know what the right answer is. he said: i've just been, i've been using debut theme and i want to upgrade. why should i wait for the 2.0 themes to come out or just get turbo now? if you're not happy with debut because you think it's not enough? i'll be honest with you. dawn is also not going to be enough for you. that's true. dawn is bare bones. so you could buy turbo now. i'm sure they will give you. i'm not, i can't say i'm sure, i don't know. they're generally very good at updating their themes out of the sandbox and you get updates for free and you get the theme updater tool which you can pay for. so if you bought turbo now, my bet would be they would let you, you would just upgrade it when they upgrade it. it's just yeah, that's all safe if you don't save assumptions, if you don't poke at it too much and you're not making a bunch of code changes, in which case you could still update it. but uh, good luck, good luck, it's going to suck. uh, yeah, can i drop? should i drop a hot take right now? uh, you don't need to rush to upgrade. i agree you're not getting a lot. i would wait. you're honestly not really gaining a lot. i mean because the, the, uh, the 2.0 theme editor, that's just live now. yeah, everybody got that. and the new meta fields- better field support- you just get. you just get and like writing meta fields in the code, which, again, you're not doing. the store owners listen to this. um, so what do you care? i mean what you see, between having turbo now and what you're going to have in turbo in six months, who cares? the, i know it's so close, it's right around the corner and you're already surviving on debut. i would wait and just do it right and get the full features because even if it's the stuff you're not like gonna use all the time or a hundred percent gonna use, you still want app sections. you're gonna want that, that support going forward. i view it as future proofing. you're viewing it more as like: well, i'm not that committed. well, is all this, is all the waiting worth just getting you know sections? yeah, you're going to want all people. you're going to want to be on it because you're going to want to be current and not be on a deprecated old system. so, like, at some point you're going to have to transition to it. i'm seeing the mindset of: well, i got to get across that finish line because i got to get access to all these great new features. ah, slow down. yeah, because it's not gonna make a big material difference. yes, yeah, you could upgrade. you're most of the- uh, you can. the gains you're gonna get from getting away from debut or dawn to like a really big, fancy, extensible, customizable theme is really just because you switch themes. yeah, not because you've got those additional features. yeah, going from dawn to turbo, like you're going from like three to ten, the transition from turbo now to turbo three months from now is going from 10 to 11.. like, okay, it's fine. yeah, like, look, i've been driving around this toyota yaris. i'm really i'm gonna pull the trigger, you know, on my, my new tesla, but do i? just, the 2022 is right around the corner. do i wait? that's essentially what's going on here. it's like most of the gain is coming from the upgrade to a premium theme, not necessarily that you waited for these extra features. yeah, yeah, um, yeah, i mean always with the car analogies: yeah, yeah, you, i know. uh, yeah, it's like everyone rolling. you can roll whatever anyone. listen to this. whatever you got right now, you, and if you're happy with what you have right now, just roll with it through christmas, it's fine. yeah, there's nothing where it's like: oh, i only made. i could have made an extra hundred thousand dollars if i only had that new theme over on black friday. it's, that's not gonna happen. yeah, yeah, it's really. it's like um, administration, cms, quality of life, improvements for managing it, more so than like act, revenue generating on-site stuff. i think, is what's going on here exactly? all right, so we spent a lot of time on this do i upgrade? question, because i think a lot of people are wondering it. the other thing, uh, we've been hearing that goes along with do i upgrade is: hey, should i be looking at headless solutions? because it sounded when we listened to shopify unite, it sounded like that they're embracing headless as a potential option for merchants. that's, that's what i got out of that. and so clifford asks: what's the big difference between headless e-commerce versus e-commerce? you know, quite confused, some of the big shopify stores are toking.

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Accelerated Growth as Shopify Expert with Kurt Elster - of the Unofficial Shopify Podcast

break it down to a strategy. it's look for the overlap of like, where the opportunity is, or maybe an unfair advantage, and what you love and what you know, and in the that venn diagram, where all those things overlap. that's where what your niche should be, whether that's a professional service or a sas business, an app, a merchant store, whatever. that's where you're going to succeed. hi and welcome to the happy progress podcast. i'm alex harris and today we're here with kurt elster. how you doing, kurt? i'm well yourself. excellent, to get started. does progress equal happiness to you? no, i think it's about it. it is the. certainly. it's about the journey, not the destination. um, so i don't know that progress itself is the happiness. i had a, an economics teacher who, in the last day of class- and i'm going to teach you the secret of the secret to life, and it's- there is a difference between, uh, happiness and pleasure, and happiness comes from achievement and productivity, and so, anytime you can, you know the choice is like: all right, pleasure, i'm gonna play video game. happiness, i'm going to finish this project. i'm going to ship this deliverable, i'm going to put up this blog post, post this podcast. scratch this item off my to-do list. that is the secret i learned when i was 21 and have never forgotten so: being productive, does that have to produce results? no, no, it doesn't. as long as there's, you know, something that you can hang your hat on. you know, check the item off the to-do list, uh, send the email, whatever it is. you get to define what that, that productivity, what that goal looks like. that's entirely in your head. that's up to you. hmm, i love it. you get to define what success really is. yes, because most people are too hard on themselves, especially entrepreneurs. really, like, it's very easy to go, the grass is greener. like, wow, you know, i don't make a million dollars a year, i only make three hundred thousand dollars a year. like, that's that stuff. entrepreneurs say, like it with total sincerity and you go: all right, you gotta stand back and listen to the statement you just made, right, um, and so i, i think with with um, with entrepreneurship, it's just really easy for us to be hard on ourselves, and one of the the most freeing things a therapist ever told me was: kurt, you're too hard on yourself. it had literally had not occurred to me prior to this woman telling me that, yeah, we definitely hold ourselves down and hold ourselves back. if you don't know about kurt, you're probably living in a hole somewhere, but he is the unofficial shopify expert from the unofficial shopify podcast. he also has the agency ether cycle. i'll give you a little background of what i've learned about curt over a number of years, because we've toked several times in the past. started out as an e-commerce manager doing drop shipping at a local auto parts store. then he played around with a few different sas startup ventures, moving into web applications related to wordpress, and learning about shopify obviously became niche in shopify, focused on his shopify agency, either cycle, and he's expanded upon that, becoming probably the the most known face in shopify and really now focusing on on shopify apps. how has that that journey been for you? it's been incredible, but i do. i have to issue one correction. you mispronounce the name of the podcast. it's pronounced like this and like: obviously you have to have the accent, so you may not be able to do it. it sounds like this unofficial shopify podcast. see, there's no way that you can get that accent right. i need to learn how to do those. uh. add those to my podcast, uh. but as you can tell, kurt brings the character and the personality to it and and he's really stand it out from the rest in in the pack. give us a little bit of breakdown of kind of the history of you becoming the unofficial shopify expert. so, really, like i, i quit my job to go build an e-commerce platform 11 or 12 years ago- and it was i. it's good, i didn't know what i didn't know or i never would have attempted it, but trying and failing, and then pivoting from that, five years later, i discovered, like i, it finally occurred to me: wait, why am i doing anything other than shopify? i had this generalist mentality you know like, well, if i catch, the wider a net, the bigger than that, the more official catch. and in marketing it really is not the case. and so we went from like generalist web design to e-commerce and then within e-commerce, i said, well, let's try a bunch of platforms. and lo and behold, shopify was still the one we like best. and fi. it just occurred to me one day after doing this horrible um wordpress project for a big agency, for a big client, where just everything that could go wrong did go wrong. it was red flag city, right, it's just awful like i had to bail from that and i just one day occurred to me: wait, why am i doing anything other than shopify? and so when i did that, i said, well, we'll start a podcast about it. we had a working title- unofficial shopify podcast- which, of course, then i never, never quite got around to changing um, and i said i'm just going to stik to this and see what happens, because i think oftentimes people's your so-called failure is just they gave up too early and it's because of, uh, probably uh unrealistik expectations. so within within 60 days of saying, uh, i'm the, i'm the shopify guy and i host the unofficial shopify podcast, and really i'd only done a handful of shopify projects at the time, but i said i'm only going to do this, i'm going to dedicate myself to this and really i'm learning in public. and i set out to do that. and within 60 days i was getting referrals from people i didn't know to people i didn't know going: hey, i heard you're the shopify guy. wow, that's the power of positioning. and so that was like my first real indication is when you have strangers recommending you to strangers that like what, this positioning is working, this marketing is working, there's something here. and so i just kept at it and kept moving my way up the ladder and kept, and i learned like, okay, adding, it's okay to have a personality, it's okay to be you, to have a personal brand, to put some of yourself into it. and so, um, i, i have an interest and a background in cars. you know, i like the automotive aftermarket and i started toking about that and pretty soon that got me to, uh, jay leno's garage and i got to go. i met jay leno and i get to do his garage or see tour's garage and do his website. and then, based on that success, if you had asked me, you know, in 2010, hey, who's your dream client? and that's when i just thought i was a designer- who's your dream club? i would have said hoonigan, this big automotive lifestyle brand. they had one of the most watched youtube videos at that time and called gymkhana. and lo and behold, uh, three years ago- it three years ago almost exactly- the ceo emailed me and said, hey, we need help with our website. we think we should tok to you. i couldn't believe it. i reread that email like three times. i'm like: wait, my dream client from when i started this just emailed me and said, hey, let's work together. i couldn't believe it and so, um that, like you know, those moments were the ones that define for me and tell you like, hey, yes, you're doing something right. yes, be confident and keep going. and you just need to keep looking for the. so if i had to break it down to a strategy, it's look for the overlap of like, where the opportunity is, or maybe an unfair advantage, and what you love and what you know, and in the that venn diagram, where all those things overlap. that's where what your niche should be, whether that's a professional service or a sas business, an app, a merchant store, whatever. that's where you're gonna succeed. and then you know, the unfortunate part is- and because not everyone is in a position to do this, you probably will have to stik to it and stack the bricks, building that business for two years, i believe. i think that's probably the typical amount of time and to dedicate to it, and not necessarily full-time, um, and from there, okay, now that's when you're going t.

Shopify vs. Shopify Plus - Unofficial Shopify Podcast #261

So I wanted to share briefly a thing. my eight year old told me that once it was in my brain I couldn't get it out, because this child has proven over and over he's a poet - I love this story, by the way - He said it was just me and him he goes. Kurt, you know what I hate? I said what Tanner And he said: when teenagers flex with their AirPods (laughter) And then he just stared at me waiting for the reaction. He knew he'd said something good (Paul laughs) And I said: do you even know what that means And which one that's like? for him it's a real gamble. just to repeat great stuff he's heard, 'Cause he said some not awful but inappropriate things. we were like: don't repeat that. That he heard on YouTube - Mm-hmm - And so this one was a gamble. and he never said it again 'cause I didn't follow up on it. I really should be like I gotta go back and tell him to be like: hey, Remember that time. you said that That was pretty funny and totally clean and tame. Just reminder to myself. And now, every time I see AirPods, I think I hate when teenagers flex with their AirPods - But you didn't he. you asked him if he knew what that meant. and he literally like, do you know what any of that means? and he was just like no, And then just turned right, you made him admit it. - Yeah, and then I was like just don't. well, it's always the lesson is: hey, that was was fine, but if you don't know what it means, don't just go around saying it, you're gonna get yourself in trouble. - That's how you sound smart, though, you gotta say it when you don't know what it means. - He is smart, though, But he's, you know, he's eight, He's. there's limited knowledge there. My favorite Tannerism of all time being. I think he was six, it might have been five, five or six. he just, and for whatever reason, him and his brother were terrified not of injuries but of subsequently applying a Band Aid, And I guess it was like you know, ripping Band Aids off sucks And it means you got an injury. So he was like wailing about having to put a Band Aid on for a blister. He gets the Band Aid on and later that day he goes. mom, my life's just so different with my Band Aid on. (laughs). And that it's another thing. just been rattling around in my head for two years now. (electronic music). (coughs). So I did. a couple weeks ago I did the One Chip Challenge. Are you familiar? - Well, I'm familiar because you won't shut up about it. - Yes, I'm very proud, And my eight year old, who also has tremendous tolerance for spice- I've been building him up for several years now- He did a little bit of the One Chip Challenge as well. The One Chip Challenge is- and this relates to e-commerce, in that I bought it online and it is brilliant viral marketing. - Well, these guys are geniuses 'Cause you bought a single, extremely spicy potato chip. how much did you pay for a single potato chip? - For a single. it's a tortilla chip, thank you. - A single tortilla chip, I'm sorry. - Seven dollars. - Seven dollars, but you also had to pay for shipping. How much did the shipping cost? - So I bought three chips and I believe all three, shipped were $26 or $27.. - All right, so you paid nine dollars for a single tortilla chip because it was extremely spicy. - It's in a commemorative cardboard box. - I want to know what their margins are, because I love these men. - (laughs). So this is how they launched the brand Paqui Chips, which sells tortilla chips that are notably extremely hot. They sell a ghost pepper chip that I love. if I eat a whole bag, it will reduce me to tears. Two years ago I saw on the Today Show and a whole bunch of local news stations- they must've just sent these things out- on-air personalities doing the One Chip Challenge, In which you simply have to eat a single tortilla chip that has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's hottest tortilla chips at one and a half million Scoville units, And then see how long you can go without drinking milk or ice cream. Just sit with the agony And then you. then you turn around and you upload a video of this nonsense to the internet. hashtag: One Chip Challenge. - So what you're saying is: you paid these guys nine dollars-- - Uh-huh. - For one chip, and then you did all their advertising for them. - Yes, And in between they waged asymmetrical warfare against my tongue. - I love them so much - It's brilliant. - And they're sold out. They can't keep 'em in stok, Just make the chips guys Print money. - Oh, get, yeah. When I found out about it two years ago, they were sold out And it I think they might have done it the year before that, on a smaller scale, but I didn't hear about it then. So I got on their newsletter. they I tweeted at them. I said: when's this coming back out? They said: get on our newsletter. Sure enough, I get on the newsletter, it's a month later. they say: One Chip Challenge is back in stok Within a week, completely sold out. Yeah, (laughs) - I love them, I want that. - Yeah, they really. it is brilliant marketing 'cause you're in, you're involving your customer in the marketing. they're doing the. ultimately, they're doing the marketing for you, but you're leveraging scarcity and social proof and all this stuff at once - Well, and it's extreme, it's a thing you, it's a thing in the world. you cannot get anywhere else. - [Kurt] Yes - And it is the best in its market segment, the market segment being horrific food items (laughs) - And it's accessible to anybody because, okay, yeah, I paid seven dollars for a chip, But that's the thing. shipped is 10 bucks. Well, a majority of people could afford a 10 dollar item. for you know - [Paul] As a goof. - [Kurt], To look cool on the Gram. - (laughs), Look cool on the Gram. - I had just tears streaming down my face. it was brutal In-- - All right, so let's get on to actual podcast content. - All right, The couple e-commerce news items: Simon Property Group- largest mall owner in America-- - They don't own our mall. - [Kurt], They don't - But they own-- - [Kurt], We're Westfield. - They own, yeah, we're Westfield. they own Woodfield Mall, which is my top Chicago area mall - Which you may have seen in the news when someone drove an SUV through it. - Yeah, I know it was awesome. - Yeah, it was pretty crazy. - You could say it was awesome 'cause no one got hurt. - Yes, - [Paul] But-- (laughs) - Yeah, in retrospect-- - If someone got hurt, it would've been horrible. (laughs). - [Kurt], Well, it was-- - He drove it through the Sears, which is good that he drove it through the Sears. Reduce any sort of possibility of injury. (Kurt laughs). if you drive through Sears - Ooh, dig on Sears. - No one in there. And then he just kind of drove through the mall for a while 'til he crashed the car. - Yeah, the Twitter, Twitter video from Twitter user nipsfalloff, I'm not kidding. (Paul laughs). We saw that going around And we're like, oh man, I wonder what, how local news will credit this man And they just credited by like Twitter user his first name - [Paul]. Yeah, (laughs). - They did not say Twitter user nipsfalloff. (Paul laughs). Anyway, Simon Property Group owns that mall and that was entirely a tangent. It has been reported 9.4 percent of mall units were empty in Q3, that ties the previous record from 2011,. so 10 percent. almost one in 10 mall units are empty right now And Simon sees the writing on the wall. they are hedging their bets. So they invested $280 million for a stake in flash sale site Rue Gilt Groupe. I've seen, I remember years ago when Frost Hill sites were huge, seeing Gilt, But I haven't paid attention to it recently. - Oh, yeah, they had an insane valuation I thought: - [Kurt] Yeah, - Were they the ones that you know some bullshit three years ago, where they were like they're worth five billion dollars, Billion dollars? - [Kurt] Yeah, a lot of these--. - I don't think they are. (laughs). - Yeah, these valuations are ge.

Kurt Elster, Unofficial Shopify Podcast, Interview with Ecommerce Merchant Andy Bedell, KeySmart

so I'm Kurt Elster. you best known for hosting the unofficial shop by podcast, recently hitting 1 billion downloads. we're very proud of that. so anyone who listens, thank you so much. and a recurring guest on that show- because he is brilliant and funny and a little weird- is mr Andrew Bedell, who is the marketing director at key smart as well as doing consulting and a few of his own side gigs. the man is just one of those people who is always, always grinding and always having fun with it, which i think is important, and he knows more about. he'll forget more about Facebook advertising that I know that I will ever know. I mean, the guy's just a tremendous guru at it and willing to try all kinds of fun different things. so I thought Derek and I toked about it. we thought it would be fun to do a live interview with mr Vidal in which we go over some of the the challenges, successes, ideas and things he learned in growing and scaling key smart in to the tremendous business it is today, so that you could apply those to your own business. and while we're doing that, please comment in the chat. let us know any questions you have. I will ask those as well. mr Vidal, could you care to introduce yourself? you always had a really good introduction for me. yeah, I would say you're the best tight man in the business. so, on the fly, without my name's- Andy and I'm the director of marketing at Keith smart. I'm kinda long I've been in advertising for I don't even know like 10 years now or something like that. how old am i? I guess like 8 years, 9 years. I started at Chicago Booth, which is the Business School at the University of Chicago, like running these campaigns for $10,000 executive education courses. so I was like selling courses, you know high-level, high-powered business people, for $10,000 for a week and it did a lot of like direct mail, Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, and I'm came to the key smart and help scale key smart into I'm an eight-figure business and we continue to grow and have, you know, just do a little bit of consulting and yeah, I think that's pretty much it for me. so it's funny you mentioned University of Chicago's Graham School of Business while you were there. I attended that and got a certificate in integrated marketing doing that classes and like it. no point did we ever run into each other. we met later but we would have both been there at the same time. yeah, yeah, I was actually at the boot school business, but I, alright, i, but I. I graduated from the Graham school as well. I did the finance. at one point I wanted to become like a finance guy and so I did the finance course rather than the integrated marketing. but I was in that same building in the greeter center and I was just on the upstairs but no, yeah, we didn't meet. we also went to school next. ignore each other. you went to, like, main south and I went to hershy, which are yeah, yeah, alright, let's. let's get to the interesting stuff for folks. let's start with what the heck is key, smart, so key. sport is. if you've never seen it, it's a key organizer. so I'll just show it to you real quickly. you're gonna feel like fan out the key. so basically you can unscrew the sides with your regular, your existing keys inside. it basically just organizes your keys or time. so cool. yeah, so you can put things like a bottle opener on there. it's got this. like you know, you can get a quick disconnect to put your- you know, to put your car keys and keys that won't fit on there. this one is a tile location tracker as well, so if you lost, you can find on the map which there was. another one of your brilliant ideas was: hey, how can we leverage strategic partnerships? and you worked with tile to resell your, say, the product you'd already sold to people again by adding tile to it and making it a tik gadget. yep, you know, that was a. that was a big win for us. you know, just that was. a lot of people had always asked us to give an ADD GPS to it. well, tile is an extra GPS, is Bluetooth, tiknology, but it was. you know, I was tough to even get ahold of them, but once we got ahold of them, it was, you know, months of negotiation with them and lots of engineering work went into it, but yet end up being a huge, huge, huge win for us. so, and uh, let's see, was I gonna say, how long have you been in a key smart? I think you smart now since 2015. so it's, I think actually, I, just, I, just I just went off my four-year, my four-year anniversary. yes, I started in June of 2015, so it's been four years, and before that, yeah, I was moonlighting. I was working at UChicago- it's about to get my MBA- and then left there and you know, basically I was moonlighting. I started our ads for key smart. we, like pod, was right when facebook video ads first came out, so we popped in some new video ads and all of a sudden, the the revenue went from about like three or five thousand dollars a day so we got it up to about twenty five thousand dollars a day and just a few minutes, yeah. so so tok to me about that. when you first started working at key smart, you're killing it with facebook video ads and the product is still new and you've got plenty people to introduce it to. what was it like? what did you learn, like quickly, what's different now? okay, yeah, so there was really an amazing feeling to start, because you know it's. you had never seen the guy campaign scale as much as that one dude. so back then it was. you know, Facebook ads- video ads were completely new. you couldn't even use video ads and the website conversion. you know tactiks. so you had to get was something called you use video views for them and you would get video views per third chief, like you know, under a penny. so people- you know everybody- was just getting cut. you know, back then everything was extremely cheap. so, but a lot of people. then you know, just you know, trucking tribe video and just couldn't get it to work. I haven't been a bunch of my friends for you know I was killing with video and Tony, but you gotta get video, the video. but all my friends, just you know, couldn't get it to work and so there's a lot. you know there's kind of a formula. we won't go into the actual formula, but you know it's kind of a formula for figuring out you know, you know that right video and it's taken me years and years to really kind of figure out. no, I feel like I could have a pretty good handle on. you know, getting a video that will sell, but you know, so some of the things that changes become much more expensive. there's, you know, the targeting is. I guess you know some of the machine learning. you may say this has become a little bit better, but yeah, it's so much more expensive but you can still make it work. but it's not as easy it was, it was before. but you really need to do is get you know, really good video production and landing pages that really, you know, sell your, you sell your product. so yeah, I hope that answers the question. you've had some success work with more like traditional West Coast la type video production folks, including working with screenwriter Michael jamon, who was wrote, worked with Mike judge and he wrote for beavis and butt-head and king of the hill and all these other things. how- and you mentioned that, hey, video has to be really like high production, high quality, and you have a formula for it. give me the elevator pitch- could be like in 60 seconds. sell me on what a good video is for it. yeah, so I work with- yeah, we work with Michael Jamin. we, that was really a fun. you know it was a great production. but you know I also worked on your lower production stuff that's performed even better than that. so really that you know the process really goes about figuring out what the reasons are the people really like your product is gonna sound basic, but you're figuring out what people really like your product and then figure out how you can create very quick videos that you know. even you have that Osmo pocket, right, I love that thing. yeah, so if you have that like you know I can- yeah, I just bought one too, let's, if you have like the Osmo pocket. so, to start, you know you just you get a piece of paper and figure out like the top you know r.