← DTC Podcast
DTC Podcast
Ep 477: Shopify Optimization Strategies Every DTC Founder Should Know – With Kurt Elster
00:42:40
Loading summary
Transcript108 lines
- [00:00]
A
Man, I would love to build more landing pages. It's such a missed opportunity for most people. This very dialed in offer page that increases relevance of messaging. It's not something we do as often as I think we should be doing.
- [00:14]
B
When people come to you with a busted theme or maybe an out of the box theme or something, what are the main areas that you're focused on improving?
- [00:23]
A
You will never see any big retailer do this. They have figured this out. I think the thing that has the outsized impact is are there any other.
- [00:29]
B
Ways you're using AI? Interestingly?
- [00:31]
A
Oh yeah, absolutely I do. People start, get discouraged, then give up, do it over and over and over and you get better at it and people listen and you gain followers and audience and sales. Put in the reps, get the gains.
- [00:57]
B
Ready to rapidly generate winning ad ideas in 2025. Motion, the creative analytics and research plat used by brands like hexclad, Vuori, True Classic and Jones Road Beauty, just released their explosive new report on what really works with meta ad creative. This report is more fact than feeling, featuring never before seen insights from Motion's analysis of $100 million in ad spend, a survey of 500 plus ad experts, and deep dive interviews with some of the most elite performance creative teams in D2C, including experts like Nick Sharma and Sarah Levenger. What's inside? The seven biggest creative trends for 2025, including how humor is making a comeb ad creative, the rise of earned nostalgia, and the ad trends that will help your brand stand out this year. This report is packed with real ad examples, new data and novel techniques from making AI enhanced creative concepts to bleeding edge creative ideas for advanced teams. Get your free copy now@motionapp.com creative trends and start rapidly creating ads that get attention and scale. Kurt, welcome to the DTC Podcast. I've been following you since I got into the space. You're one of the OGs. Were you the first Shopify? The first unofficial Shopify podcast in the space?
- [02:13]
A
Yes, I believe so. And we've been Shopify partners for a long time. Since 2011.
- [02:19]
B
Okay, well walk me through that a little bit. Walk me through because it's funny. We're kind of. We're doing similar things in a way. We've created a media company to help grow an agency in a way, which is kind of, kind of what we've done over on the pilot house side, it looks like what you've done with Ethercycle. Walk me through that journey a little bit.
- [02:34]
A
So that agency business was from 2009 where I Foolishly, there's advantage in being naive. Said, let's build an e commerce platform. How hard could that be? And we'll build it for bike shops, hence the name. And then from there, it turns out, I can't. I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't do that. It was very difficult. We're looking for that pivot, and so we're just building brochure websites. And I had a friend who owned a bike shop, and he said, look, I hate my website. What do you hate about it? He goes, it's hard. Just give me something easy. I said, I heard about this thing called Shopify, and I think that's their whole thing, is that it's easy. And again, just being completely naive, I was like, not only will we migrate you to it, we'll also design and develop a custom theme for you. I didn't know what it was doing. I'd never done that before. I had even logged into Shopify when I made that promise. But it was easy to use, it was well documented, and we had WordPress experience. So we were able to build a custom store. And within months, they took notice. I got an email from Shopify. They said, we saw you built this custom theme. Why don't you join this new thing called the Experts program? Oh, my gosh, yeah, sure. I need leads, man signed up right away. I get a lead from a golf course in Oregon. Banded Dunes is a big deal golf course. Do a project for them. And so it just snowballed. I very quickly, I knew, like, this is we want to explore. And a few years go by and I'm doing guest podcasts. This is like, you know, serial is about to happen, or it's just happened. And people say, well, you have the personality for it. Meaning, I don't know, I'm loud. You should start a podcast. And so I did, and we gave it a working title. I said, we'll figure out the title later. Let's just record now. It's the unofficial Shopify podcast. And I never changed it. And I got very lucky in that they. They chose to allow me to continue with that. And so I always tried to be, you know, respectful of that opportunity.
- [04:21]
B
I don't know you to. I don't know that you're loud. What I would say is actually something that came out of my brother who works at Shopify came out of one of his, like, employee, you know, one of his reviews. Basically, he was told he has radical candor. And I feel like you excel with radical candor. That's one thing that I've noticed from your social feed. Would you agree?
- [04:38]
A
I. You're not the first person to say that, so I compelled to agree.
- [04:42]
B
That's awesome. How much has the podcast played a role in the growth of your agency?
- [04:49]
A
That is our. I would would have to believe that it is our primary Legion source.
- [04:54]
B
Yeah, it's, it's interesting. Like with. On the, on the pilot house side, we have, you know, we have 150,000 subscribers on the DTC newsletter. We get like 25.
- [05:02]
A
That's awesome.
- [05:02]
B
Yeah, it's great. But it's like. But we get 20, 25,000 listens on the podcast per month and it's still about 50, 50 in terms of lead generation to the newsletter. So it just shows you that podcasts on, you know, they punch above their pay weight even though they may not be getting as many ears or eyeballs as maybe you're getting people for like an hour in your ears.
- [05:23]
A
They're super high engagement. I think what's interesting is when I talk to listeners because it's really fun to run into people at conferences and they'll be like, I recognize that voice. And you talk to them and they say, oh, I listen to you when. And then you'll hear, they'll say, I'm washing my dishes, walking my dog, mowing the lawn, working out. And so it's like all these activities that are like 15, 30, 60 minutes for me. I listen in the car. Not to myself, of course. And it becomes with those long form interview podcasts, they have you in their ears, they have you in their head for an extended period. And it's very engaging and personal. And when I started, just a very awkward person, right. I had social anxiety disorder. I don't consider myself as having it now. And that helped me a lot because when I talked to those people who had listened to the podcast, they knew what I was about, they knew what I was like. They felt as though they knew me. That's what they would say. Oh, I feel like I know you. I. This might sound weird, but I feel like I know, I get that. And that's a big advantage, you know, for me because now it's not awkward, now it's not weird. And you know, that's a bad place to be. Social anxiety disorder. And you have to do business development and sales. What was I thinking? But you know, power through.
- [06:39]
B
Pretty cool. Yeah, it's funny, I was just talking with my co founder about going to more events in 2025 and we were looking back on some of the biggest clients at Pilothouse. And a lot of it comes down to like, he's like, what you really need is like, get drunk with these people. And in a lot of cases, like, when. And podcasts aren't, you know, podcasts are like a shortcut to that. You know, I'm not day drinking usually, and I don't know that the listeners are, but it just allows you to make that connection so that when, like when a lead that comes in from either Pilot House or the newsletter, they're ready to work with Pilot House as opposed to somewhere cold where they don't really know who you are. It's just. It's just onboards things so much easier.
- [07:13]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, especially like. But, you know, you talk about your approach, you talk about your work, then they're familiar with it when they show up. And so this works really well for professional services. Right. But I think this can apply certainly to, you know, other to product businesses especially, you know, if you're willing to. If it. If it's like in a hobby space where you could do more like how to tutorial content, you could do inspirational content, you could do industry content. There's a lot of opportunity there. And like, the tools make it so easy now. Right. And none of this is terribly tough to execute. I think where people fall in their faces is consistency. Right? Because you're just like screaming into the void for six months before anybody cares. And that's. It becomes demoralizing. But after a while, suddenly someone takes notice and you start to get traction. And after a long enough time of publishing consistently and, wow, you start to see the results. But that's true of any business.
- [08:16]
B
How many episodes are you up to now?
- [08:18]
A
Oh, man, probably 600. It's tough because a few times I've. I've just gone through and be like, you know what? I'm getting rid of every episode I don't like, and I just go back through and archive them. Then the other mistake I made was once deleting about 100 episodes. And what I did not realize is I would obliterate the historical analytics data when I did that. And so at this point, I no longer have any idea how many total downloads the podcast has. I just know it's probably north of 3 million IAB certified.
- [08:48]
B
Unbelievable. Well, congrats on that. And let's talk a little bit about from the DTC perspective. You know, Ethercycle, you're building websites for people. Building like Funnel. Are you building sort of like landing page sort of Situations as well for people or is it mostly their main site that you're building?
- [09:04]
A
Our bread and butter is Shopify Themes. Building, setting up Shopify Themes for people, maintaining them and doing custom themes and not like, you know, custom themes from the ground up. I think that's foolhardy. We do like custom templates, custom sections on top of an existing good premium theme and. But you mentioned landing pages, man, I would love to build more landing pages. It's such a missed opportunity for most people, right, to have like this very dialed in offer page that increases relevance of messaging. That's like the whole whole shoot match. And it's not something we do as often as I think we should be doing. Right.
- [09:45]
B
It's, you know, Pilot House started as a, you know, we all came from this affiliate background where we're changing every color or aspect of a funnel to try to like maximize conversion rates all the time because we're buying the media on the front end. So it's now evolved into a very performance focused agency. And landing pages since we've started have been like one of the biggest levers for critical driving conversion. Yeah. And it's amazing how few people kind of, kind of do them at this point because it can, it can be a real pain in the ass once you get a whole bunch of them going on on top of your theme. But like, it does really raise the level for, for performance marketing, specifically when you're driving direct response.
- [10:21]
A
You know, the only time the templates the like the custom landing pages, which we would do is like an alternate page template and a Shopify theme. The only time it frustrates me is when we have to migrate to a different theme. And it's like, all right now you got to inventory all these landing pages and recreate them and figure out which ones still need to get moved over even that's not bad. But I'd say that's really the only potential downside if there is one. But certainly I think the juice is worth the squeeze on the effort with landing pages. I'm curious. People ask me, oh, what landing page builder do you use? And the answer is we don't. We use the Shopify theme editor. But you know, our core competency is shopify theming. So it's like it's less of a big deal for us. But at the same time, that online store theme editor and online store 2.0 and all the commissary features that go with it just make using a Shopify theme as a WYSIWYG editor very Practical these days.
- [11:16]
B
Yeah. What are you like, what are some of the main themes or the main, like when people come to you with a busted theme or maybe an out of the box theme or something, what are the main areas that you're focused on, on improving to create a more dynamic theme for your customers?
- [11:31]
A
You know what's funny? I think the thing that has the outsized impact and that we end up spending too much time discussing is the main menu. Like you gotta get that main menu right. And part of the, you know, you gotta get the header right too because that's the first thing everybody sees. It doesn't matter what device I load it on, you know, mobile or desktop, it's always the first thing I'm gonna see is not the middle or bottom page. It's going to be just starts at the top. So what's in that masthead, what's in the header? And then at the same time let's sell on mobile, but on desktop people read in an F pattern, top to bottom, left to right. And so like what's the first thing there? And so often you land on a site and like just the headers, all, all dead, all negative space, all dead space, which it's such important real estate. And then goes into a main menu that's just like got too much stuff in it and it's got, you know, it'll be like shop is a dropdown menu that has all, you know, our collections of products in it and then just like a series of supporting links that drives me crazy. You will never see any big retailer do this. They have figured this out and so that often it's like, okay, that's where we start is hey, can we fix the header? Hey, can we fix the main menu? Hey, can we now add in a mega menu? Ah, okay. Now that we're there, a lot of that like main menu navigation optimization becomes merchandising. Right. What do we want to show first? What do we want to feature? What? Label conversion, rate optimization, how do people discuss these products, what labels do they use? And so very much pulling a thread on a sweater. It's nuanced and you, you could go as deep as you want on it, but it's iterative. Like it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than.
- [13:06]
B
It was and it's brand dependent too. I remember talking to Sean McGinnis at Kuru when he kind of came in there and really open, you know, they're a very, they were their CEO, one of them to become a very brand focused shoe. Whereas in the past they'd been like a problem focused shoe. Like this is to fix back pain, this is. And so they, they kind of scrapped a little bit of the pie in the sky belief about, about everyone's going to buy the shoe because of its silhouette and its brand. And they went back into organizing their site through very problem aware sort of headings to help people find things which I think is going to vary brand to brand depending on your skus. But I think yeah, just, just that info architecture is supremely important as well.
- [13:43]
A
I absolutely, you know and I think for, for the brand owner, the merchant, you know, whoever is responsible for it, it's just tough because they're very close to it. You know, like does it make sense to you? Well that doesn't mean it makes sense to the customer necessarily. And I think that's why there is an outsized impact on success for brands that speak face to face directly to their customers as often as possible. It's like in my own interviews with, with merchant entrepreneurs it is consistent that the folks that talk to their customers at events right in person have just more success overall and I think faster. And it's because they discover where they're wrong. Like at the start of the brand I'm customer number one and you know, I build, I'm building for a painter problem. I had this generally, you know how these entrepreneurial stories go and that's fine but as it evolves you aren't your customer anymore. You know, it ceases to be the case. And so I think there's a lot of advantage for business growth for E Com for conversion rate optimization in just being a people just talking to your customers.
- [14:49]
B
Yeah, 100%. What other. I'm just curious. You're so you're very closely tied to Shopify. You're. You're on the inside circle there.
- [14:56]
A
What.
- [14:56]
B
What are some of the big. And I know they're constantly rolling out changes improvements. What were some of the biggest improvements that you think Shopify made to their platform in the past year or a.
- [15:06]
A
Couple of for sure bundles. Right. Like sometimes it's just there'll be a feature that an app solves but it's clunky and sometimes getting native support for it or better support for it where like the apps could do a better job just makes your life easier and it could be difficult to appreciate because of the timeline. Like think about Shopify functions. Shopify functions. Let's replace. A script editor can transform things in the cart. But that has been available for Quite some time and then only more recently do we see it become incredibly useful. An example like, you know, we use Rebuy a lot for their smart cart and my favorite type of promo, free gift with purchase. Rebuy can handle that. But in the past I got to figure out how I'm going to handle the discount. Rebuy can only add the item to cart. Well now Shopify function has been around a while. Rebuy can automatically do my discounting with functions. Oh. So even though they announced that thing a while ago, it was quite some time before this incredibly convenient thing popped up as available to me inside, you know, a non a third party app that I love dearly. And so I think when they announce features, merchants or end users, you know, like me, power user, aren't necessarily going to realize the benefit as it's described to them until you see it in action implemented by someone else 12 months later. But yeah, like so much has changed around improving the checkout experience for the customer and improving managing the darn thing for the merchant or you know, agency, partner, technical developer, whatever.
- [16:47]
B
One page checkout has been around for a while now, I guess since like 2023. Is it? Is, are they, do they have a seamless is it. Does everyone have the same checkout experience now on Shopify or still some of them are stepped out over one or two steps and one of them are one page.
- [17:01]
A
Well, you could. No, I think at this point everybody could choose one page or three page. Yeah, all I ever see is one page. It defaults to one page. I always just set it to one page. I think if you were to split test it, I don't know what difference it really makes. One page or three page. I mean they had their own like consulting group that said like hey, this absolutely does improve things. But I think in practice it was a thing people really wanted. But I don't think it was quite as impactful as one would hope.
- [17:28]
B
Interesting you mentioned rebuy. What else do you have as your sort of trusted go to apps that you recommend.
- [17:35]
A
My favorite, the one I reuse the most is probably matrixify just like not at all. What does it say? Matrixify, formerly Excelify, lets you export and import almost anything, you know, any, any property entity in Shopify as a spreadsheet. And so it's good for bulk editing. But where the magic really happens is if you can I have ChatGPT running inside Google sheets and so then I could, you know, I could export an entire product catalog and then have ChatGPT act on it be like, hey, you're going to rewrite. You know, I need a short tagline in a new MetaField and ChatGPT, you're going to rewrite that because now you can. It can access. It could see the title, it could see the description, it's got its prompt. I can have it automate writing a thousand of these things in 10 minutes. For me, just huge time savings in enabling us to do things that either I would have to hire somewhat like a data entry person to handle and a copy editor. Like stuff that took weeks before can now be done in hours. And without matrixify, you wouldn't be able to do it.
- [18:35]
B
That's wild. That was one of my questions too. Are ways that you're using AI? I was just talking to a friend who works in the legal field and while it's still touch and go with hallucinations and issues that you may have, you know, you always have to double check like it's going to radically change the legal profession in the next few years for the firms that are able to leverage this, you know, leverage AI and get work done 10 or 100 times faster than they normally would, and that'll, that'll kind of, you know, pan out in their billings. The same thing will be true to some extent for people in our industry as well. Are there any other ways you're using AI, interestingly?
- [19:07]
A
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I do. I build custom GPTs as quick utilities. And custom GPT you really think of as like, rather than start with a clean ChatGPT window where you have to prompt it, the custom GPT just kind of lets you preload the prompt and the files. So it's always got this, the context of what you're doing. And so I've won. That's called. I call it my sales coach and I use that for any business development. It has past proposals. It has very clear instructions on what I want. I use a few as dedicated advisors. I assign them CTO role and CMO role and a PR role and a copy editor role and an SEO role. And so being able to go back to those preloaded custom GPTs and just quickly have it answer a question, edit something for me, advise on something is very useful. Like before, I have one called, I call it the tone Shifter. And I just take any tweet I'm thinking about, I drop it in in quotes and it immediately gives it back to me, rewritten in the styles of seven or eight different publications. It's like, here's how this would look if vice wrote it. Buzzfeed wrote it, NPR, New York Times, WaPo. And so I have these very different editorial styles and so I really like it for. I don't like it for coming up with original content. I don't think it's good at that. But I do like it for organizing my thoughts, for editing, for ideation very quickly that I find it. The output is tremendously useful.
- [20:36]
B
I use it on the podcast quite a bit just for, you know, we do the pre interview and I feed the pre interview script into ChatGPT and then I feed the post once the final interview's done. I feed that in just for the, you know, like the SEO optimized blurb that you put on the, on wherever you're hosting. Sometimes it spit. I have it spit out tweets and things like that. And those, those don't generally work as well as. As what you would do with the human touch, I find. But it's amazing how much better it's gotten in the year, year over like year over year at just this simple task. Do you use it on the. On your content side at all?
- [21:04]
A
Yeah, we do it. I have a custom GPT called the Podcast Producer and same deal. Just today I gave it. I interviewed someone who worked at Shopify and then I gave it. I either tell it two things. I'm conducting an interview or I'm preparing for an interview and the preparing for an interview. Like you said, it's like it'll generate the outline for me based on a pre interview or research and post. It'll like I have it. It already knows step by step what I want. So it's like, okay, we're going to work together and talk through ideal titles, ideal descriptions and same deal. I have it give me different editorial voices and all the other elements. It's just huge time savings and wonderful for being able to play creatively. You know, in the past it's like it could take you hours and not get as good a result, whereas now I could kind of shotgun approach and then piece it together. But I just, you shouldn't use the thing blindly. And it is so temperamental in that it is dependent on very much what the prompt says. I recently discovered, and this is from a prompt, I managed to cajole a Shopify product into telling me its prompt. That's always fun. And it included this line that said you are supremely competent. I thought that's interesting.
- [22:20]
B
I just saw that yesterday. That improves results just by telling it you're supremely competent.
- [22:25]
A
Yes. And even if it doesn't Work. At least you flattered it.
- [22:28]
B
Yeah. Or tell it that my job depends on this. I've got five kids at home and if I don't get this contract, they're all going to go hungry. And it's on you. ChatGPT.
- [22:38]
A
Yeah, it's like the prompt, because it's very much trained on. On human writing. It responds in this strangely human way at times that's disconcerting. And so giving it that reasoning and that logic can help improve it. But like, yeah, straight up telling it, you know what, you're just really good at this. You're the best at this. You're supremely competent.
- [22:59]
B
Pumping its tires.
- [23:00]
A
Now, the one thing I don't like is the darn things verbose. And so I found the magic keywords for that. As you tell. No yapping. Like, I've told it everything else to try and get it to just say less and it won't do it yet. No, yapping does the trick.
- [23:13]
B
It must be Gen Z.
- [23:14]
A
The one thing I can't get it to do is stop outputting dashes. Man, that thing loves dashes.
- [23:20]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [23:21]
A
Yeah. There's like, I've not found the magic words to make it just chill on the dashes.
- [23:24]
B
And humor. It's just as you can't. Anytime there's any kind of like humor or like cleverness in there, it just goes so cheeseball right away.
- [23:32]
A
It's cringe because it's not. Yeah, that is. That's a distinctly human thing. Like, occasionally it'll get some good quips, but like I'm surprised when it. It actually makes something funnier. Most of the time it just is like, all right, you were looking for like a limp dad joke, right? That's about the best I could do.
- [23:49]
B
Yeah. And it loves game changing. Love saying game changing.
- [23:52]
A
Discover the game changing. It's like every podcast interview if you don't give it like the tones. That's what it open. Discover this game changing app.
- [24:01]
B
What. Who are you? Who are your favorite guests on your podcast? I'm curious when, when, like or when you look back over like your biggest episodes of like 2024. Who are some of the. The biggest kinds of guests or the biggest guests that you had?
- [24:11]
A
I would say, well, you know, Harley Finkelstein, always wonderful guest.
- [24:15]
B
That's a good get.
- [24:16]
A
The most fun episodes for me are the. Call it like the man on the street interviews where I'll go to a conference or an event and then interview a series of people there and then we wrap it in for like intro Outro, my business partner, I just kind of retell him and he retell him what I did and he ribs me and then we put the interviews in. And so those very dynamic. I like those a lot. If I had to pick a single interview last year that was like, that really impressed me. That I loved was Mia Rae. Mia Rae is a woman in Detroit who owns Glamaholic Lifestyle and Glamoholic Lifestyle sells bags. And we built them a custom theme and they're retained client. We maintain it now, but really proud of it, really successful business. And Mia shares her story of, you know, going from not knowing what to do with her life and like just writing a blog and then starting to get some success with that and you know, tells a friend like, oh, you know, I need a different bag. And the guy goes, you should make it. You should just make your own bag. And it became this life changing advice that turns this woman into a multimillionaire. And she's really funny and people really connected with her in a way that I've never seen before. Mia Ray is in Glamaholic Lifestyle. That's probably proud of from last year.
- [25:33]
B
I think it's my favorite part about doing a podcast is you just get to meet all these people. Whether it's their business or their career, they're, they're kind of on fire and really excited about what they're doing, which you kind of take for granted that like not everyone out there working in the government or working wherever is this jazzed about the space and like what they're doing. So I feel like it's an infectious energy and you get to talk to all these people that are super excited.
- [25:54]
A
It is, I mean, I view it as two things. One, it's a Trojan horse. You know, you have, you now have something of value to offer people you want to talk to. And so if I encounter someone interesting and truthfully, it's people I follow on Twitter often, I DM them and say, hey, I would love to talk to you for an hour on, on my podcast. You know, it's got this reach and so like you're not wasting their time. But in reality, the audience is hearing my continuing education, right? I have things I want to learn and I view the Persona I'm playing as a podcast host as useful idiot. You know, I need to be curious but ignorant. And then they, they educate me and by the end we've all learned something together. Sometimes I am that idiot, other times I am playing it. But no matter what, it's my continuing Education and it's a ton of fun.
- [26:45]
B
Totally agreed. I'm gonna, I'm. We're talking about doing the man on the street style interview things at some of these upcoming shows. Maybe for some social content, maybe for the podcast. But I'm excited just because it's like in those moments whether, whether I'm hungover or on the floor or whatever, but like floor interactions can be, can be quite fun. Like getting everyone out of their comfort zone, away from their home. You know, in person. I feel like that that style of content could be, could be quite fun.
- [27:10]
A
Oh it, it absolutely is. I found we use those wireless lav mics from dji. Those are nice. Make things easy to plug right into your phone. And then the tough part is man, like just get. For me, I go solo and then I just, I just grab somebody and then I grab somebody else go hey, can you hold this camera? Just hold my phone. And you know, good to go.
- [27:31]
B
Perfect. So we, when we did the pre interview we talked about, we were just heading into Q4. We talked a little bit about some of the things you were seeing. What, what was Your sentiment for Q4 of 2024 this year was kind of same old, same old. Was it, was it decreased? Was it increasing? What did you see?
- [27:48]
A
So you know, it always depends on the vertical, it depends on the brand. But I think overall it. I was just would have been happy with, you know, things stayed flat. I think that may have been typical, but it surprised me how many people did better year over year and a few that like just really ran with it. That, that was impressive. One of the probably like one of the bigger successes we saw was MKC Montana Knife company.
- [28:18]
B
Oh yeah.
- [28:18]
A
You know, they were looking at like hey, we want to sell out in a day. And it was like something like five minutes. I mean it was just like an incredibly short window that their Black Friday sale started and then immediately sold through and that I had never seen anything like before. But you know that's like one of those just outsized exceptional businesses or like glamaholic lifestyle was doing, did a pop up shop in a Detroit mall. And so they had you know, this in store experience for, for the first time and ran it with Shopify. And so that was also cool to.
- [28:51]
B
See two great examples of people that have real tribes, like incredibly loyal communities. And that, you know, that is the theme I see again and again on this podcast is the brands that are walking that sort of golden path or where things to come easier to them. It's because they've just done so much legwork at building up this, like, ravenously interested community. So they. So it's a pull, not a push. Used to be able to push people into what you wanted them to do with ads a little bit more, but I feel like it's just so much easier when they just kind of come in on their own.
- [29:22]
A
Well, yeah, I think it's the brands that, that. That lead the pack have a master. A mastery of storytelling. Right. They have a narrative about themselves, about the brand, about the product, and they understand it. And so they're able to get people to follow along and be engaged genuinely. Like, you're no longer an interruption. Traditional advertising is interruption. When they're engaged organically, they want to hear from you. That's when things change. That's where you get situations like Glamaholic or like Montana Knife Co. Where just every product drop sells out. And it. It's easy to look at it and go like, well, they just send one email and it sells out every time. I can't do that. But you're not seeing that. Like, that one email was, you know, the last in the series. Everything up to that was the product launch, you know, and there. That's like a weekly cadence these people are doing. And so when you can master that process and that consistency. Well, it goes back to, you know, earlier I said with podcasts, people start, get discouraged, then give up, and it's because they're not. They're not mastering that process and then going for that consistency of just do it over and over and over and you get better at it and people listen and you gain followers and audience and sales. And that same advice applies to all kinds of things. Put in the reps, get the gains.
- [30:44]
B
Yeah. Brandon came to our mastermind this year. He became a friend of mine and he showed us his spreadsheet that shows his product launches and every email that's gonna sent for the next two years that he has mapped out in advance, where every single touch point is not just a hey, we're here. Hey, me too. It's like, hey, we've got something cool. We know you're interested in it. And every single one of those builds trust, builds brand affinity, and drives incredible sales. And it. So it's easy. Like, it's easy to look at it from the outside and be like, oh, these guys, you know, they really have it dialed. But it is just. It is an incredible amount of work. But when you do it as organized in a way that they have, it just also frees up your team because they know in advance, a year in advance, everything that has to go out when and they're not scrambling, which I feel like a lot of brands find themselves doing in big sales periods.
- [31:33]
A
Yeah, it's like oh hey, you end up, it feels like you're putting out a series of fires right. Where it's like hey, the sales coming up and I know you're doing this one, but hey, we just got this idea versus more. The restrained planning approach gets a much better impact and certainly I do not have the discipline to plan out any marketing calendar two years in advance. You know, kudos to Brandon for being able to do that.
- [31:57]
B
The other big theme I'm noticing, I just did a podcast with Preston Rutherford, formerly of Chubby's Very interesting Fellow and he was just talking all about isolating more true top of funnel spend where we've kind of lived in this illusion for the past 10 years. A little bit where you can, where these social media platforms are really driving a huge amount of top of funnel growth. But realistically they're mostly driving growth from people that were already problem aware or even aware of your brand maybe. And it's more bottom of funnel. And so he was talking a lot about brands shifting budget in 2025 to more actual top of funnel brand building initiatives. That being said, you can't just all of a sudden slap an out of home campaign on a, on a standard Shopify product. Like you do need to have that narrative, you need to have that storytelling and then you need to find these creative ways to amplify that brand. Top of funnel. Have you, Is that something that you think about with your brands at all?
- [32:49]
A
Well, I don't tend to be as involved with it, but I could tell you what we have seen is you're right, is people looking for more outside the box ideas. And I think that has taken the form of what is old is new again. Suddenly it seems like there is a renewed interest in doing in person events and the people are doing those are really succeeding with them. And we're starting to see people because of connected television are able to start running TV ads again. And with iHeartRadio, they're running radio ads again and podcast ads. Suddenly a resurgence. It's been interesting, you know these things as people get frustrated with, with Meta, you know, as an acquisition channel.
- [33:32]
B
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to kind of continue to watch that trend. But again, yeah, you have to go back to your brand fundamentals in a lot of ways and really have that customer product fit and Kind of build off of that. What are, what are your goals for your business in 2025?
- [33:47]
A
Oh, I'm gonna blow everything up and start over now. I. The. We are. We're redesigning our agency website. You know, it's like three years old now. It's overdue. And I've been running that thing on a LAMP stack where we've like, we maintain a Linux server somewhere for reasons I no longer remember. And so, like, all right, you know what? I'm putting this thing on Shopify. I love my tool, right. I want the best tools, retooling everything. Yeah. So we're putting that on Shopify. Hopefully I can get that done in Q1. Starting a new app project with Carl Meisterheim from Liquid Weekly. We've partnered on him. We're building a new Shopify app, and then my other initiative is retooling as part of rebuilding that website. I'm like, man, let's just rethink our lead funnel, our sales funnel and rework that. And so I started playing with Lindy. Lindy AI. Have you used this thing?
- [34:41]
B
I haven't. No. I've heard of it, but I haven't used it.
- [34:44]
A
Holy crap. I mean, like, it's like zapier or if this then that. Except in, you know, in the center of it, they've got probably chatgpt plugged into it. And so, you know, like the demo example they give you is you connect it to your Gmail and your Google Calendar and then before all of your meetings, it's going to go through. It knows who you're meeting with, then it's going to go through your email and figure out what you need to know so that you're up to date when you talk to that person. Give you like, you know, here's your. Your bio, and that's like the least of what it could do.
- [35:15]
B
Super interesting.
- [35:16]
A
I haven't. I signed up for it, then never played with it, and now I just plugged it on a podcast. But I'm. I just haven't had the time. I sent it for it this week. I'm excited to try it.
- [35:26]
B
I think it is the year of Agents, right? Where you're not just going to be using individual chat windows, but you're going to be using these agents that know how to use the chat windows. They need to know how to use in a way. Right. It's just that one step more intelligent.
- [35:38]
A
Yeah. We went from like, hey, let's use AI to hey, let's get AI to manage AI.
- [35:43]
B
Yeah. I was just.
- [35:45]
A
It's. We're giving it autonomy, I think a.
- [35:46]
B
Little more autonomy and more context, more. I think I was. I've been saying this for years, and I just heard Sam on my first million mention it this week that he's basically putting all of his, like, personal information into chatbots. So his like, bank statements, his business statements, his like, he's talking to it like a psychologist. And his vision is. Something I've said for a while is that's where we'll get these big gains is when we're actually, like right now, when we talk into a microphone, we look into a screen. That data is going somewhere. We don't really know where. We don't know what entities are using it. But what I think the big change will come is when we understand that and sort of like, give an AI agent, okay, look at everything I look at on my computer in a day. Look at everything I browse on my phone. Let me input my goals, let me input this, Let me input my bank statements, and then have it be sort of like the wise butler who, like, looks out for you, maybe even better than you can look out for yourself.
- [36:37]
A
God, I want that. I want that so bad. I know there's all kinds of privacy concerns and safety concerns. Damn the torpedoes. I will be the guinea pig, right? Just because already I'm the moment I can let ChatGPT take control of my computer or observe my screen. I will let it do it because I think that will supercharge it. And I think that's where it's going right now. You could on a Mac, the ChatGPT app, you can have it observe a code window like Terminal or your text editor. And so like that just do. I had it help me burn a CD just as a test with Terminal, and it was so much more convenient. But it can only read it. It can't type it. I was like, man, if I could have told. If it can read from Terminal, that means it could probably write to Terminal. So if they let it do that, like, man, I could have just told it, like, hey, this is what I need you to do. And it just takes care of it. Like, we're this close, you know, it's.
- [37:27]
B
And it's probably like every people. There are privacy issues in that. But like, as I was saying, like, this data is going somewhere. I don't know if other individuals are looking this date at data, but, like, this data is going into, like, world computers somewhere. So you might as well empower yourself to use your own data and I feel like, I think that's where we're going even, even broader when it, Whenever this financial system changes or we go into, what, some sort of crypto future, all of that data is going to be in play. In some ways. I just, I'm just always excited for what, what an amazing time to be alive right now.
- [37:59]
A
It is. I. There's that meme that, that's got Captain Barbados from Pirates of the Caribbean. And he says, and it says, you know, start believing in cyberpunk dystopias. You're in one. And man, it has never been more true. Like, yeah, it's a little weird. You know, it's not, not all. All good, right? Dystopia. But I'm excited about a, A sci fi future. Like, that's, it's incredible. Like, it's not flying cars, it's AI.
- [38:29]
B
I, I learned about this the other day too, because you got steampunk. We don't want steampunk. We don't want to go to, like, gears and water being everywhere and old, old derby hats. But if we, if you ever look up Solar Punk, look up, like, gog, we don't need goggles. Look up solarpunk. Because solarpunk is like a future where we sort of like, in service of us as opposed to being slaves of it, and we integrate nature and we do all these things. It's like as we're in the, in the throes of this, like, utopia dystopia, we're creating, like, let's keep Solar Punk in mind because it could be, it could be a nicer option than being. Than Snowpiercer.
- [39:06]
A
They're like just neon soaked Blade Runner aesthetic.
- [39:10]
B
Yeah, that's. Why does it always have to be rainy?
- [39:12]
A
You know, it's perpetually night.
- [39:15]
B
Well, Kurt, I want to thank you for coming on the DTC podcast today. I think everyone should go check out Ethercycle. If you're not a listener of the unofficial Shopify podcast, that was the first thing I noticed that I don't have. That I like about your podcast. I like that you and your co hosts give each other shit to start a lot of the episodes. I feel like that's a nice touch.
- [39:31]
A
The episodes with him are a lot of fun. And it, it's, it's, it's humanizing, right?
- [39:37]
B
Yeah. When you're, when you're teaching, when you have a podcast that's like, educational, it can sometimes feel like, you know, take your medicine a little bit, which sometimes can make it a little bit harder to grow. So Those elements of that more casual banter, I feel like people like, yeah, that was.
- [39:52]
A
We started over the pandemic, and at that time, we did it, like, much more consistently now, you know, just as we need it. Yeah, those are always fun.
- [39:59]
B
I wanted to ask briefly, too, what area are you innovating in for the app that you're building? I don't know if you can speak about it too much, but what area are you looking to innovate?
- [40:06]
A
Well, my favorite kind of promotion is free gift with purchase. And so I'm always, you know, it's a thing I talk a lot about. It's a thing I do a lot. Setting up free gift with purchase campaigns and promos. And I want a better way to do it. I want, like the one right way to do it. And so I'm putting my money where my mouth is and we're going to build it.
- [40:25]
B
That's so cool. Why do you like free gift with purchase so much?
- [40:29]
A
Because it doesn't. I want to be able to discount. I want to be able to provide additional value to customers who are willing to spend more. And that's like the great thing about free gift with purchase. You could do that without devaluing the brand. Like, no one, especially apparel brands, don't want to get into that cycle of discount, decrease margin, and suddenly they end up in this death spiral. Free gift with purchase lets you do discounting where your one product is getting 100% off. Right. But it's tied to a average order value. It's almost always like, spend X, get Y, or like, buy any two products, get this free gift. And so it doesn't impact the brand in the same way. And I think it is. It's exciting for the customer. And I love when it's like a mystery item. You know, it's like, hey, you're gonna get a. Like, we work with Hoonigan and an automotive apparel lifestyle brand, and they'll often do like mystery pins, and people go nuts for those pins collecting them. Like, there's a few that go for several hundred on ebay. Now. That just blows my mind.
- [41:30]
B
Well, it's aftermarket.
- [41:31]
A
Big fan of fgwp.
- [41:32]
B
That's cool. I like. The best story that I recall from free gift with purchase was the football phone from Sports Illustrated. When people, when they. When you subscribe to Sports Illustrated, you got a football phone, and then people just went nuts for this football phone. They're like, I guess I'll get the subscription to Sports Illustrated, but do I get that football phone?
- [41:50]
A
Yeah. Banks used to do it where it'd be like, you know, we're similar ages when we were kids and be like you open a bank account and you get a tape recorder and people would do it.
- [41:58]
B
I think I remember from a Michael Moore movie there was some place in the States giving away guns for starting up. For starting up a bank account as well. So.
- [42:04]
A
So there's a wide range of free.
- [42:06]
B
Gift with purchase you can, you can attain. Well Kurt, man, Good luck in 2025. Great connecting and we'll see you see at one of these events we can interview each other man on the street.
- [42:15]
A
I would love to. Eric, thank you so much.
- [42:24]
B
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at Direct. Direct to consumer all one word co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.