← The Digital Executive
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is David Ballin. David Ballin is the co founder of Saluna AI, an AI powered E commerce platform built for e commerce brands and the agencies that serve them, supporting strategy analysis and optimization for imagery, search engine optimization and Rufus optimization for platforms like Amazon. David may only be 22 years old, but he's packed a lot into those years. David Ballen studied data science at university and while most people were finishing their degrees, David was co founding Horison Marketing, a UK based Amazon marketing agency that now managed over 1 billion in revenue for more than 200 brands worldwide. Combining an academic grounding in data with real world agency experience put him at the center of some of the most common and costly problems e commerce brands face and gave him the analytical foundation to actually do something about them. Well, good afternoon David. Welcome to the show.
- [01:21]
B
Hi Brian, lovely to speak to you.
- [01:24]
A
Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it. And you're taking the time to go through time zones and calendars, et cetera, to get on a podcast. You're from Edinburgh, Scotland and I am in Kansas City, so I appreciate you making the time. It's hard to juggle these things some days. But David, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump into your first question. At just age 22, you've already co founded an Amazon marketing agency managing over 1 billion in revenue and launched Saluna AI. What inspired your entrepreneurial journey so early in your career?
- [01:54]
B
Great question. Going back to when I was a young boy, I guess in the early days of my life, I remember always being curious about different things, learning how things work, learning how the world works. And of course as kids the famous question is why and why and why and why. But I've also always had this curiosity and I've kept it through my teenage years and adult years. And when you have this curiosity and passion for learning, you end up in a position where you can really spot gaps and issues and things that can be done better. And at my first job I remember spotting a lot of those things. Speaking with Amazon sellers while I was working for another agency and speaking with them. I got to have a good grasp and understanding of their issues, of their pain points and how things can be done better to to help them sell more and be more profitable on Amazon and Shopify and so on in the e commerce space. And I remember 18 years, 18 years old, on my birthday, the day after my birthday, I actually started my first company because that's when I was. That was kind of my 18, 18th birthday gift to myself. So I always knew I wanted to start a company and be entrepreneurial. But I think the backbone of what we've done and what we've done at Horizon and Saluna is to help as many people as possible in the e commerce space grow and scale their businesses on platforms like Amazon and Shopify and in the e commerce space and during Horizon Marketing and during the last three or four years, I've spoken with thousands and thousands of different sellers and different e commerce brands and I've spent many, many hours speaking with people that sell on Amazon and sell on Shopify. So we understood, and we understood their friction and their issues that they were facing. And Saluna is the evolution of what Horizon Marketing was, which is. And what Horizon Marketing is, which is basically helping people in e commerce sell and sell more in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost of what a traditional agency has to offer. So it's been a wonderful couple of years of learning and growing.
- [04:31]
A
Thank you. Really appreciate that. I love the backstory and that's so true. As a kid, I just loved how you kept that curiosity, always asking the why you have a passion for learning, how do you make things better? I thought that was really insightful. But early on you had an opportunity to explore and understand e commerce and helping Shopify and Amazon sellers improve their sales, building efficiencies, their fulfillment process, et cetera. And I think that's amazing and I'm glad that you are expanding and becoming a serial entrepreneur. I think that's awesome. So thank you. And David, product imagery is often overlooked, yet it plays a huge role in conversion. Why do you believe visual content has become one of the biggest growth levers for e commerce brands today?
- [05:13]
B
I think that imagery is something that is not necessarily overlooked, but often it is very misunderstood. You've got different e commerce platforms, you've got things like Shopify on your website and then you've got Amazon and then you've got ebay, you've got Walmart, now you've got TikTok Shop and all of these different platforms have a different type of buyer. And likewise on all these different platforms there's also different levels of competition as well. But I think the reason imagery is so misunderstood is because everyone knows what a good looking image looks like. If you look at any ad or any product image you'll be able to tell if it's of good quality from a good brand. And generally that's just a visual feel. However, what most people can't really tell is if an image is going to convert or not. And this is the most or the more challenging aspect of imagery because it takes a deep market understanding of your specific category. Whatever you're selling, you could be selling supplements, you could be selling beauty. It takes a deep market understanding of that category to create images that can convert. And this is even more of a challenge. When you're dealing with maybe 10 products or 50 products or 100 products, where do you even begin? And that's why it's so important to have a good market understanding and then have a framework to create imagery. For platforms like Amazon, it is very important when, when you guys look on Amazon, if you, if you check out on Amazon, you'll see a lot of images actually have text on them compared to Shopify website, which is just kind of product shots or model shots without any text information over the image. The reason Amazon has so much information in the image is because most people don't actually look at the title. They don't look at the descriptions of the product. They just want to look at the images. And because of the age that we're in, with TikTok and Reels and short form content and newspapers going out of business, basically it's proof that people don't like reading. But people do want to see what the products are about, what your product is about. They want to see that. And the way to do that is by answering their top questions. So something that is very important to do is create something like a customer conversion matrix, which is think through the top 20 questions that your customers are going to have when someone lands on your product listing, wherever that may be. It could be on TikTok, it could be on Amazon. What are the top 20 questions that they're going to have? And based on those 20 questions, you need to see where you can add those best. So I suggest that your top questions you have in your first images, whether it's on Amazon or a different platform, you answer those questions in there visually as well as through text. So you don't want to just have a block of text to answer all these questions like, is it made for kids? Can I give it to my dog? Don't just put the text in plain form, but actually show it visually. You can show icons, right? Right. You can have an image that says versatile use and then show icons of different things that Your product can be used for these are super important because your images, your listing is competing with thousands of others on these platforms. So we want to be able to answer any question that a customer has. If a confused customer, the old old age adage says that a confused customer is not going to be a buying customer. They're not going to, they're not going to buy, they're just going to scroll down. And if they're on a platform like Amazon, they've got tens of different options they can click on and they're going to click on a competitor. And that's why I think images are not necessarily overlooked because everyone knows they need good images, but they don't know how to create those images that convert. And at the end of the day, put money in your pocket.
- [09:28]
A
Absolutely. Thank you for that. And you're right about some things that just me as a buyer. Imagery is often misunderstood in this E commerce space. As you mentioned, every platform you talked about, all, all the major platforms anyway, different buyers. But the common denominator is that all buyers know what a good product image is. However, E commerce sellers need to understand what image will convert to a sale. Additionally, images that really people look at not necessarily like to read, as you mentioned. So I think that's important and you really kind of hit the nail on the head with that. David, the next question here. Many sellers invest heavily in advertising but struggle with conversion on their listings. How can better product imagery direct directly impact performance metrics like click through rate and conversion rate?
- [10:16]
B
Very interesting. I think most people don't understand how important a main image is and the reason for that. Let's take Amazon for example. On Amazon, you can only have an image technically within their terms of services, but we can do better. But within the terms of services technically you should have a plain image on a white background and that's it. So instantly people go to think, well, there's nothing I can do to make a main image better. And because it's so plain and there's not many options to have lifestyle images or a model in there, then it's probably okay and I can just leave it as it is. Now what we have to understand is that the main image on a platform like Amazon, which is a search platform and on other platforms is the most important creative by far. And the reason the main image is so important is because it decides and it basically decides the people that can see your other images. If someone doesn't click on your main image, they can't even see the other 10 images that you Made that are pretty and fancy because they're not even on your product listing, they're still on the search page and they're probably going to click on someone else. And this is why the main image is the most important, creative. One thing that's very important to understand for a platform like Amazon is that although they've got very strict guidelines on images, there are things we can do to make your image better. So they might say that there's nothing, you can't put anything on the background, but in fact we can and we can get away with it. And adding, for example, let's say we're selling a supplement, adding the flower or adding the plant of that supplement in the background can really make your main image look a lot more attractive. And compared to the competition, we can maybe get 10% more clicks. But what we have to understand on a platform like Amazon is that 10% more clicks is not just 10% more sales, which on the short term, it is on the long term because we're converting or getting 10% more clicks, and we can convert about 10% better than the competition. The algorithm, the Amazon's algorithm can see that we're performing better than others, and therefore it's going to push us higher and higher in their algorithm. So really, that main image that increased our clicks by 10% on the long term, 12 to 24 months can mean an increase of 50% sales. So instead of being a 50,000 per month, you could be at $75,000 per month in 12 to 24 months just because of a main image. And this is why the main image is so important. But also on the advertising side, if your image can get 10, 20% more clicks, you've already improved your advertising by 10 to 10, 20% without even changing your advertising strategy. So that's why a combined approach is imperative to success in E commerce. You need to have, in this day and age 20, 26, you need to have a perfect listing overall.
- [13:20]
A
Thank you. Interesting. I didn't know that, but that's great. I'm glad you're sharing that with our audience. But Amazon, as an example you talked about that main image needs to be on a white background. And this main image is, as you said, the most important of all your images. That is the most important thing you talked about, that if you can design your image in a way that you can get that 10 or 20% more clicks in the long run, it's going to potentially increase your business up to 50% more, which I think was interesting. So you're Absolutely right. That image is so important. So thank you for sharing. And David, the last question of the day here as we look ahead to the future. How do you see AI transforming E commerce, marketing and product content over the next five to 10 years? And what opportunities will that create for the next generation of entrepreneurs?
- [14:08]
B
I think the next five years is definitely the most exciting years of my life with this AI boom. I think that and I already see how things are changing in the space where everything is pushed even further ToWars data. Even two or three years ago, we would analyze, we would analyze metrics like click through rate, we would analyze metrics like conversion rate, add to cart and analyze that data compared to competition on a keyword level. So we weren't just analyzing data on a product level as an average, but we were analyzing how well we're doing on every single search term on Amazon. Now there's, there's thousands of data points that Amazon actually gives us and Shopify gives us and other platforms give us to analyze and make our images better, to make our product images better, to make the main image better, to make the titles, the bullet points, the back end better, to make the advertising better. But this data is and has been inaccessible because it's so vast. You take a report from Amazon Advertising and you're looking at a couple of megabytes of sheets which is tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of different rows of data points just for one product. Now AI is taking this data and is going to be able to continuously optimize, continuously test and continuously improve your products, your advertising on a scale that was never able and possible before. So you've now got one person that could have the same marketing and the same quality of imagery, the same quality of, of campaigns as almost like a Facebook or an Instagram. You could almost have the same level of marketing with just one person and maybe a subscription that's a thousand dollars a month for an AI tool that does this on repeat day in and day out. And this is what, this is what really Soluna is doing right now on a small scale to begin with. But this is the vision going forward to where we are plugging your Amazon and your Shopify and your TikTok data directly in our app. We're taking that data and we see how we can improve your listing, your advertising, your campaigns on a regular basis. We're talking every week. We can pump out new content and see how it does. So as things are going to get more and more efficient from a conversion point of view, from a click through rate point of view because we can have more target and more target approach. Advertising is also going to continue to go up because people who leverage these tools are going to be more profitable because they can convert better and therefore they're going to be spending even more money on things like advertising. And this becomes a loop of who's got the best AI system. And we want to be at the forefront of that, we want to be at the cutting edge of that and that's what we are already doing. We basically take a product, we analyze it, we give you a report, we tell you what's wrong with it and we give you the tasks to optimize that product and how to do it. Or you can press one button and we can do the whole thing for you with AI for a fraction of the cost that would have been the cost of an agency. And we can do that in two to three minutes. So you can have brand new images, brand new title bullet points and a brand new strategy within about five minutes. And you can put that live, you can put that on Shopify, you can put that on Amazon and be doing significantly better than you were five minutes before then. So I think it's a very exciting time and it's a very fast paced environment. So this is, this is going to be an exciting couple of years.
- [18:15]
A
It's awesome. Really appreciate that. I liked the excitement you had. You said the next five years will be the most exciting part of your life in this space with obviously AI and E commerce and these E commerce platforms do provide thousands of data points on your product and images, which is great. Which if you read that data and analyze it, you can obviously improve your sales growth. And that's where you talked about saloon AI comes in. AI can help you analyze, improve your E commerce sales and producing it much quicker, more accurate with a faster turnaround and obviously less overhead. So I really appreciate that And David, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [18:54]
B
Thanks a lot Brian. Likewise. All the best.
- [18:58]
A
Bye for now.