Turning Promising Ecom Brands into $10m/Yr+ Profitable Winners with Sabir Semerkant

Did you know that most e-commerce startups don't even survive the first 120 days, mainly because they burn through ad budget with little return, disappear in search results, and sell things nobody's actually looking for? E-commerce in 2025, it's a battlefield. It's brutal. Customer acquisition is getting harder. Competition is fiercer than ever. And without a scalable data-driven strategy, most brands are doomed before they even get any traction. Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mike Sirius, and today we are joined by Sabir Samarkand, a top e-commerce growth strategist with over 20 years of experience helping brands like Coca-Cola, Canon, and Tommy Hilfiger achieve massive growth. He is the creator of AD Method, a step-by-step framework for unlocking scalable, profitable e-commerce growth, and his Rapid 2X program has helped brands grow by an average of 108% in just 21 days. Today, Sabir is breaking down pricing, marketing, and profitability strategies that will transform your online business. Welcome to the show, Sabeer.

Mike, it's great to be here.

Thank you for joining us, and we love to kick off with this question, Sabeer. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

Actually, it's interesting. My background before I became this revenue growth hacker, I'm a computer scientist.

No surprise, no surprise.

So the tech and optimizing the tech is actually one of the dimensions of this framework that I've created, 8D Method. It's not just tech. Tech is one part of it, but tech actually is the thing that helps you elevate and accelerate your growth profitably in your e-com business.

So if we come back to the question, what comes to mind? So what comes to mind is that the growth is baked into the tech growth. And when we say tech, is it an actual technology like software for automation, or is it more like, you know, data centers, or is it cost management of the the whole shebang around your business. Can you give us a little bit more deeper, like what do you have in mind when you say tech?

So tech, in my view, it should be that we all have two, you know, two hands, right? And you have only— before we got on the call, you said that, you know, you're struggling with the week and you're trying to make the most of it and stuff like that. Every entrepreneur is, every entrepreneur faces that, you know, whether they're working 40 hours or 80 hours, the tech is the thing that's supposed to give you that extra limbs that you need in order for you to accelerate, you know, what you're trying to do. It has become our assisted devices, you know, I'm talking about for all, all of humanity, whether it's your iPhone, Shopify for you to launch your e-com site nowadays in 2025. The, you know, the amazing adoption of AI, you know, Claude, Anthropic Claude and ChatGPT and LLMs and stuff like that, right? All of these things to automated and AI-based, whether it's recommendation engine or live chat support for your clients and stuff like that, all of that, all of that. That's where the tech is. Tech is no longer just a calculator, right?

Yeah.

Where, you know, because I've lived through all the tech evolutions, you know, from the time that IBM PC became popular with MS-DOS all the way to now. You know, we're living in the AI age right now, and it's, it's exciting to, to see that kind of stuff. From the time I remember, I remember what I said to you earlier, uh, on this podcast. I said I, I was a computer scientist at the birth of e-commerce. There were no Shopify Payments, there was no Authorize.net. When you had to do that work, you had to create the API to connect to the Chase Bank for payment tech with the APIs for you to actually take credit cards, you know? That facility is so much amazing now. To me, it's like I'm a kid in a candy store. You drop a Shopify, you connect and get yourself approved on Shopify Payments. There's a whole app store that gives you access to incredible amounts of apps that are there. There's pros and cons to it. We will cover that today also, right? Why like Shopify stores don't need like 25, 30 apps installed on their store. They need more like maybe 7, you know? And how that's actually hurting their revenue.

Let's jump straight into it. I actually love that you mentioning the evolution of technologies and when you mentioned the birth of e-commerce, I remember helping people to get integrated with PayPal. That's just way back in the day when everything was kicking off. It was brutal. I mean, the amount of reading PayPal documentation and going through the coding where right now, you know, people probably don't appreciate that enough that they just go to the backend, just click a checkbox, accept PayPal.

You know the API calls intimately.

Yeah, exactly. You know what's going on behind, so that abstraction which Shopify gives or any other tools give is, Yeah, it's amazing to see those things. So we kicked off with this sentence, which is effectively saying that 90% of e-commerce startups fail within 121 days. So this is coming from 2023 failure report, which effectively states that majority fail because of high acquisition cost, poor marketing, and low search visibility. So Sabir, you worked with small and big brands. What are the biggest hidden factors that are killing e-commerce businesses today and why do so many founders fail to see them?

So, I mean, those reports that you see from Small Business Administration and other statistics that you see there, they talk about the after-the-effect, like after the thing happened, they say, oh, this is what happened, right? Like, for example, if there's a car accident, you go like, oh, the car swerved and hit the other car, right? But you don't realize that, that maybe the driver was, was— didn't get enough, enough sleep the night before, you know, because you have to look at the foundation. And then you, you dig into that, the, the driver has been dealing with a lot of stress and anxiety and stuff like that because of whatever is going on in their life, work or family or whatever, right? So when it comes to these statistics, the problem is You know, yes, it's true. These numbers are in fact true. And I actually have— I have had quite a lot of his in my history where I've taken companies that went to the bankruptcy court, filed for bankruptcy, not just for reorganization, for asset sale, like it was dead basically. And a venture company or an investor came, purchased, you know, acquired all of those distressed assets and then, and then joined the program and got in contact with me in order to in order to see how we can revive it and actually set it on the right foundation, right?

Okay.

So, the two main things that happen, and a lot of entrepreneurs, I mean, I exchange, you know, I do live events throughout the week, every single week of the year, right? And I talk to entrepreneurs, hundreds of entrepreneurs on a pretty regular basis, right? The first one is trying to find the right people to help them in their journey, right? And when they decide to do that, unfortunately, because of so much easy access to platforms like LinkedIn and Fiverr and Upwork and getting emails from people saying that, "I can do your SEO, I can do your affiliate marketing." I'm sure, Mike, you get hit with quite a few of those.

Tell me about it.

Yeah. Also, right? Yep. Unfortunately, if you are not, if you don't know who to like hire to do that thing for you, right? Not on full-time basis, but freelance agency, whatever. You could be kissing a lot of frogs, right? And you have heard that saying, kissing a lot of frogs to find your prince. Yeah. Unfortunately, in case of e-commerce, because you're going to be wasting your time and money, you're kissing a lot of poisonous frogs. Unfortunately, I'll give you a very, very horrifying example, right? Yep. You know, you hear from Neil Patel or me on one of our— Neil Patel is a friend of mine, you know the guy, you know, he does content marketing, he's really well known, SEO. I use his products. You hear that and you go like, okay, you know what, I need to do backlinks, right? Because Neil Patel said we should do backlinks, right? Then what do you do? You go on LinkedIn to find people who know, who have something like backlinks in their profile, LinkedIn, Upwork, Fiverr, and on Fiverr you find a guy who does backlinks, $50 for 50,000 backlinks, right?

Bullshit.

That $50 is going to destroy your company. Yeah. Your organic ranking, you're going to kill your company a lot. You know, in the 8D Method, we will talk about that and the Rapid 2X program that we have. In the first 3 weeks, 4 weeks, up to 6 weeks, we actually do a lot of this cleanup because almost everybody has committed what I call e-commerce sins. And you have to reel back from it and change it around. Unless, unless you do that, doing anything advanced like Meta Ads optimization or Google Ads or anything like that If your house is not in the right order, it doesn't matter how much you spend on it. Then you'll agree with, oh, you know what? I'll take a ROAS of 1 because your agency said that that's okay. It's not okay, by the way. You're not running a profitable campaign. You're going to kill your company that way too. So how to bankrupt your e-commerce company? I have seen quite a lot and I'll share quite a lot of that with you today. but also not only that, but also how, how we can get there from there to save the company, these e-com companies, so that they don't become that statistics you just shared. And in, in fact, they become a success story. And you've seen, I mean, if you've been to, uh, growthbysabir.com, I encourage your, your viewers to actually do that. Go there, take a look at all of these case studies, all these entrepreneurs, everyone from, uh, you know, uh, from a startup e-com all the way to like $10-15 million to the likes of $100 million plus Canon, you know, the camera company, that all of these guys implementing a good fundamental platform, a good foundational platform, uh, can help and have a compounding effect on growth and profitable growth, not just growth, because anyone can— you can throw money at Meta and that, that could deliver revenue to you, but you're not going to sustain that because you're going to have a negative cash flow in your business.

That's exactly it. And that's one of the top 3 reasons how effectively e-commerce businesses die in that 120 days. They just run out of money because they're running into minus with all the ads. They have a cash flow, but it's not profitable. So eventually the money will run out. I love how you put it, e-commerce sins, and I love the backlink story. And I really want to ask this question, Savir, because I'm exposed to that as well. I'm getting these messages every day, couple of them on LinkedIn going like, hey, you know, we know you have a successful podcast, you know, we can give you downloads, we can give you followers. Like, I know it's a bot, right? So because I'm technical, I come from this background, I know it's bullshit. So I go like, thank you not. But at the same time, it's so itching to go like, I can give you $150 and, you know, and get into top of the charts, it plays with your mind. So I do understand why people having e-commerce businesses, especially if they lack patience, you know, they go like, oh, we've been doing this for 3 to 6 months and, you know, it's not growing. You know, this guy is suggesting me a cheap heaven, as someone would say. It's so easy buying into that, right? Yeah, exactly. Like, but how do you think if you don't have those right people, as you mentioned at the beginning, as one of the most important things to get these mentors who've been, you know, made the trip, made the walk, they know all the potential problems. Like, how do you, how do you think, what mindset do you need to employ to really do the things the right way for the long term?

So this is what I'm going to tell you. You need to have, as an entrepreneur, you need to have a healthy dose of skepticism, right?

I love that. Skeptical.

You need to have skepticism. Yep. But in, in the world where you're getting all this noise, the noise is, by the way, when people are spamming you, it's one thing, right? It hits your inbox. You can ignore it. The other part of it, which you don't realize you're doing when you're sitting there, you're bored, right? You're on your phone eating your whatever you're eating, and then you're scrolling through your TikTok and something comes up there, right? And that's also conditioning you as human beings. We get conditioned digitally. We get conditioned about 7 to 9 digital impressions. As a human being, we become very impressionable. 7 to 9 digital touchpoints, right? And we could utilize that fact, by the way, in e-commerce in order to get that person from an intent to explore to intent to buy, right? We're using the same strategy, but the same strategy applies when you're getting conditioned, you're conditioning yourself through TikTok and Instagram Reels and stuff like that. As you're going through it, and the more of the same content that you see, somebody who's telling you, oh, this, this Meta Ads hack is going to do this for you, just change this one tiny thing. That person that produced that content for you is to get to get to have a healthy channel on TikTok, not for you to have a healthy business, you know. So you need to understand that and you have to have a healthy dose of skepticism. That's number one. And actually, All of our case studies, when we tape them, well, you know, when we ask them to give us their video testimonial, almost every one of them starts with that, "I was skeptical about if Sabir would be able to deliver these results for my business," right? Which is great. I love the word skepticism because more entrepreneurs need to have skepticism in there so that to ask, ask. Why do you think this is going to work? Right. Not necessarily the how or the what. Right. Why do you think this is going to work? Can you show me— can you show me social proof of other case studies that it works for? Maybe it's in my industry, maybe it's in similar industries, but adjacent industries or something like that. I want to see that. I want to see if it's going to work. Right. And have that right skepticism. In New York, in New York, I'm a New Yorker. I grew up here all my life, right? We don't call it skepticism, we call it the bullshit meter. That's a term that New Yorkers use, right? And you need to be a little bit of a New Yorker, whether you're in Netherlands or you're in Australia or you're in Egypt, it doesn't matter. We have entrepreneurs from all over the world that actually bring their e-com sites to and businesses to actually through our program and they see these successes. For example, Orem Brothers, you know, they were stuck at $1.5 million for several years. They were stuck. And what happens when you're stuck, right? You're going to keep on getting that stuck number, $1.5 million. Maybe it's going to diminish also to $1.4 million, $1.3 million, slowly comes down. But what you're doing from an expense side of it, you're trying to solve this problem. As an entrepreneur, the expenses go up. What's happening to your net cash flow? Negative. In their case, that meant business, business loans. That meant business debt. They just kept on getting into more debt in order to fund the operations of the business and inventory and stuff. The realities of everyday business, you know, they had to do that. Once they joined the program around January 20th of 2024, by September 9th, by the way, in the first 6 weeks, 112% improvement in the business, 112% from being stuck to being unstuck in 6 weeks. Right. And then by September 9th, 2024, 1 p.m., we were actually watching the clock very closely. They surpassed their $1.5 million. That's not impressive, right? That's even though it sounds impressive to you, that's that part of it. To me, it's not impressive. What's impressive We also worked on pricing. You mentioned that we will talk about pricing, discounting, discounting to death, stuff like that. We will talk about those things because those— some of those things, if you make a bad decision, leads to your company going bankrupt. Unfortunately, that's the reality of it. You're going to hear a lot of really, really harsh truths from me. But the thing is, it's, it's for the entrepreneurs to wake up, right? Wake up. And hopefully whoever is watching this or listening to it, in a recording, they say that, oh, you know what, I need to change, change my attitude. I need to change the way I'm approaching my business in order to turn the ship so that I don't become a statistic, you know, in that sense. So September 9th, they surpassed $1.5 million. More importantly, positive net cash flow because we have worked on pricing during, during the first 9 months. Right. And then from there, from September 9th, 1:01 p.m. through December 31st, was pure growth. And do you know how much we grew from just those 4 months?

400%.

Another $1.5 million.

So that's double.

So we're at $3 million with positive net cash flow. We paid off all of our business loans so that when we enter 2025, all that debt was behind us. And this year, where we— our goal is to go from $3 million to $10 million.

That's nice.

And I've done that, right, so many times across so many categories, right? And a lot of companies when they get stuck, 'cause the thing is, as you're growing from 0 to $500K, you learn quite a lot about yourself, about the business, about your product category, about, you know, different channels and stuff that you have. From $500K to $1 million, different journey. From $1 to $3 million, very different journey. From 3 to 10 million, very different journey. You know, this is one of the reasons, like, there are amazing authors out there like Seth Godin. You know, he talks about the gap, right? The gap is you get to a certain point, unless you do something different, either you are stuck like this or it just goes down like that, unfortunately. Yep. That's just reality of it, right? But that's one of the reasons that foundationally you need to put the right strategies in place for your business in order to not do that exactly, you know?

Yep. I love that gap definition. I have a different take how I explain that, you know, to founders as well is that you have these levels and you're right, you mentioned there's gonna be certain processes where you go from 100,000 to 1 million and it's gonna be totally different approaches from 1 to 3. So you have these levels, right? And every time you penetrate a new level, You're basically back to not knowing. You're back to that position of being in this new level, which requires different knowledge and different approaches. So that means that all the skills and all the knowledge you develop, which brought you to that level, is applicable, transferable, but that's not what's going to take you again to the next level, which means, you know, you either need advice or a supporter or mentor, or, you know, you can learn it yourself, but that's going to be a quite tough journey. But effectively, you constantly, if you're doing well, you're constantly reaching those new levels where you just become a noob again.

In fact, what happens, Mike, is that it actually becomes inefficient. Some of those things that worked for you before, right?

Yeah.

I hear this pretty constantly, right? You know, and that's why I tell entrepreneurs to don't dwell in the past. Like, oh, during my glory days, during the pandemic, right? I did, you know, this much. And now it's, you know, the realities of 2025 is very different than the realities of 2020 and 2021.

Oh, 100%.

If you want to think about the glory days, right, you're wasting time. You need to figure out what's happening right now. The administration is different. The world economy is different. Different types of stuff that's going on. Global economy, including regional or local economy, is different. Right. Things that are happening in the world is different. It's a different time. Yeah. Time passes by. You need to manage your expectations and your strategies based on that timeline, you know, not go back, oh, we used to. Okay, what are you going to do? Do you have a time machine? I've been working on one in my basement for the past 50 years. I've not been able to go anywhere. The movie I saw turned the guy into a fly, right? That's a Hollywood reference, right? So the reality is, come back to reality. There are things that are happening right now. Look at the world. You know, you didn't have AI in the pandemic. Now there is AI. AI is going to have an impact on that. So there are things that happen today. You need to wake up and say, okay, you know what? I need to focus on what do I have in front of me? And I need to utilize the things I need to utilize. In order to get me there.

Yeah.

Because the thing that if you dwell on it, one, it gives you anxiety and depression and mental health is, is a serious problem for entrepreneurs. I interview and talk to so many entrepreneurs, right? They have at a varying degree, they have a level of depression because of what's happening in their business because that's their baby. Right. And then exasperated with that, there is something going on in their family. You know, or personal life and stuff like that, it just builds up. It just builds up. So you need to— at least these things you can manage on the business side of the equation, right? And turn those kinds of things around so that at least you can focus more on the personal side of issues if you have, but focus more on the solutions that you can implement for your business so you can turn those things around.

So, so every system starts with the problem that needs solving. What was your aha moment that led you to create the AD Method, and how did you develop that into a structural framework?

That's a very good question. So AD Method didn't come about like 2 years ago. It— I have been working on this for the past 25 years, right? And, and as you keep on refining the methodologies in different— So 8D stands for 8 dimensions of e-commerce. One of the things I learned, and I was very lucky because I was there at the birth of e-commerce as an industry, right? 25 years ago, it's about 26 years old right now, right? Yeah. So it's been 25, more than 25 years for me. And as I was growing with the industry, I got to touch every aspect of it. So today, if somebody says, oh, I'm in e-commerce, they are hyper-specialized, right? And usually it means that, oh, I'm a Meta ads person. I only know how to do Meta ads. If you ask them any questions about Shopify, no clue, right? If you tell them anything about logistics, they go like, oh, that's not my domain. That's— I have no idea what that is, right? Because they expect like, oh, magically the traffic came in and magically the things went out, right? But in my case, I had to build all of those foundational things from the ground up. So I'm very intimately involved in all of these 8 dimensions and 8 dimensions. So like Meta ads is a sub-dimension of a dimension. So it's not even a dimension by itself, right? So you have to, you know, as I, as I went through this, I just kept on refining it because the world of e-commerce and how you build traffic to your site and the channels, social media didn't exist. Social media became a thing in 2008, 2009. Then you had content marketing related to social and socializing and engagement and stuff like that. Couple of years later, you had the paid media platforms on social appear. But in 2001, you had Google come up with paid ads with Google Ads. And back then it was called Google AdWords, right? But prior to Google AdWords, it was actually— I got— this is a historical thing. I got a nice refrigerator with a certificate from Google for generating 1 million clicks for my e-com site back then when, when Google Ads was a novelty at that time. Right. So that's how long I've been in it. So I've touched every aspect of it. And one of the things that I realized, right, is that whoever says that I'm a specialist in this area, they overemphasize that one thing, right?

Yeah.

And then what happens in your business becomes lopsided. I'll give you an example, right? Let's say you hire the best Meta ads person in the world, like phenomenal person. Their ROAS is great. Every metric you look at it, every dollar you give them, they give you back like $5, right? So that's a ROAS of 5 that you're getting from it, right? Phenomenal guy, right? They throw so much traffic, they're doing all these things, but you didn't work on your warehouse, you did not work on your order fulfillment. Your orders are incredibly mounting. It's like you were 100 orders, now you're getting 1,000 orders per month, not 100 orders per month. If your warehouse, whether it's a 3PL or you have your own warehouse, if you don't know how to optimize and scale that with your marketing, what happens? Before, when you were getting 100 orders, you promised that by 4:00 PM you would get the order out, right? That's on your FAQ pages, it's on your customer service, says it on the product page. Phenomenal, right? Everybody's happy with you. At 100 orders, you're getting those orders out. At 1,000 orders, now, now you're falling behind. Orders are not getting out. And when orders are not getting out, what's the other part of logistics that gets hurt? Customer support. Where the hell is my order? Yep. You know, where is it? And then if you are delayed too much because you're not fulfilling it fast enough, what happens? Order cancellations. Order cancellations means refunds. Refunds means chargebacks from or people just do a cancellation directly on their credit card without even bothering you because you're too busy. You cannot even communicate with them, right? So it just ends up hurting you at so many different levels, even though on the front end you look like a company that's, that's very successful and it's working really well for you.

Okay. Can you break us down these dimensions? I'd be like, can you list them? Like, what are these 8 dimensions?

Sure. So I'll list them and then I think we can go through a few of them, you know, during, during this live podcast.

Let's go. Let's, let's list them for our listeners so they can potentially do their own research. But let's talk about the most important one in your view, or maybe it's a couple of them, as you said it, but it's a building block.

We start with the first one.

Yeah.

The first dimension is performance optimization.

Okay.

It takes about 3 to 6 weeks It's— if you think about the Shopify owner, they have invested in certain type of tech stack, right? They have certain apps that we know that that's what they're running. They have Shopify, they have Klaviyo for email and SMS, right? They have Meta ads, they have Google ads, right? They might be doing a little bit with SEO potentially, right? Maybe they have SEMrush, for example, right? Or Ahrefs or something like that. Right? So that's, that's what we can rely on, that they have these, these like 5 things, right? And behind the scenes, operationally, they have certain things going on like order fulfillment and stuff like that, right?

Yep.

So in these first 3 to 6 weeks, you know what I said about, you know, entrepreneurs commit e-commerce sins? We need to undo some of those sins and clean up, not only do elimination, but optimization. Of the current stack, right? And this involves both marketing optimization and tech optimization of the business, right? Of the e-com site to begin with. It takes about 3 to 6 weeks. It's the first 6 weeks of the program. That's what we are doing. That's what we are focused on.

So when you say, Sabir, when you say cleanup, is it more about throw these tools away 'cause we know don't work or they're too expensive, take our tool 'cause like we know it's Deliveroo, or it's more like, oh, you did so many like shitty decisions over here that we need to do some damage control over here, but you really don't touch the tech stack they actually own.

It's all of the above, but it's a lot simpler than that.

Okay.

It's a lot simpler than that. Uh, it's the very first thing that we work on, uh, in the program is, uh, optimizing your site for consumer attention. That's number one.

Okay.

That touches both marketing/web design and it touches tech optimization. What is the consumer attention span in 2025? 1.7 seconds.

I thought it was 3 seconds. 1.5. That went double. That's double shorter than my—

The data is old. 1.7 seconds. That's all it is. And where does that come from? TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Amazon app. You have as a consumer, you have been trained to ignore things that take more than 1.7 seconds. You might tolerate 2 seconds. That's it. 1.7 seconds is the magical number there, right? Okay. For you to literally look and say, oh, not for me. Boom. That's what you do on TikTok. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You go very fast, right? Your eye is used to that. And that's why we need to optimize the business in that first 6 weeks. In fact, the first week is optimization of 1.7 seconds. So when you do that, there are two aspects to it, right? One is a technical aspect. So that one, you do GTmetrix, you run GTmetrix. If you're familiar with GTmetrix as a tool, it measures the, you know, what's slowing down your site, right? And typically for Shopify sites, time to interact is the KPI that I care about. Right? Time to interact, that's the, that's the KPI that needs to be under 1.7 seconds. That means that your page appeared, not only did it appear technically, but what appeared in front of me, I can make a decision to engage.

And all of that is 1.7 seconds.

If you optimize it for that, then you're going to keep that person. If you don't optimize it for that, that's when you have very high bounce rate. You have very low ROAS, you have a very low conversion rate. So that starts from that very small decision like that.

But that's— so that 1.7 is for the page to load, to show all the content, and for me to make a decision? Not all the content, what's visible in front of you, what's visible in the viewport of your screen, which means could be mobile app, could be a small laptop, mobile app, actually not the desktop.

Okay, 70 to 80% of e-commerce sales and traffic is mobile. In the United States is iPhone. So it needs to be device first. So it's not even mobile optimized anymore. That term is dead long time ago. Yeah, it's not even mobile first, it's device first.

Okay.

Device first means that for your market, for your target market, what is the most popular device that they're using? In the US, it would be iPhone. iPhone 12 is the minimum spec that you should, you should optimize your experience on. In case of certain European countries, it could be iPhone, it could be Samsung Galaxy, uh, S20 or S22 would be the minimum that you should start with and up, right?

Okay.

You should optimize it for device first on that primary mobile device and then secondarily the second mobile device. In every market you have two devices, like it's either iPhone then Android or it's Android then it's iPhone. Right? So you need to optimize it for those two devices, um, so that if you are— if your web designers, if your web developers are doing a Zoom meeting with you and they're showing screen sharing a nice beautiful desktop site, yeah, in 2025, I'm giving you my stamp of approval, ignore your desktop site, ignore it completely because it's 20%, less than 20% of your traffic, right? Yeah. Why are you optimizing or even looking at that Look at, obsess about your mobile experience. In fact, go and if you don't have an iPhone, this investment of $1,500 to buy this thing is worth it, but you don't have to even buy it. On Firefox and Chrome, you right-click on any white space of your site and you say inspect, you hit that little thing, it's for mobile and you say iPhone 12. Yeah. And it gives you an emulation at least, at least if you can get the emulation right, You're going to be okay with that. So it is 1.7 seconds. And what— and how much attention is there on that viewport? 70% of engagement happens before they even do this.

Yep.

So you know that amazing video you have down the page somewhere? You go like, oh, if they get to this— less than 30% of that traffic is going to that magical place. And how do you know that? You use tools like Lucky Orange, for example. Lucky Orange, like I said, I'm a kid in a candy store with this stuff, right? 'Cause I obsess about the data and anything that lets me read human behavior, I love it, right? Lucky Orange gives me that, right? It tells me the heat map. So it starts with red hot orange up here, and then that's 70%. And as you scroll down, you'll get to a part of that product page that's going to be completely blue. Yeah, completely blue means it's dead. Like there is no traffic. Nobody's going there. It's a dead zone. It's, it's your memorial park. Nobody's going there. There are dead bodies there, right? You could in fact put 100% off your order if you place an order with this code. You put that in there at the bottom of that area to just test if people get there. They're not getting there. You don't have to be that excessive. You could just use Lucky Orange to do that. And then it also records the session so that you can actually see what exactly what they're doing. And in most cases, they stick with that top viewport. Your call to action, information, interaction, engagement— everything needs to be in that viewport as soon as your page appears under 1.7 seconds.

Okay, I love that. So effectively, the, the outcome which is leading our first phase of optimizing everything is that the fact that We have 1.7 seconds. Everything is mobile. That's our spot. So everything below that leading towards that positive outcome we want to achieve is the optimization process. Get it? What's the second one?

So we start, we start with that, right? Yeah. The second part of it is also looking at that. So how do you prioritize what you need to work on? Right. Earlier you asked me like, what do you see as a problem? Right. One is hiring the wrong people, and then you run out of funds because they wasted not only money on them, but also money on whatever they wanted you to fund, right? So you wasted money on that. The other area is what do you need to focus on, right? What are the 5 things, Mike, you should do this week? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Just one task every day. One task that in the morning, if you work on it, by the end of the day, you feel great about doing that and laser-focused and material things that are going to impact your business in a positive way, right?

Mm-hmm.

So I just said this to you, incredible information, 1.7 seconds optimizing, 70% view port and stuff, but where on your site, you have so many pages, where do you focus, laser focus on? Number one, product page, and your best-selling product should be your first target. The very first thing, the best-selling product, you need to optimize that page, right? That needs to be the, the most important task you'll do. Number 2, your second best-selling, 3, 4, 5. You follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your product portfolio, right? It's not— if you have 1,000 products, you're not touching 1,000 products. If you touch just 20% of it, that represents it. Sometimes it's 70/30, sometimes it's 90/10, right? Sometimes it's even lopsided. Like, it's— you have a lot of SKUs for some reason. You came with so many variations. That's another problem, right? But you are— you need to focus on the thing that's generating 80, 90, 70% of your revenue. That many SKUs, you need to— those pages need to be ultra optimized. right? That's where you need to focus, laser focus your time on. Second set would be collections pages, or that's what Shopify calls it, but on other e-com platforms it would be called a category page, right? A bestsellers page, customer favorites, top rated, you know, any of these things that show you multiple products, new arrivals, you know, spring collection, whatever. Those collections pages, that represents again, follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of revenue is driven by certain pages, and you also use them for social media posts. You use them for email marketing, SMS marketing, where you're driving the traffic there, right? The least important optimization on the list is your homepage. The least important, because if you are doing all of these campaigns, whether it's paid media, you're doing social posts, blog articles, anything, You should always send people to a specific landing page, and that should not be your homepage. Homepage should be because they know your brand name. So they're putting in MikeCeras.com, right? They're putting that because they know your brand name. That's, that's the fashion company that sells amazing suits, right? So they will— you can send them there. They can go there because they know your name. Or if they did a Google search for your name, branded search, and then they clicked on the organic to get there. But if they, if they clicked on a paid ad on Google Ads, you should send them on a landing page that you have control over the experience.

Okay.

That's how you prioritize. That's how you prioritize that work, right? After we're done with optimizing our site and landing pages, right, we focus on organic channels, customer segmentation, email marketing, and SEO. Right? Those 3 are— now, before we touch paid media, we want to get these 3 done. So we fixed our foundation for the site and landing pages. Our entire traffic that gets to our site, all traffic is improved. So our conversion rate goes up, session value goes up, ROAS goes up, you know, our bounce rate comes down. All of these great metrics happen in that first set of optimizations related to site and landing pages. And these are— there are only 5 tasks you need to do. It's not like 15. It's not— doesn't take months, right? This is not a— at this phase, we're not doing CRO optimization. We're not doing conversion rate optimization in that first week. Second week, we focus on customer segmentation, email marketing, and SEO. What is customer segmentation? Most Shopify owners don't know the behavior of their consumers. They don't. right? They might know it from what is their average order. They might know how many units of products they buy. They might know how many orders they're getting in a day, but they really don't know the consumer. They don't know their customers, right? And in that, you need to actually measure your RFM score of your customers. RFM stands for recency, frequency, monetary value. Another term for it is called lifecycle marketing.

Right.

How recently did they buy from me? How and what segments do they fall into? 0 months ago, 1 month ago, 3 to 6 months ago, 6 to 12 months ago, more than 12 months ago. Their last purchase. Right. How many customers do I have? How frequently do they buy? If it's 0, that means that they just gave you email sign up. Right. If it's 1, I call these people one-hit wonders. That's my phrase. One-hit wonders. Do you know that in the music industry you have like Mambo No. 5 and Macarena?

Yeah, yeah.

Right, those are one-hit wonders, right? Or Gangnam Style, right? Those are one-hit wonders. You have customers in your database. And by the way, statistically from 2024 and even today, in most Shopify businesses, more than 70% of your CRM of customers, ignore the prospects. Prospects are just email signups. Your customers, 70 to 80% of your database is one-hit wonders. They came in, they just went on a coffee date with you, that's it. They just gave you that one transaction. And if you take into consideration, uh, return rates, uh, you probably— it's even higher, right? Because now it's damaging your business because you're refunding all those people.

Why is that, Sabir? Like, do you have theories why, why such a big number of people become one- One-hit wonder. Is it how we advertise? Is that like how e-commerce has been?

No, no, you're looking at the tail end of it, Mike. You have to go back to the beginning. If you don't foundationally, if you don't do lifecycle marketing and you don't look at this RFM, yeah, this number just keeps on ballooning. A lot of people that join, I would say 99% of Rapid 2Xers— Rapid 2X is the implementation program for 8D Method. Right? And we have a special offer for your listeners today. We will share the link and you could include it in the show notes. It's growthbysevier.com/masteringtechgrowth. If they go there, they'll get a special offer to look into the Rapid 2X program, right?

Yeah.

So when you are not looking at this RFM because you don't even know to look at it, and most people that join our program, they don't know anything about it. They just don't, you know, unfortunately that has like for some reason died away because everybody looks at ROAS from Meta ads. That's the thing that they know and they keep hearing, my ROAS, I need to improve my ROAS. The problem is ROAS is such a later thing. You need to look at your RFM to see what do you need to do when somebody goes and gives you their email or SMS, how do you get them to buy, make that first purchase? Yeah, you need to be very intentional about this. When, when they make that first transaction, right, it's first transaction, they're not a loyal customer, it's just one transaction, right? They're not your boyfriend, girlfriend, you cannot call them that. They just went on one coffee date, you know, if I use that analogy, right? You have to actively work on taking that one-time buyer to buy a second time. You need to actively work on a second-time buyer to buy a third time, third to fourth, fourth to fifth. That's what you need to be doing on a daily basis. You need to be looking at that. And because this 1x or the one-hit wonder segment is such a big number, a lot of the businesses are what I consider them to be transactional businesses, meaning that they don't have, you know, because they go like, oh, you know what? I heard that loyalty programs are good. I think I should implement a loyalty program for points. They implement it. And what happens after that? Oh, the loyalty program did not work for us because people earn the points. It's meaningless because they're not getting anything from it. Like they're not coming back a second time to either redeem the points or to make another purchase to keep on building the rewards up so that they can redeem it. And when it gets— there is nothing built into it at all. And the problem is, the problem is not loyalty program. The problem is you're not doing lifecycle marketing, you're not looking at RFM, right?

So, Sabir, is the lifecycle marketing never stopping one or is it like we do one, you know, one purchase to—

Never stops. Every single day.

Literally like—

365.

Right, so if I have a customer who bought from me 75 times, I'm still gonna be doing something to get them to buy 76 times and 77 and it just never stops.

No, because the thing is, if, you know, people get distracted just like you're distracted as an entrepreneur. Consumers are distracted in 1.7 seconds because they saw some, some TikTok that said, oh, our detergent, it gets you super white, uh, laundry, right?

Yeah.

The one that you have is only white enough, but ours is super white.

Super white. So whiter than white.

You get, you get distracted. That customer that bought 75 times from you in your example Yeah, the 76th order, they already lapsed. They moved on. Yeah, right. That's why you really need to do this on an ongoing basis. And when you have that sort of a behavior, well, whether it's a 0-time, 1-time, 7-times, 15-times, 25-times, you need to identify and you have to respect those customer segments. Somebody in my list that's 75-time buyer, I'm going to put them in my VIP list. I'm going to treat them differently. I'm going to— when I come up with the new spring collection, if I'm a fashion brand, I'm going to give them a secret sale, presale before anybody else has access to that collection. I will give them early access. Black Friday, I'm going to expose it, expose it to them 3 days early so that they're not out of their size, color variation, whatever, whatever. Right. Okay. If I'm doing— if I come up with a very limited edition thing that I'm doing right, something very special, it's only 100 units of it. I'm going to only open it up to my VIPs, for example. That's, that's making the loyalty program meaningful, not just, oh, you earn points and then those points turn into a rebate of, of a dollar amount off your next purchase. Then consumers go like, well, I don't— you have to add other, you know, other parts of the program and features into your loyalty in order to get them to do that behavior. I'm talking about the other side of it. But the first problem is 70% of your database And it's pretty easy. You can go into Shopify admin, you click on segments, you say a number of orders equal to exactly 1, not greater than 1, equal to 1 in their lifetime. And look at that number and then do another one, greater or equal to 1. That's going to be all of your customers because we want to ignore the prospects for now. We want to see— we want to divide that number of equal to 1 divided by greater or equal to 1. And when you run that, it's going to give you a rude awakening. And in the program, we actually come up with— well, we have, you know, prescription on exactly the campaigns they need to run in order to see, can we revive and reactivate these one-hit wonders to buy a second time? And what about the other extreme of it? It has been 12 months last time that this segment bought. That's another segment that's very big. Right? That's, that's very big also. So we need to reactivate this group to see, does— do they come back and become part of our active universe? Active universe is buying within the 6 months because the attention span has been— I used to do 12 months, but the attention span has been so much lower. 0 to 6 months for most product categories should be the active universe, meaning that people who are actively buying from you, this is your hot file. Right here, 0 to 6 months. Anyone beyond 6 to 12 months— 6 to 12 months is short-lapsed customers, and then 12 months plus is long-lapsed, right? So are you buying something from a brand because of some TikTok thing that you saw 12 months ago? Would you even remember the domain name of that site?

No chance. Yep. Unless— yeah, no chance. Maybe if I go to emails, you know, um, try to look for an order or something like that. If I Very, very—

you have to go out of your way as a consumer to do that.

Exactly. That's very rare. So are we optimizing our campaigns then to always do these things, or is it automated in a sense? I'm just sort of trying to think about that email and SEO aspect of that all optimization. So we do the customer segment—

campaigns, Mike, are initially— these are campaigns. These are Klaviyo campaigns, not automation flows in the first 6 weeks. Because what we are doing is we are testing the segments.

Right.

The good side effect of it, some businesses are gonna see amazing numbers, you know, during that time because they will activate zero to one-time buyers, one to two-time buyers, and then people who have lapsed in your universe, right? You're gonna reactivate them, right? That's good news. If those things happen in a positive way, that means that you can, you know, there's no more hope. You know, one of the things that— one of the words I have banned in my program is hoping and praying. We hope they buy from us. No, we will plan and we will use the right strategy to see what results we get back. We will measure it and then we will repeat the cycle. That's what we will do.

I love that.

There is no hoping and praying. There is no like spray and send an email campaign to all of my subscribers on Klaviyo and pray. I call it spray and pray campaigns, right?

Yep.

That doesn't work. And plus, what you're doing is, you know, you are just mixing up everybody in that segment, people who have never bought from you to people who, in your example, 75-time buyers, right? Why are you treating them the same way? And plus, you're deprioritizing the people who are amazingly doing amazingly well with you. And what does ESPs do? Email service providers, right? Gmail, Outlook, and stuff like that. If they see that not many people are opening your emails, they think that one, either you are a bad emailer or you are, you know, or you are a spammer. Yeah, right. And deliverability suffers. You don't make it into the inbox. All of these things happen down the line because of this foundational bad decision you made of spraying and praying, you know, your entire database.

Yeah. Hope is not a strategy. 100%. Can we talk a little bit about SEO very tactically? Like, what do you guys do in that beginning and maybe later, like Because for me, SEO is, you know, it's all organic traffic. It's building out some content and being associated with that. I'm very interested to understand how e-commerce utilize SEO.

So it's again in the first 6 weeks versus the advanced stuff that we do in the program also after the 6 weeks, right? So the performance optimization part of it is looking at, you know, looking at the you know, just like we used GTmetrix and, you know, initially for the entire site, SEMrush is one of my favorite tools, right? SEMrush allows you to run what's called a site audit as well as a backlink audit, right? So the backlink audit that we— that you do and you connect it to your Google Search Console also, when you run that, it gives you the toxic links, right? That's when you realize how much you have sinned. right? That $50 that you paid, it's going to be very visible to you very quickly, right? All bad decisions that you have made over the years, or that guy you hired thinking that, you know, and by the way, I do want to touch on that too. You know, it's not about just going even in the first phase, going and hiring that Shopify developer. Sabir said that, oh, we need to optimize our GT metrics. It's that it's making the right decisions even in the development because you can hire somebody on the— on GTmetrix, they can take you from an F to an A, but they remove certain features of the site you really need. So strategically, they didn't think— they thought completely technically. So they eliminated things that would have actually gotten you that increased average order and stuff like that. So in the program, there's a specific prescription that, that we go through, right? The same applies to when you're doing SEO optimization. The first part of it is actually looking at backlinks and getting rid of toxic backlinks, being very methodical about the potentially toxic backlinks also. So that's part of the cleanup. Then running the site audit. When you run the site audit, just like GTmetrix tells you what are the issues with your site, you have to also look at the SEMrush because those errors and warnings are getting in the way of you ranking on Google organic, right? right? You have some sort of, some type of organic ranking that's happening on Google, right? And, but the thing is, if you're doing, if you're not correcting these problems, it's deranking you, right? Backlinks are deranking you. If, if you have duplicate pages with the same content, that's deranking you. If you're missing meta title or it's too short or it's too long, that's deranking you. All of these things need to be corrected first. Fundamentally, you need to correct that. right? And then once you get out of these 6 weeks of the program, what happens is then we focus on secondary optimizations that we need to work on or even implementation because not everybody has this implemented. Then we utilize effectively, we utilize domain knowledge from SEMrush and we pull in, this is where AI actually helps quite a bit. We actually have a prescription related to AI. With Claude as well as ChatGPT, right? Where we pull the data out of SEMrush, we bring it into Claude AI or ChatGPT to actually generate the content that we really need to have on our site, whether it's blog articles, social media posts, and doing very effective content marketing, you know, checking for spam rates for email, all of anything that touches content basically, right? Your product pages need to be optimized structurally for SEO and also content-wise, you need to optimize that. And there's a prescription for that in the Rapid 2X.

Okay. So that's that optimization. I actually lost at which point in 8 dimensions we are. Are there any other dimensions left, Zabih?

No, no. So this is just everything we discussed is the first 6 weeks of the program.

Okay. First 6 weeks of the program.

That's dimension 1. That's performance optimization.

That's still the same dimension.

I'll go through the rest of them.

Yeah.

Customer UX is the customer journey and that's where we optimize like Klaviyo journey and other types of things like loyalty marketing and stuff like that. Yeah. The next dimension, I'm just going quickly through it to kind of give you a top overview.

Yep.

After that, we look at marketing and storytelling. Like every brand has a story to tell. Every product has a story to tell.

Yep.

You as a founder, you have a story to tell. Why did you come up with this product? Why did you come up with this brand? What is your POV? How do you use this product? You know, if you're a car parts company, you should show how to install that thing that you sell, right? You should be the one in front of it doing that, right? And you said, oh, I'm camera shy, whatever. No, you know what? You have a company. You know, in 2025, you need— your POV matters. You know that average order you wanted to go up? You want that conversion rate to go up or session value to go up or your ROAS to go up? Your face, your POV. This is how you— how I fit this in here. By the way, if you tweak it here, this is how it's going to work. People want to hear from you. And how many big companies can they put a founder's face on it? Not many or not at all. You being a small brand from $0 to $10 million, you need to, you need to be in front of the camera. You need to show how— what is your POV into the cat fountain that gives you the water for your cat? You can show your cat and show how loving you are and the type of cat you have, or a dog or whatever you have. You like— it's your POV. That's part of marketing and storytelling, coming up with the pillar content and from there deploying that pillar content into, uh, into your site, into your social media, into your blog articles, into your email marketing, into third-party sites. That's where the pillar content You generate it, and then from there you figure out the distribution strategy. That's also prescription, right, of how to deploy that across, across the universe.

Okay, so we got process optimization, UX, marketing, storytelling, pillar content, distribution strategy. That's 1, 2, that's 5. Are we missing a couple of— that's pricing. Pricing.

Let's go with pricing. Pricing. When I talk about pricing optimization, and, and, you know, I, I shared the You know, whether it's Orem Brothers or Lion's Leather Co. Lisa Dennen is a phenomenal woman entrepreneur, Carol's Daughter, you know, Waline, these are all global brands and they started from zero, right? And what's interesting is whenever we optimize, we do pricing optimization, that's another dimension, right? Every entrepreneur's heart starts beating like this. Right. Yeah. Why? Because they have been coached and trained in their heads. You have to coupon to death. Everything needs to have a promo code. You sign up for email, 15% off. You cart abandon, 20% off. You do SMS, 20% off. You do browse abandonment, just remind them and then give them another 15% off. Black Friday has to be 50%, 60% off, right? It's just coupon, coupon, coupon. Like, where's this money coming from? When you are doing a coupon or you're doing a promo code, you are funding a marketing campaign. That money has to be coming from somewhere. You're robbing yourself from the gross margin in order to fund that. And one other thing that kind of sneaks in there that, that, that most entrepreneurs don't even think about it as a promo— free shipping.

Yeah.

Free shipping needs to be paid from somewhere. So now you're doing 30% off of your product portfolio because you're running some sort of a cart abandonment Klaviyo campaign, whatever. On top of it, you're giving another $10, $12 off for free shipping.

True.

Something needs to fund it. Yeah. Where's that money coming from, right? In the pricing optimization, we think about, it's not just about raising prices, thinking about pricing strategies, bundling strategies, coming up with ways to actually affect a change and reward the people who buy more into your selection and collection, right? And rewarding those people versus people who just buy one-off product, like not just one-hit wonder, they are buying one unit of one product and that's it, you know? So you need to think about how you can increase that product adoption through that pricing optimization. And, and, uh, so that your gross margin goes up, right? A big example of that in the case studies is Ashley Stewart and also Orem Brothers very recently too, uh, that I just shared with you. Ashley Stewart, the reason it went bankrupt was the gross margin was 35%. Gross margin, not net margin, gross margin. That means that I made the revenue, I just want to pay off the products I just sold. That's it. Not shipping, not anything else. 35%. That revival went from $3 million to $30 million at 30 million in 2 years. In $30 million, that gross margin went from 35% to 65%. Okay, so the net cash flow actually funded the future growth of the company. That's what— when you are doing couponing to debt, you're robbing yourself of your future self of that brand, and you cannot continue doing that.

I was saying that coupons has no place or— No, no.

Effective couponing has definitely strategically, it has a place in your marketing plan. But willy-nilly just throwing coupons all over the place, that's a mistake. I'll give you a very solid analogy. If I gave you a barrel, right? You know, a barrel that you could have wine in it, water in it.

Yep.

You can hold things, right? I only put only, you know, the amount of money you can afford to give away. I just put it in there in that barrel.

Yep.

Right? Every time you do a coupon, you take money out and you just, you give it to the person. That's it. You cannot have it back. Eventually you're gonna run out of money out of that barrel. I want the entrepreneurs to think about couponing in that sense, right? If they have a limited amount of coupons to give away, they will be more careful. It's because it's so easy to go into Shopify discounts and, create a new code, or even if you use a Klaviyo or stamp.io or something like that, it even automates making these things a lot faster. But that's not the purpose of it. Yeah, I know the tech allows you to do that and it gives you the convenience, but you should always ask, should I be doing that, or why should I do it? Yeah, right. Just because it's allowing you to do it doesn't mean that it makes sense for you to do it. And, and, you know, you should understand the why part of the question, not the mechanism of— because the tech is allowing you to do that, right?

So when does it make sense?

The convenience actually kills your company.

When does it make sense? Like, if we're saying the big mistake is just, just throwing them out there because, you know, it's so easy and it feels like, okay, cash flow coming in, and because we gave this 50% off, you know, for, for this and that, and, you know, what is a good way of using coupons? Like, strategically speaking, like, one example of a good way of using coupons.

So I want to correct you. You use the word cash flow when you did 50% off. You're not getting cash flow. You're getting cash in. You're not getting cash flow. Flow means that after I take the, the, the, you know, the difference between what I got in and when I paid off my expenses, the operating expenses, right? Your employees, marketing costs, the building that you're in, the microphone you're using, you know, right? Your internet connection, all of that. After I pay the flow is at the bottom. If that's positive, that means that you have positive cash flow, right? And if you don't have it, that means that it's a negative cash flow. Your, your, your company is suffering from that perspective, right?

Cash in. Yep.

So how do you do a promotion? Forget about the coupon. No, how do you do a promotion? Let me give you an example. Like, let's say, Mike, you and I have a startup. You, you and I— it's going to be very ironic given the fact this— I'm using this example, right? Let's say you and I came up with an incredible shampoo, conditioner, and hair products, hair products, right?

Yep.

We co-founded that. It's called Sirius Samarkand, uh, Hair Products Company, right?

Sounds awesome.

Yeah, right? It's a nice brand name. It's a very long brand name. We should shorten it maybe. So we, we came up with that. Now when you think about Promotion, most people think, oh, you know, 15% off site-wide, 30% off site-wide. Why? Right? What is that going to give me? Why don't I do, for a minimum, why not do I do, if you want to do a promotion, why not do a BOGO 50? So there are different types of promotions that have, that actually what it does is it condones and it promotes a certain type of behavior by the consumer. A BOGO 50, buy one, get one 50% off. What it condones is making two purchases, right?

Yeah.

I buy the shampoo at full price. My conditioner is going to be at 50% off. If you think about it, net-net, I'm giving 25% off. That's all I'm doing, even though the messaging says 50% off, right?

Yeah.

But for the consumer, oh my God, I'm going to get 50% off if I buy the two things together. Right? And what it's doing there, now you're rewarding good behavior that's different than a one-time buyer that buys one unit, right? So when it comes to the promotion, you have to test it to see what sort of behavior that you want to condone, meaning that you want to promote, you want more people to do that behavior. And what happens, I, you know, we sell this shampoo and conditioner to Susan, right? Susan buys it She likes our shampoo. The conditioner is too lumpy, whatever she says. The conditioner is not for me. But I love the fact that the Sirius Summer Camp shampoo that I bought is incredible. It's better than Pantene. It's better than Head Shoulders. It's better than any of the other things. This is a magical shampoo. I'm going to go on Subscribe and Save, right? At least she went on that. If she bought only one product, let's say by mistake, I mean, she bought— it was a mistake like She bought the conditioner. What happens to that consumer?

Never comes back.

She's not going to buy again. She's gone, right? So you want to think about what sort of a behavior, consumer behavior, that you want to promote. And based on that behavior, the people who actually play that game, you want to reward them. And you don't have to always give big discounts out, you know. So it's not always about— because the thing is, if you even give your entire store away, like like most people do during Black Friday, 50% off, and then— but they're not driving enough traffic to play the volume game. What happens? That, that's in November, December. Come January, bankruptcy filings go up. That's very typical. It just goes up. You know, you can actually follow bankruptcy filings around the world in bankruptcy courts and business courts. You can actually subscribe to see what bankrupt— what— who's coming up. On the docket for bankruptcy. And you could see these companies and you could see their PR releases in whether it was social media or any kind of a professional journal like InternetRetailer.com, DigitalCommerce.com, whatever. You will see that, oh, we had a phenomenal Black Friday sale, we beat our numbers last year, blah, blah, blah. And then because they gave the entire store away, you know, when your house is on fire, everybody is going to show up to actually look. And see how fast it burns down, not that they care about putting out the fire, you know. So you have to be smart about running your business in a smarter way than that.

Okay, so effectively what we're saying is you have to have a proper thing of how you're gonna use the coupons. It's not as simple as just easy to create in Shopify or even easy to automate with some email campaigns and We just spread it everywhere. It has to have a strategic thinking behind, some data measurement, and looking where it actually yields.

Always data. Always data.

And promotes a behavior we want to see. So, I mean, we went into a lot what you guys do in the program, and as well, all of that is very actionable advices which people can go and do themselves. All of them are positives. So I want to ask this question because you know what works. What a common piece of advice you see around, you know, e-commerce growth online, which you know that actually is bad for long term?

There's a lot of bad advice. There's a lot of bad advice, unfortunately, right? This is one of the reasons that I make appearances on podcasts and I'm trying to get the word out so that— because it actually, when you're part of an industry and it hurts you actually to see companies going bankrupt Great products, amazing founders, bad advice, bad implementation, and aligning with the wrong people, unfortunately.

Right.

In most cases, that's, that's the part that hurts the most, right? When they come, when they come to me and I get a lot of communications like through my social media, LinkedIn, people DMing me, right? Hey, you know what, Sabir, I, you know, I heard you on Mastering Tech Growth, right? I heard you. I, you know, you hit the home. I got some PTSD from the things that you were saying to me right through that podcast. But unfortunately, this is what's happening with my business. And in some cases, unfortunately, it's so late in the, you know, the damage is so bad that for them to reel from it, it's— they have to go through bankruptcy in order for them to come out of the other side. That's the unfortunate truth.

Okay.

Right. There's a lot of bad advice. There's rarely good advice. Like, there are some people like— yeah, I co-founded VaynerCommerce with Gary Vee. Gary Vee gives amazing advice. Like, he's, he's really authentic. He's a great guy, friend of mine. Right. Neil Patel is another great guy that, that tells, tells you and gives you a lot of great information. But there are so many people that either they're doing it— unfortunately, they're not interested in your business. They're doing it for the views. right, on TikTok to get engagement, they're thinking about their TikTok metrics. They're not thinking about e-commerce metrics at all, right, for your business. And, and there are so many, uh, agencies. A lot of agencies unfortunately run on— there are, there's maybe a face or two that's a little bit older that might have a little bit of an experience, but a lot of the back end of it is college students who are just graduating or not even graduated and this is their first job and they're touching your business and you're spending $30,000 a month, $40,000, $50,000 a month. And there are very bad mistakes being done by these, by these, you know, agencies that could be avoided, unfortunately. Right. Knowing the right people and knowing the right prescription. So part of our prescription is not only here is what you need to do. And if you raise your hand and I have a lot of people If you're honest about your business and know that you have the wrong people, you know, touching your business, which 60 to 70% of people that actually joined the Rapid2X program, within the first 2 weeks, they end up firing quite a lot of their agencies and freelancers because we actually even came up with Rapid2X approved partners and tools, right? So that when they say, "Hey, I don't have a web developer, Sabeer. I'm a product designer. I don't have it. I hired a couple of people off of," LinkedIn referrals and stuff like that didn't work out. Do you have a guy for me or a gal for me? Yes. The answer is yes, we have that. So that when you— we have those partners, what we do is we do the referrals to them and they know the Rapid 2X prescription because they have been working with us for a while. Right. So they know the 5 things that are material. They— that prescription, they actually implemented that way. Right. And because they're working with that, they know how to enhance it even further. To make, to keep delivering results so that not only in the program are you getting the prescription and what to do with your business to do it correctly, the thing, some things that you may be able to do yourself because you have domain expertise in that thing, but where you don't have the expertise, then there are people in the program. We have the network that we connect you to that you can, you can go and work with those folks. And a lot of them actually do tutorials in our program. They do live workshops in our program, so they get to intimately get to know those folks.

That's good. And I think it's highly underestimated by majority of founders, entrepreneurs, especially when they are with their first venture, when it comes to partnerships and people you should be surrounding yourself with. They, they, they pay for other people education in a way, and Expensive education. Yeah, exactly. So they basically fund the failures from which, you know, these freelancers were learning and, you know, build their names. Even if it's cheaper, I always like, I've been asked this like, well, you know, they are like $7 an hour, but like, what's the value add? You know, like, would you rather pay $7 an hour and get 5 mistakes and 1 value add, or would you pay $60?

No, no, no. Let's talk about that mistake. $7 an hour or $25 an hour. The mistakes are— is costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yeah.

$100,000 loss.

Yeah.

$200,000 loss. You have to think about it from that perspective. But people are thinking that, oh, you know what, the check I'm going to give to this person because they're going to do this for me, right? That's what they're thinking. Not that if it's being done correctly, I'm going to be positive $100,000. If it's done wrong, I could be negative $250,000. And that's unfortunately in a lot of cases It's not the other way around. It's not the positive $100,000, it's the negative $250,000, unfortunately.

Unfortunately, yeah. And it takes time to realize that. And getting yourself with good partnership from a beginning, it's a very, very highly underrated way of doing business, in my view, because I see that mistake as well very often. I want to ask about—

and you and Mike, one more, one more add-on I want to do to that comment you did.

Yep.

It's not also, not just the referral, you know, these specialists that we say that, hey, these guys are great and you should work with them, right? Also, it's the network effect of other entrepreneurs that are in that circle.

Yep, true.

Right? That's the other major positive that we get in our community, right? In the Rapid2X community, that it's not just the coaching that they're getting from me and prescription and the network, of all these approved partners that they have access to if they need it, right? But it also everybody else around them that are going through their journeys so that they share. We have had a lot of great recommendations from one entrepreneur to the other entrepreneur during our community sessions, right? When we do live events and stuff like that, and we do it on a weekly basis, right? So that's the other effect of it, knowing other people who are going through a similar kind of thing and they have seen some positives in using maybe this app that they used for AI was a better app than the other thing that you're using, you know. So they would say, hey, I'm using this, it's working for me, let me screen share. They actually screen share and show the actual results of what they are doing and how it's helping them. It just— and those recommendations, one person is in one category, they're not competing against this other person, they're sharing it. The other person takes that advice, And that's the other— the network effect of knowing your community of entrepreneurs is critical also, so that you get to hear from other people also how to— not only how to handle marketing or tech besides the coaching coming from me, right? But also hearing it from others, like what did they face? How did they fix that thing, right? It's also very useful too.

Oh yeah, 100%.

Really useful and effective.

Yeah, yeah, it's iron sharpens iron and effectively surround yourself with the people you want to be. And it's, uh, it's one of these mindset and personal growth situations. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, um, I have this one fact which comes from Harvard Business Review, which is, uh, businesses who increase prices by 1% see the boost in profit by 11%, which, you know, leads to this question, like, why do founders, and not necessarily e-commerce founders, it could be, you know, maybe coaches or like consultancies or whatever. But if you talk with the smaller businesses and you go like, why don't you increase your prices? You know, they always have this mental block where they go like, well, if their heart starts beating like this, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, yeah, it's gonna— we're gonna convert less people, like, and they start competing on a price rather than competing on a value of the service. So like what advice from your perspective is like when a founder, you know, think about the pricing is like what's the go-to way of really looking at the pricing in a right way?

So here's the thing, the multiplier effect, right? That Harvard Business Review, by the way, I have been published in Harvard Business Review also, right? I published, co-published a piece with Harvard Business School professors. Right. So you can find— you can put my name in there and you can find the article there. Right. The— that was a self-shameless plug there, Mike.

It's all good. We'll put it in the show notes.

They should— they should actually— it's a very good article about Amazon and should you sell— should your company be selling on Amazon? It's a very good piece. They should definitely check that out. Right. Yeah. So here's the thing. That article that you're talking about, I'm very familiar with it. Right. Points to the fact that when you make a 1% improvement in one area, in effect, you're not making an improvement of 1% down the line. You're not. You're getting an 11% improvement. In the Rapid2X historical data, I can tell you we made 10% improvement here that led to 10% improvement here that led to 10% improvement here. You would think that, oh, okay, it's going to be 30%, 40% improvement overall in the business.

Mm-hmm.

The effect was 3x.

All right. So it's like a compounding effect.

Okay. Because it's a compounding effect. It's a compounding effect of that decision-making that you do that ends up actually paying you huge dividends. Right. So that 10%, 10%, 10% in this example that I gave you leads to not 30%, 40% improvement in your business. It's a 3x improvement, 3 times improvement in your business. The example I gave of, of, of, you know, Ashley Stewart going from 35% to 65%, there were— we actually went through those hurdles to actually get to 65%. It was not an easy thing. You have to be very methodical about this. That's why all the things that I've described to you, can you do it and check it off the list? Yes, you can. But the thing is, it's very difficult to get it right. And doing the right thing with your business is the most difficult thing for you to do. And when you have the right prescription with the right guidance, I see myself— if you know that movie, movie from the '90s, um, The Karate Kid. Yeah, you know, the original one.

Yep.

Mr. Miyagi. Hey, I'm Mr. Miyagi. Yeah, I'm not in the tournament. I'm telling you, wax on, wax off. When you're doing it, you're going to go like Daniel-san is going, like, why is he telling me to wax on, wax off? But what I'm telling you, giving you the prescription of doing it exactly this way when you see the effect of it, you realize that you're defending yourself, you know, by doing this, right?

It's a good analogy.

I love that. That was the moral of that story there, right? So the same applies here, right? When the— it's not about the checklist of things that you need to do and you check it off. I did everything Sabir said in that podcast. It's not that. It's the implementation and the depth and the correctness of that implementation. That prescription needs to be exact. Right? When you implement it correctly, you're going to see these kind of things. So that 1% improvement in pricing comes, comes back and gives you 11% improvement in your business. Yes. And higher quality customers. You didn't even think about that when you did a 1% improvement. And why do, why do entrepreneurs worry about this 1% increase? Even when it's 1% increase, it went from $0.39 to, I don't know, $0.43, right? Yeah. And, you know, net-net, to keep the numbers something like it was $29.49, you changed it to $29.99, right? It's a small change that you did, but the effect of it is it's an 11% improvement in overall business. The traffic that you're getting is going to improve the quality of the customer. You know that RFM I said earlier about lifecycle marketing? Yeah. You start seeing that shift happening also on that. Right. Okay. So anything you do has a cause and effect. A 1% improvement in one area of e-commerce has indirect improvement in other areas. A 10% improvement in your logistics has 30% improvement in marketing ROAS. You go like, those two don't connect, Sabir. What the hell are you talking about? If you, if you deliver that order when I placed it, what are you going to get? Social proof. Customer reviews, amazing video testimonials, that person is gonna come back and sign up for your subscribe and save and keep on buying from you, improving their RFM score with you. Yep. The fact that they're doing this affects all of the other consumers that they see that these people are doing it, they actually get into the same cycle. Now the effect is not directly 10% improvement or improvement just in logistics, your marketing ROAS just went up by 3x.

I love that. Everything is so—

These things are not only compounding effect, you have to think about how these things that you don't think in your head, you don't think. The only way you're gonna get that is a perspective like mine that with 25 years of this experience, when I step back and I look at the whole picture, go like, oh, you know, if I touch this area, it's gonna improve this area here. Nobody else thinks about that. There are so many agencies today when you go to them and say, can you do my Meta ads? They say yes. A lot of them don't. They don't even look at your Shopify site. They go like, can you give me the URL that, that you want me to land these people to? They're not even looking at your site. What if that's that landing page, that product page is horrible?

Yeah, it's just throwing money away. That's it.

They're throwing money away. You're getting low ROAS. Yeah. Marketing agency is getting paid. They're charging you 12%, 14% of the media spend. Their interests are absolutely not aligned with you at all. I agree. Because the more you spend on it, the more they get paid. It's not based on how much revenue you're making or any kind of a performance lift that you're getting on the other side.

That's a very good tone to finish the episode, Sabeer. So for the listeners who listening right now, just like me, you know, getting their hair up. It's so easy, by the way, to listen to you, Sabeer, you know, and you throw the facts in such a way, delivered way, where it just sort of sinks in. So I'm sure our listeners enjoying this.

I hope so. I hope so. It gets them to their soul, not just the body. Just the soul understands it and they wake up because it's hurting their business.

People will not gonna sleep for 3 days after this one, but If people want to get in touch, they want to, you know, maybe understand what you're doing now, you know, about the programs or just in general potentially, you know, ping some questions towards you, how they can find you?

So, you know, actually you could include it in the show notes and if you could share the link with them, we have created a special link just for your readers. I mean, for your listeners and, you know, viewers, they should go to growthbysabir.com/masteringtechgrowth. So when they use that, we know that they came from you. My team is going to take care of them. They could, they could apply to the program. They could get on the phone with them and go through the details, any details that I have not covered with them, especially the process and stuff like that. I know you and I could be chatting for, for the next few hours, you know, but my team is there. They can, they can explain the process to them. They can evaluate to see if it's a good market, you know, if it's a good fit. For their brand to be part of our Rapid2X program, they could go to growthbysevier.com/masteringtechgrowth. And my team knows this stuff really well and they'll take them through that journey.

Yeah, we'll have to do it.

And I would love to see a lot of your listeners on the other side where you and I can do an update to this podcast to say, hey, you know, we had so many of the folks from your, you know, listenership come in and viewership and We, I can give you the statistics of how, how great they grew.

That would be awesome. That would be awesome. Right. So if today's episode gave you valuable insights, the best way to support the show, of course, is to share it with your network, especially with the people who think would benefit from the actionable tips and insights, which has been shared here today as well. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review. We love some comments. And as always, until the next time, stay safe. And see you online!