6 Tips For eCommerce Beginners - FDDTC #6

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. This is your host, Devin Zander. And these are tales, methods and strategies that took me from a high school dropout in Jimmy John's Delivery Driver to being the CEO of an eight figure software company with over 50,000 customers around the world. So if you're ready to improve your marketing and skyrocket your business, you've come to the right place. Now let's hop in to today's episode. What's up?

What's up, guys?

Devin Zander here. Welcome to another very long overdue by the way, episode of the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. And in today's episode, we're going to be discussing six important things that every new store owner needs to understand and implement. So it's a bit of a change of pace. You know, normally we just talk about business advice as a whole and maybe like business mindset stuff. Today we're actually going to be talking about six very specific things related to E commerce only. And on call with me today, I actually have Anthony Mastalone, who is the CEO of Digital Growth Summit, an E Commerce event that he hosts up in New York, as well as Volum Skin. And most importantly, because I'm biased, he's also the operations manager at our company, Scup. You know that company that you know and love. Anthony, what's up, dude?

What's going on, man? Thanks for having me on on the show here.

Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for slave driving at our company. Just kidding, guys. We don't actually slave drive. I don't know, maybe he does. Maybe he does it behind closed doors. I hope not because that is just an HR thing waiting to happen. But whenever anybody does anything weird, Anthony always threatens to sig HR in any way. So I trust that you're doing things just fine. Thanks, man.

Kind of biased because I kind of control some of the HR at our company. But it's all good. We're all kosher here and I'm glad to be on board with SCOP and really excited to get into it on this podcast. I got a few things lined up that have been on my mind that I think are going to be really helpful for people that are just starting out, in addition to people that are perhaps starting to plateau and trying to figure out the best way to scale.

Sweet. Sweet. Mine are mostly entry level, so you're going to blow me away. You're going to make me look bad. Anyways, we'll get into it. I'm going to get started on My first point, guys, my first point is fail quicker so you can move on from ideas that aren't working. And it's extremely important that you never get attached to an idea. So, you know, we've been doing this a long, long time, not only with just our own stores, but obviously with students, people who use our apps, with who, people who use our themes. Something I see people doing over and over and over again is they just get attached to ideas that aren't working out. And then, you know, you might think, like, what's the definition of insanity? Right? You hear this all the time, and it's doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and expecting a different result. And that's kind of what people are doing on their stores. It's insane. Now, there's always a point where it's like, okay, well, it's something you're really passionate about and you, you know, you don't want to give up on, and you put your whole life into it. But the reality is, is with a lot of these store owners is it's like, it's drop shipping, it's print on demand, something like that. You're not attached to these ideas. You just think it's a good idea. You're like, oh, well, you know, if I think it's a good idea, other people will too. But it doesn't matter what you think. It matters what the market thinks. And if they're not buying, you need to get over it, because all you're doing is wasting your time, you're wasting your money, and nothing is coming from it. There's this thing that people do in Silicon Valley, you know, and this is something that a lot of businesses are adopting. It's called MVP or Minimum Viable product. And what these companies do is before they spend a ton of money, a ton of time, a ton of effort, they just build out the most minimum version of their product. You know, it's basically like only building the tires. If you're building a car. And if it was an mvp, they would actually build, like a bike first, right? And then they'd build the car later. But you spend as much or as little as possible, I'm sorry, to test something out. And if it doesn't work, then guess what? You didn't waste a lot of time. You didn't waste a lot of money. And most importantly, you can move on to something that will work. You got to keep testing until you can find that thing that works. Not every single idea is going to be a home run so understanding that it's okay to fail, it's actually a good thing because now you learned what doesn't work and you can move on to what does. I think it's just something that's extremely important for storners to understand. And Tony, if you have any thoughts on that at all.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the biggest pitfalls that I see with people that are trying to get started with E Commerce. It's usually which of the evils people usually pick. It's either one, they get started and they quit too quickly, or two, they get so emotionally attached that they're looking 10 to 12 months down the line saying, just pulling their hair out, why am I not seeing results? You got to know when you are ready to actually disconnect from something and cut ties and say, you know what, this just isn't a winner. Back to the drawing board. Let's start with something new in addition to, you know what, I've only been at this for three days or I haven't even launched my first ad yet. Why am I going to give up? So I'm finding that medium and actually knowing when to cut things off and when to keep pushing is really important.

Yeah, and you brought up a good point there about, like, being emotionally attached. I think I touched on that a little bit, but I didn't really expand upon it. And people get, you know, you get your emotions drawn into it. Well, let me tell you something, okay? The market, the Facebook ad solutions and Google Ads, those programs that you're using to promote your business, right? Those platforms, they don't give a shit about your emotions, right? You get as mostly attached as you want. They don't care if your emotions get hurt when things don't work out. So you really shouldn't be getting too emotionally attached. Try to use logic as much as possible. Anyway. So, Tony, let's get to your point.

Yeah, my point actually coincides with something that took me a decent amount of time to understand and learn how to implement in my testing processes. So this is how to quickly look like a big brand. So one of the big things that we've seen in the ecosystem and a very big shift is how consumers are becoming so well aware that there are countless stores that are not reliable not delivering products, and people are wary of buying specific products that are potentially coming from China. So the biggest thing that you have to do is give your store a big brand look and feel. Now, this isn't some daunting task. This shouldn't take you weeks this is actually something that could be done very, very quickly. And as a matter of fact, this is a great way to increase your conversions and allow new customers that perhaps have never heard of you before actually start to trust you. And one of the best ways to do this is to simply reverse engineer what the pioneers in your industry have done. So one thing that I love to do, and especially when we got into skincare, if we were to rewind about 12 months from now, I didn't know a single thing about skincare products. And the only solution that I had was to seriously immerse myself in the space. Start getting onto my competitors email list, see what they're talking about, look at their miscellaneous pages such as their about us, what's in their ingredients, stuff that make customers feel more comfortable with your brand. So understanding who you're selling to, understanding what makes them tick and what makes them actually trust these other brands that are out there. Because if people have done this before, if you were to look at some of the big brands in skincare, for example, like Tatcha Glossier, they all started with zero sales and zero customers that had no idea who the heck they were. And that doesn't mean that you can't take that similar journey and learn from their mistakes. Or as a matter of fact, the whole point of this is to completely fast track that by rolling out certain brand assets that are really important to your customers. So this could be a detailed about us page, or this could be something behind what goes into your products and how are they made. Is there something in there that you could tie into the production process? Even if it's something so simple as a print on demand T shirt, I'm sure that you could find some illustrious way to talk about how your cotton is made or where you're sourcing your T shirts from. These are the certain things that will really set you apart from people who are just getting right into dropshipping. Sort of cluelessly walking into a room that they've never been familiar with and wondering, all right, let's just make some quick money and set you apart completely. So being able to look like a big brand and really sort of copy and paste that across different stores that you are able to build is one of the most valuable things that you can do. And in all reality, it's just really minor things that you begin to pick up on. It really came to me after years of experience. But the biggest thing, if you're new to this, is to look at your competitors, look at the people who are succeeding because simply put, success leaves clues. If you're going to sit there and have a header on your website that takes up half of the screen, I'm going to give you a quick heads up. There's a very good chance that you're going to fail. Look at what is going on with other people in the space and how you can create something that is of similar stature. If you were to hold the two side by side and just say, all right, here's a website and here's another website with Shopify. It is literally easier than ever to build a good looking website. All you need is a decent theme, a logo, and then just go ahead and copy and paste a few snippets of text talking about your brand. Stuff that you've been able to build as assets over time, in addition to a couple of graphics that you could easily pick up from stock image websites or potentially have a designer make for you for 50 or 60 bucks. So that's really my point is to get into branding and make your brand look legit no matter what you're doing. And once you get good at it, it doesn't take much time at all.

Cool. I totally agree, dude. And on that note, when you are doing that research, right, like looking into what your competitors are doing or other brands that you want to emulate until you really grow into your own brand, right, it really makes things so much easier because you can take these competitors and you can take these ideas that they're doing. And I was actually just having a conversation with Patricia about this the other day. But in my opinion, the simplest way to innovate and really get ahead of the competition is looking at what everybody else is doing. And then just literally, and this is going to go into my next point as well, but literally just sitting in a room and writing down everything you see your competitors doing and just ask yourself, how can I do this better? How can I improve upon this? And that's how we come up with, I would honestly like 80% of our best ideas is just sitting in silence with a piece of paper and a pencil. Because you're probably going to want to erase stuff. So maybe not a pen, right? And just going through that and saying, how can I improve upon this? So that's just something that crossed my mind. But also when you do look at your competition like that was really cool, is it gives your designers a basis to start from. So whenever you're a new company and you start working with designers, they'll say, well, who inspires you? You know, like what kind of designs do you think look good, then you can just say, oh, hey, look, my competitors here, I think they're doing an awesome job. And maybe something like this. And especially in the skincare, dude, there's so many good skincare brands. I'm just saying it's easy to find inspiration there. Even as a software company, I find myself taking a lot of cues. And my personal brand, I took a lot of cues from skin care lines such as Grown Alchemist and Malin Goetz and stuff like that. That's just interesting.

Yeah, for sure. And those are two great brands as well.

Yeah. And it's cheaper, by the way, if you. If you can provide your designers, if you want to get that good look. Providing your designers with examples allows you to get designs cheaper. Who knew? Because they don't have to come up with things from scratch. They can kind of see exactly what you're going for. Huh? Huh? Oh, yeah. Oh, and a shameless plug for Providence. You know, if you want a really good looking Shopify theme to get started with, all you have to do is go to skupp.net forward/theme. Check out the Providence Shopify theme. Hey, man, we got like 8,000 stores using that theme. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. All right, that's a. I think that's. That's our plug for the day, Tony. Should we just podcast now? Bye now, guys.

Mic drop.

Okay, so my next point is turning off digital media and distractions while you're working. And I told you guys that what I was just saying was going to lead in this point. But so many people when they're starting their business, especially because when you start a business, a lot of times you're like, man, I don't even know what to do, right? Like, what do I do today? Fuck. How am I going to spend my time? Right? And if anyone actually does sound like that, I apologize for mocking you. But turning off social media and distractions is so, so, so powerful because right now it's. It's like impossible for someone to work more than five minutes at a time without getting distracted by Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or YouTube or even websites like Twitch TV or, you know, just picking up their cell phone. And what it does is it. It just interrupts your flow. You know, like, flow state is a real thing. And when you're constantly picking up, you know, your phone or changing your tab to look at social media or things like that, then your work is getting interrupted and it's going to take you a while. To get back into that state, right? So, you know, you're. There's always those times where you're just working, and before you know it, it's like 10 minutes has passed, and then you look at the clock and suddenly it's an hour and a half later, and you're like, what the. Did I just get abducted by aliens? How do I account for all this lost time? And then you look at your computer and you're like, oh, I actually got a lot of work done. That's what happened. Right? But when you're constantly tabbing over to social media and you have all these distractions, it's just like, it totally fucks you up, dude. It makes it so hard to work. It's a huge burden. And I'm not even gonna get into the psychological effects that social media has on us all as a society, which is completely terrible. That's another topic for a different podcast. But my best advice when it comes to this is there are these Chrome extensions that you can install on your computer. I use, actually, I don't know what the name of it is. I can maybe. I'm gonna look really quick, and if I can't find it within, like, 10 seconds, I'm not going to. It's called News Feed Eradicator for Facebook. So I use that, and it just, like, totally blocks out my entire feed, and it replaces it with quotes from famous people and stuff like that. I don't even read the quotes. I know they do that because it's like, ooh, now you learn. Instead of, you know, wasting your time, you learn quotes. I don't read the quotes. But, you know, doing simple things like this and just totally getting rid of the newsfeed, getting rid of my distractions, I've uninstalled. Especially with everything that's going on in the world right now, I find it not just distracting, but, like, really depressing, and it makes it hard to do work. And I've uninstalled Facebook. I've uninstalled Instagram. I've uninstalled Reddit. I've blocked Reddit from my browsers. I blocked YouTube. I blocked all of this because I just find it a waste of time. You know, you have to ask yourself, like, what's important? Building my business and changing my life or getting that dopamine hit that is actually just depressing me and getting me in this infinite loop of comparing my life to others, or just mindless distraction forever? And then you could take it to the next level, which is canceling Netflix and Hulu and stuff like that. And I did that at the beginning of the year for a while, but then I found myself bored in bed at night. But I think the most important thing is just during the day, eliminating those distractions as much as you can. Keep your phone in a different room, block the newsfeed, block the websites from your browser, and then at that point it becomes kind of like mental games. Because at any time you can unblock it, but you have to have the mental fortitude and strength to not do it. Because what's important to you, right? Like I said, it's building that business and changing your life. Whether you're doing it for yourself so you can have nice things, or you're doing it for your family, like I originally did, so they don't have to worry, right? I just think it's super important. And then also, email is a huge time sink, and that's something I'm still guilty of. I'm checking that shit way too often. But the really cool thing about when you get into this habit and you start blocking out social media and things like that is it really gives you power in your life. You honestly just become a more powerful person and you'll stick through with things more. Whether it's a diet or going to the gym or just working on your business. Taking these steps and saying no to things that are bad for you, even though you want to do them, just makes you more mentally tough and gives you more grit and really allows you to stick through with tasks no matter what they are. So I think that's really huge, especially for new business owners. Get rid of that shit. It's all the devil. I mean, you got to use it for advertising and stuff like that, right? And support groups, which we're going to talk about later. But don't waste all your time on it. And super important, don't waste time on it when you're supposed to be working.

Those are really valid points. And I mean, we're all guilty of doing it. Like, nobody's perfect. And no, I was not on Twitter while you were talking. But side note, I believe that there are so many ways that you can end up draining your time from your day. And I 100% agree with disruption of flow state. One thing that I've done is I've taken a majority of my email accounts and I've turned all the notifications off. Just have them in my regular iOS mail app. And then for one or two of my very important emails, which I only give to my business partners, and highest level business contacts. Those are the only ones I get push notifications for so that I can really narrow that down. And then I just check my regular emails once or twice a day, which in itself is a problem, but I've worked my way towards reducing it. So I mean, that's one thing that's worked for me to kind of narrow down the sort of emails that I get hit with in comparison to where I was before maybe like six months ago.

Let's just be honest, guys. Fuck social media. Sorry, sorry to anybody who's offended by language. Hey, but that shit sucks, dude. It does. All right. Oh, by the way, never, never got on that Twitter bandwagon. So glad I didn't because I know you and Wyatt, I don't know you guys are on that stuff and I think I tweeted once and I don't know, I never found the platform intuitive. Anyways, I'll let you move forward.

Yep. So my next point here is one of the biggest ones that have helped our brands to date specifically for 2020, which is don't be afraid to get your hands d be there going to the post office, sending out samples. There are some of the biggest influencers in your space. Perhaps you should be sending out. If you own any sort of e commerce brand and you do have maybe 30, 40, $50 to spare, which I really, really hope you do. If you're trying to build a business, allocate an hour or two every few weeks to just go to the post office and send out free samples to ambassadors in your niche or in your vertical for free without any notice. There are ways that you can get their address. You can contact their managers, stuff that you can google. You can actually buy lists of celebrities addresses or their manager's contact information online. I don't have the specific name asset for you right now, but if you just even go ahead and message them or email them directly for their shipping address for a free gift. Many YouTubers have it in their description of their channel or description of their videos. Just send people free stuff. Don't go the tacky. Hey, how much for you to charge for a featured post? Just go ahead and send them a free sample with a handwritten note saying, hey, we absolutely love what you do. We would love it if you would go ahead and check out our products or try this out. Try this T shirt on. Here's our social media. Feel free to tag us if you love it. Thanks so much. You're not going out there with the traditional, hey, can we please be promoted on your specific channel or Instagram page. It's just. It's gotten so cluttered to the point where you just have to go ahead and do stuff pro bono. And, you know, one out of ten, if you're lucky, we'll go ahead and hit. But the ROI on that is gonna be massive. This is one thing that we did with the skincare brand earlier this year. We probably sent out, let's say, you know, 20 free gifts to random influencers. We got their address from the managers, and we had two posts from two separate accounts that in total, I think were about, you know, 1.2 million followers between the two, which for five shipments of products is really a massive win for us. It's free marketing, putting our products in the hands of these people who, heck, might even love our products so much that they'll go and buy them after the fact. Especially in skincare, this stuff doesn't last forever. You run out, you know what? I'm gonna go buy some more. So that's one thing that really did a lot for us. And then on the flip side of things, on a larger scale, one thing that we did was reach out to subscription boxes, to wholesaling opportunities, where I myself had a personalized email for each one. Now, this was the part that made it actually super time consuming. And be careful that you don't burn yourself out. But this is something that really gave us a massive roi, to be quite honest with you, as we're looking to close out the year with about $500,000 in wholesaling of our products, and our products being put into the hands of anywhere between 100 and 200,000 customers. And this is all without a loss, which is the biggest thing of it all. So listen closely, please. I went ahead and reached out to countless subscription boxes, countless wholesaling opportunities, PR firms, et cetera. And what I would do is I would have the generic body of my email, which was fairly copy and paste, talking about the values of our brand, what we're doing, why they're going to love it, and at the beginning of the actual email, we would go ahead and personalize it with their subject line. Of course, this is something you probably do with an autoresponder if you import a CSV file. But we did it the old fashioned way because we needed the body of the email to be personalized as well. So we would go ahead and include their name in the subject line. We would include their name in the very first paragraph, perhaps even mention something about what we love about their content that they put out so that they know that this is truly a personalized email and this is what enabled us to actually go ahead and get responses. So even with the personalization, it's tough to get responses, but we were able to do so. So we reached out to between 300 and 500 different cold outreach emails, a mix of influencers, subscription box deals, and I'd say we probably got a response on about 10 to 20% of them, depending on whether it's a big box retailer or if it is a influencer that has a management company. Long story short, we landed some influencer deals which were, okay, roughly broke even. But the biggest thing is we were able to land a massive, massive subscription BO deal. And as a matter of fact, one of the reasons why this worked was dialing back to my first point, which was actually having a big brand look and feel to your company. Now of course it's not something that people who are trying to get started quickly or for their first time are going to dive into for months on end to make their brand look legit, look as clean as possible, and once you get good at it, quite frankly, like I said, this does take maybe a week. And when we were just at about a reasonable like five figures in revenue, we landed a multi six figure wholesaling deal to put our products in the hands of subscription box buyers. And the only reason we were able to do that was from consistent cold outreach, not being afraid to be denied and also actually having the look and feel of a legitimate brand and not something that was made by a 13 year old that just learned their first line of code. For example, because it's so easy to make this happen because we have Shopify, which is a literal just drag and drop builder with countless templates that you can use to make a super clean and professional looking e commerce website. Okay, so in a quick summary of everything I just went over, you cannot be afraid to get your hands dirty and send products out, reach out to people that you have no business reaching out to, no matter who you are and exploring where the opportunities are, could potentially lie. The worst case scenario is either A, you don't get a response or B, they say no. And when you're lucky enough and you keep pushing hard enough and you have the right infrastructure and look and feel to your brand set up, you could also end up with option C, which is a massive, massive deal that you can land no matter what stature your company is, how much revenue you've already driven, or how long you've been in business. Because we took a literal infant of a brand and put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people by the end of the year just from utilizing this, from sending out samples saying, hey, hope you check out these products, hope you love them, and also doing cold outreach as much as we possibly could because you're going to get the responses after enough work that you put in in a well crafted script. So that's my point. This is one of the most important things because pulled outreach is free. It doesn't cost you anything. Of course, sending some samples will on the flip side, where you have to pay for your cost of product and shipping. But the bigger deals that I landed, believe it or not, were 100% free because all I had to do was send a few emails. Don't be afraid to be denied and continue hustling to try to work your way up the ladder because if you don't put yourself in the position to succeed or have the opportunity to land those deals that you could potentially have never imagined, you're never going to have a shot. So that's my big takeaway there.

Yeah. And the thing you were mentioning about sending things out to influencers for free, that reminded me of Robert Cialdini. And this is a book that I believe every entrepreneur should read and most have, but it's. What is it? Persuasion. And he talks about the principles of persuasion or influence the principles of persuasion. And he talks about different ways you can influence people to take actions. And the first principle, I believe it's his most important one, is reciprocity. So, you know, you give a little something to get a little something in return. And I actually, while you were talking, I pulled something up on this. And this is something that we do at our own company scup. You know, sometimes we give away a free course in hope that, hey, maybe we'll get an app review or a theme review. And we were talking to you. You and I have been working on that recently as well. But here's a quick excerpt from CXL Conversion XL's blog and what their opinion on reciprocity is. But give a little something to get a little something in return. Cialdini's first principle of persuasion states that human beings are wired to return favors and pay back debts to treat others as they've treated us. The idea of reciprocity says that people by nature feel obliged to provide discounts or concessions to others if they receive favors from those same people. Psychology explains this by stressing that humans simply hate to feel indebted to others. So you Know, you send something to someone for free, got a better chance of them giving you something in return. And you see this at like, airports and just walking around touristy areas too. You'll see like the people handing out flowers and then, you know, they expect a tip or something like that, or monks handing out prayer beads, and, you know, they expect you to give them a couple dollars. You know, they say it's free, but then, you know, you're supposed to give them something in return. All right, but we'll move on. So my, my final point, and this is kind of the one exception I would make for social media. And it doesn't have to be done through social media either. It could be done through other ways. If you are going to do this, though, just make sure you're not doing it while you're supposed to be working. And my third point, final point, find a support group. So being an entrepreneur, and there was this article I read, I think on Inc. So long ago, and this was back in 2012 or 2013, but it was just talking about how depressing it is to be an entrepreneur, especially a solopreneur. You know, you're all alone. Your family doesn't quite get it. Your friends don't quite get it. People don't believe in you because people can't imagine someone else succeeding. And that's simply because they themselves wouldn't be able to succeed. So they don't want to think that you're capable of doing something that they can't do. So they just don't have any faith in you. And I mean, it gets lonely. And a lot of the times entrepreneurship can be hard. It can feel like you're smashing your head against a brick wall. Right? And I think it's just so important to have a support group. And that can come in many forms. It could be meetups with your friends once a week. It could be joining a group on Facebook. It could even be going to something like therapy. And I've done all these things and they're all so powerful. Therapy, probably even the most. So just because sometimes you need it, sometimes you need someone who can understand things you feel and help you get through them. But I think I just wanted to share that it's not a super in depth topic. It's not anything huge, but it's something so powerful because once you have someone to talk to and you have a creative outlet, it's not just about the bad things too. It's really great to share ideas with these people. And that's how I came up with smart apps or scup. Now that's how I helped my buddy Wyatt create his company demeo, which is used to view webinars, stuff like that, attend webinars, you just get together, you talk with people, you learn, you have fun and they're also there to support you emotionally if you need it as well. So I think it's really something that's important for all entrepreneurs to have just a safe space with other like minded people who understand what they're trying to do and can help them power through, come up with ideas and just really, you know, excel in business and of course in life. Because when you become a businessman or an entrepreneur, you know those fancy words, businessman. Who even says businessman anymore? But when you become, you know, an entrepreneur, it's just something you're really going to need and you definitely want people who understand and are on the same path as you. And the truth is, is your friend group and things like that will probably change and that's okay because you're growing as a person. But that's my last and final point. I just think it's so important and I think people really need to take it seriously.

Yeah man, I think that's huge because there are definitely rough patches as an entrepreneur. Not thing is, things aren't always good and dandy. I've had personally very, very deep pitfalls and very high achievements which I've felt the best at. But I wouldn't have been there if I didn't have like minded people around me. I wouldn't have made it through that if I didn't have like minded people around me or people to support. So yeah, that's a really good point.

Cool man. You want to share your final point, sir?

Yes. My final point is to leverage people who have achieved what you want to achieve. This is really, really important and finding creative ways to do so. There are really two paths that you can take if you do have some capital to truly invest into learning something that you haven't done before. My go to way is going ahead and paying consultants that have already achieved the things that you wanted to achieve or if they've worked in giant companies that you aspire to reverse engineer or embody. For example, if we were to go back to the skincare case study, I guess you could say in that use case, one of the things that I did when I didn't know anything about skincare was I went onto a website, it's called Clarity fm and I looked up who are people that are prominent and experienced within skincare that I could go ahead and pay for their time by the minute and talk to them on the phone. Lo and behold, I was able to go ahead and connect with people who were on the upstream development team for products at Procter and Gamble, a multibillion dollar company, parent company to Gillette. I don't want to say l', Oreal, but I know there's a bunch of self care companies under that umbrella which are very, very well known and pretty much every big box retailer in addition to one person who worked at Estee Lauder. It was just one of the most best investments that I've made into my business knowing that I wasn't going to be facing the learning curve and paying for it the hard way rather than going ahead and say I'm going to figure this out on my own. You're definitely going to spend more money, time and resources trying to figure things out the hard way and perhaps end up completely failing because you run out of those resources and time by trying to do it yourself rather than learning from people who have already been there before now. This could also coincide with support groups like Devin had mentioned. It's not difficult to join support groups. It's not difficult to go ahead and ask someone a question on their YouTube channel or their Instagram live or shoot them an email and say hey, I sincerely love a couple pointers. Can you check out my store? Or the best of them all. To really get someone's full attention is to rightfully pay someone for their time because they are a well renowned expert.

AKA join the POD system. What?

That's one thing that you could also do if you wanted to do pod. Not that I'm looking to plug any of that, it's just simply put, if you're bootstrapped, a great way to do it is like I said, Clarity fm pay people by the minute and that could potentially run you a few hundred dollars. You might have some missing gaps there and not the complete picture. But if you need to just sort of get that foundational knowledge reassurance, have people look things over, it's a great way to go ahead and have consultants that are rightfully in that place to assist you and push you in the right direction. That's just one of the biggest things. Like people are so stubborn to invest in themselves and their knowledge. Whether it's a book, whether it's a consultant, whether it's a program. Know what you have at your disposal, which resources are reputable and don't be shy to invest that. If you were to look at going out for an entire weekend and spending 2, $300 at the bar. People could very well justify that. Or going on a fancy dinner date. Just stay in one night, save that money and invest it into yourself. Invest it into your knowledge. It's not very lucrative. It doesn't sound exciting at first, but doing the things for your own leisure at first that may add up could very well be put to a much better use where in the long run you could be doing those leisurely activities without thinking twice. To me, wealth doesn't really reside into a specific number in your bank account. I believe wealth is the ability to have the freedom to do what you want, when you want, without having to stress or think twice about it. And of course with some logic behind it as well. But that's my personal Take the short term sacrifices to really get the right people in your corner, the right knowledge under your belt is one of the most valuable things, in my humble opinion to getting you on the fast track, to actually seeing results. Because if you're going to stick with free, recycled information, there's a good chance that you'll end up wasting your time, wasting your money. If you go ahead and just YouTube Best Facebook ad strategies 2020 I'm sure that 90% of the videos you see are recycled from people that actually know what they're doing and were posted by people who rehashed it in their own words. Essentially playing this long extended, useless game of telephone, giving you half assed knowledge that might even be from two years ago that you then implemented. All right, cool. I'm going to run this campaign. Let's test it. Spend 2, 300 bucks on it. Whereas you could have just been better off taking that money and putting it into a dumpster fire. So carefully and meticulously planning by learning from the right people and putting yourself in the position to succeed by learning from those who have been there before. Again, success leaves clues. That's my 2 cents there. And my final point for the podcast, which I hope is actionable enough for you to really understand what to do. If you're not sure what to do, you could always contact us in some way, shape or form. Devin and I are on social media as, you know, kind of contradictory Shopify success group y'.

All.

Yep, the the Facebook group that we have, you could contact me on Instagram, contact the scup Instagram with just a DM or email us which would probably be best. This is the stuff that we want to make sure that you are taking the information that we're dropping here and actually use putting it to use. And, of course, if you're this far into the podcast, we're going to hold that in very high regard. Appreciate that. And we'll make it a priority to respond to you, so feel free to contact us at any time. Of course.

And on that note, I think something super important is when you are investing in yourself, if you're doing something like buying courses or consultants, stuff like that. I like the idea of clarity, and we've used clarity quite a few times. I also think it's super important to hire mentors. So this is whenever I get into something new, right? Whenever I want to do something new. Like recently, we wanted to start running a different kind of Facebook ad, something that we've never run before. I was like, all right, I want the best. So I go out there, I find the best. We get them for consulting, and we figure it out. And, you know, recently we paid someone, I believe it was $15,000. This was back in, let's see. February. February, yeah. We've already made over half a million dollars from it, so it works okay. But on that note, I think it's super important when you do look for these kinds of coaches or something like that, find someone who will work, like, review your work. That's just super duper important. You want someone who will take a look at your work and actually tell you what's wrong with it. Courses that just provide information are. They're good, but you need a course that's going to motivate you to work and then have someone there who will review it. Shameless plug, by the way, guys. Pod system. It's on sale $997. We do calls every two weeks where we get on call with you personally and review your work. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Oh, by the way, Anthony, you keep saying success leaves clues. I'm like, where's Tony? Why is Tai Lopez on call with me? What's going on? Whatever, though. Whatever.

Oh, man, don't. Don't categorize me like that, dude.

There's this guy, he's a copywriter. He's super funny. Anyways, he does, like. He's a comedian slash copywriter, and he does these skits, and he impersonates Tai Lopez, and he's like, what's up, guys? It's lie Topaz here.

Oh, I'm pretty sure I've seen that.

Yeah, he does Lie Topaz. Can't Gardone. Muscle, Fun, sin. Super funny. I actually have his book. I can't Remember his name. Anyways, so I think that's good for today's episode. Guys, I hope you enjoyed. Tony, dude, Pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing. See you tomorrow at Oxford Exchange. If anyone's stalking us, you can find us tomorrow at Oxford Exchange. Guys, I'm going to be wearing a fake mustache and big sunglasses just because I don't want people to swarm me because I know I'm famous. I'm kidding, guys. The way I'm not. No one's gonna swear me. But it's been a pleasure. It's really good to be back on the podcast with you. I'm going to try to complete five episodes by July 1, so, you know, I think we can do it. I think we can do it. Anyways, Tony, dude, thank you so much for your time.

Yeah, man, it was a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on and happy to jump on any future episodes. Just hit my line, dude.

For sure. And to everybody who's still here, subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe on itunes. Well, that's the same thing. Why am I repeating myself? Subscribe on Spotify. Just subscribe. That's all. Okay. And then you'll get updates. You get the next episode. We got a lot of actionable tips. You know, we're currently running an eight figure software business, eight figure Shopify stores. And we're here to share everything we learned along the way with you. So make sure you subscribe. That's it for today's episode of the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. And take it easy, everybody. See you on the next episode.