Building a Golf Community through E-commerce - Jonah Redel-Traub

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to check in to check out the E Commerce growth podcast from Mobile first, my name is Justin Ehrenstein and my co host is Connor Burke. Welcome to check in to check out. My name is Justin Aronstein and alongside me I have Connor Burke. Our guest this week is Jonah. Jonah, what's your role? [00:00:27] Speaker B: So I am the director of commerce and growth for a startup in the golf media and commerce space called Pro Shop. [00:00:38] Speaker A: So you are, if I understand this correctly, kind of starting an e commerce entrepreneurship kind of within a company in a lot of ways. [00:00:48] Speaker B: So it's a, it's an interesting role and a relatively big divergence from previous roles. So the main thrust of Pro Shop is that it is going to build a large golf audience on social and with two websites that it owns, Scratch Golf and Golf wrx and sort of aggregate and build up those audiences and then introduce them to sort of commerce experiences separately. We also have acquired an independent golf brand called Sugarloaf Social Club. As you can see, the, the full I'm wearing there. Love it. And we're sort of acting internally at Pro Shop as like an E commerce agency to sort of incubate and rapidly grow that brand. You know, they started as basically like a one man show. A guy that had like a vibey golf Instagram and then just like started making the stuff that he wanted to make and was interested in and would buy some and sell it out and buy some more and sell that out. And so we're trying to take sort of that brand that has like a sort of natural buzz to it and put some scaffolding around it to sort of quickly scale it. And in addition to that, we're also sort of incubating brands and always looking at sort of M and A targets of other things that can sort of be accretive and brands that will sort of work synergistically within the Pro Shop umbrella. [00:02:18] Speaker A: Love that. So it sounds like you're working for a content first company. [00:02:22] Speaker B: So it's interesting. So it's founded by the guy that created the Netflix show Full Swing. [00:02:28] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:29] Speaker B: So very content, super content focused and sort of like using that content to and then obviously like doing a golf media play as well, still retaining some of that sort of like classic entertainment production, but also growing like a golf media enterprise and using those two sort of content buckets, right, to build an audience of golf obsessives. And you know, in a world of rising acquisition costs and declining efficacy of traditional ads, that was something that I found really attractive and interested me enough to make A move from like a more traditional E commerce arm of a more traditional golf apparel company. So I've now actually been in the golf space for five years. As a boy from New York who's had a very limited ability to play golf growing up in the city, it's kind of funny that this is where things have ended up. But it's an awesome. It's an awesome engaged community, focused audience and sport. And so I have really enjoyed being in this space. [00:03:38] Speaker C: Have you always watched golf or been. [00:03:39] Speaker B: A fan of golf? So I've always watched golf. You know, the biggest experience I had as a golf fan growing up was smoking weed and Playing Tiger Woods 2006 in my friend's bedroom. [00:03:51] Speaker A: I can very much relate to that. [00:03:53] Speaker B: Huge golf fan from that experience. And I also grew up like during peak Tiger. Right. So, okay. It was like much more zeitgeisty than, you know, Maybe it was 10 years before that. [00:04:05] Speaker C: So it's. It's easy for you to kind of keep up with. [00:04:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm a huge sports fan and you know, would be naturally paying attention on to golf anyway. Probably gambling on golf. But now I. Because the PGA Tour is an investor in us, I actually am legally barred from doing that and also barred from giving any golf gambling advice. [00:04:25] Speaker C: Next question. [00:04:26] Speaker B: I will not be doing that. Awesome. [00:04:29] Speaker A: So what's your E commerce team look like in a kind of content first organization? [00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So great question. So we actually built our as like the commerce organization. And you know, I said earlier I think of us sort of like an internal agency to help incubate brands. Right. And so I have a boss who, you know, has had a long and successful E commerce career. And then underneath me we have a E commerce manager who sort of handles like day to day operations on the website, a graphic designer who generates sort of all the content that we put out, and a paid media specialist who who focuses both on our commerce, paid media, as well as brand partnerships that come in from the advertising side of the media piece of the business. We also just added a production and planning specialist because anyone that's sold stuff online knows that inventory is a huge headache and dealing with the 3 PL is a nightmare. And that can become a major time suck. [00:05:33] Speaker C: Do y' all use any. Any partners or vendors for any aspect of it? [00:05:37] Speaker B: So. So right now? No. Okay. And you know, I would think of us as like almost the partner for the brand for like Sugarloaf Social Club. Yeah. [00:05:47] Speaker C: Yeah. I'm always curious how people designate what's a job for an in House role and what's something that they want to, you know, outsource to a partner. [00:05:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I can, you know, in, in previous roles, you know, where I've owned like the P and L of an E commerce business. My typical way of determining that is like, what's the shit I like to do, what's the shit I hate doing, what's the shit I feel like completely overmatched doing. [00:06:10] Speaker C: Right. [00:06:10] Speaker B: Um, and so, you know, that can be sort of like focused in one of the key thrusts of like traffic and conversion, acquisition on site conversion, rate optimization, retention operations and logistics and then even within like the channels. Like, I consider myself like a Facebook ads expert at this point, but like completely befuddled by Google and like, if I, if we wanted to, so I would outsource like that channel. [00:06:42] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:06:43] Speaker B: And you know, I've also in the past, like, if I've had an interest in doing Pinterest or TikTok or something and want to give it like an actual real effort, you know, that would be something I'd outsource. [00:06:55] Speaker C: Are y' all on TikTok or do y'. All. Interesting. We, yeah, we've had a couple discussions recently just about how you. You see a lot of users selling products now and that's become this huge growing channel. [00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I will say it is. Most of the companies I've worked for since, like TikTok's been around, the price point's a little high for like that sort of TikTok affiliate. And you know, obviously there is like a golf obsessed audience. But you know, given my career, like my fee, I see a lot of people selling golf stuff on TikTok and it does tend to be like, you know, much sort of cheaper stuff than the stuff we're selling. We've done, you know, the brand because it was an Instagram first, like social brand, like has like the content creation chops. So, you know, we do do a bunch of organic on TikTok, which, you know, is another exciting thing about this brand versus some of the, some of the previous places I've worked. Given that, you know, getting content is always like pulling teeth and its import has only increased in the past few years. So I was excited, you know, also that they had an expertise in creating content that sort of resonated with people. Now that's not to say that like, we've had overwhelming success using TikTok as an ad channel or, you know, a ton of leverage with TikTok affiliate. [00:08:16] Speaker A: Have you seen any Halo effect? Uh, that's. That's the one thing that I often see or often hear people Talk about with TikTok is yeah, we're maybe even break even, maybe even losing money on TikTok, but we see this huge halo effect for, for direct or other channels. [00:08:31] Speaker B: So it's interesting. So at this point, and I'm sure this will come up more as, as this conversation progresses, at this point I almost look at every paid channel as only providing a halo effect and not really thinking, not like paying too much attention to an in platform reported roas. Right. [00:08:50] Speaker A: Okay. [00:08:51] Speaker B: Ultimately the goal of any paid marketing, right, is getting in front of people that otherwise wouldn't see you and acquiring new customers. So at this point I mostly just look at the number of new customers I've acquired during a period, my total spend across all channels and divide that number in either it's break even or better or worse than that and then sort of like dial things up and down one at a time to see sort of what's like needle moving from a halo perspective. Right. Because you know, when you're trying to like compare 15 different channels that are different like funnel stages and different brand aware and even report on different like attribution windows, you wind up sort of like chasing ghosts and I think making sort of what might be like seemingly smart decisions but don't actually like serve the need of the business. [00:09:47] Speaker A: So to put another way, you think attribution reporting is bull, complete bullshit. [00:09:53] Speaker B: I mean like the last thing you've bought, do you have any memory of like where you first got introduced to it? Like was your journey, like you saw like a really compelling Instagram ad and then bought something like no, you probably saw an ad and then like heard someone that you trust talk about like it's, it's much more squiggly than straight line. Totally. And also the people that are on all these channels are the same. So like the only, so the variance there might be like, okay, people on Instagram, you know, are ready to click outbound links to E commerce stores where people on Twitter, you know, because they're like scrolling a feed, aren't so interested in doing that and okay, I could see that. But ultimately like you're, you're reaching some segment of the same audience and you know, probably you're just best off doing it as cheaply as possible and you know, making hammering a compelling message. [00:10:54] Speaker A: I love that. I think a lot of directors of E Commerce spend a lot of time on attribution reporting trying to get that perfect without really understanding what their customer journey is. Or why it matters. And I think you're saying, hey, just be in front of the audience. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah, be in front of the audience. Like there's no such thing as like, I mean, listen, some channels send like robot traffic that will never convert and that is a problem. But provide a compelling message and people convert and like make your budget go as far as it can to get in front of the maximum number of new people that are in market or like at least open to your solution. [00:11:34] Speaker A: I love that. So what is your process right now for finding new insights about your customers or figuring out where you invest time and treasure? [00:11:43] Speaker B: So, great question. One of the interesting things about sort of where this brand is compared to brands I've worked on in the past is it's, you know, this is like the first year that it's, it's released products in sort of like a structured, organized way. And so what the insights look like when talking about a brand like Sugarloaf Social Club are, okay, like, what are the categories that people are interested in? What, how do we tell the story of the product in a way that people will be compelled by it as opposed to sort of like, you know, like moving sort of things around on site to try to drive it in sight. And so it's, it's really fun to be sort of like ground floor strategic. What that also means is that like there isn't like a scientific process around insight gathering because there's nothing to gain an insight on yet. Right. It's so new and we're still figuring out sort of what people want and trying to like rapidly grow a brand's awareness that, you know, the traditional thing people, I think insta think about with insights are like customer segments and cohorts or on site conversion rate optimization that almost doesn't exist yet for this brand. [00:13:05] Speaker C: Do y' all do a lot of user research or talking to the users when you're trying to understand what it is that they might want? [00:13:11] Speaker B: So one of the really interesting things is that the way Ian Gilly has built this brand, you know, people that follow Sugarloaf Social Club think he's their friend and he like kind of is interesting. Yeah. And so this brand has a hugely dedicated community and they will, they will unprompted respond to Insta stories being like, this is amazing. This is fire shit sucks. No one wants this, like, stop dropping so much stuff, I'm out of money. So, you know, it doesn't, we don't have to like get, gather these conversation points in a way that's like Pulling teeth, you know, asking for a review or asking for, you know, like, whatever that score is that says how much someone likes and, like, people are engaged, which is amazing, and super open with their feedback. [00:14:10] Speaker C: Interesting situation to have. I don't know how often I've seen that. [00:14:13] Speaker A: So I know you're not Ian, but what do you think his special sauce to create that community is like? Yeah, people try to do it and fail all the time. [00:14:23] Speaker B: There's two. First off, he's awesome. He's just, like, a great guy. He's super smart and, like, able to tell a really compelling story and also incredibly talented at, like, photography. The other thing was that he was an early mover on, like, sort of the golf Instagram space. And so he was able to build something organically over a long time without sort of, like, having to growth, hack his way into doing it. But ultimately, I think people resonate to sort of, like, his storytelling and the visual, the videos and the content that he puts out. [00:14:59] Speaker C: Do you think there's any part of your job that you wish he maybe knew more about or, you know, something he might be surprised about in your job? [00:15:06] Speaker B: So he. I think that he's so busy, like, creating all the products that I wish he wouldn't get, like, discouraged when things don't, you know, sell as quickly as we might have hoped. Yeah, he's super close to it. You know, it's a really personal brand to him, but he has been incredibly generous with, like, letting us, you know, act as stewards of it in a way that not everyone, you know, whose brand I've been involved in the marketing communications has been. [00:15:41] Speaker A: How does that show up? [00:15:42] Speaker B: I'd say he's, like, super willing to let us try stuff on unpaid. He is not nitpicky or micromanagey about, like, the email communications we put out. So he's just been an awesome partner. [00:15:56] Speaker A: Oh, that's. That's really awesome. [00:15:58] Speaker C: Have you had any as is just savor question. So I don't want to steal it, but it feels like a good segue. But have you had any failures while you're there? [00:16:04] Speaker B: So I've only been at pro shop about a year and was on pat leave for 2ish months. So I don't think. And, you know, we're still early stage, so there hasn't been a ton of opportunity to fail yet. I mean, fail every day, man. Absolutely. I fail every day. And, you know, I've missed numbers, and I've missed numbers more times than I can count in my career. And Sent emails with typos and fucked up subject lines. But you know, I think like the failures that like actually stick with you are like more personal. Like, you know, when you didn't advocate or communicate clearly to advocate for your team or yourself or something you needed. [00:16:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:16:49] Speaker B: And then like when you've let like your personal feelings about work and like pervade your personal life and you know, like hurt you emotionally, like that's the failure that I know that sort of matters. Yeah, absolutely. Much more than like the day in, day out, like hitting numbers, missing numbers and you know, this has been at pro shop, a place where that has not, you know, it's been a great, a great place for me thus far. [00:17:19] Speaker C: It's hard to not take it home with you. [00:17:21] Speaker A: Yeah. How do you set those boundaries? [00:17:23] Speaker B: It's totally hard not to take it home with you. I think like, you know, the big adjustment in my career has been like not living and dying by the daily number or like living and dying by the Facebook roas, like where like one day it's at 5 and you're a fucking genius, the next day it's 0.5 and you're the, the biggest of all time and complete fraud. [00:17:46] Speaker C: You know, I think people, listeners resonate with. [00:17:48] Speaker B: I think, you know, you build up sort of calluses over time and you know, as you naturally progress through a career, like you have experience, people start listening to you and you're not living and dying by like your success and failure every day because you know you've had, you've, you've done it quite a bit and you know, you built those. [00:18:10] Speaker A: Reps and you've started to invest in things outside of work. You have a family, friends. [00:18:16] Speaker B: And you know, I, we were talking about this before. I have a 10 month old daughter and you know, you get home and okay, like now my Shopify notifications are off. Like so that's nice. [00:18:28] Speaker C: Is there any part of your job that you, you dread or maybe just hate doing or don't want to that I dread? [00:18:34] Speaker B: I mean the, the worst thing, the worst feeling and I know I just said I try not to let this happen is like when you're going into and like reporting on a bad number. Yeah, that, that's just the worst. [00:18:46] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:18:47] Speaker B: And there can be whatever reason, but it just sucks. Yeah, it sucks. And you know, the other part, the other thing I kind of dread is like when you know, you get pulled in like a random direction because someone outside of the E Commerce team has like some random idea. [00:19:07] Speaker C: Right. [00:19:07] Speaker B: And, and then it's like, ah, do I like really want to spend time like chasing this? [00:19:11] Speaker C: Or you got to prioritize, you know, other tasks and kind of tell them like it's not important. [00:19:17] Speaker B: Yeah. You're put in a no win situation. Like either you can do this thing that you like don't believe in and no won't prove results or you do it and it does prove results and you feel even kind of worse or you have to tell them to fuck off. [00:19:30] Speaker C: Right. [00:19:30] Speaker B: And so that's, that's definitely one thing I dread. [00:19:34] Speaker C: Yeah. The amount of times we have clients come up with just ridiculous ideas and you're like, I, you know what, we'll do it hoping that it just fails and then it somehow wins. And you're like, I feel like an idiot. [00:19:44] Speaker B: It's like, God, I, I don't know how that happened. [00:19:47] Speaker A: Do you have a strategy that you fall back on to tell people no? [00:19:51] Speaker B: You know, I think it's first off like assessing like how much of a time, how much time this will, will take. And then the other thing is just like making sure that like your direct boss like understands the things that are clear needle movers and making sure they're super aligned on that so that you know, they can sort of go to bed for you. If you know your head of finance is like all worked up about like a broken link or something. With this on site search or something. [00:20:20] Speaker A: In a similar vein, do you find yourself having to fight a lot of fires? [00:20:24] Speaker B: So honestly, like in a Shopify world, it hasn't been so bad. Oh, that's awesome. Um, I'll, I'll tell two quickish stories about, about fires and I'm not sure either one like covers me in glory with the way I handled it, but. [00:20:40] Speaker C: It'S the kind of stuff we want. [00:20:42] Speaker B: They're kind of fun. So the first is in November 2020. Covid, right after the election, Facebook sort of went on like a banning spree. And I promise I wasn't spreading any election misinformation, but I log into Facebook one day and I don't know if you've ever gone to the ad account and you know there's a red line that your ad account's been disabled. Well, there's actually something worse than that, which is a corporate Memphis style drawn woman pops up like wagging her finger and it means that your personal ability to ads on Facebook has been banned. So I'm like a one man shop at like a year into this job and entire running all of our Facebook and it's about to be Black Friday of 2020, like the biggest boom time for E Commerce. And my personal ability to advertise on Facebook as the only person in the company that knows how to do that has been banned. I'm like, what the fuck do I do? And what I basically did was hit up every single person I knew that might know someone that worked at Meta and like, start to back channel through them and then simultaneously get on a screen, share with my director of marketing on a daily basis and literally like have talk him through making every update I wanted to make and then getting in what I called as like a Air Gap computer. Though it wasn't actually an Air Gap. It just a fresh new MacBook sent to my apartment where I never logged into any of my personal things and only use the director of marketing's Facebook account. So I was able to make tweaks and then in two weeks, you know, it got resolved through one of the people I was able to back channel with. So that, that was a fun fire to deal with. Then the other one is another Facebook ads fire, which is in late December of 2023. It's a Monday and it's a, you know, work from home Monday. [00:22:48] Speaker A: Remember it very vividly. [00:22:49] Speaker B: Oh yeah, it's a, it's a work from home Monday. It's past the E Commerce shipping cutoff for Christmas. So it's like born on vacation. So I'm sleeping it. I wake up, you know, amble over to the couch, log into Meta to at least just like check on things because we're pulling back because the, the shipping cutoff's done and like my ads manager is grayed out. And I think I've gotten banned again. But I don't see like any notice that anything's been banned. So I go into my business manager settings and I see that my access has been changed to View. And in fact everyone in my organization's access has been changed to view. But there is someone new and unidentified in there and they have full admin access. And I like, now I'm watching like a car accident sort of like unfurl slowly where I'm like, what is happening? I go back to the ads manager and I see they're making a campaign and it's like one of you know, these like scammy, like tummy, flat, tummy teeth. Basically our. Our business manager has been hired. [00:23:56] Speaker A: Oh my God. [00:23:57] Speaker B: And before I can do anything and I don't even know what to do, they are running ads from our brand account that are pushing to like, this random website that seems to be, that's with like a Vietnamese like URL. [00:24:11] Speaker A: With your money? [00:24:12] Speaker B: With my money, with my brand. It's like also happened the day before. Maybe there's a board meeting so everyone's like hyper fixated on. And you know, at this point we've started spending enough money that I have like a personal ad account rep. And so I go back and forth with her for like eight hours as they're blowing through all our spend, you know, 50k or whatever. And finally we get the account restored. But one of the employees, one of my employees had basically been hacked like in a fishing accident and they hijacked this, this ad account. So. So those are two pretty memorable fires. [00:24:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean how did that get. Were they not just able to shut. [00:24:52] Speaker B: It off and so you would think, right? Yeah, and no they weren't. It's crazy. [00:24:56] Speaker A: Yeah, those are pretty memorable fires. [00:24:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, those are memorable fires. I mean, you know, listen, I've also had like half the products disappear on a website the day Black Friday. Like. But you know, luckily in like a Shopify first ecosystem, like most things are resolvable relatively quickly. [00:25:15] Speaker C: Right. [00:25:15] Speaker A: I love it. How do you communicate the intricacies of E commerce up the channel in an organization that may not be E commerce first? [00:25:25] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so great question. And a lot of my career has been sort of working as sort of like starting up E commerce for like a non E commerce focused brand. Be like a retailer or a wholesaler. And you know, I think like people can get super bogged down in channel by channel reporting and acronyms and so forth. But it's, it's really getting, I think, clear buy in from the key stakeholders and executives that ultimately the only things that move the needle are how many people get to your website, how many of those people buy shit and how much shit do they buy, right? So that's traffic conversion rate and average order value. You know, rather than report on like 55 different things, just reporting on those three things. Right? Like making clear hypotheses on things that can move one of those three needles. I think people can understand and resonate with in a way that makes it not feel like you're the wizard of Oz who's like pulling strings in the background. Which I think is, you know, a risk. Right. When you're in that kind of role, Right. Like no, this money didn't just appear in our bank account. We did X, Y and Z thing to get more people on the site and that, you know, that's the thing That I find kind of like most addictive about E commerce is, you know, you can see the things. You do have an impact, right? And I think when you sort of demystify and really like break it down into like, I guess like first principles or whatever, core, three core metrics, like, anyone can understand that. And, you know, if they're a retailer, it's like, okay, how many people came in the store today? How many of those people are just like, looking for the bathroom? How many of those people just wanted to buy like a little bracelet versus, like, how many people wanted, you know, to buy fancy jeans, Right? Like, they can resonate with that idea. And you don't need to be digitally native to understand that, you know, the number of people that come to your website has a direct impact on the number of orders you get. And I also think, like, people particularly like a CEO will hear X brand who they consider like a direct competitor is doing a hundred million. Like, why aren't we doing a hundred million dollars? And it's like, first off, we have no idea any of the inputs that went into that hundred million dollars, right? [00:27:45] Speaker A: How much did that cost? [00:27:46] Speaker B: How much did that cost? How many years have they been building a customer file to do that? How much traffic are they, how much are they paying for traffic? How much SEO, like, how much SEO exposure do they have? Right? And okay, we can do a hundred million dollars too, if we're willing to spend X amount of money to acquire X amount of new customers to meet that gap between where we're currently at and what we can benchmark from our repeat customers and the a hundred million. [00:28:14] Speaker A: So when you're, I think you, you've done an amazing job of simplifying it for the executive that is an E Commerce native. How do you train your staff of the intricacies and the details of E Commerce and kind of go the other direction? [00:28:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a, that's a great question that I have not as thorough an answer for. But, you know, I think, I think the thing is, like, just take a lot of people like that will come in below you. Like, they're working really hard and they're taking pride in their role. And you know, the thing I like to, you know, the thing I like to explain to them is the direct, like, daily sales are not sort of like, reflective of the work you put in. It is also reflective of, you know, the same inputs I would communicate to a CEO. So I give everyone that sort of works for me, like, visibility into those metrics as well as well as like here are the things I've done that I think might impact them. Here are the things I'd like you to do. The reasoning why I want you to do this is because I think it will will have a direct impact on one of those three metrics. It's, you know, it's communicating up and down the org, like getting everyone pedaling in the same direction of those three sort of north stars and understanding the impact they're able to have to moving those forward as well as the impact they're not able to have moving those forward. Right. Like a lot of the success and failure happens external to your brand and your website and your account. Right. Like there are macroeconomic trends at play, there are brand heat things that are not reflective of the work you've put in as an E Commerce merchandiser. [00:29:58] Speaker A: Positive or negative? [00:29:59] Speaker B: Positive or negative. Right? Yeah, like you know, you asked about my memorable failures. Say like you also come to realize like a lot of your memorable successes are, you know, outside of your control too. Right. Like you know, we probably the biggest growth revenue wise I had year on year at a place happened to be during 2020. Right. When it was Covid and was I a better marketer and better E Commerce director that year than the prior year or the next year when we didn't grow as much? No, there was a landscape. There were tides that are rising and lowering, you know, that are not in your control and all sort of you can control. Right. Is like the effort that you put in to something. Making decisions in a clear and organized way that you know, you think will help and those things can fail or succeed sort of also outside of your control if you give it a proper amount of effort. [00:30:59] Speaker A: Are you a part time New York City Buddhist monk? No, it was very Buddhist. Like. [00:31:05] Speaker B: Well, I do have this wave tattoo. [00:31:09] Speaker A: Okay. [00:31:09] Speaker B: What's the sort of symbolize like the random ups and downs of life that are outside of your control. So maybe I will, you know, look into part time monkey love it. [00:31:23] Speaker C: Well, I mean kind of similar to that conversation, if you weren't doing what you're doing now, is there something that you think you would be doing instead? [00:31:31] Speaker B: So such a good question. You know I think the thing that, and I mentioned this a little earlier before that I love about E Commerce and by the way, I'm still, you know, 15 years or whatever into this. Like I still have my Shopify notifications on and get excited about every order which like addicted to it. Yeah. The thing I like about it is that it's like a Video game. Right. Or it's like a sport. [00:31:58] Speaker A: Totally a video game. [00:32:00] Speaker B: You do X, Y and Z thing and then you get an output. Right. And so, you know, I, I, it would have to be something that I was able to gamify in that way. You know, before I got into E commerce I thought I wanted to do like political communications. Seems horrible, I would say now. Before that I thought I wanted to be a writer. That seems like lonely and you're so it's all of the output is dependent on you in a way that seems tough. So you know, listen, I think ultimately I could do anything and find a way to gamify it, but I don't have a great answer for sort of what I would like to do besides E commerce. One thing I like about my current role is that it's not actually all that siloed into E commerce. There is a bunch of like brand building strategy as well as like figuring out how we're going to take like this commerce to content to commerce model and then actually execute on that in a way that goes sort of beyond like okay, I'm just like building an E commerce environment. So you know, maybe I'm slowly pivoting away from E commerce too. But you know, I don't have a. I just really love it. I love seeing the result of something that you put into place. [00:33:16] Speaker C: I know when I got into experimentation, the team that I was working with related it to gambling because it was sort of like you just came up with an idea. At the time we were just shooting from the hip and seeing what stuck. But you just come up with these ideas and you throw them out there and it was just like, come on, come on, come on. Let me get that stat Sig. [00:33:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it was. I spent 15 grand on Facebook in a day. 25 grand. [00:33:35] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:33:36] Speaker B: I'm a high roar. Like, you know, I win. You know, I remember, yeah, like I remembered putting up a quarter million dollar day in like November 2020. And it is, it is elating. Like it is so fun. [00:33:50] Speaker C: I agree. [00:33:51] Speaker B: It's. [00:33:51] Speaker C: Yeah, we had, we've had. It's funny because I feel like that's A lot of people who get into this industry do enjoy that gamification process. I know everybody technically dies. It's part of the whole UX thing. But like a lot of the answers we get, I feel like center around that, that upbringing. It's really interesting. You know, we get a lot of people talk about fantasy games is where they got into it or D and D or yeah, It's, It's. It's odd. It's interesting. It's a pattern. [00:34:14] Speaker B: The other thing. And, you know, now having worked in golf for, like, five years, it's also kind of like golf. Like, there are 50 trillion different things to remember and focus on. There's all of this, like, gear and software that you can use to, like, augment things. [00:34:31] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:34:32] Speaker B: You know, and you can, like, give it your best go and fuck it all up. [00:34:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:34:38] Speaker B: Um, so, you know, there it's. But you're constantly, like, addicted to, like, trying to get a little marginally better and a little marginally better. So, you know, it's a. It's. It's a fun business. [00:34:50] Speaker A: We have two golf brands, maybe three golf brands that we work with, and it's interesting how they all highlight the marginal difference that their clubs provide. And they're all basically marketing towards amateur golfers where, like, a marginal difference in their game is literally meaningless in their life. They will not be any happier. They will not be any richer. It is of little meaning, but they all advertise, you will be marginally better for those three hours a week that you play this sport. [00:35:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Because people like to get better at things. [00:35:22] Speaker A: Totally. [00:35:23] Speaker B: And, you know, it's like, this agency will get me a three and a half X. This will get. This agency will get me a 3.8. If I do it in house, I'll get a 3.2. But, you know, I won't have to pay the agency rep. Like, you know, the growth is incremental and marginal. And, you know, it's still exciting to people and there's still. It's still a big biz. Right. Like, everyone is looking for that next thing that'll make them even better. And the next thing that'll, you know, take their game to the next level and their brand through that plateau. So. So there's definitely some similarities. [00:36:00] Speaker A: So that's actually a great segue to the next question is where do you see the opportunities for you in E commerce in the next six months? [00:36:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, I think, like, the obvious answer, right, is AI. [00:36:12] Speaker A: Okay, but what's that mean? [00:36:14] Speaker B: Yeah, so I, you know, I think what's super exciting for me about AI is that I can have, like, a product idea and actually implement it myself, like, in a matter of hours in a way that would have, like, required me, like, having a development resource and going back and forth on things and for months or a week or whatever. And now I can get, like, an mvp, like, going quickly. And as someone that you know is past my prime and was never going to like learn coding at this point. That is just like the fact that I'm able to bring things from like my idea to actuality like relatively quickly. [00:36:54] Speaker A: What tools are you using for that? [00:36:56] Speaker B: So mostly Claude, Claude and little GPT but for whatever reason I've found myself to be a Claude man and you know, and then Shopify has done a bunch of lifting on their end to make sort of that a reality too. [00:37:08] Speaker C: Are you using AI in any of your acquisition strategies? [00:37:13] Speaker B: So, so not exactly. I mean not really. You know I'm very interested in like what like a GEO could look like and I'm interested. It does seem like there's going to be, there is going to be a shift in how people find products and, and what exactly that's going to look like for a brand. Uploading your product feed into chat GPT and optimizing it in some way that will surface it when someone search what what's the best Golf polo is super interesting. I don't know how the fuck I'm going to do that yet. Yeah, I don't know but, but it's super interesting. I, you know, and I hate saying AI is because that's like the obvious and buzzwordy thing but you know, I'm interested to see how it'll change. Shopping. I don't know yet but like just day to day like the fact that I can like actually code stuff. I coded a computer game the other day using Replit, using Claude. I also got, I also tried Rosebud which is like one made for game creation. But you know, my CLAUDE Pro got me like pretty close and it was fun. It's just like actually fun thing to mess with. I couldn't imagine like having a conversation with it in the way that I hear like people are doing but you know, as someone who's had ideas but never been able to do anything but like bug a developer to make it for me, like it's, it's really cool to, to be able to use it. [00:38:41] Speaker A: It's life changing. It's literally life changing. One thing I want to dig into just quickly is can you explain to me, because I'm actually not in this industry why or how GEO will be different than SEO over the past 25 years. To me it feels like the exact same problem with almost the exact same solutions. But I don't do it every day. [00:39:00] Speaker B: No, I, I don't either and I, I, I think it basically is my understanding, it's just like determining like what are the sources that like GPT or Claude rely on versus like what Google relies on. And obviously like you upload your shopping feed into Google right now too. Right. And it surfaces stuff in shopping surfaces stuff in ads. Like, okay, are you going to be able to bid on like queries on GPT? Like, I don't know. Maybe, like, probably if I had a guess. [00:39:32] Speaker A: If they have to make their. I mean, they have a nut to make, right? I mean, have a big nut to make. So it's going to be some sort of platform. [00:39:39] Speaker B: Yeah, but no, I mean, I've, I've read something that, you know, GPT is like 35% reliant on Reddit, but I, you know, I, that is based off my memory. [00:39:53] Speaker A: And have you guys used Reddit answers at all for like research of how products or how consumers view your products or your brands? [00:40:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, and I've done some stuff with like the Claude Deep research tool to like have it scrape Reddit as well as like golf specific forums. You know, this brand is still like nascent in a way that there's not a ton of conversation about it. [00:40:20] Speaker A: Totally. [00:40:20] Speaker B: You know, smarter people than me, I think are doing that. So it's something I'm pretty interested in as well. And you know, people also use like more generic versions of that to come up with like hooks for Facebook ad angles. You know, that's something I've dipped my toe in a bit and you know, I want to dive in deeper on. [00:40:41] Speaker A: That's awesome. Is there anything you're reading, listening to to get smarter or maybe not because you're like, I got a kid at home, I ain't got time for any of that. [00:40:48] Speaker B: No, I'm, you know, the, the place where I'm seeing like about like professional stuff is Twitter. And I like can't scroll on Twitter on the for you tab without like every third tweet being about D2C or Facebook ads or something. I mean, there's, there's people I think are smart there. I don't listen to any of like the podcast. Neither do I. I will listen to this one. No, I probably won't. [00:41:20] Speaker C: I can't hear myself talk. [00:41:21] Speaker B: No, it seems like a huge nightmare. I'm sure they're gonna, my co workers are gonna play it in the office. [00:41:27] Speaker A: Send it to your mom. [00:41:32] Speaker B: As far as. So I don't really listen to too much. Awesome. Awesome. I. What I do do is have a number of friends that are in like either this field or adjacent field, like actual friends from like pre professional days. And so those are, that's a great resource to like have to talk to about like and get tips about like things you're trying or things that are working. Cool. And I remember like me and one of my really close friends from college is in a, is, you know, a director of E commerce as well. And you know, 2021 when it was like Peak iOS 14, we do like a weekly zoom together to like look at both our ad accounts. So I've been, you know, it's nice to have like friends in adjacent field that you can like get like hear their unvarnished truth from. [00:42:19] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate amazing insights and thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. [00:42:26] Speaker B: My pleasure. This was great. [00:42:27] Speaker A: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. [00:42:28] Speaker B: Thanks, Sam.