904: AI-powered conversion optimization (and the power of PERSONALIZED experiences) w/ Angelo Ferro

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I'll tell you what so many people want to talk about AI.

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So many people want to get into e-commerce, but all of us want to figure out ways to convert more customers and clients, and that's why today's guest is an expert in all three of those.

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I'm so excited to learn from him.

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His name is Angelo Farrow.

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Angelo is the co-founder of Shop Landing AI, which is a Y-combinator and venture-backed startup that leverages generative AI and machine learning to create personalized shopping experiences that increase conversions.

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Sounds like some really cool tech stuff that we're going to dig into today.

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Prior to founding Shop Landing AI, angelo was running the data analytics team at Unity Technologies, where they built tools for game developers to help them understand the behavior of over 1.5 billion with a B monthly active gamers.

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So Angelo's approach to business is not only rooted in technology, but analytics and also a personalized experience.

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We're all going to learn a lot from Angelo here today.

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Whether you're in e-commerce or not, when we talk conversions, it's something that all of us are responsible for in our own businesses, so I'm not going to say anything else.

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Let's dive straight into my interview with Angelo Farrow.

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All right, Angelo, I'm so excited that you're here with us today.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you so much for having me.

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Heck, yes, so you have got such a cool background in all things tech.

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I think the video game industry is such a cool place to come from.

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But take us beyond the bio.

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Who's Angelo?

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How'd you start doing all these cool things?

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Yes, my name is Angelo, I'm based in New York, and how did I get started doing these things?

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So I did my undergrad at Berkeley, where I majored in business and economics, and this was in 2008.

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And I was deciding whether to go into banking or consulting, and I found that working with economic consultants was a lot nicer than working with bankers, and so my first job out of college was economic litigation consulting, which sounds just as interesting and sexy as it sounds.

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But in that job was my first time I was, I guess, introduced to data, and so I did that for five years, and in that job I was we were just like surrounded by data.

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So I became really familiar with understanding data, how to clean data and how to analyze data so you can get meaning out of it.

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And then, after that, I joined a small startup called Playnomics, which was a gaming analytics startup that was focused on how to leverage data to help game developers basically personalize the game experience, and so that company was acquired by a bigger company called Unity, which is a game engine, and we bought over that technology and our thesis has always been how can we help people unlock the potential of the data that they have in order to personalize and customize the experience for their customers so that they can either, whether it's a game, play the game more, spend more or whether it's an e-commerce website, interact with your content, stay on your page longer and, ultimately, convert.

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So I guess it's a long way to say one good way of saying that I've always been surrounded by data.

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I think, um, I've been lucky to work at companies that have had data resources, data analysts and data engineers to learn from them, um, and now with customers that we serve in e-commerce, most of them don't have developers and don't have dedicated data resources, and so we kind of view it as ourselves to help them unlock the power of the data so that they can use it to drive more sales.

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Yeah, angela, I love that overview because you so consistently tie data to a purpose, which is personalization, and I, at its most basic level.

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When we have this conversation here today in front of thousands of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs around the world, have this conversation here today in front of thousands of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs around the world, we all understand the personalized aspect of it, because the ads that I see when I scroll through Instagram are very different from the ads that you see.

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But walk us through that, because that seems at a really enterprise level.

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Of course, that world is possible and Target sends me different discounts than what they send to you.

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How does this apply at the smaller business scale?

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How are these resources accessible to us?

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Yeah, so the example you brought up where Facebook and Instagram are sending you targeted ads, so you're seeing different ads than what I'm seeing.

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Chances are, if you're at SMB, you're acquiring customers by advertising on one of these channels Facebook or Google or Instagram and so what we found is that a lot of these entrepreneurs, they kind of rely on these paid channels to find these right customers for your product, but then that experience is kind of broken in that it's you know Facebook has find the right customers, but then you're sending them to a home page that's not personalized, right?

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One of my colleagues who has a deep experience in UI and UX she always says that the home page is kind of meant to be like the catchall for everybody.

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She always says that the homepage is kind of meant to be like the catch-all for everybody, but your ads are targeting different individuals.

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Like you might be targeting someone in their 24 to 35 age range, but that same product could also be sold to someone older.

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They're seeing different ads, but then when they land on the homepage, that's not speaking to that specific audience, that persona.

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That's a common example where we see where you're spending all this money to acquire the customer, but then they get to your home page, um, and it's not personalized to them yeah, that's fascinating because a lot of people probably view their website through a very limited lens, which is my website, is my website.

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We're talking about a different landing page experience and website experience per user.

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Walk us down that path yeah, yeah.

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So what we do is um, the way we're able to do that is we tie it to the campaign.

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So most campaigns are targeting you know, specific audience, specific persona.

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But let me back up to you.

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Should I explain what persona is?

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Yeah?

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I'd love for you to picture.

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Yeah, so you can think of personas as unique audiences that are purchasing your good or your service, and so a lot of times what we find with entrepreneurs we work with a lot of direct-to-consumer brands and they built a product because they had a problem.

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Chances are, they built that product for them and they've had a good degree of success and they sold their products.

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But they reach a point where, kind of like the, it just gets hard to scale and the reason why it gets hard to scale is because they don't know who to target beyond their original, I guess, icp.

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So that's where we come in.

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We take a look at the data that they're already collecting from the Shopify, we match that with our kind of like database to model out, like who we think these different personas are, and so through that, we basically use your data that you're already collecting to figure out who are the distinct audiences people who are purchasing that product.

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Because when we're able to identify who those distinct audiences are, the next step that we do is we do user interviews.

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So we pull from a network of people who might be that target audience and then we interview them, we figure out what their pain points are, how they need to be marketed to, so that you can market to them effectively.

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Yeah, Angela.

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I want to use some real life examples because, for sake of simplicity, let's rock with two different segments of the market.

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Let's, just for sake of simplicity, say men and women.

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I want a person, I have a perfect example for you.

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So one of the brands that we work with.

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They sell a very expensive concrete mixer and so the product costs about $3,000.

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They are on track to do really well this year.

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Last year was the first year that they started spending so mostly acquiring just through Facebook, and they had done only advertising.

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They were only advertising strictly to men and then when we looked at their data, even though that they were only advertising to men, we found that about 10% of their audience was women, so women were 10% of their buyers actually was women, so women had been purchasing this product even though they never saw an ad they weren't being directly marketed to, and so, with that insight, we were able to, through our technology, figure out okay, women, this looks like an audience that you might want to tap into.

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The next step that we did is we um, did user interviews.

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We contacted women who were small contractors and diyers to really build out and flesh out who this persona is um.

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So we do these interviews and how we leverage ai is like we'll use ai for the analysis and we also use we train our own models to help us kind of digest all this information.

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So the one one thing that AI has been super helpful for us and I suggest, like all the SMBs out there or entrepreneurs, think about, is how you can use AI to make the processes that take a long time like 10X faster.

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So for us, we do these user interviews.

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We're able to interview, you know, five to 10 people.

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We use an AI to record the transcript and then we feed the transcripts into this data that we built to kind of pull out these insights and pull out the core messaging.

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So the key things that came out of that research process was we found that the mud mixer is a pretty big machine.

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It's a funny story.

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So I was doing a test transaction for this customer and I live in New York and we don't have a lot of space and then my doorman called me and he's like, oh, you have like a concrete mixer here and, um, it's like 300 pounds, um.

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So I'm glad my doorman called me before, uh, before the ups guy got here so that he could take it back to the customer.

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But, um, one thing that came out is it's a big machine and so women wanted to see more creatives and more visuals that showed, um, women next to the machine, so they had a sense of scale.

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All the women that we interviewed, you know they had no doubt that they could use this and that it would benefit them in their small projects or in their professional projects.

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But having the right visual cues to know that, okay, this is something that they could use.

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Another thing that came out from that is making sure that the landing page or the website had more pictures of women using the machine and also content from women DIY influencers.

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So it's kind of figuring out okay for this target audience, in case women, they need to be marketed to you in a specific way they need to be.

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You know, here's the visual cues that they need, here's the language that they need in order to feel comfortable purchasing this product.

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This product is $3,000.

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You know it's a pretty expensive.

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It's not an impulse buy, right.

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So having all that information, having all that context, having all that visual information, was really helpful in kind of pushing them towards making a purchasing decision yeah, angela, it's funny a lot of people tuning in here today thinking that they're going to learn from an ai founder.

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Of course, that's what we're doing, but I think what really stands out to me is that you're talking about the good old analog stuff.

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You're talking about customer interviews and the feedback there.

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Oh, yeah Of course, AI is only as good as the inputs that we give it, and so a lot of people who think AI is just going to give me all the answers talk about those inputs, because obviously that's a side of the equation that's incredibly important.

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Yeah, yeah.

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So the AI is just not there yet where we work with a lot of consumer brands and obviously they're very protective of the branding as they should, because they worked really hard to come up with their branding and the marketing and the AI is just not there yet where you could kind of, hey, make this website for women for the specific brand, Like we need to.

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So what we do is we have our own proprietary set of templates that we know work well, based off of testing that we've done and also across the kind of like network of customers that we work with.

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So we knew that this, hey, this playout will do really well.

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And as far as the inputs, you know, really the user interviews, that's one thing.

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So we do a bit of.

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We do two things qualitative research and quantitative research.

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So the quantitative research is what I mentioned earlier, where we take your existing user data, we apply our algorithms in our to figure out, okay, who are the interesting segments that are purchasing your product, that are unique enough that you could market to them differently.

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And then the next step is we do the user interviews, talking to our customers, because that's the best way of understanding and validating the quantitative data that we had basically pulled out, our AI pulled.

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So it's a combination of the qualitative to validate the quantitative, and then it's that combination that we're able to produce the results that our clients really are happy about.

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Yeah, I love that, and we're going to talk about your website at the end of today's episode.

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You guys have so many cool case studies on there.

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Listeners, you're going to be able to check out all the cool stuff that they're doing over at Shop Landing AI.

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But, angelo, I do want to talk to you about this term.

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It's so prevalent everywhere that I look and read about the work that you all do.

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It's personalized customer journeys.

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We're not just talking about A-B testing two versions of our homepages.

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You're talking about personalized customer journeys.

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What does that verbiage mean?

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Yeah, so basically, so we have that landing page which is for women.

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Here's this landing page.

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The next step of that, next evolution of that, is basically how can we make the website experience a little bit more interactive?

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So to bring it back to gaming, the analogy there is, like with gaming are you a mobile gamer?

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I'm not.

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You play Candy Crush, you're not?

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Okay, well, your mom probably does.

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My mom plays Candy Crush.

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And so what we did for the developers I was working with back at Unity was, depending on how you interacted with the game, we're able to pick up certain signals right.

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So if we know, or if we know your history from another game, like if you're a veteran of Candy Crush, if you, you know, crush candy all the time, that was a bad joke, but instead of having starting you on the tutorial, we would fast forward you right away and get you a level 10, give you some in-game currency so that you could basically skip that first part, cause we already know that you're an expert, we know that you know how to play this game.

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So here, let's make it a little bit harder for you, let's make it a little bit more interesting for you to convert the analogy that we're doing is we started rolling out and we'll do a formal product launch next week or two, which is very exciting is basically putting a game on the website.

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So you go on the website, you fill out this quiz and, depending on how you answer the quiz, we will curate what the product selection is.

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So you know, if you're trying to think of a good example, we're working right now with a shoe company and they offer uh.

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Actually, we're working with a triathlon company, um, and they offer different uh gear depending on, like you know, uh, what it's a triathlete, triathlon company, um.

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Let me think of a better example.

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Sorry, this is my.

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This is my first time I do this to myself all the time, all the air, all the time.

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I start using examples like dog food or yoga yeah.

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And I'm like I don't know anything about these things, so why am I going down this path?

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But I love the fact that you've got so many real life examples.

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So here's an example.

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So we're working with a wine company.

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They're based in Australia and so as part of the quiz, you answer like you know, um, what type of wine do you like, what's what's occasion, what are you buying for?

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And then, depending on how you answer that, you get a curated landing page that gives you the specific type of wine.

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There's recommendations for what pairs well with the wine, as well as a little bit more of history with the brand.

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So that's a better example of like um, how we're trying to match the um, I, how we're trying to match the uh.

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I guess the goal is to get you to engage with the website.

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Like a lot of times the traffic that goes to your website, it bounces.

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Most websites have like a 70 80 bounce rate, and so what we're trying to do is what can we do to keep you on that page?

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Here's a quick quiz.

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Answer it and then you get a personalized recommendation that will lead you to either a landing page or like a product page or a curated collection.

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That is basically speaking to you.

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I have a better personalization example.

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What we're trying to do is, if you think about it like the real world analogy is like, let's say you're going to a Nordstrom's and you're trying to look for, I don't know, a suit or a jacket or something for a special occasion, you would talk to the sales rep that tells them be like okay, you know where are you going.

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Oh, I'm going on a wedding.

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It's in Lake Como, it's gonna be in June, so it's gonna be hot.

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And then they would be able to kind of and the dress code is like black tie, so they would be able to guide you to like okay, here's a selection of items in your price point that would be good for a specific occasion occasion.

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We're trying to take that kind of like concierge nordstrom personal shopper experience, but incorporating aspects of that into this uh game, with this quiz on the website where you can basically reveal more about yourself and then we'll reward you by revealing more about yourself with more engaging content and the right product for you yeah, I love that overview, especially because I think we're starting to see bigger brands in real life doing this.

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I went into the New Balance store recently and they have this whole.

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It's a really cool tech setup where you stand on some device and it maps out your foot and then you say I walk this many miles a week, I like these other activities, and it'll map that recommendation to a shoe in addition to the sales associate that you're assigned to.

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But the fact that you're doing this at scale on an e-commerce level for every single business, regardless of size, is incredible.

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I want to ask you about the actual makeup of the the websites, because obviously first impressions matter.

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It says it right there on your website.

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I think that's such a powerful headline.

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What are the elements that usher people towards that conversion?

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Because they don't have, like your north term example of sales reps standing right next to them yeah.

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So I would say, uh, the things that we've learned and we've looked at a lot of landing pages and we looked at a lot of homepages, like the stat that's accepted is like I mentioned that bounce rate.

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So 70, 80%, most of the traffic, especially if they're cold and they're just coming from an ad, most of them will bounce and most of them will never go like what we call below the fold, which is, if you think about, if you're on your desktop or your phone, that's it like the real estate right, um, where your screen hits, and so most people don't go below that.

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And so the things that we found like, well, our quiz is one of the things that help increase engagement and we've seen that through the data.

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But if you don't have a quiz, one of the easy things you can do is just bring up some social proof.

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So bring up like if you were on Shark Tank or if you have a thousand reviews or if you have influencer content that raves about your products, because a lot of the cold traffic, and the reason why I bring this up is because a lot of brands are working on building up their brand equity and they're working on building up their brand, but they are still acquiring.

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Most of the time, people find out about them through Facebook or Instagram, because Instagram is really good at finding you.

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But once you're there on the website, your goal is to kind of keep them engaged.

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So, having an engaging hero, having social proof, having any stats, so like, if you like to use superlatives so let's say you're selling I don't know wine and you've sold over 10,000 bottles of wine, or you've had 4.9 stars over thousands of reviews, having that social proof we found has been super helpful in bringing that up so that people see it.

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And then, if you're lucky enough to get them to continue to scroll down, thinking about what their common objections are, so bringing things like oh, this wine is too expensive.

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Or talking to to customers and figuring out what are the pain points or what are the reservations they might have about purchasing your product, and then addressing those within the first few instances of you know they're experiencing your website is a great way to get them engaged.

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But also get them to convert, cause what we found is you're able to get you know.

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The first thing we talked about with our clients is, like you know, the goal is engagement.

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Get people to stay on the website, get people to learn more about your brand, get them to be interested in the product, and then conversions comes after that yeah, angelo, the thing that I really appreciate about the way that you talk about this stuff is every single thing you talk about improving.

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You tie it to a metric, whether that is decreasing the bounce rate, increasing the conversion rate.

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Talk to me about some of those metrics, because you've worked in all different sides of data.

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What sort of metrics are directly relevant to e-commerce, as opposed to just the conversion rate?

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What are some of those leading indicators?

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Yeah, yeah.

00:18:51.490 --> 00:18:59.547
So for sure, if you're in e-commerce, most of the brands are working on Shopify, so you want to look at your Shopify dashboard or your Google Analytics dashboard dashboard.

00:18:59.547 --> 00:19:00.909
So you're interested in all this data.

00:19:00.909 --> 00:19:04.453
What we found is, I guess, how do I say this?

00:19:04.453 --> 00:19:05.375
Don't be scared of the data.

00:19:05.375 --> 00:19:06.476
I think the data is there to help you.

00:19:06.476 --> 00:19:10.119
I think some people get overwhelmed with all the data that's out there and then you're not sure what to look at.

00:19:10.119 --> 00:19:16.722
But I think, when it comes to engagement, think about look at your bounce rate, which again, is what percentage of people are just bouncing right away.

00:19:16.722 --> 00:19:22.180
So you can you can think of it as the percentage of people who aren't really spending time on your site.

00:19:22.180 --> 00:19:23.305
So you want to get that down.

00:19:23.305 --> 00:19:28.448
Other engagement metrics are the session length, so how long people are spending on that.

00:19:29.040 --> 00:19:33.711
Another great tool that we recommend to all of our clients and it's completely free is a heat mapping tool.

00:19:33.711 --> 00:19:49.670
So we recommend that our clients install Clarity, which is from Microsoft, it's completely free, it works across multiple platforms and it's great because you can see, like, how people are, what people are clicking on and how far they scroll down.

00:19:49.670 --> 00:19:52.000
So having any heat map team cause.

00:19:52.000 --> 00:19:54.365
What we're trying to figure out is like are people staying on my website?

00:19:54.365 --> 00:19:55.664
How long are they staying on my website?

00:19:55.664 --> 00:19:56.788
What are they clicking on?

00:19:56.788 --> 00:19:57.763
So what draws their interest?

00:19:58.200 --> 00:20:00.065
And then, how far are they scrolling?

00:20:00.065 --> 00:20:02.191
Like, ideally, you want them to scroll all the way to the end.

00:20:02.191 --> 00:20:06.788
If you're lucky, if you have a really good, you know, engaging page, you will get them to scroll all the way to the end.

00:20:06.788 --> 00:20:20.686
But a short trick to have is you know, have, if you've never done a heat maps before, go and solve clarity right now and then run it for a week and then take a look at the results, because clarity will kind of be like okay, here are the hotspots, and just move those hotspots up.

00:20:20.686 --> 00:20:37.625
If you see that people are clicking on the FAQ, if you see that people are clicking on reviews or the influencer content or UGC but that's way below the fold just bring that stuff up, because we're seeing that if you're bringing the engaging content up, that keeps people staying.

00:20:38.448 --> 00:20:41.789
Yeah, listeners, direct call to action from Angelo right there.

00:20:41.789 --> 00:20:46.739
I absolutely love that advice, angelo, as far as a free tool every business should have on their website.

00:20:46.739 --> 00:20:49.748
I love the fact that this stuff transcends e-commerce as well.

00:20:49.748 --> 00:20:52.241
It's valuable information for all of us, business owners.

00:20:52.241 --> 00:20:56.272
I want to ask you about AI because, angelo, everybody wants to talk about AI.

00:20:56.272 --> 00:20:56.720
We know that.

00:20:56.720 --> 00:20:58.242
All of our listeners are talking about it.

00:20:58.242 --> 00:21:00.787
Everybody in the world is usingGPT these days.

00:21:00.787 --> 00:21:04.231
You must facepalm so much at some of the things you hear.

00:21:04.231 --> 00:21:06.375
People say that they think AI is magic.

00:21:06.375 --> 00:21:13.574
Talk to us about some of the current limitations of AI and then shed some light on the better side of AI, where you think that market's going.

00:21:14.019 --> 00:21:16.694
Yeah, so the current limitations of AI.

00:21:16.694 --> 00:21:17.660
So it is getting better.

00:21:17.660 --> 00:21:24.597
It's improved a lot from when I first started using ChatTube, probably like November 2022.

00:21:24.597 --> 00:21:30.824
So if you're expecting that AI will, you can enter your website.

00:21:30.824 --> 00:21:32.123
I think one day it will get there.

00:21:32.123 --> 00:21:32.645
It's not there now.

00:21:32.645 --> 00:21:34.365
It'd be great if, like you, could enter your website.

00:21:34.365 --> 00:21:35.383
Here's my website.

00:21:35.383 --> 00:21:41.286
Here's a person that I wanna market to build me a landing page that will, or build me an experience geared to that person.

00:21:42.008 --> 00:21:47.529
The AI is just not gonna do that because it doesn't have enough context and also the image generation tools aren't there.

00:21:47.529 --> 00:21:51.599
So, like for a lot of brands I mean for any business owners, you care a lot about the branding cause.

00:21:51.599 --> 00:22:00.768
You worked really hard for it, so it's not plug and play where you could just kind of like you know, here's a brand, here's a brand assets, you know how the AI go to town.

00:22:00.768 --> 00:22:12.971
So what we do is we have designers on staff, so there's always a human that's looking and that's checking and proofreading every text and every image to make sure that it fits brand.

00:22:12.971 --> 00:22:19.670
I think where AI has been a godsend for us is that, like you know, we it really helps with.

00:22:19.819 --> 00:22:24.228
Think of, like, the menial tasks that, for example, it could be like combing through reviews.

00:22:24.228 --> 00:22:26.250
So we use AI.

00:22:26.250 --> 00:22:35.218
You can basically use AI to you know, comb through a thousand reviews and then identify what are the top three compliments and top three like complaints.

00:22:35.218 --> 00:22:45.721
Right, that's an easy way because it can just scan through the text really quickly and then you could figure out like okay, here are the what people love about the product and you can put that in your home page.

00:22:45.721 --> 00:22:49.269
It's like people love that, um, we're sustainable.

00:22:49.269 --> 00:22:51.333
That, um, it tastes really good.

00:22:51.333 --> 00:22:54.673
I'm just this isn't the same product, but, uh, and it looks really cool.

00:22:54.673 --> 00:22:55.438
People love that.

00:22:55.438 --> 00:22:56.521
What do people dislike about it?

00:22:56.521 --> 00:22:57.905
Oh, they say it's too expensive.

00:22:57.905 --> 00:23:14.154
And then in your in that same page or in like, you can basically take that, uh, what people perceive as a you know con of your product and incorporate them into the page and answer it so like it's expensive, but that's because we use sustainable products and we believe in sustainability, so we think it's worth the extra money, um.

00:23:14.154 --> 00:23:22.334
So I think where ai is really helpful is that it kind of like 10xs the um, the really really time consuming tasks.

00:23:23.259 --> 00:23:28.467
The other thing is that AI and I've played around with it it's also very helpful in kind of like doing data analysis.

00:23:28.467 --> 00:23:33.241
So I I first saw about a college was consulting, so we lived in spreadsheets.

00:23:33.241 --> 00:23:34.647
So I'm very comfortable with spreadsheets.

00:23:34.647 --> 00:23:38.366
But I know when I've talked to my clients about spreadsheets and I show them a big spreadsheet, they get scared.

00:23:38.366 --> 00:23:48.063
But the AI is going to get there.

00:23:48.063 --> 00:23:49.508
Where you can, you know, at least summarize this budget at the top level.

00:23:49.508 --> 00:24:03.759
So, um, I think, using air today to again make the menial tasks a lot faster so you can save your time to free up to do more strategic tasks or the things that matter more, that you know require more of your attention, or um, using air to kind of like summarize data, or even, um, just uh, make any spreadsheet work a lot easier.

00:24:03.759 --> 00:24:09.257
That's where I think is right now yeah, listeners, the word there is compliment.

00:24:09.336 --> 00:24:16.923
It complements all the things that we're doing, even to the structure of angelo's team over at shop landing ai they have human designers.

00:24:16.923 --> 00:24:19.430
It complements all the work that you all are doing.

00:24:19.430 --> 00:24:20.511
So I absolutely love that.

00:24:20.511 --> 00:24:27.551
And angelo listeners know that in these conversations I I always love talking to you not only as a subject matter expert but also entrepreneur to entrepreneur.

00:24:27.551 --> 00:24:32.193
It's so much fun to tap into your entrepreneurial mind and obviously you guys are up to some big things.

00:24:32.193 --> 00:24:38.265
I will say your roster of brands and companies that you're involved with and I know it's always growing is really incredible.

00:24:38.265 --> 00:24:42.609
And I know that you navigated the Y Combinator world, your venture back.

00:24:42.630 --> 00:24:45.153
Talk to us about that approach to launching this business.

00:24:46.114 --> 00:24:46.555
Yeah.

00:24:46.555 --> 00:24:50.204
So I would say where we landed today is kind of different from where we started.

00:24:50.204 --> 00:24:58.238
We launched the company five years ago and when we first launched the company we were building a very different tool.

00:24:58.238 --> 00:25:05.507
We were building a tool for game developers to help them collect all the data that the game was generating about performance.

00:25:05.507 --> 00:25:15.547
So if you're playing a game, it would collect, like FPS, load time, data about performance and then, based off of that data collection, you could optimize a game so that you could perform better.

00:25:15.547 --> 00:25:17.747
So we were excited to build that tool.

00:25:17.747 --> 00:25:19.079
We built it and then we took it to market.

00:25:19.079 --> 00:25:29.084
And then the game developers it wasn't nice to have it, didn't?

00:25:29.084 --> 00:25:36.078
It was, um, not something that, uh, the really big guys cared about it, but then the really big guys had their own tools and so the small guys it was like, on the smallest, small game developers, it was just performance was kind of like a nice app.

00:25:36.078 --> 00:25:37.461
It wasn't something that was going to move the needle.

00:25:37.461 --> 00:25:40.406
So, um, that was our first pivot.

00:25:40.487 --> 00:25:41.407
We've done a lot of pivots.

00:25:41.407 --> 00:25:52.001
When we, when the pandemic hit, we decided to focus on e commerce because we saw the boom where a lot of our friends and people that we knew were just getting on top of our and they were selling.

00:25:52.001 --> 00:25:55.840
This is when dropship was a huge back in 2020.

00:25:55.840 --> 00:26:01.303
And what we noticed working with those brands is that there's always been.

00:26:01.303 --> 00:26:14.306
Our thesis has always been how can we use data to help make better decisions or to make it so that you have a more compelling product, or improve the product or improve the customer experience?

00:26:14.306 --> 00:26:20.060
And so this is polyarth thread pivot.

00:26:20.101 --> 00:26:25.324
Once you pivoted into e-commerce, which is all to say that you have to keep, I would have learned the hard way.

00:26:25.324 --> 00:26:26.007
I'm a perfectionist.

00:26:26.007 --> 00:26:31.688
I want to spend a lot of time coming up with this idea and then waiting until it's perfect and then launching it.

00:26:31.688 --> 00:26:34.608
Then we just learned over the years that you just have to ship it.

00:26:34.608 --> 00:26:38.526
The market will tell you, the customers will tell you what's important and what's not.

00:26:40.128 --> 00:26:43.884
One of the things that we found when we found success with the landing page was that there was a lot of.

00:26:43.884 --> 00:26:53.001
It took some time in order to get the landing page just right and in order to start generating the results, and so we made a strategic pivot to.

00:26:53.001 --> 00:26:56.000
We're still building landing pages, but what if we can do this quiz?

00:26:56.000 --> 00:27:02.933
Or what if we could do this lower touch way of getting people to interact with the page and optimize it so that we could show value sooner.

00:27:02.933 --> 00:27:26.625
So I guess my advice to entrepreneurs, especially if you're working, if you're selling any sort of like sas product, is that, uh, we how to get yourself out of the habit of like, building technology and then taking it to market and instead of like, just talking to customers, thinking about what they want and then building technology in parallel to make sure that there was a demand for it yeah, angela, I love that transparency because I'm sure a lot of listeners will relate to your perfectionist tendencies.

00:27:27.125 --> 00:27:34.452
So I want to ask you then what's that line in the sand where you guys say let's ship it, it's, it's good enough, because obviously what you've done is incredible.

00:27:34.452 --> 00:27:39.946
But I know that your product in a year from now is not going to look like the way that it looks now, especially with the nature of ai.

00:27:39.946 --> 00:27:43.557
Obviously, ai is only getting more powerful, it's only learning more things.

00:27:43.557 --> 00:27:44.848
So how?

00:27:44.848 --> 00:27:47.077
How are you forcing yourself to just ship it?

00:27:47.077 --> 00:27:48.202
Because it's easier said than done?

00:27:48.242 --> 00:27:57.373
sometimes it's easier said than done and I think, um, I'll go back to my career experience, because when I my first job out of college, um, again, litigation consulting.

00:27:57.373 --> 00:28:06.539
So our clients were lawyers and the work had to be perfect because we were doing, basically, analysis for litigation suits.

00:28:06.539 --> 00:28:09.250
So it's like fortune fortune 500, fortune 100 companies are being sued.

00:28:09.250 --> 00:28:19.527
So the work that we had to do had to be right, because if it wasn't right, there was another opposing team on the other side that was ready to ridicule our work and so, um, that's kind of where, like, the perfectionist tendencies come from.

00:28:19.527 --> 00:28:31.249
But, uh, thinking back now, like, um, so I, you know, I'm involved in all the data analysis and I look at what the ai does and the work that comes out of the, the data analysis that comes out from the data that we're collecting for our customers.

00:28:32.010 --> 00:28:41.559
And, um, for me it's like, oh, I, I feel like I could always take an analysis further and I could always make it a little bit more interesting, a little bit more complicated.

00:28:41.579 --> 00:28:49.000
But then I have to take a step back, because a lot of the customers that we're working with they don't have dedicated data analysts or a data engineer or any of these resources.

00:28:49.020 --> 00:29:10.814
They're not even looking at their grew analytics data, what people tell which makes sense, because you have have so many things on your plate that for me I had to stop like, hey, what is the most perfect data report or what is the perfect data analysis or what is the great insight, and just present what we have, because a lot of times what we have, people are finding value in what we had, even though from my own, I guess, personal standard, I was like I could be better.

00:29:11.164 --> 00:29:16.959
But then when we showed our clients, they were super happy in that they gave them the insight that was able to help them make a decision faster.

00:29:16.959 --> 00:29:22.676
We've seen again where, like we put together some recommendations and I'm like, oh, these could be better.

00:29:22.676 --> 00:29:25.759
I can feel like you know we can be stronger.

00:29:25.759 --> 00:29:37.116
Or like I want to check this one, check that, and then you present it and then, like, within a couple of hours they've implemented our suggestion to their website and then a couple of days later, you can already see that they've increased engagement or they've already increased conversions.

00:29:37.116 --> 00:29:41.227
So just I guess, being okay with like, is that going to be perfect?

00:29:41.227 --> 00:29:44.865
But even if it's not perfect for me, it could be perfect for someone else.

00:29:45.426 --> 00:29:46.490
Yeah, I love those insights.

00:29:46.490 --> 00:29:52.674
That's kind of the fun world of e-commerce is you can show those tangible metrics and improvements and I think that's really powerful.

00:29:52.674 --> 00:29:59.351
Speaking of which, I can't have you on here and not ask you the technical question.

00:29:59.351 --> 00:30:00.676
We always get emails from listeners about the tech side of things.

00:30:00.676 --> 00:30:04.472
You've mentioned Shopify and obviously there are so many different platforms that people can launch e-commerce businesses on.

00:30:04.472 --> 00:30:08.346
What's the tech of getting Shoplanding AI set up?

00:30:08.346 --> 00:30:09.568
Is it only Shopify?

00:30:09.568 --> 00:30:10.391
Talk to us about that.

00:30:11.232 --> 00:30:19.751
Yeah, so for we're going to launch in or well, shoplanding, if you just want the landing pages.

00:30:19.751 --> 00:30:21.785
We were pretty flat for Magnostic Most of our customers on Shopify, but we also work with WordPress.

00:30:21.785 --> 00:30:27.368
We work with a lot of direct to consumer, but we've also done projects for service brands and B2B.

00:30:27.368 --> 00:30:31.954
And then for this quiz feature, what I'm, what we're going to be launching in a press release.

00:30:31.954 --> 00:30:38.627
It's going to we don't have the name yet, but we'll have a name by the time the press release is out hopefully, no, we will, because the press release is going out.

00:30:38.627 --> 00:30:46.651
That is initially just going to be available for Shopify and we will eventually have an app for the store, but we're releasing in kind of like a closed data.

00:30:46.651 --> 00:30:49.145
We do all the work for you All we do.

00:30:49.145 --> 00:30:57.497
All we need is access to your Shopify and it takes 20 minutes and then we can get your first quiz and first personalized experience up and running yes, I love that overview.

00:30:57.537 --> 00:31:00.020
That will be music to the ears of many e-commerce shoppers.

00:31:00.020 --> 00:31:05.090
And angela, I think that's a real life example of you shipping it because you're just like we don't have a name, but we're gonna have a name.

00:31:05.111 --> 00:31:06.236
We're gonna have a name.

00:31:06.236 --> 00:31:07.482
Yeah, we're still.

00:31:07.482 --> 00:31:12.332
We're deciding between two or three, but the press release goes out next week, so we'll have a name by the press release.

00:31:12.732 --> 00:31:13.574
Heck, yeah, I love it.

00:31:13.574 --> 00:31:14.215
Which listeners?

00:31:14.215 --> 00:31:21.111
For you all, that means that it's already live in the world, so you'll be able to check out Angelo's link in just a second, but, angelo, before we get there.

00:31:21.111 --> 00:31:25.133
I always love asking this question at the end of interviews, because I have no idea which direction you're going to take it in.

00:31:25.133 --> 00:31:40.133
And that is what's your one takeaway, or the one action that you, or, whether they're an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur, this is you speaking not only as a subject matter expert, but someone who is in the thick of it building a business, developing a software, serving customers.

00:31:40.133 --> 00:31:41.436
What's that one takeaway?

00:31:42.746 --> 00:31:47.251
I would say my one takeaway is to just look at your Google Analytics.

00:31:47.251 --> 00:31:49.829
I know that sounds so simple, but there's a lot of.

00:31:49.829 --> 00:31:52.611
We work with a lot of customers who kind of like take it for granted.

00:31:52.611 --> 00:31:58.671
Ga is already collecting all this data for you.

00:31:58.671 --> 00:31:59.153
Least version is GA4.

00:31:59.153 --> 00:31:59.715
And you could just go.

00:31:59.715 --> 00:32:00.519
You know you can watch YouTube video.

00:32:00.519 --> 00:32:03.713
Maybe I'll make a tutorial of how to like analyze it.

00:32:03.773 --> 00:32:07.429
But go into Google Analytics and just look at what the bounce rate is on your website.

00:32:07.429 --> 00:32:11.590
Look at you know what your how long, what the session length is.

00:32:11.590 --> 00:32:14.776
If you want to get fancy, you could also filter that in terms of like.

00:32:14.776 --> 00:32:17.710
Do you see different patterns in terms of your traffic?

00:32:17.710 --> 00:32:25.946
So, are people coming from Google spending more time versus the traffic that's coming from Facebook or coming from a TikTok or whatever traffic source Just get?

00:32:25.946 --> 00:32:33.688
I think a lot of times we talk about data, people get scared or they're not sure what to look at and you kind of just have to like dive in.

00:32:33.688 --> 00:32:36.432
It's one of those things where you just don't be intimidated by it.

00:32:36.432 --> 00:32:48.769
A lot of brands like sit on this treasure trove of data and it's not until someone like my team or you know they work as a consultant that they're able to get all that value of the data.

00:32:48.769 --> 00:32:54.407
But if you've been operating a business for more than a year, you have a ton of data already that you should be able to leverage.

00:32:55.067 --> 00:33:00.953
Yes, angelo, you say that it's simple, but the beauty is it's also free and it's also universal Everybody.

00:33:00.953 --> 00:33:02.855
I love that advice from you, angelo.

00:33:02.855 --> 00:33:13.465
With that said, I know that listeners, especially those who are in the e-commerce world, will be keen to see all the great stuff that you're rolling out, all the great ways that you're serving e-commerce brands, as well as those case studies.

00:33:13.465 --> 00:33:14.709
So much good stuff on your website.

00:33:14.709 --> 00:33:16.270
So drop those links on us.

00:33:16.270 --> 00:33:17.614
Where should listeners go from here?

00:33:18.414 --> 00:33:20.199
Yeah, you can just check that out at shoplandingai.

00:33:21.825 --> 00:33:24.192
Listeners, you already know how easy we're making it for you.

00:33:24.192 --> 00:33:29.895
Down in the show notes you'll find that link directly to shoplandingai Super easy to remember.

00:33:29.895 --> 00:33:34.269
But wherever it is that you're tuning in, you can check the show notes and click right on through to that link.

00:33:34.269 --> 00:33:39.277
So, angela, on behalf of myself and all the listeners around the world, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

00:33:39.277 --> 00:33:40.618
All right, thank you, brian.

00:33:45.605 --> 00:33:48.339
Hey, it's Brian here, and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

00:33:48.339 --> 00:33:51.166
If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

00:33:51.166 --> 00:33:57.957
Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom.

00:33:57.957 --> 00:34:00.381
And I just want to give a shout out to our amazing guests.

00:34:00.381 --> 00:34:09.193
There's a reason why we are ad free and have produced so many incredible episodes five days a week for you, and it's because our guests step up to the plate.

00:34:09.253 --> 00:34:11.217
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00:34:11.217 --> 00:34:12.827
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00:34:12.827 --> 00:34:16.317
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00:34:16.317 --> 00:34:27.266
They so deeply believe in the power of getting their message out in front of you, awesome wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, that they contribute to help us make these productions possible.

00:34:27.266 --> 00:34:35.766
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00:34:35.766 --> 00:34:37.108
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00:34:37.108 --> 00:34:41.708
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00:34:41.708 --> 00:34:43.152
Initiate a live chat.

00:34:43.152 --> 00:34:52.554
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