Hey, it's Kostin with Solutions 8, and I'm excited to welcome back my buddy, Matthew Stafford, founder and CEO of BuildGrowthScale. Matt, thanks for being here as always, buddy. Yeah. Excited to be here. Good to see you. And you have a new initiative that we're just going to dive right into, which is, it's a newsletter specifically for e commerce store owners called the early checkout. first of all, this is a masterclass in CRO right out of the gate. Like I love everything that you've done here. I love the delineation in the offers using font. Without looking messy, you've broken this up in nine different ways. Five minute read, thousands more customers. Like what a great value proposition that is. 29, 000 Shopify owners read this to grow their Shopify stores. this is just so well done. so give me the sales pitch. What's the value prop? Why would I sign up? the part of the reason is, because I actually reached out and got people like yourself, to be contributors. So over the years, obviously we've been doing e commerce at really high level for about 10 years and which is forever on the internet, but, we focus on conversion rate optimization, but there's other parts to e commerce like Google ads, Facebook ads, email, SEO. And so instead of trying to be all things to everybody what we did is we got together with a whole bunch of the very best people in e commerce and asked them to be contributors. And through that. It's meant to be about 800 words for each deep dive. So a good 10, 15 minutes you can go through it once a week, twice a week and basically get all your areas of e comm covered in one spot and then also be able to reach out to the experts that are doing it at a high level. Yeah. I'll share just so our viewers can see, this is the first. publication that I was sent and it's robust. This doesn't feel like generic copy, this feels like really actionable insights and it's a choose your own adventure to it's, what is it specifically that you're looking for? And then you can dive down those rabbit holes as is necessary. Yeah. And we even give you a kind of, Hey, this is what you're gonna find out from this particular article. So you can come back and some peaks are in a test. It's really meant to give you nuggets. Yeah. I'd love to. So newsletters I'm now obsessed with my business partner, Perry Belcher talks about this all the time. like you never thought that newsletters were going to make a comeback. You know what I mean? got me excited about them yeah. I think they have one of the highest valuations of any new business category, but it makes so much sense because we're so overwhelmed with content. you need someone who's smart and discerning to say, here's what to pay attention to this week I'm trying not to be hyperbolic, but I actually really feel this way. I'll get like panic attacks. Feeling like I'm missing out. Yeah. Because I'm in digital marketing, which means all the things. And I'm like, I have to know everything all the time. And it's really nice. I subscribe to four or five newsletters. And I at least feel like I'm not caught unaware when someone's Oh, did you hear about the thing? Like I feel safe. Sure, Protected. Same even in e commerce digital marketing, whenever you're consulting people that are in business, you feel like you have to have a broader scope AI it's such a broad scope that for us, we just keep narrowing it back down to okay, it's a great tool. it does replace. The need for the number of people that you have, but really the way that we've viewed it. And the way that we've talked to our other business owners is to use it as a tool to supercharge yourself. So basically create like super employees. So not get rid of anybody, but give everybody the ability to use a tool that Makes what they do more powerful. And one way that I just give you a couple of examples of what we've talked last using AI's knowledge base where now what you can do is you can essentially put all of your product information into a knowledge base and then have that live on your site as a little chat bot. They're getting really good with in fact, we're actually developing a product. doesn't have to do with e commerce, but using one of those bots, because you can actually make them go out and query information and come back, be very conversational. You can actually have them speak bunch of different things that we're playing with. But just to give you an example one of Our coaching students, they have about a 2, 000 average order value. So their product is extremely technical. Their conversion rate on their site was around 1%, a little over 1%. We. Went in there, cleaned up, took all of their knowledge base from all the different models and all the different things and put it in there. And now it can answer questions and their conversion rate went up over 2%. 2, 000 product, it's literally life changing Everybody that now they can buy more traffic than competitors. I always tell people, chances are you don't have a traffic problem. 90 percent of the time people come to me like we have a traffic problem. I'm like, no, you don't. You have a conversion problem. And when fix that, we'll get to the traffic. I didn't mean to interrupt you. No. I have the same conversation because people come to me and they go, Oh yeah, ads aren't working. I'm like what's your conversion rate? And they're like, Oh, it's 2%. Your ads are working. Yeah. For every hundred people you get to your site, two people are buying. I said, think about the 98 that left that came, go get two more of those. You doubled your business, right? You guys are thinking like, Oh, my ads, I need to send more people. No, you just need to do a better job with the people that already came and you'll double your business way before you have to go buy more traffic. Yeah. yeah, that's not the issue. So for them, essentially, if you think about it, that customer support person is never in a bad mood. They're never short. They can give complete answers. And they probably make way less mistakes and they're on 24, seven. And so you can put guardrails on the backside of it. Like never mentioned our competitors never, be very conversational or be very, jovial, whatever you give it, all these guidelines and it will literally change the way that chat bot works. Is this proprietary or are you using a tech stack that you can share? yeah, there's several of them out there. I will tell you the easiest one to use is probably chatbase. co. That's the one I've seen people using too. Yeah. It's very cool. We're building a custom one for what we're doing just because of the, what we're trying to get it to do, but chatbase will work for 99 percent of Every e commerce owner out there. My experience with people who have used it's not plug and play. You buy it and then it's about how well you train it. And so there's some logic going in on the back end. that one of the things that you teach at BuildGrowthScale? We can, and we probably will just because for us, it's fairly new. So we always do the stuff on our big partner stores first. And then if it's working, then we use that to teach. yeah we're getting some really good results. So now that will then trickle down into our membership where we teach. So for sure. You said something that I really appreciate it because nobody's willing to say this. You said AI will decrease the number of people you need. And so far I think Emperor's New Clothes mantra has been like, oh, no, it's not going to replace people. It's just going to make what they do more effective and they're going to get to focus on what they want to do. And I'm like, no there's definitely going to be a, decrease in the amount of human capital necessary along certain assembly lines, hundred percent. And so what I always say is where you've used it, the people that are making themselves valuable in your company, if the AI reduces. Their value in that particular area, you're going to use them somewhere else. Sure. That's my question for you. What are the roles that you think are not AI proof? Because that's a stupid way to phrase it, but safe now, if somebody is in this role, they should go learn another skill. And if somebody is in this role, you think that they're okay, or, not quite as. Yeah. What we live in the world of data, like that's really what we do. And so we're constantly looking at it. I will tell you that we're keep trying to find ways to let AI, analyze the data for us. Yeah. But no matter what, it's always going to take somebody is going to have to then translate that into how it's going to. Affect the site or hey, what is this data actually telling us? How do we make it better we're measurement marketing piece is still very human. Yes, Chris Mercer. Nope. I don't mercerownesmeasurementmarketing. io. I've said this all the time. I think Mercer is the most important voice in digital marketing. He teaches people how to do exactly what you just said. And here's the best part. Nobody wants to listen to him. Because he has the worst time, he's Oh, I'm going to teach you measurement. And everybody's Oh dear God, no. Like they want to learn offers. But I love that you just brought that full circle. I'm probably going to send this interview to him. I do, I should connect you guys. There's a ton. Yeah, I would love that. We've got a bunch of customers for you. I'm sure. But I think you've got a bunch of customers for him too, because people have to start learning measurement. They have to, it's critical. Yeah. It's amazing. So we're dealing with a company right now. It cracks me up how far into the process they get before they actually start. Thinking, Oh, I need to clean up my data. Oh, I need to do this. And they don't realize like all along the way, they've just been leaking like companies that are doing several million dollars a month. Like they've literally leaked millions of dollars on the way to that because they're doing that now and they have no good data. And so when we go in there and cleaning up just those little things, it's crazy. The difference you take equity deals. I do. Yeah. I would, man, there's gotta be so much leverage for you there because the one or two or three things where you're like, Oh gosh, I could, double the EBIT on this company just by pulling these two levers. Yeah, that's been a huge change for us over the last 12 months. It was more agency work and now we do a lot more Hey, we'd love to come in and have some skin in the game and do something partnership. What are the pre qualifications for that? If somebody wanted to partner with you in that way, they need to be a certain size industry. Yeah, it makes sense. Obviously, a really good idea that we know that we can reach out to some of our other strategic partners that know how to run ads and do things like that we don't do. But typically I would say it's got to be at least a quarter million a month that they're doing gross. Yeah. Sales. Okay. Yep. Because what we see is when you get up to the two, 3 million a month traffic again, like us coming in and optimizing and doing that, it helps and it sure cleans up the process, but they don't get that two to 3 million a month 6 million a month from us optimizing. They've already got it working well enough that it's good. People that are around that 200, 300, 000 a month. They have a good idea. They have a good product. They have a obviously a supply chain. And when we come in and fix the website and clean up the communication and stuff like that, those are the ones that, five, six X and in a matter of months, and that for us is, where the goal is so interesting. So 250 grand a month for you is the line of demarcation where an e commerce business is effectively proven concept. Yeah. We know like you've got a real business here that obviously runs. Yeah. And can in most cases be much bigger once you clean up the CRO. What's and don't give away the secret sauce here or do it's up to you. But if you were to give me the short list, the three or five, man, I go in and this lever, that's the easy button for helping those businesses when they're at that level. The checkout. Matters a lot. That's where all the money, changes hands. So the little changes there make the biggest difference in the business. It's funny how many people, even at that level are still fascinated with their logos and their homepages and all the other stuff, but there's so many more steps to where the money actually transacts. And so what we do is we always start at the checkout and then go forward. Because if I fix your homepage and make it convert way better, all that does is get more people to your product page. If I fix your checkout, you get more money. And then if I fix your cart, you get more money. And then if I fix your product page, you get more money. And so we always start backwards and then, started the checkout and work towards the front of the store, even though they want the look and feel to be better. We just want to make more money. What a phenomenal tip that is, start at checkout. I feel like that could be the name of a newsletter or maybe a training series. Or the early checkout. Yeah. Or the early checkout. Yeah. I guess you already have a newsletter. I'll stop trying to reinvent the wheel. What other AI tools are you using right now that you'd point people at? Obviously chat GPT we use it every day. The cool thing is if someone does a little bit of work with it we've used it to go in and ridiculously change the SEO for a site and would have said, don't worry about it. Just buy traffic, years ago. In fact, that's what I have said for years. Now that you have an AI tool, like you can use bar too, but like these tools will give you exactly what you need to do. And tell you the strategy and everything, and one person can implement it. we did it with a golf site. We use it and they sell used golf clubs. And so it's a constant changeover of different products. But it's great for SEO because now they rank for all kinds of terms for different things. And we really used AI to do it where as a manual process, if you had to rewrite, 8, 000 product descriptions, and then they're always changing, it was never doable without AI. Now it's totally doable with AI. So there's a bunch of branches and this always happens when I talk to you, Matt, because there's all these things I don't want to talk about. I'm curious though, just to backpedal a little bit, do you prefer chat GPT or BARD in certain instances, if you notice one is better than the other for. speaking from my own experience I do that you can hook up Google sheets to chat GPT because by doing that, you can feed in your product feed, you can feed in the Google keyword tool, and then also give it some really good prompts. And then it will literally write all of your product descriptions done in SEO. Way and, we're very specific about how we do it in three sentences or less don't mention X, Y, Z, and then use the most popular keywords and it will write very conversational. Product descriptions, which matters if you think about it, why was Jay Peterman such a success? Cause every single product description is a story and people remember stories. And so if you where, if you're not a copywriter, you'd never be able to do that. Or if you couldn't afford a copywriter, you'd never be able to do that. But now this tool literally gives anybody that's willing to put a little bit of time and effort into it to differentiate themselves. Are you going to Perry's AI Bot Summit? Yeah, I'll be there. I figured. Are you speaking? No. Dude, I gotta, would you be offended if I told Perry he needs to drag you up on stage? No, I don't know. I don't know, he might, it's so close to the time, he might already have his slate figured out, but I'm gonna text him and let him know that you're so funny, dude. You would just sit there in the audience, probably the smartest guy in the room. I doubt it. I don't know, man. You're being too humble. All right. I've made the note for myself. We've only got five minutes left. How do we make this the most productive five minutes of the interview? What do people have to know they're in e commerce? They want to use AI. What are the little hinges that swing the big doors? bEfore we hit record, we were actually talking about mindset and believe it or not. Tactics are fun and they work but it still takes the engine that drives the entire train. And what I've noticed is when the owner or the CEO of the company does the work between their ears, the entire company does better. And so a lot of times. It's, yes, we'll give you things that you can do that will make your business work better and be more profitable. But the things that you do for yourself and learn about yourself are typically going to make your business grow just as much. I had a really unique opportunity to talk to a gentleman who works on behalf of one of the largest private equity firms in the world. And all he does is run around helping them buy businesses. That's his job. And I asked, I was in the middle of my exit what's the thing you're always looking for? What's that one, key. And he goes, we don't buy businesses. We buy founders. Yeah. And I don't care what the business does, how it does it, how long it's been around, what profitability is if the founder's not. And he'll ask things like, what do you read? What do you watch? What time do you wake up? How do you spend your day? Do you exercise? And these are. Goldman Sachs guys, these are number cruncher, bean counter types. You wouldn't ever expect such an esoteric answer, you've heard their name, like they're one of the largest PEs in the world, billions of dollars. And their mandate is by founders, go get the people that do the work between their ears. Yeah. on that subject, I always remember something that Vinnie Fisher I think, he's on the faculty of driven. Okay. Yeah. he said, so many people think I'm going to build this business to exit on and build this business to exit and five years, he said a little shift of go build the business that you would buy in five years. if you're going to exit, you're getting off the ship, right? So every decision that you make is to get it to that point. Then who wants to buy it when you've taken it to the point of wanting to let go of it. If you build the business that you want to buy in five years, five years from now, that business sellable because you've made decisions that are beyond that, that are going to do much better. For me, that's always been something that I've never forgotten is build the business that you want to buy in five years. And it'll be a lot more sellable. I'm going to go tweet that when we're done here and pretend that I came up with it. sell it to two other people. And then after that, it's yours. Then it's mine. Yeah. Those are the rules of the internet, right? It's copywritten hashtag trademark. Where can people find you work with you? Hang out with you. Yeah. Build gross scale. com or they can email me at Matt at build gross scale. com. Okay. And if this is your first time hearing from Matt, this is truly one of the smartest people in the world from an e com perspective. He's been an e com at a high level for a decade. Build, grow, scale, I think has one of the best curriculums, period, full stop when it comes to e commerce development, mostly Shopify strongholds, but not all right. Like a wide variety. Have you seen that go high levels coming out with Shopify killer? haven't, but they've been making waves, so it wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, that'd be worth you and I talking about sometime too. I'm one of their top affiliates, so I gotta convert you over to the dark side. Okay, talk to you about it. Yeah. Y'all go check out Matt. All the links are in the description of the video. Comment, subscribe. You know how YouTube works. And we'll talk to you later.