Welcome to Daily Google News. It's Kasim. I'm here with my new best friends, Payam and Cyrus Pym is the co-founder of By the Numbers. Cyrus was just brought on for operations works on the front of the house. I think of you Cyrus's mother hen. The way that you guys introduced it is Payam is like, he's the founder of The Visionary and he needed co-founder somebody. Co-founder. Fred is the visionary founder, engineer of the product guy. Correct me, dude. Whenever anybody introduces me as the Founder Solutions, and I'm like, that's right. I never bring up John Marin because he gets enough attention as it is. But I like that y'all have the structure you have because very often I think, Payam, when left to your own devices, and I'm speaking as an entrepreneur myself it's really easy to dive deep into the weeds. And it sounds like Cyrus is here to kind of help. Navigate the waters for this amazing tool, which by the way, I'm not an affiliate, I'm not an investor. I have no reason to pimp buy the numbers out other than I'm a believer. Y'all have created something that allows, and I'm gonna do my best to articulate the value. And then, you guys correct me, it allows e-commerce store owners specifically in Shopify. 'cause it's only for Shopify, right? Shopify strollers to visualize their numbers maybe more importantly, and articulate their numbers according to key performance indicators that people don't often think about or use. How did I do there? You did great. How would you do it? I would say that our core philosophy is to track the movement of money between you and your clients. That is where we come from. We believe in that sort of ground truth. We are Switzerland. We're neutral. We don't get into those games of attribution where you try to figure out where your ad spend saw success. We give you the ground truth of what your business is doing by tracking the dollars, and we do it by the numbers. somebody's watching this and they're not going to buy, buy the numbers no matter what period full stop because they don't want to spend the 13 a month they don't want to forego the monthly growth. We have more expensive one, but you know what I mean? Like it's, you look at and you're like, it's stupid not to get this damn thing. And I noticed you have a free version too. Yeah. What I'd like to do is I'd like to leave our, viewers better off than we found them regardless of whether or not they use our tool. Yeah. So, and I think the way that we do that is if somebody were to take what it is that you're doing and they were to do it from themselves. What are the KPIs that you think e commerce store owners need to pay attention to, no matter what, that they generally aren't? Where's the blind spots? There are a couple that I think are so important. And I think the biggest one, which you can kind of do yourself, LTV. You have to be thinking, look, you go out, you do your ad spend for some cohort for some month. Now you have to get some data, you know, you should wait a month, at least a month. Right. But then you should probably get more data before, how good that particular campaign was. Here's the thing though. Every extra month you wait to get data, yeah, the data gets better, but you're paying for it and you're not doubling down on the winners. You're not dropping the losers. This is where predictive analysis and things like LTV can come in. There are a lot of ways to do LTV. There's, you could do, the dead simple LTV, if you just open up Excel, figure out the average tenure, figure out their average order value, and figure out their purchase frequency. Multiply those together for a cohort for a given month, and put that out and say, okay, that's what my October cohort was doing. Average tenure. Average order value, purchase frequency. Yeah. So they're spending 50 on an order. They're ordering 1. 2 times basically before they churn out or 1. 4 times. Kind of know what they're worth. That's your question for new starts or even younger brands. If you're sub two years old or even sub three years old, I don't know. How often somebody comes back. I don't know what my retention rate is. I don't know my ascension rate is. How do you, guess at that without being stupid? That is where machine learning came in for us. There's by the numbers do that. Yeah, you just feed it every piece of data you have. And because we've seen so much, we can pick up trends like the browser that you use when you make an order has a fingerprint, if you're doing it from a bank or at work. Yeah. Like you're at your work console. That fingerprint is kind of unique and machine learning just figures that out. It's like, oh, this person's ordering during the day and they're doing it during their lunch break and they're doing it from work. And we have a pattern. We have an established pattern for how often people who do that and buy at a certain level at a certain time, come back and it just sort of just comes out in the wash and it gives you a slightly better guess, but still a guess. And the longer they're with you, the better your guesses. Cause there's just so much metadata. You like, look, you have everything from their, their billing location, their, currency. Are you an Australia paying in USD? That's a different kind of person than an Australia paying. their frequency is going to be different. Their ascension is going to be different. They were everything's different. And like, I couldn't tell you how I could just tell you that when you throw all those numbers into a matrix and you do, you let the computer figure it out. It gives you back magic answers that we can then verify are better than our guesses. They're better than our simple modification because we look, we make our predictions for the next month and we check. Magic answer is the right way to say that too. Alright, LTV, that's a really good one. What's another one? What's another data point that Cohort retention. Define cohort format. Absolutely. Groups of... Niche... Prospects based off of interest? Yeah, there's two ways to cohort. The most, the easiest way to cohort is just based on when they made their first order. Do it by month, or week, or whatever. Okay. Other way to cohort, a little more sophisticated, I'm going to make a cohort based on behavior. It might be the people who use a discount code, or people whose first order is product X. those are two times. That's so fun. So I could see the difference in retention by people that order the tires before the car and the car before the tires. Yeah. Now I start to see like, Oh, I know my acquisition on the car is higher, but I should go after the tires because they stay longer. Yeah. You can also look at commercial factors that drive that, right? So if you're looking at, was it the trial pack that drove a certain behavior? Or was it the discount that drove the behavior? Or was it the deployment of a campaign that drove the behavior too? So within that, you're also really looking for a human being's behavior patterns and what the result on your business is. That's brilliant. And you called that cohort what? that was cohort retention. what we just walked into was segmentation. Okay, so let's talk cohort retention first. How do I do cohort retention without by the numbers? You just grab your, you divvy up your customers by the first month, whichever month they first made their first purchase. if you bought something today for your first time, you are in this month's cohort. You do it next month, you're in next month's cohort. Unless you're already in this month. Once you're in a cohort, you're in that cohort forever, and then you just track them. And then you can compare month over month retention rates, and you can do that instead of Google Sheets. Like, do they, how often do they come back? And what this tells you, by the way, is like, if you ran an interesting ad campaign in October, and you got a set of clients that spends more money, you'll notice their average order value is higher. You might notice their LTV is different. You might notice that they come back more often, or they come back less often, but they spend more money. You just have to look at like the numbers. Well, it's so fun for a paid traffic guy, because for me, it's always, cost per acquisition, obviously. And if my, seasonal, you have a bunch of products that are seasonal. So seasonal products, if the cost per acquisition is higher during a certain season, you think, okay, that's not the season to maximize the value of our ad spend. So if I'm planning my annual budget and my cost per acquisition is going to be higher, then I might move my budget where it could be lower, but looking. Post click, post conversion, I see, wait a minute, my cost per acquisition is 20 percent higher, but the cohort value is three times because the retention is higher, the average order value is higher, I'm actually making an inadequate decision. That would be a very difficult thing to identify without doing the data analysis that you're talking about. Yeah, and you should just go look at your last year's January cohort. January, February, traditionally, not the best months for almost any store. Why? I don't know why, I always see, I see dips. It's post holiday expend. so we're fatigued. We spent all the money. I'm poor. I don't want to do it again. It's a real thing. They're pairing. So people are paying their December credit card bill in January and Feb. They're broke. That's like a very traditional. Spend and seasonality model for lots of categories of products. Interesting. But if you go look at their cohorts, for some people, people you pick up in January, February are really good customers. if you can project, cause like you have your historical data, you're two years old, you've seen two seasonal sales. You can get a sense of what these people do. Then you can say, okay, it is worth targeting it. If I can think 12 months instead of thinking three months, and that's what the historical data is for. to move from cohort to segmentation, segmentation is this idea of what you as a vendor know, what customer behaviors matter to you, and you should slice up your customers based on that behavior. What if I don't, what are the behaviors that you've seen are perfect question. Most impactful? Absolutely perfect. we obviously start with the standards. We're like people who use the discount code, people who've never used the discount code. People who are in your top percentile spent people with the highest average order value. Mm-hmm. And then perfect segue. R f m analysis. what is R F M? Yeah. Recency frequency, monetization. We call it loyalty. So it's a graph. That doesn't change. It's just boxes you fall into. So have you ordered on the left hand side, you think about how many times you've ordered in the last month, along the bottom, you'll think about how much you spent, and then there is recency, frequency, how recent your last purchase was. So here's your best customer. They've made four plus orders in their lifetime. They've spent the highest amount, and their last order was last week. those immediately get boxed best customer. You have loyal customers. They do, they've done, they do like three orders, and they consistently do it once a month, and they spend a lot of money. You have dormant customers. They made one order. They've never ordered again. And then you can just grab those emails and each one of them, there's a different strategy to talking to them. Your best customers, they don't respond to deals. They don't respond to discount codes. They respond to knowing about what's coming next. If you give them a sneak peek of a product, a new bag. You say, Hey, we're just giving this first to our best customers. They respond to that. Your loyal customers and the ones kind of under your, underneath that, you can activate them in different ways. You can give them newsletters, you can give them, You can give some of the lower end ones discounts. You're dormant ones. You just spam like, sorry to say it, but they're dormant for a reason. Oh, there's buy, you're on subscribe. You're talking to marketers here. You're probably on like, that is our jam. Yeah, you can activate them, but you also don't worry about turning them off. you take more of a white glove approach with the high end, and you take more of a spammy approach with the low end, and as they change in groups, you change your strategy, which is why tools like Klaviyo are so important, right? have you used Klaviyo? I'm obsessed with Klaviyo. Yeah. I'm excited for high level to take Klaviyo over, by the way. Have you heard that they're doing that? No. No, I did not. High level is building out something akin to a Klaviyo, not alternative, but a couple of those features, or at least they were, I don't know if that's still on the roadmap, that'll be interesting to see. And if you're watching this and you want to use high level, make sure you click on my affiliate link in the description of this video. Nice. Go ahead. we integrate with Klaviyo, like Klaviyo has these segments, but we could just take our segments, link it to theirs. We update it every time someone moves in and out of a segment and Klaviyo knows what to do. And the automation just go ahead and fire knows how to speak to people. How not to speak to people. Yeah. So analysis paralysis, you give me all this data. I have all these segments, all the cohorts. Great. I'm overwhelmed and I don't want to do anything. Where's where's the hierarchical structure? Where do you start? I love this question. You set up goals. This came to us. we're product driven company and our customers come to us with problems and we do our best to solve them. This is not an uncommon problem. How do I get my team, say my sales team to move when are they doing enough? When aren't they doing enough? when do I need to go and set a goal. And that's what goals are for. So find a way to set sales goals for your team. We have predictive tools that could tell you how much you're going to make in a month. And I recommend, depending on what the emotions of your team are, you either set the goal below or above what you're about to do anyways, to either give them an easy win when they need it, or push them when they need to be pushed. you have analysis paralysis, but sometimes a little positive kick, it goes a long way, which is why on our sales go, we use a lot of emotes. You don't see emotes anywhere else in our app, except in the sales goals page because that's to motivate. Like, you know, it's all rocket ship when you make it, it's a sad face when you don't, it's a hurrah, you can do it as you're getting there, because it is about that motivation. What are the secret KPIs that you're seeing people base decisions off of that are counterintuitive? Like, what are the things that the more sophisticated e commerce stores are paying attention to that I wouldn't necessarily, it wouldn't occur to me as an early stage owner? Oh, that's so interesting. I don't know what's counterintuitive. I only know what people use. Well, I'm not trying to play gotcha. I'm just curious if there's things on the periphery. I know that's really smart. You live in the corner. No, really smart. Cyrus, you got anything? I was going to go back to the segmentation for a second and just double down on that. And the reason I do that, and it sort of dovetails into your question, is that There is data or sort of insight within insight and it doesn't just come down to the numerical or by the numbers, but it's actually understanding what drove those numbers and the behavior behind it. So if you're saying what are the things on the periphery that you would want people to like really know about or look about is. Understand the numbers implicitly, and I'm going back to segmentation here, but then double down on not just understanding the numbers, the behavior behind them. So why did that free trial create this response? Like we've segmented the data, we've seen that customer group, and we've seen the results behind it. I want to go back and actually understand how that customer behaved in the why, not just the results, right? And I look at that as a balance between lead and lag measures. Right now we have the ability to look at all these lag measures within a business's performance and we have the ability to forecast and we have the ability to set goals. But one thing that you really need to think about as a person who's running e commerce business, you have to think about what is the behavior that's driving these results, right? And some of those things can be more difficult to measure. And yes, we can track clicks. Yes, there can be fingerprints. Within the value chain of how a customer responds. But for me, I was a loyalty or a CRM manager at an e commerce business, all of this data and all of these visualizations and all of this way to look at it, to me, that's table stakes. If you're not doing this, like. There's a huge huge amount of money that you're leaving on the table If you are doing all of this Then the next step for me is looking at the behavior of the consumer and the consumer journey that is driving those results And so if i'm able to do that I can calculate seven different versions of LTV and KPIs that no one's ever heard of. But if you're not building that connectivity and understanding of your customer's behavior, which actually drives those KPIs, that's the gap for me. And the people that I see who do it really, really, really well are naturally curious about that versus trying to think about how do I just move this KPI by half a percentage point this month so I look great to my manager, right? That's the difference maker for me. I could do it in three words. if you're saying it took me like, no, you're brilliant. This is where I got it from. Like everything you said is right. There's one KPI for that. That's like that. There are many products purchased together. So that's exactly kind of what I was driving at, I know they're on the periphery, you don't know when you put it in front and center, it gives you the option to look at something three dimensionally and start to optimize. yeah, that's a great one. you get that. it's a little bit too perfect because it's not a number, it's, great products right yeah there's a number they're like this product was bought 114 times together. You want to know what are pairing? And then you'll know as a vendor, what to do with that data, you know, as a marketer, if you see purchases drop. Very often you could blame interest, let's say, maybe people are buying mechanical pencils and they're buying lead refills and all of a sudden you realize, Oh, my lead refill sales are down. We need to add ad spend to the lead refill campaign. And it's like, no, dude, you ran out of pencils and those two things are always purchased together. You're looking at the wrong dataset. Exactly. Yeah. Those that's fun. So I did some consulting for infusion soft a long time ago. They're a dumpster fire now. So I'm not endorsing them, at the time they were cutting edge they found something that I thought was so interesting. They brought in a guy, some SAS consultant, he'd built who knows what, and did a billion dollar exit, really brilliant human. And he did an analysis of all their customers and he found that. The customers that retained did two things. They uploaded their contact list into the infusion soft CRM, and they sent their first email blast. And you think like that's the most rudimentary set of whatever that I've ever heard, but the infusion soft built their sales team so that you didn't get commissions. Until the person you sold uploaded their contact list and sent off the very first email blast and then their retention went from like averaging three months to 14 months because now you actually have their contact information you're sending. I've always thought that that was such a brilliant analysis and it was so simple. It was bam inflection point. We're going to focus on this. I also feel like you can do that in ecom. I don't know how, and it's really easy for me to be like, you guys look what they did over here. How do we carry this? But you've got the numbers in order to be able to identify, because there are e commerce stores where I just feel like, yeah, we do. We have a client that does barbecue sauce and there's this. There's a difference between somebody that comes in and buys a sample pack and somebody that comes in and buys a sample pack and then buys the barbecue to us every single month. And I just feel like there's ways to influence that a little. You're so on point. We just set this out in our latest drip campaign, where we told people that we see a 5 percent increase in sales for customers that use segmentation. If you use segmentation by the numbers, your sales are going up. So I don't know, it's dead simple. All you're doing is saying, let me split my customers based on behavior. I don't like you could be doing a million different things with that data, but just the act of thinking about your customers in different ways and saying, I just want to know about customers whose first purchase was this. Yeah, it's relevancy right guys. Yeah, it's being specific, maintaining continuity, congruence with their journey. it's relevant to me my background, I come from a package good space, right? So, consumer package goods, alcohol, Bev, cannabis, that's my background and sort of what I love and get very curious about is behavior and the why's behind it, for me, the segmentation piece is key because you're actually speaking to the customer in a more realistic way and something that's more relevant and it's less spammy. Right. Like it's more relevant to how I behave and how I think as a consumer versus, this is a generic message for everybody. And that's the difference. I feel like you get me as a brand, I'm emotionally connected to you dependent on what you're selling. The consumer may be ingesting this product into their bodies. They may be wearing these products. They may be slathering it all over their skin as a cream. And that has a real, real emotional connection with the consumer. And if the consumer thinks for a second that the brand is talking to them, the way they talk to everybody, that's a huge gap. And that's a gap that you can actually close by understanding people better, whatever method you want to get to understanding, whether it's, understanding products bought together, understanding what drove trial, understanding what drove a repeat or a higher acquisition. It just comes back to you understand me. I feel emotionally connected with you. And as nerdy as it is using the data can actually help you get to that understanding of the consumer. I feel like you need a podcast. You got that like classic communicators cadence that just desires to be heard. You're good at this dude. I like everything that you just said. I especially like the way that you connected numbers to an empathic understanding of the human condition as it relates to your products. Because I could say like, Oh, I sell barbecue sauce who gives a shit. Or I could also say, I sell something that you're about to put in your children's body, which is what you just said. Like that's a sacred trust. That's a big deal, like I am responsible for something that you're going to ingest, and I should look at it that way. I really love that you went there Payam, you said something that I just said your name, right? Yep. Absolutely. You said something that struck me, and I don't know if you're allowed to share this or want to share this. It's a two part question. How many Shopify stores used by the numbers? Part one. Part two. Are you and do you amalgamate all that data so you can see trends and start to look at like, oh my goodness, the, planets are shifting. That's exactly it. retrograde. Okay. We cannot ever share data about any individual user. Right. We can amalgamate that user, throw it into a matrix do multiplication over it, and then everyone can benefit. In the predictive tools. So some industries are sort of leading indicators or lagging indicators of sales. And we could use that. So the more data we have, the better our prediction is for the individual, if that makes sense. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, it's similar. Yeah, but we never surface anything because it's just machine learning. it's a matrix of numbers. You don't even have to reason that as you get bigger you get better because you have more clients to build into the mechanism. I didn't share with you numbers. I have no idea. Do we share numbers? I'm not sure if we share numbers. I don't care, but this guy's in charge of this stuff. Don't if you're not comfortable with it. There's reasons. I think you should always be honest about everything and hide nothing, Yeah, well, you're the by the numbers guy. So let me ask you this. Categorically speaking, I think we could speak percentages. What are your users are generally what like consumables, apparel, accessories, where do you live? Question. Full analysis to figure out the, do you have a sense? You don't know your own segments. I don't know my own segments. Listen, talk to Cyrus about this. Your sales list by 5%. As soon as Cyrus's bag. What I was going to say was we actually just spent a whole bunch of time doing some segmentation to learn more about our customers. And this span. Of our customers is really interesting in the sense that from a revenue generation perspective, it's like A to Z, like it's really, really cool. We've got some customers in the 150, 000 range, and we've got customers in the a hundred million dollar range. Is that, that's monthly. annual revenue. So what's really cool about that is the level of sophistication of who you're working with, right? you're all the way from a mom and pop to, I've got five people working on my e commerce loyalty team, right? That's the span of our client base. And for me, I love that because I get to help the sole proprietor and I get to help the, giant company and everything in between. So. I could sit here for hours and talk to you about the segmentation, but the revenue segmentation is super wide. The geographic segmentation is really cool too, in the sense that we've got a lot of customers in North America, we've got a ton of customers in Europe, and we even have customers all the way in Australia as well. Do European customers suffer from the GDPR issues as far as number tracking is concerned because you can't append those numbers to individual prospects? Have you been able to hurdle that at all? Or do you just have a We comply for everybody. we just decided that we should do it their way for everybody. So the tool works across the board no matter what? Okay. Yeah. Compliant. Yeah. Yeah. GDPR frustrates the shit out of me because it feels impossible to comply with. it was not fun for Fred is what I would say. Okay. Didn't hurt me. So there's geographic segmentation, there's revenue segmentation, but when it comes to the product side, I love going to our customers websites because it's links is to their URLs and I go and click on it and. All I can say so far is the diversity is extremely wide and there doesn't seem to be any sort of trend right now. The only trend that we're really finding is the customers are linked through Individuals that we're starting to start conversations with. And those are, people who work at an agency level, like they love our product and they go and tell their customer groups. We were speaking to an individual and she shared with us that, she recently worked on these five different customers and it turns out they all became customers of ours, right? So that was the only common theme that we found, but. everything from fishing gear to clothing and apparel to food based products to sports based products. The spectrum is super wide. And to me, that is a really exciting opportunity as somebody coming into a business, because I'm not obsessed about sort of tailoring something to a particular product vertical, which makes my job very complicated. But what it signals to me on the other side is saying, Hey, This stuff is important for everybody. I don't care what you sell. Like, you could sell, socks or you could sell fishing rods. This data, however you choose to get it, however you choose to package it, however you want to visualize this data, just go and do it because it'll help drive your business. Hmm. Where do people find you guys? If I want to go try Buy the Numbers, where do I do that? Buythenumbersapp. com or on the Shopify store. Look for Buy the Numbers. And if somebody wanted to start using it, how hard is it to set up? It's one click. You don't need a credit card. It's free for two weeks. that's it. Only for Solutions 8 YouTube channel though, right? Absolutely. You have to mention Solutions 8. Mention this podcast. That's right. So here we are, buythenumbersapp. com. Y'all, John sings this app's praises beyond belief. That's how Payam and I met, actually. He came onto the Perpetual Traffic podcast and started pimping it out. Did y'all get any lift from that? We did. That's how I heard about you. I had multiple customers reach out to me and say they heard it through your app, your podcast was really exciting. Also for a small company like us, where it's just like two, three people, it makes such a difference to hear stuff like that. Yeah. It's really emotionally uplifting. I don't know how else to put it. Thank you. You're doing great work in a great way. I love your product first paradigm. Nobody does that anymore. You know what I mean? Like nobody, especially in the software space, dear God just been cannibalized and it's sad because it's been cannibalized by the smartest people in the world. You know, like when something's been cannibalized by dummies, like real estate, it's like, all right, I'm going to go beat the dummies. But when something's been cannibalized and it's like the most finances this way too, it's just like, oh, the smartest people in the world. are taking this and they're ruining it and it's hard to fight. So when you see some guys that fit in that moniker, like you're obviously part of the consortium, there's the smartest guys in the world, but you just chose to do it kind of in a slightly different way. I feel that way about Sam Altman. I think the way they built open AI and chat GPT is, is absurd from a monetization perspective. It makes no damn sense whatsoever, There was the right way to do that. By the way, do you use it? I use it every day. I'm obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with Sam. I'd cuddle with that guy. If he allowed me. Dude, big spoon, little spoon. I just think he's great. Yeah. But it's because it's not how are we gonna ROI instantly. It's, hey, I think I'm doing something that's gonna have a massive impact on people's lives and I should probably do that the right way. And you guys seem to be approaching this in a very similar fashion. And if you're watching this, we obsess over this all the time. If you don't know your numbers, This is the easy button. Not an affiliate. I don't have an affiliate link. I should at some point, I'm going to get one, but right now today, just go to buy the numbers, install it into Shopify. you've got 14 days. If you don't make one actionable decision based off of the data, then jump ship. But if you don't make one actual decision based off of the data, you're doing something wrong. So really appreciate y'all being here and hope we have you back. There's strategic partnerships in the future. Last words to you guys. What are the closing comments for people watching? I don't go for it. Sure. Thank you to everyone who uses our product. Honestly, we are, like you said, product driven. We care about you as a customer. So reach out to me. I answer and read every single email that sent you're not talking to a faceless customer service person. You're talking to co founders. Tell me what you use it for. Tell me what you wish you could use it for. That's how we've gone to where we are. I love that, man. That's great. Like, comment, subscribe. You know how YouTube works. I'll see y'all tomorrow. Peace!