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Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from an e-commerce expert on what specific online platforms are best for selling a new product direct to consumers.

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Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product developers,

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Narrator: and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store shelves.

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Narrator: We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses.

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Narrator: Now, onto the show.

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Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm excited to introduce Deirdre Shien to the show. Deirdre is the president of Growth Boss, an e-commerce strategy agency. Her team helps product startups scale to six and seven-figure online product businesses.

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Kevin Mako: Today, Deirdre is going to describe which online sales platforms are the best for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers that are looking to sell their product directly to end consumers, along with some best practices on those sales platforms. Now on to the episode.

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Kevin Mako: Hi, Deirdre, welcome to the show. Hi, Kevin. Thanks for having me on.

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Kevin Mako: Yeah, glad to have you here.

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Deirdre Tshien: So I understand that you're Australian, but 18 months ago, you moved to New York City. I did, yeah. It was a great time to move over here to the city. States into New York. Yeah,

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Kevin Mako: let me tell you, but I've had a heaps of fun. I've had so much fun over here. So you were moving then from the winter and coming to New York and the summer

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Deirdre Tshien: then basically on that same day. Yeah, it was insane. We had, it was us, my husband and I, and basically I think between us, we had like eight suitcases. That was all we brought. And we were in, you know,

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Deirdre Tshien: garbed up in our winter gear over in Sydney and then we come over here and it is hot. It is stinking hard and we're dragging out eight suitcases around and it was like, let me tell you, it was messy

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Kevin Mako: and just not a good sight.

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Kevin Mako: You know, I've seen a lot of people do it the reverse where they're coming from summer and landing in winter and shorts. So I think it's a lot better that you did it that way in any case.

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Kevin Mako: Well, I'm very excited today to talk about e-commerce. It's a big deal. It's continuing to increase as a major launch platform for both new start.

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Kevin Mako: up products, hardware products, but also companies that are releasing their next iteration of products as a first launch space. So I'm excited to talk to you about e-commerce. Just give our listeners

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Deirdre Tshien: a bit of a background on how you got into the space of being an expert in the e-commerce world. Yeah, I feel like it's a long and convoluted journey, but just to give you the Cliff Notes version,

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Deirdre Tshien: I start in corporate, as a lot of us entrepreneurs do in banking. My first business was actually in hospitality,

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Deirdre Tshien: but then, you know, fast forward,

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Deirdre Tshien: I ran a digital marketing agency. I started my own e-commerce product in skincare, and now here I am.

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Deirdre Tshien: There's obviously a lot that happened in the meantime, but yeah, I'm really passionate about e-commerce

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Kevin Mako: because I think there's just some really, really cool opportunities, as you said, out there for people who are getting into it. Absolutely. So let's break e-commerce down top-down.

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Deirdre Tshien: What are the different platforms, at least some of the main platforms, platforms right now for people to launch our products on digitally. Yeah. And look, there's platforms from like a, what I call your shop. So you're, you know,

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Deirdre Tshien: the place where you make the transaction. And there's platforms where you want to go and actually find your audience. And so you would, you know, you know, you would know, you would know, like a lot of the platforms where you, you know, it's like transactions that shop, but it can be a Shopify, a root commerce, big commerce. Even at Amazon,

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Deirdre Tshien: Etsy, eBay, you know, those are kind of the platforms that you can be on to, just sell the thing that you're looking to sell. But then what you really want to be focusing on very quickly is actually because you need to go find your audience. You need to go, you need to

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Deirdre Tshien: go, you know, for people who are going direct to consumer, you need to go out there and you need to fill your, what I call your funnel. You need to go fill your sales funnel. And you do that through platforms like, you know, Facebook, Instagram,

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Deirdre Tshien: Pinterest is up and coming, TikTok is up and coming clubhouse is a new one. There's all these different platforms that are popping up everywhere that, you know, you want to just make sure, though, that you don't want to be overwhelmed. So don't try to be on all of them.

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Deirdre Tshien: You want to be on the ones where you are fairly confident that your audience is on. So a pretty safe bet, I always say, is going to be Facebook because there's over 2 billion people on there.

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Kevin Mako: So you're going to have, you're going to hit your audience at some point on that platform. So that's a really great place to start.

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Kevin Mako: That's great. So let's unpack Facebook. So, you know, high level, we've got our two platforms. Essentially, your platforms which attract and then your transactional platforms, which are actually selling. So

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Kevin Mako: first things first is we need to attract people to be interested in our product.

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Kevin Mako: And Facebook, I agree. It's a fantastic opportunity.

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Deirdre Tshien: Break down Facebook and how it can be used and how it should be used to start generating interest around your product.

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Deirdre Tshien: Yeah. This is a really good one because I think there's this, I want to say misconception in the, you know, in the marketplace or in the industry for anyone coming into business. And

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Deirdre Tshien: I hear this a lot. I work with a lot of e-commerce business owners. And, you know, they come to me and they're like, I've tried all, I've tried running all these ads and then just not converting. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool. Like, tell me a little bit more about that. You know, when did you start your business? And they were like, like, two

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Deirdre Tshien: weeks ago, a month ago, like, you know, three months ago. And I'm like, okay, I think there's a reason why. They're not working. And so that's what I kind of wanted to talk about, which is, you know, and I'm going to be honest, I started my own e-commerce business with this same misconception. So it's not like I know any better.

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Deirdre Tshien: I literally came across this because I made all the same mistakes, which is I was like, this is going to be easy. I know how to run ads. I know how to run Facebook ads. So I just need to build my own e-commerce

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Deirdre Tshien: brand, run some ads and money in the door, right? But unfortunately, we'd all be millionaires if it worked that way, so it doesn't work that way. What we don't get told is that there's this missing

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Deirdre Tshien: step in between of you actually have to find your audience, build an audience, and it can be a small base to begin with, you know, 50 to 100 people, but you need to know who they are before

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Deirdre Tshien: you can actually start effectively running ads to people like them, to people who have similar interests.

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Deirdre Tshien: Otherwise,

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Deirdre Tshien: you are going to spend a lot of money just trying to find them with your ads.

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Deirdre Tshien: And I made that same mistake. I spent like $1,200. I don't even, I can't even believe I did that, trying to find my people through ads and it just didn't work. So really,

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Deirdre Tshien: what I tell my clients and anyone that I come across is, especially if you have a new business, you want to do it organically first. So find your audience, I find individual, literally individuals organically,

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Deirdre Tshien: make sure that they are the right buyer because we all have a hypothesis about who our is, but sometimes that's not the case. Make sure that they're the right buyer. Build that

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Kevin Mako: audience of ideal buyers and then you want to reinvest into ads from there. And that's how you actually do it cost effectively to, yeah, to actually get the traffic in. So build some fans

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Kevin Mako: before you're trying to sell. And, you know, there's a bit of a side note here talking about Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We have a lot of clients that look at that as the end game, whereas, okay, I'm ready to go to production.

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Kevin Mako: I've got my prototypes and, you know, I've got all my materials to go on there. And I'm going to go on there and they're going to sell all kinds of products for me because I've got this great new product.

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Kevin Mako: But what they're missing is this critical step that you're talking about here is getting those interested parties in the door before you asked them to buy. Yeah.

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Kevin Mako: And that is absolutely critical to the success of almost any e-commerce campaign. And you obviously went through that, that journey yourself, right? You tried to advertise first.

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Kevin Mako: You're asking people for money first before they even know a what your product is or how it's a value to them or just why that product is going to change their life or create a pain point resistance, you know, improvement or whatever you want to call it.

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Kevin Mako: But realistically speaking, people aren't instant decision makers for the most part. And you're losing a lot of money on the table as well if you're trying to convert only the instant buyers. You're missing all of those people who you might have been able to curate over

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Deirdre Tshien: time to become buyers when you're actually ready to pull the trigger. Totally. So that's great insight. So how does that work on Facebook? I know one of the biggest benefits of Facebook is around targeting. So how do you actually build your tribe before you're

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Deirdre Tshien: ready to send them to the buy now button? Yeah. So and I get this question a lot because people are like, but I have a Facebook page, you know, and I like I post on there all the time and it doesn't get any engagement. I'm like,

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Deirdre Tshien: yes, you kind of have to understand a little bit more about Facebook and how it works because Facebook page is great for credibility. You need one just to, you know, if people are searching you, they can come across your brand and know that you have a page, which I don't know why it's there for credibility.

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Deirdre Tshien: But, you know, it does provide that. But really, if you think about how I like to think about platforms, any social media platform is what is their strategy, what is it end game, what is it that they are trying to build and then you want to align with that.

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Deirdre Tshien: So with Facebook, for example,

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Deirdre Tshien: you know, if you kind of look through their history, it was like very much about the personal profile, which is great. And then it became, now they need to monetize it. So let's build, you know, business pages. And that was great. And then it came to a point where it was like, no, we really need to monetize it.

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Deirdre Tshien: So we hook the people. We hook the businesses in. And now it's like, okay, we're not going to let you,

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Deirdre Tshien: we're not going to show your posts unless you pay us to, which is where all of these, this boosting comes into it, right? And that you'll always see, if you have a business page on there, they're always telling you, hey, spend $5, spend $10 to boost this post.

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Deirdre Tshien: And that's because, you know, they want to monetize it. And so it kind of, the strategy kind of went away from, you know, just like helping businesses have it be a place where you could, you know,

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Deirdre Tshien: promote your services for pretty cost, cost effectively to wanting to charge for that. And now it's all about, you know, we really want to build communities.

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Deirdre Tshien: We really, we want people to spend more time on Facebook and to do that, it's going to be through communities, which is why I tell all my clients, it's a little bit, it

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Deirdre Tshien: might be a little bit counterintuitive because, you know, they're always like, I don't know what, like, I don't know what you mean when you talk about products or hardware, you know, physical things, but I tell them build a Facebook group, right? Because you want to build your own community,

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Deirdre Tshien: your own tribe, in and align with the strategy of the platform. And the strategy of platform is to build community. So you want to do it. that. And so what I find really effective is, and why that's effective as well is because when

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Deirdre Tshien: you look at, you know, when people are like, but I have a Facebook page, it's not getting any engagement, it's not getting any reach.

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Deirdre Tshien: And then they build, they have their own group. They can see like, it's like chalk and cheese. The reach and the engagement on a group post versus a page

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Deirdre Tshien: post is miles apart, which is, and you can see that's because Facebook wants to reward certain behaviors.

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Deirdre Tshien: So that's kind of, that's like, so that's, that's one one thing, right? Build your Facebook group. The other reason why I like that is because then you have a, I call it kind of like, and we can definitely go into, you know, what a sales funnel means, but I call your group and your

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Deirdre Tshien: email database, actually, those two things, the middle of your funnel, okay? You need a landing page, not a landing page, you need a net, you need somewhere for your people to land. And so I always say

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Deirdre Tshien: either email or your Facebook group because those are right now the two best places for you to be able to reach your audience almost one to one because you know you're not yes in a group

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Deirdre Tshien: you're at the mercy of your algorithm still and you know that this could definitely change 100 percent but right now your your post actually gets a lot of reach you can actually tag people that are in your group so that they can see you know like there's a lot of cool things that you can

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Deirdre Tshien: do with that.

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Deirdre Tshien: And so what I say is you want a landing place, landing place for these people, for your tribe. And then when you start to actually advertise or run ads with things like interest targeting,

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Deirdre Tshien: with lookalike audiences,

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Deirdre Tshien: you actually have a place for them to go right now where you can continue to nurture them. You can continue to, you know, without it being quite caught. And the reason why I like that rather than, for example, your website is because especially if you haven't launched yet, your website can be a little bit cold.

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Deirdre Tshien: It's kind of like a,

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Deirdre Tshien: you kind of slam me into a brick wall in a way. Like, you know, you're going to your website and it's like, well, now what?

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Kevin Mako: Especially if you don't have something that yet to sell,

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Kevin Mako: you know, which I know a lot of your audience might not because they're still in, you know, invention mode.

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Kevin Mako: And they, you know, they, so the best place actually for you to get your audience is in a group so you can nurture them, you can talk to them. You can actually connect with them, you know, human to human, person to person, and have them believe and buy into you and your cause

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Kevin Mako: and what it is that you're trying to do.

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Kevin Mako: And then when you're ready to sell them something,

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Kevin Mako: immediate sales.

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Kevin Mako: That comes down to, I mean, that's great, right? Focus on the group, your tribe, your followers, your fans, before you're ready to sell, because you can then what we call

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Kevin Mako: kind of cross-pollinate, which is where you're, you know, what you're talking about. So if you've got a lot of activity on the group, it will actually start to cross-pollinate your Facebook page because people will say, well, I'm very interested. This person is active. They're helping this. Company is giving me value.

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Kevin Mako: Where can I learn more? Where can I learn about what they do? And of course, it's all in line with your brand and whatnot. So it's a very easy transition for them at that point to say, I know these folks. I trust them. I like the problem that they're trying to solve.

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Kevin Mako: And now I can start, you know, looking at their avenues as you bring offers to them.

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Deirdre Tshien: it's going to be very closely aligned to many of that, that, that many people within that audience group. So if we talk about cross pollination,

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Deirdre Tshien: you know, you've, you've talked about Facebook group pollinating to a potential page or a sales channel.

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Deirdre Tshien: How do we use other medias, uh, mediums, I should say, like Instagram or even TikTok to now start building that tribe, curating that, as you said,

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Deirdre Tshien: middle of the funnel group, the pre-purchase group. What can we do to use other platforms and what other platforms do you like and how do you actually use those to start kind of enhancing your

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Deirdre Tshien: product essentially? Yeah. So the platforms I'm really liking right now,

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Kevin Mako: like obviously Instagram

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Deirdre Tshien: and Facebook because it has the most audience. But in a way, it's good and bad with that, right? Because there's a lot of people on there, but then the bad thing is there's a lot of people on there, which means that there are a lot of other businesses. It's very saturated. So it's very hard

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Deirdre Tshien: for your message to cut through. But obviously for credibility, for reach like for potential reach purposes you want to be on those platforms um the other great thing about

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Deirdre Tshien: instagram as well um is that it is the one um place that um easily connects with other platforms like clubhouse which is a brand new platform um you know because you can put your you can link your

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Deirdre Tshien: instagram profile to yep i'm having fun on club host by the way that that is new awesome we should totally um we should totally um we should totally um co-host a room by the way um so yeah awesome so yeah so you know

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Deirdre Tshien: Clubhouse. Same with TikTok. You know, you can link your Instagram page to your TikTok profile.

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Deirdre Tshien: And so, yes,

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Deirdre Tshien: I'll always like Facebook and Instagram for those purposes. I'm really liking Pinterest as well for hardware slash product-based businesses because the thing that you sell is very visual, right? Because it's a thing. And whether it's even

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Deirdre Tshien: sketches of it or, you know, or of it in context or not even your product, but just, you know, the context of, depending on what you're selling,

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Deirdre Tshien: like for example, if I think about skin care, then it's a context of bathrooms. It's, you know, it's your living. It's, it's, it's become, it becomes more lifestyle, which is why I really love Pinterest. And the thing with Pinterest as well is that it's very,

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Deirdre Tshien: similar to Google, it's very search. It's, it's such focus, which means that people on there have an intention. So, because when they search, it means that you know

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Deirdre Tshien: that they're, you know, partway through in terms of the biopsychology psychology process, like they're already problem aware slash solution aware, whereas the great thing about a Facebook

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Deirdre Tshien: is that it creates a demand. So it's more, these are people who might be symptom aware and you're actually bringing them along the curve by making them problem aware and then therefore solution aware. I know I'm throwing all these terms out there, so please stop me if you need me to like go into anything. But,

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Deirdre Tshien: and then TikTok is actually really cool because, yes, it has a, it has a

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Deirdre Tshien: a younger audience, which is why I actually tell a lot of our clients don't actually spend a lot of time on their, you know, trying to create your own videos and trying to make things go viral,

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Deirdre Tshien: because the last thing that I want people to do as they are starting to build a business is to become overwhelmed by all these platforms, because you can 100% be on all these platforms, but that means that you're not going to be effective at any one of them.

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Deirdre Tshien: That's just how we are, right, as humans. we have to focus. So what I would say is focus on probably Instagram and Facebook and your

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Deirdre Tshien: Facebook group. That's what I would focus on. And then I would leverage a platform like a TikTok to not actually be on there from a profile, from a brand perspective, but more so engaged with

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Deirdre Tshien: influences on TikTok to actually help a drive an audience, but also be create content for you. And when we talk about cross pollination, the reason why, because I, and you know, I get asked this all the time, but like, but why TikTok? Everyone's so young.

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Deirdre Tshien: And yes, they are young. I'm not going to lie.

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Deirdre Tshien: The demographic is changing slightly, like it is getting a little bit older as it becomes more and more prevalent.

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Deirdre Tshien: But the reason why I really like it is because

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Kevin Mako: when you get influences on there, creating content for you, that content actually makes really good Facebook ads and Instagram ads.

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Kevin Mako: Got it. Very clever. Yeah. So you're actually repurposing things and thinking about things a bit differently, right?

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Kevin Mako: And the reason why I like, and the reason why TikTok videos do so well on, you know, on Facebook and things like that is because of the pattern interrupt. And so whenever I talk to my clients about, you know,

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Kevin Mako: all of their messaging, whether it's on email, whether it's on an ad, whether it's a post, you always want to be thinking about how do I interrupt my audience's pattern because that's the only way that they're going to actually stop and pay attention to what it's you're trying to say.

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Kevin Mako: And so that's why I like leveraging TikTok videos for that purposes. Right. How do you interrupt their patterns? That is key. In marketing, that's always been a known thing. That unless you interrupt somebody's pattern,

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Kevin Mako: you are not generating interest because whatever you're offering is, even if it's for the better, which obviously, you know,

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Kevin Mako: hopefully your product is for the better, then ideally you still need to, you still need to convince somebody to change their habit,

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Kevin Mako: to either purchase your product or to use your product or to understand that that's a pain point that now can be solved or whatever else. But it's changing. It's creating a disruption, a positive disruption, but a disruption nonetheless in their life.

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Kevin Mako: Something I want to highlight on that, particularly when it comes down to hardware products, especially for the listeners here, whether you're developing your first product or whether you've been in the product business for 50 years and you're innovating on your next version or next product.

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Kevin Mako: The big key here is that building this following of people,

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Kevin Mako: as Deirdre is saying, the community, not your buyer, but the community, one level up the sales funnel to your buyer, your tribe, your group, your community around the pain point that you're solving.

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Kevin Mako: Doing that is actually far easier than people think. You don't have to be changing the world to build a tribe. That's one of the first and biggest strongest, you know, arguments to this

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Kevin Mako: that startups especially think about. They say, well, look, my widget is just, you know, improving the flushing of a toilet or something like that, right? I mean, you know, you've got so many products would seem like, okay, it's just a slight improvement or a slight modification,

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Kevin Mako: but you've got a planet of seven billion people. So if that is solving a continual everyday frustration for even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of percent of people.

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Kevin Mako: That's a lot of people who will be very interested and be an advocate for you as the hero who has come up with the solution to that problem, not only come up with the solution, but you're actually the one that's going to execute and create an option for them

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Deirdre Tshien: to solve that problem. And that has an incredible amount of power and value. So anybody with their invention, anybody with their product that's helping in any way to any demographic, no matter how niche it is, can build this tribe.

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Deirdre Tshien: fact, as you mentioned, the more niche you make it, the exponentially easier it is to actually build the tribe, to actually hit the very direct pain point that they have. We talk a lot about focus on the show. So now, you know, talking about simplicity, Deirder, you mentioned a lot of

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Deirdre Tshien: things in terms of many different social platforms here.

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Deirdre Tshien: It may sound a bit daunting, but it really isn't that daunting to execute. What are, if you were starting out a product tomorrow, a new one, and I know you've done a few and you've worked with many clients who have,

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Deirdre Tshien: but what are some of the first few steps that anybody can do fairly easily just to get the ball rolling at least? And then from there, you know, how do they grow that system? What's the easiest, lowest hanging fruit things that they can do?

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Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, so I think the first thing is, as we said, find your people. So get on,

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Deirdre Tshien: build your Facebook group or your Instagram page or your, actually, I wouldn't say Facebook page as to be in which. If you could only do one thing, I would either build a Facebook group or your Instagram page. Perfect. And that's free and it takes 10 minutes. Exactly. Exactly.

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Kevin Mako: And you know what? It does not have to be perfect. Like I, again, I do work with a lot of clients and a lot of them are women.

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Kevin Mako: And perfectionism is one. It's like, I do it too. So guys, it does not have to be perfect. It doesn't have to look like the best thing. But what I want you to do is how can you be really real on those

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Kevin Mako: platforms. So how can you show up as you? How can you show up with, you know, talking to the, the problem that you're trying to solve or the end result that you're trying to get your

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Kevin Mako: customer to? And doing that and then you will start to find that you will have other people rally around you who either have that problem right now or looking to get that to that after point, to that result that you're going to help them get to.

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Kevin Mako: It does not have to be perfect, does not have to look the best.

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Kevin Mako: Eventually, once you actually get into the swing of things and you know that platform inside out, which you will, trust me, you will, then yeah, you can

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Deirdre Tshien: start thinking about how do I make this look a little bit prettier? How can I make this look more cohesive? How can I start to put branding behind it? But guys, like, I would highly suggest just get started. Just that's just get started. And I think you mentioned it right

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Deirdre Tshien: there. Just start posting authentic value. Like, what are you trying to do? How are you changing the world? You don't have to spend a week figuring out what post you're going to put on your on your Facebook group, just get, what's on top of mind? What are you trying to solve? How are you trying to

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Deirdre Tshien: solve it? Who are some people that you're trying to solve it for? And what's some news in the space? What are some articles of, you know, highlighting others that are maybe going through the same pain point? It shouldn't take you no more than five minutes, at least in the early days, to

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Kevin Mako: think about a post, to type up something quick, two or three sentences, and to get it out there. And at least you've started. Obviously, you want to be a little bit more strategic as you grow. But

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Deirdre Tshien: But I'm a big fan of just get the ball rolling. It's all about execution. Deirdre, so if people do want to take it to the next level and start enhancing their brand,

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Deirdre Tshien: either pre-sale or post-sale across a number of platforms and understand kind of the strategies and all that, how do they find you and how do you help them? Yeah. So I actually have, so I have a coaching program.

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Deirdre Tshien: My coaching program will actually help you build your entire marketing ecosystem. So all these platforms, all the ads that I've been talking. about. We'll spend a good amount of time with you to build that out. If you want to know more about

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Deirdre Tshien: that, I'm actually holding a free three-day challenge that will take you high level through

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Kevin Mako: the strategy of what, you know, of those concepts, so that you can know a little bit more

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Kevin Mako: behind the scenes around, you know, how we think about things and how we implement. So if you're interested in that free, three-day challenge, it's at www.thegrowthboss.com forward slash challenge.

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Kevin Mako: And we'd love to see you guys there. amazing the growth boss dot com forward slash challenge yeah perfect exciting i've got to run through that just because uh i'd love to see the content in there in terms in terms of the podcast that you run

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Kevin Mako: you've got to mention that as well oh yes yes so i co-host a podcast it's called the making it podcast um and it is actually about the skincare e-commerce business that um my co-founder and i started

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Kevin Mako: and it's basically a real time on the ground chat about what are all the things that we're doing that week, that day, what's working, what's not, things that we're thinking about doing. So it kind of takes you with a little bit of insight.

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Kevin Mako: You speak to some really cool people like yourself, Kevin, on there who have also, who brings a wealth of experience and knowledge in other areas that augment our own. So it's a very, very cool podcast for anyone who is in physical products,

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Kevin Mako: trying to sell them online. Yeah, come check it out, the making it podcast.com. Much appreciated. Thanks for all the value. has a ton of information, a ton of value drop there. So very much appreciated, Deirdre. Looking forward to having you back on the show again. Thanks. Thanks.

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Kevin Mako: Take care. Bye-bye.

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Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast. The show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success.

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Narrator: This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end,

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Narrator: physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com.

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Narrator: That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako-designs for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.