Shopify Growth Secrets from the World’s LARGEST Shopify Agency co-founder: Mac King 📈

24:32What is the best value that like what you think they could do? Sure. Really hard question because there's so many different ways that this can, that you can take an answer. And so I'll give an answer that's top of mind for me right now that I'm not sure is the perfect answer to your question in general. I think there's probably like other low hanging fruit that's more prescient than the way I'm going to respond. But one way that I think brands can invest right now is through AI search is making sure that they're showing up more through AI search engines like chat GPT, perplexity and cloud in Google and everything else.

25:15What we're noticing amongst our clients, we did an analysis of website traffic trends, which is across our, we have a 95 active clients in the very specific segment on Shopify, right? The high end of the platform. The site traffic is flat. It's not changing much over the last 12 month period. Site traffic has been consistent. I think that many brands are noticing this right now too, is that it's not like it was three or four years ago when everything was just going up for no real reason. I think site traffic is being consistent. Outlier to that is site traffic coming from AI search engines. It is growing exponentially right now amongst the data on all of our clients.

25:55We know that we've looked at some external data sources as well through Mintel. AI search is growing exponentially. However, it's still a small percentage of traffic. So amongst all of our clients, it represents less than 1 % of their overall site traffic, right? This is a combined view um but if a brand wants to be a first mover and invest in this before it hits a fever pitch now is the time to do it because ai search engines are they're pulling it's kind of like seo 1.0 back when it was like yeah i'm sure jake you're an internet guy from the you're probably right there in that time period where like you kind of do this hack you know like you build a little landing page of like what's the best shot by app and then that will get picked up and you'd be right in the first page of their google results like you can do that same thing right now with ai search i was before that I was doing SEO when you would make words the same color as your background.

26:41That's crazy. To hack it. That was like 1997. But, and to rank first in Yahoo, but. Hey, you know what? That's my point, right? So that kind of hack, those are actually, you know, available for brands right now on AI search. Um, like it's that kind of like AI, Google got really good at SEO and ranking companies through their page. AI search is not there yet. Surprisingly, And everyone thinks AI is the future is so smart. They're not nearly as smart as Google for when it comes to like actually delivering quality results yet. So therefore there's an opportunity for brands to be able to hack that in this current moment in time, probably not a huge opportunity.

27:19You know, there's the six to eight month window. So something that we're obsessed with right now as a company is helping our brands do that. Like how do we get people to show up when folks are searching? I went, I got invited to this event the other day and they said that attire is Hampton's high-end casual. And I thought, what the bleep does that mean? So I went on ChatGPT and looked up, you know, what's dress code Hamptons high-end casual? I wouldn't know either. I think. Yeah, right? So yeah. And then I started shopping on ChatGPT. They delivered me, and I preferred the brand Vince. ChatGPT gave me Essence, and they gave me a marketplace to buy Vince off of.

27:57What they didn't give me was Vince.com. So, you know, what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that like Vince, like could have gotten the direct to consumer site could have gotten my business instead of I went to one of the aggregator sites or a marketplace site. Now a marketplace site wasn't carrying Vince. I wouldn't even got served them at all. It would have just said, Nope, go somewhere else, try something different. So, and there's real basic SEO hacks that not just hacks, but SEO work that brands can do to show up on AI search right now. And I think that that's to me presents a big opportunity.

28:29It's a little bit early, but it's going to be big. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility. Your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, etc. Nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products.

29:17Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything, a bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store now. I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify 1 % dot com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. So how does Shopify catalog play into that?

29:58Like Shopify is really investing in making the product structure and data and product schema be very indexable by AI. They're adding in a lot more data points that you used to just be like, you'd have the color size material, maybe, you know, the attributes that Google would need. But for AI, it's like, what does the fit feel like? Is it like, there's a lot more that ai can pull out and so my understanding is shopify is going to make that broadly available like if you're on shopify by default your products should be very readable by ai the thing that shopify does is it's great i love it but it also like always levels the playing field like i remember like in 2009 when i put my first store on shopify i remember like i was better than all my competitors because my store looked good and it was mobile friendly like in 2009 but now every store is mobile friendly right and it's always like the next thing like you have a fast checkout now every store has a fast checkout that's the beauty but also the challenge is you will have products that are indexed by ai but so will all your competitors so how do you get that one step ahead then well here's how you make up for that and is by taste like if you have better taste if your site makes people feel something, if you have a better branded experience, if your imagery is beautiful, if the way that you're spacing is in your website works, if you're the transition time between page to page, you know, that feeling when you're kind of like, when you get lost on a website, all of a sudden you're like halfway down on the about us page.

31:33You're like, why am I here? You know, just like the website feels good. You know, that that's taste. Like that's the evergreen part of all of this. You're absolutely right. Just in functionality and shop, like he's releasing all these things in a platform level that are making things easier for everyone else. But the way, the way to really stand out the way to create like a long-term brand is not don't think of yourself as a merchant think of yourself as a brand you're building a branded website you're building something that makes people feel something and that's how you stand out amongst this as you mentioned level playing field for all these different online brands what do you think about content right now has content become more important like something we're thinking about at bold is like i actually i get all the time now someone will say like hey we found your product through chat gpt and then I'll go and I'll search.

32:19I was like, oh, what, what did you ask it? What was the prompt? And I'll go and I'll look. I'm like, oh, dang, nice. We can't, they chat GPT recommended us, but then I'll do another prompt and it won't recommend us like it, you know? So one of the things I noticed that I think might be a hack right now, if you want to call it that is chat GPT always adds sources and it's relatively easy. Like I notice some of our blogs, if we have a stat that having a bundle on a product can increase conversion 20%. I don't know if that's a true stat, but just use that as an example. But if we have that on the blog and then someone asks ChatGPT, do bundles work on Shopify?

32:57It references that whatever stat we have. So like I haven't experimented with this, but I know blogs have kind of been, I don't want to say dead, but not used a lot by e-commerce stores in the last 10 years. I wonder if now they're more important than ever to now get as a source back into the AI searches. Dude, absolutely. And not only, as you mentioned, for brands, for companies like us too, for bold domain. Yeah, blogs are back, baby. So maybe it's not SEO 1.0 because we're not making same colored text that's crawlable in the background. That's like a real hack. But SEO 1.2, which is content.

33:38On-site content and off-site content. We've got a client called Fellow. they have coffee products, coffee machines. So we're doing an exercise with them where we're looking for like, what are they ranking for? What are some of the AI search terms that are going to be working? And what we realized is like some of their competitors have their own hosted content that is then helping them rank highly above them. So yeah, your own blog, it doesn't matter where it is. Again, ChatGPT is not smart enough yet to make that leap that like your own content might be biased. So you can create your own content that is biased, that points back to your own brand and own it on your own website.

34:16So it's, you know, it's pretty easy. Yeah. Google's ahead of that because now you can, you can post as many blogs as you want, but unless other people are linking to it and you have page authority and Google doesn't show it, but AI is now is the time to maybe take advantage of that. I'll throw one tip that I learned I'll share. So our recommendation is if anyone listening to this right now is thinking about just using chat gpt to create the blogs or cloud or whatever tool they will if you just go to it and if you say you know you can have an amazing prompt you can say i want to create a blog post about let's say you sell travel luggage fashion high-end travel luggage and something about it's like you want to create a blog about how to protect your suitcase on the conveyor belt or something like this or how to clean it.

35:03And if you ask chat TPT to create a 500 to 800 word blog posts on how to travel with high end luggage that you don't want to damage and create some steps products to use, and it runs and creates a blog post that will get detected as created by AI every time. But if you, so these, these podcasts that I've been doing, I turn them into blog posts after, and I use AI to, to turn them into a blog post and I run them through AI detectors. There's Grammarly has one and there's a couple other that you can search and it comes up as 0 % AI. And the reason why is this is original content, me and you talking right now.

35:44So what AI is doing is it's basically summarizing the original content versus creating the content from scratch. And so if there's a way, if you're wanting to leverage AI for blogs, I'm a big fan of leveraging AI, but don't just outsource it to AI. Talk, create an audio file, talk to something, go on a, I don't know, go on a podcast, record something and then use that as the source that creates the blog post and then run it through. Grammarly I found has a really good AI detection one. And there's another one I can't, I'm drawing a blank on the name right now, but I'll, I'll put it in the show notes.

36:20and they'll almost always come up as like zero or 1 % chance it's AI versus if you just go to it, they're always like 98%. I don't know how it detects it, but the structure maybe or something, but as long as it's based on original content, it seems to do really well. So anyways, that's one piece of advice I'll throw in there. Cause I, I think it's a, that's a fire piece of advice. I'll add onto that. I would use whisper flow for voice to text dictation. It's a great tool. You can just kind of speak into it on your computer and then it'll kind of like it'll basically dictate all of your thoughts and it'll edit it to make it a little more clear and then you can take that the whisper flow text put it into you know a chat tpt interface make a blog post from that nice it should come up with zero percent yeah yeah test it for sure yeah yeah i love that i want a linkedin chrome extension now that the that detects ai because oh my gosh then that would 90 of linkedin I'm worried that just everything on that platform is just AI now.

37:18And have we just, are we just like having robots speak to each other on our behalf? You know, is that what's happening? It's, you know, when you see all the posts that are super structured, they start with like a statement and the question, then they have three bullet points and a bit too many emojis. Right. Yeah. And part of me wonders, I'm the same way. Like I don't engage with them because it feels unauthentic. But is that just for the time being? Like, are we going to get used to that? And will the younger generation engage? I don't know, right? Like it's, yeah. I think the jury's still out on that, but I feel 100 % the same way as you.

37:58So, yeah. I always, I think it's great to use AI. I don't want to go into too much of an AI tangent, but for, I use it for research, for pulling stats, like for that, and then write your content yourself. but it's an amazing tool for, I mean, you can cut down 90 % of your time on any content you create, but still add your touch in it. Yeah, I agree. And again, what it's done is it's made taste. Yeah. The important part, if you have no taste and you're just using AI to just create something entirely for you, you know, or, you know, then, then it's going to be clear. And again, that goes back to the same point of like, it's, you're not creating evergreen.

38:37You're not creating branded content. You're not creating a brand. You're just contributing to like this like dump of information on the web. One thing I wanted to chat about was you mentioned you're seeing a bit of a slowdown in the economy a little bit right now. What are some of the things you're, you're doing with brands to, to help them still grow and still be successful during this little bit of a, I don't know if it's a, I don't know if it's a slump or slowdown. I think people are being a little tight with their wallets, the stuff happening in the political scene or who knows tariffs, whatever the reason is, there's a bit of a slowdown.

39:14So what are some tactics here working with brands? It's true. Yeah. We're noticing that, like I said, it's not a red alarm fire drill, but pretty consistently, it's not easy to come across for customer acquisition right now, to come across big sales to that old strategy that worked mid pandemic is not anymore. So one of the ways that we're helping, that we're thinking about brands who can like, how do we transition to understanding what's really important is transitioning to more of a onsite strategy, user experience, conversion rate optimization. You know, how do you do more with the traffic that's already there with the customers that are already landing on your website?

39:58The answer, I don't think the answer is just like dump more money into paid media. But the way that we look at it is how do we do more with what you have with your current customers? And there's a number of ways. First, the on-site way to do that is what the user experience looks like. How can you do some A-B testing, first click testing? You know, there's a lot of nifty tools in the web where you can input a website and pay for 500 users to tell you what the first thing they click on when they view your website. And that data is really useful. Where's the attention going to? I think that's a way that anyone can do it themselves, the DIY version, right?

40:36Sign up for usertesting.com, sign up for a first click website tool and run some tests on your own. Because on the other scale, on the high end scale, it can get quite expensive. Strategy work is very engaged and it's also not a sure thing. A-B testing means you're testing two different options. It doesn't mean that one of them is going to be better than what you currently have. That said, you know, you're any kind of agency or if you're doing it in house or if you're seeking advice, people should have a bag of tricks. There are things that we know work for every one of our clients. Here's an example, a cart page versus a mini cart slider.

41:11If you have a, you have your own, a page dedicated to the cart, you're losing converts right there. So we, a hundred percent of the time, a hundred percent of the time, every single site you see domain launch has a cart slider instead of a cart page. Every single. Wow. So, so that's just the blanket statement that I know works. And, and every brand listening to this should adopt that immediately. Aside from that, it can get pretty intense and specific about how you really should make changes in the user experience of your website. And then there's other tools you can think about, right? Which is again, doing more with your existing customers.

41:46Well, how do you, how do you do more with them? How do you meet them where they are? Is it a mobile app? You know, you want to use a tool like reactive you know we know zach and ross and with their ability over there like that's that's special i mean this is the way that brand that customers can interact with brands they love in a way that feels more intimate to them and again i use the word brand not merchant because they want to interact with the brand like remember that's at the forefront of this entire strategy it's in the forefront of our entire ethos as a company as an agency which is like people should be building better branded experiences for their customers and a Bubble app is a big part on that spectrum.

42:18I think just two things I want to pull out of that there because like I, it's funny, we've had this internal debate many times. Do we call our customers merchants or brands? And we've, we, we pretty much say brands all the time, but there's been some pushback. So the one argument for the merchant side is that they say smaller businesses don't see themselves as a brand. They see themselves as a merchant. but I would argue that even if you're one person, you should see yourself as a brand. Like, and the words we use to describe ourself matter. And it's like, you know, like if you call yourself a loser all day long, you're going to start believing it.

43:01If you call yourself a brand all day long, you'll start believing it. Like you'll start to, you'll be a brand. You'll think about consistency and how you talk. And you'll think of your brand, like your packaging. it's just uh i'm a big proponent of the word brand even if you're one person you're not like a brand like a big company that language matters i wanted to just hone in on that dude i'm right there with you and well i agree that merchant is probably more specific of a term but it doesn't make me feel anything and that's part of building a brand is feeling something you know and so like merchant makes me feel like someone's selling fish in a market you know that's not what I want to be like, we want to build brands and something that makes you feel something that has more than just being kind of a merchant that has like a stand in like an old market, you know?

43:50And I think merchant was like a word that Toby used as like an English, English second language person in 2009 that has just stuck. And I think it's in need of an update personally. Yeah. Didn't you, I think I saw you post on LinkedIn the other day, stop calling people merchants. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's, that was, I knew that was not an AI generated post. Right. Okay. And then the second thing I wanted to kind of pull out what you said, I think you're, you're kind of getting to it and maybe talking around a little bit, like is when you say like optimizing your existing customer, like first, first party data, like first party, like to me right now, this is probably the most important time to leverage your email lists, your SMS lists, your customers that are in, but also to invest in getting more on that list.

44:41And like the only way that like a lot of brands, like they have a pop-up, they give away a coupon for 10 % off to get an email or they get an email when someone purchases something. I did, I had a, we do these, well, you probably know if you listen to the show, these like 1 % wins, which is like these short little episodes. and I had this thought the other day and I actually I know that you're you you're a big believer in leveraging first-party data as well too and it made me think of this like the best brands in the world maybe convert four or five percent I don't know I think the most I've ever heard of is like 10 but I think the industry average is like two or something somewhere around there yeah yeah and so that means like 95 percent of customers who come to your store leave with absolutely nothing.

45:29Like it's a weird thing to think about. Imagine a retail store, like imagine Target or Walmart or something. 95 % of customers walk in and they walk out. It's bizarre. Like, and I know some of them are bots and whatever, but not, not that many. Like, so what could you give to that 95 % that are leaving as a way to start a relationship with them? Like some kind of offer. Could it even be a gift? Like the example I used in the other episode was like, I don't know if you're a health company, can you give a shaker bottle, like a free shaker bottle, like literally claim your shaker bottle, claim it, not get 10%, like not a coupon, but like claim it.

46:12We'll ship it to you today. And it costs you 10 bucks, but you're acquiring, you're acquiring their information. You're sending them something you're building a relationship. And when you put that in light of like how much you're spending on ads, it's probably, and I would be willing to bet if you ran a cohort analysis, like everyone that acquired a gift and it doesn't even have to cost anything. It could be like download a$39 ebook on health and wellness that you've written, but you'd give it away for free to visitors or like something to start that relationship. I think now I would love to hear your thoughts on it too, but like in this kind of slump we're seeing is probably more important than ever.

46:50Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really clever strategy, right? How do you go above and beyond to gain that customer record in that information? Because to me, that's the big unlock is how do you do more with the customers that you are already part than 95 % of people who you might even have their email because they've abandoned their carts or you sent them a free product, but they've never bought something from you before. And the reason for that is they have intent, meaning they've been to your site, they've filled out some sort of form, they've given you their email along the way, but it was never quite right.

47:23So how do you make something a little bit more correct for them, a little more on brand for that individual customer? And the way that we think about it is through personalized experiences. I think we encourage our clients to use email marketing to segmentation, first off, and invest in the cleanliness and hygiene of your email and SMS list and make sure that you're not just blasting the same message to everyone on your list or every active person on your list. That's not an effective strategy. You have this goldmine here, but how do you build one site per customer? So we know that Sally's a lady in her mid forties and Peter's a young man who's 26 years old.

48:06You sell home appliances. Peter's interested in this you know, new type of blender that's on your website. And Sally might be interested in a mixing bowl. So how do you send an email to the same two people with the same kind of structured format? So you're not kind of reinventing the wheel each time, but you're using technology to personalize that email experience, that email flow, and then the website that they land on after they've clicked the email. So they don't want to click a blender and then land on an account. You know, they click a blender, they land on the blender, they make the purchase.

48:40So think about like the full personalized experience from soup to nuts. It sounds so simple, but a lot of brands are not doing this. And for good reason, actually. It's actually fairly new technology. Klaviyo just released this API, for example, where they're allowing folks to be able to plug into personalization tools on the website. And so you can actually start with personalized content through email and then carry that through with this connected tissue API onto the website after they've clicked it. It does require a little bit of setup. It's a little bit more technical when it comes to email marketing, but these are the kinds of tricks that actually have real values.

49:15At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with, plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude, ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account, your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything.

49:54My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. and anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0.

50:29If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo. I've seen some brands doing some pretty creative things with their, when they have their questionnaire or giveaway. Actually, who was I? I was on a site the other day. Might've been Dr. Squatch. I can't remember. I loved their pop-up. I think it was them. Instead of a client, by the way. Are they a client? Did you do their pop-up where?

51:06We did. We worked with them a couple of years ago, not crying, but they're one of the ones that took over the site afterwards. Okay. So their current pop-up, it's like pick your prize kind of thing. So rather than just 10 % off, there's three boxes and they kind of, I think they jumble around a little bit quickly and then it's like pick one and then it unlocks it. First of all, it's just a great visual experience. You pick it, it opens, there's confetti or something, and then you get 15 % off. It's not spin the wheel. It's a little bit more simple, full screen takeover. and then they, I think they do this or I might've seen another one, but there's like a couple questions.

51:40It'll be like, are you, I don't know, do you struggle with skin irritation or is there any issues with like certain like lotions or are you here for the like super long protection or for great smelling? What's more important to you? Or just a couple of questions like that. And then you get your your code but i know that what they're doing then is they're tagging that person and then when it goes into their their whatever email tool they're using there's a tag that they care about great smelling deodorants or they care about ones that don't irritate the skin or that are aluminum free or something like that and then they segment their lists and they create different campaigns with the main headlines about our aluminum free deodorants or our 24-hour protection or whatever it is.

52:29It's so simple, but it's such a meaningful piece of information, a piece of data on their customer segmentation. I mean, yeah, no wonder that they're seeing growth, you know, and Dr. Squatch is doing what they're doing. What a good strategy. Yeah. Well, I want to kind of flip the script. You know, we don't get enough chance to talk. And I see the bold in the background and you know what I'm used to. And we used to have conversations in 2015. I was always interested. I was learning about you and your business, where you guys are at i mean i i'm really keen to hear what what's exciting for you right now you you've heard about ai from our side now we're thinking about making like the branded experiences what that looks like but what's exciting to bold right now i'm and like what are you focused on currently on the business side i'm so curious man you're like the first guest that has asked that i'm so thankful thank you for asking right now the thing that is really i think what that's really important to us not that i think that is is you know we've been doing subscriptions since 2014 14.

53:23In 2014, if you did subscriptions, like you were ahead of the game. It was, it was like, if you had cat food and you sold it on subscription, you're, you were better than your competitors. And fast forward now, like subscriptions are kind of table stakes. Everyone has a subscription. If you don't have a subscription, I like to say it's kind of like become a billing and a shipping decision. It's like some people will subscribe to cat food and some people don't, but it's not like a differentiator if you have a subscription. But what is a differentiator is creating an experience where customers feel like members and they feel like VIPs.

54:01They feel like you know them, that there's exclusive benefits, exclusive access, exclusive pricing, that there's relationship. um and so about a year about a year and a half ago we looked at all of our apps and we kept getting customers asking us like hey i want to do vip pricing for my subscribers and like we looked at our sales pipeline and like half of them were around vip pricing and then we looked and like oh man we got this customer pricing app that we literally built it to do customer specific pricing that you can, when a customer logs in, they can be a wholesale or they can be a gold, platinum, different levels of pricing.

54:46And then we've got the subscription app, but they weren't, they could work together, but it took some work. So we thought, well, let's make that seamless. And then we have this upsell app, which lets you create targeted offers that are different for each person. So you talk about personalization, depending what someone is buying, it'll offer a different product. And now it has AI upsells. So it's like even the same product can have different offers for different people based off of what's in their cart, what they've bought before, a whole bunch of other things. But then we thought, yeah, subscribers in their member portal should get exclusive offers that are unique to them.

55:23So not just a blanket offer of the month, but you have 20 different subscribers. They all log into their portal. They all get a unique offer or in that upcoming email that, you know, your subscription is going out in three days. Do you want to add this last minute offer? But it should be different for every person based on what they're subscribed to. So we integrated our upsell and subscription app. Now, I think this episode, depending when this comes out, we've got a new app that we're, it's actually in beta right now. And so we want to be in the business of creating great programs where customers stay around forever.

56:02and subscription is a tool in that, but it's not the whole picture. I mean, it's very exciting and it's very on brand for you. You guys have always been innovators. Here's the hard part about what you just told me, which is that you're creating a new demand. People don't know they need this other, people think they need a hammer. They don't know they need a new solution. 100%. So you're going to have to create the demand for the thing that you know is the real solution for these brands. But it's not something you've done. It's not something you haven't been able to do before. You know, you built the apps for Shopify before there was front end applications.

56:39And so that didn't exist before you'd done it. So it's kind of the next step on that same bold playbook, which is no pun intended. And you know, I mean, it's, yeah, I think it's, it fires me up. It's exciting to hear that you're still innovating and you guys are still putting this much passion and thought into releasing these new products. Thanks man. So the thing that wasn't happening when Bold started that now we see a lot of in the Shopify space, obviously like there's these kind of like large scale, single branded companies that offer one product. Did you think about branding it separately and having kind of be its own thing and its own kind of like, and maybe we can cut this out if you want.

57:17You're like reading my mind, man. Yes. Yeah. It is. It's got its own name too. What? And it's, and it's, it's got its own persona. I want to say without giving away too much. Cool. so it is a it's a thing that it stands alone it's we're not hiding that it's going to be part of bold but it's its own yes 100 and you know what's so interesting i mean it's man you're very observant like we've struggled with this we at one point had 36 apps we've gotten a lot more focused over the years and didn't you go to like other ecosystems and come back to like yeah we launched apps on big commerce on on woo and right um we're just on shopify now like it was yeah there was a bit of traction there but it was generally a waste of time yeah like bang for buck like for every hour spent over there it was a penny return versus shopify like this is just it's a better ecosystem for so many reasons but uh yeah it was interesting because we like i remember when we had a returns app we had a loyalties app we've done subscriptions and we would see a loyalty app raise 20 million dollars and or more with some with a crazy valuation and we would look at it and we go man we got we have more users we're making more arr on our loyalty app but we were seen as a swiss army knife for shopify we weren't seen as like to to investors you want to say like we want to own loyalty or we want to own returns like we want to own subscriptions right and so So I think that has hurt us a bit from the investment side for sure.

58:52We've done pretty well with raising, so I'm not overly concerned about it. But the perception is unless you are singular focused and a market leader, investors have a hard time wrapping their head around it. But lately, you look at brands like Shop Circle and others that are just like clearer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're raising a lot of money and they're basically just acquiring a lot of Shopify apps. So I think that perception has changed a little bit, but we're not making product decisions based off of that. Like if investors don't get it, that's okay. We've, but the ones that we have our board that like they're, they get it like, and they're, they're invested and they, they understand it.

59:35So, but you're, you're bang on. It's, it has definitely been a challenge for so many reasons. So yeah, this one will, will it's, and then you're perceptive for another reason. too the fact that you notice that like we're pushing batteries like it's funny when we in 2012 because you joined Shopify in 2013 yeah so 2012 we launched our upsell app and when it went live Toby actually got mad at us oh yeah because we I don't say we we kind of hacked the APIs well also your brand name at the time we should well fair enough the brand was Shopify which was genius. Come on. I love apps, apps for Shopify.

1:00:14But that wasn't what he was mad about until, and when Shopify went public, we, they asked us politely to Harley messages. Like, Hey, would you guys mind changing your name? I think there was a number of Shopify. There was a bunch. I was part of that team, by the way, that we went out and there were Shopify ninjas and Shopify theme builders. And you know, there's a bunch of different ones that we have to talk about. Which I totally get. No, the reason why Toby was upset was so like one of the first early big brands on Shopify was the Chive. Yep. Keep Calm and Chive on. And this was when they would have, they used our upsell app and when they would have some promotion on Instagram, they would post like all t-shirts, 25 % off there.

1:00:51They would get a ton of traffic to their site. Our upsell app would start firing. And for each fire, it's like three or four API calls. It like checks what product to offer. It checks inventory. And if they accept the offer, there's an API call to like add it to the cart and whatever, but it would take down all of Shopify like every single store because this one store was getting like a hundred thousand API calls per minute because they were promoting it and so Toby got a little bit upset saying you hacked our APIs apps are not supposed to live on the front end of a store this was not how our APIs were intended to be used which it's super interesting because now you go in the app store like every single app lives on the front end of store and that's always the job of an app developer like apple apps push ios to be to be better right like it's you know the app ecosystem pushes the platform but internally um apparently about half of the team at chopify and it was only around 80 people at the time so not a huge team but uh blair and brennan told me this later on they said about half of the people wanted to shut it down because they said no this is not how apps should work and about half the people said this is awesome look at the reviews it's all five star reviews so there was a bit of debate but internally then they decided to allow it but introduced api throttling and rate limits and some other important factors for apps to function but yeah even this most current one that we're pushing out it took three months to get approved by shopify because they hadn't seen anything like it before and and we had to get on multiple phone calls and explain to them and they would say, we don't get it.

1:02:34We don't get this app. What is the, what is, and then after, like, and I wish I would have recorded the calls because after I explained it to them every single time, and I don't want to say like certain people, but like you would know them, they'd say, oh, this is awesome. I would totally use this. This is amazing that I want this, but you're right. It doesn't exist and it's pushing a boundary. And I love that because like internally at our team is like fired up because like during COVID and yet you're right, we did expand onto other platforms for a bit. We kind of, I don't want to say like lost our way, but we like experimented in other areas, different things.

1:03:12And like, this is getting back to the core of who we are. We like push boundaries, innovate. And so I'm super excited for it. I'll personally show it to you very soon. you know we should chat partnership i mean you know not for a competition for a podcast yeah we'll do that off the air yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely well mac i know we're running running up against the wall here on your time can you any last things you want to say to our listeners i know we could talk for hours but like someone why someone might want to reach out to domain i know i can speak so highly of you i know every time i talk to a brand you get an email from me doing an intro because I, I only intro brands to agencies I trust that I know aren't going to bite me in the butt a year later and say, Jay, why did you introduce me to them?

1:03:59Like, I just know I can trust that introduction. Um, but for someone that's never heard of you and doesn't trust my intro, what can you say about domain and then where can people go to, to learn more? Sure. Thanks. Yeah. The, I mean, I think my advice for any brand in regard, like outside of domain, But this is something that we do is to, and if someone's listening to this podcast, they're already doing that. But learn from your peers and not just your peers, but people who are a little bit ahead of what you're doing. You know, I think we often feel the question of like, hey, what are your other clients doing for X?

1:04:36What are they doing for loyalty? What are they doing for subscription? How are they managing the slowdown? And then because we have this very specialized group of clients who are in this very specific segment of Shopify, we get to give like very detailed perspective and very niche nuanced perspective about how we're all managing this together. And actually we bring people together every year for our own client conference. We call it curated. Last year we did it at Shopify's office in New York. And you know, we had like the ladies from the row sitting there, but beside the ladies from TuckerNart, you know, these are both women's brands targeting the same age group, but very different buyers, you know?

1:05:12And so they don't have like, there's not much overlap. People who buy tucking on dresses don't buy the row dresses but they got we got them in the same room and we talked about both companies and they had the same problems and we got everyone everyone just started sharing information with each other right and even across segment you know affinity beauty was sharing uh with oh with our mattress company hush so like like how do we talk about a beauty brand sharing with a with a home goods company so that's i would encourage brand builders and people who are selling things online to learn from people who are maybe slightly ahead of their journey from themselves, put themselves in these kinds of communities where they can learn from each other.

1:05:50We have one of these communities, but there are other ones that exist and just keep going for it. Build a brand, build something for the longterm. You're a brand, you're not a merchant and taste is going to be the real differentiator in this market. So invest in your taste and how people feel about your company. Yeah. So good. And you can find us, we have, you know, we're domain with an E on the end, you can meet domain.com. But yeah, you know, always interested to chat. And sorry, which social platform are you most active on for people to follow you? LinkedIn, domain on LinkedIn or domain studio.

1:06:22If you're in the SMB and mid-market segment on Shopify, both we have LinkedIn presence on both. Awesome. I'll put that all in the show notes. Mac, this has been such a pleasure. I had you on my list to reach out to for a long time. And it was just such a coincidence that you texted a few weeks ago. I'm so glad you did. Thank you for just being an amazing person in the space. It's honestly people like you that make this ecosystem so fun. And it's been such a journey. I feel like, you know, it's been journeyed together since that 2014 or our first interactions. And now to both be on the partner side and bumping into you at conferences is so fun.

1:06:59And so just really appreciate you as a person and just wish you all the best with Domain and keep kicking butt, man. Thank you, buddy. I appreciate you having me. And, you know, I feel really good knowing that there's people like you, me and you and, you know, Kurt and Pointer and, you know, all these people who have been there for 10, 12 years, you know, 14 years who are still around and still, you know, part of this community. I think that warms my heart. I really feel good. So I appreciate it. It's so fun to talk to you. Yeah. I don't take it for granted. It is special. Okay. Well, we'll do this again in the future.

1:07:36And thanks so much. Yeah. Thank you, Jay. Hey, now, as you know, at the end of every episode, I like to share a 1 % win tip. The whole idea, you improve 1 % a day at the end of the year, you're 37 times better. So here's today's tip or thoughts that will improve you much more than 1%. This year, Black Friday is coming up and every single year on Black Friday, stores, they don't plan ahead and they run very boring generic store-wide sales I just did a full 15 minute 1 % win episode about this but I wanted to include it in another episode here to highlight it but I would recommend you listen to the full episode it's episode number 37 so go listen to that full episode where I dive deep into this but here's the idea everyone's going to open their email on Black Friday and all the emails are storewide sale 30 % off Black Friday sale on now 25 % off everything 50 % off everything.

1:08:38It's just a generic sale for everyone. Now that'll drive a bit of traffic. Mostly what it does is people who already wanted to buy something for you, they're just waiting for your sale to go on and then they decide to buy. But it doesn't create a lot of new customers. It doesn't make your existing customers feel special. It doesn't build any more connection with them. It's really just a generic sale that blends in with honestly, all the other noise of Black Friday. But my tip is find a way to make your existing customers feel special. Now there are different ways you can do this. You can have special offers for them.

1:09:18What I recommend, and we do have a product that actually helps with this. And usually my 1 % tips aren't, they're not promoting bold at all but we do have a way to help with this i'm actually we're going to make it free anyway so we're but my suggestion is you turn them actually into vips and you can do that we have an app called bold custom pricing app and what it does in a nutshell is when customers log in it changes the price you can have unlimited different prices based off who the customer is so you can have vip wholesale member gold silver bronze whatever you want. It's really easy to do.

1:09:53You just create a tag. You say, I want to give everyone 32 % off, whatever. Like you can still run your store wide sales of 25 % off the whole store, but give your VIPs something different. You set up the price. Then you go into your customers and Shopify, you click the little box in the top, select all, and then select all 10 ,000 customers. Whenever you have apply that tag, it'll apply to all of them. Boom. Now, when any of those customers log in, they'll see their special pricing. It won't be visible to everyone else in the store. It will only be visible to those customers when they log in.

1:10:26And that's a big key here is they have to log in to see it. Now, what that does is it makes them feel like their account has value. It makes them feel that there's like a connection with your store versus just sale on now and everyone gets it. And it's also better than coupon codes because a coupon codes get lost. They're tough to manage. They're hard to manage. They leak, always leak. And if someone logs in and they don't see the prices, they have to enter the coupon code at checkout. It doesn't have that same effect on conversion of actually seeing the price drop. and there was a study done two black fridays ago and the email subject that converted this one subject line converted 26 better than every other email subject line like black friday sale on now everything on sale all products sale unlocked like you know there's all these different types of subject lines.

1:11:23This one converted 26 % better and the email was log in to see your exclusive pricing. That was it. It didn't even say what the sale was. If you think about that, that's kind of crazy, right? Wait, one email says 50 % off everything. And this other email says log in to see your exclusive pricing. That's interesting that that converted better than every other email. And that's because curiosity works. And so this Black Friday, turn your customers into VIPs, give them special pricing that no other customers have and then send an email that says log in to see your exclusive pricing this year your pricing is different than everyone else's log in to see you get the point so that's my one percent tip now we did a full dive into this on episode 37 and I'll make sure I'll put a link as well to this in the show notes of this one but go back and listen to it if this is interesting to you and you want to try this we did about a 15 minute walkthrough of actually how to do it.

1:12:20And this is just kind of highlighting it at a high level right now, but go back and listen to that one. If you actually want to try it, I just want to take one quick second to give one ask. And that is if you're getting anything from this show, would you say thank you by leaving a five-star review for us in Apple podcasts or in Spotify? That's just your way of saying, thanks. I got something valuable. That's it. Those reviews mean a lot to us. So I just wanted to make sure I ask. Thanks so much. Keep kicking butt and we'll see you on the next episode.