From Startup to CES Innovation Award Winner

22:11Sabrina Wescott:The most recent one was, what was the most recent one that I just did was, I don't remember, I'm sure it'll come to me, but put it into chat GPT and say, how can I apply this principle to Max Pro? Give me a marketing angle, give me an organic social media or social angle and put it all in a, you know, a document that I can, you know, read and understand. So then chat GPT takes all that and then, and then reason, Oh, so our new year's, you know, it's new year's almost new year's is coming up. And so obviously people like to get fit for new year's. And so I had the, in my head, I had this, I want to do this theme that is choose you this new year.

23:00Sabrina Wescott:Cause so many people are so busy and they're not, they're not putting themselves, making themselves a priority. And that's the biggest thing in health is that you have to make yourself a priority when it comes to, you know, starting to make changes. That's the only way you can make a change is if you decide to do it. That's it. Right. So I was like, I have this idea, choose you. And so there was something that I read in an email that went along with it. And so what I did was I took that information and then I said, this is my this is the theme that I want to do the campaign I want to do for New Year.

23:29Sabrina Wescott:put it into a campaign for me that I can use. And so from there, it put it into there and I put it into a Word document, made changes based on to make it fit. And then I took that information. I took the part for email, sent it to my email team. And I said, this is what we want to do for email and SMS for new year. Here's the idea. And then I sent, I had ChatGPT also make a landing page because I'm a very visual person. So not that we would ever do anything with the landing page, but because I'm visual, I was like, I want to see it in a landing page that I can preview. And so I use the JS Fiddle to see it.

24:12Sabrina Wescott:And so I took the CSS, the code or HTML, whatever ChatGPT gave me, put it into JS Fiddle so I could visually see it. And then from there, I was like, okay, here's a start. This is a start. This is how we're going to start. And then from there, we'll iterate and make changes and figure out what ads will go with it and what organic posts and influencers and whatever we can use from there. So my assistant, Bruce and I, we work close. We work a lot together and he gets a lot of my just jab. You know, we have a small team. I don't have someone that I can just talk to about campaigns and things like that.

24:51Sabrina Wescott:And so AI has been super helpful for me to just have that, you know, non-human, but conversation with someone that, you know, knows all the things to be able to help kind of clear up my thoughts and get it onto paper and give me a good starting point.

25:09Brian Roisentul:That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I am curious now about, you know, starting conversations with podcast guests about the chat GPT projects that they have. I have some going on as well. I have a business coach and I brainstorm ideas all the time. Then I have, well, for the podcast, I have like a podcast producer that after, we didn't do it because we know each other from previous conversations and collaborations, but we We typically do a prep call with guests. My team do them. And they throw the notes. The notes used to be manual. Now they are AI notes with the AI note tickers. The AI agent, which is on Zapier, processes the doc and finds previous podcast appearances, articles, user brand, LinkedIn profile, all this stuff.

26:08Brian Roisentul:and give me thoughtful questions in line of what the podcast is about and the guest and the brand and blah, blah, blah. And of course, I then go through that and filter it out and edit it and do my research as well. But without, I think that's the thing for me is I get off the blank page way easier than before. And it's not the final result, but it's something that gives me a lot of information that otherwise would have taken me a lot of time, right?

26:40Sabrina Wescott:Yep.

26:41Brian Roisentul:And then I have some more, but I think that, of course, all of those are internal, but do you have any AI, you know, customer facing, you know, whether it's on a chat or an AI agent to ask questions or do something else?

26:59Sabrina Wescott:Yeah, so we use Gorgias and they have an AI bot through our chat. If you go to our homepage that we use, but I've been very specific with our customer service team on when that should be in use and when not. So I tell them, I'm like, if you guys are working and I don't want the AI bot there, I want you to respond and answer the questions. And then we did this test. It actually was last year that we did it. And so we worked with a company. He was just kind of getting started. I think he worked mostly doing local businesses, doing some AI work for local businesses. So we knew him from a friend, I think of someone.

27:48Sabrina Wescott:And so we, you know, we took a call with him. But he he did AI bots really good before I feel like they got really good. And I don't know how he did it. But I just remember when I met with him, I was super skeptical because I have just felt like AI bots were super body. And as you know, with us wanting that personal touch for our customers, I was very against it. I didn't want to do it. But then I met with him and he made this, you know, he made a program for us and sent it to me. And the idea was that if someone had been in our funnel for over 90 days and had not purchased, then what we would do is we would take their phone number and they had agreed to sign up through SMS.

28:32Sabrina Wescott:we would take their phone numbers and we would send them this conversational AI that was, you know, hey, are you still interested in fitness? And kind of do some get to know them questions and then try to ultimately get them to circle back to purchase. And so that was great in the sense of how well done the AI bot was. but we, I don't, we hardly had any conversions. I think we had maybe two from like a list of like hundreds that we had sent over to try to get started on it. And so it was a good test for us, but it wasn't something that we continued because it was, it didn't work with our current SMS system.

29:16Sabrina Wescott:It was a standalone. And so it was, it was a little kind of wonky and just a little comfort some for us to be able to like have two systems that just didn't work out. And so it was a great test, but not super successful. And I don't know if it was just because the audience was so dry and they would never purchase that. It was just, that was, that was the reason why I don't think it was because the bot, because when I went in and read questions, it was done really well. And so I actually was, it had like personally sent an email to a company. Um, this was yesterday And within second, and the question was something, it was like, if you sign up for a subscription, you get this free item.

30:00Sabrina Wescott:And I had signed up for the subscription before I saw the email. And so I replied to their email and I said, hey, I had signed up for this subscription earlier, but I didn't see this email. Will you still give me this free item? And within seconds, I got an email back and it was so well written and perfectly addressed my question that I was like, I knew it was AI. I knew it wasn't a customer service agent because the email was too long and it was within like a minute or two minutes to get it back. And so I actually replied to them, which AI do you use? I'm in customer service and your response was really good.

30:38Sabrina Wescott:And I haven't heard back yet, but I just feel like that's the direction that AI is going. is it's becoming so scary good that part of me is scared, but then the other part is just like, wow, like we can't not adapt and move forward with it. Like you have to figure out a way to make it work. And that's kind of what we're working through right now for our customer service specifically.

31:02Brian Roisentul:Otherwise you're going to be left behind because now it's like you can see like it's public, Like, you know, all the memos that, you know, the CEOs of big companies are writing to their employees about, you know, AI not being optional anymore, but the baseline. Yeah. So that's, I think that I'm no CX expert, but given like I'm, let's say, just another user as well. I'm a consumer and I'm a marketer and I speak with many brands. And what I can tell you is that my gut tells me something around, like in the same line you were saying, that it was that I think we are in this turning point that I didn't like into a bot because the bots were like calling this phone central, you know, that dial one for this, dial two for this.

31:59It was the same on here in Argentina's WhatsApp.

32:03Brian Roisentul:It could be SMS, whatever. And it was kind of, it wasn't something that was flowing very well. And it was slow. It was like, I want to talk to a human, talk to a human. The chatbot, same thing, talk to a human. I don't want to waste my time. Now, that's changing big time because talking to a human would be wasting your time because a human first there's limited operators and even more now because of AI and they need to get back to you they they have some they are in their mood and sometimes you can tell sometimes they want to cooperate sometimes they don't want to cooperate talk to a supervisor talk to they take five ten minutes to get back to you or 30 minutes and you're doing things and sometimes they hung up and it's AI.

32:55Brian Roisentul:If they have the answer, I mean, as you said, they get back to in seconds and that will be the expectation from now on. What I've heard not so long ago was how is this going to shape the next generation? Whenever you ask something to Bruce, your assistant, let's say that's up to you, but you don't need to say please and thank you. You get your answer right away. If you don't like something, you're blunt about it. You're straightforward. No compliments. So how is that going to shape people? Because if we, with the internet, all the stuff, we, and the TV as well, we felt that we were impatient. What about now?

33:39Sabrina Wescott:Man. Yeah. I mean, I have kids. And it's just so interesting to me to see how they use AI. I mean, my daughter, she's 12. She does not have a phone, but so she uses my phone to text her friends. And I was looking at my history and chat GPT to find something. And I see that she had she had said, my friend is going through some things, you know, can you write me up a reply to text her back? And I said, I said to her, I said, what you why couldn't you just reply to her? Why did you go to chat GPT to get this reply? And she was like, I just didn't want to have to like type it all out and think about it.

34:25Sabrina Wescott:And I was like, my gosh, what is happening? Like, is this what our kids are going to be like? Like they can't have their own thoughts and take two minutes to reply to someone?

34:38Brian Roisentul:I must admit, I find myself many, many times during the day every work day at least that I use ChatGPT doing something similar and there are memes online that I don't know someone goes to a shop and instead of asking if writes ChatGPT I want to ask him about this product can you please and he goes and reads the question and then the other one from the shop says he asked me this about the product can you tell me a reply for this so it's conversation like it's yeah and it's like i i laugh but then i say that's me i shouldn't be laughing right but to be fair i think that will change quickly as we as everything related to the ai is integrated into the products for example gmail just you know at least for me i saw that like a few weeks or days ago that it can, let's say, rewrite or improve my email copy.

35:42Brian Roisentul:But let's say if I sent you an email to invite you to this podcast on the fly, I just need to accept when they ask me about it and it's right there, right? So I don't need to go to an external tool. In this case, ChatGPD, it's already there. So I feel that that will be the natural thing. Like I think that, you know, there's a tool, I don't know if you know it. I think there are many, but the one I know, it's Super Whisper.

36:09Sabrina Wescott:Yeah, I don't know.

36:10Brian Roisentul:Super Whisper, it's for the phone or for the laptop, both. And you can tell them, you can press a key, a command, whatever, and say, I'm running late for the podcast recording with Sabrina. Can you please email Sabrina and tell her that I'll be five minutes late only. you will know what your contacts whatever my calendar who you are who sabrina is your email address go to gmail write the email or leave it in draft depending what you say and write the email you don't you don't like you don't spell the email out you just tell them that

36:49Sabrina Wescott:yeah it's unbelievable in like you don't even have to open your email anymore you just you know the days you remember like 10 years ago 15 years ago where it was like we you know this like the screen in front of you and you know you could do all the things with the screen and you know you didn't need a computer you know what i mean it's like that yes exactly but you don't even you don't even need exception yes yes you just say it now and it's there and it happens and

37:22Brian Roisentul:it's crazy i mean um it's crazy but what i want to zoom out you know ai i think that we covered that at length i can talk for hours about it and i guess you get to because it's of course it's crazy what happened and i still remember the first episode i recorded in 2022 before JATGPT released. It was, I think, August 2022. And nobody knew about JATGPT, OpenAI. Like, it wasn't massive. And I interviewed someone that they were using, you know, mid-journey.

38:00Sabrina Wescott:Yep, okay.

38:01Brian Roisentul:Yeah, and I didn't know about it. Nobody knew, I think. It wasn't massive either. So they had an artistic slash graphic design, but more about app agency. and they were using that to get ideas. And he was saying like, yes, it's like, let me show you. And he shared his screen while we were recording. And I want like the classic back then pink elephant with a bow tie, whatever, you know? And it was like, but where does it get the ideas from? It was from the internet, from people. How? What do you mean? Like, and he was explaining that to me. and then a few months later, I emailed him back and say, I cannot even believe what we are going through right now.

38:45Brian Roisentul:I was asking you about something like this when we recorded the episode six months earlier or so and now look at this, like it's crazy. And yeah, it's just, it blows my mind constantly and it's hard to keep up and how it's going to affect commerce as well because 2026, it's, I think what everyone says is likely the year in which we're going to see a huge spike of purchases coming directly from JackGPT, which is not currently possible, at least not massively. So I think that's going to change. And with that, the meaning of websites, again, keep in mind always TV, radio, online, offline, it's not going to change overnight, but Shopify already reported sessions and purchases from AI agents these Black Friday, Saturday, Monday.

39:35Brian Roisentul:So it's already happening. Purchases coming from directly from ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever. That's going to be huge. What do we do? Because it might be humans buying from those tools or it might be AI agents. So how do we sell? How do we market to AI agents? There's no emotions. So, oh my God, a new era is coming probably 2026 is the better start but it's going to be something that we don't know yet and that's going to be amazing but changing subjects we were talking about you know customer service before and i forgot to mention something important that i'm going i'm speaking with the og if i can say that if that's okay with you of customer service because you were awarded with the Steady Award, right?

40:24Brian Roisentul:Recently?

40:25Sabrina Wescott:Yes, we were. Yep. Thank you. That was very exciting for us. I have a great customer service team. We have four people and it was an honor to be able to win that award and well-deserved because they are, they're great. They're great people. They're great to work with and they do a great job. Thanks.

40:47Brian Roisentul:And customer service doesn't always mean to show up when things are good or being proactive as well it means to be you know to acknowledge when things go wrong and to do about it so do you recall the time in which that happened yes i do um so when we launched the

41:07Sabrina Wescott:product in 2019 um we started shipping in 2020 and that was in july of 2020 so after covid we had shipped out units and we were in very close contact with a select few customers to find out how is the product, how did they like it, how was it working for them. And we had one gentleman in particular who was a really heavy user, meaning really high resistance. the machine goes up to 300 pounds. So it's five pounds. And then if you turn the dial, it goes up to 300 pounds. And so, I mean, that's a lot. That's heavy. And so we have cables that are, they're a super high resistance, what they're made from Dyneema.

41:58And so we were super confident

42:01Sabrina Wescott:in all of our tests, super confident in the ability of the cable to withstand that pressure and that pull. And so we had a very unexpected experience where this customer, who luckily we were in close contact with him, he reached out and said, my cable broke. And we were like, what? And he says, my cable broke. And I mean, this is a cable machine. So the cable's everything. If the cable breaks and people lose trust in the machine, then what do you have? You have nothing. so that was a huge moment for us and so I I this was that was five years ago and I will not forget the phone call that Nazar and I had of like is this the end of the company like is this it for us or the the cable broke what are we gonna do how are we gonna respond we've shipped out hundreds of units to people people are using these machines what do we do we can't not say anything You know, what are you going to do?

43:02Sabrina Wescott:How are you going to respond to that? We can't have everyone ship the product back. You can't, you know, what do you do? And so we did some digging and to figure out how it happened. And we found out that our manufacturer was sent or purchased, I don't remember, the wrong cable. and so the first I think it was 500 units if I recall correctly were shipped so we so those units we couldn't do anything about the ones that had already been shipped out to customers we couldn't do anything about we had a couple hundred sitting at our warehouse and then we had you know some that were getting ready to ship out at our manufacturer and so we we were like how do you tell your customer who spent$700,$800 that their machine could break on them?

43:55Sabrina Wescott:It was just a really hard time. And so we had all hands on deck. We all met as a team and we discussed what do we do? What makes sense? And ultimately we landed on being open and honest and transparent with our customer. That was the only way morally, we felt like that was the only way that we could move forward is to tell the customers like, look, this is what happened. We didn't anticipate it. We weren't cutting corners. It wasn't a cost thing. We weren't misleading or whatever. It was a mistake somewhere along the supply chain. And this is where we're at. And so we decided that what we would do was send.

44:33Sabrina Wescott:Luckily, part of the Max Pro, that part right there is a wear unit. Naturally, you have to replace the cables after a year or two years anyway. And so we had already started producing that specific cable to be able to replace. And so what we ended up doing was we shipped every customer who had a unit in their possession, we shipped them a free cable replacement kit. And we were able to see that you can check the cable. And the cable was still very strong and very durable. But if you were a regular user at 300 pounds, those were more of the people who were affected by it. For your everyday person, it wasn't going to break on them.

45:19Sabrina Wescott:This is your high users, frequent users, heavy resistance. But we decided to send one to everyone as a courtesy. And we told everyone, if you want to send the unit to us, we'll change them for you and ship it back. It's up to you, but here's the kit. Here's how you do it. We made a video. This is how you do it. And then we got a team of, I want to say 10 people that went into our warehouse and changed all the cable, opened all the boxes, opened the machines, changed the cables out, tossed those, and then shipped and then packaged them all up and then made the change with the new cables at the supplier and shipped them out.

46:03Sabrina Wescott:And luckily, that was it. Like, that was it. We didn't have any disasters on our hands. And the feedback from the customers was amazing because I was super nervous. Like, what are people going to say? How are people going to respond? But everybody was so appreciative of us being honest with them that they weren't even mad. They were like, hey, like, we just appreciate that you're telling us the truth. And so that was a huge learning moment for me personally, but I think for our team as well, that we have applied many times over and over within the company. Like if we have shipping delays, we're truthful about that.

46:45Sabrina Wescott:We recently launched on Kickstarter the Max Pro Air, which is essentially like half of the Max Pro. And we went through all of the testing and found a weakness. in the product. And so we have really high expectations for our products. We make good quality, durable products. And so we had to have this moment where we had to meet and we had to say, here's the problem. It's not as durable as we expected. What does that mean? And what are our options. And so we defined what it meant was that the resistance couldn't be as high or the product wouldn't last as long as we wanted. And then from there, we said, is this something we want to present to our customers?

47:35Sabrina Wescott:And we decided, no, it's not. It's worth it to us to be honest with our customers and let them know that we found something in our testing that we're not happy with the quality of. And instead of creating and shipping a product that's not up to our standards, we're going to stop production. We're going to delay the shipment, unfortunately, two months to be able to get the product right and to make a good quality product. And so that's what we did. We had to tell everyone that had purchased through Kickstarter, we made a video and it was Nizar and he explained kind of what happened, but everything else is looking so good and is so promising.

48:18And so it just is what it is.

48:20Sabrina Wescott:And so we are moving forward with that. We're really happy with that decision. Things are falling into place and it's looking like it'll be about a two month delay from when we originally promised the product. And, you know, I mean, that happens when you have a consumer product and you have both sides of it. You got the quality of the product and then you have the consumer that you want to keep happy, but you just might disappoint them and it's just at what cost.

48:45Brian Roisentul:This is what a real business looks like. It happens to every single business at some point and it's their choice whether to come clean or not and straightforward and transparent with their customers. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. It happened to the best brands. And when you realize that there's something wrong, I mean, at least in this case, the upside is, the I see at least, is that you are showing your customers that you care about them. You care about the quality of your product and that you really, really test it. It's not a product that isn't tested and you receive it and it's like it goes and everyone, like, damn, it happened with the iPhone many times.

49:30Brian Roisentul:But they were overheating Samsung products as well. like it happens to the best brands as well. So you need to own it. So I think that even though some people might be upset, the real customers, I think that they will appreciate that. People get upset for nonsense all day long. So those people, you will have many of those because they are everyone.

49:58Sabrina Wescott:Yep.

49:59Brian Roisentul:The rat. They understand. I think I'd rather that as a customer than, you know, getting the product and the brand, knowing about it ahead and not doing anything about it. So, yeah, I think that's cool. Okay, Sabrina, I mean, I can keep going forever, but I want to be respectful with your time. I think we covered a lot of topics and I had a lot of fun. I think it was a great, great conversation. That being said, before you go, I wanted to ask you, is there anything I didn't ask you that you would like to tell the audience?

50:28Sabrina Wescott:um anything you didn't ask me um gosh I'm with you there's so many different areas and things that I could go on and on about but I think maybe uh one of how about that I'll tell you one of the coolest moments that I have had working for the company um and that was CES 2020 right before COVID, we were this super, like we had just, you know, done Kickstarter and we went to one small local trade show and, you know, we had some people come by and they thought the product was cool. And then we thought it'd be a really great idea, which it was to take the product to CES, Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

51:13Sabrina Wescott:We had a booth. And so, you know, remember how I was part-time and you know well you know I coordinated all of that the booth the decorations or you know all that.

51:24Brian Roisentul:A few hours a week working only a few hours. Yep and then we we hired a PR team to work with us at CES and that was great because they got us on

51:37Sabrina Wescott:a ton of these shows and so you know Nazar and I are you know both of us are new to e-commerce right and so he has an engineering background and you know I had more of an operations and like I said the app and software as a service so this was newer this was very new to us and we go to CES and we're interviewed we've got all these we're being interviewed by these companies and we have people coming you know in and out of our booths with mics and they want you know they want to talk to us about this and this and we won the CES innovation award which was super cool for us for like that moment of you feel like this was worth it, you know?

52:15Sabrina Wescott:And then we had, we were standing at our booth and we see this extremely tall figure kind of out in the distance. And our PR representative, her name is Heather. And she turns, turns around and she's looking for Nazar. And she's like, Nazar, Shaquille O 'Neal, there's, you got to get them over here. And so Shaq is walking around with his personal trainer, Rock Shabazz. And so they, you know, so Nazar's trying to get his attention and Heather says, you got to yell for him, yell at him. And so Nazar is holding the Max Pro and he's like, Hey Shaq, I got, this is a cable machine. Come here. And so Shaq and, and, you know, his trainer walk over and use the product.

52:58Sabrina Wescott:And, you know, I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is Shaquille O 'Neal. This is so cool. You know, I mean, like not many people have met him and he's, he was such a nice guy. And so he, you know, him and Nazar and the trainer and Shaq are talking and he's like, Hey, let's, you know, let's keep this conversation going. I got to go. And, you know, and so they left and Nazar kept the conversations going with, with the trainer and then with Shaquille O 'Neal and then ended up going to his house. And, uh, I don't remember if it was Florida or I don't remember, but went to his house and met with him. And then, you know, he ended up being a partner with Max Pro.

53:38Sabrina Wescott:So it was a great moment. It was it was one of those like, did that just happen? Did he just really come by?

53:45Brian Roisentul:Yeah.

53:46Sabrina Wescott:Yeah.

53:46Brian Roisentul:Wow.

53:47Sabrina Wescott:Yeah.

53:48Brian Roisentul:What a validation that you got early on. Sure.

53:51Sabrina Wescott:Yeah. Yeah.

53:53Brian Roisentul:That's amazing. Also, Brina, yeah, thank you for bringing that up. It was it was great. It was great having you here on the podcast. And yeah, have a great start of 2026.

54:05Sabrina Wescott:Thanks for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.

54:11Brian Roisentul:This episode was brought to you by BSR Digital. We help DTC brands grow through paid ads and email marketing campaigns. If you'd like us to help your business grow, head on over to bsrdigital.com and schedule a call with us.