484: Replicating Ecommerce Success Using AI with Tony Matusiak of Velocity

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2:42The first question that we ask everyone that comes on is, how did you get your job, aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today? Yeah. So I guess we'll bounce back all the way to pre-entrepreneurship. I like to explain how I kind of got into things from as early as high school, because I think that's a lot where some people start to get interested in certain things other than school or sports and stuff like that, right? People start to jab into things like their own hobbies or learn how to have fun with whatever they want to do, even entrepreneurship, right? I was not one of those people in the beginning.

3:21I was not one of those people that sold candy at high school or had these little side hustles. But I think I always had some sort of a building mindset. I enjoyed building things as a young kid. I was building Legos in the garage with my father, building small projects like go-karts and stuff like that. But obviously, that stuff is a little bit outdated right now, and especially in a new digital economy. Other things need to be built to obviously monetize. So from high school, like I said, not too big into entrepreneurship, but going to university, I started to dabble into ways to make money. So I started out by going to university in North Carolina.

4:03As a Canadian, obviously, I couldn't monetize down there. I couldn't get a job, no visa. So I looked on Google how to make money online. When I typed that in, the first suggestion was how to make money online. I typed in how to make money. And the first suggestion was how to make money online. Went down that rabbit hole, looked into affiliate marketing, Amazon FBA, all these, I guess, so-called guru business models. None of them worked out for me. Lost a bunch of money, kind of got scared of it. And then a few weeks later, I got an advertisement from a dropshipping guru. And they explained the simplicity of the dropshipping model, how you can actually start an online business and sell goods for a low startup cost.

4:49And I was hooked after that. I was like, you know what? I love how you can maneuver the product and the offer in the way that you want. You don't have to sell somebody else's affiliate offer, and you don't have to order up inventory like Amazon FBA. So you can sell almost anything instantly today. So I was hooked after that. After that, I dropped out of school, moved out, kind of ran away from my parents and tell them they're always wanting me to be a doctor or an engineer. But I saw this entrepreneurship as something I wanted to do. And I just hustled for about a year and a half and popped off my first real e-commerce brand, which was based off of the plastic straw ban in 2019.

5:34So back then there was a viral video going around of a turtle with a straw stuck with its nose. So just like any business, identifying a trend, identifying a demand for something is crucial. And I caught onto that and I started selling reusable portable straws off of that plastic straw ban. And that was my first e-commerce business. And since then I've built close to a dozen e-commerce businesses. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And I found you and the team found you through your viral style TikTok videos and reels. They're really cool, man. A lot about how to use AI to grow your e-commerce business. So that's really the big topic of conversation that we're really interested in.

6:22And it's just such an emerging topic, right? Because I think more than ever now, it is easier to start a business. It's easier to find a product. It's easier to get traffic to your site, but there is more competition than ever. Like you see how easy it is to just whip up a store using Shopify. So I'm curious, just on the dozen or so e-commerce businesses that you have built and brands, what was the most successful one? Can we talk some numbers? Can we talk about the brand? Like, are you still active in running these businesses? Like talk us through that. And then I'd love to delve on the tactics and things that are working.

6:57Yeah. So to touch on those e-commerce businesses that I built, all of those were DTC physical goods. And like that one business that was the start, that business I scaled to around a quarter million dollars in the first few months. That was life-changing money for me. But it's funny because I look back at that and I could have scaled that a lot further if I knew what I knew today. I'm sure most entrepreneurs say that. Um, since then I've done the same thing with multiple other stores, but, um, obviously learning more, uh, customer acquisition channels, um, more ways to actually have a quality customer experience and, you know, retain LTV, um, and all kinds of skills to obviously, you know, gain more revenue.

7:37So since then I've built e-commerce brands rep multiple different products, um, beauty products, lighting products, lighting was one of my biggest ones. and even dabbling into digital products as well. The biggest e-commerce business that I scaled for physical products was actually during the pandemic. And back then, I'm not sure if the audience knows, but there's sites like Exploding Topics, Trends.co. There's actually one called Trend Rocket now as well. Yeah, that's by Davey. Exactly, by Davey, yep. and all these sites make it super easy to identify trends right now. And especially right now, there's a site called Glimpse, glimpse.co or something.

8:24I forget what it's called. I use it all the time though. And there's some really interesting metrics on there that will tell you where the trends are actually coming from. And at the time there was a trend called TikTok lights that was blowing up and it's a pretty broad keyword, right? It's not any specific product. So I caught on to that. I started looking at what are TikTok lights. I typed in TikTok lights on TikTok, Facebook, all the advertising platforms. And quickly, I realized there was one massive product blowing up right now or back then, sorry. And there was a product that Madison Beer was putting in her videos.

9:01Other celebrities were putting their videos and it was catching a lot of traction. However, all of the companies that were advertising this, there was one called Galaxy Co. There was a bunch of other ones. They were all lacking on their creatives. And one thing that I know, and I'm sure you know as well, is e-commerce requires a lot of testing with creatives, right? It's always, always competing against other people in the auction with media buying or organic traffic or even influencer promotions. So I saw the advantage there where I could order in this product and film way better creatives and use this method that I like to call the king of the hill method, which I can test to beat out everybody in the competition and then win the top of the auction inside media buying platforms and scale very fast.

9:51So with that business, I was able to, in the first week, scale to already six figures a week in revenue. And then I continued to scale as high as I could with me being a young guy back then. I didn't have the best credit. So I was stacking up to like five credit cards borrowed from my mom, my father. I had a couple myself. And I was paying those credit cards over and I was able to scale to close to$400 ,000 a month until I hit that cap. I wasn't smart enough back then to get investors or a loan or something like that. So that was the cap there with that business. And altogether through those businesses, I've done multiple seven figures until right now.

10:31Yep. Got you. Fascinating. So you have a lot of methods and like you coin them. Your videos are really cool. Like credit to you, man. Like they're fast, they're snappy, the hooks are great. But then the method and you talk really like they're really valuable as well. So can you tell us about the adopt method and how that works? Yeah. So it's funny because I love how you say that I have a bunch of methods, right? I think a lot of people share some methods across multiple businesses, but I like to throw a name on things and put a brand on it to make sure that people really remember it and understand how valuable these things actually are.

11:14There's actually this quote that I heard the other day. It was CEOs and business owners, they know this one thing across all businesses. To teach somebody, they need to hear something at least seven times before it actually sinks in with how important it is. So that's why in my videos, I really make sure that people can grasp it and it's as simplified as possible. So with the adoption method, I also have one called the older sibling method. And just like I just said, the king of the hill method, all of these methods play together, but they all have their separate part. The adoption method specifically, I can use an example of another business.

11:55I like to use this business in a lot of my videos, Young LA. They're a huge e-commerce business right now in the lifestyle fitness clothing niche. They blew up through TikTok, especially in the beginning of TikTok. They utilize it super, super well. But how the adoption method works is they utilized adopting early risers in platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels that were blowing up and they had no way to monetize. So Young LA in the early stages, they were just a very small brand. They didn't have the best clothing, just like most products start out. But they knew one thing is if somebody else is growing, they can leverage their audience as long as they can form some kind of alliance.

12:41So they formed an alliance. I'm not going to name drop right now, but with a fitness influencer in the early stages, I was following this person as well. And I noticed that this person was blowing up very fast, but they had no clue how to monetize. So what Young LA did was they built a system around this person by first having them promote, I guess I'm not totally sure what the numbers are, what the commission is, but they leveraged his audience. And as his audience grew, their business grew as well. But here's where the trick is. That person is not only to replicate and duplicate into other influencers, because that's very hard to find out of influencers by just reaching out to them.

13:24What they did was they used that one influencer to start with to attract other influencers because they were already big in the fitness influencer space. So after they adopted that one influencer, they then adopted more influencers through their network. And now they have thousands of influencers probably. And they are doing, I think, close to seven figures a day consistently with very little media buying, just commission payments through their network of influencers. Yeah. So they've got a massive referral slash ambassador program. Yeah. And especially right now, a lot of people think you need a lot of capital to start, especially with marketing, with paid ads or anything.

14:05But with influencers specifically, with the adoption method, you can start with small micro-influencers with just giving them a product, not even paying them anything up front, but just agreeing on a commission basis. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Hey, FounderFam, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling the seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results.

14:43Did you know on average, OmniSend customers make$68 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code FOUNDER50. Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right. Now let's jump back into the show. We had another founder. She runs a co-founder of a company called Burst. Burst Oral Care. Are you familiar with that brand? I haven't seen it, but it's a good name. It's massive. They sell like oral care, similar to high, like not the same as High Smile because High Smile do, you know, High Smile, right?

15:26like they do the toothpaste and stuff like that and they're incredible on paid and creatives like their creatives are amazing but burst their main way of customer acquisition and we talk about in the summit we interviewed britney is using an ambassador program with dentists and they have dentists nationwide that are promoting their toothbrushes and it's like very cool massive massive business. Okay. So let's talk about like TikTok because you are very, very good. Like your videos are some of the best I've seen on even talking about how to start a business, like how to start an e-commerce business.

16:07And they're very good. And you'd also talk about the idea of using TikTok to grow an e-commerce business. How have you used TikTok to grow your e-commerce businesses, what advice could you give to somebody when it comes to using short form videos to really kind of grow your e-commerce business? Yeah, actually, this is probably one of the most exciting topics I like to talk about. TikTok is not a worse opportunity than it was two years ago when it first started. TikTok is just as explosive as it has always been. I think the main thing that most people go wrong is they don't understand that they can just replicate off of ideas that have already worked, right?

16:47Basing their creatives off of creatives that already have data. So one thing that I've always known, just like discussing the King of the Hill method with finding that one big product that I told you about earlier, is I've never ever invented my own ideas. I don't think anybody ever has, right? They've always gone the idea from reference. So what I do is I make sure that I find as many viral ideas possible that are already proven to work. And then it's as easy as ordering your product in to make content for yourself or a UGC creator and making sure that they replicate exactly what that person did in that video.

17:30That video is completely different because it's recorded in a different space, different background, a different person. It's a unique video, but it is based off of a viral idea. So there's a very high chance it's going to go viral again. So that's just for the organic side and making creatives. And a lot of people also don't understand that with TikTok ads, it works just very, very similar to the organic algorithm. So if you can make your videos viral, your creatives are just going to get pushed so much further. I've had creatives get as low as$1.50 cost per acquisition with TikTok. and it's because they've already gone viral through organic.

18:13And then we boosted that virality or if virality is not even a word, but we boost that further with spark ads or just regular ads on TikTok. So it's so powerful that you can test creatives for free and then push them further with advertising. Interesting. So basically your strategy is just modeling other people's videos. Exactly. And you would never know that I've modeled after other people's videos because Because one thing that I believe in that makes somebody creative versus not creative is someone that's not creative usually copies from just one source. But for me, I like to copy off of hundreds of sources and get the pros from all of those sources and put them all into one.

18:54So I like to combine ideas all the time. Got you. And what tools do you use? Any AI tools, any tools you could recommend when it comes to doing this? I don't have any AI tools or TikTok research for these creatives, but there's a Chrome extension that I love. it's called sort for TikTok. And what it does is if you go on a company's page or you find a viral video and then you track back to their page, you click that Chrome extension and it'll bring all their most viral videos to the top so that you don't have to look through hundreds of videos. Ah, love it. And then you basically just model them and how long does it take you to shoot a video?

19:30It really depends. It depends on the product, the environment, the lighting. But I mean, I shot videos in 30 seconds. I've shot videos in an hour. I've rented big Airbnbs, big houses, and brought in a bunch of friends or a big crew of people. It really depends. But the best thing is with TikTok, authenticity is key. So the more amateur your video looks, as long as it's still clear to understand, the better it performs. Nobody wants an over-edited video that looks like an advertisement. They want a video that looks like you're sending a Snapchat to your friend of your new shoes. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton.

20:11As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success, you should come and check out our new podcast, From Zero to Founder, hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn. These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs.

20:50People just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. You use TikTok as well to validate and research products too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's multiple ways. I like to validate products and research products through paid advertising, just because you don't depend on the algorithm having to pick up your video. And sometimes your account isn't warm, sorry, your organic account isn't warmed up properly.

21:29So I like to just force views in and get metrics right away. But now, just like you said, product research and starting a business is way easier than it's ever been because of the tools that we have. Just like you mentioned before, there's so many AI tools. There's so many tools that you can look into businesses, similar web, shop hunter, all of these things. You can see the revenue, where their traffic is coming from, and you can replicate exactly what that business is doing almost instantly now. So I don't even like to just validate products they're testing anymore, where a lot of people in the dropshipping community or e-commerce community, they like to test so many different products.

22:10But in my opinion, you don't have to do that anymore. You just need to sell something that's already selling that you found through these softwares. Yeah, got you. So let's talk about tools, right? You share a lot of different AI tools. What are you using? Talk us through the best tools that you're using as an e-com founder. So there's always different things that pop up, new solutions that we need. And I mean, probably the most go-to AI tool that we use is ChatGPT or sometimes Mid Journey with Creatives. But there's also a lot of different things that pop up that we might need a specific AI tool.

22:48Especially right now, AI is going to be the biggest trend on the internet ever, I think. so there's ai tools popping up everywhere but how do you find those tools there's marketplaces i'll give one example gpte.ai i believe that's how you spell it it's a marketplace where you can type in your issue or the solution or the problem that you're trying to solve and it will show you the ai tools that have been built for that problem so that's a exactly that's a way to just fast track through every single AI tool out there. Yeah, got you. And when it comes to ChatGPT, I know you've mentioned CopyAI or Jasper, like there's Jasper or CopyAI.

23:32Yeah. Do you use, like what's the difference and why do people use, I don't understand, why do people use Jasper or CopyAI versus ChatGPT? Well, I think the reason is the simplicity of it, right? There's already buttons instead of you having to figure out your old prompt. with chat gpt also another reason is you know those have been around before chat gpt so people are used to using those but me personally i like to use chat gpt because um i think there's more customization on your prompts right and as you get used more used to it there's actually more features than copy copy.ai and jasper um yeah super powerful you use bard or any of the others or just chat GPT?

24:13Mainly chat GPT. Yep, got you. And what do you use it for? The biggest thing is copy. Obviously, like if you find articles or other websites that you see very good copy, just like I said, you don't want to, nobody's an inventor. You can take a little bit from here, a little bit from there and combine it with chat GPT. That's one of the most popular reasons why me and my team use it. And another thing is just a lot of boring stuff like, you know, contracts and workflows and stuff that they teach in business school that, you know, I didn't pay attention to. So, yeah. Gotcha. Okay. So what do you think the main challenge in implementing AI solutions is for e-commerce founders right now?

25:02I think the biggest challenge is e-commerce founders trying to replace creativity with it. I don't know if that will ever happen. I think that's something that is very rare nowadays. I think we're actually having less creative people now that there's so many more digital communities and TikTok videos and people getting addicted to the internet, all these things. I think a perfect example is the music industry. In the music industry, if you look at all the songs back in the 90s or the 2000s or even as late as the 80s, right? All of their songs are a lot more unique because they depend a lot more on creativity.

25:44Nowadays, because everything is so simple, everybody can just hop on FL Studio and copy the next track, right? They can copy what worked on that track and make their own track like that. The same thing with e-commerce stores or e-commerce businesses, people tend to copy. And I think this is creating an environment of people being used to just staying inside of a bubble. All they have to do is copy that next person that's at the best just to get an inch further than them and then an inch further than that guy. But there's never that person that can just have straight creativity. They don't depend on these almost cheating methods.

26:22And there's never that person that just separates themselves from that bubble. So creativity, you better find a creative person for your team or you need to be creative for yourself. Yeah, love it. And with the rise of, I guess, chatbots and AI driven support solutions, how do you balance automated customer support versus the human touch in customer service? What's your take there? You know what? I haven't implemented customer service with AI yet, but I think that's something that, I mean, is going to be one of the first things to fully be automated. Obviously, big companies, they don't even have phone support, most of them anymore, especially Shopify, which is really annoying sometimes.

27:02But they all have automated messages. I think those automated messages can be improved tremendously with AI. but I believe with every company that I build, I'll have maybe a first level of AI and then anybody that needs extra help will still have human contact. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey? Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success. Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence.