511: How One Product Made Him $40M | Ezra Firestone

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. The interesting thing about business is you will be humbled by it and things will go wrong and you will fail. And your job is to show up every day with a positive attitude and do the best you can because it turns out it is a longevity game. It is a marathon. How many people have we seen give up before the miracle? It's like, you just have to keep at it. One of the most successful e-commerce entrepreneurs in the industry today. Founder and creative director of Smart Marketer, Ezra Firestone.

1:17In the eyes of the school system, I'm a dumb kid. I failed out of high school. I never made it through college. You don't have to be traditionally book smart to be successful with this. That is the beauty of the internet people like you and i can start from nothing and build real amazing businesses

1:34before we dive in i want to extend a warm invitation to join our thriving founder community it's the perfect place to discover more insightful interviews aimed at helping you build grow and scale your business so don't forget to hit subscribe your support means the absolute world to us. Thank you so much for subscribing. Let's get stuck in today's discussion. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. The first question that I wanted to ask is, can you describe the first 60 days of your first ever e-commerce store my costume weeks what did that look like well what that looked like was learning to code in rtml which was like a russian coding language that shopify stores were built on back in 2006 and there was one guy and he was in russia and he was the only person in the world who knew this and he had a book so you had to buy his book and then you had to call him on skype when you had questions and so it was basically just figuring out how to build the store you know back Then there was one visibility source.

2:48There was only one, and it was Google. It was Google search, it was Google AdWords, and that was the only way that you were going to generate the exploration of human potential. And it is a bit parallel to today. The Founder Podcast. Even the greatest entrepreneurs had help. If you want to learn from the most successful founders on the planet, you are in the right place. Branson, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Jim Ferris, Rian Huffington, Steve Case, Gary V. Sofia Amoroso, So, David, John, learn from the greatest minds in business today with interviews hosted by Nathan Chan. This is not your average entrepreneur podcast.

3:25The Founder Podcast. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in Chinatown, in an apartment that was no bigger than this desk. An apartment where the toilet was in the shower. I mean, it's like one of those 300 square foot Chinatown, New York City apartments. And I thought, this is before the iPhone. I thought, this woman has no idea who she has just purchased from. Like, she thinks she bought from a real company. and I'm just some kid like on a couch, you know? And I think that that is the beauty of the internet is people like you and I can start from nothing and build real amazing businesses. And it doesn't actually take, like I am in the eyes of the school system, I'm a dumb kid.

4:00I failed out of high school. I never made it through college. I like, you know, you don't have to be traditionally book smart to be successful with this. And yeah, it was a beautiful time. Hmm. So is e-commerce harder nowadays compared to back then? Absolutely not. Back then there was, first of all, nobody showing you what to do. There was a, there was like 31 dudes on an internet forum. Half of them were creepy. And anyone who you told that you sold things on the internet thought you were selling gambling or porn. I mean, it was like, it was a real hard time to know. Um, it was a real hard time to not get swindled.

4:37Everyone wanted your money for something. You didn't know if anything was legit. You were working with outsourcers. Today you have people like Founder. I mean, these folks who are watching this have found you. And if they've found you, they're so much more likely to be successful because they're hanging out with a community of people who are all moving in the direction of their goals with a positive attitude, supporting one another. We have technology platforms like Shopify. We have education platforms like Founder. We have so many reasons. We have places to source product. I mean, back in the day, there was no China.

5:05There was no drop shipping. There was no, you know, third-party manufacturers. I mean, it was so difficult to put in. Hey, maybe it was a little cheaper and traffic was a little easier and people know what they're doing, but it was a lot easier to lose all your money than it is today. Today, it's easier to make smart, calculated decisions with your money and know that you're putting one foot in front of the other and not moving in the wrong direction. And back in the day, countless times you were swindled or you walked 10 miles in the wrong direction. You had to walk all the way back. It was more difficult to know if what you were doing was correct.

5:35And that's not the case today. So you always say when you're starting an e-commerce business, you should start with a strong e-commerce marketing funnel. Can you talk us through what you mean by that and the steps? Yes. So essentially when it, you know, again, I'm not the high, I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I never have been. I'm not the highest educated person. So for me, I need simplicity. And if I can do this, anyone can do this, right? Like I manage a team of 180 people. My business has generated over$70 million in revenue last year, and I am just some guy. And so I keep things really simple.

6:11Here's what you need in e-commerce. Number one, you need a great promise. Everybody tells you that the best product wins in the marketplace. That is not true. The best promise wins in the marketplace. And the product has to live up to the promise that you made, right? And so how do you make a great promise? Well, today, the way your promise starts is with an advertisement or with a piece of content. You need one very compelling video. So you need only a couple assets, right? To, to, to make a sale. The first is you got to be able to get someone's attention and let them know that you exist. And, you know, in traditional times you do that with a video, it could be a customer testimonial.

6:46It could be a paid creator who you paid to make a video about your product. It could be you and your cousin talking about it. It could be a sales video you make, but you need a video asset. And ideally you've got a couple of these, but you really only need one good one. I have one, I spent$17 million of my own money on advertising my own brands last year. And I have one video that was made in 2016. That was my best video. So one good asset can carry you a long way. So you need one really good sales video. Second, you need a great landing page, which is ultimately once you've captured someone's attention, they're on social media, they're hanging out with their friends, they're looking at pictures, they're being inspired by people they follow and you get their attention.

7:23Hey, check out my stuff in whatever way you do, usually with a video advertisement. Once you've done that and they've decided to click that ad, then they go to a landing page. And that landing page, most people in e-commerce get this wrong. And they do like a, you know, a couple of pictures and a few bullet points and that's it. It's like, no, you need to do a traditional direct response sales page that is designed to overcome any objections they might have about buying. And that for me, all my e-commerce product pages, They're essentially long form sales pages with videos and stories and content and everything.

7:54This is the one thing to remember. Everything on that page is designed to communicate one thing, which is what is the ownership benefit of this product? How will my life change? What will I become, have, feel, be perceived as, enjoy if I own this item? So you have to communicate the ownership benefit of your product on that page. If you can do that, if you can have a really good video and a really good landing page, There's some other assets. We can talk about the images, having your images, like having in-context images where the product is being shown, used in its intended environment. A lot of business owners, they just have their picture on white.

8:29It's like, no, you need to show the product being used in its intended environment. You need lifestyle images. So we can get into the specifics of landing page optimization, but essentially, you get someone's attention, you get them off social media, and then you demonstrate the ownership benefit of the product on the landing page, and you get them to say yes to buying from you. there's a few other steps in marketing which is generally once you get someone's attention and you get them to your landing page a lot of people don't take action immediately so you have to follow up with them that's where you capture the email address and you send them emails right so we have incentives to get their email address when they're on our site pop-ups and things like that we follow up with them we do remarketing ads but all those remarketing ads it could literally be the same video ad to the same landing page simple you look at many many eight and nine figure funnels.

9:13It's one good video and one good landing page. And if you do those well, and I'm sure at founder, you teach how to do this because I know Nick Shackelford and I know Greta and I know some of your amazing teachers who are phenomenal at these things. But if you get those two assets done extremely well, you're ahead of 95 % of brands. And most people, what they try to do is they try to make a million videos and 20 landing pages and focus on a million products. No, go very deep. Everything is focused on one product. You want to sell one thing. All your videos are about it. Your landing page is optimized about it.

9:42Your email funnels are about it. You got to figure out how to sell one thing before you can sell many things. And that is a big mistake that new business owners make as they try to do a bunch of different things. And I focus. You know what's funny? I have a brand that did$40 million in 2023. Okay. There's only one product that people came to me for. Now, once people came to me, I upsold them. I cross sold them. I got their email address. I built the community, but they're all, all my advertising, all my ads, my sales funnel, it's all designed to sell one product and i sold 40 million dollars in that company so you can be simple you can go deep and it's better i love that what what which e-commerce business was that was that boom that's boom beauty yeah yeah and people come to me for one item which is a multi-purpose blush stick it's basically like a makeup stick that is sort of an all-in-one yeah so i um that was yeah that was the first business that i knew that you were behind from an e-commerce perspective and you used to do case studies.

10:37I never forget, you wrote like a really good blog post that I read around kind of the different types of business models. And you were quite transparent between SaaS, info and e-com. And you broke down Boom and the numbers. It was really good. And then unfortunately, Cindy passed away and you've spoken around, yeah, navigating all of that side of things. I'm curious just around Boom and just the idea of selling one product? Because I think that's a really, really good takeaway for people. How do you know when to start the next product? Like at what point in time should you have your second hero product or even have a kind of complementary product?

11:20So my viewpoint is that ideally from the jump, you have two items. One item that you're focusing on selling and doing all your marketing around and another item that you're using as an upsell or cross sell on the product page in the shopping cart post-purchase. One-click upsell, my application does post-purchase and pre-purchase upsells. But a basket building item is a very important initial thing to start your business with because it'll increase your average order value. And if you do any kind of good marketing, you probably get a 20 % take rate on that basket builder if it is relevant. So I kind of like to start with the cross-sell item already built in.

11:55and then you know a good brand that okay let me I have a I have a I have a team I work really hard and I'm only able to launch like maximum four products a year one product every three months because you got to get componentry and you're doing formulations and you're going back and forth takes us about a year to get a product out and so ideally as you're building your business you are also in the background doing product development surveying the market seeing what other people are buying and trying to develop products simultaneously while you're marketing your first one. Because the more products you have, the better merchandising you can do.

12:30And what's interesting about e-commerce today is merchandising matters more than ever. Merchandising is how you bundle, how you kit, how you discount, buy one, get one, buy, get a free gift with order, buy this, get this other one half off, live shopping discount, these two products together and you get a discount. And the more merchandising you can do, the more successful you're going to be. And the more products you have, the more merchandising you're able to do. So while I'm very focused still to this day on only selling one item with front end marketing, I'm always doing product development in the background for new business owners.

13:00They do not have the capacity generally to do good product development while they're building out their sales process. So it's like, start with your two items, focus only on marketing and getting those selling for the first year. Then, okay. Once you've got some sales and you're kind of up and running, you can now start doing some product development. Yeah. Love it. Um, one, I, I, uh, there was a guy i'm sure you would know him he's an old school kind of marketer back in the ebon pagan and i love that guy he he talked about kind of something that early stage founders should fall uh think about is is they should be spending 80 of their time on product and marketing in the early stages do you agree disagree 90 do you think that's about right um yeah i mean i think those Look, there's three big things when it comes to business, okay?

13:48You have marketing, which is essentially the same for every business. It's the same level of difficulty. You got to get someone's attention. You got to get them to say yes to what you have to offer. And then you've got to navigate them through, you know, pre-arrival before the product comes, getting them excited, delivering on the product. So then they get it and they like it, following up, upselling and cross-selling, right? That's like marketing, keeping them engaged. Okay. Two, you got to make a good product and you are never done making your product better. You're listening to feedback. You're iterating.

14:15You're making it better. You're changing components or you're making it more sustainable. You're, you know, you're, so you got, you got marketing, you got product in e-commerce. Frankly, product is the easy part, right? It's like I sell tubs of goop as I scale. It's like more tubs, more goop labels. It's wonderful goop. It's handmade goop. It's amazing. But it is at the end of the day, it is a tub with some goop in it and a label. It's like not that complex at scale. Right? So, but then the third part of this, okay. The third part of this is support. and actually for all the business models that I do, support is the easiest for e-commerce because it's just refunds and questions about the product, but support is also analogous to people and systems and processes and operations and KPIs and monitoring.

14:55And I think if you only focus on marketing and product, yes, you have to do that well, especially when you're starting, I would agree. 80 % of your energy is on that, 90 % because otherwise you don't have a business. But as soon as you are selling, you must focus on the people, the systems, the processes, the KPIs that you're monitoring, how you run the business, or it's all just going to go up in flames because you're going to basically marketing is going to break the business. You're going to sell more. You're not going to be able to answer support tickets. Nobody's going to know what they're doing.

15:21You're not going to have repeatable processes. So I think essentially it should be 33, 33, 33 eventually, but starting, yeah, I would agree with that. And when it comes to channels, where do you see getting your best bang for your buck for early stage founders when it comes to e-com? I mean, Amazon, you know, but you don't want to be on Amazon because it's like Amazon happens to have 55 cents out of every dollar spent in America. So the buyers are there, people are spending money there, and it's the easiest place to get a sale. But it has so many downsides. You don't own the customer. Competitors attack you and negatively review you and take you down.

16:02Amazon's bureaucracy is a nightmare. People are ripping you off left, right, and center, including Amazon. They know who your suppliers are. They're backdooring you, you know, going to your suppliers as soon as you're making sales. It's a nightmare. You still have to play there, right? But if you are playing there without your own brand and without your own marketing, you are in very dangerous territory. So where is the best platform to generate visibility in 2024? It's meta. It's Facebook and Instagram. It just is. And it will be that way for the next five years until TikTok matures. Google is great for brands that have 100 plus SKUs.

16:35If you've got 100 products, great. Long tail search, you know, you can do a lot of stuff with Google if you have a big product catalog. If you have a small product catalog, Google becomes a lot harder. YouTube is still not a top of funnel acquisition, you know, channel, really. And so you got to focus on Facebook and Instagram. And what that also means is creator and influencer marketing, which I think you guys also teach, which is basically part of being successful on Facebook is getting paid creators and your family and your customers to make content on your behalf. If you're not doing that, those two things go hand in hand.

17:09You won't be successful. You need that. You're not going to do it without it. So it's like you kind of need the influencer creator marketing and you need the Facebook ads. And that is, if you looked at, if you took a thousand brands that started in 2023 and you looked at the ones that were successful, let's call it a hundred of them. And you looked at the marketing that made sales for them, I'm going to say 95 % of them are Facebook and Instagram. And, you know, and then you've got one random SEO guy and one person who happened to get some PR and one person who happened to get some organic TikTok or TikTok, you know, TikTok shop or invest a lot of money in that.

17:43But it's like, it's going to be 95 % Facebook and Instagram. Hey guys, I really hope you're feeling inspired from today's interview. Now, the truth is all successful e-commerce founders started from zero with a spark of an idea and a whole lot of determination. But let's be real, building or growing an e-commerce business is no walk in the park. And that's where Founder Plus comes in, in which I'm really excited to share with you. If you're feeling stuck in your e-commerce business, lacking the confidence to move forward or worrying about making costly mistakes, Founder Plus is here to support you on your journey.

18:16You get access to a customized learning pathway with proven frameworks from super successful e-commerce founders for fast results, a supportive community, weekly live mentorship, exclusive savings on startup tools, and 24-7 real human support. So you can try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days so you can accelerate your business goals. Visit founder.com forward slash Founder Plus trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. All right, now let's jump back in the show. I'm curious, when you talk about conversion-based commerce, What does that mean? Well, I mean, look, the idea is you need somebody to actually buy from you.

18:56So what are you doing to get that sale? And what's interesting about this is in 2015, I sort of coined a term called integrated social commerce. And I said, hey, guess what's going to happen? Eventually, people are not going to leave the social networks to make a purchase. The sales are going to be happening. They're going to click an ad and they're going to be able to make a purchase right here. They're never your website's going away. You will not have. I thought this was coming faster than it was. I was correct, but I was wrong because look, websites are still 70 % of sales, but 30 % of sales for a lot of shops is happening inside of Facebook, inside of Instagram, inside of Pinterest, inside of YouTube, inside of TikTok.

19:31So integrated social commerce has really come where basically, you know, they are, you're able to make a sale in the social network without ever leaving. So what is, what does conversion based commerce means? It means everything that you are doing is designed to generate a sale. And a lot of people are afraid to sell, but it's like, look, if you believe in your product and if you wouldn't, you would, people would not be hanging out with you if they didn't have integrity, if they weren't making something to the best of their ability. It doesn't mean it's the best product out there, but it's the best you can make currently.

19:59And if you don't focus and try to do everything you can to sell that product, you're not going to have money to reinvest, to make better products or to, you know, take care of yourself and your family and your community to take care of your team. So for me, conversion focused commerce is focusing on at every step of the sales cycle from the initial impression of the ad to once they read the ad copy to when they click either to the social shop or to my website to when they're actually on the product page, the upsells and cross sells, it's all designed. How do I get the next action that is going to lead towards a sale?

20:29So on Facebook, it's like, get them to click on my website. It's like, get them to click the add to cart button. Once they're in the cart, it's like, get them to click the checkout button. Like there's very simple actions that I need to have taken in order to generate a conversion. And I'm focused on whatever that next action is, wherever I am in the sales process. And have you got, have you been exploring much with TikTok shop? Yeah, I'm playing around with it. And I think, I think, Hey, it's good for certain brands. It's not good for others. Um, I think it is an emerging visibility source that is going to become very important, especially over the next five to 10 years.

20:59I think currently the TikTok user base is a little young. And so as they come into more money. Right now, the millennials are the millennials have taken over from the baby boomers. Seven years ago, the baby boomers were the prime spenders in the economy. Now they're dying off the millennials, which is my generation. I'm 37. So I'm sort of on the, you know, later end of the millennials. Um, we are now the drivers of the economy. We're the ones who are spending the most money where, you know, all the work we're spending, we are the most contributing the most to the economy. Gen Z is right behind us.

21:27And in five years, Gen Z is going to be in their prime earning years. And that's the tick tock platform. So now's a great time to get on it because it's only going to get better. TikTok is subsidizing the success of TikTok shop. They're investing a ton of money. They're amplifying the videos and content in front of all their users that are designated to shop. That can only last a year, year, two years, maybe. And the next 18 months are your best, cheapest visibility, most success with TikTok from a conversion standpoint. You're going to see a lull for a year or two after that. And then it's going to start to spike again as those users come into their prime spending years.

21:59Yeah, I love that. So you're pretty big on like predictions. You've been around the block. You've been in this space for a very, very long time, man. I like to make predictions. I have been very successful. I will say every year I do like, this is what I think is coming. And if you go back and look at them, I've been wrong a lot. But the things I've been right about, I've been very right about. I think that's how it goes with predictions, you know? So like, yeah, I've had some pretty fun ones, but I've also missed the mark. You know, I thought Amazon was going to buy Shopify. I thought some other crazy stuff was going to happen.

22:27Amazon buying Shopify, man, that'd be crazy. They should have done it. They could have done it. They had the chance. I mean, it would have been genius, but they decided not to, I guess. I don't know. 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.

22:59You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. All right, let's talk about some e-com war stories because it's an awesome business. Yeah, I'll tell you one. One time I sold 8 ,000 Marge Simpson wigs to Fox because they were opening a theme park for the Simpsons. And these guys called me up and they said, hey, you know, we want 8 ,000 wigs for Marge Simpson. and I said and they said hey but you know we're gonna pay you uh once they arrive so you know and for me to go out and buy 8 ,000 wigs was literally all the money I had in the bank because it was drop ship store right it was like I had a I had a drop shipper um they were like these it was these two Jewish dudes it was Elliot and Moodle and Elliot was this giant guy and you'd walk into this hangar in midtown and he'd just be banging down apple pies he had this bag of miniature apple pies he was just eating them all the time and then you had Moodle in the back who was running the money and they were, they were, uh, you know, in the, um, they were the guys who supplied all the costume wigs to like Lacey costume or to, uh, Ricky's and all that stuff in New York city.