Whether you’re an established e-commerce business, or looking to your first e-commerce shopping cart, we know it can be absolutely difficult when selecting one platform over the other. For today’s episode of Skubana’s Mastery Series, we interviewed Travis Romine, founder of SharpCommerce, a service dedicated to assisting sellers to earn more money by optimizing their overall business. Travis discusses his experience in e-commerce, examples of pain points he and his clients have experienced, and his personal preference of shopping cart solutions.
In the Twentieth episode of Skubana’s E-Commerce Mastery Series where we invite experts of their respected fields to share their best practices for success, our host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz of InspiredInsider.com interviews Travis Romine of SharpCommerce.
What this interview covers:
Travis Romine’s experience building Paradise Fibers from 50k in debt to 5 million.
Common pain points SharpCommerce’s clients face and their solutions
The importance of allowing your employees to develop their own solutions and work independently
Software to utilize to not only automate your business but allow you to work remotely (even while on vacation)
Travis Romine’s preference over which shopping cart platform is best for which kind of seller.
Raw Transcript: Travis Romine of SharpCommerce.
Jeremy: [00:00:15] Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. I’m founder of Inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders, like the founders of P90X, Baby Einstein, Atari, many more, how they overcome big challenges in life and business. This is part of the Skubana e-commerce mastery series, where top sellers and experts teach you what really works to boost your e-commerce business. That’s why we have Travis. Skubana is a software platform to manage your entire e-commerce operation. Today, we have Travis Romine, founder of Sharp Commerce. His company is a group of e-commerce ninjas, helping with customer engagement, retention, advanced marketing, and much more, which we’ll talk about. He took sales from about $100 per day to over $15,000 per day, over a 10-year period, at Paradise Fibers, that he co-founded, which they grew to one of the top-performing businesses in the needle-craft industry. Now Travis, thanks for joining me.
Travis: [00:01:15] Thank you, Jeremy. Thanks for having me, man.
Jeremy: [00:01:17] That’s the polished introduction. The real entrepreneurial introduction is when we were talking before we hit record, is Paradise Fibers. Travis, $50,000 debt on credit cards, garbage shopping cart in 2005, worked 60 to 80-hour weeks for eight years, to take over the world for needle-craft. Right?
Travis: [00:01:45] Take over the world in the name of yarn.
Jeremy: [00:01:47] Yes, exactly.
Travis: [00:01:48] How about that? Is that better? It sounds less attacking. All right.
Jeremy: [00:01:51] Exactly. I don’t know if you can really attack needle-craft people.
Travis: [00:01:57] I want to sound . . . There’s some people that are gonna seek this out. There’s some hardcore yarnies that have found me after this thing.
Jeremy: [00:02:04] Really?
Travis: On social media and whatever. I’ve had long conversations with a lot of these ladies, man. You’re selling love. So anyway, they found me, and they’ll find this, dude, eventually. I don’t want them to be like, “Travis just sold yarn to make money.” No, that’s not it, man.
Jeremy: [00:02:19] No, I mean taking over the world.
Travis: [00:02:20] It really wasn’t.
Jeremy: [00:02:22] So we’ll talk about some of the big milestones of the company and what you do at Sharp Commerce, for other companies as well, but I always like to include a fun fact before we dig in to some of those, how you boosted the sales and mistakes and other things. You have a lot of interesting fun facts, and one of them . . . You have a love for mustard, which I thought was interesting. What do you like . . .
Travis: [00:02:48] I don’t know where that comes from. I love it, man. I really do. Any kind. I don’t care what brand it is. Yellow is the best. It’s not anything fancy, just yellow mustard, man. It’s delicious.
Jeremy: [00:02:58] Also, you put out a music video about dental floss dispensers.
Travis: [00:03:06] I did. I did.
Jeremy: [00:03:08] What’s the story behind that?
Travis: [00:03:10] All right. So that was a sort of entrepreneurial project that I partnered with my dad on. He has this pocket floss device, this little . . . sort of like reel-to-reel tape, and it’s a little kind of floss dispenser, but it sort of comes back in the other side. So you push a button, release the floss on one side, and you reel it back up when you’re done on the other. Now when you’ve got this floss extended, you’ve got this loop of floss, it’ll lock for you. You pull against it, and you can use it. You don’t have to wind it around your fingers. No more purple finger tips. Whatever.
Jeremy: [00:03:48] I gotcha. Yeah.
Travis: [00:03:49] Shameless plug for pocket floss.
Jeremy: [00:03:49] I knew it would have an e-commerce app . . . this music video would have an e-commerce application to it. Did it help you sell more floss?
Travis: [00:03:59] No. That product was a flop. But when you’re an entrepreneur, you make mistakes, and you learn from them. Anyway, it’s still out there. You can find them on Amazon, if you want to buy one and check it out, but they’re . . . The video . . . It was kind of crazy. I made the song about it just because I’m a weird dude, and I thought it’d be fun to just make a pocket floss song. I was just living this thing for a couple years, messing with it, trying to sell this thing. I’m approaching Walgreens and Walmart and these big oral care distributors and retailers. It was quite a journey. So I wrote this song about it, and I have . . . I’ve got a buddy in Idaho, Drew Allen, at Pepper Shock Productions, and I went to video school with him. Well, he calls me up one day, and he’s kind of a weird dude too. He’s like, “Hey. We’re doing this 48-hour film festival. Do you got a song? You got a song, man. I know you got a song. Let’s do it. Because I’ve got music video. We’ve got 48 hours to get this thing done. What do you got? Give me a song.”
[00:05:04] I played him the song over the phone, and he bought me a plane ticket, and I flew over the next morning, in costume, in the suit. If you look up “pocket floss,” you’ll see. I got the fake mustache on at the airport. I’m getting questioned by security. They’re like, “Dude, what’s up with the mustache? What are you doing?” I told them, and they’re like, “That’s too weird. He couldn’t make that up. He’s not gonna blow this plane up, man. He’s good.”
Jeremy: [00:05:25] What worked when approaching those big stores, like Walgreens and Oral Care?
Travis: [00:05:32] The story, I think. We didn’t really have a lot of success, but we had a little success, regionally, here in Seattle, in Spokane, with the Walgreens chain. We were able to get them in like 20-some-odd stores, something like that. Really it was a story about, “Hey. This is my dad’s thing. Check it out. We’re local. Whatever.” It was like . . . It wasn’t really empathy, but it was . . . There was this connection there.
Jeremy: [00:06:01] They’re willing to take a little risk.
Travis: [00:06:04] Yeah, it was a local connection. We told them the story, and it was legit. This is my dad’s passion for this device. He had thought about it for a long time. It took him a ton of time to develop it, figure it out. Then he finally made the molds and plastic injection molding. He figured all this crap out. The thing is pretty cool. You know? Anyway, that was probably it, the story that really kind of got it into the stores. The thing that we really failed on was having marketing to push it. Back then, I really didn’t understand that either. This is early 2004-ish, something like that, just before I did the Paradise project. We just didn’t understand. We’re going in and pitching it to these guys, and they’re like, “Okay. So how are you gonna promote it? How are people gonna want to buy this?” We’re like, “We’ll put it on the shelf. They’ll just come and buy it. Right?” No. At the end of it, these guys come back, towards the end of the project. These guys came back and said, “Hey. You know what? We’ll put it on our shelf, $50,000 a slot, for however many stores.”
Jeremy: [00:07:04] How many of those things do you have to sell?
Travis: [00:07:07] Numbers didn’t crunch. Numbers didn’t crunch.
Jeremy: [00:07:09] Right. Exactly. They don’t work out. If everyone’s wondering why Travis sounds so good . . . You’ve had clients like Sir Mix-A-Lot and Zombie Games and Fandango and other . . . So what did you do for Sir Mix-A-Lot?
Travis: [00:07:26] Mix-A-Lot? I did post-production editing, and I was a creative director on “Sh, Don’t Tell Him That.” It was sort of a compilation of a lot of his stuff. I was creative director on that. It was kind of cool, for the short period that I was a creative director in Seattle, working at an ad agency over there.
Jeremy: [00:07:44] Yeah.
Travis: [00:07:45] That was fun, man. Good times.
Jeremy: [00:07:46] Yeah. Your sound sounds great. So I want to go back early on. Then we’ll go on your e-commerce path. But where are you from? Where did you grow up? And what was the big influence, growing up?
Travis: [00:08:00] Spokane, man. I was born in Spokane. I was raised in the Bay Area until I was 13 and moved back to Spokane, just couldn’t get away.
Jeremy: [00:08:14] Because your family has a farm these days. Right?
Travis: [00:08:17] They do. They’ve got some sheep. It’s kind of strange, out in the middle of nowhere. They’ve got a bunch of sheep. My dad’s history really isn’t farming, per say, or animals like that. They just kind of got into that about 10 years ago or so, kind of when they started getting into the yarn thing.
Jeremy: [00:08:33] Yeah. So what did you want to be when you grew up?
Travis: [00:08:38] Still haven’t, I don’t think. I don’t know. I never really thought about that.
Jeremy: [00:08:43] In the days of San Francisco, did you want to do some . . . Did you want to create your own product? Were you an entrepreneur at the time? Or what were you into?
Travis: [00:08:52] I think I’ve always been into music. That’s been a through-line in my life. I still play music here and there. Yeah, I have a problem growing up, I guess. Can’t get serious.
Jeremy: [00:09:01] So when did your e-commerce path start?
Travis: [00:09:06] Okay. So that was in about 2005. My dad had this weird business that was kind of on its head. He had gotten into it because my mom and sister liked fiber, and I didn’t know what fiber meant. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was in Seattle at the time that I heard about this. I came back over to see them, and they had converted their house out in the middle of nowhere. It’s actually a trailer with their sheep or whatever. They’ve converted this thing into this weird online business, but it really wasn’t much. It was in trouble. I could tell it was in trouble. I talked to some other people about it, and that’s kind of why I went to check it out. They really didn’t have any background in marketing at all or warehousing or e-commerce or anything. They just needed help.
[00:10:00] So I’m like the computer guy. They didn’t really understand any of that stuff, and I did, to a degree. I understood the marketing part of it, just because I was fresh out of working with a lot of different clients, as a creative director, at the Fluid Night Ad Agency in Seattle. So what happened is I got sucked into this yarn vortex where I just said, “You know what, dad? Let me help you with this thing.” He’s like, “Thank God someone’s gonna help me. I don’t know what to do. This is great.” So I pulled up the moving van and got piles and piles and piles of yarn and animal hair, which is fiber, I learned later, basically, un-spun animal hair. I hauled that out to this space that I was able to get behind the recording studio that I was renting. So it was right next-door. I could record bands at night and figure out this e-commerce thing during the day.
Jeremy: [00:10:57] So what did you do with the stuff at the space? Did you just dump it in the space? Or you organize it in certain fashion? What were you doing with it?
Travis: [00:11:06] Compared to what that place is now and how well it’s set up now, I would consider, yes, we did basically dump it in there. We had some makeshift shelves, and we tried to do location codes, but we didn’t have the right software. We didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing. Funny enough, Nick, one of my main guys, Nick Sanders, AKA “Coco,” he’s one of my ninjas, a great dude.
Jeremy: [00:11:30] He’s a business system manager at Sharp Commerce. Right?
Travis: [00:11:34] Okay. He’s a maniac, man. He is just awesome with researching new products and software and figuring it out and implementing systems. He had no experience at that point. This is like 2005-ish. He was an intern at the recording studio and really hard worker and good dude. He was actually like a paid intern. These people had sent me this kid. You know? They said, “We’ll pay $4000 or something if you train him in audio stuff and fill out some whatever.” So it was a weird relationship, meeting this guy, but he was a really cool dude. We got along.
[00:12:06] So this opportunity came up. So the first couple of days, it’s me and Nick locked in the shop until like 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. We’re barely taking breaks. We’re figuring it out, just going crazy, adding products, starting up this new website on Volution [SP], actually, and converting it from an HTML website, with this just god-awful cart that was spitting out a text file, individual text file, into a folder somewhere. You had to download with a credit card number raw in it, totally, absolutely not PCI-compliant, by any means. That wasn’t even a thing then. Pretty ugly state of things. That was really the seed to all this, getting the Volution cart, which I have to say, man, those guys did a great job of kind of training us and getting us going out of the gate. We took advantage of a lot of their turnkey services.
Jeremy: [00:12:55] Yeah. So what was some of the initial traction that you got? What did you do?
Travis: [00:13:00] One of the biggest things that we did, initially, was Google shopping. It was like Google Base or Frugal, back then. None of our competitors were very tech-savvy. A lot of this stuff is ma-and-pa, and some of these people have been around for a long time. They weren’t necessarily into the website thing a whole bunch. They were actually still doing mail-order with little catalogs and stuff. So we came on, and we’re exploring and exploiting the software as much as we could. With Volution, it’s got the feed generator built into it. We were shooting feed to Google Base and just conquering. It was free back then. So we’ve got all these listings out there. It’s basically pay-per-click, now what you’d call PLAs. This is the early days of PLAs, and it was free, and we were just killing it. That’s what we built a lot of . . . Taking advantage of those kind of loopholes early on, man, meant so much.
Jeremy: [00:13:58] So what was the other software on the market at the time for shopping carts? So there’s Volution. Is there anything else? What were people using?
Travis: [00:14:07] Back then . . . I don’t know.
Jeremy: [00:14:11] You eventually moved to Magento [SP]. Right?
Travis: [00:14:15] Huge move. That was significant. Yeah, yeah.
Jeremy: [00:14:18] At what point did you decide to do that?
Travis: [00:14:20] I think that was in 2010 or ’11 maybe. I think it was 2010.
Jeremy: [00:14:26] So you were around Volution for a while.
Travis: [00:14:28] Yeah, we were, quite a while. It took us probably six months or a year to get moved over properly from Volution to Magento. It was a huge migration. It’s a whole different way of thinking when you’ve got . . . Your products are in this spreadsheet, and maybe a couple different tables in Volution. Then you’re going over to Magento, which has got layered navigation, which is basically . . . You’ve got true filtering, where you’re filling out attributes. So you’ve got a particular product set, an attribute set, and you’ve got attributes within that set that are nested. You say, “Okay. So this is like a camera.” Well, one attribute might be the lens it comes with and other details about a particular camera or a specific product type, basically, is what an attribute set is.
[00:15:17] So we had to kind of get our head wrapped around that and fill out all these attributes for 15,000 products and set them up properly. A lot of people don’t do that. They don’t take advantage of that with Magento, which is really crazy. That’s one of the things that we, at Sharp Commerce, we’re looking out for and finding ways for people to better present their products, with whatever platform they happen to use, whether it’s Magento or something else.
Jeremy: [00:15:40] Travis, was it called Paradise Fibers back then? Or was it a different name?
Travis: [00:15:46] No, it’s always been called Paradise Fibers.
Jeremy: [00:15:47] It’s always Paradise Fibers. Okay.
Travis: [00:15:49] Yeah.
Jeremy: [00:15:49] So the first things that worked really well was the PLA. What else worked?
Travis: [00:15:57] Oh, boy. Okay. So realistically that was a huge thing until . . . I think once we got . . . We got hooked up with Bronto [SP] and those guys. I went ahead and said, “I don’t know enough about email marketing. Train me. I’ll pay you.” Went through the service, and they did a lot for us. It was like a three . . . It was only like three months, maybe six months. They’ll hold your hand and give you a lot of different ideas on what kind of sales to run with your . . . They’re all customized to you. It’s not just boiler plate. They did a great job of kind of setting us up to win with email marketing, and that turned into a huge revenue stream, just really taking advantage of trying to send people what they wanted and segment larger groups of people, things like that.
Jeremy: [00:16:49] Yeah. So what did you learn? What was working with email marketing? I read one of your posts, and it’s like, “Don’t just send out sales coupons.” That’s not the definition of email marketing.
Travis: [00:17:05] Well, okay. So there’s two parts to that. People want deals. Okay. That’s cool. I get it. But they also want . . . There’s also . . . You can give them entertainment. You can give them value-added emails, how-to videos. Now, down towards the home stretch, the last few years I was there, we were doing segmented batches of customers, where we were doing these value-added emails, like, “Here’s a special spinning technique on this specific spinning wheel,” to get them interested in the wheel and to give them some information on that. Now, we would only send that to people that were spinners. Don’t send it to your knitters. Give people what they want.
[00:17:49] It took a lot of time to make these videos. We had an expert in-house that would do it. I even made . . . You can look up my dying video on there. I learned how to dye. I had a blast.
Jeremy: [00:17:58] Not literally die, but dye fabric.
Travis: [00:18:00] Yeah. Dye with color. A lot of friends made fun of me. I had a lot of my rock star buddies cracking up. I got a lot of emails, but it was fun, man. It’s cool because I’m in the mix, answering the phones some days, and I get talking to people, “Oh, I want to buy this dye. You’re the person who made that video.” It helps all those kind of things drive it home with your customers. You know? When you’re doing those kinds of things, you’re like, “Well, who’s really gonna watch this?” Well, guess what. You segment out the people that would like these types of value-added emails or content and shoot it to them, and then you connect with them, and it’s not just like you’re blasting out crap to your entire audience. You respect your audience, and they’re gonna pay attention. That’s really a big key to email marketing. Once you kind of figure out that approach, I think the rest of it really falls into place.
Jeremy: [00:18:51] So how did you segment? What works well? If people are like, “Well, I just put everyone on the same list. I’m not even sure what to do.”
Travis: [00:19:00] It’s really common. You need to have some kind of advanced software to do that. You’re gonna have to have a decent partner, whether it’s Bronto or Dot-Mailer [SP]. Dot-Mailer has been great. Those guys are awesome. They’re probably my . . . Sorry, Bronto. They’re probably my favorite, although I love both of you guys. Dot-Mailer and Magento, Bronto as well, they have really tight integration. I worked with both those companies to improve their integration, just because I’m kind of a loud-mouth when it comes to getting what I want with this software. Those companies, I have a great relationship with, actually, now, because I pushed them so hard. They’re like, “Gosh, what does Travis want now, man?” They finally figured out, “This guy’s actually adding a lot of value to our software, and our customers like it.” At least that’s what they told me, maybe so I’d stop calling.
[00:19:50] But no, they’re really cool people, both of those companies, Dot-Mailer and Bronto. They ended up really advancing a lot of the integration and segmentation for the Magento web platform. What we were doing is we would say, “Hey. You buy . . . What’s really cool is if you set up your database right with Magento. You do an attribute set, which is like a product type. Okay. Use that to segment a whole group of people really fast.” You say, “Hey. You bought this. Well, I know you’re gonna like this.” We set up rules. You don’t even have to like . . . You can automate all this stuff.
Jeremy: [00:20:23] It’s because it’s so close tight-knit with Magento that you could do that with those two. Yeah.
Travis: [00:20:30] Well, it’s the way if you set up Magento right. There’s people out there that are doing integrations with Magento, that don’t understand it. It’s tough. I’m actually working with a client right now. We’re road-blocked. We’ve had to do a lot of workarounds just to do some integration. They basically . . . They’re not using the layered navigation like it’s supposed to be, and the attribute sets. Attribute sets are super powerful if you set those up right, like I said, kind of how I mentioned before, where your attribute set is a product type, and you fill out your attributes for each product type. It’s a little bit of work. It’s a lot of work, actually.
Jeremy: [00:21:08] It’s just a lot of work on the front end.
Travis: [00:21:11] Upfront, essentially. Once you get that put together, then you’re using that stuff to filter. You’re using that stuff to segment your customers. You’re using that stuff to . . . You can present all those things on your website as specifications for that product. So you get so much out of it once you figure that out. It’s absolutely worth doing. It’s a great way to go.
Jeremy: [00:21:32] So you can really laser focus and segment. So if someone bought some . . . I guess what’s an example of a special or an email that worked really well because you had segmented?
Travis: [00:21:48] Okay. Oh, man. This is gonna get me going down a road here. All right. So where to start? There’s a . . . With Paradise Fibers, there was a huge group of people that were spinners. Right? Those people that are making yarn from spinning wheels with the raw animal hair, and they’re spinning it and making yarn. So those people, we knew they were gonna love a club of some kind, like a wine club. We created a Fiber of the Month Club thing. So we sent them fiber, every month, with a gift, and worked deals to get gifts with vendors. So there’s added value there. We got super good deals on that stuff and just throw that in, the free gift, and write them a nice letter and which fibers are which. We also put on each fiber, “best uses for.” So there’s always value-add stuff that we always did there as part of the system that my team designed.
[00:22:44] So we solicited all these spinners. We grabbed that segment, solicited those guys, said, “Hey. Come join our club. We know you’re spinning. Guess what else? We’ll give you 10% off supplies from here on out. Just be part of our club and let us solicit you and send out fiber to your door every month. We know you love it.” We made it really advantageous. So there was a lot of value with the fiber. So we’re not trying to gouge these people. So if they tried to buy them individually, it was a lot more than what we were giving them, essentially. They would get a really . . . The value was there.
Jeremy: [00:23:17] Yeah. So how do you . . .
Travis: [00:23:17] It went crazy. That was a terrific promotion, and that continued to go. We do that periodically to gain customers on that. That was one of the other really big successful pieces of Paradise Fibers, was the clubs [inaudible:00:23:31].
Jeremy: [00:23:31] So that was subscription. Right?
Travis: [00:23:34] Right, right. We actually custom-built, had our developers custom-build out club recurring billing system for us, through Magento, which was . . . It was amazing. It turned out really, really great. It was really easy to manage. Customers can manage it themselves. They had full control. You can sign up and bail out and rip us off because you’re gonna get a deal when you sign up. People didn’t. These are real . . . The customers are really cool. I miss those customers, man. They’re a really good batch of people. Anyway, so this was . . . The clubs were just another way to heighten the level of engagement that we had with our customers.
Jeremy: [00:24:15] Yeah. So tell me about the early . . . The idea phase of that . . . What you ended up executing on probably was different than the initial conversations. What was the initial conversation? Because you said there’s a subscription, and then you gave them 10% off. Was that always the idea? Or did it go through a couple modifications when you were talking to your customers or with the other staff?
Travis: [00:24:43] It all came together quick. This is . . . When you’re living it at a really . . . I’m talking up until the last couple years, I was doing 60 to 80 hours a week, leading by example and just going hog-wild. The other guys were trying to keep up. I had a lot of guys that worked at the yarn store, which is kind of strange, but we had a great group. Those guys would be really interested in contributing, and we would have a weekly meeting. So we’d do lots of brainstorming every week. You know? Within just a few weeks, we had flushed out pretty much the whole entire club. We refined it by . . . Hey, we’re throwing in a free gift. Let’s give them whatever, some tape measurer or this or that, whatever. We started increasing the value of the gifts. I was just pushing a lot of the different vendors that I had personal relationships with, building over long period of time of dealing with them, just like, “Hey, man. What have you got to dump? What do you want to dump? Let’s figure this out, and we’ll get your name out there.” These people would never buy your whatever product, and I’m gonna go ahead and . . . Not necessarily consumable, but some kind of special . . .
Jeremy: [00:25:49] It’s like a cross-promotion, sort of.
Travis: [00:25:51] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Definitely.
Jeremy: [00:25:53] Yeah. So what made you decide to do that? Now that seems obvious because it’s so popular with the Dollar Shave Club and all these other places, but then that wasn’t so obvious. What made you decide to start that subscription club?
Travis: [00:26:09] I think just . . . I’m just a genius, pretty much. No. I don’t know, man. We just stumbled onto it kind of when we were looking at segmentation. It might have been the segmentation, actually.
Jeremy: [00:26:20] Segmentation.
Travis: [00:26:21] It might have been. I really don’t know where it came from.
Jeremy: [00:26:22] I’m just wondering if it was like a . . . I know on your blog, you also talk about lifetime value. I don’t know if that was a lifetime value conversation, which led to a subscription or club, or maybe it was just kind of randomly came about, because I think oftentimes, we forget about this recurring revenue.
Travis: [00:26:44] Right. And increasing lifetime value. Absolutely, man. You’re keeping . . . That is a big part of it. I like to say that, yeah, I orchestrated it based on that. I didn’t even know what lifetime value was back then, hardly. It was like a report that was on some screen somewhere.
Jeremy: [00:26:59] At least you had it on some screen somewhere.
Travis: [00:27:02] Yeah. Yep. Totally. Yeah, yeah. I had some really robust reporting software that we used and hooked onto our order management system. It was customer lifetime value, the average customer lifetime value and how many times people were ordering. These things are kind of more on the top of people’s tongues now, marketers and people that are doing strategy, but four or five years ago, not so much.
Jeremy: [00:27:31] How do you price that? How do you price a subscription?
Travis: [00:27:36] We priced it based off of what we would want to see if we were a customer and if we checked it out. If we went, “You know what? You’re getting this much of this product and this and that,” three or four different products were being included. If you go and priced it out, you would see an incredible value. That’s what we wanted to give our customers. I built in . . . I built that for a couple reasons. I didn’t want people ever disconnecting from us, and I understood the value, the lifetime value of the customer, and really wanted to increase that and engage people and not have them bail out. I want them to like us. It really was not . . . That’s a pretty cheap way to make them like you. It’s a lot harder to go out and try to get new customers and keep these guys on board.
[00:28:17] Now the other thing is when you got a club, you can throw in stuff in each order, man. Throw in a leaflet, whatever, sale flyer, whatever. You know what they like. You know they like fiber. So hook them up. You know? Give them something [inaudible:00:28:32].
Jeremy: [00:28:31] What was the cost of the club? What was the cost at the time?
Travis: [00:28:35] Like $35 or something, I think, $35 a month, something like that.
Jeremy: [00:28:40] Yeah. So what else worked? The PLA, the email marketing segmenting, the subscriptions. What else did you find really, no pun intended, drilled the needle?
Travis: [00:28:53] Okay. So beyond that, figuring out ways for customers to stick to us, in general, once you start playing the game that way, with all the different channels you have . . . We tried eBay for a while. We tried Amazon. We did Amazon. eBay was definitely a different breed of customer.
Jeremy: [00:29:22] Really? Why?
Travis: [00:29:23] Tricky. I’ve heard this from a lot of other e-commerce gurus out there and retailers. I don’t know why.
Jeremy: [00:29:32] What is it? What [inaudible:00:29:33].
Travis: [00:29:32] Maybe they’re looking for used stuff. I don’t know. Man, they’re different. eBay customers are tough. I had so many nasty phone calls. It was depressing my staff. They’re like, “Oh, another eBay person.” I’m like, “No, that can’t be right. Really? Come on. We’re all upbeat, good pile of folks here. Don’t be getting down on the poor eBay people.” After a while, I got a couple calls too. “I didn’t get my stuff.” Dude, it says it’s delivered. This is your second time. Stop. Really? You give them a second load. They’re double-dipping, saying they didn’t get their stuff. There’s a lot of them, and you keep looking, and they’re all eBay. It’s so weird. A lot of angry . . . Oh, there’s one cent. They’re two cents off on the invoice or something weird. Who cares, really? It was weird. It was strange. It was always eBay. We ended up discontinuing eBay. I’m sure there’s . . . eBay is wonderful for a lot of people, but we had enough orders coming in through other channels, and it wasn’t really worth it, man. You know?
Jeremy: [00:30:27] So what platforms worked well? Amazon? How’d Amazon do?
Travis: [00:30:32] Amazon was good. It was great. It’s turn-and-burn. You’re not gonna make a ton of money. You’re paying out 15% after you take the merchant fee and everything. But realistically, you’re gonna pay 10% anyway, on average, if you’re healthy, with your marketing, plus another 2% or 3% for merchant processing. So it’s not that far off, really, but you’re not getting the branding. So that’s what kind of . . . That’s the biggest thing that I have . . .
Jeremy: [00:30:57] You don’t own the customer.
Travis: [00:30:59] No. You can put something in the order, but Amazon frowns on it. They’re not gonna catch you, but you can do that. It’s still not . . . It’s nothing like having to buy from your site. That’s part of the clubs and some of the other things to get people to stick to you. Once you’re able to . . . The different mechanisms that you have in place . . . If you can get people to come back and buy from you again and try your website again and get used to it, so they know it’s familiar, especially maybe an older customer base, those guys . . . They’re not super computer-savvy, maybe. They maybe even hate the computer. But if they’ve got this . . . You opened this channel for them, where they can really easily order the things that they normally like to buy. You created this pattern to get them to come back. One way we did that was a rewards system.
Jeremy: [00:31:46] Yeah, tell me about that. Yeah.
Travis: [00:31:48] A lot of people do it. A lot of people don’t do it well. There’s things that you can do. In the actual . . . In all the transactional emails and as part of your email marketing campaigns, you can throw in points in there and say, “Hey. You know what?” Maybe someone’s only bought one time from you. You’re gonna give them points on that order. So if you shoot out an email, even just the transactional, whatever, some kind of reminder, any kind of email that you can to them, that they’re gonna open, and you say, “You got points in there,” you’ve only got . . . Maybe you’ve got $5 in points. Maybe you got 40 cents in points. Who knows? But we’re finding that people were opening these emails and going . . . Especially talking to them on the phone . . . Our staff was very close at the shop, and we would all share what’s happening and, “Oh, hey. You know what? We’re getting these calls now after we implemented this process. I’ve got these points. I got to use these points.” You know?
[00:32:48] The customers didn’t want them to expire, and they would expire in 90 days or 120 days. So they’d have plenty of time to use them, depending on the recurring purchasing cycle of most of our customers. Typically, I think it was . . . We ended up around 120, which people didn’t get too upset about, where they would make multiple purchases in that period of time. That was a great way to get people coming back and keeping them engaged and kind of creating this excuse to come back, even just by a stupid tape measurer or something, but they’re going through the checkout process again. It’s familiar to them again. In an older client base, man, it’s super important. We found that was important.
Jeremy: [00:33:22] So Travis, what do you use to manage the rewards? Is there softwares that you recommend?
Travis: [00:33:29] Okay. So Magento Enterprise has rewards built in. I’m building it out for a client right now. We’re gonna try that out. I haven’t tried it before. Magento has their work cut out for them on finishing that, putting the frosting on the cake for sure. I’m kind of working with them right now to try to shore that up. You’re gonna have to have some custom development to make that work right. That’s the short version. Now, there’s Sweet tooth, which is great. Those guys, a terrific partner. I had a great relationship with them, where I’d even send them something that I thought was their extension goofing up Magento. Dude writes me back and says, “Hey. It’s not that, but it’s this from another vendor. Here’s how to fix it.” Just totally helping us out, getting us dialed in. It wasn’t anything to do with them. Instead of saying, “Hey, dude. You’re bugging me with something that’s not our problem. So go away,” he said, “No, no, no. Go here. This is how to fix it. It’s not us, but here. Let me just help you, dude.”
[00:34:30] Sweet Tooth was a really great partner, in that respect. Their software is terrific. Pretty much their whole suite I really liked, and it was highly integrated with Magento. It’s an extension. Actually I worked with Sweet Tooth, personally, to get them set up with Dot-Mailer. So I kind of put those guys together, which, again, building partnerships . . . I guess I haven’t mentioned that. Building partnerships has been a really big part of my e-commerce journey, and these relationships with vendors, whether it’s a tech vendor or with a supplier of product. It’s super important, man, to have those. So I called these guys up. I’m like, “Hey, Michael at Dot-Mailer. Let’s get this set up. I need to have this functionality working.” He’s like, “Dude, that’s a great idea. Yeah, let’s do it. Who are these guys? The Sweet Tooth guys?”
[00:35:16] So I called up Sweet Tooth, put them together, and we got, within . . . Both of those guys are really fast movers. Not all e-commerce tech companies are gonna do this for you. But within a month or so, we had this highly integrated system where we could present the rewards in the emails. That was a big turning point for us, again, where we just ramped up sales. Customers started sticking to us. So you get this momentum going as you’re . . . It sort of builds exponentially once people aren’t leaving. You know? You’re soliciting them properly with transactional emails and whatever else, and you’re putting the points in there. That was terrific. That was the integration that I worked on that with them.
Jeremy: [00:35:58] Yeah. So Travis, what else works? We have email marketing, the Magento subscriptions, rewards, partnerships. What else works to build it up to over $15,000 per day?
Travis: [00:36:14] Okay. So fast shipping. We did a really . . . We had a killer order management system, and we exploited it, just like we did with the rest of the software. Good old Nick Sanders and myself are kind of addicts for that. We love to just get in and figure out every last thing the software should do and exploit those things and see how we can use them even beyond where they’re supposed to be. So we pushed the order management system to a highly automated state where we were . . . We had some customizations even done to it too. So orders were just printing out as they come in every 15 minutes. There’s no processing or whatever, as long as the inventory is there. They’re just bombing out the printer, and our guys are running out and grabbing them.
[00:36:58] We had a countdown timer on the website, like Amazon does. Order in by, whatever, 2:30 PM or something, Pacific Time. It’s going out. Our guys there had . . . We had this great culture, man. They would be excited to try to get people’s orders out last-minute. Everybody’s trying to get that email back like, “How the heck did you guys get this order here? I just ordered it like 3:30 or 4:00, and I’m in Seattle, and I got it the next day. How did you guys do that? You’re like magicians. I love you guys.” You get a customer forever when you do that. You know? I kind of went over that. I try to build that into the culture there as much as I could, the excitement that I feel for that, personally, and kind of nurture my team with that kind of stuff. It was really rewarding for me, personally, when we were able to do that, and the team was doing those types of things and shipping things out super, super fast, just at Amazon speed.
Jeremy: [00:37:51] Right.
Travis: [00:37:52] Basically. You know? With a small crew, talking 15, 16 people.
Jeremy: [0:37:56] Right. So how did it . . . Tell me about the growth, staff-wise, initially, to a year in, five years in. When did you start hiring more and more people?
Travis: [00:38:10] Okay. Let’s see if I can remember. So 2005 to like 2007, it was like Nick and me and girlfriends and stuff, helping out.
Jeremy: [00:38:24] Yeah, because you’re working until like 3:00 in the morning. You know?
Travis: [00:38:28] Well, initially we were. That was just maybe the first couple of weeks. We had some serious late nights like that. We were really excited, trying to figure this software out and get these products moved over, kind of racing against time. We still . . . Even at that early stage, we understood speed of market. As soon as we go the stuff up, then we could start selling it and move . . . If it’s not up, man, you’re dead in the water. You’re not gonna sell it. So we tried to get off that bad platform as fast as we could, Nick and I. Then really, I was doing the books initially and shipping, with a headset on. I’m taking orders as I’m picking . . . I’m taking an order as I’m picking an order or maybe as I’m using a tape gun, hitting “mute.” That was happening, man. We had these great little headsets. That was me. The initial crew was myself and my wife, Sara. She was really instrumental in helping out. She was one of the first real employees there, besides Nick.
Jeremy: [00:39:33] Now Sara’s an email ninja also.
Travis: [00:39:35] She is. Yeah, she’s great, man. She’s been my consigliore forever. She knows a ton about e-commerce, but her skill set is more with the marketing, email marketing, and sort of email marketing design, stuff like that. But from that, we grew into . . . We finally hired a bookkeeper. That was huge. As time went on, hired shipper. All of a sudden, I’m not shipping anymore. I couldn’t believe it. We’re all in a very tight, confined . . . We’re in a big warehouse, but we’re in maybe 20 square feet. So shipping guy is listening to me talking with customers. This guy had been . . . He ended up staying with us for five . . . He was . . . Yeah, 2009 or 2010, he came on. So I think he was with us five years. Yeah. That’s good old Kyle Bickly [SP]. He ended up basically . . . He learned how to sell and learned how to talk to customers. He had no previous experience in customer service or e-commerce or whatever. Well, he just heard me talking to all the customers and how I addressed them. He was like, “Man, you just talk to them like they’re your best friend.”
Jeremy: [00:40:44] Right.
Travis: [00:40:45] You’re just loving on them, man. I’m like, “Why wouldn’t you? Is that weird to you?” He figured that out and kind of got that. It was interesting how that kind of . . . We bounced that off each other a little bit. I didn’t really realize it as much. So he learned that from me, and he kind of . . . We all kind of adopted that sort of through the years after that, when we started hiring a lot of people, post-2010, when Magento really started taking off for us, and we started hiring a ton of people and really growing fast. Then we had to really be careful of how are we presenting ourselves, how are we handling customers. Yeah, man. We were hanging out all the time. We’re taking camping trips together. We’d go have drinks after work, probably two or three nights a week, at least. Friday after work, pinball machine upstairs. We’re all hanging out, talking about work like a bunch of nerds, just, “Oh, wait. We can do this. Let’s do that on the site. This and that. You know this customer? Oh, yeah. She needs that.” We were into it, man.
Jeremy: [00:41:46] You were living it.
Travis: [00:41:47] Living it. Yeah.
Jeremy: [00:41:49] So bookkeeper, shipper. What was the next round of hires?
Travis: [00:41:53] Receiving. That’s a big one. All of a sudden . . . You don’t think receiving is really a job when you’re that small. Right? It’s like a couple blocks to come in, whatever, but they start stacking up and doing it right and then, “Wait. Oh, you’re stickering stuff now,” because a lot of the stuff is intangible. So how do you deal with it? That’s another common problem I find with a lot of online retailers. They won’t be able to quantify what they’re selling. Those kind of businesses are great. Those kind of product lines are great because Amazon has a lot of trouble with that. So you buy yourself some time from them, swallowing you alive. They can’t really compete with you if you’ve got this kind of product. So animal hair thing . . .
[00:42:37] So we’re . . . If you have a way to quantify that as it shows up and sticker it properly and/or repackage it or whatever you’ve got to do, that’s really helpful. That’s one of the things that we started doing, is stickering everything in the store, so that when we’re shipping it, we could scan it into the box and really quantify it, tighten up our whole workflow.
Jeremy: [00:43:00] Yeah. What systems that you created did you find were super important, that most people may have overlooked? It sounds like every step . . . You started systemizing everything. Like when it’d come in, you’d sticker it. You kind of put it away so that when the order went out, you could scan it and keep track of everything. What was that workflow look like that made it so efficient?
Travis: [00:43:30] Okay. So that workflow was based on the order management system we were using, basically. That’s how . . . The whole entire road map was built around that. Once we had . . . Creating location codes and having a . . . Being able to actually walk through and pick orders with a path, an order pick path, was great. That was another part of that sort of system. I’m not sure if I answered your question there.
Jeremy: [00:43:59] Yeah. Yeah. Just generally, I was curious. Then what caused the fast growth in 2010? You said that you were hiring a bunch of people.
Travis: [00:44:08] Magento. Okay. So I’m gonna tell you right now. Magento is not for the meek. There’s a lot of hobbyists playing around with Magento out there, with Magento CE. Some get lucky and keep it simple. Whatever. There’s a lot of people that are hosting Magento CE improperly, goofing around with it. It’s a nightmare, and they can’t get it to work. So it gets kind of this bad rap. Maybe it’s loading slow. Whatever. Magento Enterprise is also a very dangerous beast. It’s like . . . I say it’s like riding a pissed off dragon. It can slay your competition, or it can eat you alive. That’s really true.
[00:44:55] Our first year in doing Magento, me, being full of myself and being really ambitious . . . I’m not a developer. I decided, “You know what? We’re gonna switch it to Magento, from Volution.” Well, Volution is a hosted solution. Those guys have training wheels. They’re gonna hold your hand. They’re gonna tell you you did a good job. It’s great. It’s easy. You get kind of comfortable when you’re making money, and things are going great. You’re like, “This new Magento thing, it’ll do everything, man. It’ll do everything. Let’s switch to it. Yeah. Wait.” It’s not hosted by them. How does that work? Well, you go get hosting.
Jeremy: [00:45:30] Famous last words.
Travis: [00:45:32] You go and get hosting somewhere, and you go and get . . . You know what? I am really smart. I’m a smart shopper. I’m gonna go get the cheapest hosting I can find. So we do that. We go get this cheap hosting. I’m not gonna mention the company. It was awful. We didn’t realize why it was awful. We also did something that was nightmarish, and I need to share this so no one else does this. We did something. We did a migration from Volution to Magento, with this sort of cart transfer thing. Did not work, at all. It sprayed our Magento installation data fields with just crap, and it was very difficult to recover from that. The website really had a hard time for . . . We had an awful time trying to recover from that. We had like nine months of big trouble, as we’re launching Magento. We figured out how bad it was, and we had already gone live. We were in trouble.
[00:46:34] We had this huge . . . There was a big dip in 2010-ish, somewhere around there, where we were switching to Magento. We had been kicking butt for every year on Volution. We switched to Magento, and it’s nose-diving, man. Everybody was really concerned. I’m concerned. I’m working around the clock, trying to fix it, figure it out. We ended up switching hosts, got some professional help, and figured out what was wrong with our Magento installation and figured out . . . Really took the time to figure out how it works right again. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re gonna make mistakes, man. I was really just too ambitious, and we got goofed up.
[00:47:12] After, say, nine months or so, we got with some people that could help us, and we pulled this thing out of a tail spin, and it just soared. We started kicking butt. We got our rank back. We figured out what our customers wanted to see on . . . We got our pages set up in a way that our customers were excited to shop it. They could find what they needed, finally, much, much better. It wasn’t as good as Volution. It kicked the crap out of Volution at that point. It was a totally different shopping experience. We were able to present banners when we wanted to, on a schedule, coordinate that with our other sales or the same sale banner that we’d have on our re-marketing campaigns and our AdWords or wherever else we’re presenting stuff. So you’re coordinating all your marketing efforts all of a sudden. Then, wait, you’re tying it into your other third-party stuff. So you can do segmentation, like your ESPs, and presenting all the information to your customers now and really heightening your retention, heightening your engagement in all these different areas.
[00:48:17] Within a year or two, we saw . . . Finally launching Magento, I guess, was probably a year and a half, total, before we saw this thing just rocket ship, and we were really excited about it. There was no turning back at that . . . no looking back at that point, essentially.
Jeremy: [00:48:34] So Travis, would you have, in retrospect, hired a special developer to do that? Or what would you have done differently?
Travis: [00:48:40] Yes. Yes. Oh, retrospect is hard, man. We would have been way ahead. I said, “These guys want $60,000. I’m not making money like that. Why are they making money like that?” Well, there’s a reason. They know what they’re doing. You know? Now I’m teamed up with a lot of these guys, and I have a lot of the information now that I didn’t have then, of course. So I’m in a different boat than I was then. I know what mistakes we made, and I offered a lot of that counseling to people that are starting up with Magento, that I go through and consult with and help them get set up, even if I don’t do the whole build-out for them with my team or with my third-party developer. I’m giving them at least the road map of how this thing should go and what they should concentrate on.
Jeremy: [00:49:25] Yeah, what to expect. Yeah. So what were sales like on Volution and then after Volution, when you were soaring with Magento?
Travis: [00:49:35] Short version is like, “Oh, we had a 100-order day today. Yay. We had 100 orders. How are we gonna get them out? Oh, yeah.” Then all of a sudden, we’re into, a year and a half later, we’re doing 200 orders, double, in a couple of years, in that span. There were times that we’re doing 600 or 700 orders a day. Then you add in your club. Oh, wait. We’re doing a club. We’re processing 200, 300 orders for the club that day. So it’s just really incredible boost with Magento, for sure.
Jeremy: [00:50:10] Do you remember one of those big days where you celebrated? It was like a $10,000 day or $15,000 day.
Travis: [00:50:17] More than that. We had an $85,000 day.
Jeremy: [00:50:19] Wow. So tell me about that day.
Travis: [00:50:22] I still have the screenshot. I got the screenshot on my phone, man. That was a couple years ago, Christmas. Was it Christmas? No, it was end of the year. We did a huge end-of-the-year sale, and it was basically . . . It was this idea we had that we could implement with Magento. You’re gonna be . . . I’ll throw it out there because a lot of people . . . If you got Magento, this is a great thing to do. If you don’t have Magento, you can cry in your beer over this because you probably can’t do it. But the last couple of days of the year, we got to close out this merchandise. Right? After a while, in retail, online retail and retail, you figure out you don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of extra merch at the end of the year because of taxes. Right? Everybody knows that. So the last three or four days or pretty much the last week, we did like 10%. Then next day is 15% off. Next day is 20%. Next day is 25% and then 30% and then 35%, something like that, in the last day.
[00:51:17] We let everybody know ahead of time, “Hey, man. If you want something, kind of keep an eye out because the selection is going down, and we’re not getting more. If you need . . . Next month, if you need more of this stuff, we’re not gonna have it because everybody’s out. All of our suppliers are out. So if you need to get this, you’ll probably get it now. Get it at the 10% off if you know you got to have it. If you want to gamble, wait until tomorrow. See what happens. 15%. Maybe the next day, 20%. Right? Go ahead. Gamble. See if it’s still gonna be there, but it might not.”
[00:51:45] We had a lot of sales at the 10%. They kept gradually increasing. The last day, I think, was 35% or something. It was insane. I came into work at 5:00, which is not abnormal. I opened up my computer, looked, and it was like . . . It went from nothing to maybe . . . 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning, it starts going. I’m like, “Really?” Right? Right as I got to work at 5:00, it’s at . . . I’m at like 80 orders an hour.
Jeremy: [00:52:17] Wow.
Travis: [00:52:18] That’s a ton for us. The website is still . . . It’s making it happen, man. You know? Magento is doing great. We hosted with Nexus, who’s a great partner. I highly recommend those guys. So we didn’t crash or anything. We’re just rocking. I took a screenshot on my phone real quick and texted that to everybody else. They’re like, “You’re lying. You Photoshopped that, man.” Oh, no. It’s happening, dude, 80 orders an hour. Get in here right now. Somebody go to Einstein’s and get some bagels. Team, get in here right now. We got to do this, man. Let’s rock. They are stacking up, dude. We’ve got . . . We had . . . We stayed down there until 9:00 or 10:00 that night, at least, and came back again at 5:00 the next morning, cranking them out.
Jeremy: [00:53:01] Yeah. We’ll go into some of the Magento versus Shopify versus Big Commerce a little bit later, for anyone who feels like, “Well, what if I don’t use Magento? What else is out there?” So we’ll talk about that. But talk about some more of the mistakes, Travis. So you . . . We talk about the transition to Magento. What else didn’t work on this upward trajectory?
Travis: [00:53:31] Oh, yeah. Okay. I’ve got a good one for you. There was another ESP. They will remain nameless. Their rumor on the Internet was they had a better legal team than development team. I found that out. They didn’t sue me, but these guys were . . .
Jeremy: [00:53:54] Another email provider?
Travis: [00:53:57] Email service provider, sorry, ESP, email service provider. These guys . . . They’re basically a fraud. I figured that I dealt with Bronto before, and I’m like, “Hey. These guys are a little cheaper. Whatever. They’ve got some integration. They’re talking the talk. They have this huge feature list.” I didn’t do my research. I didn’t look them up online and look at their reviews. I’m too busy rocking at the business, and everything was going great. I said, “You know what? I spent a lot of money on Bronto.” I love Bronto, and I really feel bad to say this, but I was spending a lot of money on them. I was weak. I had a weak moment, and I went and tried these guys out. It was a nightmare. We lost so much money. We spent three or four months with poor email campaigns. They weren’t converting. Stuff was going to spam. It was a nightmare trying to figure out how to . . . Just creating the emails was awful. The [inaudible:00:54:51] they set up for us was terrible, and it didn’t work. We were on the phone with support the whole time. They couldn’t ever get it integrated with Magento. This was when we were first starting to integrate. It’s got to be in 2011 or ’12.
[00:55:02] We were just integrating, trying to figure out an ESP to integrate really well with Magento. They sucked me in with that. They said they could integrate with Magento. It wasn’t done. They’re doing it for us. They’re like, “Oh, we got somebody to bid on that.” So now they’re trying us out as their guinea pig. Not cool, man. So we made a huge mistake there. That was a big mistake that I made. We went crying back to Bronto. Lindsay at Bronto was gracious, took me back, and made it all right. They actually worked really hard and got their integration going shortly after, and we were one of their first clients to kind of pioneer that with those guys.
Jeremy: [00:55:39] Is that company still around, the other one that was a nightmare?
Travis: [00:55:45] They’ve changed their name twice since then.
Jeremy: [00:55:47] Really?
Travis: [00:55:48] Wonder why. It was awful. Yeah, I let them have it, man. I looked online, and I saw all these other people’s reviews, and I let them have it for all those other people too. I saw the reviews they’re leaving. They’re like, “We’re scared. We’re just gonna let our contract run out because their legal team is threatening us.” Really, dude? That’s what you’re gonna do to your customers? People are gonna talk. You know? I wish I would have saw those reviews before I signed up, but that’s why, I guess, they changed their name a couple times.
Jeremy: [00:56:13] Right. Since you can’t mention the name of the company, is there a website that people should check out reviews for these type of companies?
Travis: [00:56:23] I’m sure you can find one. Just look at email service provider review. But if you search the company name and search review and just common sense Google search it, it’s something a lot of people don’t do, and you really need to do that, especially these days with so many third parties out there of various levels of integrity.
Jeremy: [00:56:41] Yeah. What are some of the popular ones? Bronto. You said Dot-Mailer. Are there any other popular ones out there that people are using?
Travis: [00:56:49] Yeah. Let’s see what else. List Track is good. Those guys are too rich for my blood, but if you have . . . If you don’t . . . I try to have my clients be honest with themselves about where they’re at, what they’re good at. If you’re not good at email marketing, and you don’t know what you’re doing, admit it. You’re gonna make more money if that’s what you’re about. If you really want to try to learn email marketing, go for it. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, admit it to yourself and get some help. List Track will do that. They’ll just throw it out there for you. They’ll figure out what your clients want, do some AB testing, put together all the emails for you. They’ve got like full white-glove service. Right?
Jeremy: [00:57:28] Oh, wow.
Travis: [00:57:28] Dot-Mailer and Bronto aren’t quite that way. They’ll give you some training, best practices out of the gate and some articles, and then they’ll . . . If you want to pay extra, they can hold your hand through it. Not white glove. They’re not gonna create the emails for you, necessarily, or anything, but they’ll really give you a lot of good training if you want to pay for their consulting package. List Track does all of it for you. They’ll just handle it, which is really cool. For some clients, I’ve recommended that a few times, actually. It’s expensive, but they’ll do it all for you. It’ll make you a lot of money, especially if you’re doing $10 million, $20 million. You’ve got a really huge customer base. Just do that. It’s great.
Jeremy: [00:58:08] Any others out there, Bronto-equivalent or Dot-Mailer-equivalent?
Travis: [00:58:13] Oh, I’m sure they’re out there. I haven’t tried them, personally.
Jeremy: [00:58:16] Okay.
Travis: [00:58:16] Yeah, I can’t really speak to that.
Jeremy: [00:58:18] Or any competitors to List Track that you have heard people do well with?
Travis: [00:58:26] I think List Track is the big one, man.
Jeremy: [00:58:28] That’s the big one.
Travis: [00:58:29] Yeah. I don’t know.
Jeremy: [00:58:31] So what about phone systems? Do you have recommendations for phone systems to help people keep track of orders or customers or any specific recommendations on that?
Travis: [00:58:45] Yeah, actually. We got involved with the CRM system for Kayako, from Kayako, K-A-Y-A-K-O. Those guys are great. That was a huge deal for us too. I should’ve mentioned that earlier, of things that were kind of game-changers for us.
Jeremy: [00:59:05] Yeah.
Travis: [00:59:06] But when your team is getting back to people right away . . . This is a team thing. This isn’t a software thing. The software’s a tool, man. You’re gonna have to have your team excited about getting back to people right away, especially when they’re problem customers and stuff, because they’re coming, man. You’re always gonna have