Latest / Talk Commerce / Persistence, Authenticity, and $25M: A Shopify Success Story with Jay Neyer

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Persistence, Authenticity, and $25M: A Shopify Success Story with Jay Neyer · Talk Commerce

• Brent Peterson (00:01.634) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Jay Neyer He is the founder of Lantern Sol, an agency. Jay, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions. Jay (00:14.188) Yeah, so I've been doing e-commerce for about 12 or 13 years now. Originally co-founded a store myself. We grew that to 25 million before exiting that. And then I moved into the agency space. We design, build, and then grow e-commerce businesses. The majority of the time that's in the Shopify ecosystem. And yeah, we've probably built over 500 websites by now. Through our partners have done over 113 million in online sales. basically just live and breathe e-commerce. Outside of that, really passionate about music. I play the piano and travel around with a giant keyboard and also do a lot with language studies. So that's me in a nutshell. Brent Peterson (00:54.476) That's awesome. And besides Portuguese, what other languages do you speak? Jay (00:58.254) Pretty fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, intermediate Indonesian, and then pretty basic Arabic and Greek. Brent Peterson (01:06.912) Wow. All right. Well, geez, I'm not even going to, I'm not, I just did the Athens marathon in November. And so I, the only Greek I learned and I can't even remember it now is take some more water. That was it. all right. So Jay, before we get started and I'm always interested in e-commerce, I'm going to tell you a joke and all you have to do is give me a rating one through five. call it the free joke project. So here we go. Sometimes my wife messes with me and hides my stuff where I can't find it. Jay (01:18.604) Hahaha. Brent Peterson (01:36.866) Like she puts my shoes in the closet, my jacket on a hanger, and my keys in the key bowl. Jay (01:45.71) That went over my head. Where's the joke? Where's the punchline? Brent Peterson (01:50.414) So the joke is that she's putting all my stuff away and I can't find it because she's put it all away from me. Anyways, it's yeah, I've been married for a long time. Yeah, sorry. Jay (01:59.47) Man, I went over my head. I'm going to give myself a two on processing. Give yourself a four for effort and delivery. Brent Peterson (02:12.622) Yeah, that's pretty common. So, right. So Shopify, tell us about your introduction to Shopify and how you got into the space originally. Well, tell us, let's back up, tell us about your original store. Jay (02:29.206) Yeah, so I originally went to school for accounting and philosophy. I was this is at the University of Cincinnati. And I really love philosophy, but there's not a lot of career opportunity in that. And so I figured I'd balance that out with some accounting so I could actually get a job afterwards. And I started doing some internships and was just bored out of my mind. I remember one day driving home from the office and just started crying like how is this my life? How is this what I'm doing every day? Like it just it didn't feel real and so at that point I started I realized I needed a pivot and get a change so I started researching a ton about entrepreneurs famous people and it seemed like technology was a common theme and so I figured out okay I guess I'm gonna learn how to code and build websites so started doing that for myself then I started initially just like a blog and then a simple website structure and then friends would contact me and say, Hey, my family has a business. you help do that for us? We'll pay you $1,000 back then at the time. And I remember thinking, wow, people will pay you to do this. That's incredible. So I started going in that route. And that also introduced me into the Shopify because shortly after that, I saw another friend that I knew from from high school at the time. launched an e-commerce store and thought that sounds really cool. I'd love to be able to make money while I sleep. I had this dream of traveling and getting out of Ohio. And so started diving more into that ecosystem. And at that time, EDM and electronic music was really picking up. This was around early 2000s. And so that was a new ecosystem. And so I had this idea of I want to create products to basically service customers in that space, like glow paint, light up. things like that, neon sticks. There was really just a lot of wholesale but not individual providers. So I spent all this money on getting product, building a website. I was doing all this in Shopify and I remember hitting publish one day, just like, all right, here come the big bucks, gonna start raking them in. And I got zero sales. And then the next day, zero sales. And then the third day we got a sale and it was from my partner's brother. So. Jay (04:39.982) It was kind of a wake up of like, it's not just build it and they will come. You have to do all this marketing into addition to that. So I felt a little disheartened from that. That fell through. I started doing some more just kind of what I would describe as freelance work for building websites for people. And then shortly after that, I got contacted by another person who just saw me publishing stuff and just making websites pretty frequently. They said, Hey, we have this cool fitness product. We want your help doing all the digital side of it. So became a co-founder on that. That was around 2013 and just introduced a, a long journey over the course of about seven or eight years where we basically grew that product up from zero to 25 million. So it was a fitness product that you do at home. And we got a lot of luck and good timing by just being around right around COVID. So people were forced to work out from home. So we had a huge explosion piece around then. But even leading up to it, you know, is the classic kind of a inverse chart of just shooting straight up the hockey stick that you like to see. So first couple of years, just the struggle and grind. I think after three years, we did 50 K year four, we might've done 200 K year after that might've just been shy of a million. just. just seeing like the result of your business just gradually compounding. And all my other like really close friends were just doing boring normal office jobs and just feel like they couldn't really understand the excitement pieces that came in the space of entrepreneurship. So that was my for lay that got me into Shopify ecosystem. And then after I exited that space, I wanted to continue working with businesses and take apply all the learning that I had done to work with other companies. So that's what got me down on this crazy journey. Brent Peterson (06:30.402) That's awesome. Go Bearcats. And I guess Ohio, they have some college up a little bit farther north that did pretty well this year. Yeah, the something, the whatever. So tell us, so you got into the agency space and you know, I got into the agency space a little bit before you and the trajectory of Shopify, nobody really kind of figured out where it was going in the early 2010s and it eclipsed everything, right? Jay (06:32.108) Yep. Jay (06:37.583) I'm schooled up for this. Brent Peterson (07:00.386) So did you choose Shopify because your store was on Shopify and that was native and just really comfortable for you? tell us a little bit about how you got into that space. Jay (07:10.434) Yeah, I think a common theme and throughout my career has just been luck, like right place, right time. You know, it was never really intentional at the time back then. It just offered easy to use tools for it. I had also done a ton of stuff with WordPress, so I was pretty familiar with that platform as well, but Shopify just seemed very specific and native to e-commerce more so than WordPress was more or less a Swiss army knife that you could use in a lot of different contexts. So I think it was just. luck, you know, it wasn't necessarily I spent all this time doing research and diving in. I just got presented with something and ran with it and that platform happened to be one of the long term winners as well. So I'd like to say like, hey, I had this huge brainstorming session, the strategic roadmap that was laid out, but it was it was a lot more organic and circumstantial than that. Brent Peterson (08:01.112) So regardless of the platform you had talked about, how you launched and maybe your brother-in-law bought something first. And I guess that's a lesson for all entrepreneurs is to first sell to your friends and family and make sure everybody knows about it so they buy something. But what was it that sort of that first mental breakthrough that got you to start doing more than just launching the site? What was it that kind of led you to doing some specific marketing and things like that? Jay (08:14.157) Yes. Jay (08:27.202) Yeah, I think the hardest thing in my experience in entrepreneurship and the thing I always tell other people who are just getting started or early in their journeys is just persistence. I think as long as you have that stubborn bullheaded mentality of I'm just going to run through wall after wall after wall and I'm going to just keep doing that day after day, it's impossible to fail. Like as long as you're not a complete idiot and just have some sense of a direction that you're going and running in the right direction, I truly believe that anyone can be an entrepreneur, create a business of their own and have that successful as long as they're persistent. So the first business I did, I stopped. You I got disheartened after I spent a couple thousands of dollars getting all this inventory, building a website and not seeing any sales. And so that was really just disheartening for me and I stopped focusing on it. But I have no doubt that would have succeeded if I just kept trying things. With the fitness company that I did shortly after that, was again, it just not quitting on that. And it helped in that stage having a co founder, I believe, having a partner to help go through some of those hard times, because the first three years, we weren't really profitable at all. And so it does take some level of just raw and commitment, like just commitment of not I'm not going to stop unwavering commitment of like, I'm going to continue this day after day and just keep pushing through and even things that don't scale like just direct outreach. Things like that we just did over and over showing up at conferences, just going one friend like I think I went through literally my entire friends list on Facebook at the time and just check us out, you know, so that's persistence is by far the most key ingredient in my experience for getting some level of success. Brent Peterson (10:20.334) So as you move into the agency space now, what do you see as the big trends in e-commerce? I mean, I think we're all going to say AI is the big trend. So outside of AI and e-commerce, what are the big trends that you see happening? Jay (10:36.27) we're in the age of influencers. So you continue to see a bigger distrust in media. And so with that, you don't have the same leverage authority where in the past it might be through some magazine or some publication. Now it's way more on the individual level. And I think that's only going to accelerate and become even more predominant. So, a lot of the trends that I'm seeing in testing with are in what I call the age of the influencer. So what does that look like in practice? Well, When we're trying to scale out ad accounts and help businesses grow to from like six to seven, eight figures a year in sales, big piece of our strategy for what we're doing with that is doing white listing through ads. Um, you'll have the exact same ad concepts running from a brand page and then running through a white listing page where essentially you're just linking your ad account to, um, an Instagram influencers page can be the exact same content. And we see significant increases with the white listing. So I expect that trend to continue. We've also started to create very specific funnels around that whole experience to really communicate from every touch point from the ad platform distribution to the landing page to the end purchase. So AI is obviously the big thing for helping achieve more items at scale. But I think the big thing that stands out to me is this age of influencer that we're continuing to dive deeper into. Brent Peterson (12:07.148) heard an interesting interview about a TikTok shop and how a beauty brand had really embraced it and suddenly that's half their, that channel was half their sales. How important are the social media platforms in terms of just selling and another sales channel? Jay (12:24.302) Absolutely. And it's very much kind what I was talking about, that persistence and long term gain. You might not see immediate benefit and you might not have a ton of initial budget to go pay for these big influencers. But we even see this performance with what I call micro influencers. So people with even just like 1000 followers, 2000 followers, you'd be surprised that even with those accounts, the leverage authority that we see brands get so Even on smaller scales, it works really well. And you can just get unique with how you structure your offering if you're giving them free product, if there's some type of pro bono or other type of relationship for how you're engaging them. But the beauty of this is it works with brands where we're doing eight figures and it works with brands where we're doing five figures or six figures as well. Brent Peterson (13:12.878) I know you mentioned WordPress earlier and a lot of people don't know that Shopify comes with a free blog. I've also noticed that most people running Shopify stores have a few hundred words on their product page. Do you have recommendations to both enhance that and the importance of maybe using the Shopify blog to bring more relevance to your site through content? Jay (13:40.768) Yeah, we do a ton with SEO. on the agency side, SEO is about a third of our business. So definitely very familiar with that. The way I always think about it is, as marketers, we have a challenge, we're trying to simultaneously speak to search engines, and users at the same time, and they process and review information very differently. So with search engines, you like to be more robust, have more keywords, have more information. Whereas with users, you wanna have very clean UI. I try to have more visuals and iconography versus text. And so the balancing act is always trying to find that middle line between them. When in doubt, you always wanna see how much content and text length is on competitor pages and try to go 10 % beyond that. And so what we do is typically create this giant database list of all the keywords that we're trying to optimize for, map those out to specific pages. And inevitably what'll happen is you have about maybe like, you could have anywhere from like three to 10 keywords that would apply to a single page, but you can't fit them all on one page. You ultimately can maybe get two or three keywords or phrases for that specific page. And so what we do is with these blog posts is do that longer tail of the ones that we couldn't hit have that blog. Piece go into more in-depth content and then ultimately structure what are called internal backlinks, back to the back, back to the product page and things like that. So. Well, we do a lot of that with our SEO approach when we try to grow the organic side. Brent Peterson (15:11.406) So just let's talk about AI and how is it beyond the genitive AI, what is AI doing for e-commerce and how is it going to impact e-commerce? Jay (15:24.408) We're, I was just telling our team this week that we're becoming a technology focused company and AI in the future is like, obviously we use things like claw chat, GPT, grok, they've been tremendous. So I'll give you an example. We had a, a redesign for a brand that we were doing and the first drafts that we presented just weren't clicking. And so I just hopped on a screen share with the client, just pulled up AI. just. did a couple of quick iterations, we were able to bang out the rough concept of a prototype very quickly. And then from there, give it to our designer to fine tune and polish. It saved countless hours for that. And we'll do the same thing for generating marketing scripts. I'd say that's like kind of base level of like common AI today. But I think really what we're building towards is our proprietary data set. The way that I've seen these large language models work is that the more context and information you give it, the better. And so if you're just having more conversational style with chat, GBT, for example, you'll get some pretty good responses, but it won't always be great. So what we're doing as a company is building out this massive documentation that'll, example, in the context of ads, just go through so countless, endless examples of really good content for ads that have performed fairly well and just building out our own data set, essentially. So when we have a new client, we can just tweak a couple of input fields. run that into our AI model and just get a very specific ad creative and copy suggestions. And so as we get more into the future, I view this as being as our proprietary moat essentially for when we engage in a client, like, Hey, we've built out this whole data set that is very trained and specific on these specific subsets versus just going to chat GPT and Hey, give me some, give me some headline copy or give me some ad creative ideas. It's just going to be much more limited in its scope and knowledge versus having this whole library of context that it's drawing from. Brent Peterson (17:23.758) Can you point to a single trend right now that you should be looking at in terms of e-commerce for this next year, all the way going into Black Friday? Jay (17:34.862) in the context of AI, just more broadly. Brent Peterson (17:37.646) just broadly in the context of e-commerce. Jay (17:39.788) Yeah, I would say going back to what I was talking about for the influencer stuff and expanding a little bit more on that. The other thing that we're doing is having very hyper specific landing pages for that. So again, you'll have the exact same creative with the brand page and the influencer page and almost always the influencer page performs better. But what we're doing to go beyond that is then take the landing page instead of just sending them straight to the product page, having a landing page that also has that same influencer in the hero and the hero banner, for example. And that's the simplest form of just taking the exact same content and just maybe having a duplication where it has their image. So you have that consistency of, this was the guy I just saw on the ad. Now they're on the landing page. You have less of this brand conversation and more of this direct human to human one. And that can even expand into more details as far as having landing pages that are more listicles or structured in a way that isn't just a hard right hook sale. and doing more so providing value. So I'll give you the example for a product that we had that was for personal development, helping with meditation. We might have an article structured, hey, here are five science backed methods to help improve your focus and things like that. And you'll have three or things, three or so things that aren't even related to the product, aren't even related to the concept. and then sneak in there at the end, this product is really great at that as well. And so it's doing a little bit more of that soft selling, specifically at the top of the funnel. As you get more into the middle and bottom of funnel, we'll have maybe more direct approaches that are less. less obscure for the lack of a better word, but specifically that top of funnel for people who have no idea who you are, we've seen those strategies work really well. So I would really emphasize whitelisting with influencers and custom landing pages to further leverage that influencer. Brent Peterson (19:36.716) those custom landing pages, that's where you can really take advantage of those long tail keywords to get them into there. Jay (19:42.062) as well. So it can apply for that if you're doing from the SEO perspective, generally we'll have some of the SEO stuff typically exists more in the blog. So I wouldn't say the SEO is necessarily a primary focus for a lot of those pages, but it absolutely can be, especially if you're depending on the type of content you have, the top five listicles is a really common template that we use for a product if we're trying to go a little bit upstream and become less salesy and just try to give them value around a certain subject or matter. Brent Peterson (20:14.814) So a two-part question here. I know that e-commerce stores need to make themselves unique and I'm a big believer in EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And part of that is coming up with your three uniques, coming up with your mission, your value proposition. What advice do you give or that you have for merchants to make themselves different from everybody else? Jay (20:39.475) Mm I think you you got to find your true authentic voice and be consistent with that. It's not something that I can necessarily break down to you in a formula or whatever. that can come across in the form of that can come across in the form of icons. There's a couple of ways that that can come, or like unique positioning, branding. There's a couple of ways that they can come across, but I think it's just finding your true authentic voice and being consistent with that. So you might have a temptation to just look at the big players and try to copy and replicate exactly what they're doing. But I would just encourage anyone to just... Go with what feels right, like follow your intuition, find that authentic voice and put that front and center. Brent Peterson (21:21.974) And then second part of that question is for Lanternsol, what are your three uniques? Why would somebody come to you over the myriad of other Shopify agencies that are out there? Jay (21:31.158) I think the main thing is because I've walked the talk. like agency owners can often just come in and just be focusing on an agency, trying to sign and get to the next client. I've built and exited my own company before. And so I think just going through those phases, most of the agency owners that I talked to great people, really smart, but I don't meet very many that have actually done it before. And so I think just having that perspective from what the business owners are going through. Because very often times these aren't giant bloated organizations. These are 10 people or less teams. And CEOs or the owners of them are constantly juggling multiple hats, doing things like logistics, product, customer service, branding, sales, all in the same day. And so I think just going through that myself has been... been a really big, relatable point and being able to look at it from a 30,000 foot view instead of just being very hyper-specific on one problem. I think one of the things we're really good at is being able to synthesize across a variety broad reach of topics and be able to focus on these are, these are the areas that you didn't even contact us about or you were even thinking about, but make a lot more sense for you to be focusing on. Brent Peterson (22:47.886) Last question, so I know that I spoke with another agency yesterday that Shopify is kind of rearranging their partner program as helping other agencies. Is there anything that you've seen that is improving the partnerships at Shopify that would help others as they navigate that? Jay (23:09.999) You know, when we got onto the partner program, because we're, can like just type in lantern soul Shopify experts and you'll see our profile. We've been on it for a while and it's been tremendous for just getting connected with it. is evolving ecosystem. And this is something I tell businesses that we work with all the time. All these platforms are living, breathing ecosystems. They're constantly changing. Facebook ads are completely different. The whole, Google ads platform. All these systems are just constantly changing. So you have to evolve or die. The changes that I'm seeing with it, I don't see any negative impacts per se. And I only see Shopify growing as an ecosystem. So for my, for my vantage point, it's all been positive. I don't have any negatives that come with it. But it's to be expected that there's going to be continuous change, potentially even more frequent change in all these platforms, Shopify, Shopify, or even outside of Shopify. Brent Peterson (24:08.52) So Jay, as I close out the podcast, we have a few minutes left. I give everybody the chance to do a shameless plug about anything that I'd like. What would you like to plug today? Jay (24:16.974) I the main thing I just want to emphasize is exactly kind of what I was saying earlier is just focus on your true authentic self for whatever that might be. There's going to be a large temptation for just copying and looking out there. So beyond just plugging my business Lantern Soul, you can look up very easily online. I just want to encourage everyone to really pay attention to that intuition of what feels right for you. For me, it's a very eclectic combination of languages, music, entrepreneurship, fitness, kind of bridging these things altogether. It's why I also think people like Joe Rogan are really successful of combining these disparate fields from MMA, podcasting, TV show hosting. would I just really encourage everyone to go in a variety variety of topics and follow your unique passions and interests, even if they don't make sense. That's really served me well. You know, learning languages isn't something that I can monetize, but The unexpected benefits that I've accrued from that have been tremendous. So just follow your passions, follow your interests, try to follow your core authentic self as much as possible. Brent Peterson (25:25.048) That's awesome. Jay Neher, he is the founder of Lantern Solve. Thank you so much for being here today. Jay (25:30.456) Thank you, appreciate your time.