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How to Sell on TikTok Shop With AI · eCommerce Podcast

0:04
Welcome to the eCommerce Podcast. My name is Matt Edmundson and it is great to
0:08
be with you broadcasting, I would say live from Liverpool. I mean, we're having
0:13
a conversation live, obviously, but you're not hearing this live. But we are
0:17
broadcasting from our new studio here in Liverpool at our warehouse facility.
0:22
And so we're still trying to get it dialed in. It's still very messy. If you
0:26
listen to the last show where I talked about that. Um, but you know, we are
0:31
getting there slowly but surely. Uh, and it's great to be in the new studio. Uh,
0:35
same format of the show though. The studio's new. Uh, and the reason we're in a
0:40
new studio is literally because I moved house like 2 weeks ago. So, um, and I've
0:44
not had a chance to build a new studio at my new house. So we're using the one
0:49
we have at our Liverpool warehouse. It's really mad when I think about it,
0:53
because we've got 3 studios, or we did have. Um, not that you need to know any
0:58
of this. Um, but we did have 3 studios, and we'll have 3 studios again soon once
1:02
I get the new house. So I'll have one at the house, we've got one here at our
1:07
Liverpool, uh, warehouse, and we've got one, uh, in Nottingham. So where we
1:11
record the So That's Why podcast. Bottom line is you should have a whole bunch
1:16
of podcast studios, just the way— just the way it is. Just my top tip. Anyway,
1:20
enough of all that. We, we're not talking about podcasting, we are talking about
1:25
ecommerce. And so if you're new to the show, a very warm welcome to you. Make
1:29
sure you like and Subscribe and do all of that good stuff. Like you, I run my
1:34
own ecommerce business, and I have the great privilege of speaking to guests
1:38
every week, picking their brains about how I can run my own business better. And
1:43
you get to listen on to the conversation. So hopefully, you'll become a regular
1:47
listener. And if you are a regular listener, very warm welcome back. Great to
1:52
have you join us again. Now, Before we get into the conversation, a little bit
1:56
of housekeeping. If you haven't done so already, go to the website
2:01
ecommercepodcast.net. There's a bunch of stuff there that is going to help you
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if you haven't already signed up. One is the newsletter. We just email out every
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great. On those notes is an AI prompt. So if you subscribe to our AI services,
2:23
you'll get all the transcripts and stuff straight into that as well. You can
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start to grill the podcast through AI, which is very, very crazy. We've also got
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on there the cohort group. So if you want to come into like a monthly call with
2:37
fellow e-commercers from around the world, just talking about e-commerce and
2:41
thinking about ecommerce and asking questions about ecommerce and sharing
2:46
insights, um, come do that. They're free, they're on Zoom, um, last about an
2:50
hour or 2. And I just honestly, one of my favorite times of the month is when I
2:55
get on these calls, uh, with you guys and just, we all just share what's going
2:59
on. It's wonderful. And then finally on the website, uh, is our AI system. If
3:04
you haven't tried that already, go check that out. Anyway, enough of all of
3:08
that. Let's get on to the show. Welcome to the show, man. How you doing?
3:14
Doing great, man. Doing great. Excited to kick off the day with a lovely
3:16
podcast.
3:20
I love how for you, you're kicking off the day and I'm ending mine. Uh, yeah,
3:24
such is the time zone difference. Whereabouts in the world are you?
3:28
Yeah, I'm actually in an Airbnb in Los Angeles right now, traveling, visiting a
3:32
bunch of people, doing some more podcasts, not cheating on you. Very excited
3:37
about this, you know. Yeah, yeah, you're totally cheating on us. That's Yeah,
3:42
just out there. We have an in-person studio co-hosting with another company
3:46
called Kruva, hosting other people there, but excited for this one.
3:51
Fantastic. Of course you are. Of course you are. So for those that don't know
3:55
you or haven't heard of you because they've not listened to any of the podcasts
3:59
you're cheating on us with, just give us the brief elevator pitch, who you are,
4:04
what you do, and why you're here. Yeah.
4:08
So, my name's Sohun. I'm the founder of a company called Clankers, a name that
4:13
took a lot of creativity and time to figure out. And my background is in the
4:18
influencer affiliate space. Worked at a traditional marketing agency doing media
4:23
buying, influencer affiliate from Amazon, off-platform to Amazon using
4:28
traditional tools like Impact, Levanza, Refersion, those guys. And then started
4:33
to get into the creator commerce space and built up a TikTok Shop division
4:38
there. Worked at some of the legacy TikTok Shop outreach tools as head of growth
4:43
employee number one, like Euka and Reacher.
4:48
Yeah.
4:48
Now working closely with a software called Kruva. And what I saw was that with
4:53
Claude Code coming out, the way these softwares were going to change, releasing
4:57
their own public APIs and MCPs, we'll dive into what that means later. Allowing
5:01
all the marketers to essentially build their own hyper-personalized software and
5:06
AI workflows in-house. So that's what I'm helping a lot of marketers, brands,
5:10
agencies do is take these tools around TikTok Shop, influencer affiliate, and
5:14
learn how to use them productively to make their marketing processes more
5:19
efficient and impactful. So I'll usually go in, I'll audit an entire TikTok Shop
5:23
business, I'll go and build custom software and actually put it into a nice
5:27
GitHub repo and, you know, kind of embed it into their organization. And then
5:32
I'll teach them how to use that and become more AI-enabled so their business can
5:36
grow.
5:40
Oh, wow. That sounds fun.
5:42
Yeah, it's pretty fun. It's pretty up my skill level, you know, younger, uh,
5:47
25-year-old just doing Claude and TikTok. So, you know, I can't complain.
5:52
It's just funny, isn't it, where the world's got to? It's like, I have kids. um,
5:56
similar ages to you. And yeah, it's like a few years ago, if they'd have said to
6:00
me, oh, Dad, my career, I'm basically, I'm just gonna do this thing called
6:05
TikTok. It's basically a short-form 30-second video thing where people dance,
6:09
and then I'm gonna mix it with some kind of AI thing. I'd have been like, you
6:14
are smoking dope, dude. Um, but it turns out actually you're not.
6:18
Yeah, I'm not. There's a real business here. You know, it's surprising. Like, I
6:23
could actually make a living doing this stuff that sounds like complete nonsense
6:27
to 90% of the world. But even considered for SF, I'm considered an older guy.
6:31
These 18-year-olds are raising— it's crazy. These SF entrepreneurs will call me
6:36
Unc, and they're raising $10 million.
6:40
Oh, wow.
6:40
They're raising $10 million for their business where they're selling to other AI
6:45
agents. So where I come from, it's just AI agents all day. And I want to take
6:50
the relevant portion of that and apply it to ecommerce because it's just such a
6:54
different world. than building emails for AI agents, building landing pages for
6:59
AI agents. Like, the AI agents are the customers for these businesses. So long
7:03
way to go in ecommerce. I feel like we're just scratching the surface on AI.
7:08
Yeah, I totally agree. Um, so when it comes to— then you're obviously merging
7:13
AI, you're merging, um, TikTok together. Um, what's the I mean, one, that's
7:17
pretty niche, but one of the questions I like to ask guests right straight at
7:22
the start is you've obviously, you're working with e-com companies both in the
7:26
TikTok space and the AI space. What's the biggest mistake we're all making as
7:31
far as you can tell and see?
7:36
Yeah, the first mistake is really that no one has their processes written down
7:40
very clearly. So one of the big things when you go from marketing to tech, is
7:44
marketers sometimes are very ambiguous. They like to talk into like, oh yeah,
7:48
we're going to increase the efficiency or we're going to do this thing or we're
7:52
going to test new angles. But it's not like when you go into a technical
7:56
standpoint, you have to be very specific about the technical, like the angle
8:00
you're testing plus 3 specific fallbacks plus an example of what good looks
8:04
like.
8:08
Yeah.
8:08
And I think a lot of these brands just don't have their processes ironed out and
8:12
their data even cleaned up. so that AI can learn about their business. And they
8:15
get very frustrated when they try to plug in things like Claude Code or Codex
8:19
and they're like, ah, it came garbage. I'm like, dude, you don't even have a
8:22
folder on what good looks like, your brand colors and stuff. You're not feeding
8:26
it anything. And so that's the biggest mistake that prevents people from using
8:29
it in their first go.
8:33
That's interesting, what good looks like. Do you have to tell AI what good looks
8:35
like?
8:38
100%. Otherwise you get what we call AI slop, you know? And I think AI slop is
8:43
just, It's optimizing for the best usage of its own tokens and what it's been
8:48
kind of trained on. I mean, you'll see it a lot, especially when you build
8:53
landing pages. When you see those, you've seen those Claude Code landing pages.
8:58
Yeah, I've seen boxes, neon colors. They don't even have a proper blog. They're
9:03
missing multiple headers. The copy is just awful. It's like these AI I don't
9:09
even know what to call them, but they're like these phrases where it's like, we
9:14
just killed this, or like, we're fixing this brokenly. It's like these bold
9:19
claim verbose language that some engineer trained this model on that sounds like
9:24
nothing like marketing copy. So you definitely need to show it what good looks
9:29
like. The way I look at it is like when you bring an employee on, people give
9:34
the employee 90 days to ramp up. with a very meticulous onboarding guide,
9:39
multiple calls a week, shadowing it. Like, think about how much context a human
9:44
gets when they're like signing on for a new job, and then they give nothing to
9:50
AI. They're just like, hey, here's like 2 sentences, do the exact same thing
9:55
that this guy that had 90 days of onboarding and holding and context in like 1
10:00
second. And because you didn't do that in 1 second, Yeah. AI isn't useful.
10:05
That's what I see a lot of people who are like, I tried AI, it doesn't work.
10:10
Yeah. That's really interesting, isn't it? And I guess by answering the
10:15
question, what does good look like? You're starting to form your own processes
10:19
because I would venture to say that the reason we don't tell AI what good looks
10:24
like is we're not entirely sure what good looks like most of the time. Like you
10:28
say, we use a lot of ambiguous And fluff, a lot of ambiguity and fluff. Excuse
10:33
me. I think there is, which is ironic, isn't it? In an industry which is so
10:37
data-driven.
10:42
Yeah.
10:42
What's your ROAS? What's your CAC? You know, we throw out all these acronyms
10:47
because we don't actually know what they mean, but we, you know, we ask all
10:51
these kind of questions because those are important numbers. But actually, what
10:55
does good look like when it comes to writing? a blog post when it comes to
10:59
writing product copy? I mean, that's a really deep question straight away. Yeah.
11:04
And I think it makes a lot of people scared. I'll say like one of the things
11:08
that, and I was listening to this podcast with Naval. I don't know if you listen
11:12
to Naval at all, but he is like, you know, great writer on X, great, you know,
11:17
tech voice in the space, you know, and he was saying that when people start to
11:21
like get into complex technology, when they try to talk to it and it makes
11:25
errors, it makes them feel stupid because they're not getting it right. Right.
11:30
So there's this innate fear about like, hey, I need to type in very specific
11:34
commands into AI, and when it doesn't come out right, does that reflect on me or
11:38
my ability to be specific or give direction? And I really think that's the core
11:42
skill set behind being able to be a good AI agent handler or AI expert. Is like,
11:47
how articulate can you be about what you want and what good looks like? And
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people get scared trying to use this. I find that the reason those who haven't
11:55
started playing around with it already is because they don't know what they want
12:00
to do. And when I mean know, I mean bring it all the way down to first
12:04
principles and explain it to a 5th grader. Like, that's what it means to like
12:08
truly know something, to be able to explain it in like 10 different ways to 10
12:12
different people. Not just to a marketer on like, hey, you know, I'm going to
12:17
optimize my blended cocktail TV doing blah blah blah. And like, you know, that
12:21
only resonates with like one very segment of like high-tier marketers, you know.
12:25
Like, that doesn't like resonate with an AI model that hasn't been trained on
12:30
all that stuff, you know.
12:34
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a fair comment. So how do we, how do we know what good
12:40
looks like in relation to TikTok? So what are some of the things that we should
12:45
be Because obviously you're doing this now as an uncle, as a job. What are the
12:50
sort of the first steps we do to try and understand what good looks like,
12:55
especially in relation to TikTok? How are you helping companies figure that out?
13:00
Yeah.
13:06
So for me, I've seen so many programs, probably audited like 2,000 affiliate
13:10
programs at this point. Because I worked in software, I got to see the backend
13:15
of like over 150 agencies and like, you know, 1,000+ brands, right? I saw every
13:20
single different creative brief, every message, and I have my own sense on like
13:24
what the data looks like. Another thing you can do if you want to get more
13:29
data-driven is take a comparable set of brands in the space and do like a
13:33
comparables analysis, comps analysis. These tools like, you know, Kruva, they're
13:38
essentially scraping and indexing every single video, all the KPIs of, and all
13:43
the products of everything consistently on a daily basis. So you can actually go
13:47
and pull their performance of like maybe 5 brands and similar GMV and products
13:52
and be like, hey, here's how I'm pacing month over month against that. And that
13:56
could be what good looks like. That's a good proxy. The best proxy for marketing
14:01
agencies is you have first-party data on like 20 to 25 TikTok Shop brands. So
14:06
you can start benchmarking a good, like, hey, what's a good response rate look
14:10
like when I launch the beauty brand that does $10,000 a month on TikTok Shop?
14:15
What's a good sample request rate? How often are my affiliates who post for the
14:20
first time converting into sales? And compare this rate against the 15 other
14:24
brands that I'm seeing right now.
14:29
Yeah.
14:29
They can get very clear On where, what good looks like. And I think that's the
14:33
advantage that agencies do have with AI that brands really don't.
14:37
That's really interesting. Yeah. And so sites like, what was the site called?
14:43
Kroover? Kroover. Yeah. Okay. Um, so transpose slightly, uh, because I want to
14:49
get into how you mix AI and TikTok together. What are the big mistakes we're
14:55
making with TikTok Shop per se right now, or maybe even big mistakes? Like, for
15:01
those that maybe still haven't started on TikTok Shop, where do we begin?
15:06
Yeah. For me, I really look at, and this is outside of these TikTok Shop tools,
15:11
right? The first thing I look at is what's going on with your Meta ads angles,
15:15
what's going on with your traditional influencer marketing. If you have a tool
15:20
like Motion Analytics, I would start going in and reviewing the copy off the
15:24
highest performing landing pages. Even going back to traditional affiliate,
15:28
you're buying traffic and you're trying to find the highest EPC, right? And so,
15:33
you can look at landing pages with very high EPC. You can take the core copy
15:37
from that and you can put that into a creative testing strategy to give to your
15:42
TikTok affiliates. And that doesn't require you to be a super AI-focused TikTok
15:46
shop. engineer or researcher, you just take what's working on your copy for Meta
15:50
ads and landing pages and you go and put that into your first test. Maybe you're
15:55
going through all your reviews on Amazon and you're like, hey, this is what
15:59
customers have been saying in the last 30 days that they really like about our
16:04
product. So, let's go take this copy and take those one-liners and prepare them
16:08
for our affiliates. Let's go find a product. that is very demonstratable on
16:12
camera that maybe affiliates are already talking about or influencers. And we
16:17
can use social listening tools to go and find people mentioning products and
16:21
figure out a sentiment analysis. If there's a lot of creators that are already
16:26
talking about our product on TikTok, is there anything we can do to reach out to
16:30
them personally and get them posting so we can really ramp up in the first stage
16:35
without going through this huge sampling and review process? Those are some
16:39
preliminary things you can do that aren't really AI forward and aren't really
16:43
super technical on TikTok Shop.
16:48
Yeah, and very helpful too, aren't they? Because you're narrowing down a lot of
16:52
the errors people make at the start.
16:56
Exactly.
16:58
Which is always a beautiful thing. Save on the mistakes. Don't screw it up. So
17:04
let's Let's say then we're, you know, we're doing that. We're going out, we're
17:10
getting the influencers, we've got a shop set up, and we're starting to see some
17:16
results. I'm curious how you are using AI in that space. So what, I guess, the
17:23
start of your journey, how did you, what opportunity did you see there? What was
17:29
What did AI do for us that we weren't doing for ourselves? And then you think,
17:35
actually, if we use Claude to do this, you're gonna kill it.
17:42
Yeah. I mean, part of it, just speaking for marketing agencies, is you're able
17:46
to operate so much more efficiently at scale. So historically, the reason why I
17:50
joined these software tools, just to back it up in the first place, is that
17:54
every single brand needed to go into one of these influencer affiliate outreach
17:58
tools, and then reach out to 10,000 creators a day. They would have access to
18:02
the entire database of TikTok Shop creators. And then you would create highly
18:06
personalized messaging flows, giving out specific creative briefs for the
18:10
products you sample, reminding them to post, capturing those creators that
18:14
performed and moving them into a community like Discord or Lark or WhatsApp or
18:18
any of those communities, right? That was really the evergreen process. But to
18:22
actually activate and set that up would take, you know, 2 to 3 hours per,
18:26
assuming you knew how to do it.
18:30
Yeah.
18:31
But if you save that first-time process into a Claude skill and you wire it in
18:35
via MCP, which is called Model Context Protocol, it's just a fancy way of
18:40
saying, here's how one software talks to another to get it to do stuff. So you
18:44
can save that script via MCP, and now you have someone that can automatically
18:49
set up this software for you every single time. It's a clear application of AI.
18:53
It's like, hey, I have 15 brands that I'm gonna onboard, I only have to set it
18:58
up once manually and AI can do the other 14, right? So that's like a clear area
19:02
of arbitrage. Another clear use case that I'm seeing right now is on content
19:06
analysis and video research. So like the biggest thing with TikTok Shop brands
19:11
is they need to give feedback to their creators and coach them. A lot of people
19:15
may not know this, but TikTok affiliates are very different than UGC creators or
19:20
traditional influencers. a brand portfolio and are used to creating content.
19:24
They're missing the softer elements of the video, like how to set up your camera
19:29
correctly, how to actually do proper lighting. And, you know, we really see that
19:33
matter a lot with TikTok because when someone's scrolling really fast through
19:38
their feed, if there's like a little bit of bad lighting that's off or the
19:42
camera is slightly off, there's something in our brain, maybe it's some sort of
19:47
like taste receptor or judgment. It's like a neuromarketing principle. Doesn't
19:51
even want us to watch that video for 1 second. And you can put in as much time
19:55
into scripting, creating the perfect hook, studying your meta ads angles, your
20:00
highest converting landing pages, but no one's going to see that video because
20:04
you don't know how to make your video appear very good in the landscape. And so
20:09
these are things where you can have Gemini go and actually extract that lighting
20:13
by taking— what it essentially does is It breaks a video down into a bunch of
20:18
images frame by frame, and then it analyzes each video. The process is called
20:22
OCR. And so you can actually have it take the first 2 seconds of your video and
20:27
abstract different lighting concepts and be like, oh, look, you're using a box
20:31
light here. This is natural lighting. This looks like a vanity mirror. And you
20:36
can tell affiliates like, hey, the best performing lighting is when you use
20:40
natural lighting and you're in your bedroom. So here's how you actually do that.
20:44
And you can show them a diagram of like different lighting angles, times of day
20:49
that post, and like other lighting tips and hacks. And you understand with
20:53
setting up a podcast studio and running a podcast how important the lighting and
20:58
videography is. It can make or break your entire video.
21:02
Yeah.
21:02
But you don't see people index on it with that much depth in like traditional.
21:07
And a lot of creators who are just starting, like You know, the barrier is low.
21:11
You just have to have 1,000 followers and you can have a TikTok Shop. I feel
21:15
like there's about 4.5 million of them in the United States, but really only
21:20
1.6% are making a couple hundred dollars in the last 30 days. So there's a huge
21:24
education gap to bridge, and AI can help break that down specifically.
21:28
That's really interesting. The fact that AI is now analyzing your videos is
21:34
quite fascinating. Um, and did you say you were using Gemini to do that?
21:40
Yeah, Gemini. Um, you could use like 3.5 Pro. Uh, I think they, uh, sunsetted
21:44
the 2.5 Flash, which is what I used to use. And like the run is like a couple
21:48
cents per run. Um, but what's great about these like outreach tools, uh, with
21:52
Kruva specifically, they pass through a full transcript analysis, hooks and
21:56
selling points and lighting on the video already. So when you're thinking about
22:01
your costs and doing this across 1,000 videos, you can actually pull their
22:05
pre-ran analysis and reduce your Gemini cost by about 3 to 5x because you're
22:09
only analyzing the last 8th of the video to have it analyzed with your
22:13
proprietary framework. Because the major cost by analyzing a video with AI is
22:17
generating the transcript, going through frame by frame to find the hook,
22:21
classify the hook. Hook equals first 2 seconds. There's a visual hook, emotional
22:26
hook, there's a verbal hook, right? all those processes with individual runs and
22:30
tokens associated already done through this platform where you have really
22:34
talented software engineers optimizing those costs versus if you try to go run
22:38
Gemini on a fresh video and generate all that from scratch, it's, it's just
22:42
going to cost you a lot in the long run. It's going to make you not want to do
22:47
this process.
22:51
Yeah, that's really interesting. And are they doing it just TikTok or are you
22:55
getting Instagram, YouTube Shorts, the whole 9 yards now?
22:59
Just TikTok Shop for now. Um, you know, they'll probably expand, but the reason
23:03
TikTok Shop is so interesting for me is because you can see directly attributed
23:07
sales versus like with these other platforms, you have to use like earned media
23:12
value, which is like, you know, I think it's kind of BS. Um, and you're
23:16
essentially like, you know, using these indexes that platforms like Aspire and
23:20
other people put together where it's like, oh, a view on TikTok is worth 1 cent,
23:25
you know, but an engagement on Instagram is worth 5 cents of earned media value,
23:29
and I'm doing the sum across this index, and, you know, I'm using my own CPM on
23:33
Meta ads as like a benchmark, and I'm like, it doesn't really tell me how well
23:37
this influencer performed. Like, it just doesn't. It doesn't tell me that this
23:42
hook is the one that made me the most money, you know? And even on TikTok Shop,
23:46
I don't know if you know this, but in GMV Max, which is the TikTok Ads Manager,
23:50
TikTok Shop Ads Manager, you can actually pull the 2-second video view rate and
23:55
the 6-second video view rate. So you're getting really granular on like, my hook
23:59
rate or 2-second video view rate is 33%. Let me go and find all the creatives
24:03
with a 33% plus hook rate from this week and then have Gemini go in and analyze
24:07
every single aspect of the first 2 seconds of the video and then start to
24:12
repurpose it into my creative testing pipeline. And think about how much
24:16
leverage that unlocks for marketers across all their creative. If you take that
24:20
information back to Meta ads or splice out those hooks and then run them into
24:25
there, that could reduce your CAC a lot on Meta. You could even test that on
24:29
Amazon too. We see a lot of people, and this was more of an experiment I was
24:33
doing in my earlier marketing days at the agency, where we would take these UGC
24:37
from creative and we would splice them into sponsored display on Amazon and they
24:42
would outperform. Granted, we'd still have some spliced in A+ content into that
24:46
video and make it a little polished. But when you like hybridize it a bit more
24:50
with like a very data-driven approach on like these creators have a higher
24:55
2-second video view rate, or these have a higher hold rate, you're able to just
24:59
get some better arbitrage than that traditional glossy creative.
25:03
That's— I can just hear a load of the listeners going, hang on, what? It's just
25:10
like, You want me to do what? I guess it's, and this is interesting, isn't it? I
25:17
don't know if you listen to the Modern Wisdom podcast. And Chris was on there
25:23
talking with some guys about what does AI look like? I think it was in 6 years
25:30
or something. What does the future look like in 6 years?
25:37
Yeah.
25:37
And one of the comments from that podcast, which I thought was a really
25:43
interesting comment, Was, um, one of the guys said that he no longer thinks that
25:49
frontier AI models are where it's at. Now, when I say frontier AI models, if you
25:54
don't know what that means, that's where you're talking the likes of Anthropic,
26:00
ChatGPT, the guys who are creating these massive, um, AI models. They call them
26:06
frontier models. Um, because frontier models are already Really, really good.
26:12
And I, and, and the question is, how much better do we actually need them to be?
26:17
I don't know, probably not a whole lot better than what they are now for most of
26:23
the tasks that we do, right? And so the real advantage then is going to become
26:29
going forward is in effect creating the agents that, that connect what you're
26:35
doing with what the frontier models can do. Right. And which is what you're
26:40
doing here in the TikTok space, which I think is quite smart. You're connecting
26:46
AI to TikTok Shops specifically, using the Frontier models to help you. And I
26:52
guess this is where I think I agree with him in that I see a lot of AI in
26:57
ecommerce now becoming not just about, can I use AI? Can I get Claude to do what
27:03
I need it to do? Because I think most of us are getting there pretty quickly.
27:09
But at the same time, there's still a huge opportunity cost with AI. So there's
27:15
going to be this interesting sort of swing to getting AI experts. Like we've
27:20
hired 2 people recently with the sole purpose of doing AI, right? It's just—
27:26
Wow.
27:26
It's a really interesting shift in our AI In our hiring habits. And so I'm
27:31
curious where you, I mean, the complexity of it now, this is where I think you
27:36
need, and I say it's complex in your head, it'll be probably quite simple. You'd
27:40
always just do this, this, and this. But I think people listening are going,
27:45
there's so much you can do that we don't know what to do, which is where I think
27:50
this sort of people who are good at creating agents and keeping those agents up
27:54
to date are going to do. Wow. Um, in, in the future, what do you— I mean,
27:59
you've, you've obviously been doing this a while, but I'm, I'm kind of curious,
28:04
where do you see it? You're, you're creating this agent, you're creating these
28:08
agents for companies. Where is it going? Where do you, where do you see the next
28:13
6 to 12 months specifically for TikTok Shop? Um, that make— would make me think,
28:18
actually, if I don't do AI here, I'm, I'm probably going to get left behind,
28:22
maybe.
28:27
Yeah. Yeah. So it's a good question. Um, and I've thought on like where the
28:31
space is gonna go, 'cause like SF has already done it and I'm seeing ecommerce
28:35
catch up. Um, with, with ecommerce, people are still so behind. They're still
28:39
not even connecting their TikTok Shop tools into Claude as a connector, which I
28:43
feel like is a huge miss. Like that's literally what I'm seeing. A lot of the
28:47
friction when I onboard these brands and agencies, it's like, what, you haven't
28:51
connected it?
28:54
Yeah.
28:55
You haven't connected Claude to your software that does all your work. How do
28:59
you know what's going on in your software? And like, yeah, even agencies who I
29:03
talk to are still spending like 15 to 17 hours a week on manual reporting, which
29:07
is crazy. It's crazy.
29:11
Yeah.
29:11
Because you can just automate that. And I think that's where most of the space
29:15
is, like 80 to 90% of the space needs to figure out how to click settings, Go to
29:20
add connector and then add Claude to their tool. Like, 'cause they don't know
29:24
how to interact with the tool and pull data and build that muscle memory. And I
29:28
think hopefully in the next 6 to 12 months, every agency and brand is like doing
29:33
that and getting their hands into that. Because the great part, and this is what
29:37
I have all my brands and agencies do when they onboard, is that you don't need
29:42
to learn how to prompt anymore. Like prompt engineering and prompting is kind of
29:46
a thing of the past. Because you can just use what's called plan mode in Claude
29:50
Code. And so like a lot of people don't know that this exists, which is crazy
29:55
because it's just 2 clicks away inside their app. But it's a whole other
29:59
discussion on SaaS user experience, which I can also get into. But what you do
30:03
is you essentially click on Claude Code plan mode. And what we find is that
30:08
these marketers, copywriters, they're actually using Claude Code for daily tasks
30:12
that don't involve coding because the way that it thinks is just so more
30:16
sophisticated. So, for those who aren't familiar, what plan mode essentially is,
30:21
is it's like a built-in assistant that helps you clarify your thoughts. So, if I
30:25
type in like, hey, I need a report, they're going to be like, oh, here are the 5
30:29
brands connected to your account. Which brand do you want? And they're like,
30:34
okay, here are the main KPIs from your dashboard. Do you want all these or do
30:38
you want anything else? Okay, how do you want this report to output? Do you want
30:42
it to be in a spreadsheet? Do you want it to look in a presentation? Okay, how
30:47
often should this run? Weekly? Do you want it to run as a cron job, which means
30:51
run autonomously? Or do you want to have something sent to your Slack where you
30:55
review it before you send it out? Do you want to send this out to a client via
31:00
email or store it in your Google Drive? So to think about all the components of
31:04
that, put it into a prompt very specifically, definition of what good looks like
31:09
inserted into that. You know, the mental load to actually think of that prompt,
31:13
define it, actually prevents a ton of people from getting started with it in the
31:17
first place.
31:22
Yeah.
31:22
'Cause they're like, I don't have the time for this. I'm really tired today. You
31:26
know, and those are the thoughts coming through people. But if you just type
31:30
literally that one sentence, okay, I wanna create this report in Claude, it'll
31:34
do that legwork for you. And then it really just becomes a back and forth chat.
31:38
And then what I find is like really what the best people are doing is if they
31:42
realize they do this process 10 to 15 times a week, they turn it into a skill,
31:47
which is essentially a recipe or a set of instructions that allows Claude to do
31:51
this on demand where they'll take that whole report I just said and say, hey,
31:55
run my weekly report skill. And now I want it to run every Monday without me
31:59
asking you and then send it to me in Slack. And that's how you start to get more
32:03
leverage. And that's where I'd love to see the space head over the next 6 months
32:07
is just like really starting to become more efficient with their tasks.
32:11
Yeah. Yeah. And I guess identifying those tasks in itself is a skill, right?
32:17
Because I think a lot of people would, and not just with TikTok Shop, but just
32:22
sort of outside that, a lot of people will sit down in front of their machine,
32:27
Claude's on it and go, right, I know Claude can do some good stuff. What do I
32:32
want it to help me with? Do you know what I mean? It's that kind of—
32:38
It's so weird. And I don't really understand why most people don't do this.
32:42
Maybe I had a really good training and really good mentors in my life, but the
32:46
best operators are hyper-conscious of their time. They're doing time studies.
32:50
They're really putting a dollar amount on their time. And I did this before I
32:55
was even a founder. I was like, hey, my time is worth, you know, let's say it's
32:59
worth like $2,000 an hour, being like very, you know, generous. I'm like, is
33:03
this a $100 an hour task or a $500 an hour task or a $2,000 an hour task? Who do
33:07
I hire and what things can I do to reduce the amount of $100 an hour tasks that
33:12
I have on my plate?
33:16
Yeah.
33:16
And like, really, I'm surprised by the number of director-level people who
33:21
aren't looking at all the work that's being done across the organization that is
33:25
tracked in these project management tools and be like, hey, this can be
33:29
automated. This is a $100 an hour task. This is a $500 an hour task. I'm doing
33:33
too many of these $500 an hour tasks. I should be doing $1,000 an hour tasks.
33:38
And even just like taking all the tasks and dumping into Claude and being like,
33:42
hey, what's a $100 an hour task versus $500 an hour task? Go and pull off
33:46
Upwork, all the rates of people who could do this and actually organize all my
33:51
work and tell me, what I should be spending more time on versus what I shouldn't
33:55
be spending time on. I'm a founder of a 20-person company and like we're trying
33:59
to hit this revenue goal right now. We're here. Like you could just type that in
34:03
there and then you should always be analyzing every single task you're doing and
34:08
figuring out what are the next 3 most important things to get done in the next 2
34:12
days. Like if you're not, then you're just operating inefficiently and you're
34:16
just doing a job. You know, you're not really like growing a business. You know,
34:21
that's my— philosophy. And like, the first thing that my marketing agency that I
34:25
onboarded had me do when I was an intern is they had me write SOPs. That was the
34:29
first thing they do. And typically, like, writing SOPs is not a part of like a
34:33
junior level person's like training process. I haven't like been in an
34:38
organization where like anyone is really taught how to write SOPs correctly. I
34:42
think people just like to say they write SOPs and everyone builds processes, but
34:46
like No, no one's really training people how to do that and making people
34:51
conscious of that. And like my first boss out of college was director of
34:55
operations. He was so specific. He was like, every single task needs to have a
34:59
verb noun description. If task descriptions are like the name of that task is a
35:03
verb noun where it's like fill out report. And he's like, if it's longer than
35:08
that, like going back to the drawing board and reading the title. And then he's
35:12
like, If the sentence description is longer than 2 to 3 sentences, you should
35:16
have another doc that links out to the full thing where it's like insert doc
35:21
template and fill this out. It's so specific about what good looks like and what
35:25
these SOPs look like where that was the first thing I've ever done in my career.
35:29
And ever since then, I'm always thinking about how tasks can be broken down into
35:33
SOPs and their core fundamental roots. And I think that has served me well with
35:38
AI.
35:42
Yeah.
35:43
Because you just look at processes that people are doing. You look across call
35:47
recordings, interviews, and transcripts, and you're looking at it, and I'm like,
35:51
what's the noun verb here? What's the definition of good? And how do we just
35:56
take this context and insert it into a machine that's way more intelligent than
36:00
I am and then start breaking that down? And that's how you figure it out. But
36:04
people just aren't doing that. Why do you think people aren't doing that, Matt?
36:08
It's like you, because you've had multiple businesses. podcast brand owner?
36:13
I think I'm probably a little bit more nuanced in my thinking. If you're an
36:18
uncle, I'm a great-granddad, I think. Great-great-great-granddad, maybe. So I
36:24
think life is nuanced and I think it all depends on who you are. I think if you
36:29
are younger and grow up with a screen attached to your thumbs, you think very
36:35
differently to someone who is maybe my generation, Gen X, who grew up on BMX
36:40
bikes in fields. Do you know what I mean? And it, it, I think there are people
36:46
who can think very mathematically, very process orientated. And I think there
36:51
are people which just don't, and they think very creatively, very differently.
36:57
Um, but I think— For me, in some respects, that's irrelevant. How old you are,
37:02
how you think, what stage of life you're at, whether the kids are screaming
37:08
around your legs at the moment, whether the cat's been sick in your slippers or
37:13
whatever's going on. Right. I think fundamentally it's not knowing where to
37:18
start. People just don't know where to start. And I say this to our team all the
37:24
time. If you don't know, just go to Claude and say, I don't know where to start,
37:29
but this is what's in my head. Where do we begin? And you can do this in plan
37:35
mode, can't you? And I think, um, I think we, one of the things that we're all
37:40
slowly starting to realize is actually, if you don't know where to begin, AI is
37:46
really good at helping you figure out where to begin if you just ask it. You
37:51
don't need to go with a polished answer.
37:57
Yeah.
37:58
And I think it's, I think we've approached AI, I suppose, a little bit like we
38:02
approach employee. I mean, you mentioned, you know, sort of approaching our
38:07
employees that, um, if I've employed you, the, the, the understanding there is I
38:12
know what you're supposed to do because I've employed you to do it. Therefore, I
38:16
have to tell you. Um, whereas I think we can go to AI now and go, I know you're
38:21
supposed to do something. I just don't know what it is. Let's figure it out
38:26
because I haven't got a clue. I don't know the answer. Um, and so I, I think
38:30
it's taken people a little while to get their head around. I don't need to have
38:35
all the answers. I don't need to know the end from the beginning. What I do need
38:40
to do, what I do need to know is I need to understand the framework or the
38:44
process. So let's start with that and I can use AI to help me figure that out.
38:49
But don't you think, let's say putting AI aside on a first principles basis,
38:53
when someone moves from higher education into jobs, things get more ambiguous?
38:58
You're not following business out of a textbook. You're not using a 4 Ps
39:02
framework to bring a product to market. And it's just like things get very
39:06
ambiguous and getting started and taking action kind of is the thing that I've
39:11
seen at least. people who are very biased towards action, who are just like,
39:15
even if I don't know what to do, I'm just going to do it. Do you find that
39:20
there's a generational difference in the characters of people who do that versus
39:24
not do that? Because for me—
39:28
I don't know if it's generational. I think it's very personality-driven. I'm
39:32
very much— I think there's 2 types of people, right? There's the guy that will
39:36
get in the car and go, right, we need to get across to the other side of the
39:39
city. Let's go and figure it out. Right.
39:43
Yeah.
39:43
As we go. And then there's a person who'll get in the car and want to know
39:47
exactly where they're going. They'll want to map it out. They'll want to
39:52
understand where the roadworks are and all that sort of stuff. I'm very much the
39:56
former, and I think it's very entrepreneurial. It's like, well, let's just do
40:00
something. Let's just go. And there are people that want to figure everything
40:04
out before they do start. I don't think either is better than the other. I just
40:08
think it's a people thing. And I think it's, yeah, I just think it's personality
40:13
in many ways and what you've been brought up to.
40:17
And it's interesting that you say that because like, you know, when it comes to
40:21
like learning AI, I find that if you give too much documentation, SOPs, and
40:26
guidance to people, that paired with the fear of feeling stupid about using
40:31
complex technology prevents people from getting started. Like it's almost
40:35
paradoxical where it's like, If I give you too much clarity, I increase the
40:40
mental real estate that I'm taking in your head to get this started versus
40:44
finding that sweet spot where it's like, hey, just type in this one sentence
40:49
into plan mode. Just spend 30 minutes typing back and forth with it. That lack
40:53
of clarity often leads people to become more successful with AI. And I think—
40:58
Yeah, it does.
40:58
That has been interesting for me to discover because I've gone through the
41:02
process of education with brands versus agencies is a completely different
41:05
learning curve. Brands are often like, hey, I just— they get to a point where
41:09
they're like, if I give them the same instructions as an agency, they're like,
41:12
can you just do it for me? That's what I always get with brands and agencies.
41:16
They're like, what do you think about this? I created 3 skills, I'm running cron
41:19
jobs, I built a software, what do you think? How do we automate this? How do we
41:23
do—
41:26
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
41:27
They're really thirsty and hungry to do this. I see such a discrepancy there.
41:30
Like, you know, from your time, you know, you're a brand owner and you're also
41:34
like, you know, B2B podcast business owner. Like, do you see any discrepancies
41:38
between these like psychological patterns between like brands using AI versus
41:41
like marketing agencies using AI?
41:45
Yes, very much so. Because, you know, having done agency for a little while,
41:50
agency is all about the process. It's all about the framework. Here's my
41:55
framework. Let me help you figure out how to get your business through that
41:59
framework to help it grow. You understand those types of things. I think if
42:04
you're just a sole brand, I don't know of many brand owners that have sat down
42:09
and gone, what's my framework for this? A lot of it is gut intuition, right? Or
42:14
circumstantial or providence or whatever the language is that people want to
42:19
use. But there's It's very much a— if I sit down with a lot of brand owners and
42:24
I'll go, what is your framework, you know, for taking a product to market? You
42:28
go, well, they'll go, I don't know. I just, I went down the supermarket and I
42:33
saw it. I thought it was really cool. I want to put it on the website. And it
42:38
tends to be a bit more like that where agency can't be like that. It has to
42:43
justify its fee. And so agency has to have a process, which is its IP.
42:48
Yeah.
42:49
Just by definition, I would've thought.
42:50
So you're basically saying the nature of the business requires you to think
42:54
about process versus with brand, there's more flexibility and you don't have to
42:57
think about process as much to get started.
43:01
Yeah, because a lot of brands are lifestyle brands, aren't they? And I think
43:05
people do them as passion projects. And I think people, they love, I don't know,
43:09
mountaineering. And so they go, right, well, let's just set up a website selling
43:14
mountaineering equipment. Because it's what their passion is. And they, you
43:18
know, I come across, um, I'm converting my van at the moment, so you come across
43:22
a lot of these van conversion videos online. And it's amazing how many of them
43:26
are, uh, you know, they, they do these videos and they have an online business
43:30
selling the stuff that they're talking about in the videos, but their passion is
43:35
the van. And I, I mean, I don't know, I, I could be wrong and I don't want to
43:39
prejudge, but part of me would be I reckon if I went to that guy and said,
43:43
right, what's your ecommerce framework for growing your business? They're going
43:47
to look at me and go, I don't know. I just like making content. We seem to get
43:51
more people coming along and it, and I get to drive my van out into the country
43:55
every week and people buy my stuff. And as long as we get good stuff in and I do
44:00
great reviews, I appreciate that. That is in some respect a bit of a framework,
44:04
but I don't think they would have thought about it. And I don't think they would
44:08
have labeled it. That's just what they do.
44:12
I do think on TikTok Shops specifically, content volume and just getting after
44:17
it is huge for success because the thing is with the algorithm, and you hinted
44:22
at it really clearly, is that the algorithms are getting very, very good for ads
44:27
and for social media at just matching niche interests in moments where specific
44:32
people are online. So therefore, the idea, and we saw this, I chatted with
44:37
someone from TikTok and he was saying China, Turns on its feed with like about
44:42
some ridiculous number, like 60% shoppable content. Like 60% every TikTok video
44:47
you see is a shoppable piece of video. And the like in America, like there is a
44:52
huge like scarcity, like in terms of amount of content you can get. Like there
44:57
isn't enough content to fuel an algorithm for where people want to turn it up
45:02
more in America because they're in order to China, right? Um, people just don't
45:07
have enough content for enough niche interests that exist. So like the thing
45:12
that I index on right now is like, hey guys, like don't get upset that your
45:17
first video doesn't blow up on TikTok Shop because it's not. But if you're like
45:22
the top affiliates are posting 15 to 21 times a week per brand.
45:27
That's incredible.
45:28
Because they understand, they understand that you have to meet that viewer at
45:32
the right time with the right sales angle. Like, I look at TikTok Shop as like a
45:37
little micro sales army. Like, you're onboarding a sales team and you're getting
45:41
them to just tweak and test their script over and over and over again across as
45:45
many videos as possible. And the algorithm will meet that viewer at the right
45:49
interest, you know, because like, you've seen it even on Instagram, you know, if
45:53
you scroll for like clothes, you're being served clothing ads constantly. And
45:58
like eventually you will give in. And on TikTok, same thing. If you're just, you
46:02
know, yeah, varying that creative, people might not even understand why they're
46:06
buying. Maybe it's a tweak in the lighting, maybe it's a tweak in the hook,
46:10
maybe they like, you know, spill some ice cream on their pants coincidentally
46:14
that Friday, it stains, and like they've been served 5 ads prior that week by
46:19
someone else and they happen to convert. Like you have to reduce the variance as
46:23
well and let the algorithm carry your interest forward. Like, that's one of the
46:27
principles, you know, that I believe. And I think where people really mess up is
46:31
they don't chat and let their creators know that and encourage that sort of
46:35
positive behavior to get to success. They send a sample out, they do the video,
46:40
and they're not doing anything after the fact with that context in mind.
46:44
Which is interesting, isn't it? Because I, I mean, the general rule of setting
46:48
up any successful media, whether it's a podcast or TikTok or Instagram or
46:53
whatever it is, is consistency, is just putting out a shedload of content there.
46:57
So the same rule in theory would apply to creators who are creating content for
47:01
your product. You can't just do one video and expect that's going to change your
47:05
life. You've got to have this consistency of investment, I would have thought.
47:10
Well, it's— I think the mindset is like a lot of these people who come on to
47:14
TikTok Shop are performance marketing oriented, Amazon oriented, where it's like
47:18
consistency looks like testing different creatives. And then you have an ad
47:22
mechanism doing all the follow-through. Then you go and basically look at your
47:26
results, you look at your creative process, you find a new variation, you test
47:31
it, and the ad mechanism does all the follow-through. On TikTok Shop, the
47:35
follow-through looks like a human going and talking to creators, educating them,
47:39
getting them into a community, and sitting down with them and breaking it down
47:43
and sharing the data. Like, it's a different kind of psychological concept to
47:47
sit down. Like, imagine if you like, sat down with your PPC algorithm for Meta
47:51
and you were just like, hey, you did a great job spending on this, but I would
47:56
spend on this differently. And you sat down for an hour talking to your PPC
48:00
algorithm. That'd be crazy. People just psychologically don't do that. But
48:04
that's what you have to do with creators.
48:08
Yeah.
48:09
Sit down with them like they're a little salesperson, mini algorithm there. Go
48:13
in-depth on every frame of the piece of content. You have to be hyper-obsessed.
48:16
And That's what I see with the best founders is like they're sitting down with
48:20
their top affiliates like they're employees in the company because they are.
48:23
Yeah.
48:25
Like if you onboarded a sales team, when I onboarded my sales team in SaaS, the
48:29
first 14 days I have 2 calls with them a day. We're going over scripts. They're
48:33
shadowing me on calls when I'm doing sales calls, partnership calls and stuff
48:38
during the day. And at the end of the day, we drill scripts. And like in the
48:42
first 14 days, I'm making sure they really, really understand our product, our
48:46
process, our brand, what really makes certain people sell. Give them room to ask
48:51
questions. Show them what good looks like. I have them bathe on like 20
48:55
different sales call recordings and make notes. Like, the amount of hands-on
48:59
work that I do with the sales team there is crazy. I haven't seen any marketers
49:04
on the TikTok Shop side do that.
49:08
Mm-hmm.
49:08
But the best community managers on the TikTok Shop side are doing that. Like, we
49:13
interviewed, um, Javy Coffee on a podcast about, I think, a month ago, and they
49:17
had a TikTok Shop 3x their growth from $300K a month to $1 million a month on
49:22
TikTok Shop. They have 15 community managers in their community responsible for
49:27
a book of business, like a CSM, and they're making sure that all of those
49:31
affiliates have a positive experience. They're increasing their GMV, and they're
49:36
rewarded based off of how much their GMV increases from that book of business.
49:40
Yeah.
49:41
And I think that really incentivizes a positive feedback loop to take care of
49:44
your affiliates. And even in the first 30 days, they're actually making sure
49:48
that affiliate posts 30 times.
49:51
Oh, wow.
49:52
Once every day in the first 30 days. But if you look at it from a quantitative
49:56
perspective and consistency perspective, if you post 30 days with a group of
50:00
community managers that have nurtured a million-dollar-a-month brand, chances
50:03
are you'll make at least one sale. And chances are people who make a sale versus
50:07
don't make a sale, are willing to stick with a program and continue with that
50:11
momentum going forward. So, that's what the top brands are really doing to make
50:15
sure TikTok Shop is successful.
50:19
Yeah. Wow. That's level 2.
50:23
It's level 2. I call it level 1 because if you don't, you're just sending off
50:28
samples into the abyss complaining that it's not profitable and you're
50:32
sunsetting. It's like a couple hundred thousand dollars waste of time. It's not
50:37
even a fair shot at TikTok Shop if you aren't doing that.
50:42
Yeah.
50:43
Level 3, one of my friends, he's a top 100 affiliate in TikTok Shop. This will
50:48
blow your mind. He has an account just for A/B testing lighting on window fans.
50:52
He's one of the top window fan affiliates on TikTok Shop. He prints $1 million a
50:57
year in commissions. He's crazy. And he has one account where he posts multiple
51:01
times a day. window fan with a different gradient of lighting. And me and him
51:06
were really hitting it off in SF because I'm just like, I got made fun of
51:11
because I was like, oh, you need to A/B test lighting. And then Marcus would be
51:15
like, A/B test lighting? You're an idiot. We A/B test copy. And I was like, nah,
51:20
we need to A/B test lighting because on TikTok Shop, the lighting matters so
51:24
much. And this guy was A/B testing 3 different kinds of lighting every single
51:29
day. Wow. Hundreds of videos posted just to find the right lighting angle that
51:34
he could post on his main account to get that to sell really well. And then, he
51:38
scrapes and indexes the top 100 videos from the top affiliates every single
51:43
month, organizes that into a testing pipeline with Claude Code, and then pairs
51:47
that with the logic from his lighting testing. And I'm like, this is what it
51:52
takes to be a top 1% affiliate. And I knew there was— that is definitely level
51:56
3. It's level 3, but I'm just like, you know, now that it's on this transcript,
52:01
someone can take this transcript and go test it out on their account. Yeah,
52:06
there's nothing stopping someone from doing that.
52:10
Yeah, and that's interesting. And I totally agree. I think like my son, he, um,
52:15
he has got a really large Instagram account and he— that's where he makes his
52:20
money is, is, is on Instagram. He is a nutritionist. He does a lot of stuff for
52:24
nutrition. And he does so much testing, it's quite remarkable. Just the angle of
52:29
the camera, the distance between him and the camera, and everything is tested
52:34
and everything has got an exact thought behind it. To the point where he figured
52:38
out that if he had a tea towel, just like a cloth on his shoulder, when he was
52:43
shooting the video, the engagement went up.
52:48
Wow.
52:48
And it's just all these little things. All these little micro adjustments, which
52:52
took his account from being a great account to being a pretty big account. And
52:57
you kind of go, that is dedication. That is stuff that I would never have
53:01
thought about. I'm really good at split testing headlines. Because that's e-com.
53:05
And it's just the same principle, isn't it? It's like, well, let's split test,
53:10
you know, if I stand like this, or if I, if I have this on my shoulder or not
53:14
have this on my shoulder. And I think you have to do that with video content.
53:19
Agreed. Fully agreed. And when you use AI, it's you're like, hey, out of this
53:22
100 angles, which one performed well and why? And then it can start suggesting
53:26
your next 5 angles. That's where you plug AI in because we have to make it
53:30
AI-oriented, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
53:34
Absolutely. Listen, but I'm aware of time and I'm thoroughly engrossed in the
53:37
conversation as I normally am. If people want to reach out to you, if they want
53:41
to connect with you, find out more about what you do, what's the best way to do
53:44
that?
53:48
Yeah, just type in Sohun Sanka on LinkedIn. My name's Sohun. There's not that
53:52
many Sohuns in ecommerce, so I'm sure you'll be able to find me if you type that
53:57
in. And then clankersapp.com is my website, but I'm very responsive on LinkedIn.
54:01
I use it more than Instagram, so you can find me there.
54:05
Fantastic. We will, of course, link to the LinkedIn profile. I'm just trying to
54:10
say this in my head. We will link to the LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And
54:14
the description, which you can just scroll down on your app and click and just
54:18
click that link. It will take you straight to the LinkedIn profile. But listen,
54:22
bud, I genuinely love the conversation. Thoroughly, thoroughly fascinating. It's
54:26
always good to talk with fellow AI eggheads. I don't get to do it much. And so
54:31
it's always nice hearing what other people have to say. Before I go, 2
54:35
questions. Number one, what's your question for me? This is where I take The
54:39
question, I'll just go out and answer it on social media. But what's your
54:43
question for me? It can be about anything, by the way. I should have prepped
54:48
you. The question can literally be about anything. I've had people ask me about,
54:52
um, whether I think aliens exist, what's my favorite book, to anything to do
54:56
with ecommerce. I don't care. Uh, what's your question for me?
55:00
I would say if you could ask your audience what is the thing that scares them
55:04
most about getting started with AI, I'm very curious to see what they say to
55:08
that.
55:12
Okay. I will, I'm actually going to go and ask a bunch of them. Uh, if you want
55:17
to know what the answer is, come follow me on social media. Um, last question.
55:22
Uh, so much value given today, bud, but, um, I always like to do this saving the
55:27
best till last thing. What's your top piece of advice for someone who just wants
55:32
to get started in TikTok Shop using AI right now? Where do they begin?
55:38
Connect your Claude connector or your ChatGPT connector into your TikTok Shop
55:43
outreach tool. This is the repository of every single affiliate activation
55:48
motion you're doing on TikTok Shop, and just connecting it allows it to learn
55:53
everything you're doing. These tools have like 110 MCP tools that go and tell
55:57
you how to read, write, ingest the data. You, you You basically get an expert on
56:02
all these tools by just making one connection. And what I really like to do is
56:07
just ask it to pull out everything I'm doing and put it on a nice FigJam board
56:11
so I can see all my message copy logic oriented in a nice funnel. Ask Claude to
56:16
add notes about like, hey, what should I be turning on that I shouldn't? Because
56:21
it'll go and enrich itself and its learning of these tools with the help center
56:25
documentation. And everything into there. So that could probably save you like a
56:30
couple thousand in consulting fees, actually.
56:35
Yeah.
56:36
That's one of the things that I would do if you're coming to me and saying, hey,
56:40
audit my TikTok Shop, is I'd pull everything out, I'd put it onto a nice,
56:43
easy-to-view interface, and I'd show you exactly where your leaks are. But AI
56:47
can help you at least get started with that. You're going to need some TikTok
56:51
shop domain expertise to understand what it's saying and correct it. But it's a
56:55
great place to be like, well, what's going on? What are the things I should do?
56:58
How should I get started? And it can help you answer those questions.
57:02
Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on, man. Genuinely
57:06
really appreciate it.
57:09
Appreciate you having me on. It was a pleasure.
57:12
Now, we got there in the end. We had a few technical issues at the start, but we
57:16
got there in the end. It was definitely worth it. Thank you so much for joining
57:20
us this week. Uh, it's been a great show. Make sure you like, subscribe, and do
57:24
all of that good stuff like you do with your podcasts. Um, because we have lots
57:28
of conversations like this with some awesome people just like today. So make
57:32
sure you do that. But that's it from me this week. Thank you so much for joining
57:36
us, uh, wherever you are in the world. I will see you next time.
57:40
Bye for now.