Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Everything a Small Biz Owner needs to know about Shopify, Automations & Optimisation! With Pearler’s Founder Katie Zana (Part 1)

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Everything a Small Biz Owner needs to know about Shopify, Automations & Optimisation! With Pearler’s Founder Katie Zana (Part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Katie Zana for Female Startup Club.
• 0:12
  Hello, welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today is a super exciting day because you're going to be meeting Katie Zahna, the founder of Perla. And you're going to be hearing a lot more from her on the reg because this is actually the first of an ongoing series with Katie.
• 0:34
  Now, the really exciting thing about this is that Katie is leading the charge on a very new, very shiny and probably very pink website that is coming soon.
• 0:46
  We are getting a little glow up because it's time. We're also getting some tech updates because it's definitely time and you're going to be seeing some new stuff starting to happen in our little sparkly female startup club world. Oh my God. I'm so excited. I feel like I've been waiting for this time for a long time. So.
• 1:11
  Katie is going to be joining us for all things DIY, Shopify, automations, tech stacks, optimization, all the sexy stuff that is super relevant for business owners and especially small business owners. So all the Shopify kind of stuff that I don't know about you, but I struggle with. Maybe you struggle with it too. And anything geared to the D2C space website arena.
• 1:41
  Now, if you've got any specific questions or topics that you want us to definitely dive into, you can drop into the Facebook group and leave them there or slip into our DMs and let us know what you want to hear more about for the next episodes. And make sure you check out Katie on Instagram. I've linked it in the show notes before.
• 2:01
  She is an absolute vibe. I can't tell you how much of an absolute vibe I really mean. Like you just need to see it. So drop into her Instagram, have a little look around, say hello. She's the best. And let us know what you think of this new series. Let's get into it. This is Katie for Female Startup Club. Katie, hello. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Hi.
• 2:30
  Thank you so much. I'm pumped. I am so pumped. Second time around, couple of tech issues. Hopefully we've gotten there. I hope so. I hope so. Oh, well, no, we'll get through it. We'll get through it. I want to start by giving our listeners a little bit of context because this isn't our usual kind of session or episode that we do. And I kind of also want to set the scene for what's like going on between us and like our vibe. Yeah.
• 2:59
  So I've been following Katie for, I feel like, a long time on Instagram. I don't know how I discovered you. I don't know how we came across each other, but you were in my orbit. And we've spoken, I think, maybe over the years, like a little bit here and there or something. But recently, like a couple months ago, I was on holidays and I was like, wow.
• 3:19
  scrolling and I came across like something that you had done, like a new project that was like really fucking sick. And I was like, oh, I just like need to tell her how obsessed I am with her stuff because she's epic. And I had already been going through, well, I guess to paint the picture,
• 3:37
  You're a Shopify brand website vibey designer and you've just got the aesthetic of like my brain. Dopamine hit, OTT, maximalist, etc. And yeah, I don't know. We started chatting and I was like going through this time where I knew we needed to migrate our website over to a new platform. I wanted to switch to Shopify so I could have more capability in selling products and yeah,
• 4:06
  voila, here we are. And now you're going to be helping me on the Shopify side of things and we're going to be doing a bunch of epic Shopify-related, design-related stuff relevant for early stage founders who are in that DIY stage and just needing a little bit of support. I think it was fated because over the years when people would say,
• 4:34
  Katie, can you do a custom website for me? So many people would reference your website. So obviously there's just alignment there. And I was like, I don't blame you. It's a really cool website. So to be entrusted with that refresh, not that it needs gutting or anything because it's amazing, but I think it was stated. Yeah.
• 4:59
  I just love that for us. When you told me that, I was like, oh my God, that is so cool. I think for me, like the tech stack is like a big part of the problem and like kind of evolving how everything works. And we're going to get into that like automation piece and website optimization and like the functionality behind a website.
• 5:16
  But I never really had like a purpose for the website. And we just like started by like putting something up on Wix and kind of like jankily creating weird pages here and there. But now that I've found, you know, we're kind of moving into this next phase of selling products and selling merch and...
• 5:35
  I guess also like we've realized that we have a lot of just organic epic SEO and people just organically discovering us. So wanting to kind of capitalize on that traffic. So it's time for a change. I'm very excited. I'm excited to learn from you and be kind of the hype girl of what you're doing. And...
• 5:55
  Yeah, I feel like we should start by kind of giving everyone a little bit of a background specifically into like who you are, what you do and how you kind of became this DIY Shopify branding expert. Yeah, look, it's been about a decade now and most of that has been, has involved Shopify branding.
• 6:19
  I suppose, from my early e-commerce days working for fashion labels. One day their site got hacked and they were like, you need a new website. And so it's like, how hard can it be? I threw up my hand and I gave it a crack and I made a website. So it just so happened that was the perfect ticket out from a particularly toxic work environment. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to keep trying to,
• 6:45
  I don't know, help other fashion labels with their e-commerce. And I sort of fell into just becoming a web designer, which eventually led to
• 6:56
  template and just empowering solo printers and startups to, to DIY cause it can get real expensive real fast and people want to look amazing like the big guys. So that's sort of what I'm trying to do here. What you're good at, what you're really good at. I also think like for me,
• 7:19
  You have quite a unique skill set in that you're super creative and you're super like able to get the vision, understand the vision, pull it together. But then on the flip side, you're also quite technical and you're able to understand how it needs to work and the functionality piece. And I feel like for someone like me, I'm super creative, but you try and get me to, you know, dig around in Shopify and I'm like, well, hell no, this sucks. Yeah.
• 7:46
  Whereas you're able to kind of do both. And I think that's such a unique talent to have. I think it purely comes with time and out of necessity because sometimes when I find myself
• 7:59
  coding or figuring out tricky tech stats or all that kind of stuff. I think, how did I get here? Because this isn't what I'm naturally good at. It's purely something that's just come with time and being in so many different situations with so many different types of businesses where they're like, please help me figure this out. And I'm like, oh, okay. But the creativity is what comes first. And that's the part that I aligned with so many people in your position on of just being like,
• 8:29
  That's where we are the same. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you said something just a minute ago that was really interesting, like, I
• 8:37
  you know, everyone kind of wants to look really polished and fancy, but like there's not the budget to do that. And kind of something that I've noticed, and we've spoken about this before, is like I like want my website to look cool, but I actually don't want any fancy bells and whistles. I don't want any custom kind of things that could slow down my website or make it hard for people to just understand like where to go next. And I want to kind of start with that in mind and jump into like,
• 9:06
  What are the common mistakes that you've seen from small business owners who are in this phase of like trying to get their website up and running and fancy and like looking schmick, but like what else? What are the other kind of mistakes and kind of things that you're like, I see this time and time again? I think it's figuring out what platform is right for you and what is the most DIY friendly in terms of
• 9:34
  You may be able to afford lots of help now at the beginning when you've saved up all your money and you're like, cool, I'm ready to do this and do it proper. But, you know, there are ebbs and flows in small business, as we know, and you really do want to know how to use your own website and get in there and make changes if you need to. So really just pay attention to like, is this user experience actually good for this website platform or this app? Or is it kind of already driving me crazy from the get go?
• 10:04
  So those things really make a difference. For example, if you are in the early stages of building an e-com business and you're obviously like starting the process of Shopify, what's the typical tech stack? What's the easiest DIY let's get started pack, I guess, in your opinion?
• 10:27
  Well, the reason I just go with Shopify always and just really stuck to it is there's a good reason that it's like basically the most popular. There's so many things that plug into it. And if I'm allowed to swear, it's essentially sort of unfuckable because. I love that. It's unfuckable. And that's why like as a solopreneur myself, I don't know, I feel weird about that word. But anyways, I'm just going to roll with it. But.
• 10:56
  I am handing over a website for someone. I want them to be able to look after it themselves because it's not in either of our best interests to always have this back and forth of, you know, how do I do this? How do I do this? Most things plug into Shopify and if they don't, then there's apps like Zapier to do the connective work. I just would never go down the path of getting something custom made to fit
• 11:25
  an app to an app in this day and age. There is just no need. So that's a big one for me.
• 11:32
  So besides like Shopify as the like basic level, like that's going to be hosting, you know, your products, that's going to be your payment process or not your payment process. Yeah, it is. It does process the payments. Yeah. Connects in with Stripe and everything. But like that's the core. I don't know what the terms are here, but like the hub. What else are you seeing as like the kind of core tech stack that's needed just at the very beginning? Like obviously there's email marketing. Obviously there's probably some plugins, some other stuff. I don't know. What are you thinking?
• 12:02
  It's email marketing for sure. And there's so many different variables there. I tend to invite people to keep it pretty simple, like check off the 101 stuff when it comes to just, you know, getting out a newsletter and setting up your basic automations. And even still, that stuff can still be done inside your e-commerce platform and those transactional emails. They're your highest like open rate ones and should really be looked at carefully in terms of
• 12:32
  what's going in them. So that's a big one. But with e-com, there's so many variables in terms of just what's managing your inventory and stuff. But again, these platforms are just getting so robust now because they don't really want you to go elsewhere. They sort of want,
• 12:50
  be able to handle everything for you, which is pretty great. Even Preach on Demand, you can sort of do within that one area as well. So this is the beauty of it. It really is just plug and play. So the less we have to sort of get external apps involved, kind of the better and the more streamlined it is. Yeah. And I feel like
• 13:12
  you know, for me, that's been like such a big part of the problem is that over the years, I've kind of like jankily stitched things together and like tried to make it work. And I kind of know it's broken and things kind of like aren't really functioning as they should be. And that's part of this like, you know, journey to migrate over to Shopify and like streamline the experience, like make sure everything's
• 13:32
  buttoned up and just like easier for me to manage. My tech stack is so long because I have everything for one different core functionality. And I'm like, oh, I'm so over this. I was at a Shopify event the other night. Well, not the other night. It was actually a couple of weeks ago, but I was at a Shopify plus event and they were showing us kind of like the functionality for the
• 13:51
  your wholesale platform within Shopify Plus. And I was like, this is so cool. Like if you're not at the stage where you have a distributor or maybe you do whatever, but it's all still handled in this one system and like your revenue is handled in there, it's a checkout process. Again, like you can offer...
• 14:09
  deals the same way that you offer to your retail customers and you're bundling this and it's a end of financial year, that discount, blah, blah, blah. You can do the same for your wholesale accounts. And I was like, this is really cool. Like it just makes it so easy that you can do it all in the one place. It's about time because yeah, certainly working in fashion all those years ago, that used to be a massive cost to think about as well.
• 14:38
  So yeah, again, it's just like all coming underneath the one roof. So it's hard to argue with that, you know, that ease. And that's just what every little business needs is just to keep it way more simple. Yeah, totally. Totally.
• 14:57
  What I'm wondering and like where I kind of want to start with this is like, let's say you're in that early stage, maybe a pre-launch or maybe you've just sort of launched, but like what should you be spending on your website to get started? And like, should you be investing in design or should you be investing in a freelancer or should you be investing in a theme or a kit or something to get started? Or should you be doing it yourself? What's the kind of like investment that you kind of recommend?
• 15:26
  before you've found product market fit and before you've figured out whether you're going to actually keep going with this business or not? Again, this sort of comes back to like your skillset. You know, if you're really type A organized person, you're going to find certain things way easier than someone like I would where I'm like, you know what, the branding, all that kind of stuff, the aesthetic side of things, I got that on lock. But if you are unsure about your tech stack, for example...
• 15:56
  or which apps you need to do which function. Because sometimes it's like, oh, I know that I need this feature on the site for my particular type of business. Maybe bundling is really important. You get in the curse of something, of choosing apps. Honestly, any platform is choosing the right one. Sometimes they're astronomically expensive. Sometimes it might be worth just asking a developer how much it is to get the function made on your website without having to pay for an app.
• 16:25
  So if those are your blind spots and maybe you've done a bit of research and you're just like, I am still so confused about this part, then I would outsource. I would try to outsource with a freelancer instead of an agency just to not have those sort of big overhead costs applied to you. And particularly when you're starting out, you're the little guy, you know, in that kind of big company environment.
• 16:54
  you can get a little bit thrown. You're just not the priority, essentially. So I do recommend working with freelancers. A recommendation is ideal. So get in the great communities like Female Startup Club and ask around. Well, I mean, the recommendation is absolutely you. You do, you know, one-to-one, like I think you have calls, right? Like someone can just book a call with you, spend a couple hundred dollars,
• 17:21
  getting some of your wisdom and brain power and, you know, they're paying for your time, but it's not the cost of starting a retainer with an agency, which is thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars up front. And kind of like going through everything with you to understand where they should be kind of like focusing and kind of not focusing at that beginning point. I think for me, like what I've seen over the years, and I've definitely made this mistake with like another brand that I'd started a couple of years ago is like,
• 17:52
  What you were saying, you know, in the beginning, you have a budget, you've saved up, you're launching your brand or you've received like some angel investment or you've taken a loan, whatever. So you're like, oh, hell yeah, I've got 50 grand to spend. Like, let's do a really cool website. But it's like you need that capital for like marketing and inventory. So.
• 18:09
  keeping your pennies like really pinched so that you can spend on the stuff that you're actually going to need a lot of working capital for really, really soon, especially if it takes off is so important. And like for me, when I started, it was like a non-alc brand and we kind of documented it on the show, but we went down the pathway like of R&D, formulating, sampling. We developed a
• 18:34
  all the things and in the end we were like oh yeah it's actually just not financially viable and like we're going to pull the pin because you know the way that non-alc works we needed to like harvest the grapes and you know it's once a year and you've got to put the order in and it was like i think we would spent like 20 grand and 10 of that was just on the branding and that was us and the next part was like okay now we need to invest in the the actual the grapes and we were like it's not there we're going to pull the pin and like get rid of it but
• 19:03
  But I had just so jumped the gun being like, I need this perfect website and I just want it like all schmick. And then, you know, that website's never seen the light of day. That brand has never seen the light of day, even though it was so awesome. And I've heard this mistake like so many times, like time and time again, you really need to be able to just start scrappy and be like, what can I do myself? And how can I do this with a freelancer or someone who can kind of give me
• 19:32
  things on your website that also can just be really useful for someone who is looking for that kind of stuff. That's the thing, hey, is a brand designer is probably going to tell you that like it's the best money that you'll spend is on your branding. And like a web designer can be like, no, you've got to invest in the website. But then the reality is, is if you have nothing left for marketing or keeping your
• 20:00
  yourself paid or whatever it looks like to you, wherever that money needs to float. You can have the most amazing website and then just run out of steam when it's time to launch. And that is so sad and heartbreaking, which is why, yeah, I do push people to, I have like a DIY branding sort of resource file, that kind of thing, because often people will come to me, whether that's for me to build a custom website for them or when they've bought my templates.
• 20:30
  and they're about to get going, they know they need their website, but there are either a lot of missing branding elements. And especially if you're a creative person and you enjoy that kind of stuff that you just need direction, there really is no reason you can't do these elements yourself as long as you have a bit of guidance. And at the very worst case, you've put together an incredible brief
• 20:53
  for a designer, really have figured out what you want it to look and feel like. And just think about phase one versus phase two. Is this really, really a phase one thing that I need now to invest 10K into? Whatever that is. If you have a great story or great social content and a great product, even the most simple websites will make a lot of money. Sometimes you see really popular brands and you're like,
• 21:21
  That website? Okay. It's a simple flow and it gets people to the checkout. And if they really want that product, they will figure out how to buy it. So just remember that.
• 21:34
  There's always phase two and a phase three. Totally. I also think to add to that, because I'm so on that same page of, you know, let's just focus on the need to have and the step one of today and like not worry about step 100 until we get there. But like when you start a business, everyone is trying to sell you something. Like you are being pitched yourself
• 21:54
  Someone's in your inbox with this, someone's in your inbox with that. An agency wants to handle this for you. An agency wants to handle that. And if you have, you know, a couple agency retainers going on, like you are draining cash so quick. Also another mistake I've made a million times with multiple situations, but unless you're kind of backed and funded and in a different financial position, you've got to be willing to lose every dollar that you spend. And so you've got to keep that money really tight.
• 22:23
  you've got to be really lean in the beginning which is really hard especially if you are a visionary not everyone likes to maybe use that word which can seem a bit grandiose but if you can really just you're an ideas person and you're like no I really want it to be like amazing from the get-go or if you're a neurodivergent like me and have that bit of time blindness where you struggle to sort of
• 22:49
  You know, oh, I don't want to do it bit by bit. I want to do it all at once. I'm quite all or nothing. So I really relate to that, even in my own business. I want to kind of talk about...
• 23:01
  Like, I feel like it doesn't sound super sexy, but probably sexy to you. I want to talk about website conversion and like optimizing your website. And from the perspective of, you know, anyone who's listening right now who, yep, they've got their Shopify. Yep. You know, it's connected. They've got their basic flows going on. You know, they make sales, et cetera, et cetera.
• 23:22
  How important is it to kind of focus on continually optimizing your website for conversion? And what are some simple kind of tricks or hacks that someone could implement easily themselves or try and focus on themselves? I think there's a few really simple things. I always see a lot of websites that just have way too much copywriting or not enough. I would get friends and family who are your demographic. That's a big asterisk.
• 23:53
  To actually look at it and be like, do you think my website's easy? Just use my website. Because we get so close to our own websites that we just can't even see shit. So get people to look at it because your own customers, you know, unless they're real diehard fans or they know you, they're probably not going to reach out and say, you know what I noticed? This was a little bit weird. You know, they're just going to not use it or not buy it.
• 24:22
  which is sad. So I think that's a really, like one that we are just not doing enough, myself included. Mm-hmm.
• 24:30
  And now I think as well, like if you're an early stage founder and you like, you know, maybe, maybe copywriting doesn't come naturally to you. Put it all in chat GPT. Be like, look, here's my full homepage. Scan it. Tell me how I can make this better. Like improve this and like then go through and like tweak every single section to be really clear and to make sense. Chat GPT is my best friend. Yeah.
• 24:55
  totally approve this message and do it bit by bit. It doesn't have to be the whole website in one go. To be like, today it's just going to be this product page or the homepage, whatever it is, the most important pages. We're always on our big computer oftentimes when we're working just remember to go on a mobile.
• 25:16
  Every so often, just check in on that little mobile website. Just check it out. Also, just check out your own product. Like go through, like something I feel like I do all the time and I often find that I have a mistake. It's like if I'm trying to sell something or set up a new funnel or a new checkout process or whatever,
• 25:34
  like go and buy your product, like go through and buy it to make sure that it works and everything is connected, especially like, you know, I've got this janky tech stack at the moment where like everything's all connected and there's a million things going on. And sometimes I'm like, oh shit, like, you know, like I've got someone going to this link and I hadn't actually published it. My bad. And you know what? It's so common and things do get confusing and look,
• 26:00
  This is normal stuff, especially in small business that we can't like hate on ourselves too much for. But yeah, actually going through the process of buying your own product is so important because you'll get to see all the touch points, including those emails. And it will just be like, oh, I really haven't touched that email design in about a year. And I don't really talk like that anymore. Or you're noticing how it looks a little bit robotic or whatever.
• 26:28
  Maybe in that email that every single person opens who buys from me, I could talk about this other product or, you know, put some blog posts in there or whatever it is that you can cross promote in those really high real estate sort of emails. You'll just notice things. And that's really the heart. You know, it sounds fancy conversion rate optimization and like it's so specialist, but sometimes it is just being a human on your website and noticing things. Mm-hmm.
• 26:58
  100%. I actually thought of something like from what we were talking about before about messaging that I'm just going to circle back to for a second as well. I also find like on a lot of websites, people go for like these really like fancy marketing words.
• 27:13
  I don't even really understand what that means. You need to ask yourself, like, how am I just telling my best friend about this product? Even if it's not your product, but it's like you've bought something and then you're telling your girlfriends in the group chat. Oh, like I brought this beauty serum because it does X, Y, and Z and it's like amazing and you need to buy it. Like, however your customers would talk about your product and explain it to a friend should be like your homepage banner messaging and not using weird, fancy words.
• 27:41
  And that I think is where chat GPT can go a little wrong because they're not able to talk in like conversational tone of voice, but like,
• 27:48
  being like, how can I remove these words? Actually, a really good resource for this is by Harry Dry, marketingexamples.com. They'll show you like, hey, here's an example where you're using like a fancy word that no one understands. And here's an example of how your customer would say it. And then when you get into this mindset of being like, oh, hey, if I just apply that framework to like my product and you do it 10 times, like by the 10th time, you're like, oh, okay, now it's actually pretty polished. Like that's good. I'm really big on this. I think
• 28:18
  particularly as an Australian who is quite colloquial and very slang heavy and working with so many Americans who I guess more, you know, they just talk better than us. So they're a little bit more like, I don't know what the word, what I'm trying to say is, but essentially, yeah, I really notice when that formal language is used. And once upon a time I would tell people if they were doing their own copywriting for their About page or something like that,
• 28:48
  just consider doing a voice memo and really noticing like how the way you're writing and when you actually go to read it, how formal it does sound. And it's quite an art to figure out how to write like you talk, which is why it's such a great thing that so many founders are kind of forced to get behind the camera for reels and whatnot, because you really have to learn fast how to talk like a human about your own brand
• 29:18
  I actually say like my tip for this and I, cause I personally do this and I tell Josephine who works for me to do this all the time to read it out loud. And if it's like, if I, I'm never going to say the word whom or like whilst, you know, like remove these words that are like, just not in your like everyday kind of chit chat vocab. Yeah.
• 29:39
  I'm really big on this stuff. And when I'm making people's websites and redoing them, I'm often just like changing those words. Minor tweak here. Minor tweak here. Without permission, I just do it. I love that. While we're kind of like on the topic of, you know,
• 30:00
  Shopify 101, conversion optimization 101, I want to talk through the importance of the product page because I have some ideas and some tips on what I recommend people to do when it comes to the product page because this is obviously your sales funnel to get people to buy and check out. It's probably more important than your homepage, especially if you're driving ads also, for everyone to listen here, you shouldn't be driving it to your homepage. You should be going straight to that good old product page. Yeah.
• 30:29
  But I want to know from your perspective what you think about product pages. What are people missing? What should they be adding? Like what is the anatomy of a good product page? Well, look, it depends on your product, but generally speaking, we don't want to reinvent the wheel too much. There is a certain UX that people are expecting these days. And when we really veer too far from that,
• 30:58
  The amount of people that are like, Katie, do you hate the Zara website? Because I hate it. Oh, my God. I hate the Zara website. I literally messaged one of my girlfriends the other day to be like, I hate it. And the app, too. I'm like, just stop being so editorial. I just don't like it. And I don't like the text. I don't like everything's too small. Beautiful images. But damn, like the vitriol I get about that. Yeah. So great.
• 31:26
  Even as like tech savvy millennials, no one's digging it. Not many people anyway. So that's a good little anecdote on like, just don't go too crazy there. Keep the first bit sort of tradish. But the content below it now we're finding is getting a lot more sales pagey, which is to say once upon a time we would just have like,
• 31:49
  maybe some bullet points about the product and related items and that's it. But now we're going into a lot more detail in multiple sections below it. And I think it's a good thing. And this is sort of the expectation now. It's become a lot easier on platforms like Shopify with
• 32:08
  what's called dynamic content. What's that? What's dynamic content? It basically just means once upon a time you would have to create a special template for every single product. And that would take forever from a web design perspective. But now there are these, you can essentially have like the same layouts on every single product page, but the actual information, like the words and the images.
• 32:36
  they are pulled from the product admin page. So when you're filling out your product description, all that kind of stuff inside the admin area, you can add all these extra lines essentially so that it's just dynamically populating those extra
• 32:53
  sort of sections on the product page. So I know it's a tricky thing to talk about verbally. I'm like, it just sounds like. Yeah, I'm like, you're saying a lot of things that I don't understand. There is nothing more unsexy than describing web design verbally. That's why we need a Katie. Even when I first learned about it, I was like, sorry, what? Katie makes it sexy. Lol.
• 33:22
  Okay, the other thing that I feel like, well, I guess for me, what I tell founders when I speak to them is also like still go out and look for the website that you like aspire to have in the future. Go out and look at the best Shopify websites in the world. Go and dissect what Kylie Lips is saying.
• 33:40
  Is that even what it's called? Or is it just called Kylie? Anyway, what is she doing? Like what's in that product page? Or like what's on the Skims product page? Or like even, you know, it doesn't have to be like a superstar website. It can be like just someone who you know is doing really well. It's like, okay, cool. They have the product shots, fine. But, oh, okay, they've got videos of their customers using it in action, especially if it's something that performs a transformation or something like that or before and afters.
• 34:08
  you know, does it have testimonials? Does it have reviews? And like, maybe in the beginning, when you're launching, you don't have that stuff, but over time you'll start to get it. And especially for your hero products, like your popular products that are selling really well, I'm like, you should be updating those often, like add in more reviews, add in testimonials, add in videos, add in, I don't know what else, what else could go on a good product page? Do you think?
• 34:33
  I think it was spot on there in that like those hero products, the best sellers should always be prioritized. So, and yeah, reviews essential at this point. We're finding as time goes on that there's going to be more of like a replicating the user experience of social media on websites. And so I think that we'll find...
• 35:01
  Now we have these sort of carousels of like misgenerated content, UGC, sitting below sort of the products, but I think we'll start to see them a little bit more like looking like little story circles at the top and starting to see some cool apps. There's one apps like maybe Tolstoy, which you might have heard of. What's it called? It's called Tolstoy. It's pretty expensive from memory and there's some cheap copycats, guys, but yeah.
• 35:30
  It's essentially in the bottom right-hand corner of the product page. It will show you like maybe a reel or a TikTok of that product. Cool. Yeah. So depending on which product you go on, it's going to show a relevant reel or TikTok in that bottom right-hand corner. And obviously it's in the bottom-hand corner. It's moving. It's familiar because we know like we've just come from Instagram probably. And so people just want to click on it.
• 36:00
  So that kind of stuff we're going to see a lot more of, but any sort of user-generated content on the product page is really important, especially in terms of you're a fashion brand and you want to show it on different bodies, like instead of having to get a million different models into, you know, ship your product. So that kind of stuff is more important than ever, obviously. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
• 36:24
  Yeah, I love that. What are some like good websites that you've either worked on or like that you've seen or kind of like those aspirational Shopify websites that you're like, yeah, go and check this out and like dissect, you know, the CTAs, dissect the experience, like actually buy something and see what flows you get off the back end. Like what are your kind of hero Shopify websites at the moment?
• 36:50
  You know what, a favourite one that I was, it's actually not like brand new or anything, but it was I Love Creative Studio that did it. And it was the Paris Hilton tracksuits website. And I loved it. Oh, I love. I know, who knew? I loved it because the UX was so tight. It was actually like a one page page.
• 37:15
  Shopify website. And I think it was mostly tracksuits just in different colors and you could buy the top or the bottom or a set. And so we're not talking like a lot of products. So that's why it suited the one page situation. But it was so fun, but still really neat and easy to use. And I just thought it was really clever. And it just made me be like, oh my God,
• 37:45
  It's just such a perfect sort of phase one entry point. When you say one page, do you mean like the product page is on the homepage? Like there is just no, you're not navigating to even like the contacts, nothing. It is just like from top to bottom, there's one thing going on. Oh, yeah. That is so interesting. I can't wait to check that out. Yeah. That's hot. I thought it was hot. So like how much do you need to say about?
• 38:12
  the tracksuit and how you know everyone knows who Paris is but it was still a clever design and still had some like really fun elements on it but it never felt cluttered I feel like the negative to that though like just off the top of my head is like and it works for her because she's Paris Hilton and she has like people are searching for her organically like people are probably looking specifically for those track pants or like whatever like tracksuits but like for the everyday
• 38:42
  Actually, probably no, because you do need to have your SEO content and you do need to have like your resources and blog and like things that are like happening that are bringing you that organic traffic. So I'm kind of like, wait a second, I'm going to love looking at it. But like from that perspective, you do need that other like entry point from Google.
• 39:03
  Or from ChatGPT now because ChatGPT is also like if you're not focused on your SEO, then you're not coming up in ChatGPT. And, like, that's going to be a big thing in the future the more we use ChatGPT or these other, like, you know, learning language models, whatever.
• 39:20
  That's it. Like there's a huge asterisk there. It depends on the product, depends on the brand owner and like what your goals are. And, you know, if you just have like a single product beverage or something like that, it may make sense. It may also just be like a phase one situation that helps you, you know, the MVP gets you live. It's, you know, gives a conversion. It's almost like a sales page but with multiple products on it. And then phase two, you expand. You have the blog. You have the other pages, whatever it is.
• 39:50
  So I thought as an entry point, particularly as what I thought, ooh, that's got my attention. And this was really, if you can be on the internet and actually have the moment where you go, ooh, hang on, that was really easy. Why was it easy? Yeah.
• 40:07
  Hmm. Yeah. Again, it's actually observing your own consumer behavior and being like, I hated that. Or like, oh, that was just such a nice checkout experience. Or, oh, that was such a nice email to receive. You should be like, okay, cool. Adding that to my swipe file. I'm coming back to this. I'm going to zoom in. Quite literally. So yeah, if I have calls as a web designer and who's constantly looking at websites, that makes me go, oh, okay. That says
• 40:37
  really noticed that. Love. So, okay, we're going to be doing lots of different episodes on lots of different topics that we're going to go a bit deeper on. So what I kind of want to do is
• 40:53
  finish with a question here and then jump into our six quick questions, which we do in every episode. But for anyone listening, I guess for us, like we want to know what your questions are. We want to like have them in the Facebook group. We want to know like what kind of areas do you want us to dig deeper into, whether that's around automation, tech stack, more about websites, more about
• 41:18
  virtual assistants, like whatever it might be, like how we can kind of deep dive and like double click into a different little topic that would be super useful to anyone listening. And for this episode, I just want to wrap up with like the final question that I ask everyone on the show is kind of like,
• 41:37
  If you just have to leave us with one piece of advice or like one lesson or one insight that we can walk away with as, you know, the early stage founder who is building a CPG, direct to consumer, e-com, any of the above type brand, what do you kind of leave people with? I think you'd be surprised how much you can DIY. But just acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses, which may be really vague.
• 42:07
  If you are a creative person, then really just empower yourself to learn those things. And when it's time to hand over something that is really just causing you stress or making you leak money in other ways, then just bite the bullet and seek out the help. And use your intuition. Even if you are starting a brand or a business that is so different to what you've been doing in the past,
• 42:35
  Oftentimes we've just learned so many different things from our past lives that come in handy. So just trust yourself to know what's right for you and your biz and your future. Oh, I love that. I love that because I also feel like, and we've spoken about this before on the show, but like it's so easy to get crippled by this feeling that everyone else has had overnight success and they've just launched this brand and it's just gone crazy. But yeah.
• 43:03
  even if that person did just launch their brand and it did go crazy, they've still had 10 years of experience in their other career or their other brands that failed or whatever it might be that's gotten them to this point. And so it takes really 10 years to reach that overnight success. And I think it's so important that we constantly repeat this because comparison is the thief of joy and it's just in human nature to compare and it sucks.
• 43:33
  But you've got all these different amazing skills from your journey that you can channel into whatever you're at now. Yeah, it's never been harder to shield yourself from comparison. It has to be something you actively work against in this Instagram, social media age. So you're just what it is, but just remember that. Love.
• 44:00
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 44:25
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 44:47
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show, and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.