Latest / eCommerce Podcast / What I've learned in 300 episodes of the eCommerce Podcast

Transcript

What I've learned in 300 episodes of the eCommerce Podcast · eCommerce Podcast

0:08
Well, hello and welcome to the eCommerce Podcast.
0:11
My name is Matt Edmundson.
0:13
And of course, it is great to be with you today.
0:15
And if this is your first time with us, what an episode to pick.
0:20
Welcome, genuinely.
0:22
Make sure you like and subscribe and do all of that good stuff.
0:25
Because, you know, We are here and we will stay here and we'd love for you to
0:28
become a regular to the show.
0:31
And of course, if you are regular, welcome back, because today we are
0:34
celebrating episode 300.
0:40
Yes, 300.
0:42
And it's nuts when you think about it.
0:46
300 episodes.
0:48
We should probably have some fanfare and some celebration.
0:52
But I don't quite know how we're going to do that.
0:55
Maybe I'll go get a kebab later or something.
0:56
I don't know.
0:56
Anyway, celebrating 300 episodes.
1:00
And today I'm going to look at the key lessons that this has taught me doing the
1:03
show.
1:06
What are some of the lessons I've learned doing 300 episodes?
1:10
Man, I still don't know how that happened.
1:12
We started this podcast back in June 2019.
1:17
And if you'd have told me then that I'd still be going, we'd still be doing the
1:20
show 7 years later, I think I probably would have laughed at you.
1:24
I mean, I might have been great.
1:26
But I don't think I anticipated it.
1:29
But I'll talk more about how the show started later, because that story, well,
1:32
there's going to be a theme today.
1:35
It is a little bit more embarrassing than I would care to admit, as are a few
1:39
things which we'll learn from today's show.
1:43
But that's what we're going to get into that we're going to get into that.
1:46
But let me start with the updates I promised you.
1:52
Because I did make a bit of a public commitment on this show.
1:56
And I think we should probably deal with that first.
1:58
So back in episode 289, a grand old 7 episodes ago, which was in May, I told you
2:04
that I was going to run a 90-day experiment on Instagram.
2:10
And I have run the experiment.
2:13
Now the setup was this, right?
2:16
Davie Fogarty, I think his name is, the Oodie guy.
2:19
And they do— I can't remember what it is, they do something like 200 million a
2:21
year.
2:22
And he reckons founders under 10 million probably shouldn't bother with doing
2:27
the whole personal brand thing because the opportunity cost is enormous.
2:32
And so his argument is spend that time testing ad creatives, you're going to
2:35
better— going to get a better return on your investment.
2:39
Then we look at people like Alex Hormozi and we looked at Dan Priestley who say
2:42
the exact opposite, right?
2:45
Everybody should be putting out a shedload of content and that AI is going to
2:49
eat up the business founders— sorry, eat up the businesses of founders who don't
2:52
show up on camera.
2:57
So these are all quite successful people giving us very contradictory advice.
3:02
And I said, right, let's just settle it.
3:04
Let's do a sort of 90-day experiment.
3:07
I'll do Instagram.
3:08
I'll run some paid ads.
3:10
We'll benchmark.
3:11
I'll publish the numbers on what's going on.
3:13
I'll let you know what's going on.
3:14
So as I said, we have been running that experiment.
3:18
And here's where we actually are.
3:21
The Ads Benchmark uh, never actually got run.
3:25
Not that it's underperformed, it never actually happened.
3:29
So I can't give you the comparison that I promised you, which I can only
3:31
apologise for.
3:35
The whole point of the experiment was this sort of head-to-head, uh, test, and
3:38
that's not really happened.
3:41
We've done a few reels, but not lots, not even close to really what I thought we
3:44
should be doing right now.
3:48
And I do wanna be a little bit careful here because there's a version of this,
3:51
right, where I explain it all away, which I I could do.
3:55
I'm very good at that.
3:56
We're all very good at the excuses, you know, we are, in fact, moving house
3:59
after living in this one for 22 years.
4:02
And actually, as a side note, it's fitting that episode 300, this is going to be
4:06
the last episode I record in my home studio before we take it all down and move
4:10
it to somewhere else.
4:15
My very last episode is episode 300.
4:17
You may still see some other episodes recorded from here, which we recorded
4:19
earlier.
4:21
Which we're going to release later.
4:23
But this is the last episode I'm recording in this amazing studio, which I've
4:28
thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed being here.
4:32
So yeah, we're moving, moving in 7 days, in fact, heaven help us.
4:36
And so, you know, I've got good reasons for not getting done what I wanted to
4:39
get done.
4:42
But, you know, I think it's easy just to turn that into a list of excuses if I'm
4:44
not careful.
4:47
So, and I don't, I don't want to do that.
4:49
So let me run through with you some of the things that we have figured out.
4:53
So the, the first thing is, again, the experiment has not really happened how I
4:57
wanted it to happen, and I've obviously got to make a decision whether or not to
5:02
run the experiment as I want to do it at some point in the future, which I think
5:06
I'm probably going to.
5:10
But it's not a total failure, um, as like I said, we have run a few things and
5:13
we have discovered a few things too.
5:17
So Let's jump into it because I'm hoping that actually what we found will be
5:21
genuinely, uh, helpful to you.
5:25
It's, it's good for me to refresh it in my thinking.
5:28
You know, some of these things that we think about and talk about, um, it's good
5:31
to sort of for me to reprogram my brain with stuff that I have clearly
5:33
forgotten.
5:37
Anyway, I gave myself, uh, 2 to 3 hours a week for this experiment, but I didn't
5:41
really get anywhere near to spending the 2 to 3 hours a week, not once really.
5:47
So whatever went wrong for us, it wasn't a time problem.
5:50
And I don't think, I mean, I'm saying this, you know, I don't think it was a
5:53
discipline problem either because I'm a reasonably disciplined person about most
5:57
things in business.
6:01
What it actually was, and it took me, it took me a little while to see this,
6:05
which is why I say the common theme to this show is going to be my
6:09
embarrassment.
6:13
Um, because, you know, I probably should know better.
6:17
Um, it's the reason I think it didn't work is something called origination
6:20
costs.
6:23
So what do I mean by that?
6:25
So the expensive bit, I suppose, wasn't the filming.
6:27
I can film, filming's fine.
6:29
We've got this camera set up in the studio.
6:31
I've got a setup down at the office.
6:32
I've got a setup in our Nottingham office.
6:35
I've got 3 studios.
6:36
Filming is fine, right?
6:38
That's not the issue.
6:39
I've got more iPhones than I know what to do with.
6:42
I can film the video.
6:44
Uh, the expensive part was actually deciding what was going to be in those
6:49
videos, what we were going to say, and getting in front of the camera cold and
6:53
just recording them.
6:57
I know what I'm doing with podcasts.
6:59
I can sit here and record a podcast without too much drama, get it all set up
7:03
how I want to get it set up and record them, especially if it's an interview.
7:07
Um, and even solo episodes like this, I, I'm fairly confident what I'm doing,
7:09
but Reels is still quite new.
7:12
So there's that whole learning cost.
7:14
And so that's what I mean, it's the cost of originating the thing, the, the
7:17
origination costs.
7:20
And this is probably the cost I failed to budget for.
7:26
And that's important, right?
7:27
Now there was one reel that worked according to my Instagram expert son, uh, who
7:31
looked at my analytics and told me what they all meant.
7:35
Because obviously we did get some out.
7:37
Um, it was a reel about building an AI assistant for our business, our ecommerce
7:40
business.
7:43
And the angle we took in the reel was to be slightly contrarian.
7:48
So everybody's talking about how do you build AI Jarvis?
7:51
I'm a little bit old school.
7:52
And so we did this reel where I'm like, I don't want to do Jarvis.
7:55
I want to do KITT.
7:57
And KITT, if you know, if you're of a certain age, you'll know is from the 1980s
8:00
TV show Knight Rider.
8:03
And that seemed to strike a chord and it did, you know, I think about 8,000 or
8:06
9,000 views in the end, which for my personal channel, right at the start of
8:10
this experiment was brilliant, uh, way more than I expected.
8:13
I didn't script the video.
8:16
Um, I just had what they call a beat sheet.
8:19
So the hook was written out word for word, the landing was written out word for
8:23
word, and then it was just prompts in the middle that I could just ad-lib
8:28
around, which meant the reel sounded like me, uh, rather than me doing an
8:32
impression of a script, uh, which I never ever want to do.
8:37
Um, and so I, I sort of got the And I understood how I want to do the reels.
8:45
Um, the beat sheets definitely work better than scripts for me.
8:49
Batch recording also worked.
8:51
And interestingly, I've got a bunch of reels recorded, but we've just not edited
8:54
them or scheduled them yet, which is something we're solving both with the team
8:57
and with AI going forward.
9:02
So why is this all a bit embarrassing?
9:05
Apart from the fact that I talked about doing this, uh, 11 weeks ago and still
9:07
haven't really got it done?
9:11
The honest answer is I should have known better.
9:16
And I got caught up in what I call, and you may never have suffered from this,
9:19
um, but I suffer from it all the time and my team only knows this, knows this
9:23
only too well.
9:27
I call it entrepreneurial optimism.
9:29
You know, that sort of blind optimism we have as entrepreneurs that we can just
9:32
do anything and let's just do it.
9:34
Let's just crack on.
9:36
But I've learned over the years, doesn't always work out like that.
9:41
And in fact, I have two questions that I ask people when I do coaching, whether
9:45
business coaching, or ecommerce coaching, there's two questions which I come
9:50
back to time and time again, I've been asking them for years.
9:55
And the first question is this: Will this task, project, whatever it is in front
10:00
of me, will this Instagram experiment help me move the needle between where I am
10:04
and where I want to be?
10:09
Okay.
10:11
Yes or no?
10:11
If the answer's no, we don't go any further.
10:13
But if the answer's yes, we could move on to the second question.
10:16
Can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 whilst doing this?
10:22
And that's why this is a little embarrassing because I didn't answer my own
10:26
coaching questions.
10:30
I broke my second question.
10:34
And I did it in public on my own podcast.
10:37
So I'm genuinely sorry and eating humble pie here on episode 300, having asked
10:44
probably 100, if not 1,000 other founders some version of those same questions.
10:52
I didn't heed them.
10:53
I didn't ask myself, and that's been bugging me.
10:56
I'll be totally straight with you.
10:58
Because like I say, we spent 7 years doing this podcast, 300 episodes.
11:02
I'm saying that a lot because it's still mind-boggling.
11:05
To me that we've made it this far.
11:07
I've sat here interviewing people about what works, uh, some of the smartest
11:10
people in ecommerce that are out there.
11:13
I've managed to talk to people who have built things I've never built, um, and
11:18
I've taken notes on every single one of them.
11:22
You may have heard me talk about this on the show quite often.
11:24
I'll hold up to the camera, if you ever watch the YouTube, uh, videos, I hold up
11:28
to the camera the sort of the notes, uh, from the show.
11:33
So I take notes on all these episodes, yet for some reason, I still couldn't get
11:38
myself in front of a camera 3 to 5 times a week for a 60-second reel.
11:44
So what is going on there?
11:46
And I think it's an important question, because I don't think I'm the only one
11:47
struggling with this.
11:49
Hence the reason I thought I'd talk about this in the show, the sort of the key
11:52
lesson, I suppose, I've learned, not just with the experiment, but with doing
11:55
the 300.
11:58
Yes, the 300 episodes.
12:01
Uh, because fundamentally, I don't think either me or you have an information
12:05
problem.
12:10
Truth is, I've got more information than almost anyone.
12:12
I've got a searchable archive of 300, uh, conversations with experts.
12:17
If knowing things was going to be my bottleneck, uh, I'd have solved that one
12:20
long before we even got started.
12:24
So the bottleneck was never, ever knowledge.
12:28
And I think that's true for most of us, especially now, because knowledge is
12:30
just right there, isn't it?
12:33
So if I think about my notes, let me talk to you about the notes that I take.
12:36
Like I say, I hold them up to camera, and I think this is where this all starts.
12:40
I take pages of them.
12:43
I have done for a long time.
12:44
Every episode, every conference, every book, every coaching call all gets noted,
12:48
um, minutes drawn up.
12:54
Actions, all those sorts of things.
12:55
It's just one of those skills I learned very early on in life, and I'm very,
12:57
very grateful for.
13:01
It's a really important skill.
13:03
I think it's a good habit.
13:04
I'm not about to stop it.
13:05
And I would encourage you to do it if you don't already take notes.
13:10
But the other thing that I've noticed about all of those notes is they can
13:15
create a form of overwhelm, not necessarily clarity all the time, but they can
13:20
create overwhelm because when you've got a notebook with 200 good ideas written
13:25
down.
13:32
Well, I don't know, honestly, I'm not necessarily that excited about that.
13:37
I wonder if there's sort of a low-level dread surrounding it because often the
13:41
notebook can create these lists of things that you know you're never going to
13:46
get around to, right?
13:50
And that creates this overwhelm.
13:52
So you don't really start anything.
13:55
And so I, if again, just sort of thinking it through over the years, I used to
14:00
think this was a failure of discipline on my part.
14:04
I'd think, right, Matt, listen, dude, you've got all of these brilliant ideas
14:06
from all these amazing people.
14:08
Why aren't you doing those ideas from the show?
14:11
Come on, sort yourself out.
14:12
Uh, get, you know, let's get a move on.
14:14
Let's get cracking.
14:15
But that's not it, right?
14:19
Um, I, I, well, I, I don't think that's it.
14:22
And it took me a little while to see this.
14:23
So the problem isn't that the ideas themselves are bad, right?
14:31
The problem is that every single idea written in my notebook is good, which
14:36
sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, doesn't it?
14:42
Every single one of them is good.
14:46
Every one of them would move the needle.
14:48
They answer question one, you know, does this move the needle between where I am
14:50
and where I want to be?
14:52
Yes.
14:53
Because that's the reason I wrote them down in the first place, because they
14:55
passed that test.
14:57
That's a filter my brain uses as I'm taking notes.
15:01
Uh, is this a good idea?
15:03
Will this move the needle?
15:05
Yes.
15:05
And if it passes, it just goes down in the notebook.
15:08
So the notebook itself isn't a list of options, or it's, it's, it's a list of
15:12
200 things that pass this test.
15:17
Does this move the needle?
15:18
Yes or no?
15:19
But it's 200 of them right there.
15:21
And as good as it is, and as good as it is to take the notes, and as good as it
15:26
is to write those things down, I mean, it is a gold mine, I have to tell you.
15:31
I mean, the times I've sat there when business is not quite doing what it should
15:34
be doing, and I've gone back to those notebooks and, ah, there's a question, ah,
15:37
there's a point there, let's work on that.
15:41
And as good as that is, I do wonder whether my notebooks become sort of like a
15:44
library of good intentions or good ideas.
15:49
That never really get executed.
15:52
And like I say, I don't think I'm the only one that struggles with this.
15:55
Having done a fair bit of coaching, we've all got a metaphorical notebook with a
15:58
whole list of things that we need to do.
16:02
And knowledge and information is not the thing necessarily that's stopping us.
16:07
And we all feel, I guess, vaguely guilty about not doing most of them, right?
16:13
And that's where I think the second question really matters.
16:17
So question 1, will it move the needle?
16:18
Yes or no?
16:20
That's the question we all ask.
16:23
It's not a bad question.
16:24
It's a really clarifying question.
16:26
It's a necessary question, I think, because it filters stuff out.
16:31
And it— and like I say, before you even go any further, you should definitely
16:34
run stuff through that first question.
16:38
But question 2 is, can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 in doing this?
16:45
Can I consistently hit an 8 out of 10?
16:48
And I think that's the question that makes you say no to things, which, again,
16:55
if you're like me, you find saying no to really good ideas really hard.
17:04
Especially if you suffer from entrepreneurial optimism, just like I I do.
17:09
But at the same time, it is also really powerful because saying no to things
17:14
sort of turns a list of 200 items into a list of 3.
17:21
So why do I use 8 out of 10?
17:24
Apart from the fact it sort of neatly fits the Pareto principle, doesn't it?
17:31
And also there's a TV show, 8 Out of 10 Cats.
17:33
It's nothing to do with that.
17:35
The reason I choose 8 out of 10 is be— it's worse for the same reason, I guess,
17:39
that I don't chase this idea of excellence.
17:43
And as good an idea as this sounds, I've come to realise that actually I'm much
17:48
better at chasing good or very good rather than excellence.
17:53
10 out of 10 is a fantasy, right?
17:55
If I ask myself, can I be a 10 out of 10 at this, the answer almost always, all
17:59
of the time, is going to be no.
18:02
And if there's a slight chance sense that I could be a 10 out of 10 at doing
18:04
that.
18:07
I'm probably not willing to pay the cost to get there.
18:11
So if I chase a 10, then I don't know, am I ever going to really start anything?
18:18
Another way to think about it, I suppose, is 10 out of 10 is perfectionism
18:20
wearing a business suit.
18:23
And I don't think you can sustain that level for any length of time.
18:28
I think if you hit something at a 10 out of 10, and you get excited, you're
18:30
like, let's keep going at this team, I think it's going to burn you out.
18:33
And I think it's going to burn the team out.
18:37
So, 8 out of 10 is very good.
18:41
It's good.
18:41
It's very good.
18:43
And actually, that works really, really well in business as far as I've
18:46
discovered.
18:50
8 out of 10 is a level where things produce great results, Pareto.
18:55
And more importantly, I can still sustain it and the team can still sustain it.
19:02
It's not easy to say.
19:03
The team can still sustain it on a Thursday afternoon when we're all We're all
19:05
tired.
19:09
And we're all fighting for the fires that day.
19:12
Because the key to this whole thing, I've discovered 300 episodes is
19:15
consistency.
19:18
Not can I, not just can I be an 8 out of 10 at this, but can I be consistent 8
19:22
out of 10 at this?
19:25
Because, you know, hitting 8 out of 10 once is easy.
19:28
That's a good afternoon's work, right?
19:30
But can I do this week in week out when the novelty has has completely worn off
19:33
and no one is clapping.
19:36
And there are times, there's been at least 3 or 4 times that I can think of
19:39
where I thought, I'm just going to stop doing the eCommerce Podcast.
19:42
I'm just going to stop doing the show.
19:44
But we didn't give up.
19:46
We were consistent at it.
19:48
And the idea, you know, the brilliant idea that I can only do it a 4 out of 10
19:51
sporadically when I feel like it, well, that's probably worth almost nothing to
19:54
the business.
19:57
In fact, actually, it might even be worth less than nothing because there's the
19:59
opportunity cost.
20:02
It eats time and attention from anything else that you could be doing.
20:07
I suppose it, you know, so it could slowly improve your guilt score.
20:14
But that's a KPI not worth measuring or improving, I think, in any way.
20:20
But, you know, a fairly boring idea, a podcast about ecommerce.
20:25
I mean, it's not going to change, it's not going to light the world on fire.
20:27
The BBC aren't calling me saying, can we turn this into a TV show?
20:31
But if I can do that at an 8 out of 10 every single week for a year, that
20:33
compounds.
20:37
That's a business.
20:40
And that is where this podcast has done really well for us because we have done
20:43
it week in, week out.
20:47
But conversely, it is where I went wrong with Instagram.
20:54
3 reels a week, uh, Absolutely.
20:58
I mean, doing the Reels and doing Instagram does pass question 1.
21:00
I think it does move the needle, especially if done right.
21:05
Everybody would say that, right?
21:06
Priestley, Hormozi, even the guy that says you shouldn't do it knows that you
21:08
should at some points do it.
21:11
It's not saying don't do it.
21:12
There is a benefit.
21:13
It's just there's a bigger opportunity cost from his point of view.
21:16
So in theory, Instagram sails through question 1.
21:18
Does it move the needle?
21:19
Yes, it does.
21:21
But If I'd honestly asked myself question 2, can I be a consistent 8 out of 10
21:27
at originating these reels week in, week out, from scratch, on camera, on top of
21:33
running the business, on top of moving a house, on top of the season that we are
21:38
in as a company, which I have to say is really, really good.
21:46
The answer has to be, or should have been, a definitive no.
21:50
And it was always going to be a no.
21:52
I just, I just didn't.
21:54
I should have known this.
21:55
I've, like I say, I've asked this question 1,000 times.
21:59
But I never asked myself my own coaching questions.
22:02
And that's entrepreneurial optimism at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.
22:06
That is what it's done.
22:09
And I think most of us listening to the show have probably got that.
22:12
It's both a feature and a bug at the same time.
22:15
And this is just me telling my story that yes, I am like you in so many ways.
22:20
We are all the same, uh, and we all start things and don't finish them.
22:25
We all want to do things and never get around to completing that.
22:28
I mean, the list goes on, right?
22:30
Um, but let's not get too down on ourselves.
22:33
What else can we learn from this?
22:35
Because something else I have learned, uh, when something fails question 2,
22:39
like, can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 doing this?
22:43
And I go, no, no, I can't.
22:45
There's one more question to ask.
22:48
Okay.
22:49
And that is simply this.
22:51
Does this fail because of me or because of the actual task?
22:58
Because they're completely different problems.
23:00
And I think one has got a fix.
23:02
So if it fails because of the task, if the thing itself is genuinely not worth
23:06
doing, it's not going to help us, or maybe it needs resources that we simply
23:10
don't have at the moment.
23:14
Or maybe it works in a market that we're not in, or on a, on a, whatever it is,
23:17
right?
23:20
The task itself is not helpful, then fine, we can drop it.
23:23
We can cross it out of the notebook and we can feel really good about saying no
23:27
to something regardless of whether it's a good idea or not.
23:32
That's the filter doing its job, right?
23:34
That's the whole point.
23:36
But if it's gonna fail because of me and not because of the task, like the
23:41
Instagram challenge because it needs my face, my hours, my particular brain,
23:46
then we have to say, well, hang on a minute, is there another way?
23:53
So with Instagram, uh, what do I do there that is genuinely needing me?
24:02
What genuinely needs me for the reels?
24:04
Maybe that's another way to question that, right?
24:06
The 30 seconds where my face is on camera.
24:09
Realistically, that's about it.
24:11
That's the only bit that can't really be decided by anyone else.
24:14
Deciding the idea, shaping the beat sheets, um, especially with a team that
24:17
knows me well, editing, publishing, scheduling— none of that has to be me.
24:22
Sure, I want to input on it, but I can hand it off to the team even if I have to
24:24
give a little bit of training.
24:28
And for this Instagram challenge, I didn't do that.
24:31
It was all left with me, which in hindsight was not smart given the nature of
24:33
what we do.
24:36
So the fix isn't try harder at Instagram, Matthew.
24:42
The fix is to make the bit that only I can do as cheap as possible for me in
24:48
terms of my time, in terms of opportunity cost, and also as batched as possible.
24:54
And if I do those two things and hand everything else off to someone else,
24:58
whether that's my team, maybe someone on Fiverr, if you're thinking about how do
25:02
I get people to do this when it's just me, and actually you've even got AI now.
25:08
Well, what could we do?
25:09
And this is exactly where we find ourselves.
25:11
So the rule is to ask yourself this question.
25:15
Should— when you're thinking about the task, is it because of the task or is it
25:17
because of me?
25:19
In other words, should I drop it?
25:21
Should I delegate it?
25:23
Or could I systematise it, especially now with AI?
25:27
So there's 3 possibilities there.
25:30
Um, and only one of them then becomes a no-go, which should hopefully calm down
25:34
those of you who are twitching about the idea of saying no to good ideas, which
25:38
is me all the time.
25:42
Uh, so let me give you an example perhaps of what happens when this all works as
25:47
it should.
25:51
Uh, I've mentioned on the show before, um, something that happened, uh, after
25:54
the conversation with Adam Pearce.
25:58
This was episode 280.
25:59
It was in March, uh, earlier this year, 2026.
26:03
And Adam is from Blend Commerce.
26:05
He's been on the show before.
26:06
And we got chatting on LinkedIn, um, and it's like, Adam, let's get you back on
26:10
the show, man, because Adam's great, um, genuinely great guy, really generous
26:13
with his information, delivers high value.
26:17
Loved having him on the show, and the conversation was specifically about mobile
26:20
conversion, mainly because that's one of the things that we were talking about
26:24
as a team.
26:28
And I'm like, I'm just gonna grill Adam about this.
26:31
And I remember he talked about things like the first 3 Yeah, it was the first 3
26:37
thumbs— thumb— you know what, even after 300 episodes, I still get tongue-tied.
26:42
It was the first 3 thumb scrolls before somebody either buys or leaves.
26:49
And almost all of us, according to Adam, were wasting them.
26:52
And we definitely were on our website.
26:53
And Adam was talking about what he'd seen across his client base, you know, and
26:57
he was seeing something like a 30 to 50% conversion lift from the changes to
27:01
those first 3 scrolls, you know, and he gave us some examples with trust signals
27:06
and things like that.
27:10
And it was great.
27:13
Now, that conversation with Adam, if I think about that conversation, and the
27:18
topic, it of course passes question number 1, does it move the needle?
27:24
It would move the needle.
27:26
And actually, at the time, it would massively move the needle for us as a
27:28
business because we were thinking about mobile conversion.
27:31
We definitely needed to improve it.
27:34
Uh, we were thinking about some things there, but does it pass question number
27:37
2?
27:42
Can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 at mobile conversion optimisation?
27:46
The reality is no, no, I can't.
27:49
I'm not a CRO specialist.
27:51
I'm not going to become a CRO specialist.
27:54
I have lots of ideas and thoughts.
27:56
I am just not a specialist like Adam.
27:58
And I haven't got the time to be one.
28:01
And if the plan had been, Matt's gonna go and learn mobile UX, uh, and audit the
28:06
site every month and create a plan for the developers to, uh, resolve the
28:11
problem and keep us on top, it would never ever have started.
28:18
And so if you run the diagnostic, does this fail because of me or because of the
28:21
task?
28:24
Well, clearly it's me.
28:25
The task is brilliant.
28:26
The task is going to be one of the highest yielding things available to me and
28:29
to our company, right?
28:33
But it was me that was the constraint in everything that was going on.
28:38
And so we changed who does the doing.
28:41
It's one of the benefits of having a team.
28:44
And again, if you're just starting out, if this is just you, I would encourage
28:47
you to figure out what you you can do to help yourself by getting other people
28:50
to help you, whether it's using sites like Fiverr or whether the other people
28:53
are AI.
28:57
Now, I took the conversation with Adam, did some research off the back of it.
29:02
I sat, thought about it properly, um, and then we built a tool with Claude Code,
29:09
an AI skill that goes through our sites and audits the mobile experience.
29:16
Not only does it audit it, it finds the problem and then tells the developers
29:19
how to fix them.
29:23
And once we had that, that changed everything because the task was great.
29:31
It was not dependent on me.
29:32
We had AI running stuff and it can run these audits all day long, every day.
29:38
And what actually happened was as a result of that, we created this 3-phase
29:40
implementation plan.
29:43
Plan, which was a real plan with real jobs on it that a real team could actually
29:46
work through.
29:49
We have worked through two phases of that three-phase plan.
29:54
As things currently stand, our mobile conversion is up by over 400%.
30:01
400%!
30:03
That's a hell of a difference, isn't it?
30:05
And that's on a site that turns over millions.
30:07
So you can imagine the impact of that.
30:12
Now you may be sitting there thinking, how on earth, you know, does that make
30:15
sense for me, Matt?
30:18
You turn over millions online, but I don't.
30:21
That's okay, because the value of this is just in the doing, isn't it?
30:26
It doesn't matter what— whether your site's doing a grand or a million, the fact
30:30
that your conversion's going up, you're doing stuff that actually matters.
30:36
And so it's a really interesting idea, and it also makes me think about, well,
30:41
if that was the value— and again, I can't put a number on it, but it's, it's
30:47
worth a lot to our business— what, what about the podcast series as a whole?
30:53
It's interesting, isn't it?
30:56
Because that was one conversation, that was one episode.
31:00
How do you value 7 years?
31:06
300 episodes.
31:08
I mean, that's in effect, you know, a beautiful thing in its own right.
31:13
It really is.
31:13
And I— we'll talk about that in just a little minute.
31:17
But this whole thing is filtered in the right way, okay?
31:23
The mechanism here is the decision.
31:25
It's not a budget thing, it's not a team thing, it's the mechanism..
31:28
And sometimes the resistance you feel to an idea isn't a signal that it fails.
31:35
Question 2.
31:36
This is a really important point.
31:37
This again is something else that I've learned.
31:40
Sometimes, right?
31:41
Just sometimes, it's a signal that it's exactly the thing you need to do.
31:50
But maybe, just maybe, you don't fancy doing it.
31:55
I have been in that boat way too many times.
31:58
So let me tell you about Chloe, Chloe Thomas.
32:00
Chloe is great.
32:01
What a legend Chloe is.
32:02
She's got her own eCommerce Podcast.
32:03
She runs eCommerce Masterplan.
32:05
She's coming on the show again soon.
32:07
She's been on the show a few times already.
32:10
And I remember one of my earliest conversations with Chloe back in October 2020,
32:13
all the way back to episode 35.
32:17
And we were talking about Black Friday.
32:20
And Chloe was saying a bunch of stuff about Black Friday, which was super
32:21
helpful.
32:23
And one of the things that she said was, look, if you haven't got started yet,
32:26
get a move on, because you are fast running out of time.
32:29
And I think we're having this conversation in the summer.
32:32
And on the outside, I was like, yeah, totally agree.
32:35
Great point, Chloe.
32:36
And then on the inside, I'm thinking, that's true for a lot of people.
32:39
But for us, we're going to be fine.
32:40
We've done Black Friday before, we know what we're doing.
32:42
We've got a good team.
32:43
We've got a little bit of time yet.
32:45
We know what we're doing.
32:49
You know where this is going before I've even said it.
32:51
It turns out We did not have loads of time.
32:54
It turns out that we were not fine.
32:57
It turns out we didn't know what we were doing.
32:59
And we should have heeded Chloe's advice.
33:01
And every single year since then, we have been early on our Black Friday
33:06
campaigns, every single year, because Chloe was right.
33:11
Even though I didn't want her to be.
33:15
And I found myself, the more I've been in ecommerce, the more I think I know.
33:21
And especially when you do stuff like a podcast, you go speak at conferences and
33:25
people call you an ecommerce expert, they invite you to go on to their show.
33:29
And you start to believe the hype sometimes about being the ecommerce expert.
33:35
Now I've got opinions, let me, let me tell you, and I've definitely seen some
33:37
things.
33:40
But I do have this ability to think I know the answers.
33:43
And so when a guest says something that doesn't really fit, especially if it
33:48
doesn't fit what I already believe, I can push back.
33:53
And in fact, a lot of the questions I ask on the show are— I don't think it
33:56
comes across on the show.
33:59
I'm trying very hard to make sure it doesn't come across on the show, but it's
34:01
me being skeptical of what's been said.
34:03
And I'm being skeptical out loud, which I actually think makes for a better
34:06
interview, if I'm honest.
34:09
But it does mean that on more than one occasion, I've had to eat my own words.
34:15
So question 2.
34:19
Ah, the stories.
34:21
Anyway, question 2 is about capacity.
34:23
Can I sustain this?
34:25
It's not about appetite, i.e., do I fancy doing this?
34:30
It's, it's, it's not that at all.
34:33
And so if the honest answer is I could absolutely do this 8 out of 10 every
34:38
week, I just don't want to, that's probably just your typical Tuesday afternoon.
34:46
I love laughing at my own jokes, especially for me anyway.
34:49
But before we finish on this, there's one more piece, uh, and I think it's
34:52
actually, it's one of the big step changes that's happened in the last few
34:54
years.
34:57
And of course it's AI, right?
34:59
Um, that changes a lot of this stuff and the distance between having an
35:04
interesting idea and a decision I can actually act on is huge, right?
35:09
There's a huge gulf between those two things because to answer the question, I
35:12
need to know what's on my plate, what's already on the team's plate, what we
35:15
tried 18 months ago, what the trends are, what the research says, how are people
35:19
using the website, what did or didn't work, what didn't, didn't work on my
35:22
competitor's site.
35:26
I mean, what's going on in our business right now?
35:28
Where's that cash flow at?
35:29
What resource do we have?
35:30
There is a lot to think through.
35:34
And finding the space to have that level of thought is not always that easy.
35:39
It is always profitable, by the way, some of the best ideas I've ever had have
35:42
come from being on a mountain or in the ocean.
35:45
Which is never, never taught at business school.
35:48
So to combat this, one of the great things about AI, and I appreciate AI is not
35:52
all great, but one of the great things about AI is, and again, this is totally
35:56
our thing.
36:01
We built something called SAM.
36:04
You may have heard me talk about this on the show, Slingshot AI Mentor.
36:08
I know some of you use it.
36:09
It sits on top of Claude.
36:11
Um, so we're big fans of Claude.
36:13
We've sort of gone all in on Claude.
36:14
We've created this sort of e-com layer, which we call SAM.
36:18
And one of the things that I love about SAM, one of the things that I can
36:21
actually do with it is interrogate it.
36:25
And that's the really useful bit for me.
36:28
Um, because if you've got it set up right, or if you've set up right, like
36:31
there's a wrong way to do it, but if you've got it set up as we have it set up,
36:34
it knows where the business is at.
36:37
It knows what resources we've got going on, what the projects we've got going
36:40
on, what would make sense, how we could schedule stuff.
36:43
And it helps think through a lot of those things quite quickly.
36:47
So I can say, for example, here's what Adam said about mobile conversion.
36:52
Given where we're at, given what we've already got running, um, given what we
36:55
tried last year, does this make sense for us as a business to tackle this now?
36:59
You can see the analytics, you can see what's going off in mobile conversion.
37:03
And if it does make sense for us, what's the, uh, sort of order, what's the
37:06
process that we should go through, what's the one thing that we should do now.
37:12
And I've found that those conversations take anywhere from 15 minutes to maybe 2
37:17
or 3 hours, um, where you're pushing back with AI and you're challenging things.
37:23
But it's a lot— I mean, those 2 or 3 hours are a lot better than the
37:24
alternative, right?
37:27
Um, and so really, really valuable to us now.
37:31
Again, use AI grounded in your thinking.
37:33
It is not magic.
37:34
It is not, despite what people may think, an all-knowing being.
37:39
It's not here to replace God.
37:41
I'm definitely wary of the hype.
37:44
It doesn't do the thing for you.
37:46
It doesn't get me in front of a camera.
37:48
It doesn't record the reels, but it does close the gap between me doing it and
37:51
not doing it.
37:54
And that's important.
37:56
Okay, and so bringing all of these sort of findings together about the two
38:00
questions, drilling down, uh, how do I close that gap?
38:06
The final thing to think about once you've got your handful of ideas that have
38:11
passed both questions— do not do all of them.
38:16
And again, this is where entrepreneurial optimism blinds you to the logic.
38:20
Uh, don't do all of them.
38:22
Ask the one thing question, which I think is a really powerful question.
38:26
Um, what's the single thing I can do that won't create overwhelm for me or the
38:30
team, but that's gonna move the needle the most in our business?
38:34
I'm looking for the one thing.
38:36
I'm not looking for 5.
38:38
Um, I'm not looking for any more than one right now.
38:41
What's the thing that we should focus on as a team?
38:43
And I think we get dramatically more done when we do that.
38:47
And I would say This is my most valuable lesson in doing 300 episodes, however
38:53
many interviews, talking to however many experts across ecommerce.
39:00
The simplicity of this really is the thing that's made the key step changes in
39:03
our business.
39:06
Everything else has sort of functioned on top of this.
39:11
So since this is episode 300 Uh, and we are nearing the end.
39:16
Let me tell you how I started the podcast.
39:21
Um, because these are the questions that I get asked quite a lot.
39:24
So I'm going to run through the questions.
39:26
Uh, how did I start the podcast?
39:28
A friend of mine told me I had a great face for radio.
39:32
It still makes me laugh.
39:34
Uh, what a legend.
39:35
Um, but you know what?
39:37
I, I liked podcasting.
39:39
Uh, I thought podcasting was fun, as odd as that sounds.
39:44
That was it.
39:44
Um, that was the strategy in many ways.
39:46
It was just fun because I'd already got the kit.
39:49
Um, back in 2012, we ran a podcast for one of our ecommerce companies, and it
39:53
was a beauty company.
39:56
And the reason we did it was because we needed to do something different in
39:59
marketing that didn't cost a whole great deal.
40:02
And setting up a podcast was a new thing back then.
40:05
Um, and you know what?
40:06
But that podcast made the beauty business hundreds of thousands of pounds in
40:10
ways I never would have expected and couldn't predict.
40:14
I would never have predicted, uh, it working how it worked.
40:18
So I knew from that, uh, little experiment that podcasts did do something, um,
40:22
even if I couldn't really tell you what.
40:27
Uh, and I, I was doing a lot of ecommerce coaching at the time.
40:34
Traveling the world, which was great, doing, you know, going all over the world,
40:36
New Zealand, Australia, everywhere.
40:37
It was great.
40:38
I love doing that.
40:40
Um, this is all pre-COVID obviously, and we were traveling.
40:42
And so the podcast was a really big help.
40:45
It made sort of some sort of rough sense to start the eCommerce Podcast.
40:50
Um, I think it just elevates you sometimes in the eyes of people.
40:53
It's like writing a book.
40:54
The book might not be any good, but you just say published author and it just
40:56
gives you a sort of kudos, I suppose.
40:59
Um, but the first season of the podcast was basically me just talking.
41:04
I think we had one or two guests on during that first season, but it was
41:06
basically me just talking.
41:08
And you know what, by the end of season one, I was like, I was bored of my own
41:10
voice, genuinely.
41:12
I was like, I'm not doing that.
41:14
And so that's when we started doing the interviewing thing properly, and we
41:17
learned a lot in the first two seasons— how to do interviews, what's, what
41:21
works, what doesn't work, what's engaging, what's not engaging.
41:24
And we've never ever really looked back.
41:26
To this day, I don't ever script an episode.
41:29
I don't script the questions I ask guests.
41:33
The questions I ask are all whatever is in my head at the time, which makes
41:35
sense.
41:38
I'm always trying to think of who's listening to the show, what would people
41:39
want to know.
41:42
Um, and I like the conversational flow.
41:44
I like the fact that they're not scripted questions.
41:47
I like the fact they're not pre-programmed questions.
41:49
It's just like, here we go, let's just see where this takes us.
41:52
And you always end up at some interesting places.
41:54
But one of the really things, you know, what I— next question, what's one of
41:57
the— what's the most popular episode of the podcast?
42:02
Um, when you look at the analytics, which I did recently in preparing for this
42:06
show, I would not have predicted the answer on what some of the most popular
42:09
episodes of the show were.
42:14
Um, I, I, I And honestly, the answer is the very first episode, episode number
42:20
1, that episode where I had no clue what I was doing.
42:26
I just sat down with a microphone and started chatting.
42:29
Um, 7 years later, uh, you know, we've improved our craft.
42:35
We've had some great guests.
42:37
Um, and still the most listened to thing is the one that I made before I learned
42:40
anything.
42:44
How does that even work?
42:46
I don't know.
42:47
Anyway, I think it's very humbling and very freeing all at the same time.
42:53
It just, it amuses me.
42:55
It's still the thing that people go back and listen to.
42:58
And I, maybe I don't, maybe the reason I question is because I don't do it when
43:00
I subscribe to a podcast.
43:02
I never go back and listen to episode 1.
43:04
I'm always just listening to what's in front of me.
43:08
But there you go.
43:09
So what's the podcast done for the business, Matt?
43:11
Tell us that.
43:12
Um, how has it been valuable?
43:15
What's it ever— what's it been worth, I suppose, financially?
43:18
Well, it's worth saying right at the start, we never did the whole sponsorship
43:22
thing, um, for the podcast.
43:26
We never, we never chased that.
43:28
That was never going to be the way that this show paid for itself, um, was me
43:33
going and getting, I don't know, Klaviyo or Shopify to sponsor the podcast.
43:39
Um, and so I guess if I was measuring it on the traditional method of monetising
43:43
podcasts with sponsorships, it's a bit of a failure.
43:48
And we tried one or two things over the years, but we never really sort of
43:50
connected with anything.
43:53
But every single week for 7 years, I've sat down, had an hour with an expert or
43:57
a founder who knows something that I don't, which is something I don't know how
44:01
you begin to measure.
44:05
The financial value of that is not something that I've tracked.
44:07
It's not something I would even know how to track, um, but it will be worth
44:11
millions.
44:14
I've no doubt it's worth millions.
44:16
I'd even just thinking about the conversation with Adam Pearce, I can see the
44:18
impact that's had on conversion.
44:21
So if you multiply that by all the conversations I've had, obviously some have
44:25
had a bigger financial impact for us than others, um, it's millions.
44:29
It is absolutely millions.
44:31
But there's something And, you know, it's great.
44:34
I, I, I enjoy the fact that we've made more money thanks to doing the show, and
44:37
it's been worthwhile, um, doing it.
44:40
Again, not in ways predicted, but one of the sort of the side benefits, I
44:44
suppose, of doing a podcast like this is the relationships that you form.
44:49
So if I think about, um, people like Jared Mitchell, um, he was on the show back
44:53
in episode 74, which makes no sense to me, and he came on, I think I think, um,
44:58
when I was doing an episode, uh, a few, maybe last year, um, the first of a
45:02
3-people interview I did.
45:06
Anyway, um, Jared is great, uh, become really great friends with Jared.
45:12
He's been, him and his family have come stayed at my house, um, here in the UK.
45:16
We, me and my daughter have been to his house and had some fun with him over on
45:19
the West Coast of the US there.
45:22
Brilliant.
45:23
All because of the show, right?
45:24
And he's not the only one in any way.
45:26
I've got lots of really good friends as a result of doing the podcast.
45:31
And then there's people like Chris George who came on back in episode 130 to
45:35
talk about subscriptions, and that ended up opening up some doors.
45:39
I ended up going to SubSummit and recording a podcast live there.
45:41
I could not have opened those doors any other way, and my business has benefited
45:46
massively as a result of that one conversation.
45:50
How do I put financial value on that?
45:52
I don't, but the relationship was the thing there.
45:56
And it's not what was the plan.
45:58
It's not how we started.
45:59
It's not what we thought, let's go make some good friends.
46:01
Let's do a podcast.
46:02
Um, just remember, this was my best friend Tony.
46:05
Thank you, Tony, saying that I had a great face for radio.
46:08
It's how it all started.
46:10
So if you are sat there, this is another question.
46:12
Should I do a podcast, uh, for my business?
46:17
Whether you're an agency, whether you're an ecommerce business, uh, selling
46:19
widgets to whoever on the web.
46:23
Should you run a podcast?
46:25
And the answer is categorically yes, you should do it.
46:30
Would be my one piece of advice.
46:31
But do it with the condition attached, and you should, hopefully, if you were
46:35
listening to the first part of the show, already know what that condition is.
46:40
Only do it if you can be consistent at it, right?
46:45
Don't worry about the download numbers, just be hitting it 8 out of 10 week in,
46:48
week out.
46:52
Rarely do I check my download numbers.
46:55
I could care less, actually, what they are because they don't mean anything.
46:59
I see that they're growing, which is always nice.
47:02
And I see that we're getting new listeners every single week we put an episode
47:05
out, which is great.
47:08
I see the repeat downloads are good, which is great.
47:11
So we, I know the basics, but I'm, I don't get wrapped up in them.
47:15
The thing which concerns me the most is is, am I delivering value to the people
47:18
listening to the show?
47:22
And am I having great conversations with interesting people?
47:25
If I focus on those things, genuinely amazing things happen for your business in
47:29
ways that you cannot forecast at the start.
47:33
At least that's my story, and that's my experience.
47:37
This podcast is definitely not the best idea that I had in 2019, not even close.
47:43
I think I had way more interesting ideas that year.
47:46
I remember that was a year we were different office to what we're in now.
47:49
I remember where the show started.
47:51
I had two, um, huge whiteboards in my office.
47:56
I mean, when I say huge, they're the same size as an, um, if you know your
47:59
woodwork, an 8x4 sheet.
48:02
Uh, so 2.44 meters across and 1.22 meters down, 8 foot by 4 foot.
48:08
I had two of those in my office, just crammed full of stuff.
48:11
So we had some great ideas that year.
48:15
It's just that this particular one, the eCommerce Podcast, I have been able to
48:21
do at a consistent 8 out of 10 for 7 years, week after week.
48:28
And that, I think, is the entire reason it has worked.
48:32
So should you do a podcast?
48:33
Absolutely, go for it.
48:34
Go and do it.
48:37
Just be consistent at it.
48:38
And then Well, maybe put it on your list.
48:41
Go find your list, the notebook, the doc, the Slack channel, wherever your note
48:45
graveyard is, and run it through the questions.
48:50
Question 1: Does it move the needle?
48:51
Question 2: Can I consistently do this at an 8 out of 10 level?
48:55
Where something fails, question 2, ask whether it's you or the task before you
48:58
delete it.
49:02
And I reckon if you do that, most of you will end up with 2 or 3 things things
49:05
that will really, really transform your business.
49:10
Um, and that's the key lesson that I have learned from doing 300 episodes,
49:15
because every good idea— and there are so many of them out there— only works
49:20
when it goes through that framework, genuinely.
49:25
Otherwise, you just overwhelm.
49:27
But you get this sort of enormous relief when you put them through the framework
49:31
and you get to focus on work and work on things that actually grow.
49:36
So hopefully that sparks some ideas for you.
49:39
And to make it easy, of course, this being a solo episode, we've just got, we've
49:41
got a real simple freebie for you.
49:45
It's a single page freebie.
49:48
Probably won't be single page by the time it's formatted and drawn, but it'll
49:51
be, the idea is for it to be a single page because I don't want it.
49:55
I thought a 12-page workbook about avoiding overwhelm would be a bit ironic.
50:03
Even for me, that would be a bit ironic.
50:05
Anyway, in the freebie, we'll put the two questions, the Drop, Delegate, and
50:08
Systematise diagnostic for when something fails, the One Thing Selector, and
50:12
we'll throw in a few AI prompts that we use that you can cut and paste straight
50:16
into Claude or into SAM if you use SAM.
50:20
And of course, if you want to find out more about SAM, just head to the website.
50:23
But this will help you grill any idea against your actual business rather than
50:29
against fantasy version of your week, which is in your head at the moment.
50:35
So the link will be in the show notes or in the description if you're on
50:37
YouTube.
50:40
Or of course, you can just head to the website ecommercepodcast.net.
50:44
That's ecommercepodcast.net and click on the resource link.
50:48
I would love to know your thoughts on this one.
50:51
What's on your list?
50:53
That's been failing the questions.
50:55
Or the two questions for a little while.
50:58
Do reach out to me on social media and let me know.
51:01
And if you want to watch me try and take my advice, I'm the one on Instagram
51:04
slowly getting better at talking to a camera.
51:08
Bear with me for the next few weeks as I move, but hopefully sort of September,
51:11
October time, things will pick up again.
51:15
But 300 episodes in, thank you so much for being here for them.
51:20
Genuinely, thank you.
51:21
There is no version of this show, regardless of my cleverness, business that
51:24
works without you guys listening at the other end.
51:29
And of course, if no one's told you today, let me be the first: you are awesome.
51:34
Yes, you are created awesome.
51:35
It's just a burden you have to bear.
51:38
But that's it from me.
51:39
Have a wonderful week wherever you are in the world.
51:43
I will see you next time.
51:45
Bye for now.