Transcript for:
Print-on-Demand Business Strategy

over the past year my team and I have had the absolute pleasure of getting to work with thousands of students from all around the world sharing our experience of what it took for us to grow eight different brands from Zer to a million dollar plus and the results have far exceeded our wildest expectation they're people just like you or I people who have gone from0 to $889,000 in a matter of weeks or somebody else who went from 0 to $35,000 in sales in just 6 weeks people are doing1 ,000 months this person did €12,000 in just under four months this person is now up to doing over $220,000 a month and it took them just 3 months to get there and the list goes on and on now the new opportunity that you find in front of you is the culmination of a year-long massive group effort including an incredible team of 15 people who have been working day and night Gathering feedback from thousands of students going through hundreds of hours of coaching calls and we've invested 50 ,000 Plus in production to bring to you what we believe is the most comprehensive e-commerce training available anywhere in the planet completely for free and I'm so confident in being able to say that because quite honestly I've just been doing this for years and years and even though I've done $25 million in sales all that really means is that I've made 25 million in1 mistakes and so I'm sharing the exact strategies that allowed us to go from Zer to a million dollar in sales eight different times and I've even exit from several of those Brands including stores like yoga stay and history te's in fact we just had our largest month ever and did over $215,000 on our Shopify store this December we're not only sharing this based off of our own personal experience but also what has gotten our students the most success and allowed people to scale from zero to tens of thousands starting from being complete beginners the problem with free however is that we as humans tend to devalue something that we don't have to pay for and moreover we live in a extremely noisy world that's filled with lots of content being created by people that are quite honestly not qualified to be talking on the subjects that they are which results in legitimate well-founded information getting lost in the mix a lot of times so bottom line you have every tool right here at your fingertips congratulations for finding it you've done a big First Step already so I'm so grateful that you're here the best part there has never been more demand than right now for graphic designs and products that we are selling through Our Brands which means that there has never been a better time to start a profitable print OnDemand e-commerce brand and more than that we are not talking about Etsy or merch by Amazon where you're just throwing up designs and then pretty much hoping for the best this new and improved course centers around one simple goal helping you build a profitable legitimate ecomerce brand that will grow not just this month or next month but next year and 5 years down the line this time around instead of teaching it topic by topic we are doing it in stages so that you are truly just learning everything that you need to know exactly when you need need to know it so we guide you step by step sharing the tools shortcuts Lessons Learned and your brand Grows Right alongside of the content but then more than that we wanted to bring new experience and other perspectives so we brought in coaches who have done multiple eight figures in sales collectively we even have one of the most successful students joining us sharing their point of view from somebody who has literally just gone through this we've also completely revamped the materials and tools to be the absolute top quality to make your Journey as easy as possible first up we have our tracker that helps you keep tabs in your business your mindset your personal growth so that you're able to see your progress and how you're improving over time second we have the master checklist this is your straightforward step-by-step guide so you always know exactly where you are and what's coming up next covering everything from how to set up your printify account Click by click to your Shopify conversion rate optimization checklist to make sure that we have our store as optimized and ready to take sales as possible and third is the mirror board this is for any of you visual Learners out there like myself this is complete with flowcharts mind maps and is your awesome go-to quick reference guide as you're going through this process to get caught up on any of the lessons and easily refer back to and pick up right where you left off one of the biggest takeaways we had from the last course is that strategies and tactics are honestly pretty useless if we don't become the kind of person that is capable of building a successful business that's why in this course we spend over 4 hours rewiring ourselves as humans to identify our habits our beliefs and sharing real tactics and tools that we can use to reshape ourselves into the kind of person who is able to be successful and ultimately able to see through the goals that we've set out to achieve and there are two communities that we offer in order to help guide you and support you along this journey there's The Free We scale Community where we share the entire course resources broken down Lesson by lesson but way more importantly than that it's an amazing community of people who are all going through the same exact Journey as you this is an awesome place to ask for feedback share challenges you're having share your wins and so if you're serious about going through this course I highly recommend joining that community and second we have the paid we scale university community I want to be upfront that this is a paid Community cost $129 per month this is where we myself the coaches Meg we run weekly group coaching calls and workshops where you're able to get your questions answered by myself and the coaches and other students but let me be super clear this entire course is completely for free and there's no gatekeeping nothing is held back so you don't have to pay a dime you never will for any of this content this community is just an optional place to get real-time help and support and join an awesome environment of like-minded people who are all supporting each other celebrating each other's wins and helping each other out every step of the way so here's a quick look at how the course is structured so in stage zero is where we lay our foundations this is where we cover the course core principles setting realistic expectations and establishing our new identity as an entrepreneur this is the epitome of sharpening our axe before we jump in and start chopping down the tree then in stage one is research this is where we make sure that all of the effort that we're going to put in in later stages is well founded based on things that are already working in the market this includes the niche the designs and really understanding our customer before we even start building our very first design and once we've done that in stage two is where we start the building this is where we establish our brand we start building our Shopify store and implementing our best practices and get all of our accounts set up and this was a big lesson from the last time is that we're setting up all the accounts and getting all that red tape stuff out of the way so that when we get to the later stages we're able to just jump right in and get right to making our designs and growing our brand and don't worry we've also prioritized making sure that you have the cheapest offers so that we are minimizing the amount of upfront cost so that we're not like racking up monthly expenses or anything of the sort until we're ready for that point then stage three is Design This is where you're going to be seeing step by step how to use the latest design and AI tools to create visually appealing highquality mockups that showcase and increase the perceived value of your designs which you're also going to be seeing how we create a high volume of extremely cable design and in stage four is testing this is where we're going to be running our very first ads and starting to analyze our data and the whole goal of this stage is to go from zero to profitability in our ads this is a stage that is heavily invested in your own Learning and Development and we're bringing the best tools and resources and coaches to be able to make this stage as clear and concise for you as possible and in stage five is where things start to get really exciting CU at this level is where we start laying out the strategies and processes that we use to go from 10 to $100,000 per month in sales so after we've hit $10,000 in sales we're going to share all the tools and tactics and strategies that we use to go from 10 to 100,000 then once we're at stage six this is where we're learning about going from 100,000 to Beyond this is our scaling systems building a team automating our processes and really starting to elevate oursel up so that we're working on the business and finally we have stage seven which is seven figures and Beyond so after we've surpassed the million dooll in sales Mark we lay out what is the Horizon look like what are all the possibilities that we could entertain and then how do we evaluate which one works the best for us this is where I'm going to be sharing with you my own personal experience from preparing to sell and ultimately exiting from multiple Brands What it Took the things that I wish I knew that would have sped up the process a lot and how to set our next goalpost of what we're shooting for whether if that's to build a brand that we just continue to run and maintain ourselves while being able to take back some of our time and have our team run it for us and then one of the main questions we get understandably is like why is this all free why are you doing this and I've been in your shoes before where you're evaluating what business you want to start and I got sucked in by the clever marketing and the appeal of a course and long story short it's on me but I paid about $5,000 in money that I didn't have it all went on credit cards and when I got inside the course and I realized that I needed a lot more money than that to even just buy the inventory to get started so I was left sitting there feeling like an idiot and that was the most demoralizing experience and it was very close to derailing me from ever starting a business at all and I don't want anybody to have that experience so if I'm able to help even a single person avoid falling into that trap then this is all well worth it but obviously we all have businesses to run and bills to pay being able to make content like this completely for free is not cheap luckily there's a beautiful alignment when we recommend tools that we actually use and that we know you'll actually need so we've negotiated deals with these platforms to save you money and if you sign up with your link we get a small commission and absolutely no extra cost to you it helps support us and the rest of our team to be able to make more free content like this it truly means a lot to us and the team when you use them again it cost you absolutely nothing as a thank you to you one of the gifts is a free Shopify theme download that you can instantly import into your store this is a massive timesaver and this is based on the store template that we use to generate millions of dollars in sales so you can get your store up and running like that so much faster and the second is free credits to Mystic pod so you can start creating designs right away without spending any extra money so when you get to the design stage your account will already be pre-loaded with credits ready to go so we're going to go ahead and create those two accounts right now so first we're going to create the Shopify account which you can click the link down below and it's going to open this page here which the cool thing is the deal that we've worked out with Shopify at the time of recording this is that you're not going to pay a single dime it's free for 3 days and then the first 3 months first 90 days are just $1 a month which is insane if we're following along with the program and following the process we should be launched well before that point but you enter your email here and click submit and then you enter your information on login screen to create your free account and again this is only going to cost you a dollar but for right now what we're going to do is go over to the plans and select one of the plans you can do any of them and they range down from the basic up to Shopify plus and the basic plan is $29 a month and you can click that one right here to get started then we're going to enter our credit card information to make sure that we lock in the deal and then we're going to take a screenshot of this and then to get your thank you gift as a show of our appreciation for all your support just going to click the Google form link somewhere around this video and upload it second is printify which is our favorite print on demand fulfillment partner same deal you get a discount we get a small referral fee and everybody wins so you can click the link down below and then the deal that we've worked out with printify is that by when you sign up and create your account then you go to upgrade by using discount code Chris you'll get a full month free of printify Premium this dramatically lowers all the costs of your products now yes you definitely could hold off on using these deals but honestly they're changing all the time so if at the time that you're seeing this the deals are still the same then I highly recommend locking them in now is worst case scenario you're out $3 for Shopify and you can cancel the printify subscription later on so right now you have two paths in front of you path one is you can keep doing exactly what you're doing keep hopping from shiny object to shiny object wrestling with self-doubt and wondering if this whole e-commerce thing can actually work for you and give you some of the freedom that you crave or you can burn the boats starting by treating this as if you've just dropped like I did $5,000 on it and I want you to set that money aside and if it helps imagine you really invested it into yourself and then go through each one of the lessons laid out in front of you use the materials show up every day for yourself as if you were $5,000 out of pocket but you're really not cuz frankly that is what we could easily be charging but this isn't about us this is about you taking the steps towards a life of freedom and fulfillment and it's also about joining a movement of people who are not looking for get rich quick who know that they have the potential to create something great and have simply just been looking all this time for the right opportunity to go all in I'm here to tell you that this is that opportunity but the truth is none of this none of the past year the thousands students who have shared their feedback all the updated materials truly none of that matters if you don't decide right here and now that you are done that you've had enough and you are ready to make the investment in yourself for a real long lasting change if you want to take the island you have to burn the boats you have to remove any chance or thought of retreating or turning back to the way that things previously were so what I'd offer to you is set a goal in mind set a Target date I think a realistic date is 2 to 3 months and then two is set aside an amount of money I recommend between $500 to $1,000 so that you're able to leave all your excuses behind all the past stories that have held Us in place and you're able to fully commit yourself to building something that can be great you have every tool right here at your fingertips and there's a community of students and coaches who are here who are ready to support you every step of the way and now it's up to you so without further Ado let's scale to new heights [Music] together to kick things off we're going to get started by covering our business foundations and in this lesson we're going to be answering a couple of key questions to make sure that we're all in the right spot first off we're going to be answering what is the ultimate goal that we're setting out to achieve like we're about to invest a lot of time obviously it's all free but our time is valuable so we want to make sure that we're in the right place and that we're setting ourselves up for Success so we're going to cover what the goal actually is what we can expect along the way answering questions like how long does a take in order to see success what's required in order to get started in terms of how much time money previous experience do we really need to have in order to have a good shot at success and how to maximize our chances of success so we're going to look at case studies of students who have seen the best results and there were some things that we learned that they were doing fundamentally differently than other people that fortunately we're able to learn from and then bring it into our own experience as we get started and then last we're going to address a lot of the common concerns a lot of these what about what if all these questions that pop around in our head and they're all legitimate questions it's good thing to be as informed as possible before we get started to make sure there's nothing that we're missing and to start off our goal of what we'll be building in this course here together is at a very high level a brand that brings happiness to our customers and that we're shipping out products and creating designs that put out something positive into the world and not just because you know it feels better and it's a more fun business to be running but it's also capable of generating up to $100,000 a month in revenue and we're going to be aiming for $5 to $220,000 per month in net profit we'll talk about reasonable expectations and stuff but like this is the goal that we're setting throughout this course together and we're aiming to be laying the groundwork for something that it totally depends on your own goals and what you're aiming for but ultimately the brand that we run nowadays we spend 4 to 8 hours per week Max in order to maintain it now we could put a lot more time into it and grow it much larger if we chose to but my wife and I were happy with where it's at like this past year did just over a million dollars in sales with relatively little effort but obviously we've been doing this for a long time so this whole course this whole thing is about sharing the lessons and experiences that we've gained along the way and also it's a brand that or a business model that you're able to run from anywhere in the world so we've done this while we've been traveling like on cruise ships which I wouldn't recommend the internet's pretty spotty but you can do it and you can work anywhere in the world that you know as long as you have a laptop and Wi-Fi and finally it's a sellable business so we've had the Good Fortune of exiting from multiple Brands and that's one possible like end goal and we'll talk about what things we should have in place before we even get started to make sure that you know we're setting ourselves up for success but this is very subjective it's totally up to you and your own lifestyle and where you're at in life and what your goals are and these numbers probably seem lofty for some of you watching for some of you it's not large enough that's okay cuz we're giving you the fundamentals the blueprint that you can then turn it into whatever you want and a lot of people when I ask like what's your 12month goal or like where would you like to see your brand be at picturing down the road and a lot of people they just say they want to see signs that this can work and that they're able to make it sustainable for them and that's totally okay and for everybody it's different some people want an extra couple hundred bucks a month in net profit someone 5,000 10,000 the range completely varies and that's totally okay and the important thing is that you're here and you're just thinking about these questions for yourself and evaluating as we get started but you don't need to have a concrete answer but in general what we're trying to do this is a graphic from Robert kiyosaki's book Rich Dad Poor Dad and it's the cash flow quadrant in the top leand corner you have like this whole thing represents the life cycle of building and growing a business and in the beginning a lot of us start off myself included as employees we work for somebody else and maybe then we start a business and in the very beginning when we start that business we are technically self-employed we own our own a company technically but we are the sole operator so we are essentially creating a new job for oursel and over time and what the goal of these stages is you know aimed at doing is graduating us from that stage to the stage of being a business owner and at the business owner stage which it took me years to learn how to do this for a long time I thought I was you know big fancy business owner and I realized I really wasn't I just was self-employed essentially and I created a new job for myself which is totally okay it was you know uh more fulfilling for me than personally than being in like a 9 to5 But ultimately the point that I wanted to get to and where I want all of us to be able to get to if we so choose it's becoming a business owner which is the top right hand corner and this is where you build a system that works for you you have employees or you know contractors working underneath you that are able to handle the day-to-day operations and that frees up your time so you can spend it you please you can spend time in the business if you want to ramp things up you can make some key hires so they're able to grow The Business Without You all these different options we just want to have them available to us and the final stage is when you become an investor and you know move on to like that's outside the scope of this course and the business model we're going to be talking about but ultimately where we want to get you is to that top right hand corner being a true business owner not just self-employed and to quote Tony Robins without an exit strategy all you have is a job an expensive job a job with a lot of responsibility and risk the purpose of a business is to build a system that can make money when you're not there and ultimately sell for multiple so an example of this is what we did with yoga which ended up doing about $3.6 million in sales scaled to over 100,000 customers and here's a screenshot of that dashboard and I apologize for smattering my name all over it it's just lots of people take screenshots and then use it to like sell BS courses and stuff actually fun fact had somebody post one of my screenshots in my own community and like in the free community and we are Avid we moderate the crap out of that and anybody who does anything like that we remove them instantly but when I realize they're posting it in this community pretty good chance they're doing it elsewhere they're almost definitely so I don't want to contribute to that but anyway here's a screenshot and then historical sales outline this was some of the stuff that some of the materials we put together when we were selling the business just for an interesting visual if you will and again we we came out of the gate like swinging pretty hard because it was during Co so fortunately we've had lots of other brands to be able to replicate that success but something to keep an eye on whenever you're seeing screenshots from other content creators and stuff is take a look at the date range at the bottom and make sure that you're not looking at screenshots that are just from like 2020 to 2021 which this brand we sold at the beginning of 22 but just something to keep an eye on but we eventually grew it we got the trademark we broke down like what our top five best sellers were which this is something interesting to take away is that we had five shirts that were resp responsible for a large majority of the revenue like that one shirt at the top there sold $113,000 worth so two shirts were over six figures and those are the designs that we're shooting for so we had a product catalog of about 530 different products and we started off with print on demand and then eventually added on which pron man we're going to talk about is just the Fulfillment model eventually we added on other products like yoga mats equipment that sort of thing and the really fun part was that we were able to build a cool Community around it and there were people that really loved the brand and you know they came back to buy from us again and again cuz we were able to give them a really good experience they posted about us on social media and that sort of thing and this is the kind of snowball that we're going to start building together so that 6 months a year down the road you're starting to see the same kind of social proof and people buying your products and not just buying them but loving them and loving your brand and what you stand for and I know all those screenshots probably looks like a lot a lot of numbers and stuff floating around but I want to share that this is what it looked like when we first started very Bare Bones very very hum beginnings and that's okay like everybody starts somewhere so you absolutely do not need to have any kind of previous technical experience or marketing background or anything of the sort like I used to consider myself not very creative I've worked on it but I didn't have like the skill set or anything that would lend itself to this I just learned from trial and error and the whole point of this course is to help you avoid some of that the errors and just the lessons learned and we ultimately ended up working with a fulfillment partner where we had all of our inventory all the yoga mats and stuff and so it became like a pretty full-fledged operation I show this to demonstrate one an example of potential brand that you could build or like what a brand could look like and then also that we started off with print on demand like just t-shirts and then it expanded over time so there's lots of different Avenues so if you have something in your mind of what you'd like to build this is just simply the starting point we're giving you the best possible chance of success to get out of the gate and get positive cash flow get you know monthly profit coming in at least $5 to $110,000 a month in monthly profit so then you're able to reinvest it and grow it into whatever you'd like and along the way more than the brand that we're going to be building I used to think that it was just about the brand and like you know I judge my own success just based on the sales numbers which I think is a pretty normal thing to do as a complete beginner but in hindsight the thing that I've really gained from all that experience that you are going to gain as you go through this process whether if you realize it or not is a ton of new skills like you're going to be doing niche research you're going to be learning about branding and product development how to be running paid marketing about organic marketing conversion rate optimization Supply Chain management finances and cash management and If This Were you know a college in or university like some kind of higher education institution like at Penn State for example I literally went on where I went to school I went on Penn State's like course curriculum and I found the classes and then their average credit is $11,200 per credit the average class is three credits so if you were to replace nich research would be marketing 519 branding would be four marketing 497 product development would be graphic design 102 paid marketing would be marketing 401 marketing 473 conversion rate optimization would be IST 250 and SCM 200 accounting 211 all of those classes combined and this is just the bare minimum this is just all I can fit on a slide that adds up to at least $28,000 that you would be paying like I paid way more than that for my college education I'm sure if you went to school you probably paid more than that too especially nowadays but all this said and done we're very conscious of the fact that when things are free we tend to un as humans we tend to undervalue them if we don't have any price assigned to it so we can beat that beat ourselves to the punch by seeing the immense value that we're going to be learning as we go through this process and what we would be paying if we were going the typical like higher education route now course overview what we're going to be doing so to recap the brands that this is going to be based on is Yoga say which we grew to 3.5 3.6 million in sales and was ultimately acquired we had a 3pl brand that was 3.5 so I've done everything under the sun print on man 3pl Drop Shipping you name it I've tried it not saying that's a good thing I should have just picked one thing and stuck with it but anyway dots only connect when you're looking in Reverse but 3pl brand which was also acquired Drop Shipping brand that did 1.1 million acquired so all of these Brands and I've been doing this for a long time and I have just as many failures to show for it but been doing this since 2016 I have tens of thousands of hours and this is not just me this is Meg my wife the coaches like there's a lot of collective experience and time that went into being able to bring these materials together and share these lessons and I started with basically zero actually less than that negative negative and here's more screenshots just so you know this stuff actually works and again I apologize for my name being smattered everywhere and I also have a ton of failures so many more failures than wins like this brand called royal cats where we sold cat jewelry or zodiology which I was just like never really passionate about this store but we tried it because I saw that it was popular on Google Trends Serene jewelry which that's just about as lukewarm of a name as you could possibly hope for and I sold shirts like this save the chubby mermaids and what do you know it didn't work out too well so reason I highlight that is the show that I've all the successes like $25 million in sales whatever all that really means is that I've made 25 million and one mistakes and our philosophy myself Meg all the coaches our philosophy of the way that we teach here is that we teach from personal experience and that includes what is worked for me what is working for me in the present day what mistakes I've made the many many mistakes and what lessons I learned nor normally the hard way and that's it so everything here that we're going to be covering is simply what has worked for me in the past what mistakes I made made and then bearing all sharing the good the bad the ugly so the reason I highlight that is to show that this is not us saying that this is like the golden ticket or anything of the sort what we're teaching here is the fundamentals we're teaching the basics of how to build a good business it just so happens to be print on demand we just so happen to be using Shopify and you know the marketing strategies that we'll talk about but that's really it for the people who are interested in just hearing Real World Experience what has worked not just for us but for all of the students we've talked about already then this is for you and so everything you'll hear either comes from something that I done the coaches have done or something that we have directly observed from working with one of our students and in the course it's broken down into stages which like we talked about in the introduction it's broken down this way so that it's it goes in tandem with how the business is growing the first course we did it just based on topics like here's everything you need to know about Facebook ads here's everything about Shopify we did away with that because we realized that it was just inundating people with information before they actually needed it in some cases and that was leading to analysis paralysis so in stage zero we're going to cover our foundations which is where you are right now so we're covering our business foundations and personal foundations like this is laying out the groundwork of what kind of business we're going to be building setting realistic expectations then second we're going to talk about how we hone the most important asset in the entire business which is you and this is the piece and like the whole principle behind this course was that I had helped or the original course at the very least was I had helped a lot of people that I cared about start businesses but for whatever reason it was always falling short and I realized that the thing that was falling short was that I wasn't addressing the person so that's what we're doing in foundations how to become the type of person that we need to be in order to be successful at this because we can share all the best strategies and I had good strategies for a while but I didn't start seeing like actual success until I started taking myself more seriously and prioritize my own growth above the business's growth then we're going to go into research and break it down showing e-commerce research like why are we here to begin with then Niche research and design research and it's going to be Meg and and the coaches guiding you through that process of how we evaluate different opportunities or like basically how do we pick what Niche or Market we want to be building a brand for so that we don't end up making the wrong decision and have to double back later on and in the second stage we're going to be building all of your accounts getting all that stuff out of the way and this is something we learned from the first time was that what we were building the accounts and setting stuff up as we went through and that was leading to a lot of confusion as people were trying to learn and then having to switch back into like setup mode so we get all that stuff out of the way in the very beginning then stage three is when we start designing our mockups and our actual designs and that's like the meat of this whole business model is the quality of the designs we're putting out then in stage four this is where it really like you go from being just passively like learning this is where we take the leap and we rip off the Band-Aid and we become real entrepreneurs because we become real entrepreneurs the day that we go to the market and we get feedback and we're going to guide you through we learned a ton about how to better help people at this stage from the first course cuz this is the time when all of the limiting beliefs and self-doubts and all that stuff gets in our way of being able to just execute and take the results that we get and use that as inputs on what we need to improve on then at stage five this is after we've surpassed the $10,000 in sales threshold how do we scale to the next point which is 100,000 and then from there how do we get to a million and Beyond and ultimately build a business that we're able to sell and so the main philosophy that we are adopting here and something I want everybody to take away from this section is that what we are building is a legitimate brand and business that has customers who love the products so we are like every business is just products fulfillment and then marketing the Fulfillment method we just so happen to be using is print on demand the products we just so happen to be selling is t-shirts and the marketing we just so happen to be using like Shopify and Facebook ads but those are the core pieces of any real business and so that 10,000 foot view understanding of what it is that makes a business help me once I finally realized that after years get out of down in the weeds where I was just clicking buttons and just following instructions not being really sure of like why I was doing what I was doing that 10,000 foot view of like okay who is my customer what do they want what am I able to sell them and then how do I get it in front of them those are the core pieces once I finally understood that and that's a framework that you can take forward with you into the rest of the course and the cool part is that myself and the coaches we're going to be in the trenches with you building step-by-step alongside you and we have all the best materials and resources that we could possibly assemble to help aid you in that process but ultimately comes down to you and your own ability to basically just follow along and make sure that you're learning and actually instilling these lessons in yourself and you're not just checking boxes which is ironic cuz I'm about to talk about the checklist but we don't just want to be checking boxes but anyway here's the checklist perfect perfect segue so the materials that you should be using that are intended to be done like in tandem these are not just resources like here you go here's a library like use it sometimes no these are resources that we designed to be used as you're going through this process so you should grab these by going to the free community and save them to your bookmarks Tab and be using them like every step of the way so the checklist takes you through each one of the pages and it gives you a breakdown of like step by step how to set up all the accounts how to optimize your store like all the little nitty-gritty this can be your go-to guide as you're going through the process and second one that I'm personally most excited about is the tracker so the tracker includes the screen not only shows the Habit tracker but it's your habits your p&l balance sheet and your metrics basically the key the high Lev things if you want to be tracking your progress and seeing like where the business needs work the better way way to put it is like the daily Habit to get into that will disproportionately yield higher returns than anything else is committing to this tracker here and filling this out we'll talk about all this but this is another one of the the resources that I highly recommend using as you go through the course and this is something that we saw the most successful students did very religiously was they were filling out their financials they were tracking their progress essentially so we brought it all together so it's easier for you to do the same then we have the mirror board this is for visual Learners where every single lesson similar to the checklist has its own section on the mirror board where you're able to get a quick look of what's going on in this lesson what are the key pieces and takeaways to be aware of and this is your quick reference guide that has tons of different stuff that I'm not going to go through all of it now but it has everything from like the business model overview are zero to a million case study examples of tons of print on demand brands that you can reference and lots of other stuff then one of the big improvements we made to the course this time around so that you don't have to listen to the monotone voice the entire time and to bring in you know new experience and that sort of thing mostly the monotone voice is we brought in eight figure coaches which these are coaches that I personally know and trust and can vouch for the results that they're talking about but they have long story short they have all done over $10 million at least in sales and these guys are and Meg they're the people that are going to share from their own personal experience in addition to sharing like what's worked for them in their own stores what's worked for them when they've been on client accounts like a whole different range of experience and they all have their own specific area of expertise so we brought them in to try to offer different perspectives so it's not just coming straight from me and Meg that you have other people that you can trust so like Justin he's done over 25 million in e-commerce sales he's had an exit and he's worked with a bunch of different clients running their paid advertising and he also hasn't taken a head shot in decades so this is him this must be his middle school picture he's he's in high school now no I'm just kidding but then there's Eric Eric has over six years of e-commerce experience done over $13 million in sales and he sold everything from like jewelry to apparel fun fact he was out of our original group of people that we lived with which we lived in a house of it was 12 of us all running e-commerce businesses Eric was the very first one out of the group to get into print on demand so he's the OG which I'm sure he will remind you of throughout and then there's John who has done over $20 million in e-commerce sales John's an interesting one because he's like the epitome of work smarter not harder when I lived with him he had a good work ethic and everything but he had the ability to work a fraction of the time and yield like disproportionate results so he's a really good person to look to when you're wondering like where should you be placing your priorities because Justin and I used to joke like one hour of John's time is worth like five hours of our time and he's specializing in email marketing email and SMS and Google ads and a cool thing that we're adding to mix things up up throughout the course is we added in the coaches podcast so this is when we sit down with the coaches and myself and we take the top questions at the end of each stage we take the top questions from all the students over the past year and all the coaches and I talk about them and this is good because what we realized from like the normal lesson structure it's good for you know teaching step by step how to get things done you know insights like analytics that kind of thing but what it where it kind of lacks this is just lessons in general it lacks in terms of lending itself to Bringing out like the nuances and the experiences and like going a level deeper into like the emotions and what it was actually like running the business at stage one at stage two at stage three like what were the problems we ran into so we filmed these we had a lot of fun doing it and hopefully you guys enjoy them as well cuz we were very like open and candid and nothing is held back in the podcast just like in the rest of this everything is completely unfiltered I mean we don't curse as much as we probably did back then but other than that it's all completely open and authentic so that you guys are able to get a real taste and and I think what I'm most excited about for this is I think sometimes when people look at us and the coaches and they see all the success it doesn't quite come through like the number of failures and hardships that we went through and not that I want like credit or anything but quite the opposite I don't want people when they start getting to that point in their business where they start facing challenges and stuff and they naturally start getting those self-doubts to look at us as some kind of Beacon of well if I was really on track to do what they were doing like I shouldn't be having these problems cuz no quite the opposite is true like the challenges and problems you face is a sign that you're on the right track then also the coaches break down each one of them does a case study of one of their brands and just talks about the experience of growing it and building it and I actually realized we forgot to include a slide for Stephen is he was one of the most successful students from the first course he went from 0 to 100,000 in like a matter of weeks and he's being brought in he's offered to join us to offer the the student perspective of like it's great all the coaches experience and sometimes the numbers just seem like undoable you know and it seems like kind of distant so Stephen is offering a perspective from somebody who has just been there has just gone through it and he's able to translate things at each stage of the course and show like all right we just talked through stage two here was my experience from having just literally just gone through it here's what I saw success with here are the problems that I had and here's like picking through like needle and the Hy stack here's what I found to be most helpful so that's the structure of the course now I want to answer the question like who is this right for who is this best suited for so the first type of people that we can really help a lot we have like and people that are in the the community are people who are caged employees so this is you if you feel like you know you're trapped in a 9 to-5 and you maybe don't enjoy what it is that you're doing and you're just seeking a way out and I can completely relate to that next is kind of preneurs you know people who have said they want to be preneur entrepreneurs and but they just haven't found like the right vehicle to really commit themselves to and you know maybe they've had some element of shiny object syndrome and starting and then not finishing those are the kind of people that were able to give you the opportunity and give you like the solidified blueprint to be following so that you know that you finally have the thing that you can go all in on if you choose and this the rest of this lesson is going to answer that question for you next is struggling e-commerce sellers so people are already selling online maybe you're on Etsy merch by Amazon maybe you struggle with some bands on some of those platforms but you're struggling to take sales and get profitable or establish any kind of like solid brand for yourself that is able to you know not just bring in a couple of sales here and there but is like a real cash flow machine and something that brings some kind of consistency then lastly is aware students and this group has been a lot of fun to work with is the students who are are coming up you know maybe they're in high school maybe they've just graduated maybe they're even in college and they're aware that the traditional education system is just outdated especially as we'll talk a lot about Ai and some of the implications of that and they get the feeling that it just won't provide them the kind of future that they're looking for while I'm absolutely not condoning or recommending anybody to like drop out a school in order to do this full-time that's something that you have to decide along with your parents but what I can guarantee is that this will open a lens into another possible future for you so everybody on this list can absolutely help you and I think that each one of these people we've worked there's cohorts of each of these groups in the community and we can definitely help you but this is ultimately up to you and you taking full responsibility for yourself especially for a lot of Us coming from like 9 to fives realizing that stepping out starting a new business is the very first time in our lives where we didn't have some kind of boss or manager or somebody telling us what to do like when we're kids we have our parents then you have your teachers then professors then managers bosses whatever starting a new business this is the very first time at least for me where it was completely free reign I was open to make my own mistakes make my own decisions and it was pretty scary especially because I didn't quite realize that's what was happening to begin with but an important shift for us to all take is realizing that this course this is not where us as coaches we are not here to replace being that manager or boss telling you what to do and what not to do and what success looks like we can lay out strictly from our own personal experience but we are not here to tell you what to do or like to guarantee results in any way because if we were doing that then that would just be a lie and anybody who does try to guarantee results of say that they can is either charging a premium to like do it for you or they're just full of it and you should look twice at anybody like that so the warning that I want to give is I do not recommend doing this if you are paycheck to paycheck you can learn and that's awesome a big proponent being a continuous student but if you're living paycheck to paycheck instead what I recommend is to get a job and get consistent income and and it's entirely possible to do this kind of business on the side while you're starting up you know going through the course and there's lots of people in the community doing this as well so learn as you're working at your job but you don't have to go all in like quit everything and jump in like Meg for example she started doing e-commerce back during covid when she was nursing so she was extremely busy to say the very least working her tail off then on the side like while she still had her nursing paycheck coming in she was working on her e-commerce brand that's like a very doable way to go about it so instead what I recommend is if you're currently like flat broke hopefully that's not the situation you're in but if you are then get some kind of job get some kind of consistent income and just set aside 10 to 15% of the income as your business fund and then watch this training for two to three hours each night and so quotes like I have 30 days until I'm out of money I really need to get these ads to work is not the move I do not recommend going into this I recommend going into this but not making this like betting the farm on it cuz I've been there I've been in the spot where I have the thought process of I need to get these ads to work otherwise you know shit's going to get bad pardon my French but that's not a fun spot to be in it's also not the most conducive spot to be in for learning much better spot to be in is I have a 9o5 and it's okay if it's a 95 that you're not happy with that's fine it's a means to an end and I'm looking for more ways to bring in extra money so that's much better and hopefully you're seeing that a lot of course creators they would just say like yes this will solve your problem s go in like I I care about you and happiness and fulfillment and I know from personal experience that is not a happy situation or fulfilling one to feel like you have your back up against the wall and that you're fighting and every dollar of AD spend you're watching like a hawk and questioning everything so we don't want to be there we want to be and we're going to talk about next what do we actually need so how much money do I need to get started is a question that a lot of people have so when people ask how much money do I need they think of it the wrong way I'll give you an answer to the question but just concept something to understand is that it's not just you throw in some money plus your t-shirt designs and then you you know you light it on fire it's not like that it's you invest some money you make some t-shirt designs you wait a long time not a long time we try to speed it up like the fastest Student Success that we've seen is people are getting to profitability within like 4 to 8 weeks and not just profitability but like tens of thousands in sales that's not the norm like picture of bell curve that's the one end but that's what's possible and we're going to talk about the traits of those people in a second but what it really is is you make an investment you start learning the skill of making good designs you have patience willingness to like see this thing through you put in the effort and then eventually you build up like a money printing machine is what it turns into like so that the brand that we have now that does over a million dollars a year doing anywhere from 150 to 200,000 in net profit that brand we pretty much just adjust it we spend like a handful of hours each week that's the point that it's possible to get to and so when people say how much money do I need they're just picturing like a money pit like do I need to throw five grand at the print on demand Troll and like to get safe passage to The Promise Land and it's it's not like that I don't know where that came from but we're building a machine that can turn $1 into three that's really what we're building to and so if you had a Mach that machine would you be asking how much money you need like no obviously not instead you'd be asking how much can I feed it like how much can I possibly put in but to give the the short answer the starting point that I recommend is at least ,000 to get started so again if you're at zero don't recommend this but $1,000 is a good starting point cuz your expenses that we're going to have are like Shopify an AI tool and an ad testing budget and when it comes to ads and this is where a lot of people get hesitant or they're scared because you know Facebook ads they've heard how hard it is we have the best coaches with a ton of experience there are strategies that we are going to talk about and cover in extenuating detail how to get the most bang for your buck and how to stretch that budget so you're not going over that and that 500 to 1,000 it's not like you're just spending 500 to 1,000 into a pit and seeing nothing in return we're spending $50 and then seeing what the results are and then we're spending another 50 and we do testing Cycles so it's a very controlled environment in which we're prioritizing our learning but also getting Market feedback so all said and done at least 1,000 bucks is a good starting point other things that you need overall not not a whole lot a laptop with an internet connection you need an LLC once you get get started and we'll talk about that more in a second a business checking account is optional but you need it once you get the LLC really you just need the dedication and commitment to be able to ride out through the tough days we'll talk about that in a lot of detail too then you're going to need a Shopify and printify account and then the the next question is how much time do we need in the beginning 10 to 12 hours per week at minimum say the most successful students that were putting in at least part time effort like 20 to 30 hours because it's a new skill just like anything that you've learned in your your life you've learned a lot of stuff but any new skill that's like really worthwhile or valuable it takes time and so the learning curve is really the most timeconsuming piece out of all this like we're going to go through and set up all your accounts and everything and show you how to set up the ads but the amount of time is very contingent on your ability to learn and your ability to learn very often comes down to how objective we're able to be so a rough schedule that you can plan for is 10 to 12 hours per week roughly 4 to 6 hours that is going to learning watching the course material 2 to 4 hours making products about an hour or two doing marketing then Shopify another hour or two then email another hour or two and this varies by stage once you're out of the testing stage like where our time is spent now is just on designs and checking in on the ads and the main thing that makes this business go is just investing more time into the advertising so I would say and we asked this before we met with each one of our students we asked them to fill out a survey the average amount of time that people were committing ranged from about 10 to 20 hours per week on the upper end there were definitely people putting in 40 plus hours like full-time effort but then there are also people doing 5 to 10 hours and I think it's very subjective depending on what your goals are like we have people that are you know just trying to make it a side project passion project like a hobby see if it can bring in some extra money each month or they're you know looking for like a creative outlet that kind of thing then there's people at the other end of the spectrum that are trying to make this their full-time thing leave their job build a passive not passive I hate the word passive income but like a cash flow machine for themselves and their family and ultimately someday be able to have some kind of exit or liquidity event so lots of different options it's very dependent on you and like the main variables that you can put in and like answering the question of how long does it take to see results it really comes down to a few main things it's number one how much money are you putting in like somebody who has $100 to start versus 10,000 obviously it's going to take a little bit longer they have to make much smarter decisions like more calculated and cautious decisions and two is your previous experience like if You' never run Facebook ads before compared to somebody who's a Facebook ads expert obviously like the two are not going to be comparing like the same experience now this course is catered to people who have never run ads before that's exactly who are here to help but just to paint the picture like no experience that's another variable and then next is the amount of time like if you're putting in five hours a week versus 40 obviously you're going to be learning at the rate of at least eight times and then the last piece which is gets into like the traits of the most successful students is like how objective and like just yourself like how objective are you able to be and when you show up in the business like are you you know more emotional and not able to take constructive feedback from not just the coaches but from the market or are you just locked in on you know like the other end completely objective win or learn mentality all in all so it's the amount of money your previous skill or experience level the amount of time you're able to commit and then just how you're showing up in the business like are you being objective ver and open-minded or not now some ground rules for this for this course is that this is not gr Bri quick if you haven't gotten this by this point this is not get R quick this is not do nothing you know click a button make a bunch of money and this is not for people who are only out for themselves and want to profit without helping others or providing any kind of value and also our results are not typical so course disclaimer we just have to put this in here just for an abundance of clarity is if it hasn't already been clear that these are our results we've helped students get similar results but there is absolutely no kind of guarantee at any stage of this and earnings disclaimer our results that we share in this course are not typical I've been doing this for years made tens of thousands of mistakes spent tens of thousands of hours doing this good news is that a lot of the mistakes that I made are entirely avoidable and I spent so much time testing out different strategies and stuff before I finally honed in on what you know works the most consistently and that's where we're te teaching you so and I think that that fundamentally is the only way that anybody's able to teach it's like they go down a road and then they're looking back over their shoulder as you know you're about to come down that same road they're able to just shout back down the pike and say hey there was a pothole there hey there's a shortcut here and that's pretty much what Any teacher it's the best you could hope for some people try to chalk it up as like more than that but that's really what it is naturally you're still going to end up hitting some paddles you're still going to hear like this is a shortcut but you're going to think you know better and go different way we can avoid that by being objective so yeah I I don't want anybody getting into this not just from a legal aspect but I don't want anybody getting into this thinking that you know there's some kind of promise or guarantee our only promise is that this is going to be challenging it'll be probably the the hardest thing you've ever done but this stuff can work and now fortunately it's not just me saying that like it was in the last course and showing it from my own experience now you have tangible proof that this works for other people and also affiliate disclaimer we spent a lot of money making this course a lot of time Lo losing my voice the way that we able to recoup some of that cost is by placing affiliate links or like partner deals throughout so the good news is that it's aligned incentives we get paid for the most part like when you see results like for the percentage deals that sort of thing but there's absolutely no necessity you can you say screw Chris and Meg for whatever reason you're just able to go Google and find those tools but what I can say and you'll see from being inside our store that we only recommend things we are not just have used in the past but we are actively using and we also point out free Alternatives and tools that like for example customer service we use a software called gorgeous you're going to hear me recommend yes you can use that but in the meantime Gmail is very perfectly workable up to a certain point so we will call out those kind of things but again it does help support us and the team to be able to keep making free content like this also big warning I was not expecting this at all last time but I will never message DM email you Etc to sell you anything on any platform ever there were a lot of people who started writing to me saying hey I bought your course for like 3 Grand and I never heard from you like what gives I'm like what are you what are you talk like it's free what are you talking about and apparently there's people like imitating me on Instagram and stuff so just please don't fall for this I will never message you nobody from our team will ever message you trying to sell anything ever ever so just don't fall for it and if you do get a message like that just send us a message at support Chris hackman.com we'll get back to you and let you know if it's legitimate or not which it's not legitimate so you don't even have to send the email abundance of caution if you want to send it to us it might help actually if you do that because then we can gang people up to go report them and get the account banned actually yeah do that send us an email if you do get that that' be helpful so how to use this course effectively big thing that we learned from the last course is the importance of delineating between or clarifying between Concepts versus examples versus stepbystep so we are going to show a lot of Concepts this is where we are introducing and explaining fundamental principles of e-commerce then we're going to be showing examples providing real world case studies and scenarios to illustrate these Concepts then we're going to show step by step this is where we do Hands-On like line item by line item demonstrations of how to implement these ideas in practice and the reason I'm specifying this is that in the last course there were some times that we gave examples of things we make sure to specify the difference now we gave examples of things that people thought was step by step for example Meg made a mockup in the last course this is hilarious made a mockup in the last course where which the mockup is just like the picture of the shirt and as she was making the mockup like talking through it and she did it like candidly to make it clear like her thought process whatever in that demo she came up with the idea of like putting a red flower in the bottom corner because it like draws people's eye to the bottom corner which just so happens to be close to like the call to action button point being the net result was we looked at hundreds of mockups after that with when we were like working with students and stuff I can't tell you how many mockups had some kind of red object in the bottom rightand corner so that's an example of that was an example not a step-by-step prescription so make sure that we're picking up on the difference between what's a concept or like a fundamental which those are really the things that we want to take away what's an example AKA this is like what could be a result of when I follow the step by step but it's not the result that I should be aiming for and then step by step is like the checklist and like click these buttons set up the account exactly like this so yeah and to illustrate this even further I want to share a quick story time with you that applies heavily to like when we were teaching in the last course and like teaching with you know people in the community in general like so the story is uh years ago when I was I was babysitting my my younger cousin I think he was like about 10 at the time and he to pass the time we decided to watch a tutorial on how to make how to solve a Rubik's Cube I'll be honest it was me who chose it he just endured it but anyway so we were watching this tutorial on how to solve a Rubik's Cube we're both sitting there in front of the TV he has his Cube I have mine and we're watching this like 45 minute tutorial and if you ever solved a cube before you don't really have to understand this but the way that it works is you solve it in layers so you learn like the structure like the moves that you make or the problems you have to solve for the first layer and then you solve the second layer then you solve the third layer so there's Concepts to understand at each point then we watch through the entire video we get to the very end and I had been watching through like learning how to solve layer one then Layer Two then layer three and my Cube was solved by the end I'll be honest I had to replay it a couple times but eventually it was solved and then I look over at my cousin and he's he was all flustered cuz he's like what I look over his Cube still all messed up it looks like he just started and I'm like what were you doing he said I followed all the all his moves and like it didn't work and I was like were you following like layer by layer he's like yeah he went like this I went like like this and he rotate it down I rotate it down and it's a a funny example to illustrate what I've seen so many people and I don't mean to minimize anybody like I certainly made this mistake a ton of times taking things too literally and not like losing the forest through the trees type of thing this goes hand inand with the concepts versus step by step your main priority in going through this whole process as you're learning and what we try to what it's our job to convey but it's also on you is to make sure that we are doing a good job collectively of understanding the concept St understanding the why behind what we are doing and not just following along step by step and this applies not just here but in a lot of other areas of life like if we're just following step by step we're not doing any level of critical thinking or like understanding for ourselves why we're doing the thing which is important because once the instruction goes away number one we don't know how to like continue doing it we're pretty much beholden and my job is to put myself out of the job I want to teach you so well that you don't need me anymore you're more than welcome to come join the university if you'd like and we're happy to work with you but a teacher doing their job well means that they put themselves out of the job and the second piece is he was completely missing the plot that his Cube looked very different than the guy giving the tutorial's starting point so if you're just following along step and the same is going to be true with your brand if you're just looking at your brand and then you're following along with what we're doing literally step by step without understanding why we're doing the step you're not going to get a good result because you will have doesn't matter how cookie cutter we make it there's always there's Nuance to business just welcome to business so there's always going to be differences so if you're just following along step by step then you won't be like recreating what we like the success we have you'll just be making a mess more or less now I'm over exaggerating it it won't be that bad you'll be able to course correct and we'll be there to help you with that but it's really important that as we're setting up the Facebook ads and as we're running our initial tests and as we're making designs that we're understanding what tools we're using or what buttons we're click well gets all that stuff that stuff is honestly easy to convey the much harder piece way more important piece is taking away like why are we doing it so in the case of my cousin he should have been learning how do we solve the first layer what are the tools and like challenges that we Face there then how do I do that you get my point but make sure that we are learning the layers we're not just following the steps and a second example to illustrate a really key difference that separated the successful students from others who like their very best but didn't get the results that they were shooting for by their own definition is this story and a lot of people when they start making designs or just in business in general out of fear of failure or you know not knowing what they don't know or procrastination creep in letting perfect be the enemy in progress a lot of different pieces that play the harm of that is best illustrated by this is the jar story and I want you to keep in mind this because it applies across the board in this business and and elsewhere but there's a professor who at the beginning of the class at the beginning of the semester he split the class into two halves and he told the sculpting professor and he told one half of the class he said your job is to create one of the most perfect jar that we've ever seen he told the other side of the class that your job is to create as many jars as possible so they went away they made as many as they possibly could just cranking them out and the other side they worked on just making the most perfect jar that you hadd ever seen by the end of the semester you know what happened is when they came back together the side of the class that had been tasked with making the most jars not only obviously had the most but they also had the best jars cuz they had learned through just the sheer volume and a lot of people get hung up on thinking I'm going to make my design as perfect as possible and that slows them down a lot moral of the story we want to learn through volume and more than that we want to be doing just in time learning versus just in case I did this in Spades the wrong way when I got started I would sit there and hoard information for way too long and the right way to do it is we want to be learning only exactly what we need in order to solve our very next step in the business and then we want to go out and do that cuz that's how we learn that's how we reinforce in our brain like you hear something you go out and do it then you experience it for yourself if you ever catch yourself learning and then just learning more and then just learning more and then learning more and not taking any action then you're setting yourself up for not being not not hitting the goal that you're setting out for and especially that's most likely a pattern that you've exhibited previously in your life so we can self-reflect on that and say is this something that I do and then correct it going forward so we we want to be doing just in time learning learn only what we need right now for example we don't need to watch the Facebook ads section before we've made a single design we don't have anything to mark it we don't need to learn how to run an ad we don't need to learn what the pixel does when we haven't made our mockup and that's why the course is structured the way that it is so it's done in stages so you're able to just show up go through the stage complete the steps all the homework is mapped out and then you move on to the next stage what you shouldn't end up doing is watching the entire course all the way through you're more than welcome to if you'd like but watch it all the way through and then go back and watch it again and then the third time through start taking action because while it may seem like a logical thing and like you're just doing your due diligence by the time you get back to like you know stage six stage seven you're going to have completely forgotten everything you learned it'll be useless so you'll just end up wasting all this time and we want to make sure that we're taking quick action and that we're staying focused on gaining the skills that we need as our business grows so this course is just in time that's the way that is intended and the other way that this works is that there's the two different groups there's the free group free community where the way that we design this is so that it has everything you need this whole course has everything you need in order to be successful to do it completely on your own there's no pay wall no BS there's hundreds of PDF lesson guides showing you step byep all the resources in there and then we have the university which is where we have the eight figure coaches hundreds of hours of group call recordings it's a super collaborative Community there's live q&as every single week we have accountability pods cohorts and we're constantly updating the trainings and you know much more than can fit on even a single slide so we are entrepreneurs first teaching is far from our full-time thing and our Student Success is the most important thing to us by far so this is not for hobbyists or long-term business it's not for hobbyist this is for long-term people with long-term business goals the reason I'm including this here is like as you're going through this process I hardly mention this at all in the first course because we didn't really know like what it was going to turn into but now seeing how incredible it has become in large part I'm able to say that because it's mostly not me at all it's mostly due to the community the community of people in here are outstanding they jump in they support each other they support each other's WIS they're answering questions they're learning and growing together and it's really like it's the best community that I've ever been a part of and the last time I didn't talk about it much cuz we didn't know what it was going to turn into and I also didn't want you know it to seem like you know you had to join the the group in order to be successful all the wins in the free group show that that's not the case but after seeing how great of a resource this whole Community has grown into I feel like I would be doing a disservice by not mentioning it like so there's value posts that our team like people in the community are sharing non-stop what's worked for them in terms of you know just general business their design strategy marketing Shopify then there's the coaches in there where you're able to submit feedback requests and get ongoing support from one of the coaches so like imagine you face a problem or you launch your ads and you're getting feedback or you want feedback like on your metrics rather than you just having to evaluate yourself which you should learn to do you're able to post and say Here's the metrics that I have from this past week here's my interpretation of those metrics here's what I'm thinking about doing next that's the right way to ask a question not just say here it is what do I do not that's not helping anybody then you're able to get feedback from the coaches and they'll answer questions they'll shoot a loom video and help you think through the problem and basically help expedite the process so that we're able to help pay down the ignorance that for you then there's also hundreds of hours of coaching calls that it's not just like here's a list of coaching calls go watch we'll see in a year it's all laid out in a beautifully maintained by our team mirror board where you're able to zoom in and see the questions that were asked for each individual call and then you're able to say like the and the calls are Group by like marketing Shopify that sort of thing and then you're able to see okay this question I can relate to that I'm dealing with that kind of thing right now then what you have right there in the answer is a link to the call recording and that exact Tim stamp you're able to quickly scan through hundreds and hundreds of hours of group calls and then identify what would be most valuable for you to learn and then click on the link and then it jumps right to that group call at that time and you can hear the answer so you're able to benefit from all the collective learnings of the entire group in addition to we're always adding new trainings like this past Black Friday people had a bunch of questions about how we run our ads and that sort of things so we shot a training recently added a print on demand forecast which we'll talk about more throughout the course just adding new trainings all the time based on whatever is top of mind for people in the community and this is done by not just myself but also the coaches in the community and it's 100% guarantee that's why I feel like I would be doing everybody disservice by not mentioning it is that if you join and you don't have absolutely the best experience possible and your socks are not blown off you don't feel like you got 10 times the value for whatever reason you will absolutely get your money back I'm putting my name behind this and I will die before I let anybody not have the very best experience or at the very least they get returned to exactly where they were they get their money back and we have proof of doing that like this lovely woman she decided to like she had an Etsy brand before and it started doing well so she wanted to go you know spend more time on that so I just replied to her and said you know I totally understand and respect your decision I'll refund last month's payment too and she said oh don't worry about it you know I've definitely got my money's worth and I said too late I'm not saying this to Pat myself on the back or anything I'm just doing what I said I was going to do so yay that's a pretty low bar but then we also we take a lot of pride in or it's a big priority for us to make sure that we are maintaining a really healthy and active and supportive community and that means sometimes having to make the hard decision of removing some people that don't meet those standards so this was a message I blurred out their name for their own privacy but just to demonstrate that we removed this person we refunded their payments our number one priority Bar None is making it the best possible Community for everybody involved so sometimes unfortunately we just have to part ways with some people but that's how dedicated we are to you know doing right by everybody who's in there and so the requirements to join is that your currently building a Shopify brand so like if you're serious about going through this course at any stage you can join and we're absolutely able to help you out but you have to be ready to be an active and contributing member so this means no lurkers no joining and then just like hiding in the wings not only because that doesn't benefit the rest of the community but more importantly it doesn't benefit you we're going to talk about the key traits to the most successful students in a second but you also absolutely cannot be somebody who is looking for get R quick or silver bullets because that just doesn't exist and you won't find that inside the university either and most importantly you have to be extremely coachable and eager to learn the people who are best suited for this are the people who are looking to learn and they're continuous students like I like to consider myself as well I learned new stuff in there all the time from all the people in the community and the people who are the best like contributors are the ones who come in that are open-minded and are just trying to learn and give back along the way so right now and another reason why I feel I should definitely mention this is that right now it's $129 per month which again I I don't tell anybody don't do this if it's not a good financial decision for you right now like if you're just paycheck to paycheck you have like Zer in the checking account this is not for you like we talked about the budget requirements to get started or recommended but right now it's 129 month and it will go up in the future it absolutely will in order to maintain like the quality of the group there's like a certain number that we're going to keep it under and that comes with like increase in the price over time so we're able to reinvest in new coaches new resources new trainings and be able to give back as much value as possible to everybody who's already in there and like right now now at the time of filming this the community is locked so we did that at the end of October while we were locking it to help everybody best prepare for Q4 so we made sure that we did right by you know everybody who's in there that we gave all of our full attention and resources to helping them one you're seeing this the community is open just know that it won't always be like that and the price will definitely go up in the future I can't say when we don't have any plans for that right now but it absolutely will happen and the place you can go to join is school.com we scale and again I want to say this this is not some kind of hard pitch this is not me saying like oh if you really want to be successful you got to join absolutely not like the next 20 however many hours will demonstrate that we share everything literally everything and in the community that is our way of like being able to give feedback and like that's trading our time in order to do that but more than that it's about joining a community of like-minded people that are super active and engaged and love helping like one another and when I left I actually just made a post about this the other day one of my biggest realizations from this past year was after I left the house that I was living in where it was all of us running businesses together I thought that I was ready to just you know go Lone Wolf it and you know be on my own but after getting to be a part of this community I realized like how badly I craved being being around like-minded people cuz starting your own business especially when nobody else around you was doing it like it's a very lonely and isolating place to be and so that to me has been like one of the most valuable pieces of being part of the univers and like we do fun stuff like Hangouts virtual Hangouts like more than just zoom calls and stuff but yeah it's really a place for all of us to come together and help each other win and scale to new heights together but yeah other than that everything is here there's there's nothing held back and yeah I'd love to see you inside but if you want to wait and see you know if you can get some results on your own that's totally understandable totally okay and we lay out everything to help do the very best the weekend through recordings to make sure that that happens so obviously there's some things that we can do through like group coaching calls and like actually working with you one-onone but anyway enough of that let's go on to the traits of the most successful students so some of these several of these are broken down in full length YouTube videos there's a double logo that's nice in the bottom left but the most successful students interviewed them at Great Lengths talked with a ton of them in the communities I mean there's tons of them laid out and and when we I was I really obsessed over this idea over the past years like there's some people that like given the same information some people see a lot of success and like really good results and then some people try really hard but they don't get as good results like by their own definition whatever that is and I was constantly asking like why like I know obviously some of it comes down to the person but like what can we do to improve like things and that's a large part why we're doing the whole thing over again here we are but when I analyze like what were these students doing fundamentally different than the rest there were a couple of key things that really stood out to me first thing that these successful students had in Spades is that they were extremely objective and they valued logic over emotion what this looks like is that they're able to take feedback and go and immediately implement it into their business without regard for you know their own emotion to a certain extent obviously we're all human but they were the ones that like like Stephen for example I joke about this with Stephen's the coach he on our very first call together I gave him feedback that he was like one of our first coaching calls so I was like hesitant about giving honest feedback but I did it thankfully cuz he handled it like a champ but on the call he just like kind of nodded and I told him his mockup needed to be reworked like it wasn't that good and he he just like kind of nodded and then we got off the call and I I turned to Meg and I remember saying I don't think we're ever going to hear from him again like he seemed to not take it very well not knowing that's just Steven's personality he's just like analyzing and like not showing a lot of emotion he's just like very logical and he was just thinking about it and then it was a few weeks later he came back he reemerged and said hey I did all those changes you talked about and like these are the results that I'm seeing like what's next and I was like wow that was amazing so he heard the feedback took the feedback and immediately implemented it so one he had the awareness that like there was a skill deficit something that he could learn two he recognized the value in the feedback not that it's from me or whoever it doesn't matter where it's coming from but he saw that that was valuable and that he needed it then the really important piece is that the time from when he learned about the feedback to when he did something about it was dramatically condensed compared to what we see a lot of other people doing so he heard it took it implemented it and then got the results and then he just kept rinsing and repeating that same process and all of them all the most successful students we've talked to have been very very similar so along that same line they're very self-aware of their opportunities for growth meaning that they know like what what they're good at and where they have you know a need for growth and they don't like make any qualms about that or try to like chalk it up in their mind that it's something other than what it actually is and I think self-awareness we'll talk about this a lot in the the next section but self-awareness is one of those things that like make or breaks people's ability to grow in this because there will be lots of times we have to face uncomfortable truths and whether if that's in terms of the designs that we made that the market ends up not actually liking or you know whatever it is improvements we that we thought we made to the site were good and then it turns out that they're actually not that good like a lot of it's a constant iteration so they were all very self-aware and able to take like give themselves feedback on like what needed improvements then third is speed they just ripped the Band-Aid off the Speed and to give a specific like metric to this the time from when they went from starting their business to when they launched their first testing ads for these people was dramatically reduced meaning they didn't do a bunch of like justtin case learning they weren't beaten around the bush they just started saw the goal or saw like what they needed to get to and then they just beelined it for that and they just move fast they broke things they prioritize progress over were being perfect and they just went from here to there opposed to looking at the other end of the spectrum it's people who were you know taking lots of time they're working on like their three or four designs they're explaining when you ask them like why is it taking you that long they say some version of a story that you know I want my designs to be really good like that's all fine but I'm just here to share the objective observations that the time for when they started to when they launched dramatically reduced and to put like an actual time stamp on that I would say from when they started to when they launched it's like a couple ofek weeks if that like two to 3 weeks maybe whereas other I know other people that again I have nothing but the utmost respect for anybody who gets started in this regardless I'm not saying anything not speaking ill of anybody but there are other people that it's months and months before they even launch then fourth they had extremely strong work ethic and again I think everybody who does this you have to have a strong work ethic or desire to have a strong work ethic at the very least in order to even get started otherwise you wouldn't be adding something new onto your plate but these people especially they marry themsel to the idea of this consistency where they just show up every day they objectively analyze what the business needs they're very self-aware of their own blind spots and they're prioritizing speed over Perfection and then my personal favorite out of all of them is that if you look at the activity of the most successful students they were the ones giving back and sharing the most in a lot of cases in the community so they were not only moving fast and objectively evaluating what they should be working on next but as they were learning these things and having all these mistakes and like wins and like just a whole range of experiences they weren't just keeping it to themselves they were putting it out into the community and becoming a teacher and they were giving back which is beautiful not just because it how much it benefits the community and sets a really powerful precedent for everybody else to like share and like that's really the essence of a really good Community it's when people are celebrating each other's wins as well as sharing their lessons learned because then it's like The Tide Rises All Ships that's the idea behind it and they were big contributors to that but that aside the other big benefit is that then they in turn they were learning at an accelerated rate because you learn things completely differently when you are just learning it for yourself versus when you're learning it with the intent to teach and I've felt that unexpected benefit of doing this whole thing is that I've learn things on a whole new level when you know that you have to break it down to like you have to be able to synthesize it down into a way that will make sense to other people and break it down in the building blocks and for them they were learning that and like kind of locking in those lessons learning those experience expences way faster so those were the five biggest traits that I observed then picturing somebody on the other end of the Spectrum which again like I said I have nothing but the utmost respect for anybody who gets started in this not speaking ill of anybody quite the opposite I am the kind of person that I prioritize telling somebody inconvenient truths over convenient lies we all have enough people surrounding ourselves that tell us the convenient lies the things we want to hear I care about people's success and I know how much they have writing on this and how much they care care about seeing this through and how much like their selfworth and identity sometimes they unfortunately attach to this success and I want to help them Reach that goal and a lot of times somebody has to fill the tougher role of being the caring coach and telling them what they need to hear anyway the other end of the spectrum people who try their very best very intelligent people with good backgrounds and like it's like they had all they were very equipped to do well but the traits that they exhibit that or like limiting behaviors that held them back without them realizing it is number one not being obje Ive being very emotion driven this looks like making 50 designs and then you go to the market and even though they hear from all the coaches and from the course that it's very normal that when you launch your designs 99% are not going to do well they take the feedback they get from the market very personally and I did too in the beginning I got very emotional and bent out like cuz then it naturally leads you into this Tail Spin of am I an idiot for thinking I could even do this all these limiting beliefs start bubbling up to the surface and so I I totally get it but they let the emotion hold them back from what really mattered which all that really matters I'm not saying anybody's emotions aren't valid or anything but in the interest of just building the best business as quickly as possible our emotions can't matter and so people who get emotionally attached to the designs they're making are setting themselves up for failure essentially so they're very emotional and then the second piece of that is that they weren't always self-aware of them doing that to themselves so they would have this emotional response and think that their designs are good and think that it was in some way a personal reflection of them when their initial batch of designs didn't do well when in objective reality you've never made designs before why would it be reasonable to expect that your first batch is going to be good we're learning a new skill so it's completely normal but they would be oblivious to the fact that they were putting themselves into that Unfortunately they were putting themselves down in a way that wasn't necessary and I would try to help them realize like you have good data here you learned that these designs are not like you launch with 100 designs these 90 did not do well but these 10 showed good signs and I look at that and I go these 10 or something we can build on this is a big win but they saw it as these you're telling me these 90 designs suck you're telling me I wasted all that time and effort and energy I'm like no like Edison you know I didn't fail 10,000 times i' learned 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb same thing then next they they didn't move as quickly through the process not in terms of like mental processing speed or physical speed or anything of the sort but it was the the time for when they started to when they launched their ads was dramatically slower so thing we can learn from that again speed up the process be objective be self-aware of our own limitations and our opportunities for growth and have a work ethic this should really say consistency over work ethic because everybody doing this has a good work ethic otherwise you wouldn't be here like I said but consistently show up every day and focus on the main constraint of the business and while you're doing it contribute and give back something I hear a lot from people when they're getting started especially people that aren't seeing the results they want is they start to clam up and they feel like almost ashamed or you know like they don't have anything to offer and I'm like I get it from being in their shoes but from the outside looking in I'm like I think you're amazing just for being here of course you have things to share you're everybody's experiences unique and like authentically yours of course there's things you can share and like you have your own background experience and like your own perspective on things I'm sure that there's a million things that you have to share but sometimes their limiting beliefs like push push them into a shell and like push them away from the community opposed to getting them to do use the community as it's meant for that is stepping into it leaning into it especially when things get hard the community is not there just to be like you know your Hall of Fame just like wall of winds no because that would not be reflective of reality it's meant to be there as a tool for you to as a sounding board as you know all those things so anyway all that said and done bringing it all together they were more emotional than objective they were not self-aware and very smart intelligent people again but they weren't as self-aware of the specifically of like the negative behaviors that were holding them back they were slower from start to finish because they let perfect be the enemy of progress and they prioritized not making a mistake over you know making any kind of progress not realizing that you were going to make mistakes you're supposed to make mistakes that's in fact the only way you're going to learn you hear that a lot your entire life but we never really believe it until we are looking in the back you're like oh yeah I really did learn a lot from that so hopefully we can avoid that with you that's why we're going through this and next consistency in their that it again it should really say consistency but they would have short they work in short spurts where they would go like handful of days where they feel really strong and like again motion driven they would go headstrong for like a week and then they would get bad results on like a new ad cycle and then they just Peter out we don't want like spikes of of effort and then troughs of inactivity we want it to be consistent every single day objectively evaluating and sharing what you're learning along the way now we're going to go through the highlevel overview of the business model and to understand print on demand like we talked about the 10,000 ft view before instead of picture in all the digital aspects of things to really ingrain in us the realization that this business is way more complex in our heads than it is in reality and we oftentimes chalk it up to that and I know it it sounds funny coming from somebody who did it took him 21 hours to explain it the first time the irony is not lost to me believe me but learned the power of metaphors to help get points across so here's a metaphor imagine instead of having your online store Etsy whatever it is Shopify store the business that we're building is just a brick and mortar store and inside we have a bunch of our t-shirts and next to the brick and mortar store there's a highway and on that Highway there's bunch of cars coming by so in the store we have our t-shirts our products that we want to sell but there's nobody coming in so we need to get people to come in so what do we do we take out an ad on a billboard on the highway nearby and that ad gets people to come into our store we're going to come back to this metaphor a lot because it's extremely accurate to what we're going to be trying to do so that brick and mortar store is our Shopify store this is where people come in to shop this is where where all of our products are laid out this is where all of our apps Connect into this is like this is our Hub essentially and this is like our face to the customers so this is like when people want to come shop from us again they're walking down the street to our store on Main Street USA same thing as when people tell their friends about us they're going to send us to our Shopify store then our products our t-shirts inside they are fulfilled by a company called printify printify printful we'll talk about that more but and then the billboard is the meta and that's how we drive in the traffic and then to take the metaphor a step further imagine if every person that came back came into your store you were able to send them a piece of mail you know like those blanket mailer campaigns where just email or mail people imagine if that if we were able to do that automatically and personalized to every single person who came into our store so we have a brick and mortar store we lay out all of our products and our t-shirts there rather than doing the typical inventory model where it's like all right what do we want to stock our shelves with you know and we go out and place a big inventory inventory order of whatever products and they back up a big truck we shell out a bunch of cash up front just to be able to stock our shelves not having any idea if people are actually going to like the products not doing that at all instead of that what we're doing is on all of our shelves it's simply just a picture of the product we design them on our laptop and then we walk up and we put a picture of what that product will look like on the shelf and those pictures cost us literally nothing and then our customers are able to come through and browse and Shop as if that was a real product and then when they come up to the cash register to check out we then run into the back and we grab you know a blank t-shirt off the back and we print it and make the product and we take it out and we hand it to them so that's on demand printing print on demand and obviously in order to scale this to a company that's doing 1050 $100,000 per month we're going to be doing it with a lot of t-shirts so we don't want to be actually printing them ourselves out of the back we want to work with a company so if there was a company that we could attach onto the back of our store that they handle you just shout into the back hey one order of t-shirt a and they immediately print it pack it ship it and it by the time the customer gets home it's already at their front door and then looping back in the email piece if anybody who comes into our our store and they almost check out but then for whatever reason they don't we're able to send them an email or a piece of mail so when they they get back to their house there's a mail from us so cutting through the web and metaphors basically brick and Mor Store driving traffic with the billboard print on demand is just how we're making the t-shirts and the products there's lots of different companies that will offer to fulfill them for us we'll talk about how we can evaluate them but that's that's the general gist so this is what it looks like from a 10,000 ft View and this is how the course is structur is go through each one of these pieces and doing just enough of it to get it to where we need to so that we're going from zero to testing so we're doing just enough so that we're able to validate which products on our shelves do people like and then once we do that we're at $10,000 and it's like all right let's double down on what's working let's do a little bit more of the meta let's do a little bit more of the email let's make some more products and printify and we just keep rinsing and repeating whereas before the previous course was it would just be here's everything about meta here's everything about printify here's everything about clavio figure out when and where it makes the most sense to do it so best of intentions but didn't work out the best I shouldn't say that people got good results but we can do better so understanding print on demand as we just kind of did but the recap from the metaphor we are selling products online without holding any inventory and the way that it works is that a customer orders then the product is printed and shipped by a third party and you earn the profit on the difference so we charge roughly 30 bucks for a shirt we pay printify $8 to $9 pay a couple bucks for shipping then we make the difference and the reason it's great is low startup cost quick for product testing and easy to scale and print onand get gets a lot of press on YouTube and like other content channels just because it's pretty much an easy business model to talk about it's like here you just make your Etsy store then you you just make a design in canva and you throw it up and look you're a business owner and not to minimize anybody's content but I think that's grossly misleading from what it actually takes to it it depends on the the frame that they're putting it in but if they're framing it as like build a legitimate business that can help you quit your job someday pretty tough sell but anyway the reason that I'm teaching it is that I've done 3pl I've done Drop Shipping and print on demand is one that I just keep coming back to time and time again and so that's why we're here and so our business model stack if you will so there's the market there's the product fulfillment store and then the traffic so Market is who are we going to sell to product is what are we selling them fulfillment is how are we going to fulfill the product store where can people buy from us then traffic is how will people find out about us so number one the market who are we selling to AKA The Niche so this is business owners or professionals familial status professional segments gender based markets age income based segments lifestyle so the market it's basically the collection of people like think yoga history nature there's a very in-depth training on the niches but so why do we pick a niche it's because it gives us predictable and dependable Revenue because it has already been battle tested by other companies if your target is everyone then your target is nobody so your marketing is more powerful products more meaningful and it's much easier to get customers when you know exactly what you should be talking who you should be talking to and this is also it's possible to make a brand that's like an everything store I don't recommend it but the model that we've done is every time that we've done one of those Brands all eight of them that I was referencing before every single one of them had a really passionate Niche and we'll talk about how to pick that but the reason that this works so well is that you get people to buy the first time just because they like the design but you get them to stay and buy from you again and again because of who you are and who the brand is and you can't have a really powerful brand if you don't first pick the group of people you're going to serve next is products so what are we going to be selling them this is like in reference to any business so we could sell Services digital products subscription physical products a lot of different options but within physical products there's Consumer Electronics Home and Garden Health and Beauty toys and games food and beverage apparel so why apparel well apparel print on demand apparel is extremely customizable everybody wears them on a daily basis they wear out so you get repeat purchases they're extremely giftable so people are buying for not just themselves but you have like once somebody liked history te's if they had a a birthday coming up of a friend they also knew liked history they would think of us and they would go buy again so there's repeat purchases not just for themsel but then also for friends and family and it's extremely scalable we're able to go from zero I can't think of many other business models where you're able to go from zero to a million dollars a year once you reach product Market fit quite like print on demand and it's also extremely easy to Pivot back to the brick and mortar example where we're talking if you buy upfront inventory if you realize that what you just purchased a bunch of inventory for is something that's not actually going to sell that easily very challenging to Pivot then you're looking to liquidate and like all these other things whereas with print on demand if you realize what you put up is not selling you just take down the pictures and you put up new pictures and there's no harm no foul and it's also extremely lightweight for shipping which is just good for General e-commerce and Global print on demand Market is primed for growth we'll talk more about that in a later section then in terms of fulfillment what are the different options and we're laying out all of these right now so that fundamentally you'll have an awareness of the full landscape when it comes to running an e-commerce business what are the different options between 3pl Drop Shipping what are the pros and cons of both so that when you inevitably have some dose of shiny object syndrome in this process which I can prep you for now you absolutely will have it it would be if you figure out a way not to have that you will have at some point the thought in your head of is this effort really worth it is there a different opportunity that I should be pursuing we're getting ahead of that now by answering that question and laying out the pros and cons of each and then you'll show how the logical conclusion brings us back to print on demand and you'll be able to make that evaluation for it's important that you make that evaluation yourself so in your mind you should be pushing back on all these points you should be coming up with The Logical counterarguments for each of these so that you come to the same conclusion that we did and all of our students have for yourself so that once you have those points of shiny object syndrome and like feeling of quitting or whatever down the road that you're able to think back on this and and know that you're in the best possible place and I truly wholeheartedly mean that Shopify print on demand in 2025 is going to be one of the best markets to be in I believe that with every fiber of my being because of reasons that we'll lay out later but I'll just explain shortly now because print on demand in general is growing at by 2030 it's going to be four times the size it is right now it's like 23% compounding annual growth rate which is massive for an e-commerce sector long story short people are buying graphic shirts now more than ever and why so that's print on demand Graphics shirts t-shirts then why Shopify specifically well first if you look at like Etsy merch by Amazon other marketplaces they're more competitive than ever Etsy for the first time ever last year they the number of new in 2023 the number of new sellers grew by like 23% but the number of new buyers grew by only 1% so the market is becoming flooded and we're going to talk about marketplaces and stuff in a second but the market is becoming flooded and there's like it's becoming commoditized so it's going to be even more competitive and on Shopify we're creating our own demand so we don't have to worry about that like those factors so we're just able to capitalize on the fact that there is a huge upswing coming already happening for print on man demand for print on- man products the only downside downside is that there's a learning curve to learning how to do this that's exactly why all of this is here to help us get over that learning curve which that learning curve is actually a good thing it's actually our moat that's going to keep out other competitors from entering anyway because people are not willing to sit through 20 plus hour training like you are already doing so keep at it you're in the right spot moral story but let's keep going so fulfillment lots of different options there's self fulfillment this will be if you got a printer and stuck it in your garage don't recommend that but you could also do in order inventory uh plus 3pl so we did this with our yoga mats we worked with overseas manufacturers where they customized the products then we would ship them into the United States then it would get shipped to a place that looks like this it's how 3pl Works where they would pick pack and ship it when an order comes in then drop shipping this is where the seller takes the order it's basically like print on demand except instead of a customized unique product being made it's just they're grabbing any old thing off the shelf that hundreds and thousands of other sellers are selling the exact same thing as you that's the difference so whereas print on demand like Drop Shipping the product is made on demand as the order comes in so they're very very similar with the exception of Drop Shipping a lot of times the Fulfillment is done from like China and so people are getting like six weeks to never shipping I shouldn't say that I don't want to paint I don't want to give a biased perspective there there are good suppliers for Drop Shipping some like in the US or some that have decent shipping times but the fundamental problem with it is that you are always just selling the same thing as what other sellers have access to unless if you start doing white labeling and like putting your own logo on stuff which at that point you're just doing 3pl which 3pl stands for third party Logistics so print on demand is no Capital up front you're able to create unique differentiated products that puts out something new of value into the world and it's made you know when the order comes in but 3pl works like this they store all the products for you so they ship the goods to the warehouse the warehouse receives the products warehouse stores products and manages the inventory and then Warehouse picks and packs the products then orders are shipped and delivered to customers so some examples of 3pl companies is like shipmonk shipbob Amazon FBA which Amazon fun fact at least when I was there it was 50 5% of Amazon fulfillment center products were from Amazon sellers so not actually Amazon's like own products which I found pretty interesting then how Drop Shipping works is like a simplified model is that customer places an order with your online store the your store automatically sends the order to the Drop Shipping supplier then the supplier processes and prepares the order and it sends to the customer so again very similar to print onand with the exception of the quality and uniqueness of the products then some drop shipping companies autod DS overow AliExpress then how print on demand works is customer places an order and pays you retail price so they pay us roughly 30 bucks they we then forward our order onto a print on demand supplier and we pay not wholesale but we pay roughly right now 8 to 12 bucks and the supplier puts your artwork on the product so that's where it's creating something unique and then the supplier ships the product directly to the customer and this is what it looks like these are some examples of like the printers so you see all of these massive printers these things are able to make just crank out shirts and then these over here on the right I think these are the dryers so a print on man facility what it'll look like is they just store they'll have giant racks with tons and tons of blank prints blank t-shirts without prints on them and then whenever an order comes in it's all automated they have a system for it they're just told like what shirt to go grab they go grab it off the shelf like a Gilden 64,000 medium white shirt and they grab the shirt and they lock it into this printing press here see how it like it fits in and then it it makes sure that like the print is going in exactly the right area then it goes into the machine it prints it out so it's really there's different types of print Styles and stuff we won't get into all that but because it doesn't really matter but the print style the print quality and the T-shirt quality that we'll be selling this is a common question that comes up a lot it's extremely high quality it's very good are on over a million dollars in s last year which is tens and tens of thousands of shirts our refund rate or like which refund rate includes people who just wanted a different size and just normal stuff not like even just strictly quality complaints it's 1.3% so it's extremely high quality and print on demand companies there's a couple of different ones there's printify printful gelato printify and printful actually just announc that they are merging so it still remains to be seen like what impact that's going to have but we've worked with printify for years and years so I've worked with PRI for 5 years at this point and when we're evaluating these companies we're primarily looking for combination of product quality shipping speed consistency and cost and PRI is the one that consistently checks all those boxes then where can people buy from us so in terms of our store there's two main options there's marketplaces and there's storefronts Market places are places like Amazon Etsy Redbubble storefronts is Shopify magenta woocommerce and they are fundamentally different I think this is an important thing to differentiate in your mind the difference between a Marketplace versus a Shopify like Etsy and Shopify it's not like they're neck and neck it's like they're in two completely different leagues and I'm going to explain why so a Marketplace is like if we we're in a mall so Etsy is a mall and we are able to rent space in that mall the pr are that they have built-in traffic and they have an easy setup the store is already built shelf's already up we just got to go in we sign a contract whatever plop our products on the Shelf people start coming in and it's relatively low risk but it's also low reward the cons are much higher competition you are side by side with a bunch of other stores and that's honestly the lowest of the cons two is the fees so Etsy nowadays they have a per listing fee they have a pretty high transaction fee if 65% of the total sales they have payment processing fee which that's normal then they have a listing fee of 20 cents per item so yeah transaction fee of 62% that's just right off the top so that's just your cost to be in their mall that's you basically paying for the traffic they're sending you but it gets worse because not only that but you're also not getting any of the customer data so remember when we were talking about the brick and mortar example like when somebody comes into our store we're able to send them letters and mail and that sort of thing we can't do any of that and that email list like we're going to talk about is one of the biggest assets that we're building and by far the biggest is that you're you can be kicked out at any time and it pains me to hear these stories but I can't tell you how many people have come over to our community one person had been building their their Etsy store for four years and then they got kicked off so imagine that imagine the point you're at right now they spent four years of their life hard effort and sacrifice and everything they had to push through and then just overnight Etsy just Thanos snaps their whole business away and they're left with nothing they're left with an automated message saying sorry for any inconvenience please consider this decision final like that's horrible and it would be one thing if that was like an outlier I mean it wouldn't make it any better for that one person but it's not this is becoming more and more prevalent the trend is continuing more and more because Etsy fundamentally they they have more sellers joining the platform than ever before they don't need more sellers so they're raising their standards they're raising their prices and the only person losing is you this is not to say like I know people that do well on Etsy and it is a business that can work and some people do make you know money off of it definitely I mean obviously otherwise you know like there there's something to it but in my experience and not just from my experience from all the students and people that we've talked with it's not the place to really be spending your time because not only that but you're also not building an asset so when you don't own the customer data and the way to tell if you're building an asset or not is like look at where the cash flow is running through who who owns the cash flow Etsy whoever owns the flow of money from your customers to you that's the real business owner you are just a different version of a customer to them so that's what we have to keep in mind whereas on Shopify and this is where it's fundamentally different and people get confused who haven't you know haven't run a store before that yes we're on Shopify but Shopify is more akin to like it's a standalone store so Shopify is you know we're outside of a mall we're on Main Street USA we're building our own store and Shopify rather you know to build our own store we could go and get the brick and mortar ourselves and like learn how to you know lay the concrete and stuff or we could just order like a prefab store one of the ones that they bring in on a crane and they drop it like that kind of thing that's what Shopify is essentially doing so even though we technically are running a Shopify store we are building a business because if Shopify ever kicks us off which doesn't happen like I haven't heard of anybody getting kicked off of Shopify like the only time you ever get kicked off of Shopify is if they remove your payment processing and that only happens if there's something very sketchy going on with your store or if you're doing something like against their policies but even in that case you're able to get other payment processors you're able to you know go build your website somewhere else and then you still have all your customer data and you still have like all your products you still have your whole business you just have to like put up a new face for it whereas on Etsy if you get kicked off you lose all your cash flow you lose everything instantly so the pros are you get the brand control you have the customer data and there's no like transaction fees outside of the I shouldn't say no transaction fees there's no additional transaction fees like the Etsy ones and we're really building an asset every every platform has a transaction fee for like credit card processing but the cons are and it's not listed here but the learning curve which is really like a hidden Pro because that keeps out the competition and we're laying out all the resources cuz also not only does it keep out the competition but you build a really really valuable skill set I can't tell you how many doors it is open for me learning how to run Facebook ads and do like my own marketing and run my own business opposed to if you're running an Etsy business you really don't have a business you have cash flow and you get really good at making designs and stuff like that but so yeah the definite cons are you have to drive your own traffic and everything is your responsibility for Better or For Worse and the good news is like when it comes to driving your own traffic most people associate Drive traffic with with really expensive it doesn't have to be that way you don't need to spend an arm and a leg the only time people overspend in our experience and in our community is when they just think that by letting ads run that's somehow going to fix something and that's not and we we talk about why that is and how to correct it but anyway those are the cons but that's Shopify so bring it all together print on demand business model overview it's on demand fulfillment no upfront inventory it's extremely scalable and flexible low risk and extremely adaptable drop shipping similar but you're competing with everybody else everybody Under the Sun and Drop Shipping is like you find a winning product like picture fidget Spinners and then once you scale that product you go like this you can scale very fast you can make money with anything but you scale it fast and then the product burns out and then there's no lifetime value anytime you see a drop shipper Shopify screenshot look in the bottom corner if they have it up on their dashboard and look at what their returning customer rate is it's normally like 1% it's normally non-existent and also like a said earlier look at what date range are showing you for the stats as a side note but yeah shipping times are slower you're competing with you know everybody else who has access to that same catalog as you which especially if you're going for one of these big drop shipping companies like they're actively marketing themselves their their job is to find as many of you as possible to sell the exact same thing and they don't care about your competition with each other like that's how they make their money and also from a customer experience side and the reason that they have low returning customer rate is because slower delivery speeds which is not a rule of thumb but it's very common with your op shipping cuz a lot of them are coming from overseas and it's not branded at all it's nothing unique it's simply just you know whatever's on the shelf and you're not able to put like custom neck tags or anything like that so then comparing the marketplaces again they have the pros they got built-in traffic but you have limitting control there's lots of fees and competition gets commoditized versus when you're on your own store you have brand control marketing Freedom you're building a long-term asset so now it's let's talk about our traffic like how are people going to find us so people are going to find us you know the traditional ways would be Billboards tv ads radio ads picture Mad Men one of my favorite TV shows I think a lot of people maybe haven't seen it Don Draper that's so I wanted to be when I grew up anyway now our version of it is we're using Facebook ads Word of Mouth email and a teeny tiny bit of Google so all said and done we pick a target market we have our product which is t-shirts and then we fulfill the products using print on demand so we don't have to buy inventory then we use our Shopify store and then we drive traffic with email meta is 70% of our sales email is roughly 20% and organic and Google fights over the last 5 to 10 so what else what are the other questions these are all like the little what FS of like do I need do I need an LLC do I need an EIN I wish I had a screenshot up but I totally relate to all these questions because when I first started out I had my notepad and the question at the top that I wrote after watching this long webinar getting pitched on something some course was LLC question mark and then how I I had no idea which end was up so we're going to go through through the basics so legal and basic LLC you can begin as a sole proprietorship no LLC required right away why LC later protect your personal assets gains credibility and simplify finances as you grow get advice consult a legal professional when you're ready so this is like the definitions of this but my personal so in LLC stands for Limited liability Corporation if you know that you're going to be running this business long term and you're not just like dipping your toes in you're experimenting with it get an LLC I highly recommend doing it because what it does is it creates a new entity that in the eyes of the government like all responsibility which like and liability for the business falls on that so like if somebody gets injured or anything like that and this is not I need to say it's not Financial advice it's not legal advice don't listen to me but if you're still here one it's good for that like the liability piece but way more important is you want all of the revenue from the business from your Shopify store and all your expenses being counted towards the business so you're able to claim the tax deductions I recommend if you're serious about getting started and like really doing this long term get an LLC use it's called busy used to be called uh Inc file which is a much better name but if you just go to this site and this is obviously only for people in the United States it differs by country but if you go to this site busy it's one of the simplest ones to get started and you're going to pick your entity type so LLC then select your state there's lots of pros and cons by state I personally just got started with the state that I was based in and then you're going to go through the process it's going to ask you some questions about like your address business name all that kind of stuff business name does not actually matter learn from me I spent two weeks trying to pick the most perfect LLC name in the world realizing that it doesn't actually matter at all stupid mistakes patent course check really complex name that didn't matter check I did it all it was really great right out of the gate have rhymed but so LLC and the thing they're going to offer you a bunch of upsells and stuff that you don't actually need the only things you actually need are an EIN number and a registered agent and they'll offer you an upsell for expedited like processing in my experience even if you don't take that it's still pretty quick I recommend getting started with them that's the company that we personally use every time and then once you do get started business banking and recordkeeping so you want to keep separate finances and I highly recommend doing this right from the get-go have every single business transaction and expense run through a business credit card or business checking account it just makes it easier for taxes and accounting and like just makes your life easier in general but you can use a bookkeeping software you don't really need this in the very beginning but moral the story main thing to take away is you want to keep all this very simple you want to keep it very easy to manage and when it comes to taxes and sales tax sales tax Shopify will tell you they will give you alerts once you start surpassing sales tax thresholds that again this is not Financial advice but that to me is something to worry about later on down the road because you're not going to hit any of those thresholds for quite a while and that's normally it's and it's by State so it's a lot of them they have a revenue threshold and a per sale threshold so it'll be like for example $100,000 in sales in Florida or $200 orders whichever one's first which that's by state so 200 orders are $100,000 in Revenue pretty high numbers per state so it's going to be quite a while so don't let perfect be the animated progress learn just in time not just in case and you know this you're on business like do what you're comfortable with but for me personally I cross that bridge when I get to it it's not saying by any means to like not be in compliance or anything of the sort I'm not saying that I'm saying quite the opposite actually like get your LLC make sure you're running like all your expenses through the LLC from the very beginning get it Incorporated do it clean from the from the get-go but sales tax is one thing that by the end like don't stress yourself out about it until you're like getting close to those thresholds and Shopify tells you about it and hiring a CPA once you're ready for it certify public accountant or bookkeeper at the very least can they're worth their weight in gold and it completely changed my life adding them into our business then in terms of income taxes again this is just the quick nitty-gritty stuff that people think about when you file for as an l C for example and again this is just for United States when you file taxes as an LLC an LLC is what's called a pass through entity meaning that any income or net profit that's reported for your business essentially just passes through to your personal income return point being it's very simple it keeps things nice and easy the good news is that if you have when you do things the right way if you have $110,000 in so let's say revenue generated on your LLC and then you have $6,000 in expenses instead of having to show and pay income tax on that full 10,000 you're able to claim deductions it's called tax write offs youve definitely heard of it before but here's how it actually works so you have 10,000 in income 6,000 in expenses that the amount that passes through and it has to be legitimate write offs obviously the amount that actually passes through is the $4,000 in net profit which is really good news because that $4,000 is like obviously it's a much lower amount to be paying taxes on but this compounds over the course of like five 10 years of running a business ends up being like saving you a lot and the cool thing and this is not a tax course but there's a lot of ways that you can a lot of things you can save on when it comes to writeoffs so it's every ad that you run every app that you buy you know basically anything that you buy that is directly benefiting the business and not for personal use counts as it right off next intellectual property and brand protection this is a question we get a lot when it comes to like what kind of designs can I use and that sort of thing like what about things that are borderline like uh movie titles or characters or you know music uh slogan or what do they call lyrics rule of thumb keep it very easy just stay away from all of that when we come up with designs it's just make original designs we'll talk about how to do all the research and all that stuff but come up with new unique original designs there's a great book on this subject called uh steal like an artist that I highly recommend reading it'll help because it's not actually like the title sounds but but it'll help lay out like a good foundational framework for thinking through this but come up with original designs stay away from anything that is movie artist famous person likeness related with a 10-ft pole cuz yes those designs definitely could sell nobody saying that they couldn't but the point is like it's just not worth the risk there are billions and billions of possible designs you could be making you do not need to run the risk and I said this in the last course and we still get questions about it so I'm saying it again it's up to you it's your own business if you really want to be safe what you can do is hire a lawyer off of upwork or somewhere like Rocket Lawyer somewhere where it's free for not free it's cheap just a couple of hours and ask like get their opinion that's the way to get your answer I'm not a loyer this is not legal advice don't listen to me but in my experience the easiest thing to do has just been staying away from that entirely fortunately in eight years of doing this we've never knock on wood I don't think this counts as real wood but we've never had to deal with any of that so I really need to knock on wood but yeah we've just by it's not really Fortune it's just we've stayed away from it so that includes like movies songs books all of that stuff hire a lawyer if you have any questions about that but there's a billion and billions and billions of designs you can make without treading anywhere close to that the flip side of that is some people wonder do I have to get my designs trademarked and otherwise people are going to copy them no we've run stores for a long time never gotten any of the designs like trademarked or anything like that we got the brand name trademarked but it's going to be a fact of running this brand that as soon as you start getting some results people are going to copy you naturally and I said this in the last course too and people still ask about it so I'm going to reiterate it that when people copy you it's a sign that you're on the right track and you just have to take it as that nothing else I used to get super you know emotional about it was like screw them like I'm going to whatever I mean I know that they're in Vietnam but I'm going to find a way like just stupid 90% of the time when we get copied long story short don't get trademarks you don't have to worry about it you're going to get copied and it has no material impact on your business's performance and I truly mean that PE but first time you get copied you're still going to get upset about it I can promise you that but just remember back to this playback this section that you don't have to get upset about it it's just a fact of running a business the really good news and another benefit of running Shopify print on demand is it's challenging there's a learning curve so I can't tell you how many times we've been ripped off like our current store dozens and dozens of copycats all of them are run by people who are copiers who are losers who don't know how to run their own store so they don't actually get any sales so it's kind of a nice you know kind of a nice thing you have to just watch them flounder and you don't have to worry about it because they have to learn how to optimize a site and run the ads and like do all the work and they're not like they're just the kind of PE they're not like you who are showing up and putting in the legitimate hard work that goes into and honest hard work that goes into building this and like learning for themselves they just try to look for shortcuts and those kind of people will never win doesn't matter if it's print on demand or anything else so we don't have to worry about them so to summarize LLC and banking when it comes to banking I've worked with every Bank Under the Sun again this is just for people in the US or everybody International I apologize I know you all have questions that again I only speak from personal experience I have never been outside the United States trying to run a business in the US fortunately I have helped a good amount of people that are doing that and the things that they have told me about it like it's very similar in a lot of countries in terms of like the entity structure and setup and all that stuff and running you know your Facebook ads and Shopify it's all the same like you just set up like there's very few things that are like fundamentally different the only difference is like credit card rewards are not as good internationally so I'm told but for banking I've worked with every pretty much every major US Bank like PNC TD American couple others but Chase is the one that I use now I love it use mercury some weird tech one but anyway we use Chase I like them a lot and we use AMX gold card for our ad span it's where all their Facebook charges go on because we get 4X points on ads spend on that category and then we use the 2% Capital One spark card for everything else and then misinformation or mythbusting is you're going to hear a lot of stuff a lot of opinions from a lot of people as you're starting this business just consider the sources with all of it consider the source of has this person actually done what they're giving me advice on and if they haven't completely disregard it like unequivocally unapologetically disregard it and I say that because a lot of the questions that I feel from people about llc's and taxes and stuff it's like well my dad said this it's like okay here's your dad run a business like no but his like okay great so consider the source and I say that with a a caring heart because you're going to get a lot of information thrown your way you need to be able to hone your focus and pay attention to the stuff that's actually valuable and adds value to your business and sends you down the right track and it's not going to derail you when it especially when it's based on absolutely nothing so common misconceptions I need to spend thousands to start actually low startup costs are possible with print on demand and we talked about like 500 to 1,000 bucks minimum but I see a lot of people start spending a lot of money on ads unnecessarily and so you don't need to spend a lot this is especially where if you like picturing if you join once you start running your ads if you start like you join the university you're able to get feedback from a coach say you spend a 100 bucks in ads or there's people that have joined and they're like two three grand in spend like if you had joined a month ago I could have saved you $2,500 and spend that's where it makes too much sense once you start like really spending on the ads but anyway I just wish that I don't even mean for this to sound like a pitch for the University it's not join if you want to but I it just pains me when I see those people join and I'm like why did you spend this much like your cart is broken so nobody's able been able to check out so nine times out of 10 when somebody are when somebody is spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on ads it's because something was broken and they just didn't take a step back to fix it and that's what we talk about a lot in this course is how to know what those things are and take a step back myth two is I must have an LLC from day one I while I do recommend it if you're going to be you know in this for the long term and you can see that for yourself it's not something that should hold you back from getting started still create your Shopify store you can still start making designs like it should not don't let perfect be the animated progress you can get started the only time that I recommend having an LLC is once you start actually taking in sales which there can be hopefully there's not a lot of time between when you start and when that is if you're doing things right and following along with the course and like moving through things quickly and not getting hung up on stuff but next uh myth is taxes are only for big businesses now even even small side hustles must report income May own taxes so keep that in mind then next I can use any image or design I find online no we show you all the tools you need in order to be making them for yourself don't recommend using anybody else's designs ever next really really important thing is overcoming constraints and bottlenecks we want to be using something that's called the theory of constraints I learned this from heroi basically we want to be identifying the biggest hurdle in our business and then fix that first we want to solve one bottleneck at a time for steady progress and this is another thing that the most successful students did really well so the theory of constraints focuses on identifying the biggest limiting factor constraint that prevents us from achieving our goal then we systematically improve it until it's no longer the bottleneck so applying that to print on man initial constraint might be decision creation design creation and we solve by hiring a designer learning quick design tools next constraint might be fulfillment times find more reliable suppliers or consider multiple pod Partners that's not that's a bad example but uh another constraint could be traffic and conversions we can invest in better ads AB test landing pages improve product photography and descriptions point being is really the the former piece of each one of these bullets is identify the constraint and then take an action and I see a lot of people especially beginners get hung up on like what should I be doing that's why it's included here in this section like what about you know dot dot dot 90% of the time that somebody asked me what about this question it's because they're way out in left field and they're working on something that's completely irrelevant and not the constraint of the business like for example I just talked to somebody the other day their ads are performing really well but their question that they asked was about something in terms of like the like the site performance or like site speed and it's like no look at it from a 10,000 foot view identify what's the main constraint in the business which in his case it's like he literally just needed to bump the budget and he would double the size of his business over T night so that's the importance of this being able to answer your own whatabouts by reflecting on is this actually what the business needs right now then integrating just in time learning in your print on demand Journey so phase one when we launch we're going to learn platform setup basic design creation initial fulfillment setup we're going to acquire knowledge about creating your first ad campaigns only when you're ready to launch them as an example then for growth after our initial sales we're going to learn about scaling strategies email marketing automations and advanced fillment then optimization once we're more established we're going to dive into more complex analytics conversion rate optimization and hiring Das or designers so we're not going to do we're not going to talk about hiring vas or like what analytics we should be looking at before we set up our Shopify store and then we're not going to be you know asking about when you know how should we set up our how what kind of AD should we run when we haven't even made any designs to advertise those are actual examples that I've heard key takeaways and next steps foundations first set up your basic structure I mean we covered a lot this is just recapping like the the whatabout section but all said and done laying our business foundations now we know what the target is what the the metrics are for Success how much time it should take how much money we've set very realistic expectations for ourselves I've done my very best to scare away up until this point so if you're still here congratulations and the reason I did this is because we did the last course and I thought that I did a good job of that but I felt like people do way better when you set like the lowest possible bar in terms of expectations I found and then they're only able to like surprise themselves from there on out and so that's been our attempt to do that and also to set even more grounded expectations in terms of what success looks like and the people that have been the most successful what they've done versus not we didn't know any of that before it was just based on our experience so hopefully you found this helpful and now we're going to be going to build the number one most important asset in your business you can take guess what it is cu it is you thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next [Music] lesson welcome to the foundations module of the course aka the most important section of any of the materials that we're going to cover because this right here what you're watching is the epitome of us sharpening our ax before we chop down the tree the things that we about to cover are the things that students who went through the last course which honestly I wasn't even sure about putting it in because it's like personal mindset growth all of that it's like who wants to learn about that when we're talking about print on demand everybody loved it and not because of like me or anything like that it's just like these topics don't get talked about that much and when they do it's like social media people like virtue signaling not everybody but a lot of times and it's like fluffy stuff that's not actually tangible or like how do you actually implement it in like a framework that's what we're doing here and so the goal of this section is not to tell anybody that you have to change the way that you are or any of the thing of the sort it's to lay out a groundwork of here are all the things that make up a successful entrepreneur or successful people happy people in general and then you can pick and choose which tools and tangible takeaways you think apply best to your life and this is going to be heavily based off of my own experience from when I worked with prior to the previous course people that knew and loved and cared about and I was trying to help them start their own business and time and time again I would teach them everything I was doing things that had worked and generated tens of millions in sales and for whatever reason I cannot figure it out it just wasn't clicking and after like the sixth or seventh time just making the same mistake I finally realized that the thing that I was missing was the person and that you need to be able to address who the person is that's going to be attempting this and taking on this endeavor before it's even relevant to talk about what the business is how to run ads how to make good products your store all that stuff we get to all that stuff and we give you the best strategies that we have but the thing that I realize is that if the person who's doing those things doesn't have the ability to focus if they don't have the energy to put in a consistent amount of energy for extended period of time if they don't have the mindset to be able to tackle hard problems and way more importantly take feedback not just from themselves and coaches but from from the market and if they aren't able to be self-aware of their own skill deficits and even more importantly than that when they realize one of them they don't ego pad themselves and try to reshape reality in their mind to say that it's something other than it's not like other than what it is and those are all things that I see way too frequently and this section of the course is designed to give you very specific and tangible tools and metaphors and examples from tons of experts people with way more expertise than me going to be pulling on all of their combined experience and then synthesizing it down into the most tangible takeaways that are relevant for us right here right now as we are starting a new business and the tools that we will need to face the problems and happy challenges that we will get the opportunity to face now without further Ado let's get started 90% of the time that people have a business issue what they really have is just a personal issue and that's a quote from Alex or MOSI that I think is extremely true and it's held true in all of the experiences that I've had working with students that people fundamentally they pick up on the topics and like they learn the things like they have the blueprints they have all the tools and resources there the only thing stopping them from succeeding is getting out of their own way or put differently helping themselves to win and that just requires a lot of growth and facing challenges and that's all the stuff that we're going to be tackling here and as a side note before we jump in I want to be clear that this is not going to be some over-the-top biohacking you know do a handstand in a cold plunge while juggling like apple cider vinegar and meditating type thing because I know that a lot of people who have some success they get rich and then they start adopting like all these weird quirky habits and whatever they start going to Burning Man and they forget about what got them there in the first place like that thing common saying like the average millionaire has seven streams of income what they leave out that is that the way they became a millionaire in the first place 99% of the time is from doing one thing really well it's just an example then the way that they maintain the wealth is from doing seven different things so taking sound bites out of context anyway but they start telling people that it's like those weird routines that got them successful in the first place and I don't think this comes from like a bad place I think that just people's brains we we delete distort and like just forget stuff you know like there's tons of examples of like the professor who had had people he had somebody like come into his his classroom and like fake getting into a fight and then he had them leave then he had all of his students in like the electure Hall of 200 plus people take out a piece of paper and write down what they think just happened and then he had all of them handed in every single one of them was different the point is I don't think it comes from a bad place I think people just their memory lack sometimes but I'm very cognizant of this fact so this is my attempt at doing the most barebones tactical things that I recommend that actually make a difference and this is not just from my own like attempt at being objective about my own history but what I'm seeing in the present day work the best for all of our students and so even if you decide to do none of these things you can do all of them none of them at the very least you'll have the awareness of the trade-offs that we're making in our day-to-day life and that's what we're all about is the awareness and so to poke fun into this is here's a picture of Warren Buffett who very famously eats McDonald's every single day and last time I checked he's doing pretty well so obviously you know there's Nuance to of this cuz I think a lot of times like social media influencers talking about this stuff they make it seem like you have to be a freaking Navy Seal in order to be successful at business which just obviously isn't true but then you know if you picture somebody at the other end of the extreme who's whatever the exact opposite of a Navy SEAL is that person's more likely to not have any success so more often than not I find that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and this lesson is our attempt at finding that middle point and the best way to find that middle point in my experience is to demonstrate both ends of the extremes so that's what we're going to be doing and we're going to be doing this in an attempt to stack the deck in our favor so this isn't an exact prescription this is a buffet we can pick and choose which strategies and you know habits and routines work best for us and the other side of this is I I hear people sometimes say well you know when people are told like work on one business like well Elon Musk has multiple businesses the easy answer the obvious answer is we aren't Elon Musk and Elon Musk if you're comparing yourself to somebody who has 0.01% Intelligence terms of bell curve top .01% of work ethic and vision that is an absolute anomaly of a human being and we don't want to make those our requirements for Success we don't want to have to be as lucky I mean I would not consider him lucky like yeah but anyway you get my point we want to do everything that we can to stack the deck in our favor so that we don't have to rely on having an IQ of 3,000 or whatever so so failing to plan is planning to fail and that's why we're here we're making a plan starting off with this is what most people think success looks like success tough word I succeeded at saying that word and I was one of these people I thought that success was I was in this before State and then I had a goal and then I just go there it's just a straight line and you know you you just get there we're red we're bad now we get good awesome and what they don't realize or what I didn't realize is that this is what success actually looks like it involves going through a period of extreme hardship and challenges and pain going through the fire is one way to put it whereas the Emoji puts it and that's what's required that is a absolute prerequisite for Success because as we're going to talk more about real success is not about where you end up it's be about who you become in the process and if you picture the future version of yourself the one who has achieved that goal if you picture who that person is they probably have completely different skill sets habits routines mindset Focus states of energy than we currently do in the present day and that's okay cuz the first step to getting there is being aware of that deficit because then that's something we can start to work towards where most people shoot themselves in the foot is that they work it up in their minds that reality is somehow different than what it actually is and that there is no need to change that they shouldn't have to face any challenges or problems and that they should just be able to have the thing that they want without having to pay the price that's just not how anything works and believe me I tried this is where unfortunately most people end up turning back around and heading for the door once they you know once the going gets tough and this is you know where a lot of people's goals just end up going to die and a example or exper put a they took a mouse and they put it in water I'm not condoning this so don't find me pea but they took a mouse they put it in water and the mouse drowned within like 45 seconds then they took a second mouse they put it in water and they let it tread water and then as it was about the drown they took it back out they let it relax collect its energy and then they put it back in second time that the mouse treaded water guess how long it went for you can't guess so I'll just tell you it treaded water for 16 hours you can Google this 16 hours so the point of the story or of the experiment is to prove a point which is we have so much more potential and talent and possibilities within each of us than any of us quite realize and the thing that we're all really searching for is we're just looking for confirmation that things will work work out like the mouse the second time through had a belief that if he was able to hold on long enough that things would work out and he was able to go for 16 hours that first Mouse assuming that they had the same training regiment rip Mouse but they both had the same potential within them the only difference was in their minds so what we're doing here is crafting our mind so that we are able to be the second mouse we are able to be the one that's going for 16 hours so that we're are able to push through this and that that doesn't happen to our goals and to go level deeper into this want to talk about the five stages of Entrepreneurship and this is once I heard this concept it fundamentally changed the way that I viewed not just starting a business but problems in general in my life cuz it reshaped my reality or it helped me adjust to what the actual reality is that all of us go through whether if we are aware of it or not and that's why we're sharing it now at the beginning of this course so that as you go through this journey you have the awareness and you have the tools of the change mindset shifts that you were going to be experiencing and I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of students at this point I can say very confidently every single one of them 100% myself included the coaches included Meg all of us have gone through this exact cycle so really pay attention to this part cuz this is going to be your life over the next 3 to 6 months at the very least so the first step of this cycle so this five stages emotional cycle of change so it's change entrepreneurship lots of different phrases for it but the first step is called uninformed optimism uninformed optimism is the stage when things are the most exciting imagine you know when you just found out about print on demand or e-commerce Drop Shipping or crypto or whatever the opportunity is doesn't even have to be a business but you hear about all the potential upsides you see the sales dashboards and you know the lifestyle you know the Instagram Lamborghinis and all that crap that really just feeds into that they're really feeding on people being in the uninformed op optimism stage which is when people are willing to like hand over their credit cards which is like that's a whole separate topic but anyway this is when you know we see all the benefits of the change and none of the potential downside because we just don't know and like Grass Is Always Greener is another word for this but this is when we're just brainstorming and strategizing about the future and it gets better because next we move into informed pessimism so we started off watching a few videos learn a little bit and then we decide all right we're really going to start this thing we start to learn about the costs what it actually takes and every business has this I don't care if it's print on demand it literally doesn't matter uninformed optimism it's worn off and as long as you learn of the reality of it's like when you're learning about the reality what it's going to take the changes you're going to have to go through that positive emotion quickly sour and our pessimism starts to set in this stage is our shift to a negative emotional state to highlight the important points here this is when you start looking for reasons to abandon the effort and our brain it's not even you like consciously doing it your brain subconsciously is starting to throw up very logical it's very very good at this it's very good at throwing up logical reasons that we should return to whatever we were doing before that's why we're talking about this now so that we can arm ourselves against it we're never going to completely negate it it's always going to be an everpresent fact like that's just human evolution our brain is hardwired for survival and as it sees us throwing ourselves into new challenges and problems it starts to tell us hey you idiot why are you doing this like we had things pretty good back here but the problem is that the brain's definition of pretty good is not the same as ours the brain's definition are pretty good is survival it is we had enough calories we were maintaining homeostasis there wasn't risk of death or stress or anything of the sort why are we going into this it's because what our brain doesn't recognize or value like we do is the sense of happiness or fulfillment or whatever you want to call it and that's really what we're after and unfortunately it gets worse fortunately or unfortunately how however you want to see it it gets worse cuz then we head into the third stage which is the valley of Despair I like to call it the valley of growth but te each their own the valley of Despair this is the lowest point of the emotional cycle and this is where many many people give up so really please hear me on this point and you can like almost feel it in my voice cuz I have done this so many times I have gotten to this point and this is where so many people turn back around around I can picture the people in my mind and it pains me seeing how much effort and sacrifice they put in to get to that point in the first place and they had the potential to push through and if they just understood these tools on like a deeper level or maybe if I explained it better I don't know like everybody's on their own Journey you can only help so much but this is where the our brain starts overloading us with logical reasons that we should just go back to the way that things were and they end up doing that and you know the past just quite frankly doesn't seem so bad at this stage so when we're in stage one and we're evaluating New Opportunities we're hearing about all this exciting stuff we're picturing our present day circumstances of like our job isn't the best you know I want more money to whatever whatever your goals are there's like hell Island and Heaven Island so somewhere that we're trying to get away from somewhere we're trying to get to Hell Island when we're in stage one is like our present day circumstance but then as we head down into the valley of growth that's where we start to forget what that was like and so people get here and they start to have a very known cost for unknown potential think again of the mouse so even though we have the potential to push through we have yet to realize the benefit of doing so and therefore it is extremely challenging for us to continue to justify to ourselves that it is worth the trade-off it's absolutely worth the trade-off and there is no avoiding this and again doesn't matter if it's this business or next business every single business every opportunity in the world has this journey and as a quick tangent the reason I know that for a fact is that any opportunity fundamentally is based on the fact that there is an opportunity there is demand for something and then there is a opportunity for fulfilling on that demand and economics if there was no barrier to entry to fulfill on that demand then the market would become flooded with competitors and when Supply surpasses demand you then get commoditization AKA just it equals out and then the opportunity goes away so fundamentally there has to be this Valley of Despair this Valley of growth in order for there to be an opportunity at all if there wasn't then you just have Arbitrage and Arbitrage just gets washed away and the market corrects itself so this exists in every single business another word for what gets people to shift out of this is just shiny object syndrome it's when we're in the valley and we're like yeah maybe I just didn't make the right call with this business and that's very possible we're going to talk about how to make sure you are in the right business and that you're following listening to people that you can actually trust but shiny object syndrome and this is the psychological concept where people focus on new and fashionable ideas regardless of how valuable or helpful it may ultimately be thinking of schmeel uh from Lord of the Rings just chasing the shiny object endlessly until we end up looking like that or putting it differently so when we're on a current project and then you see you know another mountain or Peak way off in the distance looks super small and you're like I can Summit that one that looks pretty easy the reason that shiny objects always look so shiny is that we don't know like what the problems are we don't know the challenges and I can guarantee this is coming from Resident expert on shiny objects and every single time that I've switched gears for something that seems super shiny and they always seem so shiny there's always a reason that it looks that way and there's always something that I just don't know so now I prioritize my time being spent on things that I know the downsides I know the risks I know the challenges like the devil you know is better than the devil you don't like that's extremely true and this is where people make decisions not just here people in general make decisions based on emotion and justify them with logic a more fun example to lighten the move is like if somebody buys a Ferrari when they're making the purchase in their mind they're just thinking about how cool they're going to look how fast they're going to get to go like how you know awesome how it's going to make them feel like they age backwards 20 years all that stuff but then they justify it with logic like if you ask them why' you buy the Ferrari nobody would ever say like cuz I'm going to look so cool I'm going to feel younger and like nobody would ever say that maybe somebody's super honest I'd love to meet them but what they actually say is well you know like Ferraris really hold their value it's a collector's item and you know I got like a good deal on it and like it's all those points it's never you know the actual reasons so bringing this back to what we're talking about the LIE when somebody leaves the business or chases down a shiny object is they try to justify with logic and this is something that it would sound like they they say to themselves I gave it a good honest effort I did what I could but this opportunity just wasn't that good and it's not my fault that I'm not reaching the Finish Line like it's just XYZ they pointing the finger all around and that's dropping the the metaphor talking as myself that's okay if they want to think like that like if they want to Ego pad themselves fine that's just somebody who they're setting themselves up to be in this cycle a lot whereas the truth is if they were a able to admit to themselves that this is hard harder than I expected even and I'm not sure if I value the potential outcome over the inputs that are required that would be reality nobody really talks like that but that would actually be the reality so if you quit here you end up back at stage one and you'll have to start all over again this is why visualization SL manifesting woo woo stuff is important not like staring in the mirror shouting affirmations and saying You're great and then everything fixes itself nothing of the sort we we'll talk more about that in a second but people say the only way you lose is if you quit Kobe Bryant there's a great interview with him rip where he said he gets like animated about this and he's like losing like it just doesn't exist or failure failure just doesn't exist there is no such thing as failure you only learning and hearing like the emotion in his voice as he talked about it like really instilled to me that it's so true failure is just like a construct that we make up in our minds and we'll talk about how to tear that down later but people also say focus on the inputs not the outputs focus on what you can control we normally hear about this when we're talking about like you know Social Circles and like people in our lives and people like just focus on yourself like that that aside that's great but within the context of this focus on the input puts AKA like what you can control about your own growth and how much effort you're putting in putting your effort in the right places and then just keep doing that I used to think like okay once I get the outputs then I'll say that I'm doing a good job I realize it's completely backwards because the outputs are just a lagging indicator of how good of a job I'm doing with the inputs and this is where most people just end up heading back up and they rinse and repeat the same cycle a lot of times for their entire lives unfortunately and it's very possible for somebody to have live 50 years but end up just living the same 5 years 10 times it's unfortunate but there is a better way and that's what we're going to talk about a way to break through and get to stage four which is informed optimism informed optimism is when the possibility of success increases and you are back in the positive emotional Zone the benefits of your actions are starting to bear fruit and the cost of change is feeling worth it the key here is to not stop and keep going to highlight a main point here the benefit of your actions are starting to bear fruit and the cost of change is feeling worth it this is why some people say like in this business if you can get through the testing phase then you can get through anything because I can personally say from my own experience that by far the hardest points in my entrepreneurial Journey whatever you want to call it were the times that I was at the very beginning and I had never seen even a lick of success cuz that's when I was 100% the first Mouse I had no no understanding of what this could possibly turn into I had ideas and hopes but I never realized it so there was always that fear at the back of my mind that am I doing all this for nothing which follow that a level deeper it's like am I dumb for even thinking this I follow that a level deeper it's the fear am I enough which that's a fear that fundamentally all people have at one level or another but when we push through that we ultimately get to stage five which is success and fulfillment and this is the final stage of the emotional cycle of change this is where the benefits of your new behaviors note that your new behaviors I'm going to say it again the benefits of your new behaviors not the benefits of the sales you got not the benefits of the great products you made it's the new behaviors it's who you became in the process and the cost of Change Is Now perceived to be worth it and the actions that were once difficult and uncomfortable are now routine we're going to talk about how we can expedite that Journey so there it is the emotional cycle of change the five stages of Entrepreneurship this is it this is the process we're going to teach you all of the the strategies how to run the ads the Shopify setup how to optimize how to make the products all that stuff I have absolutely zero doubt in our ability to like I feel I know it in my bones we have the ability to teach that like cold and we can teach this stuff too I guess what I'm really trying to say is like people grasp that stuff very quickly that's what I'm really confident in people grasp that stuff where people struggle to push through or their opportunity for growth in is in this is in the self-awareness that we are in this cycle and that if you just keep pushing through which sounds like so cliche at this point to even you know be mentioning but that's really the truth and we're going to talk about the mindset tools we can use to make that Journey easier in the process but this is it so I highly recommend watch this section Back review this ingrain this because this will be your guide this will be the and I say this like to myself this has been my guide that anytime I find myself in the valley and you know you return to that occasionally you return to the valley of growth because growth never stops The Mont that I say to myself is that days like this are the reason that not everybody will do it and then that keeps me going cuz if I want different results than what other people are getting then I have to be willing to pay a higher price than what they are and that's what we're going to be doing here because building a business is hard as hard things happen it can either be helping us or hurting us and when I say hard I want I want to be clear like stepping back a second it's very relative like we're talking about working on our laptops like there is no actual fear or hardship here it's not like we're doing manual labor or out there like sweating in the sun like there's people who do like here we live there's guys like doing construction on highrises and they're getting in their construction elevators going up before the sun is even up and they're up there in the highrises doing construction all day long like I have nothing but the utmost respect for those guys so for me to call this hard is I don't know if it's doing them a disservice but you get my point like there's there's challenging and then there's you know working on your laptop when I say hard it's really the emotional change which that is hard in in any context it doesn't matter what you're working on just to clarify so now the question is how can we stack the deck in our favor to be able to push through that process Step One is setting our expectations and I said this in the first course but I want to really lay into this is for some people it still didn't quite get through that this will not be easy even with the best tools and strategies and the abundance of proof that this stuff actually works everybody's journey is different everybody's brand is different everybody's previous experience and skill sets and like all that everybody has their own like set of challenges they're going to deal with so this will not be easy and to take it even further it will be the hardest thing that you have ever done now this is not stacking up in terms of personal accomplishments like not comparing this to the realm of like you know losing a family member or anything like that so This Personal Achievement and growth that kind of thing it will be the hardest thing you've ever done and that's not from me saying that it was by far the hardest thing for me but every single one of the students I've worked for worked with work for Meg for all the coaches we all say the same thing cuz there was nothing that I think part of what made it so challenging if I hav't made it already abundantly clear enough is that there was nothing that could have prepared me for that Journey there's there's no textbook you could read about this this course is my attempt to make the resource that I wish I had but yeah there was there was nothing that prepared me for it and it will require lots of growth learning and an important thing we haven't mentioned is facing fears facing our fears of like not being enough our skill deficiencies fear of failure all of that stuff so expectations is number one so we're expecting this to be challenging but it's also beautiful like even you being here watching this showing up for yourself with the willingness to grow and learn and want something different for yourself I have nothing but the utmost respect for people like you who do this because I think the world is a better place with people who want to better themselves in it which almost sounds like a no-brainer but it's so obviously true that it hurts it's like if everybody just imagine if everybody in the world adopted the same kind of desire for better future for themselves that you have which is clearly evident just by you even being here I think the world would be a much better place I think the the world's pretty good but I think it would be even more fun because I think that when we as humans like not to get too philosophical but when we confront our fears and we are willing to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves the questions about who I am and who I want to become and then what that Gap is and then ask how can I bridge that Gap and then we actually go out and do something about it I think like that's it like that's what life is all about and to help answer that question of like who we are and where we want to go and what the Gap is we have to answer a simple question just why are we here and not not the ultimate why you know why in the universe and all of that course coming soon on that but why is this business important to us why or put differently why is this opport opportunity means something to us and taking a step further why are we willing to burn the boats and by burn the boats we mean why are we cutting off all possible opportunities all possible backup options this is not saying quit your job or like you know follow your heart but take your brain with you but why are we in our mind not making failure an option because Kobe Bryant taught us failure is not real there's only winning or learning why is this why does this matter to us and so it brings us to the question of like what is your why I had always heard that thrown around a ton and I was like yeah it sounds like a good question like how do I answer it and then like the 60 second short would be over and be like okay so here's two experiences that I've had that shifted my perspective and helped me answer that question so for a long time my why was to build a big brand and sell it for a lot of money and help out my family my friends buy a big house cool car I was like nice that's that's it and I thought that's what a y was for a while and my quick story on that was that it wasn't until after I sold the business and the first business and the wire hit the checking account and I had open up the Chase app my phone I saw that it hit and I literally closed the app and went about my day and leading up to that I was expect like that had been my goal for years and years that was my why and I expected to feel a mixture of fulfillment excitement just pure ecstasy and and I felt nothing and it shocked me borderline depressed me and I because depress might be a strong word but it left me questioning like what was it all for and not only what was that for but what is this for if the thing that I had strived for for so long ended up meaning nothing and what I eventually realized after reflecting on it for a number of months was that the surface level y that I had of like you know building the brand selling it all that that was really just a byproduct of the actual why and it was just like a means to an end and when I reflected on it the actual why that I had was that it came from realizing like the times that I had felt the most fulfilled in my life was the experiences where I had the privilege of getting to play like even a small part in the Fulfillment or sense of achievement in somebody else and it was the times that getting to help somebody in even the smallest way like achieve something or realize something forsel that they never even thought possible and like seeing their eyes light up and not even like the business or like the sales but like just seeing them like break down like the walls in their mind of like what they thought was possible that was the time that like that meant everything so now my new why is that I just wake up every day with a very simple question in my mind I wake up and I say what can I do today that will help people even more it used to just be what can I do that will help people period but now it's what can I do that will help people even more cuz then that approaches it from a place of abundance and then it's like exciting it's building on top of it cuz now I you know obviously we all have businesses to run we have bills to pay all that sort of thing but I firmly believe at this stage of my life that if I can just wake up every day and do right by that if I can just answer that question then go out and do that thing no matter what it is and then I just keep doing that and there's no like end goal of like it used to be like I'll help and then like this will happen and that'll happen like then that means that like the true thing you're trying to optimize for is that down there and now it's just I wake up and I say what can I do that will help people even more and then I go and do that and then if I do that like the rest takes care of itself and then even if it doesn't then I still feel fulfilled every step of the way like doing stuff like this I absolutely love and yeah so at that point I've already won so anyway sorry not to go on a a tangent but two experiences that shifted my perspective and helped me come to that realization in those that couple of months span when I was you know questioning everything was this so the first one is an exercise called at some point in the next 10 years exercise it's pretty straightforward I'll just write out all the questions so what you're going to do is grab a sheet of paper or a notepad but close all your notifications and set a timer for at least 10 minutes and then write out the answers to each of these questions so over the next 10 years what do you want to learn what do you want to have what do you want to be or who do you want to be would be a better question what do you want to do where do you want to go what do you want to create what do you want to contribute to what do you want to exper experience what do you want to see and what do you want to try and you realize that it's basically the same question just with different like verbs at the end which it paints a beautiful picture of like the full Human Experience and doing that helped take me a step closer to realizing like what my my true why is and you know another flip side not to keep bringing it back to my experience but whenever I set goals for business I always found it very limiting to say like my goal was just a million and then 10 million and then 100 Mil like it just felt like adding a zero next to something it was like I'll write it cuz I feel like I should but what's the actual point in that like at a certain point it doesn't really change your life that much which I I know sounds like whenever I heard somebody say money doesn't buy you happiness I was I always had the thought I was like yeah sure whatever I'll let me figure that out for myself once I get there then I'll let you know but I found it to be true and the way that I shifted that was instead of writing like it's this monetary gold and that monetary gold I wrote each of them down like the levels and it's all relative but write down the levels that you picture in your mind and then write a line across for each of them and then within each of them you do like this exercise and right at this level what will I be able to learn what will I get to experience how much will I be able to contribute who will I be able to help who will I become and then do that for the next level and obviously as you have more resources and reach and that sort of thing you're able to broaden your impact you're able to experience more things you learn new skills you help more more people and then you do that again and for the next level and then the final stage is then you rip off the left- hand side you take off all the monetary goals and then it's just this and it to me it kind of like gamified like the why and it gamified success in a way cuz now it's like it doesn't even matter what that is over there it's just about this is it like is it was always just this is a means to an end for this so yeah then the next one is the perfect day exercise so for this one I'll go through it pretty quickly is you just and you can Google this I did not come up with this I didn't come up with either of these I just found them I did a bunch of different exercises these were the most insightful so the perfect day exercise you get into like a meditative State and if that's not your thing just take some deep breaths do breath work and then you're going to visualize the answers to these questions first question is or or let me back up the prompt is you are waking up 5 years from today but today is not just any day today is your perfect day let that like really sit with you and then answer these questions say where did you wake up what does it look like what did you hear what does your environment look like what does your bed look like is it sunny outside what's the weather like and then how do you start your day do you go for a walk who do you see you have any neighbors around you do you live like in the woods how do you spend your time like what are you working on what do you do for lunch what are you eating where do you go throughout the day what are your activities what are you working on and it's all like the the little things and what do you spend your time who do you spend your time with what do you talk about and when I did this exercise again my goal had always been like just sell the business that was the goal after I did this I realized that like when I read back my answers I was shocked at what I was reading because what I was reading was I woke up in a sunny well-lit room in a place that makes me feel good I go for a walk outside with my wife which I wasn't even married at the time then I have like a healthy breakfast then I work on my business which I wasn't even specific about the business I was I just said it's a business that helps and impacts it makes a positive impact on the world and helps a lot of people that was completely opposite from before if you had asked me like even 5 minutes prior it would have said just makes a lot of money sells a lot of I would say good stuff like good products you know we run a good business but it wouldn't have been anyway it was like for health or for lunch whatever I'm just eating healthy food long story short none of it was monetary none of it was a attached to the things that I previously associated with my goals and the eye-opening part about this was that I realized that this whole time I've been chasing these goal posts in the distance only to finally arrive at them and realize that they didn't even exist to begin with not only that but that goal was really just the surface level and that the things that I was actually striving for were things that I could achieve and receive right now and that was that was pretty impactful cuz it made me question like everything that i' done for the previous couple of years but then after I had the these experiences then I it made me excited cuz then it I was chasing those goals now after that point from a place of abundance and I was chasing it from a place of like I already feel filled up I already feel whole and not I didn't have the thought in my head anymore of I be happy when dot dot dot like that's such a slippery slope I didn't have that anymore so I didn't mean for this to turn into like a why retreat but anyway hopefully you found that helpful and now we're going to talk about how we can make this a reality so let's talk about the four reasons why people fail so first off is they have a lack of energy so they aren't able to Output enough effort the second is that they lack Focus put it simpler that they just aren't able to focus on just doing one thing at a time third they're focused on just the wrong opportunity or fourth they have a lost mindset AKA they just can't handle self-doubt face hard challenges and identify the skill deficit or the chasm that they have to cross in order to reach their ultimate goal so combining all these together it's energy times Focus times strategy divided by mindset equals success we'll talk about why mindset is the dividing Factor because you can have all of these things and if you picture somebody all of us know somebody like this somebody who has the energy like they take care of their body they get good sleep they're able to focus and then they have a good strategy but then if they just have a negative mindset or they're just self-sabotaging themselves in some way it just kind of undermines the whole thing or if you take energy it really doesn't work without any of the four but mindset is the biggest one that if you don't have it it really doesn't matter the rest of them because mindset is the one that creeps into all of those areas and impacts everything now our foundations we're going to be covering is energy which is basically just increasing the number of units of output that we have per day and focus is our ability to channel our energy into just one thing strategy strategy is making sure that we are putting our energy into the right thing so that's two levels it's one into the right opportunity and then within that opportunity that we're putting our energy into the right thing so like are we choosing the right business then within that are we focusing on the right piece of the business and we talk a lot about that we give you all the tools and like Frameworks to help decide what that is within your business and then last is mindset which is handling like self-doubt and applying feedback so energy to put a a graphic to it energy is like this it's like our ability to do different things and then we have like any units of output somebody with no energy would just be like a circle and combining that with focus focus is our ability to Channel all that energy into One Direction and it goes much further so energy is good and we probably all know people like this who have energy but they don't have Focus just looks like they looks like a lot of action not a lot of busy work not a lot of productivity but then when they Channel it into one thing that's when they get focused focus and then when we take that energy plus focus and we put it into a strategy that's where we get outputs and outputs is out of the whole equation it's the only thing that we have zero control over we can influence everything else but it's very easy to you know objectively look at this when we're not involved like if this is somebody else say that's not you and it says your friend they're able to very easily look at their their 10,000 foot view of what they're putting in what their strategy is and then what outputs and tell them where they're deficient but for whatever reason who knows a little bit harder when it's ourselves actually we do know the reason it's ego ego is the enemy great book by Ryan Halliday talks about how it's basically back to our two milliony old brain concept is that ego is like a self-defense mechanism to like protect ourselves but anyway we'll talk more about that later and thinking back to our example from before this is us going from you know where we are to our goal this is our attempt at doing that and what we think it's going to be like is that it's just this straight line it's like this is just the equation we Channel our energy into a strategy then we get the outputs we want and we reach our goal now we know better now that that's not how it goes so out of the outputs and this is where things get really interesting out of the outputs we get feedback and our feedback is what we're able to channel back into ourselves to inform ourselves about how we need to adjust our strategy and our ability to accept and receive this feedback is our mindset and with a good mindset plus lots of repetitions the the arrow is getting slightly larger supposed to be more noticeable than that I guess you can kind of tell but yeah so with a good mindset plus repetitions like we're able to improve the output or our inputs into the strategy however with a bad mindset with an EG padded mindset we disregard that feedback and we start to hinder our ility to improve and we just eventually end up caving so this right here this is what happens when people are at stage three in the valley they get feedback from the market that what they're doing isn't working and that they need to adjust and rather than changing up their strategy and accepting the fact the truth that there's something that they need to change which happens every single time again if it was just launched something and make a lot of money then everybody'd be doing it if everybody did it then there' be more Supply then there is demand in the market and the opportunity go away that's a true same in any business like that's just like the natural order of things so why would we like try to reshape reality like that's just being delusional we're not going to do that that's why we're here listening to this and why we're talking about these things these things that don't get talked about enough but with this bad mindset it dwindles away not only our performance but just our ability to perform at all and an important thing for us to remember like when we get this feedback this failure okay really it's just learning like you have already failed before and you're still here out of all the bad days out of all the failures you've had you are batting a thousand you are still here so the failures you're going to face are no different the learning opportunities you face are no different than things you've already experienced in your like before in your life and it you know it's just part of the process like last time you failed you learned and you got better and the same exact thing applies here we just have to convince ourselves that we sometimes just convince ourselves that like the stakes are higher because we took a bigger risk or we're already questioning ourselves and like questioning if we're enough when we start a new business that then it somehow makes it seem like it's worse when we fail this time when really failing is not just part of the process it is the process that is how we learn and it we just have to realize that and accept it for what it is and example I give here in terms of like accepting feedback from the market and cuz this is so important cuz all of us myself included anytime we launch a new business and you know myself included definitely myself included you launch a new business you put your hopes and dreams and all your effort into it and then you get feedback that like things aren't what you thought they were one that's okay you can improve there's no like ticking time bomb that says it has to be done right now that you have to be the perfect entrepreneur right out of the gate so like chill give yourself some slack and just enjoy the process which sounds like a cliche thing to say but like this is life you only get one of them might as well enjoy it but an example of like not if you guys have ever seen the movie American Sniper with Bradley Cooper he plays a shooter in that movie and the way that it works in in Sniper teams and I've shot a gun once in my life so bear with me but they have a a sniper team and it's one guy's a shooter one guy's a spotter the spotter is obviously look looking for the Target but his secondary job is after he takes the shot if he misses he's watching the Target and he's able to say how far he was off and what adjustments he needs to make in order to hit the target the second time now it would behoove the sniper to listen to that feedback and go okay yeah great I'll I'll adjust and then he takes the shot the second time and he hits it but if he sat there and went no I think I took a good shot and ignores him and then took the same shot twice I don't know what would happen but I imagine he would probably be off the team pretty quickly and it would just be an obviously dumb thing to do and as iron as metaphoric comedic as that example makes it that's a phrase we'll go with it as comedic as that seems that's what so many of us do when we're launching a business and this is not just in the form of feedback from coaches or from which again I consider the source I'm not talking about feedback from friends or family or people who don't know what they're talking about them you can safely ignore we'll talk about that later like the pressure from peers but the feedback from the market there's absolutely no avoiding it and I don't believe in the customer is always right but the majority rules is what I do believe in and and we need to be able to accept that feedback and adjust and if we can't do that then we might as well just not get started next we're going to talk about energy so like how do we increase the units of output that we're able to put into this system to begin with so energy another way to put it is our state it's our physiology it's how well are we taking care of oursel like are we in a good State what are we putting into our bodies how are we using it so low energy little arrow high energy big Arrow so back to this example if we don't energy then this whole process isn't able to get kicked off and it's certainly not able to be sustained over a long enough period of time to see it through to success so the definition of energy is the strength and vitality required for sustained physical or mental activity or to put it simpler it's just doing the thing so the question is how do we increase our energy so in my experience the biggest changes in my energy levels I've tried a lot of things taken a lot of supplements me Meg will tell you it bothers her to this day the absurd supplement cabinet majority of them do nothing by the way but have come the majority of the energy level changes have come from optimizing my sleep my diet and dopamine which dopamine gets thrn around a lot we're going to talk about like what that actually is but sleep is pretty obvious but this is simply just getting eight hours a night diet is putting food and drink in my body that doesn't cause inflammation and decreases brain fog like before I recorded this I specifically didn't have any carbs cuz I had heard that a couple times times and I was like yeah I don't care but I I really like pizza till I actually experienced it and I noticed a tangible difference in my own ability to like perform and think well because it absolutely causes brain fog at least for me everybody's different but then last is dopamine so first we're going to talk about sleep so breaking down sleep there's a couple different main areas to it first is how fast we're able to fall asleep and second is our REM sleep third is deep sleep and fourth is our sleep length and these are the things that I've learned that have worked for me obviously everybody is different so take it apply it to you if it feels relevant but these are the things that I've felt to be true so falling asleep and this one's not based on me this is from Aura and I'm wearing both of them right now I know I look like a weirdo but I'm trying them out and I'm going to pick one so far they're pretty much the same if anybody's curious so it should take about 10 to 15 minutes for you to fall asleep each night and another thing is don't watch TV or anything before bed teach your body that you know when you get into bed that means sleep so another thing you can do is Journal these are all things you can do to help you fall asleep before you go to bed like to fall asleep faster so if you're somebody who struggles with sleep and it's been for years and you have a story that we tell ourselves that like oh I just don't get good sleep I just I just don't sleep through the night that's not a normal thing not you're not normal it's your normal it's what I would say is it's possible to get to a better state that is objectively completely true unless if you have some serious ailment or something that you know doctor diagnosed other than that absolutely possible the reason I say that is I've talked to a lot of people who just say oh they just chalk it up like oh no I just I just don't sleep well like I get I get three hours a night I'm like that's not normal you can fix that and if you talk to them more find out about their habits and stuff like how much they're drinking alcohol and doing other stuff and like just not exercising and then they are on their phone until like 12:30 and they're eating like crap it's like hey do you think maybe if we change ched a couple of these things that you know I would you you'd be able to sleep a little bit better like no I just don't sleep well I'm like all right you're right just keep doing that you'll never sleep well so next exercise this is so that your body is exhausted so you don't have nervous energy and then last is blue light blocking glasses so this allows our body to naturally produce melatonin so my nighttime routine again this works for me take it with a grain of salt is at about 7 or I try to be in bed by 10:00 each night like asleep so at about 7:30 or8 I put on these super cool looking like wood shop glasses they're like 10 bucks on Amazon but they're orange and they block Blue Light which blue light is in any not it's not just screens screens is the worst but also like this light behind me terrible but it looks cool but yeah blue light it basically blocks our body does not start producing melatonin until it doesn't see blue light cuz that's our circadian rhythms is basically watching for When the Sun Goes Down And it used to just be that when the Sun goes down it's time to go to bed we didn't have to worry about any other light we being our body but now there's light all around us artificial light non-stop so we're able to block that by wearing glasses that blocky looks super cool it's a fashion statement it's awesome next a big one that I didn't start doing until relatively recently like in the past year is journaling or at the very least just writing my to-do list for tomorrow cuz there's this I'm blanking on the name of the principle but basically your brain if you have anything in your to-do list or anything that anything that you're like thinking about and this can be small things like oh I have to remember to like go pick up that I have to run that errand tomorrow or oh I need to send that email or oh I need to do this even if it's just a small thing which those are the ones we normally let go the longest your brain keeps solving that problem in the back of your head nonstop until it has it written down somewhere and your brain has the the confidence that it's written down in a place that it will actually get done and then it can let go of it and try this for a day and see how it goes for you because for me it was I don't say this lightly but it was pretty life-changing because what it did is it took all of the thoughts that were bouncing around my head constantly and it just got it down on paper somewhere very simple thing to do it just took consistency and I was able to fall asleep like that I struggled for years with like my mind just racing constantly just thinking about the business and like oh the new ad campaigns I'm going to be launching the people were hiring like just going non-stop when I started doing this which just brain dump before I go to bed just write it down anywhere just pick a place be a notepad just write it down anywhere my brain was like more or less silent and now I know what that feels like anytime my brain feels like it's racing I know that there's something that is going around that I need to write down it's called the zigger neck effect oh this one that's a better term cognitive offloading it's the psychological principle that states that people remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones your brain keeps revisiting these unsolved problems attempting to solve them until they're either completed or externalized AKA written down so by writing down a problem or task you signal to your brain that it's stored and no longer requires constant attention allowing you to focus more effectively this is why techniques like journaling to-do list and note taking blah blah blah so write stuff down so I plan tomorrow today I write my top three priorities for tomorrow top one priority would be better and then I I don't use the phone or anything in the bedroom Meg and I put them on the other side of the room or in the living room and and that that works pretty well but the the main key is like just writing stuff down also doing the same time every night and if you go to bed like pretty late and you want to adjust that just say you go to bed at like 1: in the morning just back it up by 15 minutes each night and by like a week you'll be at the time range you want to be at but the most important thing from all the experts that I've listened to is that you just want to go to bed at the same time that's about it now REM sleep R stands for rapid eye movement so your brain is downloading everything that happened from the day and is current and this is is the definition this is not my interpretation this is when your brain is downloading everything that happened from the day and converting short-term memories to long-term ones so memory emotional processing and brain development happens during this stage the ways that we're able to improve it is one stick to the same sleep schedule heard that somewhere before avoid stimulant so not doing like coffee and stuff like that too late at night Andrew hubman who has great health podcast it's like a neuroscientist from Stanford he says not after 1 p.m. I think is to cut off next is a cold room so about 65° which this kind of blew my mind how big of a difference this made next is avoiding sleep and being super hydrated so drinking lots of water so yeah stick to the same sleep schedule avoiding stimulant cold room avoiding screens and yeah this really helps with like your memory recall I've noticed a big difference for me personally when I'm having conversations with people I can I have a noticeable difference in my like ability to recall words and like form formulate sentences when I haven't had a good amount of sleep and I I know exactly how how much sleep I'm getting or how much of each stage I'm getting right now so next is deep sleep and deep sleep this is when our cells are regenerating energy restoration immune system cognitive function cleanses the brain creativity emotional regulation and Metabolism fun fact you are physically paralyzed during stage four deep sleep this is when dreaming to stop you from acting out your dream that's actually in the wrong slide I think that's rapid eye movement is a stage where you you dream but that is true that you're paralyzed while it's happening like have you ever heard of somebody who gets night terrors or somebody who like gets like sleep paralysis or they feel like they wake up but they can't move a muscle that's because they something basically slipped up and they woke up while they were dreaming and it's like your brain physically paralyzes you to stop you from acting out your your dreams but the ways that we're able to get better deep sleep is no alcohol so this one I'm going to ruffle some feathers not here to tell anybody what you should or shouldn't do all I'm here to tell you is the fact that I have learned and the things that I've found to be true long story short I stopped drinking completely over I was going to say over two years ago it was over a year less than two years and the reason I did that was when I learned this fact about how it impacts your deep sleep and I didn't quite believe it but even having a single glass of red wine or a single beer somewhere in the evening throws off your abilities your body's ability to fall into deep sleep which is the most restorative and like biggest necessity for our body and if you ever notice like when you really tie one on you have couple too many drinks you notice how you fall asleep really fast but then you wake up really early and you aren't really able to fall back asleep if you ever wonder why that is it's because of the way that alcohol is impacting your sleep and you also don't feel like that restored it's because you fall asleep fast which to put it differently or more accurately you go unconscious faster but you're not like actually in a a restful state so another way is no caffeine after 1: p.m. next is watching your sleep cycles so like that you're falling asleep at like roughly the same time and then your sleep hygiene so this is a real thing like taking a warm shower before bed like clean yourself and also the body temperature like your in order for your body to fall asleep your brain has to decrease its temperature by like 3° so taking a hot shower actually helps you fall asleep because it forces and that's straight from hubman podcast but it actually helps you fall asleep because it forces your body's like internal temperature to cool itself off so it helps you lower your body temperature and fall asleep faster next is don't eat like too close to bed because your body is digesting rather than resting so all your blood flow is going to your stomach which it needs in order to get a restful sleep so to recap sleep temperature is 65° no phone in the bedroom sleep mask so like completely block out light orange glasses same 8h hour window every night plan tomorrow today stop eating 2 hours before bed which leads to better deep sleep and exercise during the day so your body is exhausted like if you're just sitting at your desk all day and then you get into bed and you're wonder why you feel Restless it's cuz your body didn't actually do anything like it doesn't have a need for sleep I mean it does but it hasn't like really earned it then in terms of diet this one's super short and sweet I'm far from a dietitian but just eat more green leafy vegetables nuts fish berries and then eat less of the fried foods processed carbs high sugar foods soda alcohol that sort of thing overall we all know the things that we shouldn't be eating and we know the things we should have it's really never been a question about that whenever there's the new latest diet or fad that's really just us looking for a way to shortcut the inevitable like dive down into the valley that's we all know these things like obviously and the reason that certain fads like take off more than others my theory is that they just do a better job of positioning or the perception that they give of like the effort or better put the lack of effort that it's going to require for you to see results and that's like seductive to people it's all I have to say about that next dopamine so common misconception which dopamine is like the motivation chemical or it's like what people think of as like when you achieve something that's what gets released but that's actually the opposite dopamine is not released when you achieve something dopamine is released as you are working towards something so this is like the reward center of the brain so an example of this for a while I thought like I love doing cold plunges which the hardest part about doing a cold plunge by the way is not telling people you do a cold plunge it's never been done before but I used to think that I knew that it like released dopamine and I always thought it's like oh you're getting in you're challenging your body and you know the temperatures blood circulation muscles more buzzwords something Good's happening dopamine actually not the case as coherent as that sounded what's actually happening and when your brain is releasing the dopamine is in the moment leading up to it when you're staring at the cold PL it doesn't have to be a cold plunge it can be just anything challenging like going for a hard workout releases dopamine there's lots of like healthy dopamin istic activities that do the same thing but coal plunge is an easy example it's when you're looking at the coal plunge and that you have that thought in your head of like damn I really do not want to get in that thing right now and then you do it anyway it's that act of doing the hard thing when you don't feel like doing it that is what releases the dopamine and the really cool thing the life altering thing I know I don't say that often but I've said it like three times now the life altering thing which this whole lesson is about life altering thing so what the heck I'll give myself a pass the life altering thing is that that is a muscle not dopamine but like the dopamine center of the brain is a muscle and we're able to train it and strengthen it over time so that we get better and better at it so that transcends into other areas of our life it's not like it's just the dopamine Center for coal plunges doesn't apply to dopamine Center for sit forcing ourselves to sit down and work on designs for the 10th hour of the day they're the same same thing so we are able to flex that muscle in other areas of our life and push it to go to the gym so that when we sit down to work on our business or we sit down to focus on I don't know learning something new reading a book watching a course for a 12th hour that we're able to push through those things because we Flex that muscle but the tough thing about this and this is something we can all relate to probably some of you have maybe done this while we've been watching here together is cheap dopamine AKA social media drinking junk food pornography binge watching just instant gratification brain rot Tik Tock all that stuff it is all over the place it is everywhere there is no shortage of ways to get instant dopamine releases all around us nowadays and reason really want to highlight this is that in order for us to be successful at this we need to completely rewire our dopamine system now I'm not saying we need to become Navy Seals but if you picture the other end of the spectrum somebody who has who's just sitting there scrolling for 5 hours a day on Tik Tok or worse yet somebody who thinks that they don't and then they actually do check your screen time I'm telling you it's crazier than you think but person who is doing that and then it's going to push themselves to come and sit down and work on a business where they need delayed gratification for not just an hour or a day but for weeks months for years to really see something of like uh release from that why would their brain ever do that when they're like oh I can just go on Tik Tok and that's our 2 million year old brain is hardwired to just go for the short-term gratification and the famous example of this is the marshmallow test where researchers put kids in a room and they put like a marshmallow on the table and they said you can either have this marshmallow now or I'm gonna come back in 10 minutes I'm G to give you another marshmallow and 10 minutes after that if they're still both there I'll give you another marshmallow and majority of the kids just pop the marshmallow in their mouth like I don't know what I'm here for like my mom just dragged me here whatever but the other kids the ones who didn't take the marshmallow the study followed them for decades afterwards and they also tested them on like a bunch of other factors the number one indicator of who was going to be successful or not was who left the marshmallow cuz what that showed is who has the ability for delayed gratification AKA who has the ability to prioritize a future benefit or like a better tomorrow over a present benefit and that's a very simple example to demonstrate like that's what we need that's we are the kids who are sitting there waiting for the extra marshmallows that's who we need to become and then the reason we mentioned about the cheap dopamine is that we constantly have sources that are trying to tempt us in our day-to-day lives all the time to be the kid that just snatches the marshmallow off the table and stuff's in our mouth and if we do that again I'm not telling anybody what you should or shouldn't do we're just here to bring awareness to it if you do that the trade-off that you are objectively absolutely making is that it will be harder for you to have delayed gratification in the future for something that you see is worthwhile not saying it's impossible like Warren Buffett clearly he's doing okay eats you know crap food junk food it's a form of like a cheap dope mean so like there's cases where you know it's fine but we want to be stacking the deck in our favor so we don't have to be an Elon Musk or Warren Buffett in order to see success so one of the many things we can do to stack that deck is cut out sources of cheap dopamine so that looks like deleting social media from your phone you don't have to get rid of your account you don't have to go crazy but for me I'll just share from personal experience things that I've done that have worked well for me is I delete all the social media apps from my phone and a trick for this is and researchers have studied this whenever it comes to delayed gratification whether it's like eating healthy anything that you want to do right now but you're trying to push yourself not to most people they tell thems I can never do this thing again and those people had a way higher likelihood of relapsing than people who had the same present day input but framed it slightly differently to themselves the way they framed it was they just said not right now same exact circumstance like same result but just mentally to our brain it's a way lesser load for it to think okay I can have this thing at some point it's just not right this second so there's a little tip or trick that I use that's worked well for me other things is I very actively stay like I said off social media but also any like news sources like politics and stuff aside the news companies as an industry they are hardwired to just be sucking your dopamine that's why it's always breaking news it's always what's wrong in the world the reason that they always share what's wrong in the world is that that's what drags the eyeballs to the screen cuz our brain is hardwired to see the problems in the world and when we see oh like bad thing happening here doesn't matter how small the thing is they blow it up because they know that's what's going to drag your attention because our brain is constantly in survival mode looking for things that could possibly be a threat to our existence even though those things do not exist anymore obviously there's still risks in the world but relative to the caveman days we got like a 0.001% chance of dying compared to what they had they had saber-tooth tigers and stuff we've got I don't even know what we got we got H Tua girl like she's the biggest risk that we have to our society so those are the things we have to be aware of we don't have to cut it out we don't have to be monks but we just have to at the very least be aware of the impact that it's having on us so how do we increase our dopamine sleep exercise meditation and cutting out the cheap dopamine and last one really important point is being okay with being bored and realizing that bored does not equal depression even though it can feel like it so it can feel like when we're just sitting there with nothing to do because we are constantly in such a state of over stimulation that when we sit there and we're just in silence it can almost feel like there's something wrong when there really isn't and it's very normal for us to be able to sit there and just have nothing go on it's not normal for us to have like Facebook is another prime example that little red notification there's a great uh what is it the the social dilemma documentary they did on this about how like they basically rigged our brains to be constantly checking our phones the little red notification that like the deck is stacked against us that's why we're trying to unstack it so the way we can do that is do dopamine detox so if we want to make business fun imagine if like this awesome business that you're going to be starting it's going to be amazing to learn so much you're going to have so much growth imagine if we could make that even more fun imagine if we could make it so much fun that like every time you sat down it felt like a video game well the way we can do that is by simply removing all other sources of fun from dopamine from our life like cheap dopam mean so we make it Fun by just simply contrast imagine if you lived in a an apartment where you had literally nothing else in your place no phone no junk food all that you had was source of protein green leafy vegetables and you had a desk with a chair and your computer and you weren't allowed to leave aside from that being concerning you probably get a lot of work done and some people say like well if that's all you're doing which obviously I'm not saying to like go become a like live in solitary confinement but people say well then you're not living like live a little like you don't drink anymore like what you don't like to have fun which I do like a lot drinking not drinking has become way more popular when I first started doing it it was a lot of like oh see you had a pro like how many days sober which I'm like one a lot of respect to people who do that but two like why are you just assuming that it meant that I had like maybe I just made it anyway but I like that society's slowly shifting away from it but there is like some people will like look at you as if something's wrong because you're not going out and if you say no I'm prioritizing like working on my business you just a lot of people will say oh you work too much like and if you ask them like okay so you're going out going to go to a bar and drink there nothing against that not saying you can't but like taking a level like following the thread like those people are doing something that they say is fun but is it fun or is it fulfilling like there's a big difference between the two and Norm like when people say they drink in order to you know just unwind or relax or have a good time what they're really saying is that like it's a suppressant like it it's suppressing their Consciousness and if you're suppressing your Consciousness there's probably a reason that we're doing that there's something that we're running away from so not to get too ethereal but for me no that's not fulfilling what I find fulfillment in is what we talked about before and all I offer for you guys is not saying to change your entire lifestyle just try cutting it out for a week and see if you can do it it is extremely hard delete social media eat nothing but healthy food just try cutting out alcohol and see how you feel at the end of the week if you're able to do it which I know you can it's going to be challenging but by the end of the week at least from my own experience when I did it I felt completely refreshed and renewed in a way that I didn't even know was possible so the things that drive us all said and done is dopamine is our reward chemical serotonin is our mood state stabilizer oxytocin is the love hormone and endorphins are the painkiller so those are the main chemicals that are driving us hormones rather that are driving us and dopamine is the biggest one it's one that I think about a lot and like I said even if you don't change all these things at the very least now you have awareness that every time you're checking social media very slight cost Associated of that there there's a cost it might be like very minor but all of these things piling up that's how we stack the deck and we make it that much harder for ourselves like if you show me somebody who does the opposite of all those cheap dopamine things and they do a dopamine cleanse and they're eating healthy they're exercising they're getting good sleep they're drinking lots of water they cut out alcohol or at the very least it's minimized and they like they do all those things and then that person and they have like a strong why or Reason like motivator if you show me that person starting a business stacked up against some who is just as excited to start the business but then when you objectively look at them and their lifestyle and they're eating crap food they're drinking a lot they're on social media constantly they're watch like all of those things that are just sucking down their dopamine show me that person they can feel the same in the beginning but when you actually look at like underneath like what they have going for them this person has a way higher chance of success cuz like we already discovered this journey that we're on is not something that gets left up to luck or even just intelligence it's strictly a a function of how much are we able to endure and that's something that I found to be extremely true is that the most successful entrepreneurs that I know are not always the smartest or have the best strategy or any of that they're just the ones who are able to take it on the chin and keep going they are the ones who have the highest tolerance for stress and that they are able to endure Godly amounts of like just say it again like stress and challenges and pain and they keep going and a lot of them have a smile on their face while they're doing it but the good thing if you're like well that's not me like I don't really like stress it's a skill you're able to learn it just like everything even things that are presumably personality traits you can break it down into a skill you just break it down into the core elements of like what is that person do like somebody who's able to receive feedback and is open-minded what does that look like it's like well they they listen well when they listen they ask good questions and then when they ask good questions they question themselves about the answers that they receive then when they receive the answers they actually go and try to implement it in some way and then when they implement it in some way they evaluate how well it performed and then they decide if they're going to keep doing it or if they're going to do something else so like take some open-mindedness seems like a blanket term as just one example you can break it down into like actual ual traits like all of these things if any of these seem daunting to you we able to train all of these so just keep going and next up we're going to be talking about Focus now we're going to talk about focus and to start off a big myth about Focus that I had for years and years is I thought that Focus was just about being able to sit down and just do one thing and the actual truth is that Focus true focus is about eliminating all other possible distractions so it's not about just sitting down and like looking at your screen really hard and just hyper fixating it's really about eliminating all other possible things that can draw our attention away and like we talked about before this is exceptionally challenging nowadays when there are things all over our lives on our phones around our home on our desktop emails social media phone call like non-stop inundation of just information and things that are not only trying to call our attention away but are exceptionally good at it and the reason that this is bad is there's this thing called context switching which context switching is just anytime we switch from doing one thing to another thing that's a context switch and you know the myth about multitasking that people thought like oh people who are really productive they're really good at multitasking it truly just does not exist and I can tell you personally cuz I thought that it did for a long time I thought that I was being productive when I had like six monitors up and I had like Shopify and Facebook ads and email and I was doing a little bit of everything but all that's a recipe for is us doing busy work and feeling like we're being productive but not actually getting anything done and what this chart here demonstrates is the cost of context switching which is basically for every time that we switch to a different prod project the amount of working time that we actually have deteriorates dramatically and context is not just like little things or the obvious ones like switching from your desktop to checking your social media that's like an obvious one that you know we play it up to ourselves it's not that big a deal I just checked for a few minutes or another one is if you're working and then you know somebody comes into the room and says hey could you just take a quick look at this or you get a phone call every time that that happens the reason that this is so dangerous which sounds like a strong word to use but it's true is that every time you switch away when you switch back there's at least 10 to 15 minutes where our brain is trying to reenter itself and actually get back into a flow where it's doing anything of value and so it's not just like oh 2-minute distraction now I'm back it's like 5 to 10 minutes to switch and actually do anything valuable on whatever that distraction is then at least another 5 to 10 minutes upwards of 15 to 20 when we switch back to what we were doing and so when we're talking about Focus the important thing that we are aware of is that this is something it's an ongoing practice and it's something that we have to be aware of and constantly reinforce ourselves that every time we switch away that there is a very negative cost and that those costs compound over time and when I see students like in in the community and stuff when they sit down to work they think that they are being productive because they're sitting down and they're doing a lot of different things but if I was to ask them to do a Time study of like what are the things that you were spending your time on and it was truly accurate down to like the minute of what tabs they had open the majority of them and this is not just student this was me for years and years I actually had so many tabs open and probably a lot of you watching this if you look across the top of your screen how many tabs do you have open how many bookmarks do you have scattered across the top like is your phone on do not disturb or is it sitting right there in front of you able to pop up with whatever notification or cat video your friend is sending you those are all examples of ways that we are allowing our Focus to be stolen from us in our day-to-day lives and again this is not an exact prescription saying you have to do this but in the interest of doing everything we can to stack the deck in our favor it would behoove us to do the opposite of what we are currently doing in terms of focus so this looks like turning our phone on do not disturb time blocking time where people know that we are working on this like we are busy we cannot be reached and that involves a certain degree of like training the people in our lives like what they can expect when we are in these deep focus blocks and other than that it's also it's not just you know sitting down and being able to get to work on things which we'll talk more about that in a second but it's also what we focus on in our lives and there's great quote by Tony Robbins that says where focus goes energy flows and this stems somewhat into like positive thinking versus negative thinking but an exercise that I want us to do is for just a second look around the room and find something in the room doesn't matter what it is and judge it once you to judge it as hard as you can just find something that you absolutely hate and rattle off all the things in your head that you hate about this and it can be literally anything can be something that annoys you and judge it like what is bad about it what don't you like and now just for sake of an example do it for another thing find another thing in the room and look around the room and see what else you hate now do it for a third thing so for one more thing now you have all three of the things all of them in your mind what do you hate about them each of them focus on that now I want you to look at those same three things and think about what is one thing that you love about them what what is one thing that is great about it what is something that if you had to if you really wanted to you could be grateful for about it it can be big or small it doesn't matter like for example if I I don't like the carpet in the room that I'm in cuz it's dusty and it needs to be clean it's not just example that could be something that I don't like about it and something I love about is that if I think about it you know all the people that were involved in making that rug happen everybody from you know the people that got the original materials then the people who assembled it then the people who constructed the building and carried it in and like it's pretty remarkable all the hands that touched it and went into bringing it into where it is now it's pretty remarkable that's just an example but the point of the exercise is to show and when I did this for the first time and somebody guided me through the experience the thing that I found remarkable was number one how easy it was for me to look around a room and find things that I didn't like and if I really focused on it I was able to find those things and how it was just just came naturally just add one onto the next onto the next and then how equally easy perhaps you experienced this too for me to look at those same things and find something that I liked about it and something that I was even grateful for and the point of the exercise is demonstrate that we have the ability to focus on whatever we want the saying goes like we don't experience the life we don't experience life we experience the life that we focus on and so something for all of us as we're going on this journey and just in general with life is to start to flex the muscle of our Focus not just in terms of work we'll talk about the habits and techniques that can enable that but more importantly focusing our mindset on seeing things as half full versus half empty which sounds so cliche but the truth of the matter is that studies have found that people who are pessimist and see negative outlooks on life and this applies heavily when you're running a business there's always going to be lots of challenges and pessimists have been found to be ultimately more accurate like they are turned out to be right more often than they're wrong then on the flip side optimists they turn out to be the more successful people because optimists are seeing things as the potential not as the challenges that could hold them back and that's what we need to start to train our minds to do and I was never taught this in any level of Education growing up but it's been a really important skill for me is one to be able to focus myself in terms of work and eliminating distractions then two seeing where my focus is going in terms of my mindset and what I'm seeing when I look out into the world to put it simply staying positive is a skill and especially when we live in a world full of stress and worries it's more important now than ever that we Flex that skill and we become proficient at it and for me one of the best ways ways that I have found to hone my focus and to clean out the clutter in my life and more importantly in my mind has been meditation and this takes a lot of different forms like meditation mindfulness breath work to put it simply just being able to sit in silence with your thoughts it's a great quote that I love that all of Humanity's problems stem from man man's inability to sit quietly in a room and when I have sat and meditated even for a few minutes that gives my brain the ability to file away excess thoughts worries stresses things that I didn't even realize was at the back of my mind and kind of file it away and and categorize it and an example for this is like or metaphor is you know if we had no immune system essentially like if our body had no ability to fight off any incoming viruses or anything of the sort you know we would get sick from every bug that comes our way we would just be constantly sick but us not meditating is the equivalent of us not having an immune system for our mind and every thought that comes our way whether it's from external sources or just from our self and our own observation our inability to focus on the positive and see possibility versus just problems and challenges every thought that comes our way has the ability to infect us because we aren't shielding our minds we aren't protecting ourselves at all but it's actually even worse than that because unlike when we catch a cold where we are at least aware of the fact that you know oh this sucks I have a cold but at the very least it'll pass thoughts that come into our mind we often times associate them with our self and so we aren't even aware that we've been infected with a thought or a negative mindset or anything of the sort and that just becomes our normal day-to-day life but the good news is that there's a different way to do this so this is not a meditation course or anything of the sort there's plenty of resources out there for it but it has completely changed my life which I know I haven't said said I wouldn't say but this really has before I meditated what my life looked like was I was just in constant mode of reacting like something would happen and I would just react something bad I would react and a lot of times when there's zero latency between cause and effect the reaction that we have is not normally the one that we would like to have this is you know somebody says something you don't like you just immediately lash out or something happens in the business a problem or a challenge we just immediately have an emotional response and we are not able to take a step back and decide how we're going to react and so to put it simply the impact that meditation has had on my life personally and lots of other people say similarly is it puts a barrier or it puts like a space between a reaction and our emotion and when we have an emotional reaction we're able to almost like take a step back and evaluate if that's the response that we actually want to have and put out into the world another way to visualize it is it gives us the ability to picture like if we're laying in a field and there's clouds passing by in the sky and those are our emotions and it gives us the ability to step outside ourselves and be and objectively evaluate whether if that emotion aligns with what we actually want it allows us to reflect on whether the thoughts coming into our mind are the ones we actually want to obtain and make part of our identity and honestly this could be like a whole separate section because I see this happen with so many entrepreneurs especially as we go into this uninformed optimism informed pessimism that Valley so much of our success is dependent on our own ability to modulate our emotional responses and take a step back and objectively evaluate it and not see those problems as worse than they are and a lot of times we do that we you know fluff these problems up to make them seem like a huge deal when in reality it's just something that we have to solve and you know as we start to get overwhelmed sometimes with the amount of challenges that we're having to take on it can be very easy for us to just go oh everything's everything's hopeless it's all screwed no I'm not doing it and then just that gives us a logical justification for going back to the way we so meditation has been one of the best tools in helping me hone my focus not just from emotional aspect but then also in terms of the next piece which is strategy so strategy takes on two different forms one is the opportunity vehicle that we are putting our time and effort into and second is within that opportunity vehicle what are we doing within it and are we spending our time on the right things and so for the first one this course is an example of a strategy and fortunately we have lots of proof now from students havinge reped our same results that we shared in the first course so you can see from all the social proof that this stuff actually works but we should still be as objective as possible and that's what I want to share with you is the framework that I wish I had when I was evaluating new strategies and how I got burned in you know buying courses and stuff from people that I didn't quite realize their actual motives when I invested in it but we'll get into it so strategy comes down to a couple of main things first is consider the source who are we learning from and what are their motivators like look at what they do not what they say so if they are talking about a certain business or opportunity but then if you look at what they're actually doing does it align with what they're saying like are they actually doing the business thems or are they just showing screenshots from back during covid when you know anybody with a pulse could run a Facebook ad and get a 10 row as like those are the little details to look for next is social proof is there an overwhelming amount of undeniable proof that this model works and not only that it works for them but it also has worked for other people next is longevity like is this something that will stand the test of time and that is not building you know a foundation of sand that might get to a certain height but is ultimately just doomed to crumble next is asset versus cash flow so is this something that would be building an asset or is it just short-term cash flow cost this is the big one that I did not evaluate when I bought the Amazon FBA course and spent like $5,000 of money that I really didn't have then I got inside the door and first lesson of the course was like okay so here's the amount of money you need to invest in inventory which I was like cool I really wish that was on the landing page knowing that I needed another 10 $20,000 in order to even get started but also shame on me for not doing enough research but is the cost something that we are able to to handle next is difficulty so if this was 10 times harder than we assume it would that it's going to be would we still do it and this 10 times multiplier is a pretty conservative estimate considering like what we talked about the uninformed optimism stage at the very least it's going to be 10 times harder because we just don't know what the costs are or the the effort is that's going to be required like we don't know what the new skills are and next is hidden shiny objects so are you evaluating this opportunity as a distraction from what you should really be doing like have you already started down a path on another business or opportunity or whatever and now you're just starting over again at uninformed optimism are you at the peak of or climbing a mountain and you're in that graphic looking over at another Mountaintop evaluating a new opportunity so all of these things together are really important and I didn't do any of these when I was first evaluating I was just filled with optimism and you know youthful ignorance thinking that you know I was going to light the world on fire I was just one $5,000 purchase away from you know the life of my dreams which is how a lot of courses are framed to be so considering the source social proof longevity is it building an actual asset or is it just short-term cash flow is the capital cost something that I'm able to incur the difficulty am I willing to put in the effort assuming that it was 10 times higher than what I act than what I think it is and is it a shiny object like compared to what I'm currently doing then second is your ability to decide what is the number one constraint in the business is the second aspect of strategy and this part was not in the first section of the course but I now realize how important it is is that we're going to give you all the Frameworks and all the blueprints and the necessary tools to get started and everything that has worked for us and all the students all that stuff but it's only as useful as your ability to look at the layout and then decide within your business and what you've done so far what is the next logical step what does the business actually need and we want to be solving the problem of today not the problem of tomorrow and this takes a lot of different shapes and and sizes but the best way to put it is that you know you can't drive a car with binoculars you need to be looking at the problem of today and this is particularly challenging for people that have kind of a fear mindset when they're getting started before they even get out the door they start looking for all the problems that they could encounter down the road which to a certain extent is just good like strategic thinking to be aware of it but not when it stops us from even getting started today and a lot of people use like problems of you know down the road as just another form of procrastination and like fear of failure so that they'd just never get started so what this looks like is thinking okay I could do this but like what about like if I I I'll give a personal example when I first got started one of the very first things I did was I was afraid of or I thought that I needed to like file patents in order to like launch any kind of product which part of that is just like ignorance and me not knowing like what I don't know and not following like a blueprint that's why I bought bought the $5,000 course but I took like a two to three week long patent and trademark course which I ended up never even needing because I was just forecasting for something way down the road that I I thought I might need but never actually materialize in anything so those are a couple different flavors of strategy to be keeping in mind is one the opportunity that you're in and two is and this is not like a just understand it and then you're done type of thing I'm not expecting that by any means it's just once you're in the process be constantly asking yourself am I working on the most important thing that the business needs right now or am I just working on the thing that I feel like working on or even worse am I working on the thing something like out of fear because I have a skill deficit in the area that the business actually needs effort and so I'm procrastinating on that so before we move on to mindset let's recap that productivity or true like output is energy times Focus times strategy so energy is our ability to do the thing focus is our ability to put those outputs into a single thing and then strategy is taking the energy that we're putting into a single thing and then making sure that we're putting that into the right single thing and that equals productivity so productivity does not equal effort this is a common misconception true productivity equals output that's what being productive is it means you're producing something like it's very possible and I've seen this happen a lot where people output a lot of energy and a lot of effort into just things that they feel like doing that the business doesn't actually need without any actual ual like product being made on the other end and a big part of this comes down to discipline and discipline one of the best definitions I've heard of this is doing what we said we were going to do long after the emotion in which we said it has left us and this guy who is a badass on Tik Tok who gets in a cold plunge I think he lives in like Michigan yeah he's got Detroit Lions he had one of the best definitions of this that I've ever heard he said discipline is the strongest form of self-love it's ignoring something you want right now for something better later on it reveals the commitment you have to your dreams especially on the days you don't want to the Future you is depending on you to keep the promises you made to yourself yesterday that hits heavy the future you is depending on you to keep the promises you made to yourself yesterday and the reason that I'm putting this in here is as we're talking about productivity and output so much of it comes down to we know like you're going to have the blueprint you're going to know what the thing are that you need to do and if you don't know what to do like there's all the tools there like the GPT that you can ask questions or you can join the university and ask the coaches questions and post in the community like there's an abundance of information you just have to be willing to use the resources and I see a lot of times people fall back into their old patterns and limiting beliefs that really hinder them and the best way to like persevere through that in my experience is practicing self-discipline and and self-discipline like we just said is doing the thing we said we were going to do long after the moon which we said it has left us and at the beginning if we were to ask if we were to survey anybody will you do the things that the business needs in order to make it successful everybody 100% of people nobody would start a business if they would say no to this everybody will say yes but then once we get into the mix of it and we start working hard we start having those limiting beliefs and challenges we have to overcome and we experience all that growth it becomes way more challenging to stick to doing what we said we were going to do the the same thing applies to like anybody can say they're going to start a diet but then once you're you know 2 weeks in and it's 8:00 you know you're tired after a long day of work and the snack cabinet is there that's where discipline comes in same exact principle holds true in our business and realizing that working 16 hours a day 7 days a week 52 weeks a year and people still call me lucky like this is what we're signing up for this is running a business it's not like the laptop lifestyle of people sitting on a beach and you know I worked on a beach with my laptop several times and it sucks as a side note like the sun reflects can't really do anything gets all sandy anyway the perception that's put out on Instagram and stuff of like what running a business is is not accurate in my personal opinion this is what it actually is it's signing up for long hours and another good way I've heard it put is that entrepreneurs are the type of people who are willing to work 80 to 100 hours a week for 5 to 10 years to avoid working 40 hours a a week for the rest of their lives and another important point this comes from you can see their username in the bottom but I've been collecting Snippets that I found to be really helpful over the past year this is like the best of the best stuff that I found to be most relevant to everyone's journey and it says trust in your adaptability not your plan this is really important so lock in for this because a lot of people think if I just have a really good strategy then everything should take care of itself and that is never the case the strategy never goes according to plan we need to be able to be resourceful so the lack of self-trust in the cause of tremendous amount of overthinking is the cause of tremendous overthinking it is a lack of trust in your ability to make the right decision to navigate to your desired destination consider this simple metaphor the Explorer doesn't set out on his voyage trusting that the Seas will remain calm and that he will stay perfectly on course but rather in his ability to adapt when the inevitable storms and Chaos arrive you are the Explorer and life is your Voyage you don't need to place your trust in the perfect plan but just in your ability to adapt adaptability is the single most important trait for life life is chaotic the only constant is change the best are never broken by the chaos they train themselves to be prepared for it to benefit from it so be the Explorer make a plan set sail and Trust in your ability to adapt when the inevitable punches of the sea start raining down on you and then another really insightful snippet comes from Hermos this is like his guide to being successful step one follow instructions two when he reach something you don't understand how to do Google first three when you figure it out post it others may have struggled four actually follow the rule of 100 daily which is whatever the key constraint or need of the business is do that like day in and day out a 100 times daily so in print on demand it's making designs five you'll be excited for a week on informed optimism then the excitement will wear off that's when the work begins six your work works on you more than you work on it you are the product that's getting built more than your community remember that and he's talking about specifically people that are like building like School communities I think remember that seven everything is unscalable in the beginning that's the point it's how you learn every piece of it this is called Mastery eight the pain of repetition is what forces you to seek Improvement when you figure out ways to get more of what you do you have gained skill if you complain you're dead to me 10 literally thousand and on that point if you complain you're dead to me I agree I wouldn't put it in such negative terms but there's a big difference between win and learn mindset and there's very legitimate challenges and like things that people will face but you can tell in their response to those things like for example somebody's ad account gets banned and somebody makes a post just whining about it saying like Facebook sck like what am I supposed to do blah blah blah like you can answer that person you can answer their questions but it's really you're like pouring water in a leaky bucket is unless that person is willing to do the work on themsel and accept the fact that not only are they going to face this Challenge and they have to overcome it but but they're going to face hundreds of other challenges on the path to becoming successful whatever their definition of that is it doesn't matter then unless they figure that out or until they figure that out there's really no point but if somebody posts and says hey my ad account just went down has anybody experienced something like this before and if so what has worked well for you here is what I've tried so far same exact circumstance very different reactions to it maybe they meditate very different reactions that person the person who is seeking experience shares has not only asked for advice and feedback in a constructive manner but more importantly has shared the things that they have already done that shows somebody who is actively trying to help themselves and is trying to work the problem opposed to somebody who's just throwing their hands up going wo is me is what that person is really doing the wo is me person they're really just looking for somebody to say yeah that sucks that's really hard the the deck is stacked against you you can just go back to what you were doing and that's okay which they can do that anyway they don't need to take up other people's time in order to be told that just to coddle them for them to go back and like do whatever they're doing before and again I I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who are actually putting in the effort and really want to grow themselves and change their life those are the people that I will commit the rest of my life to doing whatever I can to help them but people that are not committed to changing and they just want to like virtue signal and act like they do and like there's enough of those people in the world and those people they can change but they have to decide that for themselves so that's what this community is all about and that's what we built we scale university around is for people like the ladder people who are know that they're going to face tough challenges but have burned the boats and are determined to solve the problems anyway and they're not looking for handouts or for people to just peac mail it to them because they know that's not how they really learn but they're going to try things for themsel and then they're seeking feedback from experts and from a community of like-minded peers who are going through the same thing those are the people that we like to help and that we can help and that we do help every single day and those are the type of people that we let into the community because they make it a net positive and The Tide Rises All Ships raises All Ships that's what a really good Community is all about other communities they just let in anybody with a pulse and a credit card and that's that's fine for some people but we're about building the best possible community of people that it is a net positive for every single person that's already in there when a new person comes in the door the next 10 literally thousands of people have already succeeded you're not special repeat the same activities repeat the same outcome 11 write down every reason you're going to stick with it put it in front of you revisit when you need to remember to stick with it it's a great tip for when you're going through the valley 12 business is shockingly simple but surprisingly hard the hard comes in the form of consistency the moment you don't want to do it or just skip today is the day you realize what just what hard feels like overcome 13 just win and it was edited so who knows what the original post sounded like but yeah it's all completely true and hopefully you're starting to see the framework that we the mental framework that we're building of the challenges that we're going to face but they are 100% like challenges that we can overcome when we come in with the right expectations we start to learn where our own skill deficiencies and our own opportunities for growth in lie and this that the success story you're looking for is in the work you're running from and to put it differently how Joo willink Navy SEAL puts it is that discipline equals Freedom now we're going to talk about habits but before we do that talk about the opposite of habits and these are self-destructive behaviors that all of us have and some of these things these are definitely terms you've you've heard before but these are reframing it like defining it and then talking about what we can actually do again bringing awareness to our unaware Tendencies so number one is procrastination so what is it it's when we delay or postpone important tasks often substituting them with trivial activities why does it matter because procrastination erod productivity builds stress and diminishes confidence how can we beat it start with a single small action step to gain momentum and then celebrate the progress and I'm going to go through these quickly cuz I made a bunch of them but you can obviously watch this back and we're doing all of these will be included in the the lesson outline so you can like print them out whatever you want to do with them next this is a really important one negative selft talk so what is it negative selft talk is the internal dialogue that criticizes doubts or belittles one's own ability and worth so I'm not good enough I always fail the reason it matters is that negative thoughts erode self-confidence and discour enourage taking healthy habits and often lead to giving up prematurely and this is like when people beat themselves up over something unnecessarily it's actually like a selfish thing to do because it doesn't benefit anybody it just makes it easier on them essentially and we'll talk more about why that is later but it doesn't actually help anybody like if if you've ever seen somebody who like messes up and somebody who takes the positive outlook is somebody who's like I messed up but here's where I messed up and here's what I can learn from to make sure that I don't do it again in the future and if you're mess up like impacted other people there's a like a healthy way to apologize and be aware and be upfront about it and like make things right not talking about just like ignoring it just being an talking about once you've done that then taking full ownership and responsibility that's what we're all about but then the 2011 level of that is instead of just beating ourselves up and going into like a a hole of self-pity saying what can I learn about this for the future and they create a self-fulfilling cycle so when you believe you can't succeed you are just less likely to try and it gives us another reason to just never even get started the way we can beat it is by challenging these beliefs by asking ourselves is this actually true and then reframing our language to I'm learning and I'm improving and another topic is about like the language we choose instead of saying and you've heard probably heard me say it a couple times at this point instead of saying like where they lack or deficiency reframing it as I have an opportunity for growth like I used to tell myself I'm just not that creative now what I can say that's more actually true is I have an opportunity for growth in creativity same exact circumstance but it reframes it as something exciting something that I can improve on and then if you break it down even further it's like okay is it true that I'm bad at creativity or is the actual reality that I just haven't made it a priority or a focus to improve my creativity that's way more accurate and another example of that is when people say oh I don't have the time you do have the time all of us have the same amount of time what you actually have is or what would be true to say is I haven't prioritized this like if somebody says oh I don't have time to go to the gym I'm too busy what they actually mean to say is I haven't made going to the gym of priority and then they'll lay out a laundry list of like you know work is crazy and blah like all these things all legitimate things I'm not saying anybody needs to remove anything from their life all that I am saying is that we need to be completely brutally honest with ourselves which being honest with ourselves is just another form of self- Lov be honest with ourselves about like yes work might be crazy but you are prioritizing that work above going to the gym or whatever it may be and that's okay but what's not okay is lying to ourselves about it next I really like this one it's perfectionism so what is it it is the T tendency to set impossibly high standards and feel disappointment when reality falls short why does it matter it leads to procrastination due the fear of not doing it perfectly and burnout the way that we beat it is to set good enough standards to encourage completion over Perfection I hear this one a lot so really lock in for this a lot of people in they're getting started with their brand they see the website that we build the ads that we launch how we say to prioritize quantity over quality and the line that I've heard a lot that really gets to me is well yeah like I want my designs to be really good like I want my brand to like look really nice thinking that they are any different from anybody else everybody wants to build a good brand everybody wants to build something nice that they're proud of what they are actually debating is the method to get there and they are basing their opinion on nothing it's just thoughts and emotions on how to get there meanwhile there are hundreds of students who have seen success there's the coach's success there's like everything points that this is the direction you should go but yet they hold on to I want it I want it to be really good when in reality all it is is just fear of failure and just not wanting to get started and rip the Band-Aid off and a great quote from Tony Robbins is that perfect is actually the lowest possible standard we can set for ourselves because it doesn't actually exist I'm going to say that again perfect is the lowest possible standard we can set for ourselves because it doesn't exist so next time that you're or as you get started and you're looking at your designs and you're thinking I don't know if it's good enough we'll talk about like the 80% rule just get it 80% of the way there and then move on to the next because that's how you'll learn and that's how in turn you'll end up making the best designs and the best products we'll talk about like the jar example I'll just say it now there's a professor who had a class that at the beginning of the semester he told them he set split the class into two and he told half the class that your job is a sculpting class your job is to make the most one of the most perfect jars possible the other class other side of the class he said your job is to make as many jars as possible by the end of the semester class came back together and the side of the class that had been tasked with creating as many not only obviously had the highest quantity but they also had by far the best jars point of the story is that we learn and increase the quality by being willing to risk failure and a lot of times I see people let perfectionism be like a facade for their own fear of failure and they hide behind it as a shield when being an entrepreneur and being successful at this is about being willing to Bear all lay it all out there not just to ourselves but to our Market to the community to everybody at the risk of feeling like inadequate and feeling like there's a skill deficit because there is there's an opportunity for growth and then just go out and do it and accept the fact that we're not going to be good at it because we haven't done it before so how could we be good at it it'd be ridiculous for us to think that so don't think that perfect is a high standard it's actually the lowest standard possible next is self-sabotaging through unhealthy habits so what is it it's repeatedly engaging behaviors that conflict with long-term goals such as staying up too late skipping workouts or spending money impulsively the reason it matters is that each slip may seem small but cumul relatively they erode the foundation of our goals and our self-confidence The Way We Beat It Is by identifying triggers that lead to the habits and replacing those routines with positive Alternatives important point in there is the self-reflection so that when you do a negative habit one don't like blame yourself and self- sabotage and like shame spiral but rather than that keep coming back to why it's going to be a common theme we talk about a lot come back to why and just be curious be a student of your own habits and your own routines ask why did I do this and if you really reflect on that I guarantee you'll find some kind of trigger and if you ask why enough you'll get to the root of it and then you have the recipe for how do you fix that behavior then the question is do we have the discipline or how do we get the discipline to correct it in the future next is avoiding responsibility these are self-destructive behaviors so dodging tasks tough decisions or accountability for outcomes then the reason it matters is that avoidance leads to mised Opportunities stagnant progress and weaken problem solving the way we beat it is to reframe challenges as Lar opportunities instead of threats and ask again why am I avoiding this and the best way to put this is a book by Jo willing called Extreme ownership where the whole concept of the book distilled into one sentence is we are the only person that we can thank and blame for our current situation in life it doesn't matter what it is what happened to you who wronged you everything is your fault and because of you which is both an uncomfortable realization but it's also the most empowering one because it means that you have the ability to change everything in your life and nobody else does so you can do whatever you want but it's only going to be you who can fix it and the the way that this ties into print on demand starting your business is that when you go to launch your you know launch your ads and launch your products and you you know you get the initial results you're going to be very tempted to point fingers around not not everybody I shouldn't should on you but you you may be tempted to point fingers at other people and say like why it can't work Facebook doesn't work you know somebody in the community gave me bad advice which everybody gives really good advice at at the very least they give very honest advice they share from experiences which I I absolutely love but pointing those fingers around you might be right maybe somebody did give you a bad piece of advice but what good does that do you because that just takes away your own power so don't avoid responsibility and something I forgot to mention on the self-sabotaging unhealthy habits that we mentioned before but Bears repeating here is a great hack for improving this when you're trying to correct a unhealthy habit is telling ourselves instead of saying like I can never do this again I can never have whatever food I can never stay up late again whatever it is just reframing it as just not right now and researchers have found that that leads to more sustainable outcomes next is people pleasing saying yes to everything and everyone even when it derails your own priorities the reason that this matters is that constantly accommodating others leaves less time and energy for our personal goals the way we beat it is to practice saying no to requests that conf flict with your main priorities and this is a a big one not just in terms of like people vying for your time and reclaiming our Focus but also in as you know we're talking with friends and family and you know talking about how we're starting a business you're going to get a lot of opinions from people and you can't please everyone there's going to be people that in your life that you care about at least I experienced this people in your life that you care about that cast doubts on you and they look down on you for trying something new and just realize that every time whenever somebody's having a conversation with you what they're really doing is seeing reflection of thems And when they see you trying to improve your life they're feeling bad about themselves to put it simply so you have to take it with a grain of salt the other thing everybody's going to give you opinions only consider the opinions of people who have actually been there and done that and accomplish the things that you want to accomplish everybody else you can you know love them keep them in your life whatever but completely disregard the opinions of anybody who has not accomplished the thing that you want to do it's just putting it very simply and I didn't realize that for a long time but I received tons of opinions from all over the place and I tried listening to a lot of them and even if I didn't follow them I still felt the opinions now I feel very confident in my own skin very confident in what I'm doing now when I get opinions from other people one if I'm not tuning it out completely I'll nod along politely and then just disregard it not because I don't care about them but because I value my own happiness and fulfillment over their own ability to build themsel up and like justify internally to themselves like why they're not doing anything next habits so now we're getting into the fun stuff the the positive things how can we build things in our favor positive momentum that is going to help carry us through the challenging times as we're going through the valley so the purpose of habits in a business sense is to remove that thing from self-negation and it's to create positive habits that become automatic so what is a habit a habit is an action you perform so regularly that it becomes automatic and it requires minimal mental effort to repeat think of like muscle memory and it's very possible and even likely that we develop both positive and negative habits we just reviewed some of those so our brain makes these in an attempt to conserve energy so common misconceptions about habits is number one that they can form overnight this is probably the least common at this point people know like habits form in like roughly 42 days that sort of thing but logically knowing something then intuitively like having ingrained in us like the amount of effort that it takes is completely different because you know you could ask somebody like how long does it take to form a habit they're like oh four to six weeks roughly but then if they try to start forming a habit and then they fall off after two weeks they sometimes still beat themselves up about it so Bears repeating so the reality is that it usually takes weeks or months of consistent repetition myth two is that big changes require big habits when in reality small incremental habits can lead to significant transformation over time myth three with willpower is all that you need when in reality our environment cues and systems often matter way more than sheer willpower AKA is stacking the deck in our favor some common mistakes when it comes to building habits is number one starting too big so this is trying to overhaul multiple areas at once and it often leads to burnout so think of somebody who like tries to get in shape while starting a business while I don't know moving to a new place and you know writing their Memoir and like somebody who says all of those things another thing is and along with that is lacking Clarity so without a clear when where and how habits just don't stick it's not something that just happens by accident or just by placing a wish into the universe next common mistake is relying solely on motivation because motivation fluctuates and well-designed habits persist even when you don't feel like it so the way that we actually use habits is to start small and specific focus on Tiny clearly defined actions for example write 50 words instead of write more and there's a great book on this called getting things done blanking on the offer's name but he talks about like when you have a to-do list or habits the reason that to-do lists like the way that most people use them are so ineffective is that they just write down like a general concept they write down like start business or go shopping what they really should be writing down is like the chunk it down into tiny actions and then what you actually write down is the next action so for example if it's like go grocery shopping you would instead of writing that down you would write create shopping list grocery list of 10 things to get that would be the next very next action so if you've ever looked at your to-do list and when you scan down you're you get to something and your eyes like kind of glaze into the back of your head and you're like later you move on to the next thing that's your brain looking at it realizing that there's levels of detail that it just doesn't have or that it would have to sit down and work on in order to get to and then it just moves on to the next thing the other way to actually use habits is to use cues and triggers AKA tie new habits to existing routines or visual reminders and also track progress use a calendar or app or simple checklist to make your habit building visible so what gets measured gets grown so if you're trying to lose weight the first step is weighing yourself every single day like every morning like if you just commit to doing that you will get more results than if you commit to like some obscure like routine similarly if you're trying to like make more money run your p&l or run your balance sheet every single day make it the very first thing that you do and track the progress cuz when you repeatedly ingrain that in your mind that this is the number that we're trying to move or this is the thing that we're improving and you do that just by showing it every single day then your brain starts subconsciously training itself to solve that problem even when you're not even thinking about it next way to actually use habits this is one that I really like is Big Domino over random attempts so what is it it's when you use Keystone habits as core routines that naturally lead to positive changes in other areas of your life the reason it matters is that we can use it to create like a ripple of effect and improving these one habit often makes it easier to adopt new ones and the way we use it is to identify one habit that if improved would benefit multiple areas for example like when you exercise regularly it increases your energy which then in turn increases like your output in the business and allows you to get more designs done or when you you know set a regular bedtime and you stay consistent with that you end up waking up with more energy and that ripples into the rest of your life opposed to if your habit what that you were trying to do was like making more designs in your business one that's a good goal to have but if you look at like what's the one thing that I could do that when I do that it would make all of the things either insignificant or way less challenging and start with that thing that's why we're talking about all this stuff is so that a lot of times people don't even have an awareness of how much these things are impacting them next is habit stacking this is similar to like creating uh ripple effect habit stacking over sheer willpower so what is it this is when we attach a new habit to an existing one to make it more automatic the reason that it matters is it's easier to start a new habit if it's linked to something that you already do regularly so the way that we use it is pick a habit like making morning coffee and add a new habit while you're doing it and one uh one student that I interviewed from the community who had decent amount of success he said that his daily habit was while he was making coffee in the morning he reviewed what he was going to be doing and a way that you could actually habit stack this is like you know if your goal is to or I'll use a different example if if your if your goal is to like take supplements every morning well what do you already rather than saying okay I'm going to take supplements every morning rather than just saying that say okay what do I already do every morning you brush your teeth so a way to Habit stack would be putting your supplements right next to where you brush your teeth so every morning while you're standing there brushing you just take out the supplements and you pop them in so it's setting yourself up for success and setting up your environment in such a way that it enables you to have success which is ironically or not ironically it's almost like made the slides environment over self-control so what is it for a while I thought that to build good habits I just need to have a lot of willpower and if I wanted it bad enough and I had enough self-control then I would be successful but what we really want to do is structure our surroundings so that good habits are easier and bad habits are harder there's a great book by James Clear called Atomic habits it's really popular but the way he puts it is make bad habits invisible make good habits visible simplest example of this is if you're trying to get healthier completely remove all junk food from the house make it just filled with fruits and vegetables and that sort of thing so that then it becomes nearly impossible unless if you're going to get in your car and drive out and go get some unhealthy food for you to indulge in that previously unhealthy habit the reason it matters that our environment often influences our decision more than our motivation or willpower alone how do we use it put healthy snacks at eye level hide your phone when you're studying or set out work workout clo the night before so something that's worked well for me me personally my routine is like when we go to bed each night we put our phones out in the living room and then I get my clothes out and put them right next to the bed for working out in the morning so then when I wake up there's no phone there so I can't wake up and as hubman puts it you can't start c-shaped scrolling you know when when you wake up you start like doing dopamine drugs right as you're laying in bed I can't do that because if in order for me to get up I or in order for me to do that i' would have to get up walk into the room come back and by that point I'm already up and then on top of that now I wake up my clothes are right there it's already picked out so I just throw it on go out get my phone and go to the gym next is consistency over intensity so what is it consistency is about showing up daily even if it's just for a short period cuz intensity looks impressive and it's what people like to talk about and brag about like how you know they're getting in shape they went to the gym three times that day but it it doesn't actually last without consistency it's like the brightest Flames burn fastest that whole thing the reason it matters is that small consistent actions actually compound over time and lead to way more significant results and the way we use it is to commit to doing something small every day for example 10 minutes of reading and a quick stretch and there's something else to be said here which is lowering the bar on what our goals are like my goal used to be like read a book a week I ended up reading way more when I set the bar at read 10 pages a day cuz when I look at that goal or that habit and I'm like all right I have to read if my goal is that or my habit or my Benchmark for success is I have to read an entire book my brain sees that and is like wow that's that's a big goal but then if when I lowered it to 10 pages I'm like oh I can do that 10 pages and then almost every time I would sit down and end up reading way more than 10 pages so a lot of times the hardest part about going to the gym is just getting yourself to the gym in the first place so just convince yourself tell yourself whatever you have to that we're just going to go to the gym and do 10 minutes I guarantee every time you get there you're GNA end up doing a lot more than 10 minutes next is track progress over guessing so measure your happy performance we already kind of talked about this one but it helps us to see tangible evidence of progress which boosts our motivation and keeps us accountable and engaged and the way we use it is just simply Mark each day that you complete on your habit tracker which we'll talk about the Habit tracker in a second other way to use positive habits that has helped me a lot is viewing it as identity based versus outcome based so frame actions as part of who you are not just what you want to achieve so why this matters and like how we use it is just instead of saying like I want to read more start to say it instead that I am the type of person who reads daily I am a reader so shifting from I want to do this to this is who I am starts to make the Habit feel more natural and like it's something that we can stick to opposed to when we it it feels like there's more conflict or friction when we're like I want to do this versus this is who I am which back to our language that's just a subtle shift that makes it like easier for us to engrain in who we are so the business version of this is I want to start making more designs instead of saying that I am I'm a person I make 10 designs a day I'm a designer that's a very subtle shift might and again it'll feel like you're lying to yourself in the beginning or telling yourself like a a white lie but if you say it enough times you start to ingrain it in you and it becomes who you are which if you really think about it the things you associate with yourself how did they end up like that how did you get to that place in the first place started off with experiences habits telling yourself things so it's just now we're older and more conscious of it a lot of them were formed like when we were children and we were like who knows what was going on in our heads then but we certainly don't remember it so it feels like it's almost artificial to do it now but in fact my opinion or my theory on it is that that's the only way that any of those things has ever like we've ever changed anything about who we are and it's just a matter of now we're more aware of it so it feels weird especially because the stuff doesn't get talked about that often so my daily routine for example is this right here we're going to look at the Habit tracker in a second but I wake up at 6:00 a.m. and I'll be the first I'm going to read these things but I'll be the first person to say the habits that you choose it has to be personal to you so don't take what I wrote down here and be like all right I'm going to do this I'm going to do that okay I guess I have to drink a gallon of water a day in order to be successful absolutely not think about Warren Buffett he still does stuff and also I'll be the first person to admit that these are the things that I try to do every day and when I'm like in a season of like really working a lot like there's different SE we'll talk about that later but I don't do this every day I'm not a robot there are days where I miss this but I just try to hold myself accountable to at least getting this done 80% of the days so six out of the seven days I get this done and the majority of the days I get all of them done but on the days where I miss some instead of beating myself up about it and letting that become a shame spiral and then self-destructive Behavior ensu I just take a step back and ask myself why did that happen and sometimes the answer is just I didn't feel like it then if I ask why again why didn't I feel like it CU that comes down to like willpower or like energy levels it's like well did I get sleep the night before had I been eating well had I been sleeping there's a really funny meme about this or video it's like somebody is they're telling their therapists like or their friend like I don't I don't feel good like okay did you have you been eating healthy no have you been exercising no have you been getting sunlight no have you been drinking water no have you been talking have you been socializing no have you been working on things you like no have you been spending a lot of have you been staying off of social media no staying away from the news no have you been stretching like yes yes I did that one they're like got it and then they rattle off like five more things and then they're like yeah I don't know it's a mystery so I just ask myself why didn't I feel like doing it and normally the answer is pretty obvious but anyway I'll go through so 6:00 a.m. I wake up then I weigh in then I take my morning supplements water I drink a gallon that's not right away that's throughout the day then I drink ag1 it's like supplement drinks basically it's good for your gut coffee I used to drink a ton of caffeine now I try to limit it to two cups because I find for me that it helps me be more productive and actually have sustained energy throughout the day then I have my only diet rules is that I just have I just do three meals and I do 2,000 calories throughout the day try to get a bunch of protein then I limit my phone time to 45 minutes it really helps that I delete all the apps and I turn my phone on black and white mode so it's pretty freaking boring to look at then I do a morning workout which I have two workouts in here the morning one is I do cold plunge and then I do some kind of like lightweight training and it it's nothing intense not in there going all David goggin but something to just get my body going I'm listening to podcasts and that sort of thing to start up the day this I found for me personally that when I Spike My metabolism and I do some kind of energy I used to just wake up and go right to my desk and I started to feel like a blob but now I find that if I do some kind of workout even if it's just a light walk or jog that I feel way more energized and attentive and able to focus throughout the whole day so it works for me then meditation so before I work I meditate for 10 minutes so I use either like the headspace app or I listen to like Tony Robbins priming on YouTube a lot of different versions then I read for 10 pages then I run the balance sheet around the p&l then this is the important thing I work on the hardest thing first so and this starts from the day before I used to wake up and I would just start working on a bunch of little things just I would sit down just start popping in slack and Stuff felt like I was getting nothing done and for me my and there's different personality types or body types but the most productive hours of the day for me are in the 3 to four hours after I've first woken up like I can get stuff done all day but that's like my prime time where I feel at my Peak and so I do my hardest work then and I do it for a deep work session where I don't have slack open I don't have any notifications on do not disturb my phone's in the other room and there's nothing popping into my head and this took a lot of practice to get good at it but now the way that has worked for me preparing my environment the night before so before I go to bed I make sure that my desktop is set up so I don't even have slack open so that I can't even possibly see like a notification when I look at it in the morning little stuff like that goes a long way then once I'm done working there's like I do calls and stuff in the afternoon group coaching calls that sort of thing then I do my second workout which is normally just like a walk or for me personally I like doing like a weight vest walk so it's low impact cardio but I'm able to you know get some kind of weight training out of it then I take night supplements then I set my three priorities plus time block for tomorrow and then I journal for five minutes which I'll show you that the prompts in a second then I do 10 to 15 minutes of stretching which for me I'm sitting a lot throughout the day and uh stretching even I'm not like a gymnast or anything but just sitting there and stretching out for a little bit I've felt a huge difference in like energy levels but in like just how I feel throughout the day and I started to feel like a brick after sitting there all day then I watch I don't I'm not doing this one right now but I was mostly because Meg wasn't enjoying it but I was watching a documentary every night instead of like a show or something and I was doing that because it's less dopamine like there's no TV show that's exciting to look forward to it's the work is the only exciting thing throughout the day then for sleep I wear an eye mask now I just have blackout Shades mouth tape and nose strip and the reason I do that is not just cuz Andrew hubman told me to but because after wearing these things I wore Aura for a while before the woop but after wearing them I saw that my sleep patterns were way healthier I was getting much a much higher quality of sleep when I was doing that and the thought behind it is that they it basically you force yourself to breathe through your nose you can research about this but forces you to breathe through your nose which then like helps you get into a deeper sleep and I've actually noticed a big difference not just from what these things tell me but in how I feel when I wake up and then by 10 p.m. I'm out and those are all the things that I do on a daily basis and then perhaps the most fun thing that I do is this the Daily Journal and simple questions it's like what's the best thing that happened to me today what's something that I was grateful for today what's something that made me laugh what's something I learned today what steps did I take towards accomplishing my goals did I accomplish my three priorities from the day before why or why not what's something that I'm going to improve on for tomorrow and is there anything else in my mind and I know it looks it might look kind of silly and it feels kind of silly especially with the emojis that just makes it fun but I found by asking myself these questions just try this for a couple days and trust me it feels like I was surprised at how relieving it felt like writing these things down for a number of reasons like it felt like one I had actually made progress and you know I had gained something I learned something from the day two gratitude which Meg and I start the day with this we quiz each other and say what's three things you're grateful for today it can be big things or little things a lot of times it's just like I'm grateful that the sun is shining I'm grateful that I have a group coaching call later today and we get to help people little stuff like that just shifts you from you know the mindset of lack and stress to you know being excited and like seeing the positive in the world and that takes again that's a daily habit that it's a muscle that you work over time but yeah asking yourself these questions each day it helps like empty your brain and makes back to the sleep thing it makes my Sleep Quality go up it helps me to fall asleep much faster and here is the we scale tracker that you guys have access to so when you join the free group you have this tracker in here it's basically the tracker that I use and this is where I have my habits filled in I recommend to get started just fill in 5 for the morning 5 for at night and the really important thing is that I just laid out mine as an example but this has to come from you it has to be yours otherwise it won't mean anything and then you won't feel motivated to stick to it so think about like what are your goals and a good starting point is thinking about like personal health wealth relationships like what are your goals and then just write down like what's one habit what's one big Domino that you could do in each one of those areas that would help you further yourself in those goals and then you write them down and then each day you just go through and check the boxes it feels satisfying and then down here you have the journal and these cells are broken up to be like super small so you're able to write like as much as you want there then each day it goes through and then you can expand it so yeah you're able to journal in each spot and these are all the prompts that I use and out of everything that I've done and I I'll say like the main benefit of this not just here's the Habit tracker the main reason that this was most impactful for me was I felt like there were so many things that I wanted to accomplish in a lot of different areas of my life and it felt like all right I want to get healthy I want to build a a business I want to maintain good relationships all these things and I was like where's all the time go it felt like I was tracking so many different things in my mind like how am I supposed to possibly keep all this straight the Habit tracker was the solution for me it's different for everybody but for me the beauty of it was that it Consolidated all those goals into one spot and then instead of me having to stay committed and on top of a dozen different things I was able to wake up each day and say I just have to stay committed to this one thing I just need to wake up and lock in to just fill out this tracker whatever this thing says I'm going to do and by just doing that and I do it once in the morning once at night I'm going to say it again it changed my life especially during like the hardest points in my life where I felt like the house was on fire I had so much stuff going on just by committing to this especially in terms of like the the state stuff like the body Health all of that those are normally the things in my experience that get Left Behind the fastest those are the things like when business is ramping up or relationships are a priority whatever for whatever reason it seems like our health and our fitness Falls like to the Wayside in a big way and it can not just because like you matter and you have to take care of your body and all that but like strictly from a business sense speaking to what those priorities are that are pushing off your health and fitness like if you want those things to succeed you are the primary input into that thing so if you are deteriorating then the business business you cannot expect the business to continue to have good outputs especially because and we're going to talk about how our mindset is such a huge factor in our ability to be successful in the business so for example when you have like a tough challenge come down the pike into your business if you're in a healthy state where you wake up you're getting good sleep you're eating well your confidence is high you're exercising that person facing that challenge opposed to somebody who's been burning the midnight oil super tired eating like crap they hear that challenge completely different different reactions so even from a strictly business sense it makes too much sense to not do it so next organization and these are topics that get talked about a lot we're just bringing awareness to like what they actually are and how we can use them to our advantage so organization is the process of structuring our tasks resources and environment so that information is easy to find and work is done efficiently and really lock in for this cuz everybody thinks they know how to organize themselves or at least they know what they should be doing but in my experience they actually don't the reason it matters is that it frees up mental energy we need as much of that available as much of our RAM available to be allocated towards our business as humanly possible and it helps prevent Miss deadlines and allows us to work more effectively myth one is that it's just about clean DS and I talked about this in the last course and a lot of people liked it and it's good policy but it's not just about that true organization spans across how we manage our time files task communication and our thoughts now I am a big believer in having a clean desk cuz I firmly believe that if you look at the state of somebody's desk or their desktop or their tabs you are also seeing a window into the state of that person's mind so scary thought especially if any of us are looking around and seeing what our desk looks like so what I would like you to do and make this a fun thing we posted in the community about this before but we're doing it again is take a picture of your desk what it looks like right now then after you go through this section post a picture in the community of what it looks like after and that is something to be extremely proud of because most people are not even aware of the massive impact that it has on their overall mental health and performance so post that not just for your own sake and if it feels uncomfortable with post that's exactly why you need to post this is all about stepping outside of our comfort zone which we're going to talk about in a second but it's also motivational for other people in the community so it's not just about you and contributing is one of the fastest ways to FastTrack your own success is when you are living for others you end up in turn learning faster and being more motivated in your own life next or organization equals big elaborate systems the reality is that that's a myth the reality is that simple consistent methods often work far better than complex apps and workflows I was the the biggest fool in this I used to think any time I was getting organized I would start getting on demos with all these new apps and softwares and all this stuff now and there's a great meme for this in terms of notetaking but the same is true for organization so when you start off you're doing like basically no organization and you start to realize that you need organization you start layering in so much crap like you have these complex workflows and like backend things connecting and zappier and all this garbage that you don't actually need and then you find once you get really good at organization realize you don't actually need any of it or at the very least you need like 10% of what you were actually doing what you actually need is just discipline and consistency and to set your goals on like what you actually want and then you end up back at the original system that you had but now you just have a completely renewed mindset about it this is again why we're doing this why we're doing this whole 2hour long section on foundations is because you can see opposite ends of the spectrum I know it's just a meme but it's a very accurate one that's why it's so funny it's like we can give you the tools and like the blueprint but if this whole section here is helping us to avoid this whole middle part and this is the painful piece where I I was working my ass off for years spending all this money on stuff that I didn't actually need all just to learn lessons that I could have learned if somebody just sat down and took the time to make a really detailed training explaining to me all this stuff so if only somebody would do that or at least attempt to do that myth number three is that it's one and done that you set up one system and then you know you're good to go the reality is that organization is ongoing habit just like everything you're seeing the common themes now real organizations ongoing habit and it's a muscle that gets built up over time next time blocking versus open-ended so what is it this helped me a lot as well as you saw it in my daily habits so this is when we schedule specific time slots for each task or category of work the reason it matters is that you know exactly what to work on and when reducing procrastination and it also reduces the cognitive load that we have when things are back to the zigger neck effect there it is that that that effect that's true not just for when we like write stuff down but if say we have like 10 things on our to-do list if we don't have it planned out like when we're going to do it our brain is just thinking that we have to do all of these things right now opposed to if we just say write down how much time will each one of these take and overestimate overestimate by at least 50 to 100% so if you think it's going to be an hour block for an hour and a half to two hours and then just drop it on the calendar based on when it has to get done and a great tool for deciding the order of these priorities is the effort impact Matrix which I'll pull up to show you an example of so if you're not sure like what I should be doing this is a great way to do it so you write down activity name Activity 2 Activity 3 then you write down the amount of effort that it'll take and you just do it however many you have you write down like if if you have three of them here then you rank them in terms of like most effort to least effort so we say that this one's going to be the most challenging that's going to be second that's going to be least then in terms of impact right down that one will be a two that one will be a three that one will be a one and then okay the actual template in the the community works but what it does is it there we go so 10 five 10 okay so there you go do it out of 10 write down like what are the 10 things that I need to do right now and then in terms of how much effort will it take and you just rank them it Maps out the things that will be either a major project thankless tasks quick wins or fill-ins and then that tells us where we should put our effort so thankless tasks are things that are high effort but low impact those are things that get pushed to the bottom of the list major projects are things that are high impact but also High effort those are things we push to later on quick wins are things that are high impact and lower effort and those are the things we do right now then fill-ins are things that are low effort low impact we do them when we can so that's a good priority setting Matrix that's pretty easy called the effort impact Matrix how to use it at the start of the week map out when you'll be handling key tasks and then keep it realistic so like I said keep your time blocking to realistic estimates next up is having one inbox opposed to scattered notes so what we want to do is funnel our incoming information and again just to recap all of these things I know we're throwing a lot out one this is all recorded so we can watch it back again to re review stuff also this is not saying you have to do all of these things in order to be successful like on my path from 0 to 25 million I just learned A lot of it the hard way and if I learned these things earlier specifically like setting priorities the strategy like where I was placing my time how to maintain my state and manage my own self then like the stuff on the business side but like those were a lot of the big ones and my daily habits and rituals so that it felt more effortless in the process which then freed up my own bandwidth to be able to go and execute on the right thing and not Chase shiny objects that aside all these things are just Tools in your toolbox this is not to say that you need to do all of this and if you don't that if you don't time box that you're going to be screwed this is just if you feel like and this is where self aware awareness is key if you feel like you're somebody who you have a never- ending to-do list and that's something that you want to work on and you feel like it's hindering you in your business or just in general then here's one tool that you can now whip out of your tool boox and try it out okay so one inbox this is one that actually helped me a lot so this is when we funnel incoming information tasks and ideas into a single place before organizing it the reason it matters is a single collection Point ensures nothing slips through the cracks how to use it pick one tool stick to it and brain dump something in there as soon as it pops into your head so the thing that I use is called todoist I absolutely love it because what it does let me show you it's a very simple to-do app to-do list app there's a bunch of them out there but the reason I like this one is I'm able to set it up so that I just click the button on the side and it pops up like a little task entry bar I just type it in and it goes to my to-do list I'm sure there's lots of different ways lots of apps you can do that but I love this one because then it also connects to my calendar so I just write in a to-do and then I say the date and like I do hashtag and whatever category it's related to so if it's related to like our brand I do hashtag the brand name and then whatever the task is and when I need to get it done by and then I just send it off and it's done opposed to what so many people do is they have ideas or something they remember they have to do like errands or whatever and then they just let that Fester it just goes around they never actually write it down anywhere or they take out like a sticky note and they just write it down and then their whole kitchen floods with sticky notes and it's like you're just making more of a mess for yourself some people it works for it but I'm certainly not one of them so having one solidified place and it just gets dropped into the Inbox and then at the end of each day I go through and I clear that out and I categorize it what it relates to if it's urgent versus just an idea what business it relates to all those things and then the beauty of it is not not only is it more organized for me but then way more importantly throughout the day I'm not constantly thinking and trying to remember those things so I do this a 100 times a day day as soon as something anything pops into my head I just click that button and it pops up or if I'm on my computer just do control space it pops up doesn't matter what I have open it pops up on top of it I just type it in and it goes off it's been cute I almost said it again but it's been life improving next is purging over accumulating not that kind of purging so periodically reviewing and removing unnecessary items files or tasks this is if you know anybody who has a desktop that you can't even see their wallpaper send this to them so why does it matter this is like clutter-free desk home desktop folders inbox messages Etc it's more of an example than why it matters but how to use it in setad of recurring to do on your calendar so you don't forget cuz your brain doesn't and a frame that has helped me with this when it comes to like stuff like stuff whether it's in the closet or just around you know the apartment like wherever it may be whenever I look at something that has just been sitting there I ask myself have I used this in the past 3 months and if the answer is no then I get rid of it and I think a lot of times people look at things laying around they think of like the sentimental value and they don't realize that by things sitting there it has a and it's minimalism basically I'm I'm far from a minimalist I love Amazon too much but I do make it a recurring habit for myself to clear things out because things have a cost even if it's just sitting there there is a cost Associated to that because every time your eyes land on something like your brain is processing it and it has thoughts about it so if something is just sitting there collecting dust it's not free it's taking up space in your mind and it's not a big deal when it's one thing but if you picture the other end of the extreme the hoarders it's very easy for us to point at those people and go that's bad they shouldn't do that a lot of us live somewhere in the middle sometimes further to this end than we like to admit and again in the interest of stacking the deck in our favor covering all of our bases this is one of those things that we can at the very least bring awareness to cuz it can help us a lot cuz if we're really trying to accomplish what we're setting out to do these are like the little things that we're not even aware of that have a big impact on us so most relevant and easiest just have a clean desk delete extra folders so that when you're looking for your designs on Google Drive or whatever you use you're not sifting through years and years of stuff and if you're like well I don't want to get rid of it what if I need it someday one 90% likelihood you don't need it if you haven't used it in the past 3 months to a year when are you going to need it in the future but people still have that fear next thing you can do just get an external hard drive it's like 50 bucks on am Amazon plug it into your computer move all that crap on an external hard drive label it stuff it in your closet and then enjoy the freedom of not having cluttered Digital Life another good thing to keep in mind is using a checklist versus Reinventing so we want to standardize and there's a great book on this called the checklist Manifesto long story short it talks about how basically Pilots for years it was the I want to say it was the Boeing 747 when it first flew it they brought it out for like a big test flight it's not funny brought out for a test flight and went up and then it went down and crashed and the thing that they realized is that the pilots had missed things when they were launching and up until that point in those days Pilots didn't have their pre-launch checklist they just remembered everything and the idea was you know Pilots have flown hundreds thousands of times they just know this stuff intuitively not realizing that as yes they they have the potential to remember things but that's taking more cognitive load that we don't have to so long story short highly repetitive tasks things we do a lot especially as we standardize things and create Sops for our team someday checklists make our lives a lot easier and it saves time eliminates busy work so we can get on to higher impact tasks so identify tasks you do often like weekly reports and create a template so like running your p&l creating designs just write a checklist of like what are all the things I need to remember to do in order to make this thing reality so you don't even have to think about it so it becomes automatic next is priority over everything created equals so what is it rank task by importance and urgency before you start working and this sounds obvious everyone's like yeah I know I need to prioritize people don't do it people have a slew of things on their to-do list and they just look at them as if they're all the same when in reality if you objectively valuate them at least one of those things is Far and Away the most important thing on the business and it's fastest way to find out what it is either a do the effort impact Matrix or the even simpler way what's the thing on the list you feel like doing the least that's normally the thing that the business needs the most the reason this matters is that when you know what's most important you prevent less critical tasks from overshadowing key goals and how to use it the effort impact Matrix there we go there's some organization and habit tools that you now have access to you can come back and review these but we're going to keep going now we're going to talk about an even more important subject of mindset and when people think about mindset well let's first what is mindset why does it matter and how can we change it or use it to our advantage so when people hear mindset they normally think a one to do things they other think of the secret which had the premise of think hard about something and you'll get it and you know just put it out into the world like place your order with the universe that whole thing and I think they got some of it right but far from like all of it like think hard sweat about it and you know you'll get what you want or they think about this guy some some looking guy like I've never met him I shouldn't say he's an but Lambo and a bunch of books maybe I'm jealous have to turn no I'm not definitely not not how they turn anyway have to turn their mindset into a grinds set type of guy yeah like just you got to turn your mindset into a grind set like read a bunch of books then you'll get a Lambo that whole story bu my course or this guy and you know if you're thinking anything like I was when I was trying to learn is that I was super frustrated looking at it and felt like none of it actually seemed applicable you know somehow that turned your mindset into a grind set or by my course I always had a sinking suspicion coming from somewhere that that actually wasn't going to be the solution to my problems but I still fell for it so it's extremely problematic though because it's infectious and it's also dangerous so the reason that this is important is that our mindset is the default operating system that underlines everything that we do it's the similar to boting with the current versus against it and the most tactical explanation of what a mindset is that I can give you is out of our mind the things that we think about that's our conscious mind this is things like critical thinking logical thinking short-term memory willpower and the conscious mind tries to use willpower to control behaviors habits and beliefs but loses out to the subconscious mind's greater influence because the subconscious mind is 90% of our actual mind that's the mind that's telling our heart to beat it's what's making us breathe it's you know beliefs creativity emotions feelings habits addictions imagination so hopefully you're seeing the reason that we just talked about all those habits and tools that you can use to retrain your subconscious mind is because that's 90% of our brain power and your brain can consciously only process 40 pieces of information per second while your unconscious or subconscious mind can process significantly faster at approximately 11 million pieces of information so 40 million pieces versus 11 million so a lot of time when people sit down and they start doing a course that's uh them using their conscious mind they just jump right in with the same unconscious or subconscious wiring that hasn't helped them build a business in the past but they're hoping that something will be different because they're riding on you know hope and adrenaline and motivational David gogin videos they only have 40 out of 11 million pieces of information working for them and it's it's an extreme example just to demonstrate a point and I tried having chat GPT generate a image to represent it and didn't quite get the task so question is like why does our mind have a mindset or mental conditioning like why does process 95% of the outside world subconsciously it's because our brain is constantly using about 20% of our metabolic energy and this is going to get like a little scientific my scientific but it's interesting at least to me hopefully it's interesting to you CU once I understood this stuff it helped me understand like why I do the things that I do and then I was able to reshape it to a certain degree to work for me instead of against me and so our brain uses 20% of our calories I didn't realize that like chess Grandmasters during matches they burn about 8,000 calories they're just sitting there thinking hard but they're burning 8,000 calories the reason that it matters is that science estimates that 95% of our brain's activity is unconscious this means that the majority of the decisions we make the actions we take in our emotions and behaviors depend on 95% of brain activity that lies Beyond conscious awareness so we are literally flying on autopilot 95% of the time meaning that if we decide to undertake major project in our lives like say I don't know an e-commerce business 95% of our inputs are going to be determined by something that's outside of our control unless we can get in front of it which means that this is why every time you've ever tried starting a business or a diet or anything else it has felt great for a few weeks while you are conscious of your efforts but eventually things start to slip and your subconscious takes over and you go back into autopilot and if your subconscious mind is programmed into thinking I'm a loser or I don't deserve success I'm not smart enough then guess what the business ends up failing and that means that we end up back here repeating the same Loop the good news is that we can control it we can get that 95% to work for us instead of against us like it does for so many of us and we can use it to our advantage like having a boat that is going with the current rather than against it so now we know what our mindset is why we have one then it controls 95% of our life and how it can work for us or against us so now let's define what is a good mindset a good mindset is made up of a win or learn mentality extreme ownership realizing Heaven or Hell Island AKA like what is the thing that we're trying to get away from what is the thing that we're trying to achieve and having 100% honesty with ourselves along with being Solutions oriented thinking back to the example of the person who had their Facebook account banned and two different outcomes like or two different reactions one person who's just like wo is me everything sucks that kind of thing versus the person who's looking for a solution to it that person is Solutions oriented great book on this extreme ownership by Joo willink I already mentioned it but this book really opened my eyes to areas of my life that I thought that I was holding myself accountable but realized that I wasn't being fully accountable I think I was like 70 to 80% but there was still 20 to 30% of the times that I was very very good at finding somebody else to blame or some other reason that it had failed that was outside of my control and they were always like very logical reasons that I could pay a lot of lip service to and justify but it never really matters because as long as I'm or it does matter it's not true is what I mean to say is that as long as we're looking for those things we're always going to be giving ourselves like justification for why it's okay for us to fail and as long as we're looking for that which we've never been trained to do this at any point in our lives not to point the fingers like we we have never at least I never sought out this kind of thing cuz I didn't put myself into circles or I didn't consume the right materials that taught me this sort of thing but we all have the potential to control everything in our lives there are definitely external factors at play but what we can control is something happens how do we respond to it and even if somebody wrongs you it's on us that we were in that person like if you have a bad Business Partnership and that person wrongs you or they're slacking off or not holding up their end rather than just complaining about them doing that thing which could be completely legitimate Maybe they said that they were going to do much more than they ended up doing completely fair you know concern to take up with somebody but it's really on me that I was in that partnership or it's on you that you were in that partnership to begin with which is like w well it's not really on me it's on them it's like no you chose to be in that partnership and once it started becoming a problem you chose to not have the conversation with the person and then if they if you did have the conversation and then they still decided not to change then it's on you for not getting out of the partnership it's on you for allowing yourself like what can you control in that situation you can control you can always control if you're in the situation to begin with then if people are like well you know I'd already built the business to a certain point and like we already had so much invested it's like fine now we're getting somewhere now we're getting to the logical explanation that you had for yourself as to or The Logical justification that you had for yourself as to why you didn't end the partnership now we're getting to ownership then the next step of that is realizing that you are valuing or you are putting off the pain of ending that partnership this partnership is just one example like there's a lot of different ways but you valuing the pain of that not ending that partnership over the pain of like you know where you were right now so if you're going to sit there and complain about it you should really you only have yourself to blame like you could have done something about it and in terms of like another business example is like if you launch your ads and the ads don't do well you could either sit there and say Facebook ads don't work like I followed the course and like I made the designs even though we say like just keep making more designs it's not the ads it's you need more designs join the group calls ask the questions we're here to support like you can either just point the fingers and say like this this doesn't work even though there's an abundance of proof around you that it does work and something is clearly different about what your approach is entailing but you can either sit there and say Facebook ads don't work point the finger at something that you can't control or you can reflect and say well I made 100 designs but what else could I have been doing well I could have been doing more research and making even more designs I could have been asking questions to like improve my own knowledge of how Facebook ads work and close the skill deficit in that example there's a ton of different things that we can control so we have to be very wary of when we catch ourselves pointing the finger doesn't matter how justify we feel in that finger pointing the only place that it should ever really be pointing is at us because we deserve it not that we deserve the blame but we deserve the growth and I mean this wholeheartedly for every single one of us you deserve the grow growth that you have coming and I mean that in the best possible way and I emphasize this point heavily and this extreme ownership concept is so important because this is where the true growth is found and this is something that I'd never experienced until I read this book honestly I realized that once I turned the finger inward my growth went like that it was very uncomfortable having to sit with the fact that like I'm to blame for everything that's gone wrong in my life but when I more I reflected on it the more true I found it so next myth is that mindset is something you work hard at to achieve one time the truth is that mindset requires constant work and something that entrepreneurs at all levels deal with on a day-to-day basis I used to think like there's just Gods out there Elon Musk Jeff Bezos all they just have it figured out they were either born with it or something else that I just couldn't ever possibly hope to obtain therefore I don't have to strive for it now I know that mindset is a practice it's not one and done it's just like going to the gym it requires continuous effort in order to see results and consistency is key so like small daily actions compound over time and the definition of mindset is that it is the established set of attitudes held by somebody so mindset sets the direction of our lives and my own Journey with mindset like led me to after I read the the book I realized that I wanted to push myself further than this than I'd ever gone before so I attended this like Navy SEAL training where basically I paid to go get hazed for 12 hours and it it pushed me like like a few hours in the training I was jogging and not jogging I was running and I started getting sick this was like two hours into the training and I started getting sick I have to get graphic so I like stepped off to the side of the road and within a few minutes I thought like okay they're tough but like they see me getting sick they'll give me a pass within a few minutes not even like 30 seconds I had an X Navy SEAL leaning down like this close to my face screaming at me that I could puke and run otherwise I could get off his course I've gone on quite the journey when it comes to mindset and I don't say this to I am the furthest thing from a Navy SEAL this was it was a pleasure to get to be in their company for even a day to like learn about their mindset and like the process that they push themselves through I don't pretend to know anything about any of their challenges or any of that but for me it was eye opening relative to what I had done previously cuz I thought that I was pushing myself but I knew that I could push myself further thinking back to the mouse like we have so much more potential and doing things like this helped me realize that potential and then a lot of people asked me they're like are you insane or like did you have a good reason for doing it my only reason was I wanted to see like what I was capable of and what I can definitely say is that when I got back things that I used to think were challenging seemed stupid like sitting down to work on designs or ads or whatever it was felt like a walk in the park after having gone through that and I'm not not saying that anybody has to go sign up for something like this but it was basically if you push yourself to do hard things in one area of your life it makes the things that you previously thought hard it like resets the bar and so when I say that like we scale or this course everything that we've been doing with the content it's been the greatest privilege of my life and I've said that a bunch in the past I'm not really talking about like helping people sell t-shirts like I love print on man and I love the business aspect and and all that but I'm really not talking about the t-shirts or even starting a business what I'm really talking about is getting to be a part of people's like mindset Journey because that is where true fulfillment comes from and I talked about earlier hours ago at this point about like my true why like helping people feel more fulfilled the number one question that I've asked myself like over the past decade is like why do we behave the way that we do and why are some things hard and others are easy and something I've learned over time is that our brain is 2 million plus years old this ties into the mindset so our brain is 2 million years old but Society has changed dramatically in the past Century and even in the last decade and our internal wiring just simply has not caught up so our ancient motivations were survival our brain is hardwired to Just Keep Us Alive so that like food Water Shelter they were all top priorities and danger we had constant awareness of predators and threats and we belong to a belonging to a group was essential for safety and resources so and we sought out instant gratification just anything that could Keep Us Alive cuz we didn't know if we we had tomorrow and modern impact is we have cravings for high calorie foods still persist despite abundance so our brains it used to be a healthy hard wirring we wanted high calorie things cuz that was smart to seek those out because you know you don't know when you're going to eat again now there's food all around us not everywhere obviously but in the US like food is abundant which is now kind of a problem that's why obesity is such a prevalent issue and danger we now overreact to minor stresses as if it was life-threatening like our brain has that slot in its mind for looking for life-threatening things that by and large no longer exist and social media Taps into our innate desire to be a part of a tribe and for connection and validation cuz it used to be that if you got Outcast by the tribe or your group that you were pretty much dead it was a death sentence like early humans relied on the group in order to survive CU there was different roles and responsibilities and like fending off threats you needed a group in order to survive that no longer is true but social media Taps into that desire for approval and other people liking us which we no longer need in order to survive and instant gratifications we talked about this at Great length we have a preference for quick rewards AKA scrolling and binging over our long-term goals AKA we are hardwired to seek out instant gratification but it's even worse than that cuz we live in a society where we have built Comfort coffins around ourselves and and a comfort coffin is a mental space of safety where we avoid challenges risk and discomfort and it feels secure but in reality it slowly kills growth in our potential the reason it matter is that it keeps us stuck in mediocrity and limits our ability to achieve success and fulfillment the way that we break it is by recognizing it embracing discomfort and taking bold action so why does this matter to us it's because fulfillment comes from delayed gratification thinking back to the marshmallow test that we talked about a kid that is able to leave it there versus takes it right away that's the simplest example to demonstrate somebody who has a strong mindset versus a weak one and to give more of an example the strong mindset is somebody who is relevant to business or in the context of business is somebody who's resilient in the face of adversity open to learning and feedback focused and goal oriented and takes ownership of their outcomes hopefully you're seeing how this is all building on itself versus a weak mindset is easily overwhelmed by challenges resistant to change your feedback and D acted and reactive and they also blame external factors so on one hand we have somebody who these people can be in the same exact circumstances face the same challenges but very different reactions to them and this is especially relevant when we're in the informed pessimism form stage of the process and you know we can give you the best strategy that's what we're doing with this course best strategy that we know of having the strategy is great best strategy we know of and that has worked for a lot of people but having the strategy is great but if you don't have the mindset to face the challenges then it's pretty much worthless so let's talk about how to strengthen our mindset our mindset we can focus on the recipe for longlasting change limiting beliefs and removing ego padding so the recipe for long lasting change is State story and our strategy so our state is our physiology our story is our internal wiring our beliefs or stories that we've told ourselves about like how successful we can become what our limiting skill sets are what we're good and what we're bad at and then our strategy is like we talked about what opportunity we're pursuing and then specifically what actions or where we're placing our Focus within that opportunity so unlimiting beliefs what is it limiting beliefs are negative thoughts or assumptions that hold you back from reaching your goals now why does it matter it's because they block your growth and success before you even start and how do you use it or how do you question it you challenge your beliefs you challenge your limits so you rewrite your story and realize that your potential is greater than your beliefs one of my absolute all-time favorite quotes is that our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure back to extreme ownership it's terrifying to realize that the only place that it's worth pointing the finger or that it's true to be pointing the finger is at ourselves next let's Define ego padding so ego padding is or ego is a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance and ego padding is when we rewrite the facts to create a comforting story that Shields ourselves from discomfort or responsibility and it keeps us in our comfort coffin and the reason that this matters is that it blocks our own learning and our ability to improve and the way that we use it or that we confront it is to spot it challenge it and take ownership again the book by Brian holiday ego is the enemy talks a lot about this and breaking through egoo padding is a good quote on this is from Heros that people want to have problems because it gives them a reason to suck and it be okay phrase pretty harshly but it's pretty true like if you think about a reason that somebody likes throwing up a problem or why people like just talking about their problems a lot is one it's a good way to get Social validation because it's easier for people to talk about their problems rather than what's going well in their lives because they know that by sharing their problem they're not going to make the other person feel poorly about thems which that's a whole separate thing but ego padding prevents us from taking responsibility for our outcomes we want to replace excuses with ownership and the definition addding is rewriting facts to create a fictional story that justifies in our comfort zone so examples a healthy mindset would be what can I learn from this failure an ego padding decision or reaction would be so I made myund designs but the lack of sales isn't a reflection of me or the quality of the designs just I made the designs Market just doesn't know what they want and it's an unfortunate truth when sometimes the customer just doesn't realize how good your products are somebody should tell them and something that helped me push through this with like ego padding and discipl plan in general is like it's very possible to do the action or do what's required without feeling like it so looking at the guy doing the pull-ups like the one on the left feels motivated the one on the right doesn't feel motivated still doing it so when we realize this we can just get out of our own way and just do the thing that's required and drop the ego padding and just get done what we need to do and accept the fact that there's a skill deficit and things that we need to improve and another quote on this that I like a lot is like when people talk about their problems and they throw it up as a reason that they can't be successful just stop them and ask like why are you being so quick to defend something that's bringing you such pain like do you want to stay like that is that what you want for your cuz if so great like I just won't be in your life anymore if that's what you want to entertain but or another way to put it is like are we looking to vent are we looking for Solutions it's a good relationship a mental frame that we can use to help push through a lot of this stuff is thinking of ourselves as like a robot so which we'll never quite get to this point but true objectivity or true extreme ownership is we have back to the the systems thinking inputs strategy outputs is imagine if chat GPT or some other intelligent AI system that's soon going to rule the world was evaluating the results in the business in your business if you were to give it the results do you think that it would have any and it got negative results something that it knew that it needed to improve on do you think that there would be any ounce or any even a Split Second split millisecond where that AI would go these results make me feel bad they make me feel bad about the work that I put in like how hard I tried no it would be complete it would have its primary directive and it would do it's only actions or reactions would be things that would support that in no way would it stop to like reflect on its own emotions and again we're humans that's part of like what makes our lives beautiful is like there are emotions we're fallible like that's part of just life but in the interest of stacking the deck in our favor thinking of ourselves as robots and not taking it so harshly when we receive feed negative feedback from the market then becomes just a better way of thinking about things and I I realized we talked a lot about like receiving negative feedback in the market because we'll get to a point where we're getting good results believe me like that's the whole goal of this that's why we're talking about all these things but that point like once we start getting good results that's the easy part like anybody can run a business when things are going well that's why we don't talk about it like we'll give you the strategies and it's broken down so like once you hit 10K how do you scale from there once you hit 100K how do you scale from there talking about the problems you'll face at that point but like once you get to that point it's so much easier the reason we're talking about all the challenges and like getting the negative feedback from the market is that that's by far the toughest part and so this course is very very heavily front-loaded on that portion of the journey because that's reflective of the amount of effort and growth required like to get through that portion like the amount of personal growth that I needed to go from like 10 to 100K it wasn't really personal growth related it was mostly just like a skill set deficit which by that point if I was able to push through going from 0 to 10 I buy and large had the personal like attributes or skill sets or self-awareness required to get from 10 to 100 so not saying that I was by any stretch or in anybody's imagination perfect but you get my point so now let's go through some fun mindset tools that we can use so and things we can keep in mind so first is data over feelings so what is it it's when we make decisions based on measurable results not personal opinions or emotions why does it matter because feelings can lead to bias and poor decisions while data gives you a clear picture of what's actually working how to use it we track key metrics regularly test ideas objectively and let the numbers guide your next move even when it feels uncomfortable I would say especially when it feels uncomfortable I'm going to keep moving through these CU there's bunch of tools and have a overflowing tool boox by the end of this so next is boring habits over shiny objects so what is it it's sticking when we stick to the consistent proven habits instead of chasing every new idea tool or Trend why does it matter it's because success comes from mastering the fundamentals and staying consistent not from constantly switching between strategies I could have used somebody grabbing me and shaking me until my eyeballs fell out and tell me this one is I thought that business was supposed to stay as exciting as it did in the very beginning and so I as soon as things got a little bit boring or you know normal I just started shaking things up don't do that please learn from my mistake don't do that business gets boring at a certain point that's the time that you're getting into a rhythm and it feels repetitive it's supposed to feel like that it's going to feel exciting at certain points but that boringness that low when you're just in the flow that's where the really good stuff comes and a lot of times with the business actually needs is not a new thing getting latched on like a leech what it really needs is just more of the stuff that's already working so don't reinvent the wheel and I I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with students in the community where they hit 10K I'm like awesome like let's let's hit 100 now and they're like yeah let's do it so first thing I'm going to do is add on new product type new sales Channel new new new like I'm like do is there a reason that you can't hit 100K doing exactly what you're doing and just doing a lot more of it and they go no no I'm like okay then do that they're like okay and then sometimes they do it sometimes they don't I mean I'll be the first person to admit that a lot of times I need to learn things the hard way so to each their own but for those of you out there who like not learning at the hard way here we go so how to use it we commit to daily actions that move the needle for example testing designs analyzing data and resist the urge to chase quick fixes next winner learn mindset this is one of our core values so what is it this is seeing every outcome as progress think of Kobe Bryant either you win or you gain valuable lessons to apply to next time the reason that it matters is that it removes fear of failure keeps you moving forward and ensures that every experience adds value the way that we use it is that when something doesn't go as planned focus on the lessons learned and how you'll adapt for the next round so that every new experience everything that happens your hardening your skill set you're gaining something new and the only thing that can get in our way is our perception of that thing happening and how we think it reflects on oursel and our own performance our own selfworth next is long-term thinking so what is it focusing on building sustainable success over years not expecting quick wins and weeks why does it matter and I see this a lot a lot of people come in thinking that they have to set the world on fire and hit 100K in like a month and then it hurts when they see other people hitting those goals faster than they are and then they start comparing themselves and forgetting the fact that comparison is the thief of Joy set long-term goals and think about what you can accomplish there's a Bill Gates quote about this like people overestimate how much they can get done in a year they underestimate how much they can get done in 10 years so why does this matter is that long-term thinkers stay consistent they build stronger foundations and they often times counterintuitively see faster results because they avoid chasing shortcuts and they also go easier on themselves cuz they in my experience they have more of a learner's mindset more of a student mindset so the way that we use it is to commit to daily actions trusting the process and measure progress over months and not days keep in mind that success is a marathon not a Sprint chasing short-term goals and saying I need to make this work in a month is a recipe for Burnout if that's your mindset take a step back please rewatch the last couple of hours and then come back to this point even if your goal is to accomplish it faster fine but I had a goal of like accomplishing things much faster and every single time that I try like shot for like a month goal or like a month and so that it needed to be done in that time frame it ended up taking me way longer than when I chilled out a little bit and was like what can I accomplish over this year another frame to think about this is that if I give you a five-year $1 million contract or frame differently five-year contract by the end of the five years you'll have a million dollars in bank account would you do it most people would say yes you can do that it's just called starting a business but most people screw themselves over in the beginning by saying that they need to accomplish that goal within six months even though they have no and I did this exact thing they I had no reference of how long it should actually take I had no basis for thinking that that should be attainable other than I wanted it and that's just not based in reality next is our testing mindset so this is treating your business like a science experiment make it fun so test ideas track your results and tweak and the reason that it matters is that it takes pressure off of getting things right the first time and helps you find what actually works so the way that we use it is start small track our key numbers and use the data to make better decisions so this is also similar to like our habits that we were talking about how we need to track our results over time next is inputs over outputs so what is it this is when we focus on focus on what you can control rather than obsessing over the results because the results you can't control the results only come from your inputs the outputs are just a lagging indicator of your inputs so the reason that this matters is that you can't force results but consistent inputs creates the foundation for for Success over time and the way we use it is by just setting clear action goals for example the number of designs that we're going to make each week and I've seen a lot of people have a lot of success in the community who do this they just commit themselves to I'm making five designs per day which as a fun side fact the top 1% of print on demand sellers make seven new designs per day next is just in case versus justtin time learning so when the opposite of this is when I started off and I did a 3- week long like trademark and patent course that was just in case learning learning things for just in case at some point down the road I need to file a patent the reason that that's dumb is one I've never filed a patent but two even if I did end up needing to file a patent at some point I would need to relearn it cuz it would have been so such a long time ago so it's just a complete utter waste of time but the way that we use it correctly is to focus only on knowledge of skills that you need right now to solve current challenges or hit your next Milestone and the reason that it matters is that it prevents overwhelm keeps you focused on immediate priorities and avoids wasting time on information that you don't need the way that we use it is identify your current stage and your biggest bottleneck then seek out resources or guidance specific to solving that problem before moving on I think a lot of this comes down to people's fear of facing problems or having challenges because they're you know starting a business they're constantly like second guessing themselves which you don't have to like it's exciting that you made this decision that you're even here that you've stuck through the training even this by here's a fun fact by sticking and the the data from the last course supports this by sticking through the course this long you are already in the top one% of people that's pretty awesome the average watch time on the last course was like 30 to 45 minutes as most people are just looking for part of my French they're looking for mental masturbation they're looking to make themselves feel like they're doing a good job and pursuing their dreams when in reality they're just like seeking like attention entertainment it's the word so yeah keep it up and realize that like you're going to face challenges and back to the adaptability or resourcefulness prioritize that over having the perfect plan cuz I can say for my experience every plan that I've made at some point it goes to crap and the good news is that you get better and better over time at honing your plan and becoming more and more adaptable or adapting like being resourceful so Google Chat GPT the tools are all there it's just a matter of us wanting to use them next is your journey your way put it simpler comparison is the thief of Joy so focus on your own unique path and and stop measuring your success based off of others everyone is on a journey that you know absolutely nothing about and the reason this matters is that comparison creates unnecessary pressure and you can make can make you feel like you're behind success is not a race everyone grows at their own pace and the reason that you or how you can use it is focus on your next steps celebrate the small wins and remember that every expert was at one point a beginner now the inverse of this is mindset traps so perfect over progress talked about this a little bit how perfect is the lowest possible standard so what is it it's when we get stuck trying to make everything perfect before taking any action just another form of procrastination the reason it matters is that it leads to delays missed opportunities and prevents learning through real world feedback the way that you catch it is to notice if you're endlessly tweaking or avoiding launching because it's just not ready yet like just rip off the Band-Aid the most successful students we've worked with are the ones who condense the period of time between when they start their business and when they decide to launch or when they actually launch like when their first ad is is starting to run the people who try their best but end up not really going anywhere are the ones who just make designs like in a bubble and then they stay there and then they stay in an echo chamber of their own thoughts and their own opinions that are based on nothing other than their own opinions which our own opinions don't matter I'll be the first person to tell you that a design that I think does well is going to do well 90% of the time ends up doing terribly and a design that I think nothing of ends up doing really well so why would I sit there and like just reflecting on my own work when my own opinion actually doesn't matter for anything so the way that we change it is to shift your focus to making progress even when it's messy and Trust of refinement can come later Perfection is a myth there's only progress fear of failure we talked about this one earlier but another piece to add on to it is people like let failur stop them from doing a lot of things not considering this is great quote from podcaster Chris Williamson consider the cost of your inaction CU it has a cost consider the cost of your situation staying EX exactly how it is for years on end like people don't consider that they just see the fear of what the problems are and what if things go wrong but what if things stay exactly the same a lot of times that's just as bad if not worse it's way worse cuz even if you do go out and fail at least you're doing something another form of this or way that people slow themselves down is that they will sometimes not take advice from someone who's ahead of you and that's just another form of like prioritizing your own ego it's prioritizing like the ego of your present day self over the Fulfillment of your future self and you want to treat your future self as if you would like a loved one care for them look out for them and do what's in their best interest you know so many people care deeply about others but they never count themselves or much less their future selves on that list and that's extremely ironic for a number of reasons one of which being that if you don't care for yourself then you won't even be around to care for those other people that you love so you have to love yourself so much love someone else so much that you love yourself and reason I'm mentioning this with fear or failure is that taking care of your future self involves facing this headon and diving into it anyway and this is one of those things that you can hear and Nod your head along with but until you actually do it and you go out and repeatedly do it and embrace feeling like you suck at something then you're not going to conquer it and you're not going to become familiar enough with it that it becomes like part of your daily habits and the reality of it is that a lot of times people are not afraid of like the failing they're afraid of feeling like they're not enough and I can tell you that you're going to feel like you don't know how to run ads you're going to feel like you don't know how to make good designs but honestly with like 10 to 15 hours of real concerted effort to learn anything like even just this training like with mindset and stuff like this a couple of hours by the end of it you're going to be relatively proficient in a lot of different ways same thing with ads like it seems like a big learning curve but imagine if you blocked off a weekend and you did eight hours of each like 16 hours over 2 Days by the end of the like imagine that 16 hours imagine if you watch 16 hours of training by the end of that weekend you'd have a pretty darn good idea of how to run the ads so a lot of times it's all in our head and we just need to go out and do the thing next tunnel vision and these are the mindset traps that we want to avoid is when we're hyperfocused or fixated on one aspect of the business while neglecting the bigger picture the reason that it matters is that it leads to wasted time imbalance growth and burnout and just missed opportunities and the way that we catch it is a return to the 10 10,000 foot view to identify patterns of over focusing and regularly assess our overall business progress and using our habit tracker and our p&l our and our stat spreadsheet is an important way to identify this so how do we change it it's with systems thinking time boxing and seeking feedback from peers and our mentors next is analysis paralysis another form of procrastination it's when overthinking or overanalyzing decisions leads to inaction or delays so why does this matter it stalls our momentum creates unnecessary stress and prevents you from learning through action so there's certain things that you can only learn from going out and doing it the way that we can catch it is from by watching for prolong decision-making perfectionism or avoiding action due to fear of making mistakes how we change it is to set deadlines for decisions prioritize action over Perfection and focus on progress through small iterative steps next shiny object syndrome definitely want to avoid this one even though it's got the Cool's Emoji we want to avoid it so this is when we are constantly chasing new ideas tools or Trends in instead of staying focused on our goals and this matters because it causes distractions it fragments our efforts and gives us an overall Lo loss of Direction and when we indulge in it too much it really undermines our confidence in ourselves and our own decision- making so how do we catch it notice if you're frequently switching strategies or buying tools that you don't use how do you change it you set clear goals and evaluate New Opportunities against them before committing Sun cost fallacy big one block in for this sun cost fallacy is when you keep throwing time money or effort at something just because you've already invested so much even though it's no longer the best move clear metaphor for this is imagine if you're waiting in line for a ride at a theme park and you're waiting in line for 2 hours been all afternoon and then one of the ride operators comes out and tells you that the ride is now broken down and it's not going to be operational until tomorrow but there's another ride you know down the way that you can go get on right now some cost fallacy would be to say no I've already spent 2 hours waiting in this line I'm going to see this through you and you sit there overnight you pitch a tent to hang out and that's a a funny example to demonstrate a point that too many people fall into which is like if you're launching ads or like you're working on designs and that or a brand and you aren't getting the results and it's like getting water from a stone or blood from a stone and people like they realize that they need to Pivot and they have all the tools and strategies and coaching and support and Community there to help them do that but they get so hung up on the fact that they put all this effort in and they to confront the fact that what you did you learned from but it's not the long-term Direction they still continue to double down on that that opportunity rather than shifting to something that actually can work or worse yet they combine multiple they chase shiny object and sunk cost and they Tred to they're like okay well I'm not going to give up on this one cuz I already put so much work into it I already made the designs and stuff but I'll follow your advice and I'll start another one like that's not my advice let me be abundantly clear my advice is that you you learn what you can from this and then you pivot and also by the way for anybody as a side note for anybody who ends up having to Pivot it's okay I had to Pivot like a dozen times before I finally had like a really big success this course is an attempt to reduce that so that you don't have to Pivot but it still happens occasionally and the good news is that the second time you do it you've already learned so much even though you don't realize it throughout the process that the second time through it's so much faster so it keeps us stuck waste resources and block from shifting to ideas with real potential and you catch it by asking yourself am I doing this because it's the right move or just because I've already put so much into it and the way that we change it is to let go of our emotional attachment and focus on the upside of Switching gears and double down on what's actually working then next is shame spiral so shame spiraling really important one lock in for this again I know I just said it but super important this is when you're beating yourself up but this is when a mistake or setback triggers self-doubt leading to negative thoughts that keep you stuck saying to lock in for this because you will have this I still have this like the rule of thirds I think is true roughly a third of days I wake up feeling on top of the world feel great like this is awesome I love everything we're doing then another third of the days I wake up like me it's okay then another third I wake up questioning everything I'm like why did I think I could do this like who did I think I am that I could start a business I had those days way more often earlier on now it's much less frequently but every entrepreneur ever anyone who's being honest has has those days it's like a natural part of like running a business and just life in general I think so it's going to happen but the important thing is that we understand that the reason it matters that it drains our energy it stalls our progress and it makes it harder to bounce back from challenges and the way that we catch it is to notice overly critical thoughts that are not productive indulging in avoidance behaviors or just feeling of General feelings of being stuck and questioning whether if you're we should also question whether we're focusing on growth or just self-blame which self-blame like we talked about is just selfish and you're not selfish the way that we change it is to reframe our mistakes as part of the process and focus on what you can control moving forward that's all that we can do is and this ties in with sun cost fallacy is just what happened in the past does not matter unless if you let it like the past doesn't exist that's a Trippy thought but it it no longer exists your memory from 5 years ago that world no longer exist your memory from yesterday that world does not exist the only thing that we have right now the only thing that we have that we can control is right now and what we're going to do from this point forward it's why if you've been waiting in line for 2 hours does not matter are you either going to wait in line all night or you going go get on a ride and get on with your day so reframe your mistakes as part of the process and keep all these tools in mind again throwing a lot at you and the overall thing that I want you to take from this section the mindset section is that our mindset it's the great divider it is the thing that we can have everything else going in our favor but one thing that we have to keep in mind is that remembering that quote that people's greatest fear is not what we will not achieve our greatest fear is that you are powerful beyond measure and I wholeheartedly believe especially for the people you guys who are still watching at this point who have the focus who have the dedication who have the desire to make a real lasting change in your life you are already in the 1% you are already amongst the people who have the power to change whatever it is in your life and make whatever it is that you're dreaming about a reality I I firmly believe that in my bones because I've seen it time and time again the only thing that can ever stop you is if you forget this that you have that power beyond measure the reason that quote is so accurate is that that's also people's greatest fear because once we realize that once we realize that it's not our childhood or it's not our boss or it's not our spouse it's nobody else's fault if we don't achieve what we want or what we set out to do because we have all the power within us so realize that and embrace that cuz if we're really serious about this journey like you are like you're still here then we might as well make it all be worth something so we might as well get rid of all that self-doubt and negative selft talk that we've had that have limited us our entire lives up until this point and we might as well Embrace some real longlasting change and that's what we're going to be talking about next which is the amount of growth that we're going to be having on this journey so let's talk about growth because we are going to be growing a lot on this journey but true lasting growth does not happen by accident as all of us know somebody but ask yourself do you know of anybody who seems completely and just utterly stuck in their life or somebody who makes a painful mistake only to repeat that same mistake later on or maybe they make some noticeable progress that everyone else can see except for them and therefore they never give themselves the credit that they deserve and you know May maybe some that's somebody on rare occasions could be you so let's break that pattern once and for all and get to experience the kind of long lasting change that we are all capable of so in this section we're going to be talking about growth over comfort and how it is our key the absolute key to unlocking our full potential and I don't say that to be heavy-handed but it is absolutely true and the things that we're covering in this section is going to be rewiring our belief or at least it was my belief when when it comes to growth and I thought that I knew how to grow and I thought I knew what was important but I realized that what I was doing was I was doing a lot of repetitions and going through the motions without ever like solidifying and locking in the lessons that I was learning along the way so like if we go through the motions like if we just go through with like you know a blindfold over our eyes we might as well just not be doing it at all and there's a lot of things that we've been told at least I was told my entire life they just turned out to be patently false that kind of led me down this road so my promise to you is that by the end of this presentation this section of it you'll have gained A New Perspective and even excitement for growth or at the very least if that sounds too heavy-handed for anybody you at the very least have a new awareness of a few areas that may be holding you back CU we all have them and I want to start us off by talking about this well-known concept of a comfort zone this green fluffy area that we all picture where it's all smiles and rainbows inside and it feels like home and this is where we live and this is where many of us spend our entire lives without ever realizing it and the some of the things or common phrases that maybe keep us in our comfort zone are things like you're doing too much or just one more drink or you can do that some other time like just come out with us and all of those thoughts those or those phrases they can both be external and internal so we can either hear them from the people surrounding us or we can a lot of times be saying them to ourselves then there's also that other Zone that has a ma branding problem it's called the outside our comfort zone and we think of it as this scary place that we know that we should go but never quite have the time energy or money in order to get there all of our limiting beliefs like we talked about and to start off we're going to reframe it as outside the comfort zone is not this red scary place and inside the comfort zone is like this green happy place it's really the opposite and we're going to talk about why that is in a second so let's first Define what actually is the comfort zone well your comfort zone is a beautiful place but nothing actually grows there but to break it down even further into like the components that make it up it's emotional Social Work Financial psychological and physical so emotional Comforts that we have in our comfort zone things that make us feel like safe and warm and fuzzy are things like our predictable routines watching the same favorite TV shows or movies avoiding confrontation or different difficult conversations and staying in familiar environments or avoiding new places and also just relying on Old Habits even when they're unproductive we also do this with social Comforts this is surrounding ourselves with Yes Men or people that only agree with you and avoiding social situations with strangers and spending time with you know lifelong friends instead of taking a risk and going out and meeting anybody new and sticking to the same tight-knit Circle and avoiding larger networks or group Gatherings to put it in a single graphic it's surrounding oursel with people that will tell us comfor ing lies and things that we want to hear rather than the unpleasant truths that we need to hear in order to grow and in terms of work or productivity some of the Comforts that we indulge ourselves in is doing tasks that we've already mastered instead of learning something new I did this all the time when it came to the business I love doing the ads and the marketing like I've talked about then on the flip side there's the designs the backend customer service stuff like that and I specifically on the designs it's absolutely crucial in order for the business to actually grow grow and flourish but I stayed like ignorant to that and just focused on what I like doing and I just rinsed and repeated that same process over and over and over again and fabricated this very convincing lie to myself that I could somehow grow a big successful business without ever improving the actual product it drives me up a wall because I see a lot of people making the same mistake that I do when it comes to their ads and their products and even though it's coming from a previous you know self-claimed ads guy me telling them that their their time would be better spent they they're spending their time on their ad account and I tell them that their time would be much better spent improving your product that they have to improve their product in order for the ads to have something to go off of but they just don't want to hear it and it frustrates me is like no end because that was me and I'm picturing like literally talking to my younger self and I see people making that exact same mistake and I want so desperately to help them speed up the process but it's not about me the other Comforts that we indulge in is avoiding risks or Challen Alles and staying in a job so this outside of business like when you stay in a job that feels secure but just doesn't inspire you think of all the people you know that are in like n9o FES were like you ask them how work was and they're like it sucks and you're like why don't you change it they're like I can't cuz that whole thing and I don't mean to like mock or like put down anybody if people are happy in their jobs then great but I'm all for people hearing the Inconvenient Truth over the comforting lie and people have enough people surrounding them telling them the comfortable lie so if this gets through to even one person then that'll be make it worth it and another form of this that I did a lot is focusing on busy work instead of a meaningful high impact tasks so I also did this one a lot I would Pat myself in the back thinking that I was being productive when in reality I was just having a lot of motion and not a lot of actual impact on the business because again I was focusing on the thing that I like doing next is financial Comforts so hand inand with our job is like taking a steady paycheck instead of exploring new entrepreneurial Ventures which is why you're all here so I applaud you for that genuinely and another form of this is like avoiding Investments or big financial decisions out of fear or put differently or a better way is like when we spend on things that aren't actually helping us yeah like spending on familiar purchases like spending on the same old stuff like going out to the bar and drinks and stuff like that which if you really add up all of that over a year it's a shocking amount of money and one of the best financial decisions I ever made was stopping drinking is I was no longer going out restaurant bills went from being like 150 bucks 200 bucks a night down to like 75 to like at least half of what we were spending just from cutting out alcohol CU not only are you not spending on the alcohol but then you also end up eating a lot less as well so that aside but we spend on things that make us feel comfortable and keep us in our comfort zone and opposed to investing in education and you know things that could further us or help us improve in some way and psychological Comforts we often avoid self-reflection to dodge uncomfortable truths so we don't like to look in the mirror because or this is when we don't like to look in the mirror because we aren't sure that we'll like what we see that's part of the reason why it's so challenging for a lot of people to just sit and meditate and just sit in silence for 5 minutes is that they're afraid of like being alone with their own thoughts if that is you one I feel for you you are not alone there are lots of people that are in a similar position and my only message to you would be that you deserve better and you can have better and hopefully some of these tools have helped show you ways that everything that we believe to be true and all the things that we believe often times would be insurmountable like just given problems that will always be a constant in our life that is just our perception of reality and that is not the actual reality the actual reality is that any Behavior or pattern or Loop that we find ourselves stuck in can be broken down to the building blocks that got us there in the first place and so if anybody is feeling like they're stuck in that kind of spot first of all I would say you're not actually as stuck as you might think that you are CU you're here you're learning about this stuff and that's a sign of progress like if nothing else that is absolutely a sign of progress so that a sign that you can change and if that can change then why can't other things in your life why can't other things that we've believed would always be isn't it possible that they could change as well and another flavor of this is when we believe limiting stories about ourselves because you know change just feels too hard and staying in the mindset of good enough instead of striving for something great and because that risks failure that risks you know a lot of uncertainty it's a lot of scary stuff involved with that and another piece that's not mentioned on here that I would add is like if you're somebody who finds yourself constantly having to listen to like something some sort of like backgrounds basically if you just avoid silence at all costs that's like a form of anxiety like aversion and that's something that we can address like that's something that with these tools and I would advise not that it's impossible I'm sure that there were lots of successful entrepreneurs that had these issues but again in the interest of stacking the deck in our favor doing everything we can to give ourselves the best chance possible like these are things that are great if we can like address them upfront and even if I'm not saying that we have to like fix everything and like go to therapy if we're not doing that already that like just at the very least bringing awareness to those things in so far as we know the impact that they may or may not have on our ability to make attractively based like logical decisions in the business and our ability to like show up consistently and not have limiting beliefs as long as we are aware of the impact that those things will have on us then at the very least we can give ourselves a chance to like catch ourselves at it when it happens next is physical activity and these seem like minor things but these are the things that build up to being ultimately being a really major change like we talked about with habits so this is little things like choosing the elevators over the stairs staying indoors rather than exploring outdoors and avoiding exercise you know just cuz the couch feels too inviting the best way I can put this is It's the those little 3se second rule decisions where you're thinking about should I work out and instead of doing that you want to end up on the couch in that 3 second decision that is where progress is made and the tricky thing about it is that there's no shortcuts to this that is the muscle that absolutely must be trained and if you show me anybody who's showing up with like a limiting mindset or is like has a wo as me mentality almost every time I can guess what their daily routines and habits and stuff look like then on the flip side if you show me somebody who has really strong like mindset and they're showing up with like like well-informed questions and like they have a uh what's it called like not win or learn but uh they're Solutions oriented if they're showing up with that kind of mindset I can almost always guess what that person's like daily routines and habits and what decisions they're making and that like the way we do one thing is the way we do everything one of the the managers that I worked for at Amazon when I was there for like handful of months he was like the district manager then I was like for a section manager but anyway he was um uh walking around he would do like these floor walks with us and that was when he would basically emerge from his office for like once a week and just like see the status of everything and I used to think this this guy was like the biggest he's looking for like big safety things like risks to people's like health and that sort of thing things that could be major like lawsuits for the company and I used to think that he was the biggest because this guy would nitpick on the tiniest little things for example he would walk up to the Whiteboard board and if somebody had used the blue marker when they were supposed to be using the red marker he would flip out and or if somebody like didn't put the cap back on the marker like they would or if they put the marker cap on the wrong like little little stuff he would flip out over it I used to think that he was like just being an or like this guy's got some stuff to work out and while I still definitely do not agree with his reaction or like the way he delivered the message I don't believe in like ruling by fear I think that's very shortsighted and it doesn't take a good leader to lead like that a good leader like get to like leads from anyway but the the thing that I did take away from it that I found to be very true afterwards was that he was right the way that we do anything is the way we do everything and so if we can't get the little stuff right then what chance do we have at getting the big things right like it's not like we shortcut our way through like the building blocks and then just do really well at the ultimate goal it's like no the ultimate goal is the building blocks so we have to do well at all of those little things on the way and to make this like more specific it's the little decisions like when you're looking at like the dishes that have to be done or like you see that you know the ground your carpet needs to be vacuumed and the thought that normally pops into our head is like I'll do that later it's starting to train our brain that no we do that right now because imagine like that's a very little thing like doing the dishes making the bed whatever it is that you're looking at in our day-to-day lives physical activity is a great example of this if we're losing the battle on those little things how are we ever going to stand a chance when it comes to Monumental seeming and novel tasks and challenges in starting a new business like we have to train ourselves to be very consistent like more consistent than we've ever been in our entire lives to give ourselves the best fighting chance and that's what this whole process is about is that the truth in creating a new business or like being successful in business is not about the thing that you build it's about becoming the new person along the way and the reason that this is very bad like all of those comforting activities that we do is that it comes down to this concept of neuroplasticity which I had heard this fancy word a bunch of times before all it means is neuro is brain plasticity is like ability to change or be plastic so couple of things to understand about this is that neurop Pathways which is like our brain's ability to grow in shape is neural Pathways weaken when they're not used and on the flip side repeated use strengthens and refines our neural connections so our brain is essentially a muscle and just like muscles on our body it's possible for us to train different aspects like we can go to the gym we can do bicep curls and then we can but that's not going to train our legs so we can go to the gym and do squats and that trains them same thing applies to our brain so if we are just doing the same repetitive task over and over and over again then we're not training the other side and it's very possible that like if we go to the gym and just do bicep curls on the right side of our arm we're going to we're going to have like we're going to look like a BL top sided Popeye and people do that all the time in terms of their skill deficiencies I did it with when I loved focusing on the ads and then I just completely neglected the creative side because I didn't like it as much like I got to be really good at this but meanwhile this side of my brain was getting no exercise at all so our brain without challenges just like you know muscles weaken or atrophy without exercise without a reason to grow or maintain the size that they are and our brain is constantly looking for ways that it can cut back because a large muscle that's unneeded that's just burning extra calories that the brain does not need to be burning so the brain's neural pathway shrink without use and the Brain prunes these unused connections so neurochemicals are released less often which are essential for brain health and growth so picture like a a big open field that has a big dead spot in the middle of it that dead spot our brain has the ability to naturally go over and sprinkle grass seed over it so it grows again but without challenges it doesn't see a need that do that so this is what synaptic pruning looks like aka the the activity that our brain goes through when it's shrinking when it doesn't see a need for these synaptic connections it starts to remove them so our brain can literally shrink over time and go from looking something like that on the left to something like that on the right and I want you to really lock in for this part and realize the cost of being in our comfort zone is that our brain the most essential thing in our entire lives without it we don't exist like even our bodies we can live without a large majority of it and we still exist without our brain we have nothing and at least for me the reason I'm leaning into this so hard is that this was pretty eye opening me that I never quite put it together that our brain is just like a muscle where in so far that it can die out and if you've seen somebody who's never gone to the gym or they haven't gone in years and years and they look like emaciated that same exact thing is happening to our brain and so I don't know about you but all of that all of those habits and everything the net result really does not sound comfortable to me at all in fact it sounds so like it sounds so uncomfortable that this so-called comfort zone sounds a lot more like death so we're going to set the record straight and we are going to start adjusting our language to be more in line with reality and so from this day forward instead of us calling it The Comfort Zone it is now the Comfort coffin is that's way closer to reality than the comfort zone the Comfort coffin is what's actually happening when we are padding ourselves in all these material Comforts and like basically we've set up environments for ourselves nowadays where like we live in air conditioned a lot of us live in like air conditioned and heated units so like we never get too hot we never get too cold we always have like all of our needs met there's never like like we never even have to sit down or like use our full range of motion anymore the majority of us are our legs are never required to go be Beyond like this range of motion 90° and up we are like reducing like have you ever seen the movie Wall-E I wish I had a picture of that those people are the perfect example of like what's slowly happening to us and as hilarious as it seems when they put that up like in a Pixar movie it's really not that far off from where we're heading right now so if you picture those people these people who like the whole point of them was so that like they made them so they saiz them so much that it seems like so ridiculous but really like this is where we're heading like between our phones that we are glued to I think the average person is on their phone like four to 5 hours a day and picks it up several hundred times and it's only getting worse like today is the worst that the AI is ever going to be the algorithms are only going to get better so and more and more companies are going to exist they're going to find more and more ways to like exploit our dopamine systems to profit off of the only time that these companies will be done is once the final second of somebody's attention span has been like allocated I think there was actually an article that I was reading recently about how people's like attention capacity is like pretty much officially maxed out like the amount of attention that is being sucked away right now into things like this like staring at screens social media all of that it's like pretty much at a cap where people are bordering on like they don't have enough time left to like work and live because they're filling the rest of it with so point is it's only going to keep going in that direction and this person here does not look like living to me at least it doesn't look like a life I would enjoy living so knowing that if we don't change anything this is the direction we're heading in we have to call a spade a spade and it looks a lot more like death and so even though that thought feels you know a little uncomfortable that's good CU it means that it's working already but let's keep going so to be clear am I saying that everything comfortable is bad absolutely not to quote my amazing wife everything in moderation I've heard this woman say this thousands of times at this point that anytime I seem like I'm going all in or probably am like going all in on something being like too binary she helps me to pull back by reminding me that everything in moderation we're not saying that we're going to overly indulge ourselves or anything like that and I'm not saying that we have to cut out everything but like I said with the Navy SEAL example like we don't have to become a Navy Seal in order to start a successful business absolutely not but if you picture the other end of the extreme that's probably a person who also is not suited to be starting a business or is not not that they're not sh like yeah they're not capable of starting business should not do it so somewhere in the middle is where we want to end up and the whole point of these exercises we're going through is to paint a picture at both ends of the extreme so then we can evaluate where the middle is for us the problem is most of us never really realize where we lie on that Continuum and that's what we're trying to figure out and we're doing that by bringing conscious awareness to our subconscious trade-offs these are trade-offs we're making all day every day whether we realize it or not so put simply anybody who's ever said the phrase well ignorance is bliss has very obviously never heard the full phrase the full and I didn't hear this till recently the full phrase is actually where ignorance is bliss is folly to be wise and that's a quote from famous poet Thomas Gray from 1742 basically what he's saying is the exact opposite of the common phrase that everybody uses or the common concept in which everybody uses it nowadays the way everybody thinks it's meant is oh you just stick your head in the sand and then like you'll just live in Bliss he's actually saying the complete opposite so believe it or not you know all said and done this lesson is not about fear death or dying this whole past several hours has not been about that although it may seem like it it's actually about the complete opposite and now we're going to see how it is because now that our brain has something to fear we're going to give it something to look forward to so remember that outside the comfort zone well it's rebranding time we're just like we called a spade of spade with a comfort coffin calling a spade of spade with the Grow Zone cuz that's what it truly is and that's why this whole lesson everything we've talked about all the fears the risks the challenges the beautiful thing about it is that all of those things that we talked about how we're going to overcome because we are all of those things live within the Grow Zone and what I want to reshaped for us is whereas before it seemed like it was neck and neck like or honestly it could have gone even further like most people's comfort zone was like this and then their outside their comfort zone was like this little teeny tiny thing that we like dip our toe into at sometimes and then when we do we tell all of our friends about it so then we get the validation that like everybody knows everybody in my tribe that I'm afraid of losing because you know I still have a 2 million year old brain that's makes me think that if I'm not accepted by people then I'm going to die somehow now I'm going to get the validation from all of them and that means that then I've I can go back to how I was cuz I got the validation another hack if you in terms of that is if you are ever going to like go on a diet or try to lose weight or set out on like any real goal unless if you were telling somebody in like a accountability partner capacity don't tell anybody cu the real reason that you're telling people is to get the validation of or like the reward of people going oh yeah that's great good for you and that's actually a very dangerous thing to do because that's your brain is then getting the satisfaction of that it was picturing like wanted achieved the whatever the goal is and then told everybody because all of us on one level or another one of our human needs is significance to feel like we are significant in the eyes of others like For Better or For Worse For Worse a lot of times but when you like get that reward up FR like say you're starting a new business imagine if you know in the past you probably gone out and like told a bunch of people which it's one thing to like share with friends and family like conversations like to have fun but like this is not one that I personally would indulge in like for the first 2 and 1 half years of me running my business nobody knew not even my parents they thought that I was applying to jobs and I that I was just really bad at interviews when eventually I did like take the job at Amazon but anyway but nobody knew because I didn't want that to be I didn't want to have that like goal already met of like you know them going wow that's amazing and then people are con also the other piece is then people are constantly asking so how's it going with the business how's it going with the business how's it going and you're going to be saying I made no money for 6 months like in a lot of cases unless if you follow the blueprint and can be truly objective and act as much like a robot and be open to learning and don't let perfect be the enemy of progress all those things all those tools we just talked about if you check the boxes on all those you will very likely see results much faster I will never give any guarantees other than this will be extremely challenging and I'm more than happy to help every step of the way but other than those two guarantees but just see what happens if you don't tell anybody and then you just go through like your go through this journey on your own unless if you're going to tell somebody for like accountability partner purposes but now we're going to get into the growth Zone which is our new home so defining what the growth zone is is similar to the Comfort Zone it's mental emotional Social Work Financial physi psych psychological I've been seeing the word uh physiy ology a lot recently and physical so in terms of ways that we can mentally and emotionally grow ourselves we can mix up our routine we can try time blocking new morning habits and all the things that we just went through so we have the The Habit tracker now that' be a great way to rip off the Band-Aid and start trying some of this stuff we can watch something new like a documentary or foreign film unless if you're married to Meg she's not a fan of documentary I'm just kidding she actually she likes she likes the ones that she picks out she doesn't like my Ancient Aliens documentaries which I kind of understand anyway leaning into tough conversations with curiosity this is one that I think the world can honestly use a whole lot of nowadays especially instead of like hearing an opinion that we don't disagree with and like fleeing or like throwing stones at why they're so terrible which even if you're right sure their their opinions are horrible what does it hurt us to ask why and to question it and something that I I don't know anybody else in my life who does this besides my brother but whenever he like an opinion whether it's political or social issues of somebody else that he really doesn't agree with maybe even so much that he like feels like an emotional response to it rather than like getting upset or angry what he does is he takes a step back and then he literally buys a book on it on the topic and then he reads it to understand so picture somebody sitting there reading somebody who's like politically charged sitting there and reading a book about the the opposite side which we're all really the same side and genuinely seeking to understand is the key piece seeking to understand the other side's views imagine if everybody did that like what what is the cost of doing that the only risk is that we might actually learn something and that might challenge our beliefs and that's a little bit scary because that requires a little bit of pain a little bit of change that's where you find growth but yeah he reads a book and seeks to understand the other side I'm not saying that anybody has to do that I'm just sharing that as an extreme example and something that I'm proud of him for next is you can visit visit new places or work from somewhere different so I've done this to just break up our daily routine go out work at Starbucks go you know different different coffee shops just work in like a different part of your place even just changing your desk around just to break up your pattern cuz like one of the best ways if you ever feel like you're in a rut is to go travel somewhere and I'm not saying you have to go on an extravagant vacation but even just like drive up the road and like get a hotel just get out of the house just break up your routine I've noticed this so consistently that anytime I travel and then come back there's like a depends on how how long I'm gone but there's almost like a 1 to 2 day window where I can feel my brain is like slowly settling back in my old patterns I can almost like feel the muscle memory coming back on like the speed at which you know I wake up and like turn to the left go into the bathroom and like grab the toothbrush without even thinking about it like all those things so you have what I observed at least in myself is that after I travel and then come back and this just an example to demonstrate like the environmental changes is like it resets my mindset so much that I have like a one to two day window where I feel like it's much easier for me to reset and form new habits opposed to imagine if you were imagine if you didn't leave your place and you did the same exact thing every single day for 10 years to demonstrate with an extreme example again do you think it' be easier or harder to change a habit at that point probably be a hell of a lot harder so the opposite of that is like if you had just arrived back which is kind of getting off track into like habit forming but it's still relevant and because the next point is trade your bad habits for productive ones then social Comforts or I should say social growth seek out people with different perspectives to challenge your thinking engage in social events where you don't know anybody and meet new people instead of always sticking to just your old friends I'm not saying to forgo your friends or anything but I'm a big believer in you are the sum of The Five People You spend the most time with and you're going to see in all the podcasts with the coaches throughout the course that one you're going to see a lot on these uh like on these topics and how a lot of it at every stage of the business we talk about these things but you're going to hear like how when we all live together during like the most formative times of us starting our business we were all building off of each other and if I was living with you know four like some of the five it was 12 of us but if I was living with 11 other people who were just in N9 to fives and they just went out drinking a lot and they were just like me not really into personal growth or development do I think that I would be anywhere close to where I am absolutely not and they probably feel the same so I'm not saying obviously you need to go move in with a bunch of new people but just like the circle of people that we are connecting with and talking to and being very mindful of that that like if we're surrounding ourselves with people that are behind us compared to where we want to go I'm not here to tell anybody what what they should or shouldn't do but in my experience letting those people go will help you get to your goals much faster and we need to disconnect from the people who are holding you back and we love them and care for them but ultimately the best way that we are able to show up for not only ourselves but for the people around us is by becoming the best version of ourselves and becoming the best version of ourselves requires growth and true growth will always be hindered it will bu either be hindered or accelerated based on the people you're spending the most time with and in terms of work/ productivity growth we're able to take on tasks that push us to learn new skills AKA focusing on the creative side instead of just the ads then embrace risks and challenges to grow in our career so that we can also pursue roles or opportunities that Inspire and engage energize us so focus on meaningful high impact projects over busy work so Financial growth explore entrepreneurial Ventures you're all here congrats instead of sticking to a steady paycheck and that's something that a lot of people want when they start a business they want the growth and like the upside potential of a business while they simultaneously want the consistency of a 9 to5 and like you can't have both like it's one or the other and I want to really lean into this like when you're in a 9 to-5 that's the benefit of what you have there is the consistency you don't have the fear or the stress of the ups and downs with starting a business you absolutely have that I don't care what the business is and we can teach you like all the best strategies and stuff in the world anybody could and there's still going to be ups and downs like that's just getting up and over the learning curve now there are definitely things a lot of things especially as business grows say especially as you get one year two years out the business Can it can and a good business does become much more consistent but in the beginning it's a lot of ups and downs I would say it's very relative to the learning curve that you're following so if anybody is feeling a sense of urgency when it comes to your finances which we talked about this if you feel like you have your last like $10 to your name then I would not recommend starting this absolutely not I would not like any anybody who's starting I recommend a starting budget of at least like $500 to $1,000 at least and we'll talk about budgeting for your ads and stuff later but you want to like keep those things just keep that in the back of your mind that the trade-offs that we're making here and the good news is that we can make the investment if we're able to and it will be one that's much more worthwhile than you know going out and drinking on the weekends and my experience or my opinion then psychological growth practice self-reflection to conf front and grow from our uncomfortable truths that we have to face and rewrite our limiting stories about ourselves and embrace the change then physical growth the opposite of before just making the simple decisions in the the proper direction so that's taking the stairs over the elevators spend time Outdoors exploring new places and get up and exercise even when the couch calls remembering the 3 second rule so all that said and done why is this good or even better like why is this great because it really is great and this is the journey that we're about to be embarking on like we already have but the reason that this is great is that the only people who don't have problems are the dead so all the problems and challenges first we can reframe them completely as problems are signs of life because our bodies are like adaptable machines when we are putting ourselves into pain we can take comfort in the fact that that is the only way we will ever grow the body does not grow unless if there is a like stimuli or a physical response that requires it to grow in order to meet the challenge otherwise it doesn't it tries to conserve calories which requires like shrinking in size and if you ever seen the there was a an X-Men movie with uh these these big robot you didn't have to see the movie basically there's these big robots that they were taking down all the mutants because anytime a mutant used its powers on the robot it developed that that power and then so it get hit with laser beams and it would start shooting laser beams then it would get hit with I don't know Fireball and it would shoot start shooting fireballs and as it got hit with more and more things and incurred more and more pain it developed more and more skills and became more dangerous and ultimately like overpowered them because it was adapting every time it had something new thrown at it and we want to be the exact same as that robot so not just in terms of the robot's objectivity but in terms of its ability to adapt and not just absorb the pain that it's receiving but learn from it and then be able to go on the offensive with that new skill or trait or whatever it is that it acquired because your brain with challenges and growth strengthens neurop Pathways it builds and reinforces connections because it has consistent use and those key neurochemicals picturing the field with the dead spot in the middle those key neurochemicals start being sprinkled again boosting our brain health and overall growth so in summary Comfort equals no growth and brains are wired for Comfort AKA survival and not happiness our brain will never understand that we have to force it to and we have the ability now to reframe our challenges as or problems as their opportunities for growth and a lot of people as they picture growth like okay I know that I'm growing each challenge is you know growth but then they picture that the path to success looks something like this which is you put in like incremental effort just consistent or like I get it consistent effort I know but it'll be consistent and but then it'll also be incremental improvements every step of the way and that eventually I'll get to some promised land where some goal like some happy point where I reach all my dreams and like accomplish everything that I wanted and that's where like I grow and that's just couldn't be further from the truth because growth does not come from some Herculean show of strength or like sheer willpower that's not where growth comes from it's not like my growth when I was running my first business didn't come from when I sold the business I grew absolutely nothing from that in fact it's quite the opposite the truth growth comes from Tiny 1% improvements made every single day so the 1% better a day equals 37 times a year and I heard that and then I pulled out my calculator and did the math and didn't add up but I did my math wrong because it's actually true power of tiny gains it's 37 times it might be 37% either way it's it's much greater when it's oh no it's 37 yeah anyway the point is that the actual growth comes in the 1% changes and I think a lot of times we set ourselves up for failure by putting undue pressure on ourselves by thinking that we're only growing or achieving anything of substance when we reach the final Milestones or goal posts we put up for ourselves but that's not true the actual truth is that we are growing every step of the way and then the next level of this the 2011 level of this is realizing that the big goalpost at the at the top of the stairs there never really existed in the first place and that the only growth that not only only mattered but only ever actually existed is the growth that's every step of the way and this is I touched on this earlier but just to reiterate this the profound experience that I had was when for four years four or five years I was obsessed with this concept of selling my business well first building a business that could even be sold and then transition into the obsession with selling it just cuz I thought it would be a really cool Milestone I thought it would be I don't know meaningful and so I worked for years and years trying to do this thing and then eventually I did it and it was really challenging but then I worked really hard and we made it happen and when the wire hit the checking account I expected to be like overwhelmed with like excitement fulfillment like fist pumping like all the whole thing and I felt absolutely nothing I saw that the wire hit the account and then I closed the app and went about my day as if nothing had even happened and I reflected on that for 2 to 3 months as I was super confused and what I eventually realized is that why that I was chasing or that growth that I thought I would feel when I sold the business wasn't actually happening then there was no growth that happened there and this ties in heavily with like my why but the real growth was happening in all the challenges and stuff that I overcame on the way as I was going after these goals that I thought were important that I was really putting off my own happiness and sense of like I could have been feeling it every step of the way and like enjoying the process is I had this constant thing playing in my head I was like I'll be happy when dot dot dot and then it wasn't until afterwards like during that period of time after I sold the business when I did like the perfect day exercise that I realized like all those things that I've been striving for wasn't actually what was going to make me happy and the reason I'm mentioning this now during the growth period of of the course is that feeling that happiness and fulfillment every step of the way to me has been fundamental in me being able to realize the growth and like enjoy it because if we're not aware of it and I don't focus on like gratitude and like that's why part of my daily habits now is like reflecting on something I learned like if I don't do that like yes I pick up the skills and stuff but it's almost like it takes me having a moment of self-reflection to be like oh yeah I did come a long way like the majority here's a perfect example is the majority of people the reason I mentioned it before about pivoting is that the people people who have to Pivot and they they hold on like they syn their claws into staying on their first brand when they finally shift and do a second store and close down the first one do they do a second store 10 times out of 10 they all say the same thing and they go I was surprised at how much faster it went the second time like I really did learn a lot of things throughout the way and it's like yes you are building so many skills but like we don't want to have to wait for that moment of like oh yeah I actually did learn a thing or two we want to be able to experience that every step because not only does it feel better and all that stuff but then we actually get better and that helps us make more money faster which gets us to our ultimate goal but the good news is that all of that included or all that being said you are doing that right now just by deciding to show up for yourself and be on this training just with that one decision the and the decision all the micro decisions that you've had to continually make as you've been evaluating like continuing to watch because we all have those like hundreds of times as we're evaluating that every time you push through that it's your brain growing and you're having synaptic I know it's super high resolution working to grow our our brain so we can think in high res instead of low res but yeah our brain is growing and we're taking steps to go towards this instead of the unhealthy one and it's not just right now that is every time that you watch any lesson or make even one design attend any group call make any post in the community or answer anybody's question or solve any problem or push through any frustration apply anything that you learned from in the past and more importantly every time that you hit a stumble all of these times you're growing and the most important one of all is that whenever we're going up this path we're on this this journey and we're making all this progress and we're reflecting on it we're giving ourselves credit for it as we realize that just beating ourselves up and being self-deprecating is not a recipe for success I don't care how ingrained in us that has been in our past today it stops today is the day that we start being kind to ourselves and we start giving ourselves the credit that we are owed cuz we do a good job we are batting a thousand on our hardest days we are still here and not only are we here we're taking hours and hours out of our day to watch a training about mindset and growth and personal development and we thought this was going to be a print on demand course and yet we're still here watching it so we're going to start giving ourselves the credit that we are due and enjoying the process so that especially when we hit a stumble rather than doing what most people did or what we might have done in the past but we no longer do we start shame spiraling and beating ourselves up and we end up rolling back down the stairs and starting back over where we were and we somehow chalk it up in our heads that even though we had a string of good days where we were learning new stuff which in reality even on the days that we fail we're just still learning but even when we haven't had that perspective shift and we still have some days where we think that we failed rather than letting ourselves fall back down like this we turn it into a positive and we keep ourselves going those are the biggest growth moments of all that is like the real muscle that's why I said with like the 3 second rule with the seemingly tiny things like vacuuming and making your bed those little decisions those little micro reps is building the same exact muscle as this one right here and I think the hardest part about this for me was when I was younger like I always had this picture in my head of like this might resonate for some of you that I had this picture in my head of of you know this far off and distant version of myself where at some point in the future he's got it all figured out he's got like the big house he's got the awesome relationship which I do but he's got like all the money he's got incredible shape probably runs triathlons multiple a week I had to guess you know picture all of those things and like fantasize or like imagine what that person is like and the reason that this was dangerous is that when I would picture where that far off person was then I would just see where I was it would be want to be fun for a little bit but then anytime I hit a challenge and especially like as I headed from uninformed optimism informed pessimism into the valley every time that I went down into that Valley it required me going to a further point where it felt like this person this future version of me it felt like I I had never been further in my life and then that was a scary point and that sent me you know wanting to just go back to where I was and so the remedy to this after years of searching for it or the thing that led me to the remedy was realizing that I had never once thought about what the journey must have been like that that person went on like that future version of Chris never once occurred to me like what did he have to do in order to get there I just pictured him you know having a big business that whole sort of thing never once dawned to me like what did that Journey or process actually look like and even if it did it was probably 1% what the actual Journey it was probably like yeah he'll have to like go to some seminars and like learn some stuff but like he'll figure it out like like clearly he's got it figured out and like just completely downplayed in my mind and the thing that was eye opening about this was that I realized that I was fantasizing about the outcome without considering the input at all and the answer for all of us is that on how that person got there it was not from some random windfall or Stroke of Luck or you know hitting the lottery that version of you got there 1% at a time and you will too as long as we remember that successful people build on their failures they both have them they both have equal amounts successful people actually have way more failures than unsuccessful people way more cuz it requires consistently putting yourself out there and continual growth requires continual failure like Elon Musk like when they were launching the Rockets actually I'm going to pull this up so he tweeted out this video of a montage of their Rockets crashing he's like making a joke out of all of the multi mult time million dooll failures they repeatedly had but then here's the end result they eventually got it so the moral of the story Elon Musk is able to repeatedly wreck multi multi multi-million dollar rockets and take that failure on the chin then we can absolutely we absolutely have we don't have to be in Elon Musk to take some risks and take the failures and learn to use them as building blocks opposed to stacking them on our head as just a negative self-defeating negative talk to keep us where we are to use a great quote from Jim ran the major value in life is not what you get major value in life is who you become and the person that you are right now will just always get you to where you already are if you want new results we need to become a new person and we can't be too attached to who we used to be that's another important thing for us to be self-aware of as we're going through this process is a certain part of us has to die in order for this new part of us to become born or to be born and that requires being uncomfortable or being comfortable with the change that's required and some of us become so obsessed with like certainty that the thought of change is scary to a lot of people but the reason that it's scary is because it requires that older version of us to die we have to let go of that certainty in order for something new to be born and the similar thing can be said for like your friends and like your Social Circles is people feel guilty letting go of that because they're only considering that old connection or relationship that's now holding them down and is not serving them meanwhile they're not paying any mind to the potential new amazing relationship that they could be making and this isn't just dating this is friends like whatever so that's just another example of like we need to be open-minded to the fact that change is going to be required and we have to embrace who we're going to become because it's not like I can very confidently say that the version of Chris who started off would never ever ever have been able to achieve or have the things that have now and the reason for that is that he would have just kept on spiraling in the same spot just making the same mistakes over and over and over again he would still be in the same place launching random stores making the same exact mistakes if he wasn't learning from each and every one of them so what I want all of us to remember is that failure is not final it is formative and to quote the great Thomas Edison I have not failed I've just found 10,000 different ways that didn't work and with every single step you take you are growing and here's a final image to demonstrate the point the now called the growth Zone from the comfort coffin that these are the different stages that we go through and the different emotions that we can expect to feel is when we're in the comfort zone we feel safe and in control but as we know now no growth happens there then we step out into the fear Zone this is where we are most affected by the opinions of others that's why spend some time talking about how ways we can mentally prepare and gave ourselves the permission that we didn't really need but now we have it anyway that we don't have to listen to the opinions of others especially those who would cast doubts on us who have never accomplished what it is that we're setting out to achieve like what do they know but that's the first step outside and then this is also where we find excuses this couples together very nicely with our friends and family members casting doubts at us and especially because we lack the self-confidence cuz we have no proof that this can work yet we literally just got out of the comfort zone the Comfort coffin like how are we supposed to know if this is actually going to work or not so we are finding lots of excuses and the opinions of others combining the two together and overlaying it with our lack of self-confidence it's a tough place to push through but we have to push through it because once we get out of there we end up in the Learning Zone which is where we start to learn to deal with challenges and problems and face them head-on we are acquiring new skills and we're able to increase the rate at which we're acquiring those new skills when we're aware of it when we are enjoying the process we're finding things to be grateful for not saying we have to be like you know singing and like skipping through a field but you know we we just have to be aware that there are much worse things that we could be spending our time doing and that every challenge really is a different form of growth and this is when we're extending out our comfort zone picturing like a rubber band we're stretching it out we're slowly expanding it until we're comfortable with things that were previously terrifying to us then eventually we end up in the growth Zone and this is where we find purpose live our dreams we're able to set new goals and see even further like Horizons for us and we start to realize our original aspirations so that's what this entire this whole section has been about and I thank each and every one of you for watching this through with me and I hope that you've enjoyed it I've certainly enjoyed talking about it and it's something that I above all else out of everything we're doing here this is what I'm most passionate about as I mentioned cuz this I believe is like fundamentally why all of us are here we're here to find growth we may not know like what form or fashion we're looking for that in but we're looking to grow in one area or another and so everything that we've covered in this foundations section by having gone through this you have spent the necessary time to sharpen your Axe and I have again an abundance of confidence that you will be able to learn everything that is set out in front of you and now I have even more confidence than I did at the very beginning of this that you are now going to have what it takes to be able to weather the storm but to be very clear I'm in no way saying that this is now going to be easy or anything of the sort like if it was easy then there wouldn't be growth and at the intersection of pain and change is where we find growth and that's exactly where we're heading and now you have the tools you have given yourself the tools to help you go the distance and see this thing through and I want to thank you all again and we will be here to help you every step of the way I hope that you'll join the community so we can talk about it on the group calls we have mindset calls on all these subjects and it's a really fun place because it's it's an opportunity for everybody to open up and share about what they're going through and that's one of the last things I'll mention is that entrepreneurship can be one of the loneliest places in the world especially in this super remote world that we live in nowadays it can be extremely isolating especially when I don't know about you guys but I didn't know anybody around me really outside of like my uncle nobody in my life ran a business like nobody that I could connect with on a daily basis or had any idea what I was going through and when I talked to like family members and friends like they cared but they just couldn't ever understand because they were just in a completely different frame of mind and comparing it to like their type of you know 9 to5 not in terms of like skill level or anything but just like the mindset required like when you're in a 9 to-5 and our entire lives were fundamentally just told what we have to do from when we're kids we have our parents then we have our teachers then we have professors then we have our managers bosses whatever every step of the way it's always handed down from on high what our next move is and stepping out into owning your own business it's an entirely different kind of Challenge and exciting problem to to learn to solve having to figure that out for yourself and it's an entirely new way of thinking that it's one of the few things that I've come across that unless you've done it you really you can't like have a an opinion on it there's a lot of things that unless until you do it you shouldn't have an opinion on it but like this is one of the you can't connect over it is what I mean to say and so it can be extremely isolating and again like they always had the best of intentions and and everything but that's why it was really important for me to like find a circle to connect with of people that were like-minded and going through the same thing as me that I could open up to and connect with and I'll say that that connection was only as valuable as what I was willing to give as much as I was willing to open up and be vulnerable and be open to growth together and the community is like this it's a carrier own bags organization you get out of it 100% what you put into it and our goal is to to make sure that when you put in 100% you get 150% like that kind of thing to make sure the community is well run and it's like-minded people that are all contributing that's on us as like The Operators but you will get out like if you join a community like that and then you don't post or you don't share anything like that's just you staying in your comfort zone and so you have to be joining from a mindset of this is going to be a little uncomfortable I'm going to have to do things that I didn't previously do but that's exactly what it's there for and picturing back to the booth where it's the uncomfortable truths versus able lies that Booth we are the other booth we are the the booth that will tell you the things that you need to hear because we truly care about you and we don't just care about what's saying comfortable in the moment we care about helping you get the results that you really want and that requires growth and we're willing to be the people that will tell you the thing that you don't want to hear but that you really need to hear and especially early on in my career I was surrounded by more than enough yes people and it was very refreshing for me to be around people that were telling it to me straight and this isn't just like crapping on like people's work like the opposite of that like we very constructively tell this is what you did well let's think through your thought process on this let's see like how do you think we can improve that and like ask the leading questions to start teaching the thought process for yourself because the best coaches put themselves out of the job they make it so that the student like surpasses them because they're ultimately able to answer all those questions for themsel and then they start thinking of new and inventive ways to solve different problems my voice is starting to go so I think that's a good sign to wrap it up but thank you guys for watching through this I hope you enjoyed this comment down below this video If you enjoyed this kind of content and I'll make more of it on the channel and I could personally talk all day until my voice goes about this stuff but thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next [Music] lesson hey guys what's going on I just wanted to take you through my case study and the results of my first pod store that I started back in 2019 this was my baby back in the day I love the store I love the memories from the store it was just a great time such a learning curve very early on into all the guys living in the house together it was just a bunch of learning and experiencing new things I was freshly out of college so I had no idea what I was doing and it was just a great store and it's a great story too so let's hop right into it so here's some of the results from the store when I launched back in 2019 as you can see it's a seven figure brand had some crazy wild days in there too if you look at the image on the right we were on track for close to 100K day I don't think it got quite there but it was pretty close I love looking back at this picture it just inspires me to keep working hard you know 60 60 Grand in sales around 7:00 at night which is awesome and then just a couple other images as well right when I first first passed a million dollars in sales for the first time you I was 23 years old and I'm proud of myself for for what I did during that time and like I said it inspires me every day to keep working hard so yeah let's let's keep going here so here's some of the ad results when I was running ads at the time you know on the image on the left you can see I spent around 800 bucks I was running at an 8.17 row as so basically for every dollar I was spending I was making $8 back and then here's another image from a different day we only had spent around $400 so far but again it was close to almost $8 in for every $1 I spent so that's really crazy results don't expect anything like this I I was shocked I'm still shocked if I ever see results like this it's you know this is like Dreamland for results but it just shows you what the power of print on demand can do and if you make really good products you know you'll see results like this so yeah like I said my store was a Soldier Appreciation store it was actually the original pod store out of our entire group I was the first one to hop into pod overall the store did about $1.5 million in sales had about 41,000 contacts and it was started back in January of 2019 so how it started first of all the the brand itself aligned with my passion and you know I considered myself pretty patriotic it was after a tough time period in my life my grandfather had just passed away and he served he passed away about a year prior and it was this was one of the first main projects I worked on after college it was my first job and what better way to remember him than by working on something that I'm passionate about but also something he was passionate about too so yeah like like we've said in the course it's super important for you to pick a niche that you really align with because it's not going to feel like work when you're working on something that you truly love right you know they always say if you love your job you'll never work a day in your life I don't consider e-commerce a job I consider it a game I get to play every day and I'm I'm super fortunate that I get to play the game every day you know it started with Trend research it's funny when I was going back and thinking about this original store it really follows closely with everything that's taught in the course and at the time I was 22 years old and had no idea what I was doing and it just kind of fell and happened this way by chance but when you go back and think about it the way that we set everything up is pretty much what I did to a te but I was just following a logical response to what was happening in my life and how I could set up this business so I used Trend research tools like Etsy Amazon and Google Trends to find products and ideas that resonated with the brand that I wanted to build I wanted to be different and there's also a lack of experience too so everyone in our group at the time was selling very similar products and that's not something I wanted to do I wanted to see if I could sell something different and also I didn't have any experience running any fulfillment whatsoever you know I had never made a purchase order you know I had never worried about tracking products from a different country and arriving into the US I never had to deal with tariffs I never had to deal with importing products from a different country making sure there was arriving on time making sure that my inventory was in order you know making sure that never ran out of stock I didn't have any experience doing any of that stuff so I was just curious if there was a way for me to sell products without investing a ton of money up front you know I had a little bit of money but like I said I was freshly out of college so there really wasn't much that I could work with and that brings me to my next Point low capital I couldn't I couldn't spend the money to buy inventory and buy inventory in bulk I just didn't have the money so I needed a product that I could sell where I didn't have to put in a ton of money up front so that led to print on demand and when I was doing my research I found that the entire Market was selling pretty much the same exact products it was very military oriented and you know I'm proud that I served in the Marines or I'm proud that I served in the army or the Air Force any of those things and as I was looking and doing product research I spent a lot of time looking at reviews and the reviews were telling me that people love these designs but there was a big gap in the market and there wasn't enough products that that were available for family members or friends father son mother expressing their love for their loved ones serving in the military and I saw plenty of reviews saying hey I wish this shirt was available for me where it would say you know proud mother of and then it' be a pretty similar design or the uncle of someone serving in the army or the Marine corpse and things like that and I I saw so many reviews across multiple websites that I said huh I think there's an opportunity here that I can take advantage of and build designs that people would really like that aren't necessarily in the military but are some way connected to the military so after I did all that research back in the day chat GPT wasn't around and I couldn't use an AI image generator to generate any of my images so with what little money I had I hired a graphic designer and the designer and I worked together very closely day after day until I created my first batch of designs and that leads into my store set up the store just like this slide itself was extremely basic there wasn't much to it there was a little story about me explaining about my love for patriotism and the military and you know there was the designs and that's pretty much it it was a super simple basic seore now granted this was a different time in e-commerce 2016 to 2019 was a lot easier to sell online so you didn't really need as much but the designs were really good and that's What mattered most the big Difference Maker though for my store was when I launched the store back in 2019 I launched everything with white backgrounds and I was getting purchases on Facebook at the time but I couldn't the cost was too expensive my cost per click was anywhere from a150 to $1.75 and that's just not sustainable at least for me in in my business and I needed to figure out a way of how to lower my cost per click and basically increase my engagement on Facebook to drive all my costs down and as I was doing more research you know specifically on Etsy I found mockups that were completely flushed out where it looked like a nice scene where someone would be saying hey like I could see myself wearing that t-shirt in that style you know there was a whole mockup image built with a whole background it wasn't just white you know you know a wooden floor or you know little American flags and stuff like that so I also worked with my desire to build those original mockups to test on Facebook and that solved a lot of my problems like I said I was getting purchases and I knew that the store was popular and there was a lot of potential behind it but as I was going back and looking at my stats in Facebook I knew it wasn't sustainable so by creating those mockups it changed the entire outlook on the store and like I said this was 2019 so it was very simple pieces back then and just changing the mockup and uploading all those mockup images to my site completely changed the game for me my cos per clicks dropped in half and took my row as I think from like a 1.6 to a 3 .2 in the beginning and then as I iterated and created better designs you know you could see those row as row as days of almost an eight right so that's how it started and that's how it grew and some of the failures or I like to say lessons learned during that time so when I was running that store and it was successful I started to build other stores on top of that and I was running multiple stores all at once this was a terrible idea I already had a store that was making money and doing extremely well but I wanted to build more stores because I thought hey if I have one store that works why can't I build five stores that all work too that wasn't a good idea I strung myself Way Too Thin and all the stores kind of start to fall apart at the same time I was wasn't giving enough attention to one store and I was giving all my attention to every store and it just didn't work and like I said this kind of leads into the next part you know I was giving up on downturn sales you know it was working for a while and then all of a sudden it stopped working and I was like all right well I should just move on from the store it doesn't work anymore it was a terrible mindset right uh instead of figuring out why the store wasn't working I just threw in the towel and was like all right it's not going to work anymore I'll just move on and create another store focus on my other four stores that weren't working either so what I learned from that was constant design creation is absolutely the lifeline of any pod store I wasn't doing that at all again I was young and dumb I was a 23y old I wish I could go back and shake that kid and say make more designs but hey you know you live and you learn so yeah constant design creation super important I didn't do any of that made rough around 100 designs and then after that I just stopped design iterating until basically the store burned out and I closed the store also another thing that I didn't even touch upon when I was running that store I didn't expand to any other item lines I didn't start making hoodies when it was scaling there was no long sleeves there weren't any tank tops there was nothing else besides t-shirts you know I could have just took the same exact design and slapped it on a hoodie come the colder months of the year and it probably would have did just as well again for the same thing for the summer like I could have just created tank tops on the store and it probably would have done well I could have expanded into different lines I could have expanded horizontally and did collections on just the army or the Navy or the Marines I didn't do any of those things it was so basic and really what it came down to is I just didn't have enough experience and especially at that volume of scale I did my first seven figures pretty quickly it was in the first couple months of running the store and right after it hit you know roughly a million to 1.2 million that's when sales started to decline and I didn't really understand why I never thought to myself hey maybe I should make more iterations of this I didn't do any of that stuff and it's great now looking back on it like hey man like I really wish I could have done those things but I just take it all as a learning experience right it has helped craft and mold every brand I've started after that and I learn more and more each time I do it so yeah that's the story of my Soldier Appreciation store uh I hope you liked it and I'll see you soon [Music] hey everyone so this is a case study on my store Cosmic clothing Co so here are some results from my time running Cosmic clothing I promise these are legit I know they seem kind of crazy even to me looking back on them on the left hand side you can see our biggest day ever on that store where we did $174,000 in Revenue with over 5,000 orders and believe it or not that was a day that I was out on boat drinking so this was after I kind of found the true dire direction of the store and we had some designs that were on the site on like our second or third page that were selling okay uh they were kind of creeping up in the best sellers list but hadn't been advertised yet and there was one design in particular that I actually almost deleted before it got uploaded because it didn't really fit our Niche that well and I didn't think it was a good design overall but that design was kind of getting better and better bringing in some sales so the night before this happened I put that design in our ad campaigns and I woke up and my business partner had sent me the song trillionaire and I woke up to just a Spotify link to this song before I even checked the ad results and I just remember smiling and thinking it's going to be a good day and I woke up to see like $330,000 in Revenue at like 9:00 in the morning so I went into my ad account and just duped out all of those campaigns at the time I had five ad accounts with a $10,000 daily maximum spend and I rebuilt those campaigns in all the ad accounts said it to spend $50,000 that day and then I went out on a boat because we had a boat scheduled I couldn't edit the ad campaigns at that point but the results looked good enough that I thought you know let's let it run and see what happens and we ended up with that sales number and that was really the day that I realized there was no going back that e-commerce was really the direction I was going in life and that there was no turning back so you can see in the middle image that we did a little over $2 million between April 1st and July 31st of 2020 on the top right you can see a screenshot from that really big day that's a 10-minute window where we had 392 active carts 150 people checking out and 54 people who purchased and below that you can see some of our Google ad results that was over a longer time frame but you can see that top campaign spent $7,800 at nearly a 34 row as for a total of about $266,000 in revenue and that was a search campaign and then you can see some other campaigns below that which were also mostly search there's a few display and um other AD types mixed in there and then at the bottom you can see the total for our Google ads for the two years that I ran that company so we had 173,000 conversions we spent a little over $40,000 for nearly $800,000 in Revenue so phase one how did I choose the niche why did I go that direction so I chose a niche I was interested in where I saw potential for Unique graphic designs so I chose the space Niche because it's something that I'm interested in and I saw some cool designs on Etsy and Pinterest that I of used as inspiration and thought that could be a good direction to go but when I launched the store it was mainly targeted towards men it was you know space shuttle designs and Astronaut designs and things that I would have worned myself those did okay when we started testing but as you'll see that's not where we ended up so I started with a wide variety of designs in the general space Niche just to cast a wide net and see what worked so like I said it was a lot of space shuttle designs a lot of astronaut designs some Moon stuff I just tried a lot of different things in that General Niche because I knew from past experience that the things that I liked may not be the things that actually end up selling so phase two testing like I said I launched with a broad design approach focused on spacecraft astronauts Etc but pretty quickly it was other designs that started performing better so I initially saw expensive clicks and high cpms I think when I started my cpms were around $40 but I allowed the ads to optimize and continue spending and that's a huge point you know a lot of times in the beginning you're going to see expensive clicks high cpms and it's to get discouraged and I was close to that point to be honest there were times where I thought maybe this is just not a good Niche maybe I should go in a totally different direction but I let the ads continue to optimize continued adding designs and eventually it just took off I launched initially with about 50 designs in that General space Niche once I saw which ads were doing well I built out over a 100 new designs based off of those best performers and it turned out that those were more of the Moon and mandala style designs more targeted towards like the yogi Niche versus what I had been selling once I shifted those designs that had ad performance the store started to scale up to over a three row as so phase three scaling as I said the moon and mandala related designs had the lowest clicks and highest number of purchases so I built the store out in that direction and those were designs that I wouldn't have worn myself and honestly didn't think were as cool as the ones I had been selling but the results told me that that was the direction to go I kept seeing the row climb the more designs that were introduced I just kept adding more and more that I thought that particular audience would associate with and then as Revenue began to scale up and I got to around $20,000 in s sales that's when I introduced things like email and Google ads and it just took off from there I did run into some major supply chain issues because this was during Peak covid and I started on printify and actually at one point Monster Digital I believe was a supplier I was using and they were based out of Michigan and Co completely shut them down I kept taking orders because I was running at a very high row as and I knew if I turned it off it may kill that momentum so I just kept bringing orders in and said you know what I'm going to figure this out one way or another at one point I was on the phone with the higher-ups at printify with over 7,000 orders backed up in their log they were not being fulfilled at all they told me there was nothing they could do so I had to go reach out to other suppliers and eventually found a print provider in South Carolina who had a small print shop who said he could do it and they were able to work through the co shutdowns and that's what we went with we rolled the dice but I said you know what we need to figure this out somehow we have 7,000 orders these people need to get their stuff or I'm going to have to do a lot of refunds and uh we took a chance and it ended up working out so we ended up generating about $4.2 million in sales in our first year running this business so phase four the exit so I ran this business for two years it was doing about $4 million a year I believe in total it was between 9 and 10 million over the two years that I ran it when I went to sell it so after two years of running the business it began to stagnate a little bit and part of that was the iOS changes that made dropped ad performance significantly and part of that was just my interest turning towards newer Brands you know I launched newer brands that were more exciting to me at the time they were running at a higher row as and I just got kind of tired of running the same business for two years which is another important point just because something gets boring doesn't mean it's not worth doing I think we've all suffered from this all of us coaches we've had shiny object syndrome and that was one example of that I just you know saw other things doing well I was you know trading at the time and doing other things that took my attention off of this brand and I decided to sell it because of that and I do think about that often whether that was the right decision or not I'm grateful for the exit and I do think it was a good learning experience but I also do wonder what would have happened if I had really put all of my time into that brand and just continued running it to today so ultimately when I decided to sell I hired a broker to list the business for sale so I ended up Landing a buyer at 1.5x annual profit and I know that probably seems a little low and honestly it is I jumped at the first offer that was given to the first serious offer that was given to me which somewhat regret but like I said my interests were elsewhere the store had stagnated a little bit and at the time I didn't really want to put the time into scaling it back up so I exited at that number so some mistakes I made as I said I jumped at the first serious offer without testing my market more and that's something I really wish I had done I think it took me from the time I listed with the broker to the time I sold the business was less than a month and you know I'm wondering if I had left it on the market for 6 months or more and fielded more offers if I could have gotten gotten a better multiple another mistake I made is I didn't build a relationship with a buyer and vet them to the extent that I would have liked it ended up being an okay experience I got paid most of the money that I expected but again I really wish I had built more of a relationship with the buyer and vetted them a little bit more before I sold and the last mistake is I signed a contract with a large percentage earnout that didn't come to fruition so this is another thing it was my first sale ever I had never done this before and the broker to be honest wasn't much help so I signed a contract that was about about 60% upfront and 40% on an earnout so what that earnout looked like was the store had to meet certain Revenue numbers over a year or a two-year period and then I would be paid the remaining amount and the store wasn't run as well as it could have been and they didn't end up hitting those Revenue numbers so I didn't end up getting that earnout and that's something that you know I think we all learned from experience I had never heard of that going into it I had like I said I had never sold one of these before I didn't really know what to expect I thought you know the store is going to continue on a similar trajectory as it has been and I expected to get that money but that was a learning experience so some key takeaways from phase one pick a niche that you have some interest in and know the audience it doesn't have to be like your primary hobby or your primary interest but you should have some idea of what the audience is looking for and have some interest in the niche like I think part of the reason that I was able to do well with the store is because I was interested in it I cared about space it was easy for me to write emails that were engaging you know this day in history emails and some of these other things we talk about just because I cared about it number two pick a niche that has a lot of potential for cool graphics so one of the things we talk about a lot is you know these graphic designs over like text based designs and I knew that the space Niche was going to provide a lot of opportunity for really cool graphics whether that was moons or space shuttles or astronauts or whatever there was just a lot of potential there to make really cool designs in phase two this is a really big takeaway for me often times the store you start with is not the store you end up with so don't be afraid to change direction based on results like I said I started this as a store geared towards men it was a lot of astronaut designs and those sorts of things and it ended up with a completely different audience and completely different designs most of the designs on the store when I sold it were mandala designs and moons and much more geared towards the yogi Niche about 70 or 80% of our audience was women versus about 20% when I first launched so it was really a totally different store than I started with and that was fine I kind of let the results guide me there and tried not to be stubborn about sticking with my original idea and just you know let the results take me where they wanted to go so for phase three scale up when the results show you're ready not just when you think you are and this is another important one don't jump the gun on this stuff and start pumping up budgets and introducing Advanced email flows and Google campaigns and all that stuff if you're not ready for that you know get to a profitable row as first make sure you're Focus focusing on designs in the beginning and achieving profitability and then go from there scale up when the results show that you're ready and not just when you think you're ready so another Point here is issues are unavoidable don't get too overwhelmed when something unexpected pops up and this relates to those covid supply chain issues I talked about um that in the moment seemed like a really big obstacle and honestly was something that scared me a lot and I lost sleepover it was something that I wasn't sure we were going to be able to overcome but you kind of have to just stay calm and realize that you'll figure it out and be determined to figure it out so you know when we were calling print providers all over the country saying hey can you take 7,000 orders for us it seemed like a big issue but ultimately we found someone who could do it and it saved our company another thing I ran into here is Paypal at one point because we scaled up so quickly was holding $25,000 of my money and they held that for 6 months I called them every day trying to get it released and they just wouldn't do it I had credit cards I needed to pay off that was another one of those things that just popped up was something that I never would have thought about before I started this business as even being an issue that could happen but you deal with it as it comes you have to just stay levelheaded and figure those things out as they come there's going to be a ton of issues that pop up they're unavoidable you just have to figure them out and not get too overwhelmed so in phase four couple points boring businesses can still make you a lot of money try not to get shiny object syndrome so like I said I do wonder I don't regret the exit because I I think it was a really good learning experience but I do wonder where I would be if I kept that company to today and continued to scale it I got focused on other things and some of those businesses that I was focused on did turn out well I think this could have been a monster if I really stucked my guns and just continued scaling this even though I was beginning to lose interest in it so my last point is do your research on potential buyers and don't be afraid to hold out on deals and this is something that's really important and was a big learning experience for me you don't have to jump at the first offer that comes a lot of times that's probably not going to be the best offer have patience don't be afraid to hold out on these things do your research talk to different Brokers talk to different buyers talk to people who have sold businesses who can help you with this stuff and that's something I really wish I had done is talk to someone who had sold one of these businesses because I think that could have saved me a lot of time and probably gotten me a better deal in the long run so that's my overall case study um I hope that helps you guys it was a really crazy experience and I learned a lot made a lot of mistakes along the way but it shows you the power of e-commerce and this is the first store that really changed the trajectory of where I was going that proved to me that e-commerce was everything I had heard and everything I thought it could be and proved to myself what I was capable of so hopefully that helps you [Music] guys all right so this is my case study on Citys and I'm actually really excited to go over this one this has been one of the highlights of my e-commerce career and I actually just genuinely enjoy talking about it and diving into the lessons that I learned the highs and the lows of everything and I think a lot of what I go through can be directly applic applicable to what you guys are doing right now either if you're starting from the very beginning there's the ideation of designs to if you're in the testing phase if you're in the scaling phase I go through all of like these different stages that I went through with this specific store yeah what I learned from it what I did right what I did wrong and everything in between and it really was a um a really valuable experience for me to go through creating the store scaling the store and end up actually selling the store to someone who bought it from me and I'll walk through the entire process with you here and going through everything step by step and um I think there's a lot of key takeaways that I'll go over to that can be applied like I said to any stage along the way that you're in right now with e-commerce so let's get right into it the brand was called cityas as I said before and it generated 1.7 million in a year in sales primarily driven from Facebook ads a little bit of Google ads and a decent bit of email marketing it was around like 15% of Revenue was actually attributed towards email and SMS marketing during that time there was about 40,000 customers that uh ended up buying from my store and it was founded back in 2020 and we'll we'll talk about why that's important too and like why that led to actually the decision of me selling at some point but yeah we'll get into that in a second here so throughout this video I'm going to break down this uh Journey that I have with Citys in four different phases and that's going to be the ideation phase the testing phase the scaling phase and the exit phase now in the ideation phase it's just how did I come up with the niche the product and the strategy for Citys for the testing phase how did I test the viability of the store how did I approach making designs how did I approach launching ads all those sort of things and then the scaling phase is how did I scale to seven figures how did that look in terms of my Facebook ad account how did that look in terms of how I was like creating designs and and so on and so forth and then four exit how did I actually sell my store how did I approach that how did that go all all that in between I'm going to go over throughout this video so let's get right into it phase one the ideation of Citys and this was during a time where I was about two years into e-commerce and I had a lot of selling under my belt at this point and we primarily we as in me and my two other business partners at the time that were working together on these print on demand stores we primarily sold in these big markets where it was like either flowers space or like these big niches that we identified business model that worked and we've sold plenty of different brands where we we were selling up to seven figures with all these different Ecom stores and they were really broad niches and what that ended up happening is there's a lot of competition with these niches so as the more we dug into these niches and the more that we sold in them we saw a little bit of diminishing return because of how deep we were digging into them and then all the competition that was coming from it we had copycat stores we had existing stores that were in those niches that made you know scaling a little bit more difficult after we were like two years into running in these niches so I was at a point where this was like my first time branching off on my own fully having my own idea fully diving into what I thought was a good idea building a store from scratch with my own idea that's why I really like this store too because it was my first time actually feeling like an entrepreneur because up to this point I was just kind of working under my two other business partners that already like paved the way for the niche and the products so this one I was like okay like how do I apply what I learned from my business partners what I've learned from running these flower stores and these space stores but Branch out from these broad niches that have so much competition so I started brainstorming and I just wanted to create a new store with a unique spin that had low competition since we saw the diminishing returns with the broad niches so I started brainstorming and I actually ended up coming up with this idea of creating these city city designs and it was the idea was like I was I was brainstorming a bunch of different ideas but the one that came to mind was like the iHeart NYC design I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with just the Classic iHeart myc on on the t-shirt that like classic touristy like shirt from New York City and I was like how do I take because that's a famous t-shirt obviously it's sold so many like you see them like there's a reason people know what that is so I was like how do I take that concept tweak it a little bit and then build build a store and a brand around that so the idea was to create a non- gift shop design tailored towards a specific City kind of using like a sports like design concept so like thinking about the NFL thinking about the NBA thinking about the MLB and how they create their graphic te's and also taking that concept that people are passionate about their cities right so like I'm from Philadelphia personally and people are huge Eagles fans Sixers fans Flyers fan and they love their city so that was kind of the inspiration and the idea behind finding not only a niche that you can build designs around but also finding something that people are passionate about and that's how I came to creating the store City's and I'll jump into what the store looks like in a second here this is what Citys looked like now it's a little different like I said I actually sold this store and the new owner made a couple tweaks but this is essentially what it looked like when I was running it as you can see it's a city's logo here it's all it's all branded around like creating designs for a specific City like you'll go to the homepage here you'll see find your city you'll click on that and it'll bring you to this collection page of all the different cities that we have specific designs for so you'll see other ones that that this new owner has tested such as uh Chicago Christmas Brooklyn Winter like big game Sunday all all those weren't my this wasn't my part of my business model what part of my business model was just creating a a like specific designs and specific collections for a specific City and I actually started with the first collection that I tested before I had any sales New York City and we're about to get into that here from phase one to phase two to the testing phase so I had to think about what is the best way to approach this right was it to create like all of these different designs for all these different cities in the beginning and and test like what is the best city based off of having all these designs that would have been like hundreds of designs that I had the test of the time so I actually went against that I was like okay let me prioritize what is probably the best city to advertise to at this time what like so like I created this what I call the population to Passion ratio and the goal was to rank cities based off of who was the most passionate about their city and what had the most population so like I wanted to like advertise towards a market that had that combination of passion and population to give me the best chance of testing a concept out so the goal was to you know find one city and findi and build a collection of designs tailored towards one city and once I found that formula of actually generating a profit for it then I could copy that formula of creating these designs creating these ads these Facebook ads that I knew that worked and then horizontally scaling to other cities that are popular based off of that that list that I created that population to Passion list so the first city that I decided to go into which looking back at it now hindsights 2020 was bad idea but I I went into New York City and the reason was because there's a lot of sports fandom there and there's a lot there's a huge population it's the most populated city in the United States I could be wrong on that don't fact check me I just think that's right so I'm just I'm just going to run with that so I created this collection of about 30 designs for New York City and the goal was to like you know like create ad campaigns that I would actually this is the interesting strategy of what I was doing too I was geot targeting my ads to people who lived in New York city so I was creating a collection of these New York City designs and specifically advertising these designs to people who lived in New York city so that was the formula there it's pretty simple right but I thought it was groundbreaking at the time and I was super excited about it so I'm about a month into testing to New York City and I cannot break even I can't turn a profit on this collection and I'm just really struggling with it I just couldn't get it to work and my Design Concepts let's let's go into what this actual this collection looked like too by the way I looked at it a little bit here so this was the New York City collection now there are a little bit of different designs here but let me show you what the core design that I started with here was this design that could be applied to any city right it's the New York City initials with the skyline embedded to the base of it so that was the idea for like the base Design Concepts and you'll see that I had other designs that were kind of similar to this where you'll see like New York City just with the plain text New York City with little holes and like a little like I don't know like a little like grainy kind of design with the same concept same thing New York City initials Skyline in the bottom of it with a dripping effect I also did like these kind of designs where it was like New York City born raised proud remember I'm like I'm trying to do like a non- gift shop approach I'm trying to like make t-shirts that people are passionate about that live in their city so they're proud to represent their City that's kind of what I was going for so I had all these cool ideas and like people were buying them but I just wasn't able to get the ad cost down New York City to advertise to specifically when you're Geo targeting is really expensive and that's something I found out through this process but just giving you an idea like this is kind of the way I looked at of of like generating these designs and my strategy and this was the first this is the first collection that I made and like I said I was like a month in and I couldn't turn a profit and during this time another lesson learned I was in such a hyper like shiny object mode and I know Chris has talked about this before if you've heard it before like outside of this is as well where like as soon as something didn't work I would be hopping on to the next idea as quickly as I can just so I could like find like you know good results right off the bat so I'm a month in I'm only one month into advertising and I'm about to close shop on Citys I'm about to get out of there and go on to the next idea maybe it's back to flowers maybe it's back to space designs I don't know but what I ended up doing before I made that transition to to like closing up shop or making that decision to close up the shop I was like you know what screw it I'm going to take the same design concept I have with this New York City collection and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Chicago because Chicago was the second highest ranking for that passion to population to Passion ranking that I talked about and as soon as I transfer those Concepts over from New York City you'll see these same kind of Concepts here I saw promise right away and I saw promise as in I saw a very high row as and it got me really excited the cper clicks were cut in half I was like okay here we go we have something now phase three here the scaling phase which in my opinion was actually the more difficult part maybe maybe testing was up there too with like pivoting from New York City and like figuring out that Chicago was the winner and we had something there so this is like let me just start from the beginning here so we found out that Chicago was was profitable when I say profitable we were running around like a five six sometimes like an eight row as so I was like okay we have something here first of all let me take advantage let me see how high I can push these budgets on these ad campaigns and maintain a profitable row ads within Chicago to kind of establish like somewhat of an ad strategy moving forward before I would go into new cities so I identified that using three campaigns starting at $100 a day was the best optimal way to optimize around Ras get the most spend we can get the most revenue and essentially make the most money out of one city at a given time so that was that wasn't didn't just happen overnight maybe it took me like two to three weeks to find that that that kind of weighing of three different campaigns ended up being the optimal way to run things now this was a different time this was pre 2021 iOS update we ran ads a lot differently than we do now I'm just trying to you an example of like my thought process going into it and what you could probably do in your situation when you're in in a certain spot where you're starting to generate profitable like profitable row ads and and you're in a good spot how can you structure your ad account and this is just an example of like there's not one way one right way to do it this is just what worked for me at the time so I would start at $100 per campaign sometimes I'd scale them up to all the way up to $250 a day so I was spending anywhere from like3 to $750 a day per City so I started in Chicago and then this is when I got really nervous I'm like okay maybe Chicago is just kind of a one-off that was like just Chicago is the only thing that's going to work here so I did the same thing that I did from New York to Chicago I went to Chicago to Philadelphia and I'll show you exactly what that looked like here same kind of thing you're going to see that's it's the same Concepts here where you see the same the same kind of City initials with the with the um Skyline embedded in the base of it and when I went to Philly and Geo targeted my campaigns to this collection right away seven eight nine row as right off the bat and it made me so excited I'm like oh my God this is proof of concept that now I can just it's not just Chicago I can take this concept and go to another city holding the same Design Concepts and seeing this these results of of a high high scaling High profitable campaign so once I made that realization what I started doing is copying and and copying and pasting the designs and the ad strategy so the designs were what I just went over like the skyline embedded and like a couple of those other types of designs where I get like like a minimum of 15 designs per collection before I launch into a new city and I would do that same structure of like three campaigns per City when I would launch into a new one and every single time I was seeing profitable Ras I was seeing I was able to scale up up to 750 per collection so you could imagine as I kept on scaling into new cities the revenue numbers started getting pretty pretty hefty per day I got up to like about a 30 to $40,000 per Revenue day per revenue or Revenue per day it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows though it was very difficult to get to this point and the reason that this specific model was difficult was because I had all these different cities and all these different designs and all these different ad campaigns that I had to manage at once so I had to create a system with my design team I have a graphic design team that um I've worked with for years and I was like listen like we need to be able to crank out at least three new city collections a week to keep up with what the results were seeing so I worked really hard to create the system with my design team to ensure that we were launching a minimum of 50 designs a week to to make sure that I was at least getting three cities that I was launching into and every time I would have those collections ready I had to optimize them accordingly and I have to create these ad campaigns for that specific City each time so it was very a lot of leg work to do with just like scaling horizontally but it was worth it because every time we would scale into a new city we would we would right away because we had the proven concept of the designs and the ad structure I didn't have to worry about testing a new city each time because I knew it would work so it was kind of a double-edged sword there where yes I had to put in all the leg work for new designs and new campaign structure but two I had a proven concept that kept on working where I wasn't worried about losing money when I would like launch into a new city so that and then the designs that I was using so I've launched into about 50 cities at the end of at the end of the day I think it took me about a year to get to 50 cities and I ended up generating about 1.7 million in Revenue at this point and around like maybe like 800,000 I started hitting a wall with my existing designs so my existing designs the design that would work was the one that I showed you multiple times by now the abbreviations with the skyline embedded at the base of it those started showing diminishing returns just like anything in print on demand you have a bestseller that bestseller is slowly going to show diminishing returns just because you're going to find your customers and you have to constantly stay ahead of the game with uh finding a new design so when I hit that wall it was difficult because now I had to not only did I have to optimize for one store in one collection I had 50 different stores in 50 different collections essentially because each city was different so I had to start thinking creatively and like I'm like okay what's the next wave of designs that I can do so I started doing some design research and thinking like how can I how can I be creative and I started like going City by City going back into that passion to population list of like okay I should work on Chicago first and said that was the best one then Houston blah blah blah so what I started doing is looking into specific things within the city instead of doing that General approach where that design can be applied to any City like that that Skyline abbreviation design I went into let's go to Houston here so I did this for a couple cities but the one that specifically worked is I looked into Reddit threads of specific cities and seeing what was trending during that time within that City and I stumbled upon this Houston thread of this mural that it's called be someone and it's apparently it's a really famous mural in Houston and I would not have known that if I didn't do any homework like I have no idea what this means but this is what the mural was it was like on this bridge that everyone knew of and it recently got like spray painted over and everyone was upset about it so I saw this Reddit thread I saw the design and I ended up making a design around it and advertising specifically to Houston with this design and it it was it just exploded right away it was the number one selling t-shirt across all all all cities by far and this kind of got me from that 800k Revenue threshold all the way up to that 1.7 million and it was just like another example of like you know like you could have a strategy that works for a while but at a point you're going to have to innovate again you're going to have to figure out something creative that's going to respark your ads and get you to a spot where you can push Revenue at a profitable row as and that's what I had to do so I had a mix of like General designs the you know the SK the City abbreviations with the skyline in it and then I had these specific designs that I kept on rolling out so I kept on doing that strategy but as you could tell like it it would get a little tiresome going into each individual City and trying to figure out find that new bestseller so you know things got tired and at some point I ended up actually deciding to to sell the store because of two reasons so the exit stage first of all like I was saying before I saw this diminishing return after like about one year of running ads and it was because of that just natural deterioration that you see from design and you always have to be cranking out new ones to stay ahead of the curve and avoid that burnout but also for those of you who don't know there's this iOS update that happened in 2021 that asked people to track their D asked if they wanted to be tracked so I'm sure if any of you have an iPhone and you open up an app one of the first things you'll see a popup is like do you want your data to be tracked and the way it's worded it kind of like incentivizes you to be like no I don't want to be tracked like and I can like that's how I was too but when people opted out of that it screwed up ad tracking so bad for Facebook that all these all the costs for Facebook at the time went up so much because it was so much harder to find your customers now because that algorithm you didn't have the data that that you used to have so when that happened I saw diminishing returns from just natural product deterioration and then I saw the iOS impacts of increasing cost so I was operating at a loss and I had 50 different collections that I had to optimize for so I was like you know what I'm just going to try to sell this thing and move on to the next store because this is like a big animal and I need to figure out if I can even scale Facebook anymore so that's what made me like decid that you know maybe it's time for me to like try to sell this store and move on so I decided to hire a broker and that was a a really good experience just to get my feet wet with like an exit cuz this wasn't a big exit you know I mean it was 1.7 million in Revenue but for those of you who don't know the multiples on selling an e-commerce store aren't the best especially if they're an e-commerce like print on theand physical physical product store it's about like two to like 3x sometimes 4X if you're lucky on your annual profit so or you're leading 12 or you're trailing 12 I ended up getting about 2x of my annual profit from this guy who um he he was an interesting character the guy who bought my store he was actually acquiring hundreds of Shopify stores like mine that sold t-shirts and he was consolidating under this master website that he was taking all these niches and um and just consolidating them so I got lucky to meet this guy and and he moved really quickly like within a month of meeting him like I already sold the store to him but you know it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows again I made a lot of mistakes along the way of that exit and probably the main one was like I didn't factor in all the fees so like I was really excited about the valuation that he pitched me but I really didn't break down the numbers because I just got excited I'm like yes let's do it right away didn't look into the contract too much didn't factor in The Brokerage fee didn't factor in taxes and it took that valuation number and significantly reduced it another thing I didn't consider was I had um business partners at the time and I had two other business partners that were all doing profit splits I did consider this but it was just like I said I got blinded by the excitement of selling my store and the excitement of like I don't know the number that that was thrown at me so I just jumped on it and I was like wait I got to give you know my profit splits to my two business partners so not only did I have the taxes and the fees that I weren't considering now I have my profit splits that I had to divvy out to my um business partners so I ended up coming away with a lot less and another reason was because of the way the contract was structured it was heavily weighted towards payouts so I had upfront money but then I didn't have I mean that was upfront was maybe like 25% of the actual valuation the rest of the 75% of the of the payouts were on these payout basis so it was it was relying on things like the next year of Revenue so that depended on who bought my store actually performing well and generating Revenue which had was completely out of my control and then the other was on transition hours was like which was very ambiguous at the time the way it was worded in the contract luckily that all worked out the transition hours but the revenue payouts never actually hit so that valuation that pretty number I saw was a lot less than what I actually got so big lesson learned there but at the end of the day I don't regret a single thing like the lessons I've learned from going through and exiting from a business like I know I'm going to apply in the future on a way bigger scale so I'm glad I did it circling back kind of wrapping everything up here just a key takeaways from each phase so phase one the ideation picking a niche that is unique and has low competition really set me up for Success because once I unlocked that formula of you know I went out of New York City I went to Chicago I found out that you know like I have something here and there's no one else that was really doing what I was doing so like I wasn't competing with anyone else so I saw those like extreme ex High row as numbers right off the bat without competition but the IDE should avoid picking niches that create numerous sub collections so like that was going into like why I was a pain in the butt when I had like 50 plus collections instead of just having one collection where I could optimize on so picking a niche or picking like a strategy where you don't have to Branch out to all these sub collections would be something that maybe I would reconsider in the future so phase two from the testing phase so this was like probably the biggest takeaway that I want you guys to take away from this entire case study is you could be one change away from getting from unsuccessful store to a seven figure business now like I explained like when I was advertising in New York City I was a month in I was spending so much money I wasn't seeing any good results I was seeing nothing I was just kind of breaking even the cost per clicks were were really crappy but then I was like you know what instead of closing up shop let me just do this one tweak be a little smart about it maybe it's just the the audience that I'm like the specific City that I was advertising to and it was and if I didn't make that change if I didn't make that slight change in strategy I wouldn't have generated that 1.7 million in sales I wouldn't be here talking about this store right now so if you're in a situation now where like you know you think you're close you're like right on the cusp of like breaking even or or generating a profit try to think at this example and how you can apply it to your store in your situation where you can maybe tweak the audience you're apply that you're advertising to or maybe you tweak the designs you're doing and just like think of it like as like a just like a minor tweak that you could be just one decision away from from scaling now that brings us into phase three the scaling phase having a design strategy is essential to keep up good performance now for me this was pretty straightforward because I had the the formula down for Chicago of what designs I knew worked so every time I branched into a new city I would have like the clear cut like okay like these are designs that I had to that I had to make to get successful ads and good performance but now if you're not in this like kind of situation where you have like when you're branching out in different cities and you just have like a master collection which is really it's really ideal to have this when you just have one collection you're focusing on it's still essential to have a strategy around building new designs so like like I was talking about earlier there's a diminishing return turn when you're when you find a Best Seller like it's going to work at first but then it's slowly the performance is going to come down so how do you stay ahead of that curve by having a design structure a system a strategy that can stay ahead and you're always optimizing your new designs based off of what you're seeing was working on your store and doing research like when I research into Houston and found that be someone design you have to always be creative you have to always stay ahead of the curve and have a design system either using AI designs or using a design team whatever is like works for you just making sure you're constantly pumping in new designs and learning from what's working and same kind of thing talking about avoiding a niche that creates numerous sub collections this made launching ads very tedious instead of just like cracking the budget up I had to go into each individual collection of the city specific collection create three ads specifically for that it was just a lot of leg work and when it came to optimizing it when I needed to it made it really difficult phase four now this is the exit stage know your numbers right like I went over like I just got excited and blinded by the valuation but in reality it was a fraction of that and looking back at it I would have asked for more money up front I would have um looked for more money that wasn't based off of payouts I would have maybe tried to negotiate with my broker for a lower commission fee and maybe negotiated with my business partners at the time to get more percentage so all hindsight like I said all Lessons Learned From A great experience really like I can't wait to apply what I've learned in my next exit at some point down the road yeah I mean all in all great experience I really love Citys I'm really proud of it and I'm really excited to share it with you guys and hopefully you can have some take ways from this that you can apply to your situation and and yeah I'm just happy to share this with you guys and I hope you enjoyed [Music] it hi and welcome to stage one of the course so in this stage we are doing our research which is essentially us sharpening our axe before we jump in and this is one of the most overlooked stages so I want you to really pay attention this because this can save us so much time and effort later on down the road this is essentially where we are making sure that all of the decisions and work that we're about to put in is heading down the right track and to recap what we've done up until this point is we've laid our foundations and in that stage if you haven't watched it I highly recommend going back through it that is where we laid the foundations of our business understanding and as our own person and these are two really important Concepts because they really lay the the groundwork for everything that's to come so at this point you should have a fundamental understanding of the print on demand business model how it works the differences between print on Demand versus Drop Shipping and other businesses and why we're doing print on demand specifically we're going to talk more about that in this lesson as well actually but then also like what it takes to be successful is the other big thing that we covered in the business lesson and then on the person side we talked about how do we become the person that we need to be in order to be successful with this and that came from me working with people that I really cared about helping them doing everything I could to help them start a business but then realizing that there are certain key aspects that we need to get in line for ourself first so you should at this point have an understanding even if you haven't made all the changes yet at the very least having an understanding of where you currently lie in terms of your focus your mindset your habits your overall environment and really like setting your goals and like what you're working towards so that as we start getting into that Valley like we talked about later on in this process you'll have those core fundamentals to return to and they are I can't say it enough like how important they are but now in this lesson or in this stage rather in research we're taking it a step further and by the end of this stage you're going to understand the print on man business model you're going to have researched and chosen a profitable Niche and you will also have done your research for winning designs and this is something that in the previous course we kind of went through pretty quickly so in this lesson or this stage we're going through it in a lot more detail because it is truly like one of the most crucial pieces and like Eric and Meg are going to be the ones leading you through this and they're the ones that are going to be showing you how to do your Niche research Your Design research and everything else in between so to start off I want to answer the question of like why do we do research cuz you know we have all heard it before we know that it's a good idea but like what does it actually mean and like why is it that important well it's important because we need to First understand like that it is such a vital Step In the Journey that not not only do we need to do it now but we are going to continue coming back to this process over and over throughout the the length of the course and I mentioned this before but the a blank and quote if I had six hours to chop down a tree I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe and then I chop down the tree is what I imagine the rest of the quote to be and out of everything that we teach here like research is one of the key character traits that the most successful people come back to time and time again as a best practice and we want to instill in your mind as early as we possibly can that this is a core thing that we're going to keep coming back to every time we launch a new brand we launch the ads we get feedback from the market we see what products are people are liking or not and then we go back and do more research based off of what we've just learned so we it's a rinse and repeat process and the majority of it happens in The Upfront but we really want to instill in the fact that you need to keep doing this not that you need to but it would be it's loow hanging fruit to come back to the research cuz we want to meet the market where they are we want to make our lives easier not harder and the research is by far the best way to do that and it make sure that you're on the right track and to make this process even easier for you what we've done is we've combined ton of resources from some of the best print on demand sites available on the internet and went through their entire funnel their entire product catalog where they're getting their traffic from where they're running their ads what their branding looks like everything in between so that you have this as a great starting point and then we're also going to be sharing some other resources that can use to conduct your own research in addition to that we're going to take a look at this board more in just a second so there are two big questions we have to answer when it comes to research first off is what do I need and second is why do I need it so let's first start with what so the first thing that we're going to be researching is your Niche and a niche is a target group of people that we want to serve and you've probably heard of this concept before but there are plenty of niches and it's one of the easiest decisions once we go through this stage to nail down and get write the first time so we don't have to double back and end up relaunching a new brand I've done that a bunch of times and while it's really good practice it's not the most fun so we want to avoid that at it all possible so now there's a big difference between good niches and bad niches good niches are ones that are wildly popular they're Global they are able to be advertised to and they are passionate so an example of these would be like wildly popular is things that are commonplace or talked about by a lot of people we're going to talk about like specific Frameworks you can use to like solidify this but really the broader the better and that's the benefit that we have of running Shopify Brands opposed to Etsy or merch by Amazon or other marketplaces is that we're able to go after the most popular and passionate niches that on those platforms normally have a ton of competition already because they're so popular but in this business like we've talked about we don't have to worry about that because we are competing on Facebook newsfeeds and like Google ads like we're not competing side by side with a ton of other products we're competing side by side with people's cat videos and videos of their family so it's a very different approach opposed to if you're going Etsy or different marketplaces where you really have to keep that competition more in mind the next is global and this really Taps into similar to widely popular we want it to be something that we're able to expand internationally so while this is a good thing to keep in mind you would honestly be pretty surprised at the things that you know we start with the United States the topics or interests that we have in the US normally translate pretty well to a global audience prime example is history te's it's primarily like US History products and Concepts you would think only people in the you know in the United States would find that interesting it was actually the opposite when we launched International ads it performed extremely well so there were people all across Europe Australia New Zealand that were buying you know pictures of Lincoln and other famous historical figures and that I found that to be pretty remarkable next is can be advertised so this one really just comes down to making sure that it's nothing that involves like anything drug or just not safe for work like PG related stuff because we want to be able to run Facebook ads for it and like one student that I I talked to he had a great collection of products I thought they were hysterical and they were trying to run Facebook ads and figure out like what they could sell and what they couldn't and pretty much none of their collection was able to be advertised cuz they were all like runchy topics and like it wasn't like that over the top but it just didn't meet Facebook's criteria so a good way to think about this is like if you were to put this in front of a Facebook moderator and show them like basically if it has any curse words guns drugs references like that it's normally a noggo the good news there's plenty of other niches that don't involve that and then last is passionate so we want it to be an audience of people that it's not just something that they kind of do or something but like there are forums of people talking about this subject there are inside jokes and sayings and slogans that we can tap into and on the flip side of that the bad Niche is they're too small they're just too niche like two down the rabbit hole can't advertise to them or they're illegal or copyrighted next thing we'll be talking about a lot in this stage is a brand so first let's define a brand and really explain once and for all what that is and a brand is basically what people think of when they hear your name and in the beginning this isn't something you have to think too much about cuz your name means nothing nobody knows you so it means do not go and just start putting logos of your your own brand on shirts there's nobody will buy it like it took decades before before people were buying Nike swooshes just the Nike Swoosh on a shirt like that just doesn't happen right out of the gate but it can happen over time and that's where you're able to really differentiate yourself in the market and make yourself impervious to more competitive markets starting to pop up because you're essentially creating something truly unique that other people can't possibly touch and the way that Google defines it is that a brand is a product service or concept that is distinct from others and is associated with a company's values identity and reputation or in our words a brand is simply what people think of when they hear your store's name are they going to think when they hear yoga stay are they going to think oh I bought from them once terrible company don't do it or they going to think oh I love that company they send me really positive emails they're always launching new designs that feel like they really relate to me they have a charitable cause or something that they believe in besides just you know selling apparel and that they have a mission behind them obviously they W think it exactly like that but that's the rough idea now let's answer the question of why why are we Cho Ching a niche why are we building a brand when we choose a niche you may be starting a print on demand business but you're not really just selling T-shirts what you were actually selling and this question came up on a an email call in the University a couple weeks ago was somebody asked like how do I write t-sh like emails that just sell t-shirts and it's a great question because the an is that you don't the emails that we write and just in general people are not buying shirts what they are buying is what it stands for what's on the shirt how it makes their friends and family feel or laugh when they look at the shirt how it makes them feel when they put it on and that's what people are really buying so our marketing and all that is not based around like the thread count and like quality of the shirt yes we talk about that stuff but it's much less about that and when you take it a step further then you're selling the feelings your audience has when they put on your products and that's really the point we want to get to there's a great book on this start with why how great leaders Inspire everyone to take action by Simon synic it's also a great Ted if you want the more succinct version but it basically comes down to what is the reason that our business exists now this is not me saying that you need to put the cart before the horse and start off with a super powerful brand Mission you're going to change the world nothing like that this is just me planning the seed of you thinking what your brand could become down the road and this is not saying you have to sit there and write out the perfect brand name perfect slogan Mission none of that you really just need to think of this in the back of your mind like is there something this brand could build into in the future now as a thought exercise to prove the point of why the research is so important imagine this from the start you have a solid understanding of why we're doing this business like e-commerce which we're going to talk about in the next lesson and two you pick a vibrant and passionate Niche where people actually one there's a lot of people and two they're really like into whatever the topic is so we're not talking about like health insurance or something that everybody does or has but nobody likes it that would not be a niche but if you pick a really vibrant Niche that is based on Research it's sizable has a passionate audience and is easy to Target through ads or organic search and you keep your research organized from the very beginning so it's not just in random folders scattered around it's in a and it doesn't have to be in a mirror board like this but it just has to be in a organized and easily accessible place that works for you so this can be a folder could be a Google doc whatever it is just pick one that works for you and keep it organized because what we've seen from students is that if they do the research but then it's not easy for them to access it then it kind of Fades from their memory and then they get into the process it's almost as if they didn't do the research at all so we want to avoid that and make sure we keep it nice and organized next you have a product inspiration library with a ton of different potential design ideas and you're able to refer back to it every step of the way to so that as you are launching a rocket you can make sure as your checkpoint like am I going off course and an example of going off course would be if you start with your niche and then you do all the research I've seen this happen a lot do the research and then you're like all right time to design my products step one take the take all the research I did throw it out the window now I'm just going to start making some random stuff seen that happen way too many times and if you do all of those things if you un go through understand the e-commerce research the niche research the design research then by the end of this this stage you will have laid the foundation of your house that will give you a rock solid starting point for building your brand down the road so you can essentially build each subsequent floor on a solid foundation and we keep using this metaphor because we've seen it happen too many times where people put in the best of efforts in the next stages stages two through five and Beyond but if they don't get this right then truly nothing else matters cuz we're just building in an echo chamber of our own delusions and we need to make sure that we are constantly checking with the market because we are not building arts and crafts projects we're here to build a real business so let's talk about that what does a successful ecommer brand look like like history te's for example which we sold to open store what does that one look like along with yoga stay so yoga stay and this is really where like branding and research comes into play and when I talked about like the mission statement start with why yoga stay and history te started with the exact same model the exact same steps that we're going to be covering together but by the end they were completely different brands because they just simply followed What worked and they followed their market research and knowing like what resonated with people which led them in very different directions in a really good way and so that's why we'll all start with the similar foundations or like core principles but you're going to quickly dovetail as you see sales come in and you see not just sales come in but then you take the the sales and that information and then you refer back to your research and that tells you new things like for example if you launch with 100 designs and you see oh these positive sayings like inhale exhale that did really well let me go back to my research and see were there any other sayings that I saw that maybe I didn't launch because I just had other ideas then I'm going to go back to that research and pull out all those positive sayings and that becomes my next batch of designs that quick opposed to if you didn't do this research then you're just like kind of wandering around in the dark you're like okay that did okay I guess now what the research answers that question and to show more of like the differences between the brands yoga stay had a lot of the best sellers were just minimalistic designs and the bestselling colors were bright Heather tones and then the emails that we sent for yoga stay or like the overall brand messaging was like very light-hearted positive and completely the opposite of yoga or history teas which was dark sarcastic humor both of these did multiple seven figures in sales but on History teas a lot of the best sellers were graphics and typography hybrids and our top colors were dark like charcoal tones and this really highlights the importance of research cuz if we just followed along with this framework without the research we would end up with cookie cutter stores and that's not at all what we want what we want is to be we are building a brand we are not building a print on demand store we're not doing Drop Shipping we're building a brand we just so happen to use print on demand as a fulfillment but we are selling products and connecting with customers and emphasis on the latter so the example highlights that we really need to do the research to find our unique brand voice so side by side yoga stay and history te's follow the exact same framework ended up completely different from one another and the pitfalls that we want to avoid from the very beginning is researching too much which I know this kind of flies in the face of what I was just talking about or it seems like that at least but there's a lot of nuance to business just welcome to Welcome to the process but you want to avoid doing too much research or getting analysis paralysis cu the way that we will really learn is by just getting through the process and I've seen a lot of people treat research as a form of procrastination because in reality they're just afraid of failure and we just need to have our self-awareness why we talked about in the foundations have self-awareness of like what is going through our head are we working on the step of the process that we should be because that's what the business needs or is it just this is what I'm most comfortable with and all that other stuff seems uncomfortable and you're just putting it off is that is not good doing good Consolidated like succinct research where you just follow along with the process that Meg and Eric show you and then with the niche and the designs and then you move on to the next step and I can say from the get-go that you are not going to ever be satisfied with your work at any one stage the important thing is that you get it to 80% and then you move on to the next step cuz that's how you're truly going to learn the most and that's the thing that you really need to understand is that the majority of learning comes from getting all the way through the process and this is just a small part in the beginning this is not the last time that you will be doing research you're going to come back to this it's going to be an ongoing skill that you're going to grow over time but in general this is the step that gets skipped over people not doing enough research thinking that they're just squared away and then moving on to the next step make sure you give it the time that it needs but you don't give it too much and we'll talk about more like the timelines and like rough amount of time to pick but for me and Megan and Eric will talk through this with you for me in this stage just hammer out 10 to 20 different possible niches look at the ones that you think that you're most interested in and then in terms of designs the research comes down to just the quantity of them just find as many designs that relate to your niche as possible that are based off of best sellers and then use that as your starting point and I talk about it from you know experience having done this a ton of times so it's faster as you get more and more experience with it and those are the key Concepts to understand for the research stage and now we'll be moving on to our research about e-commerce in general which this is one that you definitely do not want to miss because this is answering the question at the back of everybody's mind whenever they're starting any new business which is I hear these people talking about it and I see that they have success and I know that some of their students have like why this business like I see all these other bit different business models why should I look into this one specifically and there's no right or wrong answer to this but the next lesson is going to attempt to put as much data and market research behind that decision as possible so that as you start going through the process and you come up against challenges which you definitely will and you start asking yourself the questions of like is this right should I turn back should I try something else maybe there's something easier this is going to answer that question for you and this is so crucial so make sure that you do not miss it do not miss it and I'll see you in the next [Music] lesson in this lesson we're going to be conducting e-commerce or market research and unlike other lessons where or stages where the concepts section at the very beginning covers all the concepts and like fundamental understandings on each subsequent lesson just like the step byep this one kind of breaks the mold but it's doing it in a way that's really important and that is one of the biggest breakthroughs in my career came when I finally understood what we're about to go through and that is making a shift from just following what I'm being told from different creators or Educators even if I trusted them I was always just like listening and then doing listening and doing the shift came once I started understanding the why behind what they were explaining like why does print on demand make sense so that when not just for the sake but like if you know a family member ask like why are you selling T-shirts or why print on a man not because I care about what they think but I should be able to explain succinctly why print on demand and t-shirts is a great business and not just meaning that like it's a low upfront cost and stuff but at the end of the day for any business we want to make sure that there's not just demand today but demand well into the future because as we're about to make these Investments of our time money energy effort for the next 12 to 18 months because all of us if you're watching at this point you should know we want to to take a long-term point of view on business not just print on demand but any business because that's where you get the majority of the benefits from if you take a short-term Outlook you're going to miss out on the best parts you're just going to pay the prices but then never get the rewards so we take a long-term Outlook and with that being said we know that we want to see where is this Market that I'm building this business in going to be years down the road and so we are in the research stage and at this point the progress we've had is we've laid our entrepreneurial Foundation we've created our essential accounts like gotten the red tape stuff out of the way like we've gotten our Shopify plan printify all that stuff and now we're ready to explore print on the man before we get into like the stepbystep the nitty-gritty and I know this is one of the parts that people are like all right just get to the tutorials we could we could just jump right into click this button click that button but if we did wouldn't really teach anything there would be you know understanding but there wouldn't be comprehension so by the end of this lesson we're going to answer these three questions why eCommerce why print on demand and why t-shirts and you can picture a friend or family member asking you these questions what you would say back and you should be able to answer because that means that you fundamentally understand why we're doing this business to begin with so to answer this question I went out and did a lot of research CU I personally have a lot invested in print on demand between my own Brands the content I make Mystic spending a lot of time in it so I'm putting my money where my mouth is and that's all that I do is print on demand in different forms and Fashions and as I'm making those Investments and looking at where I want to be 5 10 years from now I want to make sure that I'm doing it in an intelligent well-informed way and this is something I never used to do do but now I look at macro Trends and I put together like reports of the information that I think is relevant so the first question that we want to answer or the framework that we want to run through for evaluating any business is first what is the industry that it's in what's the model that we're using what's the product and then what's the distribution so in e-commerce and the flow that we're going to go through is e-commerce print on demand the product and then the market so the first piece of data we can look at is evaluating what's e-commerce doing like for example if if we saw that people were leaving online shopping in droves and they were just flocking to retail stores then print on demand business would be a pretty dumb business to be starting but fortunately I think this is a pretty obvious one it's loow hanging fruit we all know that people are buying online now more than ever and a more reasonable question would be like is that Trend expected to continue obviously we don't have a crystal ball but all signs are indicating yes and it also makes sense like that e-commerce is growing this is just the US market but it's growing by 16.4% pounding annual growth rate all that means 16% every year which may not sound like a ton at least it didn't for when I first looked at it but when you look at the way that it grows and it's compounding by 2030 it'll be roughly four times the market size that it is today so that's really important for us to understand because if we're starting a business in e-commerce and say if we had like an index fund of e-commerce businesses we could just do nothing and expect that by this time 6 years from now our business will have grown by 4X now that's assuming that you know we maintain and you know we don't shrink or anything but that's a really good boat to be in is one where the river is heavily flowing in the direction that you want to be going to begin with then the next piece of data for us to look at is we know that e-commerce is growing but within that there's a lot of different categories like there's everything from groceries to pet products to Beauty to Fashion what's the best category for us to be getting involved with well when we look at the top 10 e-commerce categories by sales we have electronics and gadgets fashion apparel Health and Beauty home and kitchen groceries books and media toys and games Auto Parts Sports and Outdoors and pet supplies and then sorted by growth rate groceries is growing at 16.6% electronics and gadgets 15.5 fashion 14 12 for home and kitchen so on now the number one spot there is taken by groceries which is at 16.6% and then putting sales and growth velocity aside for a second if we were to break down these each of these categories of like what's low price point or like low upfront cost required how fast are we able to create new products which ones are brand dominated and then which ones are in a growing industry obviously they're all in a growing industry they're all in e-commerce these are all growing verticals but then the ones that are pretty heavily brand dominated and then the ones that actually allow us to like iterate on products quickly and cost effectively and that are reasonably priced and like are easy for us to enter it really brings it down to fashion and books and media if you remember back to this slide where top 10 Ecom categories groceries was the number one category growing at 16.6% well when we look at the global print on demand Market it is currently growing at 25.8% we are here right now in 2024 about to be in 2025 and we are going here so again while a compounding annual growth rate of 25% which we were looking at the US One previously but now globally 25% it's going to be about 4X by the year 2030 and that's just over a period of 6 years and this is not just corroborated by One Source there are tons of different reports that all corroborate the same thing print on demand is growing and it is alive and well and it has never been a better time to start a print on demand business from a growth point of view so now that's great we know that print on demand is a grow we know that e-commerce is growing we know that print on demand is growing awesome what do we actually do with that well if we look deeper I'm glad you asked what we do with that is we look at these key quotes next so the growing preference of customers towards using t-shirts or other apparel to support a cause or deliver a message is expected to contribute to the high growth of this segment so looking under the hood a little bit more what are we seeing out into the world and does this validate or disprove what we're seeing in the data are we seeing like more graphic t-shirts and more people wearing graphic designs than ever before and when I tell you this you're not going to be able on to see it look at the shirts of every person next time you walk down the street you will be shocked at the number of graphic t-shirts like Etsy designs that are being worn by Everyday People everything from flowers to jokes to history tees I've actually seen a few people wearing our shirts in public before which is pretty cool but anyway point being there is a growing trend of people wanting to wear products that support a cause and are a expression of thems in one way or another and that combined with fast fashion which is basically people are not anymore just buying like one or two like really nice shirts and like having them for years and years like we used to now people are buying new shirts and products all the time every month and they're wearing it through them all the time so there's a growing demand or like my personal theory on it which is just my theory is that as people have become more isolated like after covid and like the loneliness epidemic not even getting into anything political it's just like people are feeling more isolated than ever we could say it's from social media or whatever doesn't really matter fact of matter is that people are feeling more lonely and I think that loneliness leads to people wanting a form of communication and like self-expression more than ever and so it's one that kind of validates what we're seeing and it makes sense but two you know fashion trends just also change over time but three it's just kind of a nice thing for us to know that like we're actually able to make a difference for people and that we're not just selling T-shirts and we'll talk a lot more about that like with branding and stuff but we're really not selling T-shirts what you are selling is what's on the shirt how it makes people feel like the laughs that they get out of their friends and family but anyway that aside back to the research looking at at the products that we could sell graphic design shirts segment held the largest market share and account for more than 57% of global Revenue 2022 and unisex and women's t-shirts becoming increasingly popular and all this really says it sums it up well here that this reflects the changing preference and attitudes towards fashion comfort and self-expression so this is the Golden Nugget this is why print on demand and when your friends and family ask like why you print on man why are you selling T-shirts and everyone thinks like oh you have a t-shirt business that's only from like people who just don't understand people that don't understand that there's a legitimate underlying Market or like business reason for us entering this if you look at the market in general people are there's more need and pent up demand for this kind of stuff than ever before and the data backs up a realistic expectation being that this is going to continue for the next 5 10 years I know print on man has been popular like popularized in the past several years on YouTube which it can be easy to start to feel like you're in an echo chamber of like oh May I'm seeing all this PR Dem man stuff that I haven't started May maybe I missed the boat looking at the data you can see that like print on in yes while it's grown and it's become more popular on a percentage basis over the past couple of years the actual growth in terms of net customers is going to compound exponentially over the next six years so it has never been a better time to start a e-commerce business or print on demand and then within that T-shirts because the global t-shirt printing Market is $4.3 billion that do of 2022 and if you look at the US print on demand Market again in 2022 the breakdown is is that it is majority apparel and this is answering the question of like okay we know e-commerce we know print on man what should we sell now there's apparel there's home decore there's drink wear accessories a ton of different categories we want to go after the category me personally I want to go after the category that I know has the line share of people in it and that brings us to apparel and there's a lot of different like specific attributes in there that makes apparel good so let's answer that question why t-shirts well the T-shirt Market makes up $4.3 billion in global sales and it is one of the most popular PR on man categories in short people buy a lot of t-shirts and the reason for that is that people buy the average person I think owns about 10 it's other 10 or 11 shirts and they are extremely giftable and they are consumable meaning that people wear through them like after you wash a shirt for the 10th time it's looking a little bit worse for wear than it did when he bought it so you have people buying a lot of these things they are great sizes for shipping like it's not like you're selling a toaster oven where you got to ship worry about big boxes a lot of logistical headaches it's compact you can fit it in a poly mailer which makes it perfect for an e-commerce product simple to ship and it's consumable people wear through them so they're buying more of them they can give them out as gifts it's a very easy gift to give and for us in our own interest of building a brand not a print on demand store we're building a brand they are extremely easy for us to customize and stand out in a crowded market so unlike Drop Shipping where you are basically just white labeling the same stuff as all the other sellers you have the ability to create something truly unique and special because the way that it works is that we make the designs and then we advertise it as a digital product like before there's even like a printed version of it we advertise that digital representation of it so like I I can literally go into Cana right now and make a t-shirt export it take it over to printify put it up on my store and get feedback from the market instantly in the past in order for us to validate ideas and create something unique I had to come up with the idea then go do a global search for a supplier manufacturer who is able to meet the quality standards the customizations that I wanted and then make samples and that process alone can take months then by the time I finally get it there's a very good chance that the product that I actually end up getting is not what I had in mind and so then I have a decision to make of do I actually want to continue with this product or should I make iterations do I just want to launch it tough decisions every step of the way and then once say I do another round it's four months then I go and Market it and see do people actually want this and if people do want it then it's like great then I have to go and order an inventory run and there's even more months so from the time that it takes us to go from idea to actually launching to scaling is like 6 to 9 months there's ways you can speed it up but in general it used to take that long opposed to literal minutes with print on demand and all of that whole supply chain is just for one product print on demand it's instant so again friends or family ask why does it make sense explain that to them make their mind Boggle then you get back to your dinner so that's why we sell t-shirts but that's not to say that there aren't other products you can be successful with within print onut demand absolutely not so you can start with any product I just recommend getting good at one product because what people miss a lot of times is the fact that when you're designing for t-shirts it is very different than designing for a mug than for a canvas for different wall art and I see too many sellers start with like five t-shirts five canvases oh I have some wall art I got some metal signs or whatever and they think that the differentiation in their catalog is what's going to make them successful when in fact it is actually doing the exact opposite it is watering down their skill level at each one of the product types and the quick metaphor for that is like if you learn from an artist like how to make like pencil sketches and you take that skill set that you learn you make a ton of pencil sketches and then you just start doing watercolor and you try to just do it the exact same way you did with the pencil sketches it's completely different skill my grandmother is exceptionally good at artwork so I've gotten to see her work over the years and it's amazing what she can do across a variety of different art styles but she had to work at each one of those in order to become proficient she doesn't just take what she learns about watercolor then try to apply it to a completely different art form those different art forms those are different products and so focusing on one product type is not just smart from a overall collection and look and feel perspective but it's also from the standpoint of you are building a skill set and keeping that in mind so all that being said focus on one product I don't care if it's t-shirts just make sure it's one that has a lot of demand and you're not just picking something at random out of your head just cuz you think it'd be cool to sell it make sure that there's actual real case studies and examples of people having Success New sellers having success selling those products and if there is great awesome try it out and just focus on one product do not try to catch two birds at one stone two birds at one stone yeah don't try to catch two birds with a stone they wouldn't like that anyway quick side note the top 1% of print on demand stores add 2600 products per year that comes out to about 7.1 designs per day so if you're doing t-shirts which is what we talk about what we recommend and the only reason I'm doing all of the this is not just because I did some market research and found like some graphs that back it up but we're actively doing it and have been doing it for years and years and we're seeing it work our students are seeing it work so all of that is obviously implied this is just designed to give you a more objective like thirdparty point of view of what we're looking at so seven designs a day keeps the 9 to5 away next up is the question of where should we be selling so we know e-commerce we know print on demand we know t-shirts or pick one other specific product type then the next natural question is where should I get started selling should I do Etsy should I do merch by Amazon should I do Shopify obviously plot twist you already know we're talking about Shopify in this course but why is the real question and aside from the fact that we're able to build it into an asset that we actually sell and like all those other benefits that come with it what are the market factors that also indicate that this is a good idea and I'm also going to share some anecdotal stories of why Shopify in a second so just to recap difference between Etsy and Shopify fundamentally different Etsy is a Marketplace on a marketpl you do not have a business just calling a spade a spade you have cash flow you do not have a business because no business could could just be Thanos snapped overnight and go bye-bye that's not a business that's cash flow that's just a other business allowing you through their own Grace and Goodwill to continue having business through them but that is not your business that is their business so that's fundamentally different so that's one piece and if that's not enough the second piece is that they own all of your cash flow that's how you know that it's not a business and that they own you and this is not me saying that Etsy is terrible or like nobody should do it people still make money on Etsy and I think there's still something to be said but those are the big differences and when we're building on Shopify it's not even building a Shopify store I think that confuses people Shopify is just like the tools to make our own Standalone site that's all that it is it's like instead of us custom coding our own site Shopify is just giving us like pre-built pages but we could still take all that custom code and launch it on our own and we still have the same exact business overnight so Shopify is a tool Etsy is a Marketplace tool Marketplace big difference so all that being said it sounds great just using tools sounds like the smarter more logical thing to do but if Etsy was booming and say to use crazy numbers say there's a trillion dollars in sales on Etsy per day and there's only one seller I would be saying screw everything else let's all go sell on Etsy so obviously that's beyond extreme example so the other end of it would be if there was 1 billion Sellers and only one customer then literally nobody would be doing it so the question is where are we in between and what I would say is based on the data or I won't tell you my take let's take a look first so let's first look at the number of active buyers on Etsy and the reason that I want to go through this is I want to stop hearing the messages cuz it makes me feel sad of people who work for months and months and years on an Etsy or merch by Amazon business and then overnight they get an email from Etsy or merch by Amazon and their whole business goes away and we're hearing this more and more people that worked really hard in their business they put like their hopes and dreams and like they have a lot writing on it and it sucks hearing stories like that cuz there's nothing you can do like if you get an account suspension on an account that you've just invested the last years or 6 months to a year of your life into and there's no recourse that just sucks so if there's a way that we can save people for going that down that path and having that same experience let's do it so active buyers on Etsy so the two things we're looking at and let's look at our fancy schmancy Supply demand curves and this is my economical wisdom from my 2.88 GPA economics undergrad not a brag but supply and demand curve it's the most simple graph this is one of the graphs I actually did well with is when Supply surpasses the demand then there has has to be something that gives and that thing that gives is price so what we're looking at in these charts is what is the supply demand comes from the buyers Supply comes from the sellers so let's first start with this demand so active buyers on Etsy in 2019 it was 46 million in millions 46 million and the buyer to seller ratio is 17 to one meaning for every one seller there was 17 buyers and in 2020 Co year skyrocketed they had 76% more buyers they went up to 82 million 18.7% buyer to seller ratio 2021 177% increase then 2022 negative 1.3 they had less buyers on the platform than the previous year and in 2023 they had 1.5% increase so they pretty much flatlined and you notice down here the buyer to seller ratio went from 17 to 10 it almost cut in half let's not be dramatic it dropped by 60% 70% roughly from 2019 to 2023 that's not good but now let's see why it's not good so this is the demand demand is roughly flatlining now the piece that's not factored in here is these same number of buyers could magically you know hit the lottery and they all start buying two to three times as much but we know all averages that's most likely not the case so we can assume roughly the same amount being spent now let's take a look at the number of active sellers this is the concerning part is 2022 or 2020 61% increase 2021 72% increase 2022 it's flatlined 2023 pick back up 21% increase in new buyers and this comes straight from Etsy like financial reporting so 21% increase in sellers Flatline new buyers so back over to our supply demand curve so there is demand is staying relatively the same but the suppliers the amount of Supply or competition is increasing so it's shifting to the right when the demand curve stays the same the thing that has to give is price this is what we call commoditization or AKA erase to the bottom and so as there are more people selling on Etsy than never before and the same number of buyers you're going to just continually run into this but unfortunately it gets worse than that because this is Rost from somebody breaking down their etsy's 2023 Financial reports and he paints it in an even more gruesome light basically etsy's gross merchandise sales dropped by approximately 200 million from the previous year I'll give you the tldr is that Etsy as a business made more money but etsy's sellers made less money so Etsy as a business as the marketplace the mall made more money they're more profitable but the sellers the stores within the mall are making less money now why would that be well one there's a lot more sellers so that's good for Etsy two Etsy has increased their prices and there's nothing that the sellers can do about that imagine that that like you're in a mall you've invested all your time building your nice little store within it and then the mall just comes along and doubles your rent and also to take the metaphor further you have a non-transferable store so you can't go anywhere else like if you go somewhere else you lose your entire business sucks with more sellers entering the market overall sales declining and increase in expenses related to ads and Marketplace fees the path to profitability seems to be narrowing all that being said Etsy there's still money to be made there's still an opportunity there but it's just me personally and everything we say from personal experience the way that I look at this and think about it is that if I am going to invest the next several years of my life or five years of my life into an opportunity I want to make sure that opportunity is going to be growing by the fifth year I don't want it to think that there's a chance that despite my best efforts it could completely shrink and it would all be left to nothing that just makes sense to me now part of the reason that there's that big challenge with Etsy and the number of sellers is this is barriers to entry and this is a generic infographic but barriers to entry are good things in a way and I think when people think of Shopify and print on man they think oh that's tough and they see that as just a straight up bad thing and I hear that I'm like why is that bad that's keeping out the competition that's keeping out all the people that are currently flooding into Etsy and making it like a hostile environment for sellers that's because there's no buried entry it's never been easier to like click a button and launch a listing and on Shopify we don't have that on Shopify you have to learn like real business skills like you have to learn how to or you get to learn reframe our wording you get to learn how to Market your products you get to learn how to make your own website you get to learn how to look at data outside of just like what Etsy Graces us with you have to look at all this data and learn how to interpret it and build it into your own brand and you get to build an asset that you're able to sell someday if you want or you're able to just build it into like a Lifestyle brand like there's so many different Avenues and I see barriers to entry as a good thing because that's the price that other people are not willing to pay and that's exactly why like I'll be successful and they won't now obviously there's a cap out point like I want to pay the barried entry prices that I'm able to pay myself I would not just go say like oh I'm going to go start a I don't know Bitcoin mining company CU there's big barrier to entry you need to buy all the mining Rigs and figure out how to set up like the infrastructure I know nothing about that and it requires a lot of upfront Capital to be successful so it's relative to my own skill level and resources that I bring to the table primarily experience or ability to learn capital and time like those are the biggest ones so as long as I'm able to meet the needs or the requirements to be successful in the business then I love buried entry and the next piece is that the buried entry is with Shopify and print on man like we've talked about like we have the website we drive traffic from Facebook and then we follow up with people through email so traffic products fill by printify or another print provider website email there it is that's the business and the misconception a lot of people have is that Facebook ad costs have been getting more expensive in climbing like exponentially and I think I'll be the first to admit even I thought this at the back of my mind just because I had heard it so many times then when I actually looked at the data it's not true the average Facebook CPM and here's a chart the average Facebook CPM which is cost per thousand impression roughly just how much we're paying for our ads has stayed pretty much the same since January of 2021 if you look at like for example conversions that's the one that we care about that's like purchase conversions if you look here started out at $13 or $14 now here it is as of October of 24 it's the same if not slightly less so it's just not true that Facebook ads have gotten more expensive and again I even would have believed that before and then the other thing that we use is email marketing which to me I get annoyed at getting a bunch of emails I never buy from an email I shouldn't say that I buy sometimes but I'm not actively in there like oh opening all my emails and buying stuff A lot of people do like this is revenue and billion email still works better than any other form of marketing email marketing Revenue worldwide from 2022 to 2032 so this is projections but 9.7 billion up from 8.3 billion in 2023 up from 7 billion in 22 and it's expected to continue to compound so the preconceived notion that Shopify is hard because Facebook ads are expensive and then you have to like then email marketing but does email even really work we just disproved or proved respectively in using data that it works and that's why we are doing what we do this also validates what we're seeing in our own business what our students are seeing in their businesses is that this stuff works there's numbers to back it up does not mean that there's not challenges and stuff along the way there definitely are but here's all the sources reference as well but all that being said we know that e-commerce is a great is growing as a market we see that there is more demand than ever for print on man products and that's expected to continue over the next decade we see that people are buying more t-shirts and not just buying t-shirts they're specifically buying graphic apparel because it's a form of self-expression and individuality that my personal Theory doesn't even matter but because the data shows that it's true but my personal theory is that the why behind that is that it's people are looking for a form of self- expression and like communication now more than ever and then within that we know where are we going to launch this business we could do Etsy bunch of marketplaces we see that one two Avenues one Avenue by all outward signs is crumbling and not just from the data but anecdotally I hear all the time from people so what I was saying was paining me so much hear all the time from people that they are launching or they worked hard on an Etsy store merched by Amazon and then after six months they got banned or after a year they got banned and they have nothing now they're coming over to Shopify trying to rebuild TR to rebuild their confidence post though on the other side Shopify you never hear about banss there is no ban because it's a tool Shopify is a tool it's not a Marketplace so we know that the path to success based on this data and this is all subject to your own opinion it's why we're sharing it so you fundamentally understand it is Shopify building your own brand within e-commerce for products that people are actively buying and showing signs they going to buy more of in the future and t-shirts is one of the best ways to get started with that because it's extremely giftable people wear through them they buy about 10 of them at a time we're able to create unique products that really stand out in the market and there's so many different avenues for expansion and growth which is beyond the scope of this lesson but thank you for watching I hope you've enjoyed this I hope you reflect on this and internalize it so that when you get asked the questions like why are you doing this business why are you just doing t-shirts like I got asked so many times I don't think anybody thought that I had a like even my friends and family didn't think I had a real business when they knew I was selling t-shirts until I sold them and then when they saw like the articles about the exit then they're like oh okay so you have a real business so you're going to get those questions a lot you just can't care you just don't care and also know running through the filter of like when people cast judgment they're really like looking at a mirror of themselves and if they see you doing more than them then they're going to naturally try to tear you down cuz it's easier to blow up a building than to build your own but anyways thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson [Music] hi everybody and welcome to Stage 1.2 where we are going to go through everything related to researching your Niche at this point in the course you are at stage one where we go through everything research related and specifically in this section we are going to go through researching for your KNE Now by this point you should have the right mindset to be starting this print on man Journey foundations you went through cleaning your desk getting your mindset right and really being able to synthesize and prepare yourself to be starting a journey of starting a business because it's not easy starting a business is pretty hard you should have an understanding of the print on demand business model by having this kind of quick overview and understanding of exactly how the business model works it's going to make it a lot easier to kind of take in each of these steps and really break it down and keep that 10,000 fot View and lastly you should be ready to identify and research niches that you can potentially use for your own brand by the end of this lesson you're going to be able to identify research and select a few niches for yourself to pursue and two you should have a short list of potential niches meeting the key criteria that we're going to go through in this section so why picking the right Niche matters we want to be attracting a target audience and build a brand identity this is very different from kind of the Etsy Amazon Marketplace idea that I guess most people have in their mind we don't want you know as we say a Chinese gift shop or like a Walmart where we're selling every product we are selling in every Niche and we're trying to have a market size of like the entire United States we really want to have a specific Niche so we can attract a targeted audience and get people to our site that are more likely to buy two we want to avoid comp Heating in oversaturated markets and we also want to avoid going into too narrow markets or niching too far down and lastly we want to create a solid foundation for our business by kind of setting the scene and having a niche this is going to allow us to already start building our brand giving our brand a voice and helping to figure out the designs that we are going to pursue within this Niche so what makes a great Niche the size multiple angles to test as well as engagement so what exactly do I mean by size and why Size Matters we want to have a large enough audience that there is demand so we want to make sure that our Niche is Broad enough but at the same time we also want to make sure that we're not niching too far down and our Market size is way too small this is going to make it really tough to find the right people to shop we also want to be able to find a specific enough Niche to engage a focused audience which then leads us into multiple angles to test why is this important why is versatility key it's going to allow us to experiment with themes and designs and it's also going to help us refine the approach based on what our audience likes so what do I mean by this we can use the example of the sports Niche so there are hundreds of different sports I mean there's winter sports you can think of the Winter Olympics you've got ice skating you have snowboarding skiing you have L like it can go on and on and then that's not even including the summer ones where there's baseball basketball gymnastics soccer running you name it you can take the niche of sports and really run with it in 15 different directions so this is actually good especially at the beginning when we are testing and we're trying to find what's going to work within our Niche and for our brand having these different angles to test and not immediately just saying I'm going to specifically just focus on baseball we can kind of have a plethora of different sports designs and kind of get an idea for which designs and specifically which area of the niche has the most engagement and the most people kind of coming to our store and buying this allows us to make quick moves about our store and really refine our design process finally engagement we want a passionate and active Community this is super important when it comes to our advertising something that we can do in order to kind of see if this Niche is right for us or not is by looking for Facebook groups and Instagram Pages really finding people who are passionate about this area this way we can hopefully join these Pages or these groups and kind of figure out like how can we Market to them how can we make designs that people in this Niche would like what are they passionate about what are they talking about this is a great way of collecting data that we can then put into our design process as well as into our Brand's voice if there's High interest in this Niche it increases the likelihood of purchases which is always great the next thing that we would do is then run a bumper sticker test what exactly is a bumper sticker test you know when you're driving along and you see you know I guess the classic car that I think of is like the Subaru that has like all the stickers and all the bumper stickers on the back and people who are willing to put a bumper sticker on their car because they're so passionate about something are people who we want to be marketing to and people that we know will buy from our store in our brand if you're out walking around take a look at what people have on their cars or another great test would be looking at different tattoos that people have if they are permanently putting that ink on their body and it's a soccer ball or a football just using the sports Niche that is proof to us that there are people that are passionate about that Niche and that is a good Niche that we can then look farther into and kind of see if we can make something of it we want to keep our Niche simple and memorable for example I love fishing versus humorous vintage fly fishing enthusiasts in Ohio this is taking a broad Niche and then versus a very niched down Niche so we want to keep it broad of Just Fishing and then from there we can go humorous fishing serious fishing fly fishing deep sea fishing there's a lot of different angles that then we can approach within that Niche simple messaging AIDS branding and marketing keeping this simple Niche messaging throughout our Brand's voice will be really helpful especially when it comes to our advertising and more importantly our email marketing so let's get into Niche research the first thing that we're going to do is brainstorm ideas with chat gbt from there we can generate easily 10 to 15 potential niches and you also may have some niches in your mind as well feel free to put them in on that list three we'll then refine all those options down to five options that are more of a good fit for you ones that maybe you're more passionate about yourself you find yourself in that Niche yourself then we can validate ideas on marketplaces such as Etsy and Amazon the fifth step would then be using Amazon Pinterest Google and Etsy to really dig a little bit deeper into this Niche make sure there are people that are selling within this Niche because that for us validates our Niche and lets us know that there is enough of a demand for us to approach this Niche and finally we want to look for signs of demand which kind of were just talking about and avoiding trademarks the last thing that we want to do is pick let's say the video game Niche and then just completely rip off a bunch of Nintendo designs that's not good that's going to end up getting us in trouble we want to avoid that at all costs and let me tell you you absolutely do not need to be taking any kind of trademarked anything because we can sell without that so let's get into a screen share and we'll go through all of this so the first thing that we're going to want to do is go to chat gbt and start a brand new chat from there we want to ask and try to be as specific as possible I'm interested in starting a print on demand t-shirt store what is a list of 20 potential niches that I could sell in I want the niches to be a good siiz 10 million plus potential buyers and from there Chachi BT is going to spit out 20 different niches that we could potentially sell in so as you can see they pick some Lifestyle Fitness pet lovers Outdoor Adventures gaming music Foodies mental health awareness self-care empowerment funny sarcastic sayings TV and movie lovers Book Lovers teachers and Educators healthcare workers Tech enthusiasts entrepreneurs and then we get into hobbies and interests like traveling collecting car enthusiasts crafting and DIY now I'm going to ask would a seasonal t-shirt brand or a seasonal T-Shirt Company be a good Niche and from there chbt is going to give us some advantages and also some challenges so it's also great to continue asking Chachi BT different questions about potential niches that you're going to go into get the pros get the cons you can even ask like different angles to approach the niche in like strategies that could potentially make it work and this is a great way to just continue to flush out your research process for niches so not only do I have seasonal t-shirts that I can make depending on the season but then I'll also have different holidays that I can run promotions around I can have seasonal fun fun also have some cultural moments or patriotic holidays so this Niche is definitely big enough and it's going to give us plenty of room to test and see if it's going to work out best for us so the next thing that you're going to want to do is go to Google and we can do a simple Google search just of more Niche ideas we can kind of see if chubbt missed anything or maybe we'll come across something that kind of seems like more of a better fit for us so as you can see there's a lot of different blogs that are out there there are different YouTube videos you can continue kind of digging deeper into this or just simply read some of the blogs and see what printify specifically since they're a print on demand company what they're saying compare that to some of your findings that you're getting with chat gbt Google Etsy Etc and as you can see they kind of have similar ideas as Chachi BT holidays and special occasions is one that's really big so that's great that's the niche that I'm leaning towards specifically for the course and then you can also kind of go down rabbit holes and go on Reddit and read different blogs and you know see what other people are saying out there maybe they tried selling in a niche and they're giving really good you know feedback as to what you can how to tailor towards it or things to avoid specifically all that stuff is important and good to know about and always remember to check out Facebook pages Instagram Pages just because you know it's not shown here in the screen share it's definitely an important step this is something that Eric one of our coaches at we skill he did this with one of his Brands it was kind of an army army related military type of brand and he was out there looking at these Pages for spouses of military personnel and kind of seeing you know getting an idea of what designs people would would buy from so it's a great way to tap into that Niche and to look a little bit deeper and get even more research so next we'll go over to Etsy and we can just kind of do a simple search of exactly what we're going to be selling for the case of this course we are going to be selling T-shirts we always suggest starting with t-shirts but if you don't want to start with t-shirts just start with one single product and from there we can just kind of see what are some of the top sellers what are people interested in you know what shirts have what sellers have the most reviews or are they you know star sellers because if they're star sellers they probably have some pretty decent designs they're probably uh you know selling a good amount of t-shirts or selling a good amount of designs so it's good to take a look and kind of dig in and see what are some different niches on Etsy that I can look at and tap into also it's important as you're going through and doing Niche research keep an eye out for designs that catch your eye and designs that you can kind of tweak to fit your Niche so it doesn't always have to be a niche specific shirt that we are like looking at for inspiration we can be looking at any any of these top designs and be thinking how can I tweak this to work for by Niche next we can go to Pinterest and click explore and then we can type in graphic t-shirts graphic designs we can even search stickers by doing this we can get a really good idea again of other bestselling designs see what people are you know pinning to their Pages a lot of these are clearly ads because they have you know the price point on it but but overall this gives us a really good idea of you know colored shirts that people are buying designs that people are buying I would say Pinterest is definitely a little bit more trendy kind of fits more street style type of designs but there's definitely some good ones in here like that Bagels design that could be something good that we could tweak towards our Niche or even that Texas howdy shirt um you know we could definitely make some tweaks to that and get some good ideas for our Niche now that marry and bright that could work really well for our seasonal designs especially as we are going into winter there's a Merry Christmas design Peaches I mean there are tons and tons and tons of designs out there easily distracted by plants that is a great design that we can then tweak for pretty much any Niche easily distracted by soccer balls if you're in you know the sports Niche easily distracted by butterflies easily distracted by birds I mean you can take it even funny like easily distracted by squirrels I mean squirrels are easily distracted by things as well so that's definitely something that's going through my mind as I'm looking for you know the validation in the niche that I'm selecting I'm also kind of getting into that momentum of looking for designs that I could kind of tweak and and add for for my own Niche and again just looking kind of more specific into winter graphic t-shirts since those are going to be the designs that I'm focusing on right off the bat for a more seasonal type of Niche and you can be bouncing around I pretty much will just continue typing in kind of random slogans or random design ideas to see what's out there I'll pop on to Etsy Pinterest I'll look at Amazon I'll go back to you know Google I'll look all over the place specifically with the different Niche ideas that I'm researching so I never typically just like pick a niche and just run with it I'll pick a few and then Chris and and I will each kind of go through do some research and see which Niche kind of resonates better with us the designs you know that we're seeing and we think that would do really well in Facebook ads these are things that that we're constantly looking at we just want to make sure that the market is a big enough size that you know the niche is Broad but that it can also be niched down even more that's definitely something that's really important as you're you know going through things and then also we have Valentine's Day coming up so not only is it important to be thinking getting a store up thinking about just maybe Christmas designs or winter designs but also thinking down the line they may not be the first designs that I'm going after but you know the next big holiday after Christmas is Valentine's Day so is there something for that next holiday that I would potentially be able to sell are there ideas even within Valentine's Day that I can tweak towards Christmas Etc it's kind of broadening just your thinking in general as you're going through all of this this researching and finally we'll take a look at Amazon and see some of the top graphic design t-shirts that are selling there specifically when it comes to Amazon I'm looking at reviews because that tells me that that person has been selling a lot of designs a lot of people have purchased it I mean look at that one three over 3,000 reviews I mean that's crazy again we aren't going to take anything that's trademarked which that one is trademarked but there's definitely good designs out there I mean that feeling Goods te has almost 5500 reviews um and that was nothing that was trademarked so it's definitely good to find things that have a lot of reviews that means that the Market's there there's a demand people are looking for it and also looking at you know Etsy star sellers clearly they're selling a good amount of that t-shirt so and that design so it's important to look at that and really break down exactly why are people interested in that why are they buying that design in the first place and then from there you know we'll go and Niche down a little bit we'll look at seasonal inspired t-shirts we could look at Christmas t-shirts we could look at Valentine's Day t-shirts if you're in the sports Niche look at basketball look at soccer look at tennis pickle ball and then from there we can kind of start creating you know an inspiration folder of all those kinds of designs that we can tweak for all those different areas of the niche a lot of Thanksgiving ones thankful pumpkins happy fall y'all it's good to start picking up on some of those sayings fall Vibes we could tweak that to Winter Vibes snow Vibes this is all stuff that's really important and great as we're researching I mean that pumpkin shirt that one was so good you know how many Jackal Lantern shirts do you see but then it has the leopard print glasses you know the tree with the birds flying away that's something that we could use for the seasonal Niche we can maybe tweak that to having no leaves and just being branches for the fall and the birds flying out you know there's a bunch of different angles that we can do and it's really important as you're going through digging into these niches trying to validate that market it's important to kind of be thinking outside of the box before selecting your Niche it is always important to do the research first approach and this isn't going to be the first time that you see this saying we always always always want to be going back to our research and have that initially guide us through kind of where we're going with not only our Niche but also our brand we want to be looking at top designs that are selling top sellers that are selling designs that have the best reviews that's all stuff that is super important and that we want to be using to really guide us into the area that we're going to take our brand so we'll research before doing any designing this way we align our designs with proven audience interests and now there hundreds of thousands of designs out there and it doesn't mean that we are just going to copy paste exactly what these designs have but we can pull inspiration from those designs that are already selling within our Niche and we can make tweaks and get creative and create a brand new design based off of that inspiration this also will then avoid wasting efforts on designs that we don't know if there's demand for or not it's always you know good to be testing things at every single stage but we don't want to just be going in blind and just going well I hope that this sells I hope that this Niche is good I hope that this design is good typically you'll end up testing and it probably isn't going to turn out as great as you had it in your mind it's always good to test absolutely keep testing but always go back and research and find what people are interested in what they're looking for what they're searching for what they're buying so what are some broader Niche examples fishing yoga hiking Outdoors coffee travel Hobbies regions I mean think of the different states think of cities think of national parks now you can't use national park because that's copyrighted but you can use like the towns that those parks are in you can have a mountain range like the mountain range isn't trademark so those are all really good kind of ideas that we can use and Broad enough niches that then we can definitely Niche down if needed Sports is another one seasonal it's always a great idea as well if you are a part of that Niche we saw with history teas this was huge for us Chris and I never would have thought of ever having a history store but we ran that store with Chris's dad and he is so passionate about history we were able to make we found a design that did really well we found a strategy that did really well and specifically within the history Niche and from there because Chris's dad had such knowledge of History we could really take the ideas from that top selling design and we were were able to put that into multiple designs we were able to pull from different areas of history and kind of have like a similar joke or a similar kind of sarcastic tone and that's really what ended up building our our best collection our bestselling collection so being a part of the niche is great you are a buyer you know the audience because you're part of the audience you know what kind of shirt would you want to wear if your friends are a part of the niche like what kind of shirt would they buy or what product or saying on a mug would would they want to have you know in their home so always being a part of the niche is really helpful and I think will end up serving you better than really not being interested in the niche because if you're not passionate for it you're probably going to lose interest in it pretty quickly especially if you aren't seeing the results that you want to see so what are the key takeaways of this section of researching your Niche the first remember Size Matters we want to have multiple angles to test and we definitely want engaged people within our Niche two we want to use the bumper sticker test and the tattoo test we want to be out there seeing what are people interested in would they even like my Niche are there people out there that would potentially buy three we want to brainstorm and use chat gbt validate on our marketplaces we want to be out there we want to research we want to look and make sure that there are people out there that want to buy it that there's designs out there in that Niche we want to make sure that this Niche is Broad and definitely not too niched down and and finally we always want to research before designing we always want to research before picking a niche we want to validate all of this stuff prior to putting any of our time or effort into the rest of it so now it's time for you to take action you definitely want to start your research today go on chat GPT quickly search and kind of see what are some niches that maybe you're passionate about and that you fall into make a short list you know start researching those different niches go through all the marketplaces and see what's out there two prepare your Shir list of potential niches again kind of just narrowing it down maybe to five different niches for you to research and see which one you're more passionate about see which one you would prefer designing in if you're let's say you're a woman and you're really into Lily pzer then the flower Niche may be better for you than like Gothic dark humor you may enjoy designing those designs more so definitely keep that in mind as you're going through and you know keeping a list of those niches and finally use the checklist that is linked below to help you follow along every single step of the course this checklist is absolutely crazy following along will definitely keep you organized and make sure that you are doing enough research and digging deep enough to finding your winning Niche I hope that as you've gone through this section you've learned a lot more about researching your Niche and you're excited to get started and researching niches that you may pursue [Music] hi everybody and welcome to Stage 1.3 where we are going to go through everything that you need to be doing for design research at this point in the course you at stage one where we cover everything research related to getting your print on demand brand started and in this specific section we are going to go through everything research design related your progress so far in the course you should have already chosen your Niche if you're still up in the air completely okay looking and doing some design research can actually help to narrow down that Niche and figure out exactly what you want to be selling in two you want to have completed the initial research on customer preferences within your different niches have an understanding of what people are looking for in your specific Niche and finally you should be ready to create a mockup and design library or inspiration folder of different designs that then we can tap into to later once we get to the design phase that way we are never stuck kind of thinking uh oh what should I design next by the end of this lesson you will be able to identify key elements of high quality mockups and Designs get a good idea of some bestselling designs start to get an eye for designs that should do well in ads designs that can do well for your Niche second you'll have an understanding of how to generate 100 plus designs and why we want to be designing 100 plus designs right off the bat and why that is so important in your journey and finally we want to create a solid foundation for your business your designs are absolutely everything so why exactly does this step matter why does design research matter at all designs are the aspect of print on demand it's really the only thing that matters putting out high quality good designs think you know when we talk about print on demand when you ask people you know what's the product that you're selling and so many times it'll be well I'm selling T-shirts or I'm selling mugs or I'm selling canvases whatever it may be our product goes a layer deeper than just I'm selling T-shirts really the thing that is making our t-shirts stand out or our mugs Stand Out is the design that is on that product we want to be creating designs that people can't find anywhere else that they can't find in a Target that they can't go to Etsy and find that exact design we want to be standing out and we want to have a brand and a nich of multiple designs for somebody who's so passionate in that area that they'll want to buy multiples of our shirts or multiples of our mugs or whatever product you would like to be selling but designing is absolutely the most important step and probably the thing that you're going to spend the most time on and the most time researching because it's so important and it's what's going to build that brand identity for us so how will I make designs and mockups it's a great great question there are definitely tools out there that we can use and utilize and you should definitely take time to research in this section because the last thing that we want to do is you know go out get a ton of inspiration and then have no idea what we're going to do next with all of those designs so some of the different tools that you can utilize we can use DIY tools like canva and Photoshop professional designers we can go out on you know Fiverr or upwork and actually hire designer who will help us get all of these designs across the finish line and finally we have ai image generators like mid Journey Mystic pod and chachy BT now DIY tools are probably going to be your cheapest option and it's probably the option that's going to require the most work and the most effort Pros totally customizable lowcost and tons of templates out there that we can use and utilize to quickly go through our design process cons it does require time and it does require some skills you know if you're somebody who's not Super Creative you may struggle with using some of these DIY design tools professional designers this is probably going to be the most expensive option now there's definitely ways to make it cheaper we can hire designers from outside of the us we can negotiate our price we can negotiate the number of designs that they're going to create for us for a certain amount of money there's definitely ways that you know we can make this a little bit more cost effective but because the fact that we are going to utilize somebody else's time and their skills it is going to cost us a a little more than us doing this ourselves so the pros we get high quality designs tailored designs based off of our visions and it definitely saves a lot of time because we aren't the ones who are then designing we're really doing more research coming up with ideas that then we can pass off to designers for them to bring to life and some cons definitely expensive for 100 plus designs if you're somebody who has a bare budget put towards you know starting this business then yeah designers can be a great way to just kind of getting your brand up and running as quickly as possible and finally we have ai design tools like Mystic print on demand this is going to kind of be in the middle area depending on how much you're using to generate Pros Balance cost fast and definitely professional results cons AI is definitely still improving it's not perfect yet and it may need some tweaks so you may get a design and you're like oh my gosh I really like it it's almost there but something could just be off for example maybe it's an animal and you have like the animal holding a drink sometimes AI will give like the animal a hand holding the drink and then like another hand off the side that's just an example so sometimes takes a few iterations you have to keep going back trying different prompts till you get exactly what you're looking for but AI tools are so fast and it's you know kind of crazy the outputs that AI is able to give us and we'll definitely go way further into detail specifically about Mystic print on demand and how you can utilize the tools that are there to get you know bring your designs to life faster than ever before so what tool is right for you honestly it comes down to your skills your time and how much money you want to be putting into it everybody is a little bit different honestly I prefer to do DIY designs I actually really enjoy going into canva playing around it definitely does take time but that's personally what I enjoy and maybe you're somebody who would enjoy that as well or maybe you're somebody who not super creative but you're really good at generating prompts for AI tools then AI is going to be the way for you to go it's just kind of sitting down weighing the pros the cons and seeing what is going to fit best for you and your business so why are we saying we should be researching for a 100 plus different designs and researching a 100 plus different design ideas this is so important because we want to build brand credibility with a diverse Library we don't want just a store of all the same t-shirt over and over and over again or a design that you know we just iterate on that design over and over and it's just there's nothing that stands out we also want to test multiple Concepts in order to find top performers so kind of like we were saying with the niche we want to be looking at the different angles that we can kind of approach and different angles that we can bring new design ideas in look for different Avenues of designs that are already selling and we also want to appeal to a wide range of customer preferences is so niches are big you know take Sports someone may really love soccer and not want anything to do with football this happens in every single Niche so it's definitely important to be researching and looking into those different angles that we can approach and coming up with designs that we know will hit a wide variety of people and it's also going to give our store the best chances when we finally go to launch and start our Facebook ads it's going to give the Facebook algorithm plenty to work off of and hopefully we find a few designs that the are getting the right metrics the right data that we're looking for and from there we can make tweaks on them iterate on them and really start to build out that bestseller collection like we were doing on History te's which I kind of explained before in the niche section history te's started off we found really one design that just completely took off and from there we iterated on that multiple times just in different areas of the niche and that's still to this day what sells on History te's just totally built out our bestselling collection and that's what we want to be doing for your brand as well so we want to start with product research just like researching for our Niche we are looking at Etsy Amazon Pinterest Google Redbubble go out there and find other graphic t-shirts that are within your Niche you'll probably find some Brands as well that are selling T-shirts within your Niche or designs within your Niche go out and research it all dig deep don't leave any stone unturned brainstorming and organizing your ideas a tool that you can use right off the bat is Chachi BT we can get a list of different angles and approaches of our Niche you can continue at as you saw in the last section when we were kind of digging deeper and asking chat TBT some different questions about the niche that's great to just continue asking questions for research not only for the niche but also for the potential of Designing down the road keep those ideas and then we can plug those into Etsy Amazon Google and kind of see the designs that are within that area of the niche see if there's any that are bestselling that are worth our time anything that kind of triggers an idea of how we can tweak that design for our Niche it's all great great and really going to help with this process and we can also use themes and categories to help us break down our Niche we can organize our designs into more humorous designs vintage kind of style designs inspirational designs designs that are only typography designs with no text at all that can be a really great way to know that we are having abroad enough kind of designs as a whole so when you come to our site it's not just going to look like the same design over and over and over again you're going to have a plethora of different styles different areas in the niche Etc we want to aim for at least 100 ideas and then kind of take those best ones and refine them a little bit but if we have a 100 ideas or hundred different things of inspiration we are never ever going to run out of things that we can turn to and pull inspiration from to help us in our design process so we were just talking about themes and categories something that I did with seasonal because that's the niche that I'm going in and approaching is breaking down Seasons into sub niches so you have seasons as a whole that's our big broad Niche and then from there we kind of have these subtopics we have fall winter spring and summer and from there we can pull even more ideas out of those subtopics so fall we can think pumpkins Halloween leaves football apples cool temperatures pumpkin spice Thanksgiving winter snow snowflakes I hate cold weather type of typography designs Christmas skiing snowboarding hot chocolate hockey Christmas lights sitting by a fire spring we can think of more flowers butterflies rain birds bees Easter allergies baseball gardening watering cans spring quotes and finally Summer Sun beaches waves sunsets sunglasses flipflops flowers ice cream tropical drinks Beach quotes summer vacation anything like that this can be a great kind of tool or exorcise that you can do with your own Niche every Niche is able to be broken down like this I'm sure there are some people are looking at this screen and thinking well that won't work for my Niche it absolutely will sometimes it just takes a little bit of thinking of what we truly want those subtopics to be so for example we could have like history about wars and everything War related you could have just general American history you could have European history and then you can even go further and go to like ancient history and have stuff about like Egyptians have stuff about like the Great Wall of China everything can be broken down into subtopics and it can really help to organize kind of your thoughts and get a lot of design ideas and different ideas where you can take your Niche so let's get into it and see how I approach getting a design folder an inspiration folder together and what I do to research for designs so the first thing that you want to do I like to create a folder just on my desktop it's really easy for me to just take some screenshots add them to my desktop and then I just drag them into my inspiration folder then from there I can organ it a little bit better into Different Seasons or different topics or maybe even tags that I'm thinking of putting all my designs when I finally get to like the uploading phase these are all things that I'm thinking of so let's first get into chat GPT and we'll start by getting a list so give me a list of 20 different graphic t-shirt ideas for the season Fall want a variety and broad range of designs to get different areas of the niche so it gives me a full 20 different graphic TI ideas some of them are kind of puns you've got inspirational and thoughtful fun and festive now this went kind of more sayings and this is why it's important to kind of dig deeper with Chachi BT specifically and make sure you know we're not just getting funny sayings Because unless someone's really interested in like fall puns that could kind of be taking us too far down an Avenue that we don't want to go through so the next thing that we can do is just change it from fall to winter because it's another subtopic Now fall's almost over so we can definitely start researching more kind of Colder winter ideas cold hands warm heart that's cute slay all day joyful and bright Stillness of winter again kind of coming up with more quotes oh ugly sweater Coco Club so kind of giving us different ideas that we can we can go in so this is great and definitely starts our entire process so next we can go to Google and type in Fall graphic t-shirt and see what comes up I love looking at the shop Links at the top or you can even go up to shopping in general and this kind of allows you to find other brands that are out there and maybe find like some of your competition and that way you can kind of see like what are they selling if that's on like their best sellers page clearly they're selling a lot so can I tweak that and from here if I find any designs that I like I'm just adding them to my design folder this way I can use this when I'm ready to sit down and start designing whether that be in canva or Mystic pod or ideas to send over to a designer if you are going to work with a designer it's good to have like here's my idea but like here's what I want to change about it or things that I want to tweak or find another design and say like I want the wording from this but I want it to look more like this design that can really help kind of get the visual for a designer to start working with but pretty much this is just what what I do I'll I'll go out and I'm looking for good reviews I'm looking for kind of repeat Brands so this Southern Grace Farms is definitely a good site to take a look at and kind of see what else they're selling like that definitely looked like an Etsy type of design and from here you can see like they have a lot of really cute ideas like that pumpkin disco ball like that's great I would never have thought of making like a pumpkin a disco ball but it's definitely good for like the girly girls that are out there that would want to wear that or disco football like that would be great for fall if you're somebody who like maybe you're going to watch a football game with your husband or your boyfriend and you don't really care who wins but you can still look cute typically you're not thinking of pink when you're thinking of football so it's definitely something that works so that's a great site that I can continue going back to now getting an idea of things that are selling for them can I tweak them and you know be able to make designs that would then hopefully sell for me and they have a Christmas one so we can screenshot that that's kind of all that I'm seeing so I'll go back to shop see if there's any other designs and then we can go over and check Etsy and really guys this is what I'm doing I'm just kind of going between all these different sites and trying to just find designs from top sellers with good reviews I mean look at that shop it has 14.5 th000 reviews I mean clearly that's somebody who is selling some pretty decent designs and looking for different areas of the niche that I can focus on so the snowmen are cute the gingerbread man's cute it's freezing season like that's funny again we are never just stealing a design we are never just completely copying and pasting it we want to be putting our own twist and our own like artistic flare the snowflakes cool and like something with snowflake that I think of is like you could have something that says unique like snowflake is unique so you can kind of make like twists off of that or puns those are always things that are going through my mind as I'm going through this process sorry can't ski season by I'm also thinking how can I tweak this for other areas of the niche like could be sorry can't snowboarding season by sorry can't football season by sorry can't too cold by things like that you know after selling and print on demand for a long time those are things that are constantly going through my mind as I'm researching and again like we broke down like now I can look at skiing and snowboarding and kind of see what kind of designs are out there what kind of ideas can I take to that section of the niche you know you have the simple line art that one's good things I do in my spare time that's a great design that we can tweak to other areas of the niche things I do in my spare time like listen to Christmas music think of Christmas music play Christmas music dream of Christmas music whatever it may be so always keep that in mind and it doesn't even have to be something that maybe is even in your Niche could be like a very Evergreen design of one that works on multiple niches and then it's just kind of quickly tweaking the idea and tweaking the theme around it to work for our Niche we have opy ski so people hanging out after they've skied all day that's a good one then we can go to Pinterest see what kind of graphic t-shirts there are for winter and we can look Beyond t-shirts I know I'm going through and kind of just looking at t-shirts in general but we can look at stickers we could look at Mugs we could look at kind of different top selling things within our Niche and pull ideas from that as well because maybe it sells really well on a mug and someone just has never even thought about putting that saying on a t-shirt that could be something that we try so look Beyond just t-shirts you can just look in that niche in general I love the Grinch design but that would definitely I would avoid at all cost because you know you got some trademark stuff there I think that one don't be a snowflake that one's funny it definitely makes it like political so could definitely get engagement anything that's like potentially political related can get some good engagement you know I typically avoid anything that's just like directly political like I've never sold like a trump shirt or a Biden shirt or anything like that and Facebook is you know they're really on top of all that stuff again looking into stickers looking Beyond I'm having a meltdown like that's funny I don't do winter very well honestly like all these stickers you could even see on a t-shirt a noo is yellow snow like that' be funny for winter so it does help because you'll see like when you do find something that's selling well someone will have like a bunch of different iterations off of it indoorsy that could be good specifically in Winter or it could be something like in the winter I'm like a cat it's like I want to avoid people and be in like my warm house that could be kind of something funny so it's just something to get like the juices flowing pull ideas from and go from there and then finishing up on Amazon looking for some winter graphic t-shirts specifically on Amazon I'm looking for again those High reviews chilling with my snowmies that one's good as you can see the one with the trees has over 216 reviews clearly that is a shirt that sells really well it's the most wonderful time of the year that one's got almost 3500 what the cat pushing over the tree that one's good I could definitely see somebody tagging their friend in that if they have a Mischief cat the different pattern trees that has over 1,300 views clearly that's a design that has sold a lot and again this is just me doing a simple winter search like I haven't even dug into like hot chocolate versus Ski and Snowboard I mean like you could even do some funny ones like about shoveling or like something about a snowblower sure I've seen hundreds of thousands of designs about men mowing the lawn and just from that we have 34 different inspiration designs that we'll be able to pull from in our design inspiration folder which is great and will absolutely make the design process so much easier all right so I'm about to show you guys a run through of how I use everb which is a research tool to find products that are scaling on Etsy right so you think okay well we're not selling on Etsy like what's the point of this right well we can extrapolate this information from Etsy and pull it into our shop five store and I've been using everb since 2019 it's one of my favorite tools to use in e-commerce Etsy is an extremely powerful platform that has tons of sales and tons of sellers every day it's a$ 13 billion doll company so what better way to find winning products that we can you know make into our own than to use a platform that is spending a ton of money to drive traffic to their website already and has a ton of Sellers and a ton of volume behind it it truly is one of my favorite tools to use I've been using it since 2019 and has helped me build multiple seven figure Brands it's pretty much one of the main reasons I found my first store back in 2019 the military pod store and it currently helped me find the brand that I've been working on for the last year or so it's an amazing tool one of my favorite tools and I love using this tool so much so let's hop right into it so there's different ways to use everb research the three main tools that I use are product analytics shop analyzer which is new this wasn't around when I first started using it but it's a very powerful tool and keyword research but the main two tools are product analytics and keyword research and I'm going to show you exactly how I use it to find winning products on Etsy that I can then use on Shopify to scale my own store so the first thing I'm going to use is product analytics I love this so much because it provides the product next to the price that they're selling at the monthly sales the monthly Revenue which I care about most how much money are they doing every month from this product right it's not their store that is this Revenue it's the individual product that we're seeing so we'll know exactly how much revenue that product is doing how many units are they selling of that product a month is it popular are they selling 30 units of it a month are they selling 100 units reviews too which is so important right when you're thinking of products on Etsy Etsy has a rough review estimate of every 10 orders on Etsy one of those people will leave a review 10% review rate is excellent right and that kind of lets us know also is this product popular when's the last time it got a review is it currently still selling that's super important for us to know also the listing age is this product seasoned is it an evergreen product that's been selling for a long time how many favorites does it have do people really like this product that's another indication of how well the product's doing on Etsy and you know if we can create our own version of this product you know whether it's changing the colors of it changing the text looking in the reviews of the customers you know that's the most important data we can find what are customers saying about this product what are they saying they like about it but more importantly for us what are they saying that they don't like about it why we want to know what they don't like about it is because because we can then take that information and make our own unique design from it they're saying hey the text is too small or hey the text is too big you know I don't like the orientation of this design I hate the color scheme you know there's a million different things customers could say but I'm sure the seller is not acting on that so how can we change the design to make it our own so we don't get in any copyright trouble or legal trouble with the product and use it to scale on our own store so I'm just going to start simple right let's just look up t-shirt let's see what's going on on the t-shirt for products you know when you're looking at this you want to avoid anything that says custom right you're more than free and more than welcome to sell your own custom te's where people can input their names or Custom Designs like pets but I like to avoid this because that's not what I'm focused on right now I want to just find individual designs that are doing extremely well on Etsy so let's look immediately we find two designs that are doing extremely well on Etsy $24,000 almost $225,000 a month in Revenue a month $225,000 from one single t-shirt like I said this is not not multiple t-shirts this is just this one t-shirt design that is doing $25,000 a month it's selling almost 4,000 units with 652 reviews and the listing is only four months old this isn't a seasoned listing it's very new they don't have a ton of control on the market yet you know we can come in here and find something about the design that we can tweak and change and make our own and more often than not it's probably going to perform just as well on ads and another thing about Etsy too is that a lot of etsy sellers only sell on Etsy they're not selling on Shopify most of the time they're not a lot of them are small mom and pop stores that are just selling on Etsy and they don't have a lot of e-commerce experience me personally I sell on Etsy and Shopify because why not have the best of both worlds so like going back to this product right it does $25,000 a month let's look at the product underneath of it they're selling at $29 again it's almost doing $25,000 a month $836 total sales 48 reviews this listing is 1 month old so this came right out of the gate doing extremely well so let's keep going down you know Halloween for seasonal this might be perfect for seasonal right Halloween black hat and ghost right so we can alter this design and make it our own but we know it's popular because everybody's telling us that a ton of people are buying this almost 20 grand in Revenue that is insane from one product 20 grand monthly Revenue you know this isn't alltime Revenue just that month you know there's so many different t-shirts on here for us to look at and this is why I love this tool so much right you can get so many new ideas and capitalize on these ideas so let's look at one of these products for example since you know we're working with seasonal right now let's look at this Halloween black hatat this might be for next year look at this right it's just a couple ghosts holding some cats it's super cute but I'm more curious about the reviews what are people saying down here look at that 303 reviews for The Single product that is insane that is a ton of reviews immediately off the bat I know this design is a winner you can even see it in demand two people bought this in the last 24 hours right that's more than enough to show okay this product is really good how can we make it our own for seasonal right so I'll go down and look at these reviews she loved it item is exactly as pictured you know I don't really care about the five star reviews I want to see the lowest rating why do people not like this the shirt self is very high quality and nice however it seems to run small okay that doesn't really help us something about the neckline the colors off not really what we're looking for got the shirt after Halloween it's not it's just like the photos exactly what shown okay so there's not a ton wrong with this design and you're probably thinking okay like you know how can I capitalize on this there's plenty of tools we can use to generate a design just like this you know I'm just off the top of my head I'm looking at this okay this design has four ghosts and there's four black cats and the ghosts are holding the cats that's pretty simple to go into something like Mystic or mid Journey or ideogram and type up hey you know I want you to create me four ghosts standing in a horizontal line and they're all holding a black cat make the ghost cartoonish and the cats cartoonish as well make the ghosts all holding the cats in different positions one ghost is holding the cat upwards above its head another ghost is holding the cat in its arms like it's giving it a hug another ghost is holding the cat like a baby you know we can change this design up to basically make it our own right and that's the great thing about looking at these products from everb you let's look at another product you know we'll keep it in the seasonal Niche so we're looking you know there's a ton of designs right we're just keeping this for season seasonal and how we can fit it into our own Niche Comfort colors gingerbread oh this is perfect for Christmas right let's look at this product monthly sales 371 monthly Revenue $112,000 it's doing 12 Grand in Revenue total sales $1,051 this listing is two months old reviews 113 that's a ton look at these views 60,000 views almost 61,000 views are looking at this product right now it's 3600 favorites so let's look at the product in man 15 people bought this in the last 24 hours 15 people that's crazy there's so many people that bought this product in the last 24 hours that tells me already okay gingerbread men are in we need to make a gingerbread T-shirt design and this is simple it's just four gingerbread men in a horizontal line This is not hard to make you could easily go into any AI tool and generate a design similar to this you know the most important thing is is that we do not steal or take designs directly from sellers we don't do that that's unethical we're not just copying and pasting designs you get into copyright trouble legal trouble that is exactly what you want to avoid but we can make something that's our own that's gingerbread men that are happy you know these are basically clip art gingerbread men on a t-shirt they have a bunch of different colors here to show you know they making a ton of different t-shirt colors this is super cute obviously on brand you know that green Christmas color along with the red from the beginning or brownish red you know these are all Christmas colors right they're on brand on season and it makes sense this design is super simple right it's very easy to find popular designs reviews for this item 90 that is a great amount of reviews right when I'm looking at products on Etsy I try to avoid products that have you know anything less than 10 or 15 reviews and another thing that I look at when I'm looking for products that have 10 or 15 reviews or less how old is that listing right if the listing is only a couple months old okay maybe that design has potential and it just hasn't hit the right market yet it hasn't gotten the right eyes on front of it or maybe it's just a single right when you're thinking about home run products right a single's still good it could still be a product that's generating revenue for you it's just not that home run swing and it's important to have all types of products on your store right and that's why we continuously test you can't just have a bunch of home runs on your store it's it's not possible right it's really design and quantity over quality but both are important we want to have high quality designs but we want to have a ton of quantity too because we want to be able to test as many products as we possibly can so let's go down and look at the reviews really like the color it's going to make a cug Christmas shirt perfect for seasonal right Christmas is right around the corner so I want to go again look at some of the lower ratings for this design it really looks like there's just one right and it's a fourstar so what that tells me is this product is a winner people want gingerbreads on their t-shirts so I'm going to go ahead into Mystic or mid Journey or audiogram or any of the AI tools and create some kind of gingerbread t-shirt right again this is super simple The Prompt for this would be four gingerbread men holding hands in a straight horizontal line clip art style that's pretty much it I'm sure it would generate results very similar or maybe even better than the current design that they have on this t-shirt so let's do one more design let's see what we can find for seasonal collections again look at that just those three designs that we've talked about so far you know have generated almost 75 grand in sales three t-shirts that's three amazing designs that could generate you know $75,000 in sales for us or even more you know this is why I love everb because it's so easy to find products that give you inspiration to sell on your own store so let's keep looking here lot of custom stuff like I said we want to avoid that for now because you know we don't want to sell products that are customized it's hard to sell on Facebook so let's keep looking Halloween stuff let's look for some more Christmas stuff here you know let's let's look up instead of just t-shirt let's look up Christmas T-shirts because it's more on brand for what's going on right now and you can do this for your own Niche too you can look up sub Niche keywords that resonate with your audience so let's look up Christmas t-shirts so there's that gingerbread man that we already saw that's super popular let's look at this one this one's $36 276 sales a month almost 10 grand in Revenue just from this t-shirt 276 total sales and this listing's one month old it's a brand new listing right and it's already doing 10 grand a month so let's look at it okay so it doesn't say any sales which is fine six VI in the last 24 hours it's still good yeah so make spirits bright right that's just the design idea I'm not really sure what's going on here looks like three different figures I might avoid these figures because it might be copyrighted I'm not sure of what these characters are are that's another thing to avoid when you're using Etsy there might be sellers on here that are selling designs that are potentially copyrighted and they just might not care or they'll see how long they can get away with selling copyrighted items they have trademarks on them and that's something we just want to completely avoid allog together we don't want to sell anything that could get us in trouble so you know this might be a good product but I'm just going to avoid this for now because I'm unsure of where these characters are coming from so let's go back into the product analytics here yeah like anything like the Grinch you don't want to sell that right you're just going to get into legal trouble there doesn't matter how well the t-shirt's doing it's not going to be worth the legal trouble and trust me it's brutal you do not want to deal with that so you know Mickey and friends don't go there right Disney is absolutely brutal they will track down anyone when it comes to people selling their designs and you just want to avoid it all together so let's keep looking all right here perfect pink Santa retro Christmas selling at $34 $119 a month in sales does four grand a month total sales $67 3 so there's some weird you know these numbers don't make sense right 34 * 1,673 so again everb is not always perfect with the numbers but you know let's go into the listing and and see what we can find here look at this in demand 13 people bought this in the last 24 hours it's just like a goofy cartoony version of Santa Claus it's kind of cute and feminine it looks really good on this sweater it's like a girly Santa Claus right but you know like I said look it's a bestseller it's doing extremely well in demand 13 people bought this in the last 24 hours right look at the review 381 reviews that is a ton of reviews to tell us that this product is doing extremely well and we should make our own version of you know this cute Santa Claus design right it has the mistletoe pink mistletoe with the cute pink Santa hat and he's super happy and jolly and people really like this design so let's sort out the reviews again see what's going on here this looks like just a return issue this person looks like they just accidentally clicked one star okay look definitely didn't show up as picture really faded looks like it had been ran over a few times through the wash it looks like a used sweater right so maybe this person's not using this exact print on their t-shirts right so it's kind of like some marketing manipulation here and the design doesn't look as good as the design in the pictures that they're using you know it could be a one-off case we don't really know okay the print is dull not vibrant they didn't like how the sweatshirt arrived which doesn't really help us there's even reviews down here that we can look out of pictures you know I get what customers are saying right I mean it looks kind of dull compared to the pictures that are provided right so maybe we go ahead and create a new Happy Jolly Santa face that's super vibrant and bright and you know that's that's what people are looking for like this isn't hard to create right it's just you know if you're using an AI image generator you know hey I want a picture of Santa Claus and his beard is elongated and extremely Jolly he's wearing a pink Santa hat and there's a pink mistletoe attached to the Hat his cheeks are super Rosy and he's smiling and super happy Santa Claus almost looks like a baby boom I'm sure that would generate an excellent design for us and we can iterate on that design until we find something that we really like but just going back to everb like look how powerful this tool is I absolutely love everb because they have just thousands and thousands if not hundreds of thousands look 550,000 listens analyzed of just products that are doing well that we can look at and make into our own products right this is the perfect tool another way that we can look at this is the keyword research tool and I like to use this for a couple of re reasons right so just to remind you guys everb is not the One-Stop shop all Beall tool for when it comes to researching designs and potential niches to sell into right is scraping data from Etsy and Etsy is a mom and pop style e-commerce shop where people sell handmade products that's not everyone that buys products not everyone on the Internet is going to Etsy to buy their products so I just want to keep that frame of mind when you're researching you might be selling let's say music te's or dogs or or some kind of brand right and it's not that popular on Etsy and that's okay right we're just looking to see what kind of designs we can find on everb and how it might give us an idea of new designs that we can create for our own brand so let's go in and type in you know let's start with t-shirts again let's keep it broad let's see the search volume behind t-shirts this is incredible search volume for Etsy right and you think uh 4600 that's not a lot but for Etsy that's that's really good so let's see what we can find here obviously it might be too broad we might not find any anything too good in here and this is important to use specific keywords you know you might be even using sub Niche keywords to find different keywords used on Etsy here so yeah t-shirts too broad uh it's just t-shirt different ways uh so you know T-shirt with a dash in it t-shirt spelled wrong t-shirt all together so let's look up winter t-shirts let see what's going on there so search volume's kind of low I like to look for search volume that has at least 500 on Etsy that's a pretty good indication that's getting some search volume behind it but again looks like WI t-shirt Christmas okay maybe I didn't look up Christmas t-shirts yet but now I have the idea oh Christmas I didn't even think of that let's look that up look at that 1100 search volume that's great that's pretty good for Etsy right anything like I said above 500 is good so let's see here Christmas t-shirts Christmas t-shirts Christmas t-shirts yeah so this gives us good search volume and what people are looking for when it comes to Christmas t-shirts yeah so I mean going taking a step further right when you think of Christmas you could even go to chat GPT and be like give me 50 terms at are related to Christmas and it's going to populate 50 terms that are related to Christmas and give you new ideas to look up on Etsy to find designs that might resonate with your brand right so let's look up you know we already did gingerbread so let's do and we did Santa too so let's do reindeer t-shirt the search volume's low right it only has 170 but that's okay I mean we're still searching right we're still looking for terms and we're not too worried about the search ter or the search volume on Etsy because we're not selling on Etsy as of right now you may choose to sell on Etsy at some point point but you know it's important to just see if there's any search volume and see you know what we can do with this so right we looked up all right the search volume is 170 let's go back to product analytics and see if there's anything going on with reindeer t-shirts all right it's not pulling anything too much but okay look misfit toys let's see what this what's going on here again monthly Revenue 2100 total sales 266 this listing is 3 months old so let's let's look at this listing a bit of a misfit right so again this is another good example of something I would completely avoid and not sell even though it's doing extremely well this is you know you're going to get you're going to come into issues with this with copyright right this is obviously from the movie really just a straight copy out of the movie and this is designs we don't want to use so let's just go up into the search bar and look up reindeer t-shirts obviously you know as we're looking at this we can't use anything that's like Rudolph or anything like that but let's see if there's just some generic reindeer t-shirts yeah here's another one cute deer Christmas t-shirt you know everyb is telling us has zero sales a month but this could be look this listing is only 2 months old so it's something that we might want to test on our own store and make our own style of but you know Etsy is telling us okay hasn't really gotten any sales here's another example of a customized maybe you do choose to sell these are just cute reindeers with someone's name underneath all right it's pretty easy to make let's look at this one this is just a silhouette of a reindeer it's a Sil out of Rudolph but you can't really tell so it wouldn't come into issues with copyright and it just has the name of the different reindeers right Dasher dancer praner vixon comic Cupid right they're all here Blitzen Rudolph and then has a little red Rudolph nose this is a great tach t-shirt right in 15 carts it has a ton of reviews which is great so this is something I would generate for myself and create my own example you know maybe we change the horns up a little bit maybe we change the text of the reindeers you know maybe we make it a full reindeer instead of just a reindeer head maybe we make it the nine reindeers with Santa Claus in the back and each reindeer's labeled so you can see each clearly what reindeer it is right so you can definitely just generate unique ideas just from looking at this product itself and then go into any AI tool and make that so yeah so this is exactly how I use everb I like I said I love everb it's a great tool it has helped me start multiple Brands and scale multiple Brands to seven Figures it's highly highly recommended to use this tool like I said amazing tool and I use it frequently for idea generation as well because there's always new listings coming up onto Etsy and you can look and find new products that suit your Niche just by using everb so what are the key takeaways for researching designs the first is that highquality mockups and Designs create a strong first impression we absolutely want to have a quantity we want at least 100 designs when we are ready to launch but we also want high quality especially if we're going to use something like an AI tool sometimes it's like too much detail that would that potentially work for a t-shirt maybe but a lot of times graphic t-shirts are more simple so we really want to create that strong first impression on our brand two we want a library of at least 100 plus design ideas that will enable testing and appeals to diverse taste always keep in mind kind of is this something someone would engage with would they find it funny would they want to send it to their friend would they think it's beautiful would they like the saying because it's so inspirational these are all things that are running through my mind as I am going through digging deep in researching designs and finally there are a lot of options out there to help create designs there are different tools for people who have different skills different financial backgrounds there's something out there for everybody right now the barrier to entry into print on demand has never been lower there are so many different design options out there even from 5 years ago when I was getting started in print on demand you know canva was okay but it did not have like the functionality that it has today so we're able to use that I mean AI was maybe a thing but like definitely not image generators like image generators have really been in the last like year and a half to two years so these are all things that are brand new honestly it's never been easier to start selling imprint on demand so it's time for you to take action so what can we be doing one if you haven't finalized your Niche now is the time when you are going through and you are picking out some different inspiration for the different niches that you've researched now is the time to figure out what exactly you want to be selling in so finalize that Niche that way we can keep moving forward in the process two we want to organize our Research into a centralized document or folder I specifically like to make a folder on my desktop if you're somebody who likes to use Google Drive absolutely make some folders on there or make a mirror board Chris loves using mirror he would probably make a mirror board personally I just love to have a folder on my desktop because when I do stumble across something because I'm always going back to research I'm always looking for new things that are out there that are selling I can just take a quick screenshot and throw it in my folder and know it is there for me to pull later when I go and sit down to design and finally you want to be building that inspiration library with over 100 plus design ideas then you can organize that down into like you know subtags or different areas make sure that we're being broad enough with what we are going to be designing and kind of the directions that we're able to take our brand so I hope that you guys enjoyed this you learned a little bit and we're able to dig deeper and have a better understanding of how exactly to research for your designs [Music] my name is Stephen I'm one of the coaches with wi scale and I was recently invited to help out coaching and provide some of my thoughts opinions experiences on how to scale up a print on demand brand to uh six figures which I was able to do in six weeks which is really cool you probably met some of the other coaches Meg you've done a great job of building this weale community and also the wi scale brand and then there's that other guy I can't quite remember his name he just just has that face you know he just kind of merges into the background the guy with a beard his name will come to me in a minute I always remember him because he we had a sit down and he was really let's say honest about his feedback perhaps sympathy is not his not in his vocabulary oh yeah that's it Chris I remember Chris hey Chris and the other guy Justin he's been around for a while very knowledgeable he's like the gift that just keeps on giving with his ads just be careful when you're setting up your ads just make sure you don't switch on Justin's Advantage Plus Camp aign it may work for you it may not just heads up just be careful ask him some questions if you're inure all jokes aside let's get into the fun stuff so you want to be a successful print on demand business owner and I think one of the great ways to start that out is by surrounding yourself with an awesome community of people who have already done that and so imagine yourself climbing a mountain on your own and at the top of that mountain are your print on demand and business dreams and you get halfway up that mountain you're tired things are getting difficult you're on your own and all these thoughts come into your head and you start questioning what you're doing in that moment would you continue or would you turn around and go back now imagine that same situation but instead of being on your own you're surrounded by other people that are trying to achieve a very similar goal and everyone's cheering you on everyone's trying to help you take one step further up that mountain because it is a big mountain if you had those people around you would you continue because in a nutshell that's what this we scale Community is about it's about surrounding yourself with people who are on the same Journey some of them have made it some of them are halfway through some of them are just starting out so if you're watching this video and you have not yet signed up for the weale community don't hesitate if you want to be successful surrounding yourself with the people that have achieved what you want to achieve is really important in a nutshell the print on demand business is a supply chain model that transfers the risk or some of that risk to a third party provider so that you can focus on building your brand and there's lots of things that you need to learn so print on demand frees up your time so that you can focus on learning design learning Shopify marketing and customer service there's other things that you need to be aware of that you have to learn which is how to build a brand and identify the brand identity and also its voice you need to put smart business practices in place and you're also going to have to manage your finances and you're also going to have to build your team just circling back a second to the business practices some of the things that you can expect to be doing is marketing design customer service maintaining your Shopify site and anything else other than delivering the actual product to the customer which is where print on demand comes and if you think about that for a minute that's a huge bonus because it frees up your time and allows you to do the things that you need to do and in a nutshell the way I think about this is that I can use a a print on demand facility and it allows me to learn things it allows me to build up cash flow momentum and build up profit and margin so that in a few years if I want to go out and find a new supplier if I really want to drill down into my numbers and really get into the the efficiency of the numbers I already have a customer base of thousands and thousands of people I already have products that have been proven and that transfer into a system like a 3pl warehousing solution to deliver products is way easier when you have all the customers behind you and you have Finance to do that now if you think about the alternative is which is you start out as a new business a new brand and you're designing your products you're maintaining your website you're also going to have to go out and find products and you're going to have to get samples you're going to have to work with suppliers and then you're going to have to figure out the distribution and the shipping and that is really complicated so in many ways for me especially and many other people in the scale Community the print on demand model makes a lot of sense researching so if you want to start a print on demand business you kind need to know what you going to sell and the critical part to that is identifying a niche that you're passionate about and so what I mean by a niche what is a niche a niche is something like Fitness it's like Outdoor Sports it's like cycling it's like mountaineering it's like Cars music whatever the niche is something that you must be passionate about cuz imagine having to work really hard on on something and it will get tough and if you're not passionate about that then all of a sudden that work can become really unmotivating so it's really important and and and I chose a niche that I was really passionate about I think that really helps because I've been working on my print on demand business now for six months and there there's been some ups and there's been some downs and when the when when you're feeling down I still always find the motivation to find a time to work on it because I'm passionate about it and I believe in my brand so my tip to you is when you're thinking about your Niche start wide don't don't go too specific I think it's better to start wide the way to think about this would be you might be into skipping for example and you're really passionate about that you might want to consider a broader Niche which is Fitness and within that Niche there are all these little sub niches and skipping is one of them and so you might have some other in there you know skipping gym running whatever and that's fine totally do that I think it's it's worth going wide at the start and then you can narrow down on the specifics of the niche as the brand develops and I think that's really important to think about when you're considering Niche options I think it's really good to use Google Trends I did this and I was able to establish a number of different Trends in my Niche and it's really good for identifying interests and also seasonal Trends you really need to think about the e-commerce cycle you know from January to December and what that Trend looks like and that can give you an idea of when you're going to be experiencing good performance but when you might not be and so that information is quite useful so when you're researching your Niche one thing that I can recommend that worked really well for me is that I went out and researched other brands and found websites that were selling T-shirts that I felt were similar to what I might sell by searching for the best sellers on on these websites and I just took note of the Styles what was in these designs the words that they used and you just might want to build up a bit of a list and you might want to work with something like chat GPT to use these comments these these phrases these Styles and you might want to create some unique prompts to you that you can then use to either work with the designer that you want to hire or if you want to go down the AI route then you can create your designs using these prompts that are based on bestsellers and in my experience this worked really well for me I started off using Ai and I later moved to a graphic designer but because of my Approach and how I went really deep into the research and was able to find designs and I built out my first 100 designs based on those I felt like that was really a successful Milestone moment for me and my brand because we were able to scale I well I was able to scale the business the brand up to six figures within 8 weeks so when you're building your brand you might want to just think more about its identity and its voice and one thing I'd like to recommend here is that you write an elevator pitch for your brand and if you don't know what an elevator picture is just go and Google it it's pretty simple it's just a very short paragraph that says why your brand exists what's unique about it and why people should care and just keep in mind that when you're doing this research and you're building your designs out just make sure that you add some uniqueness in because I think if you just copy other people's work this will lead to legal issues it increases Market competition and saturation it can cause price equilibrium shifts so if you can consider if 10 people all have the same design going after the same market then all you're really doing is creating a a a sort of situation where there's a race for the cheapest price which I don't think anybody wants and that can lead to financial constraints so think about it hard before you copy someone else's design especially the famous ones [Music] welcome to lesson 2.0 of the building stage where we're going to be going over the concepts covered in the next couple of lessons and so first let's recap what we've done up until this point so in stage zero we went through our business foundations and explained the ins and outs of the business model shared student case studies and like keys to success that we've learned over the past six or so months since the first course was launched and then second we dove into the personal foundation so talked all about the Habit tracker ways to like free up your how to organize your time in order to be able to make this business a reality and if you miss those steps I highly recommend going back and reviewing them because I can personally say from my own experience that getting those little things right in the beginning was so key and the time that I've had the greatest success in my career and the greatest downturns has always been a direct correlation between how good of a job I was doing to maintaining myself and the improvements that I've made in myself like not drinking and stuff like that often times those have been the most profitable things that I've ever done for myself and for my business so highly recommend reviewing that and then in the research stage we talked through the e-commerce business model in general looked at all the data and reviewed like why print on demand or why e-commerce to begin with then why print on demand then why t-shirts then we identified a profitable Niche and did research on at least a 100 different design ideas and now in the build phase we are going to be number one building your brand number two setting up your shop three connecting our fulfillment and number four setting up to run our ads so by the end of these lessons by the end of this lesson specifically you will have an understanding of the pieces that we need to set up in order to be up and running for business again this is the concept stage so we're not actually going to be following the steps but this is just to understand like the why behind each of the things we're about to do so then in those lessons you're able to just jump right into the step by step so definitely don't skip this this concept stage these are where always the majority of the questions come from is understanding these fundamental things like back to the Rubik's Cube example from the beginning with my little cousin like you don't want to just be following the steps and clicking the buttons that's not the goal here the goal here is to be learning the fundamentals and actually starting to internalize this so that by the end of this you're able to make decisions completely on your own and you've learned everything that we have to share and so these concept sections are critical to achieving that and the last thing I'll say about these stages before we get into it is that we are going to be setting everything up just basically the building blocks but we're not actually going to be launching any ads or you know paying any subscriptions this is simply just getting our account set up so that once we get into the real like launching and testing everything's already squared away we don't have to worry about coming back to this stage so we're going to have all of the pieces in place we're going to be ready for fulfillment we're going to have our store live we're going to have all of our ad accounts and stuff set up and again nothing's going to be getting buil Shopify for example we have 90 days at the time of recording this for the free trial or $1 a month so we have lots of time so there's no fees or anything being incurred so you can just keep pushing along and not procrastinating cuz I know that was a big reason that a lot of people were like resitant at certain stages was because they wanted to feel like they were fully ready before they started adding up any expenses which I totally understand and that's why we've restructured the course so that the second time through we put off as many expenses as possible until like the last possible second if that makes sense joining us in this stage is going to be my lovely wife Meg and she's going to be going through the Fulfillment section talking about the prfi setup and also myself not getting away from me now let's cover the why behind each lesson that we're doing so first off the why of why we're we're building a brand wanted to share this example here and he spent $7 million for this Super Bowl app hey y'all this yay and it's my commercial and since we spent all the money on the commercial spot we actually spend any money on the actual commercial but the idea is I want you to go to easy.com y e zycom and I'm going write it at the bottom of the screen and I got some shoes and that's it and they play that at the Super Bowl 7 million turned into $19 million in profits yeah so that's the power of brand so when people ask why do I need branding or like what's the power of your brand or I think it's something that we all like kind of know like oh yeah brand is good but like why is it good it's because of stuff like that cuz without having a really powerful brand an ad like that would just never get any kind of traction like if that was just some random person who didn't have a personal brand behind it then that would have meant nothing would have been a complete waste of money and another example of it is if you take like a brick for example which costs I don't know five bucks if you slap a supreme logo on it which is a really high-end brand then it somehow becomes worth $200 and that's really the power of branding and the reason like boil it down to just brass tax that's the reason that we build a brand is because of that effect right there aside from that it allows you to stand out in crowded markets builds like a defensible asset builds lifetime value with your customers which all of it comes comes down to your building Enterprise Value in the company and even if your goal isn't to sell it someday it's still a good call regardless so we don't even need to elaborate beyond that just brand is really good we'll talk a lot more about it in The Branding section but next let's explain the next piece of the the stage which is the setting up your Shopify store and the question we get a lot is why do you use Shopify when you know there's a bunch of different options there's woocommerce Etsy Wix Amazon like clickfunnels but that's not comparable but anyway point is there's a lot of different markets or or tools that you can choose besides just Shopify with some tools it's like kind of a toss up in different categories like you could go with that one and versus this one in my mind it there is no equivalent to Shopify nothing even close for beginner Sellers and myself included the amount of tools and apps and functionality that they have built into it is unprecedented not just the power of it but also the Simplicity and the speed it lets us get up and launched and all that I really to say is that every single one of my brands that I built to seven figures and Beyond was all built on Shopify and I've tried every other like I've used woocommerce I've used Wix been on Etsy done Amazon like I've been on all the platforms and Amazon and Etsy are marketplaces so they're like a different category entirely separate conversation but even like just the website builder tools which is woocommerce Wick Shopify out of all of them Shopify is hands down the best and every single person that I know who's run a successful like e-commerce brand has been on one of these has been on Shopify essentially so in addition all that Shopify also converts up to 36% better than the competitors which Adobe I didn't even know Adobe had a cart and conversion rate with comparison they outperformed up to 36% and by 15.2% on average so not only do they have better functionality their pricing is extremely competitive but they also convert higher so and also all of the apps and tools that we're going to be talking about throughout the course they all integrate directly with Shopify if anybody's like I've gotten a handful of questions that are like well why do you use Shopify and not like just build it yourself it's like if you were going to go build a house you could either pick up a tool chest like Shopify and use the tools to make building the house faster or you could just go start using your bare hands and like just start trying to do it like me I'm not even a developer I could go hire a developer but that would be way more expensive substantially more expensive than just going with Shopify like there are in my mind there are pretty no downsides so the next question is why printify so out of printful gelato red bubble there's a lot of different ones red bubble is a Marketplace again but out of all of them I've worked with each of them and printify has been the best experience out of all of them and even at the time of filming this printful and PRI have announced that they're doing a merger so which they are the two best in my mind in the space so they're going to become one company supposedly over time so stay tuned on what that means but pretty much all you need to know is that every single brand I've done I've done it through printify and I've tried out gelato I've tried printful I've tried local print shops I've tried like fulfilling it ourself I've tried everything under the sun and printify has been the one that I keep coming back to because the way that I evaluate which print provider we want to use it comes down to just a few main things number one is product selection like do they have the products that we want two is product quality and under that same umbrella you could say consistency then third is speed like do they have warehouses like out enough that they're able to get it to my customers wherever they are in the world and then last and not least honestly first is cost and printify checks all of those boxes and while I've tried all the other ones they're the one that I keep coming back to people compare them a lot with printful and I think printful has like pretty good branding which to somebody who hasn't sold before like looks very enticing but when it comes to the things that really matter like the things we just checked off printify like it's not even close in my mind and like they have all the products that we could possibly need they're adding new ones all the time and they have print providers all around the world but the thing that really makes them special and different than a printful or gelato which are the other two main competitors is that prini is actually a Marketplace whereas printful owns like all the manufacturers like they own the warehouse space and the printers themselves printify is different they are a Marketplace of printers so just like how Etsy sellers are competing with each other and which commod like we talked about like commoditized and drives the price down the same thing happens within printify between between the printers which the net result of that is it's a better situation for you know all the sellers cuz we're getting the benefit of like Market competition and printful and gelato they just don't have that and also all like we mentioned uh in the earlier lesson like all these companies have like partnership programs for like people who make content and teach about them and this is all publicly available information so I can say that printify has by far the lowest like referral or like thank you fee whatever you want to call it out of all of them like it is a third of what it is for gelato and it's half of what it is for printful it's in it's against my own best interest to be saying this but I only teach what we actually do and we use printify so there's the logic from a couple of different reasons but obviously still go do your own research evaluate them for yourself and at the end of the day just as long as like when when people come to me and they say like okay why should I use like I'm on printful why should I switch to printify I start rattling off those reasons and then they say well I think I have those pretty good then great if you check all those boxes awesome more power to you if you can figure out a way to make it work go for it like that's literally all that I care about was like does it check these boxes like quality consistency catalog size shipping speed price as long as they're hitting the benchmarks that we need then great I I honestly don't care at all about the source and it's just from the reason I say it so confidently it's from my own personal experience of doing it for a ton of brands at this point PRI has always checked the boxes the most consistently I think we got that point across now let's talk about why Facebook ads this is another common question that I just want to clear up once and for all long story short you can run all different ads people ask can I run Tik Tok ads for this sure people ask can I just do Google ads sure other people say I think my audience is just on Instagram like awesome great you can advertise wherever you want but the fact remains I've adverti and this is where all of these lessons are coming from I've advertised on all of these platforms everything up there except for LinkedIn but we've advertised on all of them and meta has always been the best performer and believe me there been times where I've been so fed up with Mark Zuckerberg that I'm like never again am I giving you a single penny and then I go go out and test out different platforms and give them like real shots like hire agencies make ad creative like the whole nine yards not just like Chuck up a campaign but every single time I end up coming back to mea and the reason for that one of the reasons is every single customer pretty much everyone in the world has a Facebook uh account even though it's not like cool anymore and you know Tik Tok is like the latest thing that's you know getting the most airtime the latest news Cycles our performance has always continued to be very consistent with Facebook and it's still like one of the most used channels or the most used and you can see at the top there the uh or on the bottom that channels that result in the largest Roi which is the this right here it's Facebook and Instagram are above all the rest and Facebook and Instagram just by the way are one and the same same thing with YouTube and Google they're you run ads out of the same account but you see like these two numbers like or these two charts it paints a pretty good picture and then the next piece is that while people seem to think that Facebook ads have gotten more expensive over the years and honestly I thought that too just cuz I had heard it so many times but then when I Was preparing for this lesson I was looking at it and I tried to like pull some data to back that up and it actually turned out that the opposite was true and it's cuz the ads that we run are this is the cost per Facebook CPM over the past three years out of the lines it's different objective types the one that we run is conversions or catalog sales and in both cases conversions catalog sales they both ended up at either the same place or down slightly down from where they were 3 years ago and I saw that and I really couldn't believe it I was like that that's pretty mindboggling cuz I was yeah I would have thought that they went up as well like as more advertisers have gotten onto the platform and that's just not the case so so now we've covered why we're using printify why we're using Shopify why we want to build a brand opposed to just selling random products and also about meta ads and again none of this is one siiz fits all so if you feel adamantly about you know doing something differently more power to you and that's one of our common themes of this course the second time through is making sure that we emphasize everything we're teaching is like this is just what has worked for us this is not us saying that you know Tik Tok add ad plus woo Commerce cannot work that is not in any way what we are saying so I don't want anybody misconstrued as that all that we are saying is that from our own experience and from what we've seen with our students the best formula for Success has been this and I don't even want to say formula cuz it makes it sound like just get the perfect ingredients and that works out perfectly it's more like like a battle and like you're getting all your soldiers in a line and like as long as you have the right combination then you have a good chance that's more realistic to make it even more realistic now let's cover some FAQs and common mistakes that we see that will once we understand these things will help improve our chances for Success so number one is the question does my brand name and logo matter and I'll talk about it in the logo section and branding section but no the short answer is no you can change it you can come back to it later it is not like set in stone and then you know good luck you can always come back and change it later we've rebranded it a bunch of times so when you get to The Branding stage just take it with a grain of salt follow the bare minimum requirements and move on to the next thing next is a fundamental shift in this the answer to this question which is am I building a print on demand brand and the answer is a resounding no we are not building a print OnDemand brand we are just building a brand and it's really important that we make that mindset shift print on demand is just the Fulfillment model what we are building what we are working towards and what will turn this into something that can be successful not just today and next month but two three years down the line and Beyond is building a real brand and so that shift and what that means is we're building like a mission we're building a cause and it doesn't have to feel like that in the beginning in the beginning we're just bull rushing to get to 10K plus per month and then once we have profit coming in and we've seen that this can actually work for ourselves then we switch into like thinking like this fully but it's important that we understand from the very beginning we are not building like a t-shirt store so even if you don't understand what that means you're like I'm about to just be selling T-shirts it's okay just keep watching and just keep that in the back of your mind and honestly the last most common mistake that I see people make or that has cost students the most time at this stage was making the wrong choice and choosing like woo Commerce because they had a background with woo Commerce and they just thought like it'd be easier to start that way and while yeah they were able to like get initially started a little bit faster because they didn't have like the slight learning curve of Shopify they all ended up switching in the end and so I mean there are successful woomer sellers but for especially for a beginner or anybody that I was at ing I would always recommend going with Shopify over anybody else and then the last like common mistake I think is just over complicating this step of the process because there's so many unknowns like it's very natural like when you're looking at a product catalog like in like printify has to see it and go okay they have so many different products like there's hundred of products like I hear this guy talking saying that t-shirts is the right call but everything in printify and then oh there's printful over here and like they have so many products and oh they they do like nice branding and like oh I can co-ack other items I know I know that I know the guy on on the the laptop says that I don't shouldn't worry about selling other items but I think my brand might be different I think I might uh I think I might sell other stuff and like build this into like a bigger brand that's like a very common thought thought and every single one of those people has ended up stripping it down to this model you see right here and I say that as me being one of those people as well I thought for the longest time like I would Branch out and like each one of these areas I was like oh I'm gonna have Tik Tok ads and a ton of Google ads and YouTube ads and like affiliate marketing and like then I'll co-ack my own products and every single time I tried adding on one of those extra pieces and like over complicating it and making it more than it had to be I just ended up not only making my life harder but making less money in the process so I would say the most common mistake at the build stage is that right right there is trying to overbuild like too many different things and so what I would recommend is if you have ideas of like other platforms or things that you would like to try just try it this way and worst case because this is like what the course is built off of try it this way and then worst case scenario you get all the way through and then you decide like no I I hate Shopify and I need to go switch to woocommerce then you try it but just try it this way first for this like all the students that have gone through and then had to switch later so their loss wasn't in vain just try it this way would be my only advice to avoid that biggest Pitfall but other than that it's everybody's own Journey so make your own decisions and that's all I have to say about that so I will see you guys in the next [Music] lesson welcome to lesson 2.1 in the build stage in this lesson we're going to be going over your branding here we are in stage two of building and at this point the progress that we made made so far is that we should have already chosen a niche we did that in the research phase you have the ideas of 100 plus designs that you'll be making and by the end of this lesson you will have chosen your brand name and logo you have bought your domain and you will have created your business email so this is really bringing together the face of our brand and the reason that it matters is just the face of your brand and this is where customers first build an impression of you and now branding is like their first impression of us and it's people think of when they see our brand or our business and products in general and we'll talk about examples of what makes a good brand versus bad the ins and outs biggest mistakes that we saw people make along the way and the biggest one right off the bat is that a lot of people tend to get hung up on The Branding of their store we typically want this to be like the perfect name with a.com but the reality is that in this step it should be completed honestly pretty quickly because we can change it if we hate it later and this is something we didn't really specify in the first course is that whatever you set up now is not permanent like we've had Brands like yoga stay for example we originally launched it and it was called Namaste Collections and then down the road we decided to get a trademark which we ended up not really needing but point being we had a successful brand and was run as niste collections for I'm going to say like the first year and then we rebranded it and we just swapped out the name made very little difference so the important thing here is to set a timer for yourself on the amount of time that you're going to allocate for this all said and done and this is not just a generic like okay type of thing in total coming up with your brand name Logo and your domain they're all pretty much one and the same like the name and the domain it should take you a few hours absolute Max and anytime I hear about somebody who has been working on their brand name for you know weeks or months or like oh I picked out my name what do you think about this it's like honestly I don't care and I say that with love like obviously I do care I care about your success and the name that you pick is not indicative of your success it's going to have zero impact in the long term we could pick a completely random name as long as it's not filled with like curse words and stuff and we could pick a really ugly logo and it it'd be fine and this is an important thing to understand as a beginner where at least for me I'll speak from personal experience when I started out I thought that this stuff mattered so freaking much like I spent on my very first brand name I spent weeks I literally hired a Latin translator to help come up with the name name never mattered once and I realize now in mindsight that what I was really doing was I was using picking the perfect brand name and saying like oh I really care about my brand I was using that as just a different form of procrastination because in reality I was actually just afraid of failing so point being move through this process quickly you can come back and change it later and you will see in like the Shopify setup and other sections how easy it is to change this so you won't know that until you get through the process how easy it is to change but just take my word for it this is a very low stakes decision but still picking a name we don't want to come up with a horrible name so we're going to cover the basics here and of like what makes a good brand name so first off choosing our name to further this example the popular extremely popular world renowned brand Amazon started off named Kadabra and there's a funny story behind this that Jeff Bezos he was originally named Kadabra and he knew that he needed to change it when he called his lawyer about like incorporating the name and the lawyer misheard him and said did you say kadaver and that's when he realized that it's probably not the name that they should go with but even world renowned names like Amazon started off as something completely ridiculous and Google was originally called backrub which that's just seemed let me make sure that's true yeah wow and that one sounds so ridiculous that I literally just Googled it to make sure that it's that I did my research correctly and that is true wow so there you go if Amazon Amon and Google can change their names what else do we need to know so how do we choose a brand name we want to make a brand name that is memorable and unique that also has a purpose or States like what the niche or brand is all about like and we'll get into some examples in just a second but it should be simple and easy to recall should always be like relevant and Timeless and can connect emotionally to the audience and your Brand's identity this last one is just a nice thing to throw in but honestly like our brand names history te's it's not like that emotional of a name but it just clearly states what it is it's a little bit clever because it spells history like a t-shirt I know super original but uh just short rememberable yoga stay history te like those are examples of like as soon seasonal collections as soon as you look at the name you know what it's about you know what the brand stands for and then you're able to make a logo that accompanies that so yoga ster here's the logo and the brand name very short and simple and history te's the logo was literally just h& T put together and these are multiple seven fig Brands then seasonal collections very simple name and also these yoga stay we'll talk about domains in a second but yoga stay it was a doco so it having com versus doco is not important the and we'll talk about domains but the only real things you want to watch out for is like just not doing hyphens or orgs but the things we want to ask ourselves is like does my brand name resonate with my Brand's Mission and values can it be flexibly changed over time and like what does our gut tell us and so a great way for us to brainstorm brand names is there's a lot of different tools out there but honestly what I'm going to do is just go to chat GPT and say which chat GPT if you haven't used it before is an awesome tool there's free versions of it but you can just go here and say I am creating a print on demand Shopify brand in the let's pick a niche let's say flower Niche the name should be short and memorable that's it pedal and print I like that that would be great I wonder if this is already a company but pedal and print so bloomify that's okay it kind of sounds like a like a software company fluide reminds me of fluide pedco I like that Blossom Blossom prints would be a good one bloomery freshly rooted that's clever so I just take out the ones that I like and the reason that I like these petal prints that just sounds like a me personally I'm a fan of names that have like the mention shirt or like they you're a shop or like a boutique in it that's not to say like yoga Stay doesn't do any of that but I just personally like the the name of them but so petal prints I like that Blossom prints there again it's kind of similar to that bloomery we'd have to build that into something else freshly rooted but if I just pick out a couple that I like and then say I like these give me more like them so here we go it just gave back they do this thing sometimes where they give you multiple and ask for your feedback which fun fact this is how they train their models based on your feedback it's called R rhf human reinforcement it's called rhf reinforcement learning for human feedback it's the one technical term that I know but okay so let's look at the names and this is just us getting in everything we do just broad Strokes just get a lot of things out there it's like if you're writing an essay or a book you just want to get all your thoughts down on one page and then just pick through it so we just from very simple prompt got a bunch of ideas then we told it the ones that we like and then petal and Blossom themes petal prints pedal press Blossom Co I like that Blossom Boutique Blossom Roots fresh Roots root and petal floral prints I would like that except floral is like an art style too and I don't want people to get the idea that we're just one type of art style garden bloom pedal path now it's getting kind of weird I honestly like pedal prints.com but let's see I'd be willing to bet that that's taken oh no it's not so this is an example like pedal prints.com it's taken but if I wanted to do this brand I would very easily just grab the doco and so what we've done on the spreadsheet is choosing your brand name I would list out 10 different ideas here and just write them down in the spreadsheet so you can have it to come back to and another tool that we can use is the Shopify brand name generator and this is a great free tool where we choose the type of brand we're going to create like fashion so I'm going to tell it let's try actually similar prompt as what we gave chat GPT and see the difference flower print on demand apparel brand Bloom and wear Dalia sunflower petal power apparel chrysanthemum okay these are not great blumi it's almost as if they're trained with the same model Chic floral designs yeah so a lot of these are very similar honestly so far the one that I like the best is petal prints next we're going to talk about how to create your brand logo so you should have come up with a list of at least 10 names and then set a timer for yourself of literally 15 minutes and pick a name and it's not going to feel comfortable you're going to be like aren't I rushing this process shouldn't I sit here and like wait longer shouldn't I pick a better name like there's no such thing as a perfect name and again remembering what we said at the beginning you can always come back and do it again later so moving on creating your brand logo some useful tools that we can use are things like canva Photoshop or AI image generators such as Mystic mid Journey idiogram there's a bunch of different ones out there but the just like we'll talk about more in the design section all of these are just tools you have the idea of the logo and then bringing the logo to life the tools is just what closes the Gap so it's not like AI image logos look better than canva logos or photoshop logos it's all the same it's just picking your tool set and using it to close the gap of bringing your idea to life and also honestly I'm pretty bad at this part of the process like creating logos and stuff but I've still been able to have success because I just focus on Simplicity over everything and it has gotten me pretty far so what is the brand logo actually for well it's the symbol and like visual anchor that people will think of when they see your brand so it's the most noticeable place that it appears is in when we run our ads it shows up as the profile image for your brand so that's like really the first impression that people have and then it also shows up at the top of our store but again like history te's logo we we reworked several times yoga stays changed a dozen times so our key goals are really just to instantly communicate like what our brand is about and serve as a recognizable symbol for your audience and also to help our audience remember like us and our brand for every product that we have and the key qualities of an effective logo are being simple Timeless versatile mean meaning that they can appear in a variety of different places and it's also relevant to your brand and the the elements of the logo is typography like your color palette the imagery and the shape or just general form that it takes on and again this is getting a little bit more into the weeds but we want to explain all sides of every Concept in the course so those are the main pieces to be considering but the best logos it's from this site so full credit to to these guys go check them out if you want but that's where this graphic came from just want everybody to get credit where credits do but anyway they give give examples of the best and like most memorable logos and I'm personally fascinated by the fact like how simple a lot of them are like the Target logo like come on the Nike Swoosh like often times the most memorable logos just use very simple Aesthetics and the reason we highlight that is one we're trying to emulate what success looks like but two realize that less is more like in a lot of cases with the business but especially with the logo so the best logos are simple and clear they're relevant to our brand they're Timeless and now we are going to make a logo so using canva which if you never used canva before to create a logo or just use canva in general they have a free plan but you just go to canva.com but our personal tool of choice when it comes to creating a logo is canva AI image generators are able to do this well too but Meg personally likes using Cano a lot it's basically like photoshoop but for dummies you're probably familiar with it at this point but what I like about C in particular is all the templates that they have so from the home screen if you come down here to the left templates and then click on logos you'll be able to see they have tons of templates that are already pre-made and honestly so many of these I would be perfectly fine just using and then adapting it to our own brand so like if we're doing like petal prints I'm just using petal prints as an example because it's slightly different than seasonal collections but if we did like flower logo yeah like this is great pretty much all of these if I just take this one click customize template petal prints Co and there's the logo honestly just like that you could use that as a as a logo and that' be completely fine because it's it applies to everything it checks all the boxes that we were just talking about like it's extremely simple conveys what the brand is about it's Timeless this can fit because it's so simple it can fit in a wide variety of places if we wanted to get really like creative we could even make like a a colored version of it but the cool thing and then we also want it to be able to fit in a variety of different places so if you notice this is actually like a full image so what we're going to do I want to make a version where I can have the text side by side with it so what I'm going to do is Click select all these elements and then right click group and move those something like that so then here this version would be my like icon so we want like a square version we want a horizontal version so if I do like this this would be my Square version this is good for like Facebook profile pictures like a little logo icon at the top of the site and then in any placements where this one might be too tall I can use this version instead this version like side by side this would go well like again it could go in the header so it's good to have like Dynamic versions of it and then then if I just download transparent background and there we go you're not able to see anything because it's showing like on a transparent black background but you can tell that the the design is in there and then those would be the two files that I would save but then if this one and this is a common mistake that I see a lot is see how the actual logo only takes up about that much space but it's still got all this extra buffer here it's a really really common mistake that you can avoid is people will upload this this full image into their Shopify store and then Shopify uses the full logo size so it ends up making their header way too big so what you can do is just go like this and we crop it you could either do this in canva or when you download it like here if you're on Mac if you just highlight what you want like create the box and then do command K it shrinks it down and command S I would save it and then I'll do the same thing for this one just highlight command K save and now I have two resized logos and then I would just rename this one pedal prints logo horizontal and I'll rename this one pedal prints logo Square so there's my simple way of doing it now we're going to watch Meg she recorded a video of how she creates the logos so she's creating a logo right now for seasonal collections which was the brand that we did in the last course and we're using it again as the demo she's browsing through different templates or like pre-made icons that canva has and she also did this a lot for the design section as well there's a lot of like t-shirt design elements you're able to get in here but as you can see she doesn't have like an exact science or thing planned out in her mind before she goes in she's just seeing like what icons are there and another way to do this would just be going into the templates like I did so templates image generators or doing what Meg's doing here so since it's seasonal collections there's four seasons obviously she's trying to create a logo that kind of represents it and this is just her playing around so take this as sign the like it's okay to play around and like not know exactly what you're doing if you ask Meg she'll still say to this day that she doesn't have any idea what she's doing with design uh or she's not a designer I would say otherwise like she's gotten pretty good at it at this point but even to this day with all the stores she's done she still just plays around with stuff so she's trying a leaf icon for fall flowers for spring and then she grabbed Sunshine icon represents summer I kind of like what I think she's going for like a window which I kind of like and then she just duplicated it and now she's trying another version where she just duplicates the page so it duplicates the whole design and then she's trying to see if she can make an X work and now she's trying another version and I think for this version she's going to make our logo ended up looking like last time but we can watch her go through the process and this is slightly sped up so she's not actually moving this fast so she's playing around with different fonts and Shrink down the size of the font that one looks like a little like rough edges so then she duplicates it she didn't like that logo so then she's trying out a different one see how it looks so similar to like what we did with the names where we just get a bunch of things down and then pick out the best she does the exact same process whenever we're creating designs or or logos so uh the important thing is like thinking back to the jar example the professor the classroom that or side of the classroom that had to create as many jars as possible ended up with the best jars same thing applies here so just create a bunch of different stuff but set a time limit I wouldn't spend more than like 30 minutes to an hour creating your brand logo and I I mean that literally do not spend more than an hour max on your logo like maybe an hour and a half if you're really like have never done anything design related before but in my experience from working with students in the community the normally like nine times out of 10 the logo that people come up with is fine because it just needs to be simple just represent the name something about the brand and that's it you can always come back and like fix it more later and so the total length we're speeding through it right now but the total length of this video where she's creating like 10 different template or design she's designing 10 different logos 17 minutes she she designs all of them so 10 different logos in 17 minutes now obviously she's done this before and so she has more experience but she used the background remover so she took a screenshot removed the background then she brings it in and now she's trying to combine the snowflake with the sun and this is like our classic logo a classic I make it sound like it's such a Timeless brand it's our example brand and there so she played around with you guys saw it she did at least like 10 or 15 different typography Styles and the one that she ended up choosing is just one that she thinks looks the best and she spaced out the font to give it a little bit more room to breathe and now look at all the different versions she has so once you finish your logo make sure to update your spreadsheet fill in your brand page where you're adding all your assets as you're building it like your workbook essentially make sure to add on to that so you have now your brand name your logo and now the next thing we need is our brand email and in the interest of keeping our cost low we're going to explain two different ways we can do this so now we're going to set that up so first we're going to buy our domain in the interest of keeping our cost as low as possible there's two different ways that we can create our logo so if we want to make a like with seasonal collections if we wanted to make a support at seasonal collections email make the domain the email then we would set it up using Google admin or if we just want to go the free route which honestly works just as well we just create a new Google account and just name it after our brand so if I wanted to create a just brand name at gmail.com all that I would do is I would go to gmail.com click create account and say for my personal use and we just put in seasonal collections next 1968 rather not say then I'll create my own seasonal collections at gmail.com see if that's available it's not I think that I already created that actually seasonal collections brand 2 next then I would set my password and there we go now we have our brand Gmail so now that's one way that we can do it or the other way is if we want to do support at brand name which this costs an extra like 15 bucks a month we would first buy our domain and the reason we made that separate Gmail is that then all the new accounts you create can all be under that same name you can use it as your support address and just keep all your your business accounts separate so in order to set up our branded Gmail account if you want to do support seasonal collections. first thing that we have to do is go to GoDaddy so if we were buying a domain for pedal prints for example we just go here and see if it's available so see pedal prints. Co is available another tool that we can use is called name check what name check is doing is it's essentially going and looking across like all social media pages and or this one's just doing domains here we go social media usernames but this tells us what names are available and so we see pedal prints. Co is available and then we can go over here to social media names pedal prints and honestly even if you see that your name is taken like yoga the name was taken so our Instagram page just became yoga. brand it really doesn't matter so it looks like there are Brands already for each of these so the next thing that I would do is do a trademark check which this is linked in the spreadsheet for you but we can just go do a quick us PTO trademark search it's called Tess so trade Mark search system click here and and search pedal prints and the reason we're doing this is just to make sure that there's no brands that have already trademarked the name that we're thinking about doing and this none of this is legal advice or financial advice or any advice at all but uh in my experience we have never had issues with as long as we run this check and see if there's anybody that has a trademark we've always been fine if you want to go the extra extra mile you could have a lawyer look at it but it's really not necessary in my experience but again not uh telling anybody what you should or shouldn't do with legal risks then once you decide on the domain that you're going to do like if we're doing pedal prints or in this example Meg is showing us seasonal collections you just go to go daddy there's a bunch of different domain Services you can use GoDaddy works completely fine and you buy the domain and it normally it should only cost like a fraction of here you can see seasonal collections.com this one has a dash so we don't want to go with that one or there's seasonal collections. shop you could do that one but the domain domains that we normally go with like you can see seasonal collections.com is 1,600 bucks a year wow that's crazy but the domain route that we go for is either doco dotshop or.com are the main ones and if we liked the seasonal collections.com just click make it yours they try to tag on like a bunch of extra upsells you don't need any of those just click continue then full domain protection and the reason we get domain protection is this what Meg's showing us here that if you buy domain protection you're not able nobody else is able to look up and see who owns a site if you buy it without domain protection then people are able to see who it is like she just typed in yoga stay if we hadn't gotten it with domain protection people would be able to see like our full address and everything so highly recommend getting it and they try tacking on like your website basically they're just trying to upsell you on a bunch of different things kind of like when you're filing for an LLC things that you don't really need so you just click continue to cart and then they always set it to be like more than one year so you just do one year and see how it how the price goes up so yeah just one year full domain protection and then you leave that on and then you go to check out then to create our branded email account go to google.com Gmail backabout the Gmail address is the freeway so Meg's doing the Gmail way she's entering seasonal collections so you just enter the information then you choose date which it really doesn't matter what you put here it can be any date I think it just has to be that you're over 18 but honestly even that I'm not sure if it matters then it gives you a couple of suggested brand names but Meg's just going to type in seasonal collections brand seasonal collections that Gmail's already taken then just create your password then enter your recovery email address this can just be your personal email that you currently use then there you go you have your branded Gmail account and you click next you sign your LifeWay and now your new Google account is ready now you set up your business you don't have to do that right now but uh what she is going to do is go to uh the logo and upload the logo that she just created and there you go now you have your logo plugged in now it's going to show up in any emails that you send so that was the way to create a seasonal collections brand gmail.com the other way you can do it is if you want your brand name to be in the root then you do this way so from the the starting page click create an account for work or business then try Google workspace just you enter your brand name or it doesn't really matter the number of people that you have any your contact information just seasonal collections or your brand name click create a new Google work space account does your business have a domain yes I already have one then you enter the domain that you just bought and we had already bought one but once you once you log in it's going to look like this and this is the Google workspace where pretty much there's a lot of different buttons and stuff in here it's meant for like big teams we're going to show the uh lowest price that you need is out of all these plans there's Google workspace business starter and that gives you professional email and the like Google Drive Gmail and then there's the Google workspace business standard so there you go once you've gone through so you create the account and then you enter your payment information like 12 bucks a month like we saw then you have a branded email and the re only real difference between this I recommend everybody get a branded email eventually but in the beginning it's not really necessary now the last thing that we want to do is create a Google drive folder for keeping all of our designs and work nice and organized so if you go to drive.google.com you can create uh a folder and this is what we use to organize everything so you have all of the checklists and stuff that we've given you in the course you can I recommend duplicating or moving all of those into your Google drive folder and we create first our master design folder and then you can upload each of your designs into that folder and we'll talk more about this in the design stage how to keep things organized but just know as long as you create a folder and that's your Source or like place you're organizing everything you're going to be in a good spot and personally we like to number every single design as we're uploading it so we keep things organized from the very beginning so at this point you have now chosen your brand name created your logo and then set up your email and your Google drive folder for organizing all of your assets and you also now have an understanding of what makes a good name how to create a decent logo and we've also talked about how you shouldn't spend a ton of time on this and just move on to the next step keep don't let perfect be the anime your progress and move on to the next lesson I'll see you there [Music] welcome to lesson 2.2 Shopify setup in this lesson we're in stage two of building and at this point we should have already chosen our Niche picked a brand name and our logo and have an idea of the 100 plus designs that we're going to be making and by the end of this lesson we're going to have our Shopify store fully set up and ready to take orders so that once we get into the testing stage we already have all of our ducks in row and we're going to be don't worry about this setup process we're just we're not going to be launching any ads or bringing in any traffic it's very low stakes right now the important thing is that we're just following along and setting it up and because we're going to be revisiting this again later like we're going to be coming back to like improve the store make sure everything's functioning properly so you're going to have a chance to revisit this so like just don't let perfect be the enemy of progress here and the reason that this matters is this is like the digital equivalent of our storefront this this is the first impression that potential buyers are going to get of our brand before deciding to make a purchase and this lesson strictly covers the setup so we're going to cover analytics and store optimization way more in depth in the funnel optimization lesson so first before we start building let's see what it's going to look like once we're done so here's a picture of the history tease funnel everything from the ad to the checkout the good news is that the this whole setup we're just following the template and the checklist so it's all laid out for us but the important thing is that we start to understand the 10,000 ft view of like each one of the pages and notice here that the funnel for example we're not showing the homepage all of the traffic and where what we really care about is the collection page to the product page so homepage is nice and I think that's what a lot of people focus on a lot when they're getting started but homepage really doesn't matter and we're going to talk more about like where our priority should be but collection page and important thing to note here is that we have uh mobile up mobile is where 80 plus% of our traffic is going to be coming from but our collection page is simply where we're displaying our products in like a a collection a format where people are just able to browse and see everything that we have to offer and then when they click on a product they're brought to the product page and this is where people are able to choose the color the size see the pricing reviews and really make an informed buying decision before deciding to add to cart and on the cart page we're basically just showing them a synopsis of what they've already added and you got have all obviously shopped on online stores before this is just breaking down the components and like showing what we look for and one of the this a quick side note one of the best ways to know like all right what should I be doing what should I include on each page aside from obviously just following along with what we're about to set up and really lock in for this I do this all the time and I share this a lot but people don't really do it I look at what the competitors are doing any time I'm not sure should my homepage have this or should my collection page have this or that look at five or six of the competitor we already chose a bunch of them and added them to the mirror board for you but that is one of the best ways to decide make that decision you can either a run a split test yourself and see what the results are say if you're deciding like between a different button color or just look at five competitors and a lot of times they all have the same thing in common they'll all have like the same kind of button color and then you just do that because especially when you're looking at larger companies they've already split tested a ton so being you know complete beginners and starting from like the point that we're at one of the lowest hanging fruit things we can do to accelerate our success is just tapping into what other people are doing then on the checkout page uh this is where people are entering their check their shipping information or uh collecting their payment info and this is the page where we have byar the least control over Shopify does all this for us but we'll get into that as well so all in all this is what it looks like the total funnel this is what it looks like on mobile and this is the page that we really want to be focusing on and you can claim your $1 shop trial by clicking the link down below so it's a dollar for 3 months as of the time of recording this and again this is how we it cost you absolutely nothing in fact you save money because they don't offer this deal other places but by using these links again you're able to just Google and pay full price if you want to but this is what helps us be able to support this supports us to be able to make more free content like this and we plan on hopefully continually updating this every single year releasing the most recent course so by doing this you're helping support us and the team be able to not only do this in the future but make it better and better every single year by bringing more resources more experts and we're able to improve this so like as you guys use these links the materials just get better and better and as a thank you for or an appreciation for you showing your support one I just appreciate you being here to begin with it still blows my mind how many people like listen to me talk monotone for hours and hours brought in coaches to give some different voices but anyway as an added appreciation we're sharing a Shopify theme file that you're able to download then import right into into your account so to get started claiming your $1 a month trial for the first three months with Shopify and click the affiliate link that's somewhere around this video and again when you use this affiliate link it's going to bring you to this page where you're able to claim your trial and this is a way that you're able to support us and our team and really makes free content such as this course possible and so we really appreciate you guys' support and so as an added thank you when you use this link we have some extra bonuses that we're going to share with you so to get started come here and enter your email click Start free trial create your Shopify account you're able to just skip this setup then we're going to come up here and click select a plan and here you're going to see the different plans that Shopify has available starting at $29 a month ranging all the way up to Shopify plus which is $2,300 a month and you're able to SC scr down and see the difference between the features available at each level if you're interested but honestly everything that we need is included in the basic level we'll upgrade to the 79 once we have some sales coming in later on down the road but for now just the basic is more than enough so click started then you're going to enter your name uh your payment information then we're going to click subscribe great we can just close out of this then we're going to come down here to grab our screenshot I go into settings then plan and then just take a screenshot of this whole page here and the reason that we're taking the screenshot is that that's how our team and I know that you signed up using our link and then then you're going to come back over to the classroom section and navigate to the Google form here and again the screen that you're on might look slightly different from this but you're going click forms and then you're going to scroll down enter your email address and make sure this is the same email that you use to create your school account then you're going to upload that screenshot then you're going to hit submit there we go and the reason it's important to include your or to use your uh school email is that we have an automation setup that should automatically unlock the classroom section that has the free gift so the first gift is the Shopify theme and down here you're going to find the the theme file so you're just going to click this and it's a zip file just going to click download and then once we get to the Shopify setup section later on we're going to be using this theme file to really speed up the process and this is the theme that's based on you know $25 million in sales applies to best practices and while it's certainly not a silver bullet like there's no such thing as that when it comes to themes it will absolutely save you a lot of time and help make sure that we have all our te's crossed and our eyes dotted and then the second gift uh as an added thing thank you is bonus Mystic credits so that once you get to the design generation part of this process you're going to have your account already pre-loaded with a bunch of extra credits ready to go so that you're able to hit the ground running and just start designing right away and so thanks again for using our affiliate link and now back to the lesson all right so now we're going to do it so the good news is along with uh the course we have the checklist and what we're going to be doing like we did in in the last course is just following along with all of the Shopify setup steps that are broken down right here so here we go so once you log into your store or you've created your account if you signed up using our link and then you upload the screenshot so our team to show our team that you did it then what they're going to do is send you back the theme file and the theme file is just a zip folder of the Shopify theme that we've set up for you that you're able to come down here and install it in your own store so the way that it works so it's going to be a zip folder that you saved to your your desktop and then from on the leth hand side here you're going to go down to themes and then add theme then upload zip file Zim file then click upload select the wcale free downloadable theme and click open then you're going to click upload theme and then it's going to install it into your store now this is designed to help save you some steps but I want to be very clear this is in no way a replacement for your own learning and like understanding how we're setting up the store I think there's some people out there that are like free Shopify store like guaranteed sales I don't know what they're smoking but there's no replacing you learning this and that's what I love to do is like help you learn the concepts and like let split test have work for us all that stuff so we're going to go through all that this is just designed to help you skip some of the steps and so when you preview the theme we've put placeholders in when I say we I mean Meg but this theme as basic as it's as it looks is based off of the stores that we grew like you saw the screenshots what yoga stay used to look like and they were extremely basic Bare Bones I built big beautiful stores and they always converted terribly I thought they looked really nice and I was happy to like show them to friends and family but what actually converts is an extremely simple store like this and so we have placeholders in here like for inserting your branded logo insert your branded Banner then when you go to like your product collections it has the titles in there for you it'll have obviously you won't have all the products and stuff in here because that's dependent on your like the products in your account but all of these settings and the font Styles and all of the stuff that we're about to go through a lot of that stuff will already be done for you so I still recommend watching through so you learn the steps and like know where things are and like how to navigate around but fundamentally the majority of it has already been done now this is not a guarantee that this store will convert or just start generating a ton of sales right out of the gate I want to be abundantly clear about that this is in no way of replacement for your own learning how to build a high highly converting store like anybody who says just take our theme and it's going to convert is doing a disservice is I've used the same theme across multiple stores sometimes it converts sometimes it doesn't because there's nuance like welcome to business again there's Nuance in it like yoga stay and history te's both started from roughly the same starting point but they dovetailed out as we expanded on the brand found like what colors and types of products were resonating with people the most that led to US changing things like our collection descriptions and font styles and colors like for call to action buttons so this is a starting point this is in no way a guarantee that this will convert this is just designed to help you save time so I don't want to hear you can sell it to me but it I don't want to hear I installed the theme and it like it it doesn't convert like this is not saying it's a guarantee we're going to go through like a massive conversion rate checklist so you can see all the things that are good to add to help improve that will help you troubleshoot that but ultimately figuring out how to troubleshoot that that is the business that is any business is learning to solve the problems and challenges that is what real business is made up of and the difference what's separates people who are successful versus those who do their best but don't get there is taking full accountability for the end result and outcome and realizing that these are tools and strategies and resources that we're laying out that have worked for us and have worked for our students but the only reason that they work for the students were that they were the ones who took full accountability and realized that this is their business they need to fully understand we talked about this like the self-awareness objectivity like willingness to learn all that stuff those are the real traits to lock in this is just a tool so I hopefully we made that clear but now we're going to go through the setup checklist all right so starting at the top and this checklist is pretty much designed for you to go step by step so we're going to go through and check off each of the boxes together and if you have any questions or if you feel like something is skipped over you want to see it in a different way you can go back and watch the old course because we go through the same exact setup process so we're going to show it again cuz we've learned like how to explain things better and like where there was confusion before but keep in mind that there if you have any questions go back and review the old setup because that's just another perspective or like view on things and it might answer some of your questions so we are going to customize this theme so from the main page settings we should actually show this first so the red tape stuff that we need to figure out on our our setup is go down here to settings so we're going to go to setting main page settings in the bottom left and then payments so payments and then complete setup will be right here and enter your business Ein information so this is so we already created our free trial sign up for the $1 month plan so you're going to enter your business information here so that Shopify creates a Shopify payments account for you and this will allow you to to collect orders from from customers and I recommend using an EIN for this but if you don't have an LLC or if you're International this kind of information is very readily available or you can ask the we scale GPT and it can help answer a lot of these questions for you but you enter that then you're going to put your brand name under the customer billing statement so we put it here that's the name that's going to show up on the customer's credit card statement then enter your business phone number you can either use Google Voice for this Google there there's a lot of different Services Google voice isn't available in every country but this is the phone number that's going to show up again on their credit card statement so I recommend not putting your personal phone number because as you scale and you get tens of thousands of orders you don't want your phone to start ringing off the hook enter your uh your phone number there and then enter your banking information that's what you would set up right here I recommend setting this linking this as your your business checking account and then on the checkout page going to go to shipping address phone number number so we set it's a phone number or email that's how we want it and then consent to marketing do email and we do pre-selected then you can turn on a tipping option here we had this on for a short period but it honestly just felt weird you would get people leaving tips but it's online store like what are they really tipping 4 like we're on our laptops but uh shipping address phone number optional address line to optional company name don't included don't include only require their first name don't show that tipping validate shipping address I recommend uh and then leave that unchecked and then for checkout page send abandoned cart emails we jump over to marketing go to automations and then abandoned checkout edit this should be they have these set up automatically just make sure that they're turned on and next we're going to and again we're going to revisit all of this so if it seems like we're going fast it's all good we come back to it later next we're going to connect our domain so you go to domain and then connect existing domain and then you follow the setup steps if you purchase through GoDaddy like we talked about you connect it and then the end result is that it should look like this so our domain seasonal collections. Co and then that is set as uh the primary domain then we go down to policies um and then go to return and refunds policies these should be you used to have to write all these yourself but now they generate them automatically but you just want to read read through and make sure that it's all accurate update this to include your contact information so this will have your phone number and your support email address and then uh brand they moved so we're just going to do that manually next we're going to connect our printify account so if you haven't done this already you're going to go down to the apps and which is down here in the left and then you're going to click type up here and type in printify which we already have it installed but you're just going to install the printify app and then you'll be brought back to your Shopify store yep sign into the printify account yep so now we're going to go to uh my products is up here my products and then you're going to select all the products and click publish which is right there now this is a brand new printify account we already had our other one connected so I'm not going to publish it but once you do that and Meg guide you through how to publish your own products and everything in the PRI section so if any of this is confusing you can watch that section again but you're going to choose sync product details and then here I'll show you what this looks like going to choose sync product details the bottom and then any this is good to know anytime you're publishing a new product you want to make sure that you're deselecting any of the ones that you don't want to update CU it'll update it everywhere so like for example if you have to go back into your printify account to like move where the design is on the T-shirt you want to uh deselect everything down here because otherwise it'll update all of them I can't tell you how many times we accidentally replace like every mockup on the site then had to go through and redo all of them next to uh get our product ready what we're going to do is so once the products are published on Shopify we are going to use a app that's called bulk product editor and within bulk product editor we're going to hover over the left sidebar and find where it says description going to uh step one choose select all products or another way you can do this is just do product type equals t-shirt and you can click preview match products to uh make sure that you're selecting the ones that you want to be editing and then go down here to choose replace entire description and then in a new tab I use this HTML editor and here's an example of a way that you could product description you could use where we just want these to be super short and sweet like to the point and so we just talk about the product type the type of cotton if it's true to size or pre-shrunk tear away label printed and shipped in the USA you want to update this once you start selling internationally but uh you type it in here and then you copy the source code so it' be like I did Bella canvas 3001 pre-shrunk true to size tear away label there we go then you copy this that right there actually they might have improved this let's see yeah they did yeah wow and then you'll click Start bulk product edit and then it would update across all your products all right now let's go back to the checklist and the reason we're using bulk product editors so that we don't have to go through and edit each products individually yourselves and I give you an example of a product description you can also add emojis instead of bullet points there we go so that's how to set up our account bulk product editor and now we're going to bulk product edit to compare app prices so next we're going to come over here to the left hand side looks like they Consolidated this down into pricing product type is t-shirt and we're going to do change compared at price and at the time of us filming this we're selling our shirts for $29.99 so that's our base price and then we add a dollar for 3XL or a dollar for 2XL and another dollar for 3XL and we're going to be experimenting with raising the prices again but uh for right now we'll set our compare app price uh for $39.99 and then you click Start bulk product edit now and then that would update it across all your products now we're going to get into our theme settings and this is where we're going to be using the theme that we already gave you so we're going to go down to a customizable theme and a good best practice anytime you're making changes to your Shopify theme is don't do it to the the main like your live theme always do it to one that's in backup so you don't you're not making any changes to your live site and reminder here is that we want to optimize for mobile first because that's where 80 plus per of our traffic is coming from so check that off then create new collection oh so we're going to go products Collections show creating a new collection let's go here name it um we already have one that's named this I'll just name it all products 2 and then set our product type or our collection type to smart and then we'll do product type is equal to t-shirt there we go and then here is where you can put in some emojis like Star not that star like uh 75,000 plus t-shirts sold or you could do like satisfaction guarantee just something short and sweet one sentence that uh like builds credibility or trust with with the customers or if you can't think of anything it's much better to leave it blank than to put in something like that looks overly salesy or just not good so now we're going to go back to theme editor by going to online store themes and customize this theme so to start we're going to go to First we're going to go to settings and we're going to upload our logo so we're going to change out this logo select from library let's see if I can find it in here yeah here we go then we're going to use this logo now an important thing to notice see how there this is a very common mistake I see a lot with beginner stores see how there's all this extra space above and below that's because this is a square file that I uploaded and Shopify it's trying to show the full file and it's not smart enough to crop off the top and the bottom this makes this has a really big impact on conversion rate so what we actually want to do go back settings logo want to edit the image and crop it do free form bring it down there there and Save there we go so we resized it and cropped it and now see how it's taking up much less space then next we're going to update the favicon which this is the little icon that shows up in the top so we're going to find the logo again and to do this you just make uh just a a logo file that's just showing the icon now that's updated now we're going to go down to colors and set they they honestly they have really good themes now or different schemes you're able to choose from but uh when we originally did this there you weren't able to but now solid button label color uh we have all the colors and everything here for you to enter yourself let me move this over so if you're using the theme file these should all be set to the settings that we're using but if they're not you're able to double check it uh with these theme files so primary colors solid button label we want that set to FFF accent one is the solid button background color we do this one accent one color gradient that's this right here none accent two um can either make it white or none then for text we set it to all black for the outline button all black and then these they took off so you don't even have to worry about these now we go to typography use assistance bold or semi bold and then for body assistant regular and just set it to 120 and close that layout page width 1,200 space between template section should be zero grid space is 8 and 8 and that's the space between the objects here because the whole concept that we're trying to do here is like keep things uh like nice and tight so it's not taking up excess space then we go on to the buttons and Border thickness one opacity 100 Corner radius two Shadow opacity 15% yep horizontal offset vertical offset yeah wow there's not really all this has been imported already so it's still good to go through so that you're understanding it but now variant pills this is when we're on the product page this is what the different product options are going to show up as like what they're like the color swatches and the sizes so border thickness one opacity 55% Corner radius 40 Shadow opacity 5 horizontal offset 2 this is just like the nitty-gritty settings of what the buttons are going to look like and all these settings the way that we came up with this was from a lot of testing trial and error and seeing what worked and what didn't and then a lot of the ideas came from looking at our competitors and like evaluating and this is the exact same thing you should be doing is look at your competitors see what do their buttons look like what do mine look like what is their collection Page look like on mobile what does mine look like and just going item by item and attention to detail is is way more important at this stage than at any other stage or part of the business inputs we leave all this the same you just want to make sure that the corner radius is set to 40 then product cards uh style standard or card let's see the difference yeah just do standard so this should say standard text alignment left that's where the text how it shows up here color scheme background scheme two border thickness zero border opacity 100 Corner radius 20 that's like rounding out this yeah so we don't want it that rounded turns it into like a circle Shadow opacity 5% Shadow horizontal offset zero vertical offset that's like the shadow behind the uh and blur five all right blur is staying at 40 next we have collection cards this is much less important this only like really applies to the homepage but we do style card because this is it makes like as you add new collections which in the beginning we're only going to have one but as you add more it you have the option to show cards for people to click that navigate to the different collections but we're getting all these settings done in the beginning so collection cards style should be card text alignment left color scheme scheme two border thickness zero Corner radius 20 opacity five horizontal offset zero vertical offset for the shadow so if this seems like we're running through stuff fast it's because one we are but these are just things you just got to check the boxes this is just like the style of what it's going to look like for that card and that's something that very like we're not even really using in the beginning but I just went through and did all the settings so that you wouldn't have any questions blog we leave all those the same content containers leave all the same media all the same drop downs and popups border thickness four border opacity five Corner radius 10 Shadow opacity go horizontal offset four vertical four Shadow blur there we go and those drop downs it shows up like when somebody depending on our our variant setups it'll show up like when somebody's selecting like their size that's the place that dropdowns really come into play next next is drawers so this is when the cart pops out from the side so drawers border thickness four border opacity 10% Shadow opacity 10% horizontal offset four four Shadow blur 10 perfect then badges this is like the little sales icon so position top left corner radius 20 um sales color scheme you can do one where it sets it to red but uh so if you were to do that what that would look like is choose a different uh scheme and then you would edit it and change it to red but I've been liking just the plain white recently just looks like less salesy and then icons oh they got rid of that okay brand information we can leave this all the same social media once we set up our social accounts you can add them in there search Behavior enable search suggestions don't show the product vendor and don't show the product price currency format um yeah show the currency code at checkout turn that on and then for cart do a cart drawer so a cart drawer is when we click add to cart and it pops out from the right a page would be when they click add to cart and it takes them to the cart page or popup notification would be when you add something to cart it does a popup over the middle of the page we've seen the best conversion rate with the drawer and then we want to go to checkout which checkout is the only one that has a slightly different uh layout wait stay so we want to or it has a different place that we access it so the place we access it is by going up here make sure we save our changes first and then we go to checkout so then we click customize and this is roughly what we want our page to look like so horizontal logo at the top resize it so it looks good then Center it full width and again we want to make sure that we're not using a logo that has like extra padding on the top or bottom no background image uh just leave it as white and then the accent colors use this uh code it's just this blue that's what shows up like here and then buttons want to use use the same color green that or whatever your your add to cart and checkout buttons are throughout the rest of your site it should be the exact same here and this is another little like Nuance that see a lot of people miss and then for errors just use this red now we're going to go save those ch changes now we're going to go edit our homepage so we hit exit go back online store customize our theme again and now from the homepage so we're going to update the announcement bar the announcement bar is here so this is where we're able to say what our free shipping threshold is that's what we recommend and this bar at the top it seems like a subtle thing but keep in mind that this is the first thing that people see when they land on your site on mobile so right now we're doing free shipping on ORD 75 plus but you could have this be like Black Friday sale Cyber Monday sale like new collection whatever you're able to set these so that they rotate so you can add multiple announcements and then see It'll rotate between them and then you're able to adjust the settings to change every five seconds add announcement bar we just do free the free shipping going to hide that one then the header we do desktop logo to which that's what it looks like when it's like this middle left main menu which we'll set that up in a second then a desktop menu type drop down yeah you can leave all the padding and margins the same then this right here this is the Branded uh or like your banner which Meg put in the exact Dimension it should be so you can either create one in canva or you can just come down here or not these won't be in here but okay so I can't find ours so going to it's in here somewhere but I'm just going to do free images I'm just going to do flowers again almost nobody is going to be hitting this homepage especially in the beginning so it's really not that crucial but we can add so under our image Banner if we want it to have text on the front do image Banner say welcome to seasonal collections make it bold can't really read that but that's okay then we have our will go to header yep add featured products or featured collection so feature collection we just choose best sellers and then and the collection we set it to is all products so this is just going to populate with all the products that we're adding we want to change the image ratio to square and yeah that's good you can add the quick ad button but that doesn't make a big difference there we go now we're on to a much more important page which is the collection page so on our collection page go down to the which announcement bar and header that's just carried over so our collection Banner can show collection description um and then show uh Collection image so the collection description is where we added like one sentence that's you know talking about uh you know something that builds trust 30-day money back guarantee honestly I'm not really a big fan of that star I'd really like something that's a little bit cleaner but uh we can also just turn that off see how that looks yeah it looks pretty clean we'll just leave it like that don't worry we're going to go through in the funnel optimization lesson like how to evaluate you know all these changes and like different options we're talking about and how we can measure like which ones are impacting which ones we should look at changing and all that sort of thing so now we're on product grid we recommend doing 16 products as we found when you do more than that it tends to slow down the site speed number of columns on desktop is four image ratio Square second image on Hover yes or no this one is up for interpretation because it does slow down the site speed slightly I'm going to leave it off for now show vendor is no product card show product rating you want to leave that as no until we start actually Gathering like some reviews so then there's the the quick ad button which this is something you can experiment with in my experience it actually does it's been performing better recently to leave this off but we're going to talk later about how we can measure if that is something we should try turning on or not um but we want to make sure it's two columns POS the one sometimes people are like well I want people to actually be able to see the products so they do one we trust me this is one You definitely want to do too cuz people are in a scrolling like passive buying like browsing mindset we want to enable that the best we can and when you just show them one product it's like a very slow experience it's not much like uh it's not very stimulating then section padding zero and 12 I would like to get the prices to be side by side but it's okay there we go that's better so I'm turning the currency codes off until we're actually starting to sell internationally Now product pages let's go up here to products default product so we start with product information desktop media width is medium media fit is original desktop layout is thumbnail Carousel desktop position is left image Zoom no Zoom mobile layout show thumbnails so hide other variance media after selecting a variant so this is important that if we turn this off see how it shows us the little thumbnails here this is something you can experiment with again it's your store you can run split test but in our experience we've seen a better conversion rate without that on because the whole concept here is that we're trying to be as close to the top of the fold as possible uh so we don't want to have a lot of extra space in between here that we want the call to action buttons to be as close to the top of the fold as possible so then mobile layout show thumbnails uh delete the text section that's already taken out quantity selector I don't know where they put that oh yeah it might be out here yeah so quantity selector if you have that on get rid of that variant picker so for this you can either use drop downs or you can use pills so it's pros and cons to each the thing to keep in mind is the amount of space that this is taking up so I'm just going to do pills for now you can do circles as well really change anything um but get rid of the share section sometimes there's a little button there for sharing add collap cible Row for so now we're going to add these pieces in which again these are probably already there if you're using the the theme file but going to add oops add collapsible Row for highest quality products and you can just copy paste this stuff in so and if you're on Mac you can just take a screenshot of this and then copy paste but what we really want here is trust seals so badges showing like why they should trust us like 30-day guarantees fast shipping free returns and then we want to give them more uh details if they're interested so like the product description washing instructions shipping and returns one of the biggest mistakes that I see at this step is when people are they just add way too much text and it's like a whole wall of text we don't want that like the people that are visiting our site are in a buying mindset they're coming from social media they're like scatterbrained we want to make sure that we are just giving them the cleanest fastest shopping experience possible then for sizing chart we'll talk about this later but we use kiwi sizing chart to add it it's like $6 a month uh there's no affiliate link or anything just we recommend using it and that puts a nice size chart here that when people click it it pops it down and because sizing is one of the biggest questions that people have when they're shopping for apparel so this has helped us increase conversion rate a lot something else you can experiment with so we add add rows for order shipping returns are free and easy and then uh related products so we recommend adding two levels of related products so one you can do customers also bought then you can do you might also like or featured collection you call it like your best sellers and you just want to make sure that this is formatted roughly the same as uh what your collection page looks like so there you go hit save now we're going to create our other pages keep checking these off as we go so we're going to go to online store pages and then we're going to add a couple of pages one we I'll show you how to do it you just click add page and you call it about us and here you would paste a description of your brand recommend just using chat GPT uh to to generate it and we'll talk about how you can use that to like improve your conversion rate later on but the other Pages you want to have are your contact and then your terms of service privacy policy and return policy which all those policy Pages we set up originally like at the very beginning now fortunately Shopify automatically generates some for us so now we're going to go to site navigation so we go to online store navigation and we go to our main menu which this is the menu that shows up in the the navigation bar at the top and uh we have our shop about us and contact so to add a menu item you can call it whatever you want so say we wanted to add our return policy to the top we do that and then you do uh policies uh then refund policy then you click save and then if you want to Nest it within something go like that but roughly this is what our not roughly this is what our navigation looks like when we're starting out it doesn't have to be anything complex but you just have the buttons you do want to have is home shop about us and contact and your shop button will just be leading people to your you should only have one collection when you're starting just one collection ction one Niche one big group of your products then check that off now we're going to do our footer menu so in our footer we'll do contact Pages contact us save then we can go see what it looks like a preview now here's the page or the site that we just built and notice how it has all of our policies all the way already down there even though we didn't put them there oh it added the return policy there we go and now up until now your store has been locked so to unlock it we're going to go to online store preferences and then down at the very bottom here you see restrict access to visitors with the password by turning that off you will take off the password on your site and people will be able to access it then manage customer privacy settings this depends on like where you're base and like laws and like legislation where you're located but uh we set it to partially collected then set it to yeah we recommend turning off collection for customers who are residing in California but if you have this stuff in the in the footer then you're mostly covered but this you really don't have to worry about and this is not legal advice Financial advice or anything but you don't really have to worry about this until you start selling internationally with the exception of California so this is where like if you're selling internationally and like you have to be gdpr compliant that's where you're able to set up all this then what I recommend doing next is open up your site uh and complete a test order and once you complete the test order and you receive the product which again after you set up your pry integration your order when you place it on your site it should go automatically to printify and then you should see it be sitting there ready to get fulfilled you set up your auto automated like fulfillment settings and it should get pushed through and then within a few days you're going to go from having uh you know set up your store made your designs and then your product is getting shipped right to your front door so it's pretty exciting when you complete your test order I recommend posting in the free community to share with everybody let them know about your progress and celebrate together because it's a big milestone it was pretty exciting to me the first time that I realized my product actually got shipped and it was like a real thing so it's something to not be overlooked it's a it's an accomplishment coming as far as you already have then Shopify keys for Success less is more we want to color isolate our call to action buttons and something else that I'll show you really quick is when we go to discounts the way that we create our free shipping discount is you can do create discount free shipping and then you can do automatic discount uh just the United States that's where we're launching to begin with and then minimum purchase amount $75 order discounts free shipping a there we go and then when you click save discount then anybody who checks out on your store with over $75 in your in their cart will automatically get free shipping and then in the future if you want to create other discounts like for you know holidays or like Black Friday was just going on we can do amount off discount you can do like Black Friday Cyber Monday uh 15% off all customers uh it can be so if you want it to be able to combine with free shipping then you can do that and you can do allow discount to be features on featured on channels and then save discount and then that's how you create a discount code and then online store navigation this is how you create URL redirects so for example in our ads we're going to be using back SL sale a lot to shorten the URL we can set this so that it automatically redirects to our all products collection so now when somebody types in seasonal collections. Cale it's going to automatically take them to uh to this page wow it really wants me to save those but anyways that's the quick rundown of how to set up your Shopify store now we're going to go through the the apps that we're using and these are the apps that we're currently using in our 0 to7 figure store so you're going to see under the hood exactly what we're doing and fundamentally when we're installing an app it must do one of four things it must either increase conversion rate increase average order value increase lifetime value or decrease the amount of time that it takes our team to complete something so either make more people buy make people buy more stuff help help them buy more stuff or make people buy more stuff over time uh or it must automate repetitive tasks and inside of our 0 to7 figure store these are all the apps that we are currently using so we have the online store we have printify we have Facebook we have shop clavio for email marketing goaf Pro for affiliate marketing push owl for like those push notifications across the top QuickBooks for our finances and Reporting Google and YouTube which this is the same as the Facebook app then Tik Tok which you definitely don't need Pinterest definitely don't need hexom book product editor which we just used uh Shopify inbox which we actually deleted now Crush pick this one we set up it greatly improves your site your site speed because it reduces the size of all your image files translate and adapt you only need that once you're selling internationally uh and then make we use that for automations for our International orders which we C for in a later lesson then frequently bought together this is an added block that you can put on your product page like in the Amazon style where it shows like three products and it shows people frequently bought these together and shows like product one product two product three add all three of them we found that increases add to cart or average order value then Co cozy anti- theft this is it stops people basically from right clicking and just downloading your whole store I don't really recommend investing a lot into that cuz like we talked about people are going to copy your store it's a sign that you're on the right track it literally has zero impact on your business's performance but anyway that's in there Shopify counter this one's kind of fun because it just shows our Shopify sales and it connects to like a physical counter in the real world then looks is what we use for reviews for getting started I recommend using judge it's way cheaper and it works just fine then flow is automatically set up collabs you don't have to worry about gorgeous is what we use for our customer service and I love it but I recommend just using Gmail to get started gorgeous is expensive and doesn't make sense until you're further on down the road then tripa whale is what we use for our analytics and dashboards audiences you don't need meta Fields you don't need then kiwi we uh talked about already and so all said and done the ones that we actually recommend having to start are these and even push out I would take off this list but these are the ones that we recommend and like yeah there you go to take it even further these are the apps that I have to get started so it's extremely Bare Bones and most of these like printify Facebook and Google those are just Integrations and then email search and Discovery those are and flow those are all from Shopify to begin with so demystifying the myth that you need a lot of apps in order to be successful you absolutely don't but the categories for apps are site management customer service fulfillment marketing and reviews for site management we use hexom bulk product editor for changing all the products this one is your best friend funny quick story is uh Meg used to do all of our product that it's manually until one day I was like hey you know that there's a like an app that does that for you and she was I think she wanted to hit me but fortunately she didn't um but yeah it saves a ton of time Crush picks increases the speed of your site kiwi size chart increases conversion rate by giving the little popup for the sizing chart frequently bought together increases the average order value then for marketing we use Facebook and Instagram which just connects to our pixel and our ad accounts clavio this just syncs all of our email data and sets up like our flows for us and our popup then Google and YouTube this is the exact same as the Facebook one just for Google ads then Goa Pro I really like this one because it's free and super easy to set up but this lets people sign up for as Affiliates to promote your site and there's a million different affiliate tools out there we've used a bunch of them and go out we ended up coming back to go f Pro because it's just as good and it's they have a free plan which I don't really understand we've like we do over a million in revenue on our store and we still haven't had a need to upgrade and you'd be surprised there were a lot of people posting in the community that after they updated their site and added this that they started getting affiliate signing up pretty quickly then push out this one I liked because they had like a really low price plan that you don't really need this this is just you could bucket this the same as email marketing because what you're able to do is send those push notifications like when you have a new deal or discount you're able to get in front of people and it pops up on their desktop but that's one that I would consider for later on down the road then for fulfillment we have printify and you can have printful gelato a bunch of different ones we recommend printify because of all the reasons we talked about but this integrates directly from our Shopify store so that anytime an order is received it automatically gets pushed over there then customer service right now we're using gorgeous but to get started just use Gmail it works just as well and it can carry you to like we didn't switch to gorgeous until we had done several hundred, in sales because that was the point that then the the number of tickets became so much that it made sense to have some kind of ticket management system then for reviews we use looks but I recommend getting started with judge it's like 10 bucks a month super cheap and it works just as well big misconception people have is that they need a lot of reviews in order to get started every one of our stores we've started with zero reviews and it's if you have really good products that people like you will build up reviews the reason you're not getting sales in the beginning is not because you don't have reviews it might help conversion rate slightly to have it but that is not the thing to focus on the thing to focus on is just making more better designs and a better mockup so Shopify 8020 focus on your product first Above All Else and keep in mind the order that we're focusing is our cost per link click so nothing even Shopify related then install the bare minimum number of apps one of the biggest mistakes I've made in the past was installing a ton of apps that really just slowed down the site speed and didn't actually add any value and I know definiely that that's the reason that the site was slow because after I finally ran a sight speed test which there's a bunch of them you can Google like Shopify sight speed calculator I recommend running it on like two or three of them you'll be able to see like which apps are slowing you down all the apps that we just recommended are the ones that have survived the test of time and we now recommend but fastest way to optimize look at your competitors I keep saying this but people don't really do it so please do it it's truly like the growth hack of all growth acts if you're not sure what to do which deciding what you should be doing what changes to make is like the operative piece in running any business the fastest way to know that is not to be drawing on your own knowledge especially when you're a beginner you don't have the experience that's okay I didn't either and I had really slow growth when I forced myself to try to come up with all I thought that I needed to be the one coming up with all the stuff myself that's just not the case look at the competitors they are running tests they've done millions and millions of dollars in sales see what they're doing and then emulate their success like do they add like how does their template or their theme differ from the one that we just set up there's going to be a lot of differences so try that stuff out what we've given is a starting point this is not what the end product will look like your brand should grow and develop over time so keep that in mind that if you see a competitor doing something try it out add it to your site and then the most important thing is that you just watch what was your conversion rate before when did you make the change then what was the performance after and then that'll tell you was it a good test or was it a bad one and you should like worst case you learn something new and you just go back to the way it was and then post in the community sharing the test that's an action item for everybody Post in the community sharing like what your metrics are after you start running ads what changes are you making to the site and ask other people what are they doing on their site and get the conversation going be the one leading the charge and getting everybody involved cuz this is where like when we lived in the house with 12 of us the way that we got success as fast as we did fortunately was by all of us sharing and the tide that rises All Ships so make sure like it's on all of us if any of us lean back and just like rest and like say we're just going to passively watch the community doesn't work nearly as well as it has been so get in there talk about what you're trying see what other people are doing and start a conversation and then next focus on one primary acquisition channel for one for us it's Facebook but want to focus on one and really dial it in and you can get to multiple seven figures a year from just Facebook email and Google one of the biggest mistakes I see people making is when they start to Splinter their focus and they say well I I've heard a lot about Tik Tok ads I'm going to try driving that to my Shopify store yes you can you can do organic you can do a lot of things it's a matter of asking ourselves with limited time and resources and a learning curve to hurdle where does it make the most sense to be placing that Focus that's what this whole course is about then next optimize for Mobile Traffic first it's 80% of your traffic so mobile is King and I say this all the time but look at your site on your phone see what it looks like and scroll and look at it from a buyer's perspective like is there something blocking your cart button is there some is it you know not clear where they should be going to check out like do you need to make adjustments to your font size all these things like do they have to scroll really far in order to get to the cart button all these little things make a big difference the next is run your fin anals daily should be running once you start running your store run your p&l and your balance sheet which is in your tracker every single day like every day it's the best Habit to get in the routine of and then last focus on product first so first is product last is product and it's been funny watching people in the community go through this they everybody hear is product is everything but then and I understand it I was the same way there's so many knobs and dials and stuff that when you look at the Grand schema thing there's a million different variables so it's very easy to get caught in the mental trap of thinking that all these things are created equal that's really just us not knowing what we don't know because they are absolutely not created equal it is product far in way and what I can say to wrap all this up is that I've had I've used roughly the same starting point for Shopify stores for the past eight years and every like using the same starting point same ads same a lot of variables held constant we've had very different results on different stores and the difference every single time time has been the quality of our mockups and our products so take that like hopefully you don't have to learn that lesson the hard way but out of everything here keep the 10,000 foot view of what really matters the most and realize back to the brick and mortar example that we have a brick and mortar store that we just set up when people walk into your store what matters most does is it the color of your shelves or is it what's on the shelves so putting it in perspective it's really the product that matters most everything else is just there to support the product and streamline the checkout process for people but the reason that your store is not profitable in the beginning and you know the path to you getting it there is not normally from like little tweaks in your store it's from the testing a wide variety of new products and we're going to cover that in a lot more detail in the funnel optimization section so make sure you have your Shopify theme it's a recap everything upload your Shopify theme set up your payment processors which the other one that we didn't mention but it's really simple to set up is PayPal if you're able to do it in your country PayPal is roughly 50% of our checkout uh so it's important to include that and explore you know your must have apps these are the ones that we recommend and all that said and done if you guys have any questions about any of this you can also ask the we scale GPT or post in the community and get feedback but this is a great exercise for you to start thinking on your own two feet and being resourceful and as you have questions when you get error messages error messages are not not the thing to post in a community about post things to post in the community about are like ideas you have lessons you learn experiences asking good questions that start conversations if it's not there as a help desk there are help desks for help desk questions so like if you get an error message as you're setting something up or you know you try publishing a product and it doesn't populate right whatever it is reach out to Shopify support reach out to PR ify support and you be resourceful not just for the sake of everybody in the community and you know facilitating high quality discussions but it's really important for you to be learning that skill and you're capable of it you've watched this far along like you're already more dedicated than 99% of the other people out there so you have what it takes you've been resourceful and solve problems on your own in the past this is absolutely no different and this is you right now staring down the barrel of the learning curve and you're doing it you're showing up you're putting in the work so congratulations on reaching the end of the Shopify setup lesson and I'll see you in the next section [Music] hi everybody and welcome to section 2.3 of the build phase we are going to go through everything fulfillment from what products to sell to who to print with we're going to go through it all at this point you're at stage two in our building stage here we are getting everything set up across all of the different tools that we are going to use so that we can get to designing and then quickly launching our brand so let's get into it at this point in your journey you should have selected your Niche if you haven't go back to the previous sections this section is not yet meant for you so you should have selected your Niche you should know which Niche you are selling in two you should have picked a brand name and created a logo if you haven't done that yet simply pause go buy yourself a domain figure out your brand name make a quick logo nothing too crazy and finally you should have researched and brainstormed over 100 different design ideas that then we can refer back to when we actually sit down to create these designs that way we are never just sitting there unsure what to do next we are always going to have something that we can pull from get some inspiration get those creative juices flowing by the end of this lesson you will have set up your printify account it'll be fully ready for you to go and seamlessly take orders you will have have one example product completed that you can use to copy to quickly create and duplicate out your products and finally you will be prepared to handle orders seamlessly all the settings on the backend will be completed that way when you get that first order everything is going to be smooth sailing for you so let's get into it why does fulfillment matter there are six reasons why fulfillment is so important specifically with the print on demand model so the first reason is customer experience and trust pretty much when somebody goes and places an order with the print on demand model it's immediately out of our hands we no longer have control of the shipping speed of you know the print quality that's that's happening so we want to make sure that we are picking a printer that we trust and that our customers are going to have a good experience with because technically we're just kind of slapping our name with that printer as like a partner with us so it's really important to pick somebody who has good shipping time good quality very few mistakes we'll get more into that but it's really important with the print on demand model two would be brand reputation the last thing that we want is people just receiving shirts that are horrible the print quality is terrible we're not going to be able to build a good brand we're not going to be able to get good reviews from people they're going to be annoyed they're not going to be happy with their product so it's really important that we are picking somebody that we trust that we have a lot of you know as much control as we could possibly have with three it gives us a competitive Advantage we want to stick out from competitors we want to be the better design we want to have the better backend the better experience the better just overall customer experience and we are able to do that when we pick a really good print provider we want to have reduced customer service issues the last thing that we want is to have some big huge headache because there was an issue with shipping and none of the shirts went out for any of our customers over the past week it's definitely not something good we want a print provider that's able to keep up with the demand and always ship out on time and have good quality we want increased profitability we are in this game to make money and if you're not here to make money God bless you it's a great hobby I wish I had that but I'm here to make money at the end of the day I'm here to be profitable picking the right print provider is not only good for your customer experience but it is also good and important for our experience this could be the difference between having maybe a 3 to 5% margin which is the norm for apparel brands or having closer to 15 to 20% Which is where Chris and I typically sit with our current brand month over month are around 15 to 20% depending on how our ads did that month and that's where we want everybody here to be as well we want to have the biggest profit margin that we can possibly get because that means more money in your pocket we also want to be able to scale for growth so as our ads are doing better as we're selling more designs as our brand is picking up we're getting brand recognition we want to make sure that our printer is able to keep up with that demand are they able to get those designs out the door as fast as they were when we weren't scaling as as quickly these are all important things to keep in mind when out there researching and selecting a print provider so what are the different types of fulfillment now remember we are using the print on demand model so that is pretty much somebody places an order somebody else is handling the Fulfillment for us we have DIY we could fulfill it ourselves if we wanted to go out and get little shirt press we could do the whole thing but we're unable to scale very quickly with that if we have an ad that takes off and we are selling thousands and thousands of this same shirt are you going to be able to keep up with that printing them and then shipping them probably not we also have 3pl which is pretty much we go out and buy inventory of that shirt and then we have to find somebody to hold all that inventory and then ship that inventory out that's the 3pl model but we are here for the print on demand model the lowest barrier to entry and scalable totally totally important and a great fulfillment option for everybody that is here so next question is what should I sell and that would be Evergreen products the definition of Evergreen products means that there is stable demand there are constantly people who are out there searching for this product buying this product wanting to own this product we definitely want that stable demand we want people coming back time and time again two we want that Timeless appeal is it going to go out of style something that I think about is like fidget Spinners or pretty much anything that's like Drop Shipping it's kind of like oh let me get on this latest Trend fidget Spinners like they blew up a few years ago everybody was selling them they were like hard to find it was crazy and now I like don't hear anything about fidget Spinners so definitely they don't have that Timeless appeal and then we're also looking for a wide audience do a lot of people want to be buying this product if it's just like a few things like let's think of like a high ticket thing like something that's really expensive and cost a lot like a pelaton or a fancy treadmill probably not a ton of people can afford them or would want to purchase one so we want to be keeping that in mind as we are looking for products our Evergreen product recommendation if you haven't got gotten it already throughout this course is of course t-shirts t-shirts are the perfect Evergreen product they're always in high demand people are always buying them they're low tickets so you know we have millions of people that we can sell t-shirts to I mean how many times have you gone on a vacation and you find a t-shirt that you like and you just have to have it because you're on vacation it's something that's easy to sell people like to buy them so what are the key qualities to running a t-shirt brand there are a few things that we're going to look at we definitely want high quality material we don't want anything that's scratchy or something that's falling apart or something with a really itchy tag that's something that people will complain about so we definitely want material quality we want good stuff we don't want to be selling junk the second thing is we want a good style and a good fit this depends on the niche that you're in are you selling more towards women are you selling more towards men are you unisex these are all important things to keep in mind especially when we are then picking a product that we are going to sell so like which brand of t-shirt will we select because some Styles have different fits and we will get into that we also have print compatibility so we want to be looking at the Quality that our printers are sending out you know do we like the print compared to another company should we switch things up it's always good to do some test orders look at the Quality look at the different colors get an idea for what your customer would receive and see if you would be happy with it if you're not then we need to go back to the drawing board and we need to make some changes we have cost and profit margin this is something that a lot of new new print on demand sellers I think Skip they don't spend too much time going through the math doing the data really digging in and seeing what is this going to cost me at the end of the day this is something that Chris and I we base so much of the selection of the t-shirts that we choose based off the profit margin because at the end of the day this is our business it's what we are doing to make money we want to be making the most money that we possibly can for every single sale so run the numbers and find out what that true cost is going to be to you and make some changes based off of that and lastly would be customer appeal do the people who are purchasing from our site do they overall like the shirt do they not like the shirt it's always great to get customer feedback because then we can make any changes if we need to so where should we start luckily for you Chris and I have started a long time ago and we have plenty of experience that we can now share with you so our go-to is the Gilden 64,000 now this is like the classic unisex brand and luckily for us it comes at a really great price point this is what we currently sell on our 0 to7 figure brand we've been selling it for years have had very few complaints you're always going to get complaints as well not everybody will be happy and that's completely fine we cannot tailor to every single person who purchases from our store could be a completely smooth process and the person could still hate it so you will get some negative stuff but if it's a continued pattern and you are getting the same thing over and over again then that is a time to start thinking am I getting enough feedback about this where it is statistically significant and I should be making a change so this is the one that we go with and honestly it comes at a great price point now you also have Bella canvas which is very similar quality-wise it's a nice soft style shirt has um more of a slim fit so if you're somebody who is in a unisex space which that's where our 0 to7 figure store is Bella canvas may not be the best selection for you they tend to be more fit through the midsection and a little bit longer which women tend to really like and enjoy the fit of men don't typically love the fit as much doesn't mean it can't work for your brand this is just what we've found over time we've sold Bella canvas we've sold Gilden we still sell Gilden it's a great brand to choose but always keep in mind and again just get some test orders and compare and have other people in your family try it and see which fit they like and feel and do some testing yourself and finally we have the Comfort colors 1717 it's more of a relaxed fit and a vintage look very very very popular on Etsy but unfortunately is one of the more expensive shirts doesn't mean that we can't sell it just means it's going to eat more into our profit margin and maybe you're okay with that it definitely depends on the niche that you are in if you know you're going for more of like the washed out type of style you can absolutely go with Comfort colors it's just going to cost more you may need to charge more for your shirt or get a little bit more creative when making your store and running sales and and all that stuff but we've had students successfully sell Comfort colors so you don't particularly need to shy away from it but again run the numbers see what's out there look at your Niche and make decisions based off of that so how can we be sure one order samples decide both the t-shirt brand and the printer something that I like to do is if I'm between two shirts like a Gilden and a Bella I'll order a Gilden and a Bella from like the top three print providers within like the country so if we're selling in the US I would pick the top three sellers within the US and I would try out different designs on those see the quality look at the print quality that they're sending me and then be able to make a decision based off of that also while keeping in mind the price because a lot of times the prices do not match among all the printers and we're going to get into that in a little bit two we're going to evaluate the material the fit and the print quality based off of those testing ordered samples I definitely always suggest doing a test sample just make sure you know what you're sending people and make sure that you know it's up to par for you and you feel proud of selling this brand T-shirt with this quality and three we want to analyze the cost and potential profit margins so is this going to completely deplete any profit that we were making or are we going to have a pretty good margin back at the end of the day so run the numbers see how much one shirt order two shirt order three shirt orders are going to cost you and then pretty much figure out what you'd then sell them for always good to be running those numbers and know exactly what your costs are going to be and lastly who should I fulfill with we would absolutely recommend printify printify has a Global Network of providers from literally all over the globe where they are able to fulfill anywhere that you have customers wanting to buy they also have a userfriendly integration with Shopify is super easy to connect your Shopify store with printify and it is a seamless integration anytime somebody places an order in Shopify it automatically goes into printify and they begin the Fulfillment process for you you don't have any buttons to click we will set that all up and it'll be just immediate when somebody places an order printify is handling the rest of it we also have competitive pricing for higher margins I have researched I think every single print on demand company nobody is able to compete with print ofice pricing absolutely nobody you are not going to get a better profit margin printing with anybody else and I've seen this with students they've gone to other print providers we tell them hey have you run your p&l have you run your balance sheet take a look like see let's get an idea like what is the profit margin and you would be shocked and they are shocked when they run the numbers you are not going to find any better pricing than on printify platform so let's go through the entire printify setup so the first thing that you're going to want to do is go to printify click sign up once you have put in your email address and selected a password you will then click sign up and printify is going to ask you a few questions what brings you to printify are you new to selling are you already selling just kind of getting an idea like where you at we're going to say we're a business because because we are we are a business we are here to make money we are here here to turn this into a real business and we can say I'm just starting out plan on selling in the United States we would always suggest starting out in the United States because that is the largest market and then from there I didn't find out from printify anywhere I found out from we scale University so I'm going to put we scale University in there we're going to click complete for that little survey and next we are going to be in the printify dashboard printify recently got a whole rebranding so it could a little different from any other videos that are out there but then we have our store and from there we can connect to Shopify I'm not going to connect to Shopify because I already have a printify account connected but I wanted to go through and show you guys step by step exactly where you need to go for all the settings in order to seamlessly start taking orders so we are going to give our store a name so it's no longer just called my new store it's going to be called whatever your brand name is so I just made seasonal collection to .0 next we're going to go to ship from address to make sure it is set to the printify default we will enable rerouting this is basically if there is any issue an out of stock product with our printer that we select print IFI will then send that order to somebody who does have the T-shirt to be able to fulfill with we'll then set up order approval for 11:55 p.m. this will batch send all of our orders into production that way our credit card is only getting charged one time this makes it really easy to run our p&l and our balance sheet because we kind of can run our cost of goods and know exactly how much our orders cost us so it's really great for keeping a close eye on your finances so we go and make that for 11:55 p.m. so we get it as close to midnight as possible we definitely don't want to like Miss orders that could potentially come in like right before midnight so I just do 11:55 just to play it safe next we have tracking notifications I like to receive them as soon as they are available that way if a customer does Reach Out has any sort of issue I have that tracking information as soon as it possibly occurs that way I can get that information to them if they need it you can put it off to a different time of day or say I don't want to get tracking emails it's completely up to you I just like to receive them finally delayed orders if there's any issues with shipping restrictions from some print providers if they don't have a carrier that can get the T-shirt to your customer then they'll put that order on hold you can either automatically send it or just say like I'll manually send it I like to manually send it they typically send an email saying like Hey we're unable to process this and then I can kind of dig in deeper and if I need to start a customer service chat with printify then I absolutely can do that and then daily order updates do you want to receive daily updates or not I prefer to this just gives me a really good grasp on where things are with my business I like getting the little notifications and always make sure that you're clicking save after making any changes to the store settings that way they actually save now kifi is really great they allow us to do some branding things one is gift or message inserts so you can put like your brand name and everything they also have some gift messages that's technically more for like Etsy type of things anything branding I like to set up later down the line it's definitely not needed right off the bat I like to put all the money that I'm making into getting the biggest profit that I possibly can and then adding in those branding things later now if you're somebody who's interested in signing up for printify premium you can get up to a 20% discount across all of their products definitely allows us to become more profitable again it's $29 per month it's not like super expensive this is something that you can set up at any time but if you're looking for the best price out there subscribing for PR IFI premium is going to be the best way to get that price down next we're going to go down to the wallet and just double check all of our payments here you will see your printy balance you can connect to PayPal or you can add your credit card or debit card so we like to just upload our business credit card that way at the end of the day when all the orders get pushed through our card gets charged one time and then we have a really good idea of what our cost of goods were for that day next we're going to go to the my account section down at the bottom left hand and then we're going to say the name of our business technically you're going to want to put the name of your llc at the name of business as things progress you're just going to want everything to be officially like through your business so that they know who they're doing business with and and then putting in your contact information again this is for entertainment purposes this is not how my account is actually set up with printify I use my actual business LLC my full name as well as an accurate email address and the address for my business so you want to be filling all this out with your actual business information and then click submit then if you go to settings you can then make any sort of changes that you want like the time zone that you're in you can you know change it to if you're in Los Angeles being on La time pretty much what ever your Shopify store is set up I would recommend setting up your settings to match that within printify ours is for Eastern so everything's on Eastern time and invoices I like to get them monthly that way I see a full breakdown of what I spent over the month that way when I do my big end of the month p&l I have the exact number the exact taxes Etc and if you need any help with setting up your account at all you can click the chat button down in the bottom leftand corner and start talking to printify customer service agent they are absolutely wonderful with helping you with any issue that you could possibly have whether that's customer service related for your business all the way to I'm having trouble designing next we're going to go and pick a shirt again I love a Gilden 64,000 we talked about this a little bit earlier but this is where you are able to see all of the different print providers that are able to ship the gildin 64,000 you will also see all the different colors that they are able to offer and we kind of go from there so so I like to break down exactly the price what am I going to be paying for it as you can see Monster Digital charges $82 for every single color which we absolutely love shipping our first item will be $4.75 to ship and then any additional item so if someone buys two shirts will then be $240 after that they give you information about how they do their printing any branding options that are available so you can kind of get a little bit more information about that now Swift pot is definitely number two compared to Monster Digital and something that you need to keep a close eye on is see how the prices don't match so you have $81 and then some say $816 always break down and see what you would be paying it's a sneaky way that you know can eat away at our profit margin so that's something that we want to be made aware of of course still put in that test order see what the quality is and make the decision for yourself but next we are going to click getting started with this t-shirt going through all the different steps of actually getting a design ready to be uploaded We'll add our design layer now you can just pick kind of anything you could type in some text I actually already have some design so I'm just going to Quick upload a design here so I'm going to click on some of those seasonal designs that I already have and I'm just going to upload one of the designs into printify that way we can use it this as kind of our base design and we can continue making copies of then just tweak out the design change the title and we'll be good to go right now we have our design on our shirt we're just going to kind of Center it up we're going to make sure it's not too high that it's like at somebody's neck and we want to make sure that the design is nice and big and this is where we are going to pick out all the other colors that we will sell if you click the make a specific copy or like make a specific Design This will be great if you have like a black and a white design because depending on what the color is we want it to look good across all of our colors like black on Navy is not the best look but white on Navy looks really crisp looks really clean we like that so what we'll do is make a specific design that way the black is only on the White and the sports gray and then on all of our darker colors we can just upload the white design but it'll all be under one listing okay and here's our white design again just kind of making it the same size same style as the black design and again making sure that it's the right colors across all of our colored shirts that we picked so congratulations you've now created your first product now you can order a sample straight from here or we can go back to my products where you will see all of your printify products and then we will just update the name and other parts of the listing so I like to keep my listings nice short and sweet and I always like to have the type of product that I'm selling so t-shirt you can say are my skis okay or skis okay we just like it to be a little bit shorter this will will help later down the line when we are doing Shopify optimization and then you can already set your pricing within printify which is really nice or you can bulk edit it later on Shopify so I have all of my prices in there that looks good and then I haven't connected this printify to a store but if I needed to I would then just can just click publish and it would automatically go into Shopify if we went over to Shopify we would see that within our products from there we can click copy that way we make a copy the design and then all that we really have to do is just switch out the design as well as change the title and then we are good to go so now that we have shown you exactly how to set up your printify account that way you can seamlessly start taking orders at any time it is now time for you to take action so the first thing that you're going to want to do is finalize your t-shirt brand Niche if you haven't already done this definitely go back go into research figure out your Niche figure out your designs two you want to set up your printify account and upload a test design just like we did here you can follow step by step with it the exact process that I did that way when we are designing our 100 designs when we are all completed we can just quickly get them uploaded into printify and then uploaded into Shopify and finally order a test sample from two different print providers or the print provider that you think you want to choose and look at the Quality before you pick your t-shirt brand that you're going to sell Etc do your research find what you think people in your Niche are going to like the most and of course run the numbers and see what your profit and what your cost is going to be guys we have now gone through everything that we need to set up on printify so that you are able to start taking orders and seamlessly fulfilling them I hope that going step by step was really easy for you to follow along get your pry account completely set up and I'll see you in the next [Music] section welcome to lesson 2. four of the build stage in this lesson we're going to be setting up our Facebook accounts and here we are at stage two we've already gone through our foundations and our research and the overall theme for this stage as you already know is laying the foundations of each of the accounts that we need so that once we actually start uploading products and running our ads and everything we already have it all set up so that we don't have to loop back and worry about getting any of the accounts in order we're doing all that up front that's a big lesson that we learned from the first course is made lives a lot easier for people so that we get all those questions answered up front so that later on we're able to just focus on getting down to brass taxs and getting things launched so by this point we should already have our printify account and set up our Shopify store along with everything from the previous stages and by the end of this lesson you're going to have a high level understanding of how Facebook ads work for your business we're going to have all of our assets created we're going to go through like pretty much Click by click together and you'll have visibility into every area of Facebook ads and I want to say this to anybody who has never run ads before if you are feeling daunted or intimidated at all by running ads it's okay just take a deep breath I've been there I know how intimidating it can feel and after working with hundreds and hundreds of students having the pleasure of working with all of them we know what the questions are we know what the concerns are and we are going to address all of that we're going to go through step by step addressing and answering all your questions as we go and then if anything else comes up we're always here to help and we're going to point you to the resources to help get those questions answered either by Facebook in the community whatever it may be and the reason this matters is preparation is key like I said and we're going to be familiarizing ourself with all the the areas of Facebook ads and it's kind of nice having the opportunity to set this up now and then we're going to be going into the design stage next so that we set it up and then we have some distance from it so it's not just all just Facebook and grind through it and you know that sort of thing not that it's a grind but we're able to take kind of a breather and do the setup like all the logistics and that sort of thing and we get to take creativity breather and then we revisit it and kind of bring it all together so how do Facebook ads actually work very high level we talk about this in other lessons but if we picture ourselves as a brick and mortar store and there's a highway next to us where there are cars driving by on that highway to use the metaphor our goal is to make the cars turn off the highway so the cars have a billboard above them as they're driving by lots of billboards and the job of the billboard is to show them something that doesn't get them to turn away first off and we want to show them something that gets them to go the other way and come in into our store so the point of this is that the billboard is our meta ads so that brick and mortar example it is so true it took me years to actually grasp that we're literally just running like a brick-and-mortar business it's just online and it's honestly no different like we have products we have customers we have to give them a good shopping experience all that it's it's a very apt description of this and the question comes up like why are we setting up the Facebook assets this early we talked about it but we don't have to be concerned and like all stressed out like we're not running ads this early in this lesson we're not going to be spending a single Dollar on ads and once we start spending I want to say this I'm going to repeat this a lot you don't need to spend a lot we can spend a tiny amount to get a lot of like the biggest concern I think people have with Facebook ads is like the expense and that they're just going to be spending into an abyss we have everything we need to prevent against that the store is foundational elements so we have the signage that gets people to come in we have the the layout inside we have the inventory the checkout like all of those pieces are like once people are inside the store the Facebook ad setup that's basically like us working with the billboard company to be able to run ads on the billboard so the pieces of this are step one we're going to be setting up our business manager step two connecting our Shopify to Facebook we're going to do our ad account our payment method pixel the catalog Facebook page Instagram page I know it feels like a lot or it sounds like a lot I feel like I'm saying a lot but this is all that it really is so our Facebook assets think of it as like a folder on our desktop that's what our business manager is so business manager is the source that we come back to that's where it holds all of our accounts it's like you know how Google has Google Drive and they have Gmail then Google Docs all of it's under your one Google account that's what the business manager is and within that we have our ad account which that's where we are telling the billboard company you know what ads we want to be running which Billboards we want to use how much our budget is what types of cars we're hoping to be in front of that's where we're choosing that then our Facebook page is like the name and the profile that we put alongside that so that people can see who we are then the pixel is thing that breaks the mold in a good way and that with a billboard and traditional marketing you have no idea what's working there's a great quote it's like might have been Ogie he said half of my marketing works and half of it doesn't the problem is that I don't know which half is which we don't have that problem anymore because the pixel and we're going to explain how it works tells Facebook what is working what's happening on our store it's it's a beautiful thing then next we have our product catalog which this is very simple you know how in Shopify you're able to see our products we're just allowing Facebook to see what those products are we'll talk about why we're doing that in a second so it's our ad account it's our page telling Facebook what's working which is our pixel and our product catalog and the good news is that for all of this you don't need to be techsavvy or have any experience with code or any of that you just need to be able to follow along with what buttons we're clicking and this is a step St by-step training this is not one of the conceptual ones this is where you're just following along clicking the things that we are and there's no like testing that needs to be done in the setup stage so this is what the business manager this is actually perfect timing something to know about Facebook is that they change stuff all the time they're always running tests on like their layout and stuff so if something that we're showing you here if it looks different in your ad account or your business manager that's completely to be expected and like that happens important thing to learn is just what the button does that we're clicking so then you can find where it is so this and it's perfect timing because actually at the time that I recorded this see at the top how it said try the new settings they actually just updated this so hopefully this is what it's going to look like for a while but this is the business manager so you can see down the le- hand side just folders of tabs and I can tell you from experience that the out of all these options the only ones that were actually going to be using consistently honestly not even that consistently users we use once but we don't need to worry about Partners or system users then accounts we use the pages Add accounts don't need to worry about business asset groups or apps can use Instagram accounts but even that we don't need so it's people we use once page we add our page Add accounts all this we can ignore then we use this is where our pixel is and then all of this stuff down here doesn't really matter out of to paint a picture like you can pretty much ignore 90% of this and just picture it being people Pages add accounts and then data sources if you're a complete beginner of this please pause and actually do this business. face.com settings this is the page that you want to bookmark and keep in your bookmarks tab this is going to be your your starting point of navigating to anything Facebook related do not and hear me on this do not start running ads by trying to go to facebook.com and then clicking around to like a page like don't go to like your normal Facebook profile and then click into you know Pages or run ads or something CU they've done a very good job Facebook at making it lowering the barrier for people to run ads and so they give you the option in lots of different places basically they give you like the training wheels version of running ads long story short don't do it don't get caught in like running ads under your personal profile always go to or business run to like business. facebook.com/ settings the reason they do that is for like Mom and Pop shops that are just like trying to get their feet what trying to boost posts and stuff like that well just never boost a post please add account so this is what it looks like we're going to go through this in a lot more detail this is just for the setup then Facebook page it looks like this quick myth to dispel is that the Facebook page you've probably seen people talking about growing like social media followings and like driving traffic from your page by posting good content and stuff there's definitely a play there there's strategy you can do it but organ that's like organic versus paid it's two and entirely separate things they both have pros and cons I personally way prefer paid over organic because organic it's people have a misconception that like paid is like super expensive it does not have to be if we run it the right way and two organic it takes a lot longer but it does compound and you can do it for cheap but the cheaper you do it like basically just need to be cranking out a ton of content You' be making posts all the time and it's like a very long journey not say it can't work but we're running paid so the when it comes to our Facebook page it's bare minimum in terms of what we're actually putting on it we're putting like basically our profile and our name and like a few posts then our product catalog this is where we're syncing products from Shopify our pixel and just very quickly to explain how the pixel Works we're all about understanding the why and like what's actually going on behind the scenes we learned that from the first course the way that the pixel Works to demystify it is picture meta it has three billion users they've got all these people on it so meta is going when we start running ads they're going to they have no idea anything about our business they're basically going to pick like a random selection of people and send them into our funnel and when they send them into our funnel some of the people are going to come out the bottom conversions when that happens Facebook then looks at the top and sees okay who did we send in and they take a note of that then they look at who came out the bottom and then they take a note of that this process here here is the Facebook pixel so it sends out of its massive group of people sees who it put in who actually came out and Facebook's job is to give us more people like those so now it has her little checklist so now it knows and notice that the attention to detail the people see the smiley face buck tooth and the I don't know scarecrow mouth it's then looking for people like that and then it tries to send more people like that into the funnel so it's able to learn over time that's how it works and but if we don't install the pixel then Facebook only has awareness of who it's sending in because it knows what's happening on its platform AKA our ads are being shown on their platform it knows who is clicking on it but if we don't have the pixel as soon as they leave Facebook has no idea then it's just Flying Blind it's just going to be taking random guesses at who to be sending more of and we don't want it to be doing that we want it to know like who's who we want more of essentially so that's what the Facebook pixel does now let's set up our business manager ad account and our page so to get started you're going to go to business. face.com back/ settings and here it's going to prompt you to and again this page changes all the time these Pages change very frequently so if you see something different do not be alarmed but you're going to create a business manager here you're going to click log in with Facebook and then it's going to prompt you to enter a business I already have the max number of business account so I can't show it but it's like two steps you just enter the name of your business and then you connect with Facebook which Facebook important thing to understand is that Facebook is different than other advertising platforms where like on Google or Tik Tok for example you just enter an email and then you're you're able to create a new ad account or business manager Facebook is different in that they require us to link it to a Facebook profile which is just an added level of security but just something to to know is that every business manager is linked to like a personal profile you're going to click log in with Facebook and then go through the the setup and you might see a page that looks something like this if you've already created a business manager before in the past and each person can normally have two business managers I have no idea why Meg is able to have more but so she has multiple business managers we're going to select the one that we're working with so once you get logged into your business manager once you finish creating it on the le- hand side here we have lots of different options that we can pretty much ignore the reason we can ignore them is that they give you Facebook caters to a wide array of different advertisers everything from software applications to marketplaces like lots of different use cases that they're trying to create a product to serve so that leaves us with a lot of options that we as you know normal Shopify sellers especially since we're using the most common platforms they have a lot of Integrations and they have a lot of like custom Tools in here for those like more bespoke type of circumstances that we just don't have to use so that's why there's a lot of things in here that we're able to ignore the main thing when you log in you're going to see most likely the People page and it's possible depending on where you're located that it will ask you to even as I'm talking about it they moved oh business portfolio yeah they moved it they love moving stuff this on the old settings this was at the very bottom but so business portfolio info this is where it basically talks about like who your business is this is like your your ID for your whole business manager which again back to this we're setting up our folder right now that is going to hold each of our assets and then we're going to go through and set up our ad account our page pixel product catalog so the reason I pulled this up is that it's possible depending on your location whether if you run ads before that it'll prompt you to verify your business so if it does ask you for that you'll just submit like your business details but as a rule of thumb we avoid giving Facebook any info that we don't have to so we hold off on verifying until it's like an absolute requirement and they'll they'll let you know don't worry but anyway just explaining the different elements of this but that's setting up your business manager that's pretty much it and again make sure that you bookmark this and save it because this is going to be the main point that you're going to refer back to so so this is creating a new page so we're going to do add and if you created a page elsewhere which you shouldn't have this is just for 2 to 3% of people that by accident created a page somewhere else you can add an existing page which you just click add an existing page and then you type in the name here or the URL and then you'll be able to request it and if you have ownership of that page you'll be able to add it in and then it'll just get migrated to this to this account but what we're going to do is Click create a new Facebook page then enter our demo store name we've already used that name before so going to do seasonal collections brand category clothing seasonally themed graphic apparel for all ages does not matter at all the reason it doesn't matter what we put on the Facebook page is that we're doing direct response marketing we are not doing like branded old-fashioned marketing the times that people are coming to our website is when they see an ad and they click on an ad 90% of people just click on the ad a a select few click on the page name and like go check you out beforehand that's why we put some stuff on there but by and large like the page does not matter it is never going to be like our primary traffic source and in with all of the possible things we could be working on there's much much better ways for us to be spending our time there we go so now we have our page made seasonal collections brand so we're almost there now to edit the page we click view on Facebook now that's our beautiful profile picture to edit the page we click switch to the page notice that this is is going to change it's literally going to change us to like a different profile technically now we're able to choose profile picture take a tour no thank you upload photo so I just selected one of our seasonal collections profile photos you can put a description if you want you don't have to and the mark of a a good profile photo is just picturing it like in an ad like in the top leftand corner is it going to like distract people is it going to take away from the ad so like it's pretty hard to go wrong with it it should just be clean and like just your logo as an icon something that would be bad as a logo here would be if we did here so this is this was an old brand that Meg did for a hot SEC uh but see it's one it's alcohol theme so that's like questionable to begin with but I don't think she ever actually ended up running ads for this but see how it's like really long we we just don't want that we just want like this would be an okay profile photo but it should just be something that's able to fit in there and also the reason that I'm saying so confidently that this does not matter is that we have ample chances to change all of this later on down the road this is just building just getting things set up so now we'll choose a cover photo add cover photo upload you could either make something in canva you could just use something that's on brand like this is an image that we literally made with AI but those are the two main thing or three main things that we need is the brand the logo and then the cover photo and this is this is the advertise button that we don't want to hit let's see where it takes us oh my God don't ever click this button please this is Facebook just trying to take your money and they know how intimidating it is looking at an ad account and they're trying to just simplify things but they're basically setting you up to just boost a post which is not how to run an ad that's actually going to get you any kind of result results let's go down here more now we're going to clean some stuff up things we don't need uh so we don't need sections for checkin Sports movies TV shows books likes reviews given any of that add action button so we're going to do shop now so you used to be able to have buy now and then just give a website but we'll just do learn more so you just click save you can add links to your Instagram page once you set it up and the reason we aren't prioritizing setting up the Instagram page which Facebook and Instagram ads run out of the same place just FYI but the Instagram page we're able to just run ads to Instagram using the Facebook page so we can set it up later but in my experience it has zero impact on on ad performance now we're going to make our very first post so what's on my mind it's all my mind is I just want to run ads so to make a post just going to grab one of our products all right so we're choosing one of our products and then I'm going to write a me at Alo so I know it doesn't look like we did a whole lot but that's pretty that's the only setup that we do for our pages so as we have more time down the road we can make other posts but we never expect that to drive any kind of sales we literally just want to set up the bare minimum so that we have a page that has a profile picture cover photo a post on it a good practice is to make like roughly a post a week just so there's something on it so that people that are seeing your ads and then clicking see something relatively recent on the page but other than that that's all that you need to get set up because again you're driving the traffic from the ads very very few people will ever actually end up on that page now we are going to go back to our business manager and if we hit refresh we should see our beautiful profile picture then next and this is where I'm not I don't want to risk getting banned for a demo like we talk about it in the the concept stage but like like getting banned by Facebook we'll cover all of that but basically you don't want to create more business managers or ad accounts than you actually need which we've already made plenty of demo ones but what I would do now is just click add add account and then it would create it and it would prompt me for like payment information and to select the time zone choose the time zone that you yourself are in if you're International don't choose a US time zone just for whatever reason choose the time zone that you are in and that's the only setting everything we're doing you can undo except for that the time zone is the one I think currency might be the same so I recommend just choosing your time zone your native currency whatever you operate in do those because that's mostly for you like to make things easy so and to be more specific what I mean is like it's annoying if you're in Eastern Time Zone and you set your ad account for I don't know Pacific for some reason there's no benefit to that it's just that your ad account is going to be 3 hours off from you and it's just annoying cuz then you have to like plan your day we'll get into all that as we start running the ads but next so we would create the ad account or you will create the ad account and then the next thing that you're going to do is so this is the other business manager that we set up last time I'm using this one to demonstrate it so I don't risk getting banned after you create your ad account you're going to see something like this it'll have if it doesn't have you assigned to it then just do assign people and select yourself and give yourself full controls so up until now we've created our business manager then we made our page now we're making the ad account and now we're going to link them because it's possible to have multiple ad accounts multiple Pages that'll never be us but just explaining why Facebook has the functionality we need to tell it who is working on what ad account what pages Associates with it in our case it's just we only have one of each so seems redundant but that's why we have to do it so we go to ad accounts choose the ad account connected assets and you used to just be able to connect the page but now you have to create a business asset group basically a folder within a folder I'm just going to choose uh Pages Add accounts then give ourselves full control now we're going to go back up to the ad account and connect it so you go to the ad account connected assets connect assets other business assets lots of assets choose the business group that we just made there we go then so now the page is connected the ad account is connected and now we have to connect the pixel for creating the pixel if you've ever run ads before it used to be you get like a little snippet of code then you would edit it on Shopify fortunately now we don't have to do that so what we do have somebody bought from the demo store we're going to go over to our Shopify store which we should have already created at this point and then we're going to install the Facebook and Instagram sales channels so the way you do that if you don't have it search Facebook and Instagram and this this is going to create the pixel and the catalog for us automatically it's really nice so you're going to we've already installed it but for you it's going to look like install just have to give it permissions so I'm going to click open this is within the Facebook and Instagram app in Shopify the two things that we really need are the pixel and the catalog Facebook also has this thing called Facebook shop which is basically their attempt at they're basically trying to build like a mini Shopify on Facebook so that they basically customers can check out on from Facebook shop okay so as of right now it's available for Denmark France Germany Italy Netherlands Norway Spain Sweden and United States if you're not in one of those countries you can't set up Facebook shop don't worry about it it's a nice thing to have but it's absolutely not a necessity there's lots of students in the community in we scale University who are having lots of success without any any kind of Facebook shop so how do we set up the pixel first of all here in the settings this is where we choose set up the pixel so you're going to come down here to marketing actually all of these settings up here are for Facebook shop which we don't really care about what we do care about is down here you're going to click maximum for the amount of data that you want to share and then here this is where you're choosing the pixel so we've already connected it so I'm not going to undo that but you're going to choose the pixel and if you haven't created one which we haven't then it's going to prompt you to just create a new pixel and that's how we we came up with this one so it's like two button clicks you just click create a pixel and then it's going to fill it in here and then you'll come down here and choose the Facebook page that you want to connect the important thing is that this is just set the maximum that's pretty much the only setting I'm explaining all these things it's pretty much just the concepts and like the why behind it hopefully that's interesting CU it will definitely be useful whether if it's interesting or not is just like an added benefit but you can see like the number of things we've actually clicked seems like very few that's it nowadays these companies their job is to make our lives simpler they've done a decent job in some ways I think shopify's done a pretty good job Facebook is trying to catch up but it used to be like you had to install code and stuff now it's literally just a button click and then you connect the page and then when you go back over to the overview page you'll see the product status this is all the products that are syncing to to the product catalog so you see we have 223 products but we have one that's not synced and then this shows the number of the product catalog so again back to this so we've set up our business manager that's our folder and we made the ad account we're about to jump back in there in a second we made the page then we just created the pixel it was like like that we're going to adjust some settings in there in uh Facebook but then we also have the product catalog so now we have each of the things that we need if you get an error message at this step you can just write to Shopify support Facebook support and it's very normal to have errors at these stages like do not like throw your hands up and get all flustered like this is a very good trial for much bigger challenges exciting challenges that will come but it can be frustrating I'm with you if you do get an error message I used to like fight with it tooth and nail now I just as soon as I see an airor message I just send a message to their support I make it their problem and I move on with my day so I highly recommend doing that three great resources Facebook support not great resources Facebook support is okay Shopify support they normally just point fingers at each other and tell you that it's the other one or three is a chat GPT the we scale GPT in particular has been trained on all this stuff so other than that like Reddit is another good one and just Google all all any error messages that pop up it's very fixable and it's a great practice at being resourceful to be able to solve those ourselves so now like I said we're going back into our data set in the business manager we go to our pixel seasonal Collections and now we're going to adjust a couple of settings so we're going to come up here into this three dot menu that has one option I don't know why they hid that in there if it only has one option but okay then click open events manager this is basically just the settings page for our pixel and we're just going to adjust like two things so in this this is our settings page we're able to see all the events the event match score here this is basically telling us how good of a job it's doing at tracking each one of these events page view view view content add to cart initiate checkout search we don't care about any of these these will always be four five or six out of 10 pretty low numbers that's completely to be expected the only one that we really care about is the purchases so this is the one that That Matters by far the most or the one that the only one that matters and this should always be like an 8 n or 10 out of 10 now the settings we're going to adjust quickly in the pixel we're going to settings down here first party cookies should be on automatic website matching should be on track events automatically without code should be on conversion API all this you can ignore this is what I was saying earlier how they cater to wide variety of advertisers like if you're an app you need to install this manually but we have the benefit of getting to choose a partner at Shopify so to to connect Shopify click choose partner it's already been connected and it'll say like follow the setup on Shopify you can say that we've already done it cuz we just did and we scroll down here then you can turn on autot tracking and choose the seasonal collections or your ad account that just makes our lives easier so that we don't have to constantly be checking to make sure we use the right pixel once we start running the ads so recapping everything so far all that we just did in the settings was we just for for the pixel basically told it to track everything same thing with the settings that we did in Shopify where we set it to maximum we're just telling it to track everything which back to this example we're basically just making sure that it has the ability to see everything that it needs to the reason they don't do that automatically is for like laws and regulations for some areas those are the settings that we need to do and now we did it so now let's last thing we are going to jump into the add account while I'm pulling this up quick note on payment methods make sure whatever payment method you you choose has not been used on another ad account that was ever banned or anything in the past or was even used on like a different business manager they link them together so we used to just go get anytime we need a new ad account we would open up a new credit card stupid you don't need to do that credit cards nowadays have functionality where they can create virtual cards like Capital One has it AMX has it they all do this now there's another site called privacy.com yeah privacy.com full disclaimer I've never used this but I know lots of people that have and basically what it does is it creates virtual cards for you so that you're able to it's meant for like if you sign up for like a trial or subscription you can have easy control to like cancel the card it's actually pretty good idea but another way you can use it is to create a new credit card number to enter as a payment method on an ad account which is most likely not how they intended it when they built it but that's okay so from our business manager we're going to go to the ad account and set up our columns within the ad account what we're going to be doing and again this is just us setting it up we're going we can adjust these columns so when you first log in you're probably going to see these columns which just changes the metrics we're just going to set up these columns here and you don't have to know what they do for right now just going to customize and the fastest way way to do this is just X out of all of these and then just add these in so you type in delivery click that I just put it at the bottom so delivery is whether if it's active or not then you'll do amount spent that's how much budget it spent that day budget that sets how much we're scheduling to spend then you do purchases and do total and then you'll uncheck all of these then you'll do row as total uncheck link clicks there you go and then CPC cost per link click cost per link click this one not CPC all this one this one includes people who click on the page and the profile which we don't care about so there you go and then it's going to say custom here and then you're just going to click save and rename it as wcale DS simple and use this actual naming so that when you like post screenshots in the community or try to get feedback about your ad account results you'll be looking at the right numbers this is what our 0 to7 figure store ad account looks like so this month we spent $60,000 at a 2.6 in the past two weeks so you can see all the metrics and stuff it looks like a lot we don't need to be looking at all those especially in the beginning just use Simple then we're going to create the more advanced version and you're just going to do the same exact thing and the reason we're doing two different versions is when we're in the testing phase early on we really just need to see how many purchases how many people clicked and what was the cost of the click and this is another lesson learned from the first course was that uh people were getting overwhelmed with all the metrics and 90% of the time they were looking at things that just didn't actually matter so we're simplifying and all we really really need to know is these things but we will also make our Advanced View for the advanced view these are the metrics just going to go one by one we just saw how to do it but budget bid strategy and the reason we're doing these is so that we can make sure that like bid strategy that tells us if we're choosing the right strategy for bidding like if we're purchase optimized conversion location audience location and rather than just reading through all of those so here's the advanced dashboard and here's a screenshare so you can take a screenshot of this set up these save both of them and 90% of the time we'll be looking at the simple but this gives us a more in-depth view that we'll be revisiting in the testing phase so to recap everything that we've done we are not launching ads yet I know this just took a while to get through but we explained all the concepts behind the setup and we're just making sure that our Facebook ad setup is done and ready to go and that we have a fundamental understanding of you know each of the pieces now our homework make sure we have business manager Facebook page ad account pixel connected to Shopify and our catalog and common errors you'll most likely receive error messages during the setup it's completely normal you can reach out to Shopify support Facebook support and be resourceful use Google YouTube chat GPT can solve 99% of the bugs thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson [Music] so building a business oh hang on my phone's ringing whoops it's Chris I better get this hey Chris how are you how's the Tony Robinson going MH that's good what was that oh you heard everything I said when what do you mean I'm fired right whoops love you really love you really Chris don't take it to hard so by now you probably have an idea of what your print on demand business could look like you may have a name you may even have a logo you may even have a few designs and so one thing that really worked for me when I finished my research is I started to really focus in more on my elevator pitch for my brand and again the elevator pitch you've got to really kind of focus on why the brand exists what's its purpose is and who it it's for and when you're doing this really try and put yourself in the customer's shoes and try write it in a way that connects with them on a spiritual level and for this you really have to think about your Niche and why people are in your Niche why they're passionate about that what drives them to be in the niche and if you can nail that within your elevator pitch then you are on a good track to creating a real good brand so when you're considering your brand you really need to focus on building trust and there's a couple of ways you can do this and what really worked well for me is on my about page I talk about the founder I have a Founder section in my page and and the owners of the business are visible so you can all you can almost imagine a face to the brand and I think that goes a really long way to building trust with your customers and another way that you can build trust is through thinking about how you can give back to the community there are a number of ways you can do this and when I say community I mean your community of customers and your Niche if you want to give back to your community of customers you might want to consider something like a charity this is something that we do and as an example for every order that we receive we donate $1 to a charity that works well with our Niche so there just a couple of examples you're going to need a brand name to identify your Niche that really kind of resonates with the people within your Niche and I think it should be unique um so you you know do a lot of research on this you know don't spend too much time on it and and utilize like chat GPT if you can to to kind of like bounce ideas back and forwards um and I think it's really helpful if you if you have a tagline as well and that really kind of helps the customer when they come on to your website it really helps them work out what your brand is about who's it for and what they may even find on on your website so once you have your brand name worked out you're going to need a logo and to do this I recommend and this is what I did I recommend go and look at other brands within your Niche and analyze their logos try and work out like why they're good logos you know what is the shape what's within the logo has it got any icons what are the words used what are the colors used take notes on some commonalities and things that you might think that will work do some research on logos and you might want to come up with a list of unique things about those logos and then you can go to a logo creator or you can hire someone on Fiverr to create a logo but look don't spend a lot of time on this because if your brand goes well then you'll probably want to change it later because your brand identity changes you might have some different thoughts about your logo in say 6 to 12 months from when you start your brand once you have your logo and your brand name worked out you're going to need to get yourself a domain and the way I approached this I did some research and I looked at things like search engine optimization strategies and I wanted to pick a store name and a domain that works well for my Niche and helps my SEO organic discoverability and so what I chose to do I went with a.com and also a DOT store do some research on this you'll probably find the dot store does better for organic search but it's up to you choose choose whatever you want I went with doom and. store and that's worked really well for me um you're going to want to set up your business accounts um this is kind of boring stuff but it's essential and you're going to need to set up an account for Shopify Facebook Instagram meta business Suite Tik Tok if you want to use that Google anything anything like that create accounts and then you're going to want to connect them with each other and if you have any challenges around this just just reach out to the support in my experience they're always really helpful and it's often the quickest way to get the answer that you need so that you can get them all connected and don't forget when you set up your meta account once you start going into your Facebook ad account or your meta ad account you're going to need a pixel and you're going to need to make sure that that's connected with your ad and also your Shopify account and you need to make sure you go through all the settings within your ad account and just make sure that you've got the conversion API switched on and the conversion API has access to everything in your business suite and this really helps with your ads so other things you're going to want to consider when you're setting up your accounts is you're going to need a email provider you can use Microsoft you can use Google Business suite and just pick one that you think will work best for you get that set up you're going to want to need a Facebook account and this Facebook account is going to need to be have been around for a while if you're looking at using Facebook ads and you don't have a Facebook account you may struggle to get your ads up and running because Facebook really wants to work with profiles that have been around for a while but assuming you have a good Facebook profile it's been around for a while connect that with business suite and but just make sure you have two Factor authentication switched on the last thing you want is somebody coming in to your ad account and actually getting access to your ads and doing things that you don't want them to do which can make things really difficult especially when you get banned godamn Facebook banss I hate Facebook banss anyway you're going to want to spend some time researching print on demand suppliers because this is really important because you're going to have to deliver the product to the customer and so do some research some popular ones are printify and printful um spoiler alert they're actually merging so picking one or the other may not really make a difference but I use printful it works really well for me a lot of people use printify I don't think it matters too much I mean the goods are different but you got to consider all these factors do some analysis on them work out who's better and why what the strength and weaknesses are then just make a decision on who you're going to use and just move forward and once you've made that decision go into Shopify uh download their app and just make sure it's all connected and then you're good to go to start uploading products so when you start building your Shopify site you're going to have to work out how you want to lay it out and some things that you need to consider you know what's in the menu where do images even go is there even any consideration for the size of these images is it better to have them on the left or the right do you even need text with them what does the text even say and how many images and text sections on your website on the homepage or the about me page or the product page and there's so many options it can get really confusing but the thing is these things are really important because they affect your conversion rate imagine walking into a shop and all the products are just kind of like thrown around and you know there's not really been any consideration and then you go into a different shop that has a product layout designer like a storefront designer and they've really thought about what should be where you know little signs that say certain things so it's really important the message I'm trying to say here is that spend some time thinking about this and if you would like some help with this you can use a tool like reloom doio realm.io is an AI generative web designer and it's been built on the basis that there's been lots of research done onto how websit should look and it considers factors that people like to skim read you know their eyes are left side dominant all these factors make a big difference so if you're looking for some inspiration on how to build your Shopify and design it then use a tool like reloom really important this really helped me with my conversion rate so I highly recommend doing something like this so when you're starting out doing this there can be all these factors all these things these little things you've got to progress and it can kind of feel a bit overwhelming at the start cuz let's be honest you're building a business business here this is a brand this is a serious serious thing that would can you know can change your life and so when you look at the journey to do this it's actually quite overwhelming you know there are lots of things that need to be done there's one strategy that I've adopted and I know that some other people in the we scale Community do this and it's called the Sprint methodology and so the Sprint methodology is something really simple all you have to do is identify what your goal is for tomorrow have the 10,000 foot view of the bigger picture but once you've worked that out bring it down into something that's really achievable and manageable and by and to do that all you need to do is identify what your goal is for tomorrow and you need to do that today write it down it's really important that you write these things down have a diary and so what I like to do is so tonight before I go to bed I will write in my diary what I'm going to do tomorrow and think of it from this point of view if you were to ask yourself what is the one thing that can improve your business tomorrow then that should be the thing that you write down in essence you're writing a goal down and this goal should be smart so it should be specific to the brand it should be measurable it should be achievable it should be relevant and it should be time bound and so this is really important to consider because in essence you are setting yourself up for for success and by making these goals smart you are doing that I really recommend that you write your daily smart objectives down and this is really important because you can measurably then show that you're achieving your goals and there's I think there's something really important about the mindset of actually ticking activities off it's almost like you are proving to yourself that you are taking steps forward in your business really important that you actually start the things that you write down and you finish them and this is a process that's fluid you know it's really important that you iterate on this and improve your approach and adapt it to your needs and the business the business needs super important make it efficient don't spend a lot of time trying to build the best Sprint to lever because that really won't help your business I like to write it down in the diary every day really simple so apart from the Sprint methodology I also like to run my business with consideration to the seven waste of lean so if you don't know what the seven waste of lean are you might want to research these but essentially it's just a way of thinking about what are the waste activities within your business within you within your daily routine within your life that you can remove so that you can efficiently move through the things that you need to do to establish your business as quickly as possible and so the seven ways of lean are transport inventory motion waiting over production over processing and defects bonus one is in additional form of wayte is finance working on the wrong challenge Etc and so if we kind of consider these for the print on demand business transport could be spending too much time doing other things that don't help your business inventory I mean we this is why we're doing print on demand business we don't actually hold any inventory so by adopting the print on demand model we're already kind of addressing the inventory waste issue um because we're using print on demand we don't have any waste stock that we have to try and liquidate later everything's made to order motion no driving while you're working all jokes aside if you're moving around too much if you want you know I'm not saying don't move but if you spend too much time moving around then you won't get anything done waiting not starting something idling procrastination these are things that can really affect the business so really try and start and finish the things you need to do over over production is when you spend too much time on something like a good example would be that you spend hours finessing this one design and really it's not you know it's not it's not required the goal is to create as many designs as possible overprocess in analysis from paralysis you spend too much time thinking about the things that you need to do there's too many things that you need to learn and all that is overwhelming it affects your ability to get things done defects is when you're just making mistakes over and over again you don't reflect on the things that are going well and you don't try and learn from them and if you keep making these mistakes and that can really affect your productivity so just some tips might want to consider the seven ways of lean they really helped me in my business and the proof is there I was able to scale to six figures within around six weeks that's it done no more sarcasm Chris will be happy about [Music] that congrats on make it to lesson 3.0 the concepts lesson for the design stage to start off let's review our progress so far so in stage zero we laid our foundations and understood the business model and the keys to success and then we did the same thing but on the personal side and talked about we as the entrepreneur need to be constantly working on ourselves as much as we are working on the business if not more so then in stage one we did our research to make sure we understand not just who we're going to be selling to but the business and Market in general so that we can answer those fun questions at the kitchen table about why are you selling T-shirts online again well there's a actual like Market validated reason behind that and then we chose our profitable Niche did a bunch of research and chose the one that aligns with us best doing the bumper sticker test then we came up with a 100 different design ideas and then we went through the build stage where we set up all of our accounts made our brand Shopify store Facebook ad account basically and our printify account and basically got all of our ducks in a row so that we are now ready for the next stage which is design and design is where we really start to bring our brand to life and start to stock our shelves of our online store that we just created to use the brick and mortar analogy and that's something that is going to be a common theme as in this stage we are working on making master mockups and making mockups that represent our designs and give them the life that they deserve cuz if you take a beautiful painting and you put it in an ugly frame nobody's going to like it even if it is a great painting So same thing holds true for our designs the mockup is really like the picture frame the pedestal that we're putting our designs up onto so they're extremely important and then the second piece is making sellable designs and the key there is noticing that we're not saying just making good designs or great designs or beautiful designs making sellable designs that is the key differentiator here and I'm going to keep saying this because this is a big lesson we learned from the first time in the course making it clear that we are making designs to sell we are making products we are not just making designs for oursel it does not matter what our own opinion is and by the end of the stage we are going to have 15 highquality mockups 100 plus designs and all of our designs and mockups ready for upload then assisting you through these lessons is going to be Meg and Eric and Meg is going to be presenting like the classic canva style way that she's always made designs and mockups and that she's really good at and then Eric who spent a lot of time using different AI generators is going to show you the AI way to create different designs and we'll talk more about that in just a second but to start things off I want to give a quote from the VP of marketing at HubSpot and she said that we don't want to push people where you want to be you want to meet them where they are and that's kind of the moral of the story or theme of this whole stage is going to be meeting the market where they are it's why when we're creating our product mockup and creating 100 plus designs we want to keep in mind that we are making products to sell to people and not just making designs for oursel and also this is what I said I would mention in a second with Eric and Corey is that there's different ways to create products and like canva Photoshop do it yourself AI tools like mid Journey Mystic Dolly you can hire designers there's lots of different options out there and that's something to keep in mind with everything we're doing is when you have a fundamental understanding of what the goal is and you're not just tracking the steps when you fundamentally understand the goal then you start to see how these different tools are just like cogs in a wheel and they're just available for you to sub in and out like there's no right or wrong answer it really comes down to your preference it really doesn't matter what tool you're using if you don't fundamentally understand like what makes a good mockup why are we trying to make a mockup what does a good one look like if you don't understand those things then it doesn't matter which tool you're using so I'm saying this to emphasize the importance of understanding the concept more than picking the right tool I'm saying that from personal experience from somebody who I was phenomenal at distracting Myself by switching back and forth between tools because all all along I was just avoiding confronting the fact that I had no idea what I was doing and I had a big learning curve to get over and I ended up wasting so much more time than if I just sat down and picked a tool and just got to work and started learning it I would have been so much further along but it took me a long time to confront that uncomfortableness of that whole like fear of failure so I'm saying this to take that away from you as a tool to save you a lot of time and anguish just face again and again not just with the design but in every part of this business just continually face the thing that you don't understand and that is the most important next step for the business so right now that's tackling design and there's a lot of a lot of you I know who are like graphic designers and like have it graphical background so maybe that doesn't directly apply to you but for everybody else myself included just keep confronting it like with the design stage except the fact that you don't know how to do it that well but with just like anything like going to the gym if you just lock into doing it 5 10 hours and you do that for a couple of weeks by like the 20th hour you're like very proficient at it think about any new skill by 20 hours in you're really like pretty solid so that's really just like 2 to three days of concentrated effort so that whole big mountain that I was always building up my head is like this thing that I was putting off if I just confronted it face on I would have like what was I actually worried about so point of it point of all that is just pick a tool pick an Avenue get familiar with each of them so you can decide which one you like best but then just double down on one and don't get distracted by shiny object especially nowadays there's always going to be like a new AI tool every other day it seems like so just get good at one of them they're all just tools the most important thing is that you fundamentally understand where you are where you're trying to get to then just fill in the gaps with whatever tool makes the most sense for you and to that end of understanding fundamentally what we're trying to do or conceptually hence the name of the lesson mockups things that we need to learn about mockups are we need to be able to answer these four questions like Rock Solid number one what is it for number two what makes a good one three how do you make them and four what do you need to get started like what are the components of it so first I want to show an example of this is Yoga STS mockup and to give you this is answering the first question like what is it for where does it get placed so number one on the far right that's an example just what the mockup looks like and then in the middle there that's what it looks like within a Facebook ad and then on the left that's what it looks like on the website so those are the two main places that our mockups are going to be used and the more important of the two is definitely on the website because the one on the website you're setting it up once and then you never want to have to go back and change all your mockups for your whole catalog again trust me it's a big pain You' honestly ask Meg she's had to deal with it more times than I have and the ad creative is way simpler to swap out like we could test a million different lifestyle images like no problem so the website is by far the more important of the two but just so you can see like where they're going to end up and then here's another example from history T's the one on the far right again is just the mockup there's what it looks like in an ad and then on the website again same situation it's way more important how good it looks on the website but that's what the end result is going to end up looking like and the places that it's going to be used so from what we found that like what makes a good one we'll get into this even more in a second but the flatlay like on a wood or like realistic looking background semi-realistic at the very least has always been what's work the best for us but just what works for us is definitely not the only way to be successful and so I want to show counter examples like into the am their common mockup that they use across all their prod it's just this plain white background important thing to note is that you can kind of tell from the image but it's way higher quality like the T-shirt actually looks realistic it's not just like the flatlay like the printify standard mockup it looks nicer than that but it is like a very basic just white background mockup so the other thing to take into account is like the age of a brand like a brand that's been around for like 20 years like this next one I don't know if this has been around for might be 10 years but this next one they've been around for a long time so they build up like brand reputation who knows what their mockups look like when they first got started so that's something else to take into account but just showing that there're a lot of ways to skin a cat I never understood that saying that is brutal poor cat anyway Wicked clothes they go a different direction they show just the design on a lot of them or a few on the sweatshirts they do it differently but on the shirts at the very least they just show the design as the preview then if you click into it they have lifestyle images but that's a different approach and the real place that we look to gauge this is on their collection page so what are they showing on the collection page so this one is just flatl this one's just the design and then this one on busted teas it's similar to into the am but slightly different in that it's not like a 3D rendering I mean it's semi-3d but it looks like it's on a person basically so slightly different takes and then they also have their logo in the bottom right very slight but yeah so there's lots of different ways to do it then here's what yoga stays looked like this mockup ended up doing really well for us but I have I have a really big confession I'm really bad at mockups and I'm sharing this so that anybody who's not designed or gred can know that if I can do it it's possible cuz this is what I said to the designer I went back in our old Trello board back years and found the mockup template card where I asked them to create the yoga stay mockup and this was all that I said I said darker wood B darker wood background yoga studio Vibe super descriptive rolled up yoga mat and water bottle next to it possibly some kind of jeans or other pants in the shot as well and this is what we ended up going with so it came came from this this was the extent of my ability when I started out and then we ended up with this and the way we got here was one the designers did a good job which we'll talk about like hiring designers later but you can find really good ones like on upwork and stuff but the way that we ended up here was that I just fundamentally understood what made a good mockup like I looked at a lot of examples and like established my own opinion of like what looked good and what didn't but then way more importantly I learned from I had run other successful print onand Brands before this so I knew like what a decent mockup looked like like and it was things like the amount of space that it takes up across the top and if the first place your eye is caught is by the design and that the accent like objects or auxiliary items around the side that they have to add to the scene but not ever take away from the design the design always has to be the centerpiece and then other pieces you want to make sure that the background is high contrast against two places one against the Facebook Newsfeed which is white so these slides are a good example of it because you don't want it to just blend in cuz if it Blends in people just go scrolling right by and you don't get people to stop but if you just do like a nice wood tone like this or it doesn't have to be this color but you get what I mean so it has to contrast against the White and then it also needs to contrast well against the shirt so that when people are scrolling they get stop by the background color and then when they see the background color their eyes jump to the next high contrast point and then their eyes get drawn to the design in the center and then the placement of the objects and this is really reading into it but the reason that I liked it was that we didn't have objects up here which like stopped to your gaze basically but your gaze like drifts down and then your gaze gets caught by all these objects here and it almost like bounces you back up to look at the design is just my theory behind like why this one pops but we spent a lot of time going back and forth with little things like how close should the beads be like we had the beads up here we had them back there then it was like what pattern should we put on the yoga mat what color should the yoga mat be so all in all we had at least like 20 or 30 different variations tried a bunch of different types of flowers and I think the designers were thoroughly sick of me by the end of it understandably but the end result was something that really popped so to recap the common mistakes is using one that blends in with the Facebook feed distracts from the design not testing enough of them and my personal favorite which ironic that it's the number three twice cuz I said copying Meg exactly opposed to learning the concepts everyone in the last course ended up with a red object in the corner so in Meg's tutorials and in Eric's tutorials and in everything else take it as example samples and not exact prescription so your mockup does not need to look exactly like Megs cuz the number of in the last course she mentions like a red object is a good thing to have because then it draws your eye to like where the shop now button is which like good idea and I mean it does make sense but I think that her saying that then people took it as okay every good mockup starts with a red object and we like build around the object and like it's not like that start with a good mockup and then if something like that makes sense great but like yoga State didn't have anything like that so don't worry about about it but focus on understanding the concepts think back to the Rubik's Cube and next we have 100 designs and at this stage it's really important especially for designer types who have background experience I want to share in just general design who get like spending a lot of time on that a very common misconception that I hear a lot when it comes to designs is people spending so much time on a single design and they think that they are doing that out of like some service to the brand or like oh I just care more about my brand and even when they hear me say like spend 15 to 30 minutes max per design especially in the beginning cuz you have no idea what's going to work they hear that it goes in like one year and out the other for probably a couple different reasons but one of the main ones is it's and I've done this too is delaying like by procrastinating and taking a ton of extra time on each design I'm putting off the jumping off a cliff moment that I know is coming which is just putting my ads out there and getting feedback probably brutal feedback from the market that I need to hear in order to improve my catalog but you know just like looking in the mirror when and accepting that something is your fault isn't always the easiest thing to do we just have to get used to repeatedly feeling that and the beautiful thing is that that's where the most growth comes from but anyway back on on track the jar story is what I wanted to share and when people say like I spend a lot of time cuz I want to make each design really high quality this is what I share and this is a story that I heard from Heros that I absolutely love but there was a professor he had his class and he split them it was like a sculpting class and he split them into two groups and the one half he said I want you to make one jar this entire semester I want it to be the most perfect jar possible and then he said to the other half I want you to just make as many jars as possible and long story short come the end of the semester which group do you think had the better jar it was not the group that was told to focus on just one they spent all their time on it it was the group that was told to make as many so they had not only as the most obviously but they also had the best jars and the moral of the story is that even though you might think that just spending a ton of time on a single design is doing your brand a service or your customers you're really not because the way that you learn is through volume and taking too long on individual designs is one of the worst mistakes because you really set yourself up for like building it up in your head is like it's going to be this awesome thing and I can almost guarantee every single time somebody launches initially they don't like Skyrocket so they don't get the amazing results that they're hoping for and so they're like building themselves up for disappointment and therefore it makes sense that the pattern that we see is amongst the top students they are the ones who compress the amount of time down that it takes to go from starting a print onand brand or just their business in general to the day that they launch and that they rip off that Band-Aid they compress that time down and it's dramatically shorter like at least half the time of the average person and so that's the name of the game is just speeding through this process not just chucking up garbage but doing good research quickly learning a tool or a Avenue not getting shiny object and then just making as many designs as possible and accepting the fact that the majority of them are not going to work and we're just going to learn over time and another Pitfall that we can watch out for is making designs for ourselves and not for the market so we want to meet the market where they are we are making sellable designs we are not making beautiful art we're making products also not doing a wide range of designs I see a lot of people their first stores they launch with like all typography or all like just graphic art and they don't do a wide range so in the beginning you need to not be afraid of striking out and casting a broad net like on history te's when we launched we made sure that we had some US History a few funny things women's history European like all different histories and then within those we did all different art styles like we had blueprint art which I personally liked and I thought was cool nobody else did but we tried out all those different things so then we found and it felt really random in the beginning but then because we did that we found that this product product type this is what did the best and turned out to be sarcastic history but we wouldn't have known that if we didn't do an extremely wide range and so wide range in terms of category and design style like you should not have all typography or all Graphics or just all graphic plus text you should have a smattering of everything then next is not referring to their research so they do all the research and then they at some point along the journey when they get to the design stage they're like all right time to start making designs step one don't need any of this pesky research and then they just kind of I mean you might as well just skipped the research step to begin with so we want to make sure that we are not just doing the research once and then being like that was a fun exercise and like Let It Fade from memory we want to make it an integral part of our design process next and probably the most nefarious is thinking that the performance of their designs is a reflection of themsel which it nothing could be further from the truth and the faster that you can adopt a truly objective point of view and just accept the fact that you're going to fail and that the only way to succeed is to push through those failures not just in pren on man but in literally anything that's something that we all know to be true but we all kind of shy away from it and we convince ourselves that maybe there's an opportunity out there that I just haven't been privy to that that doesn't exist but I'm here to tell you it does not exist opportunity anything that's worth doing it involves coming face to face with failure and then constantly pushing through that and I want to reemphasize that from the foundations module for designs especially cuz this is the single biggest place where people get hung up by putting in a lot of effort and then they attach themselves to it like it's an art project like we did in high school and then they equate like going out and testing it in Facebook ads to like bring it home to your parents and if they like crumpled it up and put it in the trash and it's not like that because when we go out to the market and they tell us what they don't like what they're really doing is starting to show us their wallets and saying not that but if you did something like that then yeah then I would much better incentive so we're learning by doing that process and that's getting us one step closer to giving the market something that they actually want and that they're willing to pay us for so we should really be saying thank you if anything else and also this stage I want to point out that while it may seem like a lot and you're looking at all the different components of the business and it's understandably feels like they're all kind of equal to each other I want to point out that it is far from equal the products and designs that we are making Far and Away supersedes any other topic that we'll talk about like the quality of the designs is by far the most important thing it's not even close to your ads not even close to your website like honestly launching the ads is pretty much the same for every single brand there's slight nuances in the Styles and like yes you can do different ad copy but if you give somebody terrible and we'll get into this in a second getting ahead of myself but designing products is basically like your R&D and so people ask how many designs do I need well every business has a product and that they should constantly be improving and the thing I want us to remember is that great products can be sold with bad marketing but great marketing can't sell bad products and there's always one question the most popular question on everybody's mind how many designs do I need to have and people ask that question thinking that once I hit that number then success is like that and I'm reducing it down to that because I know there's more Nuance to it but that's like the fundamental and it is not that cut and dry like make 150 designs make 200 then you see success it's not like that cuz you could have 10 Designs Plus enough luck you know all of them could be best sellers or it's possible that you make a thousand designs and you get no best sellers so the best way to start is to just start and get 100 highquality products and nothing else really matters and keep in mind that the top 1% of print on demand stores add at least seven new products per day and we also need to accept that we have no idea what's going to work for example in history te's I thought this design was pretty cool I made it so maybe I was partial but that's what I liked like these Easter Island heads and this is what the market actually liked completely different and that happens on every store for example John John who's a coach that you guys will see with the email section he had a a design that he was like within inches of deleting cuz he thought it like looked so terrible from his trell board and he like almost forgot to delete it or something happened long story short he ended up launching it even though he hated it and was close to deleting it it went over went on to sell over 10,000 units of just that design so moral of the story is we have no idea what's going to work all the coaches will say the same thing and that's why just a numbers game and keeping in mind that we're not designing art we are making products so like if you take the Mona Lisa or Star night or I'm so uncultured it hurts or this beautiful painting that I'm too dumb to understand if you take those beautiful works of art and you put them on a t-shirt it kind of loses something like these are not shirts that anybody would buy but these are incredible works of art so like what gives why is this not a t-shirt or why is this not like a sellable design and the answer is because it's not designed for a t-shirt so we need to understand that we are designing not beautiful art we are designing products and there is a very very good chance that your first 100 designs will not be good and that's okay you're building a new skill designing great products like anything else takes a lot of time and practice and the best way to learn is to just do it yourself and again the most successful students progress extremely quickly through the stage and they don't get hung up on the individual designs and they prioritize the process and getting all the way through they think back to the jar example so do that be a jar and yeah enjoy it for a lot of people it's like Meg especially she really enjoys the design aspect so you can have fun with it but just use this as this whole stage this is really the place to be building your skill set that's really going to make the boat go faster with this whole business model so there's no skipping over this stage you know just do it once and then come back to it later on like this is the thing that like this is the product of this business so there's never going to be too many designs there's never going to be like more designs that you couldn't be making or improving on cuz that's the business that's the whole thing so just keep that in mind and that's something we really want to emphasize from the first time around that this is the section like if there's any part that you're going to spend the most time on it should be this but that time should be spent getting through the process as quickly as possible and then coming back and looping through again which we'll talk more about in stage four so other than that thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson hi guys and welcome to section 3.1 where we are going to go through everything for designing your mockups at this stage stage three that is where we are doing everything design related this is your mockups these are your designs really you're going to spend the most time right here in this stage really just going through the design iteration and the creating designs creating mockups finding the right ones and then moving forward from there this is one of my absolute favorite sections I love designing mockups I just think it's a lot of fun something that I have always loved to do so let's get into it your progress so far what should you have done up until this point by now you should have established a branded Shopify store all of the setup for all the different sites that we need should all be done and in the past if you haven't done that yet go ahead and click pause because you're going to want to do all that first two you should have set up your printify account for seamless fulfillment this way when we're ready to take orders and they just start flowing in we know that they are being handled on the back end and they will be making their way to our customers and finally you should have set up your ad account now we're not doing anything with it yet but it's always great that it is set up so that way when our designs are done we have our 100 designs we are ready to start our mockup test and start just a general ad campaign for our designs by the end of this lesson these are the things you'll be able to do you should be able to understand the role and the impact of mockups specifically in marketing two you should know what a good mockup looks like and some of the different key aspects to a good and great mockup and three you should create at least 15 highquality mockups to test so why do mockups matter they are the first impression for our brand a lot of times would say over 90% of the customers especially when we are first starting out they are all coming from Facebook ads and our mockup is really what is catching their eye so our design as well as the mockup so it's really that first impression that somebody gets about our brand to begin with so we influence the customer's perception of our brand and our product so we want to make sure that it's good that it's eye-catching that it's high quality two it has visual appeal this helps a buyer imagine themselves using our product so if we're selling T-shirts we can imagine ourselves wearing in that T-shirt and going oh I love that design that would look so good for me to wear to the family reunion or for me to wear to my back to school night whatever it may be somebody can start imagining themselves in their t-shirt three it's going to really dictate our ad performance we want to grab attention Drive clicks and boost conversions and we're going to get into this in the next couple sections especially when we are in the testing phase you're going to learn a lot of acronyms a lot of data stuff that is around Facebook ads but this is directly going to impact our ad performance now we want our ads running at a really good metric we want them to be profitable otherwise there's no reason for us running ads because if they're not profitable we're just losing money we don't want to do that so what exactly makes up a bad mockup a lot of times a plain white background you know those printify mockups that's pretty much what we're talking about a lot of Brands will do this plain white background and that's fine you know you'll see this with Nike you'll see this with bigger Brands and a lot of people will ask us well why why can't I just do the white background this big brand does that the Big Brand is able to do that because they already have brand recognition something that we don't have when we're starting out is brand recognition because we've just become a brand so we need something to catch our buyers's eyes something to stop them from scrolling because remember they're going to be coming from Facebook or Instagram where they're scrolling they're not in a buying mood they're simply there to interact with their friends and now they're getting hit with this ad so we need something that's going to catch their attention and a plain white background probably isn't going to do that now depending on the niche you can definitely have some more clean kind of white background stuff but you definitely want details and things about your niche in that mockup the t-shirt that is displayed is way too small a lot of times you'll see a big square and the t-shirt is so small and there's other objects around it and you're unsure what somebody selling we want it to be clear that we are selling a t-shirt they may be heavily photoshopped so something like this something that just doesn't look natural if this wasn't an ad would that get you to stop clicking I may do a double take CU I'll say it's not a very good-looking mockup why would somebody post that that's really my first reaction nothing about that is getting me to stop scrolling a cluttered composition so there's just too much going on it's too distracting the Design's distracting I mean it's a cool design I like the look of it but just everything else around it I'm distracted I'm not focused on that t-shirt I'm focused on all the other other things that are happening in that mockup behind it there's poor contrast so the design is just blending in with a shirt which is clashing with the background it just it's not very pleasant on the eyes we want it to be something that is attractive that's eye-catching but at the same time is working with what the niche is so if the niche is I'm just going to say Beach I'm going to question why it's on a cartoon background instead of why didn't we have some beach themed things why is there not like you know a little tropical drink or a coconut in one of the corners or some Palm leaves anything like that that would get me more in a buying mood for that particular Niche is it a low resolution image so it's just not clear I'm not even able to really see the design that's not going to get somebody's attention they're just going to struggle to see it and they're just going to keep scrolling they're going to say I'm not interested so you want it to be a nice clear image that is just like getting us to stop and actually look at that design and admire that design and the work that somebody put into that and then there's off- branded elements so just stuff that makes no sense with the niche I mean I guess the submarine works because it's kind of like a beach theme the red outline like that doesn't really fit for me it's like a river running through and then you have a bald eagle all of it just doesn't really make sense and then these would be examples of I would say not great mockups because one it is not a square we like a 1080 by 1080 we definitely don't want a rectangle or just get kind of like cut off and then at the same time it just like doesn't really make sense you have to kind of twist your head like this to read the design we want it to be pretty easy for somebody pretty easy on their eyes we don't want them having to like turn their head so this would be an example of like not very good mockups so even though they don't have some of the characteristics of the other mockups I would say like these aren't great realistic mockups so what are characteristics of an exceptional mockup a mockup that's going to catch somebody's eye and to get them to stop scrolling one we want a highly replicable mockup style this is definitely dependent on the niche ours is a little bit different because it's very hard to just create one mockup for every single season of the year but this was what we made for spring you know you have the flower you have sunglasses this was our spring mockup you also want to have a clear distinction between the t-shirt and the background so see how the T-shirt pops you look at that mockup and you know that somebody is selling a t-shirt the other objects aren't like in the middle and really big so someone's not looking at that and going am I buying sunglass or am I buying the sneakers in the corner no they understand that they are looking to buy a T-shirt and three it's on brand and related to our Niche so we don't have random objects in there it would make absolutely no sense for a seasonal store for the springtime for me to have like falling leaves or a pumpkin or Christmas ornaments that wouldn't really make sense if I'm trying to sell like flower designs or stuff about gardening or stuff with Birds on it just is isn't really working with that mockup four we want to have a realistic appearance and adding little details like Shadows so see how the shirt has a nice shadow on the right hand side it's giving like a 3D almost like pop to it so it's not just like flat into the background we're making the items stand out putting some detail onto that shirt and just overall catching the eye and the attention of the buyer and five the T-shirt takes up most of the space see how big the T-shirt shirt is now it' be a little bit more difficult if the T-shirt was really small and just wasn't making sense another thing that I see with specifically bad mockups is the size of the objects will be way too big or way too small so the supporting details like the sunglasses will be huge and it reminds me of like those glasses that like the clowns wore that would be like out to here and you're like who who has sunglasses that big or the shoes are so tiny and small you're like it looks like baby shoes next to a full-blown t-shirt like it just doesn't make sense so we want the objects to one make sense for the niche but two also make sense size-wise because we're trying to make these mockups as realistic as possible six we want to have large highquality Graphics so we don't want it to be pixelized we want it to be nice and clear we want it to be vibrant we want it catching the eye of our scroller so all of the objects that are in this mockup they're all very clear nothing's blurred nothing's pixelated they all look real meanwhile all of these mockups were made with canva and basically were me playing around with it but I took all those different items and objects and put them together and made them look like it was a part of the image and that's what we're that's what we're here to do so where should you start research absolutely we are always going back to research just like we said in section one we want to start with Google and Etsy we want to be looking at other mockups that are out there that we can pull inspiration from two you can purchase mockups packages from Etsy or similar marketplaces to start quickly this is actually something that I've done so many times and can be a great starting place especially if you someone who is just starting out or maybe you struggle a little bit creativity wise it's absolutely okay to purchase mockups especially for testing it may not be the mockup that we go with but mockups typically are pretty inexpensive you know they may cost $3 to5 it's nothing too crazy I think the max I've spent was maybe like $7 for a package for me I looked at that as it was worth it so always you know go out there on Etsy see what's out there feel free to purchase stuff all of this is for testing we want to find the right mockup so that we can get wins as soon as possible and three we want to incorporate various t-shirts Styles backgrounds and objects into our mockup designs because we are going to be moving these mockups into a mockup test we want to have a plethora we want to have a ton of different angles ton of different backgrounds a ton of different styles we want to be testing everything under the Sun and you're going to see that when we go through and actually create some mockups together you want to have a whole variety of different looking stuff that way we can really test and find the mockups that are going to work best for our brand and our Niche so let's get into it now for the purpose of this video I am going to go through making a few mockups if you would like to watch the entire video of me going through and making 15 different mockups feel free to watch it at the end of this section so the first thing that we're going to do we're going to go to canva we're going to do an Instagram 1080 by 1080 then we're going to go to Etsy and we're going to start looking and doing some design research to find different mockups that we can use because we're in the seasonal Niche I'm looking for mostly Christmas holiday type of stuff winter type of mockups because that's what my designs are going to be focused on wouldn't really make sense if I was doing summer designs right now so this is what I'm going to use for some inspiration we're going to go back to canva and then we are going to just kind of start putting some stuff out there and see what we can come up with so I really liked the white shiplap again it can be enough of a contrast um and add some texture to your mockup so still keeping that like lighter crisp color but still also giving some detail and just like designing you'll see later on in the course A lot of times it's just playing around and searching using like different keywords in canva to get a good idea to find like exactly what's in your mind and and what you're looking for so a lot of times it may not be on like the first search that like I'm finding the background that I want but just stay persistent keep going for it that way you you'll get better as time goes on and you create more and more mockups you're going to get a better eye for it but it definitely takes time so we'll just kind of keep looking I do like this Navy but remember we want our t-shirts to stand out and I know Navy will be one of the colors that we use so a navy shirt on a Navy background just isn't going to really stand out and I don't think it's going to catch the eye of a lot of my buyers so then we'll also look at like some winter backgrounds see if there's anything that we can kind of pull from here I like the look of that we'll kind of see how a t-shirt looks on there just because the greenery looks really big remember we want it to be realistic and that to me just isn't the green just kind of is standing out a little bit too much for me but again this is what we do we just make different designs we play around with it I mean you can make hundred different mockups if you wanted to to test out and see if it'll work but it's all about having fun and playing around with it and hopefully you enjoy making mockups as much as I do I have a lot of fun with it I'll typically try to find pictures like this if I can kind of like those Etsy type of mockups if the stuff's like all the way out towards like the corner or the side we can often tweak it and make it work for our Niche so we'll play around and see how a t-shirt looks on there but I'm just going to search around more and see if there's anything that I can find yeah like the candy cane looks way too big on there so I do like the realistic pictures but sometimes they just don't always work out now just like my design research when I kind of just like search around I feel like that's kind of the same thing that I do when I'm designing designs as well as mockup I just kind of like look around and see what exactly I can find first and then from there I can kind of play around and kind of get some inspiration to move forward with the rest of the process but right now I'm kind of like in this background of like okay I need to find some solid backgrounds or some different points of inspiration prior to putting my t-shirt on like that Greenery looks like it's way too big but now we'll go to uploads now these are different mockup that I bought off of etsy that way I have like the Gilden 64,000 you know I'll buy just a simple lay flat like this I have some with like the knot in the corner I bought some realistic ones with people on them again it's all about testing it's all about having fun finding fun backgrounds we want to be testing a bunch of different things because we don't know exactly what's going to work for our Niche and what our buyers are going to want again we want that t-shirt to be nice and big want to take up a lot of space face again I kind of thought it wouldn't really work with this background I'm not really liking the look of it you can do a slight tilt like that it's not like too dramatic where somebody's going to be have needing to turn their head and it can add like a little bit of like Dimension or something that's just different from other mockups that somebody may see I do I like the realistic pictures but sometimes it's just hard to position the shirt just right because like I don't want the shirt over top of the pine cone so unfortunately I don't think that this one's going to work either so now I can remove this background take out the kind of extras that pillow that doesn't really quite make sense canva has a bunch of different tools that we can use now this is like the background removal so if there is something that's still in there that you want out you just have to kind of be careful play around with it a little bit the last thing that we wanted to like take a divot out of the model's hand and like make it look unnatural so we definitely want to keep that in mind remember we want we want our mockups to look as realistic as we possibly can we want them to look real but I mean that cleaned it up pretty good so now we're good Center it up again that t-shirt's taking up the most amount of space you can use tools like Drop Shadows to make it look like the person's kind of standing out now this Shadow is very dramatic remember we want this to look natural we want it to look realistic that would be like if somebody had a huge light on them kind of like similar to me right now like it's not very natural for somebody to be like in that much light but just a little bit of a shadow see that Dimension that it adds to it it just adds like a little bit of detail that's going to really make it stand out against any background now that we put behind this model so now I can get like Christmas tree yeah similar to this now this is very similar to what we saw on Etsy and a lot of the backgrounds that their realistic models had you know it was kind of like a Christmas tree like this again that red kind of like pops out it catches your eye so it's like enough for you to go okay clearly this is like a Christmas design or you know it's a Christmas tree so it's something winter related and then we can kind of just keep playing around with some backgrounds you know maybe people won't love the big pops of red but they'll like kind of the natural cream and some of the white of this tray these are all different elements that we want to be testing out so I'm actually going to stop here I continue on and going through making 15 different DIY mockups using canva if you want to watch that complete video through you absolutely can it is available at the end of this section where we go through the DIY stuff as well as the AI generated mockups but again I spent almost two hours going through designing this so I don't want to go and bore people here as they're here to learn and get as much out of this and the most information as they possibly can so if you are interested in watching that entire video looking at all the different step-by-step stuff that I do you absolutely should watch that at the end of this section but we'll keep moving forward you can also find the link to the full mockup design video under the resources on the checklist so those are constantly available to you so when you're going through the process you're creating your own mockups you can always refer back to those videos at any point so let's go through my mockup recommendation so kind of like my takeaways my best practices that I use when I am creating mockups and now you always have to keep in mind it is very Niche specific look at what people in your Niche are interested in buying and always test it out it never hurts to test something before just running with it and putting it on our store so my first recommendation is using backgrounds that complement your t-shirts now at the end of this section we're going to go through all 15 mockups that I created because of what I was seeing in Etsy and a lot of different mockup and a lot of other winter and specifically Christmas related products that's why I went the direction that I went typically I don't like to pick any kind of like super light or white backgrounds but in this case I did based off of research that I saw and it's all going to get tested all of this is going to go into ads and we are going to let the people and the data select the mockup for us so use backgrounds that complement your t-shirts and always feel free to test things out if you really like the look of a white background test it out in ads and see what happens two maintain consistency with your Brand's aesthetic the last thing that we want is multiple mockups that just like aren't making sense with our Niche or our brand Voice or the overall Vibe we we want to maintain that consistency we want to have objects in our mockups that make sense that work with the niche that people in the niche realize and pick up on three you want to ensure realistic lighting and shadows a lot of times I've seen like hard Shadows or Shadows that are just too much we want it to look realistic we want to basically make it look like we snapped a picture of this mockup so keeping that in mind as we're creating if you're really struggling with this then maybe an AI mockup is a better tool for you to use for you want to focus on the composition of the T-shirt itself that is the main star that is the main attraction of our mockup it's what we are selling we are selling T-shirts we're not here to sell any of the objects that are in the mockup we're here to sell the T-shirt so here are the different mockups that I ended up creating you can watch that entire design process linked at the end of this section so as you can see I went for some lighter backgrounds and I specifically chose white because that's what we ended up designing with the AI generator as well again with a mockup test we want to be testing everything exactly the same same design same color T-shirt the only thing that's different is the background so that's why you're going to see just white t-shirts on every single mockup so as you can see I have the plain lay flat I have the one with a knot in the corner I switched some of them up I used a realistic model I used one with just like a normal lay flat photo one with like a standing up see the shadow effect it's almost as if like the sun's being beaming down on the mockup on the left again just trying different styles because the image on the left was on more of like a white background I did a more significant Shadow because I want that shirt to pop off and to stand out from the background as you can see on the two mockups here the one in the middle and the one on the right they're both on plain white so that shadow is more significant so that that white shirt stands out more again we'll see how all of these test out and ads but based off of the research that kind of style is what I was seeing again just kind of a different background we have one that's a little bit more realistic but notice that the t-shirt is all the way in the back this was an image that we found on canva that I just want to test out and kind of see how it performs again it's not my go-to mockup but I'm testing all different angles I'm testing a bunch of different things I want my mockups to all be different that way I can find the best mockup that'll work best on my store we have the realistic woman again she stands out you can tell the T-shirt the main attraction we used some shadowing with that we also faded the background a little bit so that she stands out even more and the background isn't taking away from the t-shirt at all so now that we've gone through and you guys have learned how to do a DIY process in making mockups I'm now going to pass the mic off to coach Eric and he is going to do a deep dive into using AI image generators to help create mockups so if you're somebody who isn't Super Creative you're struggling with creating a mockup everything that he's going to teach you is going to be super helpful so instead of canva what are some of other tools that you can use to create AI generate mockup designs and one of my favorite tools to use is Mystic it's excellent at creating mockup designs absolutely excellent at creating mockups it's by far I think the best compared to all the other AI image generators that I've used whether it's mid Journey audiogram Dolly it doesn't matter Mystics is the best of all of them because Mystic is made specifically to sell print on demand products and it does an unbelievable job of creating AI mockups so why Mystic it's tailored for print on demand I just mention that it's literally built for print on demand it doesn't get any better all the other image generators are used to create images from any other path or whatever thing you're looking to do it creates images like that but these images that Mystic creates are specifically for print on demand you're putting these images on your products to sell and that's exactly what we want you know it's a One-Stop shop you're creating products for hats t- t- Shirts Mugs bags posters anything you can think of pod it's what mystic's for you know has integrated features you know has create easily generate beautiful products from simple prompts you just type in a prompt and it's going to create an image that you can slap on a T-shirt and sell edit remove backgrounds vectorize and upscale your Arts now all the other image generators don't really have this involved you know I think of mid Journey specifically here you know it doesn't have removed background it doesn't have vectorized it doesn't have upscale right it doesn't have any of those tools you're going to have to use third party tools to then take that image and basically manipulate it until you can put it on a t-shirt to sell right that's extra added time that you don't need to use you're wasting that time and that's why I love Mystic because you can use those tools right in its software generate write your titles description and text this is another important feature right if you're using any of the other image generators you're going to have to add all this stuff manually whereas Mystic does it for you it's going to add the tags it's going to add the description so you don't have to think of any of that stuff you're not going to have to go to chat GPT and have it write hey give me a description for all these 100 different products right it's all in here ready to go for you uh collection easily save your favorite designs into collections right if you're really in a good trance of creating designs you can save it all in one place whereas mid Journey you know as it keeps going and going you might lose your products in the feed whereas if you make a really good product you can iterate it right here in Mystic and keep them all in the same spot so Mystic pod some of the pros right so it's time-saving it saves you a ton of time right that's the whole point of using AI tools you're not waiting for a designer to make it you're not in cam a building the design yourself it's customizable and extremely quick results you know with the click of a button after you type in a prompt it's going to generate that image for you to sell and some of the comms so you know as you know AI is still extremely new right so AI has limited capabilities the good thing is though Mystic is constantly improving I've seen improvements just from using it myself over time and AI moves really fast Mystic is constantly getting better and that's why I love Mystic so much because you know as it iterates and gets better that means it's going to make better designs for me and ultimately more sales for my store sometimes there's an offset of vision alignment you know sometimes you may type in a prompt this is with all AI generation you may T type in a prompt and it might not give you back exactly what you're looking for but that's okay because we just iterate fix the prompt and make a new image and so some of the benefits of AI powered t-shirt mockups it's extremely efficient it's customizable it's realistic and it's scalable you know these are all extremely important things that we want when we're thinking about using AI tools to create mockups for our t-shirts so four key elements for mockups that AI helps with realistic placement and lighting it's excellent at this you don't have to worry about taking pictures yourself and figuring out the lighting and configuring all these lights and going to Amazon or wherever to buy all these lights to set up the right lighting to take a great picture it generates appealing backgrounds for you whatever is on brand with your Niche it'll automatically add that to the background of the image and make it super easy so you don't have to go to let's say you're selling Beach t-shirts and you have to go all the way to the beach in February to take some pictures in the sand for your t-shirts it completely eliminates all that nonsense and makes it super easy for you to do that the images come out high resolution already so you're not fidgeting with your camera making sure it's not blurry or your hand moved when you went to take a picture it's already high resolution and it's on brand so as long as you're adding the right elements when you're writing in your prompt it's going to be on brand and consistent so high resolution images you know you're going to use Mystic to make clear Sharp Images to ensure your product details are visible and professional number two realistic placement and lighting you know Mystic p will make sure your designs will appear naturally integrated with the products including Shadows angles and lighting number three appealing background avoid busy or distracting backgrounds use Simple neutral backgrounds and incorporate lifestyle mockups like we have pictured here number four consistency with brand style you know as we can see it's uh circled you know for the yoga style store we have a yoga mat in the mockup image and for the desert style t-shirt you know we have some white Converse that would go well with that t-shirt so it creates consistent Styles and tones for a cohesive brand image use plain or lifestyle backgrounds that align with your Brand's Niche and aesthetic so steps to create mockups with Mystic pod one Define your concept determine your T-shirt theme or Niche what what are you selling you know Mystic needs to know what you're selling so determine what it is and then let it know use specific and detailed prompts for better AI results if you don't use a lot of information your results will probably struggle now I'm not saying overload it with way too much information but there needs to be a fine line between giving enough information for it to work or you know not giving enough information and you're unsatisfied with the results what I find is if I give Mystic around three to five sentences for design Lo making maybe even a little bit more the results are a lot better than if I just say you know make me a winter t-shirt it's just going to start pulling random things and not really sure so think of it as you're describing something to someone that can't see right that they're blind you want to give enough information to that person so they can picture and conceptualize what you're telling them number two generate designs input your idea or let magic prompt ref find it for you and adjust and revieww design options provided by Mystic pod and this is great right so unlike other AI tools you know I think of mid Journey where you have to be very specific on what you're adding to your prompt if you only add a little bit of information mystic's going to take care of the rest and use its magic prompt where it will autofill and add more to your original prompt to give better mockups number three mockup Styles choose from flatlays lifestyle images or other mockup templates and Mystic is exceptional at doing this right I was just in the other day and I was curious to see how I could create a mockup with like a feminine knot in the front right I was trying to create a different mockup style and I was having a lot of issues trying to do it on Mid journey and Mystic pod was able to instantly spit out exactly what I was looking for where the T-shirt was tied at the end in a knot and it looked great and you know something some other AI platforms might not be able to do right I was struggling to get it to do it in mid journey and I've spent a ton of time in mid journey and it just wouldn't do it versus Mystic was excellent and and did it immediately and was able to do exactly what I was asking it to do so key feature of Mystic pod for mockups mockup style options you have flatlays you have lifestyle scenes or modelbased mockups you know flatlay mockups which is our recommendation this is what I use for my own stores you know they're simple they're versatile for a clean and minimalistic look there's lifestyle mockups you know you can place your designs in real life scenarios to help customers visualize wearing them say if you're selling in the soccer Niche maybe you have a soccer player on the field wearing your T-shirt mystic's really good at doing that and it has model based mockups so you can use models to add professional touch and appeal to Target demographics again if we're talking soccer again you're on the field and there's a guy in a full soccer kit wearing cleats and a soccer ball in his arm and he has your t-shirt on to show you know you're selling to the soccer Niche and the power of prompts right so the Mystic pod mockup prompt formula this is so much information here so much valuable information you know we've gone ahead and created a example prompt that you can use right in Mystic to create create amazing mockups for you and I just want to talk about why this prompt works and I'm going to break it down for you so again like I was saying before prompting is a whole skill set in its own and something you're going to have to learn when you're using AI tools prompting is kind of like putting a puzzle together right you're going to have to give it pieces to basically eventually build the puzzle itself so when you look at this I like to break down exactly what's going on in each sentence or even each section so when we're looking at this prompt and the formula behind it so let's start a flatlay knockup featuring a insert t-shirt brand here so t-shirt brand as in the Gilden 64,000 Bella canvas whatever t-shirt style you're deciding to sell through your pod business and it's a flatlay so you're telling it you want the T-shirt laying flat t-shirt prominently displayed on a soft so whatever background style you want whether it's wood grass sand whatever style you want right so this gives you exactly the tools you need we have the flatlay so we have the T-shirt Style with the brand and then on what background we want St sted with insert t-shirt layout here so you can say hey I want my t-shirt knotted I want it flat I want it folded in a square I want the back of a t-shirt I want the just the neck of the T-shirt If You're desiging deciding to put a design just on the neck so things like that the t-shirt is surrounded by very important items related to Niche or clothing items like jeans or shoes or boots or whatever sandals it can be anything right so items related to Niche let's talk about seasonal collections so if we're doing winter themed you know maybe we want a nice blanket background or we want some candles or we want some coffee or maybe some snow anything that's related to our Niche along with maybe we want a pair of jeans or a pair of boots in the bottom left corner and items related to your Niche so again you know maybe we want a pair of jeans in the bottom left and maybe we want a coat that goes with it cuz it's cold outside or in the bottom right corner maybe we want boots that goes well with our Niche to maybe across the top we want to insert items like strings of Lights to give some accent maybe we want to change up the lighting a little bit you know maybe we want it warm maybe we want it bright offset Etc so this is a really good formula that you can plug and play and and use your own Niche related items to build an effective mockup for you so tips for Effective mockup design you know you want to highlight unique features what's important in the mockup obviously it's the t-shirt and we want to be specifically highlighting the T-shirt itself and how important that is and making sure that the t-shirt is a majority of the image and you want to stay on brand too if you're doing seasonal but then you have fishing stuff in the background it doesn't really make sense right we're focused on seasonal items and fishing doesn't really have anything to do with that you want to test different styles so okay you're happy with your first mockup but that's not the only mockup you want to use you want to create 15 20 maybe even 30 different mockups because you know when you start running your ads you're going to want to test these mockups and find which one gives the best results and then you're going to optimize for platforms right so maybe these mockups are made and you're optimizing for the platforms so yeah optimize for platforms right maybe you know your Shopify is well established now and you want to start selling your t-shirt on Amazon or Etsy and they have different rules so you can use Mystic to help you create mockups that are optimized for different platforms like Amazon where you need to have a white background or SE where it might be a little bit different design than you're using on Shopify so best practices for AI mockups you want to combine AI designs with Trends so not only are you going to use AI but you also want to find trends that are performing well for t-shirt designs whether it's retro typography or anything like that and then combine it with AI to create those designs you want to focus on quality quity right obviously we've mentioned a lot that quantity is very important and you need to be testing a ton of different designs but you need to have high quality products too no one's going to buy products that are bad quality and the design stink you need to have consistency across your products again that's like when we mentioned all the mockups being similar or the same on the site you want to use the same mockup so there's continuity across your brand and importantly too use feedback you know if people tell you specific things about your mockup like hey I think the t-shirt's too small hey I think your designs are a little fuzzy or the T-shirt might be offset take that input and and use it to build a better mockup how Mystic pod stands out so Mystic creates realistic outputs it's scalable for growth and it's a streamline process so I'll go into a Mystic pod design demo showing you how to make a mockup using Mystic and actually how incredible it is at creating mockups you know it can create unique backgrounds and settings it tailored visuals for specific themes and uh lifestyle mockups to create relatable audience focused scenarios all right the fun stuff the stuff that I absolutely love I love using AI to create new mockups and new images for my own brand so let's hop right into it I'm going to show you how to use Mystic to create your very first mockup and how to make iteration mockups on top of that to create your 15 mockups to eventually test on Facebook in ads I'm excited let's hop right into it so I just went ahead and copied the prompt formula that we used in the video and that'll be given to you you just have to copy it and we want to go ahead and turn Mystic promp off when we're doing this because we just want to gener an image and since we're doing seasonal collections here I'm going to format this for seasonal collections so let's run right through it a flatlay mockup featuring a we're using Gilden 6400 let's do with a white T-shirt t-shirt prominently displayed on a soft let's do a blanket soft winry theme soft blanket background let's do like a beige blanket that'll pop out nicely on a white T-shirt styled with insert t-shirt layout here let's do a kned t-shirt feminine style the t-shirt is surrounded by items relating to the niche or clothing let's say let's do a pair of jeans in the bottom left pair of blue jeans in the bottom left corner and let's say boots since it's for winter let's say brown boots in the bottom right insert items like string of lights accents Etc insert lighting Styles here let's say okay we want Christmas them themed lights strong across the top of the image of the mockup with warm lighting okay let's go ahead and make four of these and see what it makes all right the results are in look at these mockups they are absolutely gorgeous these are gorgeous right this is exactly what I asked for a nice beige blanket in the background a white Gilden 64,000 t-shirt a pair of jeans in one corner pair of boots in the other and you're just going to go ahead and pick which one resonates or you think looks the best here right we we don't really know we're just going to be testing and like I said before we're going to be creating a bunch of different iterations of this so might as well just grab one that we like and move forward so me personally I like this one or this one I'm going to go with this one though I like the style of this one we can can just go ahead and remove this tag and pull this into canva and just easily erase it I like how the sleeves are folded on the sides gives it a very nice texture look at the shadowing the shadowing is beautiful in this image right it even pairs right up to the folds in the blanket it's so nice along with the string lights give it that nice pop feature the nice two clean boots and a pair of jeans over here this is a beautiful image right it looks great actually there's some weird Imaging going on over here so maybe I don't choose this one it's there's some kind of weird gray Block in this corner so it's look we look at the image it looks perfect besides this we're not going to use this image it's weird in that bottom corner we don't know why it's like that but we just wouldn't use that image this one's very similar so let's take a look at this one again this t-shirt looks absolutely beautiful nice shadowing on both sides the lights give off a nice perfect vibe in the image it has that beige blanket in the background two nice boots and a pair of jeans this is a great mockup this is one we definitely test we don't even have to mess around with the tag we don't have to remove the tag in canva we don't have to go and erase it this is a nice mockup to use the only thing that I would recommend is if you're pulling this mockup it doesn't take up enough of the image the T-shirt so when you pull it into canva or wherever you're going to manipulate the mockup just make sure that you expand so the T-shirt is almost touching the edge of the image so the design can be as big as possible and the t-shirt is dominating the image so that's just one example right we can go back into the mockup and do it again with the prompt let's turn this off so we're going to go ahead here again CU we're still using a guild and 64,000 go back put guilden 64,000 t-shirt promly displayed on a soft let's say we want snow background this time we want to do snow even though we wouldn't normally do this for a white T-shirt but I just want to show you the capabilities and how good m is at creating mockup images snowy background maybe we want to add a jacket too snowy background with a flannel jacket styled with insert t-shirt layout here we're just going to do a flat t-shirt this time just to show you that I can do different styles of te's flat t-shirt the t-shirt is surrounded by let's add something else to it instead of jeans this time let's do I don't know a cup of coffee in the bottom left corner and items related to the niche in the bottom right let's do a scarf this time let's make it a red scarf give it some specifics insert items like strings you know what I'm not going to add any of this stuff this time I just want to see what Mystic is going to create for us and the different style of mockups but again I just want to iterate like look how easy this is right this is so simple to create amazing mockups for your brand how cool is that like I'm astounded at what Mystic can do like the nodding feature alone this is me just being nerdy here but like the nodding feature you can't do that on other image generators I've tried and Mystic is the only only one that gets the knotting right when I've tried on Mid Journey the knot looks weird or it's like Blurry and the fact that Mystic is basically creating Etsy style mockups right before our eyes perfectly is amazing and the fact that you get to use this and quickly generate 15 mockups for your own brand to test and find Winners without having to go and make your own mockups or ask a designer to make it is gold right so let's see what happens here let's generate another four images and see the results so yeah this is this is cool this is cool results look at this one right you know you got the flannel tea you got the coffee cup right like it it doesn't make a ton of sense but I'm just showing you the capabilities of Mystic like why is there a coffee cup in the snow who knows I don't know I just wanted to show you that you can create pretty much anything you can imagine in Mystic when it comes to mockups and Designs too we'll get to that later but it added the red scarf in the corner it has the coffee cup on the flannel in the bottom left corner it has the t-shirt and has the flannel right you can make whatever mockup you want let's do one more example here again we'll just input The Prompt formula that we give you and we'll start changing things a flatlay mockup featuring a Gilden 64,000 again like I said you can use Bella canvas you can use whatever you want but I just like using the Gilden 64,000 because that's the type of t-shirt that I sell but again you can use the Bella canvas and it'll work no problem so a flatlay mockup featuring a Gilden 64000 t-shirt prominently displayed on a soft I don't know let's do Christmas theme Christmas theme background theme background styled with insert t-shirt layout here let's do fold it this time let's see what it gives us for a folded style t-shirt the t-shirt is surrounded by let's say presents presents in the bottom left hand corner and items related to the niche in the bottom right more Christmas themes maybe we want I don't know wrapping paper in the bottom right insert items like string of lights accents Etc here insert lighting Style again let's just not add any lighting strings or anything like that let's just do a warm lighting style boom let's see what it comes up with look at these this is beautiful right there might be a little too much going on here with the presents but I love the overall theme you can just go ahead and remove some of this stuff from the background so it's not overwhelming but I even kind of like this this is a cool mockup again it's not it in the corner a nice clear spot for us to put our design we can easily remove this tag so it's not a problem on the mockup and add our cool design here and yeah this is amazing and like I said before you just go ahead and create your 15 mockups in here and then you're done you have your mockups you have your 15 first mockups to test in ads and you know maybe you'll find winner if not you just come back in here and make another 15 until you find a winner it's that easy this took no time at all I generated three different mockup styles in minutes right so spend 15 20 minutes in here making a couple mockups and then you have your mockups to test again this this is why I love Mystic so much because other AI design tools other AI image generators I think don't do as great of a job there's some issues with t-shirt folding and realism when it comes to the tea but I think Mystic absolutely nails this so you want to take action here right so number one use tools like Mystic pod and canva to create at least 15 mockups number two ensure each mockup is highly distinct right for the testing phase we want to use all different mockups so we can find out which mockup performs the best on Facebook and number three focus on quality over quantity to maximize testing success so when it comes to your mockups they have to be high quality right so it's important to have mockups that have high quality and they look amazing to test on Facebook I just want to quickly go into some students that had a lot of results with mockups they've made based on the ideas that we've given them and follow the tools that we're Ling out right now so Mario here is talking about from Z to 100 real quick 10K sales for July he talking about there's still a lot to learn obviously there's always a lot to learn for all of us but 10K in sales in one month is pretty cool so he talks more about the ad Styles he was using but most importantly I want to talk about the mockup he is using here and this is an exact example of a mockup we would create using Mystic right it's a white sandy color T-shirt with a dark background with some things that are related to the niche which is some plants that he's add it yeah perfect style mockup and he followed all of the advice that we gave him and he's doing 10K a month now which is amazing here's Bastion you know he did over 12 Grand in two weeks that's insane congrats to Bastion it's amazing and he just goes in here talking about hey I'm just following exactly the tools that are laid out in the group he literally says it at the bottom I did everything as being preached by Meg Heckman Chris Heckman and Justin fluger and got rewarded for doing that so what we're saying works so just follow it and look this is some of the lessons that he's learned create a NIC looking mockup and stay away from that boring white background just as I've talked about earlier create nice mockups it will work just use flatlay mockups again this is what we recommend you can use whatever you want but all of our successes come from flatlay mockups stay with t-shirts no other stuff besides that he's just selling T-shirts that's it he's not worried about selling any other products he could potentially sell on pod he's just selling T-shirts create at least seven new products per day no days off in the starting phase that's it every single day he shows up creates seven new designs puts it on his site and adds it to his catalog on Facebook does that consistently being consistent is helping him grow create the Justin event shopping campaign with one catalog ad and let it find winning products it's that simple just go into Facebook we're going to teach you how to do that but just following the steps from what Justin has laid out he build a campaign that's performing well and once you have a proven winner crank up that ad spend it's really that easy Facebook will tell you based on the row as what product is working and then once you find that it's a profitable row as you just increase the budget so where's he at now he 289 products and approximately 4 weeks in with the shop so he created 289 products before and then 7 products per day after he launched it so still my main focus is creating products like we always say products are King here you have to be constantly creating new designs and you know just as I mentioned before if you don't keep creating new designs your store is eventually going to bleed out and stop doing well so continually creating new designs is so imperative to success and he's just shouting out the community here specifically Chris and Meg for teaching him so much and helping him generate all this Revenue it's great here's another example of Travis in our community going through and he's asking for feedback on his mockups which is amazing this is exactly what we want we want to find out what other people think about our mockups in what better way than to ask people who are in our community that are doing the same exact thing they're testing mockups too so he just created a little poll showing different mockups he's made and people are talking about the mock-ups and what they think of the mockups themselves here's Andy him talking about hey here's a different alternative route that I've been testing maybe not a popular opinion here but I found that the typical mockup design strategy suggested in this community doesn't work for me that's completely okay as you're going on this journey you're going to find things that don't work for you you're going to disagree with things you're not going to find that everything that we tell you works and that's fine if you find something that's better and that works for you then we're happy that's exactly what we want we want you to be successful in any way that you find helps you become successful and he's talking about hey my t-shirt store does really well with just white backgrounds perfect that's what we want want if you find out that hey my t-shirt performs better with white backgrounds then do that not every store is a cookie cutter we don't want you to just follow exactly the way that we do things if you find something that does better for you then that's what we want again here's Frank saying hey mockups didn't really work for my store and I'm doing better with white background mockups he talks about hey here's my prompt to the Mystic PPT skip ahead number three to see what it says about performance on Google and Amazon why do so many large e-commerce t-shirts so it's not use a design mockup but instead just use a white background great question many large e-commerce t-shirt SES choose to use a simple white background rather than elaborate design mockups for several strategic reasons now it's a focus on the product it helps customers see the design color and texture clearly it's consistent across the site which we touch upon in our mockups as well we make sure that they're all the same so it's consistent and like I said as I was talking about continuity is very important when you're selling you're an online shop you want people to move along that buying Behavior very easy and efficiently without any deterrence to stop them from buying your products it allows products of different colors and styles to be display played consistently helping customers compare items without the influence of background elements better performance in online search and advertising faster page load screen times easier image optimization so there's a ton of different things that go into you know why someone might want to use white backgrounds and feel free testing that this is just what's worked for us between all the coaches you know we've scaled to over $50 million in sales using mockup backgrounds but you might find something different and that's completely okay too e e is is is he a I come that's for is n e is is e oh la is is e sh he e is is is is he e oh oh hi everybody and welcome to section 3.2 of the design phase where we are going to go through why we should be creating 100 plus designs and actually showing you how we create designs using different design tools so at stage three this is where we are doing everything design related from mockups to your first 100 designs this is the section where we are really digging deep getting creative that way we have the best chances when we are moving forward into that testing phase to hopefully find some winners right off the bat so your progress so far where should you be you should have already created at least 15 different branded mockups if you haven't done that yet pause here you're going to want to go back to the last section 3.1 you're going to want to watch that create at least 15 completely different mockups whether that's using Mystic pod or canva or any other tool we want to be starting there with creating our mockup so that we can do a mockup test very soon two you should have established a Shopify store with printify setup that way when we need to start taking orders and orders start flooding in we can handle that with seamless fulfillment it's already set up we don't even have to worry about it the back end's ready to go three you are ready to build your single product catalog of course we suggest selling T-shirts but again this is your business if you're selling mugs only selling mugs if you're selling candles only selling candles again just a single product Rome was not built o overnight Amazon was not Amazon Amazon started with just books before they literally turned into the company that sells I think everything by the end of this lesson you will have created your first 100 designs that we will then be able to test in a simple catalog ad and two you'll be equipped to identify key aspects to use in designing high quality designs that way everything that we are creating is hopefully going to be a potential best seller so why are designs so important we talked about this a little bit in design research designs are truly what makes our brand stand out from anybody else the designs that we are you know creating for our Niche you're not going to be able to find them on Etsy you won't find them on Amazon you're not going to find them at Target or Walmart these designs are unique oneof a kind that if people want to buy them they are buying them from our store your designs are truly what is standing out they are the product yes we are selling T-shirts but it is the design on the t-shirt that is making it stand out out that is making it different from everybody else we can have not great marketing and still sell really good designs those designs they will pretty much sells but if we have crappy designs that nobody wants to buy no amount of marketing no amount of creative is going to get somebody to actually buy that design so it's really important to focus on this section so that we are creating at least 100 super high quality designs because print on demand is truly a numbers game it is all about the amount of t-shirts that we are putting out there the amount of designs testing iterating that way we are finding best sellers and winners that we can just like keep pumping out and pushing out the door that is truly the game when it comes to print on demand best piece of advice that I could give you going into this section is take out your emotion let's talk Beethoven for a second when bethoven he went and he created over 700 different compositions 7 00 different pieces of music and his favorite composition was the Misa suis probably mispronounced that but that was his favorite now would you believe me if I said that was not what most people that's not what his audience liked so his favorite was not what the audience liked it's not what they fell in love with it's not what Beethoven became famous for it was his Symphony number five that actually made him famous that the audience loved that's what resonated with them and then he went with that he said oh that's what people like that's what you then he he took and he ran with we are going to be doing the same thing with designs so remember this Niche map you saw this before in one of the earlier sections when we were doing Niche research we broke it down into subtopics we had fall winter spring summer and then from there we came up with design ideas now this was helpful for design research but we can also use that when it comes to now designing if we get to a point where maybe we weren't feeling any of the inspiration pictures that we took from our inspiration folder we can refer back to this Niche map and pick out different things that then we can design for so let's go over the common design mistakes for you to avoid one would be over complicating designs less is absolutely more for the most part again look at your Niche look at what people in your Niche are buying and then design for them now if you're a street wear brand you're design are going to look very different from like your typical Etsy like designs like for a floral Niche or a seasonal Niche like a street wear thing for a seasonal brand just isn't going to work two you are ignoring the target audience again we're not thinking like Beethoven we're saying I like it so my customers will like it if you're thinking that way probably thinking wrong and that's what I did and that was one of the biggest mistakes that I made in my first ever print on demand store I was creating designs that I simply liked with no research SE no background and I thought other people would definitely like them that was not the case so don't be like me We want to listen to our customers we want to listen to what the niche is telling us we're using poor color choice we are not being smart about that we're putting black on black or we're doing white on white our design isn't popping out we want our design to stand out we want it to catch somebody's eye so make sure you're you know selecting the right color designs to put on the right color shirts if it doesn't look good simply take it off that variant you know I've had Des before where it may only look good on two of the colors and that's fine I only offer it on two of the colors because it doesn't make sense for me to offer it on the other ones and then have somebody receive it and say the design doesn't look good so use your best judgment if you're copying designs or you're lacking originality that can absolutely hurt your brand and not adhering to Legal boundaries so again taking the Adidas sign taking Mario anything like that that's clearly trademark and you absolutely could get in trouble for that so avoid it at all costs you don't need to do that our brand we don't ever do any of that and we're able to sell hundreds of thousands of t-shirts so it's definitely not needed in order to scale this business model now let's go through some tools for design creation just like the mockups we have canva we have Photoshop we have those DIY tools canva is my design tool of choice we also have designers which we talked about um they're they're the most expensive option but can be great if you're somebody who's really struggling with getting designs using both Ai and on your own when I was starting out I was doing kind of like a half and half split I was trying to make my own designs on canva if I couldn't make the design work I'd turn to designers so it's definitely a great tool to utilize if you need to now let's get into it I'm going to show you exactly the steps that I did to create a few designs not going to go through the entire thing if you want to watch the entire video where I go through over an hour and 45 minutes of me making designs you can watch that at the bottom of this module it's also going to be at the bottom of the checklist under stage three design under resources that's where you're going to be able to watch all of the videos going through the design phase for both mockups and Designs so the first thing that I always do is I go back to my inspiration folder remember when we were doing design research we were taking screenshots and finding designs that we could recreate designs that you know are best sellers that have a lot of good reviews or from really good high quality sellers we're going to go back to them and pull inspiration from that from there I'm going to log into canva we're going to click the T-shirt size you can either do the custom size or you can go to more and simply type in t-shirt at the top and it will pull up the just go ahead and type t-shirt at the top and that will pull up all the different aspects for you so they give you some tips if you're somebody who is new to this which is great you can do that if you want we're just going to hop right into it now canvas is really good they give you some templates now they're not always all able to be edited but most of them are so that can be a great starting place again they're not always based off of research but if you are looking for some new things to test or try out those are a great place to start canva also has text templates which I always love to use which I'm doing here so you need to chill and then just like with mockups a lot of the time when I am sitting down and I'm designing I'm just taking time and I'm playing around and determining like is the text big enough do I like the look of it are there elements to this that I would change you know sometimes I'm looking for a font for it feels like hours I mean it's not hours but typically like I mean I probably searched for a font for 10 minutes just to give the design like the right feel so absolutely take your time going through this try to have fun with it designing is one of my favorite things I love looking on canva and text putting different things into the text box trying to find just like the right image that I can put on a T-shirt and I just play around with it and I have I have fun so hopefully as you go through this and you start your design process you have fun as well I like that but again I like to keep things simple again this is not very you know I'm taking the idea of like you need to chill with the Snowman but not taking like the exact look of the design and I'm thinking with this I can have the snowman kind of like peering over the chill part and just kind of like incorporating my design into the text now that text was grouped together so you can separate that in order to then give it like the right look and if you're somebody who's new to designing at all playing around with canva especially like Photoshop as well it takes time to learn like all the different tools and everything that you're able to do with that programming so give yourself some time and some great to to learn it another one of the reasons that we say to make 100 designs it's not just because it gives us the best chance of finding like a bestseller right off the bat or finding designs that then we can iterate off of it's also because practice makes perfect I'm sure like you're hating that I'm I'm saying that but really like that's the truth the more that we're designing the better that we're going to become and you'll notice like your first 10 designs compare that to your last 10 designs you're going to go oh my gosh those I can't even believe I designed those first 10 like they look horrible compared to the ones that I do now and I look back at the designs that I made five years ago now and they look very different from the designs that I'm able to now create because I've been practicing with canva for five years which is pretty crazy but that first design looks good I I like the look of it we'll see how it it does in ads but we'll go back to the drawing board so something that I was thinking about was another kind of funny saying like you need to chill and then I was thinking oh a gingerbread would be really funny and then saying like oh snap and if it's like a gingerbread kind of like the uh Gingerbread Man from Shrek if you've ever seen seen that movie I just thought that would be really funny and again this is just what happens as I'm sitting down and I'm designing things are coming to mind you know I always have my inspiration folder there so if I do need to go back and tweak something or get a better idea um to help me start that flow then I'll absolutely do so but you'll notice like as you're designing be like oh my gosh like I think this could be really funny or have like a new kind of style that like you haven't seen on like Etsy or anything else so that's where this design kind of came from and again this one was really simple like it did not require like a ton of time or a ton of effort and not every design is going to take you like let's say 20 minutes some designs may take you five and then other more intricate designs could take a little bit longer but it's important that we keep moving forward and that we keep the ball rolling because again this process is going to take a long time period we're creating a 100 designs it's just going to take time but we also want to be moving quickly so that we can get to Market as soon as we possibly can and the more we're practicing the more we're designing then the better our designs are going to get over time so that one looks good I think that one's going to really pop out on a shirt I'll be excited to see how that how that does and adds then we go back to the inspiration folder because I'm not always just full of of great ideas so now we're looking for some cookies um that way we can do like let's get frosted based off of that sticker again it's just a lot of searching a lot of playing around finding finding the right cookie like the right Vibe again going back to my my text templates they're great I like the look of this one and then it's just kind of playing around getting rid of the extras tweaking it um changing up the sizes and then again like a lot of times the texts are grouped so you want to ungroup that that way you can reposition everything and get it in the right place the right size and then you can regroup it and then resize the entire image and that's one of those tricks that like you learn over time so there we go and then again yeah see that drag and then we'll group it and then I can move it around I can increase the size it's a really great tool and now I don't love blue so the pink would look good but remember we want it to pop off of all of our colors or as many of colors as we can so although I like the pink I'm probably not going to go with it but now it's just kind of finding the right cookie to go with our Vibe so I could change the cookies to Pink tweak stuff angle it have fun with it so I'm kind of imagining somebody who's like going to like a cookie exchange like they would maybe want to wear this shirt or if you have like a family tradition where you make cookies every year like this could be a shirt that could work for that so again I'll I'll play around with it and see if there if I'm like missing the right kind of graphic but overall it's just kind of searching and searching and playing around with I mean you could do the cookie cutter as well so then I'll make copies of the design and then just kind of tweak my visuals like sometimes I'll do that or I'll switch out the text but it's always fine to have like a few iterations cuz you can just test that out sometimes one look or one kind of vibe gets Traction in ads and people will purchase it and one just doesn't so it's fine to play around get creative with it but remember like we don't want when people come to our store that every single design like looks the same or like if every single design said let's get frosted that just would be boring I wouldn't want to buy multiple designs so keep that in mind as you're going through and creating designs again just kind of changing the font playing around with it now I'm by no means a graphic designer I'm sure there are graphic designers watching this and probably cringing at my design process this is just this is what works for me and you will find what works for you as well now this I would feel like is a very much like an Etsy type of text so that's kind of the style that I'm I'm going with for this design yeah so overall just playing around with the different typography and again I'll just switch switch out the creative that I'm using so like the design that I find over on the left hand side that way I can kind of test out and tweak and see what works like two very different Vibes but still like the same kind of slogan and I'll double check and just make sure I'm not missing out on the creative that I would rather have which honestly I'm not really seeing anything that I love that I would like switch out this one so as you can see with these I'm finding like designs that were clearly done by like the same like graphic designer or whoever like made these cookies because they have like a certain style to it so that's definitely something specifically with canvas see how that one it didn't have kind of that darker more detailed stuff like specifically on like the cookie so you want to make sure that your visuals match um the last thing that we want are like three kind of Misfit cookies that if somebody got it be like this doesn't make sense like these are three completely different styles and then something that I like to do is go back and then I'll make both like a dark design and a light design so no matter what color T-shirt I am selling my design will look good and it'll pop off on it and that way I'm able to offer my customers more colors rather than just having like one or two colors and then this one I'm just matching the color to that middle middle cookie so yeah now I have a dark design and a light design now if you want to continue watching the rest of this tutorial of me going step by step walking through every single design you can absolutely watch that at the end of this module as well as the mockup videos it's a great place where if you feel like you need some extra help and you just kind of want to follow step by step watch kind of how I go through canva so that you can replicate that and do it yourself for your own brand you can absolutely do so it's also linked Down Below in the checklist for the entire course if you go to stage three under design all the way under resources you will find all those videos linked so you can watch them there that way when you're going back and you're continuing your design process you need some inspiration you're kind of stuck on an area not sure what to do you can absolutely watch through those videos get some inspiration and keep your design process moving forward so what are my design recommendations the first would be to take your time the design process is a lengthy process and it makes sense we want to be you know putting up the best designs that we possibly can out to our customers we want quantity but we also want quality now this doesn't mean that we're sitting there and working and tweaking a design and trying to perfect it for hours as you can see like during that time I made what four or five designs in probably 20 some minutes roughly so you can keep moving forward but don't just get stuck and if you are getting stuck flag it bookmark it come back to it at a later time sometimes just taking a step away and just like taking a breath and giving your brain a second to just decompress from designing sometimes is really good and when you back you just like click and you're like okay that was the font that I was looking for the whole time like why was it just not appearing so absolutely take your time no one to take a break and when to just step away from it especially if you've been staring at your screen for hours my next recommendation is always refer back to research if you are stuck or if you're unsure which direction to go absolutely go back to your inspiration folder if you're not finding anything in your inspiration folder that is just speaking to you and that you want to move forward in your design process with then go back to Etsy go back to Google there is no shame in continuing to go back to research I still do that and it's been 5 years of this process before I sit down to do any designs for our current brand I am out there looking and seeing what are people buying what are they interested in three sometimes simple is better especially for t-shirts just like the bumper sticker test that we ran we're looking for people who are passionate about this Niche or tattoos look at the graphic t-shirts that people are wearing go to a mall go go to a park and just look around graphic t-shirts they're everywhere and you will notice there is a specific style and a lot of times they are super simple and sometimes we overthink it in our brain and we put so much detail into it because we feel like the design or the T-shirt needs it meanwhile the style of graphic t-shirts is very very simple so pull inspiration just from looking at t-shirts that are already out there and finally have fun remember this process the creative process is always fun at least to me it's it's one of my favorite Parts if you're somebody who's analytical your time is coming in the next section you will dive into the analytics but in the space that we're at right now try to have fun because this is the most important part of the entire process this is something that you're going to come back to time and time again and something that you're going to continue doing throughout your entire print on demand Journey so we need to find a way to make it fun to make it you know something worth our while that we want to keep coming back to we want to have creativity around designs are the thing that push us forward that continue to allow us to move forward so find a way to have fun with it now these are the different designs that I created through my entire process so I will share them with you here this again was all just DIY stuff done with canva if you want to watch the full tutorial again that link will be at the end of this module as well as the checklist so as you can see I did the less get frosted I had dark designs white designs we saw all of these then I did some ski designs um again black and white that way it looks good on all the t-shirts I'm dreaming of a white Christmas and I like specifically using typography where the negative space will come through so as you can see the gray inside of the white Christmas is coming through that t-shirt color will then come through the text as well which is always a great tool to use when when designing just utilizing that white space and then we have pow which is another like ski snowboard type of pun I'm difficult it's a double like the black diamond funny because it's they're black diamonds that are the most difficult to ski I'm dreaming of a white Christmas just in the white and then we have are my skis okay in two different text forms as well as like you can see the negative spaces coming through that typography I like skiing and maybe three people this is one of those Evergreen designs that like no matter what Niche you are selling in it does well sorry I can't got to ski by that's another good one that we can reiterate on sorry I can't too cold by you know we can just kind of tweak and iterate on that one time and time again AA ski again just more of like a simple Line Design they're very big on Etsy right now so that could do well in a on our Shopify store I like Christmas to maybe three people a ski again kind of taking that Etsy tweak and just trying different styles Have a Holly Jolly Christmas Merry and bright and again really nothing special about that it's very very simple but wholesome and then we have winter wonder land with a pretty watercolor I don't do winter very well pulling in some kind of winter christmy colors and then Have a Holly Jolly Christmas so overall I was able to create 22 different DIY designs and over my entire tutorial that was in an hour and a half so I was able to create almost a quarter of the designs that we needed to to launch in one and 1 half hours and now again this is not going to be what happens for everybody again I have been designing for The Last 5 Years I'm very good with canva if you're somebody who's creative and kind of visualize the way that you want a design to turn out then you absolutely can design pretty quickly but for most people I would say this is going to be the part of the business that you absolutely need to dive deep on spend a lot of time find the tool that's going to work best for you again for me it's canva I enjoy working with canva more than any other product for Chris he loves working with Mystic print on demand in ER he loves working with Mystic print on demand so it's just finding what works for you and what's going to work for your business so now I'm going to pass it off to coach Eric Eric is going to go through a whole tutorial on using Mystic print on demand and specifically like prompting and tips that you can use to best utilize those AI tools to help those that are going to use that to help bring their 100 plus signs to life I'm now going to send this over to Eric Eric's going to dive deep on AI designs all right since me has just talked about creating her own designs and canva I'm here to talk to you about some AI tools like Mystic pod to use to create your designs AI tools like Mystic combine the benefits of speed cost efficiency and quality these tools will help you quickly generate designs with professional quality and minimal effort exactly what we want but why Mystic Mystic is tailored for print on demand unlike all these other AI tools that are out there mid Journey Dolly they're just image generators right they are not specifically created for print on demand unlike Mystic which was exactly made for print on demand it is so good at making images that you can can put directly on t-shirts it's the One-Stop shop you know you're creating products for hats t-shirts mugs bags posters Mystic can do all this stuff and create design ideas to put on any of these products it has integrated features you know it creates easily generate beautiful products from simple prompts right it has Mystic prompt generator that helps you generate prompts if you don't add enough information to it uh it has the edit feature it lets you remove backgrounds vectorize and upscale your Arts all in one place right if you're using mid Journey or dolly or another image generator you're going to have to manipulate those products or those images and uh you know you're going to have to vectorize them you're going to have to remove the background you're going to have to go in and erase some of the background because it wasn't perfectly removed you're going to have to upscale the image all this stuff is right and Mystic it makes it super simple and easy to your new graphics that you've created and get them ready to put on products another feature it has is generate right so it'll write your product titles so you don't have to think of them it'll write your descriptions it will add your tags that you can put right onto your store so you don't have to go in and find any of those any of that stuff or write it on yourself or write it in chat GPT it's all right here for you and collections I I really like this feature easily save your favorite designs into collections so what that means is once you generate a design in Mystic you can add it to one of your collection and keep all of your designs organized so you don't have to be looking all over the place like in mid Journey you're scrolling all the way back up oh what designs that I make last week that I might like today it's all in one place so you can keep track of your products and keep track of your progress and see how many designs you made and what you like and what you don't like and how you can iterate on those all in one spot so how to get the most out of Mystic one familiarize yourself with Mystics tools and features just go in there and play around with the tools see what it can do see what each tool does and how it can make great designs for you number two explore its potential for creating diverse highquality designs so play around with your prompts see how intricate you can get in Mystic to create highquality designs for your store and number three leverage best practices for efficiency and success so take all the stuff that we're telling you all the stuff that we've gone through so far apply it in Mystic to create beautiful designs Mystic pod versus mid Journey Mystic AI advantages it's it's an AI learning language model built for multiple pod products mid journey is not built for that is an image generator first and then you have to manipulate it as closely as you possibly can to maybe create designs you can put on your te's versus Mystic is built exactly for designning designs that will go on your t-shirts Mystic also has magic prompt it fills in missing details for better results say you know you're not feeling too creative that day trust me that happens to me I'm I'm a numbers guy so that happens all the time I'm not the most creative um I rely on data heavily to make decisions for me magic promp helps me create designs that I would have never even thought of it will fill in the rest of the prompt and give it more detail to create beautiful designs Mystic also has built-in vectorization and background removal mid Journey doesn't have this if you generate a design on Mid Journey you're going to have to download it and then take it to some third party software to remove the background mess around with removing the background that might not be perfect you're going to have to erase things or add things back in versus Mystic it has it all in one place you can remove the background then vectorize it and then upscale it all in one spot to create beautiful designs for your te's again Mystic has off it offers winning templates there's literally templates inside Mystic that are proven to work they are proven design templates whether it's retro typography uh graphic design typography there's a ton of different templates in there that have worked for other people and you can use those too and make it fit right in with your Niche the interface is super friendly it's super easy to use again with magic prompt if you're not great at writing prompts yet it'll help you create prompts for you mid Journey you're you're on your own you got to create those prompts you got to learn how mid-journey Works itself and how to write effective prompts it generates more designs at once compared to Mid Journey you can create eight designs up at all at once in in Mystic versus mid journey is four right that's huge right you're getting eight designs compared to four it's 2x the amount I mean think about output here we're getting two 2x the amount for the same amount of work put in obviously it's a no-brainer it provides product titles tags descriptions all that stuff that you would need for marketing mid Journey doesn't have any of that stuff you're going to have to come up with your own product titles whether it's in chat GPT or some other GPT format it's not going to come up with your tags for you you're going to have to generate tags somewhere else and you're going to have to generate your own descriptions but when you make that design in Mystic it's all generated there right for you to copy and paste into your store and the thing that I love most about Mystic is that it's curtailed to creating t-shirt designs that will work on your store so Mystic is always releasing new models and working on lowering costs mid journe is the same you're paying the same amount all the time it may update but again it's not factored into creating amazing designs for t-shirts that's what mystic's for Mystic is for creating amazing designs for your brand that is a GameChanger for us because we want to create winning products that sell extremely well so here's some of the best practices for using Mystic be specific describe your designs as if you're explaining to a blind person provide enough detail for clarity without overwhelming so when I say a blind person I I you know I went through and showed you guys how to create mockups with that prompt I also went through when I was explaining how to find good products in everb how I was describing them to you right so if you were a blind person how I was describing that ghost T-shirt with the cats where it was the ghost holding the cat up or the ghost holding the cat like a baby or the ghost giving the cat a hug right so you have to be descriptive enough that Mystic understands what you're doing you have to be descriptive enough so Mystic understands what you're asking it to do but you don't want to provide too much detail where it's overwhelming right you don't want to have to if we're talking about that ghost t-shirt you don't want to say every single little detail that's going on with the ghost the ghost is smiling and it's standing to the left with its face looking upwards with the cat looking back down at it and the cat's smiling and the cat has six whiskers and the cat has one blue eye and one green eye that's just way too much detail and you don't need all that detail it'll generate a good image for you without all that detail just provide details so it can get a picture of what's going on like right like exactly like we explaining to a blind person they would get enough information and contextualize what you're talking about by just explaining hey the ghost is holding the cat up in the air the ghost is holding the cat like a baby the ghost is holding the cat hugging it right that is more than enough information for Mystic to understand what's going on use templates this is an incredible feature in Mystic and there's no other software that has anything like this you're streamlining your designs process with built-in templates that work how amazing amazing is that there's templates in there that people are using right now that are working for them and they're selling designs exactly like that all you have to do is input your Niche to that design and build a design right then and there that's that's amazing how how could you not love that experiment with magic prompts toggle it on and off and see what see what happens you might get better results for your Niche if you toggle it off or you might get better results if you toggle it on or you might get mixed results where sometimes it works better when you toggle it on or for other designs it works better when you toggle it off explore side you know there's a ton of different styles in Mystic there's handrawn Styles there's long line drawn Styles there's Kawai Styles a million different styles in Mystic for you to test uh it's all the proven design styles on the internet that are selling right now they're all available in Mystic for you to test and try learn from competitors what are your competitors selling uh what kind of design styles are they using is it handrawn Styles is it line drawn styles are they using typography only are they using design only go do your research look at what your competitors are selling and see what kind of styles resonate with your consumers again draw inspiration do not copy them you will get in trouble this will be said multiple times throughout the course do not copy designs you will get in trouble you will get sued it is not worth it be ethical again a perfect segue into ethical design practices no copying your steings do not copy or steal from people originality matters if someone's already selling it and they are established as the brand that is selling that product why do you think you're just going to be able to start selling it people are going to go over there and buy it because it's already established you're not going to do well just copying someone and then pasting it on your own designs and then when you go to run your ads like well it's working over there it's the same exact thing why is it not working for me well of course it's not working for you it's already working somewhere else that design is being used and someone is doing well with it so iterate from that design and make your own this is important because we want to practice good ethic we do not want to just be people stealing from other people how would you feel if someone reached into your pocket and stole from you you probably wouldn't like it so don't do it continuous improvements so the thing that I love most about Mystic is that it's ever evolving right the models are only getting better and better and it's it's cost efficient too the price of Mystic is constantly driving down and down to be more cost efficient for you to generate more designs that's that's the beauty of it I love it can make more designs for cheaper cost Count Me In keep an eye out for new features and improvements too I I mean like I said Mystic is constantly creating new things to become better and better here's some stuff that Mystic just recently released Mystic pod image generator creates your products enter a short description of the designs use the remix feature to edit or regenerate designs and save your favorite designs to your collection streamline the process makes it super simple I'm going to be talking about how to use chat GPT and Mystic to create beautiful designs for your pod store I love using this combined method I think it generates beautiful designs and I'm excited to to show you guys how I do it now just to note that you can use the free version of chat GPT as well and you will still get beautiful images but I will be using the paid version of chat GPT to build my own GPT and I'm going to show you guys how to do that but first if you just want to use the free version obviously you can just go to chat GPT and since we're working on seasonal collections here I'm just going to type in give me 10 ideas 10 ideas for winter themed graphic designs for my t-shirt brand and chat gbt will give you 10 ideas that you can use for your brand so yeah the information's populated and let's look at the first one snowy music notes a trail of music notes swirling in the wind with snowflakes incorporated into the design caption let it snow let it flow I think this is pretty cool so let's try it out so all we do is copy this head over to Mystic and plug it right into the top and we'll see what it generates I'm going to generate four different styles and see that this design is pretty cool you could definitely take this style and put it on a T-shirt and the great thing about Mystic too is that you can do everything you need to do to get this design ready to be printed on a t-shirt all inside Mystic so firstly you can remove the background so you can remove the background here so we can click that and the backgrounds removed right here and look it's perfect it got rid of all of that light blue background and it's pretty much ready to go on a t-shirt so you would just either vectorize it or upscale it or both depending on what you want to do and then you would take it right over to printify upload it and your t-shirts are ready to go but I wanted to talk more about how to use your own personal GPT to build your designs on your store so we go over to my GPT and then we're going to click create a GPT and then we're going to click configure and then you're going to add an image if you want to so you can easily find your GPT on your chat GPT account you're going to name it I'm going to name this seasonal collections description graphic designer for my t-shirt brand instructions what ises this GPT do how does it behave what should avoid doing so you're going to ahead and going to prompt what you want your GPT to do so for this instance we're a print on demand business looking for chat GPT to help create prompts for our brand so we're going to tell it exactly that you are Tas can't type today tased with creating graphic design prompts for my print on demand t-shirt company we are a seasonal t-shirt brand that sells t-shirts for winter fall spring and summer this part's important because chat GPT doesn't know that you want it written in prompt style so a prompt that you can easily just copy and paste sometimes it'll give you bullet points or other weird things that aren't set up exactly in a prompt so we need to tell it that hey we want every answer you give us to be written in prompt format so it's ready to just be copy and paste it right into Mystic you will write all of your answers in prompt format ready to be plugged right into an AI image generator and then I like to include this too each idea you generate should be unique and none of them should be the same it's that's for if you're creating a whole long list let's say you're creating a hundred different prompts sometimes chat gbt can create the same prompts but are slightly different this makes sure that doesn't happen and you have unique promps for every time you ask chat GPT to create some design ideas for you something else I like to add as well to chat GPT is that when it prompts it'll sometimes give backgrounds because it's just creating an image and I like to remind it that hey I want all of these prompts to have a white background so I can spend less time trying to figure out how I'm going to get get rid of that background and more time on the design designs themselves and then I'll write it's important to note that every design every image you generate should include a white background and then I like to just give it one example too you can give it as many examples as you want but make sure to tell it that this is an example so here is an example a 2d snowflake graphic design with a white background conversation starters that's not really important and this is the cool cool thing about creating your own GPT is the knowledge portion of it so it says if you upload files under knowledge conversations with your GPT may include file contents files can be downloaded when code interpreter is enabled what I like about this knowledge is that for my own GPT for my own store I like to upload designs that I really like here right so gbt will start to create designs in the similar sense and it will know my winners right so it won't be just digging through anything you can find online it'll know exactly what I like and it will tailor its responses to what I have uploaded and obviously the more knowledge that you give it the the better the designs it will make now like I said this isn't 100% necessary right you can get by by using the free chat GPT version I just showed you that above and I'm going to go back to that and show you more examples that you can complete in the free version of chaty BT but I think this is one of the best bangs for your buck that you can get because you are constantly updating your own GPT and you can constantly cycle through and create better designs that are already winning on your store so you just go here and upload the files that you like and that's pretty much it so you just go ahead and create and then you just click VI GPT now at the beginning obviously this is going to act like a normal free version of chat GPT because it doesn't really have any information besides besides the small tidbits that you gave it like you know you want designs with white backgrounds and a small example prompt that I created of a snowflake so it knows the style right if I was going through and really creating this I would probably want to add multiple examples for each season so it can get a general idea and feel of how I want those designs to be created so let's go ahead and start since it's winter time let's start with 20 winter design Styles create me 20 unique winter style graphic designs for my t-shirt store and boom it's just going to generate 20 awesome ideas for you to use and here we go it generate the results so look this is an awesome list let's just do the first one a 2d blue and white snowman with a striped scarf and a carrot nose surrounded by snowflakes on a white background so I'm literally just going to copy this directly from chat GPT and go over to Mystic and see what it generates and obviously I'm leaving Mystic prompt on right now because these aren't really fully flushed out instru instuctions to give to Mystic so it's going to help me out here and create a beautiful image by adding more in the Mystic prompt and we'll see what it generates and look at that it created a great snowman that you could put on a t-shirt that's amazing right like I can easily see someone like my mom wearing this she loves snowmen so this is a great design again you would literally just remove the background vectorize it upscale it and then upload it to your store now the cool thing is too like I said before if you really like this design this is something that you would download onto your computer and then you would upload it back in chat PT and now it has another piece of information that it can use to generate better designs that are more aligned to what you're looking for for your own store so let's go back here and see what else it made he let's look at this one a Windle design of a sleigh pulled by a reindeer flying over a crescent moon with snowflakes sprinkled in the air on a white background this seems like a really cool idea so let's pop it into Mystic and see what it generates wow wow this is a really cool design this is an amazing design look there's a reindeer there's a reindeer basically dressed up as Santa Claus with two reindeers you know we could go back and refine this a little bit if we wanted to I think this is a pretty cool design along with this design as well right so obviously we didn't give Mystic enough information you know maybe we go back and tell Mystic hey we want Santa Claus in the sleigh and he's flying across the moon with two reindeers so we can easily do that right we would just go back and take this prompt the original prompt copy it again post it pack into Mystic and we would add add in Santa Claus so right here a sleigh with Santa Claus in it pulled by reindeer flying over a crescent moon with snowflakes sprinkle in the air on a white background so we'll click generate this design is really cool too look at that look at that these are great designs these are awesome this is an awesome design it's like a smokey crescent moon with Santa with the reindeers flying across it that's awesome this one too this is great little chubby Santa Claus with his reindeer and nice moon in the background but let's say if we really liked this style right we were like hey I really like the style but you know I don't know what this guy is here I want to update this design while keeping the same style and how we would do that is we would come over here and we would click remix and we would tell it exactly what we want to do change the person in the sleigh to Santa Claus keep everything else the same do a couple versions of this see what it creates and there we have it this is a pretty cool design right so I would just remove this this little Snow Hill here get rid of that from the image and then you'd have this nice image you could put on a t-shirt right you would just remove the background it's super simple you have the two Reindeer and Santa Claus here and it's a super simple Min minimalistic design and this would look great on t-shirt so let's go back and try another example let's see what else we have here so I like this one a lot a silhouette of a deer grazing and snowy Meadow with soft pastel colored northern lights in the sky above on a white background so I'm just going to copy this take it over to Mystic and see what it generates for us this is a pretty cool design right I mean it's super simple and basic but it has this mountainous feature in the background with a nice silhouette of a deer so if I really like this design I would save this remove the background and then I would add it back into my GPT and every time you iterate and add more designs that you like onto the GPT it's going to give you a better output right it knows exactly what you're looking for based on all the data that you're giving it and it will just generate better and better ideas so let's say it's 3 months from now and Spring's right around the corner let's have it generate some spring ideas so we're going to go back into chat gbt and say Hey I want you to make me 25 Spring ideas for my t-shirt store and boom it is generating the design so we'll wait for it to finish so it's finished and it generated its 25 ideas and again I like this first one a 2d graphic of a vibrant butterfly with colorful wings and floral patterns flying against a white background so we would just copy that paste it in here generate and see what it creates and this is pretty cool right I mean for someone that really likes butterflies and I've seen a ton of butterfly shirts sell online this is a cool butterfly design you know maybe you take this design and add some text to it so we can go back to chat GPT and ask for some typography that would go along with this butterfly so we can go back in here and say I have created a butterfly design I really like I want you to come up with a slogan or quote to include with it it is a spring themed t-shirt give me 10 ideas yeah these are awesome flutter into spring this is great you know you're getting ready for spring maybe it's your spring cleaning shirt it's a nice way to go from Winter into spring embrace the change that's cool butterflies are known forever changing through metamorphosis so this would be pretty cool embrace the change you could have that kind of overarching on the butterfly or underneath of it so those are two ideas right there that you can add right to that graphic so let's go back and make one more design and see what it generates also you don't have to copy everything it gives you right you can just take bits and pieces of these and make it your own for example number 14 here a mason jar filled with a bouquet of wild flowers tied with a ribbon and placed on a wooden table well a table's not going to look good in this image right so maybe we just do a mason jar filled with a bouquet of wild flowers tied with a ribbon right we copy this and then you know we want to make sure that it's also a white background on a white background so we would just copy this and paste it and we'll see what it makes and again I've seen designs like this sell before obviously because I've studied a lot of t-shirt designs so make sure when you're doing your research you see designs that resonate with your Niche right so I know that tons of people sell mason jars on t-shirts and I know a wooden table wouldn't really look that great so you know we would just want to do the Mason jar alone and look this is cool this is a cool design right it's very simplistic mason jar with that ribbon on it and the flowers and again maybe we add some typography to this or we just keep it the same and as always if we like the design we would go back in a chat GPT we'd go back to our seasonal collections GPT and we click edit and we would upload those files right here and that's just going to make your GPT better also I want to go in more of the different features that Mystic has I think Mystic is an unbelievable software and it is built amazingly for pod sellers like me and you so first I just wanted to go here to the Mystic prompt the Mystic prompt again helps you generate designs but if you want just a prompt that you create it yourself with no additional help for Mystic you can turn this off and we'll see what it creates I'll do the same exact thing with the Mason jar and we'll see what it creates you know as we're waiting this is a really cool design too it's super minimalistic maybe this is something you try again maybe it's something you don't use on your T-shirt but you add it to your chat BT and it will help create designs more like that in the future that might be different so yeah we turn it off and what it does is now it's just prompting normally just like it would in any other image generator and it still creates beautiful images right these are awesome right but you know this one looks a little too realistic so maybe that's not something we put on a t-shirt but you know you can still use Mystic besides just prompting for images that would go on T-shirts if you need other images like we've done mock-ups here you know maybe this is something you use there as well so that's awesome that this is included and I just wanted to talk touch upon some of the other features in Mystic so create which is very cool that's what we've been doing so far and then there is guide it so you just answer a couple simple questions on what you want to design and this is super nice because if you're stuck with ideas this is going to help you come up with ideas itself right it's very similar to chat gbt and as in you will input some information and it'll spit out a bunch of ideas but again chat gbt might not give you every single idea so this is just another tool to give you insanely more ideas for you to test and iterate and come up with per designs for your store so let's hop right into it so we'll click t-shirt and we'll choose our Niche let's say winter since it's winter and cold outside right now and then we'll pick a design style so Mystic comes with so many different styles for you to test I'm just going to run through and click but they have everything in here Double Exposure line art retro 3D typography grunge minimalist so let's just click a couple and see what happens we do do black and white that's pretty popular we'll do retro Sunset because why not line art and you know we'll do a fun one let's do mermaid course see if it comes up with something cool so it generates ideas for you right retro snow cap mountains 70s Vibe Peaks this is awesome classic snowflake pattern 80s geometric tiles this is cool snowy owl icon vintage H cocoa stylized sled illustration Aurora Borealis cross skis emblems let's click that one cool chilly night campsite resting bear Motif I don't even know what some of these are going to create I'm excited to see what's going to happen here winterscape Sunset yeah I mean let's just click some let's see what happens and these are great designs these these are awesome especially these two these are super simple could slap right on your tea it fits amazing with our Niche the winter style themes a nice retro Mountain you know logo style that you could put right on a T-shirt and this one's cool right you know with the skis you could probably add some typography to this maybe above or maybe next to these are great designs that we can immediately use right on our t-shirt and maybe this one too right like some kind of funny play on hibernation like just woke up from a long nap or you go back to chat GPT and ask for for a joke on hibernation that you could include in this image right so there's so many ideas that you can do with this right and I just also want to touch upon spark too which spark ideas by uploading or image or short descriptions so you can either upload an image here of something that you like and you want Mystic to create something similar or you can do pretty much the same thing you would do in Chachi BT but right here in Mystic so what product you want to create so I'm just going to type in the word Snowman and see what happens and this is awesome snowman with twinkling stars and a frosty smile cool cute snowman wearing bright color beanie let's try it this could be cool for the summer snowman wearing sunglasses chill under the Palm chilling under the palm tree adorable watercolor snowman with rosy cheeks yeah cartoon snowman wearing knitted scarf and mittens Jazz styled snowman yeah let's see what happens let's see what it makes yeah these are cool designs right this is a cute little happy snowman you know maybe this is something you put on your shirt with a typography above it some kind of quote you know someone that loves the winter again maybe this is a summer style one you know for people they're uh snowbirds maybe that'd be pretty funny too um you know maybe we change this from a snowman to a bird because we have the palm tree or make it a snow man bird or something like that for the snowbirds for the people that go from the north to you know the South whether it's Florida Arizona Texas for the winter uh it could be a cool idea but yeah so you would take all these ideas the ones that you like you would select them and then you would just bulk action download them right H or you can create them to a collection too right so this is pretty cool so let's say we want to create a collection we want to call it seasonal and we would click create and then we would go to our collections so yeah so we created our collection what's cool is is that you can keep all the designs that you love right here in this folder you can create multiple folders let's say you want a folder of just snowman you could have that or you want a folder of just Mountain Styles you can have that a folder of just skis you can have that too so it's a really easy way to manage all of your design files all in one spot and this is something that I haven't even touched upon yet this is also an amazing feature in Mystic so you just go up here and click on templates and it gives all these winning skeletons of designs that do extremely well as you can see there's tons and tons that we even have social proof behind it of people saying hey I really like this design style I used it for my own and it's great so yeah maybe we do this one and we say instead of I like my dog we change it to let's change it to I like my snowman or yeah let's do that instead of saying mine maybe we just say it's get rid of my dog and change it to Snowman and change the heart to a snowlake or maybe it's a snowman then we'll just remix it and see what it creates but do you guys see how quickly we are generating designs like if you working with a graphic designer creating One Design can take days with a graphic designer I just did this recently with my store I was working with a graphic designer and it took 3 days to make one design with the iterations all also the time differences we lived in different time zones so he worked at night I worked during the day and it just took forever to make the design and the design didn't even do that well anyway so I spent like $150 on one single design and it didn't work when you can generate hundreds thousands of designs in seconds on Mystic it's so fast for you to iterate and test designs on Mystic it's it's it's hard to beat right and it's made for pod so it knows exactly how it should be making designs that you can put directly on a T-shirt and look this is an awesome t-shirt style this is this is sick right you know maybe we go back and just edit out these extra arms for the Snowman that's super easy to do in Cana you know I wouldn't just not use this design because of those extra arms you could easily get rid of those with just any erase feature this is a really cool design I think it would do extremely well on a shirt cuz I know people love snowman you know maybe we change it from snowman to snowmen so we just go back up here we would take the Mystic prompt copy it paste it and change this from snowman to snowmen and we'll just see what it generates like we've said before AI is not perfect so you know sometimes there is mistakes right like the Snowman having four arms instead of two but that's something that you could easily buff out that's that's a super simple fix you would just go through and quickly erase all those it would probably take you less than a minute to erase those extra arms on that design especially if you really like that design that's something you would obviously do and you know if you think it's going to sell well then that's something you would do as two so yeah this is something that's Genera and this is cool I like my snowman and maybe three people and there's a couple snowmen on here super cute design I can see it doing well but yeah there's so many different different templates in here I love this part of Mystic this feature is amazing and you just go through and look at all these different templates that they have and this is pretty funny this would fit right in our Niche and yeah it just has so many different templates that you can play around with of all winning styles that you can add to your own store right these all these designs are proven to work and all you have to do is just manipulate the design style to make it fit your Niche yeah and one last feature I wanted to me mention On Mystic as well is not only does it do t-shirts it does all these different products as well right it does t-shirts stickers hats mugs posters canvases tapestries bags all different things you can print on your print on demand store all different design Styles you can put on your products in your print on demand store so you can easily expand your catalog if you're tired of selling just te's you can add stickers you can add hats you can add mugs all these different styles you can add onto your store of different products and expand your product catalog so yeah like I said I think Mystic is an amazing tool highly recommend Mystic you can find the link to Mystic below and yeah so you want to take action right let's let's get to work here number one create at least a 100 designs based on high quality research do your research do not skimp out on the research find as much as you possibly can about your Niche and what works in the niche number two upload designs in printify and Shopify store so once you you've created your designs let's get uploading let's start making that store let's start building it out let's get closer to launching your store number three prepare for the next steps launching with confidence be confident be ready to go when you're going to launch feel like you're proud of the work that you've put in you've spent a lot of time doing it so be confident that it's going to work and here's some some reviews here's Danny hey guys I hope everyone's doing well and getting ready to build great Brands I'm currently in the process of making my first 100 designs I'm excited how things are going I got a solid 40 and try for at least 5 to 10 a day that's perfect right this is a long process so take your time 5 to 10 today a day is a good start I'm eager to start but I also realized I want to build a solid assortment of different graphic looks while still staying relevant to my audience perfect exactly what we want we want 100 Unique Designs that we can use to test on our store and here's Herman talking about it's done 100 designs a small win but I finally reached 100 design Mark God what a horrible Journey hey it's tough right we're not saying it's easy you know if it was easy everyone would be doing it it takes some time but it's worth it in the end you're creating 100 Unique Designs that people are going to love and want to buy from you here's Nick a few small wins but finally hit the 100 designs again he's just talking about the design Journey how he created his mockups and then eventually went out to make his designs it took some time he said I've been working at this since June made a few mistakes and had to restart a few things but the main thing is that I've been holding me back as finances which might be an issue for you who knows well two weeks ago I got an early rais and it was pretty decent rais in my day job then this week I got a freelance design job starting at 12200 I've not been promoting my freelance because my focus has been my day job in this well my plan was to start my ads with around 1,200 for ads and it kind of came out of nowhere and tonight I just uploaded my 100th design I also might have another decent size freelancing job coming that would definitely help me with my ad spend so basically now I just wait for some money to hit my bank account and I'm ready to start rolling Perfect Design phase how long to 100 going through the 21 hour course right now and I'm going to create the 100 designs and upload pry stage I'm getting in a decent steady Groove now turning out designs I like and I know Chris has mentioned before to start once you hit 100 designs so I'm trying to shoot for that as my short-term goal before proceeding to the next steps just curious how many of you did all this and how long did it take you to get 100 designs uh this is a good question from Joe right um it's different for everyone it depends on how much time you have to make designs uh you know maybe you have an entire weekend and you bang out 100 designs or maybe it takes you three months to make 100 designs I don't know your schedule you're going to have to come up with and sit down and write out your schedule and figure out how long it's going to take you some students do it in a week other students do it in 3 months it's really up to you so like I said there's no rush here figure out your schedule but most importantly make high quality designs that resonate with your customers hey everyone Eric Corey here back with another lesson today's lesson I'm going to talk about the power of AI The Prompt generation process how we have constructed the perfect prompt to use to create amazing images to put on your t-shirts but I'm going to start from the very Basics here and then we'll work our way into that right so I just want to use this t-shirt here from seasonal collections as an example and it's the cactus Sunset t-shirt right so you look at this t-shirt and you're probably just thinking okay it's just some cactuses and a Sunset and that is pretty much it right so if I was typing this into chat GPT to help me come up with a prompt for something similar for a t-shirt style like this I would probably just put cactuses with retro sunset in the background right well that is kind of the right idea but there is way more pieces that go into a T-shirt and to generate a really good image for your t-shirt we have to understand how we get there right so the first thing is is understanding a prompt and what is a prompt so if we just went into chat GPT and we said what is a prompt it'll tell us what a prompt is right so prompt is an instruction question or set of information designed to elicit a response in the context of creative or technical applications a prompt guides a person system or tool to generate a desire outcome or solution and we don't really care about any of this stuff except for in Ai and technology for AI tools like me that's funny a prompt is the input of or request that tells the AI what response is needed so that's great so we understand what a prompt is it's the tools and the ideas that we're giving to the AI so it has a better understanding of what it is actually trying to make or write out for us right so that's great in the sense of t-shirts what makes a good graphic design for a t-shirt right so you're thinking probably right now graphics and maybe some text but there is some other things that go into this to really give us an amazing prompt that we can use over and over again to generate thousands and thousands of graphic designs for a T-shirt and I'm talking good graphic designs not any graphic design like really really good graphic designs that will sell on t-shirts and that leads us into this mirror board I'm about to show you but before I show you I just want to say you know thank you to Chris and Stephen for helping me create this more mirror board and visualizing and conceptualizing this concept and bringing it to life this is an extremely powerful tool and I'm so excited to share it with you and I'm really proud of the work that we've done here as well it is fantastic I use it for my own t-shirts it is absolute gold here so here is let's hop right into it it is this jumbled mess right here but I'm going to break this down for you guys so everyone understands what's happening here and gets the total picture and can use this to generate thousands of graphic designs using AI but first I want to talk about the attributes of a t-shirt right so that's this right here there's four or five depending on how you look at it but I'll start from the top so it's the Press which is the actual physical attribute of pressing the style onto the T-shirt and there's tons of different press Styles but off the top of my head there's Lino cut and block pressing which are pretty similar but different and there's other styles to to press on the design and that gives us the physical attribute of the design that's going on the t-shirt and when I go through this next part of the mirror board all this will make more sense but this is just the overall arching theme of attributes of a T-shirt and then you go into the mood so how does a t-shirt make you feel does it make you feel happy does it make you feel sad is it sarcastic is it funny any of these types of feelings that it makes us feel when we look at that t-shirt that's the overall mood and then you have the niche of the T-shirt right so what is your Niche you just plug that in and for us it's seasonal collection so it's fall winter spring or summer and then part four and five over to the right here is the typography and the graphic so sometimes it's four sometimes it's five parts to a t-shirt can be either just the graphic or the typography or it can be both on a t-shirt so now that we have the attributes of a t-shirt this leads us into this next mirror board which is really an amazing tool that we are extremely happy to be showing you guys and it is just so amazing so I'm going to hop right into it here so this is the prompt design process for sequence for chat GPT and AI image generation and before I get started every step that I show you here it doesn't matter how it's curated into a prompt it's just important that it has all these steps so when I get down to the example you're going to see maybe some of the these are out of order and not in the exact order that I showed it here but it doesn't matter what order order it is it just matters that all these are included in the prompt so Step Zero here I have is mood and like I said before that's how a graphic design on a t-shir t-shirt or the typography makes you feel so is it sarcastic is it humorous is it neutral is it inspiring witty warm happy nostalgic any of these things that elct a mood from you right or a feeling and then we move in into step one which is what type of press is it and this is the physical process of actually you know if we were to step out of the world of AI and we're really making a t-shirt this is the physical attributes that come along with pressing a t-shirt so there's wood cut there's Lino cut there's screen printing there's etching there's block printing which is kind of similar to Lino cut but they have their differences there's letter press monoprint Dry Point engraving and lithograph and these are not all the Press styles right these are just some examples you know if you wanted to add every single press style onto this mirror board you could go and do that and it'll give you more variations for designs that you can make right so these are the different physical processes that we've added here and then there's step two is what type of style is it and this is the visual aesthetic right so I've added 20 here this is definitely not all of them but this just gives you a good idea of how many different variations we can get when we go back to the top and I show you the process in full but there's retro monochromatic itic Y2K logo nature spiritual SL esoteric Double Exposure hand sketch Kawai and you get the point right there's a ton of different styles here for us to choose from when we're creating our graphic designs for our t-shirts and then we come down to step three which is the easiest part and you've already selected this which is what Niche or sub Niche so if it's you know we're talking about Seasons but maybe we're talking about snowman for the subn right and then after we've picked that we go down to step four which is will it include typography and just a point to note here is you should use a separate GPT or find your own words to include and not rely on this GPT to create text for your graphics you know and the point here is we are training this GPT to make really good graphics right we don't care if it's good at generating slogans or quotes because that is not the functionality of this GPT we can just use a separate GPT to help us come up with slogans or quotes or do some research ourselves to find the SL and quotes that would fit really well on our t-shirts so don't rely on this GPT to come up with really catchy phrases or anything like that for your t-shirts because that is not the point of this right the point of this GPT is to make amazing designs and help create prompts that create amazing designs so as we move down here step five is how many how many do we want how many iterations of this design do we want do we want one iteration do we want five do we want 10 so we can test all these simple but slightly different prompts at AI creates for us in our image generators and I like doing this I like to keep it in the 3 to five potentially 10 but normally I just say give me five more and this is so that the chat gbt understands and still follows all the directions we gave it prior to the prompting when you ask for like a 100 or 200 designs it kind of just starts spitting out ideas and doesn't follow the directions as closely because there's just so much information going into those 200 designs that we'd rather keep it small and stay in the 5 to 10 range so it follows all the directions that we give it here for prompting and after you do all this we are left with the result prompt which is the bread and butter of AI image generation this prompt creates amazing images and I am not being over the top about it like the images that come for this are incredible like it is absolutely insane like I said we've spent thousands of combined hours creating this perfect prompt that you can plug in for pretty much any Niche and create amazing images that sell on t-shirts right so I'm going to run through it with you and break it down so like I said before remember that some of this stuff could be out of order than the way that I just went through but it the more important thing is that it is all included in the prompt so here it is a main design style example vintage Lino cut minimalistic line art illustrationdesign optimized for a t-shirt right so that's the design style the press style as well so it's vintage and Lino cut the design features a central theme slob so something from our Niche right so this in this example we include a mountain range with a trail or a cat lounging on a crescent moon and includes supporting elements you know it might be a retro rainbow striped Sky it could be flowers it could be Vines framing to the object and yeah so this is to enhance the overall composition of the design the phrase insert text or slogan right this is optional we said that you don't have to include this for every graphic design but you can include it for some if you'd like for testing purposes it includes the font style so it could be bold retro typography handdrawn script distress s font if you're struggling to come up with ideas that kind of match that graphic you could also include that in a separate GPT to hey give me some graphic or some typography styles that would fit with this kind of image that I'm trying to make here right and it'll come up with ideas to help you with that and then we go into the the placement so do we want that text to be above below or integrated into the design and then the layout is what kind of style do we want it centered and framed in a border do we want it asymmetrical and also like the specific color palette we want with the design you know is it going to be muted earthy tones is it going to be monochrome is it going to be bright neon and something important here too is after testing this prompt over and over again we noticed that you shouldn't use gradients when it comes to the colors of your graphic designs because it just doesn't print nice we we've gone through and created graphics with gradients and then printed them on t-shirts and looked at them versus bold coloring used in the graphic designs and the gradients just don't look that great So to avoid the headache with your customers being like hey this Design Coloring looks weird I want my money back it's better to just use bold colors and uh it just proves a better result on the T-shirt so to keep moving on here the design must be created with bold high contrast elements to ensure visibility on a t-shirt kind of what I just talked about along with the coloring make sure that the design is easy to see and understand and it doesn't blend in anywhere with a t-shirt to make it look weird and then another important part here use a clean white background this makes taking the design after it's created it makes it really easy to manipulate the design after you've generated you know if you have some kind of background coloring on the design it's kind of like a pain in the butt to take that design and then remove the background and then kind of go in canva or photoshop and edit the design the background coloring all messed up so this just makes a little bit easier uh you know we're not saying that every design you make from AI is going to be immediately ready to put on a t-shirt but this probably can take up you know 95 to 98% of all the graphic designing you need to do just with the hint of little maybe color changes or or things like that to get the perfect design for you but this takes out a majority of the leg work that you'd have to do we keep moving on here and we delivered in a vector format this lets you play around with the graphic to ensure you know it fits nicely in printify when you're uploading it and you don't have any resolution issues and then finally the overall mood which is what I said was Step Zero but like I said doesn't matter as long as all this is included in the prompt and the overall mood is a Vibe example nostalgic playful elegant adventurous designed specifically for t-shirt printing right so this is a behemoth of a prompt and it looks like this because we have examples and stuff but when you really get down to it and play around with the prompt it looks more something like this right so here's an example prompt we'll run through it a vintage Lino cut style illustration optimized for a t-shirt the design features a classic snowman with a top hat scarf and stick arms surrounded by falling snowflakes and a pine trees in the background the layout is centered with a muted earthy color palette of Deep Blue off-white charcoal gray using only solid colors with no gradients again important no gradients it's bad it makes your design not look great on t-shirts just try to avoid it the design must be created with bold high contrast elements to ensure visibility on a t-shirt use a clean white background and be be delivered in vector format their overall mood is nostalgic and cozy and with that this is just one of the examples that generated from Mystic this is a great image uh you know you could add text or typography if you wanted to this but I really like the the standal Lo image that was created here and then after I got the image I just remove the background um cuz it wasn't perfectly white here as you can see I just took it into canva and then clicked the remove background button and then slapped it on one of our mockups and this is the result I mean you can just look at this yourself this is an excellent mockup with a really nice graphic design on it and this whole process was done in like less than 2 minutes uh and that's the craziest thing right like we are creating high quality designs in a very short amount of time it doesn't take hours and hours to make really good designs anymore more it takes a couple of minutes and it might take you a little bit longer when you first get started because you're just starting out right so once you get some time and some practice under your belt you're going to be generating really good graphics with this prompt pretty much immediately like it's going to be really fast for you to generate a ton of really good designs and when I say a ton like let's just go back to this this giant board here that I'm talking about like look at all the permutations you can create with just the setup I included right there is way more moods than this than the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 there's way more than eight moods so if you took that and you started up here and you dropped a marble down this and I'm I actually did this over here to show a better example of just if we did a w off if we took a marble and dropped it here into SE zero mood and it just followed along this path of sarcastic and then it went to Step One what type of press is it and then we picked Lino cut from all those different press styles that marble still falling along here to step two which is what what type of style is it and then we picked retro for example and then we moved down to step three what Niche or sub Niche is it and you know we just picked seasonal because that's what we're working with here and then step four will include typography and we didn't include it in that image we created you know if you did include typography remember if you're looking for different slogan ideas to not rely on that same GPT use a separate GPT or do your own research to find slogans that work for your Niche and then step five here which is how many you know how many iterations do we want of this to test in our image generators and you know it's broken down it looks real easy here um but going back to that other board right we go over here like look at all the different permutations of designs you could have if you followed each one for just one sub niche in your giant Niche what are the numbers there right so we have eight here and then we have what 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 here so that's 72 and then we have 20 so 20 * 72 and then you pick your sub Niche and step four will include typography so that text we include it and how many iterations of that so 72 * 20 is 1,440 designs just from one single idea one and this is just a limited number of moods I didn't include every single mood that a human can feel right I didn't include every single press style that's available worldwide I didn't include every visual aesthetic like this is just the ones I've include it and you get 1,440 designs so this completely eliminates the idea of like I have no idea where to take my design process from here once you create those 100 designs and you start figuring out what designs are resonating with your audiences and are getting purchased you you just visit this board and you can create more of those designs that are working or if none of your 100 designs are working you come back to this board and helps you generate 100 more and this board is so powerful because not only does it give you the process of how to make these designs but also it gives you the prompt that makes really good designs like really good designs not just any graphic designs but really good ones that sell on t-shirts and lastly what I wanted to include here is just some different design setups maybe something else you can include in your prompt but it's not necessary it's just some extra information you could give it and what this means here is these black boxes are text see if I can zoom in a little bit more these black boxes are text and these are just obviously images it's just following some popular graphic design Styles so we have this one the rod Father which is just a man fishing and then you know we have an image here with some text in the background and text below Size Matters and then some text above and an image so these are just some different styles you can follow that are popular now again would recommend you to do research in your Niche to see what kind of design styles are popular for the t-shirts that are sold in your Niche so you know maybe it's this one this curved text with an image with text underneath or this kind of less curved image with a smaller text underneath or image image image with some text and then some other styles here so I would go and see do some research see what's popular in your Niche for design Styles and then or you can apply those to your graphic designs that you make too so yeah all this stuff will be available for you to use and to look at um but like I said this process here is incredible when it comes to making graphic designs you're just going to have to test it yourself with your Niche and see what it produces lastly I can just show you some of the other examples of the snowman it made but this is kind of funny I was testing and messing around with a different typography and you know it says I'm freezing my Jingle Bells off which is funny but again like it created really good images that you know you could put directly on a t-shirt right like these are all good designs to put on a T-shirt and then for this one I left the typography out and again these these are all really really good designs to put on a t-shirt so I implore you to use that prompt we have created you just copy and paste it and you start filling in your information and you're going to get really really good designs thank you so much and we'll see you in the next lesson k you my a feel k is you to your he what way why why why why why feel k k k k k he your he t he C what why why why what why for e e take a I'm feel kiss feel take a feel you toight feel kiss feel St your he friend I so now for the fun part we're going to create some designs for your print on demand business once you get into design your number one priority is to create 100 designs as quickly as possible so essentially you're building out your product catalog to 100 plus t-shirt designs and the reason why that's important is because when you launch your catalog in your ads it may not be immediately clear which of those designs is going to do well and some of them may not do well and so you need to have a you know around about 100 designs so that you can test and and then you know within those 100 designs if you're lucky you'll have have maybe 20 that will sell and within that 20 you may have one or two that will probably sell the most and when you're building at this 100 designs for the first time try and focus on creating a variety of different styles for testing purposes this is something that I spent a lot of time working on and when I started my print on demand Journey watching Chris's videos I realize that thousands and thousands of people could be watching this video and thousands and thousands of people could be doing the same research and thousands and thousands of people could be finding the same sort of bestseller designs and all those people would be creating versions of them and so I spent quite a lot of time um researching different design Styles um different artist Styles different color styles and when I was generating my AI prompts um I just added in some little extra steps around the Styles just to try and make sure they are as unique to my brand as possible and that works really well for me and so when you create your designs there's a number of different ways you can do that you can use AI or you can create them yourself in Photoshop or you can employ someone to do them for you if you're doing them yourself then it's really important that you create your designs and get them ready for uploading to whatever your print on demand partn is going to be I use printall and so before I upload my design files to print for there's some things that I like to make sure that are in place place to make sure that those designs are suitable for printing and one of those things is making sure that I don't have any semi-transparent parts to my designs but also that the background is transparent so you're going to need a background removal tool or when you set the files up in Photoshop just make sure that you have transparent background switched on and you should be good there's another thing you need to be aware of when you're preparing your design files for uploading and that's is fringing around the edges of your design and this is quite common if you're using a background removal tool and it may require you to utilize Photoshop to get rid of those white or black fringes so if you do choose to use AI for your art generation that's totally fine a lot of people do that um and you can actually get some really good designs from using AI one thing that I would like to to showare when you're developing your designs you might want to spend some time on the prompts that you're going to use and test those out and try and get you know a design going that's unique and fits within your brand when you create your designs if you're using mid Journey then you can use a seed number to make designs that all look unique so you've got some designs and now you're about to launch them on your website and so you need to think about how you're going to present those and this is where the mockup comes in so awesome you have 100 designs and you're now looking to upload them onto your website so that people can look at them and so you need to give some consideration to mockups and think of the mockup of your design and just for definition purposes the mockup is the T-shirt the background that sits behind the t-shirt and any objects that you include around the edges of the T-shirt um Define what a mockup is and so consider it the retail packaging of your products if you consider how much effort retail display designers go into displaying the retail windows that you walk past every day on on your way to work if you live in the city there's a lot of effort that goes into that so it's really worth thinking about how your mockups will look and to give some more perspective to your mockups and how important they are have a think about a brand like apple and the quality of their packaging and the level of design that goes into that and how that looks when you look at it and you feel it and you know it's like this immersive journey of buying one of their products so I think it's safe to say that the mockup is pretty important and it's worth spending the time on getting it right have I got any tips for mockups yeah I have actually I've got quite a few so I've got some tips from my experience that I can share with you on how to create a successful mockup just keep in mind that your mock-ups will be used in your ads and they must be capable of encouraging the people within your Niche to click on your ads and so I highly recommend and this is something that I did that you do as much research as possible by searching on the ad Library by going to different websites and just take notes on the type of mockups they use consider how the t-shirt looks where is the t-shirt in the mockup the size of the T-shirt the background behind the T-shirt the objects that they use around the T-shirt even if they're using objects is it just a ghost sort of mockup because there's many different sort of mockups model mockups with people so do all that research and try and come up with a list of creative inputs that you can use to create your mockups consider going to somewhere like Etsy and doing some research on if there are any mockups that you can buy or even if you want to buy uh professionally taken photographs of the t-shirt that you will be selling ET is quite a good resource for this type of thing it's one thing that worked well for me I bought all my t-shirt mockups like just just the T-shirt shirt not the other things I I bought my t-shirt mockups from Etsy and which is great it came in a pack and it had all the colors of the t-shirt that I sell and I was able to use those files in Photoshop um to create my mockup and if you really really want to master and make a great mockup then I highly recommend learning Photoshop and create 15 unique mockups for testing and if you are struggling to create a mockup you might want to consider buying a r made mockup off Etsy or you can go to somewhere like Fiverr or upwork and hire somebody to create your mockups but don't cut corners on this the mockup super important it's something that we see time and time again in the we scale Community there's lots of students in there they're always on a quest to find the perfect mockup and there is a process that you have to go through of Designing testing iterating designing to find that unique mockup that's really going to work well for you and to master mockups I've got some tips that will help you and the first one is that they must look like a real photograph there's nothing worse from a consumer point of view you're flicking through Facebook and some ads pop up and they they just look like poor ads they look overly photoshopped AI Generation all those things they just don't work well in ads so if you can make your mockups so that they look like photographs like real photographs like you know somebody just took a photograph of it then that's a great start the T-shirt should fill most of the mockup zoom into the T-shirt as much much as possible the T-shirt must fill the mockup so Zoom right in there you've really got to let the design shine and it's the design what captures people's imaginations when they're scrolling on Facebook um looking at your ads and at the end of the day you're selling the design um so make it as big as possible include objects around the edge of your t-shirt that are relevant to your Niche if you're in the running Niche you might want to include a skipping rope or a pair of running trainers or some gym weights if you're in the music Niche you might want to include some records or CD players or headphones just including some things around the edges of your mockup really help you connect your audience with your brand and it really helps tell the story about what your designs are about and this is something that I did and I think it really worked well for my mockup um so I highly recommend that one tip that I think is really worth thinking about is making sure that all the objects on the T-shirt within your mockup have shadows one thing that we pick up in the weale community quite a lot when people are on their mockup Journey so making sure that the everything in there has a shadow and all the Shadows look like they're in the right place considering the lighting direction of your background and how you've done that so make sure you get that right it will help make it look real and my final tip for you is to give some consideration to the color of the t-shirts that you will be selling the variants and also the background behind your T-shirt and also the objects and you really want to try and create a high contrast mockup and that will serve you well in your mockups if you can do that and and also for your ads because in my experience like a high definition a high contrast ad really stands out from the screen and creates this scroll stopping experience for for our customers welcome to stage four the testing stage in this video we're going to be covering the key Concepts that you need in order to get started and laying a groundwork for all of the upcoming step-by-step lessons brought to you by myself and the coaches so before we jump into that let's first recap where we've covered up until now so first off we should have already gone through stage zero which is our foundations where we covered all of the nitty-gritty like red tape stuff to know about the business and honestly way more importantly our personal foundations talking about who we need to become the habits and principles and mindset tools that we can use to Aid us on this journey so that when we Face tough challenges we have what we need in order to persevere and push through and keep going and as a side note that is more relevant in this stage than at any other point cuz this stage is where it really like the rubber really meets the road and this is where like the true entrepreneurs are born cuz this is the point where we're going to get into it but we are going out into the market we've been working on stuff up until this point and now we are going to get the feedback and the feedback is always a mixture of positive and learning so if you haven't watched that I highly recommend going back and reviewing it cuz it's going to serve you extremely well throughout this entire stage next we went through the research stage which is where you research your Niche and pretty much identified along with your understanding of like why we're doing e-commerce why print on demand all of those things but more importantly we talked about how to pick a profitable Niche how to do design research and looking at your competitors and then we segwayed into the building stage which is where we set up all of our accounts got all of the groundwork laid in terms of you know the tools that we're going to be using so that when we get to this stage in particular we've already got everything sorted out so we can just jump right into testing building out the ad campaigns and that sort of thing next in stage three of design we created our mockups and which is what we're going to be testing in this stage along with our 100 plus designs and in that stage we're going to be or in this stage rather we're going to be revisiting a lot of the principles and tools and like that whole workflow that we were doing we're going to be revisiting it later on when we start to iterate on the designs based on what we learned from the market and now here we are in stage four testing and in this stage a lot that we're going to be covering it's super exciting this is one of my favorite stages because it's where we get to learn like what we're really made of and I don't mean to make it sound intimidating it's exciting it's a huge growth stage and this is the stage that I personally have taken away like the most lessons and feedback and really built the biggest skill or the most valuable skill set and not just in terms of print on demand but in terms of you know business in general and to break it down specifically what we're going to be doing is first running a mock-up test campaign second we're going to finalize our mock-ups and third we're going to run our Facebook design testing campaign then we're going to set up our basic email like our popup and that sort of thing then we're going to dive into a super beefy lesson where we go through funnel optimization and the good thing about this I know it looks like a lot but this is taking all of the best practices and the questions that we've learned from all of your guys' feedback everybody who's gone through the course before and really solidified it down to exactly like from the mind of a student what the biggest questions are and give you the specific tools cut out all the fluff that you know isn't necessary and just get right down to the concepts that are going to help Drive the most sales so after that we start iterating on the designs based on the market feedback like I mentioned and then we go through post sale operations this is things like customer service how to handle refunds chargebacks all those little odds and ends that don't really get talked about that much we laying it all out and share you know the 8020 principle of out of all that stuff what actually matters what seems like a bigger deal than it actually is and you can handle it in an easy way so by the end of this stage you're going to learn how to not only test your 100 designs using a super low budget but also your mock-ups and then we're going to be refining your ad campaign performance in the optimization lesson then we're going to be iterating on our bestselling designs and overall the goal is to get our campaigns up over a 2.0 row as threshold cuz like we talked about earlier on this testing phase is where we're getting feedback from the market and then we're getting to break even SL profitability cuz that's when the snowball really starts like rolling down the hill for us and we really start compounding to put it in plain English this is where we get feedback from the market on what they want and they don't want and the order of operations that we're doing this in is the mockup test then we're finalizing the mockup then we're doing the design Test Plus email simultaneously and then we're going to optimize and start scaling from there so a question we get a lot is why the mockup first which the mockup this is Yoga stay's mockup is everything besides the actual design on the shirt you already know this from going through the mockup stage but the reason that we want to do the mockup test first is that if you picture you know you could have the best designs in the world but if you're selling like a beautiful piece of art if you put it in a ugly frame and it doesn't really portray the design in a good light then it's not going to sell and so the mockup is really our way of framing the designs and giving them the highest perceived value possible there's the phrase so that's why we do the mockup test first and in the last of course we didn't do that we just made a mockup and then launched it and that was a shortcoming honestly on my part and and Meg because that was one of the things where everybody's feedback has been super helpful we had done mockups so many times that you know we were just able to make a pretty good one the first time well Meg all credit to her we were able to make a good one the first time through and then you know after working with students and stuff we realized that it is a skill that gets built up over time and when you don't do the mockup like we were doing it and then just putting across all the products on the store the whole store is flooded with these mockups and if we you know didn't have feedback on whether if it was good or not most importantly from the market but also from coaches and people in the community if we didn't have that feedback then there was a lot of times that we would look at people's ad results and we would end up having to suggest doing a mock-up test and the good news is that after they ran the mockup test and they swapped them all out it pretty much switched the results overnight in a lot of cases it's not like a roll of thumb but a lot of times it dramatically boosted people's results but it was frustrating because they had already done all of that work on the front end then they had to go back and you know take the time to swap them all out on Shopify so this time we don't do that this time we use the mockup test as a way of warming up our campaign and our ad account rather and then once we know we have a really good mockup then we move on put it across all the designs in the store and then we move on to the design test so we're getting smarter with the process and net result is it's going to be more streamlined and I know some this probably feels like ambiguous we're going to get into it right now and to make it less ambiguous I love these animations hopefully you guys do too cuz they take a long time but it's fun procrastination work for me but up until now we've Bas if we picture ourselves again as a brick and mortar store we've been inside the store with nobody coming in the doors have been locked we've been in there working away making our designs making our mockups and now we are officially opening the store but when we just open a store you know if you picture like a brick and mortar on Main Street USA opening up they don't always just have a magical flock of people outside the door unfortunately just doesn't work like that not unfortunately reframe it as a positive it's good news because if it was that easy then everybody would be doing it if everybody would be doing it then the supply or competition in the market would exceed the demand and then you know the opportunity goes away but it's not that easy so it's a good thing so that doesn't happen and it can be disappointing when we open up a store and then don't get any traffic so what we're doing is we're picturing ourselves as the brick and mortar store and as if we were next to a highway and on that Highway there's lots of cars flying by and our job with our Facebook ads or any marketing but specific to what we're going to be doing is Facebook ads is to get cars to turn off the highway and Veer into our parking lot and come into our store and the question is what do we put on the billboard that gets people to come into our store like what should we show them that's going to attract them and this is where ads come in but if we show them a bad ad if we show them something that they don't like and we'll talk about the components like what makes up a good ad but if we show them a bad ad then people are going to Veer away so pretty straightforward concept like show them something good they'll come in if we show them something bad then they'll Veer away so by this point you're getting the metaphor that the billboard is our meta ads and in terms of the whole overall business model 10,000 foot view where we are we use meta to drive the traffic to our Shopify store then we have Google for you can slot that away in your mind for later and then we have email marketing on clavio so right now we are diving into the Facebook side of things and this is honestly like where 90% in the grand schemey things the biggest chunks are Shopify and the products and then driving the Facebook ads email and then Google is a distant last place so up until this point we should have our Facebook assets already squared away and ready to go this was covered in the build stage so if you haven't watched that lesson please be sure to go back and do that cuz we're not going to be rehashing all the same stuff but just a quick recap is we have our business manager which is essentially just a folder of our assets it's all that it is and then within that we have our ad account we have our page we have our pixel and our catalog the ad account is like our dashboard where we are telling the billboard company what we want to be running who we want to Target that sort of thing the Facebook page is just the little profile that gets attached to that and there's a lot of misconceptions about Facebook pages and how you have to make like a lot of content and stuff like our Facebook page is not it's like 1% of the overall equation it's pretty much just your logo and your name as far as our strategy is concerned then the pixel is what tells Facebook what's working and what's not so that's like our data and then our catalog is very simple it's just you know how when you log into Shopify you're able to see all your products on the le- hand side it's allowing Facebook to have that same access so it's showing those basically duplicating that in into Facebook and the cool thing is that then we're able to use that catalog to run our ads automatically we're going to talk about that in a second so overall what is the goal here like why are we doing this what should we be looking for more importantly as we're going through this process and this is one of those it's going to be a quick slide but it's one of those fundamental concepts to understand that once youve really get this and you'll probably have to hear it and experience it for yourself until it finally syncs in but ads is just traffic and the goal is to get people in the door it's not to get conversions that is the goal of the store or that's the job of our store so if you think about it Facebook is not responsible for getting people to buy there's Facebook shop which is a separate thing which we'll talk about but the real goal of our ads is just to get people to click and second it's to get feedback from the market and if people don't click it means they're not interested and we have benchmarks that are if you're wondering like okay how do I tell like what metric should I be looking at we cover all of that but these are the two fundamental pieces the job of the ads is to get people in the door and then second it's to get feedback on what's working and what's not now let's break down what are these ads look like and what are the different components that we should be aware of so the different ad components like I said at the Top This is a history Keys ad you have the page info which just the logo and the name then we have the ad copy slofer then we have the ad creative the mockup this is the thing we're going to be testing first then we have the product or the design then we have the headline and then the CTA and we talk about like which ones have the biggest impact which ones matter most but first let's cover what are the different types of ads and this is where I think a lot of people or a lot of students that I've talked to have gotten a little thrown off and it seems like this is a much bigger deal than it actually is it's really not but these are the three different types it's static ads catalog and slideshow so all that these mean is static ad is just static they're static and dynamic they're antonyms of each other static just means it doesn't change this is when we just upload one picture and it just stays like that this is an example right here and the thing that's good about these is that these build up engagement so when we find a bestseller or something that people are clicking on in our catalog ads we'll make a static ad out of that so it builds up engagement we'll talk about all that later but next we have a catalog ad and this is where remember the components product catalog there the reason we're syncing that is to be able to run these types of ads so you can see that it has like a carousel cell there where people are able to slide through and then it has the name of the product at the bottom that's all dynamically done so in our ad account this looks like one ad but in reality the cool thing is that it's actually hundreds or thousands of ads depending on the number of products you have super powerful this is one of the main reasons that I'm like extremely bullish on Facebook ads is number one cpms are the same exact cost as they've been for the past like five six years like we talked about in the research stage and second it really empowers us to just focus on the designs and that's like the most important thing in the business we didn't used to have the luxury of running these kinds of ads before we had to make all of them individually and it was just a lot of button clicking first world problem like really tough I know but yeah now we have the last kind which is slideshow ads slideshow ads is just when kind of like the static ad you upload one slideshow really simple really easy to make we're just going to upload 5 to 10 images and Facebook automatically gener Ates a slideshow video and these are the three main types of ads that we're going to be running it's either static that's the Facebook and then Instagram version of the static and then catalog and then slideshow and these are all on the mirror board that you have access to when you join the the free community and yeah so we have the ads then next we have different types of audiences and the four main types are we have cold we have warm hot and repeat and if you picture a funnel top of funnel it's people who have never heard of you people who have heard of you but haven't clicked on one of your ads hot is people who have come into your store have clicked on an ad and gone onto your store but then haven't purchased and then you have repeat buyers so picturing the brick and mortar example cold would be the cars driving by who have never seen your billboard before or anything about you never heard of you warm would be people who looked at your billboard got out of their car went up and rote a comment metaphor kind of breaks there but commented or liked and then hot are the ones who saw the billboard and then and then turned off the highway and went into your store but then for whatever reason maybe they didn't have time maybe they didn't like the products maybe it wasn't a good shopping experience for whatever reason they didn't buy and then there's the the best group which is people who have bought from us before that we get back in front of them to show them you know new products and that sort of thing so why does this matter and why am explaining this well our goal is to build a relationship with our customer and we always want to keep in mind that on the other side of all of our ads of everything that we're doing There's real people and so picture how a close friend of yours would act if you greeted them as if you'd never met like somebody who's bought from you before gets a message saying like new customer deal it would be pretty weird and it would feel pretty impersonal or the flip side of that is imagine somebody who's never heard of you before and they get hit with an ad that says hey come back and buy again like who are you so cold audiences are the people who have never heard of us and examples of cold ads are like these right here so it's a top of funnel offer just showing the products and then the warm and hot ads are examples like this so it's hey come back and complete your purchase the main reason we're doing this is that that we break it out this way is that when somebody comes into your store and they don't buy there's fundamentally like three to four main reasons why they wouldn't purchase especially once we're getting the cost per click or the like people coming into the store that shows us that there's enough interest for the product and there's just something happening in the shopping experience that they don't like and those main reasons are either a like lack of social proof which none of us have in the beginning B they didn't know about like the product quality C they didn't like feel connected to your brand price or they just didn't have time I know that was like five things but product quality you can also talk about like your charity or cause and you can give them a free shipping incentive or if you have a special deal or something that was going on you can give them urgency or fomo to get them to complete their purchase here's an example of social proof Pro so at the time of running this we had over 25,000 orders on yoga day and then here's another one this one performed really well it's just a simple screenshot of a customer who commented on one of our ads saying that they received their order they loved it this kind of content does extremely well now within the ad account the campaigns that we're going to be running we have our library which is essentially going to be like a folder and we're going to go step by step Click by click through all of these but we have our library then we have our testing campaign we have our cold traffic and then we have our retargeting so out of all the things that I just mentioned all those examples that's just to give you a framework lay out the groundwork of all the different pieces and then we're going to go through step by step so if you're feeling like that was a lot it's good that you're supposed to be feeling like you're drinking through a fire hose you're not behind I know that this is a lot especially if you've never run ads before looking at your ad account for the first time can read like feel like reading a foreign language so you're absolutely not alone and that's what we're here for is to help guide you through the process so the ad account and we're going to start bringing some clarity to it right now so the ad account across the top here we have our campaign level then we have the adset level then we have the ad level so you see at the campaign level see how that's our testing campaign that's where we run like our mockup tests our design tests and as you'll see when we go step by step these things we're talking about like the structure of the account and stuff it's honestly like bottom of the bin priority like there's a lot of different ways to structure it this is not something that's going to make or break your store success and the best or simplest way that I can put it is that if you have amazing ads or amazing products with a great mockup and people love your designs like really high quality stuff all around if I have like a thousand really good designs I could launch whatever I want to use an extreme example any structure and it's going to perform like very well but if I have terrible designs terrible mockups and then I launch the ads and I follow everything to a te then it's not going to work so just to set the priorities and the reason I say it doesn't matter is that like the campaign level and the adset level these are basically just folders like it's not I know it it feels daunting when you look at the ad account for the first time but don't worry you're not messing anything up and you'll pick it up over time and start to see like where the priorities are and that's also what we're here for feel free to join we scale University we're here to answer any questions you have or post in the free community get feedback from people once any of this feels feels like daunting or intimidating but we're going to keep going and at the ad level this is where the actual ads are obviously and the best way to think about this is if you picture your ad account like a tree at the trunk of the tree are your campaigns then the branches out from that are your ad sets and then your ads are all the leaves so hopefully this demonstrates like you can have like for example you could have lots of skinny trees like you could have three or four trees with just one branch off of it and that would be ultimately the same same end result but this is generally how we structure it is our campaign we have our ad sets then we have our ads within it and we're going to come back to this like visual to talk about like different strategies and ways to approach things but this is really it and when we are talking about each of these at the campaign level this is where we set our objective and the reason I'm saying that it doesn't matter if you have one campaign versus three I recommend just keeping it clean and simple but the reason I say that is that that's just where we set the objective and the objective is the same no matter the campaign we always just do purchase conversion optimize and in the previous course we talked about doing PPE as a form of like lowbudget testing and I honestly regretted putting that in there because it I think drove a lot of people off down like a rabbit hole of thinking that like the PPE was really you know the main way PP is just engagement engagement optimize which that's if you're like on a Sho string budget like $10 $20 then you can learn something while you're like working to build up your cash flow flow anyway but campaign level is where we're just doing purchase optimize doesn't matter the campaign like the entire time then at the adet level this is where we select the targeting and placement again nine times out of 10 we're just doing open targeting open placements again that's why I'm saying that the ad set and campaign level it's not something to to fret about and at the ad level that's where we're choosing the image and the ad copy basically what we're selling so high level it's what's the objective level below that it's who SL where then at the ads it's what we're selling so let's answer the question like how many variables are there exactly so we're about to give some recommendations and again none of this is exact prescription the most important thing here is that you learn the concepts and that doesn't have to be an immediate thing it just has to be a priority it has to be like learning to click the buttons that we're clicking is not helpful at all because remembering back to the Rubik's Cube example if you just follow along exactly like your Cube looks different than the person next to you looks different than ours so we have to fundamentally learn why we're doing each of the moves that's why I'm taking extra time to explain each of these pieces so that in turn by the end you don't need us and you're able to make these decisions for yourself we're happy to help we're here like love to have you join the community but point is like my job is to like put me out of the job basically and so when people say Facebook ads are are hard or they don't work it's because they're thinking of this and few years ago I had a really ambitious idea of thinking oh I'll just automate marketing performance I was like like I feel like I know it pretty well so I sat down and I was thinking about making this into a software and I was like so what are all the pieces that impact marketing campaign performance like I mean the ad copy the images all of that and I I sat down and mapped it all out and I eventually abandoned the idea completely cuz the Mind map ended up looking like this you can't even read the stuff on there the point is just to demonstrate how many variables there are and when you break it down there's things like the campaign structure frequency cpms the goal the bid strategy budget funnel stages length of time budget spent the different types of traffic and then you know the product the brand the external factors the website all your optimizations email marketing all of these pieces come into play I used to do this where I would automate like the rules so if I was to fully automate it I would need to take into account all of these variables and then I would need to set up the rules and logic to be able to make the decisions based off of that and it would be hard very hard so the real question is to put it simple and bring it back to basics with the ads the question is how do we get people to stop scrolling click on the ad and then buy from the site it's all we're trying to do and the reason that people think ads are hard is that they look at all of these pieces and they think that they are all equal and nothing could be further from the truth and that is what we showed in the last course what all the people who have had success in the community and generated tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales what they all fundamentally understood is that the pieces that matter most is this right here and this is a subjective pie this is based on my own experience but it's corroborated based on again the results of students in the community so in terms of what drives the most results like what are the biggest levers to work with number one we have product that's at least 40% this is the quality of your designs how clever are they how good-looking are they how much do they strike a chord with your community your Niche next is the creative this is like the ad image the mockups next we have the ad copy SL offer these two kind of be combined then we have the structure that's what I was saying before campaigns adsets ads like don't really worry about the way you structure it as much we're still going to show you how to do it but the reason I'm emphasizing that I see a lot of people let that be like a reason that they don't get started is that they feel like they don't understand it so I'm giving you cart blanch the structure of it does not matter just as long as you follow conversion optimized USA targeting start with a super super low budget and that's it and then just focus on the products and so if we were to decide out of the millions of variables where should we place our Focus it's these things here the reason I I really want to drive this point home is I've said this to a lot of people and I think not I think I know people just didn't believe it they're like okay I I know that you're saying like the number of people that I've said it's literally just about the designs and nothing else just about the designs the mockups then follow roughly the structure experiment with whatever you want but your top priority should always be just making more better designs that people love that are unique and bring something new into the world and like that's it people would hear me say that and or students in the community and some of the students they would they would hear me say that and then they would go okay yeah but I don't know if that's really true and I'm like I don't know what else to say I've spent over 10 million on Facebook ads at this point all the coaches have spent I don't even know how much we spent all combined given Zuckerberg a lot of money not the brag but the thing that I learned from that is that this is literally it and the experience that really instilled that for me was I had run multiple stores where we would do the exact same like site layout same ad strategy same ad structure same ad copy same like same same same same same across the board and the only variable that was isolated they would all get very different results and the only variable that was isolated was the product the product coupled with the niche that was the only difference and we would see stores that we would launch with identical strategies one would launch and we'd have a five as another one we would launch and we'd have a three row as and you only have to do that a couple times before you really face the truth that it's literally just about the products now facing the truth and like actually living it was very different CU I realized that and then I still liked ads a lot so transparently I still did a lot of like when people kick and scream and they're like I don't think I really need to make more designs like I think there's something in my ads that I'm missing that you're just not telling me I'm like I've been there I've sat there for years thinking I can just make things better in the ads and and it can so how can we shortcut the process so as we're looking at the whole equation let's break it down into like what are the different pieces so we have the funnel the ad The Collection page the product page the cart the checkout So within the ad we find the winning combo by launching a bunch of lowbudget ads and hone things down to four to five creatives so fundamentally the strategy here it is this is another snippet like bookmark this part in the course our entire goal with the ads is we want to test all of our designs find out what 95% of them were bad what were the 5% that were good and then completely ignore the 95 learn from what not to do and then do a lot more of the five and we're going to keep rinsing and repeating that process until we have 20 to 30 that are decent but once you have like a winning ad like in our 0 to7 figure store I've been running the same ads roughly for like over a year at this point but it took testing dozens and dozens if not hundreds of ads in order to find those but then once we find those we Whittle it down to the four or five then that that's the recipe but it takes a lot of testing and I think people underestimate how much testing it takes in order to get there and testing is not equivalent to budget spent it's not the same so wipe that from your memory bank that you have to spend money to make money all that stuff that I honestly believed early on completely not true we can learn a lot from spending a little and really diving into the results and people use their budget as a replacement for doing the hard work because it takes more effort and learning and growth and admitting that there's a skill deficit to spend a little bit and then analyze the data then there is to just convince ourselves that I'll learn more if I just spend more and then we put off learning and analyzing things and replacing it with just spending which only benefits Zuckerberg he makes more money we lose money we learn nothing don't do that cuz Facebook's algorithm has gotten very good at finding potential buyers and showing them the right product at the best time so these are examples of some of our best performing ads all time and the question is with limited resources and a learning curve where does it make the most sense to place our focus it makes the most sense here and in the previous course method this is where we're correcting the way that we taught things in the past before in the interest of helping people save time money Etc we laid out there's different types of targeting different structures different ad copy different creative in the interest of saving people time and and money we just shared like here this is the best way to do it just run it like this and that's good to an extent showing like what's worked for us that's what we're here for that's literally the only way that anybody is able to teach legitimately teach is from their own personal experience and pain of the lessons that they had to learn the hard way and the things that ultimately ended up working for them so that's what we do but that being said we I think over indexed on sharing like what worked for us and then that became just cookie cutter just everybody was doing that same thing which that's like a separate issue but the main issue is that people were not learning why we were doing that they were not learning why are we choosing this type of audience why are we making the ad creative like this why does that ad copy work and so when people don't understand the why then obviously they're not going to get the how or like the what of what we're doing so that just results in people copying and again my job and my main focus this time around is to replace myself so that you I love to work with everybody but my goal is that you don't need me anymore after this and that you're able to understand the concepts for yourself so this resulted in people thinking things like testing which is always a good idea testing was equal to Advantage Plus which if you don't know what that is it's just Advantage Plus is a campaign type where it's like open targeting and we were using it a lot but we were calling the Advantage Plus campaign like the testing campaign that's fundamentally flawed because testing is a goal it's something we do Advantage Plus is just a tool and if you don't know Advantage pluses just bear with me it doesn't matter now after we're getting back to the new way which is testing all right we got our sweatshirt got a little chili now we're jumping back in well for you looks like nothing happened but for me we are jumping into the Facebook ad decision tree and the point of this in terms of what we were just talking about is testing and how this is the new way that we are running ads and again this is all conceptual right now we're going to get into step by step but for now the reason we're overemphasizing all of these points is that we've seen that the most successful students are the ones who are able to grasp the concepts of the why we're doing what we are and the what kind of comes later so that's why we're going into this in-depth and again if this feels like drinking through a fire hose it should so the thing that I want to show you is and this is on the mirror board that you all have access to when you join the community but this is the Facebook ad decision tree and this is really going to tell us and there's a bunch of different tools like this but this is one of the tools that will help us learn where we need to be placing our time in terms of testing and I know that this might seem like a lot but basically all that it's saying is to the right is good to the middle is okay to the left is bad and needs not bad needs Improvement and so when we use tools like this and we're going to talk about this a lot more in the finnal optimization step the key concept for us to learn is where we should be placing our time when we're testing and nine times out of 10 I'm not going to say this as a rule because I want everybody to learn this for themselves but nine times out of 10 the thing that we need to be testing is just new products and new designs new designs not new product types just one product type just get really good at it and just keep cranking out new ones and eventually one will stick but the vehicle that we're using for testing come down to something that looks like this and I'm not going to get into this too much but the main point to take away right now is that this is the business right here like when people say like you know Shopify is hard or whatever like there's a lot that you have to learn if I could point to a single slide or a single screenshot of something to summarize all of it like the Crux the Lynch pin whatever you want to call it it's this right here and this is the testing cycle and what this shows you is a high Lev overview of what the process is and the decision-making framework for when we're running tests and the good news is that you don't have to be like an ad scientist or a expert by any stretch or I've even run a single Facebook ad before CU we're going to teach you the technical stuff the step like the what buttons to click and all that the important concept to take away from this is that this involves multiple rounds of testing so go through it very quickly we launch the design ads do a lowbudget and we talk about this in the design testing lesson but you do it at a low budget you run it for a couple days keep ad spend super low like we talked about you don't need to be spending a lot in order to learn then we're seeing what the market is telling us AKA what the row ads is return on ad spend we'll go through the definitions in a second then you pause the ads and then you see what the results are the way that we see what the results are and what the market thinks is by looking at how expensive was the traffic which designs were cheap which designs were expensive CU cheap versus expensive the difference between the two is how much people liked the thing like like if they loved it then you get really cheap clicks if they hated it then you get really bad clicks that's sounds like Elementary level but that's like the key Concepts a lot of the most important Concepts aren't complex it just takes a lot of repetition before they finally get like ingrained in us so we're going to repe be repeating this a lot cuz it's crucial to understand and so expensive clicks not expensive so if it's not expensive The Benchmark that we're looking for is 75 and if it is 75 cents that means it's good that means the ads are doing what we want them to and then we move on to the next thing which is looking at our website but if they're more expensive then what does that tell us it tells us that there's probably some good ones in there there's probably some bad ones that we can learn from and if they're super expensive then that tells us that there's AKA $3 plus then that tells us that there's something across the board that is impacting all of the ads so that could either be a every single one of our products is very bad which if you follow along with the research training and then you did the design stages properly and you have a wide variety of designs they're actually t-shirt designs they're not things that belong hung up on a wall or anything like that then statistically there's a good chance that we'll have at least 5 to 10 decent ones decent meaning like a dollar to like $2 and then there's probably some that are the majority are way worse and that's to be expected I want to preface I want to set our expectations that that is the norm so that people don't get discouraged when you launch it pains me to see people put in all the time and effort to go through all of this build the store do the research make their Niche or their brand around their Niche make their designs and then they launch they don't get good results then they turn back around they head for the door like that's where it really starts and that's not to go on a tangent but anyway to bring it back like if they're all really bad it either means a we have all terrible designs which again is not likely if we follow along or B way more likely it's something is impacting all of the designs and that thing that would be impacting all of them is the mockup so back to the picture frame that's why we do the mockup first to make sure that we can do our very best to avoid going down that path and then once we see what is working then we just go back to the drawing board design not drawing board very beginning step we build up a lot at this point that we're able to build on but we go back with what we've learned and then we make more designs as we start with 100 95 are okay but they're good Lessons Learned five do decent we want make more like those and then we just rinse and repeat this process and if you can just lock in for this and rinse and repeat this process over and over again and get married to the repetition of just testing new stuff that testing mindset is worth its weight in gold and this is the point where people normally turn around is that they do it once they do it twice they realize that this is actually a business and building a real business that's you know provides value to the world and is unique and like sustainable all those things that it takes effort and this is where the effort in lies and so the the reason I highlight this and I try to highlight throughout the entire course the challenges and pitfalls is so that once you experience this for yourself you don't think you're on the wrong track and that you don't think that there's something uniquely wrong with you and your brand and what you're doing it's not the only thing that could be wrong is if you don't follow along and you don't keep doing the process so that's testing and the good news and the reason that I emphasize the product more than anything is that Facebook ads has truly never been easy easier than it is right now it used to be that we had to like handhold Facebook every step of the way make every decision ourselves like what interest we're going to Target the subin like all of that and it was a very very manual process but now we are able to in large part rely on their algorithms to find our customers for us so it's never been a better time in my experience to be running ads to break down the pieces of an ad further we have the ad copy here and again this is one of the areas that we should be testing lots of different things but this is a good starting point and the main points here to take away are the first line of the ad copy needs to grab people's attention good way to do that is by showing social proof like you'll see on this history te's one 75,000 history te's sold that grabs people's attention builds credibility and obviously you won't be able to say that in the very beginning don't say that if it's not true you want something that's grabbing people's attention so something as simple as new spring collection drop with an emoji I've experimented with dozens and dozens of this variation hundreds of sets of AD copy in total pre- chat GPT this was way harder to come up with I mean it's not anything that complex but chat GPT if you give it a couple of examples and then you tell it about your brand it's phenomenal coming up with this kind of stuff as of right now don't listen to Facebook's recommendations for ad copy their AI I'm not sure what it is I think it's powered by like a hamster on a wheel or something or just like hamster on a wheel it like knocks out random balls that go down and it like picks out the words it's horrendous but anyway so first line grabs attention emojis experiment with those so you can do like one emoji at the end one at the beginning I've spent a lot of time more time than I care to admit thinking about the strategy behind emojis probably just another form of procrastination to be honest but emojis just don't overdo them second line should be the urgency or scarcity or reason that they need to buy now so like if you have a new customer deal that can be good to include we're actually experimenting as I record this or we're going to be like by the time this is posted in January we're going to be experimenting with taking this off out entirely and we'll talk about why later but something to experiment with and the other piece of testing that I want to instill or the lesson I learned is that there's no cost to testing more it's not like we have a hundred Slots of products or like on Etsy where we pay per listing it's nothing like that we can launch as many designs as we want we can test as many sets of AD copy as we want and there's this preconceived or false notion that testing is expensive and that's just patently false because the algorithms are so good now we're able to give it a bunch of different stuff like five 10 sets of AD copy and it tests it very very quickly and something to take away from this is that the top 1% of advertisers test 70 times more than the rest so testing is very good testing iterating on the ad copy and then at the bottom is where it says insert actual ad if possible it's not possible it's not there lots of slides to keep track of then at the bottom like a call to action so you can say shop now with an arrow pointing at the URL and the main goal of an ad is to get people to click one of two places it's either the link at the top or the shop now button or the CTA so again breaking it down we have the page name the logo we have the ad creative SL mockup then we have the CTA and the headline the most important things as we already reviewed are th% the from my experience the ad creative and the design in the middle and I would say design in the middle supersedes anything and obviously this is for selling T-shirts but to give an example of you know how you would advertise different products like if you're doing wall art or pretty much any business fundamentally you have to make sure that it's a product that people actually want great products can be sold by bad marketing but great marketing can't sell bad products it you can to a certain extent but it's not a sustainable business so we want to make sure we have really really great products and we've been running basically the same kind of ad for years and years and it's still working today so at the time of filming this this is right after like the holiday season has started dying down a little bit but in the last seven days we've done $93,000 in sales and this is all using ads just like this so this stuff works but you need to test and like learn it for yourself and here's some fun memes that the team put in there is that they're poking fun at something that is ha happens a lot and that's people like try to rush through the process like try to rush the design process which I'm all for moving quickly through the process as long as we're meeting the minimum requirements and the minimum requirements are doing the research making 100 designs and then launching people who try to launch too fast end up with me pulling them back and saying don't launch that's why the first step in the decision tree is making sure that you actually have your hun products and if you don't have them then you have to go back and do it again and so there's a lot of different variables we've isolated them down to the most important ones it's the ad creative and the product then the ad copy we give you a bunch of examples as a starting point it's not the only ad copy I highly recommend everybody try their own unique flavor chat GPT is great for helping with that and another place is learning from your competitors and we've put together an awesome tool that you guys all have access to I can say it's awesome CU it was all the team who did this here it is all of the top apparel sites on the internet not 10 to 15 of them it's not every site obviously but what we've done is you can go go in here and basically look at all your competitors you can use the Facebook ad Library which is an amazing tool and highly recommend checking that out but what we've done is taken all these sites and taking screenshots of their homepage their collection page on mobile their product page where they're getting their traffic from what ads they're running what their social media pages are posting all of that so I've already gotten the ball rolling for you because this is such an important thing we want to lower the barried entry look at this and learn in the last course we shared this and I I think people looked at it like once or twice and got overwhelmed and then just didn't look at it again the reason we include this is that it's super important this is how I have learned by far the best here's a sound bite for you I have learned the majority of the skill set that I've developed over the years aside from from my own ad span and my own painful mistakes has come from looking at competitors and learning what they're doing and how I can improve for example seeing in their ads like what does their ad copy look like how are they using emojis what does their ad creative look like it's kind of interesting that these are just flatlay just white background mockups it's interesting but the things that I'm specifically looking for like which ads have been running the longest so started running and then I'm seeing which ad creative types are they using the most consistently and when you look at that you start to pick up on within a single competitor company you're able to learn like okay there must be something working here cuz they've been letting this run ad run for months and months so either they have no idea what they're doing they're letting losers run or far more likely they are they found something that's working at least decently well and they're like continuing to iterate on it and you can do the that same exact thing for the design Styles they're advertising for the ad copy the offers all of those pieces you can look at and learn from and then that's just from one company that's the cool thing and you can tell I geek out on this stuff I know but you don't have to love it as much as I do it's just a useful tool but that's just for one company then you can repeat that process across all of the competitors or like all the like industry leaders and see what they're all doing and when you do that like it's great Tony Robins quote that success leaves Clues like follow the clues and you'll learn something like piece together the clues and you start to have a blueprint and you can do all of that it's like G getting a a master's in marketing for free basically cost you literally nothing and you can watch what these companies are doing not just in their ads but in their email marketing like all over the place that's another whole another topic but so we can save ourselves a whole lot of time and effort by not making things harder for ourselves by just simply not trying to come up with something completely new and novel as a beginner and this is a misconception I see a lot of beginner entrepreneurs have that I had myself and that was thinking that in order to start a business that means like creating something completely new and different in the world not just in terms of the product but also in terms of the marketing I have to be inventing things like I thought of you know Albert Einstein like that's what it looks like and that's not the case like the most important thing is that we're just copying what is already working for other people and then especially if we're just starting out so don't try to reinvent the wheel just Reign it and accepting the fact that we're a beginner at least for now and we're going to change that by going through some definitions start to get our feet wet with these terms and these will all be on the the mirror board along with in the lesson guides for you to refer back to but these going to be terms that you're going to hear a lot so acronyms going to go through CPC CPM CTR CR aov LTV and Raz which is cost per link click cost per thousand Impressions clickthrough rate conversion rate add toart rate initiate checkout average order value lifetime value return on ad spend I know it sounds like a lot but it's really just think of the brick and mortar example that's all what this is so cost per link click what is it it's the amount that we pay for each session to our site so if we paid $100 for a billboard and 100 people came into our store because of that billboard that would be $1 cost per link click so this matters because it's top of the funnel it is the biggest bottleneck if we don't have people coming into our funnel then no need to optimize anything else like it starts with that second how do you find it an additional piece why it matters is that that's our initial barometer for what's working and what's not and how do you find it you take your ad spend divided by total link clicks and it's also in your Facebook dashboard so you spent $100 divided by hundred people came in it would be $1 cost per link click if 200 people came in be 100 divided by 200 it's 50 Cent cost per link click so how do you change it a lot of different ways this is the order of things that are the most challenging to optimize in the business it goes from top to bottom of funnel because the further down the funnel you go the fewer variables there are to to figure out like at the very end is like the checkout page there's pretty much like two things we can change there so if we're able to figure out the cost per link click then the rest is dramatically easier and so when I whenever I see like a student's account and they're like yeah I'm not really getting sales but you know my link clicks are 45 cents I get super excited they they have no idea why they think I'm losing it but that's okay because I'm excited for them because I know that like they're close that shows that they have something that the market actually wants you know they have at least some really good design well if it's 45 cents that's pretty low especially if that's the average that shows that the majority of them are under that they probably have some that are 20 to 30 cents which would be really crazy but I get excited cuz that shows like they've already accomplished like the biggest piece but in their mind understandably they're like I just I don't have any sales so like how is that exciting and in my mind I know that's the biggest piece of the pie to figure out next is conversion rate that's just like checking boxes that's just using like the conversion rate checklist that's on the the wi scale checklist like that's just very uh cookie cutter that might be the wrong phrase but you get my point so how do you change it you test new ad creatives different products offers ad copies headlines test different optimizations but but the biggest ones just think back to the pie and next is CPM which is cost per thousand Impressions this is where some people get a little hairy that it's not as at least for me I'll speak for myself I got confused by this it's really not we're going to go through it so CPM is the cost per thousand views of an ad so the store example if I pay $10 for that billboard on a day and a th000 cars drive past the billboard and see it on that day my CPM would be $10 if it helps to know it's I think it's Latin stands for like cost per melee which melee is a th000 but anyway I thought that was interesting so why does it matter it has the largest impact on cost per link click and shows how much engagement you're getting so how do you find it total Impressions divided by a th000 divided by total spend you'd never need to know that equation it's just interesting and how do you change it it's by making more engaging ads and so the way that Facebook operates is like a Marketplace it's a bidding or an auction is the right term so if you picture what's really happening when Facebook is placing an ad is if you picture like an auction Hall where there's the bidder the guy who talks really fast up there and they're basically holding up the product and the product is the ad spot and they're basically saying all right we have Chris his interests are XYZ he's this demographic going once going twice and all the advertisers are the biders in the audience and they're raising their signs saying how how much they're willing to pay for it and so using that metaphor the what would be the things that would drive up the price it's well if there's a lot of biders if they know that that spot is really valuable that would be one piece but the other piece is thinking about what's the person running the auction what's their motivation and I'll drop the metaphor for a second Facebook is in the business of keeping people on the platform the product is the user it's not the other way around so Facebook wants to keep people on their platform because that's how they are able to serve more ads what keeps people on the platform it's showing them stuff that they like how do they know if people are liking it if they like it and if they are commenting sharing staying on the ad showing all those signs of you know it it being a good piece of content how do they know if they don't like it the other end if they don't like it they just scroll past at 1,000 miles an hour and they move on then they don't that's that's bad so what does Facebook do with that well if I'm the advertiser and I show something bad it's going to make people leave Facebook's platform they're going to punish me with higher more expensive CP so picture like a terrible ad something that just like nobody wants to look at like the most Bland like mailed in product possible nobody's going to comment nobody's going to tag their friend cuz they look like a weirdo so Facebook's going to punish me they'll give me more expensive cpms so all this to say this really doesn't change any of the actions this is just us understanding the back end of why we're trying to do what we're doing and why the product is the most important thing is that the thing that drives down the picture in the whole funnel top of funnel most important thing is the cper link click the traffic getting people in the door how do we get people in the door well we get cheap link clicks how do we get cheap link clicks well it's by showing them stuff that they like because then when we do that they like they comment they share that gives us more reach number one but two Facebook it's like you're doing a great job I'm going to give you a raise by lowering your costs so more engaging ads Facebook rewards us and the best ads that I've ever seen have we normally Target like $10 to $15 cpms as a benchmark it varies by industry but the best ads I've ever seen have been in like the $3 to4 range so they're getting tons of comments tons of likes tons of shares and that's what we're aiming for next is the link clickthrough rate so this is the percentage of people who see our ads and click on the link so using the store if a th000 cars see my ad and 10 turn off the highway that would be a 1% clickthrough rate so why does it matter what this does show is if people are basically if it's stopping people from scrolling and getting giving them enough urgency and reason to click so to give us an example if we and we're going to get into this in the funnel optimization so I shouldn't say too much now but basically cpms tells us if people are commenting liking and sharing link click through it tells us if we're doing a good job of giving people urgency and reason to click now so like if you picture a cat video that's going to get really good cpms if we were running an ad for that cuz everybody's going to comment and tag their friend but what it's not going to do is like there's no urgency or reason for somebody to click and go to the website so all of those come together and create our our cost per link click so cpms is how much we're getting charged per impression link click the rate is how many of those people are clicking merge them together it's cost per link click again you see in the simple dashboard that we set up earlier really just need to know cost per link click but it has really helped me a lot understanding like the math behind that CU then I know like the different levers to pull next is conversion rate so conversion rate is the percentage of people who land on your site and complete a purchase so if 100 people walk into your store how how many times does the register go CH Chang and or how many times do your Shopify app go CH Chang on your phone so why does this matter it's because you can have the best Billboards in the world you can be getting people in the door in droves but if nobody buys then it's pretty much useless so this is also the bottleneck to aov so cost per link licks then conversion rate then aov average order value so how do we find it it's total orders divided by total sessions so again if 100 people walk in and 10 people purchase that' be a 10% conversion rate so how do we change it we're going to talk about this in depth but site layout site speed color isolation social proof product copy all those things along with a list of about 200 others it's really like a million golden BBS next aov average order value so what is it it's the average number of products times average cost of item so basically it's how much are people buying are people coming in and buying one thing or they buying 10 so if in one day 10 people buy and in total we made $500 that would be an aov of 50 bucks 500 divided by 10 50 so why does it matter it because it is substantially easier to get one person to buy more of something than it is to get two people to buy one thing so the way we find it is total sales divided by total number of orders and the way we change it is more better products free shipping incentives frequently bought together and product recommendations next lifetime value this is the total amount that a customer spends with us when I mentioned earlier that we're removing testing removing the discount for the ad copy the reason for that is that while it's good for the front end sale the theory or hypothesis that I think is well founded is that if you're leading in with like a new customer deal unless if it's framed very well it devalues the brand you get people who are buying from you because of you know just the offer their bargain shoppers rather than people who are buying from you because they love the product and they love the brand and we'll talk about that evolution in the beginning we are strictly just direct a consumer just getting sales just greasing the wheels getting things going and as we evolve as a brand and as entrepreneurs we start to make that Evolution from just store owners to you know brand operators so why does this matter this is where the real money is and the way we find it is by taking our total sales divided by total number of customers how do you change it a lot of different ways number one way is customer satisfaction doing right by people who are buying from us two is email marketing and next Raz my favorite so Raz equals return on ad spend so this is how much money we make for every free $1 spent so I spent $100 on billboards and made $200 in sales that would be a 2.0 Raz so this does not include cost of goods overhead anything like that this is just how much should I put in terms of ads how much did I get out in terms of total Topline sales not net sales so why does this matter well it indicates how optimized our funnel is and it tells us you know if we were to like if we're a mechanic and we're looking at a car like is the car moving like is stuff working well enough obviously there's things we could weak and improve and we're going to figure out what those are to get like better performance but overall how are we doing and the way you find it is by taking total sales divided by total ad spend so how do you change it literally just three ways hopefully and this is where it gets fun cuz it's like clicking together three different ways cost per link click so we can either get cheaper traffic we can increase our conversion rate or we can increase our average order value ideally we do all three so breaking that down bricking mortar style it's pay less to get people in the door out of those people that come in the door we get more of them to buy than of the people who buy we get them to buy more so what that looks like is cheaper traffic higher percentage of people that are actually making the register go CH Ching then out of those people we're getting them to buy two three four products instead of just one and a normal Evolution that you can expect is in the beginning traffic will be expensive conversion rate will be low aov will be pretty much just one product and that's completely to be expected over time though we're going to optimize things and we do it in that order cost per link click conversion rate aov we do it in that order and we systematically lower one after the next so last but not least let's talk about the fun topic on everybody's mind is Facebook bans so how to not get banned by Facebook and I think people who hear about bans on Facebook it happens but fortunately I'll say this upfront it happens a lot less nowadays than it used to so but there are some things that we can do one to prevent it two if we do get banned and then three if we get banned we're not able to get the account back what we can do and I want everyone to take a deep breath because getting banned by Facebook is not the end of the world it is not anywhere in the realm of what it's like getting banned on Etsy or merch by Amazon where your whole business gets Thanos snapped overnight it's not that we own our business we are not just a cash flow machine we have our customers we have all of our products we can drive traffic from other places we can get other Facebook accounts and all the while we're building up an email list that's able to generate us Revenue all the time so it's completely separate from anything that's in the realm of etsy or merch by Amazon because we're a standalone business but yeah bans do happen and it does suck when it happens but here's how to get unbanned from Facebook so if you one one possible option is if you get banned you can I'm going to talk more about this in a second you can just simply buy an account from somebody like either use your friend family account something like that or you can there's marketplaces I can't condone any of this this is not recommended but there's like what I did is I bought an account from like a friend of mine from college and used his account for a while after I got banned during and we'll talk about why in a second but so why do people get banned by Facebook like why do they do it when people hear this who haven't run ads before they think like are you doing something sketchy and that's not at all some people do sketchy stuff but you can get banned without doing that so Facebook is in the business of keeping people on the platform for as long as possible so what doesn't keep people people on a platform well Shady ads scams and non-pg content so how does Facebook prevent that sort of thing given that they have millions and millions of advertisers and it would be literally impossible for them to manually review every single ad well they have extremely strict rules and requirements that are sometimes overly strict for advertisers to be able to stay on their platform and how do you avoid getting banned to warm up the account we used to run the PPE engagement you can do that but basically you just run the most PG ad you don't try to sell anything you don't even do conversion like no shop now or any of that you just run the most PG ad which is just don't do any products that have like curse words or anything in that realm to begin with but we're going to use the mockup test as the way of warming up the account and you just run it and you build the relationship with Facebook so Facebook has these rules in place that are designed to basically catch scammers and they look for the attributes of scammers so or spammers so there's people that people that are running these kind of ads what they do is they buy a bunch of accounts and then they very quickly launch as many ads as possible because they know that they have like a melting Ice Cube and they have to move quick before they get caught so they quickly ramp up all their ads they start blasting out and they just try to get as much as they can before their account gets shut down so that kind of person Facebook again they can't possibly review every single ad themsel so what they do is they look for the attributes of that kind of person those attributes can sometimes coincide with that of a normal like legitimate Advertiser and Facebook cares way more about preserving their customer base or their their product base their supply because that's the kind of thing that can compound against them very quickly like if they if Facebook ever became known as like the place you go to get like spam and scam ads they'd be done so that's their top priority is keeping that then they know that they can always get advertisers there's never a shortage of companies trying to get new customers they know that they've got that in the bag what they need to preserve in order for those customers to come to them is their product so they over index on protecting the user experience and the net result of that is that sometimes the algorithms get it wrong so one thing that we do is we use a VPN I personally use expressvpn because the the main things to get people banned is one spending too quickly two is if you're traveling around or logging in from different locations Facebook doesn't like that also don't use a profile that has been banned before or has any banned assets linked to it cuz they connect all of them together so for example we stopped adding people like in your business manager they give you the option to add people to the business manager we stopped doing that entirely we stopped doing that because we notice a trend that if we added somebody to the account like whether it was customer service rep or whoever if that person had been linked to any banned Accounts at any point in the past then Facebook would times link their bad track record with ours so again we're just to recap where we're at we're covering the concepts of the fundamental things to know when it comes to advertising and stage four of testing one of the big things to know is how to not get banned so that we're able to keep testing that's why we're covering this now next is don't sign in from multiple locations that's why we use the VPN so it's a big big no no to give like a friend or family member you're you're log in or like I've had people like ask me to check their ads and they're like here's my Lo in I'm like don't do that one you should just never send anybody your login to begin with but two if I were to log in I'm then logging in from a separate location from where you are and also little known fact is that Facebook is tracking the computer not the IP address even they they track that too don't worry but they track the computer that you're logging in from so if I've logged into say an account that got banned before even if I wipe the computer and stuff they're still seeing that so if I log in on computer a even if I wipe it they Facebook's still knows that that's computer a and then when I log in to your account I would which I would never do but Facebook would then link it to that account so you don't want to do that and next is don't launch a ton of ads at the same time so back to you know the attributes of a scammer or spammer is they log in and they try to launch a bunch of stuff I especially on a new account I am very tentative in terms of the number of ads that I'm launching I will do like three to five at a time hit publish wait for it to get it goes through processing then it goes through review and then it goes live I wait for that to happen before I launch any new ads even if I have like 50 that I want to launch I'll just do five and I'll do more and I'll do more like slow and steady let them all get approved let some of them start spending and then if you do that this is just being in an abundance of caution doing everything we can again theme of this course stack the deck in our favor these are the things we can do to make sure that we never have to experience that and then obviously just not breaking terms of service they have terms of service that lays everything out the most common bans that I've seen have come from circumventing policies this is when if you get banned people will just create a new Facebook profile so picture like the Facebook profile is like where you log in to see your friends and stuff if you ever get banned do not just go and create a new Facebook profile they are on to that another version is if your ad account gets banned and you just try to make a new ad account without solving the reason it got banned that's circumventing policies next not advertising over-the-top discounts or offers this was an old ad from yoga stay that I don't think we have the 99% tag on it I think that got added in but even 55% is too high now the ads that I like running are like 20 to 30% Max but if you do like 99% they're literally looking for that and they're looking at the ad copy they're looking at the ad creative like they use AI to read the ad in all aspects and they're even sending Bots to your landing page so if you have anything anything that you're doing doesn't matter where it is it has to be above board and meeting their their requirements another one that's important to mention here that is running ads for products that have like profanity or anything like that in it I highly recommend just staying away from any of that like obviously blatant stuff that has like the FW and that sort of thing just stay away from that with like a 10-ft pole but not just in the ads that you're running but also them being on the landing page CU Facebook sends Bots to scrape the site the safest way is just avoid anything like that the second safest way is to make sure that it's at least on the second page of your collection so it's not on the main landing page but the other place to look for it is in the product catalog that we set up make sure that Facebook is not pulling those products into your catalog cuz Automatic by default everything is in that catalog so you need to make sure that you go through and the way you do this is by going to products in Shopify you go to products yeah just products and then it brings up like the spreadsheet looking thing of all your products you just go through and check the button next to all the ones that have anything guns drugs any of that I probably shouldn't even say those words I don't think YouTube will like that who cares anything like that Facebook definitely won't like it you check the box and then you click exclude from sales Channel and that'll remove it from the products getting pulled from your catalog if you do get banned then here's a script that I've used a bunch of times and it's worked really well so obviously just swap out your name at the bottom but you can send this script and you're basically just saying that hey I believe that my ad account shouldn't have been disabled I've been doing my very best basically just showing that you're a real person on the other end and an added touch that I found to be effective is putting your phone number at the bottom of this just so they see like you're very serious about this your real person all that and then plan B make an appeal or buy an account I don't I mention the marketplaces I don't recommend that I've never had a good experience I'm just laying out all the options that I'm aware of but either like for example I got banned back during in like 2020 I've been banned for years like my personal profile from running ads and the reason for that was that I was launching a new store it was around the time where it might have been yoga day actually it was called Nate collections at the time but I launched a bunch of stuff and I just ramped things up way too fast and we got flagged and their appeal process is lacking to say the least and I appealed it and it basically got lost in the mix and we never heard back and that was my personal profile there's like three levels of bands there's personal profile which is like me when I log in to see friends and stuff personal profile then there's business manager then there's ad account then there's page so mine was at the very top and when that happens I wasn't able to run ads I wasn't able to access any of my business managers and so it sucked so ever since then I've been running ads as my lovely wife and so anytime I run ads we have one desktop it's actually the desktop I'm recording on that stays here and I remote desktop into that I use Chrome remote desktop H to control the screen and we take no chances so it's annoying it's like slightly laggy but it's pretty good and that's how I've run ads for you for years and also if you get banned you can ask the the wi scale GPT it's trained on all this information and it'll be able to like pull this script and stuff for you so common ad mistakes number one is just not testing enough and not realizing that ads are meant to be tested constantly so we've already hit on that point a bunch second is inaccurate tracking so not setting up the API tracking and not using uh conversion purchase optimize I can't tell you the number of times that I've looked at somebody's ad account I see that they have really low link clicks like 10 15 cents and I look at their mockups and products and it's like okay but it's not something that should be getting that cheap and then I I'm like almost like clockwork I'm like are is this optimized for purchases and the answer is normally no so make sure you're doing that check at the campaign adset and AD level next is not understanding the metrics in the beginning it feels like you're reading a foreign language and that's why it's so important to study and learn how they actually interact and like what the levers are that is the skill to learn the skill to learn learn is not like what buttons to click and what ads to make or how to make the ads that's just like a prerequisite the real skill here is not like how to navigate the dashboard the real skill is in learning what the metrics do and the best way to learn that is by using the tracker tracker that's along with the Habit tracker and all that fill that out on a daily basis and it's going to feel repetitive it's meant to cuz after you do it you start to intuitively learn like okay my cost per click went up what did my conversion rate do what my cpms and that's the the number one skill that I've learned over the years is how to read the metrics and know where I should place my focus I used to just do a whole bunch of stuff and then hopefully something would work so I had no idea like how to see under the hood learning to read the metrics is the equivalent to being a mechanic if you can't read the metrics that's like if you're a mechanic and you don't know how to unlatch the hood of a car and so you're working on the car you're just like smacking it around and stuff and you're like all right might work obviously it's not going to fix anything you might you know even a blind squirrel catches a nut every every once in a while or finds a nut we don't want to be that we want to have both of our eyes open and that requires learning to to read the the metrics next I'm getting cheap clicks but no one's converting it's non-con conversion optimized is common one next uh favorite mistake is Let's Just Launch the ads and then leave it there so I followed along the steps I got to the ads part and I launch it and then I just step away then I come back and see I spent $150 I got zero purchases Facebook says I got 10 added carts but I only actually got three Facebook ad sucks this doesn't work what what gives and then just deflate realize that it's easier to just claim that some external thing that I have no control over is broken and it's not me or a skill deficit or anything of the sort it's nothing that I need to know it's just that the system is fundamentally flawed and stacked against me and there's nothing I can do about it that's what we want to believe and by all means we'll never succeed that's okay nothing saying that we have to be here or trying to do this but there is something saying that within ourselves there's a reason that we're here that we're listening to an hour and a half long lesson on just the concepts before we start testing there's something that's driven us to this point we owe it to that thing within ourselves our why to see it through and recognizing that when that experience those numbers that I just threw out that's where the real journey starts and along with that not being afraid to turn off the ads let me State this clearly do not be afraid to turn off your ads the throw make you got to spend money to make money out the window if you are uncomfortable with the amount of money that you were spending and you feel like at any point you're just going like this looking at your ad account hoping that things will work out then something is wrong and that's what we're here for to help that's what the course is here watch your back two three four times however many times you need to in order to start to learn the concepts and feel more confident now that's not to say like it'll be scary but there's a big difference between uh healthy fear and healthy relationship with the challenges and the uncertainty versus just ignorance is bliss just send it and walk away hope for the best we don't want to do that so please do not be afraid to turn off your ads it is expect I I'll go even further it is expected that you will turn off your ads especially in that testing cycle it's it's a step in the process is to turn them off so I think a lot of people have misconception that I do all this stuff I go through the stages I make my store I make my designs I make my mockups hit launch and then it goes like this right and then if when it goes like that and then Peters out and crashes and then we have to pick up the scraps and like go back up again and it it feels like something must be off it is not that it does not do that like if it went like that there would be no Challenge and just everybody would do it so the beautiful thing about that challenge is that that's where we grow we build like a really valuable skill set and it's an exciting Journey next very briefly I'm going to cover Google ads we're literally just setting up Google as a very minor form of paid SEO so this is going to be when people come to our store and they like it but then they leave for whatever reason and they try to think of us and get back to the store later they might know some of the keywords and they type it in on Google maybe they tell their friend about us hopefully and in the beginning you don't have any SEO we won't show up in the results cuz we're a brand new store so what do we do about that we're able to run very cheap search ads so that we show up at the top so people can type in something adjacent to our brand name and be able to get back to us next clavio what we're going to be setting up in this stage is the very beginning of our email setup which is just going to be so that as we're driving this traffic we're starting to build our email list because email is the real Cash Cow of this whole business I'll show you an example here so over the past 7 days we have done $22,000 in net profit this is slightly overestimated because Co cost of goods is undercounted for here just the way it pulls the numbers everything else is accurate and pulled directly but this is it doing like basically a math equation so it's not pulling straight from printify as you can see it's the Shopify logo so cost of goods is like 20% higher roughly but anyway the point of this the why I'm bringing this up is email accounted for $20,000 of sales and email we have no ad cost on the only cost is the cost of our email account which is a couple hundred bucks at most in the beginning when you have no like list it's very cheap but this accounted for $10,000 rough so it's 50% net profit just about our only cost or cost of good sold so $110,000 in net profit so it was 20% of our Revenue a little bit more 25% but it was 50% of our net profit over 50% roughly anyway you get the point is that email is where the money is made like if we look at last 30 days yeah last 30 days email did $50,000 in Revenue that's $25,000 in net profit did half of the profit and 20% yeah so the percentage is held almost exactly true so email is where where the money is made and that's why we're setting up in this stage is it's starting the snowball so we're going to set up the popup so we start capturing people in our list capture sounds very aggressive it sounds like we're kidnapping them we are nurturing them into our brand and so we're doing those popups giving them like a 15% discount 10 15% and then starting to put them through like a welcome flow we're not doing any of the advanced setup we're just going to go through like the quick hit stuff while we're running our design test and then we'll dive into like how do we really start driving Revenue once our list gets bigger so thanks for watching I know that this went a little bit longer but these concepts are really like stage four like I said at the very beginning is it's the stage this is the point that makes or breaks people and by you watching all the way through this you're doing your part to make sure that you make it through and that that you I don't mean for it sound so daunting it's just these are the concepts that we didn't really convey as much we just kind of jumped into you know here's what to click here's what the ad should look like go do it and then after hearing the same questions over and over and over and over again start to realize like hey maybe it wasn't explained in the most uh apt way so the thing that was missed before was this stuff was explaining the why before we show the what and the how so hopefully you enjoyed this thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson in this lesson we're going to be covering how to run your p&l and your balance sheet this is one of the most important concepts for anybody to be doing when they're running a business and this was one of the most painful lessons that I've had to learn the hardest way possible and that is by not running it for years and years honestly because I one I didn't even know that it was a thing that was a best practice and the way that I found out that I should have been running the profit and loss and balance sheet was after running our brands for like I said 3 years and we thought we were doing well like we had you know a high amount of sales coming in money was coming into the accounts but then it seemed like whenever we checked the bank accounts if you looked at like how much was being made in sales minus out our rough costs the numbers just were not adding up to what we were seeing in the account and so that's when my business partner and I we finally sat down and we're like all right we need to figure this out and we ran our very first p&l and then balance sheet and ever since then the evolution of this has been you know we started off running it you know once a month then once a week and now Meg and I run ours every single day and it is one of the easiest things you can do that has a disproportionate return because it will help you find where your money's going what hidden cost you didn't even expect what your true cost of goods is what your true like fees and overall profitability and this is how you make sure that the sales you're bringing in are actually turning into dollars in your bank account and staying that way and if you don't do this and a lot of people they hear me talk about this but then they they're like all right yeah sure I know I'll run it eventually run it now if for nothing else just do a favor to me and let my painful mistake not be for nothing and please please run it every day it'll take 5 minutes we're going to go through exactly what it is and how to do it and then just make it part of your daily routine just takes 5 minutes and it'll end up saving you a ton of money in the long term first off what is a p&l pnl stands for profit and loss statement and we're not going to get into like fancy accounting and bookkeeping this just going to be straight down to Brass tax like the thing the 8020 principle of the things that you need to know in order to make this work in in your business or to use it in your business so in short it's a summary of your business's Revenue costs and profits over any given period so we do it on a daily basis and then we roll it up and make a monthly one and the reason that this matters is that it shows your business's Financial Health and helps guide decisions that can increase profitability and we'll talk more about like what that means specifically the way we use it is by running it daily to track our revenues control our costs and ultimately optimize our profits and it gives us an idea of if we're at a good profit margin and if we're ready to scale or if there's things that we need to fix up and just like the stat spreadsheet this is in your tracker so stat spreadsheet tells you the performance but the p&l like your bottom line is like the true ultimate source of truth that is the number that we care by far the most about and the profit and loss statement is simply income minus expenses that's your net profit another term for this is eida earnings before interest taxes depreciation amortization basically it's the net amount that's left over after all your expenses so this does not includ include taking out for taxes cuz that's very dependent on like where you're located your LLC or business structure so but iida is the number from my experience that buyers go off of when they are considering an acquisition and an example of this super simple is if we had $1,000 in income $800 in expenses we would be left over with $200 in profit pretty straightforward and the biggest expenses involved in this business are number one are cost of goods sold that's normally our largest expense second is our ad spend third is transaction fees fourth is overhead and then you could have another category for refunds returns Etc so cost of goods is however much the total amount that we're paying to prfi so this includes shipping and product costs like the total amount at the end of the month and pry gives you an invoice that tells you what this total number is so all in how much do we pay to printify or printful or whoever you're using and also this doesn't even have to be be a print provider this could be you know depending on your business model but we're talking about print on demand so normally print if I or printful then ad spend this is how much we paid to Facebook ads Google and those should be pretty much the only ones and the split there it's normally like 99% Facebook and single digigit percentages of Google transaction fees that's how much we are paying to Shopify payments and PayPal every credit card processor doesn't matter the business or industry they all have transaction fees uh in order to cover their cost so these normally range all in from like 4 to 6% on the highest end because it's like on Shopify it's 2.9% depending on the plan you're on 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction PayPal is similar but there are higher fees Associated depending on the card that people are using their location and so normally if it's just us-based customers about 4% is a pretty safe bet but once you start selling internationally down the road it can go up a little bit so and then overhead this is all other expenses this is your Shopify plan any softwares you're using if you've hired any vas to help out in the business we'll go through a more specifics and then there's also returns and refunds we're going to show we're going to do an example walk through together and the normal ranges that we shoot for cost of goods 40 to 42% at spend 25 to 33% which that inverse of that is between a three to a four row as off Facebook row as the way you get that is just 4 * 25 that's 100% so then transaction fees 4 to 6% then overhead 3 to 4% and overhead is obviously like you pay your Shopify plan once a month and when we're calculating this on a daily basis it's pretty simple the way you add it up you just add up all your monthly expenses and then you divide by 30 and then you just take that daily amount and apply it every day on your p&l next we have our balance sheet and this is the one that we didn't run for even longer but or really start using it until later on and you should start using it right now just run the p&l and the balance sheet in tandem every day and what it is is it's a snapshot of your business's financial position showing assets liabilities and Equity fancy terms all it means is like how much money does the business have now why does this matter it helps you understand what your business owns owes and how much is invested and provides like really your financial stability like foundation and the way we use it is to monitor cash flow manage our debt like credit cards and ensure that our asset exceed liabilities AKA we're actually making money and you can use this to guide like long-term planning once we get into talking about like hiring designers and Outsourcing and all that sort of stuff knowing how much cash you have in the business is absolutely crucial to be able to answer the question of at what point can I start potentially hiring or making other Investments and good news we have templates for you these are all in the tracker we're going to go through this template in just a second so this is the p&l and this is the balance sheet and I know that this looks like a lot but it it really isn't a lot of those lines and we're going to go through this line by line together a lot of those lines are like it's just summarizing it's just adding stuff up the actual ones that we are plugging in we're really only putting in these numbers a important concept that it took us a while to learn is that the p&l and the balance sheet and the reason that we want to run them in tandem not just the p&l not just the balance sheet they both give like half of the picture p&l tells us how much we brought in or how much we think we brought in then the balance sheet tells us how much is currently in the business so when tying it out the balance sheet should roughly increase or decrease relative to the amount that was the net profit or loss on the p&l so to use an example say like we've run the balance sheet in the morning every day and say at the start of day one we had $100 left over in the business so that would look like say we had $200 in the bank account and we had $100 on credit cards assets minus liabilities gives us $100 net or to use different numbers so it's not 100 twice if we had $300 in the bank account $100 on the credit card that would be net of 200 so for sake of example if we have $100 on the balance sheet then if the p&l say so we ran it at snapshot and time we have $100 then at the end of day one on that day we did $200 in net profit so we started with 100 then the p&l is showing us that we added $200 in net profit the balance sheet should in a perfect work World add up to or it should show $300 the next day so I'll say that again if the balance sheet at Point on day one is $100 then we make $200 on day two it should say $300 and I know this is it seems like simple with these easy numbers but this concept is so so important because I can't tell you how many times hundreds of times that we've run the balance sheet and the p&l shows one thing like the p&l shows we made $1,000 yesterday but then the balance sheet only moved by $300 and so then with that kind of variance we need to figure out what happened or worse yet if there's a period where we made like $2,000 and somehow the balance sheet goes down that tells us we really have to look into things and I'll talk more about this in a second but the normal main causes for that are things like recurring transactions that we thought we had cancel but we didn't cost of goods might have crept up or we fulfilled maybe like shipped out a bunch of orders by accident like mismanagement into the pry or fulfillment is a common culprate misreporting something on the p&l maybe we fudged one of the numbers when we were typing it in by accident that happens as well or like a big transaction or like monthly bill hitting like for example clavio bills once a month at the size of our list now it's several hundred so it's very possible that when we run the p&l and then balance sheet if clavia build on that day it'll look like we possibly had a loss which is fine like it's expected we knew that expense was going to come but it's important that we know know the reason that that happened and a 20 because of all those things a 20 to 30% variance is normal but if it's 50 40 50% up then that's time to put on our investigative hat and go take a closer look now let's see how to run a balance sheet let's do it so to do this we're going to be going over into the wi scale tracker so I'm going to be doing it for yesterday so as of today is December 15th I haven't run the p&l yet for yesterday okay so that's what we're going to do so the numbers that we're going to be entering then for Shopify fees and PayPal fees the way you can get the exact numbers by waiting until the transaction like until the balance hits the account I'll show you what that means but I normally just put in a rough estimate here this is actually too low I normally do 3% and 3% and then we're doing going to enter our costs and then our overhead expenses then the good thing about this spreadsheet is that then it tells us it has formulas down here that points out the key metrics that we want to be tracking some of the key metrics like our overall row as our cost of goods sold and then our overhead is a percentage of Revenue so let's take a look so I like to just start going top to bottom so we're going to go get our Shopify gross sales right now it's like holiday season so we're having really strong sales yesterday we did $144,000 in sales a mistake that we used to make is that we would I would just enter the total sales amount here and it's kind of confusing how Shopify does this so just follow along make sure you do it exactly like this so that total sales number that you're seeing that's not gross sales gross is just that's just the product cost so that's like say if you sold 10 shirts at 29 like 30 bucks a piece that would be your gross sales for that day would be $300 so yeah there actually they they've gotten better at this they put in a formula they didn't used to have this so it's gross sales is your product cost so again 10 shirts 30 bucks a piece that' be $300 in gross sales then you would back out discounts so maybe those people Everyone say everyone use a 10% discount code then you would deduct that would be $30 in discounts say we didn't have any returns so now we're at 270 in total sales plus the shipping Revenue so there's and some people get confused with this there's shipping Revenue then there's shipping cost which shipping cost is in printify putting that aside this is the shipping Revenue so this is when people get to check out and they pay $49 5 or whatever you're charging you add in that so there's gross sales minus discounts minus returns plus shipping plus taxes and that's an important one if you're collecting sales tax on your store that's essentially a wash because that would be getting passed through to the state States and then duties fees so now let's take a look at at how to do this so that that was just the reason that we're not grabbing just the total sales number and see so the gross sales is actually much lower so it's 13668 so just going to copy that and paste it in then next Shopify shipping the shipping Revenue we collected was 1,100 bucks that's a pretty normal ratio then I'll do printify charge in a second while we're in Shopify I'm going to do discounts and you enter this in as a positive number because this gets deducted out as this cell is adding this one adds let me just get the last number how many returns zero perfect so total platform costs that's adding up these numbers then total cost of sales that's adding up these and then gross profit is that so your total gross sales minus these costs so our printify charge and I grab this right before filming this and if anybody is getting build on a daily b or for per transaction on printify go into your printify settings go to your wallet and it's they move it around sometimes but there's a setting that you're able to change and if you can't find it just ask printify support there's a setting you're able to change so that you get build on a daily basis rather than per order like it we used to just get hundreds and hundreds of daily transactions and print on our hitting our credit card and it was super annoying switch it to daily billing for example we do 11:30 p.m. it batches all the orders for that day and then we just get build once well in this case we had two different batches just because it's higher volume so we push through some of the orders halfway through the day but our total printy cost so this is including everything this is including our the product costs any taxes they charged us any shipping fees everything everything so these are the numbers that we want so if we take equals 4506 plus 11 so 5677 so there we go so our total costs we back out the thousand bucks in discounts there we go then we have our estimates for transaction fees now let's get our Facebook costs you can either get this obviously from your Facebook ad account I'm using triple wh right now which triple wh this is just a free dashboard tool that just pulls in all the data makes it easy because it has like Google ads clavio wow clavio did really well yesterday that's awesome all right so Facebook costs 4156 then Google barely anything awesome zero row as it's only 43 bucks then overhead expenses right now for our overhead it averages out to $133 per day so now let's take a look at what we have so you had $1,849 in total sales which again if you look at see if you can answer this for yourself why would our gross sales be higher than what our total sales are being shown as on Shopify give you a second to think about it and remember back to the formula that we have here hopefully you got it the reason is that we the total sales here is it's not accounting for discounts then the one thing that we actually missed on here which you won't have in the beginning until you're collecting sales tax which Meg did a separate lesson on that is there was about how much was there in sales tax 264 I'm just going to deduct that from here there we go okay total platform costs and in total we paid printify $ 5,677 we did $1,000 in discounts no refunds and this sell is just adding that up total cost of sales is adding up these two then gross profit is taking gross sales minus platform cost which again you can pretty much just take this template and just plug in the numbers and just look down here but I'm explaining this through so you have a conceptual understanding of like what's going on and this is also the template that we made when we were selling the business so took us a while to put this all together but Shopify fees and this is slightly probably slightly overestimated but I like to be safe rather than sorry and then our advertising cost spent 4,156 on Facebook ads Google 43 then our overhead costs 133 which again that's if you were to take that times 30 so we're paying about four grand a month right now and the way that I recommend doing this I would just make a separate tab for your like recurring transactions and like if you have vas and stuff I just and they're hourly I just put in like you know 160 number of working hours in the month times whatever their hourly rate is have that as a recurring like expense and then and you just take that you add up all of them so it be Shopify clavio any like AI tools you're using if you're working with designers and this number should be roughly we want it to be like 3 to 4% of Revenue Max so total operating expenses it's adding up all of those then our operating income is total amount hopefully you're seeing like it's it's working it it gives you like a breakdown at each step essentially and the reason we do that I know it seems redundant seem redundant to me as well but these are in here because these are the numbers that potential buyers are evaluating when they're looking at your business like one of the questions we got early on was so what's your gross profit I was like you mean net profit like no what's your gross I'm like I'll get back to you on that needless to say we did not end up getting an offer from that buyer so I learn lesson learned know the gross profit cold the reason that people want to know that is that shows like that's basically your your cost without advertising so it's like what's the cost to fulfill your products basically so when you add all these up and work out the total Math it comes out to $2,700 in net income for the day and our profit margin this is just if you take the total sales or take the net profit divided by the total sales minus out uh any discounts gives us 20% net profit for the day so our off Facebook row as which is our total sales minus discounts divided by our total ad spend then our cost of goods sold is our total printy costs divided by our total sales minus discounts and then our overhead is a percentage of Revenue right now it's super low it's 0.91% that's just because we're scaling up a bunch for through the holidays so that's our net profit for yesterday now this isn't counting like we made another 2% on our this isn't including any credit card bonuses that's just icing on the cake so for example we have the Spark 2% cash back so on top of this you would take all of our printify charges so another 5,000 600 so that would be like an extra 100 bucks 120 bucks it's close 113 bucks so yeah another 113 bucks on top of that plus we're using the AMX gold card for our ad spend which is 4X points so we made 16,000 credit card points which when you use it on flights comes out to about 160 bucks so so another 270 bucks in other bonuses but again that's not counted here this also is not remembering back to iida earnings before interest taxes so all that so it's not including like this will be a number that we have to pay taxes on so whatever your tax bracket is that's very uh subjective Next Step so what we used to do we used to just not do any of this and we would just like look at pretty much our total sales and this is what a lot of people do so don't make this mistake a lot of people just eyeball it and they look at their like Shopify they're like oh I made $144,000 yesterday and then I paid Facebook four grand and then I paid and also cost of goods here you can see is slightly underestimated so what a lot of people do they just eyeball and they go like total sales minus ad cost minus pry like finger in the wind it's not the way you want to do it you want to run this in depth and this taking a lot longer cuz we're explaining each piece but you can see just plug in the numbers and it you get a pretty holistic View and then the things that we want to monitor down here I'll complete that so we used to not do this at all then we started running this like monthly then we started running it weekly now we do it daily and then we started running it in tandem with the balance sheet which is the next one so we think yesterday we made $2,700 in net profit now we would see what does the p&l show or what does the balance sheet show so to find this what we we would do and is go into our credit card so if I go into like Capital One and AMX you can add another row if you have two credit cards you would add in okay our credit card balance say it was $1,000 for Facebook outstanding balance this was one that we didn't check for a while or didn't even think of but Facebook it bills at certain increments so like on our account and on most accounts it bills in $900 increments which means we could have up to $899 that we owe that we are not accounting for if we're just looking at the credit card so the way you find this is by going to your ad account and on the left hand side left hand side you go to finances then billing and then in there you'll see the the total balance same thing with Google go find the total balance so we'll put an example number say we ow 500 and then Google outstanding 100 then sales tax we keep a running log of this gets into a whole another can of worms so we're not going to cover on this video but sales tax we remit it it's differs by state but our bookkeeper remits it either monthly for some states quarterly for others and so as we're acre that sales tax amount it's building up in our bank account but we have to keep a reminder for ourselves that that's not our money we have to pay that out to to the states so we have to keep that in mind here so we'll just say we have 350 and then Affiliates so we use Goa Pro for our affiliate marketing as we as a Affiliates are generating Revenue we owe them and so that's another amount that we owe so 150 just use random numbers so this gives a holistic snapshot of everything that we currently owe now this is very subjective so this is up to everyone watching to know your business yourself know exactly where the places that you owe money and this is a good starting point this is a pretty complete view from from our experience but this is not be all and all this is not Financial advice legal advice not not advice at all but this is a good starting point but you need to know what's all the money that you currently owe another example would be say if you're working with a design agency and you have a monthly invoice and maybe you have an invoice you haven't paid that would be an extra item that you would add here because the goal is that you want to know everything laid down in one place what's all the money we owe then what's all the money that is owed to us and that we currently have so moving into accounts receivable so if our bank balance we'll say we had $1,000 in the bank account and then our Shopify balance the way you find the Shopify balance by going to finance and then you can see payouts up here so you can see right now we're owed $ 29,000 $56 this and I'll touch on this at the end but you also have to keep in mind that payments and stuff they don't settle immediately it takes like one to two business days and on the weekends and holidays it will delay it slightly so like running the p&l or balance sheet on like Saturday and Sunday it's a little bit tougher cuz things are in flux but if you and even Monday sometimes it hasn't settled yet so Tuesday is truly the the best most complete view because everything is settled from the weekend it's the most complete snapshot but if you do a good job of tracking like how much we owed by Shopify so that would be the number we would write in but obviously I'm not going to that would completely blow up the example so we'll just pretend like it's 1,500 that Shopify us and then our PayPal balance similar to to Shopify you go into PayPal and just see what the total amount is that's sitting there we set it up for auto withdrawals so it'll take it out I think it's on a daily basis you just want to double check make sure you don't have money lingering in there and then take all of that so you have $3,000 in total assets now keep in mind that this the actual money that you have like liquidable assets money that you have access to immediately that you can do whatever you want with is only 1,000 bucks so there's big difference between accounts receivable total and liquidity so like if you were to have a random expense pop up you wouldn't have $3,000 that you could use to pay for that you would only have a th000 so just a Nuance to keep in mind and then down here you just take receivables minus payables 3,000 minus 21100 it's $900 and you can call us different things you could just call us assets liabilities bunch of different ways to refer to it all you need to know is like what we owe what we are owed or already have then that gives us $900 so so say we ran this pretend like this was for yesterday and then we ran this again today so say we ran this like the timing will throw it off slightly like for example if you run the p&l if you run the balance sheet like midday your Shopify pay payouts amount will already have gone up say you're on track to do two grand that day and by noon you've already done a th000 bucks that Shopify payouts will reflect that $ thousand but your costs up here for like printify like printify isn't on here because it gets charged daily so that amount has not hit your credit card yet so that's like another that like the time and day that you're running it is important to keep in mind as well as the day of the week but so say we ran this at the beginning of the day yesterday easy number say we ran this at 12:01 a.m. and this was the amount then we ran went the entire day and generated $114,000 in sales paid Facebook this amount all of these net net amount all said and done for yesterday we made $2,700 2738 so in a perfect world the balance sheet this next day should be this plus this so it should be 3,638 it will NE it will almost never be that exact amount but again all that we're looking for is a 20 to 30 30 like 10 to 20% variance so if we do 20% up there's 20% down so to show 20% variance equals that times 1.2 and you don't need to actually do this calculation I'm just showing this as a demonstrated point8 so while it in a perfect world it would go up by exactly that amount a realistic or a possible outcome would be 900 then equals that plus that equals that if I saw anything in this range I would be okay with it because there's a lot of very reasonable explanations for that so like we talked about earlier different Char if it was up 20% it could be maybe we missed like one of the accounts receivable maybe there was a Shopify payment that we missed that kind of thing oh maybe we had uh something that can happen a lot with the cost of goods with in terms of like cost of goods which I said is like one of the most common reasons for the variance is say we had 100 orders and then yesterday and we received the income from them but maybe five to 10 of the orders we'll just say 10 had an issue with it or it was out of stock say those orders would then go into like needs attention or needs review in PR ify so we wouldn't get charged for those so basically we we we would end up paying less in cost of goods than what we actually owe so that would be a potential reason that it would go up by more than the p&l is is showing then on the flip side 20% down a lot of reasons for that like for example again those 10 orders they have to get fulfilled at some point so it's possible that the next day or the day after whenever we we reach out to the customers and we try to fulfill the orders those orders then are that expense is then realized that a ler date so but that would not be reflected in the p&l so point being it stuff goes up and down by 10 to 20% if it goes beyond that if it's like 40 50 60 plus perc then you really want to dive in and first when I say dive in what I mean is first go through each of these numbers and make sure that they're 100% accurate with a fine- tooth comb and then if nothing stands out then I look back because normally the the variance in my experience comes from things like kind of pil up over time like little things like printify orders or maybe transaction fees maybe we we started doing a lot of international orders without realizing it and then our PayPal transaction fees went up a bunch or maybe uh we again with International orders increased maybe we were accidentally fulfilling some of those from a us-based print provider so our cost of goods went up a lot so those are all good things to keep in mind and places to investigate when when stuff happens so all said and done this is one of the I I know that that probably sounded like a lot especially if you're not somebody like me who has any kind of accounting or bookkeeping experience or at least I didn't before this but you really get the hang of it pretty quickly it's just a matter just like with a lot of things in this business it's just doing it consistently doing the important repetitive tasks on a daily basis and just committing to doing that and if you do this I can almost gu this will be one of the only guarantees that I'll ever make if you run your p&l daily you will almost guaranteed make more money than if you don't because that has been every time that I've not run this run the p&l run the balance sheet uh it always adds up to being a bad situation so and I think the reason that people avoid doing it is and or the reason that I avoided doing it for a long time is that I didn't want to I didn't want to see what it had to say and I didn't want to see like you know we had made less money than I actually thought and that's just not a good reason to not do it it's actually the worst reason because if you have that sinking suspicion that it's going to tell you something you don't want to hear that means that you really need to hear it and you need to get out in front of it and fix that otherwise it's it's I was going to say it's it'll fix you but it'll do the opposite of that so and also within we scale University whenever I'm reviewing somebody's store or looking at their metrics and somebody feels like uh you know they're not making more money than they're not making as much money as they thought they should be the literally the first question I ask people every time is well what does your p&l say have you been running it daily and almost every time I hear some version of well yeah I know you said to run it but you know I I just XYZ what and my brain just shuts off as soon as I hear that like whatever comes after the but just irrelevant the only thing that matters is we haven't done it now do it that's it you can kick and scream and not do it if you don't want to and I feel for everybody who has that that urge cuz I know the uh the pain that there's setting themselves up for but this is especially as you get to the point of selling a business when we went to sell the business like I said we didn't even know what our gross profit was we didn't know that it needed to be broken down on like a monthly basis it it was a huge nightmare going back so we had to do years and years of this process on a monthly basis and it took us from start to finish working 60 70 hours a week on it it took us a full month to get all of our financials in order in order to be able to sell the business had we been doing this all along taking 5 minutes a day Not only would it have made the business way more profitable and ultimately led to a higher valuation well we would have higher valuation plus it would have taken it took us a month full-time effort it would have taken us maybe two days max if we're like really trying to cross our te's DOT our eyes so moral of the story just run the p&l run it every day run the balance sheet and feel free to ask any questions if you have them and happy to take a look at these so thanks for watching in and I'll see you in the next lesson all righty guys so welcome to mockup test campaign so this is stage 4.1 of the course and at this point we're going to go over where you should be at and the importance of running a mockup test and and everything that's involved with it so at this point you're at stage four which is the the testing phase and at this point you should already have a complete Shopify store and Facebook accounts set up you should also have around 15 to 20 mockups that are uh created and ready to test based off of the prior course of preparing to this point and you should have at least 100 designs at this point and we say more the merrier with with designs at this point but 100 has been kind of the threshold that we've identified is is enough to go in to make sure that when you're going to test on Facebook that you're actually identifying and giving yourself the best chance of finding a winner so we're going to go into why this is all important and how to how to actually structure the mockup test through these next slides by the end of this lesson you should successfully launch your first lowbudget Facebook ad campaign now this is for first of all just to warm up your account and there's many benefits to this that we've talked about throughout the course but when you first launch on especially on a new ad account it's extremely important to um to go through the initial launch and spending money on that ad account because there's there's many reasons to do this one is just to get you Fami familiar with meta ads and getting comfortable with with spending money on there and making sure you have your ads plat platform set up correctly and you kind of know what's going on in there when you turn on your ads it's really important to see when like you're getting charged money to have like a an understanding of of where that money is going and making sure you're actually analyzing the data correctly also it's it's important for warming up your ad account and also when you first especially with a new ad account Facebook sometimes throws you through review processes such as sometimes you spend like five 10 maybe some some cases $20 they'll put a hold on your account and you'll just submit like an ID verification so using this mockup campaign as kind of like a a warming account I mean a warming campaign as well is really important for bypassing those uh those verification processes so like when you are fully comfortable with understanding how meta ads manager works and understanding the data that's coming in you won't have any roadblocks that's going to delay you from actually testing your design so there's many reasons why mockup tests are important but this is kind of just like a side benefit of that as well also understanding how and why we run a mockup test which we'll get into and understanding how to interpret the data to select your winning mockup and this is going to actually establish the foundation of how you look at metrics not just for mockup tests but for when you go to actually talk like test these designs that you have on your store it's going to set the foundation of of what metrics to look at for identifying winners or identifying maybe mockups and designs that aren't performing well and how you even know that these aren't like the winners or they are the winners and it's just such an important foundation to have in the beginning because that's what's going to make or break your Facebook ad account is by looking at what you're spending on Facebook and analyzing the data and make sure you're optimizing it accordingly so why does it matter it helps you interpret and understand the ads data so like what we just went over it sets the foundation of how you're going to look at meta ads especially if you're a very like if you're a beginner it's a perfect opportunity for you to sit down look at your ads manager platform and really dive into the metrics and be like okay like what is a cost per click why is it important why is it important that Facebook's spending more on this ad vers another why is it why is rowad so important why is that the the king metric so we'll go into all of that and understanding all of this is like imperative to not only testing your designs out but being able to scale to a successful Point within a print on demand business the reason why we stress that having a mockup test done first before you go to actually testing your designs on your store is because it can save you a lot of money and it can save you a lot of time so what we mean by that is the mockup is essentially the foundation of what you're testing all your designs on so every single ad is going to have this mockup so you could see that's important you need to make sure that mockups appealing and most importantly it's generating data that you can actually work with and when we talk about that we'll we'll get into it in a second here but we're trying to find a mockup that can generate under a dollar cost per clicks because if you say for example you have a really good design that actually could sell really well but you put it on a crappy mockup where it's on like I don't know just it's just not presenting the right way you can actually stop yourself from from actually selling that design because you don't have a mockup on it that's actually going to present it the right way so let's say you you make all these designs you have 100 200 300 designs and you don't have a good mockup so you're testing and you're spending money you're like $1,000 doll into testing and you haven't even established a mockup that can generate sub dooll cost per clicks you're wasting money and you're wasting time because at some point you're going to have to run a mockup test that can get you those sub dooll cost per clicks and you're going to have to go spend more money testing that and once you do find that winner you're going to have to go back into your Shopify catalog and swap out all the mockups for all those designs which takes so much time so doing this first is imperative not only for actually saving money but also saving time so first of all what is a mockup test it's a structured approach to compare different mockup styles so we'll get into those different styles but what we recommend based off of our experience and based off of what I've seen with my stores with Chris has seen with his stores and what I've seen with my client stores as well is that these flatlay mockups perform the best and when I say flatlay mockup we talk about a t-shirt that looks like it's appearing that it's laying on a flat surface the picture looks like it's from a bird's eye view of the where it looks like it's laying down the T-shirt has wrinkles in it the Shadows are realistic the elements look like they're actually there not photoshopped all these things we're going to dive into and why they're important but the the whole goal here is like we're taking all these different mockup variations that you've created uh before in the previous stages and we're putting them into a Facebook campaign and we're spending we're going to go into I I recommend we recommend $25 Max for a test and the goal is to you're just spending money across all these different mockups that you created and you're letting Facebook identify what is the mockup that's going to resonate with your specific audience and the way we do that is look at the metrics and we'll get into that as well it's also to gather feedback and data determine what what works best for your market so that's kind of the same concept of like you know if you if you run like a a City store for example and and I've talked about Citys in in throughout this course as well and we'll get into an example of that where you don't want to put it on like a random like flower like Garden mockup where there's flowers and stuff like you're you're doing a city specific store where you want to be tailoring the mockup towards that audience so we'll get into that in a little bit of what that looks like and why that's important so why run a mockup test first of all validate which mockup Styles resonates best with your audience so that's the whole concept of we have all of these different mockup styles we're testing them through a campaign and we're identifying what are the elements what are the background what what is the style of the actual t-shirt the way it's laying down what is the combination that's going to allow us to establish a mockup that's going to look good on not only because we're running these as your as your ads on the on the top of the funnel for Facebook ads but when people go to your store on your Shopify store it's also going to be the product image that appears so it's extremely important to establish that this is this something that this mockup style resonates with your audience and the way we do that as what I was talking about before is the main metric we're going to be looking at in the beginning when we first launch these is is cost per click and specifically if we can find a mockup that is generating a sub doll cost per click it's essential that we do that because it it actually allows us to test our designs efficiently which we'll get into further in this in this course as well also what we talked about before this also is a way to warm up your ad account and get used to meta ads manager get used to clicking around and getting just getting a feel for the the UI as well because it's for someone who hasn't been in there before it can be overwhelming and this is a perfect example because you're only spending $25 on a test that's what we recommend it's not like you're spending $50 $100 at a time right off the bat and you don't really know what's going on on it's it's an opportunity to to learn how to manage your money and what to actually look at so yeah so the benefits of running a mockup test too is first of all this is why we like we keep on talking about there's a reason we talk about um establishing a subd dooll cost per click finding a mockup that can bring in a cheap CPC is essential for testing designs and what I mean by that is the same concept we talked about earlier right if we have a winning design a winning design is a what we talk about is like a design that could actually generate purchases but you have it on a mockup that's generating two three four cost per clicks first of all there's a chance that people won't even like it because the way it's appearing is not resonating with them so they don't even they can't even picture themselves wearing it therefore it won't generate a purchase but also expense wise you're not going to be able to turn a profit with a two three $4 cost per click because you're going to be paying double the recommended sub dollar cost per click and the formula of actually generating a profitable ad isn't sustainable with cost per clicks that high so it's an imperative that we've identify that mockup that can generate those sub dooll cost per for clicks also we talked about before that this is the ad that we're running on Facebook right so this is what people are seeing for the first time they're seeing your product and and you're displaying it to them so it's it's establishing that cost per click which is going to get people into the door for a cheap but then it's also going to establish when they reach the store that same mockup is going to be the product image that appears on the Shopify store so therefore there's a direct correlation on the the cheaper the cost per click is also the higher the conversion rate when people actually get to your Shopify store so it's it's so important because these are your product images they're not only your ads they're also your product images another benefit of running a mockup test is what we talked about before the the cost efficiency you don't want to be avoiding I mean you don't you want to avoid wasting money on poor performing mockups where if you never ran this mockup test in the beginning and you just kind of ran with this mockup that's generating two three $4 cost per clicks you're spending double triple quadruple the amount that you could have if you went ahead and actually ran these mockup tests and established a foundation where you're generating $1 cost per click so you're saving money then the other thing we talked about is saving your time because when you establish a good performing mockup first it saves you from that problem that we talked about before without doing that you will have to go back at some point and run a mockup test identify a mockup that can get you a sub dooll cost per click and once you do that you could be a thousand designs into your store at this point and you have to go back and manually change all of those products with all those SKS that will take so much time and it's just so much like it's it's so worth doing this first before you start testing your designs and we can't enforce that anymore like it is so clear this is the right way we do it we've had success with our own stores with client stores like this is the way to do it for all the reasons we're talking about it so the steps to run up a mock run a mockup test and we'll go into a screen share where I actually go into building this campaign out and showing you step by step but just on a on a kind of a zooming out level here you can generate mockups in a number of different ways you can use Mystic pod which uh we've gone we've gone over in this course as well to create different mockup styles for the same product also something to like keep in mind when when doing that you want to ensure that your each mockup presents a different kind of style towards it because we're testing different concepts right we could be testing a wood background versus a brick background versus you know a grass background like we're trying to test different things that relate to our sub Niche so you can use Mystic pod to do this you can also buy these um these mockup packs on Etsy if you have a graphic design team um you can use them as well but um I know Mystic is probably the best way to do it for your guys' stage and and yeah we've already gone over how to do that so setting up a testing platform which is for for how we're running our mockup test we're using meta ads right we're going in creating a campaign which I'm going to go into in a little bit here but this is also a chance to talk about a concept that gets confused a little bit and using this campaign objective which we'll go into as well from people use PPE which is essentially optimizing for engagement so people that are likely to like your post to comment on your post to share your post versus using this campaign with a conversions objective and why we recommend now coming from from the 21 hour course to the 22-hour course is using conversion data as as soon as you can like you can use PPE if you want to like kind of warm up before this process but the concept here is PPE is a completely different kind of audience compared to conversion audience so PP are people that are likely to what were were saying like like and comment and share but never actually purchase and when you're running tests that are towards an audience that are just likely to engage and just like but not actually buy you're getting false data because you're getting data from a pool of people that are actually not who you're going to be advertising to so what we recommend is when setting up this campaign is use conversion purchase objectives because those are the people that we're actually going to be advertising to so the metrics that we're getting back and the feedback we're getting back from that data is the the actual data we're going to be using because that's the pool of people that we're going to be running these ads to the central part we've already talked about a couple times here is defining the metrics that we're going to be looking at in the beginning before we have any purchases coming in through the door the main metrics that we're going to be looking at is amount spent cost per click click-through rate also known as CTR and clicks and there are some cases where we see someone launch a a uh mockup test for the first time and they actually get purchases now purchases Trump all cost metric so let's say for example there's there's a mockup that gets you know $25 spent all of it gets spent on it really cheap cost per clicks let's say it's it's 50 Cent cost per clicks but then there's a mockup that also gets like two to three purchases at a at a high row as like to me like our whole goal here with this entire store that we're setting up like we're trying to generate purchases at a profitable row as so if you do get purchases during this mockup test that's an extremely valuable metric to to consider and actually trumps the uh cost metrics that we have here once we're U once we identify the metrics we're we're going to run the test so we're going to launch the mockup test campaign we're actually going to turn it live and what we recommend is we you you should only spend a total of $25 for each test and the reason we say this is because we've had people in the past I've had clients in the past I've had students in the past that actually they spend way too much they spend hundreds of dollars on this mockup test without truly understanding the data and they're kind of on this hamster wheel of spending money when that's when they don't need to spend that much $25 is more than enough to actually test if you have a winning mockup or not and we'll keep on enforcing that throughout this course and then once we run the test during that for that $25 to spent you can do $25 in one day you can split out this test in two days and spell and spend $12 a 50 cents each day kind of depends we'll talk about the subjective nature of how to how to create these campaigns there's no concrete exact way to run these right there's there's kind of preferences on like how your mind works so if structuring it in two different two different days to see the trends of data works better in your mind and that's something you like to do go ahead and do it we just enforce that you don't have to spend over $25 for one cycle of testing these mockups once you actually run the test you spend that $25 how do we identify the top performing mockup style we pick the winner if if there's a winner that has you know a decent amount of spend allocated towards it which we'll get into the actual data here in a second and they're under a dollar cost per clicks that's a winner but if you don't have any mockups that's generating that do that sub dollar cost per click we have to run that cycle again until we get that desired under a dollar cost per click and the reason that we say that is because the same reason we're running this mockup test in the beginning right we have to find that mockup that's under a dollar cost per click or we're not going to be setting oursel up with the foundation of success to actually test these designs effectively once we take that winner so we have that mockup that's actually generating that sub dooll cost per click we're taking that winner and we're implementing that mockup across all the products in your Shopify store so that's that's what you're going to do when you actually find the winner that's like going to be the next and final step of implementing that winning mockup to your store then you have you know the ad that's going to be having a foundation of generating those sub dooll cost for clicks and you're going to be applying that across your entire Shopify store to increase conversion rate and it just Brands your store well there there's many benefits of of doing this but that's going to be kind of your final step once you actually finally find that winner winning mockup this is an example of a of a mockup that actually I created in a past tour it's called City te's apparel you guys can look that up and I'm sure um you've seen some other uh data and some examples that I talk about City T's so let's look at this mockup here right so there's uh the T-shirt has realistic wrinkles and shadows as you can see where it looks like it's actually laying on the surface of the brick there's also a darker background so the design Pops from the actual mockup and the the Brick is related to this was a city store as you can see here it's a Chicago design so this whole this whole store was around creating um designs that are based off of specific cities so that brick background is tailored towards the niche right like it looks like it's like a on a city block on a city brick wall and that's kind of the um the concept that we went with just to make sure like it's actually tailored towards the audience that we're going after and it looks realistic right like these these um shoes in the corner and the jeans in the corner they look like they're actually there they don't look like they were photoshopped or they were just kind of plopped on top and this adds we've seen this consistently like the more realistic you can make your mockup appear the better it's going to perform so that's that's the goal here that we have laid out make the mockup look like it is a real picture someone took that should be your mindset when going into creating these mockups and testing them so the best practices for testing mockups is test one variable at a time so focus on a mockup style first then test other variables like background or design placement so for example like let's say you have five different mockups and you just want to test the background so the t-shirt is going to appear the same way the design on the t-shirt's going to be the same the elements on the T-shirt are also going to be the same the only thing you're you're changing is the background and the reason you do that is because you can isolate the variable that you're testing so instead of testing the elements and the T-shirt style and the backgrounds all in the same test and you don't really know like what is actually influencing the metrics that you're looking at you need to isolate to one actual variable so you can be like okay this background is definitely better than this one because that's the only thing that's different from that mockup versus the other one using Advantage Plus targeting we'll go into this while I actually walk through creating this campaign so Advantage Plus targeting we've gone over this before but we can talk about it again essentially it's just open targeting and we simply the reason we're saying this is because we get the best results using this targeting we can get into the details of that but that's for another another part of this course but simply use Advantage Plus targeting when running these mockup tests just because we have experience and data that supports that this is the best way to test this is the best targeting method to use another thing to reiterate obviously there's there's a reason we keep on saying this use realistic elements so a realistic t-shirt a realistic background and realistic like elements that's that are in your Niche is a imperative to generating an actual successful mockup another best practice is repeating your test so if you don't get that desired $1 cost per click we don't want you to be like okay like I tested it whatever like I'm just going to move on with this like $2 cost per click we really encourage you to keep on running these $25 tests and use the data that you're getting like even though you're not getting that desired sub dooll cost per click if you have like if your best mockup was a $2 cost per click and compared to your other ones that got four five $6 cost per click you still have data to use there right like that $2 cost per click was better than all the other ones so the next round you want to use okay this this $2 cost per click was my my best mockup that I had so I'm going to make variations based off of this one and move from there that that way you know that even though you didn't reach that desired sub dollar cost per click you're still making progress you're still analyzing the data and you're optimizing around it which is the entire Foundation of which makes these pod meta ad accounts successful is you're spending money on Facebook you're getting the feedback from the data and then you're making decisions based off that data and that's the foundation that's the that's the whole principle of what we're doing here and establishing with these mockup tests then you got to manage your budget and now this is something we talked about there is no reason you should spend over $25 for these for these Cycles I've seen people that are spending thousands of dollars and they don't know what they're doing and there's there's no really reason for it because you can get the same effective data with $25 worth worth of spend versus 50 versus 100 so I we really encourage you to stick with $25 for each of these cycle tests and taking your time with things if you don't know what's going on you still don't have a good foundation and understanding of of why you're running these ads or what metrics look at pause your ads and think about it look at the resources we have given you and then go back to it but never spend over $25 with each test all right just like that I'm in a different shirt and I'm going to walk through actually creating this uh this mockup test campaign from from scratch here so you guys can can walk through what I what I do when I approach creating these campaigns and how I structure things and another thing that I want to make clear is like this isn't the only way to do things this is the way that I prefer and what I recommend especially if you're a beginner and you've never done this before for so I'm just going to give you like how I do things and and you can change them any way you like but this is the general structure that I recommend absolutely it keeps things simple so to create a mockup test what you're going to do here is create a campaign from scratch so you're going to hit this green button plus the plus uh create up there and we're going to do sales so we're always doing sales campaign objectives and the reason we've talked about this before there's there's PPE there's there's uh traffic there's awareness but the traffic that we're going after here is sales and the reason we're doing sales because this is the actual audience that we're going after when we actually generate purchases and try to actually scale our business so this is the audience that we want to be running all test on because these are the people that matter so click sales here then hit continue and uh now this is this is a concept that we've talked about before but there's Advantage Plus shopping Campaign which Facebook is clearly pushing here it's at the top it's got all these like you know features and and it just looks appealing it looks like you want to click on it so they they really pushed doing this and um you know for Simplicity sake we can just do this too so what this does the only is when you click this it takes the adset level out of creating a campaign and a manual sales campaign it leaves the adset in here and regardless the way I like to run these mockup tests and actually most of my campaigns in general I only run one adet so it actually isn't going to make a difference if I do either of these and we'll walk into that concept later on the course too but for Simplicity sake if I were you I would do the Advantage Plus shopping campaign and hit continue now the first thing I do is just label this we'll do mockup test one what we're gonna do here you don't have to do anything with the categories here this has nothing to do with what we're doing here now I recommend for mockup test just to do website and we'll go into website and Shop in the future but for now um we're just recommending doing website just keeps things simple and what shop does it allows users to actually get sent to a Facebook and Instagram hosted checkout rather than going directly to your website and you know we're we're just testing the mockups here on the Facebook level we're not like actually trying to generate any purchases right now so I recommend just sticking with website here and we're always going to be keeping these performance goals the same so it's always going to be a maximized uh number of conversions make sure you have the the correct uh pixel selected here which we do and this is very important too make sure the conversion event is purchase and you may get these errors here your ad may not be optimized for conversions because we haven't received any activity from the conversions you selected now this is going to be a default thing that you're going to see especially with any new ad account because you're not going to have any data right so like this is going to be a default warning don't be don't be afraid of this this is nothing to be concerned about this is completely fine and um just keep on scrolling down here and what we're going to do is because we already have Advantage Plus shopping here this is going to be default to using Advantage Plus targeting and uh this is already look we can do some suggestions here down in suggested ads but I don't recommend doing anything I would just leave it all the same here and now remember we're doing the the schedule of doing Thursday to Sunday so you can you can actually control the scheduling down here but now as I discussed before in when creating a mockup test that you just want to spend a Max maximum of $25 what I like to do personally is spend that $25 in one day I like just to get it done get it over with so I can get the data and actually make some decisions based off of it as soon as I can but I know some people have different preferences some people like like to do this over two days so they'll do like 1250 a day and the reason people like to do that is because like they like to space it out between two days so they can see a trend so if the first day has higher cost per clicks but the second one they see it coming down they can see that like there's a little bit of a trend and it's trending in the right direction now that's just a personal preference and that's an example of of a lot of these situations that are going to come up that's depending on like who you are and how you work so I like to do things quick I like to do it and I like to get through these mockup test Cycles quickly but if you like to take it slower then that's that's up to you so I'm going to do $25 a day here I'm not touching anything with the with the scheduling it all and I'm just scrolling down and I'm hitting next so going to the very top here let's run let's make this mockup one so this is the ad level right so we talked about when using the Advantage Plus shopping campaign there's usually in in a normal campaign before that these were created there was the campaign and then there's an ad set which you're not seeing here and then there's the ads so we're on the ads level and this Advantage Plus shopping campaign takes out that ad set level just a a reminder and I'll I'll show an example of what it will look like with a manual campaign as well we're going we're going to label this mockup one seasonal Collections and uh Advantage Plus catalog ads so we're not doing C catalog ads for this this is going to be when we're doing mockups we're doing manual uploads and that's always going to be the case we're never using catalog ads for for when we're doing Mal up tests and we're going to text uh we're going to select format here and we're going to do single image or video and we're going to do setup creative here so this has actually changed within the last like month or so usually there was just like a a a media section here where you can just manually upload just the image but now they created this like kind of more of a a buildout feature for creating the actual ad so I ignore all of this just because I'm used to doing what I've in the past and that's just using just skipping to the media then going back and adding these um these other source URL and um and primary text as you'll see in the next uh slide here I do that afterwards and I'll show you how I do it so I just skipped over this the only reason I'm here right now is to upload the actual image we're trying to test so as you can see I already uploaded my mockups here I'm just going to use 10 for example this is kind of like how like the number that I like to use that I like to test especially with a $25 budget but another example like you can test more you can test less it kind of depends on like your strategy and what you're comfortable doing so I'm taking this first image here heading next uh enable flexible media deliver medios yes so I always have this enabled on original on all of them next AI generation I skip and continue like I said I I want to skip through all of this stuff um and also here are some things that are new so I like to take I like to turn off all these optimizations so I'm going to select them all so they're all on and then I'm going to select them off so now they're all off I don't like to screw around with any of this like the any of this is like kind of just like other variables that we're not testing right now like keep in mind the only thing we're testing right now are the mockups so it's the background and how the teacher it's appearing on the actual uh ad here as we're seeing so I like to turn everything off that's creating more variables variables for us that's why I turn all those off then I'll hit done and we'll see that it's the image is appearing here and this this primary text the headline all of these things were the things that we were seeing when we were we hit uh the original media formats but I skipped over and this is how it used to be and this is this is how I like prefer to do it because I'm just used to it so that's the reason I skipped but if you like the features that you saw before that I skipped over by all means you go ahead and try and do it that way it's going to be the same outcome this is just like the way that I I'm just used to doing it so that's the way the way I'm that's the reason why I'm doing it this way so now we can go back in and edit our primary text I already have this ready to go and this text can be anything what I like to do is like I pretend like I'll have my ad copy ready and we're going to cover this in in a different video as well but this is I just like to have I use the same ad copy the primary text as I would in my normal like purchase campaign so we want to keep like everything constant like we're actually trying to advertise and we're fully going into trying to generate purchases here so this is what I recommend and we'll get into ad copy in a different part of this course as well um you may have already learned about it by now but we'll go over this too but this ad copy should be the same as a normal Facebook campaign that you're actually trying to generate purchases for now what we're going to do too is grab this URL we're going to scroll down and we're going to go to the call to action and we always do shop now that this is proven amongst all of our different stores we've had countless examples of testing this call to action button and shop now is the number one performer so I wouldn't even think twice about this shop now is the answer go back up to the headline here now the headline can be a number of different things I'm going to paste in this headline here that I already had prepared like I said the same kind of concept of the primary text we're going to have this prepared on a separate separate module here going over like how like how we came to like creating this this primary text why we've done it same kind of concept it's like it's just we've tested so many in the past with our own stores with client stores and that's how we came up with this primary text but we'll get into that like I said on another video same thing with the headline I think we're good to go here so the shop now is selected right and then the destination this is the last one we have to do so as you can see we already have the URL in the copy so what I do is just what you saw before is go up and grab let's just make sure we have it again we're going to grab the URL copy it bring it down the website URL paste it and we're good to go here so we're going to do browser add-ons none don't worry about any a lot of what this platform is is like it's very overwhelming especially if you don't have you you've never been here before a lot of these features that you're seeing from the browser add-ons the display link event details languages tracking I mean it's tracking you want this to be set up correctly you want to see this your pixel firing which is good but URL parameters view tags app events like we don't need to do any of this and there may be times in in a like in a more in-depth course that we'll run we'll get into URL parameters and what they mean and why we need them but for the purpose of making a mockup test and even launching our test campaigns that we'll get into into further down the road here we don't need to do any of these so don't overthink them just copy What I've Done exactly everything that I showed you how to do is is the essentials and nothing more so what we're going to do and this is the fun part I love when I'm here was where you created kind of the template right so we had the primary text we have the collect the correct uh call to action button here we have the uh the headline and it's directing to the right place so we're going to hit publish here now this is this is why I'm going to say I love this we're in the correct campaign we have that selected um I'm going to go back out of here make sure it's the right one mockup test campaign one is the one we just created now it's going to be just one ad set like I said before they automatically create one for you and it's going to be this ad that we just created in here so the thumbnail takes a little bit to to populate but I'm going to go back into to selected the right campaign sorry I'm having a little technical difficulties here this is also that's a good example of what Facebook does you have to click around a lot sometimes it just like won't work exactly the way you want it sometimes and that's one example of many you're going to have a lot of examples where Facebook's kind of glitching out on you and you just have to keep on doing the off on method where you have to like just go back maybe refresh it so that's a good example of that happening in livetime there and we're going to create we're going to select the uh this campaign here the mockup test one we're going to go the adset level make make sure that this that this ad set's checked off go to the ads and this is the ad we just created right so once we created the skeleton right it's it's it's awesome I love this part we already have everything set up so all we have to do when we're testing all the other mockups so we have 10 others total right you go to the ad level you make sure you have this selected and you hit duplicate so here what you're going to have to do is make sure you clicked existing campaign when you hit duplicate the mockup test one campaign this is the mockup test ad set as well and we hit duplicate so we're just going to make sure it's the same campaign that we just were working on and we're trying to build more ads in here so we're going to hit duplicate here and we're going to rename it so this is the this is the first thing you're going to do is rename it to mockup 2 or whatever you pref prefer to like organize things for yourself doesn't have to be exactly that we're going to go down to the media here hit the trash can because we're deleting this image we're going to go to add media and what we're going to do is Skip through this like I said before and we're going to select the second image here let mockup two hit next Skip and continue done boom so the ad copy still there the call to action still there the headline still there the destination URL is still there too from we originally set up that first one so we can rapid fire through these so this is once you start kind of getting some momentum in Facebook ads and you realize like okay I set the template up now all I'm doing is just swapping one element and for this situation we're just we're swapping out the image so we'll hit publish here so mockup 2 is created same thing we're going to do is go into the make sure we have the right campaign selected which we do then the ad set make sure we have that ad set selected as well now we're in mockup 2 we're going to duplicate this and rinse and repeat so I'm going to do this with you guys make sure you have existing campaign selected existing ad says to correct one hit duplicate and we're going to see that it's within the right campaign we want it where it's at here and we're going to relabel this to three you guys are kind of catching on now right this is how it goes then we're going to hit the delete then we're all we're doing right is swapping out we're changing the name and swapping out the image now don't don't do anything in here we're just swapping out the image it's all we're doing so we swapped out the image next Skip and continue blah blah blah not looking at anything all optimizations are turned off and we are good okay so shop now is good to go the change to mockup 3 is there publish great so bear with me here we're going to go through all these we're going to do 10 of them so same thing make sure the campaign the adset selected duplicate boom existing campaign duplicate boom now what we're going to do is change it what we're doing change the name change the image change the name change the image now I'm doing 10 you guys can do five you can do 15 you can do whatever you want but for me I'm doing 10 that's what I always do and boom not even looking at this I'm just looking going straight to Media selecting the the fourth one here and hitting next next not looking at anything blah blah blah Skip and continue done now these add optimizations look like they're turned on but they're not um okay mockup four boom publish and we're firing we're going through it this is when you can start kind of like putting some music on if you want if that's the way you work and like you know what you're doing now right you're duplicating it out you're doing existing campaign you're hitting duplicate all right now we're switching the name changing the image that's all we're doing switching the name and we're changing the image all right I might have accidentally clicked something there now we're good so we were on four now this is the fifth one here as I can see the top left so I'm going to count when I get to the media one two three four five click the image boom next boom la la la not looking at anything Skip and continue done and mockup five publish all right so we got five just like that we're firing through this now you'll see this is a kind of a recurrent theme with meta ads where you have that original set up you originally set up your campaign for the first time and then when you're building out ads especially when you're not using catalog and you're doing static ads like we are here there's going to be this process of like you're just duplicating and swapping duplicating and swapping and it makes things go a lot faster and it's to be honest it's pretty fun so same thing we're going duplicate make sure you're doing existing campaign existing adset duplicate boom changing five to six keeping that in mind when we go back to the media and swap that out that we're doing six Here track flash can add media add image skipping just going right to Media going one 2 3 4 five six six image here boom next next Skip and continue not looking at anything blah blah blah done done and uh New Image there clearly mockup 6 publish changing the name swapping the image same thing same thing guys you know the drill by now mockup 6 we're duplicating it existing campaign duplicate changing mockup six to mockup seven scrolling down going downtown hitting the trash can adding image boom skipping to Media because what we're doing we're changing the name changing the image that's all we're worrying about so now we're at seven here so I kind of forgot it's up there one two three four five six seven selecting number seven here lucky number seven maybe this will be the winner we don't know we will find out we're skipping going done and now we're at M op 7 New Image boom publish now we're getting close to 10 bear with me here we could probably fast forward this a little bit but uh this is this is you're getting the gist but this is good to know like this is kind of like how the routine goes you kind of get like a little bit of a a Cadence going down duplicate existing campaign now what are we doing changing the name changing the image that's all we're doing here changing the name to mockup eight not 78 okay that' be crazy and then deleting changing the image right changing the name changing the image so we're going to eight we're skipping we don't care about anything other than media here and we're going one two three four five six seven eight so we got eight here just like that we're already at eight Skip and continue we don't care about nothing going to done change the name change the image now we're going to nine publish it boom that was a quick one that might have been the quickest one yet you guys with me here it's pretty simple once you get the foundation so looking back at this you want to make sure that you're getting that that first step correctly because that's what we're duplicating out to all these other ads so ensuring that you're taking your time on that first step to have the primary text correct the link correct the the structure of everything that I that I walk through correct so when you duplicate you don't have to worry about going back and switching all these out so we're not done yet duplicating mock up 8 existing campaign existing ad set duplicate Boom Mock up nine not 89 that'd be crazy swapping the name swapping the image this one's number nine remember so we're hitting next don't care we're going to Media that's all we care about this is number nine next next Skip and continue done okay the name is changed the image is changed publish look at this so easy right so easy bada boom B Bing all right so same thing going in the this is the last one this is the last one so we're on nine we're duplicating bada boom existing campaign existing adset duplicate bada bing let set up straight my back slouching all right so we're changing the name what are we doing changing the name changing the image now you can see my computer's lagging a little bit here because we're duplicating a lot of ads out and the more ads you create the more that have to kind of go through this creation process the slower your processing is going to be so you're going to see this in the future as you build out more campaigns here's number 10 hit next we don't care about nothing other than the image and the name done hit me there we go all right mockup 10 we're g to hit publish let's hit publish okay so see it's really slowing down I can hear the computer too working pretty hard right now and this is very common this is what happens and you'll see that there may be some glitches that come with this right now we're not seeing any campaigns so when this happens just hit a little refresh it should clear things up sometimes it takes a little bit more we'll see all right so mockup test one right so this is the campaign we created let's look at the uh the budget that we have we're using an ads set budget for this so the budget we have is $25 that's correct that's what we want and we look here into the ads all these are in review and this one's learning so these are all good signs you want to make sure you check that these are either processing learning or in review if we see any red errors there it'll show you exactly what's going on with that um but this is what you want to see you want to see all these greens and eventually all them will be in the learning phase here and you start seeing some spend being allocated towards them and what we're going to do is we're going to let this run and we're going to give it the full $25 a spend and we're going to come back to these mockups and we're actually going to review them together and look at the data all right so that was the end of the walkth through there and I'm going to go back into the slides and explain like what we're going to be looking for when we run this $25 spend and um look at the data so we have to wait like a full day for that but I'm going to go to the slides and just like go through all right so like I said we're going to wait until that $25 spend um happens and we look at the data but this is the main things that we're going to break down what we just did and kind of what to think about when creating these campaigns so there's I don't know if you've heard this by now but there's a CBO versus an and a CBO and an this is all about where we're managing the budget so where you saw where I put that $25 where I was controlling the budget and for our example that was on the adset level so that was an and the CBO is on the campaign level so we're when we're in as manager and we're in there's different tabs that's just where you manage the budget so when it's a CBO you're managing the budget on the campaign level and on the you're managing it on the adset budget level another thing to to touch on is we did Advantage Plus interest targeting there and we did an Advantage Plus shopping campaign as you saw that it will default use Advantage Plus targeting now if you with the manual campaign level the camp campaign route what you would have to do is within the adset level you would have to go in and actually make sure that the advantage plus interest targeting is turned on which is very straightforward it's it's right there in front of you so that's the only difference between what we did with the Advantage Plus shopping where it's default turned on versus what you have to do when you do a manual campaign and it's very straightforward and I think in the manual campaign it's actually turned on by default anyways and what I recommend too is like I did 10 ads there I recommend anyway anywhere from between five to 10 ads when you're testing these different mockups um that's just like the optimal way that I like to work personally but once again this doesn't have to be the exact way you approach things if you want to do 15 if you want to do 20 by all means you go ahead and do it I just like to do it like this it's it simplifies things down it's just a number I've always worked with so that's why I do it going back into campaign budget let's just paint a clear picture for you when we talked about the campaign there's a campaign level there's the adset level and there's the ads so the campaign is comprised of adsets and the adsets are comprised of ads now when you're using a CBO this is at the campaign level the budgets managed within the campaign level this is what I kind of just explained but kind of painting a clear picture for you of like what I mean and what and what it looks like now adset budget level is managed on the adset level so instead of on the campaign level as we saw before it's on the adset level it's the only difference and this will simplify things down because like right now you might be a little confused like what what does all this mean like for me what I recommend especially with a mockup test we're just using one ad set but this is another example of you can do whatever you'd like but I prefer using one ad set so when using one adset in a CBO or there's actually zero difference between using a CBO or because there's one adset so if you're managing Budget on the campaign level here or on the adet level it's going to be the same amount of allocation of the budget because there's only three ads or whatever ads you have that's being allocated to that campaign or ad set because there's only one ad set it doesn't matter so if you structure the campaign this mockup test the way I just walk through with you doing an or CBO is not going to matter so like don't over think it is kind of what I'm trying to get at like it's not going to make a difference but if you're doing different adsets then I would recommend doing for the mockup test where you're actually you're managing the the budget on the adet level but like I said if if you want to simplify things down and get really good results and I have proof and I have so many examples of running a campaign like this and to test your mockups don't worry about it like if you have it set up with one adset using the Advantage Plus shopping like you saw with me or you do manual the manual campaign setup with one ad set using a CBO or an is going to be the exact same thing when we go and look at this data what what are we going to be looking at we're going to be looking at the cost per click mainly we're looking for a mockup that can generate under a dollar cost per clicks and the way that we actually verify this data is it has to spend at least $5 because there'll be cases where you'll have some mockups that get spent like two cents on them and they might have like two cent cost per clicks but that's skewed data that's not enough statistical like justification to actually make that data true so like what we have to look at for for is like first we're looking like we'll look at the ads data and we'll walk through this in a second here of okay what are the what are the mockups that generated close to a dollar cost per click or under dollar cost per click then we look at the amount spent has it spent at least over $5 then if it has then that's true data that we can use and that's a winning mockup now if it's spent under $5 and it's still under a dollar calls per click we can't take that as solid data because it's not enough spent there's not enough money to actually prove that that metric is true we're also looking for clicks over $5 the same kind of concept we want like it's like a statistical thing so think about if you ever takeing statistics or just in general when you think about sample sizes so you pull 10 people if they like ice cream or not now they might get 50 people I mean 50% of people like Ice Cream 50% of people don't and that's out of 10 people now if you branch that out to 100 people that's going to be a lot more accurate of like how many people actually like ice cream versus don't because there's more people involved with that sample size now take the amount of people compared to the amount spent that's the comparison we're trying to do here so let's do $10 of spend versus $100 a spend $10 a spend yeah you might get some data that might be true but $100 a spend is going to be a lot more solid data because it's tested a lot more information AKA more people that gives that actually solidifies the data more so that's the kind of comparison we're trying to make here the main thing that at at this stage is like usually we don't see any purchases come in so like we're looking at cost per click we're looking at amount spent as the data for us to make decisions on finding a winning mockup but if a purchase does come through this trumps any CPC data cuz what are we trying to do do here with this mockup test right we're trying to identify what's a winning mockup what can cause someone to see our ad and then go to our website and actually purchase from our website that is going to be the end goal so when someone purchases from your store that is the king metric right we'll get into row as 2 and as the number one thing but we're not at that stage yet but if a purchase does come through that is also an indication that you have a winning mockup as well now you want to consider both and we'll get into this once we actually dig into the data of if the purchase does come through what are the calls per clicks like we can kind of combine that data as well to get a picture of what is our winning mockup or what is the best one we have tested so far we we'll cross that bridge when it comes there may be misleading data that comes from lower span that so this was um the same concept that I was talking about with if you don't spend at least $5 we can't actually validate that data because there's not enough like statistical justification for it some additional tips to remember and this is kind of like once again this is like what I abide by you can kind of change this if you'd like but I would I would recommend sticking with this these kind of principles here sticking to $25 total for one mockup test budget is really recommended I've seen some people spend like thousands of dollars on testing their mockups and they still like aren't at a place where they have a winning mockup you don't have to spend nearly that much you can spend $25 within a test the way I set it up as I as I showed you before and you know I mean if you get lucky you might you might find that winning mockup right off the bat but you'll spend 25 on the next cycle too and like what I'm trying to say is $25 is more than enough spend to get enough data to actually make decisions on a winning mockup or not same kind of thing you can run the full test in one day which I like to do like that's what I was saying before I like to just like get it over with and do it in one day but you can break it up in two three 4 days if you liked if you want to see some trending data if you're kind of if you work with metrics that way also another thing if no mockups achieve a sub dollar cost per click they make five new Renditions based on the best best performers so this is like kind of the concept here where you know you spend that $25 and you don't find any like winners so like what do you do well you you do another you do another cycle test but this time you're progressing each time you from the last data that you got so even if you got like let's just say you got like you have those 10 mockups that we tested and not one of them reached a sub dollar cost per click but there was there was one that was close that was like a120 cost per click that is information that we can use for our next test and that's the way you have to be thinking with all of this just with the mockup test but just in Facebook ads in general just because you don't reach that like desired profitability right off the bat when you spend $1 any any amount of money on Facebook you are getting valuable information that if you're digesting it correctly and making the right decisions based off of it you're getting yourself closer to the point where you can actually run profitable ads so back to my point here if none of these mockups got close to a sub dollar cost per click but one was very close it was like a like a120 cost per click then you're going to pick that one as the winner as not but like not roll out and actually like verify as your winner for your store but like that's like the best one you have so what you're going to do is like look at the elements that worked within that mockup so was it the background was it the like the ele was the element surrounding the mockup was the way the T-shirt appeared like all those things and make variations based off of that one for your next cycle so you're always progressing you're always you know taking the feedback from the data you're seeing and getting closer to the desired Sub dooll C per click one more thing we recommend that at this point like on your store right so like we're we're testing this all on meta ads as you saw before and on your store what mockup should you have on on your on on your website right it doesn't really matter at this point like you can just have the default white uh white background mockup that Shopify or printify provides for you and you can just wait until you actually verify the winning mockup before you go and Implement that winning mockup to all your products on Shopify because you can end up if you keep on changing them and like you don't have a solid winner it can take so much time so we really recommend waiting to implement the winning mockup on your Shopify store before like like you need the you need a winning mockup first you need one of those mockups that actually achieve that sub dooll cost per click before you can go ahead and actually roll that out to all your product so I just want to throw that in there to save you some time save you some money and it's it's just a smart way to to just save some time all right so we're here back in the ad account and we're going to look at our mockup test data so as you can see we spent a little bit over $25 I let it go a little bit over so I'm going to pause this now obviously we want the $25 to be the cap that's what I said from the beginning all you need is $25 to effectively test the campaign so let's go ahead and look at our results so we have the right campaign selected here we're going to the adset we have the right adet selected and we're now going to the ads now make sure like we've talked about this in a different module that we have the the column set up correctly and we don't have to get into that right now but this is one of the column presets this is the advanced preset that we recommend and what I do the first thing when looking at data especially mockup test I look at amount spent so I'll click amount spent and make sure it's filtering with a down arrow here so it's showing highest to lowest and the reason I do that is to me what ad is getting the most spend on is what Facebook has identified has the best chance of actually being your winner so I see $18 here right away spent on this one mockup so I'm like okay there's definitely something here that Facebook's seeing so I dive in a little bit deeper I'm looking at cost per clicks next and I say oh my God 4.57 cost per clicks that's not ideal we want something close to a dollar if not below a dollar but that being said $18 is enough to show that there's some Concepts here within this mockup that Facebook likes so there's there is a takeaway there is a Learning lesson that this mockup outperforms the rest of them because Facebook has spent on them even though there's a high cost per click and it hasn't qualified as a winning mockup there still is something good to take away from here another thing I want to mention is looking at this 71 Cent cost per click now there is such a low amount spend here like this might catch your eye like oh look you have you have sub dooll cost per clicks but it only spent 71 cents on this specific ad and it's not enough data like we talked about before it's not enough data to actually verify that this was actually given enough spend to actually verify this cost per click so it's very skewed essentially is what I'm trying to say but there is some checkouts initiated on it and there you're going to see this time and time again that Facebook doesn't really make sense a lot of the time so like how was there only one click on this on this ad but there was actually two checkouts initiated I don't know exactly what's going on with that this happens time and time again where you see this kind of Rogue Data so this is a good example of like take Facebook data with a grain of salt sometimes like you're going to have you're going to see this kind of sporadic behavior where things don't add up but what I would take away from this test right we haven't found our winner and unfortunately this is what's going to happen to the majority of you guys who launch your first mockup test it's not going to be sunshine and rainbows sub dooll cost per click right off the bat like you have to be lucky to be in that situation but what we can do is learn from what we've done so what are we learning from first of all to me the best performing mockup here is the one that got the most spend even though it's a really high cost per click it still got the most clicks and it got the most spend therefore on my next round of mockups the next time I spend $25 with 10 total mockups I'm to make sure to include this mck up in that campaign I'm going to go look at what are the attributes what what are the features that made this successful is it the background is it the snow is it the way it's floating there is the wood here I don't know but what I'm going to do in the future if for my next test is make variations based off this design using like this the certain thing so maybe I keep this wood thing here and change the background maybe I keep this background change the wood thing here add skis maybe I do X Y and Z Right add some elements in there add some boots in the corner here add some poles in the corner I don't know but that's the way I'm structuring and making my decision-making moving forward into the next mockup test and that's the whole goal here right I'm kind of glad that for this example we don't have a winning mockup because this is going to be the case for a majority of you you know like if you do find one mockup that gives you those sub dooll cost per clicks over $5 spent on it consider yourself lucky because that's not how this goes and like I said it's it's the game is building off of the information and learning from the data that you're getting back like I said like the data here this is the clear winner even though it's not what we want it's it's far from what we want we're still progressing in the right direction because we're spending we're learning what Facebook's spending on as well and we're making our new designs our new mockups based off of it so what I would do like I said I would create a new mockup test launch at $25 Max but base it around new mockups on the winning one that we have here and including this winning one you can do five new mockups in this test you can do 10 whatever you want to do it's kind of up to you and how you work but that's what I would do moving forward and and yeah that's all for the mockup test and you know if I had the winner what I would do is go ahead and I would take that winner and and apply it to all your products to your store so if if you did get that mockup that generated sub dooll cost per clicks $5 spent on it boom you got your winner so the first thing I would do is take that mock up apply it to every single product that I have in my store and then I can start the design actual testing designs on that winning mockup process which is down the road and we'll go over it if no like I said retest using another $25 but learn from the last test use the best performers which I just went over so that wraps up the mockup test I hope you guys enjoyed it like I said you're always going to want to learn you always don't want to spend over $25 and you always want to learn from the data that happened before hey guys welcome to section 4.2 where we are going to talk about finalizing your mockup at this point we are at stage four which is the testing stage this is going to be the stage that you're spending the majority of your time so prepare to be here for a while but at this point your progress so far you should have created a mockup campaign it should have been running for a few days you should have tested at least 15 to 20 different mock-ups to identify the best cost per click and other data that we can use to determine which one is clearly the winner and lastly you should have found your winning mockup by the end of this lesson you will use your winning mockup across all of your product listings you will upload polished professional mockups to your Shopify store so why is this section so important your mockup will catch the eye of your customers specifically in Facebook ads your customers want to see how your product will look on them in real life and lastly it will reinforce the professionalism and credibility of your brand it also is a part of your brand identity and kind of a part of your brand voice now the 10,000 foot view what exactly is the role of a highquality mockup again this is the visual appeal brand credibility and AD performance this is going to affect all three of these areas so it's really important that we run that mockup test correctly actually pick the winner based off of data and then move on from there spend the time uploading to all of our products and to our Shopify store so I found my winner now what now every design needs to go on a mockup and there's a few ways that we can do this the first would be using canva which is going to be a more manual way of doing it and also if we want to automate this slightly we can use a software like my designs where you can actually upload your mockup and from there it will basically bulk create all of our mockups that then we can just take those files and upload them into Shopify but for the case of this video and for this course we are going to use canva so let's dive into canva and take a look at how we do this so once you're in canva you are going to click on your winning mockup now for the case of this course and for this video we are choosing the mockup that had the cheapest cost per Clicks in Justin's mockup test but remember the data that Justin got from that mockup test was not good if we were actually fully running this brand we would be going back to the testing phase again and testing even more mockups we would be trying different designs we would be you know tweaking a lot of different things we would even be trying maybe different colors on the shirt but for the case of this course we are using the mockup that was technically the winner from our mockup test even though it clearly was not a winner in the form of the data that it was providing as you can see we have our winning mockup from that mockup test and we have created all the mock-ups with the different colored t-shirts on it now we need to add our designs so once you're on this page we are then going to go to upload and we will upload the design that we are going to put on these mockups so we've found the two designs because one is the Black version one is the White Version and this is what we are going to upload into canva so we're uploading our designs right here okay now that they're here we are then going to add the design resize it now remember you want your design on your mockup to be nice and big we want it to catch the eye of the viewer and really like have it stand out and be bold now I like to put a darker design on my lighter colored t-shirt so on Sports gray and on White I am going to make sure that I use a dark black Navy whatever color you want but something that's going to stand out on those shirts now for my darker colors I like to have a lighter design like white or gray something that's really going to pop on those shirts and then we can click command C and basically just go down the list of the other colors and it's going to just put our design in the exact same location because everything should be in the exact same place and by doing this we now have our design across all of our t-shirts it's important to remember after you've uploaded your designs into printify which color designs you would have put on the different colored t-shirts that you offer so like I said white gets the black design Sports gray gets the black design so it's important to remember that and make sure that it matches up what we're showing in Shopify and what we're showing in our ads versus what the customer is actually going to get from printify the last thing that we want is for somebody to order a white shirt and it shows up with a white design on it because that's how we accidentally uploaded it within printify so now that we have our design we are then going to download this and we would be doing this for every single design that we have uploaded into the store so this is why we say canva is more of a manual way of doing this of getting your mockup kind of set up and ready for Shopify now my designs is going to do the same exact thing but basically just swap out the designs so it's definitely a faster way of doing so but canva I would say is the most userfriendly and probably the cheapest option so if you're somebody who's balling on a budget who's trying to do this for cheap canva is probably going to be your best bet so we are going to download and we could rename this I just named it winning mockup but you could rename it whatever you're naming your T-shirt and you could also download them and then upload them into your Google file to help kind of save room from your desktop now we have our design and from here we're now going to go over to Shopify and we are going to find the product that we want to upload our mockup to and again we would be doing this for every single design in this case we just have this one design here I'm going to filter by created and the newest because this is the latest design that I've uploaded into seasonal collections we're going to click on the design and from here we are going to remove all uh all of the printify mockups that they you know just put across all of their all their uh products so we're going to click upload new and we are going to find our folder with our winning mockup select them all and open them and this is going to upload them all into Shopify definitely can take a little bit for them to load so now that we have uploaded our mockup images to this product page we are now going to scroll down a little bit further as you can see the different variants now in this first big position under media this first big picture that is going to be the variant that is displayed on our collection page it's really important that we are selecting a color that either is the best selling or one that really is just catching somebody's eye now at this point we don't have too much data on the new collection or the new designs that we are doing so I'm just picking really the color that I prefer and one that catches my eye the most once we get more data from our ads and even from Shopify as we get more purchase data then I will come back through and I will kind of rearrange and pick the bestselling variant and put that in that first position when people click our product page they get taken there we want to make sure that the co this first color in this first position matches whatever color is in this big media position that way when they click they are automatically on that variant so we like that it's match with navy we love that the sizes are in the correct order sometimes you could occasionally see like the 3 xl's in front of the small and that's just really confusing for people as we scroll down we now see all the different variants and this is where we can upload our specific mockup picture to the color variant so Navy we're going to select the navy shirt Royal we're going to select the Royal shirt we've got Sports Gray we've got white black oops black and then military green and since they're all uploaded now we're going to click save you can either click save down here or all the way up here in the kind of search bar area but we definitely want to make sure we click save otherwise none of the none of any of the changes that we just made to this specific product are going to save or then show to make sure that we've done this correct we can click View and it's going to give us a quick kind of glance at what our product page looks like so again we love that it's the navy shirt we like that the Navy is selected as well as size small and as we go across and check all of these variants the mockup picture should change every time we select a variant so this looks really good we've definitely have no issues here now this process is definitely a timely process it's going to take time it's going to take effort there are ways of speeding this up like using my designs to kind of speed up getting your design on those mockups but once you're at the point where you're uploading them into Shopify it is going to be manual and it's going to take time of you just sitting down and kind of going through every single product now this is why we really push doing a mockup test because of the fact it takes so much time to do this we don't want to be wasting time in the wrong areas we want to be utilizing our time effectively and efficiently and by doing the mockup test finding that winning mockup and then then going back to our store and putting that mockup across all of them you are going to save a ton of time so let's go over some tips to efficiently get these mockups across our products the first is going to be saving our mockups to our Google drive folder this way to conserve memory on your desktop or your laptop and at the same time it really helps to keep all of your designs organized you know if we've got our design file as well as our mockup file keeping everything the same across every single design is going to be helpful in in the future and you know time and time again so definitely try to stay as organized as you possibly can as you're going through this phase of you know of your print on demand Journey the next would be using batch processing tools like my designs for faster uploads again we kind of talked about this would just pull your designs and put them over top of your mockup and then export basically all of them out this is going to save time on the like doing the manual canvas side of things you're still going to have to manually upload them yourself into Shopify and finally consistency is key ensure that all of your product listings match your Brand's aesthetic the last thing that we want is for our brand voice and really the images that we're showing to be off and just not working with what we're showing in ads we really like consistency something that we've found is that by Simply Having the mockup in our as our ad creative it really actually helps Drive sales on the site because people are looking for that exact image of what they saw I'm sure you've been there you've clicked on an ad because you've liked the product you liked how it looked then you get sent over to the website and you feel like you're searching for almost like hidden treasure you can't find exactly what you clicked on it's happened to me a few times especially when I'm like shopping on clothing sites and it's really frustrating so by keeping it consistent for your customer from what they're clicking in the ad to them what they're seeing on your site it's just going to help seamlessly kind of bring the entire buying process together now some key takeaways from this portion of of the course would be one getting your winning mockup on every single product listing and the second key takeaway is going to be getting pumped up to start testing your designs once all of our mockups are uploaded into Shopify we can then connect them to the Facebook catalog it's going to pull all those mockup images in and actually test our designs for us this is going to save a ton of time on the ad side of things and it's really exciting we're going to start to see which winners we've we've found I hope that by going through this section you guys get a really good 10,000 foot view of why it's so important to run that mockup test find that winning mockup and then uploading it to you know to your Shopify store and getting it across all of your designs this is definitely a tedious process it does take time but it's 1,000% worth it at the end of the day so thank you guys for watching and we'll see you in the next episode welcome to Stage 4.3 and this is the Facebook testing Campaign which in my opinion is one of the most important things and important stages and Concepts to understand throughout this entire uh testing stage now as you can see we're still in stage four which is still testing and at this point you should have already found your winning mockup you should have taken that winning mockup and implemented it into your Shopify store so all your products are reflecting that winning mockup that you've identified and you've had a warmed up ad account so you have some spend on the ad account so far you have an understanding a fundamental understanding of the metrics you're looking at and yeah essentially you have at least some spend on this ad account to move forward with this uh testing campaign by the end of this lesson you're going to understand how Facebook ad campaigns work on a fundamental level you're going to optimize your ad account in Shopify store based off of data feedback with kpis that we're going to go through throughout this uh this presentation here and finding winning design that will shape your brand at this point right now you have those 100 products you have that mockup that you found is a winning mockup and you have these 100 designs that you don't really know what is going to be like what's going to work yet right so you don't you could have designs like say you're in a flower Niche and you have a bunch of sunflower designs and you have a bunch of Daisy designs and you have a bunch of gardening designs and you don't really understand what is going to resonate yet because you haven't tested anything so the point of this campaign is to identify kind of which designs are resonating with your audience and then building your store around that moving forward so getting that cycle down using this campaign to as a kind of a foundation of of fueling the vision of what your brand is going to look like in terms of designs and products now why does this matter this will be the Baseline of every campaign you'll do in the future step two talks about this this is the process that you'll be spending the most time in so in the beginning when you haven't even identified you haven't even gotten one sale on your store you have no idea what's going to work this is the campaign style and structure you're going to use and when you're down the road when you have already identified your brand you have hundreds of thousands of orders already you have an identity this is still the same type of process that you're going to be using to ensure that you have long-term growth because you will see a point even when you've sold all these t-shirts that you're going to have to implement this testing strategy to find new winners to Fuel Long long-term growth like we talked about now mastering this process will lead to profitable growth the same thing I'm talking about with long-term growth if you master this process you have an understanding of the budget that you want to allocate towards the data that you were referring to to actually make decisions on creating new designs fueling winning designs this will establish what it will take as like a process day in and day out to ensure that you'll have long-term profitable growth now let's just zoom out a little bit and talk about why test on Facebook first of all you have access to billions of active users and you have the capability of using meta ads targeting algorithm now this has changed a lot from what it used to to be but Facebook has an extremely powerful algorithm that allows you to find your customers really effectively so back in the day before iOS in 2021 there's this iOS update that kind of changed the way that targeting works but you were able to say you're selling a flower t-shirt store again and you could identify a user on Facebook that is interested in sunflowers let's say you have a sunflower design and you want to send them that ad you can find the exact person that is interested in sunflowers that maybe has bought a teach t-shirt before that is the exact demographic that you'd be looking for you can show an ad directly to that person now things have changed a little bit and at first it kind of screwed up what we used to do in terms of campaign structure but it actually has rebounded into even better situation using Advantage Plus which is used to be called open targeting it used to be like United States and 18 plus which is like if they're 18 years or older and live in the United States that was the main targeting method we used to use but now it's it's been refined and they've used an AI technology to create this Advantage Plus targeting which essentially allows you to not even have to worry about creating custom audiences and creating custom demographics to to Target because Facebook does it for you now and that's another reason why testing on Facebook is such like you have an advantage now where like you can just throw products out there and not really focus on who you're sending them to because Facebook will find them for you now it's also a very cost effective way to test your new products especially if you're testing a store for the very first time the beauty of of testing on a meta ads is that you can identify your downside and mitigate that downside like you know how much you're spending each day because you're setting that budget and you're seeing the data that's coming in and on a on a very like 10,000 foot view you're seeing how much money is coming into your bank account versus how much you're spending on Facebook so you don't have to you know invest thousands and thousands of dollars to test if you have a winning concept you can test it's kind of up to you how much money you're willing to spend and as long as you're looking at the data which we're going to go through here to actually like recognize if you have something that's working and capitalizing on that and if you have something that's not working and cutting that out you have the ability to do that and therefore you're controlling your downside which is a great another great benefit of using Facebook as like a testing platform and also the scaleability that you have within meta ads manager is essentially infinite and what I mean by that is once you identify you have an ad you have a collection of products you have a store that can generate consistent profitability you can scale that out as long you understand the data and you can scale that out infinitely because it's not like you have to like launch a bunch of billboard ads and launch and you have to like go to different cities and and promote your products like you just have a click of the button that you can create a new campaign and increase your budget to actually scale a proven profitable Campaign which is extremely powerful especially when you have something that's profitable and the combination of combining meta ads with print on demand and print on demand therefore you don't have to invest in an inventory which allows that scalability to have happen essentially instantly as soon as you see the numbers that are that are right for you so if you have that formula that you're generating profitable ads you don't have to wait to invest into more inventory you don't have to wait to create new campaigns and work with this marketing team like you have the power to take a proven formula and scale that out because you don't have to wait on any of these things which is another beauty of this combination of meta ads and print on demand the benefits of Facebook testing campaigns we talked about a little bit just now but um using meta ads features such as catalog ads and Advantage Plus allows you to efficiently test through your products so we'll go into what catalogs look like I I'll walk through exactly how to create a campaign what a catalog ad actually is but essentially what it allows you to do is take let's say you have that 100 that that base of 100 products and if you use catalog ads effectively you can test your entire catalog and do it quickly by just a click of a button and we and we'll walk into that also the optimization that you have within Facebook ads if you're constantly getting data and you're understanding that data and you're taking that feedback it'll help you make decisions faster and lead to a quicker road to actually getting profitable another benefit of Facebook is the the cost efficiency and you can test efficiently using a lower budget and this is what I was talking about before like you essentially have the power of how much money you're willing to lose and if you understand the data how much money you're willing to gain so if you're just spending hundreds of dollars and you're not getting any money like you have the power just to turn that off you don't have to continuously spend and spend and spend as long as you have a fundamental understanding of the data that we're about to teach you and how to implement testing strategies to analyze when you have a good situation versus a bad situation you can essentially protect yourself from losing a lot of money and another benefit of using Facebook testing ad campaigns is that it boosts conversion rates and it helps you optimize your Shopify store so not only are you getting data of like what's performing well on the front end in the top of the funnel with your ads you also take that data and you optimize your Shopify store based off of that so if you've been winning ad that's generating consistency sales and people are clearly enjoying what you're showing them you go to your Shopify store and you make sure that product is one of the first products if not the first product that they're seeing and you rinse and repeat that process and you're using Facebook ad data to actually optimize your Shopify store as well the goals going into this testing campaign is first of all you want to understand your campaign structure which we're going to go into you want to understand the kpis which we're going to go into and then the the main goal here is identify your winning designs and the way we're going to do that is is exactly like understanding that campaign structure and implementing those kpis that's the way we're going to find Our Winning designs and that's going to lead us to how do we create new designs that are going to do well and also how are we going to manage and and fuel winning profitable campaigns and ads based off of these winning designs and at the end of this uh stage here we're going to have to have an established foundation for you and like this is different for everyone right everyone has kind of like their own thought thought process with these things but we're at least giving you the foundation of what we advise what we've done in the past versus from our experience from our clients and and from what Chris has experienced with we're giving you the road map of what we've done in the past to get to a successful spot now this isn't saying that you have to do it exactly this way but we need to establish a a process for you of like testing designs analyzing analyzing the data and then scaling the winning ads and creating new designs based off that data and then repeating that process and that could look differently for different people and we'll go into that but that's the the main goal here with this testing campaign is creating this process that's going to be really the fuel of your entire print on demand store the best practices for your Facebook testing campaigns first of all is defining your goals right so our goal is to find winning designs efficiently and this is this goes into like our lowbudget tactic that we're going to go into here that we can actually test a full product catalog in two weeks for $100 or less if you want to do it that way but the whole thing there is like we want to find winning designs within a big pool of products efficiently and effectively and then another best practice is on on identifying your kpis like what are we looking at when we're actually launching the launching these ads we'll go over row ads which is King in the situation as long as purchases are coming in amount spent important metric to look at cost per clicks important cpm's important click-through rates important we'll go into all that too as we go through a screen share of actually launching these campaigns and looking at the data that we're seeing and why they're important also optimizing your data based on the feedback that you're getting so that's another thing we talked about is we we know these kpis and we're seeing data that's coming back to us so we're optimizing our ad account accordingly and we're also optimizing our Shopify store like we talked about ordering the collections with the products that are actually showing the best results from Facebook on your Shopify store and vice versa if if we see a purchase that comes in from Shopify we're actually going to take that information let's just say it was a specific design that was using a a different color than we were actually advertising so let's just say blue was was the one that was actually generating purchases when we were advertising gray on a certain design we would take that information and apply it and we'd add that blue color to Facebook ads and there's kind of this you'll see there's this joint like Harmony between the data of Shopify and Facebook that we need to be in tune with at all times to ensure that we're optimizing the data this is kind of something that we were talking about before is establishing a process that is tailored towards your preference so that comes down to budget how much are you willing to spend a test also what is like the time frame that you work best on and we'll give you our recommendations based off of data and our personal preference but this also comes down to your personal preference too also campaign structure like same thing we're going to give you the guidelines of what we use and what we recommend but if something makes more sense in your head and it works better with your workstyle you can tailor the foundation that we're doing here and and showing you and tailor it towards what you think works better for you the strategy we we proposed that we're about to go through here should be used as a framework not as an exact guide unless you want to use it as an exact guide and that's the way you work so it's it's all this that we're teaching you isn't for you to be like I have to do it this way and if I don't do it this way it's not going to work it's more of like this is the general structure that's going to allow you to like you know set yourself up for success but if there's certain little details that you want to tweak that fits you accordingly go ahead and do it and yeah the goal of this strategy that we're about to get into here is going to be running a test for a full collection and of products for under $100 or $100 Max within two weeks so that's kind of the budget that we propos in the beginning especially if you're launching for the first time to you know you don't have to spend that much to get a lot of lot of valuable feedback back that can lead you to optimizing your store and actually getting to a profitable spot quicker but it doesn't have to be $100 but we'll also we'll walk into that in a second here too the way this is structured there's there's two cycles the cycle one is going to be a Thursday through Sunday so we start our ads on Thursday morning and we shut off our ads on Sunday night and the second cycle we'll get into is the same thing it's going to be a Thursday to Sunday Cycle where we do the same thing and and the purpose here is Thursday through Sunday it's an optimal window to run your ads Monday through Wednesday usually statistically underperformed Thursday through Sunday so if you're going into running a store for the first time you want to make sure you're getting the most bang for your bucks so you want to be advertising during the most successful time frame it also allows you to kind of segment and put a strategy towards how you're launching these ads instead of being like I'm going to turn them on at noon on Tuesday and then we'll see how it goes and maybe I'll turn them off maybe I won't this at least gives you a structure and a process that you know what you're doing so you know you're launching on Thursday morning you're shutting them off on Sunday night and then you're analyzing the data so for cycle one specifically we're setting a $50 budget from Thursday to Sunday so that's going to be $12.50 Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday for daily budget so that'll be a total of $50 and then same thing that that time frame is going to be Thursday through Sunday but this ad type is going to be catalog ads and we'll go into that like I said we'll have a screen share of how to create that and how to approach it and what that looks like but we're using catalog ads now this is going to be one ad that is going to be showcasing all of your products so Facebook is using its technology in combination with it algorithm to show what Facebook believes is the best ad for that specific user to see and the reason we're doing this is we're pretty much casting a wide net right for this first cycle to see out of these 100 plus products that we have what is Facebook identifying as the best products out of that Bunch so that's going to be cycle one there's going to be certain kpis we're going to be looking at Cycle One compared to cycle 2 so for cycle one we're going to be identifying primarily cost per clicks now this is assuming we're not having any purchases so we're going to be looking at how many ads actually got a sub dooll cost per click and spent enough money and we'll go into this metric exactly enough money amount spent to actually justify that that's real data that we can use so the goal with this first cycle is identifying any products that are under a dollar cost per click and those are considered our winners now if in the case that you actually generate purchases based off on this first cycle you're taking that any any AD that generated a purchase you're moving that to the cycle 2 which we'll get into there in a second if there are no winners so if there's no products that actually got that sub dooll cost per click or got any purchases then we're just going to restart this cycle with new designs I'll walk you through that in a second here so this is what the cycle one looks like on the kind of like a 10,000 foot view so the first thing we're going to do is create a purchase conversion catalog ads which I'm about to walk through we're going to let the ads run Thursday through Sunday so once we pause these ads on Sunday we're going to look okay which products averaged below a dollar cost per cost per click over $5 spent which we'll get into in a second here with more of that data or they generated purchases so if you have products that are under dollar costs per click or generated purchases we're going to move these products into static ads for week two in the cycle test that we're about to get into in a second here and if no products actually generated purchases or had under a dollar cost per click we're going to create 25 new designs and retest excluding previously tested ads and repeating step one which will also show you exactly how to do this as well so once we F let's just say we we got past this phase right so we have products that are averaging under a dollar cost per click or have purchases we're going to do the campaign uh structure for cycle 2 and what this looks like is $50 budget same thing right same thing we're trying to spend $100 total in two weeks to test this out so it's going to be $12.50 a day Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday for $50 total it's going to run Thursday through Sunday but these ad types are going to be static ads and we're taking out of those catalog ads that we that we identified as the winners in cycle one we're creating specific ads on those products on those ads that actually qualified as winners and guaranteeing that we're advertising to those specifically and no longer into the into the big net of the of the catalog ads so we're looking at the data from Thursday to Sunday and the now the data we're looking at is simply if ads got purchases or not so if the ads did get purchases we're we're optimizing around that right like that's what we're that's what we're here for that's what we're testing for that people went to our website and bought a product based off of an ad that we showed them so if we do get products that actually generated purchases the first thing we're doing is we're moving those products specifically to the top of the collection on Shopify and we're making sure that we're still advertising the correct color that actually brought the purchase in which we'll get into in a second here as well and if ads did not gener generate purchases we're creating new new designs based off of low those low so cpcs that came in and repeating cycle one so we're essentially if we get to cycle two and we still don't have any purchases we have to go all the way back to cycle one so looking at week two this the week two cycle here on a 10,000 foot view we're taking the winners from the cycle one and we're creating static ads for them and like I said we're going to walk through exactly what this looks like looks like as well we're letting the ads run Thursday through Sunday $50 total 1250 a day did ads generate purchases if they did we're moving that product to the top of the collection making sure bestselling color is default on product page and being advertised to in static ads now if they did not generate purchases we're creating new designs based off of the low cbcs and we're we're repeating cycle one here and the goal here right remember let's let's remember what we're doing here we're taking two weeks and it's Thursday through it's two cycles of Thursday through Sunday windows and we're taking $100 and we're spending that $100 to test all those products that we have now that's the goal here and in a lot of circumstances you're going to be at the end of cycle 2 and you're not going to be at a spot where you actually have any winners that are bringing in purchases and that's okay okay that's completely fine because what we did is we spent and we got a lot of data and we can use that data to if when we do go back to cycle one here for the second time we're progressed further than we were when we originally started because we we see we've tested these original whatever 100 25 whatever design how many designs you're you're testing and we see that you know there'll be designs that have significantly high cost per clicks and you can say those didn't those are tested and then they're not going to do it for us but then you're going to see the ones that like maybe they got close to a dollar cost per clicks or maybe you know they got they went to cycle 2 as winners for low cpcs but they just couldn't generate a purchase but now you know that there's certain designs that actually were close to generating a purchase so you can create new designs based off that information and restart the cycle with actual datadriven designs instead of being at like square one so that's the whole thing you got to have to think about like just because you don't have success at the end of cycle 2 doesn't mean you failed you never fail as long as you're taking the data and you're learning from it and you're optimizing around it for creating these campaigns that we just walked through this is going to be the first week one cycle Thursday to Sunday test and we're going to create purchase conversions catalog ads and we're going to let them run Thursday to Sunday at a $50 total budget among this entire time frame of Thursday to Sunday and we're going to get right into that here so going into my Facebook ad account we're going to go right into creating a campaign from scratch so we're going to hit this little green button at the top left and we're going to hit sales because that's what we're always doing we're always going to be actually choosing the campaign objective of sales for every single campaign that we're creating we're going to hit continue and we're going to do a manual sales campaign here you can do either one I've dis I've discussed this before the difference between the two it's kind of just personal preference if you're using one adset which I recommend so I'll just do manual S Sales campaign to kind of switch it up to give you like a little different approach of how I would do it so we're going to label this cycle one test and you can put a date to it if you want this is kind of like the way that I've always done it so you can kind of you know tailor that to to what you want to do now this is very important so we're going to skip over this you don't have to do anything here with categories but we're always going to have sales objective sales I mean campaign objective to be sales and then Advantage Plus catalog ads are turned on now we're going to make sure that we have the Shopify product catalog now you can check this catalog within your Shopify store to make sure that this catalog ID is the correct number so I recommend going into Shopify going into your uh Facebook and Instagram sales Channel and then referencing this catalog ID to make sure this is the correct one so for this one we do we have the correct one here Advantage campaign budget now this is vers I mean uh CBO versus AB now this isn't going to make a difference I I'll just keep it all for now but you don't have to worry about this because we're using one ad set so I won't even think twice AB test we're not turning we're not turning on right now so we're just going to go over to next and we can do the same thing it can be just like cycle one adet we're always going to be doing maximizing number of conversions the conversion events always going to be purchased and make sure that the all the product set here is going to be all product products cuz we're selecting we're testing all of our products here for the cycle one test and we're going to change this daily budget assuming we're launching on a Thursday here at $12.50 so we're monitoring this we're turning it on Thursday morning we're turning it off Sunday night so we should have a total $50 total to spend to work with here now you can schedule this out if you want to I never really do it I always just manually turn it on and off to my own discretion so I don't usually do this make sure you have the audience type on fine perspective customers even they haven't interacted with your business this is essentially just creating cold traffic and that's what we're testing here we're not retargeting anything we don't have any data to actually ret retarget on anyways so there's no point of doing so audience control set criteria for ads include just right now we're just doing United States nothing more and then this Advantage Plus audience this so like this is important to know that like n9ine times out of 10 your account's going to have this on default so you're just going to go in here if this was you creating this campaign right now and you see this green check mark next to Advantage Plus audience then you're good to go you don't have to touch anything with the actual targeting here you're good any everything with placement screen check that's good too this is what you want to see just like make sure you're reflecting the same thing that I'm seeing here when creating this campaign that's all you have to worry about now you hit next now you can re rename this I'll do like catalog ads for example and we're doing make sure you the right Facebook page selected here now I like to do Carousel when I'm doing the um the catalog now you can do single image too we've had a we've had a decent amount of success but I would stick with Carousel that's just what we've seen to be the best performing ad here for for us specifically and the concept here is like Facebook is pulling using its algorithm to your entire catalog that you have connected through Shopify and using a carousel is exposing more products per ad so essentially you're exposing more products for for cheaper when you're doing Carousel so that's why we kind of recommend doing that as well catalog options I always like doing you actually can only do multiple products here so that's fine that's just kind of keeps things simple create I like doing single image some people do slideshows but for testing purposes I like using single image just because that's the most data we have to support a successful Cycle One catalog campaign so I just like to stick to what what works here and then the primary text now we've gone over this before with like the actual content and what to what to use for for copies so we don't have to go into that right now so I actually already have the primary text pre- copied here so I don't have to worry about that like I said we're going to we worry about that in a different part of this course and then the same thing with the headline here I'm going to go grab uh when you scroll down here what's the headline okay actually this is a good difference between static ads and catalog ads the the headline by default is going to be the name of the product which is what we recommend to do so to talk about what we're just saying the headline is actually it's already predetermined because it's pulling the actual name of your product from Shopify as the headline so you don't have to touch that there's actually not even an option to change this so that keeps things simple do manual destination for now we don't have much testing with the advantage destination and this is just going to create more variables for us to test so I'll just stick with manual destination for this test make sure that you the right shop selected which is your seasonal collection and the website URL is going to be the same as we have here in the ad copy so this is extremely important to note that we always want to be sending traffic to our collection pages and this is something to make sure that you have set correct you don't want to be doing this to product pages the reason we do that is because we have data also to support that when you send traffic to a product page it significantly underperforms when you send it to a collection page because when you're sending traffic to a collection page what's happening is people are getting exposed to a lot more products at once which is going to increase your conversion rate because they might stumble across a product they'd even think they liked in the first place because they didn't see it because they clicked on a different ad and then two it's going to increase your aov because people are going to add more products to their to their cart because they have exposure to more products going to a collection page versus a specific product page so that being said simply we have data that supports routing traffic to a collection page significantly outperforms running product uh traffic to a product page so that's why we recommend it don't want to overthink that too much now all this other stuff display link don't to worry about the app you don't have to worry about tracking you don't have to worry about and you're good to go here so just some other check like just to make sure you have set up correctly here you have the carousel selected multiple products selected single image selected and you have your primary text in there you have your call to action is always shop now and the manual destination make sure your Shop's correct and the and this website URL is also correct now this yeah we don't have to worry about the app sorry about that we don't have to dig into that at all so once you have the setup you're good to go and you're good to hit publish so let it publish let it load a little bit but and um yeah so you're good to go on this cycle one so what's going to happen is you're going to let this run Thursday to Sunday you're going to look at the data and we're going to go back to this chart here so looking at let's just say we came back to it and we let the ads run Thursday to Sunday and we have products with an average CPC or that is lower than a dollar or it generated a purchase so we're looking at our data here we're looking at the cycle two test or the cycle one test we have it highlighted and we're looking at the correct date range just say it ran last Thursday to Sunday now we're not going to have any data to actually populate here but this is kind of what you would do you look at this data during that time and you go to the ads level here and you're going to go to to analyze the data you're going to go down to breakdown here and you're going to do product ID so this is going to show because we don't have any data right now it's going to show all of your ads that are in your cataloges and it's going to show the um the results off of that so if I were you what I would do is once all these ads are populating here I'd click amount spent and you're going to identify what are we looking for right we're looking for over $5 spend and we're looking for a product that averaged over or under I mean sorry excuse me under a dollar cost per click or purchase so anything what I'm looking at first is a cost per clicks anything under a dollar I'm like okay 90 cents I'm going to the amount spent to just spend over $5 and boom we have a winner that we can bring into cycle two and then also purchases if you have any purchases which is a rare occasion on the first test but it can happen and what I'm doing too is identifying any of those products that we'll see in'll drop down once you actually have some data populated here when you ran from Thursday to Sunday you're taking any product that has or any AD that has a purchase and you're bringing that over to cycle 2 too so the two things you're checking for is the cost per clicks under a dollar and they spent over $5 and yeah that's a winner and then anything I got to purchase is also a winner so let's just say you know you identified uh a product that you only had one let's just say you only have one product that actually got under a dollar cost per click and everything else failed so what you would do is you'd go and make that cycle 2 campaign for our example we're going to uh take any winners so anything that under a dollar costs per click with more than $5 spent and anything that generated a purchase is going to be moving to the static ads for week two cycle test which we'll get into in a second here and then anything that like just say you got no purchases and you have um no products that generated under a dollar cost per click you're going to have to go and restart this cycle but you're going to have to create 25 new designs and retest excluding previously tested ads and you have to repeat step one here we're resuming into week 2 cycle so the same thing we're doing a Thursday to Sunday test we're only spending $50 and let's take a second here and zoom out and remember what we're doing here this is a a testing campaign so we're testing an existing let's just say like this is your first launch and you have a 100 designs so on week one we're taking a catalog of all those products and we're letting Facebook test it out with $50 worth of budget from that Thursday to Sunday window we're identifying what is Facebook showing us that has potential of any of these ads actually generating a purchase now that's why we go over the cost per click and the purchases and bringing them into the second cycle so the second cycle the reason we're going from catalog ads to static ads is because we were taking those winners from the catalog ad that was using all of our products with all the different SKS and guaranteeing that these static ads that were showing good signs are going to get some spend towards them to see if we can actually generate a purchase so the idea is we're like casting a net with the catalog ads and we're testing the wat to see which ones are going to work and then with the static ads we're trying to capitalize on any of that good data so it's like casting a wide net and then plucking out the winners and applying them to this week two cycle test now what we're going to do is create static ads so we're going to show you exactly how to do that now let just say from our example we only had one product that actually categorizes a winner that could move to cycle to so we're going to we're going to reflect that here so same thing you can see that in my my ads manager here going to create a campaign we're going to go sales we're going to hit continue we're going to do a manual sales campaign you can do either one here but I like manual sales preferably now that's going to be called cycle 2 and we're going to scroll down here and we're this is one thing that's going to be the difference between cycle one and cycle two is we're going to turn off the catalog ads here because we're doing static ads right so we're going to turn that off that's the only thing you have to do you can do AO if you want it's not going to make a difference because we're using one ad set anyways doesn't matter we're just going to do website here we don't have to do website and Shop and we're going to do maximize number of conversions and we're going to do the data set make sure you the right pixel selected and conversion event is going to be purchase as always now this data this this notification pops up all the time if you have no data so don't worry about that you have things set up correctly um Dynamic creative I have turned off same thing we're doing the $12.50 Thursday to Sunday window for a total $50 once again so make sure your daily budget is 12250 you can schedule this out if you'd like but I preferably don't do this I just look at it more manually I turn it on in Thursday morning I turn it off on Sunday night I just make sure I'm on top of that now same kind of thing we want to make sure we're we're advertising the United States here and we're doing the Advantage Plus audience is turned on now this is this is important but this is going to be by default I think it's almost 100% of the time going to be defaulted so you don't have to do anything here but if this doesn't have the green check there'll be a an option to so here you see switch to original audience options if you don't see this green check here like we do it'll be switched to Advantage Plus audience and you just click that and you'll see that green check that's the way to get that there placements checked on that's that's what we want so we're good to go we just label this cycle two ads set to cycle two adset and we're good to go and move on to the ad level here so we're hit next now remember we're doing a static ad so we're going to manually upload this and we're going to look back at our data so going back to mirror board here which ads actually generated and qualified US to move them to the cycle two test for our example we're just going to pretend we had one so we're going to go and upload this one ad and and what we're going to do here is oh there we go single image set up creative now this is different I think on my mockup video you saw how this is different and like the only thing I care about in this section is just going to Media because all this is just like trying to automate the rest of the process of the ads which like it may be a good thing and easy way for you guys to do it this way but I'm so used to doing it the old way that I kind of bypass this and come back to the old way so I I've explained them in the mockup test walk through as well so I'm skipping to media and I'm uploading the design so let's just say the winning design here was once we looked at the data from the cycle one test and we found the one that actually registered as like a you know maybe let's just say for example it's had $10 spend and it was below a dollar cost per click and it was it was this design here the law happy design we're going to select this one we're just happy sorry I thought I said law happy happy with the Danny line here and we're we're skipping this like I said I like to do it the old way so I skip and continue done you can keep all these optimizations on if you want I don't think about that too much at this point and we're going to insert that same primary text that we've been using from cycle one which I already have copied here so I can paste it in there same kind of uh same exact copy nothing changing here same kind of thing the headline now we were using catalog ads so this is going to be a different thing too the catalog ads automatically brought over the product title from Shopify so here you're going to have to manually upload or manually enter the actual product name here this is Happy dny L to and we're have to go and change the call to action here so it's going to have to be shop now as we talked about before and then we're going to have to make sure the URL is correct so remember we have the URL in the in the copy here this is kind of just a shortcut that I always do just copy that bring it down to the website URL now here we're good to go so we we took the cycle one winning ad with an ad and in this case this make this make belief scenario that this ad specifically got $10 spent on it allocated WS it with a sub dollar cost per click we brought it over to the cycle two test where we have a static ad of this one we're going to name that this the actual um name of the T-shirt too so we can keep things organized happy Dand line Dand line T can I not spell dandelion so for example if you had let's publish this if you had three ads that qualify that either some of them got a purchase or some of them were below a cost per click you would just go ahead and do the same thing that if you want to reference back to the mockup test campaign it's kind of similar to like duplicating that out but what you would do is let's just say let's just do it for another one just to be just to be safe you would go to the right campaign right so we're at cycle two make sure that's selected it's a it's a correct uh ad set as well here checked on and we're going to the ad level and we're going to let's just say like we're bringing over one more winning ad to this cycle two and we're going to do make sure it's existing campaign existing adet uh no see new ad set sometimes it those will switch up on you sometimes so you really got to make sure you're doing it it's always existing for the this duplicate and what we're doing is we just going to change the name but let's just get the new product in there first all we want to do is add a new image in there we're skipping everything until we get to Media because this all we care about let's just say it's stay Sunny Design here did well too and and it got that you know it qualified to getting the cycle two we're skipping all this we're hitting done now we swap the image and we're just changing the name so we can keep things organized stay sunny now boom there we go we're going to hit publish and now we have in this scenario we have two of those winning ad that graduated to cycle one to cycle two and now we're testing these from let's go back to the mirror board here we're testing these from Thursday to Sunday spending a total of $50 and we're looking at did the ads generate a purchase here so the difference between cycle one and data is primarily centered around cost per clicks and we throw in purchases there but it's really just not likely at this stage but it does happen so we're looking at call per clicks on cycle one stage but this we're looking for purchases because we're at this point now where we graduated these ads that were showing good signs in cycle one bringing them to cycle two to prove if they can actually generate any any actual sales so if you did generate purchases what we're going to do and we'll get into this at a at a later date on through this course but what we're going to do is move that product at the top of the collection on your Shopify store and make sure that whatever color sold for that specific design is is the bestselling color is actually showing as the primary color on that Shopify product as well and it's also the correct color that's being advertised to in the static ads so you can go back let's just say that this Stace Sunny Design sold like five uh t-shirts of this design but it's gray so what I would do is I would make sure that on my Shopify store the gray design is showing as default and then I also have a gray variation of this ad within ads manager so I duplicate this out take the gray version of this and make sure it's published in live because that's a good a good sign that if you do advertise the actual color that's actually generating the purchases that that ad could even do any better could do even better than what this original one is doing so that's what we're going to look look at so we're going to go let's just say this runs Thursday to Sunday the same kind of cycle we're going to that campaign make sure we have the cycle two test the ad set cycle 2 ad set is selected as well and we're in the ad section here too so we're looking at amount spent we're looking at purchases if any of these generated purchases what are we doing we're moving that product at the top of the collection like I said make sure the best selling color is default and we're actually running an ad towards that now let's say during this time frame you didn't generate any purchases which is completely fine this happens all the time what we're going to do here is we're going to create new designs based off the low CPC ads so let's just say like these were consistently showing low cpc's but they didn't generate any purchases and we're going back into cycle one's data as well where we did have these original ones that graduated we're we're just reiterating on these designs and we're we're like taking these Concepts so like for this example we're seeing that like the happy and like the yellow kind of style is is working so we're going to build off of that our next design variations are going to be using this information that we got so we graduated these two different um designs to cycle two there's a reason we got there because like show Facebook was showing us like you're on the right track but you're just not close enough to generate any purchases so what we need to do with that information is make sure we're acting on it so the way we act on it is we go back to cycle one but we refreshed the catalog with designs that are around what was showing us good results so those those products that actually got to cycle 2 were doing design variations off of this and this is where you have to be creative right you have to like look at these ads and look at these designs and be like okay stay sunny how can I like use this concept and Implement new designs and and and stay like on that track of like what Facebook was showing us had the potential of buying but expanding on it being more creative and making new designs and just testing things constantly on this cycle and we'll talk more about okay so let's say you did get these that get some ads that generated purchases which is great like that's the whole thing you want to do and that's awesome so you're at that point how do we actually take advantage of that and we'll get into that um in in a further video like we said once we're actually scaling these ads and a lot of it has to do with the the relationship between Ras and budget which we'll dive into but let's let's recap things here okay so something to keep in mind when running the structure that I just showed you was Cycle One Running Thursday to Sunday and then cycle two running Thursday to Sunday with the catalogs versus the static ads and we're spending $50 on each cycle so it's $100 total to test your entire product catalog ad so that's the that's the point of this structure right like this isn't like how you should like scale your ads and everything this is just for testing your initial catalog or if you're at a point like where you've been running a bunch of ads and you don't really have a structure to things the whole point of the cycle one and cycle two and how we use the catalog ads and graduate them Statics is giving you a process and a budget to use so you don't spend too much in the beginning cuz what we see a lot is people think that they have to spend money to make money which is true but they think that they if they increase their budget they're going to see an increase in performance which is never the case unless you get really lucky in the beginning so having a strategy the one that we just showed you there and like making sure that you're staying true to a timeline and true true to a budget is extremely helpful in the beginning so you don't blow through money and start acting emotionally when when making decisions with Facebook ads so that was the purpose of of that testing cycle we'll get into detail more along the course of what we do when we actually have these winners that are consistently Genera purchases how we recommend structuring them in the campaign how we recommend allocating budget to them but that's for down the road like we talked about so some tips going in from after creating those those testing campaigns or going into testing these campaigns as well to kind of keep in mind so make sure like when we're setting that original cycle one test we're setting it up where we're referring to all the products so like when you just saw me walk through creating this catalog ads when we're looking at the product set that it's referring to all products now the reason we want to do this is because we want to test as much as we can using catalog ads so we're casting a wide net and we're getting the data back to seeing out of all of these designs that we're testing which ones actually have potential now this is a concept that we've talked about before but it's important to kind of reiterate where I've had this happen to me personally and I know Chris has had this and and John and the other coaches and other clients well as well have had this experience where let's say you created like a a new collection and like you're really excited about the like you you created 50 designs like you haven't tested any of these and your favorite designs are the top five of the collection and like you're like okay these ones are definitely going to do well and then like there's the ones that barely made that cut off at like the bottom 50 of of the collection I've had it happened and same with Chris and same with clients and same with the coaches where those bottom designs that you think aren't going to do well actually end up performing the best so setting yourself up where you're testing everything regardless of how you personally feel about the design is extremely important concept to understand because if we didn't have that concept like beaten into us at this point we would have so many sales and so many bestselling designs that we would never have tested because we're like oh I don't like it personally therefore it's not going to sell that's like why we recommend using the catalog ads because it gives you the chance to like not really like make decisions based off of how you feel personally but just like let the data do the thinking and testing everything so you avoid not testing things that actually have potential to blow up for you that's the first tip and then cycle two so like that's Cycle One using catalog ad cycle two is using static ads to force focus on winning design so when you're using a catalog ad and what you'll see time and time again again and we'll get into this in a second that you'll see a lot of ads actually don't get any spend at all allocated towards them and there's some reason and there's some theories that Facebook actually makes decisions before they actually start spending so just because you don't see spend on a certain ad doesn't mean Facebook hasn't decided that that's a good ad or not so but there still is a concept that you want to like when you do see those good cheap costs per clicks sometimes Facebook's algorithms a little wonky and you want to make sure that you're taking advantage of the data you're seeing so the reason that we're moving from catalog ads to static ads is we're forcing spend on those ads that are showing good signs so why testing Cycles now the main reason is we pick Thursday to Sunday because Thursday to Sunday is statistically the best window during the week to test your ads it's when the buying behavior is at its peak and it's what we statistically have seen the highest performance during that window especially in the beginning when you don't have any proven designs out you're like you're running for the first time you don't want to be running on days like Monday Tuesday Wednesday because those are low buying Behavior days which is going to lead you to like spending money not efficiently especially in the beginning so that's one reason and the other reason is just to provide some structure for you right so like you're going to know that you're turning your ads on Thursday and you're shutting them off on Sunday it's giving you like a pece of Mind of like okay like I'm going to run during this time and on Sunday I'm shutting Those ads off and I'm looking at the data and I'm making decisions based off that data I have till next Thursday to be like look at like okay what were the cost per clicks did I get any purchases instead of running all every day during the week where you're kind of scrambling and you're spending money and you're like don't really fully understand what's going on with the metrics and what's really going on in your ad account it can lead you to spend money needlessly so like the two reasons there why test and cycles first of all it's just a proven better window for higher performance and two it gives you more of a structure to to mitigate spending too much during those Cycles now these are some questions that we had in the community that's related to um creating these types of campaigns and I think it's really important to walk through these Concepts because this is something that you may ask yourself at some point when you've launched these campaigns so from Raj here has questions about Facebook testing and buz budget distribution and this is something that commonly happens and I was just talking about briefly before but let's let's go into it so he said hello everyone I just joined we we scale University and I was going through the Facebook ads module I had a little experience with Facebook ads and I have a few questions would you consider this test a proper one from what I've observed Facebook's algorithm tends to distribute the budget unevenly across ads over the twoe testing period so this was a different time when we were doing twoe testing periods versus Thursday to Sunday something to keep in mind one ad might get as little as $1 and spend While others get a 100 how do you ensure that all products get a fair chance through ads if Facebook isn't spending evenly how can we accurately determine which products are genuinely underperforming versus just getting getting enough exposure does this mean that if we keep all products on Shopify Facebook will continue wasting add-on weaker products no so Raj I know I don't know if you're watching this or not but this is a common thing and it's actually like a good sign that you're seeing this uneven distribution because whatever Facebook is spending on is they're they're spending on it for a reason so even if you have ads that have no spend at all Facebook's making a decision to not spend on those ads because they don't believe that has a chance to actually generate a purchase because that's what your objective is with these campaigns so when you see ads that don't get any spend it doesn't mean that like Facebook hasn't gotten to them it just means Facebook doesn't believe it's worth getting spend so when you see this uneven distribution of AD spend it's very common and it's actually like the most common of a successful catalog campaign structure and it's nothing to be afraid of so like it's it's something that's very common it's actually like actually the formula of like things being successful I've seen this kind of uneven distribution so so that that's goes back to like the concept you can make the assumption that if Facebook's not spending on a certain ad they haven't identified it as worth spending on so therefore it's not a winner versus what Facebook is spending on might not necessarily be a winner because we got to look at the cost per clicks we got to look at the purchases like we talked about before with those kpis but Facebook believes that there's something there that that's worth spending on so that's kind of the decision- making there and it's aough concept to kind of like wrap your head around a little bit because you want to see spend that means testing in your mind but in reality Facebook's making a decision before that stage now another question from Troy in the community his uh Title Here is Facebook testing purpose engagement or sales when doing a testing campaign are you driving engagement or sales I originally had one set up for engagement but deleted it and went with sales and went to sales with it now I'm second guessing so this is also a very common concept with like the PPE or running traffic conversion campaigns versus sales or purchases for the objective and this is something that we can't preach enough like there are some strategies with using PPE but for this course we don't recommend it at all and the reason we recommend doing a sales objective is because that's the audience that you're going after so that's the data that you want to be looking at so a way to look at this is thinking about different types of people right so there's different types of people that Facebook knows that have bought in the past because Facebook has that data on them they know they're they have like a good buying behavior and when you're optimizing for sale Facebook's looking for those people based off that data now when you're doing PPE for example for just engagement people that are likely to engage with your ad those are completely different people that we don't really necessarily want to test on anything because those people Facebook know for a fact that are likely to like your post or like your ad and then comment on your ad or share your ad but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to buy your ad and and most of the time when you're running this engagement traffic that's all they're going to do they're just going to like and they're going to comment on your ad and they're never going to actually purchase so why would we test data towards people that are likely to engage not to buy versus people that we want to go after that actually want to buy our product so that's the reason we always recommend using sales objective for any kind of test from the mockup campaigns to what we're doing right now with the Facebook testing campaigns for testing designs for the first time it's always recommended that we do sales traffic and sales objective because those are the people that we're actually trying to Target and that's the data that we need to be considering the people that we're actually going after so FAQs from being in the community for a while now and just kind of see and and also just kind of putting myself in in the shoes of of you guys too because I I mean I ask the same questions and and some of these things some of these answers change over time but this is like kind of what I abide by and what's got me to a good spot the first question is how much should I spend so when testing specifically starting low and what I mean by low is under $50 a day is highly advised and we don't recommend bumping the budget until the scaling phase and we'll go into that further along in in the in the course here where we explain the scaling phase and how we operate but essentially we don't recommend going anything over $50 a day until you consistently are generating a 2.0 row as or more next question when should I run my ads so when testing this is something we talked about a little bit too when testing sticking to the Thursday to Sunday Cycle is is advised don't run as Monday through Wednesday until the scaling phase same thing like the scaling phase is consistently running at a 2.0 row as or higher now when should I call it a quits now this is a really tough question and it's really subjective and everyone kind of has their own perspective on this and their own risk tolerance meaning how much money are you willing to go down to actually you know prove out if you can get profitable with one of these print on demand stores and everyone's and everyone's like different so let just say like your risk tolerance your risk budget is $1,000 so like if you haven't seen any performance increase so Inc performance as in like purchases that are coming in Raz is increasing and you're approaching that thousand Point what I would do the first thing I would do is ask yourself these question questions have I learned from my previous data and this is something that we've been talking about throughout the entire course every time you spend even though you might not be generating the desired results are you taking the data the cost per clicks the trending of of cost per clicks the the purchases that are coming in you're optimizing your stores are you continuously enhancing based off the data that you're receiving or are you kind of just doing the same thing over and over again now also another thing to consider am I testing enough Concepts or doing the same thing now that's the same kind of thing like if you're just say you you're getting close to that like you have that, that you're willing to spend and you're getting close to that you're at like $900 in spend and you still haven't seen any results like look at what you're doing are you doing the same thing over and over again are you still if you're running a flower store are you still testing sunflowers for the 10th time or have you tried daisies have you tried typography have you tried different hybrid designs have you tried researching on Reddit and Pinterest and Etsy and and tried different Mystic designs like or are you just testing sunflower designs and you're just kind of like doing the same thing like that's where I see a lot of people getting in in trouble where they just like stick with one thing and they just try to hammer it down and expect this expect different results when they're doing the same thing you need to mix it up you need to be creative in this type of business so making sure that one you're consuming the data and optimizing your your ads with that your Shopify store with that and also optimizing your design process by seeing what people are interested in and then also putting a creative twist is essential so this is where the Community Resources like being a part of wi scale is extremely valuable when you're you're kind of you're asking yourself this question when should I call it a quits so we have things for those of you that are in the community you already know this we have live calls we have live calls bunch of times during the week where we go in and we answer people that are in this situation and guide them based off their data based off their story based off understanding who they are and we can apply our experience and be like hey like maybe it's time for you to change stores or maybe like or we can give you like no you are so close to turning a profit because we've seen this before this is what we recommend so we have these calls that can go through this we also have a thing called feedback requests which go in even more detail where me and and the other coaches actually go in and deep dive into the data and create a specific video it's it's recorded on loom for those of you who are familiar with it and deep dive into your metric same kind of thing and give you kind of a a second eyes on your story to give you some guidance during this tough question like I I it's a tough question that that I've asked myself many times and it's all depending on your risk tolerance but it's also like it comes down to you and like making sure you're optimizing and then also if you have the resources if you're part of the community you can utilize our experience and then other people in the community too that are going through the same thing that can help you out and guide you during this time another common question that I see a lot is how should I structure my C my ad campaign and as much as we like we show we're showing you how to structure ad campaigns and this is like we're showing you based off of like what we have experience with and what works for us but there's no exact right way to do things like I wouldn't overthink how like if I don't have things set up exactly the way we're showing you it's not going to work like as long as you first of all are running traffic that has purchase objectives not PPE or other conversion events you are setting yourself up to give yourself a chance to actually run successfully so like if you have one campaign one ad set and five ads versus having one campaign five ad sets and three ads like as long as you're showing people a good ad where it's good designs it's on a good mockup and it's structured in a way where it's optimizing towards purchases you don't have to overthink this structure of like how do I how how many adsets should I have how many ads per adet should I have it doesn't really matter that much what really matters is the designs so that's why we emphasiz in this course so much to really really hone in your design process and making sure you're optimizing that consistently because like let's just say for example I have one campaign one ad set and one ad and that one ad is a good ad that's that good ad is going to run at a profitable row as because it's a good ad now I have another campaign that has one campaign five ad sets four ads per ad set and then one of that that same winning ad is within each of those ad sets that campaign's also going to perform well because we have a good product and Facebook's going to find it allocate the spend towards it and generate a profitable row as for you what I'm trying to say is like it alleviate some of the pressure of making sure you have everything set up exactly the right way it's more so of like if you have the general framework down and you have a strategy of like okay like I'm learning every time I'm spending on Facebook and I'm optimizing based off of that you're setting yourself up in a good situation and like as long as you have the things that we set up on like a fundamental level you're going to be in a good spot that being said kind of wrapping it up you should test everything and and do do it the way that makes sense for you so like for example if you like you are thinking like maybe I want to do two adsets maybe I want to do three adsets maybe I do one one adset try all of them see what makes sense for you see if the data shows you specifically that maybe using three adsets is like working better for you and you should run with that like this isn't a one way to do everything there's that's never how any this is going to be it's just we're giving you a framework to work with and you tailor it based off of like your preferences hey everyone so in this lesson we're going to be going through email setup we're still in the testing phase at this point by now you will have completed your Shopify store with 100 plus designs and you'll have your Facebook testing campaign running at a low budget so by the end of this lesson you should understand the concept of email marketing and how it works you to understand why we do email marketing and how it fits into our overall strategy and you're going to learn how to set up your clavo account and your basic email flows so why does this matter email is one of the most valuable assets that you'll build on your brand email pop-ups can improve conversion rate while building your customer list an email is high margin and can help stabilize inconsistent ad results so why do we do email marketing it increases LTV and builds a lasting relationship with our customers so LTV stands for lifetime value which is the total amount of money a customer will spend over their lifetime as a customer it builds trust and gives our brand a voice and the ultimate goal is that 20 to 30% of our overall Revenue will come from email marketing so why is this advantageous over other platforms email is a valuable asset that we build on Shopify sellers on other platforms like Etsy and Amazon can't do because those platforms don't provide their customer data to their sellers so think about what the customer experience would be like if every time you purchased from Amazon you got added to another sell's email list obviously no one would like that people buy from a bunch of different sellers on Amazon and don't want to be getting blasted with thousands of emails so that's a huge advantage that we have over sellers on those other platforms so why do we recommend clavio clavio is the only email provider built specifically for e-commerce sellers which is why we use it so here we have a recording of Chris setting up his clavo account so you're just going to go into Shopify in the apps search for the clavio app and then install it on your Shopify store so this is pretty straightforward same way you install every other app and then it's just going to prompt you to set up the account right within Shopify so here's where you'll put in your email create a password enter your brand name all that good stuff and then you're just going to click get started so here you just want to make sure that the all these settings are selected and this is just going to sync your Shopify data with your clavio data so it's going to take all of your customer data from within Shopify and give that to clavo to build customer lists so just ensure that the email and SMS marketing status is selected and then click continue here you're going to put in your Center name which will generally just be our brand name you could also do like John seasonal collections if you wanted it to come from a specific person we can do email and SMS because we will be sending sms later on and then you're just going to get an email to your inbox to verify your account then we're going to come in here to the clavio dashboard and we're going to turn on website tracking and that's just going to allow clavo to track customers on our Shopify store so you're just going to go into your Shopify theme and you'll see on the left hand side clavo JavaScript and we just want to make sure that that's turned on and click save and you may need to refresh this sometimes it doesn't always work the first time then we'll come back here and refresh and now you see that it's turned on then we'll return to our clavio dashboard and then click the get started and here we're going to set up our subscriber list so you can just leave it as newsletter and this is just going to be our primary customer list and we'll create lists later on and you want to make sure that we change this to single optin and this is going to be the case with any list that we create we want it to be single optin meaning that the customer only has to subscribe once if we select double optin that will send them an email when they subscribe to the list and ask them if they're sure they want to subscribe and they have to click yes to actually be added to the list and we don't want that to be the case we want to make sure that as soon as someone signs up through our popup or wherever else that they get subscribed to the list right away because if we don't do that we're going to lose people so just make sure that every list you create is single optin once that's selected we're just going to click next and that's all we're going to do for now we're just going to click done and then we're going to go in create our signup form create our other lists and everything else so what is an email email list an email list is a collection of email addresses that a business or individual can use to send messages updates newsletters and promotional material to a specific group of people so lists versus segments who is our audience lists are a static group of customers who subscribe to our emails and these only change as customers sign up to the list and unsubscribe lists are generally divided by the source of the sign up example email popup so we're going to walk through a popup on our website and we're going to have a list specifically for that email popup so everyone on that list will have subscribed through our popup and the only way they get removed from that list is by unsubscribing so some example lists we use are popup all customers which is just our total email list for anyone who's purchased from us or our newsletter list which is anyone who's signed up for our newsletter so what is a segment a segment is a dynamic group of customers that match a set criteria and these are divided by conditions we set such as people who have opened an email in the past 90 days segments are Dynamic meaning they constantly change and update themselves based on the criteria so segments we use are engage 90 days and unengaged 90 days so for our engaged 90 days segment that's anyone who's opened an email or engaged with our lists in the past 90 days and that's constantly moving so you know they may open an email now 90 days from now if they haven't opened email they'll automatically get removed from that list even if they haven't unsubscribed so here we're going to walk through how to create a list and a segment within clavo so we're just going to come into clavo go to list in segments create new create list and we're going to name this email popup and this is the list that that we're going to use to attach to our popup we're just going to click create list and here is where you could click create signup form if you wanted to create the popup right now we're not going to do that right now we're just going to go into settings and make sure we go to consent and change this to single optin and again we just want to make sure that people are being automatically subscribed to the list as soon as they sign up and don't have to opt in again because if we do that we'll lose people and we'll get a a higher sign up rate this way so just any list you create change to single optin click save and now we have our list and then when we go into create our popup we'll just select this list and that's where those customers will go now to create a segment we're just going to go to create new create segment and here we'll name this engaged 90 days so here we'll just choose the criteria we'll choose what someone has done or not done we could do active on site if we wanted to Market to people who have visited our site recently in this case we're going to do opened email at least once in the last and we're going to change this to 90 days so this list will constantly be evolving and anyone who's opened an email in the last 90 days will be on this list and if they have not opened an email in the last 90 days they will automatically be removed from this list even if they don't unsubscribe and this just keeps our list healthy make sure that we're only marketing to people who are engaging it's going to give us higher open rates if you don't do this and we just Market to everyone it's going to be detrimental to our performance because we'll get a lot of people who are no longer opening our emails it's going to bring down our overall open rate and lower our account health so we want to make sure that we're only marketing to people who are actually engaging with our emails so once we set that criteria we're just going to click create segment and that's going to allow us to Market to that specific list of people and don't worry if you don't have anyone on this list yet if you haven't sent any emails obviously you're not going to have anyone who's engaged in the last 90 days yet but as I said this list will populate itself so just set it up and then this is what we'll use to send our campaigns so here I'm just going to run through some examples of emails from other brands tell you what I like about them what I don't like about them and hopefully just give you guys some examples for you to run with so I just searched discount here on M so these are any email that had a discount in it so for example right here we have an email that looks pretty good it's a it's a good Banner image um I don't love how far down the button is if you were to see this on mobile um which is not going to let me show but this button would be below you know what you're going to see on the initial screen so I always have like to have the button up top obviously they had to make room for This Woman's face so they put the button down below I would try to avoid that if you can we really just want to make sure that the customer knows what the offer is and is able to click to the site as quickly as possible so I always like to have a button at the top this email otherwise looks pretty good but again they have a button way down here learn more and donate today I would like to see that much higher up so here's an example of an email that I do like see right here in big bold text they have 30% off sitewide it's very clear what the offer is and they have a shop now button right here so you know in reality most customers aren't even going to scroll down and read the rest of this they're not going to look at these products they're just going to see oh 30% off shop now and click to the site so this is an example of a good email if you guys are going to do Banner images like this you know image-based emails just make sure that the offer is very clear right up front that as soon as they open the email they know what it's about and that you have a shop now button and make it as easy as possible to get to the site I also like this countdown timer you guys can mess around with that Cavo has a bunch of options drag and drop options for things like that but again not necessary just make sure the offer is super clear so super clear you know what's happening and how they can go claim this offer so here's another example this is a Texton email again we've had really good results with these this is longer than I generally will make them especially if I'm doing some kind of an offer so if I were going to send a Content email I have less of a problem with it being this long you know if I'm telling our Brand Story for example where I'm not trying to sell the customer something then I think this is a little more acceptable But ultimately if the goal is to try to sell the customer something like here they're offering 15% off Cyber Monday deal in that case I would make the email as short as possible I would probably even try to get these links up here just so a minimal amount of reading is required before we get to the offer you know most people aren't going to read this entire thing so we want to have the offer very clear in the same way we do with the banner emails just very clear upfront you know only a small amount of text before we say okay this is what we're offering this is where you need to go to claim that offer so I would just try to shorten this quite a bit given that this is a sales email so here's one more example this again is one I really like it's very clear what the offer is I would make this button a little bit bigger especially on mobile that button is going to show up pretty small again we just want to make sure that it's very clear where they need to go and just make it as easy as possible for them to click to the site but I think the rest of this looks really good you know they have an image here and then they have another button down here that says save up to 60% off sale this is one thing I would change I don't like how they have a 30% off up here and a 60% off down here I think that can be a little confusing I try to only send one offer per email or you know if we're doing like a dash deal for example or we're doing 35% off to the first 15 people 30% off to the next 15 people and then 25% off to the next 15 people you can do something like that where you're offering different percentages if it's the same offer so sometimes we'll have those kind of tier discounts where it's they're only available for a limited amount of people and those are okay but just try to make these as clear as possible and try to avoid using multiple different discounts especially like different percentages if they're not the same offer in the same email but other than that this email looks really good again I would just make that button bigger but but I think overall it's pretty solid so that's about it again this is m.com is a really great resource there's tons and tons of emails on here from different brands um you can also see their subject lines what's working for other brands which is huge so feel free to come in here but again don't get overwhelmed you don't need to be sending emails like this especially in the beginning what's important is that we have our basic flow set up that we're sending basic campaigns even if those are Texton campaigns again we've had great performance from those so you know don't feel like you're missing out if you're not sending some crazy Banner emails but if you guys do want to try this this is a great resource for you so what is an email popup a popup is a form that pops up on our site for visitors to subscribe to our email list generally in exchange for a discount this popup provides an incentive for customers to stay and complete their purchase and or gives us the ability to follow up with them later and we can set up a dual popup that collects both their email address and phone number so why do we use email popups email popups boost our conversion rate when they're done correctly they also build our marketing list for remarketing later on and email popups make it so your traffic isn't All or Nothing a lot of people who subscribe to your popup won't end up purchasing and that way we can sell to them later on so what is on SMS popup an SMS popup is similar to an email popup but instead of collecting the customer's email it collects their phone number for text message marketing and as I said before these are often dual popups where they're combined so one step is an email popup and one step is an SMS popup so it creates a multi-step form that collects both their email and phone number for marketing later on SMS lists are generally smaller they're usually only around 20% of the size of an email list because a lot of customers aren't comfortable giving out their phone number in the same way they are an email but SMS lists are still very important because they have much higher open rates and conversion rates and we're not going to worry about this right now we're not actually going to send any of these SMS campaigns until later on but it's important to at least have that popup and begin building our list at this stage so here's an example of a dual popup this is from Chris's previous store history te's and the first step is where the customer will put in their email address so it says ready to save 10% and and in exchange for the customer's email address we'll give them a 10% discount code so the second step of that popup is an SMS sign up where the customer can put in their phone number and we generally offer exclusive VIP deals to SMS subscribers only to encourage them to subscribe so you get a smaller number of people actually putting in their phone number but again you're going to get a higher open rate and higher conversion rate on those fewer SMS subscribers so the next thing we're going to do is create our email popup so in order to do that the first thing we're going to do is go into listed segments and we already have our email popup list but we want to create SMS list as well so we're just going to click create list name this SMS list create list and then just again go to settings consent and change this to a single optin now we're going to go to signup forms create form and we're going to scroll down until we see the Dual optin the multi-step email and SMS and we're going to select this one and here we're going to choose our email subscriber list which will be our email popup that we created and our SM subscriber list which will be our SMS list that we created this one and I typically will turn off include a teaser it's not super important that's just when the popup is not up it'll have a little image on the site saying get 10% off or whatever discount we use but it can be a little distracting so I will generally turn that off especially for mobile so we're going to click create form and so this is what our popup is going to look like so we're going to change a bunch of these settings just to make it look better we're going to replace this image and here's where you guys could upload your image I'm just going to choose one that's already in here here to save time but here's where you would want to display a product model images are really good here if you have like AI images of models wearing your clothes or even customers wearing your apparel this is a good place to put those and then we're going to change this so this is not super exciting it just says limited time 10% off I typically will change this to something like unlock 10% off and then say your order and I'll I'll capitalize this and a lot of times I'll change this to Red just to make it stand out a little bit more unlock 10% off your order and we can even make that text a little bit bigger let's go to 40 and then I'll generally remove this descriptive text right here we don't really need that we just want to make this as clean as possible so this is where the customer will put their email in and then I'll generally change this to something like claim my 10% off again just to drive more urgency that seems more exciting than just continue and then we're going to go in here to targeting and behavior and we want to show this based on rules so the default is to have it immediately pop up as soon as someone gets to the site but we don't want to do that we don't want to show this to every single customer we only want to show this to customers who are likely to leave our site because if somebody's going to check out we don't want to just give them 10% off for no reason we really want this to pop up as customers are looking to leave our site to try and win them back so we're going to do this based on rules and we're going to do it when visitor is exiting the page and when visitor has scrolled a certain amount so here we're going to do 50% and when visitor is exiting the page and then we're going to leave this deselected so it will trigger on either one of these so when a customer Scrolls 50% of the site or when they are intending to leave the site this will pop up we'll leave the rest of this as is and then up here we'll go to targeting and we want to click don't show on certain URLs and here's where we're going to input back SLC cart and back slash checkout and what this is going to do is prevent the popup from showing up at on the cart page or on the checkout page because again we don't want to be giving this code to people who are already going to check out you know if somebody's on the checkout page ready to purchase we don't want to just give them a 10% off code if they're going to check out anyway so we want to prevent the popup from showing up on those two pages and that's everything we're going to do there so we have unlocked 10% off your order claim my 10% off and then we want to add another button so we're going to go to add blocks and then we're going to add a button down here and this button is going to say no thanks I'd rather pay full price and then we're going to change the background color to white and the text color to Black so now they're prompted to claim the 10% off or if they really want to close the form they'll click this button that verbiage really drives them to take the discount because they feel like they're missing out if they don't and then we also want to go up here and look at the mobile version and just make sure that it looks good on mobile as well another thing I'll generally do here is ADD blocks and then add the logo up here so what you can do is is drag and drop this image block and then upload your logo our logo is not uploaded so I'm going to skip that step but I would put your logo in here and then you can resize it right here they'll give you options if you need to crop it or you know adjust the size of it but I would generally add our logo up there and then again just make sure it looks good on mobile and then for the next step we're actually going to go to this SMS optin step and delete this and we're going to clone the email step and name this SMS and then here we're going to delete that and add a phone number and here it's going to add all the text terms and we can't delete this this is required legally but what we can do is make that smaller I'll typically make it like 11 or 12 font size and then we're going to change this to unlock SMS only deals or actually let's do want SMS only deals and let me see yeah so that looks good and then here we're going to say get SMS deals or something like that and then the list to submit here we need to change this to our SMS list so when they opt in here it adds them to our email list when I opt in here it adds them to our SMS list and then down here so we'll just change this to no thanks I don't want texts and then that button we just want to make sure the action is Clos form so we now have a two-step popup first step is their email in exchange for a discount code and they're going to get this discount code via email and they don't also have to subscribe to SMS to get the discount because as I said before we're going to get a lot more subscribers to email than we are SMS people are a lot more willing to give out their email than their phone number so we want to make sure they're getting the discount regardless if they sign up for email and SMS is just kind of a bonus and we're going to offer SMS only deals in exchange for that but they're going to get the discount either way so once we do that and again check it on mobile just see how it looks then we're going to go to our success step right now it just says thanks for signing up again here is where you would add your own image and I'll typically delete this and again here's where I would just go to add blocks and add my logo up here and we're just going to change this to we can leave it as thanks for signing up and we're just going to say check your email to receive your discount code and that's it and then our discount is going to be in our welcome flow and then if you guys want to get a little fancy you guys can add what we call a micro commit so don't feel like you need to do this but we have seen good results with this and this is something people in the community brought up that they had good luck with which was awesome great to see people testing things but basically what we do here if we want to do that is just hit clone and we'll just name this micro commit clone that step and then drag this over to the beginning and we can say something like do you want 10% off your order and pose it as a question and then here we would just delete the email sign up and this is all that'll look like so what we're doing here is asking them if they want to Discount before prompting them to put in their email and surprisingly in a lot of cases you'll actually get a higher commit rate with this because people commit to the discount and then once they're on this step they're already into the process and will put in their email so if you just ask for the email right away some people aren't willing to do that but once they've committed here they're more likely to put their email in so again don't feel like you need that but we have seen good results with it so I'd recommend it if you want to give it a shot would just say do you want 10% off your order claim my discount and then unlock 10% off your order promps them to put in their email then one SMS only Deals they can put in their phone number if they'd like and then again success check your email to receive your discount code so once you're done you're just going to go up here click live and it's going to give you alerts it's probably going to prompt you to set up your SMS so we can just click finish we'll choose United States only or you can do US and Canada if you'd like next and then here's where you're going to put in your company information they just require a little bit more info for setting up SMS so just go through these prompts click next and then once that's done you'll go back here again go to live and just hit publish so what is an email flow an email flow is an automated email sequence that's sent to customers who trigger the initiation of the sequence based on a specific set of criteria some example criteria are the customer purchased the customer signed up through a popup customer added items to cart but did not check out so these email flows run constantly in the background and are sent to people at different different times depending on when they enter the flow so the two flows we're going to worry about right now are the welcome flow and the abandoned cart flow so what is a welcome flow welcome flow is a sequence for customers who are new to our email list that welcomes them to our business and provides information about our brand so you guys have all seen these most brands at this point run a popup and when someone signs up for that popup they get put into a welcome flow where they get a series of emails essentially introducing them to the brand and building trust most subscribers come through the popup on our website and we'll get put into this welcome flow and this is the most important flow because it builds trust with the customer we have to remember that a large percentage of the people who put their email into our popup won't end up purchasing the first time and this allows us to remarket to them it allows us to show them reviews give them a discount code essentially prove to them that they're going to have a good experience with us and build their trust to get them to purchase at a later date so what is an abandoned cart flow an abandoned cart flow is an automated series of emails that's sent to anyone who adds items to cart and then leaves the site without checking out this increases conversion rate by recovering lost purchases because we have to remember that a large percentage of the customers who put their email into our popup won't end up checking out and those purchases would be otherwise lost if we didn't send them a follow-up trying to get them to purchase again so the abandoned cart flow re-engages customers who may otherwise never come back so the browse abandonment flow what does browse abandonment do it can recover lost Revenue can convert High intent traffic it reinforces the brand and builds awareness and it drives repeat sales and improves customer LTV so pretty much all the same points as the abandoned cart flow these customers are going to be a little less intent on buying just because they haven't added items to cart yet they've just viewed items so we're probably going to see a slightly lower conversion rate with this versus like an abandoned cart flow but very similar and we still want to be marketing to these people because we're going to have a fair amount of customers who view a product but don't actually add it to cart so this is going to allow us to Market to those customers even if they didn't add items to cart so here we're back in clayo and we're going to set up our browse abandonment flow so we're just going to go to flows create flow and browse aband and if you don't see that up here just search it browse abandon and the one we're going to use is the one that says standard so this is just email a lot of these are both email and SMS we're not going to worry about that right now we're going to do just email browse abandonment so we're going to choose this standard one click create flow and then here's our browse abandonment flow so as we can see the trigger says when someone viewed product so that's going to be anyone who went to the site looked at a product but didn't add it to cart and didn't check out so you can see the profile filters here checkout started zero times since starting this flow and placed order zero times since starting this flow so you're going to see this time delay where it says wait 2 hours and then it's going to send them this first email and the subject line here is did you see something you liked and you guys can pretty much leave the email that's in here this is just a template one that we have and then we also have these templates for you so these are some example browse abandonment flows we have used these are text only so you guys can come in just grab one of these come in here click edit if you want to use these and obviously feel free to use whatever you want it's going to have some stock you know dynamic products and buttons and things in here but you can come in just add this text so add something like that obviously just change it for your own brand name you guys can also write something completely different if you would like you can use chat GPT to help you with this um however you want to do it we just try to make it as easy as possible with these existing templates and then there's going to be it's going to show them the products that they viewed right here and just say do you want to come back and purchase this and then it's going to have a shop now button that's going to take them back to that product page so you can pretty much leave this email as is and just save that done that's pretty much all you need for the first one and then I would generally clone this out and make this flow a little bit longer so here we'll do we'll edit this to do maybe wait 24 hours so 2 hours after they view the product and leave the site they'll get this first email then a day later they'll get this second email and we can just clone this down here and then we would do something like this got questions about seasonal Collections and again feel free to tailor this to your own brand um you guys can do whatever you want here but we' do something like got any questions as the subject line and then we would just go in change the text got any questions about seasonal collections we're here for you just checking in and again it's going to show them those products try to get them to go back and purchase so that's what we'll do for the first two emails and then I generally will do one more where we'll do another another wait one day and then this last email we're going to give them a discount code because if they haven't purchased by this point after they've gotten these first two emails it's unlikely that a third email with no kind of discount is going to get them to come back and purchase so we kind of want to up the Annie now offer them some type of discount and try to win them back and get them to come back and purchase those products so here we could do something like come back and Shop 15% off and then again I would just keep this same style of email with the products and everything I would just go to Shopify make a quick discount code Mount off order so we could just do something like sc15 for seasonal collections just put in our percentage there I generally will set these to combine with shipping discounts and then we'll just save that and then we can offer them that discount code to come back and purchase here we'll just go to clavio so we have our subject line as come back and Shop 15% off and then I would just go in here edit and then we would just change this to say so we could say something like that come back and Shop 15% off for the next 48 hours only with code sc15 and we always want to make that stand out I typically highlight these in red and I'll even highlight this or embolden this whole line of text and then we could just do something like this ready to celebrate the seasons with us click below to shop now and then I would change this just because we used it in the previous email do something like claim your 15% off claim your 15% off and then again it's just going to show them those products that they viewed because those are the products that they're most likely interested in and if they click shop shop now it's going to take them to the site to those products so that's a good example and again we just want to check make sure everything looks good on mobile but that's a good example of a browse abandonment flow and you guys can add emails to this if you want to I don't really see a reason to do more than three so the first one is that did you see something you liked and then here we just have the got any questions and then this last one is comeb back and Shop 15% off so it's basically just a you know pretty General one then asking if they have any questions kind of inquiring why they didn't check out why they didn't make their purchase and then offering them a discount kind of a last Stitch effort to get them to come back so that's all you should really need and then when you want to publish this you just go to set each of these to live and again you guys can mess around with this if you want to make you know Banner images or anything like if you want a banner image with a discount you guys can do that again that's something where we could go into canva make a design I'll just show you guys a quick example of that here so we could do something like an email header and go to so they have a bunch of templates here for you so you could grab something like this put in your own picture change it to 15% off there's a lot of different templates they have here for you obviously you know you could grab something like that again put your own information in there update this to say 15% off don't feel like you need to do that these brows abandonment flows can be pretty simple and the way clavio has them laid out for you that's based on a lot of data they have they've found that these don't really need to be that built out they can be pretty simple emails ultimately we're just trying to remind the customer that hey you looked at these products and didn't end up purchasing do you want to come back and purchase so again these don't need to be super in-depth something simple like this is pretty much all you need I would just do you know at least these two initial emails where we're asking them to come back asking them if they have any questions and then you know at least one email that has some sort of discount code to incentivize them to check out that should be all you need for the Brows management flow and then again just make sure these are all live and then again just make sure these are all live and then hit update status and make sure you do that the default here is to be on kind of a draft version that's not actually published so just make sure when you're done with this you set these all live and then hit update status and now our browse abandonment flow is live all right so here we're going to set up our welcome flow and our abandoned cart flow so we're just going to come into clavo again click create flow and then we're going to find our welcome series and it's the one that says customer versus non-customer so start with the essentials these are the main flows we're looking at um so just choose that welcome series trigger we want this to be our email popup list so just make sure you choose that list that we created for our popup and then click create flow okay so once we're in here you can see this trigger is when someone has added two email popup and then it's going to immediately trigger this list and start sending them these emails so the default here is to have conditional split where it divides the pathway based on whether or not the customer has purchased from us before we're just going to come in and delete that remove the yes path because we want these emails to get sent to everyone who signs up through that popup whether or not they've purchased from us so you're going to see the default here is two emails one's going to get sent immediately after they subscribe to that popup and one's going to get sent 3 days later so we're going to build this out a little bit more but the really important thing here is that this first email sends them that discount code from our pop up so I'll generally come in here just remove this star and say welcome here's your 10% off code and then we're just going to make sure that we create a discount within Shopify to reflect that then we're just going to make sure we create a discount in Shopify to reflect what's in that email popup so I'll generally just do something like welcome 10 and we're going to come in and create our discount we're just going to make sure that we do the same discount that's reflected in that popup so don't generally do something like welcome 10 10% off and then just set this to combine with shipping discounts save that and now we have our welcome discount for anyone who subscribes through that popup so then we're going to come in here again subject line just welcome here's your 10% off code then we're going to edit this email and here's where you can go and grab our template that we have prepared for you so in our example we used a 15% obviously just update that to reflect whatever discount you're using in the popup 10 or 15% doesn't really matter and then we're just going to paste this so it just says as promised here's your 10% off coupon to all our seasonal collections T's to claim this discount use a coupon code welcome 10 again that's a coupon we just created at checkout and we'll take 10% off and we'll take 10% off your entire order but you have to hurry this coupon is only valid for the next 48 hours this your chance to try anything in our seasonal collection store add a discount just use code just going to delete that so that's really all you need and um I'm actually going to remove this too we don't need this text block because we already have the discount code and then we just have our shop now button and I will usually change the color on that make that look a little bit better so I'll generally come down here maybe make this a red button with white text I think those stand out a lot more just looks better I'll generally remove the merge tag here and just put in the actual brand name just because sometimes those merge tags can not fire correctly and it'll show up like that so we'll just say welcome to the seasonal collections family and then we're just going to make this text bigger now we're just going to increase the size of this text let's make it 16 and then we'll check it on mobile just says welcome to the seasonal collections family as promised here's your 10% off coupon that's really all you need we just want to make sure that it's super easy for them them to take that discount code and go to the site and purchase something um and this will just show them different products from the website and obviously you guys can mess around with this if you want to you know if you want to have some elaborate banner up here that shows the discount feel free to do that a great resource for that is this website called M so this just shows you e-commerce brand emails so if you just type in like discount or you know if you typed in Black Friday or any particular sale this is going to be great for showing you what other brands are doing what's working for them so you guys can get as elaborate with this as you want to obviously here's an example of like a plain text email we've had really good luck with these even though it looks super simple again just a hyperlink again it's just hyperlink text with a discount you can go anywhere from as simple as that to you know getting crazy with some of the clavio templates and some of the canva templates and I'll show you some examples of those so if you guys did want to come in here to canva you can create all kinds of email banners they have a bunch of templates for you that where you can kind of just drag and drop change the information so there's all kinds of stuff you can do with it but again 8020 principle we always talk about that what's important is that you have something here what's important is that we're giving them the discount that we promised them in the popup and that's really it you don't need some crazy elaborate email here feel free to do that if you have the time you want to mess around with it but as long as we're giving them the discount and we have some follow-up emails that's really all that matters so once that's done we're just going to click exit done so you can see the email here and I forgot to save this so this is another important thing to do anytime we update anything in here like when I updated that subject line I forgot to hit save so just make sure you're doing that click save otherwise it's not going to actually update that so there we have our first email where we're giving them their discount code from the popup and once that's done you're just going to change that from draft to live and now that message is live now that will send out as soon as someone enters the email popup they'll get that email sending them their 10% off code so then right now we have a 3-day time delay and then another email that just says welcome email to follow us on social media we have some other templates you guys can use here's just one introducing products and talking about a little bit of our background there's a bunch of different templates a lot of these have discount codes in them so you guys can do whatever you want here you guys can make this flow as long as you want I generally recommend at least doing three emails so for this one we're going to come in and do so for this one we're going to come in and just add this template text so we're just going to remove all of these boxes that are here I don't normally do the share on social template that they have here I haven't found that to be super important and haven't gotten great results from it so I'll generally come in just paste one of those templates that we have so this is just a kind of a Content email can't seem to get enough and talks about you know a little bit about our brand and then again it's going to have Dynamic products down here I'll usually change these buttons change these to Red just think those look better just says ready to get shot shopping so we can do something like that and again the easiest way to do this is just using these templates we have ready for you and then we're just going to change the subject line to something like can't get enough so we now have that claim your 10% off code and then we have can't get enough and then obviously you would rename this and that's what that email is going to look like so it's just a little background on the brand again introducing them to some more products and you guys can build this out as long as you want we have multiple templates for you so what we'll usually do is give them this initial temp % off code wait 3 days they'll get this email and then probably do one more in the middle and then 3 days later we'll give them another discount because you can use this to continue selling to them so you can make this flow as long as you want you could have 30 emails if you want and um you know just have alternating kind of discount and content emails if you wanted to schedule them out like that you can also just send those as campaigns as we talked about totally up to you uh it does make it a little easier if there's sales that don't need to be sent out at a certain time for example like a Black Friday sale obviously that would be sent as a campaign email but if you just want to give a 15% off code and it doesn't matter when the customer gets it you can throw emails like that in this welcome flow so we have some templates again for you down here we have a your 15% off coupon expires we have an email it says your 15% off coupon expires today so this is where you would just go into Shopify make that 15% off coupon like we just did and then add another email down here using that template so again we're trying to make this easy for you guys I'm not going to go through through that entire process just for the sake of time you know we could have an entire course on email marketing there's so much that you can do with it but what's really important here is just having this welcome flow set up and making sure that when someone subscribes to that popup they're getting this 10% off code and then beyond that you can kind of do whatever you want again we just like to alternate do some sales emails and some kind of content just brand emails where we're not giving them a discount code and I would like to see this you know at least three emails you know but you can go as as long as you want so next we're going to talk about our AB cart flow again we're just going to go back to flows create flow we're going to go search abandoned cart and we're going to do the top one standard which says email and SMS and we're just going to delete the SMS pathway because we want to only do this for email create flow so the trigger is when someone starts checkout it's going to wait 4 hours and then we're going to remove this conditional split and just remove the SMS pathway so that's going to be the yes pathway just delete that so we're only going to send emails here so when someone starts to check out it's going to wait 4 hours then it's going to send them this email it's just going to say it looks like you left something behind dot dot dot don't let your item slip away and it's going to show them their items here just use the template that's in in clavio uh you guys don't need to do anything spectacular here these are really simple again we're just trying to remind them that hey you left these items in your cart come back to shop so just double check the email make sure the links are good and everything but you really don't need to change much in here and then again we're going to wait 20 hours and it's going to send them another email your card is about to expire and then again same thing just it's going to show them emails we have a template uploaded here you're just going to look a little bit different but just use what they have for you but again just go in there Ure everything works properly it's going to show them Dynamic products based on what they had in their cart so you shouldn't really need to change much in here at all just kind of ensure that everything's working properly and then I like to add one more email in here so I typically do a three email flow versus A2 and we're just going to clone this last email and then clone this time delay and I'll typically change this to 24 hours so they're basically getting three emails over the course of two days so we're going to change that 24 hours click save and then this last email we're actually going to provide them a discount code so we can leave the email pretty much as is again yours is going to look different but we're just going to go in and create a discount code and then add that to the email because if they haven't purchased through the first two emails it's unlikely it's sending them a third without any form of discount is going to get them to come back and purchase so we just want to give them a little bit more incentive kind of say hey we really want your business come back we'll give you 15% off or whatever it is so you guys can play around with those discounts I would generally use a 15 to 20% off so again you would just come back into Shopify create that discount code say we wanted to do 20% set it to combine with shipping discounts and then click save then we just come back in here go into this email probably change the subject line to something like come back and Shop 20% off just so they know that there's a discount in that email and then we would come in here just edit this and just add our discount code so we could just say something like that shop 20% off your cart before it expires and then we would say we saved all the great items in your cart so you're ready to buy simply come back and complete your purchase use code 20 off 20% off your order then we would just highlight that make sure that it's clear probably make that text even bigger so just something like that doesn't need to be super complex again if you guys want to make some crazy Banner in canva feel free to do so but you really don't need that playo builds these emails based on the data they have so these are actually tailored based on a ton of data on you know what works and surprisingly even though they look super simple and you know in my mind don't look all that professional these work really well so don't feel like you need to go building some crazy email template um these work just fine so once we have that email with our discount code we'll just click exit done and that's pretty much all you need for the abandoned cart flow so we just have uh it looks like you left something behind your cart's about to expire and then a last chance come back and Shop 20% off or again whatever discount you use that could be 10% off could be come back and get free shipping whatever you guys want to do there uh then we'll just set that to live and then make sure we update status here flow status make it live and then click save um and make sure you guys do that that's something that's easy to gloss over and again these are in draft by default so they won't actually publish until you change them to live and click update status so just make sure you guys are doing that so that's pretty much all you need we're just going to publish that abandoned cart email and you guys should be good to go so what is an email campaign campaigns which are also called blasts are any email that's sent as a one-off email and is not part of an automated flow these can be scheduled out but they don't run constantly in the background the same way flows do and a campaign is any email communication that we want customers to receive at the same time such as Black Friday sales emails because we have to remember that flows are going out on an automated basis and they're dependent upon when the customer entered the flow so those customers are getting the flow emails at all different times but when we're having like a seasonal sale for example we want everyone on our customer list to be receiving those emails at the same time so in those scenarios we want to make sure we're sending a campaign so now I want to walk through some different email types to show you guys the different styles of email that we use so the first email we'll talk about is a sales email and this is any email in which we're trying to get our customers to purchase something from us so these often times will include discount codes or offers but they don't always some sales emails examples are a Black Friday sale a summer collection sale any seasonal sale or promotion that we're running the next type of email I'm going to talk about is the content email so this is any email that's not directly aimed at selling products to our customers and the goal of these is ultimately to build a lasting relationship with our customer and build their trust so some content email examples are a brand story or about us a this day in history or a frequently asked questions and these won't include discounts they may not even have a link to the site although sometimes they will but the goal with these is not to get the customer to purchase anything it's just to build their trust and build a relationship with them next I want to talk about email style so there's two main styles of emails that we use and these are Texton and image-based emails so Texton emails use Simple Text and hyperlinks and these come off as a lot more personalized and even though they're super simple they often convert really well image-based emails use banners product images buttons Etc and these are generally what you think of as sales emails when you think of you know an email from any brand you would receive like a Black Friday email for example would typically include pictures of the products that are being sold it'll typically include some sort of banner saying you know we're having this big Black Friday sale they're a lot more involved they look a lot more professional but surprisingly don't always convert better than Texton emails so as I said Texton emails can feel more personalized and they often perform better even though they're far simpler so one thing we want to be doing with these emails is AB testing so what is that AB testing allows us to test different variables such as subject lines content offers Etc by sending different variations of an email to the same audience these generally run with two to four variations and use one of three metrics to determine a winner so they'll either use open rate click rate or placed order rate and one important note here is that we need to have a large enough sample size for each of these AB tests to ensure that we're getting accurate results meaning that we want multiple customers taking that specific action on each of the samples before we decide on a winner so let's go over some email best practices we want to use a combination of sales emails and content emails generally in around a 1:1 ratio so we're sending two emails a week we want one of those to be a sales email that may or may not have a discount code but the ultimate goal of that email is to get the customer to purchase so will include product images links to the site those sorts of things and then the other email will be a Content email and that will may or may not have a link to the site but the goal of that email is not to get the customer to purchase it's really just to build trust with them and keep them opening our emails and we want to make sure that we send discount codes infrequently we really only send them one to two times per month other than on large sales such as Black Friday or other seasonal sales the purpose of this is to keep customers looking out for those discounts and to drive urgency when they do see them if we send discounts constantly customers won't think they're special and won't feel the urgency to purchase but if they only get a discount one to two times per month it makes them want to purchase right when they get that discount we want to aim for two to three emails per week any less than that and it can hurt our open rate people will start to lose interest and stop looking for our emails and any more than that and we can start to annoy people and get a lot of unsubscribed so we found that two to three emails per week is generally that sweet spot where at least one of them is content email and at least one of them is a sales email and we want to use a combination of text only and image-based emails this is something we can ab test where we compare a Texton version with an image based version and see which performs the best so as I said we want to be always split testing variables this can be anything from subject lines content such as text only versus image based and different offers and we want to run a tests that have large enough sample sizes so that multiple people are taking the action for each variation if if we send the test to too small of a list and don't get anyone taking the action it's impossible to tell which variant was the winner so we want to make sure that multiple people are taking the action whether that's opening the email clicking the link or purchasing so that we have enough data to choose a winner okay so in this video I'm going to be covering sending a campaign email and doing some AB testing so one of the best things we can do to get started here is go to content images and brand and then go to brand and we can upload our logo here so you'll just go to upload image add your logo and this will save us a lot of time because it'll put our logo in every email and it'll save that as a template so we don't have to do it every time so we'll just upload our logo there click update brand and you can also change the colors here if you know there are certain brand colors that you want to show up in every email feel free to do that same with social icons you know you can add your Facebook page your Instagram page add those links and it will add those to every email you go to send for now I'm just going to save my logo click update brand and then we're going to go to campaigns so here's where we go to create a campaign we're just going to click create campaign you're going to name it whatever you want I'm just going to do spring sale select email then click continue here's where we're going to choose our audience so we're going to choose the engage 90 days list that we created that's generally the list I'm going to be sending to again we want to be sending to people who have recently opened emails and if they're unengaged there's no point in marketing to them that's going to hurt our deliverability so we're going to do that engage 90 days list 95% of the time and then I'm going to turn off Smart sending smart sending just means it won't send the email to people who have received one in the last 24 hours I turn that off because with the flow emails for example people are going to be getting them at all different times and if someone just got a flow email we still want them to get these sales campaigns generally so I'll turn that off then we'll click next and then here's where we create our email so you can grab an email template if you want to you can come in here and search you know Black Friday for example and it will give you a ton of different Black Friday emails we also have some templates saved and you guys will have access to these we have a bunch of different templates available for you so I'm just going to use this one and change some of the information and then you'll put in your subject line something I like to do is something like you won't believe this I like to keep it vague that forces the customer to open the email to find out what we're talking about and can help improve your open rate and we'll say huge deals are here and then I'm just going to use this template because it's already here but basically you guys would go in grab one of those clavo templates or if you wanted to do like a plain text email for example you could just do one from scratch and just grab a text box make it super simple like I said I'm using this because it's already here and any emails that you guys create like if you were to use a clavio template and put in a bunch of your own information your own images and everything you can then save that as a template to use it again later so that's exactly what we did with this one we came into one of those stock email just uploaded our logo put an image in put buttons in and everything and then we saved this as a template so now we can reuse this template email so this one has a code on it it just says as promised here's your 15% off coupon to all of our seasonal collection T's to claim this discount use the coupon code welcome 15 but you have to hurry this coupon is only valid for the next 72 hours and then we have a product image some more text and then another link to the site so this is a great layout for a sales email we always want to have a button right at the top we to be very clear about what the offer is so this text box right here lays out the offer it says hey it's 15% off you have 72 hours to use it so they know what the offer is and what's happening immediately then we show them a product and then we have another link to the site at the bottom so that's pretty good layout like I said when you're starting out it's great to use those clavo templates or the templates that we have available for you you don't need to be building these emails from scratch every time yeah just just use the existing templates so then here we'll click next Once we are happy with this and then here's where we'll create our AB test so you just click that button and what's it's going to do is just create a second variation of that exact same email so right now these are going to be identical and then here's where we'll change whatever we want to whatever we want to test so for example if we're testing subject line I would leave the first subject line as is and change the second subject line to something like here's your 15% off code you can test a variety of different things like I said I've had really good luck with these kind of vague subject lines that Force the customer to open the email but we can use a lot of different things sometimes these ones where we lay out the deal right away work well it it really depends so those are good things to test you can also test the content of the email so for example if we wanted to test a different product we would leave the subject lines the same but we would go into the second variation and just put a different image a different product in here so in that case you're testing the content of the email so you'd want the subject lines and everything else to be the same and just test that single variable we generally only want to be testing one variable at a time just because it can be a lot going on especially when you have a smaller list to test multiple variables and it can be hard to get accurate data so I recommend especially in the beginning only testing one variable and I'll usually start with subject line because you're going to have the highest percentage of people taking that action so subject line is going to be a test based on open rate and like we said about 30% or more of your list are going to open the the email so that's a pretty large percentage of people who are taking that action whereas like click rate for example we're only going to see you know 2 to 3% of people taking that action so you need a bigger list to have a big enough sample size to test based on that metric so subject lines will be tested on open rate because the customer is going to see that subject line decide whether or not to open the email anything content related you know if you want to test different products here if you want to test different buttons or a different offer anything that's in the content of the email will be tested on click rate because they're going to open the email and then decide whether or not they want to click to the site from there so the content is going to alter that click rate in the beginning I would stay away from placed order rate obviously that's just the percentage of people that go on to place an order but again a small percentage of people are going to take that action much smaller than click rate even so you need a big list to be able to use placed order rate as the winning metric so once you get to you know thousands of people on your list you can do that and one of the things I'll use place order rate for a lot of times is the offer itself if I'm testing like a 15% off like versus a free shipping or something like that you could test that on click rate or placed order rate I prefer to do it on placed order rate but again that's only when I have a big list of usually tens of thousands of people so to set up this test because we're testing subject lines we're just going to go to open rate and then test size this is the total percentage of your list that the test will go out to so half of that is what percentage we'll get each variant so for example say we had 100 people on our list and we sent this test to 50% that means 25% of our list or 25 people would be getting variant a and 25% of our list or 25 people would be getting variant B so in the beginning if you have less than 100 people say I would send this to 100% of your list and in that scenario you're not going to have a winning variation that goes to the rest of your list but because our list is small it will still give us accurate data to use down the road so 50% of the list will get variant a 50% will get variant B and that's the extent of the test but you can then look at that and say okay variant B1 it had a better open rate now I know that that style of subject line is better going forward so that's something you can do in the beginning and once you get to a couple hundred people on your list that's when I would start to do smaller sample sizes like 50% and in that scenario there's going to be a time delay so I generally do 4 hours and that means it's going to send 25% of the list variant a 25% variant B it's going to wait 4 hours and then it's going to look at the data and say okay which of these variants had the better open rate and then it's going to send that winning variant to the remaining 50% of the list automatically so that's how those AB tests work so once you set that up you'll just go click next up here and again because we don't have any people on this list it's giving me an error there but this is exactly how it should look when you go to schedule one of these you should see all green checks here and then we're going to go to schedule or send and here's where you can schedule it out so you can send the email right away if if you would like to or you can schedule it out for a later date so one thing I really like to do is do these like a week at a time so generally if I'm sending three emails a week I'll go in on a Saturday for example and schedule out my three emails for that week just so I don't have to worry about it makes it way easier than trying to get in there at a specific time of day and send a one-off email and like for Black Friday Cyber Monday for example I'll schedule out the whole month in advance just because we're sending so many emails and so involved you know I'll spend a few hours in there in a few different chunks and schedule those out a month in advance so don't feel like you need to be sending going in there and sending these at the exact time you want them to go out make use of the scheduling so you can choose your send time here so I generally will do between like 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. because we want to make sure that when people are likely to be on their phones so especially if I'm doing a split test like this I'll try to do it earlier because we have to remember that it's going to do that 4-Hour time delay before it sends to the rest of the list so we could even start this at like 9:00 a.m. and then it going to wait that 4 hours and then at 1 pm it's going to send the winning variant to the rest of list and you would just schedule that campaign here so that's pretty much it that's how you set up an AB test it's the same every time you can also do this in flows so it's going to be the exact same setup you're just going to do it individually on the flow emails and with these campaign emails like we talked about you can test you know an image email versus a Texton email you can test a sales email versus a Content email there's a lot of different things you can test just when you're starting out keep it simple keep it to one variable at a time and you know stick with subject lines in the beginning and then kind of graduate to content of the emails hope that helps so let's go over an email strategy case study and this is a test we ran on two of my previous brands on one brand we used only sales emails and on the other brand we used almost exclusively content emails so brand one we did nothing but sales emails just constant discount codes and offers the entire goal of every email was to get the customer to purchase Brand number two we sent nothing but valuable content we rarely use discount codes and the entire goal was to just keep the customer engaged get them to trust us and keep them opening our emails and believe it or not Brand number two won by a landslide it wasn't even close so let's talk about email metrics and ideal values these are the things that we're looking at when we're evaluating our email performance the first thing we're going to look at is open rate and that's the percentage of people who are sent an email that actually open it so we're really looking for at least a 30% open rate and this may be lower in the beginning I wouldn't be surprised if starting out you see somewhere around 20 to 25% that's not a huge deal that should go up over time one of the big things we can do to improve open rate is better subject lines because ultimately what determines the open rate is the subject line text because that's the first thing people are seeing that determines whether or not they'll open the email second thing is Click rate and click rate is the percentage of people who are actually clicking a link in the ad and going to the destination which is generally our website for click rate we ideally want to see 2 and a half% or higher again in the beginning it may not be that high but that's our ultimate goal next is unsubscribe rate which is the percentage of customers On Any Given email that unsubscribe and we really want to see that below 1% and reasons you may see a high unsubscribe rate are if you're blasting a ton of sales emails like we talked about or if you're just sending too many emails overall you may also see a high unsubscribe rate if the emails you're sending aren't valuable if the content isn't good if they're not giving good offers you may get a high percentage of customers who are unsubscribing so we ideally want to see that number under 1% next is Bounce rate and the bounce rate is the percentage of emails that go undelivered so for whatever reason they aren't able to be delivered sometimes that's issues with deliverability sometimes that's subject lines that are really spammy or have a ton of emojis that are rejected by the provider but basically balance rate should be under 2% ideally under 1% if you're seeing anything higher that's a problem and that means your emails aren't being delivered well and the last metric is deliverability which is basically just the inverse of Bounce rate and that's the percentage of emails that are being successfully delivered to inboxes and we want to see that over 98% ideally 99% plus and it should be again unless you have some major issue with your account if you're starting these lists on your website and you're not uploading big customer lists you should see a good deliverability rate if that's below 98% especially well below 98% then you have some sort of issue where your emails aren't being delivered to those inboxes and that needs to be looked into so let's run through some email examples so this is an example of a Texton sales email but here we didn't give a discount code our entire site was just 30% off we didn't give them a specific code but the goal of this email was to get the customer to purchase and you can see on this email we had a 41% open rate which is very good we had a 8% click-through rate which is lower than we'd like it to be but the email overall did $1,300 in Revenue so here's another example of a sales email also with no code but this was an image-based email so it had a banner image saying Black Friday loading and then we had product images in the email as well this email had a higher open rate at 48% but a lower click-through rate at 73% and it did $1,100 in Revenue so the Texton email in this case performed better even though it had a slightly lower open rate so here's another example of a Texton sales email but in this case we did give them a discount code we gave them an $11.95 credit to their account and this email had a 46% open rate a 1.39% click rate and did $3,100 in Revenue so this email performed better and that can be attributed to giving them that discount code and providing them with that credit which drove urgency so here's another Black Friday email where we provided a discount code and this one had a very good open rate at 57% but I would have to look I believe this was sent to a slightly different list and that can affect your open rate but this had a really good click rate at 2.64% and this email did $2,700 in Revenue so very good overall and this was a Black Friday 24-hour only sale and here's an example of our Black Friday Cyber Monday email calendar that we used this year so this is a total of 20 emails and you could see leading up to Black Friday we had kind of our standard layout where we were doing a Black Friday teaser on Monday and then a Content email on Wednesday and another content email on Saturday so that was our three emails a week two of those were content emails where we weren't trying to sell them something and one was a sales email where we said hey there's a sale coming be on the look out for discount codes so we did that for the 3 weeks leading up to Black Friday kept kind of our standard layout and then as soon as we got to the week of Black Friday that's when we started sending a bunch of sales emails and again the only time I would do that is you holidays or big seasonal sales where people are expecting those sorts of things so for the week of Black Friday through cyber monday it was pretty much all discount codes we actually sent two emails on Black Friday and two emails on Cyber Monday and again that's the only time I would do that I never recommend sending multiple emails on the same day unless it's a very specific holiday sale or something of that sort and then the following week here is when we would revert back to our two to three emails a week and our kind of standard layout so here are some examples of sales emails versus content emails so on the left side here we have a sales email where we're providing a 15% off discount code and it's kind of a banner image email and then on this side we have a Texton email and it's an entirely content email so this is an example of a this day in history so it says on this day in history Napoleon bonapart the renowned French military leader entered the city of Moscow so this has nothing to do with trying to sell the customer products we're just giving them unique information on the background of our store related to our niche just trying to get them to be excited to open emails and to learn something from us so here's another example of a Content email and this one is a link to our FAQ so again we're not trying to sell the customer anything we're just linking to our frequently asked questions page answering all of the commonly asked questions and building trust with the customer without trying to sell them anything and here's another example of one that we sent Thanksgiving this year just says Happy Thanksgiving today we give thanks the many blessings in our lives customers like you are why we're able to do what we love each and every day and we're incredibly thankful for that so again this is just building trust building a relationship with a customer we're not trying to sell them anything and then we just have a PS Black Friday deal start tonight at the bottom so this is still a Content email but we're letting them know that there's a sale around the corner so it kind of serves a dual purpose but it's not in your face we're not pushing them to the site or anything we're just saying hey we're thankful for you by the way we have a sale coming up so these are just a couple of examples from our community Joe set up his welcome flow and saw $267 in Revenue come in just from that welcome flow and here's another EX example where we're seeing amazing results from these email flows so that's awesome to see and this is actually pretty standard when you set up these flows and send these campaigns the right way you should see great results too so here's an example from Dano just asking about email and he got some amazing feedback from the community on how people were doing people sharing their numbers awesome to see that engagement and here's an example from Steven where over 20% of his revenue is coming from clavio and from his email marketing which is amazing and here's another example from Stacy who implemented email sent her first first campaign and generated $91 in Revenue just from that first Campaign which is awesome to see and that about wraps it up as I said email is super important and I think the examples from our community show that we've seen some amazing results and it's one of those things that you only have to implement one time the flows especially and then they're kind of set it and forget it and they just bring that Revenue in so that's about it welcome to lesson 4.5 of the testing stage in this lesson we're going to be covering our funnel optimization which this is the Crux of the entire business this is where we are figuring out how to make heads or tails of the data that we're receiving and where our Focus needs to be placed in order to get from where we are to profitability at a very high level and up until this point our progress so far a lot of different things but most recently we've set up our email and popup um and like basic flows and then we have our testing campaigns running and by the end of this lesson we're going to have a fundamental understanding of our sales funnel metrics their meanings and how we can improve them and we're going to learn how to lower our cost per click increase conversion rate increase our average order value and the reason that this matters is that optimizing our funnel takes us from you know losses or break even to $3 in revenue or profit per $1 spent which that's really the point we're trying to get to and this this is how we build a money printing machine and this you will know how to quickly identify the leaks in your business and how to fix them and before we even get into it I want to say very clearly upfront that this is the most important skill you're going to be learning this entire business everything we're sharing and it's going to be about an hourong synopsis of the highlevel most important stuff to understand but this is a process that took myself and the rest of the coaches and Meg thousands and thousands of hours to really fully learn these things so we're taking thousands of hours of experience and testing and brutal trial and error and Distilling it down into an hour so it's going to be extremely densely packed so if it feels like we're going quickly through things and you know you're drinking through a fire hose it's supposed to feel like that and this is also the stage just testing in general where most people get frustrated and feel like they're doing something wrong and they as they start facing the challenges that come with optimization and getting to you know break even and then profitable results that challenge is the thing that we need to lean into when you feel that challenge and you feel like you're facing a problem that shows that you're on the right track and I want to really emphasize this because I've seen so many students who they put in all the effort they've gone through all the stages up to this point they made all the designs the mockups they built their store they launched the ads and then they get the original results back and when the results that they get back we expect it to be like okay we expect there to be a lot of work to be done that is the expectation that is the next next progression in this whole process and I see people like take that as a bad sign because this is the first time that we're actually getting feedback at every stage in the business up until now it's just been us building in like a bubble this is the first time that we're turning it into a real business by having the confidence and the the courage really to go out to the market and get that feedback so we saying this upfront because it's really important to know that this stage the success or failure or learning at this stage comes down entirely to your ability your own ability to take feedback constructively and not as criticism not from me or the coaches but really from the market and to lean into your resources all the tools that we've laid out and to really use this as a chance to fundamentally improve your own understanding and skill level and that's the thing to get excited about this is where you're building like this is where real entrepreneurs are made and this is where you're going to learn by far the most I learned so much more by testing with my own dollars and AD spend way more than I ever did from watching any course or like consuming any content because now you're out there doing it you're doing it for yourself and we're here to help and point out like the most important levers and what we've learned from experience but at the end of the day it comes down to you so in this lesson we're going to answer what is Shopify funnel optimiz optimization why does it matter and then how to apply it to your business and in general the optimization comes down to what are the main steps of our funnel it's cost per link click conversion rate average order value and to help you with this process we have this calculator where you're basically able to just plug in your metrics and then it spits out what you should be working on but before we get into that and then we're going to show like cost per link click conversion rate average order value like how to improve each one of those which it really just comes down to one of those three things and if you feel like you're hitting a brick wall in any one of those again that's your opportunity for growth that's expected we spent tens of thousands of hours doing this every single day like millions of reps staring at the numbers and then testing things out to see what we could do to move the dial what we're sharing is the result of all of those tests that we've run and what's worked for us but that is in no way a guarantee if I haven't made this abundantly clear already that's in no way a guarantee that what worked for us on our brands in that circumstance in that situation it will directly apply so that's why we're what we're teaching are the fundamentals it's the root principles that are always true and it's the critical thinking skills that we can use to think through this problem so then we're not dependent on following a step-by-step blueprint and we don't even need us or the coaches we're able to decide and objectively analyze the results we're receiving on our own so before we go through that calculator and I show you like the specifics and a really important thing or mindset shift for us to have is like let me ask you a quick question like if you what if you had a machine that every time you put in $100 it returned $400 back to you 3 to 400 and it was doing that 24/7 365 days a year how much money would you put in obviously it's a silly question you would say take my money and we'd all be hanging out you know chilling on a big pile of money like these guys from Breaking Bad that's bilber on the left I love that he was randomly in this bilbur and then I think Ed Sheeran and Game of Thrones were two most random but fun cameos anyway so that's the same thing as asking like how big should my ad budget be and so when we're talking about this testing phase and like we're starting to spend on ads one we should have already decided the amount of money that we're comfortable investing in the beginning then two we should listen to the structure and approach that we've laid out to minimize our ad spend because we're able to learn a lot from a tiny bit of AD spend but really what we're building is this machine and so the better question is how much does it cost to build the machine so let's build it so step one what is Shopify funnel optimization well to Define what a funnel is a funnel is steps that a customer goes through within your business optimization is improving towards a desired result or outcome so some definitions we have funnel optimization then Shopify Shopify funnel optimization so our funnel is like where we put in we pour in traffic in the top and we get customers out of the bottom hopefully and to use a easier example is like if you picture a funnel that you have like in your kitchen pour water in the top and you get water out the bottom and we're we're explaining like the high level fundamentals and framework we're demonstrating with metaphors so when we start looking at the metrics it makes a lot more sense because I've explained the metrics and what's important to focus on so many times over and over again before finally realizing that it's useless unless we have this 10,000 foot view framework so this is also where it's very easy to get caught in like our emotions and stuck in our head and like limiting beliefs and that sort of thing so remember again back to the foundations module we want to be as close to a robot as possible when we're evaluating our met so a funnel a good funnel is one where you pour water in the top and you get all the water out the bottom so when you increase the amount of water or traffic you get twice as much out the bottom that would be good and you can spot leaks with this is lock in for this this is when we say you don't need to spend a lot of money to learn a lot it's because of this a non-optimized funnel is one that has lots of holes and when you pour water in the top you get a little bit out the bottom but you get a lot coming out these sides sides and so when you double the water going in the top or you double your traffic you're you're not learning anything new you just see where the leaks are even more but they were still the same and you just have more money or water flowing out the sides and this is not what we want and by the way you already know what a funnel is this is not a foreign concept cuz you're in them every day I know it's crazy but every single business has a funnel and it's their Journey the journey their customer goes on from first touch to purchase and Beyond Chris Amman Michael Scott so let's see a quick a few quick examples so we can draw on our previous experience and realize that we already know this whole funnel concept and now we're just building one for ourselves so grocery stores brick and mortar stores High ticket sales agencies Etsy sellers YouTube Shopify stores they all have funnels so a grocery store example funnel would be when you have a coupon offer that gets mailed out then you walk in the door then it's their aisle placement where their register is all of those things are their funnel brick and mortar store like the example we've used a lot is like when you have a billboard then you uh which gets you to come in the door in the first place and then you walk in the door again it's the aisle placement and where the register is that's the funnel it's in the physical world but it's the same concept then if you have high ticket sales or like selling like picture Tony Robbins selling like his business Mastery Program which is like a $10,000 seminar that you get you attend they do an ad to you schedule a call because it's a high ticket purchase so they schedule a call to hear about it and like persuade you it's sales call and then you have the call and then they close you and that's their funnel they optimize it each step like how well is our ad performing how many people are we getting to show up on the call what's the conversion rate on the call and then agencies they do some kind of lead magnet then like a a an example of lead magnet would be like get a free if it's a Facebook agency be like get a free audit of your ad account and then again you schedule a call that to review the results with you and then at the the end of the call it's like hey we can help you with this this and this all your big problems so there they evaluate each step of their funnel to get you to close Etsy sellers collection page product page fulfillment YouTube video it's your thumbnail then it's the the title thumbnail then the hook and then it's the quality of the content and then they do an offer maybe but so you're able to improve what's our thumbnail performance what's our retention rate through the first 30 seconds like our hook what's our retention rate through the rest of the video so you're able to turn that into a funnel then for Shopify stores it's our ad to our landing page to our cart checkout sale and then our lifetime value so the order that we optimize in is our cost per link click so what's the cost of our tra and really hear this part is this is it this is the whole thing this is the most simple slide but it's the most important because this is the order that we should be turning our brain on and off because in the beginning we want to turn our brain off to everything besides the cost per link click then once we get that down then we move on to conversion rate then we move on to average order value so if you're launching your ads and you're in the testing phase we only care about the cost per link click I can't tell you how many times I've seen like students have shown their ad account they're like you know I'm getting really expensive clicks but like no nobody's buying like I'm getting I have three add to cards but nobody bought yet I'm like okay and I look at their cost per link click I'm like you're getting $5 clicks I we don't care that nobody's buying yet you're not getting enough traffic we need to fix that we need to fix the top of the funnel before it's even relevant to talk about middle and bottom of funnel so we get people in the door we get them to buy and then we get them to buy more so history teas funnel for example is we have the ad then we drive people to the collection page then the product page the cart then checkout so funnel optimization is fundamentally the process of pouring in just enough traffic that we're able to see where the leaks are and then how we can improve it so now we know what Shopify funnel optimization is why does it matter so the reason it matters is that when you have it your s reach more customers your ads are more effective your brand ultimately grows and you end up making more money when you don't have it your products and all the hard work and effort you put into your designs ends up fluttering around in The Ether and we never get the feedback that we need in order to improve our catalog and make products that our customers actually want and you're also feel like you're losing money the entire time so now to close the loop on the metaphor is that if you picture the water being money pouring money in the top of your funnel with an optimized funnel we put in 100 bucks we get 200 bucks at out the bottom or over time we get 400 so and we shoot for like a 3 to 4X row as so then when you back out your other expenses like cost of goods transaction fees overhead other expenses roughly 50% means we're making roughly no that should be that's roughly a 20% 25% net margin oh there we go shouldn't have doubted myself so oh yeah because that X is canceling out the one at the top yeah nice all right so a non-optimized funnel unfortunately looks like you put in 100 bucks you get a 1.5x so you spend 100 to make 150 or even worse you spend 100 to make 100 back which after that you're not really making anything so let's see a simple equation if we're at a 4X row as and you minus out your other costs minus your ad spend that means you make $100 profit but if you're at a 2X row as after you take out other costs and add spend you're at a loss so and roughly a 2X row as is around like break even for us it's just to demonstrate an example so what row as do we want like what is our Target and I see people think like I just want it to be as high as possible the actual answer is we don't want it to be Infinity because there's a something called the law of diminishing returns which means that as our Raz improves dramatically and this is just to show us like what our Target is what point we're trying to optimized too once our Raz hits a certain point it starts diminishing in terms of the marginal gain that we're getting so when we're at a 2 this is going to get a little mathy but this is about the most math we'll do the whole time so at a 2X rowes that means that 50% of our revenue is going to ad spend because we're putting in $1 getting $2 back so two over one or one over two 50% when we're at a 3X it means we're putting in $1 getting three back so 1 divid 3 33% 4X putting in one getting $4 back 1 over4 25% so our row as to profit when we're at a 2X and this is assuming 50% roughly other cost in all examples so when you see each of these at a 2X we're at roughly break even when we're at a 3X we're at roughly 16.7 at a four we're at roughly 25% net margin at a five we're at 30% 6 we're at 33% so the profit margin that we see at each one of these levels is like this it go from 0 to 16.7 to 25% and so on so when you break down the incremental Improvement or the marginal Improvement that we're getting at each additional row as it diminishes over time like going from a two to a three which is still just a 1x Improvement on our return is 16.7% additional net profit then when you go from a 3 to a four which again is just a 1x Improvement on our row as that's an 8.3% improvement then when you go from a four to a 5 that's a 5% 5 to a 6 it's 3% so where's the ideal range that we want to be at it's about a four but between a 3 to a 4X and so this is the point that we're trying to optimize to and then once we hit that then we start just increasing our ad spend to keep our row as around that level so how do we apply it so first we start by reviewing our key definitions so some important acronyms to know that we're going to be referencing a lot are our cost per link click our conversion rate average order value our lifetime value our rowes and our cpms so our cost per link click and it's important that we look at the link click cost not just CPC all Facebook gives you both metrics so this is the amount that we pay for each session to our site so if we paid $100 for a billboard and 100 people came into our store that would be a $1 cost per click the reason that this matters is that this is the top of the funnel this is the first metric that we have to optimize and as you work your way down the funnel there's less and less variables to be isolating in the beginning top funnel cost per link click that's everything that's you know people you know evaluating your brand your Niche your designs your mockup a lot of different variables as you work your way down it gets easier and easier so the way that you find it is it's your ad spend divided by number of Link clicks on your Facebook dashboard and it's also on your Facebook dashboard how do you change it you test new ad creatives new products offers ad copy headline there's a lot of different variables but we'll get into how to like what the dials are next is CR which is our conversion rate conversion rate is the percentage of people who land on your product site product store and like actually purchase the reason that this matters is that you can have a like the best Billboards in the world but if no one buys then they're useless so the way that we find it is we take the total number of orders divided by our total sessions and it's also just on our Shopify dashboard so how do you change it by adjusting site layout speed color isolation social proof product which that should be top on the list and our product copy next is our aov or average order value so remember these these three these are the ones that are you know the most important ones average order value this is the average number of products or the amount spent by your typical customer the reason this matters is that it's substantially easier to get somebody to buy more than it is to get somebody to buy like a new purchase so it's much easier for us to get somebody to go from buying one shirt to two shirts than it is for us to get somebody to go from zero shirts to one so when we have somebody there and they're cheing out or they're buying we want to do everything we can to get them to buy more and this is where like the economics of this business where it really works a lot of people my dad did this too on history te's when he was trying to understand the business model A lot of people do like all right so if I sell this many t-shirts then I minus the product cost like $30 for a shirt then minus product cost like eight or nine then shipping is like four or five then my ad cost is like 15 like how am I really making that much money and it it comes down to this average order value because we're not we're never our goal is never to get people to buy one shirt our goal is to get people to buy at least two or more shirts and we talk about how to do that because when you get people to buy more than one you only have the acquisition cost for overall so then we're spending $15 to make 60 or 90 opposed to spending 15 to make 30 and also there's savings on the cost of good side like we pay less when we're shipping more than one item on a per item basis so the way that you find it is by taking your total sales divided by total number of orders and the way you change it is just more better products so that if when somebody's landing on a site because they clicked on a product that they liked in your ad that they should see other products that are like those around it if they you know click on a a very flowery colorful graphic design then they land on a collection page that is you know just scattered with completely unrelated like sarcastic dark humor it's not going one it's going to hurt conversion rate two it's going to lead to the low average order value how do you change it more better products free shipping incentives frequently bought together and product recommendations lifetime value this is the total amount a customer spends with us why does it matter this is where the real money is like we want to get people to buy five six seven times we worry about this later on in the beginning we just focus on our main three metrics cost per link click conversion rate average order value then rowes is our return on ad spend so this is how much money we make for every $1 spent so if I spent $100 on a billboard that day and that day $200 worth of customer purchases were made that'll be a 2 to1 row as we talked about before our Target that we're shooting for is between a three to a four and this indicates overall how healthy and optimized our funnel is this is like the the cost per link click conversion rate and average order value all three of those bundle together to make the row s then we have CPM which CPM stands for cost per thousand Impressions and this is so cost per Lane click conversion rate average order value this is underneath cost per link click this ladders up into that so cost per link click or CPM and then link click through rate equals your cost per link click the reason we look at this separately is because this is the cost per thousand impressions of the ad it has the largest impact on our cost per click and shows how much engagement we're getting when we get when we have an ad that is really resonating with people and they're getting lots of likes comments and shares Facebook rewards us with lower cpms so now let's identify the leaks so how do we spot the leaks so we use those metrics so just like Neo in The Matrix is able to see like through the any fellow Matrix nerds here with me like it's basically this kind of scene we're running a very digital business where it's nearly impossible to if we're just looking at like our online store just seeing like the visual aspect it's inre it's impossible to tell what's going on the way that we're able to see the entire business see behind the hood like what's working what's not is through these metrics and fortunately I know it's overwhelming when you look at the account for the first time when you look at your dashboard that's what we're here for that's what the calculator is designed to help so that as you're just following along and plugging in your metrics into the tools you'll start to pick them up for yourself so we're going to find them in two places number one is on our Shopify analytics dashboard and here is where we see total sales average order value and then our online store conversion rate and then we also see them in our Facebook ad account and I know when you look at this it feels overwhelming uh and you yeah so the three metrics that we really care about are these three so we're going to go in this order and these are the targets that we're trying to hit is 50 to 75 cent cost per link click 2.5% uh conversion rate 2.5 to3 and 45 to $50 average order value and whenever I look at somebody's new account and we set up the simplified dashboards this time through which was a big Improvement whenever I look at somebody's account and they don't have purchases yet I'm pretty much just seeing their account like this so take this as a snapshot in your mind when you're looking at your own account and you have all these confusing metrics you can just hone in on this this is all that matters in the beginning and then as we start getting purchases then I expand it to look at more of the full picture like what's the row as what's performing well that sort of thing then our average order value that's up here and this we want it to be $45 to $50 and again top of funnel is hardest to optimize to Middle to bottom aov is by far the easiest conver rate which we'll talk about next slightly out of order for some reason I don't know why I did that is just to keep you on toes that's down here so conversion rate is again if we send 100 people to the store how many of them are purchasing and this varies a lot depending on the traffic Source the location that you're targeting like United States purchase optimized this screenshot was for I think this is history te's and this one at the time we had some International traffic but anyway no this is the 0 to7 figure store yeah it started in July we H we have a lot of international traffic which converts lower but anyway the point is when you're looking at the online store conversion rate it's really not just one number it's three numbers broken up and this is the beauty this is where we can really become Neo and start seeing through everything and start identifying like where the real leaks are in our business because it's really three different numbers and we should look at them separately so it's the add to cart the reach checkout then the sessions converted so if we look at the funnel metrics here so cost per link click is determined at the ad level so the most important metric is determined just in the ad account and that's determined in large part by like the quality of the products and the mockup but then when we look at the rest of the funnel the conversion rate the add to cart and you should like take a screenshot or something of this slide because this is really important if you so as you're you're trying to optimize say you've gotten your link clicks down to like 50 cents and now you're on to the conversion rate what you want to do is see which one of these numbers do I need to improve and add to cart we want it to be like roughly six to eight% reach checkout should be like four to 5% roughly like 70% of whatever your your ad to cart was so if your ad to cart rate was 10 then your reach checkout should be roughly seven and then your sessions converted should be roughly 50% drop off from reach checkout so if it was 10% add to cart which we shoot for 6 to8 but just for easy numbers 10% add to cart you want 7 77% reach checkout and then 32% sessions converted are like healthy benchmarks that we can shoot for so each page impacts within the funnel each page impacts a different one of those metrics so the add to cart rate that's what percentage of people landed on the site and then added to cart how do we find what pages could be impacting add to cart rate it's pretty straightforward it's what pages have an added cart button on it it's only two it's the collection page and the product page or not not which Pages have the add to cart button on it which page would impact somebody's decision if they're going to add to cart or not it's the collection page and product page like the collection page cannot impact the reach checkout rate his reach checkout is what percentage of people added to cart and then clicked on the checkout button at the bottom that button is not on the collection page at all so this is where 10,000 foot view understanding this and this is like the most important concept that I can teach anybody anytime I'm evaluating anybody's story I'm running through this exact process looking at what's their cost per link click then if it's if the cost per link click is bad then I stop there and I focus on the ads I don't care about conversion rate or average order value but if it's good 50 to 75 cents then I move on to conversion rate and then I'm looking at okay I break it down like this every single time every single store it's the same every funnel it's the same you just go in logical order remember back to uh business foundations we talked about the law of constraints this is also applying it to your business so we're evaluating what is the constraint in the business right now so add to cart is the collection and product page then cart page is initiate checkout and then the checkout page is the conversion rate and then average order value is impacted by all the pages so step two is we plug the leaks and we're going to go through this in more detail like how we do that so at the ad level the fundamental goal of an ad is number one to get people to stop scrolling and the way we get people to stop scrolling is to make sure that we have a high contrast background of our mockup it should not blend in with the Facebook feed and be like white or light colors it needs to be high contrast something that really stands out and doesn't look artificial we've been seeing recently more realistic mockups been performing better than like this one for example but anyway the goal of the the ad is to get people to either click here the link in the descript in the ad copy or the shop now button at the bottom and all the variables that impact it refer back to the the ad section of the course where I'm talking about like the concepts of like what what stuff is most important to focus on and really hear this part you can do a different ad copy and I recommend testing it so you learn like how big of an impact that has or doesn't have but really it's the ad creative it's the presentation of your product it's what is in the middle there because that's what gets people to stop scrolling and then the second step is get people to click and the reason the way that we give people a reason to click is primarily by showing them a product that they love and then two giving some kind of urgency or scarcity or reason that they have to click now in the ad copy and general rule of thumb for ad copy that has worked well for us is short form where it's three lines making sure that it doesn't add on the expand or like C more button uh which you can see in the preview of the ad and then doing the first line is some kind of emoji and like attention grabber that speaks to whoever your target audience is so like yoga t-shirt sale or nature t-shirt sale or new nature or new hiking collection or 75,000 history T's sold and then the second line should be some reason it can either be a discount or urgency or new customer deal some reason that they should buy right now and then lastly is shop now call to action button like get yours here and then a short link that we we showed how to set up the URL redirect so that it doesn't expand and show like the full URL which then cuz then it expands into like the C more button that we don't want then on the collection page really we should be looking at it on mobile the goal is to get people to either click one of two places and so that's either on the product image or the quick add to cart button if we have it enabled we right now don't have it enabled on our store and it's performing way better but that's the goal is to get people to click on the on the product then on the product page the goal is to show people the information that they need in order to click the add to cart button that's the fundamental goal of this page and you can experiment with like that's the shop pay button you can experiment with turning that off and having uh what's it called the the quick checkout options that's one lever that you can play with to improve the the add to cart rate on that and then on the cart the only goal of this page is to get people to click the secure checkout so we're just going through what's the goal on each page like there's a lot of noise it's important that we hone in on what's like what's the ultimate goal we want them to click the add to cart on the product page we want them to click the secure checkout button here and you can use either a full cart page or a cart drawer then on the checkout page our goal is to get them to click the the checkout button at the very bottom and now before we go through the troubleshooting and like how you can improve cost per link click conversion rate and average order value this fun graphic illustrates a learning experience that I see a lot of students having to go through and learn the hard way so please pay attention to this because it can save you a lot of painful trial and error just by grasping this concept and that is when we have a non optimized funnel here we are as good little entrepreneurs studying our data and actively working to recognize what we don't know and identify the main constraint in the business and then work on just that and if we're doing our job right we take out a our little blowtorch and we start to optimize our funnel we patch up the top of funnel hole I should jump over to the other side but you get the point so we patch up each one of the holes and we go around and we optimize the funnel that that's the logical just completely objective way to do it much easier said than done to it's it's easier it's easy the steps you have to take in order to fix those pieces but it's much harder to like just objectively move from one to the next because naturally we get distracted we like certain parts of the funnel more than others uh we feel more confident and solving one area than another and this is where we start getting into like you know misleading ourselves by saying things like no like my my conversion rate it's fine or like my my cost per my ads are good my products are actually good like I just need to fix my people just aren't buying I need to fix that then I'll fix my cost per click like things like that just we need to throw that out completely we need to very objectively go based off of the calculator and not the calculator itself but like the fundamentals in there and just go like thinking back to the brick and mortar store it would be insane for a business owner who has zero people coming into the store to spend all their time rearranging the shelves and like getting new carpet and buying a new cash register that'd be insane there's nobody in the store but we still end up doing that a lot of times because maybe that person was an interior designer in their previous life and that's what they're most comfortable with so and I'm not here to tell anybody what you should or shouldn't do I'm just here just to show what we actually get you results and I've been that person who lights fussing around in the Shopify store adding on a million apps making it all pretty tweaking the buttons making a little round update it let's see what it looks like if I adjust the roundness to be you know 20 instead of 15 like what about this shade like adjusting all the little hex colors let me go check the checkout page make sure it's the exact same hex color all those little thing I I've wasted all that time please don't follow in my same Footsteps in that way as after going through all that I realized this and that is that I wasn't doing that instead what I was doing is I we sometimes tend to just sit there hyper fixating on one area of the funnel and we fix the crap out of one piece meanwhile our overall funnel which is what we really care about is just gushing water but you know we fixed that one section really well so we want to be doing the former not the latter so the question is now how do we identify what those leaks are in our own business and then what do we do to fix them so step one is getting very familiar with this page which is our analytics dashboard in Shopify so this page the way you find it is from your home screen you come down here to Analytics and here you can rearrange it and they they update this view so it looks uh different here let's just show the new one I don't really like this new analytics view but since that's what you'll probably be seeing so you're able to customize each one of these sections but the three main numbers that we're looking for are again conversion rate which that's actually kind of nice how they break it down like that but then uh average order value average order value and conversion rate are the two main ones we're looking for here and then you can see total sales like this past month 215,000 um then you can see your returning customer rate bunch of different uh metrics in here but bottom line this is what you want to get very familiar with in addition of that something else to get to familiarize yourself with is these reports in here so like when you click conversion rate breakdown you're able to filter this view is messed up why it's not showing this stuff over here but I spent a lot of time in here going like this so if I ever want to analyze like what's my conversion rate by country or my conversion rate by landing page again it' be really nice if this wasn't okay just imagine if you will there's a and you're all smart people you're able to find it it's over here but there's a way to add a EXT ra column here and ones that I look at a lot are like region landing page path and then you sort by that or you add that variable and then you sort by number of sessions and then you're able to break down and see okay what was my conversion rate for people who landed on the homepage what was my conversion rate for people who landed on the collection page what's the conversion rate by device type and these are all things that it are very good to be taking a look at and diving into the metrics like like this anytime we had a store that we were trying to optimize I was in here non-stop just click and I didn't have like an exact rubric or something to be following I was just clicking around seeing what I could find and that's where I learned a lot of the best stuff and everything that we're talking about now came from just messing around in here and seeing what insights I could pull from the data so get very familiar with this and when I say get very familiar make it more tangible you should be running your D Toc stat spreadsheet every day running your p&l every day then anytime that there's an issue or something you need to optimize at one point in your funnel dive into it by going to analytics and then clicking to see more and like experimenting with it and like seeing what it shows you based on the different views there's a million reports in here so we're not going to go through all of them but at a high level these are the most important metrics to be looking at to First evaluate where we need to be placing our Focus like is it cost per link click is it conversion rate is it average order value we have this calculator that you're able to use that helps answer the question for you so the way you use it and this is linked somewhere around the video in the the free community but question one is do you have more than 100 designs on your store if the answer is no then it says stop pause your ads and go make 100 designs so these are the prerequisites and second is is your campaign optimized for purchase conversions and this is a common one I highly recommend checking it we don't want to be optimized for traffic or anything of the sort we want to make sure we're sending purchase traffic cuz it's entirely possible that we'll get we can get very cheap traffic but not convert At All by using the wrong optimization then third is your targeting set the USA only uh which in the beginning up to 10K in sales it should be and next we enter what our cost per link click is so once you've answered yes to all these you meet the the requirements then we move on to entering our metrics so down here say my cost per link click is $1.75 then that would tell us okay we need to go optimize our lower cost per link click and the key here is that then I don't go mess around with my Shopify store I don't do any changes to the conversion rate or average order value I literally just go review the checklist and see what I can do to lower my cost per link click but then once my link click is decent like 120 it's getting better but once we get under the dollar Mark then it moves on to the next piece of enterr conversion rate so let's say our conversion is 1.75 show okay it needs Improvement and as we talked about it breaks down into three different numbers so expand this and then we enter what's our add to cart rate so I look at our Shopify store and enter okay my added to cart rate is 5.3% and notice that it's changing down here and this has logic built in where it prioritizes in this order and but if your conversion rate overall is good good like a 3.0 then it doesn't look at what these metrics are it just jumps you right to the average order value but say we're at 1.7 needs Improvement say our add to cart rate is 5.3 so it's not good we want this to be like 7% which is good enough I think 8% is where it says great yeah eight and then our reach checkout percentage this is the one that we want it to be 70% of this so there's two different versions of this you could either do like if this was 10% Like view this say it would be seven or as a percentage of that this is written in as a percentage of that number so you would just enter what your your reach checkout rate is which is on that Shopify analytics dashboard we were just looking at so once this hits 70% then our if our add to cart and our reach checkout rate are both in a a solid spot then our conversion rate should be up in a good range if it's not then that tells us that it's just something on the checkout page that needs to be fixed because add to cart back to that graphic is the collection page product page then reach checkout is the cart and then from reach if we have a good add to cart and a good reach checkout but then our conversion rate is not good then we know that it's just something on the checkout page which as we talked about before is where we have by far the fewest variables that we're able to impact Shopify better for worse gives us very few knobs we able to turn there it's for better it makes our lives easier the carts in general convert really well so the only main things that impact there is like the shipping cost shipping cost and uh like the the color of the the checkout button which we did in the what's it called in the Shopify setup section so now once we're in this stage and we're trying to optimize our funnel and go here to stage four test in funnel optimization and what we have here is a massive how many steps is this 238 Point checklist you're able to go through that gives so step one understand fundamentally why we're doing funnel optimization what it looks like and that we want to apply the the law of constraints or theory of constraints and work on just one piece at a time then we want to use the calculator ultimately we want to learn the metrics for ourselves so we don't even need the calculator but in the meantime use the calculator to help us hone our focus and a game you can play I recommend is test out like okay know your metrics and then guess what it's going to tell you and then plug in the metrics see what it spits out and over time if you guess a couple of times you'll pick it up pretty quickly because the metrics don't change or the benchmarks don't change so once you you get that to spit out the answer where you need to place your focus then you go to your checklist here and say if it's cost per link click which I need to add the section for cost per link click but when it's your add to cart rate for example you're going to go look at what pages could impact my ad to cart rate well would be my collection page and my product page so you would expand these and then you would go through each one of these steps and make sure that you've done this and these are examples and some of these are just general like best practices and principles for Shopify in general or just like website optimization but a lot of these are specific specific mistakes that we've seen people make that once you you know fix it like it a lot of these things take like 5 minutes to fix it's just you don't know it until you know it type of thing so a lot of these changes they they seem like very minor tweaks or like little details but conversion rate optimization in particular is death by a th000 Cuts it's tweaking a lot of little things in order to get the the overall picture to improve so now we're going to go through each of these step by step starting with cost per link click and then conversion rate and then lastly average order value and how you can apply it to your own fun so you can bookmark this section there's also the show notes where you can refer back to this and anytime you're having trouble with your cost per link click or your conversion rate or your average order value you can refer back to this jump to the specific section and run through it but keep in mind that again there's no replacing learning these principles on your own I'm going to give lots of recommendations and mistakes that I've made but ultimately you want to be quizzing yourself and testing your own ability to pick up these Concepts so that at the end of the day the ultimate goals that you don't need to be referring back to this you just start to know it intuitively which bringing self-awareness to it will help speed up that process but you're naturally going to start to pick it up over time anyway just from sheer repetition and now we're going to be seeing examples of ways that we can look at top performing sites such as busted teas Wicked clothes into the am and what we're able to learn from looking at these sites to apply to our own stores in the interest of optimizing our overall funnel and this is a practice that I use all the time even after spending tens of millions of dollars on over10 million on Facebook ads doing over 25 million in sales I I still do this to this day that's one of the most valuable things we can do is looking at our competition and being constantly being a student because there's things that are new strategies and techniques that are changing all the time that we're able to learn from but before we do that you know using the strategy while it works really well it's only as useful as our ability to fundamentally understand what we need to be doing on our own site as I can look across you know different sites and go through the checklist like we're going to do in a second that's over 200 different steps on how to optimize your store but if we're focusing on the wrong section then it's ultimately going to be like useless and I see this happen aot lot where people will make a lot of effort and put in a lot of work on a section of the business that isn't where their their focus really needs to be so that's where we have the optimization calculator the Wei scale calculator we just went through then another piece that's equally as important is the row as formula and so we're going to go through this and then we're going to go through the checklist next while referencing other sites in addition to our template to show the process of how we can improve our overall performance but to start things off this Ro formula if I were to synthesize down like the most important skill that I've learned over the past you know better part of a decade in e-commerce it would absolutely be without a doubt this skill right here and the RAS formula are the goal of it is to understand the levers for increasing our rowes and we'll be doing it in a way that applies to everybody doesn't matter what stage you're at this point in the course you should be at the testing stage have run your mockup test campaign and have you know some spent but even if you haven't started spending yet this will give you a better understanding of what to look for once you do if you've spent your first 100 bucks this will help you analyze your winners uh if you spent your first thousand this will help you fine-tune your funnel and find profitability if you spent 5,000 this will help you increase your net profit by 10 to 20% at least and if you're over $10,000 in spend then this is going to help you scale and really ramp things up from here and this is one of those topics that doesn't get shown on one it requires some math and like backend like logic and strategy to like really understand it so like it this is not one of those topics that you'll ever see in YouTube videos and stuff like that cuz like content that does that performs well and on those platforms are catchy things it's like you know new tools and tactics and like new shiny things like new buttons that people can press but fundamentally like this this is the thing that has yielded me like by far the most returns is understanding this concept right here so if you're able to like understand this and then start to practice this and applying it to your own business then you will have a huge advantage over the competition and this is essentially like if you were ever in math class growing up as a kid where the teacher does that really fun thing where they explain the really long form version and then they give you the short form and you're like awesome why didn't you just explain it that way to begin with well you know in that case the only pay off is you know you get a better grade on your math quiz here you make a lot more money so I'd like to think that it's worth it so to demonstrate this example even further or this concept we're going to be using an example of student from in the community using their stats from a few months ago and in these stats or in the screenshots they had done $30,000 in sales about $112,000 in ad spend overall row as a 2.3 $46 aov 1.55% conversion rate 1.88 overall 42 Cent cost per link click and they're at roughly a 7.3 net profit margin done $2,000 in net Tome income so these are examples of screenshots that I look at all day long like all the time and analyzing like what's working what's not and help people you know reallocate their spend effectively so that they're able to you know ultimately scale and get better results faster and so you can see this is their ad account then this is their Shopify store and some key definitions for us to review that we're going to be referencing we just went through the slides that included some of these but first we have our row as which is return on ad spend so for every $1 we put in how many dollars will be getting back earnings per session is for every session and this is a new one but for every session on the website how much are we making so if we send 100 sessions and we make $100 that' be $1 earnings per session then next is our cost per session so if we get 100 sessions to the site how much do we spend on ads in order to get them then conversion rate this is if we send 100 sessions how many of them purchased so if five people purchase that' be a 5% conversion rate average order value this is if we have 100 orders and you know we did $5,000 in sales you do 5,000 divided by 100 give us an average order value of 50 bucks then drop off percentage this one we haven't talked about yet but this is the percentage of people who drop off before the page loads so if we send 100 link clicks to the site and 80 people actually end up being sessions this that's a 20% drop off and that's very typical like anywhere from 80 to 90% is the number that we want to see um then CPM is and the biggest impactor on this the drop off percentage is the site loading speed and we'll talk about how to judge that or gauge it in a second then we have our CPM which is our cost per thousand Impressions then we have our link clickthrough rate and then we have our CPC which is cost per l click so the row as formula return on ad spend formula is at a high level pretty simple it's our earnings per session divided by cost per session so if we are making $2 per session and it's costing us a dollar to get each session that would be a row as of two earnings per session to take which should be that plugged in up here is our conversion rate times our average order value so if we send a 100 people to the site and five people buy and you have $50 average order value that would be $250 earned and then you divide by 100 so that would be $2.50 earned per session then our cost per session is our cost per link click divided by or basically cost per link click take away the drop off rate so cost per link click divided by one minus drop off percentage then our CPC is essentially the CPM and the link clickthrough rate combined so it would be CPM divided by C CTR * 1,000 so if our to use an example if our CPM which is cost per th000 Impressions was 20 and our CTR was 2% then our cost per link click was 1% would be 1% this is a really important thing to understand right here is so if CPM is $10 link click rate is 1% that would be a $1 cost per click if CPM was $100 and our click theough rate was 10% that would also be $1 the reason that this is really important to understand is that cost per click it just equals your CPM times your click the rate it's just taking these two numbers combined so we want CPM to be as low as possible we want click the rate to be as high as possible it's not exactly like that but it's just combining those two variables so in this example this student had $11 cpms 2.16% link click theough rate conversion rate to 1.88 and it's aov is $464 it starts to feel like a superpower over time just by seeing these top level metrics you're able to know exactly what's going on in the business and have like x-ray vision and know exactly what they should be where they should be placed in their focus and then over time you'll start to learn what are the steps that they can take to improve those numbers so again row as equals earnings per session divided by cost per session so earnings per session we know is conversion rate times average order value and then it's divided by our cost per link click which cost per session is just cost per link click take away the drop off so the cost per link click formula is CPM / CTR * 1,000 uh divid 1 minus a drop off percentage then Raz so to break down first we're going to do the CPC so his CPM $9.11 is there then a CTR is $216 times 1,000 okay so you plug in and you get 42 cost per link click and if we go back up here and look at yep on his I don't know if you can see that or not but on the screenshot it's 42 Cent cost per link click it's literally just a math formula see so these two columns so 42 Cent cost per link click 2.16 click through rate $9 cpms it's literally just a math formula we take CPM and CTR gives us 42 Cent cost per link click then we have to factor out the drop off rate to get the cost per session for sake of example I'm just keeping it easy and saying that there was zero drop off that would obviously not be the case but the way you calculate drop off percentage roughly is you just look at the number of Link clicks that you sent from Facebook then you go into your Shopify analytics and look at the number of sessions you had from Facebook there's a report there that you can do it to see you know how many came from Facebook versus otherwise and that's how you calculate the drop off percentage and in the grand scheme of things this is a m a lesser thing to keep track of biggest thing is this is mostly included so that we know to keep an eye on it so that we know that you know we don't want the the drop off percent or the the site load speed to get away from us but yeah 8020 principal if you just focus on if you even just look at the cost per click you'll be well well ahead of the competition so 42 C is cost per session now we're going to calculate the earnings per session which to do that it's 1.88 time $46 41 so that equals 87 uh earned per session so for every session that lands on the site they're making 87 cents for every session they paid 42 cents in adspend so that gives a row as of 2.07 that's just based on the Facebook traffic but the actual is 2.13 so it's extremely close that like the difference is because of like Facebook reporting is always off by like 5 10% normally but to keep going the the point that this is demonstrating this is where it gets really powerful so first this whole formula up here this is just for your like understanding I whenever I'm looking at somebody's store I'm never ever doing this in my head I'm never doing like one minus a drop off percentage like I'm never like uh what's his name from uh The Hangover I mean it was a spoof on the Rayman movie but like when he's counting cards and there's like all the numbers floating around his head Allen that's his name uh it I'm never doing that this is just to demonstrate like this is the logic behind it so that when you know you so you understand like the fundamentals like the the core principles behind it so that when you know the roaz calculator spits out like okay you need to work on your add to cart rate you know like why that is on your own and when you you know start to go through this funnel optimization process you know that behind the scenes there is Sound Logic and reason and that it it's not just chosen by chance like okay you need to work on the initiate checkout you know that this is how it's calculated this is how everything works so then you know on your own that trust in like this approach basically which is not even approach it's like just the fundamentals just explaining like how the math works out but so this is the long form version of it what I actually am doing is much much simpler I'm literally just doing conversion rate times average order value divided by cost per click and then it to demonstrate this point to give us some easy examples of why we focus on let me undo this like why do we focus on cost per click then conversion rate then average order value because cost per click is the dividing factor it's the one that you know we can improve conversion rate but if our cost per click isn't good two things number one it's always going to like it's the denominator it's always like the great divider and then two we're not really able to improve these numbers conversion rate and average order value until we have a substantial amount of traffic to be able to see where the leaks are and so we have to get cost per click down for two reasons one just math and two it allows us the amount of traffic we need to be able to improve these so to give us some examples first example say if we have 3% conversion rate and a $40 average order value and then a $1 cost per link click so that would give us a 1.2 row as and this is where I see a lot of people go wrong so be sure to really focus on this so if if these were our stats 3% conversion rate $40 average order value $1 cost per link click ask yourself like where would you want to place the focus which lever makes the most sense for us to be investing our time into obviously there's a million things we could do for any one of these numbers that's why with limited resources and time and a learning curve to get over it's really important that we're able to hone in and decide which one needs or or warrants our Focus first and then a followup to that is make sure we then go out and actually execute on that like regardless of our own emotions but that's a whole separate topic but in this case let's say that we improve the conversion rate so we take take the conversion rate from 3% to 4% well what would that do to our overall row as is it would take us from a 1.2 to a 1.6 it's not bad Improvement but what if we were to do something different instead of putting our focus on the conversion rate what if we were to lower our cost per link click to buy 50 cents well that would take our rowes from 1.2 to 3% time $40 divided 50 will give us a 2.4 row as so it would a 50 c decrease in our cost per click would literally double the row as and this is what I see so many people get hung up on is they'll have stats kind of like this and they'll focus on making changes to their site thinking that they need to improve the conversion rate wondering why people aren't buying more than one shirt not re completely missing the plot that it doesn't matter until we get the cost per click down and the other things is that we know from experience and from all the students and you know just industry standards that there's certain benchmarks of what we can shoot for in each one of these categories that are not only very reasonable but very doable for us to hit and so like we know and they're down here that conversion rate of 2.5 to three I would even say 3.5 are very doable and an average order value of 45 to even $50 is very doable getting a conversion rate of say 10% is would be getting kind of crazy getting to an average order value of 100 to 150 that's much harder and then on the cost per click side we know that we can get down to 50 to 75 cent cost per click can we get down to 10 to 15 cent that's a whole another discussion but we know that these are numbers that we can hit and we do and our students hit them very consistently so these are the ones that we're shooting for we're not shooting to fix this equation by getting to a 10% conversion rate we're not shooting to you know fix this equation by getting $150 average order value we're trying to hit these benchmarks and we're trying to hit them in this order and reason that we do it in this order is because of this so when we lower the cost per click by 50 Cents gives us a 2.4 row as if we lower it by another 25 cents takes us from a two a 2.4 to a 4.8 so these would take roughly like the same amount of effort now we can I'm not saying we won't improve the conversion rate or we shouldn't improve the average order value but what I am saying is we want to make sure we're placing our focus in the order that it makes the most sense so moving on to the metrics from the example so they had 1.88% conversion rate $46 average order value 42 C cost per link click so they at or 2.07 row as so then the question is where should they Place their focus what should they be trying to improve out of this well the simple way to figure it out and this is what the calculator does for you is look at the benchmarks so if we go in the and I'm going to put these in the order we look first to their cost per link click or are they within range yes they're better than in range then next we look at conversion rate 2.5 to 3 1.2% no they're at 1.88 then average order value $45 to $50 Yep they're right in range but they're only at a 2.07 rows which again isn't bad but we can get a lot better than that so out of these three numbers what should they be focusing on the answer is conversion rate and so conversion rate uh if we get it to a 2.5 % which is very doable that takes a row as from 2.07 to 2.76 then if we increase it by another half% to a three that takes and everything else held constant same number of shirts being bought on average same cost of the traffic that brings them up to a 3.3 row as then uh and again the calculator does this the question is okay so we want to increase the conversion rate so what number do we focus on because we learned that conversion rate is broken down into three see add to cart rate then it's the reach checkout then it's the sessions converted so add to cart rate is at 6.27 but their reach checkout is at 2.33% which that's a big drop off we want this to be at 70% of that so 6.27 * 7 that should be at a 4.39 so it should be almost double about 80% higher than what it is right now and again not only should it be there but we know it's very possible POS and very doable for us to get it there so if we're able to increase this by almost double that would close to double their conversion rate then I I looked in this example I looked at their site to give them some suggestions on things that they can do to improve the reach checkout rate but yeah this is the and we're going to get into like how we come up with these steps and this is what the 200 some point conversion rate checklist is based off of yeah this is the concept that if you take anything away from this whole course let it be this because this not only applies to e-commerce and print on demand but this applies to literally every business it's what's the cost per session to your funnel your landing page whatever it is and then how much do you make over the lifetime is one way to look at it or on the first purchase how much do you make earnings per session off of that person landing on the site and if you take the earnings divided by the cost that gives you the row as then if you're looking at it and you're like okay I don't like the number that it's showing me getting a bad row as currently what can I do to improve it the answer is two things either I can increase the earnings or I can decrease the cost ideally we'll do both but you can only do one at a time so if we decide like should I be getting my average order value up or my conversion rate or is my cost too high and I need to get that down and again remembering that the reason we go after the cost First is one we it's the biggest impactor like we could have a conversion rate average order value that's you know 30 40% above industry average but if our cost per click is still bad it's not going to be profitable then second we're able to optimize our earnings per session way easier when we have a lot of traffic coming in so this is the concept takeway and apply that this is like behind the scenes of the calculator down here this is what we're going to go through next looking at the the checklist version but there's different ways that optimize each piece so like if you have high cpms or high cpcs high cpms low ctrs low initiate checkouts there's different things you can do for each step break it down into a funnel and make sure that you're placing your focus in the right area and this is a concept that we didn't touch on nearly enough in the first course is the decision-making behind where should I be placing my focus why and what should I do and so now we've covered where should it be focused why should it be there and that this is the answer to the why and next we're going to cover the what which is what should we do once our focus is there like what changes should we make how do we run the test and then how do we know when it's time to move on to the next one like what's statistically significant all that kind of stuff so now that we've gone through the Raz formula we've completed the first step of our funnel optimization checklist and now we're going to move into the stepbystep guide about 205 steps in total that will walk us through the variables and changes that we can make or you know at the very least steps we can entertain um in order to improve each one of these main metrics so it's our cost per link click our conversion rate optimization and our average order value and conversion rate optimization cro or just CR doesn't really matter uh either term works and goal of the cost for link click is how to decrease the cost of our traffic conversion rate optimization is how do we increase the sessions that convert into a purchase and then average order value is how to increase the number of products people buy per purchase and to help us in uh demonstrating this we're going to go through all the checkpoint all the items on the checklist there we go along with looking at different sites that are like popular like very successful multiple eight figure apparel SL print on demand sites so that along with seasonal collections so that we're seeing a wide variety we're seeing that it's not just one size fits-all there's lots of different ways to do this and the important thing the only thing that really matters is that we're learning the skills and tools necessary in order to problem solve this once we get to this point ourselves and everything that we're about to go through are things that have worked from our experience and things that we've seen have a big impact for students of ours but is in no way a exhaustive list or just simply your checklist to follow along and by the time you get to the bottom you know it's all sunshines and rainbows because things change uh you know back to the Rubik's Cube example we need to be learning how to solve each layer and the tools that you know and resources that we have available to help us with that but fundamentally we it's not enough to just be following how we're moving the cube we have to be uh if anybody skipped over that section of the course the metaphor Probably sounds super uh confusing but Mor of the story we need to learn fundamentally what impacts cost per link click what impacts conversion rate and what impacts average order value so we just went through the why and the how via the realiz formula now we're going through the what so we're going to go through this in the order that we optimize in our stores starting with cost per link click so now we've learned how to you know identify if cost per link click is the issue which it's pretty straightforward it's not really rocket science we just explained all the backend stuff but it doesn't have to be a complicated process it's just is my cost per link click greater than 75 cents if the answer is yes then the result is that that is most likely your issue and most likely the thing that you have to work on and this is also the step that has by far the most you know variables at play so it is very much expected that this will be a challenge that this will take some time in order to get this right so do not think that you will launch a 100 designs and you'll immediately get these results one don't think that because it won't be realistic but two by thinking that and that make setting that expectation for yourself you're setting yourself up to fail and feel like you're a failure when in reality it's completely normal so plan to be going through two to three cycles of like the B the bo testing method or whatever you want to call it like there's lots of different strategies but basically you're going to launch 100 designs and your cost per link click is most likely going to be $150 250 if not more and if it's over you know $250 to $3 normally you have to run a mockup test then if it's under that you know in the dollar to150 range you're looking for things to dial it in long story short normally it comes down to the mockup and the product but we're going to give you whole slew of things that you can troubleshoot in addition to that and for anybody who's currently in the University this is going to be like breath of fresh air for you guys because you've heard me say the same things over and over again now this is Flushing out everything that I could possibly say about how to lower cost per link click but again the the answer is not changing it is by far the biggest variable is always going to be your mockup and your product but let's go through it so cost per link click to start off let's recap uh that cost per link click is simply our cpms and our link click through rate so CPC equals CPM time CTR another thing to note is that the top 1% of advertisers split test 70 times more than the average person so uh all of the ad copy and audiences and stuff that we're setting up to begin with there's a million different things that you could test and things that are good ideas to test and if you want to hone in on one thing like what separates you know Steph Curry from the rest of the shooters in the league is just the number of times that he's practiced that he shot Mill millions and millions of 3point like practice shots to make we went over the stat and the foundations module but he takes so many practice shots to to be able to do what he does the top 1% of advertisers split test 70 times more than the rest that means they're making 70 times more ads they're coming up with 70 times more ideas and they're getting like they're finding you know 60 plus different things that don't work in order to find the one thing that doesn't work so there are thousands of variables that impact cost per click we have to keep focus on the highest leverage variables and nine times out of 10 when somebody has a high cost per click it's because of one of two things number one they either have bad mockups so they blend in meaning they have it's like white uh low contrast against the newsfeed and they don't represent the design well so low perceived value they look overly AI generated just overall they're just Bland and don't really look that you know appealing not that aesthetically pleasing and I'm not saying this at anybody I've made plenty and plenty of horrible mockups but uh I've noticed a huge difference in our ads performance after just swapping out a bad mockup with a good one and we talk about how to test different mockups and how to come up with them so you have the tools to be able to do that second is they just have bad designs designs that don't belong on a t-shirt or meaning that they they're like overly detailed or concepts that just don't resonate with the audience so this could be just Bland either and I'll say this one is the more common of the two if I had to pick especially with AI nowadays I see a lot of people using AI tools and making designs that like look cool but it's just got too much going on it wouldn't really be something that somebody would want to have you know 12 Ines below their chin for 12 hours out the day or they just have Concepts that don't resonate with the audience so like if we are you know selling ski designs you could sell a design or a t-shirt that's just you know line art of a pair of skis and you know it totally depends on your Niche and like the vibe that you're going for with your brand but for like the ski or Niche that might not be the thing that resonates with them the most might for some of them but something that resonates with them a lot more could be you know that same line art but then add in like a funny quote or saying or inside joke related to the niche that would be something that could resonate more but that just comes down to a lot of testing there's no literally no way to know what's going to work before you actually launch it that's a big that should actually be an extra point on here is that just assume you know nothing and I abide by this all the time because I've been humbled again and again and again like every time that I think a design is going to do well it normally ends up doing pretty poorly and vice versa but the inverse is also true when somebody has low cost per clicks it's normally because of one of two things one they have a great mockup that stands out in the feed looks super realistic and does a good job of representing the design increasing the perceived value then great designs is the second one one which are unique original Concepts that resonate With Their audience which leads to lots of Engagement shares Etc which then leads Facebook to reward them with lower cpms which then leads to cost lower cost per clicks this is an a important uh thing to understand which I'll explain now with the troubleshooting High cpms why aren't people commenting liking or sharing my ads so the reason that cpms matter is because cost per click equals CPM time link click through right it's it's not multiplications but it's just a combination of these two and so CPM has the biggest impactor so CPM is cost per thousand Impressions the way that we lower it is a couple of different ways the primary one is Facebook is in the business of keeping people on their platform because when they keep users on their platform then they're able to serve them more ads when they're able to serve them more ads then they're able to charge advertisers for those ad spots so what Facebook do they want to incentivize advertisers to show high quality content that because when you know their ad is high quality something that people find interesting then they're more likely to stay on the platform logger which means they can serve more ads so on and so forth so how does Facebook tell if what you're showing is a high quality ad it's what metrics does Facebook have access to they can see how many people are liking how many people are commenting sharing and watching your video ads so engage metrics is the answer and so when Facebook sees a lot of Engagement then they rate that ad as like high quality and then they go into that whole cycle that we just described for rewarding you with lower cpms and so the question that we want to answer is like why aren't people commenting liking or sharing my ads because if if anytime I see somebody's cpms and they're like 4050 $60 it's because of one of these things either a they aren't getting people to stop scrolling long enough to even look at their ad or B their designs just don't resonate enough with the the user and so the solution to this is test New Design Concepts that resonate with your audience and the ideal reaction we want is from customers to go wow like this is so me I have to show dot dot dot not in so many words but this is like a general explanation of the experience we want them to have we don't want them just looking at our ad and going yeah that's a T-shirt and then just scrolling by we want it the goal that we're after is gripping them and making them feel like this brand this Niche like this mockup this specific product was made specifically for them and nobody else once you figure that out once you crack that code then you get insane engagement because when somebody feels like an ad or a product really speaks to them then it gets them to want to I'll just jump to this part here it gets them to want to share with their friends because what are the reasons that people share things it's because of the perception that other people will have of them when they share that and the emotions that people like to feel after sharing something is either feeling like they're funny they think that it'll make their friends perception of them change and think of them as being funny being clever well informed unique uh or like connecting like if it's something that like an inside joke or something that they have in common and a perfect example is of this is that some of History teases bestsellers in my opinion became bestsellers because they required at least some level of History knowledge in order to quote unquote get the designs and like the zone that I found to be The Sweet Spot is when somebody looks at your design having like a split second where there's like where they have to process looking at the design before they actually get it like Lincoln five star review like it grabbed people's attention because they recognize the figure but then they look at the joke and there's like that split-second pause where they have to think about it and then once they get the joke then they feel like they're smart like they want to tag their friends share it with them see if they get the joke like I can't tell you how many history tease ads we got with comments from people literally saying I'm buying this because of all the confused looks I know I'm going to get I'm like thank you for that perfect window into your soul now I know exactly what to show you more of and there was so many comments like that and that's not just true for history teas that's true for you know yoga say when we had sayings that were you know Yogi related or like inside joke related those did extremely well there too and on our 07 figure brand we see the exact same thing and now that's just to demonstrate an example of a way that you canar lower cpms it's not saying that every single design far from it it's not saying every single design needs to be you know some kind of inside joke or you know secret handshake that only your Niche gets that's just one way you can do it U like for example in seasonal collections those minimalist line art designs they were getting decent engagement from people I personally wasn't having a lot of fun running it but you know we were getting if I was going to continue running that store then that would be the direction that I would head in is more minimalist line art that honestly that brand was to me wasn't that fun to run so we stopped but yeah that that's one Devil's Advocate point is that it doesn't have to be just that like there's lots of different ways but that's really the thing that we're we're going after um another thing you can do is so test New Design Concepts that resonate with your audience test more engaging creatives uh and test larger uh audiences and a note on mockups that I want to show quickly when it comes to the ad creative and this so this worked really well as ad creative for a couple of main reasons so and it didn't have this 40% off thing here so the reason that this mockup did so well and to give you frame of reference this took us like a couple of weeks of back and forth with designers before we really got this dialed in but the reason that this mockup did well is number one looking at the contrast of the news feed which is just like a white background compared to the mockup it's extremely high contrast so this wood stands out I actually just noticed of this panel is thicker than that one it's thicker than all the rest anyway that's really funny um I've seen this mockup at least 10,000 times and that's the first time I've noticed this learned something new but anyway so high contrast from the background to the newsfeed and the second high contrast that we want is from the T-shirt to the background so as you're scrolling down your feed grabs your attention gets you to stop scrolling this area first catches your attention then your eyes are immediately drawn to the t-shirt and then the design is centered takes up the majority of the print space very easy to read uh and you get the gist of the product very quickly it's very you know um clean aesthetically then additional pieces all these supporting objects down here none of these were just randomly placed we tested dozens and dozens of variations of this mockup including everything from what kind of pattern we're going to have printed on the yoga mat uh the placement of the bead beads like if they should be further out versus in like for example one of the versions We had was the beads were like touching the shirt and we decided to go against that because as you're looking at the design here and your eyes scan down if you see something that's like breaking through like this there's some technical design terms for this that I haven't I haven't uh learned but I've just done it so I feel it to be true that like if you have this bead like overlaying this section then your eyes get drawn to that and then it like breaks you out and then just goes down to the yoga pants down here and we don't want that we want it to be supporting but keeping your gaze where we actually want it and that's why all of the objects we also tested like different colors of flowers so they supported versus distracted like we found having the flowers be a similar color to the yoga mat was nice because we had flowers that are like a different color then it added too many different colors to the mockup and it it made it too busy whereas when they're the same just nicely compliment and it also acts as a Barry to push your view back in here and that's what I was starting to get at is all of the objects are specifically are intentionally placed down here so that as you're scrolling your eyes don't get blocked by them but they rather they get caught so notice as I scroll down your eyes Go From Here down to here and as they drift down these almost act as like barriers to push you back up and look at it again opposed to picture of the yoga mat pants flowers were all at the top those would be barriers that your mind would have to like B basically you know push past in order to get there so those subtle things and again this is a back to examples versus Concepts versus step byep this is just an example this is an example where you can pull some Concepts out of it this is in no way me saying you have to use this color wood and you have to use bright Heather color shirts and you know you have to have beads that are halfway covered half white that's none of that like it needs to be something that looks good for your brand the important thing and you you can look at lots of other examples and analyze it the same way that I just did or if you don't think you can analyze analyze it like that plug it into chat GPT chat GPT will Amaze you with the things that it's able to come up with in terms of like uh design analysis so uh back over to the checklist when we are troubleshooting low clickthrough rates last thing on this is so this design this one in particular got high cpms or got low cpms it got a high engagement rate but if I were to take this exact same mockup and then swap out the design I would get a completely different CPM say if I just did something random that made no sense if this shirt just said heavily on it and I took out the Lotus and I took out the meditated completely make though be bizarre makes no sense but it's a silly example to demonstrate an important point which is that the CPM that's it's partially from the mockup but it's not like you know the mockup if once you get the mockup to be really good then you're only looking at like $20 or less cpms and then it's just on the good design to make like the last5 to $10 difference it's not like that at all it it has it's all or nothing like having a really good mockup is the prerequisite for getting lower cpms yes however the design is what will get you there like if I did just heavily people would think we're a weird company rightfully so and nobody would like it maybe they make fun of us a little bit and then they just move on so the point we're demonstrating there is that it has to it's the design and the mockup in tandem that lowers cpms and a lot of it comes down to the design concept more than anything like I would take a really good design concept over a well executed design any day of the week like as long as it's 8020 principal it's not like you know just completely garbage but the concept is what really sells like picture the LinkedIn or LinkedIn the linkoln festar review if you just swap out like the font style or like maybe rearrange the font placement a little bit it's still definitely a top selling design so but then if you take out Lincoln and you make it some other joke and use that exact same style probably not as good of a a seller so when we're troubleshooting our low click-through rates we want to be answering the question why are people commenting liking commenting liking sharing engaging but not clicking on the ad so when we have once we fix cpms we know that you know we're getting engagement but the answer is that they like the design but not incentivized SLC convinced enough to click right now so we want to increase urgency scarcity to help demonstrate this point here's uh one of the slides from the presentation that we just went through like why are people engaging but not clicking on the ad well a couple of things we want to be testing new offers slad copy Test new headlines or link descriptions want to show social proof guarantees product quality Etc use well-placed tful emojis to accentuate key points about your product SL offers we only care about getting the cost per clicks down to 50 to 75 cents once we achieve that we don't care about what the cpms or ctrs are and gotten this question a couple times so I want to explain like the math behind it is that it's very normal to see uh direct correlation between your cpms and your ctrs meaning that as your cost per thousand Impressions drops it's very normal to also see our click-through rate drop and this is not something to be concerned about the way to know if we're heading the right direction or not is to look at the cost per clicks but the reason that this is not something to be concerned about is and it makes sense if you just think about it yourself like if you take say our cpms are let's say $20 per 1,000 sessions then let's say that our cpms drop to $5 so that means for $20 up here we're make we're getting a th000 sessions for $20 down here same amount of money we're getting 4,000 sessions so during that time it would be very normal for us to see a link clickthrough rate of say 3% go down to 1.5% because we're getting so many more sessions there's so many more people coming down the highway that it would make like even if we're just maintaining since this number is increasing so much even if we're just just maintaining or our link click the rate doesn't drop at the exact same ratio as a CPM then we're we're in good shape like in this example let's say that our so if we were at 2% and $20 CPM that would mean that our cost per click equals $1 at first so $20 2% click-through rate that's $1 CPC then after our CPM gets dropped by 4th if our CTO stay the same then we'd be looking at 25 C cost per clicks but since it dropped by 25% um doing myself this is some math right here this dropped by a factor of four but this fact dropped by a factor of two so rather than looking at going if this stayed the same then it would be 25 cent cost per clicks but since this drop by factor of two then it's 50 c cost for clicks so e way to put this is if we just look at these examples here what we just did essentially is just this just like just showed like what the drop is by looking at uh CPM and the the CTR or this right here so freezing that it's nothing to worry about that your ctrs drop as your cpms drop this is again the fundamental concept takeaway is like the relationship between these metrics and how they all work together and it took me years and years to learn or to fundamentally understand this right here which is that as long as cpms are dropping at a higher rate than the ctrs then we're in good shape but really the only thing that you have to really be watching is are my cost per clicks heading in the right direction again all this backend math is just good we're just going over this so you understand everything just like anything you know when you're learning new Concepts important to understand all the inner workings but then in the day-to-day the things you end up actually using is much more surface level than that but it's not enough for us to just understand the surface level because then we don't fundamentally understand like why we're not pursuing other things and why the surface level is what we're doing if that makes sense then yeah I'll go through the ad structure in a second but so campaign structures so for the testing campaign we use USA targeting purchase optimize adset budget optimization we use this campaign as our Bullpen for testing out new ads and important this is just a reminder everything can be split tested ad copy audiences creatives remember to place your focus on the most important variables which is your ad creative product mockups add copy slhe headlines and then your audience is last then our main CBO it's USA targeting purchase optimize campaign budget optimization and again breaking down these fancy sound Buzz terms they're really nothing this is just telling Facebook what countries do we want to show we do USA in the beginning because Logistics much easier selling to one country than many second we're telling Facebook what kind of people do we want to get do we want people who just click and look at a lot of stuff or do we want people that actually purchase and more importantly do you do we want you to you know learn who's purchasing on the site and then send us more of those people or do we want you Facebook to just send us more people who click around obviously we just want them to send more people who actually purchase then campaign budget optimization this is so we talked about adset versus campaign budget it's just you know if I have five adets and I give them a $10 each budget it's going to manually spend that 10 bucks on each one opposed to if I set a campaign budget of 50 bucks it's going to decide on its own how it wants to split up that 50 to get us the most bang for our buck and REM reminder for the main CBO is that we only use this campaign after you found two to three winning ads that consistently maintain a 2.0 plus row as after a 7 to 14-day period now if somebody showed me a campaign or a testing campaign where they've you know they're at a three to a four row as would I say still wait the 7 to 14 days absolutely not so there's Nuance to all of this these are just general principles that I've learned are important to clarify after working with a lot of people but the main concept takeway from this is that and our overall approach to ads is we test out a bunch of different stuff again 70 times more testing is done by the 1% in the testing campaign and then we just take the best of the best and plant that in the main CBO and the speed the 7 to 14 days or however long it takes you to you know be able to start using the main CVO is just however long it takes you to test and find your way through to you know at least two to three winning ads and it normally it's very normal for it to take two at least two or three testing Cycles before finding enough winners to start this campaign then add creatives so add creatives couple of notes is they need to stop people from scrolling on the feed so I show them something that they like enough that they then look at the ad copy we want to use high contrast colors should stand out from the rest of the content people see on their feed so avoid using Blues whites since these are the most common colors on Facebook product should be clearly displayed as a focal point of the ad creative I like where is your eye drawn to when you first look at the ad then and a good test for this and for just evaluating it in general is just doing exactly what we were doing on yoga day just scroll up to the top and scroll down and just objectively ask yourself like where are my eyes drawn when I first looked at this and obviously this is not like an exact science it's not like you know until the only thing you see is the design you know keep iterating it's just yet another tool that you can use to help like give yourself feedback and know where you can improve then example ad creatives we have the static product ad which is the one we just looked at on yoga day the carousel ad slideshow video ad uh which that's where you upload 10 different images and then it Cycles through each of them for you then we have the grid ad I actually really like this one super easy to make on canva there's no exact you know template to recommend like the 3X3 grid works well the one where it's one big like it takes up four squares and then you know there's five around it that one does well ugc image which is like customer submitted photos and then lifestyle mockup like the ones that they have on play it then in terms of add copy so there's first second and third line we tend to use shorter form ad copy and again these are just examples these are not me saying this is the only thing that you should be using far from it please don't please test your own stuff like I would go so far as to say it's a requirement this is your homework assignment to come up with your own concept and test it during this testing phase following something that completely breaks the mold of what we talk about now breaking the mold in smart ways versus you know Reinventing the wheel is a very fine line but little things that you should not break the wheel on is little stuff like using the shorter URL like that's just a good best practice but things you absolutely can break the wheel on and Test new stuff is these offers here like 15% off that's about as lazy of a starter offer as you could hope for then other things you could break the mold on are like these headlines these are things that have worked well for us I've seen some mistakes where people put like $75 plus free shipping and I'll show why I say that's a mistake but follow these Concepts so first line it should be attention grabbing and address the niche audience so an example of that is five stars 75,000 plus history te sold new history teas collection with well-placed emojis that would be a good line so it grabs people's attention because it has a couple of emojis and then it speaks to the niche or the Audience by addressing well in this case you know the brand name was in there but and yoga stay was actually the same like new yoga stay collection or you could say new yoga te's collection a lot of different and that's something where if you really wanted to you could split Test new yoga t-shirt sale new yoga tea sale and you could do like one emoji so you can do like new yoga Tale or new yoga t-shirt collection new yoga Peril collection or you could say spring Yogi collection depending on the time of year and then try out different emojis so there just in two seconds we came up with five different versions of things we could split test as the attention grou Grabber but again keeping in mind the most important things to be testing and where you'll have the biggest impact is in order that the user consumes ads which is this order they first look at the product or the the ad creative then they look at the design then they look at the headline then they go back up here to the ad copy then they look down at the link description if they do it all then they decide if they're going to click shop now or not and so the general mindset or unconscious thought process behind users looking at an ad is scrolling down this grabs their attention they go oh what's that or what the hell was that then they look at the design and if it's something that resonates with them then they they go down to the headline the biggest font to see like what is this all about and then if it if that passes their test and it's not something cheesy or corny or unexpected unexpected in like a put off way like a bad thing to say here would be like like 75% off or like or like you know funny t-shirts like something just generic when you have like a brand in a niche that would be something bad or something with a lot of emojis there's a lot of different ways you can mess it up but just keeping it clean and simple and either doing the product title or addressing the niche or the offer is are pretty safe bets and then back to their their thread of thought then they go up to the ad copy and they read the first line which is should be you know again addressing the niche grabbing their attention then the second line is the urgency or scarcity or reason for them to shop now and then a link and like a call to action for them to shop now then the final one is their CTA button down here and then the link description and the link description is their last stop if they look at it at all before the CTA and that's where we want to build credibility or social proof or give them some reason like trust us uh more so that's the order that you should be optimizing is like the ad creative headline and AD copy is kind of in tandem then the link description and then the CTA button and the CTA button I can save you time we've always just done the shop now button so first line attention grabber that addresses the niche SL audience second line urgency scarcity discount then third line CTA and link to buy headline product name restate the niche collection grab grab attention then link description to build trust credibility CTA shop now button and then that's the sequence that they shop in and again this is what we would call short form ad copy where it's three lines there's lots of companies and we've done this for you where you can go look at what the top 10 or soarel sites are using for their ad copy and then use that as a tool for your unlearning like this is just one example of what has worked well for us and some of our students but should 100% be coming up with your own ideas uh because that's how you're going to learn the best like you're going to learn far more when you come up with your own ad copy like have a reason or strategy behind it that you think it'll work even if that strategy is just plugging this into chat gbt like even if we just did something like this yeah and then tell to write 10 more and there you go it just gave us 10 new ad copies and you will learn far more from reading through and chat gbt is obviously just one way you can come up with them but you will learn way more I'll say from per personal experience I've learned way more from when I came up with my own original ideas follow the framework to understand like the ins and outs but then once I started iterating and coming up with my own ideas which you all have ideas even if this is your very first time ever running ads you're like I still barely know what a CPC is that's okay it's a process number one so except that it's going to take time to learn it but a lot less time than you might think and especially when you consider that I've learned by far the most by coming up with my own ideas and then testing them and then seeing the results of those ideas cuz like in the beginning you just don't know what's good and what's bad and the only way that you're going to learn is by coming up with your own ideas and then testing it and the way that you would test something like this is you just go just go over here so say if we had like a say if I wanted to test like a new ad copy for so if I want to test a new ad copy what I would do is I would make a new ad set within this testing campaign yeah just pretend like this is in that campaign like that I would set it for I don't know $10 day budget and I would make four to five static ads in there and I would use the same exact ad creative in all of them because I want to at all the variables so this would be the same ad and then I would just swap out the ad copy on each and then I would let it run for a day or two and then see what the results are and if one of them is getting significantly cheaper cost per link clicks than the rest then I would use that as a winner I might test it again further um by putting that ad copy across a bunch of new static ads and then eventually I would find a winner from doing that and then I would start using that one on my cold traffic ads and you could have multiple you know winning ad copies we've had that in the past but that's just one example of like I'm saying to test a lot like here's an example of how you would test and then say you know maybe you want to do test you know a new headline we'll say that ad copy one became your control then you would start using that ad copy and the way that you know I'll I'll rule a test as a winner when you know it's spent it depends on the test but you know at least 10 to 20 bucks on the test and I I should have at least like 10 to 20 link clicks by that point but there it there's Nuance to it like if I'm seeing horrible results and it's spent $12 and gotten zero link clicks then I'll just pause the whole test and just re-evaluate things but if I'm seeing decent results like2 to3 cost per link clicks after the first 67 bucks six to s then I might let it run a little bit longer but say I want to test a new headline then I would just take like that then so I isolated the ad copy using that across all of them already using my best static ad and then I would test uh the headlines next then rinse and repeat that process and once I get to you know having a couple of ads that are running it consistently 50 to 75 cent cost per clicks then I'll more or less stop doing that I I mean I'll always test with like 5 to 10% of budget in the testing campaign but it's not like like I would keep doing that I would keep testing but my number one priority once I find something that's running at like two plus row as consistently two to three of them my priority is then to very quickly move into this called us CPO quick tangent but uh next audiences that we can test open targeting lookalikes interest based and demographic there's these are different audiences that you can test I can say confidently that even still to this day after testing a bunch of different interests and local likes open targeting still performs the best for us and gets the cheapest uh cpcs all right next we're going into conversion rate optimization and this is where we're going to be referencing a lot of competitor sites and showing what they do and again conversion rate optimization is not a silver bullet it's not like check boxes once and then you're good for forever it's a constant like habit and something that we revisit all the time um the good news is that conversion rate optimization is much more formulaic like I know I just said it's not check the boxes but it is much more like uh you pretty much make sure you have the best practices and then it's much more of like a every change you make results in a 1% Improvement whereas cost per clicks it can be you try 100 things and get zero change and then on the 10 you first you get a huge change so all that to say it is slightly easier but there's still a lot to it as you can see and this has broken up into the general section uh then add to cart then reach checkout or initiate checkout and then checkouts converted and then we'll go over aov last so General cro things to keep in mind number one fast loading we want to ensure that all of our main pages load in under 5 Seconds speed is crucial for conversions this is one that you can test with just using different site speed test tools like the way that I test this is I just pull up three of them throw in your url here here and here and then just watch what it says and it'll tell you if you know you need to improve something but uh the reason I'm not going to harp on that too long is that as long as you're following what we laid out in the course in terms of the apps you're not going crazy adding you know 10 20 new apps so we don't really talk about then you should be fine and you will add other apps in the future I'm not saying never add another app but just keep in mind that apps are the primary thing that slows down your site so just keep an eye on that and the way you'll know if this is impacting your performance or not is when you're using your D Toc marketing stats spreadsheet you'll be able to see if you know your number of Link clicks to your sessions if there's a big discrepancy like if your site speed is really slow then you'll see like a 50 to 60% stick rate like if you send 100 link clicks you'll see like 50 to 60 sessions a normal one is if you send 100 link clicks you'll see you know 70 to 85 sessions so if it gets much you know further below that then you know that you have to look into something and normally it's just like deleting apps making sure that you have Crush picks installed that sort of thing next every page has a CTA include clear call to actions even on secondary Pages like about us FAQs 404 blog posts next clickable designs make buttons obviously interactive and label them with verbs like shop now or get yours today so this is color isolation we want the CTA button to clearly stand out let's take a look at what are some of the other sites doing so like on ours we have that see what busted T does they have the green rounded one then Wicked cloes they just do the black one then into the am I think is the same yeah black rounded so there's a couple of interesting takeaways that two out of the four have the rounded button two out of the four were the black add the cart button and we we'll go through more of the specifics in a second but couple of initial interesting takeaways next mobile friendly space out buttons and forms to avoid accidental clicks on smaller screens 80% of traffic comes from mobile so it that's why we're looking at them on mobile it's really the only thing that matters upsell postp purchase so offer relevant upsells between checkout and the thank you page without requiring additional payment details so a lot of these things in this list are just general best practices and things that help conversion rate in general so this one we haven't talked about a lot cuz that's really boosting your average order value which there's a lot of different ways to do that but that's something you could test and something that we're considering testing right now is a post-p purchase gift card upsell so when somebody checks out they complete their purchase they've already entered their payment info when they reach the thank you page rather than it being the thank you page they'll land on a page that says wait like special one time offer get a $100 gift card for $80 and if you know even 20% of people take that that increases our average order value by 20s bucks or no that would increase it by 16 bucks so that's uh an example of something you could do as a post purchase upsell next sticky logo navigation keep your logo consistently placed top left on all pages linking back to the homepage time appropriate popups ensure that your pop-ups only appear when the visitor is engaged with the site not immediately so we want this to be either Exit intent or second page load the point is we want it your exit intent popup it should not load like the second that somebody hits your site it should be after a short delay then next is sitewide offers so use a top bar from like your announcement bar across the top here uh so free shipping on order 75 plus to create urgency and provide direct links to shop then navigation keep navigation broad um with easily accessible categories this is not as big of a an impactor in the beginning like your categories or collections are fine just being very short and simple even if you're navigation was just home shop about us and contact cuz what you don't want to have happen is in the beginning you start splintering your focus between like four five six different Collections and then you're driving traffic to each of them you basically end up optimizing like six different stores in one without even realizing it because it feels like you're just doing one but we want to keep all of our Focus placed on just making one just one collection so all of our traffic is driving there I'm mentioning it for the navigation because you don't really have to worry about this in my opinion you can obviously set up multiple categories if you like but just in terms of what I've seen Drive the most impact the number of categories and Collections and product types is not it next logical ordering prioritize product categories over corporate info in the menu so just have shop above about us or contact sticky Navigation always visible navigation ensures customers can search or find the few the cart without scrolling so way we do this is notice up here at the uh top when I scroll back up even slightly see how it shows the bar with the menus next search bar place the search bar and all the search stuff even on our our million dooll year store we've received at most a couple hundred searches per month so these are good things to keep in mind but not like if your conversion rate is low optimizing your search bar is not going to be the thing that takes you from you know 2 to 3% conversion rate uh autocomplete suggestions we do this automatically friendly no results me message ensure frequently search items which you can see from looking at the analytics in your Shopify what people are searching for uh you want to make sure that they're showing highly relevant results and search hints provide examples like search for funny mug or Excel hoodie mobile friendly make the search box long enough to handle mobile inquiries which again the default we show that the only thing that we don't have here is the recommended searches then cart widget easy access the cart icon should always be visible in the top right corner so like this right here see I think all of them do that except busted doesn't have the scroll back up navigation that's interesting what does Wicked close do they always have it then into the am also always has it then shipping incentives highlight how close customers are to free shipping and this is in the cart widget like here so into the am does the cart drawer let's see what yeah uh wiked close does the cart drawer I think busted does too yep everybody just a cart drawer now what Wicked does that's interesting is they don't do uh free shipping they do uh what is it it's like 70 get a25 $25 sticker pack some nice stickers for every order over $75 so they try a slightly different version probably ends up being cheaper for them actually uh and then if rather than offering free shipping I mean and interesting wake a close doesn't do anything maybe that's because right now they're doing their holiday sale and into the am this is what we're talking about they do the free shipping ships next business day so it's a loading bar showing how close they are uh then upsell on an empty cart so this is one that we have where if I delete the products from the cart see how it shows all products or continue shopping those are the buttons that we're talking about having on the pages like the empty pages then quick checkout links so ensure both view cart and checkout option are accessible so busted doesn't have it yeah actually none of them have the view cart button all of them just show the checkout button then in the footer highlight your store benefits uh include it back the top button let's see if one of these has it now they don't uh but a back to top button uh that would be like a little arrow like when people scroll all the way down to the bottom you show them like a little arrow that shoots them back up to the top there's apps that can do that next this is this is a good one to have trust and contact info so show trust Badges and contact details like uh email or phone into the am I think does this the best so they have you know uh support icons and then they talk about the company and then if you want to contact them into the am I think does one of the best jobs in terms of their site layout also really interesting that they don't do any uh mock-ups it's just flatl like there's a big difference though big big difference between this mockup and how high quality this looks uh versus like the printify just blank mockup that's pretty cool then uh remove the power by Shopify branding so you'll have this uh actually if you use the theme that we gave you it's possible that it updates it but it may not because it's in your settings but it'll say shop Power by Shopify at the bottom we just want to take that off and there's lots if you just Google how to remove how to remove power by Shopify branding there's lots of tutorials that'll show like guide you through that um then Cate links again this is one we don't really have to worry about until we have more C or collections down the road then P specific tips overall mockup quality what you want ensure that your navigation search and cart widgets prominently feature Your Design mockups uh seasonal promotions use urgency based language in the top bar so if you're running like a Black Friday sale or holiday sale or something of the sort you can add that in addition to the free shipping bar then cross sales recommend complimentary designs and localized elements use concurrency and language appropriate for the primary audience this we do once you know you've passed 10K in sales you want to add on International and we cover how to set that up uh next focus on storytelling incorporating messaging and the footer of product pages about the story behind your designs for example like eco-friendly production or Community impact so this is a prime example of what we're sharing is just an example to get started like if you're noticing that your add to cart rate is low and you're looking at things you can do to improve it and you're like I feel like I've already checked all the boxes I've done exhaustive research on every other site and I feel like I've emulated all of the best practices which I almost guarantee you haven't but if you feel like you have and I say that very confidently because I haven't done that and I've spent tens of thousands of hours doing this and every time I look at a competitor site I always see something new that they're doing that I could add that I'm just haven't tested yet but if you are looking for things to improve something that you can add is a good section like this it talks about like a charitable donation or way that you're giving back as a brand uh this also builds a ton of proof and like branding this is a really nice line so not only saying we like congrats to us we did a million orders saying thank you to the customers so that's like perfect into the am does this with you know a section that talks about what it means to wear into the am clothes and bust the te's they do a slightly different version they just it's just like a paragraph of text saying like why people wear their stuff Unique Designs that sort of thing but that's another thing you can do to improve uh conversion rate now we're going to go into the add to cart and we're not we're just going to skip over the homepage because all of our traffic goes to the The Collection pages but you can review that at your own speed uh so on collection Pages we want to put our best sellers first this gets it into an important concept The Ordering of our primary collection where we're driving all the traffic to is one of the biggest things we can do to improve our conversion rate and so the way that we want to sort or filter this collection sort not filter we want to sort bu bestselling predominantly but in the beginning especially you're not going to have enough data for it to sort off of because it sorts off of I want to say it's roll 60-day window of top selling products and in the beginning you're going to have like no sales if you know barely a few and that's not really enough for it to sort the whole collection off of so what we do is we sort by bestselling and then we do by featured and you're doing this in the Shopify backend so you go to the collection you do sort by bestselling and then you switch it to sort by manual and then you are clicking and dragging up the designs that are driving the most traffic like for example if I I turn on my Dynamic catalog and I see that this don't touch me Cactus or ouch t-shirt is driving cheap link clicks then I would I would go into Shopify I would go to products and collections find this collection make sure it's sorted by manual then I would find this design and I would drag it up towards the top and I normally try to drop it like in the fifth through 10th spot I normally try not to throw off the top four assuming that they're based on some kind of data and it's not you know at the very beginning but the top four are the ones that I normally try to leave consistent until I have strong enough data showing that I should you know bump them out of the way the reason I leave the front four is that every time we make a change to the landing page that's going to throw off conversion rate but that's not something to really concern yourself with when your when your conversion rate has yet to become optimal there's a big difference when you're optimizing a store from a 3% conversion rate versus a 1% conversion rate when you're at a 1% % level you just want to be changing everything you want to be testing a ton of different stuff you're not really worried about rocking the boat cuz the boat is sinking not to use bad metaphor but like you're in a beautiful spot where you don't have to worry about breaking anything because there's nothing to break yet whereas when you're at a three it's it's almost like when you're the winning team in a in a game and you know even though you're winning you still you feel the risk of losing more than the other team because you're afraid of losing the top spot and the other team just feels hungry and they're coming to get it so when you're at a 3% conversion rate you are the winning team so you're afraid of rocking the boat and throwing off what's already working so that's where the leaving the top four designs recommendation comes from but we want to put our best sellers towards the top make sure the designs that are driving the traffic are featured on the first page and I see this a lot where people have traffic being driven by a product but then their conversion ratees low and they're like I've made all the changes on the site and then I preview the ad in their ad account I click on the ad then I land on the landing page and that product is nowhere to be seen so and I've done that a ton of times too so it's a pretty silly mistake every time that I've made it it's very easy to correct that's the thing with most of these conversion rate changes is that we're going through this whole list in all honesty this whole list will probably take you like 2 to three hours max to do and that's just how it is with conversion rate with lowering the cost per link click it comes down to putting in a lot of time to come up with something good and you know there's still a lot of variability in that whereas with conversion rate it's the time is really invested in learning what are the things that I should change it's much less time intensive on the actual implementation side of things um so keep it clean use a grid layout that highlights visuals for example your design should be the star not a busy background that gets into the mockup make sorting useful allow customers to sort collections by what matters so that's you know bestselling alphabetical featured make sure the bestselling color product is set as the primary photo this is another important one so the color that is showing up here on this primary on the product page or or on the collection page of the product we're able to change this so we're able to change this to be any color we want and we want to make sure that we set it to be the top selling color and so if this you know if the top selling color for this Cactus summer T-shirt design is blue I would want to change this off of the charcoal and I would want to make it blue now there's Nuance to it cuz if all my top sellers are just blue I wouldn't want a whole collection of blue cuz we try that's another piece we try to optimize for is variety so that it's aesthetically interesting to be scrolling through the page looking at the designs and if it's just all white shirts or all black shirts that's pretty bland so we want to add some variety but by and large we want to lead with the bestselling color as the primary image then a second piece that we're about to get through in one of these okay also make sure that color is shown when they click on the product page if not you need to reorder the products variance from the product page so what this means is like this shirt let's say the blue was the bestselling color and I clicked on this before and saw this is perfect example so when I click on this product if I'm a customer I'm expecting to see a blue shirt when I click on it goes to Charcoal it's kind of weird obviously it's not a big deal for me to switch back to to Royal but it doesn't matter the name of the game game with conversion rate optimization is removing as many steps as possible it should be as seamless as we can possibly make it the most seamless interaction would be if somebody looks at a design they express mental interest in it and then they automatically place an order like that would be the perfect shopping experience we'll probably get there someday but in the meantime our goal is to get us as close to that as possible and so every little point of friction everything like that like me having me expecting to see a blue shirt and then seeing a charcoal has a massive impact on conversion rate when especially when it is compounded with lots of little things like that cuz if you think about a professional site that you know you would feel confident in shopping from and people are very very good at weat like people have exceptional BS Radars nowadays so every little thing like that even if they're not able to pay a lip service to why it cause them to lose trust in your your site it absolutely does and so every little thing like that every little misstep adds up to a poor user experience but fortunately we're going through this list to make sure that that doesn't happen so the way that we fix this is by going into products going to that products page in the back end and then reordering the variance so that instead of the charcoal product being at the top we put the Royal one at the top or so the point is that whatever main product image is showing that should also be the top variant being shown then next use data to decide your layouts your top performing ads or designs with highest row as should always take center stage on the collection Pages prioritize Niche research group designs by what resonates with your target audience so the funniest example of this is we wouldn't want to see if somebody clicked on you know the Whimsical line art flowers whimsic whimsically simple line art flowers we would not want them to land on this page and see that that would be good if it's at the top showing the bestselling color checking a lot of the boxes but but then if the products surrounding it are you know a dark adult humor like sarcastic adult humor it'd be pretty off-putting and somebody who is seeing that design and they see they're about to click it they're like what the what is what oh my God and they're they probably not going to buy and obviously there's inverses of that like if somebody clicked on a dark you know sarcastic humor shirt and they see that there they're cracking up doing their evil laugh to thems and then they're like what the simple flout Oh I thought this was a fun site and then they leave so it's there's no like exact signs like this has to be the messaging the important thing is that it's congruent with what your customer is expecting based on what they clicked on in the ad so we we actually spend a lot of time fixating on the order and the colors and the products that we're showing on each product page or collection page I'm sorry next test everything use AB testing on badges product orders uh and hover effects to see what drives most clicks so there's AB testing software honestly I've used it like once and that was just for pricing split tests as everything else with the amount of traffic we're driving it's pretty low stakes to just keep track of what your conversion rate was using the direct to Consumer the D Toc marketing stat spreadsheet and then make a change so you mark it on the spreadsheet like reordered collection in the notes column and then you just keep running ads and then see what the performance is after you made the change and that little very simple thing took us years to start doing I can't tell you how many times we made a change on the site to run a test and then we were left like going back through iMessages to try to find like oh what date did we update the cart and it's like well we talked about it on the 3 but then on the fifth conversion rate went up so like was it so just simply tracking it and it's it's just like you know your taxes it's should be very very simple as long as it's done consistently and well over time so it doesn't pile up to a big thing but yeah so staying organized then next simple product titles don't describe the entire design in the title I see this one a lot and some of them are pretty funny we had some pretty funny ones on yoga day but the way to do this wrong would be making it I'm trying to find one I think we corrected all these but doing here like a bad example would be Forget Me Not blue watercolor t-shirt Here Comes the Sun retro circular design t-shirt uh water and can watercolor t-shirt like way too wordy the best titles are one to three words Max one to two plus the word t-shirt and making sure that t-shirt is spelled the same you can either do T te or t-shirt but don't do both just make it consistent again you want to build as much credibility as possible and seem as professional as possible so two to three word titles so a bad one would be Lincoln Ford Theater one out of five stars would not recommend t-shirt good was Lincoln festar t-shirt next another reminder optimize mobile over desktop uh then on mobile we want to have two columns not one column so we want it to be side by side like this and this is also corroborated by if you look at busted te's like what do they do how many products do they do side by side there uh how many does Wicked clo do all right so they just do one it's also interesting that they just do they show just the design and not the mockup okay so that's interesting they just do one what does into the am do yeah they do side by side so there's three for side by side one for vertical and the one that's vertical something else to keep keep in mind is that they've been around since 2010 and so when you've been around for over a decade almost decade and a half you normally are able to get away from get away with more things but that's how I I really judge if I'm ever sure not sure about a change I'm going to make I just go down the list I just look at other sites that and I would probably look at like 10 not just the handful that we're doing but I would look at like 10 sites and then by the end it's a pretty easy way to come to relatively conclusive answer just look down the row and if I'm trying to decide should I do side by side or stack on top one at a time just look at 10 different sites and if seven of them have side by side and three of them have one by one then I go with the side by side just majority of rules and that's where the site that we have now that it comes from doing that test and then making those changes and then seeing what the results are next collection header should be short and on brand um so it should be like spring t-shirts exclamation mark one emoji Max should only take up one line Max and like yoga t-shirt sale history te sale so something just short simple and it should reinforce what the person was expecting to see when they clicked on your ad next square product images not vertical so we want them to be like this uh not vertical make sure the collection title only takes up one line on mobile make sure the logo and the header is not pushing down the collection page so we did this in the Shopify setup together but see how when we scroll up it's nice horizontal logo there's no like extra padding and you will definitely have this if you did a a square logo because it'll have the extra white space above and below and Shopify is just trying to show the whole image so it'll you'll end up with a top nav bar that comes down to like here and then when people scroll back up it covers like down to here on their screen it's a pretty bad experience those are that's one of the most subtle nefarious impactors I see on beginner stores just little stuff like that and a lot of that stuff can be caught just by obsessing over loading your site looking at it then going back and forth to these sites I want to pause here to emphasize this point you can learn so much if you are ever struggling with your conversion rate just by obsessing obsessing doing this constantly because just like I just looked at the yoga stay mockup for the 10,000th time and just noticed something new that i' never seen before in four or 5 years like you will have that same experience looking at own site and look at your site and go okay I need to increase my add to cart ratio I know that's either collection page or my product page so let me go through all of the collection pages of busted te's what do I notice so here okay they just have the title they don't actually have the price that's interesting I have the price they also they outline the t-shirts but then not behind the font that's interesting uh they have the star reviews now let's see what what Wicked clo is doing so they they do have the price uh they also have the star reviews want to see what ncam does they also have the price they summarize all the reviews from all their products uh they do like Square images with no background and then just from that and we do that for five or six other sites I would come away with at least four or five things that I could test doing differently on my collection page next reorder The Collection to show complimentary Products near each other we just talked about that one uh Drive traffic to one main collection and then create others as your store grows but even now you know at a million plus 90 plus% of our traffic goes to a single like bestsellers collection and that collection now has like 700 some designs in it next make sure you don't have an email teaser or any floating icons so this is on here to show that you don't want to have this so this is after somebody comes to our site triggers to clav you a popup and then they close it this is a setting you're able to turn off but they have it on by default the reason this is important is putting yourself in the mind of a shopper as they're scrolling and in reality their phone is probably like up to here so about the bottom 10 15% of their screen is being blocked by this little present as I'm scrolling down where did my eyes go they go to the bottom to see what's coming up and What's blocking that is this little freaking present thing uh which that's bad number one but reason it's even worse is when I go to add to cart What's blocking the checkout button and it was actually funny I noticed that into the am surprisingly has this when I'm scrolling down trigger it a little 70% thing went away see if busted has it no they have it covered so it doesn't pop up but into the am did have this 70% thing it's not showing up at all anymore there it is see that 70% thing if I click add to cart see that how it's covering it that's really bad CU if I'm a customer I'm trying to check out I might be clicking that button and then hitting this pop up and then wow then I have to so I have to be able to click that X and then click check out so again doesn't seem like a huge deal but every little thing adds up so long story short just turn that off in your clavio set collection descriptions to be one sentence that builds trust with the Shopper so this one sentence at the top so this 30-day money back guarantee with the star honestly I'm not really a big fan of the star but the the importance of this one line is that if you picture when somebody is loading and this will help put things in perspective so really listen to this when somebody is loading your site on mobile the top three qus of their phone is taken up by this top three qus of their phone is your free shipping bar your nav bar your product your collection title and then your collection description so these things while they may seem small have really big impacts because every single person who lands on your site and ends up ultimately buying is going to form their first impressions of your site based on what they see here so we want this collection description to be short very tactful and build trust and credibility with the customer and honestly it's better if like here's some examples say like star star star 100 plus t-shirt sold USA own small business or just nothing and if you can't think of anything with chat GPT can definitely help you with that but if you can't think something that's short succinct and builds credibility and doesn't look tacky then it's honestly better to just put nothing there and again with this thing just like anything if you're going to be adding it you what you should be doing is marking it on your your stat spreadsheet when you're making the change and then tracking what was the performance before versus after and that's where it helps having more traffic it's another reason why we do cost per link click first is if we have 10 sessions going to the site very hard to tell if it's statistically significant or not versus if we have a thousand sessions and we're able to see after we sent a thousand new sessions how many more people added to cart then we're able to say pretty conclusively whether if we should leave this collection description as you know the updated version or if we should be switching it back uh and finally just a reminder that your collection page impacts your add to cart rate not reach checkout then on the product pages so on this page here which impacts add to cart rate we want to have a color isolated add to cart which is like this notice how the this color green it appears there and nowhere else on the site Wicked clo is just black which they have lots of black in other places but into the am they do the black rounded one where it just stands out and it's very clear that this is the button that they want you to click something else I like that they do is they have the scrolling ad to cart that's a good thing to add on I also like how they they don't have any sizes pre-selected they make you select it and if you don't select one then it gives you like a little error message like that then something you can experiment with is these Dynamic checkout buttons so and the dynamic checkout buttons are these right here and this is something you enable in your Shopify settings but basically what this does is if their browser detect Tex that they have a PayPal account or shopay account or Apple pay it will show that logo there and give them the option to Quick Check out using that payment method this is a double-edged sword because yes it can increase conversion rate because it's a brand that they trust a logo that they trust and they've shopped with before and two it takes them directly to check out but which leads to a faster experience because it already has their stuff their information pre-loaded but the double-edged sword piece of it is that while when it takes them directly to check out it's just doing that with the one product in their card and our goal is to get people to add one to two like 1.7 to two products to cart so our average order value is 45 to 50 bucks so double-edged sword if you're trying to optimize conversion rate it can be a good thing to add but also something else that I just noticed is that busted te's they don't have it into the am they don't have it uh and wicked close they don't have it so honestly right there I would just turn it off just learn something new just recording this and something else I want to point out that they all do well is that the amount of space from the except for busted te's I don't think they do this that well I think the order that I would trust these or judge these off of is into the am then Wicked closed and then busted CU what I was going to say that they do well is the amount of space between the bottom of the product image to the add to cart button is so minimal like look at how condensed all this information information is like Wicked clo the amount of space from here to there is minimal cuz they're minimizing the amount of time that or the amount of scrolling that people have to do to get to the button that they want them to click busted does a pretty good job of this I think they could do with getting rid of the quantity selector and putting these check boxes underneath the add to cart instead but I mean overall they're they're doing pretty well but yeah so that's something you can experiment with taking off like this theme does a pretty good job I think if it had just one line of colors that' be even better and if the sizes fit on one line yeah kind of like this which I think we could definitely make it fit like that there's even just that slight difference taking up one less line here that gets rid of all this dead space then do we really need you know a whole extra line of colors probably not so if we take that out we take this out then our add to cart button is loading up here versus way down here then trust seals below the CTA button that's these right here busted does this they put them further down they look pretty good Wicked close yeah they just have you know social proof and Trust everywhere they don't actually have trust seals though but into the am definitely does yeah that's like product seals but then down here they have the trust seals clear your product images experiment with adding additional product images and lifestyle shots other mockups this is and the way that I prioritize each one of these changes is I think about the amount of effort that it'll take like trust seals below CTA buttons way simpler and faster to put into place than adding product images or life style shots to every product page same thing with color isolated that's like the quickest then trust deals adding product images or lifestyle images is like this how they have the person then the video of the person wearing it uh also remember that product page impacts are add to cart rate then not reach checkout and we should have at least two layers of recommended products so this is like your best sellers which we have this we have customers also bought we have you might also like and this is something that people get confused when or they ask about a lot when it comes to you know having a single collection that has several hundred products they look at the collection page and they're like do you really think anybody's ever going to you know scroll to page uh you know 17 like seven to see your products uh and the answer is no we're not expecting that what we are banking on and expecting is or we have faith in and what's proven to be true is that shopify's algorithm the product recommendation algorithm gets very good especially as you're driving more traffic it learns what products people who viewed this product what other products are most interested in and it starts to recommend them here so that's why we're able to drive traffic to just a single collection that has hundreds of products because once people click on the one design that they're most interested in Shopify is very good at showing them other products and it pulls from the entire collection in order to populate these and if we look at into the am they have bunch of recommended these keep selling out they come up with clever terms for it take another look I also like that's a subtle thing to notice that these keep selling out this is just showing them like this and it shows six so maybe we could add another row and then down here take another look these are the ones that I was looking at before and it does these horizontal so that's a subtle interesting difference and I'm pointing these things out if it's not already clear I'm pointing these things out as evidence that like there's not it's not one size fits all and there's lots of different ways and ideas that you could test and busted teas very surprisingly doesn't have any I mean they have no they don't it's interesting about Wicked close yeah you might also like yeah I I think product recommendations is a pretty pretty much a no-brainer variants Made Simple let customers easily choose size color and remind them if they forget that remind them if they forget is the thing that into the am does that I really like localized pricing don't have to worry about that until go International then shipping clarity highlight delivery times cost or free shipping perks near the CTA so your shipping speed which we haven't done this right now we don't dynamically display it anywhere we just in our shipping policy say like average order ships out in one to two business days but we could you know especially using Monster Digital and printify they normally ship out the next day and so we could add in like estimated delivery four to five business days from you know whatever the current date is that would be something interesting to try then feedback after adding to cart confirm with a clear message like item added prompts next steps to go to cart so this is when somebody's on the product page I click add to cart and it's very prominent and obvious that you know it's now in the cart it's also displayed up here the three dots uh upsells and bundles we honestly haven't done a whole lot with this this doesn't really help conversion rate it just helps average order value so honestly it should be all right oops all right scarcity triggers use phrases like limited edition only few left to drive urgency so that would be something you could try in like the collection description saying like limited edition collection or limited time only especially if you're doing like seasonal designs you could say that very legitimately then highlight free s or donations mention any charity tie-ins so uh Wick clo does a good example of this with your help we've been able to donate $150,000 to important causes so that builds a lot of like brand equity and like reputation and just again people are aside from it feeling good and you know being good for society and all that people are constantly evaluating when they're landing on a site for the first time whether if they trust you or not and so charity tie-ins is a great way to show that we're more than just you know t-shirt sellers we're actually building a brand and we believe in something and for a lot of people showing that you give back is a great way to to prove that uh then product descriptions easy to read use short paragraphs and bullet points to highlight key features I love I love uh showing these different examples so to demonstrate the point that there's different ways to do this what we've seen the most success with and what we do is just like this just simple four or five bullet points and it's nested within the description uh similar but different version of that is what uh Wicked close does they do five bullet points super simple hits on like the sizing the material if it's pre-shrunk or not and then it again it's not nested meaning they don't have to click a button so that's an interesting difference to note also I love this social proof that they have there 1.4 million shirts sold since 2010 that is insane so really good site to be looking at and then into the am does a slightly different version of that so we had the five bullet points nested version five bullet points separate now we have busted te's who does nested but preet to be expanded meaning that when I land on this page I'm not seeing it like this where it's condensed I see it open and the description they have the product features down here but they have like three to four paragraphs just talking about their graphic T's like this first two paragraphs are or first three paragraphs are about the the design specifically um and then the last paragraph is about you know into the am and graphic te's in general so and then their materials and care that's kind of bad I would jump me down but yeah so different versions for the description and then busted te's does uh long form description pre-open and you're able to switch between these so again different versions of the same thing what I think would be interesting to test is doing one to two paragraphs talking about the design and like what's unique about it and what people might like about it chat GPT is phenomenal for this and test adding those into the product description and then maybe test taking these bullet points and putting them above and then having this nested description be the multiple paragraphs describing the design that would be an interesting thing to try out all right apologize for the raspy voice I'm losing my voice after all the recording uh the next focus on the benefits write descriptions that explain how the product improves the customer's life like stay cozy stylish in the winter add FAQs so the FAQs are sizing material if it's pre-shrunk if it runs true to size shipping and return policies those are the big ones so as long as you're answering those in one form or fashion it doesn't have to be a dedicated FAQ section at the bottom but just make sure you're hitting those big big questions explain the design story that would be like the one to two paragraphs talking about the design mobile optimization is everything and being transparent shipping times returns and any fees should be clear near the CTA don't leave room for surprises like here how we say shipping calculated at checkout let's people know that it's not you know it's not uh it's not like free shipping so when they get to the checkout page they're not get getting surpr surprised and the way You' be able to tell if people are getting surprised is if you have a high add to cart rate high reach checkout and then a big drop off at your sessions converted that tells you that something is going wrong at the checkout page next initiate checkout so this is the cool thing as we're going further down the funnel the number of variables are shrinking so we just talked about how to increase the add to cart rate which is how do we get people to click this button right here and 90% of it comes down to just making really good designs really good mock-ups and then making it super super simple but then once somebody has done that they've clicked add to cart how do we get them to click this checkout button here big step one is just removing anything that's covering it and I laugh about it but please double check look at your own site obsess over looking at your site on mobile like 10 15 times a day just seeing what you can find send it to your friends and family see if you have Banner blindness you're not you know noticing something anymore after seeing it so many times but the question we're answering now is how do we get people to click this check button so we want a clean simple design keep the cart page minimal clutter free and easy to navigate focus on Clarity we want to mobile optimize this as well ensure the card is fully functional mobile with sticky ctas and large taable elements no obstructions we just talked about this one Dynamic updates allow customers to update the quantities or remove items like these right here uh ensure that items remain in the cart when customers return reducing friction for EP buyers Shopify does this natively so we don't have to worry about that trust icons add secure checkout badges near the CTA to reassure customers this is one that I'm interested in seeing uh what the other sites do so let's take a look so busted te's when we add to cart yes the no trust seals they do have frequently bought together this would help with the add to cart or not the add to cart the reach nope help with the average order value now Wicked one yeah no trust seals into the am no besides Clara nothing then shipping details clearly display estimated delivery dates uh yep ships next business day and then an asri but they don't tell you what the aster means that's interesting uh what it Wicked close do now it doesn't show an estimate and busted also doesn't show an estimate I personally would like to show an estimate we just don't have that right now transparency show subtitles estimated taxes and total savings prominently near the checkout button then threshold awareness highlight how close customers are to free shipping or perks so that's like busted has this at the top and this one does help with reach checkout because once somebody sees like oh I I received a free gift or whatever it is you almost feel dumb not to click the checkout button and either claim the free gift or the savings that you've you've earned quote unquote and while we're talking about all these things there are apps and plugins that you can add on that will adjust your reach checkout like your cart experience in general and they're all promis to increase your conversion rate just really really important I saw this happen to several students in the community really important that when you install it you verify that for yourself and you watch like anytime you make a change you should be watching like a hawk like a hawk obsessing over what happened to my conversion rate after I added this and not just the overall conversion rate but what step in the funnel did this specifically impact and then watch what happens to that so for example this uh checkout app or this Cart app which I think they might be using I think Wicked clothes might be using it too I'm blanking on the name but when you're once you install that you want to be watching like a hawk to see what happened to my reach checkout rate because I know in this case that it's impacting reach checkout because nobody's seeing the cart app unless it change like the button or something nobody's seeing the cart app out here so it can't be impacting the add to cart rate so if I see add to cart rate went up after I installed the app I know that's great but it's not because of that app then urgency triggers use forages like your cart is reserved for 10 minutes or order now for same day shipping payment options uh we talked about that Clara these are just options I'm not like each one of these things especially the ones that are like payment option based these are things that are good to have but it is not going to be the Silver Bullet that fixes your conversion rate so again prioritize these based off of the amount of effort and time that it will take you to accomplish them and just knock them out in that order and then track your conversion rate to see at what point you can stop because I can tell you that on our 0 to7 figure store we don't have Clara or afterpay we don't have the your cart resered for 10 minutes we don't have this free shipping threshold thing we don't have a bunch of these they're just good things to have but it's entirely possible to have a high converting site without some of these um then you can test different free shipping thresholds adjust thresholds based on customer data but keep them realistic and motivational so we chose ours to be $75 because we found that or not we found it's just math that in order for to hit that they have to buy three shirts so that's like the sweet spot that we found is whatever the amount is the lowest amount that somebody would have to spend in order to hit three shirts so like technically if we're selling shirts for $29.99 we could get away with like 65 or $70 free shipping threshold and it would still require people to buy three shirts then checkouts converted so this is your CR so this is people who clicked add to cart they got the checkout and then they got to this page and for whatever reason they didn't buy what could be the reason so fortunately on this page there's very few things we have control over it's either the payment options the colors and fonts that we choose here which we set up in the Shopify section or the shipping rates and let's see what there wow that's expensive as crap okay so wicked close their shipping rates it's 3 7 Days 9 $9.95 that might be because they're doing 20% off right now but anyway so what are the things that could impact somebody getting to this page and not checking out it's the payment options uh and then the call to action button here not being the same color as the rest of the funnel and then the shipping rates so you can experiment with this but anytime that I've seen we have a big drop off here which it should be roughly like seven like 70% 50 to 70% of our reach checkout so like if we had 10% add to cart and then 7% reach checkout we should expect to see like a 3 and 1 half to 4% conversion rate like it should be pretty much neck and neck so if we're seeing like it goes from 7 to 1 or 2% then that's an immediate red flag that there's something here that we need to change nine times out of 10 that thing that I found on somebody's site is something's messed up with their shipping methods and they need like either their charg too much or it's not available and then I hear some version of well I use like the pr IFI settings or I followed it up followed like the setup in the course like it it doesn't matter you you just need to be catching that it's on you to be catching stuff like this so that's why I'm saying obsessed over this that's how you're going to learn it's how you're going to catch stuff like this and when you're obsessing over it you should be doing test orders on your site as well like check out all the way through the full process on your phone and then see what you're noticing uh as you go through and something interesting I noticed on Wicked clothes is that they're quick ad so they use the black call to action button here but then they use yellow here which no other site does that busted te's uses the same green all the way through yeah Green into the am I guarantee uses the same come on that was a really slow load speed so yeah use the same color all the way through and that's a subtle one that a lot of people Miss because you adjust this color or this checkout button's color in a separate place than the rest of the online store because fun fact the checkout page on any store is hosted separately cuz that's where um uh like people are entering their credit card information so it has to be done like a more secure setting that's why if you ever on a website then you go to checkout it always looks like slightly off a lot of times it looks similar nowadays like SES have gotten better at this but it in the past especially it looks slightly off it's because they're switching to a separate page that's more secure and normally built on like older uh Tech so make sure your shipping rates are set up properly common error is importing printify shipping rates so the rates that we use are 0 to $75 order value is $4.99 we experimented with adding a dollar and doing like weight based so you can do that as well to squeak out an extra dollar or two but roughly 0 to 75 is $4.99 then 75 Plus is free shipping make sure guest checkouts enabled order sumary which we have so if they click that button there they say the see the summary of their whole order uh Center logo and use a smaller size it's like we have it centered here you want to make sure that it's smaller so it doesn't take up a ton of space honestly this one we could even shrink down a little bit and remember that the checkout page impacts your reach checkout to conversion rate and again the optimization calculator helps point point out to you which one of these things you need to be working on but we we're just going through the whole list and the biggest impactor on the checkout page is your shipping rate um that's in the wrong spot oh yeah these are both in the wrong spot we already went through those so yeah improving the checkout rate there's really not not too many things here that we're able to to play with few things you could do is like change the color of this so it's not blue you can make it black or gray so it Blends in a little bit more I actually think that we saw that on a couple of them yeah like they do black see what Wicked clothes does yeah they do black and I bet yeah so actually all of them they all do gray or black for all these accent buttons so that's something interesting that we could apply because they just don't want them to blend in another thing you can notice is are they using the one or twep checkout which looks like they're all using one step which one step is when you have them enter all their delivery information then all their payment information on the same page and it's not enter delivery then hit submit so that's another thing you can control then finally we have the free uh or the average order value number one thing that we can do here is the free shipping incentives so this is at the very top here where we say free shipping on order $75 plus I see some people like filling the space with stuff that just doesn't belong there like uh you know flower graphic te's or just something about the brand in general which is just irrelevant to put there it might seem like it makes sense when we're first building our store but not once we start to understand this process of funnel optimization we're looking at the store end to end as like a full business like the full journey of the user and so once you start thinking that way you realize that it would just be very redundant for somebody to click on an ad that says like flower t-shirt sale and then land on a page and the very first line that they see here is just restating flower t-shirt sale and then it says it again in the collection title so we realize what we want to have here is you know like something that like free shipping threshold then recommended product section on the product page and frequently bought together section on the product page test out removing the dynamic checkout buttons that we were looking at because what we said that while they're good for conversion rate sometimes they do hurt average order value uh reorder products on the collection page to show complimentary Products near each other so again we spend a lot of time thinking about the orders of these products and like I would look at them on mobile for hours and just reorder them and overly obsessed about them a little bit like little things like if somebody's seeing a graphic shirt here then a flower shirt here do I want them to see another flower shirt here or would it be better if these are the top four sellers would it be better for them to see graphic flower shirt here and then diagonal across another graphic one there because people's eyes tend to go like this when they're browsing and they tend to air on the side of scanning down the left side more than the right so any ones that you think are really top sellers I tend to put them on the left side rather than on the right and again that's just an example or a concept that's not like an exact prescription saying you know every top seller has to be on the left-and side but just an example of example of like backend thought process or some strategy that you can employ yourself if you so choose next check your shipping profiles to make sure you're not overcharging for two to three product orders this is a really sneaky one that I see get a lot of people that if if you're charging like say if you import printify default shipping profiles which it it goes something like this it's like one shirt is like $5 shipping two shirts is like 730 or somewhere around there let's say it's an extra two bucks and then three shirts equals $9 if I'm somebody who's adding two shirt orders or two shirts to my order and I've seen somewhere it's like two plus it's like $9 what would be the net result of that so picture you're going to have high add to cart rate you're going to have high reach checkout rate or or you could and it wouldn't be impacted by this because people don't find out about this until they get to the checkout page at the very end but if they get all the way there and then say they have three products in their cart they really like that's going to lead and they get smacked with $9 shipping kind of like we just saw on Wicked clothes that that's going to lead to them abandoning cart but you're going to get people with one shirt converting so while you're going to have a lower conversion rate for two and three shirt orders the reason that this is particularly confusing is that you'll have a super low average order value and it'll be tough to get it up because anybody who's got two or three shirts in their cart is going to be getting there than abandoning so you're explicitly losing the highest cart value customers so that's a really important one to be aware of that that because that impacts not only conversion rate but also your average order value then next you can offer quantity discounts or Price breaks I'm not really a big fan of this one for apparel stores but it's an offer that uh like history tease has been doing for a while since we sold it or they're doing like buy two shirts get one 50% off or like buy three get one free that sort of thing then you can offer upsells and bundles so suggest related products like pair this tea with our matching tote bag obviously we don't have other product types in the beginning but um and we see a lot of good examples of these like in busted te's they do this with sticker packs but how they recommend yeah frequently bought together and if I click add to cart that's interesting they just show the design there wow that was quite the process it was like three popups but point being they they are upselling recommended products another interesting thing is that you see how they they have some sizes are out of stock I mean you can tell that they are pre-printing these and that as they're like they pre-printed them and they're running out of stock on them if this was all print on demand then these would obviously all be in stock unless if they actually ran out of the base unit which might be the case oh no this one has large but yeah so there you go so we just went through the entire conversion rate optimization checklist starting with cost per link click then average order value or then conversion rate then average order value so by this point you should have a high L understanding of the why and the how behind you know the Raz formula like where to place our Focus why we're doing it there like why we're placing our focus in each section because of how it impacts the overall formula and now you know what we're able to do to improve each of these and the levers that we can play with to help increase or um decrease cost increase performance or decrease cost and most important thing out of all of this is that these are high level recommendations these are things that I've learned and the biggest mistakes that I've seen slow down people's growth we explain it in a lot of repetitive detail because this concept more than a lot of others just comes down to hearing things a lot of times but uh final two things to take away is that one you're going to learn way more from coming up with your own ideas and testing and two look at the competition I'm always doing it to this day and as you can see I have recommendations written down here based on my own experience but then when I'm looking at the other stores I have an open mind and I know that they are you know pumping eight figures in Revenue through each one of these sites opposed to our store that's doing a million of Revenue I mean I've done 25 million over the past years but in present day like they are putting a lot more focus and effort into optimizing their store than I am so it would be stupid of me to be bigheaded looking at them saying I know something that they don't like so never stop being a student because the day you stop doing that and the day you start letting your ego get in the way is the day that you shoot yourself in the foot and you do the opposite of optimizing your funnel like your your ego has no part to play in optimizing your funnel it's like the most humbling and uh repetitive task that you'll do in this entire business maybe second only to design generation but ego can't have any part in it it just objectively use the calculator learn the ins and outs of the Raz formula and start to quiz yourself on it like how does each metric um interact with the other one and a good gauge of if you're understanding the concept is that you should be able to see just three numbers from anybody's store you should be able to see their cost per click their conversion rate their average order value and if somebody tells you that their cost per click is 55 cents their conversion rate is 3.7% and their aov is $32 you should be able to immediately look at that and then if you know some sembling of the amount of traffic like if that's off of one purchase that's obviously very different than somebody who has 100 but assuming we have statistical significant so they have like you know say 10 to 15 purchases at least and they're getting 55 cent cost per clicks 3.7% conversion rate you should be able to know right off the bat that aov is the thing that they need to improve and then you know what are some things they can do to improve aov and the thing that we didn't really mention actually I'm glad I brought that up so that you just end up talking yourself after recording for this many hours like I'm so glad you asked nobody asked it was just me but one thing that uh I didn't mention is that the biggest impactor on aov is seeing is if people are clicking on a product and then seeing other products they would also like which sounds kind of you know implied but it Bears repeating that if you like when we launched history te's and we had Lincoln fivar and it was surrounded by like blueprint art and graphics and like just unrelated at ated designs at least designs that weren't of that same vein the aov was terrible because people were coming buying that one shirt then they were leaving so the biggest way that we and we had all this stuff we had free shipping incentives all that stuff right off the bat because we had learned it from previous stores but the time that the aov skyrocketed was when we added I'm totally blanking on some of the shirts but like other designs like the Socrates wear's my coat pickets charge like all of those designs that were all similar like style Concepts humor sarcasm once those were added then aob skyrocketed because people that are funny sarcastic history Buffs landed on the site and found something that you know resonated with them opposed to before they were seeing that one shirt and then they were seeing like blueprint art of a Sherman tank going that's cool but it's not really what I would wear so they would buy The one shirt and then they would leave so aov the biggest way to improve that and the cost for link click is just test in more designs and so we just went through 200 points I don't want this to be 200 distractions from the most important thing which is and always will be just testing more better designs and so but back to that example you should be able to look at somebody's three highle metrics and know immediately where should their focus be placed what are the steps that they can take what are some tests they can run what are the most important levers within this 200 step checklist uh that they should be starting with and what they prioritize based on the amount of effort and like investment that it takes uh in order to get it up or like test it out and then once they're once they've made those changes how they should can track it and make sure that it actually improved it opposed to you know sent them backwards and then rinse and repeat that process and then rather than that being somebody else's metrics you should be able to do it with yours way more importantly but it's so much easier picturing it being giving feedback to somebody else and so if you're ever having trouble optimizing your own funnel and you feel like you're hitting a brick wall just say pretend like this was somebody else's store somebody in the community and they're seeing these metrics what should I what would I recommend to them and by the way it's also a great way to exercise these skills is to when you see questions that people have in the community if they're asking a question about like how can they improve their conversion rate help guide them through the process and help coach them on one is conversion rate what we really need to be focusing on like get all the information that's what I do first if somebody's asking a question I make sure that we're not going down the wrong Rabbit Hole I'm not answering a question to something that they don't even need to be improving I make sure that we're like treating the overall system not just the the symptom but help them guide through that process of like one are we asking the right question I.E looking in the right area like are we in cost per click or conver verion rate or average order values and that where we really should be two do we have enough data like are we talking about $10 spend on ads we talking about 100 or 300 uh then also do we have the right data like are we looking are we judging our conversion rate based off of something that Facebook is telling us which for Facebook we only look at the purchases we don't really regard what it says for add to carts or initiate checkouts because it's not accurate so are we looking in Shopify for the right pieces and this is mapped out on the calculator but these are questions to ask are we asking the right question like looking the right area do we have enough data do we have the right data and then third is the thing they are asking about really the best way to improve their main constraint like if they are asking about how do I improve my conversion rate and you go okay we are in the right area we have enough data they're looking at the right data now if they're asking about how do I add Clara to increase my or how do I update I don't know like the colors on my checkout page to increase my conversion rate and then you look at their stats and you see that their add to cart rate is 4% I should just used the calculator for this but reach checkout is 1% and sessions converted is 1% and this person might be asking about how do I update the colors on the on this checkout page like how do I update this to be gray and if you were to answer that question you would help them increase their sessions converted which sessions converted is already as high as it could possibly be they're converting 100% of the sessions they're actually getting there and so what they should really be asking about is first how do I increase the add to cart rate then second how do I increase the reach checkout rate they should not be asking about how do I increase the sessions converted because this is already good so you can help them identify are they asking the right question in the right area then do we have enough data then are they asking about the right section Within that section like about the main constraint and then if they are then you answer the question or if they're not then you help them Realize by asking good questions do you think that this and don't not just giving them the answer but helping them realize like is this the best area to be improving is this really the constraint and nine times out of 10 I found people are very very smart and if you just ask them a question that gently pushes them back in the right direction they're able to pick up on it and then one you've helped them out which is nice for you good for the community helps you learn more but then two it also helps them learn it for the next time cuz you didn't just hand them the answer they had to think about it for themselves and that ingrains it in them and then they're able to apply it in the future they're able to help out other people and again swap out that person with just being yourself and you see where I'm going with it so thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed uh hear my monotone croaky voice talk about funnel optimization for like 2 hours but this really is like one of the most important sections of the entire process it's where by far the most people get hung up and get frustrated so it's really just a math problem it's just inputs and outputs and realize that it's a math problem that takes time to solve and it's a skill just like anything else so it would be completely ridiculous to think that you're going to crack this nut within one to two weeks people have done it but that is far from the norm like everybody's on their own Journey everybody has their own situation and set up to consider so focus on the skills and the concepts and just lock in for a consistent and repetitive process and then pick your head up 30 45 days from now and I'd be willing to bet anything you'll be looking at very different results so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson welcome to lesson 4.6 design iteration so we are currently in stage four testing stage and our progress we've made so far is that we are in the process of actively optimizing our sales funnel we're conducting regular test Sprints uh using the methods that uh were laid out in the ad section and we're beginning to gather insights about what our top performing designs are and we should be identifying standout ads that with products that resonate and give us a solid basis for iterating on those designs and by the end of this lesson we're going to know how to iterate on your top performing SLB bestselling designs to create new collections of products understand how design iteration worked in case study for history te's and know what poorly iterated designs look like and the reason this matters is that Cura collection you know boosts your brand identity customer loyalty and drives increased revenue and focus on designs that buyers love encourages repeat purchases and allocates our resources confidently by focusing on designs that have already sold well so reading between the lines what this really shows or what we're really saying here is that iterating on top selling designs or top performers is like this is the the fuel of the business this is what makes the business grow over time and ultimately gets people to come back to us after they've purchased and increases our lifetime value so why iterate on designs it increases our brand identity we are able to double down on our buyer favorites grow our revenue and leverage data to make sure that we're investing our time in you know the the best performance like where what's actually working and so to start off what before I show us like we go through some examples of what it looks like to iterate on top designs because this was a concept that we touched on briefly in the first course but didn't go nearly in depth enough uh and it's been one of the top questions that's come up and it's one of those things it's easy to say oh yeah iterate on top selling designs or top performers but then it's like what does that actually mean so that's what we're we're answering here so first how do we know what designs we want to be iterating on and then second piece is what does that process look like so when we're in the testing phase so say we've launched our testing ad set we have a catalog of ads that are running and say this is our catalog ad that's testing our 100 different designs what we're looking for here are designs that are getting between 50 to 75 cent cost per linkli and if you're well over this point you know getting two $3 cost per link click and nothing is getting within the range we want then you should consider the possibility of running a mockup test which is outside the scope of this lesson we talk about that elsewhere but just to show it briefly like if we are in the testing phase we run our ads and then we're looking at the range of the cost per clicks that we're at and if we're seeing super expensive like over $3 then we want to check the mockup and make sure that our mockup is good but that's why we run the mockup test first to make sure that we're like giving ourselves the best chance not having to redo that but what we're really looking for is designs that are getting between uh 50 to 75 cent cost per link click which cost per link click is basically just the cost of getting somebody to click so what that translates into is cheaper link clicks are a good sign that people are liking the design more expensive link clicks are assigned the people don't like the design just in very simple terms and so after we launch our designs we're looking for out of the hundred or so that we launch with which ones were the winners which ones got 50 to. 75 and so the ones that got those cheap link clicks we then want to make more designs like those winners and create static ads in a separate ad set and a common question that comes up a lot is statistical significance like how many link clicks are we looking for and like a design that's only getting one link click or two link clicks it's not really enough to go off of we're really looking for at least like three to four link clicks yeah so once we find some and if you don't have any that are getting that cheap a link clicks then it it's just a matter of making more designs and just just pulling at like what you do have uh if there's anything showing positive signs like if I don't see anything that's in the 50 to 75 cent range then I'll start iterating off of like things that are getting a dollar to a120 L click and because it really is just a volume game so we're targeting designs that are 50 to 75 cents but if we're not seeing anything like that it doesn't mean we just lock up and go into stasis just in a holding pattern we double down and we keep making more designs and we just keep making more designs until we finally find something that works and so this takes two different forms form one is iterating on the designs that we have and then two is going back and referencing our research again so let's look at some examples so on history te's when we first launched we had a a wide variety of designs and these were some of the designs on the store history te's best seller was this design right here Lincoln uh festar like Ford Theater one out of five stars would not recommend so this was the the top seller so if we see that this is getting cheap link clicks which this one when we launched I think got 20 to 30 cents if we're seeing that then what are we going to do to iterate on this and referencing back to Eric's training about the different aspects of a design like the different variables that you could iterate off of one of the most common ones that I like to iterate on is the concept and so the ways that we iterated on this one is like iterating on this the the confusion before was like okay do I just make it like different fonts or different styles like change the color of Lincoln and the answer is no because what you want to focus on is like what was the main driver or the main thing that got people to buy and a easy way to answer that question for yourself is picture any of the variables in your head like the font style the colors all of the concept imagine changing any one of those things and which one of those things would be the quickest reason that people would either buy or not buy like this one if we leave isolate everything and then we just change the concept people are no longer going to buy it like people are buying this because of the concept we could have done you know uh a different art style for Lincoln's head we could have done a different font style could have done not a yellow star and just made it a white star like there were lots of things that we could have done that it still would have sold because what people are buying here is the concept now if this was just a graphic based design like some of yoga st's top sellers like just the lotus flowers and stuff those would be different like we couldn't really change up the art style because that's what people were buying for but in this case this was the best seller and the concept is like historical figure well-known historical figure and then a sarcastic joke or reference uh that's based in history and so to iterate on that these were some of the new ones that we came up with you notice how they all follow a very similar trend or thought thought pattern behind it it's a well-known historical figure simple like monocolor art style and then very simple text and uh like just very plain font but it's a very sarcastic humorous joke so this is an example this was the original and then to come up with these we sat down and or I didn't my dad did and he thought like okay what worked about this well it's a reference to a historical event that had a funny or sarcastic spin so he brainstormed what are other like pretty well-known historical events and then what's a sarcastic spin that we could put on them and so he did like signing a declaration of independence Thomas Jefferson July 3rd crap that's due tomorrow the funny side story about this one is that Declaration of Independence was actually signed on want to say the second or it wasn't actually signed like on the fourth although that's what everybody I thought was signed on the fourth but apparently it wasn't and he knew that and so he was all torn up when he was making this design he's like should I make it like crap that's do tomorrow July 1st like so he was like getting caught between the zone of like should I go super history buff and you know make it so only 1% of people will get it or should I go you know with the broader understanding and fortunately he went with the broader understanding because it really like performed extremely well and the funny thing is that he got there were a bunch of comments in the ads of that the 1% history Buffs who really knew their stuff saying it wasn't actually signed on the 4th like this is wrong and I just love all that because that's just engagement that's just comments piling up and that really helps our ad performance a lot so I was all about it uh then another one was mediocres me good enough then George Washington it's only treason if you lose and then we also tried other iterations where and these aren't the right examples but yeah these are not the right examples but we had other iter of similar Concepts where it was the historical figure and then a joke and some of them just fell completely flat so Point like reason I'm mentioning that is that every iteration is not like a slam dunk it's just a volume game so it's so what your workflow should look like if you have a Lincoln five star it should not be like okay what's one other historical event and then how can I it how can I make that funny and then okay launch that one iteration and then improve on it no it it should be what are 20 to 30 other funny or historical events that I can make a funny spin on and then just shotgun approach make all of them and then this is just us focusing on one of the best sellers obviously you want to ideally have multiple like we want to be iterating on this one and this one which I'm I just highlighted random ones these are not actually winners but and this one so take that same process that we're talking about with Lincoln and multiply that across all of your top sell all the ones that are driving the cheapest clicks and you're going to have some failures like I would say it's like a 20 to 30% success rate on design iterations is a pretty good range to shoot for then on yoga day to show a completely opposite example or opposite Niche example so these were some of the designs that we had when we first launched this was one of the the top sellers which is a yogi figure doing a yoga pose blended with like a tree or nature element and so to iterate on that we took a bunch of different yoga poses and intertwin them with like tree SL nature and each one of these performed just as well and we had I think at the peak we had at least 10 to 15 of these that were all selling pretty well yeah here's here's some more and a subtle not a subtle a mistake that we made was we were using the actual like yoga po like the full name which we should not have done like this was the name actually on the on the website for a short time before we caught it so just we so when we finally noticed that we went back and simplified them all down like to reverse Warrior that kind of thing but yeah so this was the top seller these were the iterations and the important thing to keep in mind here is that we want to be completely objective on what the buyer wants it's not our personal preference or emotions that we want to play you know play into our feedback here and or into our design itation and the place that we're we're finding the the data for these iterations is in our Shopify analytics so go to Shopify then your analytics and then go sort by your top selling products see what people are buying the most and then also in your Facebook ad ads manager so ads manager using the simple dashboard that we set up is going to be your best friend in this process and the way that you're going to be able to see how each one of your designs is performing is you're going to select the campaign like or your your Dynamic catalog that you're running and then you're going to go over here and click breakdown and then you're going to do drop down and then it's at the very bottom there's an option called product ID and when you do that it's then going to open up and show you all of your products here and then you're just going to sort by the number of Link clicks and then look at which designs got the most link clicks and hopefully there's going to be some that got 50 to 75 cent cost per link click and those will be the ones that you iterate on but again if there aren't then just go back to the drawing board and start making more designs and it's very very very normal at this point to not be having a ton of winners to just have one or two and so it's really important back to the mindset piece that if you find even one winner even one design that's getting 50 to 75 cent or less cost per link click that's an amazing sign and so if you launch with 100 designs you get even one that's showing good signs that's awesome do so focus on the one winner that is TR like when I look at somebody's account and they show that they launched 100 designs and they have one or maybe two winners I I'm like ecstatic CU I know that that's a string that we can pull on or that's a thread we can pull on that's something we can you know double down on and build out into our whole collection and like really start growing The Collection like around that concept and this isn't like you know the whole collection starts filling up with just that same design it's you know that gives us a foothold so Lincoln festar that was our launched with a 100 different designs and like we had a wide variety of like you know smattering of different things it was Graphics to just straight up Bland historical quotes to maps and all kinds of stuff and the sarcastic humor was the thing that took off and so we stopped making all the other stuff and we just focused on making sarcastic history related humor and so not all the top sellers that doesn't mean that all of our designs turned into just a bust of a historical figure like we didn't just make the whole collection you know uh stuff like this we had a wide variety of other things but we leaned into that that thread of what was working and what was working was funny humor and on yoga day what was working completely opposite and this is where I don't these are examples I want to emphasize this this is examples this is not a demonstration of how to iterate on Lincoln festar and just make your own Lincoln festar that is not at all the point of this training the point of this training is how the concept of how to do it for your own store like in that's why I'm showing multiple examples like in yoga stay completely different Niche completely different brand your brand is unique and I'm saying don't don't do this one because it wouldn't be fun to just have a million history TS and yoga stay copycats out there but way more importantly it's not going to work for your own brand your brand is different your brand is unique and if it's not then it's not going to be successful long term it has to follow the thread of what's working for your brand so you have to learn the concept of what we're talking about behind behind these examples and the concept is looking at your design and objectively evaluating what worked well about this and then what can I improve about it and another example or tool that you can use is from the design training that Eric did where if you're like if you're not sure about how to iterate on it like go like this like each one of these layers represents a different variable and like a different variation that you can put on a design so for example if we were to follow this it's kind of like a what's that like arcade game where you like drop the coin in the top and it like goes down I Plinko I don't know the name but if you drop a coin down to recreate you know linkoln festar what would it be it would be you know humorous or sarcastic like screen print and then which one typography I guess and then Niche or sub Niche so then and this is for making a prompt but then like if you follow that down if you were if you wanted to iterate on a linkoln five star or on you know the the nature uh yoga poses you would just you would figure out which way like which path did it follow down to create that design like which category at each one of these like levels and then just shift one way or another like the yoga poses one like that one would be monocolor yeah monochromatic so then what if you shifted it to more nature inspired artwork or what if you shifted it to do hand sketched or what if you shifted it to do um and these are just examples there's a million other ones but like you get what I mean like you just shift it and then you have a completely different design and then you go up here and you try out like different print Styles and so the the moral of the story is like learn and objectively evaluate what is it about this design and normally it's the concept like the concept is King the concept is normally the thing that has by far the biggest impact and then to figure out how ways you can iterate on that like if you take a screenshot of Lincoln festar and then you plug it into chat GPT and you ask it to come up with 20 different different variations of that like now back when we were running history te's it was nowhere near that good but now if I was to plug it in into chat gbt it would do a phenomenal job of giving me ideas of how I can iterate off of it and then you can use the prompting that Eric teaches you to create new designs like those but bottom line most important thing to take away from this is the volume of iterating on your designs like it's not just doing ones and twos and to close the loop on what I was saying before when you launch with 100 and you have two winners two winers is a huge win and I see some people you know get deterred when they're like so you're telling me that 98 designs like weren't good you just honest quite honestly cannot think like that nobody who's successful with this ever has ever thought like that you just need to put that thought out of your mind because like like we talked about ad nauseum in the foundations module you're going to constantly face new new and original challenges that's just welcome to business so iterating on your designs is the place that we have to be more objective than we've been anywhere El and at the same time you know the iterating on our designs is one piece but the second piece is returning back to your research with the new data that you've gathered so you know now you have when you're doing your original research you just had like hypotheses and ideas in your head of what you think might work and like your own personal opinion was definitely sprinkled in there to a healthy extent no matter how much we try to avoid it and now that we have this new data of like what people are actually clicking on what are they actually buying put take that in mind and go back and do more research and the research really never stops like when I'm like running and scaling a store and I'm heavily in the design phase which is like always I'm constantly looking at research and it's just like rinsing and repeating and I think that a lot of people let me go back to the tree I think that a lot of people have a misconception where people get hung up the most is that they do this once like they launch with 100 designs they go through the process they see what you know worked and they iterate and then they relaunch then maybe they go through a second time and really lock in for this because I more I talk about it Tom Mar I realize this is what exactly what happens what where most people fall short or what like people feel like they're failing is they just get through this process once or twice and then for whatever reason they just stop and they just don't realize like all these extra lines are not I didn't draw these in here for fun these These are in here because that's the process and whenever I'm launching and scaling a store I'm doing this like a madman I'm just doing this repeatedly that's all that I'm doing as long as I know that I have a good mockup and I'm not seeing the cost per clicks that I want yet and I've run a mockup test to make sure that the mockup is not the problem and I know that I picked a good Niche because I did my research I know that it's broad enough that there's enough people then this is the process it's just rinsing and repeating and just launching as many designs and making it a challenge to yourself to see how many new designs you can launch based off of research and based off of what's actually working that's another place people lose the thread is that at at some point they start sometimes making new designs just based off of nothing not referencing the data or doing more research they just kind of you know do it in a silo so don't do that either but like once I know that I have a mockup that works and I'm trying to lower my cost I'm just launching new designs like crazy and I think a lot of people sometimes convince themselves that the problem is somewhere else but really the design are it and you will be tempted mark my words you will be tempted to fiddle with your Shopify store to fiddle with your email settings to fiddle with your Facebook page to fiddle with you know your campaign structures and all these little things that and I can say it very confidently because I was there in your shoes hopefully you'll only be there for months I was there for years I am intimately familiar with what it feels like and how seductive it can be to get drawn into all these shiny little objects that are surrounding you and and uh completely avoiding the fact that I just need to make more better designs and every single person in the community who has seen like reasonable success has gone through that same Evolution and I've tried to do my part whatever I am capable of to help speed them along and almost every one of them in their success post when they come back and they're like yeah so I just started launching a bunch of more designs and it worked and I think it's almost like too simple sometimes and we tend to try to over complicate things for ourselves but really that's the business like it's just this process right here and then once you start you just never stop you put workflows and stuff in place so it's not just you making the designs all the time but that's really that's really it so and and recognize the skill Gap like recognizing the need to iterate on designs is step one step two is recognizing the volume that you need it's 25 to 50 new designs every single iteration cycle if you're doing less than that knock yourself out but you're not giving yourself the best chance of success but then step three is how do I iterate on the designs that's the point of this lesson is like what does it look like to iterate on them and then four is how can I speed up the process and then five is objectively asking yourself like looking at the data or yeah use the data first and then objectively ask yourself is are the iterations that I'm making are they working and if they're not then ask yourself why and we did that with you know a lot of the history teas losers that we thought would do well but you know uh just didn't turn out as good and we realized like for example some of the iterations we did there was like we did historical topics that were like a little bit too Niche and just nobody really knew what it meant or maybe the joke just wasn't that funny like the pun wasn't as good like it didn't have whatever it was but we asked ourselves those questions and then we start building up our knowledge base of what works what doesn't and then we just get better every single cycle and just as long as we're making improvements and we're learning from our mistakes and learning from what's working every time then it's quite literally just a matter of time until it starts working and you get profitable and we talk about how to minimize the amount of time it takes you how to keep your ad spend and costs as low as humanly possible and then so that the only forces that could ever stop you like you're not going to run out of money from when you run the ads the way that we're talking about you should be spending $50 to $100 absolute Max per cycle so that's $ to $400 per month if you're doing fast onee turnarounds on your Cycles so $3 to $400 per month meanwhile you're getting sales that whole time so it's not even $300 to $400 just you know a poof it's like $2 $300 Max but when you're doing that like you're not going to run out of money and this is not Financial advice or anything like that but we're giving you the tools to help speed up the process literally the only thing that can stop you in this process is yourself is your brain convincing you that you know something is off we shouldn't keep doing this whatever and then you just give up and at one point you just stop the cycles and then you just give up entirely so don't do that keep testing keep iterating keep asking yourself objective questions and learn every time keep the winner learn mentality at the Forefront of your mind and thanks for watching I'll see you in the next lesson hi guys and welcome to section 4.7 where we've got some sales now what at this point we are going to go through pretty much all of like the backend kind of operational stuff some customer service things and really just dive deep into how to manage your print on demand store after you started to receive sales so let's get into it now your progress so far at this point we should have launched our store we should be running some ads and we should have started getting some sales which is great the whole point of why we're actually trying to run this business in the first place now by the end of this lesson we will have set up an efficient customer service process we will learn how to track and optimize our cost of goods which is extremely important when it comes to our profit margin and finally we are going to learn how to manage daily operations effectively to sustain growth so why does this matter really what is the 10,000 foot view for this section that we are in in right now the first is that customer service plays a huge role in our brand voice it's really going to affect how people talk about our brand and how they perceive us so do we want this perception to be a positive or A negative one the second reason why this part of the course is so important is that by keeping a close eye on our cost of goods we can actually help become more profitable this is an area where we can make little tweaks here and there we can switch print providers if we need to really digging into the financials is going to be one of the best decisions that you can make as a business owner because really at the end of the day we're in this business to make money and finally if there are broken or no systems in place scaling is going to be very challenging and we already know that running one of these Shopify stores is a lot you know it all falls on our shoulders we're thinking about the Facebook marketing the email marketing we're thinking about customer service we're thinking about all areas of the business so we already have enough on our plate how can we build some systems and really make it a little bit easier for us to actually be running one of these stores so the 10,000 ft view for post sales operations we want to have great customer service we want every single person who is coming to our site to have a great experience and even if they don't have a great experience we want to be taking care of them after the fact that they've already purchased this then leads to Brand loyalty and people coming back to us time and time again and also telling their friends and family you know when someone goes to a family gathering they say oh my gosh Meg I love that shirt where did you get it I would love to say oh I got it from seasonal collections you should totally check them out word of mouth is going to be the cheapest marketing and the best form of marketing loyalty will then lead to referrals which we just kind of talked about Word of Mouth getting people to come to our site that we didn't have to pay to achieve and finally that is then going to lead to growth and really scaling and helping to grow our brand so let's get into customer service there are four key aspects to really great customer service and the first is responsiveness so we want to be replying to people getting back to emails any kind of customer service questions in a prompt time because this is going to build trust and it's going to make people realize that we are actually human beings that are running this store I'm sure you found it frustrating when you know we've worked with a B A Big Brand and you didn't love what you got you reach out to their customer service and you get hit with an automated response that just says hey thanks for reaching out we'll get back to you in 72 hours I don't know about you that always leaves a kind of sour taste in my mouth and I'm always a little bit frustrated all I want is for the issue that I'm having to be solved and by waiting 3 days that's just not doing it for me so we definitely want to be responding to customers in a quick and prompt amount of time now some statistics that kind of helped to prove this point 88% of customers are more likely to make a repeat purchase after receiving excellent customer service so we want to make sure that every time someone is reaching out to our customer service we are providing excellent customer service back to them because of the fact this can lead to more sales even if somebody didn't love the product or they didn't love the size we can totally take care of that issue on our end and hope that we can then reach out to them time and time again and they'll continue to come back because they know we're going to take care of them at the end of the day another statistic 89% of clients state that a quick response to their initial query influences their choice of company So the faster that we are responding you know making sure that people feel heard then this is going to work out better in our favor at the end of the day the second key aspect to excellent customer service is going to be empathy we want to personalize our responses to show our customers that one we actually read and listened to their you know email and their concern and two we're not just like a robot we're actual human beings who are running this brand we want to make it known that you know we're a small business that we care about our customers so a statistic to go along with this 68% of customers expect Brands to demonstrate empathy in their communication so people want to know that their message was read that we understand what they're going through we totally get the frustration and yes we want to help and fix this problem for them another statistic is 63% of consumers anticipate that customer service agents will understand their unique needs and expectations so this means more than half of the people that are reaching out to us expect that we are actually going to listen to them and understand what their problem is so that's really really important the third key aspect to excellent customer service is going to be reliability we need to be consistent across all of our support channels now I say all of our support channels because you're probably just thinking of customer service email which yes that's going to be your biggest kind of channel to manage when it comes to customer service but when we run one of these Brands and we're running Facebook and Instagram ads we are going to get people messaging us on Instagram messaging us on Facebook maybe even just commenting I've seen that a few times s across Our Brands just commenting on our ads like they'll get hit with another ad and then they'll comment and say I need to talk to somebody from customer service and just like basically write their customer service email in a comment so we want to make sure that we're being consistent with the way that we are giving our customer service that whether it's through an email through a comment we are taking care of the customer in the exact same way and communicating them with them in the same fashion 80% of customers consider the experience a customer provides to be as important as the product or service so that's huge people are expecting that we are going to be on our aame topnotch providing excellent customer service so we want to make sure that the experience is the same no matter where people are interacting with us whether that be on our website through our email or through one of the other channels like Facebook or Instagram a second statistic is 77% of consumers have remained loyal to specific brands for over a decade often due to consistent and reli able service so this just shows that if you are providing good customer service that keeps people coming back because they know they're going to be taken care of at the end of the day and I don't know about you but like this statistic definitely resonates with me now the fourth key aspect to providing excellent customer service is going to be problem solving we want to resolve issues as effectively as possible and leaving a positive impression so problem solving really comes down to how can we get the most information from a customer so that we can actually handle the problem at hand so what do I mean by this let's say somebody reaches out and just says they got the wrong color sent to them I could say hey I'm so sorry about that you know here's what we can do and then the customer responds back okay what information do you need for me and then we respond again and it's like a back and forth It's almost like a tennis match we don't want to have 15 different messages with the same customer to try to come to a resolution we want to really in that first email get all the information that we could possibly need from this customer so that it's really maybe one or two emails back and forth and boom their issue is handled they're happy with how prompt and easy this process was if we're going back and forth and it's just a continued on takes a week people are going to get really frustrated with that so we want to be conscious of that we really want to be utilizing our time and our customers time effectively so we want to be getting all the information up front so we can handle it on the back end and immediately send them an email saying hey Amy we totally hear you we got this entire situation under control this is what we did for you please let us know if there's anything else that you need from us that is always the resolution that we're looking for so some statistics to go along with problem solving is 45% of consumers desire their issue to be resolved in the first interaction so this is fast people really want for us to read their message hear what they need from us and then move on and have their problem resolved they don't want to be spending all their time dealing with a customer service person and the second statistic that goes along with this is 91% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a great customer service experience highlighting the impact of effective problem solving so again by providing quick and good customer service where we are listening and being empathetic that gets people back time and time again to our store purchasing so it's really really important and by doing this guys we don't have to keep going out on Facebook to keep collecting new consumers this is really where so much of the profit is made by people that we you know have gotten the first time from Facebook ads they loved our product we took care of them and they come back time and time again because they love our products they love the way that we handle our service that is the true meaning of running one of these Brands so brand values and customer service we want to be consistent because that creates a seamless experience that no matter where somebody is reaching out to us we are giving them the same similar responses differentiation makes customers choose us because we stand out from some of these bigger Brands like let's say a Walmart you know or one of those brands that you've reached out and they just send an automated message that says hey we'll get back to you in 72 hours that makes us different because we are immediately responding to our customers after we've read their message we understand what their problem is and we know that we can solve it and three loyalty turns customers into Advocates so instead of having a negative experience with our customer service and people just walking away we can provide excellent customer service have people come back turn it into loyalty and then they become Advocates of the brand and really help to market the brand for us which is amazing so where should you start how should we like effectively start working on our customer service okay so let's talk about customer service tools there's some different tools that we can use and utilize the first two being Gmail and looks Gmail is going to be the cheapest it's going to be free you should have already set up your support email address in one of the previous sections we can definitely work and manage off of Gmail don't feel like you need to upgrade and purchase a gorgeous account or anything like that Chris and I actually operated our businesses out of Gmail for years before ever making the switch to gorgeous and the only reason that we did switch to gorgeous was because we finally had hired out our customer service and it gives great analytics into how your customer service agent is handling your customer service for you so that's really the only reason why we upgraded otherwise we would have stayed within Gmail there are ways that we can organize it and I'm going to go through some tips and tricks that way you can organize your Gmail account to be fully prepared for any customer service issues now gorgeous is great because again it gives you that analytics that data Insight so when you have hired out your customer service you can really keep a close eye on how your customers are responding to the way that your customer service agent is interacting with them it allows people to actually review your customer service agent and give them a score on how they did with handling the problem so gorgeous is a great tool if you're already somebody who's maybe starting to scale or starting to grow a little bit this is something that you may want to think about down the line and in the future so let's get into the Gmail account and actually go through you know how I've set it up and how I've managed our account in the past so as you can see we are in the support Gmail account for seasonal collections now the way that I like to organize you know everything that's coming through is by creating labels so on the left hand side you should see a labels tab there may have already been some created in like your general Gmail account but to add a new label we can just click this plus Buton button give our label a name and click create now I've already done this and I like to really create labels for all of kind of the different issues that I've seen across our brand that way it allows me to organize and I can easily you know go back and find emails in the past if I need to look and see how we had interacted or responded with a customer so the first thing that I would do as you can see these tickets are closed this means that we have resolved the issue for the customer that there's nothing else that we need to do with these customer service issues or questions now all these unread ones they would technically all get the open label because we have not yet gone through the ticket understand what the customer needs so that's going to be an open ticket this is going to tell us like hey we need to take a look at this this is not yet completed this customer is not yet fully satisfied with how we have maybe handled the situation or we're waiting for an email back from them Etc this lets us know we need to maybe follow up with these customers now some of the other labels that I've created on the side one Clos tickets lets us know that they're all done business related so sometimes your support email address we'll get maybe like a clavio email or a Google email so we could label that as like business related so not necessarily a customer service related ticket we then have defects so if a customer was sent a defective t-shirt we can put this label on it that way we can keep an eye if somebody's just reaching out with general questions about the brand if they are requesting a refund they would like to return an item wrong color or the wrong size this is the majority of I would say customer service queries that we get so I just like to create labels that way I can keep track of it and also address issues so if a customer they may reach out and say oh my gosh I totally put the wrong shipping address in instead of going to my house it's now going to my mom's can you please change it that would be an address issue so as we create these labels we can then really keep a close eye on what the needs are of people who are reaching out to us and this also allows us to really Trend some of the issues that are going on and then make different decisions on the back end to better prepare our brand so now that we've gone through our Gmail account we kind of know how we can organize it keep an eye on tickets we know about Open tickets closed tickets some of the most common issues that we've received from running these businesses in the past we can now move on now tools don't matter if we don't set a foundation now what exactly do I mean by this we really need to think about what are polic policies are going to be you know what is going to be our return policy what's going to be our refund policy we kind of need to sit down and determine the rules around how we're going to manage this brand so for example returns are we going to accept them what will we say if somebody wants to return an item because we can't really send it back to printify if anything we would collect the return and I don't know about you I don't really like a ton of t-shirts that are defective or have problems or that people didn't like just hanging out in my home the second would be refunds what are the parameters we're going to put in place for refunds are there going to be any can they ask for a return at any point will it be 30 days 90 days these are all things to think about and finally wholesale pricing will we offer wholesale pricing if so what are the discounts going to be these are some of kind of the different questions that we get from customers who've reached out to us in the past and just things to think about prior to really scaling up so my policies are set now what now that we've thought through that we know exactly how we want to approach this the next thing is going to be taking out our emotion when we run these Brands we almost attach ourselves to it especially the customer service because I don't know about you but when anybody says something negative typically we get our back up against the wall we feel like we're being attacked and emotion comes into play so emotional responses actually lead to poor responses so the best way that we can do this is actually trying to remove ourself from the situation and that doesn't mean okay let's hire somebody right off the bat we don't want to be doing that if we're not yet profitable we're not yet making money so we need to figure out a way to really remove our emotion but also allowing us to continue to run our customer service this is where the we scale customer service GPT comes into play I have basically trained a GPT based off of the way that Chris and I run our customer service and how we've been able to provide excellent customer service to everybody who's reached out to our previous Brands and this has really shaped this GPT and helps to craft responses so that we don't really need to emot Ally think about responding to this customer instead chat GPT is going to do the hard work take the emotion out for us and really provide a solid response and it's also going to save a ton of time I used to write out every single email that I would respond back to people I would create some macros which would basically be like a plug like I would copy the message and then paste it if it was something like an issue that we've seen time and time again but chat GB is great because it actually like reads the message from the customer and then the customer feels like they've actually been heard just adds an extra layer of that empathy you know key aspect that we were talking about earlier which is huge so let's do a screen share and actually go through using the GPT and see how it performs on some customer service emails okay so we are back in the Gmail account for seasonal Collections and we have three Open tickets so let's open these tickets up let's plug them into the GPT and see what responses we get back so the first is for a return order High seon seasonal collections team I just received my order and unfortunately skis okay t-shirt I ordered arrived damaged oh man there is a noticeable tear in the sleeve and I'm really disappointed because I was looking forward to wearing it for a holiday gathering can you please let me know what we can do for this to be resolved I've attached a photo of the damage for your reference so this is great again there's no photo here but if the customer has sent a photo that's going to save us on the problem solving side because printify and as you'll learn when you're handling your customer service printify if there is a damage if it's the wrong size if it was the wrong design printed on the shirt they're going to want photo evidence showing what the actual like default is that way they can reach out to the printer make sure that it's going to be covered and then it doesn't come out of our pocket it's actually going to come out of like the printer's pocket so it saves US money at the end of the day so let's copy this email and then we're going to go to the we scale customer service GPT which is linked below and we are just going to write in the GPT and just say like hey we have this email please help respond so we said I have a customer service email that I need help responding to so the GPT is going to take all the information from the policies that Chris and I have always used with running our brand and kind of the way that we provide customer service so let's see the response that the GPT made hi Amy thank you for reaching out to us I'm truly sorry to hear about this issue with your skis okay t-shirt I can understand how disappointing it must be especially with your upcoming holiday gathering unfortunately our store policy does not allow for returns or exchanges however I want to ensure that you're taken care of so this just means we can't accept the return she can keep the shirt so this portion here will probably need a little bit of help and a little bit of tweaking and that's completely okay again the GPT is not always perfect so we're just going to kind of give the GPT a little bit of a nudge to help get a better response out of it okay so we're going to tell the gbt to remove that we don't accept returns portion because it really just doesn't matter and doesn't really fit into this we can tell her that we appreciate that the photo that this helps tremendously with getting a new t-shirt sent to her and we're going to ask if she would rather have a refund over really getting a new shirt sent to her because she does have a family gathering coming up and if it's not going to get there in time then she may not want the shirt at the end of the day which is completely okay let's see what the GPT comes up with now so the GPT says thank you for reaching out to us and I'm so sorry to hear about the damage of your T-shirt a damaged item absolutely is not the standard that we strive for and we will take care of this for you right away we truly appreciate the photo that you provided it helps tremendously in getting resolved quickly to make things right we'd like to offer two options we can ship a replacement t-shirt to you as soon as possible or if you would rather we can issue a full refund for the damaged item please let us know how you'd like to proceed and we'll take care of it immediately once again I apologize for the inconvenience this is perfect I love this response so again helps to take that emotion out of it and instead of being upset like oh my gosh I can't believe it like was damaged now I'm annoyed with pry and this is really frustrating it just takes the emotion out from how we would and should be responding to our customer so it's always frustrating when you know something is damaged but it happens mistakes happen sometimes printers don't always catch every little defect within a shirt because they're printing so many shirts per day so we are going to now copy this and then we're going to just do a quick little reply and paste it and there we go all we have to do now is just change the name and it's set to go we can send this back to Amy and really wait for her response on how she would like us to proceed we can put the numbers too CU that's what was in there and then there we go so that's a really goodlook email at the same time it answers the question that the customer had the issue it's going to resolve it again this one we do need to wait for a response back because the last thing that we want to do is say hey we're sending you a replacement then her respond back and say well my holiday is tomorrow I'm not going to get the t-shirt in time I would have rather refund so we can click Send and again we will label this as defect so it lets us know really why the customer was reaching out to us in the first place now let's go back we'll do one more and then see what the GPT has to say and from there we can make kind of any changes so high seasonal collections I just received my order but it's not what I ordered I was supposed to get the sunshine and coffee t-shirt in a medium but instead I received a completely different design and in a different size so we can label this as wrong size and wrong color so like wrong design wrong color wrong just the whole shirt is wrong so let's take this email and we will paste it into our GPT and this time I'm not going to give it a prompt let's see how it responds hi Colleen thank you for reaching out I'm so sorry to hear about the mixup with your order I completely understand how frustrating it can be to receive the wrong item and we're here to make it right for you to resolve this we can send you the correct sunshine and coffee T-shirt size medium right away there's no need to return the incorrect item please feel free to keep it donate it or gift it as you may see fit truly appreciate your understanding okay this is a great response now the only thing that is missing is we do need a photo from Colleen we do need the picture showing that it was the wrong design the wrong color the wrong size so we're going to just say please add a section asking for a photo okay so because we have some missing information we are going to say please add a SE asking for a photo of the incorrect t-shirt and of the receipt if they still have it that they received with their package because every printify order will get a receip and it should have the name of the T-shirt so if it was like a different t-shirt from your site it should have that name so we're going to click Send and see what it gives back hi Colleen thank you for reaching out I'm sorry to hear about the mixup to help us resolve this quickly can you please send us a photo of the incorrect t-shirt along with the receipt that was included in your package this will help us investigate the issue and ensure that we get the correct item shipped to you without a delay because we know that we need to reach out to printify now I don't tell customers that I need to reach out to another person before I resolve their problem I like to really go to printify handle it with them directly and just make it seem to the customer that I'm actually handling it that we are going to print it as if I were the actual printer so that's great once we have that information then we can send you the sunshine coffee t-shirt there's no need to return the incorrect item please feel free to keep it donate it gift it perfect this response is great so this would again be one that we copy we are going to paste it in here to respond to our customer we'll put our name and boom like that was so easy and so fast now things that to remember as we're handling customer service I would be going into Shopify and I would be checking to make sure that Colleen actually ordered that t-shirt so you do want to make sure that when people are reaching out that it's matching what we're seeing in Shopify I have had people reach out and say you send me the wrong design I ordered this and then I look at their order and I go hey actually no you didn't order that you ordered this and again yes it's not always problem solving super quickly but sometimes you do need more information from your customer and sometimes people reach out and it just the information's incorrect so we want to make sure that we are following up we want to make sure you know that we're checking things on both the printify and the Shopify side and really dotting our eyes and crossing our te's when it comes to customer service so we will send this okay so let's say that that this is Colleen's order let's look into it and kind of see what we can do on the back end within printify to handle this so what we can actually do is edit the order that way we don't have to change any of the personal information none of the shipping address everything Remains the Same so we'll click edit order as you can see this was not the shirt that Colleen ordered so we're actually just going to delete it and from here we can add the correct product so Colleen said that she wanted the sunshine and coffee shirt so we're going to type in sunshine and coffee and now we get a whole bunch of them and that's because this is already set up for international fulfillment you don't need to worry about that we're going to talk about that in a later section of the course so just get that out of your mind you don't need to set anything up within printify at this time we are going to find the sunshine and coffee t-shirt from Monster Digital because we know that she lives in the United States so we want to pick the printer within the United States we pick Monster Digital we can say she picked charcoal again we are looking back at shop by looking at her exact order and making sure we matching it up appropriately and she wanted a size medium so as you can see we now have this brand new shirt correct color correct size she only needs one boom perfect we're going to go to shipping again we don't have to put in any of this information because we're just editing an order that already exists okay and then we can click save for later so I'm going to save this for later now if this was an order that maybe had already gone through something that we can do because because a lot of times you can't edit an order that's already been shipped out we can duplicate the order so because Colleen had already received it we can click duplicate because this will again pull all the same information in and then we can kind of put in a second order or again we can reach out to customer service which is always the first thing that you should do when it comes to printify talk to them and say Here's the issue because a lot of times they can handle it on their back end so if it was an issue where printify had sent the wrong design sometimes customers pick the wrong design and that's something that we just have to eat that cost but if it was an issue with prfi let's say we looked at her order she did order the sunshine and coffee shirt and printify just had messed up they'd sent the wrong one we would go directly into the printify dashboard start a customer service ticket with them and basically say like that's why we need the picture this is what they received they would go oh that's not right okay let's reprint it or we'll give you a refund and then from there we can make the right decision on what our customer wants and is looking for so always start with talking to printify customer service reps they're always excellent they're always attentive honestly I think Price customer service is some of the best customer service that I've ever experienced being any type of consumer I can't recommend printify enough for just the way that they handle their customer service themselves so now that you've seen the GPT you see how it can respond to customers feel free to use it below in the link it's abs absolutely free just plug your emails in and it really helps to take and remove that emotion out again it's still not perfect sometimes it needs a little bit more prompting a little bit more tweaking but over time it's going to get better and better so definitely utilize it save yourself a ton of time and really just save yourself from being emotionally drained by the negativity of the customers that are reaching out to you sometimes next let's go through fire so this is like the big issues things that kind of come up that seem really scary with running a break so let's get into what some of these fires are the first is going to be fulfillment issues you should always be checking regularly on your printify account to see if you have any orders or issues so what does this look like how do we know if there's issues with an order your printify dashboard is going to look something like this when you click on your orders as you can see I've blurred out all the names because these are actual customers of mine and you know got to keep that nice and confidential but at the top you can see requires action and out of stock so it's going to come up big and red if there's any issue with any of your orders meaning issues that prfi can't move it forward to production this could be an address issue like a shipping address issue printify uses different applications to determine whether a shipping address is like written correctly or not and if it's not correct then they want you to reach out to the customer and say hey is this like actually right because it's not working with any of our softwares which typically only affects like with internet National stuff as well as like really really rural addresses I would say very rare that you know it occurs but you'll see in red at the top of your orders page if there's any orders with issues so it's always good like every once in a while pop in and and check on that the last thing we want is to not have been in the printify account for let's say like a month and you've got you know 250 out of stock now if you're checking your customer service emails you'll probably pick up that there's some sort of issue because people aren't receiving their order they really angry but it's always good to be checking in on printify looking for any of those problems that way we can catch them quickly and handle them effectively now one of the biggest customer service issues that I ever dealt with was actually during covid during 2020 I had a t-shirt color that was scaling and selling so much of Printery literally ran out of stock with every single printer like you could not find a tropical blue shirt anywhere and my printify dashboard was just like all red there were just hundreds and hundreds of of orders with issues um so definitely don't delay on handling any of those issues reach out to those customers be proactive that way you don't end up with the dumpster fire of a customer service issue like I did the next fire that we're going to talk about is chargeback so what exactly is a chargeback it is when a customer disputes a charge with their credit card or debit card and asks the bank to reverse the payment so I'm sure you've done this sometimes sometimes if Brands aren't willing to work with you on like returning a product you can reach out to your credit card company or your bank and say hey I'm trying to get my money back like I was given this horrible product that doesn't work they're not you know responding to any of my messages you know I I want to do a charge back so they'll initiate this charge back and then it is up to us to then dispute our side so it's kind of like he said she said almost so they come to the bank or the credit card company the credit card company goes to Shopify and basically says hey this seller did my customer wrong and they need to pay for it so we're going to give them a fee and see how they dispute it and then it's up for us to respond and give a lot of evidence in our favor saying like hey this is why the customer actually Incorrect and why we are correct and we shouldn't be you know charged this fee so let's go through the steps of actually handling a charge back now the first is going to be staying alert for chargeback notifications that you will see in your Shopify dashboard it'll be up kind of at the top where it says orders like the number of orders that you have to fulfill if there's any payments that need to be captured that's where you'll see kind of like it'll say like charge back like one and you can click that and it'll immediately take you to the form and you'll just fill out all the information that you possibly can about that order so definitely monitor your Shopify dashboard when you see one pop up it's important to handle it as quickly as possible because there is a time frame and the later that we're responding to it like investigation they'll look at it and if if it's a shorter amount of time like they don't increase the amount of time it's literally just like the 30 days if you submit it on 29 they're literally just going to look at it for one day and then make their decision so it always doesn't look great it's always good to be prompt and responding to these Gathering as much evidence as we possibly can so that way the chargeback can then hopefully be reversed in our favor again responding promptly within the time frame specified by Shopify you will see this again it's okay to let a day or two go by collect your evidence you know be strategic about it and diligent going through all of your different sales channels to gather as much evidence as you possibly can but again handling these things prompt and when they first come up is a lot better than letting days and days and days go by two is going to be reviewing the chargeback details so understand why the customer is saying they need a charge back so understanding the reason code for the chargeback provided by the customer's bank or credit card company it's going to say that when you open up the form like it'll say fraudulent or it'll say they didn't receive their order there's a few different reasons so it's just important that we look at the reason and then we're building our evidence around why that reason is maybe Incorrect and again we try to fight back as many chargebacks as we possibly can if people are continuing to charge back that would probably mean we're not running a very good brand or a very good company so that definitely shouldn't be happening with the way that you know if you're following the steps within this course it's very rare that we get a charge back it's every once in a while so if you're getting them time and time again again maybe look at the back end and see if something's off definitely not common and the more chargebacks that you get you can actually end up losing your Shopify payments which is always not great so we want to be prompt but again these things are rare and they shouldn't be occurring often if they are definitely look into the back end but again you shouldn't be getting a ton of chargebacks and if it is in fact a chargeback that maybe is for good reason maybe the person did reach out and we didn't handle it or their message got put into spam and you know we just didn't see it then yeah like that is worth the chargeback and you can actually accept it and just say okay like I'm going to get hit with this fee fee is not huge it's maybe like $10 but you just you can accept the fee and then like you don't have to go through all of these steps but if it's a reason like let's say the customer didn't reach out at all we definitely want to gather evidence and say like hey like we would have handled this like we run good customer service this person didn't even give us the chance to you know effectively handle the problem for them they just went to you instead it was almost like a tattletail so we definitely want to gather evidence on those that way you know we don't get hit with that fee and we don't get hit with like a chargeback notice from Shopify so the more that we win the better it is in our favor so the third step is gathering evidence we want to look anywhere and everywhere and take screenshots to include in our response so this is let's say the customer service Gmail account you're going to see the order that was affected by this you'll see the customer's name so it's important to get the name get the email address plug all that stuff into the email platform that you're you're using and see if they ever reached out make sure to check your spam most of the time when we get hit with a charge pack that customer has never reached out to us before so we take those screenshots and show like hey this person has not reached out to us they never tried contacting us I like to take screenshots of all the areas where we show like how to contact us like our contact page at the footer like our contact us link that way the company knows like I'm not trying to hide people from finding me like I'm happy to handle these customer service things but this customer never reached out they never gave me the chance that is huge and totally helps build your case in your favor because credit card companies don't want to be doing this either like it's a waste of their time A lot of times the fourth step is going to be drafting a professional response and this is another area where Chachi BT can be a huge Lifesaver because you can basically say here's all the information just like write a whole summary about your chargeback all the information that you have the evidence that you've gathered and then you can just answer all like the questions that Shopify is giving you within your chargeback response with trap GPT and it's giving you like a beautifully written like perfectly professional response so it's great it saves so much time and again allows us to remove that maybe negative emotion that we have from having to handle the charge back at all the fifth step is going to be compiling and then submitting the documentation so taking all the evidence the screenshots all those responses that we've now written out in the Shopify form and then actually submitting the information the sixth step is going to be actually receiving a response back from the bank or from Shopify typically this is Shopify that's notifying you it does take roughly like 30 days I would say like 2 weeks to 30 days for them to like fully process and look at all the information and you'll receive an email from Shopify basically saying whether your charge back was reversed or whether it was accepted in in the customer's favor so they will follow up with you and you will know whether you won the charge back or not sometimes it's also important to gather data within printify we want to be looking at Shopify printify all of our customer service kind of areas that people could reach out to us and communicate with us so it's really important to be checking all those Gathering all that information that way we can be winning these chargebacks in our favor the next fire that we're going to talk about are BBB complaints or Better Business Bureau complaints now these complaints are formal grievances filed by customers with the Better Business Bureau the about businesses product service or practices now the funny thing about the Better Business Bureau is there's this connotation that it's like a government run agency and that if there's so many complaints with the Better Business Bureau that like they're going to shut down your business that's what most consumers like think and have in their mind the Better Business Bureau has absolutely nothing to do with the government they can't shut down your business like there's nothing that they can really do it's basically the same as somebody going to like trust pilot and just write wrting a review except it just sounds more formal and scary because it has Bureau in it so you know I've definitely had customers reach out and just say like if you don't handle this for me like I will go to the Better Business Bureau like it's almost like a threat that they give you if they say that again the beauty of Chachi PT like take the emotion out of it you're probably going to be annoyed that they even use that line on you but use a Chachi PT respond you know professionally to the email and just know like you can kind of laugh at it and just be like okay like go ahead it's really not going to do anything it's just going to be a negative review that's out there okay so this cost of goods can be a fire most of the time it's not a fire but it definitely can be a fire when you finally start running your financial you know p&l and balance sheet again always be running these daily especially you know even if it's negative I know it can hurt your mental space when you're seeing negative days as you're running ads and trying to get things up and running but it's really really important to track every penny nickel DME from your business to keep a really close eye on the financials because I hate to see it when someone hasn't run their p&l any other finances we say hey run it and then they come back to us and they're like oh my gosh I thought I actually made all this money when in reality they broke even that to me is heartbreaking we want to know exactly what our cost of goods is because it is the biggest expense that we are going to pay within the business model of print on demand so it can be a fire but it absolutely should not be a fire so so how do we avoid a cost of goods fire the first thing that we can do is use the p&l spreadsheet and track this daily so running a pnl and running a balance sheet which is going to show our cash flow that we have within the business those are going to be two really important documents that we are running every single day the second thing that we're going to do is monitor for changes so identifying raising costs or added fees and I'll get into that and kind of show you on our mirror board kind of how we've tracked our cost of goods month over month and finally we want to aim for a 40 to 50% cost of goods so the lower the cost of goods the higher the profit margin again you know sometimes we've had students go through all the information they're getting sales they're so excited we say hey have you run your finances they haven't they sit down they run them and then they find that their cost of goods is 70% at that point we're left with like the smallest bit of margin our goal is to have the biggest profit margin as we possibly can anywhere between 15 to 25% that is the goal for profit margins and everything that we are teaching you within here that's why you know we print with printify because they provide the best prices when it comes to cost of goods so absolutely run those financials know the numbers know what we're aiming for know that our cost of goods should be between 40 and 50% so even if you're not printing with printify you're adjusting your prices accordingly so that your cost of goods is anywhere in that 40 to 50% range so as you can see this is one of the spreadsheets that Chris and I actually created when we are really trying to determine what our cost of goods could be with different printers now in this case this was for our International fulfillment but we do this with us fulfillment as well you know we looked at Monster Digital we looked at Swift pod we looked at some of the top rated t-shirt companies that pry offers and ran all the numbers and it just so happened that Monster Digital was going to give us the best quality and the best price so really breaking down what your costs are going to be not only for production but also for shipping is going to be huge and can save you tons of time if we are just doing this from the start so let's go over to the mirror board and actually take a look at how we Trend and track our cost of goods so now that we are in the mirror board let's zoom in and I will show you our cost of goods so this was our 07 figure store that Chris and I started last July July 2023 and as you can see we plug in all of our information this is our monthly p&l so we run a daily p&l but then at the end of the month after we get our big summed up invoice from printify I like to compare our daily to our monthly and they should match up almost exactly the same in a perfect world they are going to match up perfectly but you know sometimes issues happen things get charged to the credit card on different days Etc so I like to break it down daily and I also like to do an end of the month one so for July this was you know all the income that we got in from from Shopify our printer refund from printify as well as cash back from credit cards that we use to run the business and then we have all of the costs and you know Facebook ads is definitely one of a bigger cost because that's how we're getting traffic to the site but as you can see the printer invoice is always higher it's going to always be our biggest expense is just cost of goods and actually fulfilling all of those orders so we plug this into our p&l and as you can see here the cost of good person percentage 39.4 one% boom perfect now typically in the beginning stages it's going to be lower as we're growing as we're scaling as we're adding new apps and having to upgrade our plans because we have so many more orders coming in our overhead is going to become more expensive over time as you can see from the first month to the second month it doubled you're going to notice that as you scale up within your business and you're going to notice that your cost of goods percentage is going to change so look at it from the first month we went from 39.4 one% to 44% I would much rather it be 39.4% because that means I've got more money in my pocket at the end of the day but we watch this and this is what Chris and I do month over month we look at all the numbers and determine really what our cost of goods percentage is and as you can see as it's increasing you know we look is it because of the overhead prices or is it fees are changing on printify maybe Monster Digital bumped their prices or they changed the shipping price this is going to happen time and time again so it's really important to look at like the extra fees and everything that's going on you know over the last few years we've had such high inflation and everything has just naturally become more expensive so if we're not matching our prices with where everybody else is kind of raising them then we're definitely going to fall behind when it comes to our cost of goods and our overall profit margin so we definitely want to keep an eye on that and make sure that we are staying within that 40 to 50% % range and always constantly going back and looking at the numbers time and time again so you know it's great to see that over the last year we were in that correct range but you know if we were ticking up closer to 50% that's definitely going to cause some red flags I want to look into those numbers and catch any kind of issues prior to anything happening or you know letting time go on and just noticing like oh again my cost of goods was high but I'm I'm not going to look into it no I'm going to look into it and see are there any changes that I can be making somewhere you know do I need to just increase prices or am I missing something on like the pery back end to be saving money It's always important to be digging deep and looking at the numbers constantly now that we've gone through customer service the different fires that can happen just you know after you've made some sales let's talk about like how to fix these problems now it's time for you to take action the first thing that we want you to start doing is running your p&l daily again I know in the beginning stages it can be be really difficult when you're looking and just seeing you know oh man I lost 20 bucks today or oh man I lost 15 my ads just didn't perform you know at the row as that they should have it was a 1.5 versus the day before was a 2.5 still run your p&l daily because this is going to catch any cost of good fires or even overhead fires you know sometimes Chris and I have looked at the financials and we're like oh my gosh our overhead for the month was $10,000 like that's crazy so it's important to catch that kind of stuff and realize what apps are we using what aren't we using what can we cut can we decrease you know any of the plans that we're on to a lower one or can we reach out to the customer service of these other applications or whatever the overhead expense may be and kind of bargain with them you know when you reach out to one of these apps and say like hey it's too expensive for me I got to find something cheaper a lot of times they'll like negotiate with you so it's always good to reach out to and keep that in mind as well the second thing that you can take action on is use the we scale customer service GPT to help take emotion out of you know responding to customers it can be really frustrating when you've put all this time all this energy you love this brand that you're building and somebody just doesn't like it it's human nature to become emotional about it so take a step back take a breath throw it into the GPT so that you are actually sending a quality customer service email and not letting any of that negative emotion come into play and finally keep an eye out for fires and handle them them immediately it is never good to kind of they almost work like a Snowball Effect like starts out small and you're like oh like I'll handle it like eventually it's fine you know it's not that big of a deal and then a few days go by and now your you know Snowball is turning into a small snow Boulder and it's just a pain in the butt like no one wants to deal with that if you're noticing any kind of little fires put them out immediately the last thing you want is a forest fire and having to really put out the blaze so definitely take action in these three areas guys I really hope that you found some good tips and tricks going through the I got some sales what should I do now portion of the course again always catch those fires early keep an eye on your finances you know I hope that you utilize some of the customer service tools that I've learned and used along the way providing high quality customer service is going to be one of the best things that you can absolutely do for your brand especially when you were just starting out you know we are in the age of AI and automated response is and I don't know about you I'm not somebody who's super old or like oldfashioned but I want somebody who's actually going to read my email I don't want it to be 3 days later and then I'm getting hit with an agent who may or may not know exactly how to handle the problem I'm telling you it is a way that makes your brand Stand Out amongst all the other brands so take the time be empathetic problem solve and be quick with your response and customers are going to notice that and see it and you're absolutely going to stand out and be building an excellent brand so thank you for watching this section and we'll see you in the next one when I think about tests I often think about tests at school or maybe a test when you have an STI or a DUI which is never great not that I've ever had that by the way if you want to join the weale community part of your application processes that you send your DUI and STi test in for verification test I love tests just not those type so as part of your print on demand Journey you're going to have to do some tests and it's worth considering these a risk management strategy and if you can imagine what it would be like and this is theoretically speaking what it would be like to launch a business and invest money in marketing and products based on an idea that's never been proven and so when you consider that the idea of a test starts to make a bit more sense and so the question and the challenge that everyone within business is faced with is how can we prove the ideas that we have before we make the the bigger Financial commitment and so that is essentially scaling we invest more to scale the business business but before scaling we have to kind of prove that our designs the website funnel and marketing will work and if we don't do that then there's a high risk that we could waste a considerable sum of money so this shouldn't have come as a surprise I mean it's it's part of the training and the process and in the we scale Community we will help you do that um it is essential for success and the more that we do it and you do it the the better we get at it so during this testing phase you should expect to invest a startup sum and I mean I can't really tell you what the sum will be for you I can tell you that my startup sum was $ 11,000 New Zealand dos um and that was because of the amount of testing that I did to to reach my goals and I consider that an investment and now the business is profitable I'm able to get that back and so your awareness of this training your data analysis and how you use the data will essentially affect the size of that sum so essentially that means the better you are at testing the smaller the sum will be the better you are at learning and asking for feedback and receiving that feedback and implementing it the smaller the sum that will be so we're here to help you with testing um don't be concerned about that it's just part of the process and um it's actually quite good fun you you learn quite a lot lot about marketing and the numbers a big part of testing is the learning process of the cost associated with your ads and so if we consider for a moment that if we just launched ads without any testing the cost to deliver Those ads may be high and or it could be low and so this this is why we do these tests and in essence before we get to the the scaling part we have to prove that our designs and mockups are capable of running in an ad campaign with cost efficiency and so that's really important and so I want to say that again it is absolutely essential that we do enough testing so that our mock-ups and Designs have been proven to be capable of achieving a cost per click of one US dollar or less and the alternative to that is that we don't test and the cost per click might be two three four $5 and at $5 it's not economical so testing is the only way and so you can expect to be running lots of tests this is a normal part of the process and the testing never really stops and we'll talk more about that later in in when we start speaking about ad fatigue and next steps and so while these tests are running it's a really good opportunity to focus on some of the aspects of the buildings like building out your a submitted email flows homing in on the um conversion rate of your website and focusing on that if you want to try and get some ideas for email flows that will help you a real good tip that worked for me is find some inspirational Brands and sign up to their newsletters and just start taking notes of the type of emails they send you how often they send them to you what's the content is do they have images in them do they not do they have links or buttons do they show the products or are they showing something else is it a sales email or is it a value email or is it an inform information email so there's lots of considerations around emails um so highly recommend signing up to newsletters and just start taking notes on other brands emails and so when I speak about this testing approach I like to talk about what I call the trifecta testing mindset and so that is essentially the design your website funnel and marketing that must be built and optimized based on ideas that are proven through testing and this is a continually improvement process throughout the whole life of your brand you will continually improve the design the website funnel and your marketing and the good thing about that is is that the more you do it the better you get at it and the better you get at it the more you're able to stay in front of your competition so I want to talk about the website for a minute because this is something that that we will have to test and optimize and in one of the earlier videos you heard me talk about um reloom doio and how you can use that to build out your website but in essence the website must be capable of converting sales in order to test that you are required to invest some money in your ads and you're required to send traffic to your website and the traffic must move around in your website and create data points for you to analyze so that you can make the necessary changes to improve the conversion rate of the sales on your website and so one of the key elements to this is focusing on building trust with your customers by using your Brand's elevator pitch that we spoke about in earlier videos and you can use this on your homepage your product pages and about me pages and really give some thought to whether you want to give your brand a fa on my website I have a Founders page and the founders are visible and I really think that that helps the customers connect with the brand and it just lets them know that they're dealing with real people and that it is actually a real business and one tip that I can share with you to improve the conversion rate of your website is to have an offer on your website you might choose to offer free shipping or you might choose to offer a buy X to get y but the main aim here is to increase your average order value which will increase your revenue and also increase your profitability brand voice and so I have some tips for you on brand voice here's a few things to consider appreciate that your brand voice and identity will continually develop over time and she be tailored to your customers and you can utilize data from sales comments on your ads and feedback through customer service to help craft your brand and to give an example of this I use two of my bestselling designs as an inspiration for a redesign on my logo and that was hugely successful for me because I now have a line of products within my store that just have my logo on them and really proud of this and we sell many of these daily which is great so all being well uh you following the course and everything's making sense and you've done your testing and you've launched some ads and eventually you'll start to see some conversions and hopefully over time you'll start to get a few orders per day and this is a really important a milestone to achieve but it's also an opportunity to collect data and also an opportunity to put some processes in place to use that data so that you can make some informed decisions on how you're going to move your business through the next few weeks and months and this is really important for funnel optimization tracking purposes but also recording changes on your site and on your ads is really useful so as you make these changes to try and improve your conversion rate and you make changes on your ads it's worth keeping some kind of diary of these changes with the dates if you see some good results then you can go back and consider what that was so that you can maybe do more of that or if something didn't go so well then you equally can go back and work out why that may be so you can reverse that change and do something differently when you achieve 10K per month highly recommend implementing a customer service ticket management tool and then also work on optimizing your cost of goods variable cost ratio and the Target that we're aiming for here is 40% so essentially 40% of your per sale cost um should be the cost of goods uh so essentially 60% is is for you for running the business and also your your profit margin hi and welcome to Les 5.0 this is the concept section for stage five which is talking about going from $10,000 in sales to 100,000 and Beyond and to be watching this section unless if you're just trying to learn in advance just in case learning which we talked about earlier you're more than welcome to watch along but this section is really intended for people that are already at the $10,000 Plus in total sales volume the reason for that is that these are the principles that we're going to going to cover are talking about we should already be at a point where we're putting in $1 at a very high level we're putting in $1 getting two to3 back consistently in terms of our investment into the business specifically with our Facebook ads and now we're at the honestly in my opinion the even more fun stage of how do we put in you know $10,000 get 20 to 30,000 back then how do we put in 100,000 200 to 300 you get where I'm going with it but first to recap what we've done up until this point we've covered our foundations where we laid out the all the course curriculum all the nitty-gritty that we need to know in terms of laying our foundations as business owners and then we did a deep dive into our personal foundations laying into our mindset different growth tools limiting internal thoughts that we have and how we can push through a lot of that stuff basically sharpened our acts before we dove into stage one which was when we did our research and if you're at this point now of having done already 10,000 in sales at a profitable at the very least Break Even row as that means you did all of these stages very well maybe you had to come back and revisit them at some points which is completely normal but you did your research and this is going to be something that we're going to refer back to to help us scale throughout the rest of this section but we did all of our research then we built out our stores our accounts and then we started designing where we did all of our mockups we hadn't run any ads or anything yet but we made all of our mockups we made made all of our designs and then we put those mockups and designs on our store but first we ran a mockup test which was to see which one of our mock-ups perform the best before we double down and then once we found the winner then we started testing out our designs and we also did a little bit of email marketing in the stage as well which is just so that as we're driving the traffic we're building up our email list so now by this stage you've surpassed the foundational phases and you should be generating have generated at least $10,000 in total sales and in this stage we're going to be talking about how we can ramp things up and take it to a whole another level and this is where things get really exciting so we're going to be covering selling internationally more advanced email marketing so we can increase that email as a percentage of Revenue of our total sales we're going be setting up Google ads diving into more advanced Facebook ad strategies it's not like you have to become even more of a data scientist or anything it's just like the strategy change up and how can we maintain consistency in our accounts as we scale and then we're we're going to be talking about how we scale operations and all like the backend stuff that doesn't get talked about too often so we can maximize our profitability then by the end of this stage we're going to have expanded our sales internationally have our active email campaigns uh running where we're sting them out twice per week and we'll have expanded our Facebook ad campaigns to increase ad spend while maintaining performance to the best of our ability and we'll also have an effective Google ads strategy so congrats this is a huge milestone and it's something to be extremely proud of the important thing to take away from this is that we don't want to lose momentum because everything's going to get bigger like everything that we were doing in stages 0er through four that was really laying the groundwork and as you saw in like the graphics where there's the line the dividing point between the testing stage and 10K is because that's like where a lot of people end up dropping off because that's where you know we're the most vulnerable all the things we talked about but you push through that and now the really important thing is that you're still running the business the exact same way you're just bringing in a much much larger audience but the fundamentals don't really change at all this is just where we start to like really scale things up scaling at this level means us asking a couple of key questions like how can I sell more to my current audience how can I reach new customers globally and how can I ensure that every dollar spent on ads and you know our backend operations yields the highest return possible these are some things to be thinking about we're going to be shifting our focus into three main areas so expanding internationally and the reason we haven't done that up until now is that it's just a complete splintering of our Focus if we had started selling internationally prematurely yes we could have done it in the testing stage and it would have gotten us some decent results but in my experience especially for people who were just starting out starting to do that too early on yields to results in like a much worse like long-term outcome because they end up trying to catch two things at once so it's good that you've held off on that up until now now we're also going to be smoothing out our operations and then doing more Advanced marketing so I'll cut to the chase here the thing I really want you to get away from or take away from this section the concept section for 10K is keep doing exactly what is working do not reinvent the wheel really lock in for this part you have put in so much effort and so much work and you have grown so much just getting to this 10K point now if you just follow along with the things that we lay out here that is it's going to seem repetitive and it's going to seem overly simple and it is and reason I'm leaning into this so hard is that I made this same mistake so many times that as soon as things started going well I thought that business was you know I needed to start glomming stuff on so I would start adding new product types and you know I would basically fall into this shiny object syndrome and you know that Meme is hilarious a lot of PE I've heard this from a lot of people they hit 10K and I'm like awesome like let's start scaling it up they're like yeah so the way I'm going to do that is adding new product types you know selling on different marketplaces and it's okay like I get it I made the same mistake but I want I'm I'm in the business of helping people get the best results possible with the least amount of time and mistakes and heartache that I had to go through but then it's up to each and every one of us to decide you know if we want to listen to that advice or not but what I can say is that I've gone from zero to a million dollar Plus on eight different stores which I don't say that to brag it would be way cooler if I said that I went from zero to multiple eight figures a year on one brand but anyway regardless I have built up the skill set for Better or For Worse definitely For Worse of going from zero to multiple seven fingures over and over and over again so that's what we're sharing this is never coming from a place of like I think you should do this it's no I I'm looking back in the past at the mistakes that I made and then recently getting to look at student stores who have gone from 0 to 10K and then from 10K to 100K and what were their patterns what were the similarities they're almost always identical because the business just needs what it needs it doesn't really change over time like the target doesn't move so if things start to feel repetitive that's a good thing the time that you know the person teaching you starts changing their tune that's not a oh okay new strategies that means that like their original basis for what they were saying was not as rock solid as they made it seem so the target is not going to move it's been the same so don't get distracted by New Opportunities and back to this so don't add be adding new product types like you we added like kid sizes and 5 XLS to history T's and absolutely nobody bought them and then on our zero seven figure store we have crew necks hoodies tank tops and then t-shirts obviously and we added them for like all of our top sellers and 95% despite having all those other three to four other product types t-shirt still year round makes up 95% of our sales 95% so all that time that we invested into adding those new product types would have been much better spent just reinvesting it into what was already working just more t-shirt designs and around this time also another important concept I'm going to keep sounding like like a broken record run your p&l daily your p&l and your balance sheet run your finances on a daily basis and you should also know your numbers cold I'm not just talking about your Finance numbers I'm talking about your your main metrics and kpis that should be what your eat breathe sleeping is your your metrics and your kpis like you should know off right off the cuff what has been your conversion rate over the last like 30 days roughly what is your conversion rate what's your average order value what's your cost per link click how much are you spending on ads and you should know those things not only because it helps us answer your questions faster on like group coaching calls and stuff like that but anytime I ask somebody like if somebody's on a group call and they ask a question I go okay like what's your help me answer that like what's your cost per link click or what's your conversion rate and like they're saying that their row as is low then I I say like okay what's your conversion rate they're like uh I I'll have to check like is that in Facebook and I'm like I don't I don't even need you to pull it up I know why your row as is low it's cuz you don't know that and it's not just about being able to regurgitate the number for a group call it's more about like what it's reflective of and it shows like where your focus has been so our Focus needs to be on what is the bit like the top high level metrics it's cost per link click conversion rate average order value then email as a percentage of Revenue all the stuff in your tracker you should be reviewing that on a daily basis that's where your time should be spent your time should not be spent on new product types launching on Etsy like stuff like that just in my experience in my opinion cuz I've tried all those things and every time that I gotten away from just the fundamentals and somebody had a great Post in the community after they hit $100,000 it was €100,000 actually in sales they put it way better than I ever have and they said that at this point I think it's more likely that hell will freeze over or something like that hell will freeze over before the fundamentals stop working and they said yeah I hit €100,000 Plus in sales all that I've been doing is just adding more designs and just rinsing and repeating the same process if you look across all the most successful students that's the same thing holds true I've yet to see a student who says I tried this new weird hack or this new whatever Guru told me to do this and then it worked I've yet to see that not saying it's impossible but so avoid shiny object syndrome like it's the plague focus on your numbers and just rinse and repeat and really hear this part the path from 10 to 100K is just doing more of the thing you've already been doing it does not change we're going to improve each one of those areas now so in the beginning we are trying a bunch of different stuff now we're just improving the things we already doing that means just launching more ads more testing ads launching more designs so 5 to seven new designs per day improving your email sequences and just rinsing and repeating that and then adding on International and that's another form of just improving it's really like International to like bucket it in terms of a metric that's really just improving like your ad performance because it's opening up the possible reach of people that's able to hit and the larger the audience the less competition that whole sort of thing but that's where our focus is and so a question that you can be asking yourself as you go through this process is you need to gut check yourself now more than ever like what am I working on and is this what the business actually needs and the tricky thing is that your brain is very good at convincing you that the thing you're working on is what the business needs when a lot of times it's not in addition to that don't get complacent I see a lot of people like once they hit like a decent amount in sales they start inventing problems for themselves and whereas if they just kept doing a lot more of what they were already doing it would it would have gone much better I know I sound like a broken record but this is like you put in all the work to get to this point now do yourself the favor of doing what you need in order to get to 100K level and this is also the point that if you haven't joined the university up until this point I I truly believe that joining the university has the potential to change a lot of people's lives and the people that we can help by like we can help everybody at all stages like and not just myself and the coaches and Meg but like everybody in the community helping each other but once you hit the 10K level you should absolutely be joining and it's just my personal opinion but once you hit 10 like 10,000 like it's not the amount of effort and like problem or trouble shooting that you have when you're going from 0 to 10 going from 0 to 10 is way harder than going from 10 to 100 10 to 100 is just learning to see the knobs and dials you have in your business and then learning which one you have to tweak and when and how much that's literally just a skill set that you build up over time so when you join the university there's eight figure coaches plus myself and Meg then hundreds of hour actually over a thousand hours of recordings now live q&as every single week week super collaborative Community like of people who are just awesome accountability groups SL cohorts constantly updated trainings that's where you know we release the 21h hour super long Course once per year but then we're constantly in in the University watching like that's our priority that's those are the people that we make it absolute number one priority for us to make sure that we're answering all of the people's questions in there and not just help answering people's questions helping them learn the things for themselves helping them like pick it up not just like drop the questions on the doorstep CU that doesn't really help anybody you have to learn the fundamentals for yourself but anyway we're constantly updating the trainings in there based on what we see people need the most help with so and there's also way more that can possibly fit on a single slide so if you're at this point I highly recommend joining and again there's 30-day money back guarantee absolutely zero questions asked everybody who joins will have the absolute most phenomenal Community experience that they've ever had in their entire life or they will get their money back that's my guarantee and we showed screen shots earlier like proving how we've done that but hopefully by now if you've listened to me this long you know that I mean what I say and I'm not doing the exact opposite of selling this for anything more than it is if anything I paint it in like a even more challenging light than what it actually is but I think it's better to air on that side of caution all that said and done congratulations on hitting $10,000 in sales and I look forward to scaling together bye hi guys and welcome to section 5.1 where we are going to Deep dive and go through everything that you need to know about selling internationally so let's get into it your progress so far what should we have done the first thing is that we should have a solid domestic sales foundation so we never want to start selling internationally unless we already kind of have built our base within the US and the reason that you know we suggest starting in the US is that it's the biggest Market hate to admit it but us United Staters love shopping we love spending money so it's a great Market to get started in we know that there's plenty of people out there who want to buy from you know your brand so that first thing we definitely want solid domestic sales prior to starting this this phase the second thing that we want at this point is a positive ad performance if our ads are not working within the US the last that we want to do is just think oh if I expand that then it'll work that's not the case it's always we want to focus on the product that's then going to help get the ads up and running at a positive row as and then from there we can slowly expand out so if you're not running at a positive row as yet it's not your time to be moving on to International fulfillment the third thing um that should have already happened at this point is extensive catalog with at least 150 Plus designs so so we definitely start have started to understand our customer understand the niche understand what they're looking for the types of designs that they're liking and purchasing you know if we are maybe sitting at 30 designs and it's just not time we want to have a lot to offer especially when going International and finally we want to have a funnel optimized for scaling so if you know Chris has talked about that leaky funnel water kind of spewing out on different areas if that funnel is not yet optimized then just expanding isn't going to help it's just going to make our bucket even more leaky than it was before we're going to lose more water out of those holes so we want to make sure that those holes are all patched up we have this really nice funnel that's optimized for you know scaling and for expanding our brand and Company now by the end of this lesson you will be able to prepare your Shopify and printify for international orders you will also learn the best practices for handling International challenges so different things that can arise different issues um as well as optimizing your pricing colors and processing for New Markets on both printify and Shopify so what is the 10,000 foot view what are the things that we need to focus on in this section the first is going to be tapping into a new customer base and increasing our Revenue so as we expand we should be you know getting new more customers in the door as well as increasing the amount of Revenue month over month the second thing is diversifying our business across different regions so we're going to be expanding and going really out into the world um and showing every Everybody our brand so you know it's important that we are diversifying and really starting to slowly expand um when the time is right and the last thing is going to be preventing common mistakes and accelerate growth for Preparation so these are all the big things that we want to keep in mind as we are going through this topic so first let's start off with perfi now I'm going to be talking about the pry portion Chris will come in in a little bit and he's going to talk about the Shopify as well as the Facebook ad side of selling internationally but I handle everything fulfillment wise on our brand so we're going to do a deep dive into printify and really get things set up on the back end and actually prepared for accepting International sales so the important thing about printify is that they do have ways that can automatically you know partner partner you up with International printers but again as we've seen time and time again your cost of goods can sometimes suffer from from that so what Chris and I like to do is run a big huge spreadsheet really breaking down all the prices you'll see that in a little bit but it's important to choose the right print provider based off of the needs that we're that we have and what we're looking for and really that big need is our cost of goods so we want to decide the target regions that we are going to look at and go after um and we'll dive deeper into this on the actual printify website but it's important to kind of think of our region so we've got Europe you've got Asia Asia you have um New Zealand and Australia as well as Canada and then South America so we'll take a look at kind of the different printers that we can utilize within the printify platform and then go from there but again we like to set this up manually you can absolutely choose the printify connect but we've found more success and we have more control over our finances if we are choosing them manually and kind of going the extra mile with um setting up our International fulfillment uh the second thing that we going to do is is filter by location so it's really important that we're sending the right orders to the correct printer again this is manual this is on our back end it's what we handle that way we're keeping a really close eye on our budget and really determining are we running in a way that we are going to be profitable uh we want to be checking the quality and the reviews of these printers the last thing that we want to do is maybe select a cheap printer um but they have horrible reviews uh maybe they're really slow with getting orders out the door maybe they have a lot of defects we want be looking into that um and understanding the quality you could also run a test order again it would probably be a little bit more expensive because you would be paying to ship it internationally to yourself but sometimes it is important to actually put in an order see the quality that your International customers are going to get we want to be able to match availability so this could be colors that's probably the biggest thing that comes to mind when we are thinking about International fulfillment is the T-shirt colors that's really the big biggest thing that does get affected so a lot of these International printers don't always have a lot of the fun funky colors that the US the US printers like to carry so depending on your Niche you may kind of be stuck with some certain print providers so definitely we want to look into that before just immediately expanding out into International again we want to Compare costs and shipping the because of the fact it's our cost of goods it's our most it's our largest expense that we're going to pay it's important to go through the numbers and the data and determine you know if we're making a good move prior to just saying okay let's throw gasoline on the fire and just see what happens again that can just cause a huge mess for yourself um so save yourself the time really break down the data look at which printers that we want to be fulfilling with and make this kind of a slow transition it doesn't have to be something that happens overnight it's going to take some time so remember that big spreadsheet I was talking about this is what Chris and I did for all of our International print providers who had all the colors that we offered on our site had the the same you know Gilden 64,000 um you'll notice now if you're selling Comfort colors a lot of the international printers actually don't have that t-shirt to print yet so it's really important to look into that as well prior to just starting this entire process so we break down who carries our t-shirt who carries our t-shirt colors um we break down the prices the shipping what's one one item shipping price versus any additional items that way we can really run the numbers and determine are we going to be in that same you know 40 to 50% cost of goods even if we go International because sometimes it does get a little bit more expensive so it's always important to run those numbers um and make sure that at the end of the day we're actually going to make something off of this because the last thing we want to do is just expand and make more work for us and then not make any more money on top of it so definitely important to break everything down really dive deep into uh priz platform and look and see what they have So speaking of which let's get over there and let's take a look and then we'll kind of get into how we naturally expand on the back end okay so the first thing that I like to do when I'm looking into International print providers is I actually find my product so I go to the Gilden 64 listing because then printify is going to give you the breakdown of every single print provider and before we get into that it's always good to make your ship from no preference because then it's going to show us kind of like the cheapest shipping we're picking these International printers so that hopefully our shipping cost is a lot lower because if Monster Digital was going to be the one fulfilling this you know order one it would take 10 to 30 days sometimes to reach our International customers nobody wants that that's really annoying and two it costs us at least $10 to ship it from the US to an International location so that's really expensive compared to I think we pay like $475 or $479 to ship it to somebody within the us so you know that's a way higher expense so we want to make sure that we're you know keeping all of our cost as cheap as we possibly can and also getting our customers orders to them as quickly as we possibly can so since now we have no preference from our ship fromom let's get into looking at some of these different print providers and then determining if this is a good fit for us or not um so we have via here this is where it shows the location of where this printer is if you don't recognize the flag um you can just hover over and it will show you the country that they are in you'll see the rating so the higher Stars the higher rating that the you know print provider has has gotten and then um also take notice of the colors so remember what I was saying a lot of times when we were selling internationally these International printers don't have a lot of like the fun funky colors so that sometimes hinders where we can really expand to and reason why Chris and I have really kept our our colors to be very few on our site because we want to be able to uh print and ship with a lot of different print providers all around the world so this one here Dua I'm going to say they only have six colors again even if we wanted to print with them they wouldn't be able to handle the military green so that one's probably off of my list now their pricing isn't bad um but still a little bit expensive now shirt monkey they they're price is pretty good and shipping is from $3.49 so you know that's pretty cheap so this is one that I would want to dig into and I would probably put this on my spreadsheet so I'd click the provider information and take a look at all the prices that I would be paying um so it is really nice again they only go up to 2 XL though Monster Digital goes up to 3XL um so that could potentially be a problem but the prices overall are pretty pretty decent $810 I mean they kind of do that Swift pod thing where you know they can sometimes they trick you us thinking you're paying 769 for every single shirt but overall the pricing isn't bad next let's go over to shipping and just kind of take a look of at things so if it was coming to the United States so they're printing it you know over in the UK and shipping it to us look at that delivery time 10 to 30 days that's just not ideal um and it would cost $13.99 but if we are shipping to somebody within the United Kingdom and this is what we would manually do on the back end it would be two to three business days and it would cost us $349 and if it was a two- shirt order it would be you know $349 plus $1.99 so overall pretty cheap shipping so can't you see how you would save so much money if you were actually printing with them in the United Kingdom and shipping only to the United Kingdom so this is where you know all the little like manual backend stuff starts to starts to work and play so I would throw all this information I would just take all the information here and I would plug that into a spreadsheet similar to this that way we are keeping a really like good eye on what of which printer we're going to save the most money with has a good rating um and allows us to have the most options for our brand so some really important stuff and you just kind of go down the list and look at some of these different locations so this one's Australia we would definitely want an Australian printer because then they can ship to Australia and New Zealand for pretty cheap as well as ship to Asia pretty quickly because printify doesn't have there are some you know um Chinese providers but when it comes to printing of t-shirts there's not a ton there really isn't any so we need to kind of get strategic of which printers that we're going to select and how we're going to get you know those products to those customers so looking at the print bar they definitely have a good amount of colors so that's good they've got military green they have all colors that we need so we would click the provider info overall price not terrible I mean it's more expensive than Monster Digital but you're going to find that most most of these other printers are going to be slightly more expensive than them they just by far have the best pricing compared to really anybody else I mean Swift pod does uh compete pretty well with them as well so overall pricing not terrible I would throw all of this information again in that spreadsheet and look they have the 3XL so that's great now let's take a look at shipping again I'm not really I don't really care about like the rest of the world because the only orders that I would have this printer fulfill I would just send them the Australia and the New Zealand ones so you know from the US it would take 10 to 30 business days maybe even longer because you know far away from the United States to Australia or in New Zealand and it would cost us $10 in shipping versus if we print with them yes we're spending a little bit more in in our production but overall look at that shipping price compared to $10 like that's huge and their additional item is is cheap so overall I would say this is a great Contender for fulfilling in Australia and New Zealand and you want to just continue going down the list looking at kind of the different providers that we could go with xprint Germany this is this would be a great European provider or op on demand look at this price 662 and look at that it's 662 on all of them except the dark heather gray so this is super cheap this is cheaper than Monster Digital you know that that Monster Digital can provide for us and look at the shipping prices for Germany it's $379 and for an additional item a $119 so this would be great for those European countries I mean overall it's it's pretty cheap so great to look at and kind of determine which customers from which regions would we want to actually send their orders to this printer so I would probably send anybody well one Germany any Czech Republic as well as any of Europe besides like the UK this would be a great way to uh actually get your your items printed by somebody in in Europe and again not too bad color-wise they have all the colors that Chris and I use and and would need so it's important to keep that in mind as you're you're looking through all these providers and I just kind of go down the list and you know I want somebody in as many areas as I could possibly get so I want a UK printer who can handle UK and typically it's a little bit cheaper for Ireland I'd want somebody for Europe so that opt on demand would be a great choice because it's pretty cheap to go all of all of Europe Australia New Zealand it's going to be uh probably cheapest and fastest to get any orders one for for those two countries but also any Asian countries so people are ordering from the Philippines or Thailand Hong Kong those would be a great print provider to you know get that over to them and then Canada because even though it's coming from the US to Canada it's not as far of a distance still has to go through customs it just takes a lot of time so if you're actually fulfilling with the printer in that country you're skipping Customs it's getting to the customer a lot faster and hopefully again you know we're we're saving money by printing with these print providers so let's say we've selected all of our print providers we know what we're going with what do we do next you want to go to your products we will will filter by Monster Digital and we're going to look at this uh skis okay t-shirt because this is going to be our first t-shirt for our winter collection and the first thing that I want to do is just I want to duplicate this design so now we have a copy and you kind of just keep doing this for all of your print providers and then I'll show you the trick so let's say we have a Canadian print provider a European a UK an Australian so we want to pick four different print providers so I want to duplicate this out four separate times two 3 and four so now we've duplicated this same t-shirt same design four separate times and now we can go back and the trick is going to be we are going to replace and it's going to let us swap out the print provider so the reason that we make four different copies we're not going to publish these but it's important to have the four different copies that way we can just kind of select on our back end when we need to edit the order and then we'll select the correct um design with the correct printer so it's definitely more manual but again guys this saves so much money so let's say print bar so we're going to select this it's going to take us here to the design again we can tweak stuff if we want again this design looks great you'll notice on some print providers the size of the print area will change a little bit so we just want to make sure that it's matching up as best as we possibly can with our with our mockup so this looks great I don't need to make any changes again they have all the colors that we needed if you know we wanted to add something we absolutely could but again they have all the options that that we need so we're just going to click save product and then instead of copy we can delete that and we can write in the back Australia so it just shows and we're not going to click publish we're just going to click save as draft so that way we know okay we've done the Australian printer great boom right here now the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to replace the next copy and this time we're going to do it with a European printer so we're going to go and find opt on demand here we go perfect let's select it again again our design is already in but look do you see how the print area is a little bit different here so this one I would definitely want to um move down so that my print is in a similar area as it was on you know my my us designs and then we would just you know make sure that we're doing it the same for the dark designs as well just making our adjustments just like this and overall like that's a pretty good placement again like I wouldn't want it like all the way up here at my neck um so we'll just move that down again it's going to match our mockup pretty well we'll click save product again we're going to delete copy of and then we're going to put Europe up save as draft and then we'll go on to again the next one so we have Australia we have Europe let's pick a UK now I didn't really do too much digging deep in the price but I think this one's going to end up being our cheaper option so we're going to click select and then overall this one's not bad I think I'm just going to move it down slightly okay save product and this would be a provider for UK and um Ireland you can say UK plus Ireland and finally the last one that we are going to now switch is going to be the Canadian one so we'll replace this now this is a Canadian one but look at that price like that's expensive so I'm going to keep looking I know that there's another one priek yeah so look at this definitely cheaper still pretty expensive shipping but again we'd be saving you know both time and probably a few dollars by Ship by printing with this Canadian provider and then just kind of make that bigger I'm going to do that so overall design looks pretty good we'll click save and now we are going to write that this is Canada and save as a draft so that's great so now again only the monster digital design this one right here only this design is published to our Shopify store so when someone goes and orders this whether it will be in the US or Canada or Europe it's going to come into printify already connected to Monster Digital so one we you know we'll break down all of our International orders we'll see where they're all coming from we'll look at where the buyer where the consumer is and then we can go to our orders and really find them and then tweak them so for example we'll take this order right here now this one's made manual but for the case of this course this would be how I would actually handle kind of switching the print provider so here's our order now imagine that this is the ski shirt it's a ski t-shirt we need to change it this customer is in the UK so we're going to find our order from that customer we are then going to edit our order because this order has not yet gone into production so it's important that we're making these changes prior to our automatic time so as you're getting orders throughout the day you can be switching the print provider or you can kind of allow your yourself some time at the end of the day to switch all these um over or manually fulfill your products and don't automatically fulfill with printify so there's there's some areas that we can tweak but what Chris and I do is um at this point now we have an employee who throughout the day as we're getting orders she is changing where the pr who the printer will be for that customer so that that customer one is getting their order as fast fast as they can into we're saving some money so what we would do is come to edit order and it's going to pull up our shirt right here now I like to keep the shirt pulled up again we're pretending that this one is the ski shirt we're going to click add product to order now because we just updated these they're going to be right here at the top but we're going to just say skis okay and it should pull up every single print provider that we have now remember remember this person is in the UK so we are going to click the um UK provider print clever and from there we are we want to make sure that we are matching up all the same credentials from the order and this is where some human error could come into play so let's say they ordered black so we're going to click black and they ordered a medium so we're going to select Medium as you can see we have the UK and Ireland here telling us okay we can now delete the US so we're going to delete that that shirt and now basically what we did was we replaced the United States shirt just with the same exact shirt for the UK provider we'll go to shipping again it's going to I know this one's not a UK address but when it is it's going to calculate your shipping based on that area in the UK um and then we can look at our production cost the shipping cost and then the total cost that it's going to cost us and you can actually see the difference prior to editing the order and sometimes it's like you save almost $10 on an order it's absolutely crazy and then I'll click save for later because Chris and I do the automatic fulfillment so now that I've switched the provider to the UK in Ireland print provider now at 11:55 p.m. that order would go through and it would automatically just get sent to the UK printer and they're already going to be handling the order um so it's really that simple it's just making that quick little switch so really the most time-consuming part is one the research and looking at which print provider is going to be the best provider for you and what you're looking for and then the second most timely thing is really just copying out that design and then um connect like replacing it with the correct print provider so definitely takes a little bit of time but by doing it manually guys you will save so much money and you're going to be able to keep a way closer eye on your fining es and again increasing that profit margin so now that we went through really how we handle everything on the back end on printify and how you can get everything set up there Chris is now going to come in and go through everything International fulfillment wise on Shopify now on the Shopify setup side there's two main things we need we need to One update the currency and then two update the shipping rates so the way we're going to do this is by going to markets over here on the Le hand side so this is your settings and then markets and uh we're going to set up each of these markets that you see here so you can screenshot this or bookmark this to come back and we have 10 different markets we make one for the United States which is our primary then we do one for Australia Brazil Canada Euro countries France Germany International which is just rest of the world Japan and then United Kingdom and the reason we do each of these and not you know like a bunch of other ones is the US is a primary market so we set this for USD all Australia we have a separate print provider for and we show Australian currency Brazil is only .1% of total sales but we show the Brazilian currency and we show the shipping rates there Canada and then Euro countries we bundle all together because we want to be showing one that you know all of the the country shopping from there we want to show our products in Euro which comes down to two pieces one it's the currency of the product but then the sneaky one that I didn't realize for a while but you have to set up these separate markets so that they're along with separate shipping settings so that they're seeing their native currency when they check out as well because the thing that I didn't realize for a while was that we had I set up the European like the euro currency for our products so somebody from you know a European country would come to the site they would see the t-shirts in Euros but then they wouldn't see when they got all the way to checkout their shipping rates were being shown in US Dollars which think about that from you know but I thought about it from my perspective was like if I was shopping on a store in US Dollars and then I get all the way to checkout and then it shows me you know the shipping rate in Euros or Pounds that'd be pretty weird and you know even if they it would just come off as kind of strange and so that was def that was hurting our impact our conversion rate for a while and the way that I found that specifically back to the funnel optimization training if you haven't gone through that yet highly recommend watching it the way that I found that was by by reviewing our top three metrics in terms of conversion rate which is add to cart reach checkout then sessions converted which one of those three is impacted by shipping rates that's sessions converted so I noticed that we had a big drop off there that when I looked closer I looked at the reports in Shopify and saw that our conversion rate for the US was normal but it was and even Australia it was normal because it should it looked like it was their currency but it actually wasn't they thought it was just really cheap because their currency is the same symbol but anyway I noticed that the US had a healthy conversion rate and it was the rest of the countries that had a big drop off so I started asking why is that happening what are people seeing that they weren't expecting and going down that rabbit hole that's where the the vast majority of our improvements have have come from so for the United States so set up markets and you might need to upgrade your Shopify plan in order to do this I haven't checked what you need to have access for but I think at the time that of this screenshot we were on the medium plan which is like 105 or 129 a month something like that and so you're going to within our markets looking at the US market first I'm going to show each of the settings for the different what's it called the different different markets so at the top you have Market settings you have English then you set all products and pricing to US dollar not collecting duties and import taxes and again this is not Financial advice this is not legal advice this just me it's entertainment and educational purposes only do your own research make your own decisions it's your business not mine I'm just here to share from my own personal experience what has worked for us and what we're currently doing to generate over a million dollars a year in sales so getting all the disclaimers out of the way we set up shipping rates and the reason I said that is specifically around duties and import taxes and those questions always come up and always upfront with people that I'm not a tax expert CPA certifi any of that I'm just sharing the things that have worked for me if you're really concerned about it then hire a professional hire lawyer or an accountant or International tax law specialist to get more clarification but all these settings that we're showing have worked well for us we haven't had any issues knock on wood but so shipping we set up two rates uh shipping to the US and you can see them in the bottom right then payments manage the payments payment methods you accept worldwide and then for products and pricing manage what currency customers in this market will see so that's when you click on this right here so we do US dollar and price adjustment is 0% and you'll see this for each one of the markets this is Shopify asking like do you want to round up for the Euro or down or whatever it is based on where people are are located so we don't do any price adjustments we just leave it as is but and the reason we do that is because you know our cost of goods per t-shirt is pretty much the same if not slightly less for a lot of the international providers then for the Brazil market so language and domains English products and pricing and the reason they have domains there is that you can technically set up subdomains for like if you wanted to have like a like like a different subdomain by country and you'll see that for a lot of big Brands we don't do this but just explaining why it's there so you could set up like a you know brl dot or you could do like seasonal collections. b.co or br. seasonal collections. so buy country but again we don't do that so then all products and pricing all products included and Brazilian real that's their currency rounded to one the nearest $1 and we set the price increase to 0% then we set up five different shipping rates and Brazil is one of the ones where there aren't really any good shipping options available so it's pretty expensive and if you were observant on this screen see that our conversion rate is pretty darn low on there it's because there's no none of these print providers here have good shipping rates to Brazil notice how that none of them made it onto the list so Brazil we end up shipping for monster digital and it's super expensive so we just pass that price onto the customer and you know it's it just is what it is so uh until you know a print provider gets added into the print find network that's available in Brazil it's we're going to be looking at the same kind of pricing and next we do Euro countries so and I included screenshot so you can see all of the countries that we include in here but it's andur Austria Belgium Cyprus Estonia Finland Greece Ireland Italy covo Lavia Lithuania Luxembourg Malta lvia is where PRI is based fun fact Monaco Montenegro Netherlands Portugal San Marino Slovakia Slovenia Spain Vatican City and I stated those out loud partially for the the GPT so it has has it in the transcript if anybody asks about the Euro countries but anyway so products and pricing just running through the the settings we use the euro price increase set to zero and then for the shipping we do shipping from or EU shipping 0 to 32 is $3.95 32 to $49.99 is $4.95 and then free shipping is50 and up and so it's about like the Euro at least at the time we set these up was roughly like these shipping settings roughly equal out to what we were paying to to printify for the shipping so now every person from any one of these countries that's shopping they're going to see the euro currency for your products and then when they get the checkout they're going to see Euro shipping rates as well the next is international and international is just every other country so 206 countries that these are just this is just a catch all for all the other countries that uh we're not in that list that we looked at before and so the reason that these are all separate is that there aren't any print providers that have really good shipping rates to them because they're far harder to reach whatever it may be bottom line we we aren't really able to ser service these countries which is fine the vast majority of our sales come from you know Australia UK those countries anyway but so the way we set it up is do International all products we leave it as the US dollar and then for shipping rates we have to be pretty hefty because it's so expensive to ship there so free shipping is for orders of $100 and up shipping and handling for order Z to 20 bucks is $10 20 to $40 is $1.95 40 to 60 is 13.95 then 60 to 99 is 14.95 so uh we just went through a couple of these but you're going to do repeat the same process for each of these uh shipping rates and yeah something else that I recommend doing after you've set this up is like I alluded to before look at your conversion rate by country so go to your Shopify settings your analytics and then look at the breakdown of conversion rate by region uh remove the comparison field just to make it easier to look at and then sort by number of sessions and then you should see a list of all the countries and then track the conversion rate by country you don't have to track it in terms of like fill it out on your spreadsheet but what you should have is you know a good finger to the pulse of like which countries are converting and which ones are not then for your ads it's very very simple we literally just duplicate out your campaign and then change the targeting I've tested adjusting the ad copy to be in that country's native language tested a bunch of different like spent a lot of time doing that and saw basically zero impact so now I literally just duplicate out our main us CBO and then change the targeting and just exclude India Pakistan Trinidad and the way that I came to the conclusion to exclude these again nothing against any of these countries obviously hopefully that goes without saying as we've gotten to know each other this much over the past however many hours it is but the way that I came to the conclusion that it made sense to exclude these and way you can evaluate for yourself is if you look at your campaign and then look at breakdown by country if you ever get suspiciously low cost per clicks I'm talking like 5 10 15 cents but you're getting barely any purchases and your bounce rate is really high look at the breakdown by country and when I did that I found that like we were getting thousands of clicks but barely any purchases and I was like uh there's something is horribly wrong with our site and I evaluated that too but then what I found when I looked at the breakdown was that these three countries were sucking up all the spend they were getting thousands of clicks for like a penny but just nobody was converting so I don't know if it's a click Farm or people just really like clicking stuff there and then not buying whatever it may be point is that it was just tanking our results so I excluded them now this is not an exhaustive list like I had somebody in the community say like I recommended they look into this and they were like well I excluded the ones you said like well that's not really the point the point is understanding the concept it's not following just the example the concept here is if a country or a demographic is ever sucking up your spend for basically garbage traffic you want to exclude it and that's something that you don't really have to worry about when you're targeting just the United States but it's something important to be aware of once you start targeting internationally now ongoing fulfillment so when you have a low volume of orders and this is very subjective it just determine how much time are you spending manually updating each order in printify and you know whenever it flips like for me I automate it right out of the gate because I just want to scale up fast and I don't really want to have to spend time clicking around and printify but it's very different when you're just starting out so low volume I would say 5 to 10 orders per day roughly again it's very subjective just manually update each order yourself and you should do at least some so you learn the process enough to be able to train a VA but then once you get the higher volume like you're going to see our spreadsheet in a second we actually showed it in another lesson in the course as well but we've had thousands and thousands of orders um so once you get the high volume you want to use make automation which make.com is just like zap here just a tenth of the cost plus a VA so the way that we do this is so if we get here's an example order that we've received so this was somebody from oh I blocked out their address for their privacy but somewhere in the EU let's PR ify a yeah really I did a good job of defending their privacy so somebody in the EU so they place that order then if I go over into printify so if you see the number of the order in Shopify and I go over to printify I find that order and then we set our orders to automatically submit at like 11:55 p.m. each night so we have you know a full day to go in and reroute so full day where it's sitting and pending and uh then at you know 11:55 p.m. these will all automatically submit so just before that happens we go in and we change the the address so we would find the order this one was actually a one shirt order so they did it automatically but uh the way that you do it is you find look up the order in Shopify I'll show you how to do this automatically but then you find it in printify by matching up the number then you click on the order and then up here which this one again is already going to texal drug but you go up here and click edit order and then you'll see all the products that are in the order right here now what we do is we click add product to order and we're just going to search for this title of the t-shirt and it'll pull up all the other and a way to do it fast is just copy this copy and then add product order paste it in here and then this will show you all the products you made for that design but for each of the print providers and these are all the ones that are in draft then you're just going to select the one based on the address or location of the customer whichever one is closest and then you're going to click on whichever shirt it is then choose the color and then you select the size and so I'm just making a note that they wanted whatever this t-shirt is military green medium so I find whichever like if you pretend that this was you know a Canadian order you would choose the Canadian print provider print geek choose military green then you would choose medium so you just click select and then it would add that product to that order and then you would just delete this one the original one and then it would then you would continue on to shipping and so there you've effectively it's manual but you manually rerouted it and again this example was for one that was already rerouted but in most cases it would be like coming from Monster Digital um but it's still good even though so PRI does reroute one shirt orders but it's still a good idea to get in the habit of checking every single order and the way we do that automatically without you know having to manually filter this every single day is we use make and the setup that we have that works really really well it's very simple automation we just have two steps and there's some setup to this like you have to connect your Shopify store and Google Sheets but what this automation is basically doing is it's watching our Shopify store and anytime a new order comes in it's filtering to see to pull orders that are not from the United States and then anytime it finds one of those orders it adds a row to a Google sheet so here are the exact settings you can screenshot this copy it whatever you want to do but these are the settings we use and then in Shopify so status is open financial status paid fulfillment status unfulfilled limit 20 that's just the number of rows that it's going to pull and then uh Fields just select all of them and then in Google Sheets you create a sheet like I named it International orders you Mark if the table has headers you say create the column A use the created at which is the order date then for column B you use the order number and column C is shipping address uh country so what we're pulling looks like this so we have order date order number and then country and then what are VA is doing and this updates all the time but our VA has a daily recurring task to go into this spreadsheet and they go literally one by one they pull up this order they click on the order number whoops they click on the order number command C and then they go over to uh printify paste it in and then they see where is this order being fulfilled from and then if it's as you can see 90% of the time they have to reroute it but they enter where they're going to fulfill it from so if this was at Monster Digital and they're rerouting it to print bar which the way they do that is just what we just found or what we just went through so they're grabbing the order from the spreadsheet searching for it in printify uh seeing what the person ordered and where it's being shipped from and then they have that spreadsheet of the international print providers that we were looking at before uh this they have this pulled up on a separate Tab and they're constantly referencing it I mean over time they you know just remember it there's not really that many print providers but then they're seeing okay this one should be rerouted to whatever printer based on what the spreadsheet says and then they click edit order then they add the product from the new print provider they're using then they click uh they continue to shipping and they submit it and then at midnight it'll be submitted and get fulfilled from the new print provider and so that's why I say roughly 5 to 10 a day really doesn't take that long but it adds up over time and lots of little things add up in this business like any business but you can see over here on the total saved column we saved a ton of money and in the other training we added it up I want to say it added up to like over $100,000 in total saved so again it would be completely unfeasible selling internationally without doing this and again so Indonesia like Asia Mexico a lot of those countries like all the ones that are international fall under like the rest of the World Market Cate category those we just aren't able to reroute so we can either like we just eat the cost basically and just ship it from Monster Digital then a few reminders update your free shipping bar/ email popup for countries where free shipping thresholds are different you want to monitor your conversion rate per country Bella canvas just in my opinion don't do it other printers don't carry it and a question that I get a ton is well can I set up you know my uh my store so that my us customers are able to shop for Bella C my International customers get gild in 64,000 and the answer is yes technically you can I've done it before but it is and this is one of those things that I think people just need to try and see how much of a can of worms it is for themsel they can hear me say this but you know they really need to experience of them but long story short don't do it it ends up being way more complex than it seems on the surface level it seems like oh I'll just lock a collection then send people there or I'll just set up URL redirects based on on their IP address like that kind of thing then I'll just have my USA collection of products and I'll have my International collection but then you start getting into well what about recommended products and uh you know abandoned card emails and what about like new uh like when you're emailing your customers about new collection drops are you going to segment your email list and send one email to your us people and a separate email to each individual country based on what they're you know what products they're able to fulfill it's like yes you can do all of those things but is that the highest leverage thing you can do in the business in my opinion absolutely not so I highly recommend not going with bell canvas because printers don't carry it and the Gilden 64,000 is high quality the the Gilden 5,000 is the one that's cardboard and that's what people think of when they hear gilding so just don't do Bella canvas if you have any plans to scale internationally which I highly recommend it and if your brand I should have mentioned this at the beginning but if you think your brand is like oh I'm just us like nobody's going to buy my stuff internationally that's absolutely wrong any I've yet to see a brand that does well in the United States that uses that as like their testing ground that isn't able to do well selling internationally like people were buying Lincoln F star we only sold internationally for a minute on History te's before we uh started working with open store and they have some something about being like a C Corp or something with their company structure they're not able to sell internationally I'm not sure but long story short we tried internationally for selling internation for uh about a month and it did extremely well so people were buying shirts that had a picture of Lincoln on it over in Germany France UK so if that's about as Stark a contrast as anyone could expect or what you know I would have expected would work in selling internationally but it did phenomenally well so and lastly keep it simple and international does not fix an unprofitable store so do not get into this too early do it when you know you have something working well in the United States and then just use this as a tool to scale it is not you know uh things aren't working I'm not able to get a low cost per click therefore I'm just going to start piling one international I don't recommend that it'll you know pull your focus away but all that said and done thanks for watching uh and if you have any questions about the make automation or anything like that honestly there's a ton of tutorials and YouTube videos on it the automation that I set up is nothing like that crazy but but it uh yeah it it helps uh if you have any questions try asking the chat GPT it's really good uh with that sort of thing as well um and yeah thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson hey everyone we are back with some Advanced email marketing so by this stage you will have done at least $10,000 in sales your email po up will be implemented and your list will be growing and you will have active foundational emails and hopefully some campaigns being sent semi-regularly so by the end of this lesson we will have configured our Advanced email flows based on our customer journey and you'll understand and apply Advanced email marketing best practices so more email flows yes unfortunately so the first one we're going to talk about is a postp purchase flow and a postp purchase flow comes after the customer purchases obviously it reassures the customer after their purchase it can reduce customer service inquiries it can answer customer questions and build trust and it can Drive repeat sales and improve customer LTB so there's a few different ways we can approach a post-p purchase flow I personally like to do it soon after the customer purchases and I like to start it off with things like an FAQ sheet a message from the founder things where we can basically reassure the customer that they can trust us that they're going to have a good experience with us answer any questions they may have and then move to sales emails where we're giving them discount codes and trying to get them to purchase again we'll also see sometimes Brands will just wait until 30 days out or even further and then just try to upsell them and give them discounts try to get them to purchase again and won't worry about that initial post-p purchase section but uh I like to do both so the winback flow a winback flow re-engages customers who haven't purchased recently generally provides a discount code to come back and purchase this is cost- effective compared to acquiring new customers obviously we all know it can be expensive to acquire customers on Facebook so if we already have customers emails we really want to get them to purchase again and can increase customer LTV by reactivating dormant buyers so wind back flows typically have a significant time delay so this will be anyone who purchased from us who hasn't placed a second order in 60 days or 90 days you can set any time delay you like typically we go at least two months two to 3 months and this will try to re-engage those customers and get them to come back and purchase from us again generally by giving them a discount code so the browse abandonment flow what does browse abandonment do it can recover loss Revenue can convert High intent traffic it reinforces the brand and builds awareness and it drives repeat sales and improves customer LTV so pretty much all the same points as the abandoned cart flow these customers are going to be a little less intent on buying just because they haven't added items to cart yet they've just viewed items so we're probably going to see a slightly lower conversion rate with this versus like an abandoned cart flow but very similar and we still want to be marketing to these people because we're going to have a fair amount of customers who view a product but don't actually add it to cart so this is going to allow us to Market to those customers even if they didn't add items to cart okay so here we're just going to go over setting up our post purchase flow and our win back flow so again you guys have done this before we're just going to come into create flow they're up here so we have the post purchase follow-up and we have the customer win back under start with the essentials so first one we're going to do is the post purchase we're just going to again create flow so when you come in here you're going to see the trigger once someone placed order let wait one day and then there's going to be a conditional split and depending on whether they've placed an order multiple times or placed an order once it's going to give them this conditional split so if it's their first order it's going to send them over here and say just a new customer thank you it's going to say welcome to seasonal collections thank you and then if theyve placed an order if this is their second order or they've placed an order you know multiple times it says it's a repeat customer thank you just says you've made some fantastic choices lately so I'm going to come down here and just remove this no path so it's basically just going to divide this flow into people who purchased for the first time and people who have purchased previously so it's just going to be a little bit different email you know if it's their first purchase it's going to say welcome to the family if it's their second third you know fourth purchase whatever it's going to say you've made some fantastic choices lately and just kind of thank them for being a repeat customer so you guys can leave these as is they're pretty basic I really like these because they help build trust they help you know communicate to the customer that we're appreciative for their business and they're just overall great to have to build a relationship with our customer so again feel free to leave these as they are they're pretty simple you guys can also use chat GPT if you want to to build these out a little bit more you can talk about some background of the brand you can go a little bit more in depth with thank you explain what their support means feel free to do whatever you want to do here but again we can stick with these pretty basic ones don't feel like you have to go too overboard here and then the second email for the new customer here is a discount code I would actually move this one down so I'm going to do we'll leave this 3day time delay but then I'm going to add another delay and then I'm actually going to put an FAQ email in here so this is one thing I always like to do I like to have a frequently asked questions email so you can come in here and just say change the subject line to frequently asked questions and I find this really helps to reduce customer service inquiries just answer customer questions you know you're going to have a lot of new customers who are asking about shipping times you know when is my order going to be here you know all different kinds of questions about your order so I always recommend having a frequently asked questions page on your website we don't on this site just because this is a demo store but usually I would have it linked up here in the navigation bar and then you would just grab that URL and then input that into this email so just have the subject line frequently asked questions save that and then come in change the email and say something like questions about your order and then down here I would just just say have any questions about your order feel free to browse our extensive FAQ sheet so we'll just say feel free to browse our extensive FAQ sheet that has answers to all of our most commonly asked questions appreciate your business and are excited to have you join the community if you have any questions that aren't answered on our sheet don't hesitate to reach out so I would just say that and then right here we would just hyperlink this hyperlink that and then put in the URL for our FAQ page and again I found that really helpful people have given us good feedback on that it helps alleviate a lot of customer service inquiries because a lot of the customer service inquiries you're going to get are from new customers in the time from when they order to when they actually receive their order and we're only going to do that on the new customer path because obviously if a customer is returning they probably have already had their questions answered um it's unlikely that they're going to need to refer to our FAQ sheet in the same way new customers will so we're only going to put that on this pathway and then you guys can build this out however you want so here we have some templates for you these are different post-p purchase templates now the way Chris and Meg have this setup this is from a previous store they have a 30-day delay so here they didn't have any emails going out between the time when the customer placed their order and the time when they receive their products you can do that but again I like to send emails out right away just to alleviate customer questions especially for those new customers if we're talking about repeat customers this is fine to do but especially for those new customers we want to do that FAQ sheet I typically like to do a Founder message as well where I'll just do a plain text email from myself as the founder just saying hey we really appreciate your business here's why I started the brand you know just build trust with the customer build a relationship with them make them feel like they're buying from an actual person and not just some corporate entity that can always be good to do and this flow example here is really just for repeat customers but for new customers we want to have that separate pathway where we're doing those additional things and then we have some templates in here for you guys to grab feel free to just change these around a little bit but they're pretty basic they're just going to have different discount codes and basically the goal with these is just going to be to sell to those people again in the same way we would with campaign emails this just makes it easier makes it automated so we're just going to you know wait 30 days after the purchase and say hey we appreciate you purchasing from us here's a 15% off if you want to come back and purchase again something like that so I'm not going to walk through that again there's so much we can do with this I think you guys get the gist of it down here is where we would add a time delay so here we could say you know wait 30 days and then clone this out and here's where we would start kind of the remarketing process where we're sending them discounts and those sorts of things you guys don't need to do that again you can be sending those emails just as campaign messages as oneoff blasts if you want to if you want to build this out to 50 emails feel free to do that as well totally up to you guys how you want to do it but it can be good to just you know add some automated emails that aren't tied to a specific seasonal sale or anything like that if we just want to give them a 15% off or 20% off and it doesn't matter when they get that it can be good to add those in here same thing over here again we're not going to do the FAQ and like the founder email for repeat customers because they will have already received that the first time but here we would just do the same thing you know clone this 30-day delay we would just clone that 30-day delay and then here's where we would just any of these emails we do down here that would be discount emails that we would want to go both to new customers and existing customers anytime we create one of those we would just clone it out and put it on this pathway as well so the only part that's really going to be different here is these first few emails and then everything after that can be pretty much the same so that's your post purchase flow again feel free to set that up however you guys want what's important here is these first emails and networ marketing to new customers one way and repeat customers another way so the next flow we're going to do is the winback flow so again just come in here to create flow customer win back and so this flow is going to have a 75-day time delay after someone places an order and there's a filter here placed order zero times since starting this flow so this flow is only going to be sent to people who placed an order at least 75 days ago and haven't placed another order since then if they do Place another order in that time frame they'll be removed from this flow so you know like we talked about the post-p purchase flow customers are going to be getting those emails ongoing if they do Place another order they'll be removed from this flow so they won't be getting both of those at the same time that's a question we get occasionally no the way these flows are set up they're exclusive so once a customer purchases they'll get removed from once they won't be getting both at the same time so this is pretty simple it's similar to The Post purchase flow and the goal here is just to get a customer to come back and purchase from us again when they haven't a long time so the first email here subject line is it's been a while here's what's trending right now it's just going to show them some popular products you can leave this as is I think that's perfectly fine email if you want to throw a discount code in there feel free and again we have some templates for you guys over here we'll typically include at least one discount in this flow uh a lot of times multiple discounts so feel free to grab any of these templates just tailor them to your brand again don't have to be anything crazy but what's important is that we have a few of these emails going out just trying to win these customers back so the way it's set up is with a 75-day delay then this first email just shows them trending products another 15-day delay and then says we've missed you and again just showing some popular products this is dynamic based on the customers um experience it'll show them like products they' viewed before so again I think this is a perfectly fine email to leave in here and then I would just do another delay and then here's where I would start adding the discount emails because again we want to try to send them a couple emails first without a discount hoping that one of those will get them to come back and purchase and then if they don't you know if they see those two emails we still don't get them back then we say okay we're going to up the Annie here's a discount code and hopefully that incentivises them to come back you can just clone these emails out super easy grab one of those templates and then come in here you know leave the email largely the same just throw in a discount say hey if you come back and shop now we really want to earn your business back we'll give you a 15% off or whatever that is so again I'm not going to walk through all that I think you guys know how to do this at this point pretty straightforward and again if you guys want to build some crazy banners make these emails look super professional feel free to do so I know I talked about it before m.com and canva two good resources for that canva makes it really easy to make your own banners and things and m.com is great for showing you know what's working for other brands um so feel free to do that this Advanced stage is you know if you if your marketing is doing well your business is running profitably that's where I would kind of start getting into these more advanced emails and this is a great resource to do so as I've said before we could build on entire course just on email marketing but the important thing is that we have those flows set up and running again clayo does a good job of making of optimizing those flows based on the data they have so you really don't need to go too elaborate with these but feel free if you have the time want to mess around just come to mild see what's working for other brands and then go crazy with it so that about wraps up our flows and hopefully that is helpful to you guys so SMS marketing know we talked about this a little bit before and we set up our list and started building that but here's where we're going to actually get into sending sms campaigns so SMS lists are very valuable and they allow us to get information directly to customers so you guys know this pretty much anytime you get a text message you're going to open it and see what it says versus email where you make open 30% of your emails or even less so SMS marketing allows for remarketing at a much lower cost than ads again similar to email as I said SMS marketing is similar to email marketing with a few major differences so you'll see fewer signups for SMS but a much higher open rate and click rate which improves customer LTV so with email marketing we'll get a large number of people who will sign up most people are willing to put their email in in exchange for a discount code or something like that but we'll get fewer people opening our emails as we talked about you know our open rate may hover around 30 to 40% with SMS marketing we're going to get a much lower percentage of people who will put their phone number in and sign up for SMS because it's more intrusive people are less willing to give out their phone numbers but when they do we're going to get much higher open rates a lot of times up to like 90% much higher click rates it's easier for people to click to the site and they're going to be more willing to do so so even though these lists are generally a lot smaller they have a lot of value so some SMS tips and best practices as I said SMS is more intrusive and should be handled more cautiously we really want to send a maxim of one SMS per week and ideally only two to three per month so this is in contrast to email as we said with email we're typically sending two to three emails per week uh we definitely don't want to do that with SMS you're going to get a much higher unsubscribe rate so we want to limit it to a maximum of one per week and ideally really only sending one every 10 to 15 days and for these SMS messages we really want to prioritize high value messages such as large sales so an example of this would be like a Black Friday sale we send a few messages this Black Friday had you know 30% off discounts and really high value things but we're not sending any content or you know anything outside of really important sales information and things that we really need our customers to know so as opposed to email where you pay for the number of subscribers you have SMS messages get build on a credit basis so each SMS message you send must be under 160 characters or it counts as multiple credits if you go over that it will be twice as much even if you do you know 161 or 162 characters that counts as two credits and will cost twice the amount we really want to stay under that 160 character limit we also want to stick to Texton messages ideally images will count as an MMS message which is two to three times the cost of an SMS message and emojis also will eat up a large number of characters I think they account for between 35 and 40 characters so it's really hard to send a meaningful text if you include emojis just because you're very limited on characters and we really want to avoid going over that 160 character limit just because because it's literally going to double your cost okay so here we are in clavio and we're going to run through sending an SMS message so we're just going to go to campaigns same way we do when we send a campaign email create campaign and we'll select SMS and you guys should have the setup at this point uh obviously name it whatever you want click continue and then we're going to choose our SMS list we don't have anyone on this list because this is a demo account but obviously if you have your popup running you guys should have some subscribers by this point again I'm going to turn off Smart sending and then click next and here it is super simple so we're just going to put our message content over here as you can see it has the 160 character limit you can go over that but it's going to count for a second credit as we said so we really want to stay under that if possible so we could say something like that hey Rockstar today only shop 30% off our spring best sellers and then we would go grab our collection and here's where you could do like an auto applied discount or we could just give them a discount code in the text itself and then we would add the link and that obviously is where you would grab the auto applied discount from Shopify actually that is going to be over our character limit so see it happens quickly because they put in the brand name and you have to have this text stop to opt out so we got to be really careful with our character limit so you could even just send something like that and again we want these to be really important emails only when we're offering a big discount or something of that sort um so it gives customers a lot of incentive to go to the site we don't want to be sending content or text that don't contain really important information and then once we're done once we have that message obviously just test the link and then we'll go to next and actually one thing you can do here before we move forward is you can send a test up here so you can just put your phone number in and hit send and that will send you a preview message that you can just look at on your phone make sure everything looks good click the link um and that's always good to do just to make sure it's everything's as we want it and here we'll just click next and it's giving me an error here just because this list doesn't have anyone on it obviously you guys shouldn't see this presuming there's people on your list and then once we're done with that and everything looks good we're just going to go up to schedule and send and this is exactly the same as we do with email you can schedule that out for a later date or you can send now and then we'll just schedule the campaign and that's it very similar to email even simpler again the really important things here are that we're sending these infrequently that we're only offering you know meaningful discounts and meaningful information when we do and that we're not spamming our customers so what metrics are we looking for for SMS marketing they're going to be a lot different from email as I said you're going to see a much higher open rate you're going to see a much higher click-through rate even though our lists are a lot smaller you're going to get a lot more conversions from that smaller amount of people so for open rate for SMS we really want to see at least 90% uh it maybe even higher than that sometimes you'll get you know 95 96 97% just because most people are going to see a text on their phone and open it no matter what as we talked about it's a lot more personal it's easier to get that information to people so we want to see 90 plus% there if you're a little bit below that you know in the 80s not something to worry about too much it's really only concern if we're down at like 50% or something then you're probably having an issue with deliverability so for click-through rate we really want to see at least like 15% 20 plus is even better we typically see between 15 and 20% on the messages we send and some of that will depend on your list how engaged they are how recently they were added to the list so again there's going to be some variation but we want to see at least 15% ideally and again if you're you know sub 10% there's probably some sort of issue there I would check your link I would check your offers and just make sure that everything in the text looks good that it's important information that's really driving people to site with a sense of urgency and then the last metric we're going to talk about is unsubscribe rate so unsubscribe rate for text messages is always going to be higher than for emails just because again it's a lot more personal people get bothered by texts more quickly than they get bothered by emails so your unsubscribe rate is naturally going to be higher we typically see anything from 3 to 5% as long as you're below that 5% Mark I would say you're okay obviously the lower the better if you're sending these the right way where you're only sending a few texts a month it's important information it should be lower it should be you know 2 to 3% or even lower than that if you're above 5% you're probably sending texts too often or the texts aren AR meaningful enough they're not providing important information or they're not giving good discount codes whatever the reason may be if you are above 5% just take a step back send fewer text messages make sure the messages that you are sending are important and are going to be meaningful to your customers hey everyone in this part of the course we're going to be talking about Google ads so by this point you will have done at least $10,000 in sales and you will set up your Advanced email flows and be ready for the next step in marketing so by the end of this lesson the goal is to have you set up your own Google ad account to have you learn the fundamentals of Google ads and to have you successfully launch your own Google branded search campaign so why does this matter Google ads allow us to Target lost traffic from Facebook search ads allow us to outrank competitors with even the best SEO and SEO stands for search engine optimization and they require minimal budget for what is generally a great return so the Google ads overview Google ads are similar to Facebook ads but they cover the Google ecosystem so this includes the Google search engine YouTube and other different placements there's various campaign types including Google search Google pmax or performance Max Google shopping and Google video These allow Brands to reach potential customers across the entire internet and they give us the ability to Target high intent or warm traffic searching specifically for our products you can think about this in comparison with Facebook where on Facebook we're essentially casting a very broad net to a very wide audience who may or may not be interested in our products some of them will purchase but a lot of them have no interest with these Google search results we're only showing our ads to people who are searching for our brand specifically or similar products to what we're selling because we're inputting those specific keywords and if people are searching for different keywords our ads won't be shown to them so we know that this is warm traffic and that they are either looking for our brand or looking for similar products to what we're selling so Google search campaigns show text based ads to users on Google search engine based on specific keywords these ads are made to look like standard search engine results and a lot of times you won't even notice that they're paid ads and what we're doing is essentially bidding on specific keywords that users are searching for so here's an example of a search campaign result this is from one of Chris's store's history T's and you can see it looks like a regular search engine result the only difference is that it says sponsored at the top so that's how you know that it's a paid ad so you guys have all seen these you may not have even known that you've seen these but anytime you go to Google and search for something the first two or three results are are going to be sponsored ads and that means that people are bidding on those keywords to show their result first and here's a standard search result you can tell that it looks nearly identical the only difference is that this is going to be shown as the third or fourth result below those sponsored ads so how do we use Google search campaigns we use search campaigns primarily to Target lost traffic from Facebook meaning that the more traffic we're running on Facebook the more potential there is for Google ads to perform we'll start these at $10 a day and ramp them up based on results and we'll scale them alongside our Facebook ads in anywhere from a 20 to1 to a 10:1 ratio so ideally we want to be spending between $100 and $200 a day on Facebook at a minimum to spend $10 a day on Google and we're going to use branded keywords to bypass SEO so here we have a screen recording of Chris setting up a Google ad account this is super straightforward it's only a few steps all you have to do is enter your business information add a payment method and click submit and we're going to wait to set up a campaign it's going to prompt you to set up a campaign now we're going to wait to do that until we link this to our Shopify and set up conversion tracking so for this step just set up the base account enter your payment method and then we'll be good to go perfect so once that account is set up we're just going to go to our Shopify and we're going to add the Google and YouTube app so we're just going to click install so once you've downloaded the app it's going to ask you to connect your Google account and you're just going to log in to the same Google login you use to create your ad account once that's connected you're going to see up here just want to set up Google ads conversion measurement and you're going to click get started so here is where you're going to connect your Google ads account that we just created and if you go into your Google ads account over here you'll see your ad account ID and we just want to make sure that that matches up if you only have one Google ad account that should be the only result but just double check that that's matching and then we're going to click connect and then complete setup and then we're going to scroll down and where it says conversion tracking we should see a green check mark and that means that Google and Shopify are now communicating and Google's going to be able to track any conversions that come through Google ads on our website so once that's done we're going to go into our Google ad account select new campaign choose a sales objective and we're going to go down here and just ensure that this says purchases and you guys are going to get this error message here and it's just going to say one inactive or unverified conversion goal that just means that it hasn't triggered yet so that will go away as soon as we record a purchase so you're probably going to see this after we set up the campaign 2 until you get a purchase in just ignore that it just means that that conversion event hasn't triggered yet so we're just going to select continue going to do a search campaign optimized for website visits and and we're going to go grab our URL and then just name this whatever you want I'm just going to leave that as is and for bidding we want to make sure it's on conversions and we're going to leave these two unselected this is if you wanted to select a Target cost per action and that's like if you wanted to Target a specific purchase price or a specific click price for example you can do that down here if you want to optimize for acquiring new customers you can also do that but because we're using this primarily as a retargeting campaign a lot of these people are going to be existing customers or will have engaged with us in some way so we don't care whether they're new customers or existing customers we just want to get them to purchase so we're going to leave that deselected but if you ever did want to run a campaign specifically targeting new customers you could turn that on so we're going to do next I'm going to change this to United States and Canada you could try International leave this on all countries if you wanted to but I generally just do either United States or United States and Canada we want our language to be English we're going to leave this as is Select next and here we'll put in the final URL so if we want to send them to a collection page for example which I generally recommend doing we would just GL grab the URL for whatever collection page we want to send them to input that here so we'll just put our unique URL in here and then what makes your products or Services unique we can put in whatever we want here and then click generate and here it's going to spit out some keywords for us and we're going to remove a lot of these because some of them are going to be too broad like summer clothes we don't want to be showing our ads to people that search for that because they're probably not searching specifically for what we're selling so we want this to be like our brand name and anything very specific to our Niche or our brand remove all the very general keywords seasonal we could do like seasonal t-shirts fall t-shirt winter t-shirt you just want to make sure that these are specific enough that we're not showing our ad to too broad of an audience and I'm also going to do an exact match for our brand name by putting in Brackets that just means that it's an exact match and the customer has to type in this exactly for it to show up but we also have a broad match here and we'll go back in afterward and see how those perform and a lot of times the exact match performs better so I'll end up removing the broad match we just want to keep an eye on that and I'll also do things like seasonal collections reviews and you can add a few things in there but again just keep them very specific down here again is going to be our final URL we just want to make sure that's going to the collection page or wherever we want to send our people and then down here is going to be all of our headlines so typically it's going to put our brand name first and I'll generally pin that to the first position and that just means that in every variation that will show up first so what it's going to do here is it's going to optimize these based on performance so it's going to try a bunch of different headlines in different orders and whichever performs the best is what's going to get shown the most so I generally change these put in like collection sale if you're running any kind of sale or promotion I'll generally put that in the second spot we can also do things like printed in the USA we just want to make sure that this is selling points that these are you know driving engagement and getting people to click on our ads so we don't want to do anything that's you know too broad or too generic so feel free to remove some of these if you don't think they fit it's good to have a bunch of different headlines because again it's going to optimize and the ones that aren't working well won't be shown so seasonal apparel we can leave made in the USA we want to remove because these shirts are not made in the USA we can say printed in the USA but again just make sure that you're double-checking all of these and ensuring that these are actually correct and representative of the brand remove that one unique high quality designs that's one that I don't mind having just make sure that you have a bunch of different options and that they're representative of the brand as a whole so once you're happy with those and again this is your preview right here so just make sure that that looks good you're happy with how that's showing up then we're going to come down here put in our descriptions and it's going to generate some of these for you I also like to put in here our free shipping so we'll say free shipping over $75 printed and shipped from the USA and again feel free to put in other descriptions here you can also pin these if you want one in a specific spot again it's going to test those and show whichever one performs the best so down here logos it's just going to pull that from your website you can also get access you have to verify the ad account and then it will allow you to add your logos if you want to do that site links we can come in here and add our own site links so I already did this but you would just click create and I always like to add like an about us so you would just grab this URL in sight link text you would add about us and you would put the URL in right there and then you just click create so for these I generally like to do some kind of sale where it's going to take them to a collection page whether that's you know the fall collection for example or if we're having a sale I would take them to the sale collection right now I just have it as all products because we don't have promotions going on but that takes them to the collection page then I'll generally do the about us and then I typically will also do a contact us um that can just build trust shows people that you know if they were to order from us and have any kind of issue that they could reach out to us and we would be responsive so it's always good to add those site links to anywhere on the site where people may want to click to directly and then once that's done you just come down here click done these are all of our keywords and then we're going to select next then here we're going to input our budget so I'm going to do $10 a day and make sure that you change this a lot of times the budgets that it will recommend are very high like it's recommending $119 a day make sure you don't do that and that you update your budget and we're going to click next and this has been giving me issues it's probably going to give me these error messages again you guys shouldn't see this yeah see it's giving me all of these issues it's been doing this all day you guys shouldn't see that if you do just reach out to support I'm not exactly sure why it's doing that that but basically once you have everything in here you'll see a publish button down here and you'll just click publish and once that's done uh your ads will start running they'll typically take a few days to start spending so don't be alarmed if they don't spend the full amount right away similar to Facebook it can take a little while to ramp up and like I said if you see that inactive conversion action error again ignore it that's just because it hasn't triggered yet as soon as you get a purchase that will go away so that's pretty much it for Google search campaigns like I said if you guys have any issues here reach out to support you guys shouldn't see that that's just issues that we're having with our account right now but that's about it all right guys so this is where things get fun we're at Facebook ads the advanced section stage 5.4 and at this point like we said it's stage five you've generated 10,000 Plus in sales and your progress so far you like we said $10,000 in sales a stable 2.0 or more row as and you're at the point where you're asking yourself how do I scale this so by the end of this lesson you're going to know the concept of vertical versus horizontal scaling and how to implement both understanding how continuous ad testing works and understanding how retargeting ads work as well why does this matter so print on demand is a high volume and low margin business now you know if you're lucky you can get 20% maybe 30% margins that's really if you're operating in a very high row eyes but usually you're sitting around like a 10 to 20% profit margin assuming you've achieved like a consistent profitable business where you're over a two row as and even then it's difficult to maintain that so you need to push volume when your profit margin is that low so thinking about if you do a million dollar in Revenue great you're only making 100 to 150k in profit now I say only I don't mean to sound like you know my high horse by any means but when you do a million dollars in sales you think you're making a little bit more than 100K right so that's why you need to push the volume and understand how to take advantage of when you're in a situation when you can scale your ads to push volume also why does this matter mastering Facebook ads at advanced level will teach you how to reach a consistent Ras so that's the whole game now in the beginning when we talk about the testing phase we're really looking at cost per clicks amount spend click-through rates cpms all those kind of data but when you're at the point now when you're generating consistent purchases Raz is King and there's a reason Raz is King because that's when you're making or breaking your money you're fueling your profit or you're cutting your losses so that's why it's it's really essential that we understand and master this concept of Raz and a consistent roaz is it's kind of the same thing a consistent Raz is a key to achieving and maintaining profitability so understanding this concept is imperative and that brings me to the next concept here that we're going to talk about that I personally live and die by so a big whammy here a big whammy to understand is the inverse relationship between budget and Raz and what I mean by that simply is when you increase the budget you are decreasing the Raz because you're going to have diminishing returns and we'll dive deeper into that in a second and then when you decrease the budget you're actually increasing the row housee now there isn't an exact this isn't like an exact inverse relationship this is just statistically when you increase the budget you will decrease your Ras and vice versa there are situations where there's a million variables in your ad account where you could increase your budget and you really have like a winner where it could actually fuel row ads but for the majority of things when managing an ad account dayto day week to week month to month understanding this principle and abiding by this principle is imperative to establish and maintain a consistent profitable row so when do I increase the budget right that's a question I get so many times from people in the community and so many of my clients also ask the same thing when do I increase it and it's essentially when you have a high enough row ad to justify the increase in ad spend so inverse relationship right what does that mean when something goes up the other thing goes down so if ad spend goes up the row ads must come down now we need to make sure we're making money right so for print on demand usually the threshold that we use as a break even point is 2.0 or higher sometimes it's a little less than that but in our case here we're talking about 2.0 so you have to have enough cushion to maintain above that 2.0 row as so if you're at a 2.5 or higher maybe you're at a three or four or a five that dictates how much you can actually increase the ad spend so it provides room for the rowad to come down but still be at a profitable spot when you increase the spend so more spend equals more Revenue equals more profit and then that's the concept that we want to understand so like why would you even ever want to lower your row as is because the more you spend the more Revenue you're pushing ping therefore the more profit you're also making understanding that you're still above a 2.0 row but if you're below the break even and you're losing money when should I decrease the budget also almost just as an important concept if not more important especially in the beginning phases when your row as is lower than a 2.0 and you're losing money this is when you should either lower your ad spend to get that row as remember the inverse relationship lower one thing the other thing gets higher lower the ad spend row as will get higher if you're at like a 17 and you want to be at a point where you're breaking even or making money lower that ad spend a little bit to push that row as above that 2.0 now some cases you might even want to completely pause your ads and that's a different scenario we'll talk about on a different stage of this course as well but this is kind of the concept right the inverse relationship all right guys so I just want to give you a live example of this inverse relationship and making decisions between budget and row as on a live ad account so as you can see in here I'm in one of my campaigns here and I got a bunch of adets that I'm testing right now this is just for examples by the way this isn't like a structure campaign that we've shown in the course this is something that we've been experimenting with but it's a really good example to show you how we look at the inverse relationship and how we influence the budget based off of what we're seeing so what I like to do is filter by Raz and see what's generating the highest Raz for us right now so as you can see there's this ad set here that has about almost $200 spend and the budget's pretty low but look at that Raz man that's a pretty Raz it's a 4.89 also the cost per clicks are under a dollar so it's in a good spot and we're really in in a healthy spot here where we can bump this budget somewhat aggressively cuz we we talk about having room above that 2.0 row As and we're at a 4.89 so there's a lot of room for this row as to come down so I can be a little bit aggressive here so for here I'm going to like usually we like to do like 10 20% increases sometimes 30% increases in in budget when we see this but what I'm going to do here is go to 75 and I'm going to check in tomorrow to see if this is maintaining and this is something that I might push if the if tomorrow is a good day too I might push this to 100 maybe 125 and the reason there is because there is so much room here to grow now let's look at this one look like 88 purchase doesn't really matter what the adsets name we're just looking for this practice is the budget versus the row so we see a 2.77 not close to the 4.89 we saw but still really good it's over that 2.5 Ras that we saw so I'd be happy with like bumping this by 25 here going to 50 and we'll keep a close eye on all of this when we make these changes like we're we're making mental notes okay like I changed this budget I bumped it up did we see this drop a lot that maybe go back to what the budget was when it was successful so like kind of having that approach is essential here now here's a good example of something that I wouldn't touch so we see $120 budget it's more than these other two and we're at 2.27 so we're not at a 2.5 so we don't have that much room to actually increase budget but we're still making money here so this is kind of a sweet spot where I would just keep it here I would just keep it 120 I would keep an eye on it if it starts dipping maybe consider lowering the budget if it starts increasing maybe consider upping the budget but you know same kind of thing we're looking at the inverse relationship here so here's another good example here so there's this ad set here has 16 purchases at a 2.1 row as at a $250 budget so this is a pretty aggressive budget and we're seeing 2.1 is very close to that break even too right so we got to be careful here maybe we even consider dropping the budget just to make sure we stay over this too but let's see what the trend is right so we're looking at the past week here let's look at the past week and we're looking at this 2.1 row as maybe we launched it yeah we've launched it somewhat recent so we're not seeing that change so what I would do here is just keep it the same we're still above the two and maybe it's just taking time to learn a little bit so we're just going to maintain over two not touching the budget not enough room to actually bump the budget so that's the thought process there looking down at this one right on the cusp right it's right at 2.0 we look at the most more recent data here let just look at like Thursday to today what are we seeing we're seeing a 2.11 here so that's fine as well I think this actually might have swapped on me so forgive me if I'm messing up 375 2.11 so it's actually trending like kind of saying around the same so I'm not going to touch this one as well it's just like right above the cusp I'm going to see and just like let it go it's been showing good signs I don't want the roow to go up or down here cuz we're spending a decent amount here and it's still profitable so I'm leaving that one go now the last one here you know it's right below 2.0 so maybe just bump it down a little bit to 120 now this may not do anything it's such like a low bump but this is kind of the concept right we're looking at RAS and we're adjusting our budget accordingly and that's how I would approach like managing campaigns like as you see we're on the adet level here so it may be a little different from how you have things structured but it's just for the concept for the fundamental principle of when we look at Raz and we look at her budget how do we make decisions to maintain profitability right another thing I wanted to touch on is the date ranges when actually diving into your ad account and looking at the metrics you making decisions so the first thing that I do if you're at this point which you should be if you're at the 10K plus spot is the monthly date range so this is good for like a macro understanding of your data I don't usually make any decisions with like budget allocation based off of this but it's good to know like okay November I was at a 2.5 what I was doing was maintaining profitability during that month oh on the next month I like December I was at a 1.5 therefore I lost some money there like how do I change like was I overspending here kind of like a macro look of your ad account right so that's when I like look at the monthly date range macro look but where I really make my decisions where I really look at the data and actually make budget allocations I look on a bi-weekly date range and that's every two weeks and it's it's mostly commonly used for my budget decision- making so I'll use that that window of time to look at the analytics and be like okay if I have a campaign that's consistently over 2.5 I'm going to bump that budget that's like when me I'm actually going in there and making decisions I'll also look at the weekly range as well and this is good for like identifying Trends right so like if you're looking at a month and your campaign's at a 4.0 right I just that's a really good campaign but you look at the bi-weekly date range and you're at a 5.0 or 6.0 and you're like okay the past two weeks has been really good so it's trending actually in the right direction it's going up and you look at the last seven days it's even a higher row as that means like your campaign even on a monthly level It Maybe started out really poor which like got it back to that four level but now you're like a seven or an eight and you have a lot more room to fuel that so maybe you can get a little bit more aggressive with the budget bumps that you're doing there so 30 days a month is look good for like a macro outlook on your ad account bi-weekly is where you actually make your decision makings based off of that budget and Raz inverse relationship that we just talked about and then the seven days is good for identifying Trends if it's trending up or trending down in terms of Ras all right guys so at this point you're going to have three main campaigns going so an important concept to realize that this always doesn't have to look the same like the way our campaigns are structured the amount of campaigns we have the amount of adsets we have the amount of ads that we have per adsets it's really up to personal preference like the campaign structure is not going to make or break the success of your ads like a majority of it is the designs you're testing the creative you're testing the copy the deals the the site optimization like that's where the Real Performance and success is monitored and decisions are made on those levels this is more just for like a general framework to organize to make sense of things when you're testing and then like also scaling at this point where you know we give you a framework of what we've done in the past now this doesn't have to be directly applied this could be done in a numerous amount of ways and we're going to go into actually how our ad account looks like right now and how it's like yeah we we're showing these three main types of campaigns but you'll see in the ad account that we don't stick directly to this it's all about kind of personal preference like what makes sense in your head but at the end of the day just like the concept here like the account structure does not matter that much so we don't want you wasting time like if you're not seeing that desired row as going into like your ad account and like duplicating out ad sets and then switching like the audience targeting and all these things cuz that's really not what's going to get you that desired row as that's going to be creating and testing new designs so we just want to emphasize that going into here like that's really where you should be tweaking things is like the only variable you should really have assuming you have everything set up correctly is the designs your testing and everything else should be constants because we're giving you the framework of like what we've done before that that has gotten us to a successful spot so knowing all that here we are we have three main campaigns so we have our testing campaign where these have like the first time we're testing a new design or we're testing a new kind of concept or new audience whatever it is that's all going to be hosted in our testing campaign now our cold campaigns are going to be really where most of the spend is going to be hosted and a lot of the revenue is going to be almost all the revenue is going to be generated from our cold campaigns and then that's like a our best sellers and like you know our best performing ads are all going to be in that cold campaign for the most part now you can have a hybrid between the two like I said there doesn't have to be one way you can do a cold end testing campaign allinone if the Raz is showing you that it's performing well I wouldn't change it I would just fuel that budget and do that invert relationship we talked about before to make sure that I'm maximizing Revenue at a profitable spot so what is a retargeting campaign so I actually typed this into chat gbt on how to explain what retargeting is to a 5-year-old so this is what I like to do on a lot of Concepts here because I try to like explain things because I've been doing ads for seven years now and I have a certain like understanding of things but I realize that doing this explanation to like a 5-year-old can really simplify things down and actually help people out like really understand what's going on here and it can actually help them actually create create better results from the retargeting campaign so imagine a kid visits your toy store and he loves a red toy car but he doesn't buy it you send them a note later saying hey remember this cool toy car a retargeting meta ads campaign does the same thing online showing ads to people who looked at your product but didn't buy it to remind them to bring them back so it's retargeting right just think about the word retargeting what is that it's targeting someone again so someone who saw your products all your website engag with any part of your business online you're sending them specifically an ad that you know that they engaged on before so when should you create one right it's at the stage we're at right now so you have generated at least $10,000 in sales that's kind of the point we want you to start like really taking advantage of retargeting because up to that point you don't really have enough information for one to populate the audiences that we're going to go into and two to even like take advantage of having success with these types of campaigns because you need at least 10,000 in sales to optimize around it so yeah another thing you need enough data to your site to populate these audiences so when we're talking about audiences we're talking about people who have gone to your site and added to cart for example you need at least a thousand people that have done this on your site to actually even create this audience on Facebook so they can actually find those people for you same thing for website visitors that's going to be a little bit easier because it's people that go to your website is going to be a lot more than actually add to cart but the concept here is you need at least thousand people reaching any of these kind of events to actually populate for you to actually Target them with retargeting campaigns I know we talked about like 20 to 30% allocated of your cold I think this is is very subjective like I did the math actually and I looked at my clients in my account specifically and I saw that around 10 to 15% was the total spend allocated to retargeting campaigns from your total account so 10 to 15 is kind of a good like Benchmark to go off of but this is another example of like this is what I've seen but you could have a situation where your retargeting campaigns are kicking butt and you can actually allocate more budget towards it or if they're not doing as well and it's like actually like 5% of your total spend you know it's it's another example that there's so many different ways that this can pan out for you it doesn't have to be the exact way we're saying so going into the three main types of retargeting audiences that we focus on it's the add to cart so people who have gone to your website actually added a product to their cart the have the view content so that could be either someone who viewed your ad or viewed a landing page whatever you want to do there you have control over what that's going to look like and then you have your engagers right someone who's liked engaged shared commented whatever on a specific Facebook ad or Instagram ad and we can Target those people and these are fleshed out like we have tested these Concepts so many times where we've seen success time and time again when we set up retargeting campaigns tar these specific audiences all right so as you can see I'm in my meta ads manager and the first thing we're going to want to do is create those main types of retargeting audiences that we talked about so the add to card The View content and the engagers are the main three that we're going to start with so what you're going to do when you're in your meta ads manager is you're going to go on the leftand side and you're going to go over to audiences here so you click audiences now what we're going to do is create an audience as you can see I already have these audiences here for for other examples that I've done but I just want to show you how guys how to do it from from scratch here so the first thing thing we're going to do is add to cart so we're going to do custom audience we're going to do website and we're going to hit next now we're doing website because people add to cart on your website right that's why we selected that make sure your correct pixels selected all website visitors we're going to change to add to cart because we're doing add to cart is our objective here and actually I like 30 days 30 days is usually The Sweet Spot here and we're just going to do add to cart sorry this keyboard is a little different C 30 days as the name of this audience here so we're going to create that audience so that's the first one done good to go we'll show you where we're going to actually reference that in the future and then we're going to create another one here for view content so custom audience same kind of thing what kind of content do we want is it website yes I'm pretty sure it's not it is if not it may be one of our one of these meta sources for ads let me see view content yeah so it is it is going to be website and you're going to do view content here same thing 30 days is great as well and you're going to do view content and you're going to do 30 days as well I like just always including the most information I can when creating these there we go cool and then we're going to create that audience done all good the last one we're going to do is engagers right so custom audiences we're going to do Instagram account Facebook page whatever you want to do let's start with Instagram account next so anyone who engaged with this professional account in the past let's do 60 days because it's going to be a broader and not as warm audience include any who meet any of the following criteria so so they're coming from seasonal collections which is the brand that we're doing here anyone who's engaged with this professional account audience name is going to be Instagram or insta engagers for the past 60 days now we can do this with Facebook too just repeat the same process just do Facebook instead of Instagram page and then create the audience so boom we have three new audiences here right we have our add to carts we have our view content and we have our instant engagers so these are populating so this is actually taking Facebook's matching your audience to profiles on meta right now as we created that so they're finding people who have engaged with your Instagram post or your Instagram page in any kind away for the past 60 days so this is actually in real time populating but you can create these campaigns you don't have to wait for these because like you'll see available for for use right here you you're good to go to actually use these so let's switch over to actually creating the retargeting campaign and how we can Implement these audiences that we just created all right we're going back over all right so we are back into our Facebook ads manager account and we're going to create a retargeting campaign from scratch so we're going to go the same kind of process right we're going to the top left of the green create button we're going to hit sales it's always going to be sales for these uh campaign objectives we're going to hit continue now you have to do a manual sales campaign for retargeting because we're going to be doing multiple adets so this is the one that you're going to want to make sure you're doing manual sales campaign for because we're using multiple ad sets for these multiple audiences that we just created so let's hit continue what we're going to do here is just name it right same kind of thing you don't have to do it this way but this is what I do it it's pretty simple pretty straightforward retargeting Camp one that's what I'm going to name it now you can have that number system if you want so is like what is it Z zero or it's going to be two is retargeting for us what we talked about earlier now Advantage Plus catalog ads you want to have these turned on because this is actually an important part about retargeting is because for example if we're going to be targeting people who added to cart this Advantage Plus catalog ads being turned on will actually allow Facebook to see the exact product that someone added to cart and show them that exact product in the retargeting ad that they're going to be shown so this is an important feature to have enabled Shopify product catalog just make sure it's the main one whatever your main catalog is here that'll guarantee that whatever product they added the car is going to be included in that catalog now you can do I I actually actually don't do for this so what we're going to do is leave this off here because we're actually going to want control over the certain adsets that we're actually running here so we want we want ads set budget control now we're going to hit next now this is where you're going have to pay attention to this is like a different part so this is going to be the first one we're going to do is add to cart and we'll show you how to do this so that you want to do maximize number of conversions this is going to be the same as like setting up your testing campaign or setting up your actual scaling campaign for when you have successful ad ad but you're going to do maximize number of conversions you're going to do conversion event as purchase you don't have to worry about the cost per result and then the product set is going to be all products is the same thing as the catalog and then we'll set it at we'll set it at $10 to start and this is all going to be kind of subjective depending on like how much you've sold and and kind of your own risk tolerance here but I like starting at 10 with retargeting per adset then we scroll down and this is something that's new okay so this audience type is brand new this used to be this pretty much automates what I just did when creating those custom audiences that you guys showed that I showed you before when we went through like selected website then add to card as the event 30 days this when you select retarget ads to people who interacted with your product on on and off Facebook is a way to automate like that whole process that I just did and the reason I did that process is because I'm so used to doing that that I'm not going to change from doing that like as long as that's an option I'm going to continuously make those custom audiences the way I just shown but this is another way that Facebook's automating the the campaign creation process it's one another one of those Advantage Plus kind of features where now you can just create these retargeting audiences right there in the on the adet level which is really cool it's just something that like I'm not used to so what I like to do is do it the old way so the old way is let's see going down and searching custom audiences so that's what we just did right when we created those three add toart view content engagers these are the where the custom audiences are and what you want to do is make sure you're excluding like we talked about excluding people who may have purchased because you don't want those people that added to cart that actually ended up buying and then you're hitting them with a retargeting ad to that same product that they just bought doesn't really make sense right so we want to exclude those people but then make sure we're including the add to cart audience that we created right so what we're going to do is go down here switch to original audience options right so this is going away from Advantage Plus and the reason we're doing this is because we're going and we're referencing a custom audience that we just created and that's the add toart one so there it is add toart custom audience Advantage Plus audience Reach people beyond your customer is likely to improve I keep this checked on sometimes it's kind of hit or miss with me I never really like split tested this down to the wire so for now for this I would just like recommend turning it off just because this will guarantee that the only people that you're showing this audience to are people that added to cart this will expand beyond that so we want to stay away from that for now excluding people we're good to go there so we can publish this and move on to the next one so we're going to go to the adset level and we're going to duplicate this out so we can create our next audience that we created which is going to be the view content so we're going to duplicate this out this is pretty simple so make sure you just have the existing campaign and we are doing the retargeting campaign here so this is good to go hit duplicate now we are going to name this view content right CU this is the other one we created and we're literally just going to rinse and repeat what we did with the add toart audience and we're just going to scroll down find that custom audience that we had before and this is going to be view content 30 days it's the one we created so now we have as we can see the add to cart that we created first and the view content and the last one we're going to create right is going to be the engagers so let's duplicate this view content ad set out make sure we have the existing campaign as the retargeting campaign selected this is important because this can kind of get messy sometimes s when you skipped over this step sometimes you do new campaign and creates another one and you're like it just creates a mess sometimes so make sure you're doing existing campaign when you're duplicating these out select duplicate now what we're going to do is go down and remember the only thing we're changing here is the custom audience so this is going to be engagers we're going to scroll on down town Charlie Brown custom audiences view content we're switching this out to you guested engagers look at that instant engagers 60 days this is this is the last one that we created and now now we can hit publish and now we have three of our audiences all three of the ones that we created live and ready to go this is now the ad section of it so as you can see we're in the retargeting campaign we're selecting the first we're just do Eng gaugers here what you could have done is on the first add toart audience we did we could have just gone and done this and then when we duplicated all these out this would have already been done which would have been a more a faster way of doing things so I'm just going to do this once and just the only thing you guys have to reference is make sure that instead of doing it my way way where I just did the ad sets before I did the ad level just when you do the first ad set here creating the add to cart you go right into the ad level and then build the ads out so when you duplicate the ad set it'll actually show when you duplicate over like it will have all like the the ad parameters already set up where you don't have to do it individually like I'm about to do it right now so go to the ad level hit edit this is going to be the engagers here as we can see and so the cool thing that we've seen so we've been experimenting with different types of copy recently like some times with retargeting you want to switch up The Copy being like hey welcome back or hey don't forget this like we've experimented with that and we recommend experimenting with that too if you guys if that's something you're interested in but we found the same copy that we use on our cold ads actually perform the best compared to those other kind of copies and that's just been for us recently so I wouldn't overthink this too much just know that um that has been working for us so I went in and actually copied and pasted the copy that we were using for our normal like cold campaigns for our scaling and testing so that's a good thing to know like you don't have to think too much about this new primary text unless you want to test it but important things to note when setting these up so we're going to do this is going to be retargeting ads so whatever you want to name it this is all make sure you the right Facebook page set up we're always going to do for the ad setup the formats always going to be Carousel for these retargeting ones we've tested this between single image and collection and Carousel always performs the best and we always do multiple products you only have the option to do product categories here so I wouldn't worry about that as well single image creative op we like single image of slideshow but we've actually seen some recent success with slideshows so mixing this up isn't a bad idea so you can test either one and see what works best for you now you don't have to do anything with adding any cards here primary text we already talked about I'm going to grab this URL just in case we need it I don't know if we do and the call to actions always like we said shop now right so the destination is going to be the manual destination it's going to be the seasonal collection here and we're also that's where we need the URL so we're going to have to push the URL here as well it's already there what are you talking about there we go yeah see that was just a random glitch one of the many you're going to see look it's doing it again the Link Field is required please yeah I mean it's okay so it works now that's another like I said another Facebook glitch that you're going to have to get used to working with here and yeah so we scroll down and everything is good to go so for these other um you're going have to make sure if you did it my way where you just duplicated the ad sets out before changing the ad level to like what I just did here then you're going have to go in and do these changes for each one here as you can see but if you went in and did the first one so you did your ad to cart ad set then you went right to the ad level filled out the ad copy then you wouldn't have to go back and change all these ones because that once you duplicate those adsets over that information of like the primary text the carousel information the URL is all going to carry over so just rinse and repeat what I just showed you for the other adsets here so like as you can see if the engagers one I have the right copy in there but when you go to view content you see it's not in there so you got to insert that primary text just like I said rinse and repeat copy exactly what I just did there and same for the last one here so if you did it my way with duplicating the ad sets prematurely without actually building out the ad then you have to go and individually add them if you did just go in and on that first ad set you actually went to the ad level filled out the information then duplicated the ad sets then you don't have to worry about it and that's what I recommend I just kind of screwed that up a little bit and uh it happens you know sometimes you do it the fast way sometimes you do it the slow way but um you can hit publish here once you hit publish your retargeting campaigns created so we created our add to cart our view content and our engagers audiences as I as I walked through and showed you how to create those custom audiences and then we went and actually created a retargeting campaign creating an ad set for each one of these and you'll manage those the same way you'll manage any other campaigns but just remember that this is going to be lower spend right it's not going to be a normal cold spend so keep that in mind but same thing like the inverse relationship between budget and rowad is going to be managed here on the adset level and yeah it's a it's a really consistent once you have like you reach that $10,000 revenue and you're spending a decent amount on Facebook in the cold traffic retargeting performance fairly well when you think about it like you have your cold traffic right it's people who have never seen your ad before you have your warm traffic so people who have added to car that's even that's very very warm view content is pretty warm engagers sort of warm but they're people that have engaged with your brand they're familiar with it so hitting them with another ad is just another touch Point another opportunity for people who are familiar already interested in your brand to actually generate a purchase so that's why we recommend doing and that's kind of the concept right we talked about the kid who saw a toy car didn't buy it but then got a reminder to buy it that's the same kind of concept right and that's all we're doing here and having this set up is like it's really a good fundamental thing to have set up that can be consistently profitable for you because these are people that are proven to be interested in your product that you're advertising now you're at this point right so you have your testing campaign set up you have your your main cold campaign set up you have your retargeting campaign set up and you're like what now how do I get from this $10,000 spot to H 100,000 and this is when testing new audiences which is essentially just fueling your cold campaign using open targeting with Advantage Plus doing retargeting like we said and maybe doing some experimentation with some detailed targeting but we'll get into that later in the course and essentially just expanding and find finding new customers and that's with managing the budget right like if you have that high enough row as where you can bump the budget you're going to be finding new po pockets of audiences that Facebook will find for you therefore expanding your customer base therefore expanding like how much money you're making essentially it's pretty simple at this point right you want to be managing your budget creating new campaigns that are working and that's the whole like new audience side of of what you should do at this point another thing you should be doing and this is constantly but this is like really important during this stage to be focused on is making new designs so this is like variations on your best sellers and then doing also market research so like when I say variations off your best sellers like if you had a flower t-shirt store for example and a sunflower worked for like was your best seller for a while you better make sure that you're making as many sunflower designs as you possibly can because you know that your store you can advertise and AD to a sunflower t-shirt and people buy it so that's extremely valuable data that you should be building new designs around to increase your aov to increase the potential of you finding a new bests seller that's going to be bringing people in the door and it's just an essential like core concept to have a constant conveyor belt of these new DES designs coming on based off of what's selling on your store now that being said I've been in situations where I've been doing that right like I've been making variations off of what's selling and I've been making making variations based off of what Facebook showing me is doing well but I've hit a point where I just couldn't get past that next stage right I was at $10,000 how do I get to $100,000 I had to think outside the box and what I did I actually went over this in my uh City's case study that you saw at some point in this course where I had to think outside the box with one of the designs that I I actually found and end up being a best seller and what I did is I went into Reddit and I went into my Niche which was cities at the time and I found this design that was resonating with Houston specifically it was this B someone mural design and it was like resonate it was like just trending right it was like a lot of people were like up voting it on on Reddit I saw that people are really passionate about it so I actually took that design I took that concept created a design for it tested it and it took off it was my bestseller by far so what I'm trying to say here is like during this point you want to be like yes do what's been working for you that's gotten you to to this point that you got $10,000 in sales that got you a two plus row as keep doing those things but don't stop being creative don't stop doing market research don't stop thinking about ideas that could potentially lead to a bestseller for you that could lead to completely changing the amount of Revenue that you're doing on your store also another key concept that you want to understand at this point is say you're at like a 2.0 row as a 2.5 and you just can't get past spending like $200 a day every time you go beyond $200 a day you just see that inverse relationship in works right where you see that like you increase your budget and your Ras comes down so you can't get past that $200 a day spend so a lot of people that I'm seeing in the community and from talking to my Consulting clients they get hung up on this right they're like okay like how do I like structure my campaigns differently can I like add another ad set can I try to look at like audience can I try testing this slideshow type of like ad or this grid ad and like nine times out of 10 those changes are not going to lead to you getting a higher row as at a higher spend what's going to do that is the designs that you're launching so like that's why we talked about at this point new designs is such an essential part so what I mean by that is like if you have a winning design it doesn't really matter how your campaigns are structured Facebook is going to spend on that ad because it's a good design it's going to generate a positive row as for you and it doesn't matter if you have one ad set two ads sets grid ads slideshows whatever it is like because it's a good product and you're displaying it to people assuming that your campaign is optimized for purchase conversions which we always recommend it doesn't really matter how you're structuring your campaign we're telling you the way that we structure it just because it keeps things organized it's been a framework that we've used that's been successful time and time again but it doesn't matter so like I don't want you guys getting caught up but like I can't get past a 2.5 row ad and I can't spend over $100 like let me just like tweak around my ad ad account that's not what's going to do it what's going to do it is an effective testing system between you creating designs and actually testing them on Facebook ads so I just wanted to reiterate that like when you're at this point where like how do I get scale higher it's going to be designs it's not going to be the structure of your ad account so the 10,000 foot View for the Facebook ads Advance stage 5.4 is really heavily focused on what we talked about the inverse relationship between budget and Raz and understanding that that is a direct control that you have on how much money you make and how much money you lose so understanding that when you raise your budget your Raz is going to come down and when you lower your budget your Ras is going to come up and you have the lever essentially in your hand to control how much you're spending so when things start looking like you're going to lose money you can pull that lever down recover the row as and therefore you're kind of mitigating your downside which is honestly a really powerful tool to understand because there's not a lot of things in business and a lot of things in life where you can control your downside and actually maximize your upside in such a way so understanding this concept is imperative so like I said when you're losing money and you think you're going below that break even you know you have the lever pull that lever down make the Raz come up and recover take some time test more to recover that Raz when you have that room for Raz 2.5 Raz or more you can increase the budget Therefore your Raz is still going to it's going to drop down but you're still going to be profitable over that 2.0 maximizing Revenue maximizing profit so that's the whole idea here with the advanced section is understanding that relationship and really that being the core principle of you managing your ads at this stage welcome to lesson 5.5 scaling up so here we are in stage five where we should have already done $10,000 in sales launched our Google ads and advanced email flows and we are selling internationally and by the end of this lesson we will have covered what it takes to actually hit $100,000 in sales how to maximize our profitability as well as what stops people from scaling and so the key levers for scale and where we should really be placing our focus and the thing that I want us to reflect on as we're going through this lesson is and again we should have already hit $110,000 in sales if we haven't then we're just learning you know just in case instead of just in time but once we've already done $10,000 in sales need to be reflecting on since we've hit that point what have been the things we've been spending our time on and what got us and I think a lot of times we have a tendency to misremember the things that got us from zero to 10 and then we come up with like a completely different set of ideas and logic in our mind that of what will get us from 10 to 100 because it's going to feel uncomfortable again like just like it felt uncomfortable when you were first launching and getting started for the first time you're like I have no idea what I'm doing it's going to feel at least my experience was every time I broke through a ceiling in terms of sales in my business it always felt brand new and that feeling of newness kind of sent me reeling like just grasping at straws and stuff so I want us to take a deep breath and just simply reflect on what were the things that got us from Z 0 to 10,000 and realize that we've already done the hardest part not saying that going from 10 to 100 is easy but we've done the hardest part and we've learned the skills we already have the skill sets a lot of them that will get us to 100 and the key levers for us to get there is just doing the basics right just doing the fundamentals over and over and over again and you can get to a multiple seven figure year business from literally just selling T-shirts fundamental lever number one is making seven new designs per day and I'll be the first to admit like on the 0 to7 figure store we were pretty good about this but like in 20 20 four Jesus I'm saying Jesus because what I'm about to say we got married in January hope Meg doesn't watch this part we got married in January of 24 and so from like January to March like we got married and then we were moving long story short we had a bunch of things going on so we were not as disciplined about launching our new designs as we should have been so I'll be the first to admit like these are best practices and these are good things to do but I'm not always perfect at it far from it but part of the reason that I'm very confident these are the right levers to be pulling is because I've seen the impact of when I have them as well as seeing the impact of when I don't have them so I've seen both ends of the spectrum so seven new designs per day at least 5 to seven email marketing we should be shooting for this to hit 20 to 25% of our total revenue and international expansion pretty much doubles business so as long as we did it in the right way we should have gone through all that setup and like learned how to you know fulfill it highly recommend entertaining the idea of hiring a VA to help you with that fulfillment especially as you scale up towards 100,000 and then Facebook ads learn about like horizontal versus vertical scaling and the things to be watching out for and another another key piece here to keep in mind is that as you're scaling it's really just a math formula and placing like I've talked a lot about how you need to know where your focus should be and I've said like the general principles but you can answer this question for yourself by starting to view your business as just a math formula that's all that it is and I've seen people that do multiple six figures in sales and still not get this down so really hear this part that if you're ever not sure and there will be periods even after you hit 10K definitely will be periods where performance will go like this and then this and then like it won't be consistent until we hit like multi in my experience multiple six figures in sales but even then we talked about how we're trading consistent paycheck for you know the unlimited freedom of running a bus potential unlimited Freedom so like we know the trade-offs when we signed up for this but it's going to be inconsistent but the beautiful thing is that when it feels inconsistent it's a math problem that we need to solve in order to get back on track it's not like it's some black box we're like I don't know could be anything it's literally and this is the math formula this is literally all that it is it's your cost per link click conversion rate your average order value and then your email that's it that's in terms of Topline sales overall what that buckets up under is your row as your overall row as so if we did 10,000 in sales 2500 in spend that's a four row as we want to be at close to a three to a four if you're not in that range once you're over 10K really need to pay attention because these are the things we need to be fixing so that's for the top line revenue and then below that is the profitability which that's what we're all really here for and maintaining profitability is just even more of a math equation like getting the Topline sales to be growing while maintaining that overall return that's the hardest part the the sub piece of that is our cost of goods sold and like that's pretty much it like cost of goods sold making sure that we're tracking our overhead and like transaction fees so that we're not losing like death by a th000 Cuts but if you show me somebody I'll give an example if you show me somebody who has done 10K in sales and their results are going like this and then I in terms of sales it's going up and down first thing I do I don't look at their cost of goods or anything first thing I do is I look at what's your cost per click like literally every single time this is all that I do look at what's your cost per click what's your conversion rate what's your average order value 90% of the time if it's super inconsistent one of those numbers is out of the range we want it to be in and then I talked to them so what have you done recently about improving this if it's the conversion rate like what split tests have you run have you run through your checklist to make sure you're driving traffic to the right places all those things then if it's cost per link click what new ads have you launched what new what tests have you running your ads and if they show me just an ad account that's just filled with verbatim the exact stuff that we talk about here like no nness or tests being run of their own then that's a big problem because they completely missed the plot they need to be running a test of their own in order to fundamentally start to understand this stuff like just following along thinking back to the Rubik tube example at 10K plus it's even more relevant than ever you cannot just be repeating the same steps like that we do you need to be learning each layer of the cube so you can repeat it for yourself cuz the stakes are higher than they've ever been but if you show me some like like if their cost per link click is high and a lot of times they're just throwing their hands up I'm like so what have you done here recently they're like well I I launched this campaign and like that's pretty much it but then they tell me about all the new products that they're launching on their site like like new product types I'm like okay good news bad news I know the reason why your performance is you know up and down it's because you're not putting your focus in the right place that happens too many times to count but then if you show me somebody whose store is growing they're having relatively consistent sales they're between a three to a four overall like off Facebook row as but then they're like I just feel like I'm not making much money first question are you running your p&l daily normally the answer is no these are Big mistakes that you can learn from so you don't have to learn them the hard way so really listen to this normally the answer is no I'm not running my p&l then question is okay why are you not running it or it doesn't even matter why you're not start running it and they go okay then second it's do you know what your cost of goods percentage is as a percentage of your overall sales they go no they're like I think it's this then they talk about print fulls pricing versus printify like my brain shuts off as soon as I hear no it doesn't matter whatever you're about to say the only thing that matters is do you know that number and if the answer is no then you need to know that number because I almost guarantee that that is the reason then if they do run their p&l they do know what their cost of goods is but they still feel like they're not profitable then again it's just a math equation like what are the other expenses like impacting the business it's either and they should be running the p&l in the balance sheet in tandem but then it's just why is it not what's your overhead expenses what's your transaction fees they should know all these number numbers cold and if they do all that if they know all these numbers from their cost of their traffic to their conversion rate or their average order value to how well their emails performing all that together makes their overall row as that's Topline sales if they know all those numbers and then they know bottom line like what's their cost of goods they're running their p&l every every day they're tracking their overhead making sure it's only three to 4% then they should be profitable and they will be profitable 90% of the time if I'm talking to somebody's over 10K it's one of those things that they they're missing and this concept stems very nicely into cash flow management as we start scaling up as we're shelling out more and more money on ads how do we make sure that we're you know maintaining profitability not only profitability but that we also are that we have like the cash reserves that we need in order to keep scaling which credit cards balances like solves a lot of this not telling anybody to go start racking up credit card debt the opposite but when you have like say you only have 1,000 bucks in your checking account when you have a credit card that even has a few thousand limit you're able to float the expenses on your credit card while you're waiting for the deposits to be hitting the checking account and then you just pay it off consistently so here it is the key metrics to track cost of goods should be in the 40 to 42% range the myrr or marketing Effectiveness ratio just your your off Facebook row as it's just your total sales divided by total ad spend so this is like your Facebook ad spend Google all in and it should be 25 to 33% of Revenue roughly overhead should be 3 to 4% and transaction fees should be ballpark 4 to 6% and your overhead expenses is everything that everything besides your cost of goods your ad spend and like transaction fees and stuff so it's your Shopify subscription your printify premium whatever AI tool you're using all that stuff there's one point where my old business partner and I we let our overhead completely completely get away from us and it wasn't until a few months of us feeling like we were just making absolutely no money we finally sat down and added up our total overhead and this is on a print on demand brand our our overhead was over $30,000 a month cuz we had just started glomming on apps and softwares and stuff that we just didn't need and the ironic part is that when we stripped all that out we canceled everything just about performance not only didn't dip it actually increased cuz our sight speed went up our Focus honed so we are launching more ads like we're doing the important we're getting back to the basics question is so what do we do when the cost of goods gets high cost of goods there's only like two main ways that we can move it either charge more to the customer or lower our cost in terms of charging more the other thing we can do is incentivize people to buy more because on printify we get charged more for the first item shipping so if we're able to get somebody to buy two to three shirts instead of just one talk about a lot in the funnel optimization then we're able to ultimately lower our cost of goods but cost of goods is one of the ones that I tried for years to negotiate with printers I've worked with every printer Under the Sun everybody from printify to printful to gelato all of them and that I've even worked with local printers like Mom and Pop shops everybody just trying to get blood from a stone trying to nickel and dime to get the lowest possible percentage primarily because I had a limiting belief for a long time that nobody would pay more than 20 bucks for a shirt which just turned out to be completely false which that's another lesson I had to learn the hard way challenge your your beliefs with data not just with you know the reason why you think that if your cost of goods is in like the 44 45% range if it's at 50% then you have a real problem like it's very hard to be profitable at that so if your cost of goods is too high most likely the the best answer is just increase your prices second answer look at what your average order value is if your average order value is like under $40 you need to get that up to 40 to 45 at least and the other things you can do is like once you do a significant amount of volume you're able to reach out to printify printful and print provider they'll give you volume discounts they have margin to give you just need to be a large enough player for them to consider giving it to you but it's pretty quick topic on this the most important thing is that you're tracking it and international sales is another tricky one where you can potentially be losing a lot of money if you're not fulfilling it in the right way that's another reason why we put off doing International sales until this late into the course because if you try doing it too early and you do it the wrong way you end up paying absurd shipping fees and it's just that your whole life is stressing about that opposed to doing the important stuff like more designs more ads that sort of thing next so what do we do if our ad spend is inefficient so this is if we are under and we're just going through like the Big Blocks the big things that help make sure that we're maintaining profitability if our ad spend is inefficient we AK if our on Facebook row is like under a two then we pull back the rein and we talk about this a lot in the the ad section so I'm not going to go into too many details but basically anytime our AR RZ is dropping below two my knee-jerk reaction is three things number one I look at the data and I see what's been going on is this just a fluke for a day or is this a trend over the past one two 3 weeks and if it's a trend which is what this is referring to then I decrease the ad spend by 20 to 30% and if it continues to be poor then I just keep decreasing it like every 2 to 3 days and then if it continues to be poor and it's nothing's going up then I know that I need to launch more ads I should be launching more ads in testing anyway but if I really want to get my performance back up that's what I definitely need to do the Target rowes that we shoot for in order to scale to 100K plus is roughly like a 2.2 to a 2.5 because when you're at that scale and you're getting lots of new customers your email is starting to do really well it should be doing really well and that's where like this past Q4 our email made up 20% of sales but it was 50% of our net profit it's pretty substantial Facebook ads and organic is 80% of sales but it's only 50% of the net profit so next is what to do if your overhead is too high so if your overhead is high which it should be in roughly the 3 to 4% range like you really don't need that much ways to stop this from happening in the first place is keep a running log of what all your expenses are they should all be very visible and easy to see keep it in your p&l spreadsheet like off to the side or create a new tab and update it once a month set of recurring reminder so you know exactly every single expense that's hitting the business card every single recurring transaction make sure that you're not paying for higher tier on any of those that you don't have to be paying for but again catch it in the first place to know that you need to change it so you have to run the p&l daily and then if it's above 3 to 4% only two ways you can improve that is either a do more revenue or b lower your costs I'm a big fan of doing both keeping cost as low as possible while doing the highest revenue because I know roughly like what our bare minimum expenses are our bare minimum is like customer success VA our Shopify subscription PRI subscription clavio subscription then a few other apps like uh Swatch King and like bulk product editor like those kind of things like we're just not going to run without those so I know like the bare minimum that I can get to and then I know if it goes beyond that then I just need to start increasing sales which is always kind of the goal but it's good to play offense while you're playing defense to help us maximize profit and also as we're doing thinking about these or I'll go through transaction fees transaction fees is pretty straightforward there's not a whole lot that you can do with this it's transaction fees is the amount that every single credit card processor charges you in order to use their services so PayPal has them Shopify has them stripe doesn't matter what platform you're on they all have them and an average like for Shopify they decrease it the higher the plan you're on like once you're at 10K 10 to 20K is when I would you can do the math and if you look at the Shopify plans you can see so here it is these transaction action fees down here so when you're on the lowest plan the most basic plan it's 2.9% and 30 cents when you're on the 79 it's 2.7% you're on 299 it's 2.5% so you can just do the math equation that and we don't care about in person or third party but you can just do the math equation to see how much would you need to be making in order for this to be worth it so going from 29 to 79 that's a $50 in increase so if I do uh 50 / 02 I have to be doing 2500 bucks a month in sales for it to be worth it for it to just pay for itself just off of the transaction fees alone then a level up from that is another 0.2 but that's a $220 increase so in order for that to be worth it I need to be doing at least $11,000 per month in sales so really once you're at the 10 to 15K month mark it makes sense to just be at the highest plan that is if you're billing yearly though so let's do the math if you're not that would be 399 minus 105 yeah so 15K a month if you're just billing monthly that's the point where just mathematically your the highest plan is paying for itself plus the other things you get is like additional staff accounts checkout capacity we don't really have to worry about but that's one way to lower your transaction fees another thing to watch out for in terms of transaction fees is PayPal and well most most payment providers they charge more for international so keeping an eye on that but roughly 4 to 6% is a typical range but run the p&l daily actually run the p&l daily and keep things in perspective like what's the most important lever to be pulling like if your cost of goods is 50% and your overhead is 6% I don't care at all about the overhead being 6% I care about getting the 50% transaction or cost of goods down to 40% cuz once I do that that's going to be a 10% swing in in my total net profit opposed to like a 2 to 3% on my overhead so do both but make sure you're moving the ball forward or on the one that actually matters like back to strategy the definition of strategy is number one making sure we're working on the right vehicle and then number two is making sure that within that vehicle we're working on the right thing and something that somebody in the community somebody who's doing very very well he was taking a bunch of notes on like as he was going through the course and he mapped out like that the success equation like energy times Focus times strategy divided by mindset and then he drew an arrow for himself to both of the ones that he thought that he needed the most work on so again self-awareness being key to be able to take a step back and evaluate and as you're ramping up and you're scaling more the numbers are going to feel more and more like intoxicating and it's going to money does weird things to people and it does weird things to you too I guarantee it did stuff to me not in terms of like the type of person you are or anything but it shifts your mindset and somebody who was logical I've seen them flip and become very emotional because they felt really good when things started going well and then performance dies out a little bit and they start questioning everything and they're like was that just a fluke is that never going to happen again like no there's no such thing as just a fluke it's just a math equation just return to that and get back to the basics and get back to your discipline and get back to doing the things that got you there in the first place another thing you can do is QuickBooks your p&l and like tax reporting and all that stuff it integrates with Shopify and PayPal directly so it pulls all of our transactions all of our payouts and then we just link all of our credit cards and bank accounts and then we have a bookkeeper who handles that plus our sales tax so sales tax and bookkeeping to me go hand inand like once you and Shopify will tell you this like once you start hitting sales tax thr olds in individual states then you need to start collecting it and remitting it this is not Financial advice this is not legal advice or anything of the sort but once you start hitting those thresholds I personally found it to be way easier to just go and hire a bookkeeper who had e-commerce experience rather than trying to learn it myself because when it comes to sales tax and Meg is the our expert on this out of the two of us you need to be filing in every individual State some some of them are grouped together like if you know like college applications there's like the common app or you're able to apply to a bunch of them similar to that for sales tax but you need to basically your LLC or whatever your entity type is needs to register with each individual State again some of them are grouped chat GPT can help answer a lot of this but don't make that your final decision maker you can just answer your broad stroke questions but basically you get a number from the states and then you enter it into Shopify Shopify will collect that for you but it gets deposited to your checking account so that's why when we're talking about running the p&l you need to make sure that you are using it uh effectively so that you're taking out the sales tax amount because you have to pay that to the states some states it's monthly others it's quarterly like a fewer annually but again the reason I'm not going into excruciating detail about this is that I'm not an accountant I'm not an expert I just know the way that we solve the problem and we vetted tons of services and stuff like avalara tax jart we talked to all of them they're super expensive and not really worth it we pay our bookkeeper anywhere from like 3 to 400 bucks per month and she does all she's an absolute Gem and she does all of the books and obviously all of the books but like she runs the her version of the p&l and balance sheet and sends that to us but then she also files or sends the the state income or not income tax the sales tax returns to each one of the states so that we don't have to worry about that and then in terms of writeoffs again this is not a tax course by any means consult your own tax professional it's not Financial advice but tax deduction and if you don't have an LLC yet by this point please get an LLC everything should be running through an entity it should not be running through your own personal checking account but the the broad stroke 8020 principle things that I've learned when it comes to taxes is number one keep everything clean all of your business transactions absolutely have to be running through a either a business checking account or a business credit card and just have two of them I've had multiple credit cards in the past for like different bonuses and structures and stuff not worth it in my experience just makes it a nightmare come tax season so now we just have one checking account One credit card that's not true we have the Capital One 2% and then we have the AMX gold card okay so three cards AMX is literally just for Facebook ad spend so it doesn't really it feels like just one card we just clean it up keep the accounts clean no literally no personal transaction should be going on any one of those those cards and then vice versa none of your business expenses should be going to a personal card and if you accidentally slip up that's okay just make sure that you keep track of it and this is one of those things that a lot of people will hear and they're like yeah yeah I know I need to keep track of it I know I should run my p&l and bookkeeper like would be a good thing to invest in but then at least for me I needed to learn it the hard way and come to like have to go through a couple of really bloody tax Seasons where last minute I'm scrambling to get stuff together before I really put two and two together like there's an easier way the easier way is doing it a little bit at a time and some of of the tax rate offs you're able to do are things like basically any investment that you make that is going to be used strictly for business purposes is like the definition and the tax code handbook not many people know this but there's a good book on this called taxfree wealth and a fun excerpt from that is that the the IRS like tax code it's like it's several hundred Pages only like 44 of those pages are for like listing out the things that you get taxed for and like where like what's a tax event defining those things the rest of the like 3 to 400 pages is all about the ways that you can save on taxes so the taxes are there to like think about what the government wants like from a fundamental level it wants to incentivize economic growth so it wants to incentivize people who are reinvesting in one way or another into improving like the economy and like improving the country essentially so like that's why real estate there's a ton of tax breaks that's why when you start a business there's a lot of tax breaks there's a lot of things to learn about this but bottom line is as long as you keep it clean and you have at a very basic level you run your p&l and you hire a bookkeeper when it makes sense like that to me has been the the best thing for us and like keeping clear track of our expenses and then next another this is outside of the outside of like the the cash flow stuff but a design workflow is one of the best ways to scale things up and to like really start cranking stuff out so like like as you're making you know at this point you should be making at least 1,000 bucks 2,000 maybe 3,000 a month you should be able to grow very very quickly to set your sites you should be able to grow at least 20 to 30% month over month if not much more like 20 30% is very conservative cuz pretty much the main functions that you're doing is bumping your budgets 15 to 25% every 2 to 3 days as long as the brow as holds you're watching your email performance so it should be at 20 to 25% you're making more designs so that improves your ad performance and then you're just basically rinsing and repeating those same things and when you're doing that and you're doing a good job and you're testing lots of new stuff in your ads then you're you should be able to spend more and more 15 to 20% doesn't sound like a lot but it compounds very quickly over the course of a month so keep doing that and one of the best things you can invest in is a designer so you have a design workflow like on History te's the design workflow that we had was we hired a bunch of designer like three to four designers off of upwork we gave them all a Tri we gave them five t-shirt designs like ideas and said make these t-shirt designs and then out of the the ones we hired for the trial we picked the top one or two that we like the best we added them to a trailer board and then on that trailer board we just loaded it up we had a bunch of columns it was like ideas ready for designer designer in progress approval ready for mockups like the whole workflow like picture in the master design checklist and then our time was just spent and this is how we do it on this 0 to7 figure store now we're not actually the ones making the designs anymore at this point cuz that frees up so much of our time now if you like the designs by all means keep doing it but if you by hiring a designer and putting a good workflow in place and building a good working relationship with them it can help you really scale the business up like much much quicker than just doing it alone so your homework for this section is that you should have build out all your email flows set up International fulfillment launch your International Facebook ads and have your Google search campaign running other things you should set up Facebook ret targeting ads you should send your email campaigns two times per week test out Facebook manual bid campaigns and be consistently bumping budgets on your winners 15 to 20% every two to three days and never ever ever stop iterating on your winning designs and you should also be tracking your email as a percentage of Revenue your overhead percentage your cost of goods and your myrr there's the keys the most important things to keep in mind on the path from 10 to 100,000 and enjoy the ride and congratulations on making it this far thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson stage five 10K important Milestone should we do a quick um interesting fact you might be wondering what this photo is here on the wall and so this is Milford Sound and so this is one of the most photograph places in the world and it's in the very bottom of the south island of New Zealand and it is a uncular world heritage site and the reason for that is because it is one of the only places in the world where you can see a glacial formed fud a temperate rainforest and a glacier all in one sort of scene and it may look familiar because it was used in um the film I think it was the start of the Prometheus film from memory the second one of those films is it Prometheus I think was and so yeah it's an amazing it's a coastal place and so that's the tasmin sea and there's also a glacial Rivier glacial river that flows down and um it's very difficult to get that photo with the reflection because of where it is it's in a really remote area of New Zealand and it's extremely windy and uh I got very very lucky that day so what do you do when you get to 10K have a party spend all the money congratulations you have reached 10 K and revenue it's such an important Milestone I remember mine it was such a great day but it's also a time to reflect on what's working well and what's not at this point you should have at least one design that is generating most of the sales than the others and so just go and make more designs like that and so once you reach 10K it's time to build out an accurate profit and loss daily tracking spreadsheet and really drill down into your numbers and focus on finding the efficiency your costs to maximize your profitability tip pay close attention to the shipping costs it's one that caught me out the cost that you charge versus the cost that you get charged by your print on demand provider use the data that you track and analyze to focus on improving your conversion rate and increasing your average order value consider expanding to New Market locations and focus on locations that are relevant to your brand don't forget the email side of things of your business and ensure that you maintain a row as of 2.0 or more on your Facebook ads and focus on building out your customer list because the true value of your brand is in your customer email list and it's way way easier to send out email marketing to your customer list to generate Revenue than it is to pay meta to deliver your ads it's also a really good time to implement a review collection tool and also adopts the founder plain text email approach to requesting reviews there's nothing more intriguing from a customer point of view than to receive an email direct from the founder asking for their feedback it's a really good time at this point to build out your clavio flows and complete them and start research on how to run email campaigns and one thing that we like to do is we focus on uh one salesy sort of email per week and then than two value based emails per week but I bet John did a great job of explaining that to get inspiration about your emails consider signing up for other newsletters from similar brands in your Niche and take note on their emails in terms of the frequency that they send them out the subject the content whether they you know contain images or text so take lots of notes and then use that to formulate a plan on how you're going to do your emails so once you reach 10K per month it's a really good opportunity to ramp up your ad strategy uh by building out your Google performance Max and search campaigns um and as a tip I recommend that you utilize Google ad support for setup if needed they were very helpful in setting my Google ads up there's also an opportunity for you to build out your meta retargeting ads um and so once you're at 10K per month you will have lots of data and the custom audiences that you will have built out will be populated with lots to data too and so with your R targeting there are essentially two approaches the first approach is a middle funnel which is essentially customers that are already familiar with your brand they've been on your website but haven't purchased anything they've maybe been on your Facebook page or your Instagram account they may have viewed one of your ads or engaged with one of your ads they've also maybe viewed some of your videos and so these are warm customers they are just one step away from purchasing from you they just need a little bit more encouragement and so with a middle funnel retargeted campaign it's a really good idea to provide some additional information that helps build trust and gives them reassurance and you can do this in the form of providing reviews customer photos Etc really good idea and the second type of retargeting ad that you can utilize is what I like to call as the bottom funnel which is essentially customers that have added something to their car or initiated a checkout but didn't complete the purchase and so these are really hot customers they're moments away from buying and they just need some incentive to buy and a really good strategy is to offer them a deal with some urgency and that will work well for your retargeting bottom funnel campaign so I just want to share some tips with you about managing your ad account these are some of the things that I've learned over the last few months so when you're making budget decisions about your campaigns it's really important that you consider the 7day 14-day and 30-day averages across your campaigns and ads it's good to use the one- day view but it's really not good practice to make decisions based on the one day view you can use it to establish if your row as is trending up or down but it's really important that we make these decisions based on more data than one day the reason why this isn't so important is it's really easy to get into the habit of making changes BAS based on one day and these changes unsettle your ad account and can affect the overall performance in a negative way good news if you're profitable you are ready to scale by increasing your ad spend on The Meta campaigns that are 2.0 or more Ras um and you should be looking to reduce the budgets on the campaigns to less than 2.0 row as another tip that I want to share with you is if you have a specific card that has receiving a lot of AD spend but it has has generated any sales then you might want to consider turning that ad off as a rule of thumb I like to use the value of one t-shirt for the total amount spent on an ad before I switch it off and I just want to share some Milestones with you that we should be aiming for so we need a conversion rate on our website that's 2% or more we need an average order value that's $45 or more the cost per click of our ads should be 30 C to $1 optimal range around sort Q4 that can get a bit just keep that in mind when it comes to emails we want the percentage of our total revenue to be attributed to email by 20 to 30% the cost of goods that we sell should be 40% of the retail value and when you're looking at your Google ads the target row as is around about 4.0 so it's important to keep customer service quality at its best and I've got lots of tips for this and the first thing I want to say is that do not take take the negative customer feedback as a collective picture of your brand hopefully you will have had hundreds if not thousands of orders by now and the amount of feedback you you will get that is negative is only really a small amount of the things that you have already done well to receive thousands and thousands of orders but you need to be aware that customers like to complain and you can expect to receive negative reviews from customers that have never emailed you they will say things about your brand that are inuendo in a and are in a way just trying to damage your reputation and this can feel emotional it can feel harsh especially when you haven't been dealing with it for very long and so to try and take the emotion out of that it's really important to have a good customer service tool in place and if you have one with an AI feature this can be really helpful into responding to negative reviews and also difficult customer service tickets come in most of the customer service tickets you'll work with normally quite positive it'll be customers who order the wrong size or customers that haven't yet received their order and they just need some help finding the tracking information but sometimes you get some that customers are really demanding um expect to be told that despite all the information you provided on the website you are wrong for not providing them with the T-shirt they were expecting and and you get these sort of complaints and it's perfectly normal but the key takeaway here is that it is not reflective of you and your brand and as long as you focus on delivering a high quality outcome for the customer while maintaining the the policies with on your website um in a positive way then everything will be okay and so once you reach 10K per month it's a really good opportunity to start homing in on your brand identity and and the voice and how you can use that to build trust more trust with your customers data is really important again you can you can look at your customer service feedback you can look at the comments on your ads and you can really use that information to start to build out your brand identity and also to build out your ads I mean you can there there's data everywhere at this point and it's really up to you to find that data and use it to improve your business in terms of customer service ticket management tools I highly recommend you go into the Shopify App Store do some research um gorgeous is one another one is called Tido which is I which is the one that I use and there's probably some others out there you can do it through email for a while but once you start getting 20 30 tickets per day and those tickets are at different statuses at any time and you're waiting for responses from your print on demand provider or responses from the customers because you need more information it can get a bit unmanageable so highly advise getting a a good customer service ticket management tool in around about the 10K per month mark welcome to lesson 6.0 the concept section for stage 6 100K plus and in this section up until now we have gone through our foundations we've recapped these enough times at this point we know what we covered so we went through our research we buil out all of our accounts we did our design phase which we will be revisiting uh continuously throughout scaling this business then we went through test four testing and optimization uh or stage four which is where we ran our mock-up test and launched our Facebook testing campaigns and then we went through stage five where we started talking about scaling and now here we are in stage six 100,000 plus so first off congratulations on surpassing $100,000 Plus in sales and if you're watching this far in the course and you haven't done1 ,000 plus you're more than welcome to watch along obviously it's totally up to you but uh just keep in mind like learning just in case versus just in time we want to be doing the latter cuz these are good things to know about but there's nothing that we're going to talk about in this section that you need to have a fundamental understanding of when you're still in like the testing or the design phase for example so if you're watching this out of you know a fear like you're going to miss something and you need to know what's going to happen 10 steps ahead that's just simply not the case but again you're more than welcome to watch but for all of you who are at the $100,000 Plus in sales Mark which there have been several people even from just the first course alone who have already surpassed this this section is for you and in this stage we're going to be talking about a couple of main things one is hiring a team two is Building Systems and workflows to help scale up our operations even more than at the $10,000 uh level uh and then three we're going to be talking about scaling our paid ads and how to achieve like a real consistency with our performance so we're going to have streamlined operation for our initial hires automated some workflows and um active like customer retention programs like really boost our lifetime value and so at this point it's important that we dial in some of these things because it's at a stage now where like we're either winning big or we can learn big it says lose big but learn big is more accurate and the reason for this is that with every now we're at a point like you've seen it already that with every decision we make and that's what a lot of like scaling from 100,000 to a million is about is just making the right decisions it's less about like learning like new skills and hacks aside from like learning you know to hire and manage people effectively it's really about making sure that we're making the right decisions that are going to scale the business up opposed to have to relearn the same thing things that we already did and this is where we really start going from employee to business owner cuz up until now remembering back to to Robert kosaki cash flow quadrant when you start off running a business you know you don't become a business owner the day that you even though I thought you did you don't become a business owner when you file for an LLC or when you open up your Shopify store yes you technically do have a business and you own it so sure but a real true business owner is somebody who is able to elevate themsel up out of the day-to-day operations and it took me years to learn this but elevating ourselves out of the day-to-day operations is like the Hallmark of somebody who's actually a business owner somebody who works on the business rather than in it when you're in the business which is necessary for a really long time and even to this day like I still do the ads and stuff because I like it especially when it comes to like the key things that are very Outsource if that's a word like customer service uh supply chain like uploading products designs those three really timec consuming tasks we really want to like Elevate ourselves up out of those roles because not only it's not really about like we don't want to do the work but like if the business is going to grow it needs like a CEO it needs the person who is looking out at the Horizon setting the vision of where we're going to go and then training the rest of the team on that to make sure that everybody knows their place cuz all the individual contributors they are down in the weeds they have to be in order to do their job effectively and as somebody who was down in the weeds fundamentally you don't have an eye for what is coming and like what the future holds so you don't know what to expect that is the role of the CEO or business owner but before we get ahead of ourselves the ultimate goal here is to build it to a point that it's able to run without us being there not that we're going to completely step away if that's your goal we can talk about how to do that but the goal here is to build it to a point that it's self-sustaining so that then we are able to make uh spend our time making improvements rather than just maintaining cuz probably up until this point you've felt like a large percentage of your time has gone to just maintaining the business as it is like just keeping the lights on making sure sales keep coming in we want to it's a process but we want to slowly start to move ourselves out of that and in doing this process the right way this is where we either stand to gain a lot on our margins and our bottom line or you know we can lose a lot basically we need to understand and like do the basics extremely well and systematize that so that we have people that are doing it consistently up to our standard rather than just delegating it out and just saying here figure this out cuz that's a recipe for undermining everything that we've built and I've made that mistake a lot of times before as well yeah made that mistake a lot and shiny object syndrome I love this beam so much we included it twice because it's ever relevant even it doesn't matter what stage you're at as you grow in business the the shiny objects only get shinier so it's something that bears repeating over and over and over again so Mor of the story this whole stage is going to be about it's it's going to be more conceptual and like thought process driven because that's really what it comes down to but we're going to talk about hiring uh and as well as like some more advanced ad strategies and things to be thinking about to help make sure that we get the maximum performance and really going from 100K in sales to a million is just about adding consistency it's about adding consistency and that comes from our ability to elevate ourselves out of it now I've run like like for example to give frame reference our 0 to7 figure brand that went from0 to million doll in sales in 10 months and it does a million dollar in sales every year you know about 20% net profit margin like 18 to 20 that's run with myself Meg we're like 5 to 10 hours per month on the brand except for during the holiday season and then we have one customer service rep uh and we have somebody who helps with like product uploads but those two vas the only full-time one is the customer service rep and other than that the business pretty much runs by itself and we're going to talk about how we get the ads to a point where they run consistently like uh without you having to be there constantly checking them like in the very beginning I was checking them every single day like hour by hour just about but now that we've taken more of a step back we're able to do put up six figure months you know again anywhere from 15 to 25% net profit margin is a normal variance with very little little involvement now if we really wanted to grow it and we really wanted to go to multiple seven figures a year we could definitely do that but this is where it comes into play deciding what you want like what you want to build the brand into and but I would recommend if this is your first time hitting 100K on any business just don't even think about that for right now just plan like your next year and plan on just rinsing and repeating the same thing over and over and over again and don't make any like knee-jerk decisions like I wouldn't recommend quitting your job or anything or like basically if you're relying on this business in order to live I recommend like take some time wait a month or two if you're considering quitting your job to do this full-time now that you're at this point I take it from me I quit my job too early if I could go back and do it again I would have waited another couple months CU for me it was like as soon as I made more money on my business than I did on my job I just quit like pretty much the next day and that was premature because I didn't realize like the ups and downs that comes with business I just hadn't experienced that before so hold off for a month or two would be my advice obviously it's up to you make your own decisions but uh wait a month or two to so you can really experience what the ups and downs are going to be like even safer time to do that would be after hitting a million dollars in sales which is what we're going to talk about next so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the lessons now we're going to talk about team AKA how do we hire people that are able to take some of the things off of our plate so that we are able to focus on working on the business instead of in of it uh so we're at stage six $100,000 Plus in sales and this is the one lesson that it could possibly go sooner uh at the 10,000 is level but it's something that we should definitely be doing here once we're at 100K so we should have already hit 100K in sales scale to profitability consistently and have a clear understanding of your market and product performance and we're starting to master running you know Shopify all the metrics our ad campaigns and customer service workflows and that's going to be an important thing like in order for us to effectively Outsource or delegate things we need to have a fundamental understanding of how to do it well ourselves before we can you know expect to hire somebody and train them uh to do it well so by the end of this lesson we're going to understand when and why to hire help know the key roles to hire for first and learn how to train and manage your team effectively and the reason it matters is that hiring a team and delegating tasks allows the transition from being self-employed to a true business owner like we talked about in the concepts lesson so with a team growth becomes sustainable and reduces burnout or operational inefficiencies and to quote Steve Jobs great things in business are never done by one person and quick story on this that when when Meg was starting her first brand and she was you know starting to scale things up I think we were yeah we were working together on it by this point she started doing it like by herself at first and then we started working together one of the things that like she had designs and and she talks about this a lot now so I can share it like she had designs that were doing really well the ads were doing well and like her time objectively would have been best spent just making more designs like the top sellers and being able to think like a business owner instead she was getting very sidetracked with running understandably I did the same thing when I got started she was getting sidetracked with all the customer inquiries and on the note of customer service in general like it doesn't matter how good of a job you do like you could have the best products the best prices fast shipping speeds fast customer service like you could do everything perfectly but as you scale things up and especially with a low price point high volume number of orders business as you get out into the bell curves of society doesn't matter how good of a job you do you're just naturally going to bump into some people that are just miserable and they just are going to find something to be upset about no matter what so we have to be able to take that and set it aside but her time is being like used up by in large part by customer service and every time she would get a single message from somebody who was upset about anything she would take it like very personally and it would throw into like a a tail spin cuz it was the first time she'd ever done anything like this so point of the story is that once we finally hired a VA which VA virtual assistant just somebody who is internationally based just not in the office just like a virtual employee but they're a contractor once you hire that person and put them in place and teach them how to do the job well imagine if just all the customer service tickets you're receiving you just didn't have to think about them and that was just off of your brain entirely and then you just check in with that person on a weekly basis to see how things are going that's the point that we're going to get to so when we're building a support team we're hiring in order to like Aid our growth and an important thing is for us to be training and then delegating well and a big mistake that I made when hiring was I would just hire a person and throw them in and say pretty much figure it out and then I would get upset when they couldn't figure it out because e even if they're like a very like intelligent and capable person just they weren't in my brain so they can't know it was on me they couldn't know how to run like the customer service department well because I hadn't ever explained like what I wanted so being able to create Sops that people are able to pick up and like just refer back to is absolutely crucial first let's answer the question of like when should you start hiring and I recommend starting to hire at the point that you have positive cash flow so you're making profit every single month which by the time you're at 100K you should definitely be at that point and then when you see that there's a section of the business that is taking up like run this is a good way to to finalize this for you do a Time study where for one week you track everything that you do everything that takes up your time and mark it on your calendar like make a new calendar in Google Calendar then anytime you do something just like drag a block and Mark it in at the end of the week look back and reflect on what were the things that I got done or what were the things that were taking my time and one it's eye opening for a number of reasons because you realize that maybe you weren't working as much as you quite thought you were or it felt like which that's a whole another topic but one of the biggest sections you'll see is that like customer service for example is taking up your time and if you see like customer service this past week took up I don't know 10 hours of my time imagine if you took those 10 hours and you put it into a higher leverage activity like working on designs then ask yourself if I took that 10 hours and I was able to put in designs especially when you're at this level 100K how much would that 10 hours what would be the return on investment for that time and normally the answer is like 10 hours spent building new ads or 10 hours spent making new designs is worth dramatically more for the business than it is to be doing the customer service so then the question is how much could we expect to pay reasonably expect to pay in order to Outsource that 10 hours of time and if we're going overseas to the Philippines to the places where like cost of living is dramatically lower than over here in the United States wages range anywhere from like $3 to $4 an hour upwards to like 5 to 10 it completely depends on the person like in the United States stes but it completely depends on like the what the role is uh and like previous experience all that sort of thing but for customer service R say we're talking about five five bucks an hour so that 10 hours a week that's $50 you'd be paying for that then try to put a number to it of if you had that 10 hours back how much would that be worth for the business once that equation equals out which it does very very quickly it honestly equals out at the 10K level pretty quickly but that's the time that it makes sense to start hiring and the roles that we want to be hiring for are three main ones first one is customer service that one get off your plate right away and what we have the customer service team do is they do all emails all returns all order processing that that's their whole department is there Theirs to own so emails uh so that's all the tickets managing the orders talking with PRI to figure out where orders are all that whole realm of things and then also uh social media comments which quick note on that we don't just add them to our business manager or to our page because like we talked about in the previous ad sections that's a recipe for unfortunately getting banned so what we recommend doing is uh setting up a software like hoot site or there's a bunch of other ones that are honestly cheaper than HootSuite that do the same exact thing where you connect to Facebook and then you're able to give the person a log into to that software and the softwares are also kind of nice because it shows like all your pages which you only have two you have Facebook and Instagram but it shows all the comments across Ross all of the ads all the inbox messages and that's what we have the customer success people manage is they manage email tickets social media comments that's pretty much it but that adds up to a lot of hours especially as you're scaling then the next thing that we recommend Outsourcing for is design so uh we talked about like setting up a design workflow like we had on History T's but design is the one that it's a little bit more expensive the place we' recommend to go for hiring designer which there's a couple of different options so these are a couple of the options when it comes to hiring for designers so you can either go the Fiverr route which Fiverr is like a gig economy site where there's people listing their services and uh there's a lot of designers there's AI services on here now but you can find people for a wide variety of things but the one that we personally use is upwork and upwork is a place where you're able to find Talent from all around the world and you're able to hire them like on an hourly basis and so if I just go here and I type in T-shirt designer $25 an hour John S so what I do is I create a a profile and then I create a job listing and I would use chat GPT to do this so I would say write an upwork job posting for a graphic T-shirt designer we are aiming for someone in the 20 to $30 an hour range is able to make one to three t-shirts per hour these are for our print on demand apparel brand and there we go so we create a job listing simply by asking chat GPT to write it and then we go over to upwork and we would sign up with a an employer account and then you post the listing and then the way that it works with upwork is you make the listing and people are able to apply to your job or what you can do is go through and invite people so wow there's a lot of people on here for this yeah so I would go through and add people that look good and send them like a personal note say something like uh a shirt that they that they did that you liked and invite a bunch of people to to the job and I aim for like five to 10 people and the things that I'm looking for when I'm evaluating talent is really it's pretty simple I'm looking for and you can filter by it over here people that are either top rated or top rated plus so like this guy you can see John S he's $25 an hour and he has a 96% job success rate and he's earned over $80,000 and he's been in the graphic design industry for 12 plus years so this guy's been around a while this guy where is he oh he just went away there was somebody who uh maybe he was wasn't yeah this guy's he has 93% success rate but he has earned over $600,000 that means he has done he's been full-time on here for a while so point being they're very very qualified but what I like to do is filter by top rated Plus or top rated Rising Talent is people who are brand new but they're showing good signs of promise but what I'll do is look at these guys and then look if you click on his profile you might have to create an account in order to see it but you create an account then you can see their their portfolio of work and when I'm doing this I would browse for like 30 minutes 30 to 45 minutes invite a bunch of people and the reason that I'm not like looking at it very meticulously is because of what we do next and what we do next is we give them uh we pick out like four or five people in terms of designers that we like and then we give them a uh a trial like a paid trial where we give them five design Concepts and we ask them out of all the designers we ask each of them to make these five designs and you have to be upfront with them about that tell them that it's a trial that you're not just hiring them right off the bat but uh they'll get paid hourly for it have them do the five designs and then send it back to you and then whichever one of the designers you like the best then You' go with that one and that step it sounds like pretty obvious but we didn't do that for a while and we would just find one on there that we liked hire them start working with them fulltime then it would take like a week or two before we realiz realiz and we get back the first round of designs then we would realize that you know it wasn't actually what we were looking for so I recommend looking through the portfolios and try to find design design portfolios that align with the design style that you're looking for and more importantly look for designs that like augment your collection maybe not just the same exact thing that you're already selling but try to find designers that have a new skill set or a new flavor that can improve your collection and not just like completely out in left field like if you're selling you know mostly minimalist line art then you wouldn't be wowed by alwin's Design there where it's like kind of psychedelic trippy but look for design portfolios that align with what you're looking for invite them uh then once you run them through the trial the nice thing about upwork is that they track everybody's time and everything they take screenshots so you can tell that they're like actually working and then you just hire them on like a a ongoing retainer or not retainer like an hourly you set the cap number of hours so like say we hir John and we give him the target of two designs per hour which is pretty typical depending on the quality of the design so we say John we are adding you to a trell board where we have 10 design ideas and we're expecting roughly two designs per hour if anything changes please let us know but do you think you can hit that get them to say yes or no and then that's what you can expect so then it again bring it back to just a math equation you're able to make one new design for 12 $.50 so if you make a 100 designs that's a $1,250 investment but that's 100 extra designs that's massive for your store so hopefully you can see that by working with and you might have to work with a couple like you're not going to get it perfect the first time through I've worked with a ton of designers before we found like really good ones that we like a lot but once you find a really good one it can help your business scale so much because then you're no longer like spending all your time between customer service and then making the design designs you're now just able to do the truly like unique skill set that only you are the most qualified person to do which even this can be trained but the element that you were the most qualified for is being able to see what's happening in the ads what's getting the cheapest clicks what are people buying in your store and then iterate on those top designs and coming up with the concept that you want them to iterate off of is like the most important piece and we talked about this in the design iteration but like I showed examples of ways that we iterated on the design and like instructions that we gave to the to the designers and really good ones you're able to just give them like here's a ballpark like design style ballpark of the design style that I like please like come up with new ones based off of this but like the more specific that you're able to get the more likely you are to get the outputs that you want and get the most bang for your buck but by hiring on here you're able to really scale up your production uh a lot you will have some that are like agencies you have to watch out for make sure they're not just like farming out the work to a bunch of different people but at the end of the day just as long as the the output is high quality then that's what we care about the most next in terms of hiring for customer service and somebody who's like uploading all your products which that can be the same person for a while we have two different people one who manages customer service one who manages like product uploads and stuff but here's an sop that is linked somewhere around this video uh in the free community about how we hire highquality vas and in terms of hiring people you can either a higher expensive like it's like the price or the quality so or the quantity of Outreach that you do so you can either just higher expensive and get quality without doing a lot of Outreach or if you're trying to get the cheap like a really good like caliber candidate for the lowest price possible then you just need to do a ton of Outreach and using sites like this one like onlinejobs.ph it's essentially like an upwork or Fiverr but specifically for like people in the Philippines and when you post on here here the I won't read through the whole sop but basically what we recommend doing and what we've had the most success with is I used to just hire people uh just like on upw workk I would just hire the person I like the best now I know that's not the best way to do it because when you post on a site like this you're going to get a lot of Tire kickers you're going to get a lot of canned responses so here's the strategy that we use that has worked extremely well to sift out the best candidates from all the rest and when I say you'll get a lot of applications you'll get like over a hundred like very quickly there's a lot of people on these sites so what you do is you set the kind of like how we filtered the tags to be like Top Talent on here we filter it to be ID proof greater than 70 so basically we know that it's a real person and we're aiming for like a few hundred applications then out of 20 to 30 of those they're going to take the video interview and you don't have to do this this is just a strategy that worked well for us so for the video interview what we do is we set up a software such as spark hire there's a bunch of different ones out there I'm not affiliate with spark hire at all it's just the one that I had used but spark hire what they do is they create video interviews so you set up the interview questions and when somebody clicks a link they're then brought to like a portal where it has their webcam and audio and then it asks them the questions and they have to records answering them and especially for a customer service role and just working with somebody in general it's really important that I mean at least for English speakers that their English is at at least passable enough that you're able to have a conversation with them and there's a ton of them out there like that and uh I mean I I can't really talk I can't speak I speak like three words of Spanish so I can't speak speak their language but just for hiring them you want somebody who can speak English enough to to get by so we're filtering for that that's part of the reason why we do the video interview the main reason we do it is that when you have hundreds of applicants coming in you want to see who's actually good and who's not and you want to see who's serious about it and so what we do is we put at the bottom of the application we put a link and here's the application down here here's an example this was one for like an executive assistant but you can rewrite it for just plug this into chat GPT and have it rewrite it for customer service um and then down here is where we put serious about applying record and submit your interview here then insert spark hire link and then this will you'll get a lot of people applying not seeing this link and those are ones you just completely ignore the ones you actually pay attention to are the 20 to 30 people who fill out the spark hire video and out of those and here's some questions you can use uh for for the spark hire interview you watch back all the 20 to 30 interviews it's like 5 to 10 minutes per interview up to upwards of 15 depending on how many questions you ask which if you're not getting anybody filling out the interview just make it less questions and make it like less intimidating just like lower the bar slightly but then you just watch back each one of these interviews and then you pick out the top you know three to five out of the 20 to 30 roughly that you get it's really just another funnel like we talked about funnels for optimizing it's the same thing when it comes to hiring it's like top of funnel it's you make the post all the applications you get middle of funnel is the people who are the people who fill out the video application bottom of funnel out of all the video appliations you watch you pick out three to five and then you do a phone interview with them and then you pick the one that you like the best and the reason that this process our old process was so inefficient was that we would just field the two to 300 written applications and then we would interview phone interview like 20 of them and then we would just pick somebody out and it's pretty hard to tell like but doing it this way it helped weed it down so we get really good candidates then once you actually hire them you want to use something like this which is Hub staff so Hub staff is good for when you're working with like a virtual team so that people can like track their time they track their time and like you can run payroll through there automatically so like the way that we have it set up is our team we use uh wise used to be called paywise for like sending International payments like their weekly payroll bi-weekly and then they just log their hours in Hub staff and then whenever they're which similar to upwork it tracks like all their hours and everything and then you're able to set like weekly caps and you set their weekly or their hourly rate and then at the end of the pay period they submit like their what's it called like their pay stub essentially or their time report then you just approve it and then wise automatically processes the payment and sends it to them so it's super streamlined very efficient and then things to know oh another thing that I forgot to mention is you can do if you're not sure out of the like three to five phone interviews that you do you can pick two people and do a paid trial you just have to be very if you're going to do this you just have to be very very upfront with people it would be pretty crappy If you hired two and they both thought that they were like the hire and they got the job and they were like telling their families and stuff about it and then you know you end up telling them like hey this is actually just a trial like don't do that like be very upfront with people and say this is going to be a trial two weeks for us to try out working together see if you like working with me vice versa but if you when doing the video process I've normally found like a really good candidate after doing that and then you onboard them which onboarding it comes down to having really clear Sops which an sop is just standard operating procedure and the good news is that even at the time that we did the last course it wasn't able to do this but now if you just say write an sop for our new customer service hire on our print on demand business our text stack is Shopify Gmail for CS tickets hoot site for social media and printify for product fulfillment this person will be responsible for receiving and replying to all customer service inquiries social media comments slash inbox messages Etc and now it's writing an sop then you'll obviously like rework it add in anything that's necessary for or like specific to your company yeah it's super detailed it's insane but that was another mistake we made when hiring we would not have any Sops and we' just say all right handle customer service and then we would end up getting like a lot of back and forth questions and that was not not ideal another thing when they come in is you want to make sure you're giving them kpis key performance indicators you want to tell them very clearly upfront what are the expectations what is our and the main kpis for customer service in particular is like uh customer satisfaction which you can't really track until you start using something like gorgeous but like a score out of five like how happy was the customer with the with the support they received um but then the one you can immediately track is uh average response time and tell like an average score that you can shoot for with your new VA is like within 24 hours and then you can tell people that like on your site like we get back to we respond within 24 hours that kind of thing but when they come in you set them up with Hub staff uh give them bi-weekly you agree like on the salary and then you pay them out bi-weekly using wise or you can use PayPal there's a lot of different services and it also depends on like where you're located personally and then you give them clear Sops with KP eyes of what their expectations are and then you can expect like at least a 2 to 4 week ramp up period where they're going to be getting their feet wet they're going to be getting experience and um to make it like a fun to make to like get them not only like get them the best result from working with the person but also to make it a fun experience all around like connect with the person get to know them people don't like nobody likes feeling like they're just a cog to machine and not only because it doesn't feel good but it also gives much people take more pride in their work when they know that you actually care about them and I see like a pretty in the past I've seen a negative connotation or culture sometimes around like hiring vas and you know it you know the people hiring get a bad rap too because of that so for me it's been way more fulfilling and also more productive to take the time to get to know the people like get to know the people you're hiring and like get to know who they are what are their goals like ask about their family that kind of stuff and there's a really good book on this called the culture code and they found that there was a direct correlation between the uh employee retention and the number of times that keywords like coffee and family were mentioned in inner company emails point being that when people feel more of a connection to you and your company and the team they're working with they end up enjoying it more and they stay longer and then they give you like better outputs in the company which is what you want you want somebody especially for customer service you want somebody in there who actually cares about not just you and the company but like the customer so take the time to get to know them and like all this Sops and stuff this is good for like laying out the expectations but you want to you know take the time to get to know as a person and then in terms of annual bonuses it's it varies based on location but um in the Philippines it's uh common something called 13th month bonus where basically you pay like an extra one month bonus at the end of the year that's up to you and your own company policies what you want to decide but Allin if you're paying somebody like $5 an hour to manage your customer service and it's full-time it's 160 hours so that's $800 per month and your customer service all your social media comments all that stuff can be completely off your plate I would plan on allocating at least 5 to 10 hours a month in the beginning to effectively manage that person to make sure that they know what the expectations are and they're you know training you're training them to improve in their role but overall it's one of especially as you're heading towards the million dollar Mark Outsourcing managing this effectively is absolutely key like I would have never been able to scale to multiple seven figures if it wasn't for the team that we had behind us so we hire for designers customer service backend support SL uploads so where to hire Philippines is awesome there's a lot of great people if you know how to like properly interview for it which we just went through and in terms of designers just upwork is a great place but Eastern Europe we found a lot of really great talented designers for like $ 20 to $30 per hour in the United States I would not recommend there's awesome designers but in terms of like keeping your your margins healthy the designers in the United States are like dramatically more expensive then how to manage effectively it's everything we just talked about get to know them as a person lay out very clear expectations set in the beginning at least set weekly meetings like a standup meeting to uh check in with them ask about the kpis see what questions they have and it's really key especially when working with a virtual team to make it a welcoming environment so that you hear feedback and you don't make it like a an uptight environment where nobody wants to share anything so you have to take time to that's another reason why you have to take time to get to know them uh then in terms of tracking the the hiring cost where this sits on our p&l is we just add it as a monthly expense so in your like your tracker add a tab for your overhead expenses and then just take whatever the hourly rate is for that person times 160 and that's the the monthly rate so if it's what's it called like 160 * 5 800 bucks and then what you do to put that on your p&l is you just do 800 divid by 30 and that's $26.67 so 26 bucks you would add that to your overhead on a daily basis so then you're able to track that and that gets grouped in with your Shopify um subscription your clavio all your other overhead expenses and then that's the number that you just want to keep under roughly 3 to 4 per. so there's a quick rundown on how to hire effectively how to manage people and it really is like one of the keys to unlocking growth and like freeing up your time so that you're able to uh you know focus on the other pieces that come with going from 100 to a million and that's what we're going be talking about next is our systems and automations and then our paid ads scaling so I'll see you there welcome to lesson 6.2 systems and automations and in this lesson instead of going through a slide deck what we're going to be doing is something a little bit different and pretty fun we're going to be going through our entire Tech stack which fancy is term just all the apps that we actually use in the day-to-day in running our business and I'm going to show you uh the apps that we use for project management communication uh in addition to our internal like folders and Sops uh and then the make automations that we use to speed up uh a couple of the like recurring processes so let's get into it so to start off we use monday.com for our internal project management and this is very similar to there's a bunch of competitors it's like Trello Asana uh jira uh clickup all of the tools I've tried all of them thinking that one of them would be like a silver bullet and I get you know as soon as I logged in I get struck by a bol of lightning and be like oh my God this is it and everything would just start falling into place maybe that's just me but that's what I was looking for in a project management tool now after trying out all of them for years now I know that it's really just a matter of picking a tool and then sticking with it and Trello works great for in the beginning it's very very simple very Bare Bones but uh something that I've learned from both of my parents who are project managers and tech companies or like larger Enterprises that or they were at at points in their career that one of the the main lessons that they've taught me is that real project management or like getting a team to adopt the project management tool is really just about accepting the fact that it's going to take at least two to four weeks if not longer to get everybody used to using it cuz what's more common is everybody's just sending lots of slack messages or emails or whatever and they're just used to like just firing stuff off it's a learning process to get people including yourself like including me especially getting me to use it consistently so that then instead of sending one-off messages like hey can you do this real quick you're creating a ticket and it feels like a an extra step in the beginning because it is but trust me in order to actually scale and grow your organization it's absolutely a necessity so you don't need it when you're a single person team but at the 100K plus Mark highly recommend investing in it's not even really an investment they they have very low price plans but anyway we use Monday for project management then we use slack for all of our team Communications we create uh one channel for product or designs one channel for customer service uh one channel for like Shopify and like backend stuff so like really just three main channels and then one channel for like the leadership team which again when you have when it's just you and like one maybe two vas you don't need to go overboard like three or four channels Max is all you need but having them categorized helps so that it's not just one General Channel and you can use the free plan for slack and that works well you just like lose your messages after like six months or something but then we use um this is going through all the softwares that we use so this is literally everything uh next we use triple whale and triple whale is basically just a a data reporting software and we're on the free plan and this is just where it pulls in all of our results uh from Shopify from Facebook ads uh from Google and from clavio so that we're just able to see it all in one place and they have a mobile app which I like a lot so that I'm able to check it throughout the day because otherwise you're checking like Shopify then you're checking Facebook and then you're doing the math to figure out like you're off Facebook row as now now you just have this right here and you're just able to see it in one spot and then clavia was the one that when I wasn't using triple whale or something similar I was like just unaware of what was going on with it now whenever I'm checking trip oil I'm always always also checking the clavio numbers so it helps you keep a finger to the pulse of everything that's going on in the business and this is one of those things like we talked about before like you should know all these metrics cold like what's happening what your conversion rate is what your average order value is and triple was a great way to to do that and again it's free but it uh helped out a lot let's see what our numbers are for this year yes we just crossed a million for the year yeah email 178,000 so if we did and this profit is slightly inflated it's probably like 180ish because cost of goods so cost of goods it's just pulling the way that you set this up is Shopify pulls this these numbers in automatically and then the custom metrics this it's yeah so it had it factors in cost of goods shipping expenses Gateway costs then custom expenses so for custom expenses for example I just put in what our overhead is so our overhead comes out to roughly $133 per day so it's counting that it's just deducting a flat rate for that it's not linked to like how much does our Shopify Plan cost all that then for Gateway costs so Shopify payments it's importing it directly from Shopify so shipping cost and cost of goods is where it's just pulling in numbers straight from Shopify but for shipping for example it's counting it uh it's just passing through the shipping cost so like if a customer pays $4.99 or whatever for shipping it's charging that or it's counting that as a cost but if somebody surpasses that free shipping threshold then it counts it as zero so again it's good for a rough ballpark estimate but it's not like the complete picture but it's good enough that you know we're able to base a lot off of it uh and then Facebook ads it's just pulling this in directly cost of goods and stuff we talked about oh here's the custom expenses there we go so it's just taking this and multiplying it by 133 per day then Google ads it's just integrating pulling this number directly from Google ads and you're able to like adjust these uh like reorder there's a lot of things you can add in here I just narrowed it down to the most important stuff like Facebook ads they have a a ton of different oh you need to upgrade but yeah you're able to customize it a bunch but these were the metrics that I like looking at the most next for customer success we use gorgeous and the reason I like gorgeous which we use Gmail for a long time up until several hundred, in spend and and it worked really well but gorgeous is nice because it pulls all of the tickets into one place obviously and then it also gives us these nice metrics that we're able to see so like customer satisfaction average response time resolution time and then it gives you like industry benchmarks to shoot for so this was really what we wanted it for the other nice thing is like clavio is the email provider built specifically for e-commerce sellers gorgeous is that to but for customer success so it has direct Integrations with all the providers that we would need specifically Shopify and the cool thing about their Shopify integration is that when a customer I would open a ticket but I don't want to share somebody's information when you open up a ticket it shows you their Shopify order so it it sees the email and then it it queries your Shopify database and it sees if you know that email is attached to a specific order and then if it is then it pulls it up in a sidebar so that the customer success rep is able to respond to the email ticket and if say they have to process a refund or something rather than them having to switch over to Shopify and then go find the order and then refund it and then go back over to like Gmail they're able to just do it all from one view so they can uh issue a refund get order status all the things right there it just speeds up the rate of responding to messages a lot and so we're able to see like how well we're doing in terms of these metrics and then these are the kpis that we review uh with the team then for time tracking and for managing the team we use Hub staff which we talked about in the team training but we add everybody in here and then it tracks their time and then it integrates with wise which is what we use for sending International payments and you have to be on you might have to upgrade the plan on hubstaff in order to integrate with wise but bottom line is that it does a really nice job of basically they submit their time sheets on a weekly basis bi-weekly basis and you can do monthly just whatever you decide your company policy and then when they Smit their time sheet we just hit approve and then it automatically pushes out the payment which seems like a minor thing but it's actually really nice especially once you have a couple people on your team because then you don't have to go into Hub staff see how many hours it was do the math yourself and then go over to PayPal or whatever else and like manually enter it in it's little things like that that add up over time then in terms of our so that's really the main apps that we use is Monday for Pro Management slack for communication triple wh for data dashboard analytics dashboard gorgeous for customer success uh then hubstaff for team like time tracking and then wise for sending payments and then the other one you could add on is upwork for working with designers and that sort of thing and then oh one other one that I forgot to mention is uh hoot Suite so hoot Suite is the one that we use that we connect all of our Facebook and Instagram pages to which we only have two but then that's where where we add the our customer success team they get added to that so then they're able to manage all the comments and the we'll go through the Sops in a second but we have them respond to every single comment and so they're in there like very active uh pretty frequently so next the customer service Sops so here's just a snapshot so you can get an idea of all the different Sops that we have written down so we have customer service overview uh customer service Loom Library how to respond to Facebook and Instagram comments and Hoot site how to respond to tickets in gorgeous U filling out the customer success spreadsheet uh International order fulfillment opening a chat with printify how to respond to PayPal cases how to process Shopify refund reaching out to uh return refund form filing customer uh so we have we have a refund form that when customers want a refund they fill out like a Google form and then when that form gets filled out it automatically updates a row in spreadsheet that we're going to look at in a second uh how to respond to Shopify chargebacks uh like how to manage social media in general and then just like a welcome to the team and all of these Sops you can just take this was one of the things that I didn't know for a while was like what do I actually need an sop for here's the list of all the Sops we have so to get your brain going and then you can just go into chat GPT and ask it to write Sops for each one of these and it's able to do it like very easily next we have our product development Sops which these are the ones that we Link in the the master design spreadsheet so we would link them across the top here for how to do each step and that was the thing that I didn't understand about Sops when I which is standard operating procedure when I first got started was it feels very redundant and it almost feels like silly it's like everybody knows this everybody should know how to do this but they really don't and not not that like from a skill deficiency like they've done the things but it's really like back to the checklist Manifesto that we talked about way back in the foundations module like that book changed my perspective on the how much of a necessity it is to have like recurring tasks well documented and checklist out so that not just for the people who are already in the role but then for when you eventually hire new people to help out like as your team grows rather than having to retrain them on all the same things you're able to just say here's the Sops go check it out and uh this was another thing that I I thought you know we needed some super complex system in order to make this work but just Google drive with Google Docs nicely organized like this one this is our marketing folder where I just like to number them so they're they sort in ter in terms of like most frequently used to least and at the top we have marketing assets so that's where I drop like all of our logos all the different versions make sure they're labeled and numbered well uh then we have our ad creatives so this is AD creatives like outside of this the normal product images if I'm trying like different grid ads and stuff like that rather than than just downloading it to your desktop save it to your Google Drive make your life easier and do these simple things well like when you're still growing and it'll make your life 10 times better once you get to the million plus level cuz these little things are what makes all the difference cuz every little step of friction that you're able to remove helps your chances of scaling that much more like you don't want to get to the point where you have hundreds of designs and hundreds of AD creatives and stuff is just scattered everywhere because I've been there and it's an absolute Nightmare and cuz then you end up like for example if you have like you know you have a bunch of really good ad creative and you go to sit down to launch your some new ads and trying to like like if you're say we're in Black Friday season and we know that we had a bunch of good Black Friday ad creatives from last year but then we're searching around through just a mess of folders and trying to find the creative can't come up with it our brain especially depending on the time of day that working on it has a tendency to just go screw it I I'll just whatever just one ad is fine and no like you put in the work last year of making five to 10 different ad creatives it's like you should be able to use those same ads this year and the ability to do that comes down to our organization so simple things like this make uh a big difference but email marketing creatives marketing other and then monthly creatives like if we're updating our Banner or like cover photos on any of our pages that sort of thing but again just just very simple clean and then this master checklist which you guys all have access to this it's the very last tab on the uh on the big spreadsheet and this we didn't do for years and years and I'm going to show you the automation that we have set up so that it automatically populates this but this spreadsheet was an absolute Game Changer CU we used to have hundreds of designs just strewn about everywhere and there was no Rhyme or Reason there was no naming convention and to try to find designs and find the right version I can't tell you the number of times that we had like when we were way less organized we would have like designs being printed and shipped out to customers that were not the ones that was listed on the site and that's just really bad and more than that you end there were a lot of times that we would end up you know uh making designs then they just wouldn't end up on the site and or they would end up on the site but like without the mockup or they would end up on the site but they weren't uh like numbered properly or they didn't have the right prices and the only time that we would find out about that is when we would just so happen to be on the site later on and go hey this product doesn't have this product is priced at $12 like what the hell and then I would keep scrolling through more pages and i' be like this one's priced at 12 like what is happening then I would send a message to the product team and they would have to like go through and like do a full audit to see how many products did this happen to and that's all completely avoidable by just having a little bit of extra organization so we use this spreadsheet anytime we make a new design it gets added to the spreadsheet and then as the team is uploading it they go through and they check off each one of these boxes so then we're able to just review it and we have steps built in here for like auditing it and like making sure that it's it's QA yeah printify QA Shopify QA so this is where like we're making sure that okay do we upload the right design is it centered is it you know hitting the top of the box on the print area then Shopify QA it's like okay is the right mockup up do is the first product uh like when you look at the product on the collection page is that top color the color that's being shown there is that the same color that shows up when you hit the product page it's little little things like that that end up getting slipped uh or end up getting missed if you don't have this in place then next is our one of my personal favorites is the international orders and fulfillment spreadsheet the reason I like this a lot is that so when you are yeah look at all so these are all of our International orders since 8 since August of 23 so the reason we set this spreadsheet up is because whenever at least at the time of filming this when a order comes in from Shopify that's International and it goes to printify what we do is printify does not automatically reroute it and like we use Monster Digital for fulfillment in the United States if an order is placed in Germany prini has German printers that are able to ship it much faster at a fraction of the cost but by default it won't it's not smart enough yet that it'll do that it it'll do that with one shirt orders but it won't do it with two two shirt plus orders so which that's a lot of orders so what we do is we set up a make.com automation which is similar to uh zapier where anytime an order comes in from Shopify that is international it adds a new row and then one of the things that are uh customer service rep does is every day uh before midnight our time when our orders get pushed through they go in and they reroute it so let's just take a random order this one here perfect German order so this one this order came in and it was routed to go to Monster Digital and it started off costing us $779 then when they rerouted it to the I think it's texal druck location oh yeah d texal d location then uh it ended up costing us $51 so it saved us $25 almost $26 in product cost just on that single order let's add up yeah in total we saved $131,000 in cost a good sold by doing this rerouting if we hadn't done this we would have been we would have stopped doing International a while ago because it would just wouldn't have been profitable but by doing this process it saves us a ton of money and the good good news is here's the automation that we use so we set up make.com and this won't be like a full tutorial showing you how to like create the make account and stuff we have a tutorial on that in the free community when you join but basically the way that it works is make.com is very similar to zap year except it's a fraction of the cost it's like literally a tenth of the cost and we set up a trigger so that we connect it to Shopify and it watches this Shopify account for any orders that are not us so we ship fill by like region and any region outside the US then yeah not United States then it goes to Google Sheets and we connect it to our International ORD spreadsheet and then it grabs the values from uh Shopify which is the created at date the order number and then the uh shipping address country so if you look at any one of these especially the more recent ones yeah actually all of them yeah so just prints the time that it was the time that it came in the order number and then uh the country and then the customer service rep goes in grab finds that they just copy paste that order number into Shopify they find the order or no they just go WR to printify they find the order and then they click on each product that's in the order and then they click edit and then they swap it out to that same exact product from but from the print provider that's closest to them and the print provider that the way that this works is whenever we're uploading and you see this in the master design checklist that anytime they're they upload a new design they automatically not automatically it's part of our Sops that they will duplicate that design uh four or five times and they duplicate it for each one of the international printers which is a pain but it doesn't have to be when you add it to your Sops so then when you know an order comes in from Germany for product one and three all of the customers success rep has to do is go in find that order and then they go to the product they Click Change product or change printer and then they find that same product for the printer that's closest to this order and then they just add that to the order then they delete the original products and then they click submit and then you end up saving uh $130,000 and then last but not least is the so whenever a the workflow that we use for adding new designs to this so that it automatically populates with the design image and the title and then a link to the Google drive folder is we just have one folder that we Nam drop folder and we use this workflow to watch for when a new design is added to that folder so it's watching a specific folder in our Google Drive then when a design hits it it grabs the name of that file then it adds a row to this spreadsheet at the very bottom it adds a new row and then it updates that row like with the name of the product and again there's the full tutorial on this is in the the free community but it basically it updates the title and yeah it it updates the title and then it creates a new folder in our master design folder so there's a drop folder and then there's the big folder that has all the subfolders of all the individual designs it creates a new folder in there and the reason that we write the name first is it names we write the name first in the spreadsheet and then we get range values so it creates a new row it updates the row with the name of whatever that F that file was and then it this step is getting the range values so it's seeing okay what was the name of what number was that row what was the name of the file and then it uses those two combined to create a new folder and it uses the name that it just pulled and then the next step it moves the original file into that folder and then it it updates the name of it by like it removes it and then it updates the row and what it's doing at this step updating the row is that's where it's pasting the preview link for that image so long story short when you upload uh one image a new design to that drop folder you should have already named it what you're going to call the design but then when you drop it into that folder it creates a new folder with it it names the row creates a new folder moves that design into it and then it pastes the preview link here and as painful as it was to hear me explain that just imagine how painful it was figuring out how to make that work so go ahead watch the training just follow along it took a long time to get that to work so if it if you have to mess around with it a little bit I feel your pain uh making this entire thing end to end was at least 100 plus hours hopefully that helps your your workflow simplify things a little bit and yeah then last but not least want to show an example of a sop so this is an sop for like a monthly collection launch you don't have to follow this exactly this is just an example of an sop but if we're going to launch a new like monthly uh collection like for a batch of new designs you put the collection name launch date Google drive folder collection folder and then we just have checklists of all the things that have to be done so 50 new design that have been in the Q past the QA phase uh then social media make posts on Facebook email Mark is like for seven days out three days out one days out post on your stories and a lot of this stuff like you don't even if you just these are just suggestions but like even if you just cut out all of this stuff and you just did email marketing saying hey new collection is dropping in seven days new collection in 3 days it drops tomorrow here it is that email flow would do really well but again bringing it back to to the goal of just this lesson is just about the SOP so like launching new designs new collections of designs is like one of it's the best way that you can best consistent practice you can get in the habit of that will like yield disproportionate returns more than anything else in the business because this is like the lifeblood so this is a prime example of a function in the business that it makes a lot of sense to document and turn into an sop so that not only for eventually teaching your team to be able to do all the pieces but for just you to remember so it becomes more automatic and it's less work on your part to have to you know go like re-remember everything each time so that's the whole business in a nutshell hopefully you guys enjoyed this lesson uh if you have any questions um please feel free to post in the community and after you like set up your your automations and stuff like that um Post in the community see if anybody else needs help with it and also like let us sow once it's working cuz I'd love to see it uh cuz it took a ton of time to make that so makes me feel good knowing that somebody else is benefiting from it so anyways thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson welcome to lesson 6.3 scaling our paid ads at the 100K plus level in this lesson I'm going to be taking you inside of our ad account on the 0 to7 figure store and walking you through what the thought process and strategy looks like in terms of how we not only increase the scale okay the amount that we're spending and the overall output but making sure that we're maintaining performance as we're doing it because it's pretty useless if we're just ramping up ad spend but we're not maintaining a row as that we need in order to achieve profitability hopefully well beyond just like break even so and the good news is like once you're at this stage it's uh a lot of the the scaling techniques and strategies that I'm going to show you is really just like rehashing things that you already know it's like scaling AKA increasing the budget while maintaining the performance comes down to like two main ways of doing it either a horizontal which is when you are launching more different ads or vertical which is just when you're increasing the the budget on things that are already running and as you can see looking at let's look at our performance from this year we managed to spend $377,000 at a 2.3 row as now there's things that we could have done that would have spent way more and scaled things up a lot but in order to maintain a million dollars plus per year like this is roughly What It Takes and this is the strategy that we use to do that and now I've scaled campaigns and accounts way higher than this like to spending well over a million dollars per year and there's people that spend a lot more than that I'm not saying that this is like the largest ad account in the world but the strategies that we are using they actually work and they work not just for us but for the students and to take us inside let's look at this month filter by all the things that are spending all right we'll just do the big ones so what we have is our testing campaign then we have our USA CBO and then we have our worldwide uh CBO and then we have have our retargeting this one should actually be renamed so testing campaign cold traffic driver cold traffic duplicated to worldwide and then uh retargeting then we'll talk about manual at the end so couple of things to notice right off the bat is and also our testing campaign has spent a ton this month this is not like the norm but this is also a good way to demonstrate the point that there's no like one size fits-all like there's lots of different ways to do it but typically the testing campaign and I'll move over to the mirror board which you have access to this inside the free community our testing campaign looks something like this so we can have an ad set with our catalog ad this is what's testing through like all our different products then we could have a testing ad set with static ads these two would be effectively the same because catalog is essentially just testing static ads then we could have once we have tested out a bunch of stuff in the through the catalog the next stage of that is seeing what the top performers were in there and this is just me recapping things that we should already know up until this point so we pull out top performers and then put them in testing a testing adset and the way that we go about the test like which ad set you're putting it in and that sort of thing is pretty immaterial the important thing is that you just are running test so there's lots of different ways to run a test but fundamentally the idea behind it is that you just have a variable that you isolate and then you run them all in tandem with each other so then you see which one performs the best the variable that we isolate way more than anything else is the product like the actual image that we're testing you could also run a split test for different offers or different video Styles which that's another one that I wanted to demonstrate so I'll come down to right here this is the structure of our campaign that performs the best and this is the campaign structure that we want to get to and I'll zoom into to one of the adsets but this is the exact structure of our cold us CBO this campaign you see here that spent 7,000 this month at a 2.8 and this one was the manual version spent similar at a 2.9 So within that campaign in one ad set this is the winning formula this is what has worked by far the best for us there's lots of different strategies but this is what's worked for us is we have a catalog ad which is also the same as the one that we're testing in the testing campaign by the way then we have a slideshow ad then we have two static ads the reason that this works well is which it doesn't even really matter my logic behind it or my justification why it works just it works is that we have a catalog ad that is tapping into our full catalog of products so as we're continually launching new stuff this campaign is or this ad is able to test through all of them so it always has access to your full catalog gives Facebook a lot of tools to be able to work with next is the slideshow ad reason this is important to include is that there's certain people that just like watching video ads they just like watching video posts and so when Facebook hits a pocket of those people it is able to show them something if it doesn't have a video in its Arsenal then it has nothing to to deliver to them then down here we have our top performing static ads the reason that these are important is that these are building up engagement on them and they start snowballing and engagement is important because uh there's certain people that will only stop to look at an ad if they see that lots of other people have already vetted it out and like validated it for them and also uh Facebook every time you hit like a factor of zero in your or factor of 10 a new factor of 10 in your engagement it rewards you with lower cpms so roughly when you hit a th000 likes or comments or engagements you'll see a drop in your cpms when you hit 10,000 you'll see another drop when you see 100,000 you'll see another drop so on and so forth and we try to build up to having like a winning combination so like what testing went into being able to build this up is in order to find a winner slideshows for example so in order to find this one slideshow the way that I do that or the way that I did that is I made 10 different slideshow ads and we're not going to talk about like how to make the different creatives and stuff like that we should know that by this point but this is just the video where you upload 10 different products into Facebook and then it automatically generates the video for you so the way that we find what's going to be a winner I'm not just going to make one slideshow and then drop it in is the whole premise is like the graduation strategy is these campaigns like this main campaign down here what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to build a campaign that is so good that I never really have to touch it I'm not going in there and tinkering with stuff and I'm not going in and like changing ad copy or anything like that so they're lock in for this part this main campaign this campaign right here I'm not making hardly any changes to it not not hardly I'm not making any changes to it outside of two things a budget b swapping out ads once performance starts to diminish so let me show you what I mean so in terms of budget I'm increasing the budget by 20 15 to 20% every 2 to 3 days normally not Mondays and Tuesdays but pick 2 to 3 Day intervals besides that increasing the budget as long as performance holds and the metrics that we're looking for is very simple just as long as this the row as stays above like a 2.2 to a 2.5 I'm continuing to bump the budget the range that we're looking for is like a 2.5 is I deal if it starts getting up over three then I'm really heavily bumping the budgets but back to the graduation piece up here in the testing this is where we should be very active and if you're over $100,000 in sales the main functions or activities you should be doing in the business is number one making new new products new designs based off of your top sellers Non-Stop and two you should be launching lots of new creatives to test and what this looks like is you should be launching different static ads different video slideshows and different grid ads are like those are just three different creative types that we've found success with but this is your account and take this as whatever permission you felt you needed to test whatever you want not just because you'll likely find some winners and stuff that we're not even talking about here like there's a billion different ways to run successful ads we're just sharing one possible strategy but we show the Mind map already of all the different variables so like I recommend honing in your focus on the most important things and testing there but not only will you find your own winners but two that's how you learn and that's how you see what's a good idea and what's a bad idea and what I recommend to everybody is set aside five at least 5 to 10% of your budget to be constantly making new ads and testing them out and the structure that I use for testing them is very very simple it's one of the most frequently asked questions is like what's the structure for a testing and it's always myself and the coaches if it always makes us like like go like I don't know like if because it doesn't really matter like we I do 5 to 10 ads per ad set and like $25 budget $25 a day budget and like that's it and that's like the extent to that we think about it because we know that the priority should be on what are the ads actually made up of that's what the priority is it's not about and I get it like I was that way too when I started out I was like watching YouTube videos and like pausing when people would show inside their campaigns so I could like copy their exact settings and stuff like that now I know it really doesn't matter the structure thinking back to the pie chart what actually matters what actually matters is that we're testing new creatives so we should be testing different slideshow videos different grid ads different static ads lots of different ideas of things you can test and if you are like well I don't really know what I should be testing why I just rattled off some things so go do those and if you haven't done it and when I see people say like well I did test some of those and I look at their account they normally made like three slideshow I I made at least 10 like to begin with like the Aver the top 1% of Facebook advertisers here's the metric to to walk away with the top 1% of Facebook advertisers run 70 times more tests than the rest so there's your metric that if you're looking for an action that is going to disproportionately improve the performance of your account and give you much greater stability it's that right there so be testing Non-Stop and people equate testing with spending a lot and that's not the case because this down here is always going to be 70 to 80% of my budget it's always going to be like that these Camp my main CBO campaigns but my testing campaign I have 5 to 10% and as you scale more that 5 to 10% makes up more and more like in the beginning you're spending a th000 bucks a day then you're spending 2,000 then 3,000 that 5 to 10% adds up a lot and you can be running a lot of tests so what does it look like running these campaigns well this CBO we have one open adset and this is a rough approximation this is not an exact prescription but we do one open targeting ad set then we duplicate it AKA same exact ads same static same everything into a second adset and this one we do an interest targeting and we make sure that these static ads in particular are using the same post ID so that they're building up the engagement then we duplicate it again and test out like a lookalike audience and lookalike audience just use like the 1% purchase you can just just throw stuff at the wall and see which one works that would be an an example of something you can test up here in your testing campaign thinking of all the variables you can test out different audiences and see which ones perform the best but in this example I have three different ads sets you can do up to five I found like five to seven I wouldn't go over seven we used to do like hundreds and they're all adset budget optimization but now just CBO like five is normally like I think we have five adsets in this one and like three of them get all the spend you don't need a ton of ads sets but then to what I was saying before about like when performance starts to dip if I ever see performance dip over like a 7 to 14 day window then I'm looking at which ads out of all of these are not getting any spend AKA which ones of them are just not pulling their weight and it's normally the same exact ad in each placement so that ad what I'll do is I'll make a note that this one's not performing well like that and then I'll go up to my Bullpen and I'll see okay out of all the tests that I've been running which ones have been performing the best I'll be like okay maybe this one this one and that one and then I'll grab the post ID of each of these or I only really need one for this example so I grab the post ID for this ad say this one was maybe performing well and then I come down here and I would sub it in just like that so that's how you graduate ads and the reason that our testing adset or campaign ended up with so much spend was because I was testing out new stuff and new new adets were doing really well and these campaigns were maintaining their performance like throughout the entire year just about so I never really needed to submit anything else so I just left them running in the testing adset and then I started or testing campaign then I started bumping the budgets and then next thing we have is this worldwide campaign very very straightforward same exact thing as this campaign and we did this when we crossed the 10K threshold we literally just duplicated that campaign and switched it to worldwide targeting so this campaign here is just select the whole world and then exclude United States India Pakistan Trad and Tobago and then lastly down here we have our retargeting adsets which there's a whole very detailed retargeting sop available in the course that we're not going to go through because it's honestly overkill for what we need but our retargeting audiences I'll just show you so we have social engagement Facebook and Instagram engagement slideshow uh 95% View and website traffic look at the row ases on each of these that's another benefit of using slideshow ads is that you create a retargeting audience off of them so there we go this is what our retargeting campaign looks like and this is bringing it back to scaling 100K you need to have retargeting running because that just runs at a really high return and these are the audiences that we're using right now that's working really well but fundamentally what you're trying to do is just get back in front of people who saw your ad express some level of Interest by either engaging social engagement Facebook and Instagram engaged this is people who have been to our page but then didn't buy and then uh people who watch 95% of our slideshow ad people who visited the website but then didn't purchase and these are just all worldwide and then I had like different like retargeting ads in there showing things like you know customer testimonials and stuff like that and to my pleasant surprise they were all blown out of the water by just our same catalog ad that's running for our cold traffic so which kind of makes sense as Facebook has gotten better at the delivery of retargeting or of uh catalog ads it's learning to show people like different products that they think that they would like so this campaign is working really well and we just start each one of these at like A5 to $10 budget starting point and then we just increase it similar to our cold like 20 roughly 20% but you have to keep in mind that these audiences are only as useful as the size of your cold traffic budget like if you're barely spending anything on your cold ads then these audiences are going to dry up and then the last piece is the manual bids so manual bid like we talked about in one of the previous lessons Facebook operates like an auction so if you picture every Advertiser every Advertiser sitting in like an auction Hall and there's Zuckerberg up at the top waving around you know each ad spot and then all the advertisers are there like bidding on it normally we're using automatic bidding which means Facebook just chooses for us and it works pretty well but a way that we're able to get extra scale out of our account is to set a cost cap or a bid level and around down $19 this is very subjective based on like what you're selling what your average cost per acquisition is but in our account our average cost per acquisition is let's just take we just take 66844 divided by 35 9 8 I think it's like 15 yeah 1857 this month so and that's up slightly because our cost per click is up because we're in the the month of December if we were to go back to November yeah and November is actually high too so yeah $19 those are our CPAs $19 cost cap is the one that's working best for us and the way that you choose that is just when you're setting up the campaign at the campaign level it'll have like bid strategy and you just enter $19 instead and the cool thing with these is that they'll either spend absolutely nothing like literally zero dollars depending on like how the auction is that day or it'll spend like a moderate amount but at a really high rate as and that's what actually happened this month was our worldwide manual bid was performing so well that it was like completely outshining our normal worldwide like Auto bid so I just turned it off and just put all the budget into this like this one spent almost yeah $119,000 at a 2.5 and then an example of how you get extra scale is I realized I was looking at the account on one of the days that I think it was like after the first week yeah after the first week and I realized I was like what can we do that's going to get extra scale out of the account like what can I be building and then I realized that I didn't have a manual bid for USA so this whole Campaign which throughout the month throughout the month of December spent 7,000 at almost a three row as the way that that came about was me just looking at the account and brainstorming like what could I do differently or what how could I get extra SK and I realized I didn't have a manual bid for USA so I just duplicated I literally went like this hit duplicate and I changed targeting to USA and that made an extra over $20,000 in sales like a couple thousand in net profit just from that couple of couple of button clicks Mor of the story is that none of this would be working if we hadn't been testing all along and finding new things that we could be moving in but fortunately we didn't even like if we hadn't been testing originally to find that so to find that that winning combination so now this this structure is what's been working really well for us but you have to play around like every account is different like you know your brand best the thing to take away from this is that you have to get like a finger to the pulse of like what your how your account runs like what days of the week is it performing the best and you know that will tell you like when you should be bumping budgets and that sort of thing and you know people ask like well what how many how much do you spend on a test before you you kill it or like when when are you bumping more aggressively and it's very tough to give a a straightforward answer because it's very subjective like for example one of the things that I take into account whenever I'm looking at the account is like how much work have I been putting into the brand recently like how confident do I feel in the ads that are in there like are they fresh ads that showed really strong results when they were testing or they brand new or did I not really do enough testing and they're just like pretty flimsy and I'm not that confident in them or another version is I've been launching lots of new designs so I think that there's a lot of like potential latent potential buildup in the account that hasn't been realized yet or do I feel like we're just kind of riding on you know our old winners and we haven't really been introducing anything new those are the things that I'm taking into account every time I'm bumping or cutting budgets those like main CBO campaigns the only changes I've made to those over this past entire year has been bumping or cutting the budgets so it's and I check like twice a week in the account and I either increase or I decrease by 20% I'm checking triple whale and stuff constantly just because it's fun but that's pretty much all that I'm doing in the account and that's after me doing this for years and years it's almost like when you do something and you get like muscle memory in your ad account so you start to look at it and just with within seconds of looking at it you intuitively know like is there something wrong is there something I need to be working to fix that sort of thing and like I'm whenever I look at the metrics first thing I'm looking at is just rowes and if rowes is good then I'm increasing it and then I don't even look at the rest of the metrics but if Raz is like faltering a little bit like down to like a low two or something then I'm looking at what's the cost per link click been what's the cpms been then I preview all the ads and I see have there been negative comments piling up that maybe our CS team had missed which I really shouldn't be like there's not really people like to complain but so it's a good thing to be checking but those are the things that I'm watching for and then if you're ever not sure about like what your next move should you can join one of the group coaching calls in the university and ask your questions but the way that you have to ask your questions is saying this is what I've been doing up until now this is what I'm thinking about doing next what are your thoughts because we we can't answer questions where it's just here's my numbers what should I do because we could answer it but it doesn't help you the real skill to be building up is thinking on your own two feet what you should be doing to improve it because you should be able to do this without us there or not that's the ultimate goal so exercises to get better at that fill out the D Toc marketing stat spreadsheet like every day if you're not doing that start doing it you should know your conversion rate your average order value like the back of your hand and when you're at 100K it's it's really just a matter of rinsing and repeating the same stuff that's working you see the structure of the account it's really not that complicated people get very hung up on like how many ad sets how many ads per ad set like come up with four solid winners and then start while while those are running and getting their time in the Sun be testing out to find more solid winners that's it that's all it comes down to and people get hung up and hamstring themselves by over complicating the process but that's really it like that's the structure that has worked for years so that's pretty much all there is to it the big but it's entirely possible to have an account go from doing well like 2.5 to a three row is and then crash and burn it's entirely possible but in my experience it has never come down to they used like the wrong structure in the account it's always been because there was something like some normal habit that they were doing before that got them to that point that they stopped doing and just like the math equation that we have at you know when we're in the testing phase and then at 10K now at 100K it stays the same and I'm constantly revisiting that it's like what's our cost per link click what's our conversion rate what's the average order value and if you just are in there watching it tracking things starting to build that skill lessons like this almost become like just nice to have but you know how to do it already yourself so thanks for watching and congratulations on hitting 100K and now we're going to talk about all the fun stuff that comes when we surpass that magical 1 million Mark congratulations on reaching 100K in Revenue this is a huge achievement you have never been closer to achieving your target of 1 million than you are right now so take some time to celebrate but not too long and get back to it because the hard work starts which is maintaining your trajectory at this point expect a few things like your website to be fully optimized for conversions and is capable of maintaining an average conversion rate of 2% or more your returning customer rate will start to increase and you will have at least one or two designs or ads that are receiving thousands of likes comments and shares so congratulations let's assume that you've done with the points I just mentioned because you'll need to shift your focus some things to be aware of are ad fatigue seasonal shifts price changes returns tax and competition now is the best time to get prepared for these things I made a mistake when I got to over 100,000 I thought I was okay and AD fatigue got in the way and I was not prepared for that so please learn from my mistakes do the research continually try and create more ads um and really focus on those ads that are high engagement and when I say ads what I really mean is t-shirt designs the t-shirt designs and Those ads must be capable of creating High engagement and this will do great things for maintaining your trajectory seasonal shifts is something else that can catch you out and it really caught me out most of my customers are in the Northern Hemisphere and I had strong sales in August and then at the end of summer and sort of that kind of back to school period um the focus of my customers changed and they went and they started focusing on back to school things and it affected the performance of my store the things you need to be aware was if price changes from your supplier um just keep an eye on things like the tax that they charge you the shipping rates that they charge you for different areas and even if they charge you different rates for the same t-shirt because they're coming from different providers so it's a really good opportunity now to get really deep into your profit and loss and get as much data as you can and really understand what's going on with your costs at this point the returns will increase and this is something else that you need to consider within your profit and loss so get a good handle on the returns and try and work out why that's happening try and minimize them really kind of separate out whether these returns are happening because of your suppliers is not delivering them or whether they are genuine returns from your customers tax is a big one um employer a tax specialist if you need help with this you've got GST which is good service tax but you've also got income tax to consider and then the final one to mention is competition buy now all your competition will probably know who you are and there will be other people coming into the market and they will be looking through the ad library and they will be taking inspiration from your best sellers so now is a really good opportunity for you to double down really go deep on the research on your next designs and really continually try and iterate and improve on the design designs that you're creating so that you can continually stay ahead of your competition and fight things like ad fatigue finally you have to be aware of these six priorities focus on your email campaigns this is such a huge opportunity for you to create Revenue at a really low cost stay ahead of your competition and plan for ad fatigue make more designs that encourage engagement in the form of Lights comments and shares stay ahead of your competition sure we've just said that already do some take some time to understand your Market at a deeper level and how external factors affect it be aware that Advantage Plus campaigns do not adapt quickly to these changes and they require lots of data a really good tip to consider is to plan the timing of your campaign changes and new campaigns that you will launch with the seasons and also monitor Regional performance Implement and optimize your customer service ticket management tool really look after your customers especially the ones that buy from you more than mons so now's a really good time to consider employing some people to help you with your business so have a really good think about what you enjoy about your business and what you don't enjoy consider letting the things that you don't enjoy so much if you can pass them on to somebody that can help you at a really low cost if you're profitable then totally do that because that will free up your time and it will give you the opportunity to continually build your brand which is really important and finally I'll say it again drill down deeper and deeper into the data and your cost to find the efficiencies because this is where the real money is made especially at high volumes where there's High competition welcome to Stage seven going from 1 million and Beyond and in this lesson we are spefic specifically going to be talking about optimizing our operations for even more growth and to start off I wanted to share fun screenshot of the very first store that I ever had that hit a million dollars in sales this is from right before it hit hit a million but I was absolutely stoked so congratulations on getting this far it's a insane accomplishment and the good news is that the very best is still yet to come because you're really just getting started and the only ceiling on your potential growth is the perceived ceiling that we set for ourselves and I'm sure that already coming this far feels like a massive achievement because it absolutely is but the point that you're at now it can only get like like things are about to get even crazier because now you are starting to amass resources and knowledge and uh momentum that is able to catapult you to the next level and that's what we're going to talk about in this stage so here we are at stage age seven we have already done a million dollars in sales and uh we should have built a profitable and sustainable business with automated workflows we should have a team in place that's managing our customer service a design team that is M cranking out new designs for us all the time and we've established a loyal customer base and starting to have a truly recognizable brand that people love and in this lesson we're going to be talking about how to optimize our business Ops even further and understand how to improve our cost efficiency and profitability even more and the reason this matters is that efficient operations are critical at this stage to maximize profitability and maintain smooth scaling and small kinks in your operation can lead to significant losses even as a business grows and this is going to sound like a broken record but it Bears repeating because people still sometimes miss it I certainly did run your p&l on a daily basis know your numbers cold your high level kpis and take action on the number one constraint that business honestly we could just stop the lesson there like that's it review your kpis identify the main constraint and then work on that and that's it so it's either your ads your conversion rate your average order value your lifetime value of your customers or it's your cost like those are pretty much it so you should be reviewing those numbers on a weekly basis identifying which one needs to be improved and then doing that and if all those numbers are good and you're seeing consistent performance then you just need to continue doing exactly what you're doing increasing ad spend like you can build to multiple seven figures a year from literally just selling T-shirts with Facebook ads and email and a little bit of Google I used to think that when I hit a million that meant I needed to now start doing Tik Tok and like a bunch of different random sales channels just because and I was like you know people are searching for our our brand name on Amazon like it' be dumb for us not to be listed on there and stuff like that and like I just kept repeating this almost kept repeating the same mistakes at every stage of the business like when I hit 10K I made a certain set of mistakes like shiny object syndrome letting my focus drift into like new shiny objects and then I did that again at 100K then a million and then you know the worst flavor of it was when I would hit a million dollars with a brand and then I would just pivot and start another brand just because that was exciting which good and bad news bad news for me good news for you is that then I got a ton of experience at going from zero to a million two to three million a year over and over again but anyway so keys to scaling number one key that I wish i' done this a lot earlier is we've talked about a few times at this point but do a Time study and evaluate where your time is actually being spent in the business and then out of the where your time is being spent see what can be delegated what can be eliminated entirely and then what should you be doubling down on and normally like we're very good at finding things to fill our schedule with and especially when you're at the million dollar plus level there's so much money that's being left on the table that unless if you are being like extremely self-aware like you run the risk of having like death by a Thousand Cuts and like you start to Take Your Eye Off the Ball you start getting distracted and thinking that you made it and you know you're a big shot now I'm talking to myself if you can't tell already thinking that you're a big shot and that means that you know now business easy you just outd delegate everything without really managing which Del like training and hir hiring and training and then managing is very different than just like chucking it over the fence so those are a lot of the mistakes that you can avoid by just doing a Time study seeing where your time is being spent and all make sure you're allocating it effectively next is your design process this is the lifeblood of the business so if this was a software business this would be like uh product development if this was you know uh every company has this every company has the thing that they need to continually improve upon otherwise the dis the business ceased to exist like you can ride on it but if the goal is to like really grow it to multiple seven figures a year then this design process needs to be Iron tight and it needs to be humming along so what that looks like as a kpi is five to seven new designs a day which really is not that much especially when you're Outsourcing it's 150 to 200 designs per month and if you do that consistently like it and this is why this this should be just like a very short lesson just make 150 to 200 new designs per month launch lots of things in your testing ads keep increasing your budgets watch your numbers to make sure your conversion rate isn't plummeting and you didn't add like a weird app or something that tanked things which is where the dtoc tracker comes in handy because you can you should be keeping track of like when changes are made so then you can see back and you know troubleshoot and then be focusing on your email Market marketing if and once it's at 20 to 25% like you're good to go email flows should be humming along sending two emails per week like those are the actions and if you just rinse and repeat that you'll not only you've already hit a million but you can double that or triple that just by doing a lot more of the thing that's already worked you should also have fully outsourced customer service you should not be answering a single customer service ticket but that's not to replace you understanding like the needs of the customer you need to be connecting with your your team so they're telling you like what are the complaints what are the problems what are people requesting you should know all that stuff but your time should not be consumed with it and next branded emails this is something that we did on History T's or my dad did that really set it apart taking the time to like go through and add like extra branded Touches at every step in your funnel is a really good use of your time like going through and rewriting all of the automated emails that Shopify sends to you know sound like more on brand like for example on History T's the Shopify automated order response email instead of it just saying like thanks your orders on the way nice job uh he rewrote it so that it was like this fun Old English uh like sazed piece of content that was like the whole town has erupted in cheers at like the the announcement of your your orders arrival uh it's now being carried on like a a velvet pillow and like a horong car like that kind of thing and people absolutely loved it and where that fits into a metric is in the lifetime value so those the little things that take start elevating yourself from being just a direct to Consumer store to an actual brand and like we talked about hours ago the difference in yoga stay versus history teas was that they both just followed what was working and that's what made them truly unique and special and really grew them to multiple seven figures a year is breaking away from the cookie cutter of everything that we've breaking away from the cookie cutter in terms of like what the brand looks like not overly inventing things certainly not changing our actions but just being more creative and like putting more thought into like how can we connect with our customers even more cuz the real money and the real way to scale to multiple seven figures is in getting your customers to come back and buy a second time a third a fifth and so on next is AD testing so this is one of the main things we're GNA keep on coming back to this need to be testing new ad creatives all the time so that you're because that's like at least 70% of your revenue is coming from your ads there's things that we can do to decrease that but it's always going to be over half of the revenue so you want to make sure that you are constantly stoking that fire with testing new ads and so your role as the business owner at this point is you should really be watching the metrics and the numbers and knowing the profitability cold and you should be setting the vision and making the key decisions of like where the brand is going in the future now this is all relative to like the size of your team and obviously like you're most likely still the person running the ads you're probably still doing the emails but that's where like over time as you grow even more your time is going to be spent more and more on just watching the bottom line and then watching the highle metrics and especially once you start scaling there's going to be lots like to a million dollars and Beyond there's going to be lots of fires and stuff that pop up so the p&l is more important than ever and your balance sheet because that's your window into the soul of the business and that's how you know like through like everything that's happening what you actually like what's actually working are you on the right track and are you not every time that I've had like a oh moment in the business and I've realized like things are going wrong it's when I've put off running the p&l and then put off like really diving into it deeply and then every time I come back to it I I'm just like shying away from it cuz I know it's not going to tell me something I I want to know when you're at the million dollar plus level you have to be doing it there's no avoiding it and you need to be uh like watching this on a daily basis and I know broken record but these are the lessons that I wish somebody would have grabbed me and told me repeatedly as a lot of times we don't need to be taught we just need to be reminded so run the time study see where your time is being spent and then see what you can be delegated create the Sops and also take this as an opportunity to purge everything from your system that you're no longer using like all your old Google Drive folders all of your like use this as a reset point to really catapult your success because all those little micro tears in your focus and in your B your team's like workflows those things really compound against you if you're not careful other than that you need to be tracking the kpis so watching your your p&l your balance sheet your DTC marketing stat spreadsheet and then your finops so you should be watching cash flow extremely closely so making sure that as you're scaling up that the balance sheet is reconciling against what the p&l is showing and at this point I highly highly recommend having a bookkeeper somebody who is giving you a financial statement every single month so that they're telling you like the actual truth then you can compare it with your balance sheet mpnl and see if you know you're on the right track but not only for that but also for the next stage which is um maximizing our evaluation for potential exit welcome to lesson 7.2 on maximizing our valuation for a potential business exit in this lesson we're going to be going through uh basically all the lessons that I wish I knew prior to trying to sell a business I had no idea what was involved with it and the first time I sold a business it was uh a very drawn out process that could have been much shorter like in the grand scheme of things the businesses that we're building and we'll talk about like when's the right time to sell what you need to have in place beforehand but roughly like a couple million dollars a year business is not that sizable of an exit it's not that's not to say it's not exciting or like a major accomplishment because it definitely is but the amount of work that goes into it is I made it a lot harder Myself by not knowing these things first and so here we are in stage seven $1 million plus and at this point we should have made at least a consistent million dollars in sales we've automated our systems we've started to build up some brand Equity or recognition and we have consistent sales where it's spread between like email Facebook Google organic and Affiliates and by the end of this lesson we'll understand how to prepare your business for a sale and learn every step step of the exit process for your business now this is not like an exact guide like just check these boxes and your business will be sold because it's a very very involved process but the reason that this matters is that preparing for potential exits lets your business look very appealing and sellable to buyers not just for potential buyers when you decide to sell but even as you're just running the business these are good practices to be in the habit of that just makes the business like one that you know it's kind of like if you when you go to save lived in a house for a long time then you decide that you want to sell it and then when you you start fixing it up and do all these Renovations and stuff on it then once you are done with all the renovations you're like actually I kind of like it here I I don't think I want to sell it we can do that for your business right now so if you remember when you first started like everything up until this point was about building a sellable business but when do you prepare to sell your business the right answer is right from the very beginning because all the things that are involved with selling your business oneone is number one preparing all the right documentation two is coming up with a formal valuation three is your exit strategy four preparing your business to sell five going to Market and buyer Communications then six receiving Lois and due diligence then seven is closing and transition and in the last course we split this up in a bunch of little lessons we're just covering it all right now so for preparing documentation you need to have your Sops your financials and all your brand assets nice and organized and picture if a potential buyer was looking at your business and you just and they asked to have the keys like it should be extremely easy for you to hand that over to them like you should be able to basically just send them like a Google Drive and it has everything so nicely organized that anybody can pick it up and understand exactly what everything is and what needs to be done in the business that's the point that it needs to get to and for a valuation standpoint like formal valuation like if you're like a a C Corp you need like a 409a valuation it's not like that not like a a tax or legal document or anything but you need to come up with the valuation of like roughly what the business is worth and this is a a screenshot of some slides from our pitch deck that we put together for one of the businesses that we were selling but in coming up with the valuation of your business the way that it's calculated is it's off of so a couple of things one the majority business sales are asset sales they're not stock sales common misconception at least e-commerce businesses of this size they're all just about asset sales meaning that the buyer is buying your site your products and your customer list and like your ad account they're buying those Standalone assets they're not buying like your actual LLC they're not buying like your credit cards and your bank accounts and your EIN and all that that's all separate the buyer and the reason it's done that way is the buyers don't want that they don't want to take on like the potential risk or liabilities that may be associated with that LLC they just don't want to they don't want that headache but the weights C it's an asset sale and the other thing to know is that the accounting method you have to use is something called a cruel so there's cash base and there's a cruel based accounting and I didn't know this for too long cash base is what you can just Google this this common like accounting or bookkeeping definitions but a cruel base is when I'll say cash base First Cash base is just when money in Money out that's the month that it's counted in so if you paid for a Shopify annual subscription in December then and that would say it's just $1,000 that would be negative $1,000 in December and then it'll be 0 for your Shopify expense for the rest of the year which is not like an accurate representation of how that should really be distributed but some businesses do it on cash basis similarly like if you have your printify say you did a really big day sales-wise on the last day of the month well that printify expense say you did like 10 grand in sales that printify expense isn't going to hit until the 1st of the next month so December looks like it has $10,000 in sales from that last day but 0 and cost of goods for that day which would be a pretty big discrepancy and the way that the buyer wants to see it is they want to see like using the Shopify annual subscription first as an example they want to see that annual subscription split out evenly across all of the months so if it's $1,000,000 divided by 12 like 80 something bucks a month that's the the amount that needs to be spread evenly across every month then in terms of like your cost of goods for example that needs to be shown like that $110,000 even if the cost of goods for that 10 grand in sales hit in January it needs to be reflected or captured for December which is a massive headache if you're doing all that retroactively is why I stress the point of keep track of your finances every step of the way run a daily p&l and then also run a monthly p&l at the end of each month so you should have uh daily is just like each day and then your monthly one is when you take the invoice statements from printify or whatever fulfillment provider and you plug in that final invoice amount as the cost of goods because once you get into due diligence which we're going to talk about in a second the buyer is going to be asking for backup or proof for all of the numbers which is it just makes sense like they want to validate everything that you're saying and backing up a second some something in in terms of like getting ready to sell the business I think that I had a preconceived notion that like just if we have a business that's you know decent size and has some profit that somebody will buy it like somebody will want it and the answer is no like you have to build a business that somebody would actually want and like investors are are not idiots so if you have a business that you like you're not that happy about running why would a buyer be any happier like they're going to have your unhappiness compounded by the fact that they have all the learning curve of like learning how to run your business so it has to be a business that is actually generating cash flow positive cash flow and doesn't have a ton of key man risk meaning that you are the entire business if you're the person person who is and that's going to be one of the questions they ask they definitely ask you is what is the like what does your day-to-day involvement look like in the business and if like obviously you have to answer honestly uh if your answer is well I run the ads and I make all the design decisions and I'm answering customer service tickets and this and this and that like no buyer likes to hear that unless if you're coming along as part of the deal which to me I was never interested it I never wanted to be like Aqua hired and then I'm basically just getting a job so the business needs to be like it's calculated a cruel method asset sale and the valuation method is by looking at what's called TTM iida so trailing 12 month earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization so like roughly your net profit over the last 12 months and in terms of valuation it helps your valuation a ton if your your growth trajectory is trending upwards by at least 15 to 20% year-over-year if you are stagnant or Flatline or even worse go declining that's a massive red flag for a potential acquir so the ideal time to sell a business is one get ready from the very beginning but then two is when you have a business that's done at least a million dollars in sales has at least a year of history at least a year of history and a million dollars in sales and is going like this IDE like most business sales and where you'll like Peak the interest of like a larger potential like buyer pool is is when you're at the 1 to2 million in eida so that's 1 to2 million in trailing 12 month net profit so that's the real point that most buyers get interested and but it's still possible like companies like open store exist to acquire companies Shopify Brands exactly like that and I guess we could talk a little bit about like potential buyers there's aggregators there's like family offices which they wouldn't really be that interested there's strategic acquirers like yoga state if we got acquired by like gam or something somebody who already has a large yoga customer base and then there's like selling like direct to you know like a mom and pop shop not a family office but like a mom and pop shop of like somebody who's just you know working in 9 to5 has built up like a pretty decent nest egg and is looking to get into e-commerce and then rather than you know learning it all themsel and like getting started from zero they're looking to just acquire somebody so there's lots of different options but the bigger buyers you'll you won't really peque their interest until you're at least a million in uh trailing 12mth EV up closer to two to three so in coming up with the formal valuation it really helps to put together like a slide deck like this one that we put together for our Brands where you map map out like all the potential business opportunities like expansion opportunities how strong the brand is your marketing channels what differentiate you why the market that you're in is growing and not going to stagnate all all that sort of thing so for exit strategies explore the following options you can sell merge or you can scale further strategic partners that was the one I was looking for or you can just scale it further and like if you once you have a brand that's doing over a million dollars a year in sales you're bringing home at least 150 to 250 in net profit if you double that the next year you're at 300 to 450 at least like why not just keep doing that and you definitely can to me the reason that I ended up deciding to sell my Brands was that one it had been a go of mine for a long time and two it's like if I can just take chips off the table and then reinvest it in something new that seemed like a pretty good option to me and it completely depends on like what your your goals are and like for some PE if I was like super obsessed with yoga or if I really loved history then and it felt like a passion project for me and it was something that I could see myself growing for 5 to 10 years then yeah then I would hold on to it but if I had other ideas like you know knowing that I wanted to get into software like try different business opportunities at some point just for me personally it like always made sense to me to sell it um and I also wanted to have that experience just like I learned a lot better by going all the way through the process of building and growing a Shopify store than I ever would have learned like from just sitting there before starting I learned so much more getting all the way through that process I wanted to have that same experience getting all the way through an acquisition process cuz then to me that was like the full life cycle of running a business from inception all the way to acquisition so then I had experience with all that was just another thought process that I had in mind then when you're preparing your business to sell it there's three different ways that you can uh sell it so you can either I'll go right to left you can either sell it yourself which is the simplest simplest structure-wise not necessarily like the most efficient but sell it yourself which is where you just go out and list it on marketplaces like one that I listed it on is called yeah this was the marketplace that uh we went to find buyers Shopify used to have a Marketplace it's called the Shopify Marketplace they now closed it because it was filled with like just a lot of Tire kickers a lot of people that would reach out saying hey I'm very interested can you send me your site name and like financials it's like sure will you sign an NDA and the answer is always no uh so you can go sell it yourself on marketplaces like this or there's a lot of other ones or you can go with you can just Google them or you can go with Brokers which Brokers it's like I'm not even going to name some of them but there there's a lot of them that are just like used car salesmen so there's some good ones out there definitely but you have to watch out for the Brokers that and the way that they work is that they essentially have a Rolodex of potential buyers that they've worked with in the past and they partner with you they help you fix up like your listing and stuff like that and come to a reasonable valuation and then they go out the idea is that they go out to their list of buyers and that they find you a potential buyer at least get you conversations very quickly the commission structure is normally tiered based on the size of the deal on a percentage basis anywhere from like 10 to 20% I can't even remember what percentage we paid now but yeah so they take a percentage of whatever the final business valuation is and it you know the larger the deal size the smaller percentage they take but you just have to talk to a bunch of them before you end up settling them one cuz it's a it's a really important decision you want to make sure that you're not getting somebody who's just like I said used car salesman not really going to add much value and they're just going to take their percentage then investment bankers they're kind of like Brokers just much higher quality but they also only deal with much larger deal sizes like starting at least when I was talking with them it was starting at 2 million iida and up so those are the three different options and then next in terms of like going to Market and your buyer communication so you're going to write your listing which chat GPT can do this extremely well now but in order to list them like acquire you have to write like a business synopsis and you come up with like basically a good pitch on like why it's a good business that there's growing opportunities you know it's Diversified It's relatively hands-off all those sort of things and it's like primed for growth because of X Y and Z reasons chat GPT can help you come up with that then you make the listing on like an acquire or one of those marketplaces and then buyers will start reaching out asking you questions and they'll want to just see the financials and what I recommend doing and what we did is have everybody sign an NDA so I had a what's it called docu sign so I had a docu sign account that was just on fire I was getting tons of messages flooding in from potential buyers about half of them probably just wanted to see the financials but I had all of them sign an NDA where I just used docu sign create a link send them rather than having to ask them for their email and stuff like just send them the link they click it they sign it and then you send them the financials and the way that we sent them the financials is give them like a PDF packet where it has the slide deck that talks about the brand and then has the financials in there but then it also has uh what's called an a process letter that's what this is right here so this is not required but this is linked somewhere around this video but a process letter is so like let me back up the stages that you go through is you decide you're going to buy you prepare all the financials and then you write your listing you get everything in order you get your valuation you put together your slide deck you have your trailing 12 the full business length of the history the full length of the business history has to be done in the financials they're only really looking at the 12 months for the valuation but they are looking at the whole business history and then when they look at that past 12 months they're going to put some kind of multiple on it anywhere from like a two to a three to a four depending on the size and the growth like if you're growing 20 to 30% you could get closer to like a three and a half or a four if you're pretty large and you're growing at that rate then you can get like a five so like if you're trailing 10 or 12 month eida is like $100,000 for example and you're like stagnant you could be looking at like a two or 2.5 which would be you could sell it for 200 to 250 but if you're growing then you could be looking at closer to a three which would be 300,000 and then if you're growing and you're pretty sizable like a million dollars plus at least then you could be looking at like a four so it's like there's levels to it and there's like orders of magnitude and profit to be gained off of the acquisition by just doing these things well in the beginning and I didn't understand any of this and then the really bad trap that I fell into was that as I Was preparing to sell and like getting over this learning curve like I didn't know what I didn't know like should I go with a broker should I just list should I whatever in hindsight I wish that I just listed and forgone a broker at least in the beginning so I could learn the process for myself so I could manage the broker and know like what they what them doing a good job even looked like and there's also no risk of me just listing it myself for a little bit but I got caught in like analysis paralysis while I was and also just getting over the learning curve meanwhile I had to be running the business still and because my focus was so heavily placed on selling the business the business's performance started to decline or stagnate at the very least and so that's a tough conversation I have to have with Buyers like explaining why you know the business's performance hasn't been great so that's another learning like make sure that you are not the key man that you are able to have the business continue running while and growing while you're not a part of it so back to the the communication you have them sign an NDA and you send them the materials and included in the materials should be what's called called an offer letter if you choose you don't have to do this we actually didn't use this but I wish we had because an offer letter basically the again the template is around here but it's basically saying like uh that we like the process that you're running like the timeline of when you're willing to receive offers which is Lois letters of intent between what dates and like the requirements that you have to meet that and then also the information that you're requesting from them like conditions and approvals like if there's shareholders or like financial instruments that need to be leveraged in order for them to do the deal like proof of funds like all that kind of stuff and you can ask for proof of funds or proof of like ability to pay before you even send somebody Financial would be a completely legitimate thing to ask but the smaller your business size and less experience you have the less you can like really ask for but back to the uh offer the process letter so you're giving them the deadline of when their Loi has to be in by you're asking them to clarify like who they are what Financial instr ments they would need to use in order to you know buy the business all that kind of stuff because that's going to factor into your your decision cuz say you've run like a 30-day process and say that your all Lois must be received by the end of the month ideally you'll have multiple Lois so then you you have your pick and you're able to like not just go for like the the only offer but hopefully you have multiple and then you're able to evaluate and some of the things you'll evaluate on again this is a very dense subject so we're just going very high level here but some of the things you might evaluate based off of are like who they are who like what's the reason for them buying the business cuz for me that was a big one I wanted to know that the people that were buying the business had a chance like that they were qualified to actually be successful with it I didn't want to sell it to somebody who was like just getting into e-commerce and they needed to figure out every because I I that would be tough for somebody to come in it's possible but that's something to consider then in terms of the financial instruments and like proof of funding all that stuff that's the biggest risk is that if you don't validate that up front or vet for that then you end up accepting an Loi from somebody which means you turn down the other Lois and then you go into a due diligence process and then you know it turns out that they were not who they said they were which we had that happen we had buyers that we were talking to very seriously and then they just started acting like kind of sketchy like they wouldn't turn their camera on on Zoom calls and like we tried to find like look up their locc that they said they were getting the funding from and it was like not a real LLC or my personal favorite was they sent a PDF uh like screenshot of proof of funds and then I used the tool that shows like if PDFs have been tampered with and it saw that uh like the the date and this it was something weird but something had been edited in the screenshot which there was no reason for it to be edited and then we asked them about it about you know like why that happened they just got all like clammy and then when it finally went to like okay let's move forward like let's make a formal offer and like move to the next like we sent them to the due diligence documents and they like never had a real follow-up question they were just like yeah this looks good I'm like do you guys have any questions or anything and they had it was just very sketchy all around all in all they ended up just completely ghosting us and we never move forward so lesson learn make sure to vet them beforehand and that's where the process letter comes in is it's making it it's adding a sense of urgency to potential buyers opposed to you know them not having like a deadline or any kind of not social proof but urgency or scarcity that like this deal is temporary they don't have like they can't just wait for forever to decide so that works to kind of pull all your offers and hopefully you're getting a bunch of Interest based on like one the quality of the business two the quality of your listing and the number of places you're listing or the quality of your broker but hopefully you field like 5 to 10 different Lois you pick from them you pick the one that sounds the most legitimate the buyer that you like the best and you've had conversations with all them at this point like the first step before an Loi is that you get on a phone call with them and just talk to them and like selling a business is just like anything is like about people you need to truly get to understand and like know the buyer and like what their goals are and like build a rapport with them it's not just like a business transaction it's more about like who the person is on the other side of the table and then once you go through uh the LOI process and then you go through due diligence which we're not quite closing and transition yet but I like the meme uh when you're in due diligence that's when they're like lifting up the kimono and looking at everything all your dirty laundry within the business hopefully you don't really have any but if you did everything legitimately like you obviously should in your p&l and your balance sheet and all of that and all of your numbers align with what you have backing for and like you actually appr proof like you should have a uh some kind of backing like either an invoice or a screenshot or something for every single line item of every single month for the entire business's history printify for example makes a easy Facebook makes this easy Google does Shopify so fortunately the majority of our our large providers they already have this built in like you're able to go pull every invoice from every month that like in your history but you need to have those things like ready and available and when you're going through D due diligence you're going to get questions about like what happened in this month why why did sales dip what happened here and it's not it's not a good answer to say things like well I got married that month so I stopped working on the business as much like that's not a good answer another question you should be prepared for is why are you selling and that's a very legitimate reason as well I mean you also you don't need to BS like especially entrepreneur investors they get it like they've been in your shoes where you built something and you just want to like take a break and exit but so be transparent and authentic throughout the entire process that'll get you much further than anything else but at the same time be considering your your responses and knowing that everything that you say the buyer is evaluating like your every word and also in the due diligence process when we were were doing this the first time through all of our stuff was like I got the p&l and the financials pretty organized but then people were asking me for things like like our products our products like distribution I forget they had some fancy term for it but it's was basically like our which products out of our catalog like our ABC analysis that's what it was which we were print on demand so I didn't really understand that but that's like an in inventory like cost analysis which we didn't really have any but anyway yeah they were asking questions like that so nowadays ask chat GPT what are questions that I should be prepared answer when going through due diligence for potentially selling a business and that'll cover most of your bases but yeah again this is a a quick and dirty rundown of what the process entails most important thing recapping everything is at least 12 months of History doing at least a couple $1,000 in net profit otherwise you won't really Peak the interest of most buyers just not worth their time and your valuation will be calculated based off of that trailing 12 profit and the growth rate and the size so anywhere from like a two I know some companies that have sold for like a 1 to a 1.5 depending on how bad the business is so you want to have a really good business that's sizable and it's growing like 20 to 30% year of a year ideally 15% minimum definitely not flatlined and then that's how you get your valuation I recommend putting together some kind of pitch deck or just presentation your asset sheet so like your your balance sheet for the whole business history your p&l for the whole business's history those are all your materials together along with your process letter then you write your listings to go on on different marketplaces decide if you're going to work with a broker or not but you put up your listings on different marketplaces start Fielding messages from people when people reach out asking for the financials you send them a NDA which is very common practice any any potential buyer any legitimate potential buyer should not have any issue with that and then you when they fill it out the fancier way is you can set up docu sign so that when they finish filling it out the autor response message to them sends them the materials I thought that was fancy anyway and the link that you send them is like the link to the PDF form it has the the process letter your financials the slide deck all all of that stuff and the process letter tells them everything they need to know in order to uh submit an Loi it tells like when where the evaluation that you're like range that you're open to and the information they need to send and then you set a a process due date like roughly a month or 45 days out and by the end of that date you should have hopefully at least a couple of Lois you pick between all of them and make sure you the buyers that their financial instruments sound like legitimate and you think they can actually get the deal done and then you decide on one you accept you let the other ones know that thank you but uh we're evaluating like this opportunity but make sure you don't burn any of those bridges cuz worst case you know the one that you go with ends up falling through and then you go into due diligence you share all the financials you get riddled with questions they ask you everything about the business you need to have really good answers for all of them and then normally they'll try to like retrade on the deal and you know try try to nickel and dime maybe I shouldn't say normally sometimes they'll try to do that to try to get you know a better valuation for themselves and then eventually you close and once you close then you go into transition and transitioning is basically your time to make sure that you're doing right by the buyer and that you're doing everything that you can to ensure their own success now the specifics of this are determined in your closing documents like it's negotiated like either the amount of hours or a time frame that you'll be involved with the business's operations and then it's also possible that they'll include some kind of earnout clause so your earnout Clause is normally like a performance bonus like for example if we were at a million dollar last year if we surpass 1.5 this next year then you would get an extra I don't know $100,000 whatever it is and it's normally at least from what we saw the offers range from like 60 to 70% up front and another like 20 to 40% were earnout and the advice that I was told that I think is really good advice and I still stand by it is when you're deciding if you want to do a deal or not you should do the deal as if with the thought in mind that the earnout will never happen and if you're still happy with the deal just with The Upfront lump sum then great then go for it but I've seen a lot of deals where that value that earnout just never even comes close to happening because there's too many things that are outside of your control CU you can only do so much when you're in trans like helping them out like at a certain point it's up to them and their team to be really motivated and organized and on top of their stuff so those are a couple things to consider but like I said the transition specifics are included in the in the closing documents but ultimately it's like just the ethical thing to do to do right by the buyer do everything you can to make sure they're successful not just because you know they're they put a lot of trust in you and doing the deal and stuff but also they're now taking over your brand the thing that you put all that hard work and effort into and yeah you you just want to make sure that you're setting that up for success as well that it's not just going to crash and burn afterwards and another thing to consider is what's happen to your team afterwards like for me it was very important that the team would be either like taken care of by the new buyer or that they would stay with us and we would keep them employed some other way like I was never going to do a deal where it just left anybody like laying out in the wind hanging out in the wind whatever the saying is so a lot of different variables that play to keep in mind but all in all once you're done it's the biggest day of my life it well it felt like that or I thought it would feel like that and then it ended up feeling like just any other normal day so once you get to this point you realize that the journey is the destination as cliche as that is but congratulations you've done it you have reached the very end of the 2025 course this has been quite the journey I hope that you guys have enjoyed it along the way and uh yeah I I think this hopefully it feels this way that it was a big improvement over last year and I can't wait to see all the results you guys get with this um and especi even for you guys who are watching this were not at the million-dollar level and you're just interested to learn about selling a business then hello to you as well and thank you all for watching very much and I hope that you guys get a lot out of this and that you go out and more than like all the lessons and stuff that you just go out and take action and that you're okay with the fact that you're going to mess up you're going to make a lot of mistakes and that's 100% part of the process the important things is that you just don't get discouraged and that you keep going uh and like back to the growth lesson that you're giving yourself credit for all the progress you're making and just getting to the very end of this course is a massive achievement in and of itself so congratulations on making it this far I want to thank you guys again for watching and hanging out with us and yeah we look forward to working with you bye