Steve is a legend in the eComm space. He is not only the store owner of Bumblebee Linens, but also the host of the highly successful marketing podcast, "My Wife Quit Her Job,” which ranks among the top 25 in its category. He has been successfully running an eComm event for 7 years, and it is one of my favorite events to attend and speak at.

He’s also the author of a brand new book - The Family First Entrepreneur.

His impressive combination of experiences gives him a unique perspective on eCommerce and entrepreneurship.

Here is a look at what we cover:

• How to grow using lifecycle marketing when only 12% of your customers buy more than once.
• How Steve thinks about customer buckets to grow cross-sells, upsells, and repeat orders.
• How Steve and his team use Chat GPT4 to 10x their organic traffic.
• What’s the future of AI and white-collar jobs?
• How Steve thinks about pricing and why they no longer offer deep discounts.

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Family First Entrepreneur
• MyWifeQuitHerPodcast (YouTube)
• Steve Chou (Twitter)
• Sellers Summit
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I have an e-commerce veteran. He's a legend in the space. He's a podcaster, he's an author, he's a store owner. He runs his own events. If you don't know him, you are going to love getting to know him on this podcast, but I've got Steve Chou joining me. Steve is the host of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, a Top 25 podcast in the marketing space. He's also the author of a brand new book called The Family First Entrepreneur, which we'll talk about a little bit on the show. He's the co-founder of Seller Summit, one of my favorite events to attend and speak out. I think I've spoken there three or four times coming up at the time of this recording, which is great. And then also co-founder of Bumblebee Linens. And so we're going to be talking lifecycle marketing, ai, and probably other fun stuff because he's a podcaster. He's comfortable with all this. But with that intro, Steve Chou, my man, how you doing? Welcome to the show and thanks for coming on,

Steve:

Dude. What up Brett? Always happy to talk to you and very thankful that you were able to speak at Seller Summit. I want to say for the past five years, I want to say, I think that's

Brett:

Right. I think it's been five years. Seller Summit has become one of my favorite events to attend and speak out. I think I've spoken there for the last four or five years, and it's also been really fun to watch the attendees grow. Now you keep it small and intimate on purpose, but the size of the sellers you, you're seeing their businesses grow over the last several years, which has been fun to watch. And so I don't know what your perspective is on that as the event organizer,

Steve:

It's been great. Actually, the average revenue per attendee is in the mid seven figures now, and it wasn't like that in the very beginning. Seven years ago, everyone was making six figures, and it's been amazing to see them grow over the years. And your talks always get high marks, which is why I always invite you back.

Brett:

Thanks, dude. Thanks. Good to hang out. I always in just enjoy the speaker networking and the speaker mastermind. You do, but always a good time, great audience and super fun event. So talk to us about, I dive into a few things. I want to talk about lifecycle marketing, and you've had a really unique perspective because you run a podcast, you run an event, you talk to merchants all the time, but you are a merchant, you run a store. And so we're going to talk about lifecycle marketing and love your perspective there. Also going to get into AI just a little bit because I think you're using it in a very unique way, very powerful way. So we're going to dive into that, but talk to us about what was the process like to write this book? So Family First entrepreneur, what's the motivation behind that and what was that process like? Just curious.

Steve:

Yeah, I, I'll just tell you, the motivation was I've been blogging for 10, 11 years now over a decade. My mom has never read a single thing, but as soon as I told her that I was doing a traditionally published book, she got all excited and wanted to read her right away. That made me very happy.

Brett:

See, you're doing this so that hopefully your mom puts something on the fridge. Look at what Steve did. He wrote, he wrote a book. He finally did something interesting.

Steve:

There's a lot of childhood trauma there. Let's not get into that. But yeah, the other reason was it's always been on my bucket list and I just want to walk my kids to the bookstore. Hopefully this bookstore, that's the only bookstore that's left in my area, stays in business in time for the book to be released. So I can actually walk them through there. So

Brett:

Dude, that would be amazing. Yeah. Hey, dad wrote that book also for you to do a book signing at that bookstore. That would be super cool as well. I'm not sure if they'll, you know how I'm

Steve:

Going to do a tour? I'm going to do a tour.

Brett:

Are you really?

Steve:

I am, yeah. Afterwards, yeah, just like a relaxing tour where I'm just going to go around and just do a little book signing here and there. I don't know if I'm going to make it out to your neck of the woods. Brett, you're No

Brett:

Springfield, Missouri. Come on. Actually, for mid-size market, we were very entrepreneurial in nature and entrepreneur friendly. Actually, I saw it was Inc. Anchor four, somebody several years ago ranked us it one of the top mid-size markets for entrepreneurs, which is kind of cool,

Steve:

But maybe I'll have it at omg. Who knows? What's that? You led me to your offices. Maybe I'll have one there.

Brett:

Yeah. Okay, let's do it. Let's do a book signing at OMG headquarters. I love it. So more about the book later, but let's do this. So you're the co-founder and you also said you called yourself the Grunt at Bumblebee Linens. So explain what you guys saw, what you guys do, and then we're going to get into lifecycle marketing in just a second.

Steve:

So we mainly sell handkerchiefs and linens for special occasions. And I would say our primary customer base are people who are getting married, people who have baptisms. And unfortunately we also do a lot of funerals, but we personalize these hankies. So we actually have these industrial sewing machines in our warehouse, and we do a lot of sewing, which means generally there's not a lot of repeat business, but we're talking about lifecycle marketing, which implies that you sell to your customers a lot. We do have a really strong set of repeat customers, and believe it or not, I kind of discovered this by accident, but there are a lot of people who collect handkerchiefs also. Really something we discovered over the years. They

Brett:

Collect handkerchiefs BA based on special events or something. They're buying a handkerchief to commemorate something or they want to buy 'em different

Steve:

Styles. It's kind of like there's people who have a hundred pairs of shoes in their closet. These people have thousands of handkerchiefs. It's

Brett:

Crazy. You got the sneaker heads, you got the shoe dogs out there, you got the

Steve:

We hanky heads.

Brett:

The hanky heads, hanky heads. That is hilarious. So yeah, it's a good point. So I mean, obviously people do get married more than once on occasion, certainly, and you have those other events, but yeah, this is not, I'm not going to join the hanky of the month club unless you're in that crowd or I'm not going to buy one a year or something. So yeah, I was a little surprised when you said, Hey, one of the things I'm passionate about is lifecycle marketing. Let's talk about it. So how do you think about lifecycle marketing knowing that the vast majority of your clients are only going to buy once?

Steve:

So just throwing some numbers out there. So only 12% of our customers are repeat, but it actually represents over 36% of our revenue. And I kind of stumbled upon this one day by just looking through our, does

Brett:

That mean that the AOVs are really high for your repeat customers,

Steve:

Or they are? I'm going to tell you why I'm getting into that. Yeah, good,

Brett:

Good, good. Yeah, sorry, jumping ahead. Yeah.

Steve:

Yeah. So I was just looking through the stats and I just noticed some customers in there that were purchasing a lot of linens. If some person's purchasing 40 dozen napkins or a hundred hanks, it's kind of unusual. So one day, just on a whim, I called the person up and I was like, Hey, we noticed you ordered a large quantity and you've ordered more than once. Can I ask what you do? And then they told me, Hey, yeah, we're an event planner. We do this all the time. And so I was like, okay, great. Here's a custom coupon code and here's a dedicated rep, so when you need anything for the event, we'll make sure it gets there. We'll put a person on it. And so now what we do is we go through our customer list almost every single month, find those outliers, and we just call them up and on the phone. People are surprised.

Brett:

You literally call them on the phone. On

Steve:

The phone, yes. Not email.

Brett:

Are they like shocked? They're like, wait a minute. The e-commerce store that I just bought from is calling me on the phone right now.

Steve:

Exactly. But they're good. I mean, they bought from you, they know who you are. So they're more receptive, and we're always really polite. We lead in with coupon, dedicated rep care of the order, and it works really well. And so these people who we get that way end up being customers for life, and they buy a lot and they buy often.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. I think, I know we're mutual friends with Drew Sonke, nerd Marketing, but also involved in a number of companies, just kind of a legend in the e-commerce space. But he talks about identifying your whales, identifying, looking at things like recency frequency, monetary value, so how soon did someone purchase, how often did they purchase, and then the monetary value of what they purchased. And so you identified those people and now you're totally giving them the white club treatment phone call, thank you, coupon code, dedicated rep. And yeah, after you do that customer for life, why are they going to go anywhere else? Why do they choose Amazon or something for their next linens? They want to buy from you. So

Steve:

Yeah. The other thing we also noticed, and I recommend that everyone do this, is we looked through all of our traffic sources and we found out which traffic sources had the highest revenue per visitor. And because before I did this analysis, I was just looking at everything in aggregate. If everything's good, usually, you know, don't look at it. But I started looking at it and I noticed that the people I was getting from Facebook were our lowest revenue per visitor of all the traffic sources.

Brett:

Interesting.

Steve:

The people who were coming in organic through Google were our highest value people, which tends to be true for, I would say for most stores. But that's what caused me to actually focus more on the organic SEO side.

Brett:

Interesting. And as a Google paid guy, and I also have a background in seo, I love SEO too, but how did Google, so Google Organic is the highest, was it still comparable to Google paid search as an example, or was it noticeably different?

Steve:

No, paid search is up there too. I mean, they're one and the same, right? I mean, yeah,

Brett:

You are actively searching at that high buyer intent, so that that's different than someone that you're demand gen type advertising with Facebook

Steve:

Super. Maybe you can comment on this, Brett, but I moved over to Performance Max and Performance Max is a black box.

Brett:

It

Steve:

Is. So it's actually kind of hard to tell where everything's coming from once I did that.

Brett:

So a couple things. I can send this to you after we're done recording. There's a script that my buddy Mike Rhodes, he runs Web Savvy and Agency Savvy, is based in Australia. Brilliant, brilliant Google marketer. He and his team built this script and we added a little bit to it, but basically you run the script, it'll pull all the data outside, pull all the data out of Performance Max and show you where the spend is going. So it gives you quite a bit of insights to know what you might need to adjust or what you might not need to adjust. And we have heard, because everyone is telling Google the same thing, we want more visibility, we want more data inside of Performance Max that some data's going to be coming into the account. So we'll see. We have seen though, kind of anyway, we slice it. Performance Max is doing pretty well for most of our clients. We spend now between four or 5 million on just Performance Max here in the last year or so, and a little better than smart shopping at new customer acquisition. We can scale it a little bit better, but they're definitely some kind of best practices to follow in terms of the way the assets you've given and the way you structure your asset groups and the way you bid. I'll be talking about that at that seller summit, which will be fun. But yeah.

Steve:

Yeah, I mean, what I like about Performance Max is that you can actually maintain it with it's relatively low maintenance.

Brett:

Yeah, totally. If you want to be hands off a performance max and you've got all the right assets there, you can totally be hands off. And this is also why I kind of hated it in the beginning because I thought it would only be hands off. You could be hands off if you want, but if you want to tinker and you want to add new things, you want to try segmentations, you could do that too. And we've been able to push the envelope with a couple clients by creating multiple campaigns or by the way we structure the asset group. So it's kind of interesting. But yeah, if you just got it kind of simple and it's dialed in, it'll just keep working, which is great. Did you see, and we're getting a little bit deep

Steve:

In the field off topic. Yeah, yeah. Curious,

Brett:

Did you, your performance improve from smart shopping to Performance Max, or is it about the same as it was with Smart Shopping?

Steve:

So I was actually never using Smart Shopping. I was only on shopping. Okay. And it's just regular. And I found that unfortunately, performance Max kind of eats into the,

Brett:

It does

Steve:

The other campaigns. So I just like the hands off nature of it. And overall it gives me greater reach. The isn't as good, but it gives me higher reach. I make more money overall, so that's why I like it.

Brett:

And the issue with just standard Google Shopping is your placements are limited to just the search results, but you'll notice if you pay attention, if you're shopping for something and then you go to YouTube or you go to a site that's part of the Google Display Network, which is like 90% of the internet, you'll start to see product listing ads or Google Shopping ads for related products. Not even the products you clicked on, but if you've been searching for cookware or a vacuum or whatever, you'll start to see ads for those things in other places. And that's largely driven by Performance Max, which is interesting.

Steve:

I see minutes everywhere I go now, actually.

Brett:

That is awesome. Cool. Okay. So you identified your best customers. You call them, you give them an offer, you identify your top traffic sources. What else do you do that's unique related to lifecycle marketing?

Steve:

So we just have different buckets for customers, and I don't know if this is unique, I'm sure other people are doing it, but we have a portion of our list that has never bought before. So for those people, we'll discount a little bit more heavily just to get them to make that first purchase, just to get them to open up their wallet. We also have a bucket of customers that have purchased once but didn't purchase again. And I just can tell from our data that if we can get someone to buy again, just twice anything, chances are they're going to be a longer term customer. So we do whatever we can for them to get that second purchase. We'll cro, so we have these flows automatically set up in Clavio so that, I'll give you an example. We sell three different types of napkins in our store, cocktail lunch and dinner napkins. And we usually sell 'em in matching sets. So if someone buys like a cocktail napkin but does not buy a dinner napkin or a lunch napkin, we automatically send an email that tells 'em, Hey, did you know that we sell matching lunch applicants and dinner applicants? And so we're kind of automatically getting them to buy again, and it's all fully automated in the auto-responder sequence. So for those people who bought once and haven't bought again, we just cross-sell them other products that are just automatically related based on what they bought. What's

Brett:

The take rate on that typically? Do you know off the top of your head, if you send that, Hey, you bought the cocktail napkins but not lunch or dinner when we saw matching, are you getting a pretty good take rate on that?

Steve:

The take rate is probably in the low double digits, high single digits. But we actually cross sell a bunch of, so another example also is, Hey, did you know that we sell personalized cocktail napkins, though the take rate for that is higher, so if they want their initials on it and whatnot, that tends to work better. So we'll leave with that

Brett:

So that that's more of an upsell. Right. So you got cross sell bought cocktail napkins. Now here's the lunch and dinner that are matching, but there may have been a reason why they only bought cocktail, so now you're saying, Hey, you've already got those, but now get customized cocktail napkins. Correct. Got it. And then there's a higher take rate for that. Correct.

Steve:

Correct.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. Interesting. What are some of the mistake, because again, I know you got a unique perspective, you talk to people at Seller Summit and you run a podcast. What are some other mistakes, either tactically or with the approach or mindset? What are mistakes you see people make when it comes to life cycle marketing?

Steve:

I would say the biggest mistake I see people make is spending all their money on customer acquisition and just kind of neglecting the repeat business side. And I can get it. I get it. It's much sexier to get a new customer. You're running ads and you get these new customers, but then our business wouldn't be the same if we didn't have our repeat customer base. Right? Totally,

Brett:

Totally.

Steve:

Because it's a solid foundation to build upon, and in fact, that's the way we grow. We constantly build upon these repeat customers,

Brett:

30 per 36% of your revenue. That's huge.

Steve:

And not only that, getting new customers is just getting more and more expensive every single year. So you almost have to focus on your existing customers in order to survive, in my opinion.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And I heard this from J Abraham first, but there's really only three ways to grow a business. It's more new customers. So customer acquisition, it's getting people to buy more each time they purchase. So increasing your A O V, and then it's getting them to buy more often increasing the ltv. So new customers, A O V ltv, those are really, that's it. Like millions of tactics you can kind of layer in there. But those are, that's it. And it's often easier, more profitable to either in increase your A O V or extend increase the LTV over time. And so

Steve:

Can we just talk about pricing a little bit too?

Brett:

We would love to, yes. Would love your perspective on pricing. Absolutely.

Steve:

We pretty much don't do big discounts anymore. And it was only after I did the math, did I kind of discover how detrimental a discount is. So during Black Friday, a lot of people do heavy discounts. Let's just take some numbers here. Let's say you have a product that sells for a hundred bucks and your margins are 50%, which means it costs you 50 bucks. Yep. Right? Let's say you typically sell a hundred units a day of that item. So you're making 5,000 unit $5,000 a day. Let's say during Black Friday you decide to do a 25% sale. I like it. I like it. Not a big deal. A lot of people do that. So all of a sudden

Brett:

It's just 20%, it's just 20 Steve,

Steve:

But it's not, yeah, 25%. That's it. That's it. So the new math is you're selling it for 75 bucks, your cost of goods is still 50, and so you're only making 25 bucks per sale, and all of a sudden you need to sell 200 units a day just to break even. Right? Right. So yeah, you

Brett:

Cut your margin in half. Another way to say is you've got to double your sales to make the same amount of money. Yeah.

Steve:

Yes. Most people don't realize it. Most people only think that they need to make up 25% more sales to make up for that 25% coupon. And I'm being generous here, right? 50% margins is, I

Brett:

Mean, those are healthy. A lot of people would love to have 50% margins.

Steve:

Exactly. Now, what's cool is the opposite is true when you raise prices, right? Let's say a store's net margin is 10%. I think I looked at statistic up at one point. The average net margin after everything for an e-commerce store is 10%, right? Let's use that same example. So a hundred bucks, you're making 10 bucks per sale. Let's say you decide to raise your price as just 1%, right? Just a dollar. You can probably raise your price 1% and not see that effect on your sales. So all of a sudden now you're making $11 in profit, that's 10% more, 10%

Brett:

Increase by raising increas profits, right? Yeah. And it's also one of those things where, and people are kind of used to price increases now because of inflation and just everybody knows the cost of goods are growing up and whatnot. In that scenario, you raise your prices 10%, which may not be that big of a deal. So you go from 50 to 55 or something like that, that could double your profits, right? Because you're at a 10% market, which is pretty crazy. So yeah, love that. That cool. So eyeopening like we got to think more than just customer at new customer acquisition. We got to think about lifecycle marketing and putting people into different buckets, focusing on those whales or those VIPs or those most profitable customers and really treating them differently. And then love this pricing discussion too, just because I want to make sure we give it adequate time. I want to talk about AI because I think you're doing some pretty cool stuff there. You're getting some tangible, measurable results from ai. But first of all, what's your general take on ai? Should we be scared? Is AI coming for our jobs? Are you excited about AI and nervous about ai? A little bit of both. What's your general take?

Steve:

I see. I think on the content side, I'm a little worried because a lot of my business is based on seo. I don't know if you've tried the new Bing search, have you?

Brett:

Not much. I've tried more chat G P Ts. Some team members have tried Bing, and I'm hearing mostly good things about it. I do hear the Google's goo, so Google's got barred, right? But I heard there's a new thing coming called Project Magi, I think. Yep. Yeah, that'll, that'll be interesting. So yeah, we'll see how that all shakes out. But yeah, continue.

Steve:

I was going to say, it's just if you use the new Bing, it's just kind of a glimpse to how things are going to look like in the future. So let's say you type in, what are the best hankies? Well, in Bing search, which is based on Chachi B T four, I believe only the top four results come up and it's not search. It says, Hey, the top hankies are from this place, this place, this place, and this place. Then there's citations, which basically means you really need to be in that top four just to get any clicks. Wow. Yeah. Going forward. And if you run an affiliate site or a content site, you're just going to get the answer and no one's going to click on the citations. Right.

Brett:

Yeah. Super interesting. So now you know where it's always been super important to be page one. It's always been important to be at the top of page one. Now you got to be top four your toast, basically.

Steve:

Yeah. So I think content sites are in trouble. I think e-commerce is okay, but you're going to have to really take those top coveted spots in order to get

Brett:

Traffic that way, bid to be in those top spots, treat customers in a way that you're going to get good reviews, offer a great product. So that's going to kind of fuel everything else. Cool. So talk about how are you guys using AI to grow your business?

Steve:

Yeah, what's cool about ai and a lot of people are using for content, a lot of people are using it for bullet points for Amazon. Some of the cool ways that we've been using it for is just even for product ideas. So let's say you're a dad of a ton of children, eights

Brett:

Kids, man, I got the old show

Steve:

Eight children. I didn't think I'd ever meet someone with more kids than Tony, but yeah,

Brett:

You got to be by one, right? She's got seven. Yeah. We instantly connected us weirdos with lots of kids, different cut from a different cloth.

Steve:

You can actually ask Chad g b t to give you products. Someone with a father of eight kids would be interested in. Maybe that's a little broad actually, but you can actually get really good product ideas based on just demographic information that you give it.

Brett:

Interesting. So give me product ideas for this type of person, this avatar.

Steve:

Yeah, the same works for cross sells also. So like, hey, give me stuff that people would buy hanky with and or napkins or linens or whatever. And sometimes it comes up with some obscure products that you actually might want to look into carry.

Brett:

Interesting. So have you used AI to fuel your next product idea, or is it more like it gives you some ideas and that spurs other thoughts? Or have you taken an idea directly from Chad G P T and executed

Steve:

On it? I mean, that's kind of how we stumbled upon some of our next products because we haven't been brainstorming new product lines in a while. We, we've been getting variations of the same because you can get a whole bunch of variations of hankies and napkins, but we haven't really thought too much about completely different product lines. And this is something that we just recently did and we used chat G P T four for that.

Brett:

Interesting. Have you launched those product lines yet? We

Steve:

Have not yet. We have not yet. So the original plan was actually go to China because we used to go to the Canton Fair every other year, but then Covid hit and then we kind of made the last minute decision not to go this year just in case. So we'll probably end up going next year, but we do have some source agents that are looking for these products for us right now.

Brett:

Very interesting. Yeah, we'll keep you posted on that. Super interested in that as well. So of course, the content idea of writing bullet points, descriptions, things like that. We're still much very much in this exploration stage as an agency. How do we use ai? One interesting thing that we're running into, some of our larger clients are telling all their agencies, Hey, you cannot do anything related to our brand on Chat G P T. And the reason they're giving us is because once you enter that information to chat G P T, then it becomes, now Open Eye can use that in other ways. So there's some clients that are resistant to that, which is totally fine. One way we're using it though, just for the podcast as an example, so I'll write show notes and a title for a show. My sister will then got to plug it into chat g, PT and Disaster Variations. And it's probably more than half the time we'll either use a suggestion directly from chat G P T, or we'll take that and tweak it and then use that. And so we're using it that way. We're getting into fuel copy ideas for some of things we're working on, but we're mostly just playing around with it at this point. I've got some lofty ideas for AI related to data analysis and stuff, but we're still playing around with it. But you guys are using it for content even out outside of Amazon? Correct?

Steve:

We've actually, I have a couple posts that rank on the front page that was, I would say 80% ai. Wow. Google made a statement in 20, their stance in on that in 2022 was, Hey, no way. Don't use it. You're going to get

Brett:

No AI generated content. You will not work well for you. We don't want it on the internet basically.

Steve:

But in 2023, they soften their stance. They're like, it's okay, as long as it's not used in a spammy way. They don't want sites that are just purely ai. So the way we're using it is we're using it to avoid the blank page syndrome, generating outlines, and then within the outlines, maybe generating content for each bullet point and then having a human go through it, fact check it, and then kind of tailor it more for seo. What's unfortunate about ranking on seo, and I mentioned before we started recording that we actually increased our SEO rankings four x in the last six months, R

Brett:

Four X in the last six months, and you identified that's your most profitable source of traffic.

Steve:

Correct. And I, I'll just tell you this, just a way to rank Google today, and maybe you used to do this, and I, I've been doing it for the last decade, it's taken all the fun out of writing because Google just wants the answer in a succinct way. And so now that's the way we write all of our blog posts,

Brett:

Right? Yeah. It's not like creative pros, whimsical ps, things like that. Not so helpful and

Steve:

It's actually hurtful.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. Because you, you're clouding the real answer or the substance that Google wants to find. Because if you look at what is Google's goal been from the beginning to organize the world's information and make it easily accessible and useful to everybody, and part of what they're doing is just trying to surface answers. And so the quicker you can answer a question that users are asking for, the better. And that's really what Google's all about, answering questions. So you need to help them by answering questions very clearly and succinctly. So,

Steve:

Hey, we're on the topic of ai. One thing we're using it for also is to write some of our email marketing autoresponder campaigns. Probably let, I hate writing that stuff just because it's just not my thing. And so usually I put my wife in charge and she hates writing, but we've actually trained the AI to sound like us, and you can actually have it write personal emails and just kind of tweak it a little bit as it goes to sound like. So how do

Brett:

You do that? You have to feed it some of your other content? Yeah, 10 of my emails. Write another one that sounds like me.

Steve:

So I shoot, I can't remember the terminology now right off the top of my head, but you feed in something that you've already written and you have it generate a voice paragraph, I think that's the term for it. And then you say, Hey, using this voice paragraph, write an email about this, and then it pumps something out.

Brett:

Interesting. So really you're maybe only giving it one piece to then base that voice paragraph right off of Very interesting. You can

Steve:

Actually, if you have access to the api, you can actually, so this is one thing I'm working on the side. Once this whole book launch is over with, I'm going to f I have a class that I've been running for over a decade, I'm going to transcribe all the videos and feed it in and create Steve Bot so that whenever someone has a question, they can ask this bot first and it's all my stuff and it should answer them with my answers as a first line with your

Brett:

Tone with your, with your answers you've already given. Exactly. Yeah. Not to do that. To build Steve Bot, do you have to use a paid version of Chad pt? I would assume, or you have to do use an upgraded version or

Steve:

Something? Yeah, you should get the paid version and just have access to the api. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah, because I know if you use just the open free version or whatever, you're limited on the amount of content you can have it crawl or look at or assess or whatnot.

Steve:

Plus you want to be using chat G P T four, which is only available to paid customers got. It's actually significantly better for content. Okay. Okay. Yeah,

Brett:

Good to know. And then they break a record on subscriptions going from zero to millions of subscribers in record. It's nuts. Time for chat. GBT four.

Steve:

Yeah, it's been nuts. It's been nuts. Let me just tell you this chat, GB four is probably comparable to an average US writer, whereas chat GBT 3.5 was more along the lines of in international writer. Got it. That you would hire. So I mean, it's sad to say this, but I, I'm downsizing my writers because Chad GBT four, is that good? I'm keeping my editor who's just going to massage it. But I mean, what's scary about AI is I think a lot of jobs are going to be lost.

Brett:

Yeah. I mean, one thing on the more optimistic side of ai, I hear people saying things like, Hey, it's not going to replace anything. It's going to augment things. And I think to a certain degree that's true, where you'll always need people with good business ideas, you'll always need a creator. I've seen, you know, have mid journey that will create photos based on prompts and stuff. You always kind of need someone who's creative in giving those prompts. But I think there is an element where it's like, well yeah, but we don't need as many people. So maybe it's not replacing all the rider, but it's replacing some or you know what I've heard, I'm not a coder. I know you've got an engineering background, Steve, so you'd have a unique perspective here. But some people thinking, Hey, does this do away with really large develop large development teams? Do you just need one developer or two maybe? And then you use AI to generate everything else. And now you've got these smart developers that are just kind of checking and pulling things together and now it's 10 Xing, a hundred xing their output. So yeah, I think there is a scenario where you don't need as many people, which is encouraging from a profit standpoint, but kind scary from another standpoint as well.

Steve:

I mean, I keep in touch with my buddies in the hardware space and they're using it now to design hardware, so it's going to replace white collar jobs.

Brett:

Isn't that interesting? And I heard someone say this not too long ago that the fear was, hey, machines are just going to take away all the manual labor jobs. And that's true for some things like checkout. So someone working at point of sale at a retail store, you have the automated checkout stuff, but it's actually coming for white collar jobs in a much more aggressive fashion than blue collar jobs, which is super interesting.

Steve:

So start your own business folks. If you're

Brett:

Start listening to My Wife Quitter job podcast, start an e-commerce store, not selling linens, but something else, and then use AI to write your content. So talk about that. So four x four x your your SEO rankings in the last six months, is that strictly from just increasing the amount of content you're creating? What do you attribute that

Steve:

To? It actually was not, I would say a large portion of it was rewriting existing content in such a way that Google wants the answer. This is why I was alluding to earlier when it sucked all the life out. So I literally pulled out all the anecdotes, all the stories win for the featured snippet, which means you try to answer a question in a sentence and try to hit that featured snippet spot, did a bunch of link building, which still works, just talk about something the

Brett:

More. So it's totally works. And that's something we did from the very beginning all the way up to the end when we shut down our SEO practice just because it wasn't a passion anymore and nobody on our team wanted to do it. But link building was always the most effective. You get good back links and it's still true today, which is pretty crazy.

Steve:

It's still true, but it's a pain in the butt. And I'll, lemme just talk about some creative ways that we built some links. It's the simple thing that any one of you guys out there listening can do is to issue special discounts for military teachers and students and nurses and first responders. So we got links from military.com, all you got to do is say, Hey, I got a discount for the military, and then you reach out to all the military sites and they'll link to you and post it. Another way that we did it was I now have a Bumblebee Linen scholarship and my wife Quitter job scholarship. So I've got backings from a lot of top universities all over the US and we just give away a $500 scholarship every year for both companies.

Brett:

That's so crazy that I remember that idea from a long time ago. I don't know, thousand 12 or 13 or something insane like

Steve:

That. Oh, has it been around that long? I didn't. Okay, didn't. It's been a long, long

Brett:

Time. Maybe not quite that long, but a long time because those EDU links are super powerful, even if it's a no follow link. And so super smart. So you're doing the scholarship thing and for the cost of 500 bucks, one, you're doing something cool, you're giving a scholarship, but two, you're getting those high quality back links. That's super interesting. I hadn't heard anybody doing that for a while, but I love that.

Steve:

And another, a large part of it, and the problem with SEO is you do all these things, you don't know which one most had the most effect. The other thing we did was we carefully link sculpted everything to our money pages. And I basically found out the primary products that make the most money on Bumble B linens. And I put those in the menu and all the other categories, I put all on a separate page with one link, so they're not usually accessible anymore. And then all the scholarship page, the first responders page and all those coupon pages, we just linked to those money pages. So we're just sculpting everything towards,

Brett:

So you're getting that page ring coming to those scholarship pages and then you're sending those to the money pages. Yeah. Yeah. Love that, man. That's super, super short.

Steve:

So I don't know which one had the most effect, but

Brett:

Yeah, and that is the thing about seo, it's a little hard to, harder to pinpoint. You can't turn it on or off. You just got to do the work and keep doing the right things and then eventually you'll be rewarded with great rankings. But yeah, you do enough of the right things and you can do stuff like four extra traffic, which is amazing. So a lot of them, so you use chat G P T for then to look at existing content and rewrite it and pull things out and make

Steve:

It simple? No, actually for the existing content part, that was all kind of manual. Those was all, okay. Yeah, all new content is helped with Jet Chat g, PT four. Got it. Mainly because rewriting stuff and knowing what to take out requires a little bit of human intervention.

Brett:

Yeah, it does. It does. Yeah. That's pretty tricky.

Steve:

Yeah.

Brett:

Cool. Any other thoughts or predictions or insights on ai? I'm just curious other parts of your perspective there?

Steve:

I mean, the only thing I fear is I think this is going to be the year of spam. Think of how many people are just pumping out eBooks on Amazon right now. And as a result, I don't know if you've heard, but Amazon's been canceling a lot of people's Amazon KDP accounts really, if there's suspected of putting out low content books or regurgitated books, but just the sheer number of websites, blog posts, eBooks, it's just been astronomical.

Brett:

And then how do you feel like you are, so now you're browsing the web, do you want to read something that bot created or do you want to read something that a human crafted and they thought through and you're reading an author's life rather than something that's just cranked out by the machine? And yeah, it's

Steve:

Interesting. I think the Google search results have been crafted for many years now personally because everyone's gamified

Brett:

Because of that, because of kind of the spammy content that's out there.

Steve:

It has nothing to do with Chachi. BT really, it's been around for the last five years. I mean, if you Google something, it's all the same regurgitated stuff that's on the front page. And it's been a problem for a while. This is why I think Google's ripe for disruption. I mean, they're going to take a hit. So whatever this Project Magi thing they're working on, I'm pretty sure it's going to hurt their ad business.

Brett:

It it'll have to, and that's really what I heard about the reason Bard was delayed so much, which is their answer to Microsoft's version of chat, is because Google is 80%, 80 plus percent of their revenue is ad driven. Microsoft is a 2% of their revenue is ad driven. So they're like, who cares? We'll just let, let's go scorched earth on our AI offering through search and let's see what it does where Google's like, they've got to be productive if they can't kill the golden goose there. So yeah, we'll see. So Project Magi, we'll see what that looks like. If it's successful, it's awesome, but it's going to have to hurt their ad business. So yeah, man, I'm very curious to watch that unfold.

Steve:

And I'm curious how it's going to affect my ads too, right, that we run.

Brett:

Yeah, no

Steve:

Doubt. Here's the other way I think about it though. In the event, let's say they Nerf all the content sites by just giving the answer, well, guess what? I'm going to creating content and that's going to lead to less that they can feed in to their tools. So I'm just curious how that's going to play out.

Brett:

And then we also are like, well, okay, what if you disincentivize people from writing content, so then you're not feeding the AI good content. So then what does that do to future content? All kinds of interesting questions there, philosophical questions that it opens up. But hey man, this has been super fun. I know we're kind of coming to the end of our time. I want to do a couple things. Let's talk a little bit about the book. So Family First Entrepreneur, I know you, you've got a family, beautiful kids, very intentional about spending time with your family and then pouring into what's the most important part of your life, your family, not your business, but what is the book all about and who did you write it for?

Steve:

So the reason why I wrote the book, Brett, is because I feel like 99% of the entrepreneurship advice out there is either wrong or just given by a bunch of single dudes who have the time to work 80 hours a week. You's got

Brett:

To crush it, man, sacrifice all about the business,

Steve:

But that's not true. So I run two seven figure businesses. I work 20 hours a week pretty much, and I have one VA for the blog that handles almost everything. I believe that if you structure your business correctly and all you want to do is make a couple million dollars a year, then you can do it in such a way that you can spend time with your family and spend time with your loved ones. Now, of course, if you want to start something that's like a hundred million dollar business or whatnot, or a billion dollar business, you're going to need to hire a team and all that stuff. But most of us, honestly, and I don't know you're the reason why you started your business, Brett, but for me it was just all about freedom.

Brett:

I like paint, I like

Steve:

Paint, and hey, you paint

Brett:

Trouble.

Steve:

It's all about freedom. Most people don't go into this wanting to star a billion dollar company. And what happened to me was I just kind of lost track of that. So once Bumble VN started getting some traction, I started trying to grow that thing, scaling like crazy, and I ended up driving my wife crazy because we'd set these goals and we'd hit 'em, and then I'd move the bar more the next year. And I'm cheap. I'm a frugal Asian dude. I don't spend that much money. We make way more than we spend all. So what's the point of trying to grow the revenue, right?

Brett:

Every single year, just growing for the sake of growing is all you're doing at that point. Yeah,

Steve:

Exactly. So the book really is about how you can build a business that suits your lifestyle while still making a good lot amount of money and how you balance the two.

Brett:

I love it, man. I'm excited to read it. I bought a bunch of copies so I can give 'em to friends and stuff. I don't want to support you and your journey, so proud of you. I dunno if I'll put it on my fridge, I'll leave that to your mom, but I'm excited to get some copies and share them with people that are close to me. So for those that are listening who are like, okay, hey, yeah, that sounds awesome. I want to check out the book. How can they find it? I'm assuming it's Amazon and all over the place.

Steve:

So you can go to the Family first entrepreneur.com, and I'm giving away a lot of pre-order bonuses. So you'll get a three day workshop on e-commerce, get a two day workshop on how to make money with content because I podcast, YouTube and blog. And then I'm doing this Family First Challenge where I'm actually going to go in there and work with people for six weeks on how to help them figure out their sign hustle or just kind of talk about imbalances and how it can help them out with their businesses. So those are all just free pre or bonuses that you can get The Family First Entrepreneur, you can order it anywhere. Amazon probably the most common place.

Brett:

Cool. So I'll link to all that in the show notes or check it out there as well. If somebody's like, Hey, got to check out the podcast. Got to learn more about what Steve Chou is up to. Where can they connect with you? Because you're active on the socials as well, or is it mainly YouTube?

Steve:

Probably YouTube. Do you consider YouTube social?

Brett:

It is ish. Yeah. I think it's still lumped into the social platforms, but it is quite different. Yeah,

Steve:

I would say YouTube and Twitter.

Brett:

YouTube and Twitter. Got it.

Steve:

It primary places. Yeah.

Brett:

Awesome. YouTube and Twitter. And then Seller Summit and annual event. I think it's a must attend event for sellers that are trying to grow their Amazon business and D two C and want to hang out with a tight-knit community that's really growing and smart. Probably based on when this is going to be released at maybe after Seller Summit, but where working if people will find out more about Seller Summit, if not this year, next year.

Steve:

Yeah, let's just go to seller summit.com. And really the main reason to go is to hang out with Brett. He usually has this entourage around him, which prevents the riff raft from getting to him. But we have a no riff raf. We have a No Entourage policy at some no

Brett:

Entourage policy. So yeah, I will, I'll take the picture, I'll sign the, I'll sign whatever you give me. But no, I would love to hang out and it's an awesome event. So Steve Chou, ladies and gentlemen, Steve, this has been a blast. Your're, super smart guy, love hanging out with you. Also love that you typically poke fun at our mutual friend, Andrew, you Darien and E-Commerce Fuel, which yes, I love that in your almost every talk that you give you sneak in a couple of jabs at UD Darien, which really just warms my soul. I love that guy, but it's also fun to make fun of him.

Steve:

So it's so easy to make fun of him when he runs probably one of the most successful e-commerce forums and he doesn't sell anything himself.

Brett:

So there's an example right there. Another chap, you Darien. But no, that dude, dude's super smart. We're both investors in some of his projects and he runs an awesome forum and it does a good job of taking the flack that's given him. So that's awesome. So all right, man. Hey, really appreciate it. We'll have to do it again sometime. Looking forward to hanging out with you in Florida here in just a few weeks.

Steve:

Sounds good.

Brett:

Thank you. And as always, thanks for tuning in. We would love to hear from you. So what would you like to hear more of on the podcast? Any suggestions, ideas, guest ideas? We are open to that. And if you've not done it, hey, leave us a review. Or if you think someone else will find this show helpful, please share it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.