TEIS episode title with headshot of Jon and Natalie

Creating a Work Environment for Success – Q&A with Jon MacDonald and Natalie Thomas

In this special Q&A episode, we talk to Jon MacDonald, Founder and CEO of The Good and Natalie Thomas, our Director for CRO and UX Strategy. We're answering questions about ecommerce, CRO, working remotely, and agency life at The Good.

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About this episode:

In this special edition episode, we’re joined for a Q&A by The Good’s very own Jon MacDonald and Natalie Thomas. Our questions have been sent in by some of our followers, and we’re taking time to sit down and answer them. 

We discuss the latest news and trends in ecommerce and CRO, what’s been working for us at The Good, and what the shift to working remotely has been like for us. This week’s episode also covers a lot about our experience over the years, the changes we’ve gone through and the leadership style at the company. 

In this episode, you’ll learn things about: 

  • What the current state of ecommerce looks like after the pandemic
  • How remote work is working for us   
  • What automations have helped in improving our workflows
  • What marketing secrets are helping our blog rank well on Google

Learn more about Jon and Natalie here

Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We’ll be keeping an eye on that inbox. 🙂 

The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): So here’s the question. How can you, commerce leaders make sure that they are producing a great product, providing a world-class customer experience responsibly managing the finances and still reserve time, energy and resources for marketing their products. My name is James Sauers, and you’re listening to the e-commerce insight show.

[00:00:16] The podcast that gives you a specific, actionable advice for growing your e-commerce business. Every Monday, you’ll get a conversion rate optimization tactic that you can implement quickly to make your business 1% better. Every single. Every Thursday, we sit down with industry experts to go deep on a specific aspect of running a successful e-commerce business.

[00:00:34] It’s the perfect blend of learning and application, which means that you maximize the value of every single minute you spend with us. We’re just as committed to growing your business as you are. So if you’re looking for a partner to help you crush your revenue goals, you’ve come to the right place, roll up your sleeves and grab a notepad because it’s time to get to.

[00:00:52] John, Natalie. Thanks so much for joining me today for this harebrained idea that I have one of many I’m sure to do kind of a quarterly Q and a with the leadership team here at the. I think the context here is really just, we crowdsourced some questions that folks have about how we run the agency. Maybe about conversion rate optimization, e-commerce growth, anything related to, uh, you know, the world that the three of us live in day to day.

[00:01:15] And, uh, I just thought it was an interesting opportunity for us to be. Transparent about what we’re working on, how we think about things, how we solve problems and that kind of thing. And, you know, people like reality TV. So this is kind of in the same vein, just in an audio format primarily. So yeah, maybe a quick introduction from the two of you, for anybody who doesn’t know, they know me as the host of the show.

[00:01:34] So James director marketing here, but John let’s start with you and then we’ll go over to. 

[00:01:37] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Founder and CEO, the old school here. 

[00:01:41] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): My name is Natalie I’m, director of conversion rate optimization strategy here at the good then creating my own problems and then solving those problems here for the last 

[00:01:50] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): four years.

[00:01:50] That’s my preferred strategy is just to keep creating problems, just job security, right? There’s something else that needs to be handled. And John doesn’t want to do it. So that keeps us. 

[00:01:58] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): As long as the two of you solve the problems. I’m good with that. Yeah. Yeah, that 

[00:02:01] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): sounds good. Cool. So let’s just jump into some questions here.

[00:02:05] There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. Again, they were crowdsourced primarily from Twitter, but also some slack DMS. And, uh, I guess I’ll be the facilitator or the host here. And some of these questions feel more appropriate for certain participants than others. So we’ll start by directing one that John, this question was basically around what’s the current state of things with e-commerce, as it pertains to the global pandemic and some of the.

[00:02:24] Economic shifts that we’ve seen in the last year or so, are you still seeing strong demand for e-commerce brands? And I think where this question is coming from is basically as the sales leader at the organization, having most of the conversations with those decision makers at bigger brands, how are their businesses doing?

[00:02:39] What are they worried about? What are they coming to us with? And, uh, do you think, like going forward, we’re in a strong position to sustain some of the growth that we’ve seen or, um, is there maybe some cause for concern on the horizon? 

[00:02:49] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I think it’s. Up in the air at the moment, I can tell you I’m hearing day to day.

[00:02:56] Demand is not waning e-commerce is here to stay in terms of the boom that happened, right. It was here to say before the pandemic, but during the pandemic, it really took off. It had a lot of demographics who weren’t used to buying, or weren’t as sure about buying on e-com and they jumped right in. And that demand was only tapered really by supply chain issues.

[00:03:17] And those are starting to lose. Uh, there’s still a massive line at the port and Los Angeles here in the United States and a few other places around the world. But I will say in terms of Yukon business, I’m hearing that, that everybody had a great holiday, uh, for the most part. And it’s still super expensive to advertise.

[00:03:37] And for us, that’s actually a benefit, sad to say, but it’s true that when costs CPCs go way up. And people need to get more return on that ad spend optimization is one of the best tools that they can deploy. And that’s where we can come in. I’m also hearing though on the flip side of that, you know, everyone’s concerned a little bit about the economy right now this week at the beginning of the year has just been kind of trashed for the markets.

[00:04:04] But the reality is that I don’t think the day-to-day person is feeling. Beyond inflation. So I think inflation is hitting the day-to-day person. Right? Gas costs, more groceries, cost more. But outside of that from a business standpoint, I don’t think it’s hitting most businesses just yet. 

[00:04:22] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): How does that compare to what you may be hearing from clients who are already working with Natalie?

[00:04:25] You’re hearing some of the same things or are they really focused in, on kind of the work we’re doing for them in the projects and tests we have. 

[00:04:31] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): The clients that I think are fairing the best are the ones that are pretty diversified. So if we’re still hearing about supply chain issues, it’s from folks who can’t get a certain kind of metal that they need in order to produce their product.

[00:04:42] And they’re really only living in one vertical. So those folks are having to be extremely creative about how to both bring folks in fulfill, and then make sure that they’re driving traffic to the products that are in stock rather than products that are out of stock or, um, on, you 

[00:04:57] know, 

[00:04:57] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): shipping. Yeah, that’s kind of aligns with what I’m hearing marketing conversations that I have.

[00:05:02] Most people are generally optimistic and if they have a supply chain issue, it’s like I have more demand and I can’t get the supply fast enough. So there’s trying to get creative and do pre-sales and stuff like that. Or sell gift cards instead or something. Capture that demand while it’s there and just help with the supply chain catches up.

[00:05:17] So it sounds like generally we’re still on that upward and to the right trajectory. So we’ll look forward to seeing that continue for the rest of the year and keep a close eye on it. Let’s see. So the next few questions are more about agency life, and then we’ll come back to the e-commerce industry and what we do specifically.

[00:05:33] The next one again is for John. What’s your best list? So we got hindsight is 2020, right. And so what’s your best advice for someone who’s either just starting an agency today or maybe somewhere in that first year? Like I know the good is over 12 years old now if I’m remembering correctly. So yeah.

[00:05:47] Didn’t always look like it does today, but I’m sure you’ve learned a lot over that time. So what advice do you have for the future? Jon MacDonald is sitting out there. Well, I think 

[00:05:54] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): the first thing you need to do is it all starts with positioning and you have to have a niche focus and become experts in that focus.

[00:06:03] And if I tell the story all the time that it took us about 18 months, almost two years to really. Like go all in on optimization. And we were an e-commerce development firm when we first started, that was kind of the game. And we did optimization and I realized it was a commodity because it really, it just is.

[00:06:24] Unfortunately now there’s other stuff you can add onto it. You could be the best at it, whatever, but all those are really fringe and really hard to prove. So in a lot of clients aren’t going to buy just because of that. Right. So it’s interesting. I think that the first. But an agency should do starting out is narrow that focus and have really good positioning where they do specific X thing for specific Y market.

[00:06:51] And if we had went all in from the get-go on optimization for e-commerce. I think we’d be two years ahead. So that’s the biggest kind of regret from that. If I had any, although I learned a lot going through what I did with the commodity market, I know not to go back there. I’m always saying no about expansion opportunities and things that clients ask us to do for them.

[00:07:14] And I’m like, we’re not a good fit for that because I know it’s a commodity or it’s just not as easy as it sounds or the client might think. So I think having positioning is the first key and that’s where. Agency starting out fail because they just, they start by an ex subject matter expert coming in, who can do the work quite well and is tired of doing it for somebody else and not reaping the rewards.

[00:07:39] And so they go and they start doing the work again, and they basically have started themselves. Instead of a business and they end up really just focusing on getting more billable hours or things of that sort instead of the high overarching strategy, which really began to a 

[00:07:59] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): positioning. Yeah. And I think, you know, from the outside looking in, I don’t do any of the client work here, but some of what I see being communicated from Natalie and her team, we do a lot of that on behalf of our clients.

[00:08:09] And we advocate for them to have stronger positioning. Right. And you can’t be a solution for everybody in your market. If you’re running a test, if it’s a headline or something like that, tailor that to the specific audience, try to talk to one person, not a hundred different people, right? Um, maybe a mis-characterizing that?

[00:08:22] What do you think, Natalie? Is that what you’re seeing? 

[00:08:24] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): I would agree. I think that there is a really strong relationship between the product that we’re delivering and how we’re trying to explain what that is. Being able to say, I have a really good understanding of who this strategy is for. That’s one of those personas, maybe an e-commerce operator, and maybe they’re really own the data.

[00:08:46] And they’re really excited by numbers and they want to get a little more context around one part of that. I think being able to communicate to a person with a really strong need and having a really specific way that that’s fulfilled and an angle, a perspective on that. I mean, anybody can do what we do, but are they going to do it in the way that we do it?

[00:09:04] We don’t believe in dark patterns or deceptive user experience design, we would never create a cancellation flow. That’s so confusing that you might get sued like Amazon has. So I feel like our perspective is another added part of how we approach things in that positioning. And we’re always trying to communicate that through our marketing efforts.

[00:09:25] Yeah. 

[00:09:26] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): I love that. Love that perspective. We’re talking about something that we’ve learned over the last decade or so. I think it’d be a good point to introduce something we’re still learning, which is transferring or transitioning into more of a remote setup. I know historically the good has had a footprint there in Portland and pretty much a hundred close enough to a hundred percent of the folks were coming in there into the office and working together.

[00:09:45] We always had contractors and stuff like that, supporting us, but. More recently, the world has kind of forced us to like a lot of folks to go more into a hybrid model. So we still have a lot of folks there locally located in Portland. We still have an office space, but we’re kind of in this transitory phase where I’m sitting here in Cleveland, Ohio, we’ve got folks in Lima, Peru.

[00:10:00] We’ve had folks in Chicago and that’s only going to continue to be more diverse as we continue to grow the team. So we haven’t always been remote friendly, so to speak in the definition that most people use it today. But at the same time, like that’s the direction we’re heading. I guess the question here from the audience is like, how are we taking something that has been traditionally a brick and mortar kind of establishment and bringing it into more of a hybrid or a remote friendly workplace.

[00:10:25] And just making sure that those relationships are still strong, everybody’s still feels heard and appreciated. And the fact of the matter is we still need to get the work done. So what have been the challenges? Are there learnings there alone? You should direct that a specific person that host, I don’t know, I’ll say Natalie, you have the biggest team, right?

[00:10:39] Technically John sits on top of the entire company so that you could argue that point, but I would say like you have the biggest team and it’s still largely locally based. So as you have new team members come in from the marketing team, or otherwise that are remote, like what has been something you’ve learned or something that you think would be helpful to the audience?

[00:10:57] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): Yeah, well, let’s take a step back and just understand that I think we’re still a Portland business and that has always been part of our positioning that we’re in the community. We’re a B Corp we’re dedicated to. Doing good as if you will. You know, when we have volunteer events there for businesses and communities 5 0 1 C3 or small nonprofits that are really important to our team and are really close to our heart.

[00:11:21] And those usually happen to be Portland establishments like Portland backpacks. I will say though, that having a remote team has made us get really creative in terms of how we’re continuing to. Think about being Portland based. I think making sure everyone feels really included in those volunteer events specifically, but as well as during the onboarding process has been really important to us.

[00:11:46] We had a really good foundation that set us up really well for remote work. We were already on zoom. We were already on slack and we already had a process in place for. Well, how do we make someone feel included when they’re in their first day, 10 days, 30, 90 days of working at the good. So we have things like an onboarding buddy, someone that you can just go to and be like, Hey, I actually don’t really know how to use the espresso machine.

[00:12:09] No one ever taught me on my first day or, Hey, is it cool if I post this in this channel in slack? Or is that for a different kind of channel? And it’s kind of about making someone feel like there are no unwritten rules. We want to have everything really above board and. Making sure that people know both, you know, the snacks are for them.

[00:12:27] If they’re in the office and that they can ask this kind of question in this kind of channel just helps that sense of inclusive. So I think it’s definitely challenging. I mean, it takes a lot of creativity. Like I said, to get that whole team to feel included and to still feel really like we are Portland based, but we find ways to make 

[00:12:46] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): it work.

[00:12:47] How about you, John? You’ve been here for the entire ride. I know. Made the decision or were forced to make the decision to go more remote or more distributed. So how has that experience been for you so far? 

[00:12:56] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Well, I’ll say first of all, it’s been lonely in the office. I’m the only one here and in a large headquartered office all by myself every day.

[00:13:04] But I will say we’ve always been remote from. We haven’t been remote first, but we’ve been remote friendly. And I say that because a we’ve never had a butts in seats culture. We don’t track time. Right. We’re not checking in on people. We hire adults and we help them do the best work of their careers. And.

[00:13:25] I expect that when we bring people in, they’re going to want to be part of the team and contribute, and they’re not going to take advantage of it. And in fact, the peers on the team will not let you take advantage of it because that’s going to fall back on them. And so we kind of have had a culture. It doesn’t matter when or where you work, as long as you’re getting your stuff done, nobody cares.

[00:13:47] So that transition was not really an issue now. Yes. We have a headquarters here in Portland. It has a physical office. How long we have this? I don’t know. I mean, we have a lease, but I mean, after that is a question, I don’t know the answer to, I will say. That I think that won’t replace us, always getting together over a couple of times a year is a bigger team.

[00:14:08] I think that those in-person interactions are still important and we’ll find a way the budget that we spent on this office every month will likely go to flying everybody someplace and putting them up for a few days, a couple of times a year. So. That’s likely what it’s going to transition to, but regardless, I also think, you know, we’ve for 99% of our clients, we’ve never met them face to face.

[00:14:32] And that was true before the pandemic. So our clients don’t care. We never skipped a beat with the clients. They had no idea. And again, I think that all goes back to our positioning. We’ve been, so well-defined in what we do and what. Experts in that because we see the same problems over and over and over, because we’re focused on this industry and this challenge that clients come to us for that they don’t come to us to have buddies.

[00:14:58] They’re not looking to be friends with us and like want to hang out and go get drinks. They’re looking because they have a serious pain point and they know we can S we can solve that for them. I would say remote friendly has always been part of it. Remote first has not been, and that’s been the change and I’m kind of happy with how the team has handled it because we’ve hired adults.

[00:15:18] Everybody’s done extremely good job with it. Yeah. I 

[00:15:21] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): think that’s the biggest learning point for me or the biggest observation I’ve had. I mean, we have these touch points that. Uh, keep the conversations flowing and, and keep, uh, break down the silos, so to speak. So we have a tool called 15 five. That is kind of like a weekly pulse check.

[00:15:34] We still have a huddle. Every Friday. We have coffee chat every Wednesday, which is like a no agenda. We can’t even talk about work. That’s the rule, right? Come in and talk about anything but work. So there’s like little micro touch points that I think a lot of businesses are doing. The biggest learning for me is actually on the front end and in hiring and onboarding.

[00:15:50] It’s like all of a sudden you have to, if you’re going to have a specific position that is remote first, that’s maybe a different kind of person that really embraces kind of like autonomy and independence. And a lot of people say that they’re okay with that. But if they’ve never actually. Worked remotely full time.

[00:16:07] It can be hard to really know if it’s a good fit for you. Like I like to be alone. I like isolation and to sit on the couch and read or whatever, but like, that doesn’t mean I want to be single. Like if I had to live by myself 24 hours a day, every day, eventually, yeah. I would get lonely. Right. So there are different, there’s a spectrum of like independence and autonomous.

[00:16:24] And some people may say, yeah, I can operate fine in this 12 by 12 office from home all the time with nobody to interact with. But then when you get in there month, one is fine. Month, two is fine all the way up to nine or 10, but then somewhere along the way, it’s like, man, this really, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel fulfilling.

[00:16:40] And I, so, so I think there’s like something on the front end in the hiring where like ideally experience in a remote setting is kind of the best indicator. But one of the things I really loved is when I came on, John asked me to fill out basically like how to work with James document. Right. And there wasn’t really an official template, but yeah.

[00:16:55] Here are my preferences. Like here’s how I look at the world. Here’s how I manage my schedule. Ideally, day-to-day, here’s how I like to communicate asynchronously. Here’s how I like to receive feedback. And you put that stuff on paper and it’s not like here’s the way I do things. So now John, you have to bend yourself in half to accommodate that.

[00:17:11] Or vice versa. It’s more like let’s independently read this about one another and figure out where we already kind of align. And then where we don’t align, let’s work out some kind of common ground. Right. And I think that went a long way. That’s something I asked Caroline to do when she joined the team and I would make it a permanent state front end, new member is basically like, what’s your ideal day look like?

[00:17:29] What is your ideal work-style look like, how can I be a good manager to you? And here’s how I like to manage a team and let’s figure out how that works. Not just in a remote setting. Overall, like, how do you like to, how are you most effective and how can I play a role in supporting that and sustaining that feel free to re react to that if you want, or I’ll look for the next question out of the group here.

[00:17:47] That seems to make sense. Well, I mean, I, 

[00:17:49] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I shared a how to work with John document too, and I think that’s been really helpful. And I just wrote down a note to share that with everybody who joins the team moving forward, because I think it’s important to, you know, Everybody to know, you know, Hey, if I don’t respond to you right away, that doesn’t mean I don’t like you.

[00:18:07] Right. I mean, I think that there’s, it’s helpful to set that ground up front. Right. And I think that it’s important. You again, as adults, we all have preferences. We all know how we work best. And so it’s great to communicate that upfront. And that was why I asked you to put that document together, knowing that you were one of the first on the leadership team to be remote.

[00:18:30] And I wanted to make sure that. So I’ve really deep into that immediately. And that seemed like one of the best ways to do that for me. 

[00:18:38] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Okay, cool. So one more about kind of agency life, and then we’ll transition over into e-commerce or CRO specific type of questions. This one’s all about EOS or the entrepreneurial operating system.

[00:18:48] We could have an entire episode just on our experience through that, but I get this question so much. I want to at least touch on. Today. So I think that basically the question here is like us is getting popular or was already popular and we jumped on the bandwagon. I’m seeing it all over Twitter, you know, should we implement this at our e-commerce brand or whatever the business model is?

[00:19:06] And I’m like, yeah, we went through it. It would take me 10,000 words to tell you everything I know about EOS. Or it would be like a 30 minute video and nobody wants to watch that, but maybe in a nutshell, like we’re coming up. I think we just had our one-year anniversary of officially like kicking it off, starting with the leadership team and then starting to introduce it to the rest of the company.

[00:19:24] So maybe from your perspective, let’s jump over to Natalie. Since we just had a big response from John, like I know EOS was new to you and we were lucky enough to work with a great facilitator to kind of start that process. I had been through it before, so I think it’d be great to get a fresh perspective from you as like just initial reactions, checking in.

[00:19:42] Yeah, I would say the 

[00:19:43] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): most valuable thing that, well, maybe there’s two things that are the most valuable that have come out of EOS. For me, one is the idea that I think we already had a culture of this internally, but just putting it down on paper and saying it out loud has been really helpful that the leadership team, we go into a room, we argue it out and we come out aligned.

[00:20:03] And I think that’s really what. Clear what our goals are. Whenever we go into a strategy session and coming out with a really clear vision that’s well articulated and painted super clearly. And that we’re all agreed on has been really a great driving force in the last year. I think the other thing. I really appreciate about just having gone through EOS.

[00:20:29] You know, part of the process is just identifying, discussing, and solving problems and you have a whole dedicated meeting to that once a week, once every other week, just with your working. And for me, that solving piece is really crucial. I think we have a really strong culture of the good at the good of improvement.

[00:20:49] And so identifying and discussing problems was never an issue for us. We were always good at it and we. Try to look at our issues and not away from them. I think we’re all really good at admitting when we could do something better. And that’s part of that, like culture of optimization kind of bleeds throughout the company, both to what we do for our clients and internally, but in terms of handling our own issues, We have a lot more traction for how to solve those and accountability than we’ve ever had.

[00:21:20] And I think that’s come from those bi-weekly or weekly. Check-ins just saying, what are we working on right now? What’s that stuff in that important, but not necessarily urgent category that we really need to be dedicating time to. So for me, that’s the best thing I’ve gotten out of it. I mean, the process itself, you know, you can read a book.

[00:21:37] I don’t need to explain it to anybody. If you’re really interested, you can look into how it’s done, but that’s what I’ve gotten on. 

[00:21:43] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. How about you, John? I think you brought it to the table originally through a EO or some other referral source and said games you’ve been through this. What was your reaction and that kind of thing.

[00:21:51] So, yeah, as the champion of the effort, what was your. 

[00:21:54] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Well, we’ve done a competing type of system called scaling up or used to be called Gazelles when we did it years ago. And I found it really helpful at the time, because at the time we were growing really quickly and we wanted some structure. But I also quickly found that it was formulated for companies doing like tens to hundreds of millions and bigger, and it left out a lot of the stuff that a essentially a smaller company needed.

[00:22:25] And so. That was always my complaint with it and why we stopped doing it because it was just putting processes in place that the team was like, I could just go talk to them and be done with it. And I’m like, yeah, that’s true. Why are we having a meeting about this and why? You know, so it was adding complexity.

[00:22:40] EOS, I feel like, is much more about. Getting shit done quite honestly. And that’s where IDs comes in. As Natalie said, that’s where it’s just facilitating communication in a way that’s not really getting in the way, but a lot of the concepts are actually straight up stolen from Gazelles and scaling up quite honestly.

[00:23:00] And I actually saw Verne Harnish, who is the founder of Gazelles and scaling up, wrote the book, Rockefeller habits, et cetera, all where all that stuff. And he spoke to my master’s course at EO, where everybody was talking about EOS is like the new thing they should all be doing. And Verne Harnish came in and kind of let a three hour talk.

[00:23:23] That was amazing. He’s a very, very good speaker, lots of great insights, but he straight up, somebody asked him, well, what do you think about EOS? He’s like why I told the guy who started EOS. Just if you’re going to steal my program and just, just say it’s a derivative of my program. He’s like you straight up stole like half of the IP and turned it into something else.

[00:23:44] And I actually, that intrigued me because I was like, yeah, I loved half of that, but I hated the other half. So I’m going to look into this. And so that’s really where it came from, was looking into it. And I don’t think Vern’s upset by any means. He realized this there’s a gap in that lower SMB marketplace, if you will, outside of the larger corporations, which he’s really going after with his program.

[00:24:08] So I don’t think he’s upset. I think he’s more said that in jest, but at the same time, It’s true. And I think it’s been really helpful for a company of our size. 

[00:24:17] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah, I think so too. I, I always like in ELs too, like having a personal trainer, it’s like, yeah, a lot of people know they need to eat right. And exercise.

[00:24:25] But if you just go into the gym and workout, whatever muscle groups you think is right. Or you do whatever cardio you think is, right. Or you do you meal plan, like it’s much better to have a system and a process and an experts based system. Here’s your workout plan for the next three months, right. And here are the days broken out exercises, sets, reps, weights, everything based on your goals.

[00:24:43] Right? And so the meal plan is the same thing. Like you have this nutritional goal, I already did all the work for you. You just need to follow the program. And trust me in 90 days, we’ll have made progress. Right. So that’s how I describe it. It’s like it’s structure. And for me really, I love the forcing function that comes along with it.

[00:24:58] It’s like you can have three to five rocks in any given quarter and that’s it. And so like, it’s really easy if you. Follow EOS or you don’t commit to following EOS or some similar system to say, well, at the beginning of the quarter, we thought these three to five things were important, but this thing popped up midway.

[00:25:12] And so we swapped one out and then you just kind of like lose your way over time. Right. You start to wander away from the path. But EOS to me is like, you’re falling, you’re tracking this data. You’re commit to doing these three to five things in your area of expertise over the next quarter. You know, we don’t deviate from that.

[00:25:25] And if something. Support that, and it’s still not done. That gives you kind of like this justification to say, no, that’s a distraction for me right now that doesn’t align with my rocks. We’ll table it for next quarter, or we’ll find the right time for it. But right now I got to focus on what I got to focus on it.

[00:25:39] And as somebody who is subject to shiny object syndrome, that really helped me out. Cause I’m definitely more prone to saying yes, So if I can have a system of Elena and be like, Nope, doesn’t fit in with my rocks. You know, then that makes it, it makes me feel less guilt about shutting 

[00:25:50] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): something down.

[00:25:51] Right? Yeah. I was just going to bring that up and say, that’s been, I think one of the biggest, helpful things is it’ll helps eliminate shiny object syndrome as much as possible. And James even had some comments when we first started it like, well, what if things change in the middle of the quarter? And it’s like, Well, that’s, you’re getting pulled in that direction from shiny object syndrome, less about actually needing to change in most cases.

[00:26:12] And I’m that same way. And I think Natalie balanced as you and I out in a really great way when it comes to that always saying, Hey, is that really what we need to focus on and, and questioning that. So EOS definitely provides a space. For Natalie to be able to do that, which is really helpful from my point of view for you and I, so, yeah, 

[00:26:31] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): totally agree.

[00:26:32] Okay. Let’s talk about e-commerce industry at large, a little bit like most industries it’s subject to these hype cycles where you’ll see the hot new thing come in and either quickly burn out or stick around and really take off. I would say fast was what, an example of that, right? Fast kinda like burned, hot and heavy for awhile and then physical.

[00:26:47] So, what are you seeing out in the market now that for better or for worse might be one of those impending hype cycles. Maybe we’re in the early stages of it. And you’re just hearing a lot of buzz and a lot of energy around it. That could be a technology, uh, that could be a new app or extension for a marketplace.

[00:27:02] It could be a strategy that people are using to grow their business. I guess I’ll turn this one back to you, John, from the sales perspective, and then Natalie, we’ll go to you. If we’re hearing anything from clients, things are experimenting with their successes. They’ve had, 

[00:27:12] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I’m not hearing about it in.

[00:27:14] Sales conversations yet, but I see it all over. Social and that’s e-commerce brands wanting to get into NFTs and I just don’t get it. It makes no sense to me. Here’s the thing. Maybe I’m just old and a curmudgeon or, or whatever. I’m all for web three in general. Like, I don’t have an issue with that, but as an e-commerce brand who, you know, you really are dividing your focus away from selling a really good product to trying to chase that quick money of doing an FTE release and.

[00:27:48] Shopify has had to respond to that and support it on their platform. So they’re coming, rolling out support for entities because they keep getting asked about it. I think that’s the new thing. That’s like, Hey, you know, it could be cool for a larger brand to do a little bit of NFTE stuff and just, you know, be a participant in that.

[00:28:06] Is it going to deliver real value? Probably not for 99.9% of the brands. It’s not, you’re not Nike. Right? You can’t release NFTs with all of your sponsor athletes and do some big things and then go spend, uh, several hundred million dollars to go buy a company that’s going to help you release all this stuff.

[00:28:25] So. I think that’s the biggest challenge that we’ll see. And I also second to that, I think is this whole metaverse with, you know, we’ve seen Walmart do where they put a whole bunch of patents on shopping in the matter of furs where you can literally put on your helmet and go shopping in a Walmart store and pick things up off the shelf and buy them.

[00:28:47] Sounds pretty cool. How reasonable is that going to be? I don’t know who, I mean, the whole point of going online is it’s quicker and easier than going shopping. If I want that experience, I’m going to go to a retail store. So I don’t know how much that’s going to play out over time. Again. Maybe I’m just not forward thinking enough.

[00:29:04] Oculus is an amazing thing. I’ve had a lot of fun playing with them, but do I want to go shopping in a Walmart virtually? Not at all. I don’t even want to go shopping at a Walmart to begin with, why am I going to do it virtually? So I don’t know. I think those two issues right now and FTS and, uh, and shopping in the metaverse are the two 

[00:29:22] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): biggest.

[00:29:23] Yeah, I think about NFTs and Twitter and Twitter is like, we just want to be able to edit tweets and mark RDMS is unread and Twitter’s like, here, you can have NFT profile pictures and look, they’re hexagons with rounded corners and everybody’s like, we just want these features over here. Please. Can you just give us what we’re asking for?

[00:29:39] And I think sometimes. Maybe it’s encompassing some of the distraction element that you described there, which is like, you’re great at selling apparel or whatever you’re selling. And, uh, to deviate from that kind of feels a little bit like that shiny object syndrome we talked about earlier, Natalie, anything from clients that you’re seeing that might, uh, be in support of the NFT.

[00:29:56] Cause the John just put out there anything totally different. I dunno. 

[00:29:58] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): I feel like I’m back down on earth and John’s telling me what’s cool in space. 

[00:30:06] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Yeah. 

[00:30:07] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): Um, in terms of hype cycles, I mean, I hear a lot of our clients and potential clients talking about personalizations, and I think it’s really exciting to think about treating your customers like individuals and having worked in customer service and specialty coffee and fine dining for so long.

[00:30:25] I think the idea of making sure that that experience on the web and shopping on the web feels as personalized as in real life is extremely appealing. But in general, the folks that I’m hearing it from are usually a pretty far ways off from actually being at the level of wanting and needing to make those personalizations.

[00:30:43] Usually there’s a lot of optimization that can happen before that point. And when you get to the point of personalization, that’s because you have a robust testing program it’s because your site is really highly optimized. You have everything kind of in line with at least where close to where you think it could be.

[00:30:59] Personalizations or that next level where you’re customizing the content in a way that I think is just a little more advanced than the folks who are really biting onto them. Another thing that I’m hearing from sort of bigger ships, if you will, the cruise ships of e-commerce is just that they need insights faster, which is why we’re doing a lot of rapid testing on.

[00:31:22] Clients’ sites and with their customers, we’re trying to find ways to make the research and validation process a lot more agile and work in smaller cycles. Then AB testing can sometimes allow. And I think that. Is it a problem of sometimes the politics or the limited resources or the bureaucracy of what it actually takes to get an AB or multi-variate tests live with such a large organization.

[00:31:50] They’re trying to find ways to kind of circumvent the, um, order of operations there and get insights faster. So we’re learning to be extremely lean with some of our research and validation process. 

[00:32:02] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah, I’m really excited about where rapid testing could go. And, um, if anybody’s curious, John, on one of our other podcasts drive and convert, John did a summary kind of, of where we’re at in our thinking around that driving convert.com/ 47.

[00:32:15] We’ll get you there for a little bit more context about what not always just talking about. The one I’ve seen is his video. And I don’t know how it’s going to shake out, but I’ve seen a lot of tools and agencies now kind of offering video right there in the purchasing process. So you could have two examples that I’ve seen.

[00:32:29] One is customer support via video. So you can query somebody about a product right there, and theoretically they’re calling in from their apartment or from the office or whatever. And they’re basically FaceTiming you and say, Uh, which one are you looking at? Okay. You’re looking at the red top. Let me hold that up for you.

[00:32:44] Let me get some light on it. You can see exactly what shade it is. Let me stretch it out. You can see how it’s going to fit. I’ll show you the texture of the material up close to the camera, and basically like serving a sales function there and I’m helping somebody make a decision. I think that could be super powerful as a brick and mortar tends to be trailing downward and more people are shopping online.

[00:33:01] The one thing they miss is that physical ability to touch and feel a product, especially something that they’re going to be wearing or ingesting or something like that. So I think that’s cool. The other thing I saw recently was like right there on the PDP, you can basically click play on a social media asset that was produced by like an influencer or a user generated content.

[00:33:18] And they’re physically wearing the sunglasses right there on the PDP. And you know, some of these things like that, I’ve seen it Warby Parker or whatever. They basically take a cutout, a transparent cut-out of the glasses and put it over your face. Like you can turn your camera on or whatever. I’m like, yeah, that’s great.

[00:33:31] But it’s like imperfect that doesn’t it usually it’s not reality. The scale is off or whatever, but to watch a 32nd video of the same pair of glasses and the same finish physically on somebody’s face, they’re turning their head. They’re acting naturally. Like that gives me a much better sense of how that fits into my life and what I’m expecting to get out of it.

[00:33:47] So, yeah. I’m excited about the prospects of video as kind of a, something to test for the conversion funnel. They’re specifically at the point of sale. So, all right. Uh, let’s jump back over. I think the one thing I wanted to make sure we get into, I thought this was kind of a fun question. We’ll go back to Natalie here for this one.

[00:34:02] What is one common mistake or misconception around your line of work? That if you could wave a magic wand and erase it from the world would make your life better. 

[00:34:09] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): So a lot of brands who come to us come to us because they are conversion rates, not that high, or they just feel. This is something that they know they need to invest in.

[00:34:21] Right. They have some optimizations that they need help with, but they look at us and they think that it’s just us making some small tweaks to the site and it’s best practices that are all out of articles that they’ve read online. And so a lot of the misconceptions I hear as part of having a lot of those sales conversations from folks that come in.

[00:34:42] Is that what we’re going to do. And they’re always blown away by the amount of research that we do that we diagnose before we prescribe. And I think that that’s a misconception around conversion optimization in general, from a large portion of e-commerce brands. It really, I keep hearing this over and over.

[00:35:02] It’s like, well, what are you going to do? You’re just gonna make a few tweaks to our site. It’s something we can do overnight. And they’re not basing any of those thoughts on actual. They’re just saying why, you know, why wouldn’t I just go follow all the tips you put up on your site? And I was like, well, you don’t, you should consider those, but you should test them.

[00:35:21] And that usually is a turning point in the conversation. So I think the biggest misconception, if I could summarize is just that what we do is just make some initial tweaks to the site and then they’re done the reality of what we do is. Deep dive into the data, tracking every click and movement that’s happening on their site and helping them to use that data, to understand how to improve the customer expects.

[00:35:44] Which in turn leads to better conversion rates and 

[00:35:48] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): et cetera. Yeah. It’s not a checklist, right? There is no one size fits all playbook for optimizing your site. And it’s, we’ve tried to form that 

[00:35:55] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): checklist for how many years now. I mean, when Allie came in four years ago, I was like, okay, I want your fresh perspective on what this checklist could be.

[00:36:03] It seems like. So what, there’s no checklist. I’m like there has to be, we’ve got a system monetize this, we got to have a checklist and it’s like, no, every time we do commercial growth program, it’s customized for the site. We’re doing it for now. We have a process that we follow. We have some guideposts that we know, and we have things that ways that we do things that really accelerate the success and the results, but what tests we’re going to run, that’s going to be based on the data specifically from the client.

[00:36:34] Not from what we’ve learned with other people. Yeah. 

[00:36:37] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): And what that brings back to me is that, that personal trainer example, which is like, you can work with a firm that says they’ll run hundreds of micro tests. Right. And yeah, sure. You might get results or they might say, yeah, we have a standard process.

[00:36:49] We run all our clients. We get grades results from sure. Go ahead and try that. But would you rather like wing it in the, in the weight room or whatever you’re trying to pursue, right. Or would you rather have a coach? Whether you’re trying to learn how to sing or play piano or paint or get fit? Like you want some, an expert that is going to come in and first do a diagnostic.

[00:37:03] That’s the important part is where are you at today? And what are your goals and how far are we apart from those and then maybe what assets or resources do you have at your disposal. And then how can we put a plan together that realistically gets you closer to your end goal? But the phrase we always use is like, you’re always optimizing, never optimized, right?

[00:37:21] And so I think that’s kind of the mentality here, or the misconception is like, you’re never really done. You might achieve your goal and then set a new milestone, but you’re always experimenting. You’re always running new tests. You always have new information or customer preferences change. So. It’s kind of, uh, you know, it’s, the beauty of our work is like been back to job security.

[00:37:37] Like there’s always something to work on. You never really have everything done, but at the same time, like if you come in thinking that you can just pull a few levers and get more money out of the money machine, like it doesn’t always work that way. Not only do you have a perspective on this, I’m sure this ties into your line of work.

[00:37:49] So yeah, I think 

[00:37:50] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): the way I would respond to that is that one of our favorite phrases here at the good is it can always be further optimized. So as we’re looking at a website, it’s not that it’s bad. It could be further optimized. And I think some of the best clients that we work with are the folks who are always looking to get 1% better.

[00:38:12] And the misconception comes from folks who say, aren’t we done? Aren’t we done testing? Isn’t this like, good enough. It could always be further optimized. And that happens because user convention or web conventions change, user mental models, change trends, change the market changes. The quality of your product might change.

[00:38:35] Your competitors might change. Your competition might change. So there are so many factors going into how we might want to describe display a product that we really need to stay. On top of our game, in terms of how our understanding, how to optimize a site, there’s no one answer. It could always be further optimized and that’s that spirit of getting 1% better every day, or trying to make these tweaks over time.

[00:39:01] And it’s not to get to that one solution. It’s because we’re really hungry for what’s the best right now. Version of this site. 

[00:39:09] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. You know, it starts to sound like hotel California. At some point it’s like, people work with us and they can never leave. Right. Because it’s never done, but I don’t think that’s really the angle, like clients part ways with us, for all kinds of reasons.

[00:39:19] Like they shift to retail. Right. And they don’t want to prioritize e-commerce anymore. Or there are a number of reasons why they, they bring it in-house and they’ve learned enough from us to hire an expert and maybe we help with some of the training and they hand off there. But the fact of the matter is like, Once you’re done with high school or even all the way up to a PhD, like you’re not done learning.

[00:39:35] There’s so much more, even, even PhD is a big part of what they do is research and continuing to learn even more to expand kind of the universal, shared knowledge around their area of expertise. So that’s the same mentality I think with CRO is like, there are always ways that you can be improved and then that 1% better.

[00:39:49] It’s always out there as something you can chase. So maybe a couple more questions here to wrap things up. One that I kind of liked that I think we might have conflicting opinions that we’ll have to work out here is where do you think brands and marketers should go for inspiration, direct competitors, indirect competitors, or people totally outside of their industry.

[00:40:07] I know that in the book. Putting your blinders on that’s. Why race horses have blinders. Cause you’re not supposed to look to your left and right. A house, somebody else’s running the race, you’re supposed to follow your own program and kind of look internally for that kind of thing. But at the same time, I’ve read books where they say, copy your competitors, because if they are already established and you’re just starting out, it can help you close that gap really quickly and get on par.

[00:40:27] And that’s the point at which you can start to innovate and start to run your own race. Maybe I’ll throw this one over to John first. Do you have a perspective on where marketing leaders and e-commerce leaders can go to look for inspiration? Should it be competitors or should it be more of a holistic approach?

[00:40:40] I think 

[00:40:40] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): that you should look at your customer base and the challenges that they’re having first and foremost and solve for that. And secondly, I think that if you do look at competitors, I’m not suggesting you ignore the competitive landscape. I’m just saying you don’t blanket copy them. And so maybe you look at that and it becomes something that you decide you want to test with your customer base, if, and when it makes sense to do so.

[00:41:09] The challenge with the statement is, and the reason that we talk a lot about the race horses wear blinders for reason is that if you start looking left and right at your competitors, and that’s all you’re doing, you’re not going to run straight ahead and you’re going to lose the race. And so I’m a firm believer that you should pay attention to your customer base and do your thing and do it extremely well.

[00:41:31] Run as fast as you can, straight ahead at your consumers. Now, if you’re going to run at your competitors, then you’re always going to be chasing the competitors and you’re never going to get. So what’s the point. 

[00:41:42] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. You’ll always be a step behind, right. I try not to overuse the sports analogies, but even like you’re playing basketball or football.

[00:41:48] Like those guys always glance over their shoulder when they’re making a big play to see if there’s somebody coming up from behind them or from the side. And they’re going to take a big hit or there’s somebody going to block their shot or whatever, they steal a glance, but then they look back at the target ultimate.

[00:42:00] And they’re still trying to get done what they were looking to achieve in the first place. So maybe that is a good representation of what you’re saying is like, it’s good to be aware of competition and make note of what they’re doing, but if you let it dictate your own strategy for too long, then you’re always a separate tube behind.

[00:42:14] You’re never really creating separation. Not only anything 

[00:42:16] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): to add there. Yeah. I would just say, I totally agree with John, like everything should come from the angle of understanding what your customers need, what they’re looking at. If we do look at competitors, it’s more. Non-standard verticals. So I really like taking ideas and inspiration for what to test from industries totally outside of your own.

[00:42:36] And that’s because it helps you tap into what your customers or your users might be seeing in other places, whether that’s on the web or in person. I mean, we get inspiration from just walking on the sidewalk and picking up a penny. It doesn’t have to be from a website, right. We’re always looking for that next idea.

[00:42:52] That’s gonna win another million dollars. And so those can come from anywhere, but I think it’s most inspiring when they come from something completely outside of your industry. And it’s not just reinventing the wheel. It’s really looking for. Another way to align to user expectations, but add that surprise 

[00:43:10] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): and delight.

[00:43:11] Yeah. I love that point about getting totally outside of your industry, customers, competitors, whatever. A lot of people advocate for positioning like John did at the beginning of the conversation. And I fully support that specifically in my world, in the marketing world. Like I’ve always benefited from being a generalist or having like a diverse set of interests because I’ve worked on.

[00:43:28] Software products I’ve worked on educational or informational products. I’ve worked in e-commerce. And I like to pull lessons from each of those and apply them to a different context. And sometimes that’s where the true innovation comes from is like, wow, software is light years ahead of e-commerce in terms of customer onboarding.

[00:43:42] So like, it won’t look the same, but can we take some. Nuances and touch points. And can we repackage them into kind of your conventional e-commerce checkout experience with post-purchase experience and like, how can we replicate the success that they’ve already had? That’s not really a competitor. That’s drawing inspiration from another area and applying it to your area of expertise.

[00:44:01] So I love that you called that out because yeah. And then there are tiers to it, right? So like, I would always. A piece of data from a customer who’s openly paying me money or opening their wallet to contribute to my mission over a competitor or overcome some kind of like generalists or so that’s just me.

[00:44:15] I, I guess you guys would probably tend to agree with that, but I’ll let you to speak for yourself. 

[00:44:20] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): So chances are, most of us aren’t doing something so unique that no one’s ever had to solve a similar problem. Which is why going into other verticals can be inspiring. I mean, if you’re an auction site and you’re having a hard time getting your customers to add their credit card to their account so that they can actually make a valid bid on a product, think about who else has had a similar problem.

[00:44:42] I mean, the banking industry has dealt with that forever. Sure. You can create an account, but putting in that $200 to activate it is a hump that. Single bank has had to get over. So in terms of putting your blinders on, yeah. Great. Put your blinders on, but also know that you’re not the first person to solve this problem ever.

[00:44:59] And so there are places you can look for inspiration. 

[00:45:01] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah, totally agree. Okay. Uh, maybe we’ll bring it home with one last question. I think this one’s stemming from the fact that when I asked for questions, I included that we almost doubled revenue this year. And so it was a really good growth year.

[00:45:10] There was a lot of stretching happening in a lot of different ways. So I think somebody posed the question, looking back over the last year. What was your biggest success? And also, what was your biggest challenge? I thought it’d be fun for us to answer this individually, Natalie. I know you’ve got notes in here and I’ve got some notes, so I’m open to whoever wants to start.

[00:45:25] Maybe we’ll give John some time to think about it and we’ll come around to him last. I 

[00:45:28] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): think my biggest challenge remains the same, which is getting the right people in the right seat or. Concerned with our team and making sure that they’re kind of doing their best work growing in their skill set, evolving, learning, growing.

[00:45:42] And so I need to go to the team thoughtfully, but I also need to put people’s skillsets to use in ways that are nourishing and interesting to them. And in ways that support our clients. So it’s always a balance. Plugging those pieces into the right spot. And if I solve this, I’m going to package it up and sell it because I assume a lot of other folks are having the same challenges in growing a 

[00:46:03] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): team.

[00:46:04] Totally agree from my seat. I think my biggest success here, they kind of go hand in hand, but, um, you know, historically we’ve been very focused on content marketing and attracting traffic through written material in the last year or so we’ve added audio and video onto that. Uh, people are experiencing that right now.

[00:46:18] And, um, we’re also doing. Guest events and things like that. So the diversity of traffic generation or traffic acquisition channels has really expanded. Uh, but we only added one new person to the marketing team and we’re leaning on a lot of contractors support there. So kind of casting a wider net, so to speak with, uh, effectively the same amount of resources or very close has been a good win for the marketing team here.

[00:46:39] And then the biggest challenge I’m going to call out this maker versus manager identity crisis. As I call it. As you, as you started to get a team, like when you’re a marketing team of one with some support from everybody else inside, it’s easy. You’re just, you have to be a maker. Right. But as you start to grow a team behind you, um, there is that manager time that creeps in.

[00:46:56] And I always identify as a maker if I’m not in there, like creating landing pages or writing emails or reviewing blog posts and publishing them or recording podcasts episodes, like I feel like I’m not contributing to the overall mission of the company. There’s equal importance on mentorship, professional development, more project management or reporting and strategy work.

[00:47:14] Like that’s all valuable too. And so I can’t be the only one out there who is struggling a little bit with letting go of that worker bee mentality and going into more of a strategic advisor kind of role. So that’s mine. How about you, John? From the, uh, the head honcho? How are things looking? Oof. Well, 

[00:47:28] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I would say the biggest success over the past year has definitely been when we’ve grown as fast as we have been able to, you know, predicting revenue and having goals around revenue is, you know, you’re, it’s a crap shoot.

[00:47:42] You’re just guessing in a lot of cases because you’re just, you’re like, Hey, providing this train and, and we’re going to slow it down if we feel like we need to or want to. Right. Because not all revenue is good revenue, but I would say that. Being within $13,000 of our goal this year was a really good success.

[00:48:00] It was heartbreaking in some ways, cause I was like, oh, we’re so close to hitting that goal. And then, you know, I think I had several people remind me, like you hit your goal, right? Like the reality is if you can guess within 13,000 at the scale that you guys are at, then that’s a hell of a win. So I would consider that a success.

[00:48:16] And the reality is this year we’ve been, we have a goal and it’s not to grow as fast it’s to grow more meaningful. And utilize the gains that we’ve had over the past year. I think the biggest challenge for me this year is more just around keeping the wheels on the bus as we go forward. There’s so many things that we could could be doing.

[00:48:38] And so many ways we could continue to grow. That if we did them all, then it would just overtax us and we’d collapse. So it’s figuring out what are the best opportunities and which ones do we want to go after? And where are we going to put our energy? Because when it comes down to it, work-life balance is a big thing for us.

[00:48:59] It’s a huge culture point for the good. And if we attacked every single opportunity that’s in front of us this year, We wouldn’t have any life in that work-life balance. So I’m a huge fan of us picking our battles and going after them. And I think that’s the challenge for me right now. It’s really? Which ones are we going to go after?

[00:49:20] Which. It’s actually a good thing. I think I like those types of challenges. 

[00:49:25] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. It’s much better to live in a world of abundance and scarcity. Right. So if we have like a, what is it, uh, uh, riches of options or something like that, like, there’s probably some psychological term where like there’s so many opportunities and you’re always worried about the opportunity costs of going with one over another.

[00:49:38] Right. So just being very diligent and harking back to our conversation around dos, hopefully that’ll help us really focus in on the ones that are most important and kind of leave. The rest for next quarter and next year, whenever they fit in. All right. So I want to respect your time. We’ll wrap things up here.

[00:49:51] Thank you so much for joining me today. We didn’t get to everything. We’ve got a handful of questions that we didn’t have time to tackle. So we’ll save those for the next round. And if anybody listening has more, they want to add podcast@thegood.com is the place to drop those and we’ll make sure they get incorporated in the next one.

[00:50:05] If you have any parting words, I’d love to hear them, but otherwise, thanks so much for joining me today, John and Natalie, we’ll do another one real soon. Hey everybody, this is James again. And before you go, I just wanted to invite you to join one of the coolest things I get to work on. As director of marketing here at the good it’s called the e-commerce insiders list.

[00:50:21] And it’s a private version of this podcast feed that gets you access to tons of additional bonus content, like extra interviews, Q and a sessions, website, tear downs, and anything else we can dream up. It doesn’t cost you anything but your email address. And we promise to always respect. This is just our way of forming strong relationships with our listeners and making sure that we produce content that is actually valuable to you and to your business.

[00:50:42] If you’re interested, you can join the rest of the e-commerce insiders by going to the good.com/podcast and dropping your email into the form at the top of the page, we’ll follow up with directions for how to access the private feed and you’ll be off and running. Like I said, this is one of my favorite things that I get the opportunity to work on because it lets me interact directly with e-commerce founders and leaders just like.

[00:51:02] If you’re interested, I’d love to see your name pop up in my notifications until then keep an eye out for the next episode of the e-commerce insight show. And we’ll talk to you soon.

James Sowers

About the Author

James Sowers

James Sowers is the former Director of The Good Ventures. He has more than a decade of experience helping software and ecommerce companies accelerate their growth and improve their customer experience.