June 11, 2025 • 53 mins
What if the secret to massive e-commerce growth wasn't a marketing gimmick, but something as simple as improving by just 1% every day? Meet Sabir Semerkant, the accidental marketing genius whose systematic approach has generated over $1 billion in incremental revenue for more than 200 brands worldwide.
Sabir's journey began as a programming prodigy at age six, eventually leading to a pivotal moment when he was tasked with rebuilding VitaminShop.com after bankruptcy. What started as an engineering project transformed into a business revolution when he replaced a million-dollar search engine with his own creation (humorously named "MOSES" - My Own Search Engine by Sabir), instantly boosting conversion rates from 3% to 12%. This experience launched his 25-year career as an e-commerce growth specialist.
The heart of Sabir's methodology is deceptively simple: improve one meaningful KPI by just 1% each workday. This tortoise-like approach compounds dramatically, realistically delivering 10X growth within 12-18 months for committed entrepreneurs. But his most valuable insight might be his ability to diagnose the real barriers to growth. While many brands obsess over ad creative, they ignore fundamental issues like page load speed (averaging 28 seconds on most Shopify stores) while customer attention spans cap at just 1.7 seconds.
Sabir also provides fascinating insights into properly implementing AI tools for e-commerce growth. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement, he advocates using multiple tools in combination (Claude, ChatGPT, Manos) as augmentation to accelerate testing cycles. The right implementation allows entrepreneurs to generate and evaluate hundreds of creative variations rapidly, dramatically accelerating growth.
For entrepreneurs ready to implement these principles, Sabir distinguishes between "involved" entrepreneurs (who delegate critical learning) versus "committed" entrepreneurs who personally lead transformation. As he colorfully explains: "The chicken is involved in breakfast - it laid the egg. The cow is committed - it gave itself for the steak." Which one are you?
Ready to apply these growth principles to your business? Learn more about Sabir's 8D method and Rapid2x program at growthbysabir.com/USC.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital
changemakers, a speaker seriesand podcast brought to you by
USC Annenberg's Digital MediaManagement Program.
Join us as we unlock thesecrets to success in an
increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
It is such a pleasure today on Mediascape to have
Sabir Semerkant on the show.
I did butcher your last name alittle bit, which I knew I was
going to do, going into this,but, sabir, I'm so excited that
you're here today.
Thank you for joining, anika.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Let's talk about your background, gosh, you have done
so much.
You've been in an adjunctlecturer, a guest lecturer at so
many universities.
You've been on many podcasts.
You were a co-founder with GaryVee, on and on, and on and on.
And now you have Growth bySabir and you're doing amazing
things to help e-commerce,storefronts and entrepreneurs
(01:02):
really 2 to 10x their growth.
So how did you get started inthis whole crazy sector?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Total accident and it's a wonderful accident Prior
to Sabir being this e-commercegrowth advisor for not just I
mean so many e-com brands, butalso the venture capital funds
tap into me the sharks fromShark Tank.
I work so many e-com brands,but also the venture capital
funds tap into me the sharksfrom Shark Tank, you know I work
with them pretty regularly, youknow so.
So prior to that, I was knownfor a different type of hacking
(01:34):
and it was I was a programmer.
I had been programming since Iwas coding, you know, since I
was like six years old, you know, very, very young start, you
know, just because I got bored,you know.
So I started coding with mybrother both of us, me and my
elder brother and startedwriting games so that we can
write games that we liked, thatwe like to play.
(01:54):
So we came up with our owngames and we did that.
Even at that age we published agame in a Commodore 64 magazine
called Ahoy, right, so that wasthe start of it.
Fast forward, college comes, andnow college wants to give us
universities, want to give us acomputer science degree.
We're like, wow, it's likegiving me a degree for being an
(02:15):
English speaker, you know,that's great.
All right, we'll go for it.
Finish the BA degree in two anda half years, you know, to just
get it done.
Yeah, wow, love school butdon't like it that much.
You know.
I like the education part of it.
I extract information andknowledge.
But going to school was not justthe operations of going to
(02:37):
school, didn't like it much so Iwanted to be out in the world
20 plus programming languages,on and on and on developed a lot
of the internet infrastructure,e-commerce infrastructure.
When I say that I mean build itout like payment systems and
stuff like that.
That didn't exist.
In fact, I had beta testedGoogle when it was at Stanford
that's how long I've been inthis game.
(02:59):
So the pivotal point came thishuge transition into being this
revenue growth hacker, theadvisor that I've been for the
past 25 years over a billiondollars in incremental e-com
sales that's my track recordacross 200 plus e-com brands.
Right Was that.
You know Vitamin Shop.
(03:19):
You know the company, like theyhave now thousands of stores.
Right, 25 years ago they spunout and a lot of companies were
doing that.
They were spinning out theircom.
It went to NASDAQ.
A lot of bad decisions wentbankrupt, right.
So US Marshals seized theassets on behalf of the
creditors.
It went into bankruptcy courtand Jeff Horowitz, the founder
(03:42):
of Vitamin Shop brand, went intothat bankruptcy court and
reacquired all of the assetsback and brought it back in
physical assets like serversthat were running the e-com site
, put it in the warehouse inNorth Bergen, new Jersey, and
then looked around to see whocan take this over.
That's when I got involved atthat moment, in fact in the very
(04:03):
early days, because I wastrying to build a team.
Also, I was moving the serversto find a data center where I
can plug it in and turn it backon Cut my finger, you know,
moving those servers becausethose used to be pretty heavy
from Sun Microsystems it waslike it looked like picking up a
refrigerator, basically right.
So you know I put it backtogether and I start poking
(04:25):
around.
I remember that in that phaseof my life Sabir is an engineer
Right, so I poke around.
There's a lot of bad decisionsmade from an engineering
perspective, you know, becauseI've been coding and developing
things.
I actually was one of thefounding team members of the
street dot com with Jim Krameras an engineer Right.
So you know I've been doing alot of that.
I put it back together.
(04:50):
I see a lot of bad decisions,even from an engineering
standpoint, rip things out.
I mean one of the things Iripped out which didn't make
Jeff happy before it wentbankrupt.
They had invested in alicensing of a search engine for
the e-com site right.
Plus the implementation of it,the price tag was close to a
million bucks.
Here I come along, go like thisis garbage, right.
Rip it out, throw it out.
And what do I replace it with?
(05:10):
There was no e-comm searchengine back then, but I had beta
tested Google so I knew thatrelevance was a very, very
important thing, right?
So I go like there was noe-comm for Google, so I'm going
to develop it myself, becauseI'm an engineer, I can develop
anything.
So I come up with a searchengine that I built that I call.
After I finished it, I called itMoses.
(05:31):
Right?
Moses is not a biblical term,right?
Just to be clear.
I don't want any religiouszealots coming after me here.
Right, moses is an acronym forit's M-O-S-E-S S my own search
engine.
By severe right, it's M O S E S, right Moses.
So I get this up.
What it did was I had baselinethe traffic.
(05:52):
I ran it for a while from on.
That garbage of a search enginethat was there, right?
A million dollar garbage.
Basically.
That was giving us two to 3%conversion rates, right?
Once I put in Moses, 12%conversion rate, right?
So forget about that.
You spent a million bucks onthis thing.
It's losing you money, itdoesn't matter.
(06:14):
You spent a million bucks.
This is hurting us, right.
So I replace it.
And then I did other tweaks,also with email and other
content and other types ofthings.
And then I go back to Jeff.
I say to Jeff okay, I'm donewith all the engineering things
I needed to do and I'm going tostart building the engineering
team.
Who do I talk to?
For the business and marketingGives me a puzzled look.
(06:36):
He goes, like didn't you just6X your conversions on the site?
I said yeah, like do you knowthat this brand went bankrupt
because I gave it to businessand marketing people and my
network told me you're the guy Ineed to hire.
That's not going to do that,right?
And you're coming to me askingme which marketer do I need to
(06:58):
tag team with?
You're it?
I'm like I'm sorry, this is nowa Star Trek moment right.
Scotty and Kirk.
I'm sorry, jeff, I'm anengineer, I'm not.
I'm sorry this is now a StarTrek moment, right?
Body and Kirk.
I'm sorry, jeff, I'm anengineer, I'm not a marketer.
Right, because, like no, I'veseen you have the knack for
doing the right thing inbusiness, and that's a knack
that no person that goes throughmarketing education is going to
have.
Why don't we do this?
(07:19):
Let's try it out.
You're going to learn marketing.
I'm going to teach you thevitamin business because at that
time I was not taking anyvitamins.
I had no clue what glucosamine,chondroitin, msm was or any of
the other 25,000 products he wasselling.
I had no clue.
I think my parents may haveshoved down some multivitamins
into my mouth when I was a kid,right, but that was it.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
you know as a kid they were called Flintstones.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
when I was a kid, yeah, but I don't remember it
even.
That's the point, right.
So I go like, okay, I took itas an engineering challenge
Because the thing is, as anengineer, you never know
solution to everything.
What you know is how you canget to the solution, right.
So to me I said, okay,marketing.
I go like Jeff, I tookaccounting 101 and economics 101
(08:02):
back.
This was 25 years ago.
I took Accounting 101 andEconomics 101 back.
This was 25 years ago.
I took those things.
Is that marketing?
I was like, nope, that hasnothing to do with marketing.
That's accounting, right,that's finance, right.
So you need to learn marketing.
So what I would do on theweekends?
I lived in New York City.
On the weekends I would go outto Long Island.
There's a beautiful bookstore,if you're familiar with Long
Island, near Roosevelt FieldMall, called Barnes and Noble,
(08:24):
right, you know that.
But they have a giganticbookstore there, beautiful
bookstore with a cafe andeverything.
Every single weekend, for fourand a half years, I would go
into that bookstore every singleweekend, eight to 10 hours a
day, right.
Saturday and Sunday no life,right.
I would go in because I wasteaching.
It was the matrix download forNeo.
Basically that's what I wasdoing right, so I would go to
(08:47):
that section.
E-commerce is nascent at thattime.
There are no books one-commerce, right?
So I go like, okay, let me findadjacent industries that are
very similar to this thing thatI'm trying to do.
Let me learn from it.
Let me see what they have tosay.
Tv marketing, radio marketing,direct marketing, infomercial
marketing, books on QVC, hsn Tome it seems like you're talking
(09:09):
to consumers, right In thosekinds of channels.
So there were books on thosethings.
So let me pick those out.
I'll pick it out.
I would sit in their cafe.
I would read through it.
If the book was dense, I wouldactually go and pay for it.
If the other books, I wouldjust sit there.
They allowed you to do that, soyou would sit there, I would
take notes, right.
I would take notes, right.
And then thanks to Jeff he gaveme permission to do this, right
(09:31):
I would come back Mondaythrough Friday, literally what I
learned and took notes on onthe weekend, I would test it,
right.
I would test it and learn fromit and from that learning.
If it worked, I wanted to domore of it.
So if I sent an email to athousand people, you know, next
time I'm going to send it to10,000 people to test it, or
50,000 people, or 200,000 people, whatever I was scaling it.
(09:54):
So this behavior of test, learnand optimize became a vicious
cycle for me For four and a halfyears.
If you count working days,that's close to a thousand days.
Right, that brand.
When it went bankrupt it waseight to $10 million business
and the gross margin I learnedthese things later on during
that journey right Was in ahorrible shape, right, which was
(10:17):
one of the reasons that itdidn't work that well.
I grew that from eight to 10million four and a half years
later, first time, around $52million and over 68% gross
margin, right, wow.
And one big thing is that fromthose books, what I learned was
every one of those authors, likeDan Kennedy and all of these
guys right, they were allcomplaining about.
(10:38):
Oh, you know, when you do thesethings, you have to rigorously
set the tests up properly,because the thing is, once the
campaign that postcard is out,right, because direct marketing
right, or the TV infomercial isout, it's out of your hand Then
you have to wait.
I went like I don't have thatproblem.
E-commerce I have data, realtime.
I can do things a lot fasterthan these complaints that these
(11:02):
people are complaining about.
So again, engineering side, Idon't have analytics tool.
There's no Google analyticsright, let me build it.
Let me build.
I want to know everything.
When the consumer is searchingfor this, they're clicking on
that.
How many people look at theproduct and add the card?
Because I don't know any better?
Right, I want to learn allthose things.
I want to know what's going onand my goal is I just want to
(11:24):
improve.
In those four and a half years.
I set up the bar very lowbecause I was testing Every
morning when I showed up to work.
I wanted to improve one KPImeaningful KPI, not BS KPI a
meaningful KPI by 1% percent,right?
You take that math, youmultiply it in 365, that's 36.5x
(11:46):
growth in whatever you do.
But then you go like Anika.
You say that's severe, yousound like a robot, you sound
like Chad GPT, right, but I wantto take time off, I want to go
on vacation, I have family time,I get sick, there are federal
and bank holidays All right, Idid the math for you already.
The thing is, I'm very precisewith numbers.
Right, there are 220 workingdays, right, with all of those
(12:11):
excuses included in there, right?
Weekends off and all of thatright, 220.
If you do that 1% rule Mondaythrough Friday, you can get a
22X growth, but you're not goingto win all the time.
Sevier, right, even that 1%sometimes is impossible.
Okay, fair, let's have asuccess rate of less than half,
right?
So it's not 22X, it's 10X.
(12:33):
I have done that time and timeagain over 25 years for many
brands across the not just US,globally, uk, eu, australia, new
Zealand, middle East, even inJapan and China.
Right, I've done it everywhere,right, tedx growth in 12 to 18
months.
Time and time again.
You know.
That's the number one rule test, learn and optimize.
(12:57):
Right, that's one.
Number two 1% rule.
Just improve it by 1%.
Don't buy into this BS of likeoh I want to grow this thing by
15% or 17X or whatever.
Some of that might be marketinghype.
Set the rule at 1%.
It's the story of hare and thetortoise.
Be the tortoise, slow andsteady, very mindful, very
(13:19):
intentful.
You're going to win big.
You're going to win bigger thanmost of those people that crash
and burn being the rabbit inthat story, right, rule number
three is ego.
Check your ego, because there'sa lot of ego right out there.
Oh, because I have been thedirector of marketing at Procter
(13:40):
and Gamble.
Worship me.
No, how many mistakes did youmake?
Talk to me about that, right?
How many mistakes did you make?
There are so many founders.
They always have a North Starbrand that they go like.
Oh my God, what if we had thatone person that joined us from
Procter Gamble, from that XYZWarby Parker, whatever, right,
(14:00):
that would be so brilliant,right We'll give them.
Oh, she is a director ofmarketing.
We'll make her CMO in ourstartup, right?
You know, that person couldmake one mistake that's larger
than the next three years ofyour revenue at that big company
and it would be swept under therug with no issues, right?
(14:23):
But you won't be able toswallow that mistake when they
make that, even a portion ofthat mistake in your startup.
You have to be very careful.
With $1 billion, to my credit,incrementally growing these
e-com businesses across 200 plusbrands across the world, I
don't think my ego matters.
I mean my opinion matters atall.
(14:43):
I check my ego even today.
If I'm working on something, Ineed to look at it because the
environment changes, meta haschanges, ai all of these things.
It's a very dynamic world.
Things change.
So you had a success threeyears ago.
Yeah, what does that have to dowith the economic rules, the US
(15:05):
tariffs and all of these thingsthat are going on right now?
What does that have to do withanything?
You're sugarcoating it.
You're covering it up by sayingthat.
Oh, you should listen to mebecause of XYZ experience that I
have.
Your opinion is one data point.
I'm going to take it.
I'm going to put it in theblender that I'm going to test
it in.
If it works, you know whatGreat I'm going to scale it.
(15:27):
If it doesn't work, I'm sorry Imight release you to the
community of the world becauseyou don't belong in this brand.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, so there's several things that you
mentioned.
Along the way.
I have friends who are verysuccessful in their areas as
well that did the same thing.
I said I need to figure thisthing out because I'm not making
enough money, for instance,putting a friend who is a
scientist not making enoughmoney.
Putting my funds into the stockmarket oh, real estate is the
(15:58):
way to go.
She went every weekend, took herson to Barnes and Noble and
studied books on real estate,and now she is a major player.
People come to her all the time.
She's building things all over,and it all started there, and
so I love the fact that you tookthis and said I know a lot of
(16:19):
things.
I'm already exponentiallyincreasing growth, but now I
have a new challenge.
I'm going to.
Even if you don't like to go toschool, right, I have a new
challenge.
I'm going to.
Even if you don't like to go toschool, right, you have a
thirst for knowledge and forcontinuous learning, and so you
use that to benefit, use a lotof words that we do talk about
in the marketing world.
We A-B test, right, we want tolook at all the touch points,
(16:40):
and you talk a lot about thedata which we have the data and
the storytelling aspects that gotogether.
So you know there's so muchthat you've done and you talked
about a few steps as well.
Now are those part of your 8Dconstruct.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, there are principles.
Right, there are principles.
And then the 8D method actuallystands for eight dimensions of
e-commerce.
Right, but what most e-commercegurus get wrong?
Or even if you're running ane-commerce brand yourself, right
, you think that your problem iswhatever is staring in the face
, right?
Let's say meta ads, right?
(17:15):
Well, like, oh you know what?
Only if I had better creative,If I had hired the next meta ads
person, they probably know howto configure this advantage plus
thing.
Right, Maybe I don't have thatright.
Right, when I look at it, okay,your ads are six out of 10.
But when I look at your website, your landing pages on the
(17:35):
website, where the ad is goingto advantage plus six out of 10,
it's going to do its job ofdelivering that traffic to you.
Right, that person shows up onyour site and your site is
taking 28 seconds on average.
Actual data, by the way,whenever I cite these numbers
right, these are actual.
At the average, I Shopify storepage load time is about 28
seconds.
Some of them are even worsethan that.
(17:57):
Right, when does it need to be?
It's consumer attention spanit's 1.7 seconds.
Why is that?
You swipe to the left, or youdo this on TikTok or Instagram
Reels, or you do that on yourAmazon account.
Your attention span is gone,Like it's 1.7 seconds.
You did not make the point.
I'm leaving you, right?
You're wasting my time.
(18:18):
So why is that a meta adsproblem?
That has nothing to do withmeta ads.
Meta ads delivered the click toyou.
You did a great job of makingpeople believe in whatever
creative you had in there tosell them on this thing.
That's gonna solve theirproblem.
Great, I'm sold.
I clicked on it.
Shop now.
Perfect.
When I look at a six out of 10,can that be eight and a half
(18:42):
out of 10?
Yes, in the program we do gothrough the paid media
optimization also.
But traffic came to your sitebut you did not cater to that
attention span.
And then you're okay with, butsevere, it's okay.
My bounce rate on my side is65%.
That's good, right, Becausethat's everybody is getting 65%.
Why is that okay?
(19:03):
You're telling me for every$100 that you're going to spend
$65, you can burn it and it'sokay.
$35 is what's going to generatefor you, right?
Why is that okay?
It's not okay, right?
It's definitely not okayBecause the thing is, if you did
a great job on the ad side,Advantage Plus did its job of
(19:28):
delivering the traffic to you.
You dropped the ball on the site, right?
So consumer attention span itis highly measured, right, you
can measure it.
That's a technical KPI.
You could use a tool likeGTmetrix.
You plug in your best-sellingproduct.
Let's say that's the number oneselling product that gives you
70% of your revenue on average.
So you plug that in, it getsyou 28 seconds.
That's the time to interact.
(19:48):
That's a KPI.
In GTmetrix.
I just told you it's supposedto be 1.7.
You are 22 to 25x worse thanwhere you need to be.
Where's the money hidden inthat?
Right?
One is revenue loss.
That's how much more revenueyou could be getting, and that's
an unacceptable bounce ratethat you think it's okay.
(20:09):
It's not okay, right?
And number two what else areyou losing on the money you just
spent on meta ads, deliveringthat click to you and the
impressions, right?
You're losing money on that tooand potential of acquiring that
customer versus somebody elsewho does a better job of that,
right?
That's kind of the number onething.
Remember your brand existsbecause that consumer exists in
(20:31):
the market.
The center of that universe isthe consumer, not the brand.
This is not 1955.
It's 2025, right In 1955,consumers revolved around brands
.
That's not the case anymore.
The consumer sits in the middleand they are pitched ideas
(20:52):
throughout the day and if youare not catering to that
attention span, you're not intheir purview at all.
And that's the gap.
I fell by having ridiculousgrowth across 200 plus brands.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yeah, and that's been in your business.
You've also worked in many,many other organizations,
including Vanderchuk, and so youhelped build e-commerce.
You did a lot of other stuff.
You were a mentor.
Talk about how you moved fromexperience to experience and
what that added to yourknowledge base and also your
(21:30):
ideation.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
So here's the thing.
You know, people usually referto what I do as my career.
Right, it's my career To me,it's my passion, right?
Regardless of whethersomebody's paying me or not
paying me, I'm going to be doingsomething in this area, right?
Like you don't need to tell agardener, somebody who loves
gardening, that I'm going to payyou to do more gardening.
(21:53):
Right, they're going to dogardening regardless.
You're going to find them dirtin their fingers in their
backyard on Saturday, Sunday, ifit's not raining, they're going
to get out there to work ontheir rows to get more flowers
out of it and stuff like that.
They'll figure out all of thosekinds of things.
You don't have to teach themthat, right?
When I was coding, that was mypassion.
It still is.
By the way, I'm still withamazing updates that just came
(22:16):
out.
I don't know if your audienceknows.
Cloud Anthropic Cloud came upwith the next release, which is
Cloud 4, Opus and Sonnet.
I'm all over that right now.
It's incredible with AI, likethe amazing things, Things that
I had read in theory when I wentthrough computer science degree
is reality for me, you have noidea I.
To do a computer science degreeis reality for me, you have no
idea, I'm a kid in a candy storeright now.
(22:38):
Right, my eyes are like thoseanime eyes, you know of that
little girl when it sees thatthing.
That's me right now.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Not that I'm a little girl, you know, just to clarify
that.
And, Claude, you mentioned myfavorite of the GPT tools.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
So oh, but I have a more, better one.
Right now.
I'm going to compare Cloud4 toManos.
Manos is incredible, but Manosuses Cloud behind the scenes for
all of his agent tech work.
You know I'm really well versedin it, like both being a tech
nerd and also from a businessstandpoint.
I think the acceleration that Ihave done, like you were asking
(23:12):
me about these journeys andwhat I learned what I learned is
as human beings and astechnology has improved.
You know the Moore's law, right.
You can apply Moore's law to mycareer, right.
I have gotten.
It took me in that first round.
It took me about four and ahalf years to 5X more than 5X.
You know vitamin shop, eventhough it was bankrupt, right,
(23:34):
but when I, by the time, like Iwould say about seven, eight
years later, when I touchedAshley Stewart, it took me two
years to take it from 3 millionto 30 million, so 10 X in two
years.
So the time element of how longdoes it take has been reducing
over time and my skillset hasgotten better, obviously, but
(23:55):
the amazing tool chest that wehave is incredible, right.
If I want to launch ane-commerce business, I can do it
this weekend.
Within 48 hours I can have afully branded, amazing,
content-rich, thanks to AI alsoand all the tools, like Shopify.
It's an incredible tool.
Right, I needed to buildShopify for Vitamin Shop in
(24:17):
order to build vitaminshopcom.
Right, if you understand whatthe statement, what I just said,
right, yes, now, vitamin Shop.
If I needed to build it, itwould take me 48 hours to fully
build it from the ground up.
Right, this weekend, if I startright now, sunday night, I have
the brand up and running,including I would attach ads to
(24:37):
it from Google and Meta to getit going to start getting
traffic Monday morning.
I can do that.
So the time element of it, thetechnology, how we have
progressed, has become so muchbetter.
I mean in the implementationprogram for the 8D method, for
the eight dimensionsoptimization of e-commerce.
Right, it's called the Rapid 2X.
(24:58):
Right In the first six weeks ofthe program where we do
performance optimization.
That's dimension one,performance optimization of
everything.
When I say that, it's not justtech optimization, it's also
paid media optimization, emailoptimization, everything we
touch.
Like you have already investedin a lot of things, I know what
that stack looks like prettymuch you know, specifically
(25:18):
speaking, like 80% would beShopify, klaviyo, meta ads,
google ads.
You do some social posts andyou do some other.
You know you maybe some YouTube, maybe, right?
So I know what that stack lookslike.
So, if I take that stack and Ican squeeze out more growth out
of it plus clean it up, likethere's so much email hygiene
problems, right, you're sendingemails to everybody, like, how
(25:42):
do you know that that person iseven alive, right?
By the way, historically thathappened to me at one brand.
Like I needed to like literallytell the chairman your
customers are falling off, rightI use a different word dying,
right?
The chairman said yeah, that'swhy we hired you.
You're really good at this lifecycle thing.
This is after years ofexperience, right?
(26:04):
I'm like no, no, no, I don'tthink no amount of Sabir is
going to help this.
They're six feet under.
Like, what do you mean?
I just looked at the data.
I'm very literal abouteverything.
Right, there is no sugarcoating, anything but me.
Right?
These people are dead.
In fact, I have the data.
It shows that they have beendead more than five years.
In fact, their familiesprobably are pissed that you're
(26:24):
still mailing them and you'reemailing them.
You know, and they were mailinga lot.
After implementing the hygiene,we ended up saving $250,000 per
quarter, not mailing deadpeople.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Let's just let that sink in.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Wow.
No amount of severe could helpthat.
I'm sorry I don't raise thedead.
I mean, there's a guy I heardthat he's supposed to do that,
right?
Not me, right?
(27:01):
I'm not that guy Not going todo that, right?
That's not in my skill set orwheelhouse, whatever, however
you want to approach that.
So that's the thing, like.
You have to understand likethings happen in life.
Right, email had babies, right.
Maybe you were interested in itfor another, maybe in the
beginning, maybe 20 years ago,for three to five years, and you
(27:21):
had two and a half kids onaverage, right?
But those marketers are stillsending you baby products right
now, 20 years later.
It's stupid, it doesn't makesense, but it happens, it
happens.
There's a real cost associatedwith it.
And then the other cost is allof your KPIs are wrong.
Right?
You think your campaignperformed at a certain level.
Maybe it performed betterbecause you had all this hygiene
(27:42):
problem and bad data.
Right, knowing what data you'recollecting, what data you have
and the cleanliness of that data, the hygiene of that data is
critical, right?
And also, that's not just foremail.
You could do the same thing.
Are you sending the wrongsignals to meta ads?
Are you sending wrong signalsto Google ads Most ad accounts.
(28:02):
The first thing they do is theygo like oh, what signal should
we be using when they're settingit up?
Oh, all site visitors, but youjust told me you were okay with
65% bounce rate.
Now you're sending that garbageof a signal saying that people
who rejected me, they ghosted me65% of them are okay.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Send me more people like that, and I'm going to keep
on spending more money.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
It doesn't make sense .
I mean things that I say soundsvery obvious, like, oh yeah, I
wouldn't do that.
No, you're doing it.
I can go into your account andyou're doing exactly that.
And if you're doing a littlebetter job, you might be saying
engaged site visitors.
So the 35% that did somethingwith me, what about the people
who bought 17 times from you andspent the top 1% on your site?
(28:48):
How about that?
That's a better signal, notsite engaged visitors, right?
So there are things like that,that a lot of.
And because there's hyperspecialization of skillset and
what do I mean by that?
People who have gone into metaads.
They don't even do Google ads,right, and then within it, they
(29:09):
might have experience withe-commerce.
They may not have experiencewith e-commerce and they get
hired for as a freelancer or asan agency and then they touch
your brand.
They don't have the expertise.
They just don't have theexpertise to understand like
that.
There are nuances to everycategory, right.
There are nuances to everyregion of the world.
You have to understand that,right.
How you sell to a person injapan is different than india,
(29:32):
than it is in can versus America, right, united States it's
different.
Yeah, if you just oh no, I justmarket to English speaking yeah
, and Aussie acts very differentthan a New Yorker, than a
Californian.
Very different.
That's just US and within theUS, right, if you look at that
versus Texas, right, verydifferent.
You have to understand theconsumer better and
(29:54):
overgeneralization of these kindof statements actually hurts.
That's an opinion.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
It ends up actually hurting your business when you
make those kind of bad decisionsbecause it's something that you
know really well and intimately, but it's also you're making
the argument for we're seeing aworld of hyper-personalization
on the customer side as well, toyour point wanting to make sure
(30:23):
that each of our customers feelspecial.
And one of the examples I usein class sometimes is a major
airline sent me an email for mybirthday saying happy birthday.
My birthday's in December.
So what they offered was a seatupgrade as long as I booked a
flight that month.
Well, december you probablyalready have your travel plans
because it's a big holiday time.
(30:45):
It wasn't customized to me.
They didn't look, use anyresearch about how long I've
been a customer, how manyhundreds of thousands of miles
I've flown on that airline.
They could have seen by thosesignals that you're talking
about what a better offer wouldbe and it wouldn't cost them
anything.
Maybe they give me a discountto go to a certain place, or
maybe they do something else tocreate a better user experience
(31:07):
for me as an existing customerwho has loyalty.
So everything that you'resaying and I think this is an
area where we see- of course youtalked about AI a little bit.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
You just like hinted at it.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
And this is a subject we can dive deep, by the way.
I'll give you a phrase for that.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
I'll give you a phrase before we close up that
conversation.
Right, Brand amnesia.
Right, Brands have amnesia, andevery time you walk through
that door, oh hello.
I don't know you who?
Speaker 2 (31:33):
are you yes?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, I've been to your store 17 times over the
past five years or whatever,right, oh, oh really.
Oh, welcome anonymous.
I just told you I've been toyour store 17 times, right, so
there's brand amnesia.
But the thing is here's theironic thing, given the tech
Shopify knows you, klaviyo knowsyou, facebook knows you, google
(31:58):
knows you.
You just need to surface it andjust acknowledge and most
people, most brands, don't do it.
And there's this brand amnesiathat exists, unfortunately that
they don't even act on the datathat they're collecting.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Well, and I'll say, going back to Anthropic and
Claude, I love the conversations.
I have right, and I love thelittle hello good, good evening.
What do you want to work ontoday?
or happy weekend, you know, eventhat little bit of
personalization from an ai toolmakes it yeah, as soon as you
turn it on, it says good morningannika right and then on the
other side, I've just created mydelphi clone right, and I love
(32:37):
the fact that when people testit, I had somebody say, oh, she
gave me such great advice.
I'm like, well, thank you,because that's all my knowledge
base, that it's built on andyou're going to be able to pick
up.
If you call my Delphi clone,she'll ask a question right away
(33:00):
.
That has to do with exactlywhere you left off in the text
conversation, and so I love thefact that these tools are now
giving us the ability to havethat memory and even if it's not
person to person right, it'smachine to person, it's still
helping us create that pathway.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
So there are a few things there, though, you know,
because just for your audienceto understand like there are
right ways to do AI that arehighly productive and very good
for you, Like in case ofe-commerce, use case right
Versus doing the wrong thing andthen giving up on AI right.
It's like oh, ai is not for me.
What happened?
(33:38):
Oh, I just put this thing inthere.
It was such a generic thingthat it came back with.
You know, ai needs context, itneeds to know who it is.
It's very intelligent.
It can organize things.
It does a great job of that.
It can figure things out that,if you give it an immense amount
of data, it can figure outpatterns in it that you would
(33:59):
take you years to figure out,right, that's why I'm saying
that my speed is going to geteven faster now.
Right, that with AI augmentingme, right, not replacing me,
it's an augmentation.
We're in the augmentation stagethat this is something from an
AI perspective, like most peoplethere's oh, is it going to
replace humans and stuff?
No, it's augmentation.
Right, it can help you.
(34:20):
Well, I'll give you, my daughteractually is going to Stony
Brook University, she's seekinga degree and actually she wants
to become a professor increative writing at Stony Brook,
right, so there's always aspecifically in writing.
That has been a big topic,right In universities about
plagiarism, right, and whenstudents because I have thought
(34:41):
also, I have guest lectured andI have been a professor also in
my back in my history right, sowhen AI generates a generic
piece of content because yougave it, you copy and pasted the
task your professor gave youright your homework.
You plug it in what extractcomes professor gave you right
your homework you plug it in.
What extract comes out?
You know what it's pureplagiarism.
I've actually, when I was aprofessor, ai was coming out so
(35:04):
I actually taught my studentshow to use it properly, right,
not to cheat and to save time.
The thing is, it's very obviousthat those words are not yours.
Right, you're using words thatwe never discussed.
Like, where did you get that?
Can you explain to me, like,yeah, the story behind Menelaus
and what happened with Paris andstuff?
(35:24):
Yeah, I know that you this is avery deep thought that you
didn't have right.
And then, as soon as I havethat dialogue, I know that the
student cheated, right, it takesme two seconds to evaluate that
From their writing.
I can tell that.
But I want to make sure that Iunderstand that they actually
definitely did that right.
But my daughter, the way sheuses, she uses it as an
augmentation.
(35:45):
She's a great writer, shewrites amazing pieces, so
original content creation is her.
But then she uses Claude as aneditor Says Claude, I wrote this
thing.
This is what I'm trying toachieve.
This is what I wrote.
I need you to criticize it andgive me where do you see plot
holes?
Where do you see in my writingstyle?
(36:06):
Where can I improve things?
Don't do it for me.
Tell me, I'm going to do it andI'm going to give it back to
you.
I'm going to go through thisiterative process.
So she's using cloud to augmentand this is a great lesson for
all the students.
You know, if they're, you knowwhen they're listening to this
podcast, that you can use it inthat sense.
Right, if you're a computerscientist and you go like oh,
(36:27):
you know what Cloud code whichis now general release, right,
you can literally tell it towrite code and it will write it
for you.
How about you write the code?
You get better at craftingamazing code.
Give it to Claude and go likewhat would you be the reviewer
of my code?
Right, do a code review.
And as a senior developer, I'ma junior developer.
(36:49):
You tell me where can I improvemy skillset?
I'm going to improve it.
I'm going to refeed it back toyou.
You evaluate it and give methat criticism.
That's augmentation.
That's going to.
It's going to.
We're going to be in this cyclefor a little while there.
Right.
In case of e-commerce, forexample, you know every
entrepreneur gets this shinyobject syndrome, right.
(37:13):
The next pretty thing, the nextYouTube video or AI right now
is a hot button right syndrome.
Right.
The next pretty thing, the nextYouTube video or AI right now
is a hot button right now.
Right, that came out.
What are we doing?
You know I'm doing this andit's not giving me the right
answer.
Yeah, because we need to do itproperly.
So in our premium workshops, inthe Rapid2x program, what we do
is we actually have a deep diveworkshop into how to use it.
(37:34):
For example, one of the thingsthat we did was generating
graphical content from ChatGPT4.0, right.
So giving it not a prompt likethis, but a prompt like this,
right To say this is what we arelooking for.
And I need you to variate thisover a hundred times, because I
want to test out 100 differentad creative concepts on meta ads
(37:56):
, and it's optimized for metaads specifically, versus.
I want to test this on TikTok,or animated GIF, or use OpenAI
Sora for a piece of videocontent that I want to test,
right, those are the kind ofthings.
Those are very specific usecases for specific things you
want to test.
And why do you want to do that?
(38:17):
Most entrepreneurs lack theproductivity of producing lots
of creatives because they runout of creative ideas, to be
frank.
Right, so how can you take thatand turn it into a weapon so
that these entrepreneurs cancrank these things out so fast?
Right, and they can learnfaster and they can come back
(38:37):
and go like, oh, I tested ahundred ads and these five did
phenomenally well.
I want to move forward withthese and I'm going to pour more
money into it and these 95, Ilearned from, got my learnings.
Now I'm going to get that dataout and I'm going to feed it
back into Claude, into ChatGPTto analyze to see what's going
on with it.
So into Cloud, into ChatGPT toanalyze to see what's going on
with it, so I can acceleratethat Content generation, image
(39:03):
generation, evaluating One ofthe things that you know, the
consumer attention span that Italked about, giving the
criteria of the artifact, of howit should be evaluated, taking
a copy of that, saving thatwebpage as a PDF with the GT
metrics, feeding it back intoCloud or ChatGPT with the what.
There's an element, a filecalled HAR report, which gives
(39:24):
you the waterfall of how yourobjects are loading on your page
.
That's a very detailed data,right.
So you give that and then chatGPT.
Can you identify the bestplaces where I need to improve,
technically first, and then,after you fix that, then you go
okay.
Now, given the fact that thisis the visual elements of it and
these are the criteria forRapid2x, how can I re-optimize
(39:48):
this page from a layoutstandpoint, or even copy, and
then it comes back and gives youexactly what it is?
And now?
So how do you prioritize?
Let's start with bestsellernumber one Represents 50, 60% of
your revenue.
If we improve that by 10%,that's a huge uplift.
Then, picking an arbitrarynumber 50 on your list, that
(40:11):
even if you improve it by 100%,it's not going to move the
needle at all.
You know.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Oh gosh.
Well, we have so much more totalk about, but I know we're a
little short on time, so I wantto ask two questions what are
your favorite AI tools?
I'll start there.
What are the tools thateverybody should have in their
wheelhouse?
Speaker 3 (40:34):
So currently I'm actually because I was beta
testing and because I'm wellknown in the industry as a guy
who actually takes your tool andmakes it into the e-commerce if
it belongs there, right.
So you know, I have beenextensively been testing Manos
M-A-N-U-S dot I-M.
Right, it kicks ass.
It's really good, right.
I've been beta testing it for awhile.
I think now they just had ageneral public release so that
if you could Behind the scenes,it uses Claude also, right, but
(40:57):
it's very good at what it does.
If it cannot figure out or ifit doesn't have an agent to do
that thing that you're asking itto do, first it it writes
Python code to do that thing andthen goes, executes it, then
gives you the results from it,and then you modify it from
there and rewrites the code alsoagain.
So it's phenomenal from thatperspective.
I think I'm going to startbecause Anthropic is number two
(41:18):
on that list with Cloud AI,right.
Cloud 4 just came out yesterdayI heard about the news so I'm
going to be testing it andseeing how you can do more than
just content generation andother types of things.
But I'm going to put it throughthe wringer ChatGPT, obviously,
just because of mass adoption.
It's there, but there arechallenges with ChatGPT
(41:39):
sometimes because I have proaccounts across all of them.
I have Perplexity.
I have that Gemini, just withGoogle IO.
Recently this week they had ahuge announcement with things
like Google Veil, that's a newvideo generation, and Imagine is
another one from Google.
That's another one that's beingreleased right now or it's in
(42:00):
day beta.
It's going to be released bysummer timeframe.
So these are incredible tools.
For now, what I would recommendfor most is to have the five
tabs open, right, right, andthis is a lesson I learned very
early on.
It was Microsoft versus Apple.
For me, it was Microsoft andApple.
(42:21):
For a time, it was iOS versusAndroid.
For me, it was iOS and Android.
Right, the thing is with theand replacing the versus with an
, and what it does is it justopens up opportunities for you,
because these AI tools, they doone thing really well and other
places they are horrible, youknow.
So that might be filled.
(42:41):
So right now, for example, I useManos, cloud and ChatGPT in
three different areas.
One becomes an input.
It provides me the output thatbecomes an input to the other
one, and then this produces anoutput that becomes an input to
the other one and that gives methe best solutions that I'm
looking for, right?
So don't do the versus thing.
(43:02):
That's a branding thing andyou're buying too much into the
marketing message.
Right, go with the and, becausethe and is where you're going
to find the thing that's goingto help you stitch that together
, because if you go with one,you go like oh, I only use chat
GPT, yeah, but it's horrible atcontent generation.
Claude does a much better jobat that.
Right?
So as soon as you open yourmouth and you say something like
(43:24):
that, I have a rebuttal for you, because I've tried, tested it
over a thousand times or 10,000times.
Right, I can give you thatrebuttal.
So, remove the versus and putan end to it.
Like, especially with AI, is sonascent.
Right, you would have thoughtthat Google was the one that's
going to do the AI thing.
In fact, not even Google IBM,because they were on jeopardy.
(43:46):
Right, they were the AI thing.
Where's IBM right now?
Right, so never make that sortof an assumption.
Right?
And when it was IBM that'sgoing to take over computing, no
, it was Microsoft and Apple.
Right, it was not them.
Right, the thing is my view, myPOV, is so broad because I've
been through all these techrevolutions.
(44:07):
You cannot just put your place,your bet, on that one thing
right.
It's also possible that thatone that you think is the leader
is the first one is going tofail first, right, and it's the
number two or even the numberfive that you didn't think is
going to win.
Two and five combine theirforces and that becomes the
standard right.
So never make that's anassumption by itself also.
(44:30):
So never make that assumptionright With these AI tools like
these are the things that are somany exciting things that are
going on right now.
Like you know, the market, thetech market, gives you always an
in to get in right To do thenext thing right.
The internet boom, the e-comboom, the social media boom
(44:52):
right, the crypto blockchainboom.
Now ML slash, ai boom.
Right now that we are goingthrough right One.
These are not trends or fads.
These are legitimate thingsthat are going to be the normal
for us, like three to five yearsfrom now.
Like where you are walking intoyour kitchen and talking to your
coffee machine like it's anormal thing to make you a dark
(45:14):
roast coffee right, it's goingto become a thing.
Right now You're doing it kindof with Alexa talking to it, and
if it's AI enabled I mean ifit's smart enabled or Alexa
enabled it does that.
But it will become very natural, like a very natural thing for
you to do.
Right, you put the stuff intothe microwave, you press the
number, it heats it up for you.
(45:34):
It will be like that.
It would be very easy that it'sa normal thing for you to do,
not a normal thing right now.
If you take a person from 1955and you time shift them to today
, they think that we're an aliencivilization right now.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah, there's so much more we could talk about on
this topic, but I want to get towhat you do now.
So what are the different waysthat you work with people and
what size of business do youneed to have, because you have
obviously a lot of expertise?
I would imagine that if you'rejust starting out, or if you
don't have very much revenue,are there still ways for people
(46:12):
to work with you?
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Sure.
So the program is a structuredprogram called Rapid2x, which
actually goes through theseeight dimensions to grow the
business.
By the way, 2024 data right.
Very recently we actuallylooked at the whole year's
performance of 12 test brands.
We got 118% incremental revenuein a short period of time, and
they started at different timesof the year too, so it's not
(46:34):
like they had a full 12 monthanniversary all of them.
So that's the performance of it.
So, as far as the size of it, itactually we have a criteria for
accepting people into andbrands into the program.
We go to a very rigorousinterview process.
The criteria is very simple.
It's two things, right, but thesecond one is going to be hard
(46:54):
for some entrepreneurs.
The first one is product marketfit.
Product market fit means thatyou worked on your product, you
tried marketing it, you got to50K, you got to 100K.
That means people are buying it, not your friends and family
circle.
Strangers are buying it fromyou, right.
So 50 to 100K, you can be partof the program.
(47:14):
It can definitely benefit you.
Now we have brands that are $10million brands in there too,
yeah right, and they canaccelerate that growth even
faster because they have theright infrastructure, people and
stuff like that in there.
Right, we have someentrepreneurs who are because
I'm known in.
You know this program hasgotten great results.
They are serial entrepreneurs.
They're working on their nextbrand with zero revenue, but
(47:37):
they want to have the rightfoundation from the ground up
because they understand thevalue of it, that they know that
when they did that withoutthose things, those were the
lessons learned from the priorbrands right, that they would
want to do it differently.
That we have several of thoseserial entrepreneurs.
That, in fact, they end upafter 12 weeks in the program
(47:58):
because they're learning it andthen they're leading their teams
to let them know what to do.
Right, so when they come out ofthe gate, they win big time.
Right.
So we have had a lot of brandslaunch during the Rapid2X
program within the six to 12weeks the first six to 12 weeks
of the program, right, byimplementing the right things in
it.
The second criteria so productmarket fit is that Second
(48:20):
criteria is entrepreneurial fit.
This program is not foreverybody, it's not right, and
I'll give you a definition ofwhich entrepreneur belongs in
this program, which one shouldnot even bother applying.
Right, it's the entrepreneur.
And I'll use an example, a verysimple one.
Right, it's involvedentrepreneur versus committed
(48:41):
entrepreneur.
How do I define that?
Right, it's a breakfast item.
Everybody is very familiar withit.
It's steak and eggs.
The chicken is involved in thatbreakfast.
In that brunch it laid the eggand it contributed to the
breakfast.
The cow is all in with thatsteak.
It gave itself.
(49:03):
That's a committed entrepreneur.
So that you know, when you'rein this program, I don't want to
be leading your company, youneed to be leading your company.
A committed entrepreneur doesexactly that.
They roll up their sleeves andgo like this is what we need to
do to business.
Because this guy has experience, we will implement exactly what
he's doing, what he's tellingme, and it's not too many things
(49:24):
.
By the way, you need to work onhighly valuable things.
Like a few of them, like threeto five things this week.
Right, I'm not expecting you todo a thousand things because
unreasonable.
Right, you're not going to getanything done, right?
So a committed entrepreneurdoes those things Involved
entrepreneur.
Well, like, oh yeah, I'm goingto send my marketing person to
do that.
And that marketing person whatif I said something in there
(49:44):
that that person, like Anika,you know that you attended that
thing.
You're director of marketingfor this brand, right.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
I said something in there.
Now it points to a flaw youhave.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Right, are you going to bring that thing that's a
critical thing back to thefounder to say oh, by the way,
sabir today said this thing andI think you should fire me.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Yes, right Never.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
That's never going to happen.
It will happen.
Zero, exactly zero times.
That's the statistics, based onthat right.
So you know, in that case, ifyou're an involved one, like you
don't appreciate the rightexpertise, that you really need
to dig deep, like you need to beleading Don't send me, don't
send me your number two incommand.
Or third, or worse, oh, wehired this freelancer, he's
(50:29):
going to be freelancer.
What's their commitment levelto your brand?
Zero, all right.
So it's not going to beanything.
Maybe that person you hired fulltime might have a level of
commitment, maybe, maybe, Idon't know maybe 60%.
But if they heard somethingthat's going to hurt them,
they're going like, oh, it's thesame old, same old.
The severe didn't really coveranything new, but I just told
(50:51):
them five things they shouldimplement, which included
replacing that person who justattended that on your behalf.
So if you're an involvedentrepreneur, don't even bother
applying to the program we'veactually set up for your
listeners.
We have set up a special linkyou know they can go and
investigate the next steps isgrowthbyseverecom slash USC,
right?
They can go to the site.
(51:11):
They can learn more about theseeight dimensions, about the
Rapid2x program.
They can have a ton of freecontent on the site like really
valuable content.
I dig pretty deep into the topicso I don't let go of anything
because there's a lot ofmisinformation and bad
information out there.
So that's why I do really deepdive, like almost like lecture
(51:32):
type, but not boring.
Like it's very valuable thatthey can go through a case study
walkthroughs of, like OremBrothers how did we get 112%
increase in six weeks?
Right, so I do a walkthrough ofexactly what happened in those
six weeks on the site, so that'savailable.
Or Ashley Stewart from 3million to 30 million how did
that happen?
How did you 10X and moreprofitable?
Right, that walkthrough is inthere too, right?
(51:55):
So there's a lot of valuablecontent on there that they can
sit there, take their notebooksout.
School is in session right.
Take lots of notes andimplement it right.
That's the thing is that it hasto be actionable knowledge, not
just.
Otherwise you would see a lotof librarians driving
Lamborghinis.
I don't see any, you know.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
Yeah, amazing.
Well, we will definitely bringyou back onto this show and I
know we're going to do someother things together as well,
but this has been a reallylively conversation.
I love seeing your passion andhow you are bringing your
passion to everything that youdo and how you're using that to
help other people reallyunderstand and achieve
(52:39):
everything that they want intheir businesses, as long as
they're committed.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
Yeah, and thank you for having me.
Thank you for sharing yourplatform with me and your
audience.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Absolutely, and thank you to everybody who's
listening to this episode orwatching it on your favorite
platform.
We'll be back again next weekwith another amazing guest.
In the meantime, thank you,sabir Simrakant, for being on
our show today.
Growth by Sabir.
We'll have the link in the shownotes for everybody to check
out the special offer foreverybody who's listening to
(53:07):
this podcast.
Mediascape Insights fromDigital Changemakers, brought to
you by USC Annenberg's MS inDigital Media Management program
.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital
Media Management program, visitus on the web at dmmuscedu.
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital
changemakers, a speaker seriesand podcast brought to you by
USC Annenberg's Digital MediaManagement Program.
Join us as we unlock thesecrets to success in an
increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
It is such a pleasure today on Mediascape to have
Sabir Semerkant on the show.
I did butcher your last name alittle bit, which I knew I was
going to do, going into this,but, sabir, I'm so excited that
you're here today.
Thank you for joining, anika.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Let's talk about your background, gosh, you have done
so much.
You've been in an adjunctlecturer, a guest lecturer at so
many universities.
You've been on many podcasts.
You were a co-founder with GaryVee, on and on, and on and on.
And now you have Growth bySabir and you're doing amazing
things to help e-commerce,storefronts and entrepreneurs
(01:02):
really 2 to 10x their growth.
So how did you get started inthis whole crazy sector?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Total accident and it's a wonderful accident Prior
to Sabir being this e-commercegrowth advisor for not just I
mean so many e-com brands, butalso the venture capital funds
tap into me the sharks fromShark Tank.
I work so many e-com brands,but also the venture capital
funds tap into me the sharksfrom Shark Tank, you know I work
with them pretty regularly, youknow so.
So prior to that, I was knownfor a different type of hacking
(01:34):
and it was I was a programmer.
I had been programming since Iwas coding, you know, since I
was like six years old, you know, very, very young start, you
know, just because I got bored,you know.
So I started coding with mybrother both of us, me and my
elder brother and startedwriting games so that we can
write games that we liked, thatwe like to play.
(01:54):
So we came up with our owngames and we did that.
Even at that age we published agame in a Commodore 64 magazine
called Ahoy, right, so that wasthe start of it.
Fast forward, college comes, andnow college wants to give us
universities, want to give us acomputer science degree.
We're like, wow, it's likegiving me a degree for being an
(02:15):
English speaker, you know,that's great.
All right, we'll go for it.
Finish the BA degree in two anda half years, you know, to just
get it done.
Yeah, wow, love school butdon't like it that much.
You know.
I like the education part of it.
I extract information andknowledge.
But going to school was not justthe operations of going to
(02:37):
school, didn't like it much so Iwanted to be out in the world
20 plus programming languages,on and on and on developed a lot
of the internet infrastructure,e-commerce infrastructure.
When I say that I mean build itout like payment systems and
stuff like that.
That didn't exist.
In fact, I had beta testedGoogle when it was at Stanford
that's how long I've been inthis game.
(02:59):
So the pivotal point came thishuge transition into being this
revenue growth hacker, theadvisor that I've been for the
past 25 years over a billiondollars in incremental e-com
sales that's my track recordacross 200 plus e-com brands.
Right Was that.
You know Vitamin Shop.
(03:19):
You know the company, like theyhave now thousands of stores.
Right, 25 years ago they spunout and a lot of companies were
doing that.
They were spinning out theircom.
It went to NASDAQ.
A lot of bad decisions wentbankrupt, right.
So US Marshals seized theassets on behalf of the
creditors.
It went into bankruptcy courtand Jeff Horowitz, the founder
(03:42):
of Vitamin Shop brand, went intothat bankruptcy court and
reacquired all of the assetsback and brought it back in
physical assets like serversthat were running the e-com site
, put it in the warehouse inNorth Bergen, new Jersey, and
then looked around to see whocan take this over.
That's when I got involved atthat moment, in fact in the very
(04:03):
early days, because I wastrying to build a team.
Also, I was moving the serversto find a data center where I
can plug it in and turn it backon Cut my finger, you know,
moving those servers becausethose used to be pretty heavy
from Sun Microsystems it waslike it looked like picking up a
refrigerator, basically right.
So you know I put it backtogether and I start poking
(04:25):
around.
I remember that in that phaseof my life Sabir is an engineer
Right, so I poke around.
There's a lot of bad decisionsmade from an engineering
perspective, you know, becauseI've been coding and developing
things.
I actually was one of thefounding team members of the
street dot com with Jim Krameras an engineer Right.
So you know I've been doing alot of that.
I put it back together.
(04:50):
I see a lot of bad decisions,even from an engineering
standpoint, rip things out.
I mean one of the things Iripped out which didn't make
Jeff happy before it wentbankrupt.
They had invested in alicensing of a search engine for
the e-com site right.
Plus the implementation of it,the price tag was close to a
million bucks.
Here I come along, go like thisis garbage, right.
Rip it out, throw it out.
And what do I replace it with?
(05:10):
There was no e-comm searchengine back then, but I had beta
tested Google so I knew thatrelevance was a very, very
important thing, right?
So I go like there was noe-comm for Google, so I'm going
to develop it myself, becauseI'm an engineer, I can develop
anything.
So I come up with a searchengine that I built that I call.
After I finished it, I called itMoses.
(05:31):
Right?
Moses is not a biblical term,right?
Just to be clear.
I don't want any religiouszealots coming after me here.
Right, moses is an acronym forit's M-O-S-E-S S my own search
engine.
By severe right, it's M O S E S, right Moses.
So I get this up.
What it did was I had baselinethe traffic.
(05:52):
I ran it for a while from on.
That garbage of a search enginethat was there, right?
A million dollar garbage.
Basically.
That was giving us two to 3%conversion rates, right?
Once I put in Moses, 12%conversion rate, right?
So forget about that.
You spent a million bucks onthis thing.
It's losing you money, itdoesn't matter.
(06:14):
You spent a million bucks.
This is hurting us, right.
So I replace it.
And then I did other tweaks,also with email and other
content and other types ofthings.
And then I go back to Jeff.
I say to Jeff okay, I'm donewith all the engineering things
I needed to do and I'm going tostart building the engineering
team.
Who do I talk to?
For the business and marketingGives me a puzzled look.
(06:36):
He goes, like didn't you just6X your conversions on the site?
I said yeah, like do you knowthat this brand went bankrupt
because I gave it to businessand marketing people and my
network told me you're the guy Ineed to hire.
That's not going to do that,right?
And you're coming to me askingme which marketer do I need to
(06:58):
tag team with?
You're it?
I'm like I'm sorry, this is nowa Star Trek moment right.
Scotty and Kirk.
I'm sorry, jeff, I'm anengineer, I'm not.
I'm sorry this is now a StarTrek moment, right?
Body and Kirk.
I'm sorry, jeff, I'm anengineer, I'm not a marketer.
Right, because, like no, I'veseen you have the knack for
doing the right thing inbusiness, and that's a knack
that no person that goes throughmarketing education is going to
have.
Why don't we do this?
(07:19):
Let's try it out.
You're going to learn marketing.
I'm going to teach you thevitamin business because at that
time I was not taking anyvitamins.
I had no clue what glucosamine,chondroitin, msm was or any of
the other 25,000 products he wasselling.
I had no clue.
I think my parents may haveshoved down some multivitamins
into my mouth when I was a kid,right, but that was it.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
you know as a kid they were called Flintstones.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
when I was a kid, yeah, but I don't remember it
even.
That's the point, right.
So I go like, okay, I took itas an engineering challenge
Because the thing is, as anengineer, you never know
solution to everything.
What you know is how you canget to the solution, right.
So to me I said, okay,marketing.
I go like Jeff, I tookaccounting 101 and economics 101
(08:02):
back.
This was 25 years ago.
I took Accounting 101 andEconomics 101 back.
This was 25 years ago.
I took those things.
Is that marketing?
I was like, nope, that hasnothing to do with marketing.
That's accounting, right,that's finance, right.
So you need to learn marketing.
So what I would do on theweekends?
I lived in New York City.
On the weekends I would go outto Long Island.
There's a beautiful bookstore,if you're familiar with Long
Island, near Roosevelt FieldMall, called Barnes and Noble,
(08:24):
right, you know that.
But they have a giganticbookstore there, beautiful
bookstore with a cafe andeverything.
Every single weekend, for fourand a half years, I would go
into that bookstore every singleweekend, eight to 10 hours a
day, right.
Saturday and Sunday no life,right.
I would go in because I wasteaching.
It was the matrix download forNeo.
Basically that's what I wasdoing right, so I would go to
(08:47):
that section.
E-commerce is nascent at thattime.
There are no books one-commerce, right?
So I go like, okay, let me findadjacent industries that are
very similar to this thing thatI'm trying to do.
Let me learn from it.
Let me see what they have tosay.
Tv marketing, radio marketing,direct marketing, infomercial
marketing, books on QVC, hsn Tome it seems like you're talking
(09:09):
to consumers, right In thosekinds of channels.
So there were books on thosethings.
So let me pick those out.
I'll pick it out.
I would sit in their cafe.
I would read through it.
If the book was dense, I wouldactually go and pay for it.
If the other books, I wouldjust sit there.
They allowed you to do that, soyou would sit there, I would
take notes, right.
I would take notes, right.
And then thanks to Jeff he gaveme permission to do this, right
(09:31):
I would come back Mondaythrough Friday, literally what I
learned and took notes on onthe weekend, I would test it,
right.
I would test it and learn fromit and from that learning.
If it worked, I wanted to domore of it.
So if I sent an email to athousand people, you know, next
time I'm going to send it to10,000 people to test it, or
50,000 people, or 200,000 people, whatever I was scaling it.
(09:54):
So this behavior of test, learnand optimize became a vicious
cycle for me For four and a halfyears.
If you count working days,that's close to a thousand days.
Right, that brand.
When it went bankrupt it waseight to $10 million business
and the gross margin I learnedthese things later on during
that journey right Was in ahorrible shape, right, which was
(10:17):
one of the reasons that itdidn't work that well.
I grew that from eight to 10million four and a half years
later, first time, around $52million and over 68% gross
margin, right, wow.
And one big thing is that fromthose books, what I learned was
every one of those authors, likeDan Kennedy and all of these
guys right, they were allcomplaining about.
(10:38):
Oh, you know, when you do thesethings, you have to rigorously
set the tests up properly,because the thing is, once the
campaign that postcard is out,right, because direct marketing
right, or the TV infomercial isout, it's out of your hand Then
you have to wait.
I went like I don't have thatproblem.
E-commerce I have data, realtime.
I can do things a lot fasterthan these complaints that these
(11:02):
people are complaining about.
So again, engineering side, Idon't have analytics tool.
There's no Google analyticsright, let me build it.
Let me build.
I want to know everything.
When the consumer is searchingfor this, they're clicking on
that.
How many people look at theproduct and add the card?
Because I don't know any better?
Right, I want to learn allthose things.
I want to know what's going onand my goal is I just want to
(11:24):
improve.
In those four and a half years.
I set up the bar very lowbecause I was testing Every
morning when I showed up to work.
I wanted to improve one KPImeaningful KPI, not BS KPI a
meaningful KPI by 1% percent,right?
You take that math, youmultiply it in 365, that's 36.5x
(11:46):
growth in whatever you do.
But then you go like Anika.
You say that's severe, yousound like a robot, you sound
like Chad GPT, right, but I wantto take time off, I want to go
on vacation, I have family time,I get sick, there are federal
and bank holidays All right, Idid the math for you already.
The thing is, I'm very precisewith numbers.
Right, there are 220 workingdays, right, with all of those
(12:11):
excuses included in there, right?
Weekends off and all of thatright, 220.
If you do that 1% rule Mondaythrough Friday, you can get a
22X growth, but you're not goingto win all the time.
Sevier, right, even that 1%sometimes is impossible.
Okay, fair, let's have asuccess rate of less than half,
right?
So it's not 22X, it's 10X.
(12:33):
I have done that time and timeagain over 25 years for many
brands across the not just US,globally, uk, eu, australia, new
Zealand, middle East, even inJapan and China.
Right, I've done it everywhere,right, tedx growth in 12 to 18
months.
Time and time again.
You know.
That's the number one rule test, learn and optimize.
(12:57):
Right, that's one.
Number two 1% rule.
Just improve it by 1%.
Don't buy into this BS of likeoh I want to grow this thing by
15% or 17X or whatever.
Some of that might be marketinghype.
Set the rule at 1%.
It's the story of hare and thetortoise.
Be the tortoise, slow andsteady, very mindful, very
(13:19):
intentful.
You're going to win big.
You're going to win bigger thanmost of those people that crash
and burn being the rabbit inthat story, right, rule number
three is ego.
Check your ego, because there'sa lot of ego right out there.
Oh, because I have been thedirector of marketing at Procter
(13:40):
and Gamble.
Worship me.
No, how many mistakes did youmake?
Talk to me about that, right?
How many mistakes did you make?
There are so many founders.
They always have a North Starbrand that they go like.
Oh my God, what if we had thatone person that joined us from
Procter Gamble, from that XYZWarby Parker, whatever, right,
(14:00):
that would be so brilliant,right We'll give them.
Oh, she is a director ofmarketing.
We'll make her CMO in ourstartup, right?
You know, that person couldmake one mistake that's larger
than the next three years ofyour revenue at that big company
and it would be swept under therug with no issues, right?
(14:23):
But you won't be able toswallow that mistake when they
make that, even a portion ofthat mistake in your startup.
You have to be very careful.
With $1 billion, to my credit,incrementally growing these
e-com businesses across 200 plusbrands across the world, I
don't think my ego matters.
I mean my opinion matters atall.
(14:43):
I check my ego even today.
If I'm working on something, Ineed to look at it because the
environment changes, meta haschanges, ai all of these things.
It's a very dynamic world.
Things change.
So you had a success threeyears ago.
Yeah, what does that have to dowith the economic rules, the US
(15:05):
tariffs and all of these thingsthat are going on right now?
What does that have to do withanything?
You're sugarcoating it.
You're covering it up by sayingthat.
Oh, you should listen to mebecause of XYZ experience that I
have.
Your opinion is one data point.
I'm going to take it.
I'm going to put it in theblender that I'm going to test
it in.
If it works, you know whatGreat I'm going to scale it.
(15:27):
If it doesn't work, I'm sorry Imight release you to the
community of the world becauseyou don't belong in this brand.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, so there's several things that you
mentioned.
Along the way.
I have friends who are verysuccessful in their areas as
well that did the same thing.
I said I need to figure thisthing out because I'm not making
enough money, for instance,putting a friend who is a
scientist not making enoughmoney.
Putting my funds into the stockmarket oh, real estate is the
(15:58):
way to go.
She went every weekend, took herson to Barnes and Noble and
studied books on real estate,and now she is a major player.
People come to her all the time.
She's building things all over,and it all started there, and
so I love the fact that you tookthis and said I know a lot of
(16:19):
things.
I'm already exponentiallyincreasing growth, but now I
have a new challenge.
I'm going to.
Even if you don't like to go toschool, right, I have a new
challenge.
I'm going to.
Even if you don't like to go toschool, right, you have a
thirst for knowledge and forcontinuous learning, and so you
use that to benefit, use a lotof words that we do talk about
in the marketing world.
We A-B test, right, we want tolook at all the touch points,
(16:40):
and you talk a lot about thedata which we have the data and
the storytelling aspects that gotogether.
So you know there's so muchthat you've done and you talked
about a few steps as well.
Now are those part of your 8Dconstruct.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, there are principles.
Right, there are principles.
And then the 8D method actuallystands for eight dimensions of
e-commerce.
Right, but what most e-commercegurus get wrong?
Or even if you're running ane-commerce brand yourself, right
, you think that your problem iswhatever is staring in the face
, right?
Let's say meta ads, right?
(17:15):
Well, like, oh you know what?
Only if I had better creative,If I had hired the next meta ads
person, they probably know howto configure this advantage plus
thing.
Right, Maybe I don't have thatright.
Right, when I look at it, okay,your ads are six out of 10.
But when I look at your website, your landing pages on the
(17:35):
website, where the ad is goingto advantage plus six out of 10,
it's going to do its job ofdelivering that traffic to you.
Right, that person shows up onyour site and your site is
taking 28 seconds on average.
Actual data, by the way,whenever I cite these numbers
right, these are actual.
At the average, I Shopify storepage load time is about 28
seconds.
Some of them are even worsethan that.
(17:57):
Right, when does it need to be?
It's consumer attention spanit's 1.7 seconds.
Why is that?
You swipe to the left, or youdo this on TikTok or Instagram
Reels, or you do that on yourAmazon account.
Your attention span is gone,Like it's 1.7 seconds.
You did not make the point.
I'm leaving you, right?
You're wasting my time.
(18:18):
So why is that a meta adsproblem?
That has nothing to do withmeta ads.
Meta ads delivered the click toyou.
You did a great job of makingpeople believe in whatever
creative you had in there tosell them on this thing.
That's gonna solve theirproblem.
Great, I'm sold.
I clicked on it.
Shop now.
Perfect.
When I look at a six out of 10,can that be eight and a half
(18:42):
out of 10?
Yes, in the program we do gothrough the paid media
optimization also.
But traffic came to your sitebut you did not cater to that
attention span.
And then you're okay with, butsevere, it's okay.
My bounce rate on my side is65%.
That's good, right, Becausethat's everybody is getting 65%.
Why is that okay?
(19:03):
You're telling me for every$100 that you're going to spend
$65, you can burn it and it'sokay.
$35 is what's going to generatefor you, right?
Why is that okay?
It's not okay, right?
It's definitely not okayBecause the thing is, if you did
a great job on the ad side,Advantage Plus did its job of
(19:28):
delivering the traffic to you.
You dropped the ball on the site, right?
So consumer attention span itis highly measured, right, you
can measure it.
That's a technical KPI.
You could use a tool likeGTmetrix.
You plug in your best-sellingproduct.
Let's say that's the number oneselling product that gives you
70% of your revenue on average.
So you plug that in, it getsyou 28 seconds.
That's the time to interact.
(19:48):
That's a KPI.
In GTmetrix.
I just told you it's supposedto be 1.7.
You are 22 to 25x worse thanwhere you need to be.
Where's the money hidden inthat?
Right?
One is revenue loss.
That's how much more revenueyou could be getting, and that's
an unacceptable bounce ratethat you think it's okay.
(20:09):
It's not okay, right?
And number two what else areyou losing on the money you just
spent on meta ads, deliveringthat click to you and the
impressions, right?
You're losing money on that tooand potential of acquiring that
customer versus somebody elsewho does a better job of that,
right?
That's kind of the number onething.
Remember your brand existsbecause that consumer exists in
(20:31):
the market.
The center of that universe isthe consumer, not the brand.
This is not 1955.
It's 2025, right In 1955,consumers revolved around brands
.
That's not the case anymore.
The consumer sits in the middleand they are pitched ideas
(20:52):
throughout the day and if youare not catering to that
attention span, you're not intheir purview at all.
And that's the gap.
I fell by having ridiculousgrowth across 200 plus brands.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yeah, and that's been in your business.
You've also worked in many,many other organizations,
including Vanderchuk, and so youhelped build e-commerce.
You did a lot of other stuff.
You were a mentor.
Talk about how you moved fromexperience to experience and
what that added to yourknowledge base and also your
(21:30):
ideation.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
So here's the thing.
You know, people usually referto what I do as my career.
Right, it's my career To me,it's my passion, right?
Regardless of whethersomebody's paying me or not
paying me, I'm going to be doingsomething in this area, right?
Like you don't need to tell agardener, somebody who loves
gardening, that I'm going to payyou to do more gardening.
(21:53):
Right, they're going to dogardening regardless.
You're going to find them dirtin their fingers in their
backyard on Saturday, Sunday, ifit's not raining, they're going
to get out there to work ontheir rows to get more flowers
out of it and stuff like that.
They'll figure out all of thosekinds of things.
You don't have to teach themthat, right?
When I was coding, that was mypassion.
It still is.
By the way, I'm still withamazing updates that just came
(22:16):
out.
I don't know if your audienceknows.
Cloud Anthropic Cloud came upwith the next release, which is
Cloud 4, Opus and Sonnet.
I'm all over that right now.
It's incredible with AI, likethe amazing things, Things that
I had read in theory when I wentthrough computer science degree
is reality for me, you have noidea I.
To do a computer science degreeis reality for me, you have no
idea, I'm a kid in a candy storeright now.
(22:38):
Right, my eyes are like thoseanime eyes, you know of that
little girl when it sees thatthing.
That's me right now.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Not that I'm a little girl, you know, just to clarify
that.
And, Claude, you mentioned myfavorite of the GPT tools.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
So oh, but I have a more, better one.
Right now.
I'm going to compare Cloud4 toManos.
Manos is incredible, but Manosuses Cloud behind the scenes for
all of his agent tech work.
You know I'm really well versedin it, like both being a tech
nerd and also from a businessstandpoint.
I think the acceleration that Ihave done, like you were asking
(23:12):
me about these journeys andwhat I learned what I learned is
as human beings and astechnology has improved.
You know the Moore's law, right.
You can apply Moore's law to mycareer, right.
I have gotten.
It took me in that first round.
It took me about four and ahalf years to 5X more than 5X.
You know vitamin shop, eventhough it was bankrupt, right,
(23:34):
but when I, by the time, like Iwould say about seven, eight
years later, when I touchedAshley Stewart, it took me two
years to take it from 3 millionto 30 million, so 10 X in two
years.
So the time element of how longdoes it take has been reducing
over time and my skillset hasgotten better, obviously, but
(23:55):
the amazing tool chest that wehave is incredible, right.
If I want to launch ane-commerce business, I can do it
this weekend.
Within 48 hours I can have afully branded, amazing,
content-rich, thanks to AI alsoand all the tools, like Shopify.
It's an incredible tool.
Right, I needed to buildShopify for Vitamin Shop in
(24:17):
order to build vitaminshopcom.
Right, if you understand whatthe statement, what I just said,
right, yes, now, vitamin Shop.
If I needed to build it, itwould take me 48 hours to fully
build it from the ground up.
Right, this weekend, if I startright now, sunday night, I have
the brand up and running,including I would attach ads to
(24:37):
it from Google and Meta to getit going to start getting
traffic Monday morning.
I can do that.
So the time element of it, thetechnology, how we have
progressed, has become so muchbetter.
I mean in the implementationprogram for the 8D method, for
the eight dimensionsoptimization of e-commerce.
Right, it's called the Rapid 2X.
(24:58):
Right In the first six weeks ofthe program where we do
performance optimization.
That's dimension one,performance optimization of
everything.
When I say that, it's not justtech optimization, it's also
paid media optimization, emailoptimization, everything we
touch.
Like you have already investedin a lot of things, I know what
that stack looks like prettymuch you know, specifically
(25:18):
speaking, like 80% would beShopify, klaviyo, meta ads,
google ads.
You do some social posts andyou do some other.
You know you maybe some YouTube, maybe, right?
So I know what that stack lookslike.
So, if I take that stack and Ican squeeze out more growth out
of it plus clean it up, likethere's so much email hygiene
problems, right, you're sendingemails to everybody, like, how
(25:42):
do you know that that person iseven alive, right?
By the way, historically thathappened to me at one brand.
Like I needed to like literallytell the chairman your
customers are falling off, rightI use a different word dying,
right?
The chairman said yeah, that'swhy we hired you.
You're really good at this lifecycle thing.
This is after years ofexperience, right?
(26:04):
I'm like no, no, no, I don'tthink no amount of Sabir is
going to help this.
They're six feet under.
Like, what do you mean?
I just looked at the data.
I'm very literal abouteverything.
Right, there is no sugarcoating, anything but me.
Right?
These people are dead.
In fact, I have the data.
It shows that they have beendead more than five years.
In fact, their familiesprobably are pissed that you're
(26:24):
still mailing them and you'reemailing them.
You know, and they were mailinga lot.
After implementing the hygiene,we ended up saving $250,000 per
quarter, not mailing deadpeople.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Let's just let that sink in.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Wow.
No amount of severe could helpthat.
I'm sorry I don't raise thedead.
I mean, there's a guy I heardthat he's supposed to do that,
right?
Not me, right?
(27:01):
I'm not that guy Not going todo that, right?
That's not in my skill set orwheelhouse, whatever, however
you want to approach that.
So that's the thing, like.
You have to understand likethings happen in life.
Right, email had babies, right.
Maybe you were interested in itfor another, maybe in the
beginning, maybe 20 years ago,for three to five years, and you
(27:21):
had two and a half kids onaverage, right?
But those marketers are stillsending you baby products right
now, 20 years later.
It's stupid, it doesn't makesense, but it happens, it
happens.
There's a real cost associatedwith it.
And then the other cost is allof your KPIs are wrong.
Right?
You think your campaignperformed at a certain level.
Maybe it performed betterbecause you had all this hygiene
(27:42):
problem and bad data.
Right, knowing what data you'recollecting, what data you have
and the cleanliness of that data, the hygiene of that data is
critical, right?
And also, that's not just foremail.
You could do the same thing.
Are you sending the wrongsignals to meta ads?
Are you sending wrong signalsto Google ads Most ad accounts.
(28:02):
The first thing they do is theygo like oh, what signal should
we be using when they're settingit up?
Oh, all site visitors, but youjust told me you were okay with
65% bounce rate.
Now you're sending that garbageof a signal saying that people
who rejected me, they ghosted me65% of them are okay.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Send me more people like that, and I'm going to keep
on spending more money.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
It doesn't make sense .
I mean things that I say soundsvery obvious, like, oh yeah, I
wouldn't do that.
No, you're doing it.
I can go into your account andyou're doing exactly that.
And if you're doing a littlebetter job, you might be saying
engaged site visitors.
So the 35% that did somethingwith me, what about the people
who bought 17 times from you andspent the top 1% on your site?
(28:48):
How about that?
That's a better signal, notsite engaged visitors, right?
So there are things like that,that a lot of.
And because there's hyperspecialization of skillset and
what do I mean by that?
People who have gone into metaads.
They don't even do Google ads,right, and then within it, they
(29:09):
might have experience withe-commerce.
They may not have experiencewith e-commerce and they get
hired for as a freelancer or asan agency and then they touch
your brand.
They don't have the expertise.
They just don't have theexpertise to understand like
that.
There are nuances to everycategory, right.
There are nuances to everyregion of the world.
You have to understand that,right.
How you sell to a person injapan is different than india,
(29:32):
than it is in can versus America, right, united States it's
different.
Yeah, if you just oh no, I justmarket to English speaking yeah
, and Aussie acts very differentthan a New Yorker, than a
Californian.
Very different.
That's just US and within theUS, right, if you look at that
versus Texas, right, verydifferent.
You have to understand theconsumer better and
(29:54):
overgeneralization of these kindof statements actually hurts.
That's an opinion.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
It ends up actually hurting your business when you
make those kind of bad decisionsbecause it's something that you
know really well and intimately, but it's also you're making
the argument for we're seeing aworld of hyper-personalization
on the customer side as well, toyour point wanting to make sure
(30:23):
that each of our customers feelspecial.
And one of the examples I usein class sometimes is a major
airline sent me an email for mybirthday saying happy birthday.
My birthday's in December.
So what they offered was a seatupgrade as long as I booked a
flight that month.
Well, december you probablyalready have your travel plans
because it's a big holiday time.
(30:45):
It wasn't customized to me.
They didn't look, use anyresearch about how long I've
been a customer, how manyhundreds of thousands of miles
I've flown on that airline.
They could have seen by thosesignals that you're talking
about what a better offer wouldbe and it wouldn't cost them
anything.
Maybe they give me a discountto go to a certain place, or
maybe they do something else tocreate a better user experience
(31:07):
for me as an existing customerwho has loyalty.
So everything that you'resaying and I think this is an
area where we see- of course youtalked about AI a little bit.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
You just like hinted at it.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
And this is a subject we can dive deep, by the way.
I'll give you a phrase for that.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
I'll give you a phrase before we close up that
conversation.
Right, Brand amnesia.
Right, Brands have amnesia, andevery time you walk through
that door, oh hello.
I don't know you who?
Speaker 2 (31:33):
are you yes?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, I've been to your store 17 times over the
past five years or whatever,right, oh, oh really.
Oh, welcome anonymous.
I just told you I've been toyour store 17 times, right, so
there's brand amnesia.
But the thing is here's theironic thing, given the tech
Shopify knows you, klaviyo knowsyou, facebook knows you, google
(31:58):
knows you.
You just need to surface it andjust acknowledge and most
people, most brands, don't do it.
And there's this brand amnesiathat exists, unfortunately that
they don't even act on the datathat they're collecting.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Well, and I'll say, going back to Anthropic and
Claude, I love the conversations.
I have right, and I love thelittle hello good, good evening.
What do you want to work ontoday?
or happy weekend, you know, eventhat little bit of
personalization from an ai toolmakes it yeah, as soon as you
turn it on, it says good morningannika right and then on the
other side, I've just created mydelphi clone right, and I love
(32:37):
the fact that when people testit, I had somebody say, oh, she
gave me such great advice.
I'm like, well, thank you,because that's all my knowledge
base, that it's built on andyou're going to be able to pick
up.
If you call my Delphi clone,she'll ask a question right away
(33:00):
.
That has to do with exactlywhere you left off in the text
conversation, and so I love thefact that these tools are now
giving us the ability to havethat memory and even if it's not
person to person right, it'smachine to person, it's still
helping us create that pathway.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
So there are a few things there, though, you know,
because just for your audienceto understand like there are
right ways to do AI that arehighly productive and very good
for you, Like in case ofe-commerce, use case right
Versus doing the wrong thing andthen giving up on AI right.
It's like oh, ai is not for me.
What happened?
(33:38):
Oh, I just put this thing inthere.
It was such a generic thingthat it came back with.
You know, ai needs context, itneeds to know who it is.
It's very intelligent.
It can organize things.
It does a great job of that.
It can figure things out that,if you give it an immense amount
of data, it can figure outpatterns in it that you would
(33:59):
take you years to figure out,right, that's why I'm saying
that my speed is going to geteven faster now.
Right, that with AI augmentingme, right, not replacing me,
it's an augmentation.
We're in the augmentation stagethat this is something from an
AI perspective, like most peoplethere's oh, is it going to
replace humans and stuff?
No, it's augmentation.
Right, it can help you.
(34:20):
Well, I'll give you, my daughteractually is going to Stony
Brook University, she's seekinga degree and actually she wants
to become a professor increative writing at Stony Brook,
right, so there's always aspecifically in writing.
That has been a big topic,right In universities about
plagiarism, right, and whenstudents because I have thought
(34:41):
also, I have guest lectured andI have been a professor also in
my back in my history right, sowhen AI generates a generic
piece of content because yougave it, you copy and pasted the
task your professor gave youright your homework.
You plug it in what extractcomes professor gave you right
your homework you plug it in.
What extract comes out?
You know what it's pureplagiarism.
I've actually, when I was aprofessor, ai was coming out so
(35:04):
I actually taught my studentshow to use it properly, right,
not to cheat and to save time.
The thing is, it's very obviousthat those words are not yours.
Right, you're using words thatwe never discussed.
Like, where did you get that?
Can you explain to me, like,yeah, the story behind Menelaus
and what happened with Paris andstuff?
(35:24):
Yeah, I know that you this is avery deep thought that you
didn't have right.
And then, as soon as I havethat dialogue, I know that the
student cheated, right, it takesme two seconds to evaluate that
From their writing.
I can tell that.
But I want to make sure that Iunderstand that they actually
definitely did that right.
But my daughter, the way sheuses, she uses it as an
augmentation.
(35:45):
She's a great writer, shewrites amazing pieces, so
original content creation is her.
But then she uses Claude as aneditor Says Claude, I wrote this
thing.
This is what I'm trying toachieve.
This is what I wrote.
I need you to criticize it andgive me where do you see plot
holes?
Where do you see in my writingstyle?
(36:06):
Where can I improve things?
Don't do it for me.
Tell me, I'm going to do it andI'm going to give it back to
you.
I'm going to go through thisiterative process.
So she's using cloud to augmentand this is a great lesson for
all the students.
You know, if they're, you knowwhen they're listening to this
podcast, that you can use it inthat sense.
Right, if you're a computerscientist and you go like oh,
(36:27):
you know what Cloud code whichis now general release, right,
you can literally tell it towrite code and it will write it
for you.
How about you write the code?
You get better at craftingamazing code.
Give it to Claude and go likewhat would you be the reviewer
of my code?
Right, do a code review.
And as a senior developer, I'ma junior developer.
(36:49):
You tell me where can I improvemy skillset?
I'm going to improve it.
I'm going to refeed it back toyou.
You evaluate it and give methat criticism.
That's augmentation.
That's going to.
It's going to.
We're going to be in this cyclefor a little while there.
Right.
In case of e-commerce, forexample, you know every
entrepreneur gets this shinyobject syndrome, right.
(37:13):
The next pretty thing, the nextYouTube video or AI right now
is a hot button right syndrome.
Right.
The next pretty thing, the nextYouTube video or AI right now
is a hot button right now.
Right, that came out.
What are we doing?
You know I'm doing this andit's not giving me the right
answer.
Yeah, because we need to do itproperly.
So in our premium workshops, inthe Rapid2x program, what we do
is we actually have a deep diveworkshop into how to use it.
(37:34):
For example, one of the thingsthat we did was generating
graphical content from ChatGPT4.0, right.
So giving it not a prompt likethis, but a prompt like this,
right To say this is what we arelooking for.
And I need you to variate thisover a hundred times, because I
want to test out 100 differentad creative concepts on meta ads
(37:56):
, and it's optimized for metaads specifically, versus.
I want to test this on TikTok,or animated GIF, or use OpenAI
Sora for a piece of videocontent that I want to test,
right, those are the kind ofthings.
Those are very specific usecases for specific things you
want to test.
And why do you want to do that?
(38:17):
Most entrepreneurs lack theproductivity of producing lots
of creatives because they runout of creative ideas, to be
frank.
Right, so how can you take thatand turn it into a weapon so
that these entrepreneurs cancrank these things out so fast?
Right, and they can learnfaster and they can come back
(38:37):
and go like, oh, I tested ahundred ads and these five did
phenomenally well.
I want to move forward withthese and I'm going to pour more
money into it and these 95, Ilearned from, got my learnings.
Now I'm going to get that dataout and I'm going to feed it
back into Claude, into ChatGPTto analyze to see what's going
on with it.
So into Cloud, into ChatGPT toanalyze to see what's going on
with it, so I can acceleratethat Content generation, image
(39:03):
generation, evaluating One ofthe things that you know, the
consumer attention span that Italked about, giving the
criteria of the artifact, of howit should be evaluated, taking
a copy of that, saving thatwebpage as a PDF with the GT
metrics, feeding it back intoCloud or ChatGPT with the what.
There's an element, a filecalled HAR report, which gives
(39:24):
you the waterfall of how yourobjects are loading on your page
.
That's a very detailed data,right.
So you give that and then chatGPT.
Can you identify the bestplaces where I need to improve,
technically first, and then,after you fix that, then you go
okay.
Now, given the fact that thisis the visual elements of it and
these are the criteria forRapid2x, how can I re-optimize
(39:48):
this page from a layoutstandpoint, or even copy, and
then it comes back and gives youexactly what it is?
And now?
So how do you prioritize?
Let's start with bestsellernumber one Represents 50, 60% of
your revenue.
If we improve that by 10%,that's a huge uplift.
Then, picking an arbitrarynumber 50 on your list, that
(40:11):
even if you improve it by 100%,it's not going to move the
needle at all.
You know.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Oh gosh.
Well, we have so much more totalk about, but I know we're a
little short on time, so I wantto ask two questions what are
your favorite AI tools?
I'll start there.
What are the tools thateverybody should have in their
wheelhouse?
Speaker 3 (40:34):
So currently I'm actually because I was beta
testing and because I'm wellknown in the industry as a guy
who actually takes your tool andmakes it into the e-commerce if
it belongs there, right.
So you know, I have beenextensively been testing Manos
M-A-N-U-S dot I-M.
Right, it kicks ass.
It's really good, right.
I've been beta testing it for awhile.
I think now they just had ageneral public release so that
if you could Behind the scenes,it uses Claude also, right, but
(40:57):
it's very good at what it does.
If it cannot figure out or ifit doesn't have an agent to do
that thing that you're asking itto do, first it it writes
Python code to do that thing andthen goes, executes it, then
gives you the results from it,and then you modify it from
there and rewrites the code alsoagain.
So it's phenomenal from thatperspective.
I think I'm going to startbecause Anthropic is number two
(41:18):
on that list with Cloud AI,right.
Cloud 4 just came out yesterdayI heard about the news so I'm
going to be testing it andseeing how you can do more than
just content generation andother types of things.
But I'm going to put it throughthe wringer ChatGPT, obviously,
just because of mass adoption.
It's there, but there arechallenges with ChatGPT
(41:39):
sometimes because I have proaccounts across all of them.
I have Perplexity.
I have that Gemini, just withGoogle IO.
Recently this week they had ahuge announcement with things
like Google Veil, that's a newvideo generation, and Imagine is
another one from Google.
That's another one that's beingreleased right now or it's in
(42:00):
day beta.
It's going to be released bysummer timeframe.
So these are incredible tools.
For now, what I would recommendfor most is to have the five
tabs open, right, right, andthis is a lesson I learned very
early on.
It was Microsoft versus Apple.
For me, it was Microsoft andApple.
(42:21):
For a time, it was iOS versusAndroid.
For me, it was iOS and Android.
Right, the thing is with theand replacing the versus with an
, and what it does is it justopens up opportunities for you,
because these AI tools, they doone thing really well and other
places they are horrible, youknow.
So that might be filled.
(42:41):
So right now, for example, I useManos, cloud and ChatGPT in
three different areas.
One becomes an input.
It provides me the output thatbecomes an input to the other
one, and then this produces anoutput that becomes an input to
the other one and that gives methe best solutions that I'm
looking for, right?
So don't do the versus thing.
(43:02):
That's a branding thing andyou're buying too much into the
marketing message.
Right, go with the and, becausethe and is where you're going
to find the thing that's goingto help you stitch that together
, because if you go with one,you go like oh, I only use chat
GPT, yeah, but it's horrible atcontent generation.
Claude does a much better jobat that.
Right?
So as soon as you open yourmouth and you say something like
(43:24):
that, I have a rebuttal for you, because I've tried, tested it
over a thousand times or 10,000times.
Right, I can give you thatrebuttal.
So, remove the versus and putan end to it.
Like, especially with AI, is sonascent.
Right, you would have thoughtthat Google was the one that's
going to do the AI thing.
In fact, not even Google IBM,because they were on jeopardy.
(43:46):
Right, they were the AI thing.
Where's IBM right now?
Right, so never make that sortof an assumption.
Right?
And when it was IBM that'sgoing to take over computing, no
, it was Microsoft and Apple.
Right, it was not them.
Right, the thing is my view, myPOV, is so broad because I've
been through all these techrevolutions.
(44:07):
You cannot just put your place,your bet, on that one thing
right.
It's also possible that thatone that you think is the leader
is the first one is going tofail first, right, and it's the
number two or even the numberfive that you didn't think is
going to win.
Two and five combine theirforces and that becomes the
standard right.
So never make that's anassumption by itself also.
(44:30):
So never make that assumptionright With these AI tools like
these are the things that are somany exciting things that are
going on right now.
Like you know, the market, thetech market, gives you always an
in to get in right To do thenext thing right.
The internet boom, the e-comboom, the social media boom
(44:52):
right, the crypto blockchainboom.
Now ML slash, ai boom.
Right now that we are goingthrough right One.
These are not trends or fads.
These are legitimate thingsthat are going to be the normal
for us, like three to five yearsfrom now.
Like where you are walking intoyour kitchen and talking to your
coffee machine like it's anormal thing to make you a dark
(45:14):
roast coffee right, it's goingto become a thing.
Right now You're doing it kindof with Alexa talking to it, and
if it's AI enabled I mean ifit's smart enabled or Alexa
enabled it does that.
But it will become very natural, like a very natural thing for
you to do.
Right, you put the stuff intothe microwave, you press the
number, it heats it up for you.
(45:34):
It will be like that.
It would be very easy that it'sa normal thing for you to do,
not a normal thing right now.
If you take a person from 1955and you time shift them to today
, they think that we're an aliencivilization right now.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah, there's so much more we could talk about on
this topic, but I want to get towhat you do now.
So what are the different waysthat you work with people and
what size of business do youneed to have, because you have
obviously a lot of expertise?
I would imagine that if you'rejust starting out, or if you
don't have very much revenue,are there still ways for people
(46:12):
to work with you?
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Sure.
So the program is a structuredprogram called Rapid2x, which
actually goes through theseeight dimensions to grow the
business.
By the way, 2024 data right.
Very recently we actuallylooked at the whole year's
performance of 12 test brands.
We got 118% incremental revenuein a short period of time, and
they started at different timesof the year too, so it's not
(46:34):
like they had a full 12 monthanniversary all of them.
So that's the performance of it.
So, as far as the size of it, itactually we have a criteria for
accepting people into andbrands into the program.
We go to a very rigorousinterview process.
The criteria is very simple.
It's two things, right, but thesecond one is going to be hard
(46:54):
for some entrepreneurs.
The first one is product marketfit.
Product market fit means thatyou worked on your product, you
tried marketing it, you got to50K, you got to 100K.
That means people are buying it, not your friends and family
circle.
Strangers are buying it fromyou, right.
So 50 to 100K, you can be partof the program.
(47:14):
It can definitely benefit you.
Now we have brands that are $10million brands in there too,
yeah right, and they canaccelerate that growth even
faster because they have theright infrastructure, people and
stuff like that in there.
Right, we have someentrepreneurs who are because
I'm known in.
You know this program hasgotten great results.
They are serial entrepreneurs.
They're working on their nextbrand with zero revenue, but
(47:37):
they want to have the rightfoundation from the ground up
because they understand thevalue of it, that they know that
when they did that withoutthose things, those were the
lessons learned from the priorbrands right, that they would
want to do it differently.
That we have several of thoseserial entrepreneurs.
That, in fact, they end upafter 12 weeks in the program
(47:58):
because they're learning it andthen they're leading their teams
to let them know what to do.
Right, so when they come out ofthe gate, they win big time.
Right.
So we have had a lot of brandslaunch during the Rapid2X
program within the six to 12weeks the first six to 12 weeks
of the program, right, byimplementing the right things in
it.
The second criteria so productmarket fit is that Second
(48:20):
criteria is entrepreneurial fit.
This program is not foreverybody, it's not right, and
I'll give you a definition ofwhich entrepreneur belongs in
this program, which one shouldnot even bother applying.
Right, it's the entrepreneur.
And I'll use an example, a verysimple one.
Right, it's involvedentrepreneur versus committed
(48:41):
entrepreneur.
How do I define that?
Right, it's a breakfast item.
Everybody is very familiar withit.
It's steak and eggs.
The chicken is involved in thatbreakfast.
In that brunch it laid the eggand it contributed to the
breakfast.
The cow is all in with thatsteak.
It gave itself.
(49:03):
That's a committed entrepreneur.
So that you know, when you'rein this program, I don't want to
be leading your company, youneed to be leading your company.
A committed entrepreneur doesexactly that.
They roll up their sleeves andgo like this is what we need to
do to business.
Because this guy has experience, we will implement exactly what
he's doing, what he's tellingme, and it's not too many things
(49:24):
.
By the way, you need to work onhighly valuable things.
Like a few of them, like threeto five things this week.
Right, I'm not expecting you todo a thousand things because
unreasonable.
Right, you're not going to getanything done, right?
So a committed entrepreneurdoes those things Involved
entrepreneur.
Well, like, oh yeah, I'm goingto send my marketing person to
do that.
And that marketing person whatif I said something in there
(49:44):
that that person, like Anika,you know that you attended that
thing.
You're director of marketingfor this brand, right.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
I said something in there.
Now it points to a flaw youhave.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Right, are you going to bring that thing that's a
critical thing back to thefounder to say oh, by the way,
sabir today said this thing andI think you should fire me.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Yes, right Never.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
That's never going to happen.
It will happen.
Zero, exactly zero times.
That's the statistics, based onthat right.
So you know, in that case, ifyou're an involved one, like you
don't appreciate the rightexpertise, that you really need
to dig deep, like you need to beleading Don't send me, don't
send me your number two incommand.
Or third, or worse, oh, wehired this freelancer, he's
(50:29):
going to be freelancer.
What's their commitment levelto your brand?
Zero, all right.
So it's not going to beanything.
Maybe that person you hired fulltime might have a level of
commitment, maybe, maybe, Idon't know maybe 60%.
But if they heard somethingthat's going to hurt them,
they're going like, oh, it's thesame old, same old.
The severe didn't really coveranything new, but I just told
(50:51):
them five things they shouldimplement, which included
replacing that person who justattended that on your behalf.
So if you're an involvedentrepreneur, don't even bother
applying to the program we'veactually set up for your
listeners.
We have set up a special linkyou know they can go and
investigate the next steps isgrowthbyseverecom slash USC,
right?
They can go to the site.
(51:11):
They can learn more about theseeight dimensions, about the
Rapid2x program.
They can have a ton of freecontent on the site like really
valuable content.
I dig pretty deep into the topicso I don't let go of anything
because there's a lot ofmisinformation and bad
information out there.
So that's why I do really deepdive, like almost like lecture
(51:32):
type, but not boring.
Like it's very valuable thatthey can go through a case study
walkthroughs of, like OremBrothers how did we get 112%
increase in six weeks?
Right, so I do a walkthrough ofexactly what happened in those
six weeks on the site, so that'savailable.
Or Ashley Stewart from 3million to 30 million how did
that happen?
How did you 10X and moreprofitable?
Right, that walkthrough is inthere too, right?
(51:55):
So there's a lot of valuablecontent on there that they can
sit there, take their notebooksout.
School is in session right.
Take lots of notes andimplement it right.
That's the thing is that it hasto be actionable knowledge, not
just.
Otherwise you would see a lotof librarians driving
Lamborghinis.
I don't see any, you know.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
Yeah, amazing.
Well, we will definitely bringyou back onto this show and I
know we're going to do someother things together as well,
but this has been a reallylively conversation.
I love seeing your passion andhow you are bringing your
passion to everything that youdo and how you're using that to
help other people reallyunderstand and achieve
(52:39):
everything that they want intheir businesses, as long as
they're committed.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
Yeah, and thank you for having me.
Thank you for sharing yourplatform with me and your
audience.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Absolutely, and thank you to everybody who's
listening to this episode orwatching it on your favorite
platform.
We'll be back again next weekwith another amazing guest.
In the meantime, thank you,sabir Simrakant, for being on
our show today.
Growth by Sabir.
We'll have the link in the shownotes for everybody to check
out the special offer foreverybody who's listening to
(53:07):
this podcast.
Mediascape Insights fromDigital Changemakers, brought to
you by USC Annenberg's MS inDigital Media Management program
.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital
Media Management program, visitus on the web at dmmuscedu.
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