2X eCommerce Podcast

Kunle Campbell (00:00.938)
Hey, so welcome to the 2X Ecommerce podcast.

Sabir Semerkant (00:04.786)
It's a pleasure being here and thank you for inviting me to be on the show.

Kunle Campbell (00:08.982)
Amazing. I'm like super excited about this one because just having reviewed the amount of work and contribution you've put into e-commerce, it would be a disservice to the audience not to give you a platform to sort of, you know, tell your story. And with that in mind, you know, your story spans well beyond 20 years in e-commerce and probably before. So could you

give us the how it all started, you know, how did you get into this industry? Go for it, please.

Sabir Semerkant (00:48.338)
So I would say that it's the power of yes, and saying the right yes throughout my life, right? And it started out when I was literally six years old. My elder brother was nine years old and the two of us were gifted a Commodore 64. And after you play, nowadays you get Nintendo, you cannot really do computing on it, right?

But back then, you wanted to play a game. You had to buy an Atari or a, you know, I'm very old school, so Commodore 64, you know, something like that. And then you would load up the game and you would play with it, you know. But after a while playing with it, you get bored. You know, we got bored. And then we went through the box and we found the basic programming book, right? So we said, okay.

let's see what it does. So we've started poke, you know, we're playing around with it, whatever it told us to do, we did. Poke 53280, 15, that actually changes the foreground. And then if you do it eight one, it would change the background. And then we started writing all this test code that was given to us in that programmer's guide, right? Because at that time, whenever you bought a computer, it came with a book that actually taught you how to code, right?

So we started coding and then the very first thing I remember at the age of six that we created was learning to play piano on a computer. Mind you, I had no idea how to play piano at that time. So we learned how to, what piano was and what the notes were and stuff like that. And then we took that and we put it into Commodore 64 program. We actually created a piano program.

Kunle Campbell (02:12.666)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (02:36.282)
that when you use the keyboard on Commodore 64, it actually was acting like a piano for you. So that was our very first application that we wrote. And then later on, fast forward through that year, by the time we figured out how to move things around, and then we actually ended up writing a game together at that age. So this just went on for a while. You know, we kept on growing up and...

Our dad used to tell his friends that his kids know how to use computers. So we would be asked to go and help these, I guess, businesses to help them with their computer needs and stuff like that. And the reward was some sort of a toy or something that we were getting at that time, because we were young kids and we had not figured out how to monetize our skillset at that time. There was no such word at that time. You just helped out your dad's friends, you know, and kind of fast forward that, get to college.

I wanted to actually become a neurosurgeon in the medical field. So I had no intention of getting into computers or anything. My passion was neurosurgery because that was the highest thing and the hardest thing to achieve. Going to college, you know, I find out that it's going to take me 12 to 14, 16 years before I can do any kind of surgery. I had decided that I don't want to do that.

And then I speak to a guidance counselor who tells me oh, so what's your interest? So I said, oh, you know I've been coding and programming since I was a child, you know, I really know how to do that. Oh They said oh, that's interesting our college university offers a computer science degree But you have to major in like physics mathematics and computer science in order to get your computer science degree at that time So I go through it You know

pass with flying colors, do really well. Now I get into the job market. Actually, in my sophomore year, I got hired as a intern and then that internship within two weeks turned into a part-time job because the owner of the company realized that I was not a regular intern and they would lose me if they don't change me over to this paid position. So I became a computer scientist from the sophomore year in my college.

Sabir Semerkant (05:01.85)
I continued writing a ton of code. In the early part of my life, I was a computer scientist, written millions and millions of lines of code, Macy's.com, TheStreet.com, Tommy.com, PerryAlice.com, VitaminShop.com. There are so many of these sites, including mutual fund companies, the first of its kind, that offered mutual fund access through a website in the early days of the internet. I actually built a lot of that.

You know, so as a coder, that's what I did, you know, engineered all those sites and stuff like that. And then fast forward to the dot com era, that's what I was doing a lot of it. I was literally launching two or three businesses every six weeks to 12 weeks, literally. I was known as the guy you hire to launch your dot com, right? So then from there,

Kunle Campbell (05:54.692)
Hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (05:59.762)
an opportunity came up in my history and that was the Vitamin Shop. And I think to me that was my pivotable point. At that time I was an engineer, a hacker, I was Scotty on Star Trek, you know. So that's who people knew me as in that part of my life. But at Vitamin Shop, through Jeff Horowitz, who's the

a founder of vitamin shop through his network came in access to To me and said oh, you know, you got to hire this guy He can help at that time at vitamin shop What had happened was vitamin shop the parent company had spun off vitamin shop.com Into nasdaq and it had gone public and after going public just like a lot of other dot coms in the dot com era It went bust right? So it went bankrupt and then the parent company went into the bankruptcy court bought all the assets

And then once they bought the assets back, they needed somebody to actually now revive this channel and run it, right? So through the networks came to, you know, know me and stuff like that. So I got involved, you know, and I started to, like literally he had bought the assets, put it on the shelf. When I say shelf, I mean literally warehouse shelf. And I, at that time I didn't have any team to, cause I was the first one.

Started moving these servers and literally I'm showing you on the camera this part of my finger Was cut because as I was lifting the server these servers were very heavy as I was lifting it It actually cut through the bone to the bone, you know So I literally like bled, you know moving these servers and putting them together and Kind of starting the stuff up while building the team up also to help me

Kunle Campbell (07:37.07)
Hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (07:55.446)
You know the different types of engineers and web designers and stuff like that I needed on the team To kind of build it up. So I do this and now the site is up and we're ready to go I talked to Jeff I say hey Jeff, who do I need to talk to to? Get this going from our revenue standpoint like bring traffic and stuff like that. He goes like what do you mean? I thought it was you I said

No, i'm an engineer. I sounded like you know scotty talking to kirk, you know You know, i'm an engineer. I'm not a doctor, you know so Uh, that's what I say to him. He goes like no. Um, uh, i've seen you do a lot of things. I think I can help you But I want you to be the one um running this channel I said Let me remind you. I have taken a lot of physics math and computer science

Kunle Campbell (08:25.87)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (08:50.618)
The only business course I took was economics 101 and accounting 101. That's it. I don't know anything about marketing. So he says, Oh, you know, don't worry about it. Um, you know, you, you can catch up on that kind of stuff and I can help you learn how to sell vitamins and, and that would be it. Right. So that's when we, um, then I started to like, he was investing time with me. And then I, what I would do on the weekends is I would go to Barnes and Noble.

At that time, Amazon was a young company at that time. So I would go to a Barnes and Noble physical store on the weekends, pick up a marketing books and I'd just read it, read it, make notes, just keep on absorbing like the matrix Keanu Reeves. I was consuming all this knowledge. And then during the week I would bring it and I would literally experiment with what I had learned in the book. And what I realized was

Kunle Campbell (09:37.095)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (09:49.142)
Marketing, especially in e-commerce at that time, there were no books on e-commerce marketing. It was all classical marketing, right? Direct marketing, catalog marketing, TV marketing, infomercial, stuff like that. But I consumed all this and said, okay, I need to build this thing because it doesn't exist, right? From a timeframe standpoint, Google.com as a search engine was being beta tested. So that's the reference point for that, right? So I learned...

very quickly that in case of e-commerce, everything is numbers. So that's great. I'm a mathematician. So that's great. I can understand that and I can turn that into, marketing things that I learned traditionally, classically, that all these things, all these platforms are teaching me, right? So what I did was I would learn it on the weekends, bring it, apply it. Whatever I learned.

Kunle Campbell (10:37.558)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (10:45.242)
then I would go and relearn whatever I needed to relearn or learn more things and just continued building it out. I mean, this is how that business in four years while I was learning went from 12 million to $52 million and I was fully responsible for all revenue from there. So from there, that was my first time doing it. And then when Jeff sold a vitamin shop, you know, he was the reason I was there, right?

And then when he sold it, and I had been there for four years, I said, okay, it's time to go right after he left. So I left and then I tried my luck a second time, a third time. I saw that, you know, what I was doing was at that time, I didn't call it a D method. Right. Uh, but what I realized was what I was doing was I was being very methodical and looking at every dimension of the business. I was not just looking at marketing. I was not just looking at operations or.

the tech side of things or my team. I was looking at every aspect of it whenever I wanted and all the successes I was gaining over the past 25 years now, right? Every one of those things had to do with not just this one magic bullet that gave you ridiculous growth. And I have had ridiculous growth with a lot of brands. Vitamin Shop being my first one was 12 to 52 million, but then later on, the roadmap for Canon was 100 million to 1 billion.

Right? And then on the lower, on the smaller end of it, a case study that is, I believe it's on my website on growthbysavir.com is our current client. It's a $1.5 million men's jewelry brand that has gone from 1.5 million stagnant for several years now and spending a ton of money to now growing in there six weeks into our program. Our program is about 12 weeks with our partners. So.

in 12 week program, they're in the middle point right now, six weeks and the business is trending over 112% right now. So this methodology that has been crafted and refined over 25 years generates ridiculous growth and profitable growth at that, you know.

Kunle Campbell (13:00.574)
So you've had a string, first of all, thanks for telling your backstory going really, really deep and that and I see why you had to go deep. Because what I gathered is you're essentially very, very intelligent mathematician, you're polymath, you know, in a sense, and yourself, in a way, partly yourself taught polymath, you know, whether you had university or not.

or college or not, you'd have still made enormous strides with what you're doing. Just out of curiosity, what does your brother do now?

Sabir Semerkant (13:37.274)
I'm sorry I missed the last part of it.

Kunle Campbell (13:38.998)
Just out of curiosity, what does your brother do now? Because you said you used to code with your brother initially.

Sabir Semerkant (13:45.451)
Oh, um...

Oh yeah, he's actually a computer scientist still. So he did not change, but he does an incredible job of being a technical project manager for a pretty large financial firm. Bank of New York Mellon, I think. Bank of Mellon, New York, I think, is one of the largest banks in the world. And he implements AI, machine learning, stuff like that.

Kunle Campbell (13:55.733)
Interesting.

Kunle Campbell (14:03.158)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (14:06.399)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (14:09.716)
Okay.

Sabir Semerkant (14:15.558)
of at a banking in the banking sector for the financial industry. So he went hardcore into technical and he leads these projects, multi-billion dollar projects. Mine went towards this e-commerce B2C, B2B e-commerce, you know, industry.

Kunle Campbell (14:19.839)
Okay. And then you.

Kunle Campbell (14:26.786)
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (14:34.128)
And then what key books do you think in marketing were very pivotal or pivotal to you and to anybody listening over that period you were really trying to turn around the vitamin company?

Sabir Semerkant (14:49.842)
So that's an excellent question. Like I said, there is no magic bullet, right? I know everybody would like to get that magical book that did, you know, that worked for me, right? I can give you a list of them. Actually, I even published an article on Medium saying how certain books shaped my career and my life, right? I consume anywhere from one to two books per week. And that's my behavior. Like, that's what I do.

I devour these books. And the way I do it, it's not like I read the paper back. Sometimes I do. I like reading fiction that way, right, on paper. But most of the time while I'm working, I'm listening to an audio book, right? And usually I keep it on 2X because I hear a lot faster and I consume a lot faster. So this way I can finish one to two books a week, right? And there are so many, so many books that are...

that have shaped and because the thing is marketing does change the fundamentals don't change because At the end of the day you're you are marketing to humans. So it's all about human behavior, right and human psychology but understanding that at the fundamental level and then that the strategies related to The mechanism changes for example Facebook and instagram didn't exist when google existed at that time when google existed and it was burgeoning

It was not the number one player. It was Yahoo and Alta Vista at that time, right? So the platforms change, affiliate programs, for example, has changed into influencer marketing, you know? So the mechanism changes. However, the fundamentals of the strategies that you need to implement in your business, that doesn't change, you know?

Kunle Campbell (16:36.718)
And that's what your 8D method actually covers, which is, which is, of course, we're going to jump right in. One of the, one of the things that really caught my attention was your work with Gary Vaynerchuk. How did you guys, how did you meet him and how did you, what do you guys work on?

Sabir Semerkant (16:52.658)
So everything like, you know what I said about the power of yes, right? So at one of my junctures, I finished up a project and I didn't want to work at that time I didn't want to work from home. So I was trying to figure out like where, you know, it was there any kind of an office space that I can get so that I can go and work on my startup. And at that time, I was starting up a an e commerce company at that time.

So I look around and in Tribeca, there is a shared office called Sunshine Suites. I don't know if they are still around, but back then it was a very popular place in Tribeca. So I go and meet with the founder of that Sunshine Suites. They go like, oh yeah, there are hundreds of entrepreneurs here. This is the environment. You could be part of the community. And you just pay for a desk and...

We can give you internet connection and everything. You have access to all these snacks and stuff. This is way before WeWork, you know, so this is a while before WeWork was founded. So I say, okay, sounds good. I signed the thing, I get in there. At that time, so the desk I get, because I was just starting out, so I was a one person startup at that time. The desk I get, Gary Vaynerchuk, who I did not know who he was at that time.

He was also renting space but his startup had gone a little bit further up and with his VaynerMedia and he had six people right at that time only it was him his brother and Three or four of his brother's friends That's it was six people roughly and they may have hired one extra person from outside But it was just them right they had started this up and then I learned About Gary Vaynerchuk from the founder of this company and other people I met

who he was, right? And then his team, and mind you, at that time when I joined that community, I was one of the most seasoned entrepreneur because of what I had done in my career with internet, with e-commerce, and stuff like that, right? So what people did were they were gravitating towards me to ask questions about their business and things that I could help them with and stuff like that.

Sabir Semerkant (19:14.998)
And just like that, I also became good friends. We would have lunch and stuff with that first six crew of VaynerMedia and Gary Vee at that time. And at that time they were trying this thing out. And at that time it was a novel idea to do a web-based live discussion like this, like a podcast, right? They were doing this over Twitter and some other platforms.

Kunle Campbell (19:39.522)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (19:44.086)
and they wanted to have guests on the show. So they asked me, would you like to be a guest on the show and talk about e-commerce, right? And then where do you see this going? I said, yes. So like I said, you know, the power of yes. So I said, yes, no problem, right? And I would do that. And then I would also engage with that crew, you know, just throwing it out there just as a favor, right? You know, I would just do it for no reason, not necessarily for any reason.

And then what happened was his agency grew, he left, I sold my company, so I left that location, and then we parted ways for like five years or something like that. And then I was doing my stint at Canon, and one day I got a call from someone that said, oh, we are looking for, you know, there's an agency that's looking into bringing on e-commerce as a service.

and you have a very interesting background and the founder is really interesting and he wants to get into this, right? Mind you, there weren't any e-commerce agencies at that time, right? So it's to me sounded very odd. So I said, who is it? Do you mind telling me who the founder is? Said, oh, Gary V, you may not know him. I said, no, I shared an office with him. I know who he is. How's Gary V? And I named some of the other people at that time, the veterans, right?

the OGs from VaynerMedia. I said I knew him when it was like six people company, he goes like, oh, it's 400 people now. So I said, oh, that's interesting. So why does he wanna do e-commerce? And then he explained the thing. I said, okay, sounds good. Just mention my name, say that Sabir is interested in this opportunity and let's see if we can have the next series of conversations.

And that's when I went and got reacquainted with Gary Vee and we co-founded VaynerCommerce. And that's what I did for about three, four years with him, turned it into a global e-commerce agency. But anyone who knows me knows that I like working directly on the businesses myself, right? Either whether I own them or I work with as an advisor to businesses. But the agency model is a little different than that, even though it sounds...

Kunle Campbell (21:46.579)
Hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (22:07.982)
Sounds like it's similar, but it's different. It's just that it came up a point, a fork in the road where it was time for me to move on. So we acquired another agency, rebranded it as VaynerCommerce, utilized some of the services that we had actually perfected over time, and added on other services like Shopify development and stuff like that. And then...

time was right for me to step out and go my own way and where I started Growth by Sabeer, which is focused on taking on select clients and utilizing the 8D method to do profitable growth in a very short period of time. Because historically that's what I've done over the past 25 years. So anywhere from the clients I've experienced through the 8D method.

they have experienced 2X to 10X growth in a very short period of time. I'm talking about 12 weeks. If you think about 12 weeks, it's one quarter basically, right? It's three months. And what can you do in 12 weeks? I can tell you, you can grow your business 2X to 10X because a lot of agencies and a lot of other, even other people who run e-commerce channels, what they tend to do

in the business is they focus on one dimension of the business and it tends to be something like Facebook or Pinterest or TikTok or influencer marketing or something like that, but they don't look at all the eight dimensions. When you're not looking at eight dimensions of your business, then you cannot grow the business profitably. Then you're looking at one dimension and then when you grow it, what ends up happening is your business goes in the red. Because you didn't really fix your operating issues.

You didn't fix your team. You didn't fix your content. Your storytelling is not up to par. Your brand positioning is not great. Your product pricing, you keep on couponing and promoting, right? And thinking that, oh, you know, if I keep on promoting, then it's race to the bottom line, basically. And the bottom line is very red, unfortunately.

Kunle Campbell (24:28.275)
First of all, a very great precursor to the 8D method. In eight sentences, could you describe the 8D method? I mean, what are the key components in the 8D method?

Sabir Semerkant (24:43.442)
Okay, so there are eight dimensions. So let's start with the first one, right? The very first one that I tackle is site optimization, right? Performance optimization. That's the first dimension. So in that dimension, I look at and see literally from the consumer's perspective, if I were to engage with this site, would I buy, right? And

And it's an eye-opening statement, right? Because most people, they believe in the mantra of the creative director, right? The creative director says, oh, because of on branding, we need to do this and that and whatever, right? But the consumer doesn't really care about that. The consumer wants to engage with your brand to buy, right? Literally these consumers have their wallets in their hand with the credit card out. They wanna buy from you.

and the anti-commerce team members that you have, they are working against the plan of purchase and they end up isolating those people so that your bounce rate increases, your conversion rate is sub 1%, right? So that's the first thing that needs to be done. That's your store, right? And if the consumer doesn't get it, and when I say get it, the attention span of the current consumer in...

2024, that's the year we're in right now, right? Is 1.7 seconds, that's all. Like if you, you know, it's swipe to the left, swipe to the right, or swipe up 1.7 seconds. That behavior has been perfected by Instagram Reels, by TikTok, by Amazon app. That's the reference point. That's the reference point you need to implement. And if your performance off your site

and your experience does not convey your messaging and your value. And within 1.7 seconds, any number above that 1.7 seconds, you're losing for every second, you're losing 30% conversion rate, 30%. So when you think about just looking at that dimension and if it's fixed and cleaned up, you can get tremendous growth from fixing that first dimension to start with, right?

Kunle Campbell (26:58.517)
Hmm.

Kunle Campbell (27:09.494)
Hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (27:10.522)
Because everything you do, everything, whether you're asking influencers to come to your site, you're asking Google ads to send traffic to you, meta ads and Facebook and TikTok and whatever, social media, whatever you're doing, at the end of the day, they show up on your site to make that purchase, right? And if your site is not optimized at that level, so that you're making, you keep on making your point within 1.7 seconds of attention,

Kunle Campbell (27:29.335)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (27:40.378)
you're losing revenue, right? So that if you're showing a gigantic logo and it takes, I don't know, a minute to download because you want the highest res logo, your bounce rate is 99% on that site, right? So it misses the mark. So the first dimension is performance optimization. And it has to do with your website, right? There are a lot of great tools you could use.

Kunle Campbell (27:56.568)
Mm.

Sabir Semerkant (28:09.414)
There are some of them are freely available like GT metrics is a great tool, right? You can pass your site through that and then it will give you a grade and it will tell you exactly what's wrong that you need to fix But that's just a technical side of it But then you have to also think about dimension number two, which has to do with customer UX

Kunle Campbell (28:28.522)
Sorry, just with step one, what role does mobile play in, in like site performance optimization, particularly given Particularly given, you know, access, web access speeds, you know, not everybody has, you know, decent speed. Interesting. Okay, good stuff.

Sabir Semerkant (28:35.13)
Huge, huge, that's why it's 1.7 seconds.

Sabir Semerkant (28:50.03)
Yeah, so mobile, most sites, most commerce gets done on mobile, so if your web designer has a beautiful Mac, a gigantic screen Mac on their desktop, and they're designing a beautiful desktop website, it's completely irrelevant to e-commerce sites, you know? And for a lot of e-commerce sites, 70%, a number like 70% of their revenue is coming from mobile.

30% comes from desktop. And in some other ones, it's even higher, higher mobile commerce, right? So that if you're not designing, especially in the US, I don't know where your content gets consumed to where your listeners are, but if you are in the United States, the number one platform you need to design your mobile commerce site for is iPhone. Specifically iPhone, not just mobile phone, iPhone specifically in the US. If you're in Europe,

you have to think about Android and Samsung as your platform, right? And some other markets, you know, it's probably more Android because of just access to cheaper phones and stuff like that, right? And more access to like Google and Google Android ecosystem and stuff like that. So you have to understand where your consumers are coming from. You need to design primarily for that device first and optimize it for that experience first. Not that your site looks amazing on desktop.

Kunle Campbell (29:58.466)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (30:17.718)
You're looking at 30% of your revenue coming from your desktop. Why are you designing it for the desktop? It should be mobile first and desktop responsive. The opposite terms, not like mobile responsive like a lot of people design these days. And that's the wrong thing to do.

Kunle Campbell (30:33.194)
Yeah. And I guess you need to also use multi-browse testing. So you could see it in multiples of browsers, right?

Sabir Semerkant (30:44.454)
For the mobile in the US market, I would say first make sure that your site works flawlessly for Safari because it's iPhone, right? Because that's the app, that's the web browser that's pre-installed on your phone, right? And then secondarily, you can test it for other popular browsers like Chrome and Brave and other flavors of Chrome based and Firefox and stuff like that on the mobile phone. But primarily,

Kunle Campbell (30:51.607)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (31:13.734)
If it's coming from an iPhone, likely, highly likely, it's a Safari browser. So if your site is not compliant with Safari, it breaks, it doesn't pop up correctly, and things are too small, too big, you're expecting people to zoom in to look at things, consumers get turned off of that, they move on, right? The more of those things you solve, the better that dimension is going to be.

Kunle Campbell (31:40.034)
Okay, so you're moving, I caught you off in point one, so you're moving to point two now in the AD method.

Sabir Semerkant (31:49.158)
So in the 8D method, the second one is Customer UX. Customer UX is customer user experience, right? When different types of people come to your site, first of all, you have to identify who they are, right? Why are they coming to your site? Are you really giving them the user experience that is going to be conducive to them engaging with your brand, right? If you make it...

The same for all, you're gonna get a generic, one KPI that I really dislike in e-commerce is called conversion rate. You're gonna get a very low conversion rate. I believe in a different KPI than conversion rate, right? Because your business is better optimized using this other KPI, not conversion rate. So, customer UX has to be right. You have to think about, like let's say if you are a...

In this example, if you're a jewelry store, right? If you're an online jewelry store for men, what kind of products do you sell? You sell bracelets, you sell rings, and you sell necklaces, let's say, right? Are you giving, because the necklace buyer, a man who wears necklace, is a very different kind of customer than a customer who buys a ring from you. It's possible the person who buys a man's ring,

may not wear a bracelet or a necklace, you know? Even though it's all jewelry and that's what you make. So you have to think about like when people show up with different tastes and why they are there, are you really giving them that experience that's going to give them that, you know, experience that's kind of siloed within your site? If you do, then you're giving them the greatest experience possible. And if you...

Think about that customer UX. Now, if you're running ads or email marketing, you could send men who like bracelets to the men's bracelet page, right? And experience. Men who like necklaces, men's necklaces, you're gonna send them to the men's necklaces. You know, men who like rings and genuine stone, blah, you're gonna send them to that customer UX. So that...

Sabir Semerkant (34:11.482)
The customer UX needs to be not to boast your brand's ego, or your ego because you're the CMO, the co-founder, the founder, whatever, it's more to do with the consumer at the end of the day. Are you giving them the experience that they care about? And if you make it about their experience, then you can get conversion rates. And this is where you have to look at your product pages. Are you showing them a

a generic template for all of your products? Because for me, a ring could be presented very differently to the ring buyer than a necklace would be, than a bracelet would be, right? If you're selling pet food or pet products, a toy is different than a pet food, right? I mean, it sounds very obvious, but if you go to these sites, you don't see it. You don't see the difference between them. It's like treated like everything. Oh, why are you doing it? Oh, because Amazon does it.

Kunle Campbell (34:59.544)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (35:10.67)
Well, Amazon had a 25 plus year head start on you. You are just starting out. You need to tell your story differently, right? But are you giving them that customer UX that's very unique so that brands like nowadays, like Sundays for Dogs, for example, does a fabulous job of story. You know, that brings me to the third dimension, which has to do with storytelling and storytelling as a marketing dimension, right?

Kunle Campbell (35:19.446)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (35:40.342)
What is your story? How is your product different? How is the founder's story different? You have to utilize storytelling in the third dimension. And when you're using that, you're doing it on your ads, you're doing it on your email marketing, you're doing it on your social media channels, anywhere that you can tell your story, you have to tell your story to make it unique and your own. And it's not always about the product, you know? It's not always about, oh, our product has

10 more ounces of food, you know? Okay, that's a technical detail, right? That means that, yeah, I'm saving some money, right? But it doesn't tell me like what makes it special, right? Why buy from you? I could buy anything from Amazon. Why should I buy it from you, right? What makes your product so special? So focused on this third dimension after customer UX is marketing, but specifically storytelling as your foundation, right?

Kunle Campbell (36:16.802)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (36:38.402)
Hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (36:39.026)
Because a lot of people miss this aspect of it and they don't think it's important because they start doing price optimization, right? Buy one, get one free, 30% off, free shipping. They give the store away basically by couponing to debt. Instead, if you spend time storytelling, maybe you don't have to do any of those things. You don't. And you could only use it when you need to, when you have to do a price promotion.

Kunle Campbell (37:02.263)
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (37:07.646)
I often say storytelling is your ability to tell your why, why you're doing what you're doing. And when people understand that why they can, you know, justify any price points, they can, they can, you know, just essentially sacrifice or do anything you ask them to do, because they believe in that why, you know, and it's so important. But in

Back to like point two, you mentioned something I didn't want to cut you short. You said you preferred another metric over conversion rates. What is that metric you prefer?

Sabir Semerkant (37:38.03)
Yeah, so I completely do not use conversion rate at all. And coming from a 25 years e-comm veteran, right? Hearing that sounds very odd because every other e-comm person says conversion rate. Conversion rate is such a garbage KPI, right? Because it doesn't really tell you anything, right? So I have replaced conversion rate with session value, right? For an e-commerce site,

I don't care about the conversion rate. I care about how many sessions that I get or how much traffic, how many visitors that come to my site, right? And how much revenue did I utilize if I divide those two numbers, right? So revenue divided by number of sessions gives me the session value, right? And I'll tell you why that KPI is a meaningful KPI, right? When you know, like let's say you do that math, right? You get certain revenue and you divide it by...

a number of sessions you have on your site, you get a session value of let's say $2.50, right? That means that when you bring a session to the site, it generates $2.50, right? And that means that if that $2.50 goes down to $2, that means that you're bringing unqualified traffic to your site, right? And let's move that along further, right?

Kunle Campbell (38:58.66)
That's right.

Sabir Semerkant (39:05.43)
If you take a look at all of your paid channels, your paid channels generate certain amount of clicks to your site, clicks, visitors, whichever one you like to use, right? And if you look at, and you know your spend, so even though the platform might charge you like a meta ads charges you by impression, right? It doesn't charge you by CPC. However, Google ads charges you by CPC, right? Depending on the ad units that you buy. But if you normalize that to

cost per click, regardless of the channel, right? You know your cost per click is let's say 50 cents, right? If you know that every click is gonna cost you 50 cents, but every qualified session that you bring to the site is $2.50 in revenue, what is your ROAS? No, it's 5X, right? 50 cents times five is $2.50, right?

Kunle Campbell (39:56.986)
$2. It's 5x, yeah, sorry. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. So it's. Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (40:04.618)
Knowing that number, you don't need to know any other numbers. If you know that number, you're going to keep on working towards that number And when I said at the earlier part of this podcast I said our Clients whether they run amazon ads which one of them is experiencing 10x Roas right on amazon. That's an amazon platform less control, right? But still doing the right fundamentals of the 8d method They're experiencing 10x roas, right?

Kunle Campbell (40:11.568)
right.

Sabir Semerkant (40:33.306)
This jewelry brand that has a Shopify store, it has grown 112%. And here's the catch. We reduced our Facebook ad spend.

You know, because everybody thinks, oh, you know what? Oh, Sabir went in there, just, you doubled your Facebook ads. Yeah, that would be very lazy of me and stupid, right? I don't do stupid and lazy things, you know? We need to do the right things by the business, right? So in their case, specifically during these six weeks, we actually reduced our ad spend on Facebook.

Because why spend money if your site optimization, your customer UX, your marketing and storytelling is not set up properly, right? So we spent time on these first three dimensions first, increased our conversion rate, and we said, okay, while we're working on this, we don't wanna pay attention to our Facebook ads. Let's knock it down a little bit. Let's just do retargeting and just do bare minimum for bringing some traffic in.

but we don't have to, we can even shut it off if you don't need to, right? Now, in these next six weeks, we will be talking about Google Ads and optimizing Meta Ads properly, and Pinterest Ads, and TikTok Ads, and looking at influencer marketing as a channel, getting better at email marketing, which we have done already in the first six weeks, right? And optimizing it even further moving forward, right? So, session value.

is a much better metric for e-commerce businesses. It's not conversion rate, because conversion rate doesn't really, there's nothing practical you could do with conversion rate.

Kunle Campbell (42:13.216)
on what on what

Kunle Campbell (42:19.274)
Yeah. On what dimension do you track it? Is it time-based or is it channel-based?

Sabir Semerkant (42:27.994)
No, as we go through each dimension, right? We look at, are we looking at organic or are we looking at paid, right? When we are looking at organic channels, we have to look at the session value by the channel, right? To see what kind of return are you getting on the session value, right? For example, affiliate marketing does, has phenomenal session value, right?

Kunle Campbell (42:55.661)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (42:56.302)
But then when you get into the holiday period, all those numbers tank, because now you're paying the affiliates to throw more traffic at you, right? Because you're paying for placement during the holiday seasons, for example, right? So you have to be mindful of those kinds of things versus organic SEO stays pretty stable. It's profitable, session value is pretty consistent throughout the year.

Kunle Campbell (43:05.783)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (43:22.486)
unless there are drastic Google SEO algorithm changes that affects the entire product category, other than that massive change like that, it's pretty stable. You're getting your session value pretty consistently. So you have to keep on investing in those backlinks, doing more content, blog articles, better optimized SEO content on your site, better structure, technical SEO, stuff like that, right? You're getting a pretty consistent.

return on that, you know, the time you spend doing that SEO optimization, because that's where you're not spending money on, maybe sometimes you are, but mostly you're spending time on SEO and the cost of time you should take into consideration when you're considering your ROAS on that. But your session value is going to be the same, right? To count how much time did you spend on doing the SEO.

If you had to do backlinks where you paid for some placements or guest posts or you paid a third party agency to do SEO for you and stuff like that, that's your cost for that channel, even though it's technically free, right? Email marketing, the same thing. So you have to look at organic channels first, and then you look at your ad spend by channel, right? There is no generic number you should be looking at for your business ever, right?

This is one of the reasons I hate conversion rate, right? Because everybody says, oh, my site's conversion rate is less than 1%. When we do this AD method, are we gonna improve the conversion rate? That's such a generic number, it has no meaning. I would rather look at every channel and see how we can improve the session value of that channel. And then conversion rate is a derivative number. And you can look at your Google Analytics or Shopify Analytics or whatever.

Kunle Campbell (45:08.846)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (45:16.15)
to see how it improved, but it's a derivative number, it's meaningless.

Kunle Campbell (45:20.382)
Makes sense, makes sense. So we talk about sites, site performance, optimization, customer research, creating unique product UX storytelling. What is the number four? What's number four D in the AD method?

Sabir Semerkant (45:34.258)
So number four is product positioning and your brand positioning, right? So now we looked at the customer, we looked at your site, we looked at your marketing and storytelling, and we looked at, you know, we have to look at your product and we looked at your customer, right? The next place that you need to pay attention to is your product positioning, which also is associated with your brand positioning, right? There are, for the same product, there are a thousand variations in the market.

Right? If you doubt my statement, just go on Amazon, put in your product category search term and you'll see thousands and thousands of Competitors, right? It's not like you have three competitors. You have thousands of competitors at the product level, right? So What are you doing for your product? That is positioned differently for your product specifically, right? Part of it could be technicals. You have your vitamin has better ingredients

Right? It's organic. It has XYZ ingredient. It went through the packaging is sustainable. All of those things count. Cause today's consumer is not just, doesn't wanna just take the pill and put it in their mouth or they don't wanna take a lotion and put it on their face. They wanna know how it was made, where it came from, who made it, you know? What are the ingredients? Is it ethical? All of those things matter, right?

So from your product positioning perspective, so when we get to this fifth dimension, you have to position every product for success. What are you doing to position it correctly? And then are you doing things to ask those customers that you acquire and they bought this product, are you asking them to do things for this product on your behalf? And what are those things? Reviews, testimonials.

You know video testimonials pictorial testimonials textual Testimonials and reviews whether you're selling on Amazon or on your Shopify site or WooCommerce or whatever Is that part of your product journey, right? Just like we talked about site journey customer journey Marketing and storytelling journey, right? We have to talk about the product journey in the products life What what things are you doing? Are you setting it up for success so that you can?

Sabir Semerkant (48:01.81)
get the right reviews? Are you getting, is everybody happy? And are you listening also? That's really important with reviews and questions and answers and complaints that customers tell you. Are you really paying attention to that? And are you really making the changes that they're telling you that there is a fault? For example, let's say you sell tomato sauce, right?

And you start selling it, people, you're getting mixed reviews. You're getting people who got it and they used it for their pasta. They love it, right? This is their choice now. Your tomato sauce is the best. They will go out of their way and pay for shipping and handling to buy your buy your tomato sauce, then to go to Whole Foods or Stop and Shop or whatever market. They would rather buy yours because it tastes amazing because everything is made out of

Kunle Campbell (48:47.406)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (48:58.026)
organic tomatoes and every tomato was kissed by a fairy, right? So whatever those selling points are, right? However, now you get a mix of people that are telling you, yeah, the tomato sauce is good but I bought three bottles and one of them the lid came off and it was all over the box right? They're going out of their way to tell you what you need to fix with your product right?

Kunle Campbell (49:25.871)
Absolutely.

Sabir Semerkant (49:27.382)
And a lot of businesses, this sounds very obvious, and it's not a tomato sauce, it could be a piece of jewelry, it could be a shoe, it could be your size six woman's dress is not really size six, right? They're really telling you these things, right? But a lot of people, they look at four and a half stars, do I have four and a half stars on my ratings? How many reviews? Oh, we need to get the number of reviews up.

Kunle Campbell (49:42.171)
Thank you.

Sabir Semerkant (49:55.194)
but they're not paying attention to the content of those reviews where customers are really working for you and telling you they're not only buying the product, they're telling you what's wrong, right? And if you're not, and a lot of businesses are not listening, unfortunately. That's the other, that's the product journey. Go ahead, Kunle.

Kunle Campbell (50:09.738)
Yeah, I often find, I often find like the reason for this is two pronged. One, there's the like operations, or even product or product and operations are one the same in my opinion. Do not listen, they've not put a feedback loop to customer service, and marketing that essentially sort of

gives them that feedback. This is what our customers are saying. You know, you're really communicating that customer cry towards actually improving the product and feedback. Every feedback is good feedback. You could always, you know, put that to its rates. And the other thing is the physical, the nature of e-commerce, it's the physicality of e-commerce. So let's say, for instance, you were, you know, you'd, you'd had your, your consignment for the quarter. You, you know, you brought in,

50,000 units of a product or you brought in X amount of products into your warehouse or your performance center. The objective of e-commerce to sell through. Now, if those products or some of those products have some fundamental issues that are going to essentially cause issues with customers, they still have to sell through commercially because that's what's going to fund the next inventory turnaround that could potentially lead to the

know, to those changes. Question is like, what are you seeing? How are you seeing, you know, really good companies really close that loop and take on feedback as well as how do you handle stock that, okay, you know, may have some fundamental issues? Do you destroy it or what do you do in that scenario?

Sabir Semerkant (52:00.966)
So, Kunti, what you did is jump to dimension number eight, which is team. So, you know, when we get to that eight dimension, right? Well, one of the things, I know that we're jumping, it's fine, because you asked the question, so I'll answer it, right? The eight dimension is your team. And when I say team, I don't mean your full-time employees. Your team is your agency.

Kunle Campbell (52:05.35)
Okay. Burn off.

Kunle Campbell (52:19.756)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (52:29.85)
the people you hired on Fiverr, Upwork, LinkedIn, freelancers that work for you, people who come in, your cousin, your wife, your husband that comes and helps you over the weekend, that's your team, right? Whether you pay them, don't pay them, or pay them on a W-2, or you pay them on a 1099 as an independent contractor, doesn't matter to me, right? Or an agency, you may have hired an agency to work for you. When you have the team,

Right, the team, it's under your leadership, right? You're the owner of the company, right? You're the owner of the company. When I say owner, it doesn't mean that your name is on the equity thing. You could be the CMO, right? You could be the CEO, meaning that you don't own the company, you are hired as a CEO, right? At the end of the day, building the right communications.

And in case of e-commerce, and actually an online blog had interviewed me several years ago about fighting fraud online, which fighting fraud is a huge issue with e-commerce sites, right? And I had given, one of the directions that I had given there is communication. Number one, number one thing fraud happens is lack of communication in e-commerce companies, right? And that's a real practical issue, right, in e-commerce.

Kunle Campbell (53:51.854)
Sure. Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (53:54.25)
Fraud is number one issue in e-commerce like you know You could be selling to fraudulent credit cards and or shipping and rerouting and there are so many things I could write a book on fraud on e-commerce, you know, so But the reason that happens it has to do with lack of communication Right if in your company Let's say this issue is not really a big issue when you are one to two person company And then you have a bunch of freelancers working for you, right?

because you're controlling the communication, right? Everybody, all the buck stops at you, right? But when that group grows to 15 to 20 people, it's no longer that, it's like you have several chiefs in there, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, so on, right? Chief technology officer, right? And each one of them have their own kingdoms, right? And then the person who runs marketing doesn't-

has some issue with the person who's running customer service, and they don't wanna talk to each other, and they wanna throw each other under the bus, right? That's just corporate politics, right? So as a leader, as the owner of the company, it's your job to make sure that you weed out those issues first. Because that's cancer for your company. That's cancer. If you don't weed that out, no matter how great your product is,

you are bound to have serious issues and pockets of issues or tremendous issues in your business. So that eight dimension being team and communication being at its core, you really need to pay attention to that, right? I'll give you a gigantic example, right? And this example comes from Vitamin Shop. So the marketing team was told by merchandising that

Amazing book has come out and the publisher has given us this book To be included with every order and it's a very popular book mind you the book was not a small paperback It was one of those gigantic physicians guide whatever to natural alternative whatever gigantic book Most of our orders in at vitamin shop were three to five Bottles of vitamins different types of vitamins, right? So the box was this big right?

Kunle Campbell (56:07.606)
Okay.

Kunle Campbell (56:18.616)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (56:20.966)
So merchandising made the deal with the publisher to get the book. They told marketing that the marketing go ahead and this is, you know, promote it, promote the hell out of it because we have thousands of books we can give away and we can increase our orders. Merchandising did its job, amazing. Marketing did its job, amazing. The two people that were not told were customer service that this promotion was going on.

Kunle Campbell (56:48.003)
Hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (56:50.798)
Right. And the other person that should have been at the forefront before marketing would have been operations. Because we didn't even have the boxes to put the book in there and then put the vitamins in there because the book was gigantic book. What do you think happened to the shipping cost that month?

Kunle Campbell (57:14.283)
just blew up it was huge

Sabir Semerkant (57:18.522)
Huge cost because it's an additional shipment for every order that qualified. So from KPI standpoint, we had tremendous wins on merchandising, marketing.

Kunle Campbell (57:21.238)
Yeah, different dimension.

Sabir Semerkant (57:33.178)
When it came to like, where's my book? Because some packages were lost. Where's my book? That increased customer service costs. And shipping costs went up and double the labor in the order fulfillment area. Right? So even though you have successes in parts of your team, right? That communication is critical.

I mean, nowadays you have tools like Slack where people are supposed to talk to each other and we talk to each other because there are so many remote teams now, right? But leadership still is needed in managing those teams so that it's not siloed kingdoms that are running within your company, right? That there are free flowing conversations that are happening in that eight dimension.

Kunle Campbell (58:19.731)
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (58:24.998)
Yeah, I often liken Slack as a baseline conversation layer, communication layer. But as you said, with critical decisions at the leadership level, you require another level above Slack to make those decisions and essentially effect what actions need to be taken so leaders can absorb it. And

and essentially use Slack as potentially the medium to alert the rest of the team. But what I think, Slack can be overstretched as a channel if every single decision is passed through it. When there's no decision hierarchy, it's just tougher to run a company, right?

Sabir Semerkant (59:14.35)
Yeah, listen, you cannot shirk your responsibility as a leader by pointing to the tool, right? You still need to do your huddles with Zoom or Slack huddle, right? Or Microsoft Teams or WebEx, whatever flavor of in-person like this that you could do, that doesn't go away, right? Even if you have remote teams, right? If it's in-person, right?

Kunle Campbell (59:28.535)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (59:44.33)
What are the meaningful one meeting of the week or two meetings of the week that you should do in person, have to do? And then what are the followups you could do through Slack so that things get done faster, better? Oh, I finished this thing. Can some of you guys go and test it to see if it works? That you could do in Slack, right? But making critical decisions, you still need to do that face to face, right? So that you can have that dialogue.

Sabir Semerkant (01:00:17.539)
that analog, right? It's not transactional chat in a Slack, right? It's an analog human to human discussion about the challenges and stuff like that. And so that you can all be in the know. So that as the owner of the company, you're setting the tone and you're setting that pace as for your team.

And then even if you have lieutenants or majors in your team, that all the C-level executives that report into you, or directors or VPs, whatever title you give them, they need to do the same thing to lead their teams also. And then if you have this unified conversation on a weekly basis, that's how you win. When there's a lack of that communication, or if a leader doesn't...

Kunle Campbell (01:00:54.572)
Absolutely.

Sabir Semerkant (01:01:07.942)
carry through that communication, that's when you start running into issues and you know that, oh, this company's making amazing products, but why is their marketing so horrible, right? But, you know, this product does these amazing things, but they never tell me that these things could be done with the product as a consumer, right? So that's when you have those kind of questions about a business, when you're evaluating it, you know, you're doing your case study or learning or auditing it or just learning from it, right?

When you see those gaps, typically it has to do with a communication gap in that organization, right? And the faster you could find those communication gaps and you find out what's causing it, you need to address it. You can do training, you could do things like that, but sometimes maybe the person just doesn't have the DNA to make that happen. In that case, you have to make the critical decision of-

Kunle Campbell (01:02:02.412)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (01:02:05.826)
releasing them to the community of the world and finding another superstar to add to your team.

Kunle Campbell (01:02:11.186)
Yeah, sometimes it would be a talent problem. OK, let's jump right back into the list. Side-to-side performance optimization, customer research, storytelling. We had brand and product positioning, and then we've covered eight, which is team. What is number five?

Sabir Semerkant (01:02:29.894)
So number five is, actually number six, we covered five dimensions. So number six has to do with pricing. So as you can see, pricing in my book is really further out in a dimension, right? If you can identify all the things that need to be fixed in the prior dimensions, then you can literally dictate your price, right? And when it has to do with price,

you have to take into account promotion also, right? Because that's your ultimate price that the market will bear, right? Whatever the market will bear based on all the other optimizations that you have done and they're willing to pay you for it, that's great. I'll give you an example, right? Let's say we are selling the same product, same exact product, right? Exactly the same, right? Not that it's from two different brands, exact copy, right?

One sells it for $10, right? And that's like the cheapest price, but you get it in six weeks, right? And there are a lot of complaints about even in six weeks, you got the smaller size. So it's not, they're being dishonest, right? Versus somebody who sells the same product for $15, right? $5 more, which is expensive, right? 10 versus 15.

Kunle Campbell (01:03:54.351)
50% more. Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (01:03:55.834)
but they send it to you within two days, two, three days across the US, right? Two, three days, you receive it, and they have fabulous reviews about how great they are, how great their customer service is and stuff like that. One has invested in customer service, it has invested in truth and storytelling and on their branding. People are willing to pay for the same product, they're willing to pay $5 more, right? Versus...

the one that was for $10 and they, the customers who fell for it are really sorry that they did, cause they lost their $10. One, they didn't get the right product, they lost their $10. So you can see that it could be the same product, but if you optimize the other dimensions of the business, you could ask for more money and consumers are willing to pay for that, right?

If you are in a commodity business, that's what also sets you apart. It's it's your experience, right? Does Amazon sell anything different than anything that Walmart or Sam's Club or Costco or anybody else sells? The answer is no It's the same commodity products. Why is Amazon the number one e-commerce company in the world?

Kunle Campbell (01:05:21.163)
It's just customer centric. It does what it says typically faster than when it says it.

Sabir Semerkant (01:05:26.882)
And they're marketing it as a label too. You know what that label is? Prime. Ha ha ha. When you hear Prime, and 72% of US households know what Prime is, because that's how many have it, they know that when I place an order, I'll either get it overnight, or worst case scenario, within one or two days. And it gives me music, it gives me movies, it gives me all these other benefits, ancillary benefits, that were added on over the years. Right?

And it's a branded experience. Prime is a branded experience. What are you doing to your brand to build that stuff out? So when the question of pricing comes in, that can you price it in a way that it's not always race to the bottom line, right? Which tends to be very red. I mean, if you see a lot of companies during the holiday season, they show...

Amazing numbers, right? Black Friday was great, Cyber Monday was great, Cyber Week was great, right? Our Christmas holiday season was amazing. Come January, US retail bankruptcies skyrocket.

That's a real indicator of how horrible those companies were being run. So, yeah, so that's why you have to do those other things. It doesn't, does it require time? Yes. Can it do it fast? Yes. I've been doing it for 12 weeks at a time and turning these companies around. Some of them were turned around like Ashley Stewart, for example, in my history was a bankrupt company.

Kunle Campbell (01:06:49.314)
Yeah, the unit's economics was just not right. Yeah. Yep.

Sabir Semerkant (01:07:11.99)
And when I inherited it, it was a $3 million company as an e-commerce company. They had retail stores too Three million dollars within two years of this continuous improvement on a daily basis In two years that three million dollar channel went to 30 million dollars Three million was at 30 percent gross margin to 30 million dollars at 65 percent margin

So not just top line growth, overall profitable growth in two years. But now this model has been perfected and we do this every 12 weeks.

Kunle Campbell (01:07:57.552)
So what's the second, what's number seven after prize and promotion?

Sabir Semerkant (01:08:01.862)
So number seven, because we are in e-commerce and the world runs on tech and computers, it has to do with your tech stack, right? So number seven has to do with your tech stack that if your tech is not, actually, I'm sorry, you were right, my number was a little bit off, right? We have one more dimension besides team. So your tech,

could be a detriment to your business, right? There are businesses that ask for my advice and when I go through the evaluation and audit of their business, I find out that all the other dimensions, it's fabulous, like they are working fine, right? Can we improve it? The answer is absolutely yes, you can always improve a business, right? But what I find out is, is mishmash spaghetti of

Connections integrations over time because different people touch the tech stack over time, right? There are ecommerce businesses today still they are They have a staff of I don't know 20 people in tech working on coding everything

Why are you doing that? Like, does Shopify not do for you what you want to do? And then believe it or not, more than 90% of those, the answer there, more than 90%, there are some odd examples. Like I would give it five to 10%. There are odd examples, no Shopify cannot do certain things, right? Meaning extreme customization and personalization, maybe. Right? It may not be able to do.

But for the other 90% of the businesses where they have coded everything from the ground up on a Magento using C++, Python, or whatever flavor that tech people really like, they build it based on that. So that every time they try to do a promo, the site breaks, the performance is horrible. It takes forever to launch features on the site so that the marketing is crippled basically because of it, right? So it's touching so many of other dimensions.

Sabir Semerkant (01:10:16.89)
the tech is affecting, negatively affecting all these other dimensions, then you need to figure out, you need to swallow the hard pill and say, we need to move off of this thing, because the tech stack is actually killing our company. Right? And in some cases, unfortunately, what I see is that the person who's running tech has ulterior motive, meaning that they have...

Kunle Campbell (01:10:31.618)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (01:10:44.802)
company they invested in or whatever overseas and because it sounds cheap to have a bunch of Engineers working for you at a hugely discounted price That sounds like a bargain. It's actually not a bargain. It's actually detrimental to the company Right. I would rather hire an agency a Shopify agency to rebuild that entire site and the budget for that would be cheaper than

Kunle Campbell (01:11:04.032)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (01:11:14.314)
My expenses related to operating that tech and managing that tech and paying all this payroll and all of these other things Also touches team in that scenario your tech team also, right? all of those things the cost of it would be a fraction of it when you move it to a platform that's You don't have to worry about hosting shopify does that right? You don't have to worry about all these payment connections and stuff like that. There are connections pre-built and if it's

Kunle Campbell (01:11:34.635)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (01:11:40.558)
If you are being affected, that means that thousands of other merchant sites are being affected. And everybody is screaming at Shopify and at authorized.net, at Stripe and all of these platforms, right? So there are things that may have made sense and I built a lot of it back in the 90s. In 2024, it doesn't make sense for you to do that. So if you're tech stack, you have to always evaluate once a year or twice a year, you have to evaluate and see

Even the decision I made in 2023, is it still relevant from a tech standpoint or did somebody, a startup get funded that has a magical solution for me that's going to solve time, cost, operations, whatever. Is it better, right? Because the thing is the thing that you keep on investing and you're going to keep on doing that over the next five, ten years. But if you bite the bullet and make the change right now,

You may not need to. So tech is a huge dimension there, right? If your tech is not right, so when I come in and ask you to make site optimizations in the first dimension, and you're gonna give me a timeline like, oh, that's gonna take two and a half weeks, and we can only work on five things, the answer is, you know what? In Shopify, you could have done it in the next hour, and we could start getting data and see how this change is gonna positively affect our business.

and collect revenue at the same time, right? When I say Shopify, Shopify obviously is one of the most popular platforms, but you could be on other platforms that give you a similar type of features that are pre-built that you don't have to engineer yourself.

Kunle Campbell (01:13:22.995)
Yeah, focus on the other aspects of the AAT method. OK, so you said we missed one. What's the one more?

Sabir Semerkant (01:13:31.246)
So the seventh dimension is logistics. So your logistics, you got everything right. You have your team, you have your marketing, your product, customers, pricing, everything is perfect, right? Brand positioning, everything is fine, right? Everybody's holding hands, everybody is celebrating. Now it comes to logistics. Are you getting, so when I say logistics, it's a lot of different functions. It's not just order fulfillment, right?

3pl which is third-party logistics that handles your orders after you sell on Shopify or If your inventory runs out and you send it to Amazon FBA, right if your partner Or you're doing it yourself You know if your logistics is not optimized It doesn't matter that marketing hired severe to go in and do his 8d method and now you're getting double the orders

Your logistics partner could be your own warehouse They didn't they didn't increase their people on the ground to pick back and ship If it's robotics their robotics cannot handle double the capacity right so Logistics is critical from an order fulfillment side when all of these things are optimized but part of that logistics is also can your

Can your manufacturing plant generate twice the volume now or three times the volume? Some of our clients in 12 weeks got 6.5x growth. Can they generate so much more clothing, so much more shoes, so much more whatever widgets that you're selling, right? The logistics part of it needs to be done, especially if you're in the custom business.

Do you have enough people to put that custom thing together if you're getting more custom orders because now you're getting double the volume Right. So your logistics Need to be optimized also. So as we optimize these businesses across each one of these dimensions We are very mindful of logistics and customer service as part of it too, right that making sure that Uh, they are up to par meaning that your manufacturing can generate more products

Sabir Semerkant (01:15:52.018)
your inventory could be checked in on time, that if you're running out of inventory and you have to keep, now in order to have savings, you have to keep like 90 days of inventory in order to get different levels of prime, even with Amazon FBA, right? You have to think, be mindful of those things. Can you send over 90 days volume while you're selling on your own website, right? Because you have to manage different channels. So logistics is...

really, really critical, and then you have to go all the way back to your supply chain. Do they have double the capacity? For example, if you are in the supplements business, right, you can grow only so many trees that you can cultivate the ingredients you need from those trees, right? There are so many fishes in this ocean, right, and you cannot overfish. There are legal restrictions against that, right? So even if you are doubling or tripling or 10Xing your business,

Kunle Campbell (01:16:36.398)
sure.

Sabir Semerkant (01:16:50.574)
are the capabilities there behind the scenes or are you selling vapor on this side and 10Xing the business and you didn't think about the fact that you needed to have finished inventory to fulfill those orders. And in fact, you needed to have more people, more robotics or whatever, in order to fulfill those orders for it to go out, even if your warehouse is full of products, right? So you have to be mindful of the seventh dimension being logistics, that you have to be

lock and step from every one of these things. So when you think about your business, a lot of people, a lot of business owners, what they do is, this is where they fail, right? They look at, oh, my issue is a Facebook issue, right? I'm getting the traffic, I don't know if my ad is right, this, that, let me go get an agency, somebody who's a guru at that, right? And they do that, and then they don't get the results because they're not looking at the full picture.

What I do, that's why I don't call myself an agency, I don't call myself a consultant, I'm an advisor, right? I take a step back, I look at the entire business and look at exactly what's wrong with the entire business, not just looking at one dimension, one element of a dimension and say, oh, we need to improve our ROAS on Facebook, not even Facebook, it's like ROAS on Facebook. That's looking at a drop of water from an ocean, you know?

and deciding what the ocean is made up of, you know? And you're missing the whole point, you know? And you have to look at the whole picture, and the 8D method looks at that whole picture in a 12 week period. It is a very intense 12 week bootcamp. And every week there is deliverables related to the dimension that need to be implemented, ASAP. So literally I become in charge of that company for 12 weeks. And every week those things are being given.

Kunle Campbell (01:18:18.762)
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell (01:18:44.419)
Hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (01:18:48.25)
And the owner takes it and gets it done. And if my clients don't have the right resources and most of them don't know everybody, and the typical question is, Sebeer, do you have a guy that can do X, Y, Z, right? The answer is always yes, because I have a network of really amazing experts that I have personally vetted who are incredible at executing the 8D method, that part of the 8D method, that specific part that they excel at.

So I make the introductions, they get it done. So that during those 12 weeks, they typically work with the client. And then after the 12 weeks, if they like each other, they can continue their contract and agreement till they reach a certain goal or they keep going, right? But I become the advisor to that business for those 12 weeks. And for clients that want, and I have had many clients that stick with the plan because they see the value in the...

Kunle Campbell (01:19:34.955)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (01:19:47.97)
not only the strategy, but the execution is so on point. It's laser surgery, not butchery. It's so much laser surgery that they see it, they continue on. And I've had clients for three, four years that have continued on. They started as an 8D method client. The program is called Rapid2x. They started there, but they continued on for three, four years now.

Kunle Campbell (01:20:03.32)
Mm.

Kunle Campbell (01:20:14.274)
Hmm. Speaking of logistics, what are your thoughts and experience with pre-order and backorder experiences, particularly, you know, when you're scaling and really and truly, you're just not able to meet up with the demand, you know, that the other aspects of the AD method have so delivered.

Sabir Semerkant (01:20:40.05)
So at the end of the day, it's managing expectations, right? It's managing customer expectations, communication, setting up the expectation ahead of time. For example, if you think about it, you know what's a pre-order? The entire model is based on pre-order, Kickstarter programs, right? When with a Kickstarter, the person has, idea is a figment of their imagination and they recruit people to be part,

Kunle Campbell (01:20:59.891)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (01:21:09.414)
to realize and make this imagination, figment of their imagination into reality, right? And then they share their journey through Kickstarter and then you get a product. That's managing and communicating that journey, right? So people are willing to pay ahead of time, three months ahead of time. I'm a Kickstarter fan. I actually have bought cameras and stuff like that and audio, you know, headsets and all sorts of things like that through Kickstarter programs.

Kunle Campbell (01:21:17.292)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (01:21:39.066)
because that's what I liked doing, right? So when you take a lesson from that for your business, when you're doing pre-order, are you setting the right expectations or you did not really communicate that well? And it's not the first time communication, it's ongoing communication of why they're on this journey of pre-order with you, right? And I'm not talking about a 30-day pre-order, I'm talking about three-month pre-order, right? So...

Kunle Campbell (01:22:03.028)
Mm-hmm.

Sabir Semerkant (01:22:08.99)
It's matter of how are you generating that? How are you building that up? Right and managing that expectation for the for the for the pre-order the same applies to backorder, right? If you say that you have limited quantity you have a thousand that's available But if it runs out then you're gonna go on a backorder a lot of sites and businesses. They don't communicate that well So what happens your chargebacks go up?

Kunle Campbell (01:22:14.126)
Thank you.

Sabir Semerkant (01:22:37.538)
your refund rate goes up, your reviews and ratings tank, right? All those things are connected and at the end of the day you could have saved all of those things by communicating, right? By communicating it on the product page, by communicating it with a follow-up email, SMS, you know, through your social media and again goes back and touches the dimension of storytelling and marketing, right? You have to you have to story tell. It's not just that before...

You try to get them to buy your product. You have to do it also after they bought your product because they're on a pre-order or a back-order, right? That needs to be there, right? The more you communicate, the more you manage the expectations there and make it convenient for them to like, look, if you wanna bail out, it's fine. There are other people who wanna take your spot, right? There are some events like Comic-Con, right? I don't know if you're a Comic-Con fan, Kun-Li, right?

Kunle Campbell (01:23:35.446)
heard of it, but not, I've only attended one or many Comic Con in Oxford here, but nothing to not so fun.

Sabir Semerkant (01:23:44.454)
So one of the great things that they do is they actually send you an email. You bought a ticket, right, which is very hard to find for Comic-Con, especially in New York and San Diego, right? These are very popular destinations for Comic-Con. So you buy your ticket, you bought it, you have it on you. They send you an email telling you that, hey, there are some people that want, we already sold out. If you want a refund, if you cannot make it,

to the event, we can give you a refund so we can give it to other people. Your money is already in the bank. They're telling you, we'll give you a refund to get out if you're not committed to coming so that somebody else who is a bigger fan than you will come and they are willing to pay for it, right? That just builds up that level of, you already bought it.

Kunle Campbell (01:24:29.162)
Yep.

Kunle Campbell (01:24:38.634)
with or without your mentality. Yeah, it's like, we'll do it. We'll do it anyway. So it's been you know, every single aspect of this interview met surpassed my expectations. So I was really, really had high expectations for this. But yeah, it really surpassed my expectations. So I just want to express my gratitude for you coming in to share the methodology for you sharing your story, your backstory.

Sabir Semerkant (01:24:40.507)
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell (01:25:08.022)
25 years worth of just experience in e-commerce. Now with what you're doing in Growth by Sabir and the program, you have a Rapid 2x program, which I believe is a 12-week program, and then you have a Hyper 10x program. How can people find out more? I believe your website is called

Kunle Campbell (01:25:35.062)
What are the nuance? What should they expect when they reach out to you?

Sabir Semerkant (01:25:40.346)
Well, first of all, thank you, Conley, for having me. I had a fabulous time on your show. So what I would recommend for your audience members is to, if they're interested in learning more about it, this upcoming Tuesday, I'm doing a webinar that they can register for free, right? To, it's a workshop, actually. I don't even call it a webinar. Most people call it webinar, but it's a workshop. So if they go to Growth by Sabir, my name is spelled S-A-B-I-R.

So growthbysabir.com slash workshop. So if they go there, they will be sent over to the workshop registration. It's free. And it's upcoming Tuesday. I am running a free workshop where, you know, I'll go through this in more detail and they could find out more. They can learn more about the case studies. I take a deeper dive into the case studies also so that they can see that if this is for them,

Because I don't run an agency, it is very limited to highly qualified businesses that I work with, right? I personally work with them, right? And this Rapid2X program is a mastermind that we are launching very soon that will bring in a group of like-minded entrepreneurs who are like type A players, highly motivated to grow their business.

and they have the right product market fit so that they can, you know, if they attend the workshop, they will learn more about it. And then they could contact, you know, and apply for the program to see if they are a good fit. And if they are, then they can start in the workshop and spend the next 12 weeks. It's gonna be, I have a fabulous time during those 12 weeks, but people are a little bit in a shock in the first few weeks until they get used to my pace, right?

because they've never worked on their business at this pace, you know? But it's exciting. And what I can tell you is our clients consistently say that, you know, in the first two, three weeks were, was adjustment period for them to get used to the pace. But once they got the pace, then they're on it. Because what makes it exciting is they see results. They see it directly on their Shopify, on their Amazon seller account.

Kunle Campbell (01:28:05.955)
Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant (01:28:06.114)
They see it. So when they see it and how do they see it? They're seeing the business grow 30%, 40%, 50%, 70%, 100%. They surpass 100%. They see their average orders going up. They're seeing their return on advertising spend on Google and Facebook and Amazon ads going up. That's exciting. As a business owner, when you see those metrics go up.

and you see your business growing and it's not like stagnant like it has been for years now, right, or a year or two or five. We have had some clients that their business has been stagnant for 10 years and they come to us and they start growing. When they see that, that excitement is revived, you know? So growthbysevere.com slash workshop, attend the free workshop, see if it's for you, and then we'll take it from there.

Kunle Campbell (01:28:48.56)
Absolutely.

Kunle Campbell (01:28:56.426)
Yeah, and just to clarify, it's open to both marketplace merchants and DTC merchants. It really doesn't matter, right?

Sabir Semerkant (01:29:06.178)
No, if they're in the e-commerce business, it really doesn't matter. I've helped launch several of the categories for Amazon. So I've been an OG on Amazon also. So yeah, it doesn't matter. I mean, we have current clients that, multiple clients that are, they are native to Amazon selling only, right? So they don't even have a Shopify site. And we have clients that are Shopify only, and we have clients that are multi-channel. They sell on multiple channels,

Kunle Campbell (01:29:17.194)
incredible incredible.

Kunle Campbell (01:29:31.234)
So it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast.

Sabir Semerkant (01:29:36.342)
Amazon and

Sabir Semerkant (01:29:40.942)
I'm sorry.

Kunle Campbell (01:29:41.29)
Yeah, there was a bit of an overlap, but I was saying it's an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast and thank you for turning up.

Sabir Semerkant (01:29:53.262)
Yeah, I mean, I had a great time. Conley, I really appreciate you having me as a guest on your show and looking forward to hearing the feedback from your audience and from your listeners.

Kunle Campbell (01:30:04.426)
Incredible. Cheers.

Sabir Semerkant (01:30:05.97)
Cheers.