068 | Breaking the Mold and Balancing Privacy on Personalization | with Shahram Anver

Shahram Anver is a co-founder and CTO of DataCue, a Shopify solution that helps merchants grow sales and conversion by showing each visitor the right content.

On this podcast, we talk about how to know if you need personalization, the simplest way to get started with personalization, how demographics can be bad for personalization, and much more!

To learn more, visit: honestecommerce.com

Resources:

• Shahram’s LinkedIn Page: linkedin.com/in/shahram-anver-33b26219
• DataCue’s website: datacue.co
• DataCue is excited to offer an extended 14-day free trial, exclusively for Honest Ecommerce listeners. Offer only valid till the end of March. DataCue will also complete the store set up free of charge for you. If you want to redeem this offer, email support@datacue.co and mention Honest Ecommerce and we will waive the first month off for you. If you have more questions about personalization or DataCue, feel free to ask Shahram questions using this email, as well.
• Visit gorgias.grsm.io/honest to get your second month free.

 

Transcript

Sabir Semerkant

Ecommerce gives you data. Utilize the data.  

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to show an amazing gentleman, an Ecommerce expert, a growth strategist, and an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience driving over 1 billion, that's what it'd be, in revenue. He's endorsed by names like Gary V., Neil Patel, Matt Higgins from Shark Tank.

Sabir has a VIA Fortune 500 company. He's scaled startups. He's helped brands like Canon, who's the camera I'm using right now. Tommy Hilfiger, Sour Patch Kids, to achieve rapid growth. Sabir, welcome to the show. 

Sabir Semerkant

Chase, it's great to be here. 

Chase Clymer

I'm excited to chat. At this point, we've chatted two or three times now. And we always run over and we always have too much fun with it. But now we're recording it to make an awesome piece of content for our listeners. 

So quickly, for those that aren't familiar, you give me a little bit more than your intro? What have you been up to? How do you know so much about Ecommerce? What are you doing now?

Sabir Semerkant

It's a very interesting journey. The thing is, it happened on it 25 years ago by total accident.  Total accident. And those are the best things to happen in your life. Before I became this revenue growth hacker, over a billion dollars, over so many hundreds of DTC brands worldwide, by the way. It's not just US brands worldwide, multi-currency, multi-language, taking brands from the US to the other markets, from other markets into the US, from those markets to other markets and so on and so forth, right? But before that, millions of lines of code. I'm a computer scientist by schooling, right? I had been coding before I made the switch and the switch happened by total accident, right? I was a computer scientist, millions of lines of code. I was a founding team member of thestreet.com with Jim Cramer from CNBC. 

So I helped launch it. But at that time, Sabir was this total engineering nerd. It was the Scotty of the world, right? Scotty from Star Trek, right? The engineer, not Captain Kirk. So, you know, but the transition happened. I clearly remember it, right? It was the vitamin shop. Again, I got recommended because vitaminshoppe.com had gone bankrupt, right? 

And the owner of the vitamin shop brand went to the bankruptcy court and actually bought out all these intellectual property, all the assets and stuff. Everything was seized by US Marshals because it was completely bankrupt. So he buys it back. He tries to find  the right person to take this on and move it forward now and revive it. Comes across me through his network. We talk.  I go like, yeah, I can do that. It's not a problem. So I go in. I get involved with it.

I do all the tech things you could think about from an Ecommerce standpoint. And back then, just kind of gave you the landscape. Google is beta testing at Stanford. There is no social media. Shopify does not exist at all. So anything you need to do with Ecommerce, you have to build it from the ground up. Every single component, including payment processing and stuff like that.

So I grabbed these  servers, I found a data center, I put them in there, I turned it back on, turned it back on. And from a technical standpoint, because I'm an engineer, I start optimizing things that need to be optimized from a purely tech standpoint, right? I do that, already, the site is already performing because it was in shambles, it was in a very bad shape. So I got it  to  operate better and stuff. And then I go to Jeff, go like, Jeff, I got the thing up.

We're starting to get some traffic because of just name recognition, right? You know, I'm getting some orders. We've been dropping it into the warehouse. We've been shipping it out. I said, can you connect me with the business marketing person that I need to talk to? Right. It was like, what are you talking about? My network told me you're the guy. I said, yeah, I'm the guy. Now, this is a Star Trek scene, right? Yeah, I'm an engineer, not a marketer. You know, like Scotty says to Captain Kirk, right?

He goes like, no, I've seen what you have done. You've already done a few things to vitaminshop.com. So already great, right? You're a smart guy, you'll figure it out. Have you taken any business marketing courses? Back then, this was 25 years ago, I'm very young, right? But I had quite a lot of success on the tech side of things. He goes like, have you taken anything? Yeah, accounting 101, economics 101. If I didn't take it, they would not give me my computer science degree, right?

So he goes like, you know, okay, that's fine. I'm going to teach you the vitamin industry ebb and flow, right? The nuances of it and stuff. Because at that time, I had no clue what Glucosamine Conjoint and MSM was. I had no idea what that was, right? So I go like, okay, that's great. But what about the business marketing side? I have no clue. I was like, you'll figure it out, right? So I treated that as an engineering challenge, right?

So I needed to engineer this  learning. So think Neo from Matrix. I needed to download everything, right? So I live in New York. I go out to Long Island in Garden City near a mall, at Roosevelt Field Mall. There's a Barnes and Noble there, right? It still stands there. It's been there for a long time. Beautiful  book shop, right? Timeline again, no Amazon Kindle. There is no Audible. It does not exist, right?  

So I go into that on the weekends I go there, I go to the business and marketing section, I pick up books, they have a nice cafe, they always have one. I go there, I sit down, I take the books, I start looking through them. The ones that are pretty dense, but very valuable, I go and buy, right? The ones that I can sit there and, you know, look through and take notes. Even to this day, this behavior has always been with me, right? It's my trusty notebook with a pen, right? I start taking notes, right?

I tried using it, but it's not for me. I start taking notes. And what do I do? Because Jeff has this amazing trust in me. I go back into the Vitamin Shop Monday through Friday and I test everything I learned over the weekend. And what was I learning? Because Ecommerce was nascent at that time. Think of the early days of Amazon. That's very nascent. Nobody has written a book on it. There is no podcast. Podcasts were just being worn at that time.

Right? There were newsletters and stuff, but there wasn't anything Ecommerce related. Right? So what I do is I take that stuff I learned over the weekend and I'm applying it. What did I learn? I learned about TV marketing. I learned about direct marketing, radio marketing, infomercial marketing, because to me, those were like the cousins of Ecommerce from what I gathered at that  time. Right? And every one of those books complained about data.

Every one of them complained about data, right? That, you know, we have to have data, but the data is not going to be perfect, but it will be directional. But I went like, oh, this is great. In Ecommerce, I don't have that problem. I have data up to wazoo. I can learn everything. And back then there was no Google Analytics. I ended up writing my own analytics software, right? Because of my engineering background I can collect everything.

How many people clicked on Add to Cart? How many people went through the funnel? How many people looked at this product versus that product? You know, how many people were coming from search engines back then, Alta Vista,  Yahoo were very big at that time, and then later on Google came about, right? All of these things, if I did email marketing, that was the primary big, big revenue channel, right? 

So everything I was collecting, and I was doing that and basically what I did was for four and a half years, Monday through Friday, if you count the working days, I took vacation and all of that. It's about a thousand days. So in a thousand days, I took a bankrupt brand and the pre-bankruptcy was eight to $10 million, right? But it had gone bankrupt because of a lot of bad decisions. In four and a half years, under 1000 days, I turned that into $52 million, highly profitable, very positive cashflow. And that was my number one try. And there are some lessons I learned. I would love to share it with your audience.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Well, first of all, something I really want to highlight here is if you're for some reason against reading books, I've come across entrepreneurs that are like, Oh, I don't read. And I'm just like, Why? It's a cheat. It's literally a cheat code to just get the answer to. And it's like, oh, I consume it in a different way. It's just like, Yeah, but books have it distilled down to like, first and foremost, just  get a library card and go read all this stuff. And to that point, it's like the things you learned in those books.

Even looking back now, you could read some of those same books again  and just be like, well, this is about TV marketing. But all of these concepts and strategies apply to Instagram influencers and how that works.  

Sabir Semerkant

And YouTube. Exactly. Hulu, Netflix now. It's like the strategies and the concepts don't work. 

Chase Clymer

It's just the mediums in which they're executed evolve over time.

Sabir Semerkant

Yeah, I mean one of the analogies  that I use. By the way, I read between 100 to 150 books a year. And when I say that, I'm not saying it just like everybody else does. They read posts  or they read Reddit or they read blog articles. They did not read a book, you know, when they say, oh, I read books, you know. I actually read books. I could tell you the latest books that I've been reading right now.

You have to read books. Books are incredible at, you know, distilling and giving you that knowledge. But the thing is, if you are listening to a cursory in the background, you're not gonna get that. There are some books that I listen to over and over again, right? Because, you know, just like your point, like even the books that I read 25 years ago, I reflect back. You know what I do? You typically, I kick myself, you know? And the reason is that, oh, that was TV marketing. 

Why did not I see this thing that was coming up 10 years later, right? And that was 15 years ago, you know? 

Chase Clymer

And that's why some people need to hear that 101 or they just need to hear things a few times before it clicks. And I often am like, I knew that. Why didn't I do that? Why'd I have to learn it the hard way? 

Sabir Semerkant

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's so rich. There are so many, so many amazing, amazing people out there. And what's great about it is those folks actually, that's their lane, right? That's their life, you know, and they have done a great job of, you know, like for example, Ali Abdaal talks about productivity and he's a doctor in the UK, right? 

And I think he recently moved, right? There are so many people who have written amazing, you  know,  Tiago Forte, you know, amazing influencer, right? There are so many amazing people that have picked their lane and they are very good at what they do, right?  And you go like, but that has nothing to do with business. Yeah, now, improving your productivity has a lot to do with your business.

In fact, I'll tell you, I'll give you one thing that I do. I have been doing every single day of my life for 25 years. I'll give you my secret sauce, right? My rule is a 1% rule. And what is this 1%? When I wake up in the morning, I set a goal for myself to improve whatever KPI in Ecommerce that I'm looking at. I want to improve it by 1%. It could be email open rate. It could be a better click through rate on that meta ads because of better messaging.

Changing some words or my leading hook is better, right? Everything is an experiment, right? So if I set that goal of 1% improvement, either I'm going to fail miserably and you'll laugh at me, right? I'm gonna give you that opportunity, which is perfectly fine. I'm an engineer,  failure is part of life, right? Or I'm going to do bangers with that. I was expecting 1% improvement in my click-through rate, I got 30%, right?

And when you use that basic math in one year, it's 36.5x  improvement because those things that you're doing compound over time. These are not tactics, right? And you go like, well, the thing is, Sabir, you are a robot. You're the next Tesla robot, but I am not, right? I take time off with my family. I want to take weekends off. I don't want to work evenings and stuff. Perfectly fine. I actually did the calculation for you because I know you're super lazy. That's fine, right?

It's 22X, right? It's 220 working days in a year. If you take vacation time with family, sick days, federal holidays, weekends, all of that stuff, right? It's 220. It's 22X. Look, but I'm not gonna be perfect. You're not gonna, you said that you're gonna fail sometimes. Okay, let's succeed less than half the time. Let's cut that down even further. 10X. I have case studies after case studies. I have 10X businesses.

In 12 to 18 months. I've gotten you, that was my example number one with Vitamin Shop. Over time, because of how the industry  has given me, like  I'm a kid in a candy store with all these tools. That's incredible, right? I didn't have social media when I was growing up in Ecommerce, right? From the birth of Ecommerce. I did not have payment systems like Shopify payments that allow you to accept Apple Pay and everything else. 

And it takes two seconds to get approved and integrated into your Shopify store. Shopify stores are an incredible blessing, right? From my perspective. Klaviyo collects all of this personalization data that you could deploy and do event-based marketing, not only on email and SMS, those are obvious. You could do dynamic segments on all the social media platforms. 

Incredible, right? And  things like that. It's like, yeah, I was building the Lego parts. Here I have the Lego parts and the best Lego parts that I can accelerate that growth even faster. Right now, we will talk about the framework and the program that we have for Ecom founders and Ecom brands. In six weeks, I can point to, I would say, 50 to 70 brands in Ecom, DTC, in different markets, different languages, different currencies and everything, over 100% growth in six weeks.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And we're absolutely going to get to that framework. First, I'm going to follow up on something before. The lessons you learned in growing the first business in growing vitamins jobs. You said there were 4-5 lessons that came out of that particular endeavor. 

Sabir Semerkant

Yep. So the first one never makes assumptions. You can't engineer growth. Never make assumptions. In fact, your ego and opinion, check it at the door. This will piss off a lot of people, right? It's perfectly fine because we're so driven by ego, right? Oh, I have 25 years, Sabir says. Oh, I have 25 years, $1 billion. I work with Canon and Sour Patch Kids. You have to listen to me. Nope. The thing is in 2025, something amazing happened, right? I mean, a huge change happened around the world, including one specific nation, right? 

On January 20th, 2025. And that actually set a different stage for a lot of the future of a lot of brands, right? Whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States, supply chain disruption because of tariffs and stuff like that, right? Right.  I'm not here to discuss politics or anything like that. I'm not political. I just want to talk about the Ecommerce business side of things, right? That has caused an effect. So what does it matter if during the pandemic your business grew, I don't know, 212 percent, but I don't know what's going on right now?

Yeah, your business grew during the pandemic, had nothing to do with you. Everybody was stuck at home and even your grandmother knew how to do Zoom meetings now. So that has nothing to do with you. That acceleration of technology adoption happened because all of humankind went through a certain  behavioral change that they needed to go through. So that's why ego and opinion, park it at the door. 

A form of opinion and ego is resumed also. Don't hire resumes.Because the resumes could tell you, oh yeah, this person is coming from Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble. Whatever that shiny  brand in your mind is, oh my God, they were a director of marketing at Johnson & Johnson. They are looking at our brand to join our team and we will give them the CMO spot. Why? That person you're hiring could make a mistake at Johnson & Johnson. Bigger in total dollars the entire revenue you're going to make in the next three years. And they will be forgiven over there. So it will be marked as, well, it didn't work, or the agency sucked, or whatever.  Whatever the excuse will be.  

But in your case,  that could be the demise of your brand because of that bad decision. So  never hire from that perspective. Never hire a resume. Hire the right experience at the right  time of your growth.  So that was number one. Number two, Ecommerce.

gives you data.  Utilize the data. And it's not just Shopify analytics. It's Klaviyo, it's meta ads. All of these things give you data. There's a way to look at data, right? Make sure that you're looking at the right KPI and not the wrong KPI and collect all of that data and bring it into a singular place because you want one vision, a unified place. Not that, oh, but Sabir, I have access to that data. Whatever you want me to look up, I can look it up in Klaviyo.

I don't care about you looking it up in Klaviyo. I want you to know what happened with your email open rates last week, Monday through Sunday, with all the campaigns that you sent out. When I ask you that question, you should be able to tell me 38.96%. In  fact, one campaign did blah, blah, blah. This campaign did not do so well.  The open rate sucked and we had an open, you know, click through rate from that. This other one we tested and it had an amazing  click through rate from it.

You should be able to take half an hour to tell me everything about email, right? As a business owner, you should be able to do that. Not that,  oh, hold on a second, let me go, Klaviyo.com.  What was my login? Hey, Susan,  you go in, could you give me the password? You don't even know the password, right? That's, by the way, that's pretty typical, right? It's either TikTok or Klaviyo or something that somebody else has access to.

As a business owner, why is that an excuse? Why is that okay for you to do? You should not be able to do that, right? You should not be allowed to do that, right?  One, it needs to be unified and you as a business owner should know what's going on. But I'm a product designer blah, blah, blah. It's your business, right? You're not working for a corporation where you are a unit of work. 

The entire shebang is your responsibility, right? Including making payroll and making sure that your accounting software is getting all the right data for your bookkeeper and  for tax filing or whatever you have. It's your responsibility, right? In fact,  if there's a spillage in the aisle,  you better know where the mop is, right? It's your responsibility, right? So that's the second one. Third one,  overreliance  on one channel and committing the sin of gambling. And what is that sin of gambling?

You take your coin, you go to the casino called Meta Ads, you put your coin in, you pull the slot machine, and you go like, please, please, please, three cherries, three cherries, right? And what are those cherries? It's your ROAS, right? And your ROAS, want it to, because you've been brainwashed, you think that one, one and a half ROAS is fine, right? It's not, I'll give you the math for it, right? One, one and a half is not fine. 

What happens is when you get a one, one and a half ROAS, even let's assume that you have a 50% gross margin, right? Just gross margin, not even operating costs, gross margin, right? You will still be on that $1 that you spent on ads, you got $1.5 in revenue, you have to pay back the $1 for the ad because Meta Ads is going to say, give me your credit card, pay me, right? So, they'll take that $1. You have 0.5 left. 

If your margin is 50%, it's 0.5 left balance from your revenue minus 0.75. That's your gross margin that you collected. So you're negative 0.25. So 1.5 is not the answer, right?  And so that's even just from the cost of goods is not the right answer. Your number needs to be around 2.5. And why is  it 2.5? Most Shopify businesses, if you do this math, like and please do.

There's a term I have, I've coined called one hit wonders, right? One hit wonders are, if you know Chase, songs like Last Ketchup Song, Mambo Number 5, Macarena.

Chase Clymer

Oh yeah. 

Sabir Semerkant

Gangnam Style, those are all one hit wonders, right? You have customers in your database that are one hit wonders. They came in, they gave you their money and you sent them the stuff never to be seen in their lifetime, right?

So in Shopify, just because most people run Shopify stores now, you go into your customer segments, create a segment, number of orders equal to one, just equal to one in their lifetime, entire lifetime. And then you create another segment, number of orders greater or equal to one. That's all of your customers. 

Don't look at what Shopify defines as customers, it also includes subscribers like email signups and stuff like that. Let's ignore those people. People actually have, they should have at least placed an order, right? If you divide those two numbers,  most Shopify businesses, here's the shocker.  It starts from 70% of your file to 100% of your file, and your customers are one hit wonders. They bought it only one time. 

So the argument from agencies that say, oh, you know what, don't worry about it. It's 1.5. You lost a little money, but you acquired a customer, that's cost per acquisition, right? You'll get them to buy again. No, I have 10 years of data that tells me that that doesn't happen unless you do it. That brings me to the next lesson. You have to understand customer lifecycle marketing. You have to understand recency, frequency, monetary value. And then once you master that, you could add a P to it, RFMP. P means profitability of customer segments, right?

To understand which segments in your database of customers, not prospects, that actually are profitable. And how you should treat those. And it's a very different and refreshing way of looking at your customers and your business. 

Chase Clymer

No. The nerd in me is loving math and the science here. Obviously, the return on outspend things definitely shines so bright for some people. But at 2.5, I think that's like the start of it. Also, I think that some people also suffer from maybe the flip side of that equation where their expectations are too high. They're like, if I'm not getting  10X, I can't grow my business. Well, that's fantastic. Especially now with how expensive ads are, like that might not be based in reality anymore. 

Sabir Semerkant

I always look at the root of the problem. Right? Because the thing is you want to kill things at the root or you want to address them at the root so that you can improve things. That's purely that's how I look at it. To me, the world is black and white. There is no gray. Right? So let's go down to the root of that problem. There are Ecom founders, there are Ecom business owners, Shopify business owners, right?  They treat their business like it's supposed to be their saving grace, their lottery. Right?

That they will do this thing, it will take them out of whatever, right? It's a side hustle, you know, I'm channeling Gary V, my friend, right? So,  it's a side hustle or Tim Ferriss, another friend of mine, right? So,  you're doing that, right? And then, you know, you're expecting like, oh, that side hustle, you know, I want that to become my, you know, million dollar thing and I'm gonna sell it and it's going to be somebody's going to come buy it. It's a million dollar business and is going to come buy it for 10 million dollars. But I'm going to be such a snowflake that one million dollar business is going to be a hundred million dollars. Never happens.  Never happens.  If you're going to waste your time like that and your life and  even cause  mental anguish, that's what's going to happen, right? Because you're not going to do that, right?  You know, might as well not do it.

And just do, have a dollar in a dream and go play your state's  lottery, right? Or your country's lottery, right?  I'm not condoning gambling by the way, but  that would be more reality for you than what this is. is work. It's work. You  need to respect it like work, right? And you need to do the right things with this work. And if you don't do that, what ends up happening? Reality bites you in the ass. That bite is very, very aggressive, right? Business loans out, you have credit cards up to like filled up, up to whatever. And you go like, why isn't it working? Because in your head, you think that that $1 you're giving to Meta Ad should return $10, right? 

You know, there are brands in our program that are achieving those numbers, but you know what? They had to work backwards in order to move forward, right? Paul Abdul, right? Two steps forward, one step back.

Right? You have to, there's some reality to that in business and especially in Ecomm. You have to understand what things are bad for your business. You need to get away from those things and what things you should be doing and not wasting your time and doing those things. Some things do take time. Even though there are incredible results in my program, the one thing that I promote and I preach is patience. Right? 

You have to  be the tortoise or the turtle, not the rabbit. Slow and steady. Slow and steady, you will win the race. You will achieve explosive growth in your business. But if you go with the rabbit way because you saw some TikTok bullshit, that's not going to give you any kind of win. It might give you a blip. You go like, oh, that worked. Let me put more money behind it. You put money. What happens? You put money behind it. And then you go like, oh, it didn't work. It failed.

So that's the kind of stuff that you have to be smart about. Do the right things for your business and always question why. Like if somebody tells you to do this, like why should I do  it? Give me proof that this is gonna work.  Ask the why question. Most Ecomm founders ask what should I do and how should I do it? Wrong questions.  Be an engineer like Xavier. 

Start with the why. Like, why are we doing this? What question could be, what are we testing?  How should we  set up our tests to learn from this test? And then everything you do should start with a bucket of tests, and then they get promoted. The ones that get promoted to an actual campaign are the ones that actually prove in themselves that they actually work. Or you retest them until you get it right, or you demote them to, no, this is garbage, this doesn't work. Literally, that should be every day of your Ecomm life. 

Chase Clymer

You're so correct. It's the tortoise and the hare. It's like compounding growth. That 1% every day wins out every time compared to just a flash in the pan, a stroke of luck, trying here and there. 

Sabir Semerkant

Yeah, it's a blip. You did a flash sale. Okay. That explains why your revenue for that one day went to 70%. Right? Can you do that every day?

But you're not a flash sale site, you're a luxury brand, you can't do that, right? So  fundamentally, go back to the root, address the root. It could be your product positioning, it could be your brand positioning, it could be your storytelling. 

As a founder, why aren't you in front of the camera talking about and taking questions about your category, right? You sell gardening supplies, why aren't you in a garden being filmed showing people how to treat the soil and how to  make the cucumber thing snake up and make sure that you cut the bottom parts of the tomato plant. I do some gardening, right?  So I'm giving you that example, right? If you are that gardening  Ecomm founder, why aren't you doing that, right? But the thing is, Scott's doesn't do it. That's the big industry guy, right? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, but you're not Scott. 

Sabir Semerkant

Yeah, Scott's doesn't have a founder. You  are the founder. You know how many people are looking to  listen to your advice because on camera you're showing them exactly the truth of what to treat your soil with, how to fertilize it, how to find out that this plant, this soil needs more calcium. So egg shells are the easiest way to do it, right? 

Cheap. You eat eggs, crush them down, put them into the soil, right? You should be doing that in front of the camera. And that's your social media content. That's your email. That's your blog article. That's your video long form on YouTube, right? That's the point of it, right? You could do that with fashion. You could do that with jewelry. It doesn't matter if you're a discount brand or if you are an ultra luxury brand like Globe-Trotter that has existed since 1897, right? 

They did these 80 methods that we should talk about, right?  They went and tried out Ryan who runs their Ecommerce, tried it in three different markets, Japan,  UK and EU and US and Canada, and saw that  this applies regardless of what your language is or currency or your markets because consumer behavior is different, right?

So I tried it out. 333% increase in 6 weeks. And then just kept on going deeper and deeper and deeper to implement every aspect of the 8D method. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Let's pivot, dude. Let's get into the 8D method. So it is a framework. And I don't know, you explain it a lot better than I do. I'm going to slaughter what it is because it's a lot of value. 

Sabir Semerkant

So 8D stands for 8 dimensions. Where did it come from? It's 25 years of trial and error  and sleepless nights. Is, by the way, this Dwayne Johnson cut on my hair is not a fashion statement. There are no more follicles left, you know, because I've lost it all. You all the strands and,  you know, growing that one billion dollars, right? So from that, everything, I shared three lessons for you, right? But we look at  the framework in eight dimensions. That's why it's the 8D method, right?

So it's eight dimensions. What I learned over time is that  you cannot look at Ecommerce and treat it like a single  dimension thing or even a sub dimension.  What do most Ecom founders do?  Most Ecom businesses and brands are set up to  go live on  Shopify. What's the next natural thing that they do? Meta ads. That's pretty much it. You'll be shocked. There are so many Shopify businesses, they don't even look at email marketing.

And let alone SEO optimization. But Sabir,  AI, AI,  AI, nobody cares about SEO. No, you should really care about SEO. The death of your brand is going to be the fact that AI came in and you did not do SEO because AI depends on content on your site, right? In order to build context on those LLMs. So even in the age of AI, it is ultra important for you to do SEO, right?

But that's just the marketing channels, organic and paid, right? That's just one aspect of one dimension or sub dimension of these eight dimensions, right? So let's go through them. What are these eight dimensions? I start with dimension one. You've already invested in infrastructure. Let's optimize it. So it's performance optimization of the existing stack, right? But we hired a CRO guy last year. We spent 15, 10, 15,000, 25, insert a number depending on the size of the brand, right?

For smaller brands, they went on Fiverr and somebody said, I'll optimize your site. And they spent 500 bucks, right? Whatever they spent on. Even if you spent $25,000 or you spent $500 when they entered the program, in that first week, within the first two and half tasks of the performance optimization, they see 79% increase in their revenue. They were like, what did I pay for? I said, I didn't hire those people. You did, right? Why did you hire them, right?

I managed to squeeze out 79% growth even after you did all of that and spent so much money on it. And probably how long did it take you? Oh, they took about three months, right? Yeah, you did this in three days. You squeezed out another 79%, right? So one of the analogies I use in dimension one is squeezing out an elephant out of an ant's butt, right? Because the thing is you have no idea how blessed you are with the tech stack and marketing stack you have access to, right? Existing stuff. Let's squeeze out incredible growth from it. So that's dimension one. 

Two are pricing optimization and strategy, right? It's not couponing to debt, right? Cause everybody, oh yeah, they come in, email, sign up 15% off. They cart abandoned, give them 30% off. Oh, it's been 72 hours or two weeks. Give them 50% off. Let's get that sale and we'll figure it out. Yeah.

Figuring it out is like saying, let's hope and pray, right?  I'm here to kill hope with the AT method, right? No hope. It's planning and engineering your growth and looking at numbers and  executing and going through this flywheel. Test, learn and optimize everything you do in your business, not just marketing, right? So pricing is the second dimension. 

Third is the customer journey. Customer journey looks at when a customer comes in, regardless of where they come from, and customers come from all over the place, right, in case of digital.  And if you're a brand that does offline marketing like retail and billboards and stuff like that, you are going to be getting those kinds of things, right? So that's the customer lifecycle.

Looking at Klaviyo, looking at dynamic retargeting, looking at all of these kinds of things. How do we improve the customer lifecycle? Number four is marketing and storytelling, right? Every brand needs to do storytelling and get really good at storytelling because every consumer in the world  is buying stories. They're not buying products. Why am I buying this detergent over that detergent? 

Because, you know, it makes my kids go, oh, that's incredible. Smells great.  And you saw that ad, you know, and that got engraved into you because you got bombarded with that message for 20 times. And now you want to buy that  Gain detergent because it smells so nice. That's the ad that they run with the sniff test. And every brand really needs to get great at storytelling. And Founder is part of that storytelling.

Your category is part of storytelling. Your brand is the product that the way you're solving the problem, that's part of storytelling. That's the thing that you're marketing, right? And if you start marketing the technical aspects, oh, our packaging is on our tomato sauce, the lid is 37% better, tighter. Okay, how about that helps us keep the tomato sauce fresher, right?

What does it do for the consumer? Not you. Not boosting your ego because you decided on a better supplier. Right? That doesn't give anything to the consumer. Right?  After that, it's product positioning and brand positioning. Not every product is for everybody. Your brand is not for everybody. And if you think, oh, this works for everybody. You don't have enough budget in your marketing to storytelling and spend money on whether you're doing it organically with content or you're selling it through paid media. 

You don't have the budget for it. So we need to work on that strategy to get that going. Then we move to number six in logistics. You do a great job of everything on the front end, but if you are in that last mile and  in the bottom of it, if you are not delivering a great experience,  the consumers walk away. This is one of the symptoms of the one hit wonders also because you gave it off to your 3PL. You gave it off to your warehouse, even if you own it.

But like, those guys will get it out, right? But you never thought about what that post purchase journey looks like, right? Oh, but we do send out the reviews. Yeah, but your delivery, your customer service part of it, when the person got the package, it was a horrible experience, right? And you're wondering why aren't they coming back? Yeah, you did it. You mistreated them. But people do return our products. We don't want to care about those people. No, the return process does not mean divorce, right? You have to treat them right, right?

So that's number six. Number seven is tech optimization, tech strategy and optimization. In the age of Ecommerce, tech does matter quite a lot. You need to have the right stack, not just for Ecommerce, for your entire business in order to operate it correctly.  And number eight, and this is number eight, is something that people first blame for what's wrong with their business. I put that as the eighth dimension, your team. You need to have a team strategy. You have to have the right growth plan. You have to have the right optimization. And when I say team, I don't mean full-time people only.  

Anyone, if your mom, Chase,  you  fulfill your order, you're in that early,  less than $1 million stage. In your garage, your mom on the weekends, she's actually packing those orders and assembling the thing. And she is part of your team, right?  The 3PL you hired, that's part of your team.

That temporary hire you did on  Fiverr, that's part of your team. Everybody needs to be aligned on the other seven dimensions. They need to understand what you're doing. And as a leader, as the Ecom founder of this  Ecom brand, your responsibility is to make sure that that communication happens. The right growth happens at the right time. You treat the right people at the right time. 

You elevate them where if they actually need to be elevated, right? If it makes sense to be elevated, it's not like, oh, well, that person, Linda has been with us from the beginning, she started  taking customer service calls, now we wanna make her CMO. No,  therefore your brand,  she's not our CMO, she is the Huck, right? Don't make those kinds of bad decisions. Those are the eight dimensions. Typically, the first dimension takes about six weeks,  and each subsequent dimension takes about four weeks each, about a month, let's say, right?

And then we go through it. The guided, structured program for implementing the AT method  is called Rapid2x. And that's the premium program that we have. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And I just want to clarify here. It isn't a do-it-yourself course, but it's also not a done-for-you solution. It's like a  done-with-you guided experience.  Am I right there? Am I wrong? 

Sabir Semerkant

So before I get to that, right?

Who is Rapid2x for and who is it not for? Let's talk about that, right? That's a good question, right? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I think that'll help you answer that question. 

Sabir Semerkant

Right. Because the thing is, that's cool. Because remember, we have to find out who the audience is first before we say this is for you or not. Right. Let's go with that first. Right. So who is it not for? Right. And you pointed to it, right? Done for you.

The Ecom founder, the Ecom business owner, the Ecom brand thinks that the answer to the thing that they're trying to solve is with another person, right? It's another agency. Oh, this agency is not doing well, fire them, let's get another agency. And forever, they repeat that cycle, right? Freelancers, agency people, if you have enough budget, you have full-time people, you have part-time people, you go through this flywheel of a lot of dating, right? You're doing a lot of dating, right? No marriage. There is a lot of dating like this. But at the root of that, the problem with that Ecomm founder  is they don't appreciate knowledge. They don't appreciate expertise, right?  And when for this type of an Ecomm founder,  to them, there's always somebody to be hired that needs to solve that thing, right?

And forever, they never understand the ebb and flow of their channel. They don't understand the ebb and flow of what the KPIs are that I should care about. They don't even understand the intelligent questions they should be asking from an agency like yours, like Chase.  It would elevate your conversation with them too, right? As an agency owner, right? So they don't do that. 

But they go like, it's Chase's problem. Chase should solve this problem. And if Chase doesn't want it, fire him, go get Linda.  Go and hire another person.  And forever they're stuck in this loop and they never understand the nuances of paid media, SEO optimization, CRO, any of these kinds of things. I'm not asking them to be experts. I'm expecting them to at least appreciate the knowledge and understand what goes into it. So this group that I just took my time explaining to you, this group does not belong in Rapid2X at all.

Right?  If you don't appreciate the expertise and you're not  willing to roll up your sleeves to actually understand your business, your Ecomm business that you founded, if you don't want to do that, it's okay to utilize the talent on your team. But you need to be at the helm. You need to understand what's going on. Right? Not that, oh, somebody else's problem. Oh, they're sucking. Let's fire them. Right? 

We actually are entrepreneurs, Ecom entrepreneur test when we take interviews to see if they belong in the program or not, right? And entrepreneurs fit is part of the interview process. The other part of it is product market fit. We will talk about that, right? So this first group does not belong. Please don't even apply to the program, right? Right, because my team can sniff out if you're pretending even, right? So don't do that. Because if you think like, oh, you know what, I'm going to hire

Sabir is going to do this for me. Nope, not doing it. Right. You cannot afford me. You cannot afford me. Right. The likes of venture capital firms and Canon and huge budgets can afford me one on one. Right. You cannot afford me on a one on one basis. So who is a fit? You're an entrepreneur that appreciates knowledge. You want to learn this thing. You want to, you're willing to roll up your sleeve and you're thinking, oh, this might be a less than one million dollar business. No.

We have had brands that are a $10 million business and they got stuck. Like every business when it goes through those life cycles from 0 to 100, you get stuck. From 100 to 250, you get stuck. From 250 per year, 250 to 500, 500 to 1 million, several brands that worked with us, 1 to 1.5 on that path. 1.2 million got stuck. 1.3 million got stuck, right? And stuck for years, not just a couple of months or anything like that with mounting losses, right?

Several case studies of that are on my website. We can go through a few of them here if you would like, right? So this group really appreciates it. When they get into the program, they put the blinders on, they go like, Sabir have 25 years. I have 18 months of experience in Ecommerce or three years of experience or 10. He is 25 years old. I gave birth to a lot of technologies that you see today in Ecommerce, right? That's how long I've been in this, right?

Sounds like a very old guy, Bob, on your block, right? So I've been there  for a long time, because the thing is I have actually created  quite a few of these things from the ground up, because nothing like it  existed.  In the case of Vitamin Shop, there was no Ecommerce search engine. Nothing like it existed. So I created my own. I actually, while writing my email update to Jeff,  Jeff Horowitz, the founder of Vitamin Shop,  I started writing in my own search engine by Sabir. Go like, ooh, that's cool.

It actually is Moses, M-O-S-E-S, is my own search engine by Sabir. When I mentioned Moses to him, he goes like, oh, biblical, parting of the sea, what cool thing are you doing? I said, no, no, no, nothing to do with the Bible. This  is  an acronym, it's my own search engine by Sabir. He started laughing, right? And that thing, actually, we laughed to the bank, right?  From less than 3% conversion rate, 12% conversion rate increase, right? 4X in conversion rate boost just by changing the search engine to make it more relevant because I had beta tested Google. 

Relevancy had played a huge role. So I took that. It sounds obvious today. I took that and applied the same kind of logic to my own search engine that I had developed myself. So it's that's the kind of entrepreneur they put the blinders on like Sabir has the experience. Whatever he tells me, I'm going to do it. And it's very easy, by the way.

You know, the thing is I'm reasonable. I'm not going to give you something ridiculous for you to do because I know how long certain things take because I've done it a thousand times, right? So Monday through Friday, there are five fingers on our hands. There are five days in a week, Monday through Friday. Do one task on Monday, second one on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, right? Five of them. How long do these tasks take? If you have the expertise, I'll explain what that means.

15 minutes to 90 minutes, that's it. That's all you have to dedicate each day. The rest of the day, you're running your business, whatever you need to do, right? But I don't have the expertise. We actually have Rapid2x approved partners who have gone through Rapid2x training and they understand exactly what they need to do. They have the prescription that we have given, that we give to you as a business owner. If you have the expertise, do it. If you have a team member, do that. 

But I don't know if your team member has the right level of art and science aspect of the skill set in order for them to actually go deep with that implementation. And deep means instead of spending just 15 minutes, you're spending 90 minutes on it on the task to get it done. And that's all it is, right? Every week, that's all you're doing. In fact, when you're even working on the dimensions, if you go through the guided, you know, because everything I do is live sessions, you know, there are no recorded stuff, you know, there are some tutorials that in order to save time, you could watch it, but everything is workshopped live, right?

So in that kind of scenario,  when you're working from dimension two through eight, you're working on two, maximum of two tasks in a week, right? So I even cut down the number of tasks you do because now you're doing a lot of the performance optimization, email marketing, you're doing better and stuff like that from the dimension one. I know that you're working on that and you're busy with that. So when you're working on getting the rest of the dimensions done, I lessen the workload just to make sure that you get everything done.

and you make progress with the other dimensions and stuff like that. And that's where there are so many brands, you can see their testimonial on the site. And by the way, we have set up a special offer for your listeners so that they can get $500 off of the Rapid 2X program and they can come to us and that would be, they just have to go to growthbysevere.com slash honest, just like this podcast. 

The podcast name, you could include it in the show notes and descriptions and stuff. So they can just click on it because I have a unique name as part of my brand name, right? So growthbysabir.com, slash honest. And  when they come through that, they'll get $500 off the program's cost. And it's highly attainable. We have brands that make about 100k a year, right? And they're part of the program and they want to  set the right foundation, can afford it. 

We have actually worked on payment plans and other types of things like that to make it ultra affordable.  And we have also deals for the brands who could pay out  from the get-go for the entire year's program. That's a membership. We have options for that too. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Sabir, it's been amazing talking with you today. We'll make sure to link to

That specific offer in the show notes today, again, that's growthbysabir.com. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all those amazing insights. 

Sabir Semerkant

Chase, it's been great. And thank you for sharing your platform with me. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. I'm sure I'll have you back again soon. We've already talked about it secretly behind the scenes. Oh, yeah. 

Sabir Semerkant

By the way, listeners, I'm going to do a little bit of a promotion with you. Definitely stay tuned to this podcast, to the Honest Podcast.

We have planned an incredible comeback episode that we will do. I'll give you a small hint. It has to do with the holidays. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. 

Sabir Semerkant

That's it. Then I'll let Chase do his thing that he needs to do with the audience to tease it out when time comes. 

Chase Clymer

Thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Sabir Semerkant

Thank you.  

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!