Bonus Episode: Finding Elite Talent for Your Ecom Business with Tim Masek

Tim Masek is the CMO of Storetasker, the largest platform to hire high-end Ecommerce talent. With a deep background in growth and Ecommerce enablement, Tim has played a pivotal role in connecting top-tier freelancers with Shopify merchants, helping brands scale with expert support.

Before joining Storetasker, Tim founded and sold 1-800-D2C, a go-to platform that helped Ecommerce operators discover the best software solutions. His expertise in building marketplaces and curating specialized talent has made him a sought-after voice in the future of hiring and the evolution of freelance networks in Ecommerce.

Passionate about the intersection of talent and technology, Tim continues to shape the way brands access expert freelancers, ensuring that Storetasker remains the trusted hub for Shopify’s growing ecosystem.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:46] Intro
• [01:04] Connecting brands with top talent
• [02:33] Targeting specific pain points
• [04:36] Expanding services strategically
• [08:20] Finding the right DTC marketer
• [09:31] Matching talent by industry
• [10:19] Avoiding marketplace dilution
• [12:52] Building brand equity first
• [13:50] Balancing full-time and freelance
• [17:40] Running lean without full-time hires

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Connect With The Best Shopify Experts storetasker.com/
• Follow Tim Masek linkedin.com/in/timmasek
  

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Transcript

Tim Masek

We see successful teams who have full-time generalists on their payroll. And then they pick at part-time contractors and freelancers to do really specific tasks. 

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 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 Tim Masek to the show. He is the CMO of Storetasker, the largest platform to hire high-end Ecomm talent. Tim, welcome to the show. 

Tim Masek

Thanks, Chase. Yeah, pleasure to be here and excited to chat. 

Chase Clymer

Oh yeah, me too. I think if you've been in the Shopify ecosystem for longer than a week, you probably heard of Storetasker. How long have you been over there helping them grow? 

Tim Masek

Yeah. So I've been there for 3 years now. And the business is about five years old. So the interesting story about Storetasker is it used to be called Lorem in the early days. It was a talent marketplace at the time the way it is now. The difference then and now is that it used to be focused on anything digital. 

So you could go to Lorem and find a person to help you with Zapier integrations or like your Webflow sites and stuff like that. And then as of a few years ago, we completely switched to focus on the Shopify ecosystem. And yeah, it's been a good ride. 

So we started off just having freelance devs. That's evolved a lot. And now we have new skill sets on the network. And we're starting to think about not even just having freelancers, but also potentially having studios. So I think that's how you and I started speaking a little bit.

Thinking about Electric Eye and thinking, okay, is there a fit for you guys to be a studio in our network so we can start sending you leads from brands that are looking to work with some of the best-of-class Shopify agencies? 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And you just blew my mind. I remember, Loram, I remember when the branding changed. But I probably would have never thought about that again unless you mentioned it now. But I do remember the Lorem website. It was really cool. 

So I guess the first question there to give some free advice to all the listeners out there, what do you think was the power in focusing on one ecosystem and one specific. Let's call it TASK for lack of a better term, as Storetasker was building out its initial offering.

Tim Masek

Yeah, I think it really comes down to having a point of view and having really tight messaging around that point of view. When you're scattered and you're trying to solve lots of different problems, you're having to communicate to lots of different buyers. It just makes your message a lot more diluted. 

When you have a strong POV on, okay, we're just going to focus on Shopify Dev, your message becomes a lot clearer.Then you can easily get to understand that market really well. For a very specific pain point, it would be really difficult to fully understand the different pain points if you're trying to tackle lots of different areas or industries. 

I think really just focusing on Shopify allows us to have a very crisp message and to get to understand the pain points of merchants really well. And that buyer is quite unique as opposed to somebody who's interested in Zapier and somebody who's interested in Webflow and somebody who's doing some Shopify stuff. They all have different personas. But all Shopify merchants do hang out in the same spaces. They do have similar challenges that they're looking to solve. And so it just becomes a lot clearer and a lot crisper to speak to them. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. An example I always like to use when talking about the power of niching down and really developing a core offering and a core ICP ideal customer profile. Who do you call when your roof is leaking? 

You call a roofer that is known for a specific problem and being able to solve it allows the customers to come to you in their time of need, whereas you're not going to call a general contractor if your roof is leaking. 

So when you take that same analogy and apply it to Ecommerce development, if it's a jack of all trades, master of none, maybe I'm not going to ask them to help me with my website when I have a specific need on a specific platform. I'm going to go for somebody that is well versed in Shopify. 

Tim Masek

Yeah. So I think that's a really good point. What's super interesting about our space as well is because there's other players building out. 

I've started to really enjoy and develop a passion for talent marketplaces. I think they're such a cool business proposition. Because basically, it's like solving talent gaps in quite an efficient way without having to set up too many processes and stuff like that. So I really like talent marketplaces as a whole.

What's interesting about Storetasker though is like we started off with Shopify dev. So talk about your roofer example there. But then we realized that we're in the business of building a home, let's say, with the example of the roofer. And so you might add a house cleaner and you might add a gardener. You might add somebody who's really good at creating fences and stuff like that. And so you can add services but still around the home.

And with Storetasker, we've done that. So we started off with devs, freelance devs, and then we added freelance marketers, and then designers as well. We've also added Ecomm managers to the mix. And now we're thinking about adding agencies and young studios onto the platform. But it's all still the same message and the same customer base, because these are Shopify merchants that we're speaking to, and they have some of those same problems.

So when we first expanded into design and marketing, it was because our customers were asking, okay, great, you've hooked us up with an amazing dev. Do you have a cool marketer that we should speak with? Because we need to run some paid social media and we just don't have anyone. So that's really quite crisp. And it was an easy extension for us to do. It felt quite natural, which is a little bit different. And I'm not saying it's bad, but if you look at other players, I think of marketerhire.com, for example.

Great business, I think they've done quite well. But their niche is, the way our niche is Ecommerce, their niche is marketers. The issue I find in that model, and again, they've made it work. So it's an issue that I see, but it's not an issue that they've obviously experienced because they've been successful, is that the buyers are all different. Because a marketer who's worked at Uber, is very impressive and that might be useful for a certain type of business, but it's not useful for Shopify business. 

And so they're having to actually speak to lots of different buyers, lots of different customers that have different pain points in a way that we don't struggle with that as much because we can just speak to Shopify merchants. So yeah, there's something interesting there. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I mean, I say that all the time. When I'm talking with prospects or even clients, it's like, hey, at Electric Eye, we don't offer any marketing or advertising services because we understand the power of being really good at one thing. Now we have opinions and we can definitely help people find people. And the power of a network is like one of the secret assets of a good agency. 

But you hit the nail on the head with if someone is a great marketer at, say a Fortune 50 startup, that doesn't mean that they can help you break your brand new D2C brand. Those are two different avenues. They're marketing to the mass market. They've got unlimited budgets. They can do crazy things that you don't have. 

So often when I'm talking with prospects or clients about marketing, I go like, hey, whoever you hire, a freelancer, an agency, whatever, make sure they have a case study that they've done the thing you're asking for before, and they can prove it with numbers. Because that is really the best way to make sure that your investment isn't going to go belly up. 

Tim Masek

Totally agree. Yeah. And that's why when we highlight, when we work with brands that are thinking about using Storetasker, etc. One of the best things we can do is say, okay, well, you're in the jewelry space. Here's XYZ who used to run growth for studs. 

Here's another person who used to run, who did design for another one of your competitors. And you start to, you know, they start to really get impressed by that and seeing that a lot of the network that we have on Storetasker, these are very talented people who have worked in super relevant companies in the past. And I think that that sets us apart from a lot of other folks. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And I really want to highlight something that you skimmed over. And this is a little inside baseball. This is definitely more about building a service business and building an agency or an agency adjacent model, which I think Storetasker is kind of an adjacent model. It's a service business at the end of the day. 

But the power of niching down, right? You guys started with development. I literally made a comment on Reddit about this the other day. But it's like you niche down into one thing and then your customers told you the other services they wanted.

weren't guessing what they wanted you to expand your service line with. They told you straight up they wanted designers. 

They're like, we have great development. We need a designer for this. And solving for the needs of a market that's already asking you to solve that problem is just a cheat code in building a business, instead of trying to invent a solution to a problem you may not have a market to solve for. Does that make sense to you? 

Tim Masek

Yeah, totally. It sounds easy from our perspective, when you think about the Storetasker story now in terms of us expanding into those other skill sets, because that's quite intuitive. But I think when we go back to those early days of Lorem, you just listen to your customers. I wasn't there for that early period, so it's hard for me to really speak on it. 

But I do recall that because you're getting so many requests from so many different types of buyers. Some are experienced, some are super junior folks, some have a business, some are freelancers, they just need to get something done. Some want to get something done on Webflow, others on Zapier, etc. 

So if you do just listen to those problems to solve, you end up not really having that POV that we talked about earlier and kind of getting lost in terms of like where you fit into the world, especially when you compare yourself to like the mega marketplaces, the Walmart's of talent marketplaces, it would like Upwork and Fiverr and stuff like that. 

I think you kind of get lost in that way with that. So I think you're totally right about listening to your customers and letting that guide you. But I think it did take some really smart thinking from the team at Storetasker to say. Well, let's actually make a real bet on having authority in the Shopify space. And build a strong foundation there. And then that's when we were really able to lean into the demands from our customers and expand a little bit further from there. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I bet. Not that I'm going back on what I just said, but I think there was a smart play before the second smart play, which the first smart play was. Yeah, they dabbled in a few different things. And then they listened to their customers back then. Back when it was Lorem, they see traction in a specific niche, which is Shopify. Their message is really resonating with those customers. 

So closing, narrowing their focus back then to build up that customer base and to build up that message and to build that brand equity was the first smart decision. And then once they have a real business adding more lines to increase profitability, those are both very smart maneuvers. But doing them the other way around, I think would be probably impossible, to be really honest. 

Tim Masek

Yeah. And that's how it all happened. 

Chase Clymer

Now I want to talk about just the power of a marketplace, like Storetasker. We're hiring all the time at the agency, full-time, part-time, adjunct work for overflow stuff, whatever. Freelancers work constantly meeting new people. 

And it's unfortunate when you're going it alone. And I can only see how scary it would be for a brand owner when they can't afford to make mistakes and they don't have as much experience hiring for these specific tasks. So their bullshit meter isn't as in tune as perhaps mine or Sean's is. Talk about the advantages of a vetted marketplace like that where you guys are doing the hard work for us. So it's like, yeah, this guy or gal definitely knows what they're talking about. 

Tim Masek

Yeah. That's the value we provide. We've gone out and we've found some of the most talented folks you can find in Ecomm. We vet people very thoroughly and we just go out. We also leverage a lot of referrals from our network to make sure we bring in smart new folks that are known in the space.

We look for real resumes, people who have worked at the top agencies, people who have worked at the top DTC brands, etc. and gone freelance. And then we're evaluating them from a technical skills standpoint. The second thing that you need to evaluate people for though is, are they going to be good? Are they going to be a good freelancer for you? Do they have good project management skills? Are they going to deliver their work on time, etc.?

It's not just the technical, but you also really have to have the human component, especially when folks are working in a remote fashion because you just can't call people out as much when things aren't in person. So that's where we spend all of our time is really getting great folks in the door. And then when we have them in the door, then it's always a treat for the brands because they get introduced to somebody who's spectacular.

One of the benefits is they may not need to hire a full-fledged agency to do a piece of work. They might just need somebody to come in one to two days a week as an individual freelancer. They're not having to pay a premium for an agency to do something bigger than they actually need. And so in some instances, it's very well justified to bring on an Electric Eye.

That's going to take, you're going to need multiple people involved. You're going to need a PM, you're going to need a designer, you're going to need a marketer, you're going to need a developer, etc. You need a lot of components. Having an entity that can piece everything together is quite important and critical. But in other instances, when you're not building a new site from scratch, which is as a Shopify business, you're not building a new site from scratch every other day, you're doing that every couple of years, maybe, right? 

During that time, you're going to need to work with individuals on a more fractional basis. We see successful teams who have full-time generalists on their payroll. And then they pick at part-time contractors and freelancers to do really specific tasks and they're picking from the best in the world. I think Storetasker allows people to have access to that talent in a very simple and seamless way. 

Chase Clymer

Especially with just how Shopify has built their products, it allows you to build a fractional business. Most brands that are doing under 8 figures don't need a full-time developer. They can get away with these fractional hires and finding partners in a way that can help them solve those things. And it's just the power of the Shopify ecosystem. And I really do believe that finding talented people that can work ad hoc is a key to being profitable and to staying in business. 

Tim Masek

Yeah. And those people have to be trustworthy. Because at the end of the day, you are trusting them with your code. You're trusting them with access to your ad account, etc. So it can't just be anyone. I think Storetasker has a real value out there and just like embedding these individuals, we monitor the individuals we have in our network in terms of the work that they do and how well they're rated and all these different things. 

So we have eyes on all these things. But to your more general point around brands not needing to have such a bloated full-time team. I think that's true now more than ever before. It's going to continue to be increasingly true. I see it like I've spoken to some many great founders who run extremely sizable businesses with maybe one full-time employee. That full-time employee is usually two founders.

One who's quite savvy from a digital standpoint and the other one who's very good product-wise from a product development standpoint. And then the higher they bring on is somebody who's extremely good from a logistics and operations standpoint. That's the team. That's the team that can get you quite far. And then they bring on a freelance paid social person, freelance designer to redesign the sites of a developer to update their theme and all these things. 

With just that one single full-time employee, they can get extremely far. So we've seen that model time and time again. I think we're going to see it increasingly so. And it's also pretty much in tune. I think you're seeing this as well, Chase, but like it's pretty in tune with what's happening in the world today where the hot, sexy DTCs are just throwing money anywhere they can to get the best in class of everything. 

That's not the world we live in anymore. People are really trying to focus on building super strong businesses that are quite lean and get a lot of performance out of a lean and mean structure. So that lends itself quite well to hiring contractors as opposed to having large bloated full-time teams. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. The days of venture capital in Ecommerce are gone. I just read an article the other day that another roll-up is getting sued and busted by lying to its investors. So that's a conversation for another day. Now, Tim, if I'm listening to this episode, I've got two questions that are very similar. But if I'm listening to this episode and I'm a brand, right? And I'm curious to learn more about Storetasker. What should I do? Where should I go? 

Tim Masek

So go on Storetasker.com and you can submit a request right there on the site. It's super simple. Website URL, you describe what you're looking to achieve, and the type of expert that you're looking for, and then we'll help match you to the right individual. That's one way. And then that's the way everybody does it. But if you are listening to the podcast, would happily speak to you on a one-to-one basis and help you.

A more bespoke way, maybe show you a profile or two of folks who I think can help you out and tell you more about Storetasker in detail. So feel free to contact me and just reach out to me via social. You can find me on LinkedIn. And Chase, I think we can share some links on that. But you can find me on LinkedIn and I'm also active on Twitter. So either of those platforms works. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. We'll make sure to link to that stuff in the show notes. Now, on the flip side of it, we've got a lot of freelancers that listen to the show and some other agency folks, and if they're looking to potentially get into the Storetasker ecosystem and help support these brands, what should they do? 

Tim Masek

Yeah. So there's a simple application process also on the website. So go on Storetasker.com. You'll see there's an “Apply to join as an expert”. Fill that form out. That will get flagged to our team. We review every single application. And we will reach out if there's a good fit and bring you on to the network. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Tim Masek

Cool. And Chase, it was really fun. And thank you so much. 

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!