How to Build the Online Bologna Store of Your Dreams | Episode 20

Bologna. Is it meat? The jury is still out, but what Jerry, err Gary, and David are certain of is making a e-commerce store is a lot harder than the latest Wix ad might suggest…

This week the guys discuss all the various pieces, parts, and hurdles that come with building a good online store. And yes, there is some bologna involved.

Here are the links to all mentioned articles/videos in this episode:

The Verge - It’s pronounced "neft"
BBC - DeepMind AI rivals average human competive coder
Newsweek - My face mask has a first name; it's O-S-C-A-R: Oscar Mayer introduces beauty product

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

David: 0:00

Did you like bologna growing up? Did you? Did you take the little red piece of plastic? Why didn't bologna out of all the lunch meats have the plastic that you had to remove on every slice?

Gary: 0:09

I don't I remember, was it. There was some kind of a worst that had that plastic on it. What was it? Let me know. Was it liverwurst maybe ever worse to just got into a worse day?

David: 0:24

Yeah, just how did you come up with my mom loves liver. Just loved it.

Gary: 0:31

I couldn't even be in the house when my parents made it. I literally I got so nauseated by just the smell of them cooking liver that I would have to leave the house. Because they we used to make like liver and onions for like a sandwich or whatever. I couldn't even tolerate

David: 0:45

that's brussel sprouts in my house. Whenever those are cooked. My son calls them German fart balls. Because they think our house, so we always, someone's cooking on we have to leave the German part balls for being Hi, everyone. Welcome to the biz dev Podcast. I'm David Baxter. I'm your host today and I'm joined by Jerry, my co host for the day.

Gary: 1:15

It's Gary, how you doing Jerry are a GIF or Jerry Gary, but

David: 1:20

it types it ties in to our first conversation, which I thought was funny, but we're going to be talking about NF T's briefly. The Verge is is making a steak that they should call it a NEFT not in Ft.

Gary: 1:38

And if you don't know the Verge is a very popular tech related website that kind of covers all the newest stuff tech related.

David: 1:44

So well a lot of articles come from that cuz they're my favorite. Yeah, but so they are they're putting a stake in the ground saying instead of NFT it should be called NAFTA. Now I seriously doubt it is going to get any wind. But in big pixel, it got us chatting. And then it came down to is it GIF? Or is it GIF? I have always a GIF. I know that's wrong. But it is GIF officially, right?

Gary: 2:10

Yeah. Well, GIF itself stands for graphic image format. So

David: 2:15

there you go. That's the official thing. So the the joke I guess came out is Gary tried to say it's Gary not Jerry. And that was he

Gary: 2:26

said sometimes the G can be pronounced as a j and i understand like maybe a name like Jeffrey if it's G O like Joffrey but no, not in the real world. That's only a made up Movieland.

David: 2:38

I do think I am intrigued to see if this will get any traction. I don't know if it will I doubt it will people I guess we'll just always call them fts. And I think

Gary: 2:47

it was just more for fun for the people that work at the verge because they're having to say it a lot. And I think they were just trying to make it less syllables. Because they were also complaining about saying www as nine syllables and it takes too long. It's Oh man,

David: 3:01

I remember back in the day when the internet was just getting popular. We're talking 20 years ago, 18 years ago. And they were calling it you know, it had all these names. It was the World Wide Web, that information superhighway. Oh, that was the best. The what was the other ones? There's just there were tons

Gary: 3:21

of just online meant just the interviewer online.

David: 3:25

He everything. Everything was he. And then Apple came around and everything became I. I just found it interesting. Anyway, that's not really a great article to talk about in depth. But I thought that was funny. And I had to make fun of Jerry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's last time.

Gary: 3:39

You're not so you did it on purpose.

David: 3:41

I totally did it on purpose. I will I won't. I'll try not to do it again. Maybe. Alright, let's move on to the next article. This one was really interesting. This one was from the BBC. The way it was from all over the place, but I'm looking at it from the BBC DeepMind, which I believe is an IBM product set, right? No,

Gary: 3:59

I think it's a Google product.

David: 4:01

It's a Google product. Okay. They I'm trying to look real quick. It doesn't really say

Gary: 4:07

owned artificial intelligence company. DeepMind.

David: 4:09

What is what is IBM called? Blue. Now they have Watson. Maybe that's Cortana or is that? No, that's Microsoft. Okay. That's Microsoft. So okay, so

Gary: 4:19

everyone.

David: 4:20

I think this is Watson. They were the ones who went to Jeopardy. No. Okay. So there's this but that that leads us into there's this big push for all these massive companies that have way too much money on their hands to figure out really high end AI. You've seen them. Some of them played chess, some play Go, which is really, really popular in China.

Gary: 4:38

Some may come play video games, horrible paintings, some make

David: 4:42

bad paintings, some make music, where they're making more like electronic beats. There is some that play video games, solve puzzles. And now there's one Google's now is taking on coding, which ties in everyone asks me I mean all the time that, hey, are you going to be you as a developer? Are you going to be replaced by no code? Or are you going to be replaced by artificial intelligence? I can't speak for the future, but probably not in my lifetime. But like right now, this guy, this deep mind thing, it now is considered it that the headline sounds amazing. DeepMind AI rivals average human competitive coder. It sounds like I'm out of a job, right? Boom, bam, that's scary course it made me click it right, cuz I have to read that.

Gary: 5:37

If you're learning how to code and you see a headline like that, you're just like, What am I doing? Why am I even trying? They,

David: 5:43

when you dig down deep? All they're saying is this thing. There are coding competitions, online ones, they're, they've been around forever. They kind of ways to say, Are you a good coder or not? And usually, they're very abstract. And they're trying to make you think, not necessarily a business problem, you would actually solve for a client. They're they're just theoretical problems that are difficult to solve. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying they're easy. But they're they're relatively esoteric. So what they did was there's a company called Alpha code, which is one of these companies that do these challenges. And they gave DeepMind, the AI thing, contests 1010 of them, and said, Hey, go solve these. And they did, which is amazing. That taking any credit away from from Google, it's amazing that they finished them.

Gary: 6:31

They compared the results of DeepMind to 5000 other human participants,

David: 6:37

and it ranked better than average. Bears amazing.

Gary: 6:41

Better than average. But yeah, it is still it's still amazing. It's still nice.

David: 6:45

It's so I mean it, they get credit where credit's due. But the bigger question is, is am I about to lose my job? No. And I think the simple thing is the human part of my job is deciding how to best help my client. Right? That's the hardest part of our job is to decide what to build. Not necessarily the actual building, the building is hard. Please don't get me wrong. But not building the wrong thing is also hard. And that's the strategic side of it. That requires its own that's more of the art form behind it. Now sounds hoity toity, I don't mean it to be but

Gary: 7:21

Well, it's actually thinking that needs to go into

David: 7:24

this. And that's going to be much, much harder for an AI to come up with now, what I could totally see in the next 1015 years, maybe I could totally see that after you've decided what you're going to build. And you know, you need to go and do X, Y and Z tasks. These are laid out there ready to go. They're all backend, let's say there's no UI involved in these, like, I've got to go and import a CSV and process the data and put it in my database, right? That is a task probably in the future, we'll be able to just say, hey, go do this. You know, I'm going to give you the an example. CSV file, which is a comma delimited list, by the way. Yeah. And I'm going to give that to a computer of some sort. And they write the code that will parse it and turn it into database. I could totally see that happening in the next decade.

Gary: 8:14

So it's like an automated process on steroids with like, predictive abilities.

David: 8:19

Yeah, like right now in the newest version of Visual Studio, which just came out like a month ago, which is what dotnet coders used to write code, they now have a bunch of things that help you predict what you're about to type. And it's neat, it's super handy. It'll, you know, if you're doing a loop or whatever, it'll, it'll finish it out for you with just a little double tab. And, and it's really nice, but it's wrong. Like it's guessing what I need. It's wrong, probably half the time.

Gary: 8:45

So what are the non coders out there? It's like the predictive text in an email or on your

David: 8:49

iPhone, correct message very similar to the predictive text you see in Gmail nowadays, which in in the average, Joe knows that that predictive text is right, maybe half the time, and it is Andy. And I think that's really where we're at. And so if you're asking, Can AI, do it? No, no, they can't. But it's impressive step forward. I do think at some point, they will be good enough. I don't think that that's out of the question. I just don't think it's going to be in the next 20 or 30 years. I think we have a long way to go until Skynet takes over. Yeah. Because I've gotten on this soapbox before about AI. AI is. In most startups, what I've seen is it's really more of a guy named owl than it is. But actual AI, it's doing the back who's the the marketing team is pretending. Now the big boys, Google, Microsoft, Apple, they're using AI, for sure, but it requires an enormous amount of resources to do it right. And the bang for your buck is pretty low except for specific tasks. Now, that is changing very fast. And one Joe was just named Mark Cuban, you know But that guy on the obscure guy

Gary: 10:02

that's like do something with like a basketball team or something.

David: 10:06

He does a lot of things. He is he's an amazing person. I like his gruffness, a lot of heat. But most people would listen to this and know him from Shark Tank. Yeah, he also owns the Dallas Mavericks. He's just a very opinionated tech guy. But he's he's of the opinion that the future of tech is going to be the AI haves versus the have nots. And the big boys who can in vest in these vast amounts of money and data and services and all that will have such an advantage in the future, that it'll be really hard to compete with them.

Gary: 10:38

Yeah, they'll have more control over the the industry, I guess you could say.

David: 10:42

And that's going to be across a lot of industries. I mean, that's a kind of a dystopian view. But AI is coming. But it's not coming in the way of Skynet, and Terminator, and all that scary stuff. In our lifetimes. It's coming in ways that make businesses more efficient. Google tried and failed, I should note, to add something to the Android that would make it so that they could call and make like a restaurant reservation for you. They would call the place. They would listen to the human understand the human, tell them that you need the table for six or 730 and engage in that whole conversation and you didn't have to be a part of it.

Gary: 11:16

As long as that conversation only went the one way. Yeah, there was no questions thrown in there.

David: 11:25

And so they had to they had to pull it back because it wasn't ready for primetime. But that's coming and cool, neat. I like it. But that requires such a level of perfection. Because even if you think about like we use if anybody's noticed on our podcast, we have a transcription of our podcast, which just basically is a robot for lack of a better term, who's listening to my dulcet tones and Gary and squealing and laughter and it turns it into, you know, speech. And if you ever read our transcripts, they're pretty funny, because they're probably right 85% of the time. But when the wrong boy there was

Gary: 12:07

it is pretty funny when they are. You mentioned no code earlier. Like one of the other questions that you get is, are no code tools going to replace programmers in the future?

David: 12:19

I think it follows in the same same track. I think that no code is getting better and better and better. We talked about that are in another episode. Yeah, they're they're getting better. And they're getting more sophisticated, but they're not cheap. For one. People think no code means free. Not true. No. But I think they also are, though, the real hard part is just like a Wix website, or a Squarespace website. Or any of them take your pick. Yeah, they're they make making a website much, much easier than it is for if you want to build a customer from scratch, for sure. But there's an art to it, that if you don't know what you're doing, it's still you can make some really, really ugly websites, you still need a pro to do it. And that's what I think a lot of people don't realize, I mean, Squarespace and Wix. And all of those guys, they make it seem like anybody can do it. And technically you can.

Gary: 13:16

And they do offer some templates that are built in, they look good. And if you follow the template precisely and just change out images, which are of the same high quality that they're used.

David: 13:26

Yeah. See, that's the kicker. People don't have images the way that they had those

Gary: 13:29

if the copy is written the same way. Yeah, exactly. So they can give you the shell. And you could throw the stuff in there. But without knowing, you know, or having the eye forward or knowing how to write copy. Or just knowing the visual flow and a hierarchy of what that website what stories are telling what information is it trying to give the user, it can go horribly wrong, no matter how good the template is, or how easy it is to create.

David: 13:55

I mean, I think there's going to be a fleet of other probably already is, I guess, fivers full of these guys where you just that guy does have the talent you need right it's way cheaper than hiring someone like us who's going to build a completely from scratch. But for that Fiverr guy for probably a few 100 bucks you can have a guy who has an eye for design and can find good photos on up Unsplash and all of those things and can write you decent copy and you know I'm saying and put that together for you for way cheaper. It's definitely not a bad idea if that's your budget, but but I think no codes the same way. It's you still got to know what you're doing. You might not need to know how to write a for loop. But you still need to know what the inputs and outputs right

Gary: 14:39

so that brings up another question, um, ecommerce and a lot of these no code platforms like Squarespace. Wix Webflow is adding some functionality in there as well. I know Shopify is basically the giant for this for E commerce. There's also a lot of other websites where if you could just you put up your product, you name a price and they take care of it. everything else. But when it comes to like a small business, if they're starting a website where they're trying to sell things to people online? What is the difference between just a premade ecommerce shell versus something that might be specific that might require some taxes?

David: 15:17

So I want to I want to take that question. I want to take a step back. Because I think what you're you're tapping into is, how does ecommerce work? I've got it, I'm selling my T shirts. How do I go online? What's involved in that? Right? And that's the larger conversation. And we get asked that a lot. Friends, family, people aren't really hiring us or anything. I've got an idea. I've got a I want to sell T shirts, I want to sell a hat, I want to sell my perfume, so whatever. And how do I do that? And there is a those ads for all those places. Squarespace, Shopify Bigcommerce. They make it sound so easy, which is great. They've made it world's easier than it used to be. But there's a lot of gotchas that I think get forgotten about. And that's what I think is worth diving into a bit today. For our meat potatoes section here.

Gary: 16:08

Yeah, also, sites like Teespring, or Threadless, or something where you could just upload your mediocre artwork, and then share that with everybody that follows you on Twitter, hopefully someone will buy a shirt. And then you get a small percentage.

David: 16:23

Yeah, I think you've got you've got the concept of, I want to sell a t shirt. So why don't I use that? If if you're going to do that, if there's already a marketplace for what you're selling, I would say step one is to do that.

Gary: 16:41

Yeah. But then you people want to take it more, they want to take ownership of it, and then put out their own products as themselves. And that's, that's, that's

David: 16:49

awesome. Yeah. But I would say, step one is to take the Etsy route, take the, the route of a threadless, if you're selling T shirts, if you're selling hats or random things, then I would say Cafe press is one that's been around forever. I don't know if they're any good anymore. But that there are equivalents to those I'm dating myself there. But what I what is important is the step is to use someone else's platform to see if there's any traction. Again, this is like when I when I give the advice of doing something with no code, get on the phone, and make some phone calls rather than calling me to write you an app. Same thing, if you start selling your soap, let's just use that as an example. And you you've got your own, that's a common thing that it gets made, you know, in houses and stuff. And you want to see if you can can do the make it into a business, then start with Etsy, right and see if you can get any customers there and get a decent amount of following there. Because that's just going to take care of the tech, it's going to take care of the taxes, the shipping, all of that stuff that you're not even thinking about right now. And they'll shoulder all of that, of course, they get a cut, which is fine, they deserve a cut. But take that and see if you have any traction once you have traction. And man, I'm selling a decent amount of soap right now, then you can take the next step. It's not necessarily a I mean, it'll cost more. But it's also an expertise that you don't have have yet learn how to do the business first, then let's go out on our own brand. And even that, when you're ready to do that, here's some things to keep in mind when you are shopping around an E commerce site. Things that get every single one of our clients taxes. That's the big one man. Taxes. If you are selling on the internet, that means officially, you're selling to every state in the country. Let's just say your us only. That's 50 different states of sales tax.

Gary: 18:52

So every purchase has to be calculated with this specific delivery. Addresses state's taxes.

David: 18:59

Oh, it gets even crazier than that. Yes, you're right. You're what you said is 100%. Right. But it gets crazier than that because taxes are not just at the state level. There is city taxes. And then some have county taxes, some even have music, municipality taxes. And they had little point this point that to add up to the sales tax, and you've probably already seen this, when you go to one city around you the taxes a quarter percent higher or lower. Right.

Gary: 19:24

Yeah, I mean, there's even places around where I live here that certain shopping centers at a point zero 1% sales tax just for the upkeep of that shopping center that you don't know. You examine your receipt, you're like wait, what?

David: 19:39

Now that's not tax, but because tax has to be from the government. But so

Gary: 19:46

what's your name for the product?

David: 19:48

That's fair, that's fair. So what's important is I mean that tax can be a very deep rabbit hole. There's a couple of ways to solve it. If you have a decent audience and you have a little bit Money. There are companies like Avalara. There are there are several of them. Avalara is one we use pretty regularly tax jars another one, where they will, based on the shipping address of that you are shipping your soap to they will calculate the tax based on the zip code, because that will get you all the way down to the municipality taxes. I don't know why am I saying that word. But done done work. But that if you don't have that the cheaper way to do it, or the free way of doing it, all of those things you can grab a list from there are lots of places you can download a list of taxes, and you can upload them to Shopify or whatever. And that will work based again on where you're shipping it to. But that the problem with that is as a static list and taxes change. So it's not a

Gary: 20:51

solution, you have to keep updating that as things change. Or Yes,

David: 20:55

like once every six months or once a year or something like that. It's worth refreshing that you'll be close enough. What if you're selling soaps and stuff, you're not making, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars of revenue, you're probably be fine. Because it's against the law, just so you know, it's against the law to charge like, let's say it's 10% tax, and you just charge everybody 10% You're over collecting the taxes, that's against the law. Yeah, what you can do, if you just want to avoid taxes completely, you can just say, my soap is $20. And it's flat fee, and then I will do the taxes on my own later. You don't collect it from your people at all. You do it later. Now that's a lot of work on your side. But you can do it. Like when you go to the state fair, right? And you go get your $7 Hot dog, there's no tax added to that because the tax is included. Most countries actually tax is always included. But in America, we split it out because it allows you to have cheaper prices, quote unquote, you know, 499 as opposed to 534. So that's a big good gotcha that people just always forget about and when Pete if you're talking to a company like us that tax thing, it's it's there's a lot to it, when you're usually people come to us have already have a business, and they already have money and stuff like that. So we have to collect taxes from all over and we're bringing in those third parties like Avalara and tax jar. And that's not an easy thing to do. They all have great APIs is up and it takes time. The other thing that gets everybody is shipping. I'm shipping my soap, I got to get it to you. How do you calculate that shipping cost? Right? Now if I'm selling my my one thing, I've got a collectible that I'm selling on ebay that I might just say, I'll take charge 10 bucks for it. And I'll pay for it. And that's the end of it. Right? It's a onesie. But we're just doing value slider

Gary: 22:53

stuff out. Yeah. And also, how does that shipping work? If there's multiple companies that do the actual shipping, like whether it's going to go through a post office or like a FedEx or UPS or whatever, like, you have to figure out which one is probably the best option for each product, depending on where it's going. And yeah, it's

David: 23:12

gonna take some research to take to deliver it, it's going to take research, because each company has pros and cons. USPS is usually cheaper, not always, but usually, but they're not as reliable in terms of or that's not right. They're not lower. Yeah, they're not expressed. And UPS is there. And then FedEx is usually too expensive. But some people use them. There's DHL and other ones, which is mostly not real anymore, that's international more than anything. But you can there are, if you do your research, you can find calculators that say I know that my soap is going to weigh half a pound. And you can figure out do that research, figure out how much it should cost. And it's also based on their Shopify in those, I'm using them just as an example, big commerce, they all have them, they will have little shipping calculators that you can connect to, and you pay a small fee for that. And they will help you calculate the shipping as closely as possible. Because that's important. If you don't do that, right, you're going to leave a lot of money on the table, or you're going to lose a lot of money depend on what you can

Gary: 24:13

do with that. Paying the difference if you didn't cover it. I mean,

David: 24:16

the date the days of when I was a kid you had you know, you bought the gizmo from the television ad. And it was you know, 3999 shipping. What it was it would they had the what 1499 shipping and handling that was like a flat fee. That was just another profit line for those guys, that those days are gone. Amazon killed them with prejudice, because everyone expects free shipping now. But just because it's free doesn't mean it's actually free. You got to pay for it. So just like Amazon has to pay for they invest billions setting up these distribution centers to get you that gizmo today. And that's another thing worth worth jumping into Amazon as your story Don't sell that short that people make lots of money doing that. It's like an another version of Etsy, right? If I'm selling soaps and stuff, probably not your ideal place. But if I'm selling a packaged good, or drop shipping, which is a whole nother thing, which I'm not qualified to talk about, but I know it's a big deal.

Gary: 25:18

Then, just setting up an Amazon store,

David: 25:21

setting up an Amazon store, man, that's a good way to test the waters is this worth is, am I gonna sell anything here? Because then it takes you as the entrepreneur, it takes you out of the tech business or less in the tech business, and puts you back in the marketing business, which is really sales business, which is what all founders really are salesmen.

Gary: 25:40

Now, would there be a difference between using these types of tools, whether it's completely no code, and you're using a different website, or it's half and half? Or if it's Amazon, the amount of money that that product is taking from your sales? Like, is does Amazon seem to take quite a bit from your sales,

David: 25:57

I can't tell you specifically their their costs. I don't know that. So I don't want to I don't want to say but they take a percentage of the sales. I mean, for sure. Shopify and the like, they charge you a monthly fee. And usually, I think they're starting ones like 80 bucks a month for big commerce, Shopify, all of those guys, some they have a free tier usually, or a really cheap tier, those can get really messy, because they don't have some of those things we're talking about for shipping and taxes and stuff, and probably not worth it.

Gary: 26:24

And plus, once you start selling a certain amount, they're pretty much telling you Nope, you have to pay for the

David: 26:29

Yeah, if you have too many skews, which is you know, items or different items you're selling. Or if you want, you know, variants of your products, there's all sorts of different ways that they try to push you into the higher tiers. Now, eventually, here, one thing we've learned, there are multiple now this is getting into bigger businesses. But if you own a larger business, and you're getting into E commerce for the first time, like you had brick and mortar, but now you want to move into this, there are tears and all of them have it, they have the cheap tier, right, which is like the $80. And that's for getting started, you know, a few $1,000 of sales a month, whatever, that's great, maybe up to $100,000, that's great, you're going to be served very well with those, when you start to getting more than that couple 100,000, they're going to start pushing you pretty hard with features that you as a business are really going to want. And they're suddenly like 500 bucks a month, sometimes they're a couple $1,000 a month. And those are that now they're talking about a lot more automations and stuff like that, those are really great. And then you can get up to the what they call the enterprise level, which is you're probably in the millions at this point of retail sales. And those can be like$10,000 a month. Now, if you're selling 10 $5 million a year who wants 10k, but it gets pricey in that price never goes away. Right? But But now they're adding all sorts of services and things that a company that side needs. And then

Gary: 27:55

now is that a time for? Like say if a business grows from a small business to a bigger business, and they become an enterprise level? You know, customer? Should they consider taking that stuff into their own hands instead of paying that monthly fee?

David: 28:10

No, I unless your process is super duper custom. Like you're doing some wigwams and weird things, or you need 47 variants or something very, very special. I would not recommend building an e commerce Store from scratch almost ever. You should always fit into one of those stores. That's just one of those things.

Gary: 28:36

It's already been done. And it's done. Well. Yeah, we

David: 28:39

believe very strongly in it not reinventing the wheel for our customers. Now most of the code we write is custom by its very nature, but when it comes to e commerce, I mean, yeah, I can build you this whole thing. But oh my gosh, it would cost a ton. Because of all the stuff that bringing the taxes in this means so many API's so many there's so many that the variants all the different ways. I mean, yes, it can be done. But the bang for your buck is generally not there. It's just not now you can buy. There are ones like Magento, that's a very popular off the shelf, custom coding platform, they do a lot of the heavy lifting. And then you hire a company like us, or there's a million Magento companies to do like the connections to do to really put a custom look on it to make it look unique to you to put in oh well I've got a couple of extra sliders that I need. I've got a couple of this at the yo yo customisations but the engine is still theirs. And that's that's kind of the middle ground. Usually if you're around the million mark of revenue, that's usually worth looking into. That's where we kind of come in is is those kind of custom hybrids, or you use Shopify but I need to connect to our custom back end. We'll come in there like that's when but I I don't think I would I just told a client the other day he was open to it. And I'm like, No, don't no, don't do it. So, um, I think that's important. I think that's something that a lot of people don't realize when because I think I, I've always thought that those ads were a bit disingenuous, because they make it seem like you're gonna have a website in the store up in a few minutes. And

Gary: 30:20

yeah, especially the ones like the Squarespace and the Wix like, it's a little misleading to see someone put together a pro level website with a few mouse drag, clicks, and oh, and put your product up perfectly shop product photography, and make some money and then sales just start generating. It's like, okay, come down, let's,

David: 30:39

I remember gosh, I remember, like my dad, when I was a kid. I don't know if he just didn't sleep well or what but he, I have many memories of him waking up. We were in is this was forever ago, he'd wake up in the middle of the night and watch late night TV, we're talking like two three in the morning, and we're sleeping on this foldout couch or whatever. And his condo. And he's up there. You know, he's a dad, he doesn't care. He woke you up, right? And so he's sitting there. And there were all these things besides the guy selling knives, or the guy who was on the boat selling real estate,

Gary: 31:12

no matter what guy selling the tiny, classified ads was the best. I don't remember that guy. Yeah, there was a guy who would walk around on a you said boat. So it made me think about it. He'd be like, walking the dock where all these yachts are parked with like two bikini girls behind him. He'd be in the pink shirt with the sunglasses talking about, you know, opening his arm saying Look at all this, you know, you know how you get here and just start by selling small little classified ads, selling products? And oh, yeah, it was total scam. But I know exactly what kind of commercials you're talking about the game.

David: 31:44

There was one of them that this was late 90s, ish, early, maybe early 2000s. But I'm thinking late 90s More, where they would tell the person whoever the poor guy who's not sleeping, right? That all you need to do is pay them a stupid fee. And suddenly, you would have a website that would be earning your money. 24/7 It was like a money printer. That was their pitch for early websites. And I didn't see those. But that's Oh, man, it was basically a drop shipping company, which I know drop shipping can make you a lot of money. But it's a lot of work. But they would basically say yeah, it's just an easy button, right? You just want to print money, you just pay us the end, you know, the sights were just horribly bad, horribly bad. And you just, you just select which products you want to sell, and you pay them and was like $99 a month, and they would set up your website and then magically, the money would just come on in. And oh, even back then I didn't believe them. And I didn't even know what I was talking about back then. Anyway, hopefully that answers some of the questions.

Gary: 32:50

I don't know much about drop shipping, but it's always seemed to have like, some people love it. Some people hate it. Some people think it's great. Some people think it's a scam. Like, I guess it really does just come down to who's doing it and how hard they're working on it. But yeah, I don't really know much about it just

David: 33:07

is simply a I found a product here for $5. And I'm gonna sell it there for $10. And when you buy it, I mean, yeah, for all intents and purposes, but if they go to a larger level, right, yeah, I know, the manufacturer over here, or I know where I can get a lot of these over here. But no one knows about these things. And so I just I'm just the middleman making sure that the process runs smoothly. It's a legit business, but it can be run by a bunch of skeezy people too. But there are people who make great money off.

Gary: 33:38

Okay, so if you're investing, if you're investing a lot in the marketing between the company that makes the product and then the consumer, and you're pushing that product, like it's, you know, the next best thing, I could see how that could work for you.

David: 33:51

You're basically a distributor. I mean, it's not really what I mean. But you're serving the purpose, you know, a lot of companies for the last 5080 years, you know, they don't make anything but they have exclusive rights to sell X, Y or Z. And they're the distributor of that thing. And that's basically what drop shipping is except for it's not as a formal. I mean, they're not formally these distributors, they just find cool kids catchy products that they think will be hot, and they flood and nowadays, they flood Amazon with it. And hopefully someone buys it now. The skeezy ones are the ones who they know there's a popular product and they charged double for it. Hopefully you don't know. Like those are the skis now we're going to talk about something very serious. We're gonna change gears completely.

Gary: 34:39

This is this is important to your health. So this is Hey everybody.

David: 34:42

Listen, this is like a public service announcement. Oscar Meyer is now making a beauty mask. You can put what looks like meat on your face.

Gary: 34:56

You don't even have to eat out little holes for the eyes in the mouth.

David: 35:00

They already provided the holes and we have a link to this. It is a true product. I don't know if they're really going to sell many of them.

Gary: 35:07

Your $5 baloney mask is going to be on its way. As soon as you click that button

David: 35:12

you can have what's interesting is what? Okay, so did you ever do that when you were a kid make a mask out of a

Gary: 35:19

piece of meat? No, I always thought it was funny when other kids did it, but I

David: 35:23

wouldn't. But it was a common thing, right? Yeah, you bite out little eyes, you bought a little nose, you stick it to your face. And for some reason, when you're seven years old, that is awesome.

Gary: 35:32

Or if you're a teenager and you've seen Silence of the Lambs, then you start saying clarity is,

David: 35:37

that's just creepy. Yeah, you're just That's just creepy to go in. So apparently, Oscar Meyer thinks that people really wanted this. And what's funny is in all the articles I've seen about it is they have to define you cannot eat this.

Gary: 35:53

It's yeah, this is just like when we talked about the Captain Morgan Super Bowl bowl. This is just a marketing thing for Oscar Meyer. They've prided themselves on having quirky kind of fun marketing, whether it's a big hot dog car, or some songs or whatever. So yeah, this is just another love the hot

David: 36:11

dog car. Everybody does,

Unknown: 36:13

dude, everybody, but

David: 36:14

I will say this is a real product, though. You can go to Amazon making a face bias. Yeah. Yeah, you can buy unlike the Punchbowl. It's not

Gary: 36:23

actual lunch meat, though. They actually make it with moisturizers and stuff like that. It's

David: 36:27

yeah, it just looks like lunch meat. It's cute.

Gary: 36:31

Exactly the same. Baloney pink. Weird, like

David: 36:35

Maloney. I mean, even no Bologna is no one knows what Bologna is. Bologna is the white chocolate of meat. It's not what white

Gary: 36:46

chocolate is though. Do you know what white chocolate is? I'm going to use a mixture of sugar and Carib which is like kind of a wax a white waxy. So from what

David: 36:54

I understand, and I'm sure someone will get mad at me. But from what I understand why chocolate is what's left over. After everything is cooked out of and they make the real chocolate. Well, maybe I'm right on that. I know. That's what baloney is baloney is the Scuzz at the bottom. Whatever,

Gary: 37:13

whatever. You're scraping out whatever you finished the butchery stuff with and then just kind of gelling it together and

David: 37:22

Okay, officially white chocolate is a blend of sugar, cocoa butter, milk products, vanilla, and a fatty substance called lecithin. Okay, yeah, I have no idea. So there's actually no chocolate. No chocolate at all.

Gary: 37:35

But it looks so good. No,

David: 37:38

it I don't understand how someone, whenever they invented the first time someone goes, You know what this weird thing I just made, it kind of looks like chocolate. So we're gonna call a chocolate, even though it's a 1936. I'm learning as I go here. And I do six is when some guy invented white chocolate out of nothing. So I always

Gary: 38:01

like when you look at something. And you're just like, Who's the first person who said what does that taste like? Can we eat that?

David: 38:08

Let's try it. Yeah, yeah, the first or first person who ate mushrooms.

Gary: 38:12

I thought the same thing mushrooms has has that has to be the most common one that people think of, like, oh look something growing out of dirt by a tree. Let's eat

David: 38:20

it well, in the fact that half of them were poisonous. I mean, like you got to be really dedicated to find the one that won't kill you or make you sick or whatever. You keep having to eat the things from the tree or the dirt. Under the leaf. You really have to, I don't know. But if you want to stick fake baloney on your face, you can do that now for $5 on Amazon. And we will have the article there for you to go into and see if because of us. We're going to sell like

Gary: 38:48

the packaging all the books. Yeah, the packaging looks like one of those plastic little, I guess, tubs.

David: 38:57

This thing this this week has been all over the map. Um,

Gary: 39:00

but it is our 20th episode. So we've made it this far. That's true. It's our 20th episode. Hopefully, with enough hard work, we can make it to 21

David: 39:10

that people might revolt up to this up. I think it's pretty amazing. We've got the 20 that our next big big milestone will be 100

Gary: 39:20

Push. Why don't we just jump? We've tried 50

David: 39:25

Gold streak for gold baby. I don't know maybe 25 People listen to us by the time we're up to 100

Gary: 39:30

Maybe we'll get one more question by then we'll get one more question if you want to be the person to send us our second question of legitimate sources not from people that we work with not from our people. Yeah, email Hello at the big pixel dotnet or comment on the YouTube channel

David: 39:48

Yes. Okay. I'm I'm I'm out of witty things to say I'm not sure I had any witty things to say it my earphones are dying. So now I feel like I'm stuck in a hole. because my my earphones the noise cancellation one ear is working and the other is not. And so I'm in this weird. Have you ever done that?

Gary: 40:10

I'm hoping you can't hear me because now I can call you the German football of podcasts.

David: 40:15

Oh no, I can hear you and I'm fired.

Gary: 40:17

Okay, well, that's Jerry with a G. That's right,

David: 40:21

Jerry at the big pixel dotnet send them all your hate mail. Alright everybody, thank you so much for joining us. We will talk to you next time. See you