MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
From Programmer to Revenue Whisperer: Turning Digital Data into Dollars
What if the secret to massive e-commerce growth wasn't a marketing gimmick, but something as simple as improving by just 1% every day? Meet Sabir Semerkant, the accidental marketing genius whose systematic approach has generated over $1 billion in incremental revenue for more than 200 brands worldwide.
Sabir's journey began as a programming prodigy at age six, eventually leading to a pivotal moment when he was tasked with rebuilding VitaminShop.com after bankruptcy. What started as an engineering project transformed into a business revolution when he replaced a million-dollar search engine with his own creation (humorously named "MOSES" - My Own Search Engine by Sabir), instantly boosting conversion rates from 3% to 12%. This experience launched his 25-year career as an e-commerce growth specialist.
The heart of Sabir's methodology is deceptively simple: improve one meaningful KPI by just 1% each workday. This tortoise-like approach compounds dramatically, realistically delivering 10X growth within 12-18 months for committed entrepreneurs. But his most valuable insight might be his ability to diagnose the real barriers to growth. While many brands obsess over ad creative, they ignore fundamental issues like page load speed (averaging 28 seconds on most Shopify stores) while customer attention spans cap at just 1.7 seconds.
Sabir also provides fascinating insights into properly implementing AI tools for e-commerce growth. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement, he advocates using multiple tools in combination (Claude, ChatGPT, Manos) as augmentation to accelerate testing cycles. The right implementation allows entrepreneurs to generate and evaluate hundreds of creative variations rapidly, dramatically accelerating growth.
For entrepreneurs ready to implement these principles, Sabir distinguishes between "involved" entrepreneurs (who delegate critical learning) versus "committed" entrepreneurs who personally lead transformation. As he colorfully explains: "The chicken is involved in breakfast - it laid the egg. The cow is committed - it gave itself for the steak." Which one are you?
Ready to apply these growth principles to your business? Learn more about Sabir's 8D method and Rapid2x program at growthbysabir.com/USC.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2:It is such a pleasure today on Mediascape to have Sabir Semerkant on the show. I did butcher your last name a little bit, which I knew I was going to do, going into this, but, sabir, I'm so excited that you're here today. Thank you for joining, anika.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about your background, gosh, you have done so much. You've been in an adjunct lecturer, a guest lecturer at so many universities. You've been on many podcasts. You were a co-founder with Gary Vee, on and on, and on and on. And now you have Growth by Sabir and you're doing amazing things to help e-commerce, storefronts and entrepreneurs really 2 to 10x their growth. So how did you get started in this whole crazy sector?
Speaker 3:Total accident and it's a wonderful accident Prior to Sabir being this e-commerce growth advisor for not just I mean so many e-com brands, but also the venture capital funds tap into me the sharks from Shark Tank. I work so many e-com brands, but also the venture capital funds tap into me the sharks from Shark Tank, you know I work with them pretty regularly, you know so. So prior to that, I was known for a different type of hacking and it was I was a programmer. I had been programming since I was coding, you know, since I was like six years old, you know, very, very young start, you know, just because I got bored, you know. So I started coding with my brother both of us, me and my elder brother and started writing games so that we can write games that we liked, that we like to play. So we came up with our own games and we did that. Even at that age we published a game in a Commodore 64 magazine called Ahoy, right, so that was the start of it.
Speaker 3:Fast forward, college comes, and now college wants to give us universities, want to give us a computer science degree. We're like, wow, it's like giving me a degree for being an English speaker, you know, that's great. All right, we'll go for it. Finish the BA degree in two and a half years, you know, to just get it done. Yeah, wow, love school but don't like it that much. You know. I like the education part of it. I extract information and knowledge.
Speaker 3:But going to school was not just the operations of going to school, didn't like it much so I wanted to be out in the world 20 plus programming languages, on and on and on developed a lot of the internet infrastructure, e-commerce infrastructure. When I say that I mean build it out like payment systems and stuff like that. That didn't exist. In fact, I had beta tested Google when it was at Stanford that's how long I've been in this game. So the pivotal point came this huge transition into being this revenue growth hacker, the advisor that I've been for the past 25 years over a billion dollars in incremental e-com sales that's my track record across 200 plus e-com brands. Right Was that. You know Vitamin Shop. You know the company, like they have now thousands of stores. Right, 25 years ago they spun out and a lot of companies were doing that. They were spinning out their com. It went to NASDAQ. A lot of bad decisions went bankrupt, right. So US Marshals seized the assets on behalf of the creditors. It went into bankruptcy court and Jeff Horowitz, the founder of Vitamin Shop brand, went into that bankruptcy court and reacquired all of the assets back and brought it back in physical assets like servers that were running the e-com site, put it in the warehouse in North Bergen, new Jersey, and then looked around to see who can take this over. That's when I got involved at that moment, in fact in the very early days, because I was trying to build a team. Also, I was moving the servers to find a data center where I can plug it in and turn it back on Cut my finger, you know, moving those servers because those used to be pretty heavy from Sun Microsystems it was like it looked like picking up a refrigerator, basically right. So you know I put it back together and I start poking around. I remember that in that phase of my life Sabir is an engineer Right, so I poke around. There's a lot of bad decisions made from an engineering perspective, you know, because I've been coding and developing things. I actually was one of the founding team members of the street dot com with Jim Kramer as an engineer Right. So you know I've been doing a lot of that. I put it back together.
Speaker 3:I see a lot of bad decisions, even from an engineering standpoint, rip things out. I mean one of the things I ripped out which didn't make Jeff happy before it went bankrupt. They had invested in a licensing of a search engine for the e-com site right. Plus the implementation of it, the price tag was close to a million bucks. Here I come along, go like this is garbage, right. Rip it out, throw it out. And what do I replace it with? There was no e-comm search engine back then, but I had beta tested Google so I knew that relevance was a very, very important thing, right? So I go like there was no e-comm for Google, so I'm going to develop it myself, because I'm an engineer, I can develop anything. So I come up with a search engine that I built that I call.
Speaker 3:After I finished it, I called it Moses. Right? Moses is not a biblical term, right? Just to be clear. I don't want any religious zealots coming after me here. Right, moses is an acronym for it's M-O-S-E-S S my own search engine. By severe right, it's M O S E S, right Moses. So I get this up.
Speaker 3:What it did was I had baseline the traffic. I ran it for a while from on. That garbage of a search engine that was there, right? A million dollar garbage. Basically. That was giving us two to 3% conversion rates, right? Once I put in Moses, 12% conversion rate, right? So forget about that. You spent a million bucks on this thing. It's losing you money, it doesn't matter. You spent a million bucks. This is hurting us, right. So I replace it.
Speaker 3:And then I did other tweaks, also with email and other content and other types of things. And then I go back to Jeff. I say to Jeff okay, I'm done with all the engineering things I needed to do and I'm going to start building the engineering team. Who do I talk to? For the business and marketing Gives me a puzzled look. He goes, like didn't you just 6X your conversions on the site? I said yeah, like do you know that this brand went bankrupt because I gave it to business and marketing people and my network told me you're the guy I need to hire. That's not going to do that, right? And you're coming to me asking me which marketer do I need to tag team with? You're it? I'm like I'm sorry, this is now a Star Trek moment right.
Speaker 3:Scotty and Kirk. I'm sorry, jeff, I'm an engineer, I'm not. I'm sorry this is now a Star Trek moment, right? Body and Kirk. I'm sorry, jeff, I'm an engineer, I'm not a marketer. Right, because, like no, I've seen you have the knack for doing the right thing in business, and that's a knack that no person that goes through marketing education is going to have. Why don't we do this? Let's try it out. You're going to learn marketing. I'm going to teach you the vitamin business because at that time I was not taking any vitamins. I had no clue what glucosamine, chondroitin, msm was or any of the other 25,000 products he was selling. I had no clue. I think my parents may have shoved down some multivitamins into my mouth when I was a kid, right, but that was it.
Speaker 2:you know as a kid they were called Flintstones.
Speaker 3:when I was a kid, yeah, but I don't remember it even. That's the point, right. So I go like, okay, I took it as an engineering challenge Because the thing is, as an engineer, you never know solution to everything. What you know is how you can get to the solution, right. So to me I said, okay, marketing. I go like Jeff, I took accounting 101 and economics 101 back. This was 25 years ago. I took Accounting 101 and Economics 101 back. This was 25 years ago. I took those things. Is that marketing? I was like, nope, that has nothing to do with marketing. That's accounting, right, that's finance, right. So you need to learn marketing.
Speaker 3:So what I would do on the weekends? I lived in New York City. On the weekends I would go out to Long Island. There's a beautiful bookstore, if you're familiar with Long Island, near Roosevelt Field Mall, called Barnes and Noble, right, you know that. But they have a gigantic bookstore there, beautiful bookstore with a cafe and everything. Every single weekend, for four and a half years, I would go into that bookstore every single weekend, eight to 10 hours a day, right. Saturday and Sunday no life, right. I would go in because I was teaching. It was the matrix download for Neo. Basically that's what I was doing right, so I would go to that section.
Speaker 3:E-commerce is nascent at that time. There are no books on e-commerce, right? So I go like, okay, let me find adjacent industries that are very similar to this thing that I'm trying to do. Let me learn from it. Let me see what they have to say. Tv marketing, radio marketing, direct marketing, infomercial marketing, books on QVC, hsn To me it seems like you're talking to consumers, right In those kinds of channels.
Speaker 3:So there were books on those things. So let me pick those out. I'll pick it out. I would sit in their cafe. I would read through it. If the book was dense, I would actually go and pay for it. If the other books, I would just sit there. They allowed you to do that, so you would sit there, I would take notes, right. I would take notes, right. And then thanks to Jeff he gave me permission to do this, right I would come back Monday through Friday, literally what I learned and took notes on on the weekend, I would test it, right.
Speaker 3:I would test it and learn from it and from that learning. If it worked, I wanted to do more of it. So if I sent an email to a thousand people, you know, next time I'm going to send it to 10,000 people to test it, or 50,000 people, or 200,000 people, whatever I was scaling it. So this behavior of test, learn and optimize became a vicious cycle for me For four and a half years. If you count working days, that's close to a thousand days. Right, that brand. When it went bankrupt it was eight to $10 million business and the gross margin I learned these things later on during that journey right Was in a horrible shape, right, which was one of the reasons that it didn't work that well. I grew that from eight to 10 million four and a half years later, first time, around $52 million and over 68% gross margin, right, wow.
Speaker 3:And one big thing is that from those books, what I learned was every one of those authors, like Dan Kennedy and all of these guys right, they were all complaining about. Oh, you know, when you do these things, you have to rigorously set the tests up properly, because the thing is, once the campaign that postcard is out, right, because direct marketing right, or the TV infomercial is out, it's out of your hand Then you have to wait. I went like I don't have that problem. E-commerce I have data, real time. I can do things a lot faster than these complaints that these people are complaining about. So again, engineering side, I don't have analytics tool. There's no Google analytics right, let me build it. Let me build. I want to know everything. When the consumer is searching for this, they're clicking on that. How many people look at the product and add the card? Because I don't know any better? Right, I want to learn all those things. I want to know what's going on and my goal is I just want to improve. In those four and a half years.
Speaker 3:I set up the bar very low because I was testing Every morning when I showed up to work. I wanted to improve one KPI meaningful KPI, not BS KPI a meaningful KPI by 1% percent, right? You take that math, you multiply it in 365, that's 36.5x growth in whatever you do. But then you go like Anika. You say that's severe, you sound like a robot, you sound like Chad GPT, right, but I want to take time off, I want to go on vacation, I have family time, I get sick, there are federal and bank holidays All right, I did the math for you already. The thing is, I'm very precise with numbers. Right, there are 220 working days, right, with all of those excuses included in there, right? Weekends off and all of that right, 220.
Speaker 3:If you do that 1% rule Monday through Friday, you can get a 22X growth, but you're not going to win all the time. Sevier, right, even that 1% sometimes is impossible. Okay, fair, let's have a success rate of less than half, right? So it's not 22X, it's 10X. I have done that time and time again over 25 years for many brands across the not just US, globally, uk, eu, australia, new Zealand, middle East, even in Japan and China. Right, I've done it everywhere, right, tedx growth in 12 to 18 months. Time and time again. You know. That's the number one rule test, learn and optimize. Right, that's one. Number two 1% rule. Just improve it by 1%.
Speaker 3:Don't buy into this BS of like oh I want to grow this thing by 15% or 17X or whatever. Some of that might be marketing hype. Set the rule at 1%. It's the story of hare and the tortoise. Be the tortoise, slow and steady, very mindful, very intentful. You're going to win big. You're going to win bigger than most of those people that crash and burn being the rabbit in that story, right, rule number three is ego.
Speaker 3:Check your ego, because there's a lot of ego right out there. Oh, because I have been the director of marketing at Procter and Gamble. Worship me. No, how many mistakes did you make? Talk to me about that, right? How many mistakes did you make? There are so many founders. They always have a North Star brand that they go like.
Speaker 3:Oh my God, what if we had that one person that joined us from Procter Gamble, from that XYZ Warby Parker, whatever, right, that would be so brilliant, right We'll give them. Oh, she is a director of marketing. We'll make her CMO in our startup, right? You know, that person could make one mistake that's larger than the next three years of your revenue at that big company and it would be swept under the rug with no issues, right? But you won't be able to swallow that mistake when they make that, even a portion of that mistake in your startup. You have to be very careful. With $1 billion, to my credit, incrementally growing these e-com businesses across 200 plus brands across the world, I don't think my ego matters. I mean my opinion matters at all. I check my ego even today. If I'm working on something, I need to look at it because the environment changes, meta has changes, ai all of these things.
Speaker 3:It's a very dynamic world. Things change. So you had a success three years ago. Yeah, what does that have to do with the economic rules, the US tariffs and all of these things that are going on right now? What does that have to do with anything? You're sugarcoating it. You're covering it up by saying that. Oh, you should listen to me because of XYZ experience that I have. Your opinion is one data point. I'm going to take it. I'm going to put it in the blender that I'm going to test it in. If it works, you know what Great I'm going to scale it. If it doesn't work, I'm sorry I might release you to the community of the world because you don't belong in this brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's several things that you mentioned. Along the way. I have friends who are very successful in their areas as well that did the same thing. I said I need to figure this thing out because I'm not making enough money, for instance, putting a friend who is a scientist not making enough money. Putting my funds into the stock market oh, real estate is the way to go.
Speaker 2:She went every weekend, took her son to Barnes and Noble and studied books on real estate, and now she is a major player. People come to her all the time. She's building things all over, and it all started there, and so I love the fact that you took this and said I know a lot of things. I'm already exponentially increasing growth, but now I have a new challenge. I'm going to. Even if you don't like to go to school, right, I have a new challenge. I'm going to. Even if you don't like to go to school, right, you have a thirst for knowledge and for continuous learning, and so you use that to benefit, use a lot of words that we do talk about in the marketing world. We A-B test, right, we want to look at all the touch points, and you talk a lot about the data which we have the data and the storytelling aspects that go together. So you know there's so much that you've done and you talked about a few steps as well. Now are those part of your 8D construct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there are principles. Right, there are principles. And then the 8D method actually stands for eight dimensions of e-commerce. Right, but what most e-commerce gurus get wrong? Or even if you're running an e-commerce brand yourself, right, you think that your problem is whatever is staring in the face, right? Let's say meta ads, right? Well, like, oh you know what? Only if I had better creative, If I had hired the next meta ads person, they probably know how to configure this advantage plus thing. Right, Maybe I don't have that right.
Speaker 3:Right, when I look at it, okay, your ads are six out of 10. But when I look at your website, your landing pages on the website, where the ad is going to advantage plus six out of 10, it's going to do its job of delivering that traffic to you. Right, that person shows up on your site and your site is taking 28 seconds on average. Actual data, by the way, whenever I cite these numbers right, these are actual. At the average, I Shopify store page load time is about 28 seconds. Some of them are even worse than that. Right, when does it need to be? It's consumer attention span it's 1.7 seconds. Why is that? You swipe to the left, or you do this on TikTok or Instagram Reels, or you do that on your Amazon account. Your attention span is gone, Like it's 1.7 seconds. You did not make the point. I'm leaving you, right? You're wasting my time. So why is that a meta ads problem? That has nothing to do with meta ads. Meta ads delivered the click to you. You did a great job of making people believe in whatever creative you had in there to sell them on this thing. That's gonna solve their problem. Great, I'm sold. I clicked on it. Shop now. Perfect. When I look at a six out of 10, can that be eight and a half out of 10? Yes, in the program we do go through the paid media optimization also. But traffic came to your site but you did not cater to that attention span. And then you're okay with, but severe, it's okay. My bounce rate on my side is 65%. That's good, right, Because that's everybody is getting 65%. Why is that okay? You're telling me for every $100 that you're going to spend $65, you can burn it and it's okay. $35 is what's going to generate for you, right? Why is that okay? It's not okay, right? It's definitely not okay Because the thing is, if you did a great job on the ad side, Advantage Plus did its job of delivering the traffic to you.
Speaker 3:You dropped the ball on the site, right? So consumer attention span it is highly measured, right, you can measure it. That's a technical KPI. You could use a tool like GTmetrix. You plug in your best-selling product. Let's say that's the number one selling product that gives you 70% of your revenue on average. So you plug that in, it gets you 28 seconds. That's the time to interact. That's a KPI. In GTmetrix. I just told you it's supposed to be 1.7.
Speaker 3:You are 22 to 25x worse than where you need to be. Where's the money hidden in that? Right? One is revenue loss. That's how much more revenue you could be getting, and that's an unacceptable bounce rate that you think it's okay. It's not okay, right? And number two what else are you losing on the money you just spent on meta ads, delivering that click to you and the impressions, right? You're losing money on that too and potential of acquiring that customer versus somebody else who does a better job of that, right? That's kind of the number one thing. Remember your brand exists because that consumer exists in the market. The center of that universe is the consumer, not the brand. This is not 1955. It's 2025, right In 1955, consumers revolved around brands. That's not the case anymore. The consumer sits in the middle and they are pitched ideas throughout the day and if you are not catering to that attention span, you're not in their purview at all. And that's the gap. I fell by having ridiculous growth across 200 plus brands.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's been in your business. You've also worked in many, many other organizations, including Vanderchuk, and so you helped build e-commerce. You did a lot of other stuff. You were a mentor. Talk about how you moved from experience to experience and what that added to your knowledge base and also your ideation.
Speaker 3:So here's the thing. You know, people usually refer to what I do as my career. Right, it's my career To me, it's my passion, right? Regardless of whether somebody's paying me or not paying me, I'm going to be doing something in this area, right? Like you don't need to tell a gardener, somebody who loves gardening, that I'm going to pay you to do more gardening. Right, they're going to do gardening regardless. You're going to find them dirt in their fingers in their backyard on Saturday, Sunday, if it's not raining, they're going to get out there to work on their rows to get more flowers out of it and stuff like that. They'll figure out all of those kinds of things. You don't have to teach them that, right? When I was coding, that was my passion. It still is.
Speaker 3:By the way, I'm still with amazing updates that just came out. I don't know if your audience knows. Cloud Anthropic Cloud came up with the next release, which is Cloud 4, Opus and Sonnet. I'm all over that right now. It's incredible with AI, like the amazing things, Things that I had read in theory when I went through computer science degree is reality for me, you have no idea I. To do a computer science degree is reality for me, you have no idea, I'm a kid in a candy store right now. Right, my eyes are like those anime eyes, you know of that little girl when it sees that thing. That's me right now.
Speaker 2:Not that I'm a little girl, you know, just to clarify that. And, Claude, you mentioned my favorite of the GPT tools.
Speaker 3:So oh, but I have a more, better one. Right now. I'm going to compare Cloud4 to Manos. Manos is incredible, but Manos uses Cloud behind the scenes for all of his agent tech work. You know I'm really well versed in it, like both being a tech nerd and also from a business standpoint. I think the acceleration that I have done, like you were asking me about these journeys and what I learned what I learned is as human beings and as technology has improved. You know the Moore's law, right. You can apply Moore's law to my career, right. I have gotten.
Speaker 3:It took me in that first round. It took me about four and a half years to 5X more than 5X. You know vitamin shop, even though it was bankrupt, right, but when I, by the time, like I would say about seven, eight years later, when I touched Ashley Stewart, it took me two years to take it from 3 million to 30 million, so 10 X in two years. So the time element of how long does it take has been reducing over time and my skillset has gotten better, obviously, but the amazing tool chest that we have is incredible, right. If I want to launch an e-commerce business, I can do it this weekend. Within 48 hours I can have a fully branded, amazing, content-rich, thanks to AI also and all the tools, like Shopify. It's an incredible tool. Right, I needed to build Shopify for Vitamin Shop in order to build vitaminshopcom. Right, if you understand what the statement, what I just said, right, yes, now, vitamin Shop. If I needed to build it, it would take me 48 hours to fully build it from the ground up. Right, this weekend, if I start right now, sunday night, I have the brand up and running, including I would attach ads to it from Google and Meta to get it going to start getting traffic Monday morning. I can do that. So the time element of it, the technology, how we have progressed, has become so much better. I mean in the implementation program for the 8D method, for the eight dimensions optimization of e-commerce. Right, it's called the Rapid 2X. Right In the first six weeks of the program where we do performance optimization. That's dimension one, performance optimization of everything.
Speaker 3:When I say that, it's not just tech optimization, it's also paid media optimization, email optimization, everything we touch. Like you have already invested in a lot of things, I know what that stack looks like pretty much you know, specifically speaking, like 80% would be Shopify, klaviyo, meta ads, google ads. You do some social posts and you do some other. You know you maybe some YouTube, maybe, right? So I know what that stack looks like. So, if I take that stack and I can squeeze out more growth out of it plus clean it up, like there's so much email hygiene problems, right, you're sending emails to everybody, like, how do you know that that person is even alive, right?
Speaker 3:By the way, historically that happened to me at one brand. Like I needed to like literally tell the chairman your customers are falling off, right I use a different word dying, right? The chairman said yeah, that's why we hired you. You're really good at this life cycle thing. This is after years of experience, right? I'm like no, no, no, I don't think no amount of Sabir is going to help this. They're six feet under. Like, what do you mean? I just looked at the data.
Speaker 3:I'm very literal about everything. Right, there is no sugarcoating, anything but me. Right? These people are dead. In fact, I have the data. It shows that they have been dead more than five years. In fact, their families probably are pissed that you're still mailing them and you're emailing them. You know, and they were mailing a lot. After implementing the hygiene, we ended up saving $250,000 per quarter, not mailing dead people.
Speaker 2:Let's just let that sink in.
Speaker 3:Wow. No amount of severe could help that. I'm sorry I don't raise the dead. I mean, there's a guy I heard that he's supposed to do that, right? Not me, right? I'm not that guy Not going to do that, right? That's not in my skill set or wheelhouse, whatever, however you want to approach that. So that's the thing, like. You have to understand like things happen in life. Right, email had babies, right. Maybe you were interested in it for another, maybe in the beginning, maybe 20 years ago, for three to five years, and you had two and a half kids on average, right? But those marketers are still sending you baby products right now, 20 years later.
Speaker 3:It's stupid, it doesn't make sense, but it happens, it happens. There's a real cost associated with it. And then the other cost is all of your KPIs are wrong. Right? You think your campaign performed at a certain level. Maybe it performed better because you had all this hygiene problem and bad data. Right, knowing what data you're collecting, what data you have and the cleanliness of that data, the hygiene of that data is critical, right? And also, that's not just for email. You could do the same thing. Are you sending the wrong signals to meta ads? Are you sending wrong signals to Google ads Most ad accounts. The first thing they do is they go like oh, what signal should we be using when they're setting it up? Oh, all site visitors, but you just told me you were okay with 65% bounce rate. Now you're sending that garbage of a signal saying that people who rejected me, they ghosted me 65% of them are okay.
Speaker 1:Send me more people like that, and I'm going to keep on spending more money.
Speaker 3:It doesn't make sense. I mean things that I say sounds very obvious, like, oh yeah, I wouldn't do that. No, you're doing it. I can go into your account and you're doing exactly that. And if you're doing a little better job, you might be saying engaged site visitors. So the 35% that did something with me, what about the people who bought 17 times from you and spent the top 1% on your site? How about that? That's a better signal, not site engaged visitors, right? So there are things like that, that a lot of. And because there's hyper specialization of skillset and what do I mean by that? People who have gone into meta ads. They don't even do Google ads, right, and then within it, they might have experience with e-commerce. They may not have experience with e-commerce and they get hired for as a freelancer or as an agency and then they touch your brand. They don't have the expertise. They just don't have the expertise to understand like that.
Speaker 3:There are nuances to every category, right. There are nuances to every region of the world. You have to understand that, right. How you sell to a person in japan is different than india, than it is in can versus America, right, united States it's different. Yeah, if you just oh no, I just market to English speaking yeah, and Aussie acts very different than a New Yorker, than a Californian. Very different. That's just US and within the US, right, if you look at that versus Texas, right, very different. You have to understand the consumer better and overgeneralization of these kind of statements actually hurts. That's an opinion.
Speaker 2:It ends up actually hurting your business when you make those kind of bad decisions because it's something that you know really well and intimately, but it's also you're making the argument for we're seeing a world of hyper-personalization on the customer side as well, to your point wanting to make sure that each of our customers feel special. And one of the examples I use in class sometimes is a major airline sent me an email for my birthday saying happy birthday. My birthday's in December. So what they offered was a seat upgrade as long as I booked a flight that month. Well, december you probably already have your travel plans because it's a big holiday time. It wasn't customized to me.
Speaker 2:They didn't look, use any research about how long I've been a customer, how many hundreds of thousands of miles I've flown on that airline. They could have seen by those signals that you're talking about what a better offer would be and it wouldn't cost them anything. Maybe they give me a discount to go to a certain place, or maybe they do something else to create a better user experience for me as an existing customer who has loyalty. So everything that you're saying and I think this is an area where we see- of course you talked about AI a little bit.
Speaker 3:You just like hinted at it.
Speaker 2:And this is a subject we can dive deep, by the way. I'll give you a phrase for that.
Speaker 3:I'll give you a phrase before we close up that conversation. Right, Brand amnesia. Right, Brands have amnesia, and every time you walk through that door, oh hello. I don't know you who?
Speaker 2:are you yes?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've been to your store 17 times over the past five years or whatever, right, oh, oh really. Oh, welcome anonymous. I just told you I've been to your store 17 times, right, so there's brand amnesia. But the thing is here's the ironic thing, given the tech Shopify knows you, klaviyo knows you, facebook knows you, google knows you. You just need to surface it and just acknowledge and most people, most brands, don't do it. And there's this brand amnesia that exists, unfortunately that they don't even act on the data that they're collecting.
Speaker 2:Well, and I'll say, going back to Anthropic and Claude, I love the conversations. I have right, and I love the little hello good, good evening. What do you want to work on today?
Speaker 2:or happy weekend, you know, even that little bit of personalization from an ai tool makes it yeah, as soon as you turn it on, it says good morning annika right and then on the other side, I've just created my delphi clone right, and I love the fact that when people test it, I had somebody say, oh, she gave me such great advice. I'm like, well, thank you, because that's all my knowledge base, that it's built on and you're going to be able to pick up. If you call my Delphi clone, she'll ask a question right away. That has to do with exactly where you left off in the text conversation, and so I love the fact that these tools are now giving us the ability to have that memory and even if it's not person to person right, it's machine to person, it's still helping us create that pathway.
Speaker 3:So there are a few things there, though, you know, because just for your audience to understand like there are right ways to do AI that are highly productive and very good for you, Like in case of e-commerce, use case right Versus doing the wrong thing and then giving up on AI right.
Speaker 3:It's like oh, ai is not for me. What happened? Oh, I just put this thing in there. It was such a generic thing that it came back with. You know, ai needs context, it needs to know who it is. It's very intelligent. It can organize things. It does a great job of that. It can figure things out that, if you give it an immense amount of data, it can figure out patterns in it that you would take you years to figure out, right, that's why I'm saying that my speed is going to get even faster now. Right, that with AI augmenting me, right, not replacing me, it's an augmentation. We're in the augmentation stage that this is something from an AI perspective, like most people there's oh, is it going to replace humans and stuff? No, it's augmentation. Right, it can help you.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll give you, my daughter actually is going to Stony Brook University, she's seeking a degree and actually she wants to become a professor in creative writing at Stony Brook, right, so there's always a specifically in writing. That has been a big topic, right In universities about plagiarism, right, and when students because I have thought also, I have guest lectured and I have been a professor also in my back in my history right, so when AI generates a generic piece of content because you gave it, you copy and pasted the task your professor gave you right your homework. You plug it in what extract comes professor gave you right your homework you plug it in. What extract comes out? You know what it's pure plagiarism. I've actually, when I was a professor, ai was coming out so I actually taught my students how to use it properly, right, not to cheat and to save time. The thing is, it's very obvious that those words are not yours. Right, you're using words that we never discussed. Like, where did you get that? Can you explain to me, like, yeah, the story behind Menelaus and what happened with Paris and stuff? Yeah, I know that you this is a very deep thought that you didn't have right. And then, as soon as I have that dialogue, I know that the student cheated, right, it takes me two seconds to evaluate that From their writing. I can tell that. But I want to make sure that I understand that they actually definitely did that right.
Speaker 3:But my daughter, the way she uses, she uses it as an augmentation. She's a great writer, she writes amazing pieces, so original content creation is her. But then she uses Claude as an editor Says Claude, I wrote this thing. This is what I'm trying to achieve. This is what I wrote.
Speaker 3:I need you to criticize it and give me where do you see plot holes? Where do you see in my writing style? Where can I improve things? Don't do it for me. Tell me, I'm going to do it and I'm going to give it back to you. I'm going to go through this iterative process.
Speaker 3:So she's using cloud to augment and this is a great lesson for all the students. You know, if they're, you know when they're listening to this podcast, that you can use it in that sense. Right, if you're a computer scientist and you go like oh, you know what Cloud code which is now general release, right, you can literally tell it to write code and it will write it for you. How about you write the code? You get better at crafting amazing code. Give it to Claude and go like what would you be the reviewer of my code? Right, do a code review. And as a senior developer, I'm a junior developer. You tell me where can I improve my skillset? I'm going to improve it. I'm going to refeed it back to you. You evaluate it and give me that criticism. That's augmentation. That's going to. It's going to. We're going to be in this cycle for a little while there. Right.
Speaker 3:In case of e-commerce, for example, you know every entrepreneur gets this shiny object syndrome, right. The next pretty thing, the next YouTube video or AI right now is a hot button right syndrome. Right. The next pretty thing, the next YouTube video or AI right now is a hot button right now. Right, that came out. What are we doing? You know I'm doing this and it's not giving me the right answer. Yeah, because we need to do it properly.
Speaker 3:So in our premium workshops, in the Rapid2x program, what we do is we actually have a deep dive workshop into how to use it. For example, one of the things that we did was generating graphical content from ChatGPT 4.0, right. So giving it not a prompt like this, but a prompt like this, right To say this is what we are looking for. And I need you to variate this over a hundred times, because I want to test out 100 different ad creative concepts on meta ads, and it's optimized for meta ads specifically, versus. I want to test this on TikTok, or animated GIF, or use OpenAI Sora for a piece of video content that I want to test, right, those are the kind of things. Those are very specific use cases for specific things you want to test. And why do you want to do that?
Speaker 3:Most entrepreneurs lack the productivity of producing lots of creatives because they run out of creative ideas, to be frank. Right, so how can you take that and turn it into a weapon so that these entrepreneurs can crank these things out so fast? Right, and they can learn faster and they can come back and go like, oh, I tested a hundred ads and these five did phenomenally well. I want to move forward with these and I'm going to pour more money into it and these 95, I learned from, got my learnings. Now I'm going to get that data out and I'm going to feed it back into Claude, into ChatGPT to analyze to see what's going on with it. So into Cloud, into ChatGPT to analyze to see what's going on with it, so I can accelerate that Content generation, image generation, evaluating One of the things that you know, the consumer attention span that I talked about, giving the criteria of the artifact, of how it should be evaluated, taking a copy of that, saving that webpage as a PDF with the GT metrics, feeding it back into Cloud or ChatGPT with the what.
Speaker 3:There's an element, a file called HAR report, which gives you the waterfall of how your objects are loading on your page. That's a very detailed data, right. So you give that and then chat GPT. Can you identify the best places where I need to improve, technically first, and then, after you fix that, then you go okay. Now, given the fact that this is the visual elements of it and these are the criteria for Rapid2x, how can I re-optimize this page from a layout standpoint, or even copy, and then it comes back and gives you exactly what it is? And now? So how do you prioritize? Let's start with bestseller number one Represents 50, 60% of your revenue. If we improve that by 10%, that's a huge uplift. Then, picking an arbitrary number 50 on your list, that even if you improve it by 100%, it's not going to move the needle at all. You know.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh. Well, we have so much more to talk about, but I know we're a little short on time, so I want to ask two questions what are your favorite AI tools? I'll start there. What are the tools that everybody should have in their wheelhouse?
Speaker 3:So currently I'm actually because I was beta testing and because I'm well known in the industry as a guy who actually takes your tool and makes it into the e-commerce if it belongs there, right. So you know, I have been extensively been testing Manos M-A-N-U-S dot I-M. Right, it kicks ass. It's really good, right. I've been beta testing it for a while. I think now they just had a general public release so that if you could Behind the scenes, it uses Claude also, right, but it's very good at what it does. If it cannot figure out or if it doesn't have an agent to do that thing that you're asking it to do, first it it writes Python code to do that thing and then goes, executes it, then gives you the results from it, and then you modify it from there and rewrites the code also again. So it's phenomenal from that perspective. I think I'm going to start because Anthropic is number two on that list with Cloud AI, right. Cloud 4 just came out yesterday I heard about the news so I'm going to be testing it and seeing how you can do more than just content generation and other types of things. But I'm going to put it through the wringer ChatGPT, obviously, just because of mass adoption. It's there, but there are challenges with ChatGPT sometimes because I have pro accounts across all of them. I have Perplexity. I have that Gemini, just with Google IO. Recently this week they had a huge announcement with things like Google Veil, that's a new video generation, and Imagine is another one from Google. That's another one that's being released right now or it's in day beta. It's going to be released by summer timeframe. So these are incredible tools. For now, what I would recommend for most is to have the five tabs open, right, right, and this is a lesson I learned very early on. It was Microsoft versus Apple. For me, it was Microsoft and Apple. For a time, it was iOS versus Android. For me, it was iOS and Android. Right, the thing is with the and replacing the versus with an, and what it does is it just opens up opportunities for you, because these AI tools, they do one thing really well and other places they are horrible, you know. So that might be filled.
Speaker 3:So right now, for example, I use Manos, cloud and ChatGPT in three different areas. One becomes an input. It provides me the output that becomes an input to the other one, and then this produces an output that becomes an input to the other one and that gives me the best solutions that I'm looking for, right? So don't do the versus thing. That's a branding thing and you're buying too much into the marketing message. Right, go with the and, because the and is where you're going to find the thing that's going to help you stitch that together, because if you go with one, you go like oh, I only use chat GPT, yeah, but it's horrible at content generation. Claude does a much better job at that. Right? So as soon as you open your mouth and you say something like that, I have a rebuttal for you, because I've tried, tested it over a thousand times or 10,000 times. Right, I can give you that rebuttal. So, remove the versus and put an end to it.
Speaker 3:Like, especially with AI, is so nascent. Right, you would have thought that Google was the one that's going to do the AI thing. In fact, not even Google IBM, because they were on jeopardy. Right, they were the AI thing. Where's IBM right now? Right, so never make that sort of an assumption. Right? And when it was IBM that's going to take over computing, no, it was Microsoft and Apple. Right, it was not them.
Speaker 3:Right, the thing is my view, my POV, is so broad because I've been through all these tech revolutions. You cannot just put your place, your bet, on that one thing right. It's also possible that that one that you think is the leader is the first one is going to fail first, right, and it's the number two or even the number five that you didn't think is going to win. Two and five combine their forces and that becomes the standard right. So never make that's an assumption by itself also. So never make that assumption right With these AI tools like these are the things that are so many exciting things that are going on right now.
Speaker 3:Like you know, the market, the tech market, gives you always an in to get in right To do the next thing right. The internet boom, the e-com boom, the social media boom right, the crypto blockchain boom. Now ML slash, ai boom. Right now that we are going through right One. These are not trends or fads. These are legitimate things that are going to be the normal for us, like three to five years from now.
Speaker 3:Like where you are walking into your kitchen and talking to your coffee machine like it's a normal thing to make you a dark roast coffee right, it's going to become a thing. Right now You're doing it kind of with Alexa talking to it, and if it's AI enabled I mean if it's smart enabled or Alexa enabled it does that. But it will become very natural, like a very natural thing for you to do. Right, you put the stuff into the microwave, you press the number, it heats it up for you. It will be like that. It would be very easy that it's a normal thing for you to do, not a normal thing right now. If you take a person from 1955 and you time shift them to today, they think that we're an alien civilization right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's so much more we could talk about on this topic, but I want to get to what you do now. So what are the different ways that you work with people and what size of business do you need to have, because you have obviously a lot of expertise? I would imagine that if you're just starting out, or if you don't have very much revenue, are there still ways for people to work with you?
Speaker 3:Sure. So the program is a structured program called Rapid2x, which actually goes through these eight dimensions to grow the business. By the way, 2024 data right. Very recently we actually looked at the whole year's performance of 12 test brands. We got 118% incremental revenue in a short period of time, and they started at different times of the year too, so it's not like they had a full 12 month anniversary all of them. So that's the performance of it.
Speaker 3:So, as far as the size of it, it actually we have a criteria for accepting people into and brands into the program. We go to a very rigorous interview process. The criteria is very simple. It's two things, right, but the second one is going to be hard for some entrepreneurs. The first one is product market fit. Product market fit means that you worked on your product, you tried marketing it, you got to 50K, you got to 100K. That means people are buying it, not your friends and family circle. Strangers are buying it from you, right. So 50 to 100K, you can be part of the program. It can definitely benefit you. Now we have brands that are $10 million brands in there too, yeah right, and they can accelerate that growth even faster because they have the right infrastructure, people and stuff like that in there.
Speaker 3:Right, we have some entrepreneurs who are because I'm known in. You know this program has gotten great results. They are serial entrepreneurs. They're working on their next brand with zero revenue, but they want to have the right foundation from the ground up because they understand the value of it, that they know that when they did that without those things, those were the lessons learned from the prior brands right, that they would want to do it differently. That we have several of those serial entrepreneurs. That, in fact, they end up after 12 weeks in the program because they're learning it and then they're leading their teams to let them know what to do. Right, so when they come out of the gate, they win big time. Right. So we have had a lot of brands launch during the Rapid2X program within the six to 12 weeks the first six to 12 weeks of the program, right, by implementing the right things in it. The second criteria so product market fit is that Second criteria is entrepreneurial fit.
Speaker 3:This program is not for everybody, it's not right, and I'll give you a definition of which entrepreneur belongs in this program, which one should not even bother applying. Right, it's the entrepreneur. And I'll use an example, a very simple one. Right, it's involved entrepreneur versus committed entrepreneur. How do I define that? Right, it's a breakfast item. Everybody is very familiar with it. It's steak and eggs. The chicken is involved in that breakfast. In that brunch it laid the egg and it contributed to the breakfast. The cow is all in with that steak. It gave itself.
Speaker 3:That's a committed entrepreneur. So that you know, when you're in this program, I don't want to be leading your company, you need to be leading your company. A committed entrepreneur does exactly that. They roll up their sleeves and go like this is what we need to do to business. Because this guy has experience, we will implement exactly what he's doing, what he's telling me, and it's not too many things. By the way, you need to work on highly valuable things. Like a few of them, like three to five things this week. Right, I'm not expecting you to do a thousand things because unreasonable. Right, you're not going to get anything done, right? So a committed entrepreneur does those things Involved entrepreneur. Well, like, oh yeah, I'm going to send my marketing person to do that. And that marketing person what if I said something in there that that person, like Anika, you know that you attended that thing. You're director of marketing for this brand, right.
Speaker 2:I said something in there. Now it points to a flaw you have.
Speaker 3:Right, are you going to bring that thing that's a critical thing back to the founder to say oh, by the way, sabir today said this thing and I think you should fire me.
Speaker 2:Yes, right Never.
Speaker 3:That's never going to happen. It will happen. Zero, exactly zero times. That's the statistics, based on that right. So you know, in that case, if you're an involved one, like you don't appreciate the right expertise, that you really need to dig deep, like you need to be leading Don't send me, don't send me your number two in command. Or third, or worse, oh, we hired this freelancer, he's going to be freelancer. What's their commitment level to your brand? Zero, all right. So it's not going to be anything.
Speaker 3:Maybe that person you hired full time might have a level of commitment, maybe, maybe, I don't know maybe 60%. But if they heard something that's going to hurt them, they're going like, oh, it's the same old, same old. The severe didn't really cover anything new, but I just told them five things they should implement, which included replacing that person who just attended that on your behalf. So if you're an involved entrepreneur, don't even bother applying to the program we've actually set up for your listeners. We have set up a special link you know they can go and investigate the next steps is growthbyseverecom slash USC, right? They can go to the site. They can learn more about these eight dimensions, about the Rapid2x program. They can have a ton of free content on the site like really valuable content.
Speaker 3:I dig pretty deep into the topic so I don't let go of anything because there's a lot of misinformation and bad information out there. So that's why I do really deep dive, like almost like lecture type, but not boring. Like it's very valuable that they can go through a case study walkthroughs of, like Orem Brothers how did we get 112% increase in six weeks? Right, so I do a walkthrough of exactly what happened in those six weeks on the site, so that's available. Or Ashley Stewart from 3 million to 30 million how did that happen? How did you 10X and more profitable? Right, that walkthrough is in there too, right? So there's a lot of valuable content on there that they can sit there, take their notebooks out. School is in session right. Take lots of notes and implement it right. That's the thing is that it has to be actionable knowledge, not just. Otherwise you would see a lot of librarians driving Lamborghinis. I don't see any, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amazing. Well, we will definitely bring you back onto this show and I know we're going to do some other things together as well, but this has been a really lively conversation. I love seeing your passion and how you are bringing your passion to everything that you do and how you're using that to help other people really understand and achieve everything that they want in their businesses, as long as they're committed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and thank you for having me. Thank you for sharing your platform with me and your audience.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and thank you to everybody who's listening to this episode or watching it on your favorite platform. We'll be back again next week with another amazing guest. In the meantime, thank you, sabir Simrakant, for being on our show today. Growth by Sabir. We'll have the link in the show notes for everybody to check out the special offer for everybody who's listening to this podcast. Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers, brought to you by USC Annenberg's MS in Digital Media Management program.
Speaker 1:To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
.jpg)
