Shopify Happy Hour

Ronnie Teja on Building Branzio Watches, Burnout, and the Power of A.I. for E-Commerce

• Dan Cassidy • Season 1 • Episode 16

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In this episode of Shopify Happy Hour, Dan sits down with Ronnie Teja, founder of Branzio Watches, to unpack his inspiring journey from picking blueberries as a new immigrant to building a global watch brand with a scrappy $10K start.

Ronnie shares real stories of entrepreneurship—burnout, supplier scams, PayPal bans, and team drama—and how he overcame it all by staying relentlessly curious, leaning into AI, and building a brand that now operates with global scale.

They also dive into:

  • The early days of Facebook ads and retail media buying
  • The mindset shift from performance marketing to brand-building
  • How AI is changing e-commerce—from analytics to ad copy
  • Tips on outsourcing, remote teams, and hiring middle management
  • His philosophy on leadership, karma, and connecting people

Whether you're a solo founder, aspiring operator, or scaling ecom brand, this one is packed with gold.

👉 Learn more about Ronnie: Just Google his name — he’s everywhere.
 🎧 Available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you tune in.


Products / products mentioned:


Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Shopify Happy Hour

02:46
Ronny Teja's Journey to E-commerce

05:51
Lessons from Blueberry Picking

08:21
Marketing Education at Best Buy

11:31
Starting Branzio Watches

14:12
Challenges in E-commerce

16:49
Navigating Entrepreneurship

19:41
Building a Team and Leadership

22:31
The Evolution of Branzio Watches

24:50
The Evolution of Online Advertising

27:10
Shifting Mindsets: From Performance to Brand Marketing

29:41
Current Trends in Performance Marketing

31:51
Harnessing AI for Marketing and Business Decisions

36:31
Leveraging AI for Strategic Insights

39:48
Building a New E-commerce Business from Scratch

41:10
Choosing the Right Niche for E-commerce

43:19
Exceptional Customer Experiences in E-commerce

45:12
The Art of Connection and Networking

Dan (00:00)
Welcome to the Shopify happy hour. On the Shopify happy hour, you'll hear from Shopify founders, operators, and experts on growth marketing strategies, lessons learned from the trenches, and other nuggets of e-commerce wisdom shared over a different drink each episode. Today, I'd like to welcome Ronny Teja, founder of Brandsio Watches, which produces versatile watches designed to be worn every day. Ronny, welcome.

Ronnie Teja (00:23)
Bye. Thanks for having me, bud.

Dan (00:25)
Of course, so good to have you on. So we were just talking about what do we cheers with and we're going back and forth with coffee, protein shake. You've got a protein shake, I got a coffee, but I just had a protein shake. So let's talk protein shakes, man. How often are you drinking protein shakes? What exactly are you drinking over there?

Ronnie Teja (00:44)
Yeah, got it's a it's a company that recently sold in fact for a for a billion dollars called Ghost and I kind of like the peanut butter protein. So that's that's what I have before I go to bed. So we about 12 hours apart, I think so. So I had usually all my caffeine is done by 12 o'clock. But, you know, before you go to bed, you have a protein shake and that's that's my little treat to myself like a dessert.

Dan (01:11)
That's awesome. Probably much smarter than drinking coffee. So yeah, we're about 12 hours apart. So 10 a.m. East Coast, U.S. Rodney's 12 hours ahead. know, slam or yeah, 11 hours ahead. So slamming coffee right before bedtime probably isn't the best idea. But yeah, what's nice about protein shakes is you can, depending on what you're doing, they are like a little bit of dessert. You know, if you're not, I think for people who don't have a clean diet, if you're eating sugar all the time and lots of candy, you might drink a protein shake and be like, what is this thing?

But if you're eating real food most of the time protein shakes can be delicious.

Ronnie Teja (01:42)
Yeah, that's why I do it. I've got a sweet tooth. So that's a really interesting thing that you bring up. Like I literally have a sweet tooth. So like before bed, I crave something sweet, but this is my substitute.

Dan (01:53)
That's awesome, and you sleep well having it right before bedtime.

Ronnie Teja (01:56)
Little bit. I'll drink it through then I'll keep it next to the bed stand and then slowly. It's got creatine as well so it's like literally like some muscle recovery, some all this fun stuff so you feel a little better in the morning before you go to the gym.

Dan (02:07)
That's

amazing. Well, good for you for adding creatine. know, buddy was asking about supplements recently and creatine is probably, if not one of the most studied, like let's say muscle enhancing supplements. It is incredibly safe. It is effective, but what's really nice too outside of muscle enhancements is there are some neurocognitive benefits too. So supposedly if you have creatine in your system, not only is it good for your mind, but it can be protective against things like

So creatine's amazing, so good for you for drinking protein and creatine and staying healthy and smart, good job. Yeah, well let's, let's.

Ronnie Teja (02:42)
Thanks bud, appreciate it.

Dan (02:45)
Let's get things kicked off. You've got an interesting background. You've done a lot of stuff in marketing and e-commerce and AI. I wanna hear about all of that, but let's start with e-commerce. You've got a brand, Brandsio watches, but how did you get into e-commerce?

Ronnie Teja (02:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's an interesting story. So I'm a first generation immigrant to Canada. the accent still remains. mean, as of now, today I'm 40 this year. So it's like 20 years of my life I lived in India. And the other 20 years of my life I lived in Manila, adopted home of Canada. In 2005.

My family called me up. was doing my masters in London and they said, look, we won the golden ticket. The golden ticket essentially meant that we were getting an opportunity to immigrate to Canada. And fair, you know, fair enough, we landed, you know, like any it's every immigrant has a similar story. May 14th, we landed. May 15th, I had a job. My first job was basically picking blueberries. And I was and I was this guy with a chip off his shoulder. I was like, well, you know what? I got my masters in economics. I'll have a job waiting for me and the people waiting for me to do stuff. Lo and behold, my first job was basically picking

blueberries and basically I had never done manual labor in my life before right so I was like holy shit what is this right so it was it was pretty humbling so it was me basically standing in a field picking blueberries at like five in the morning to like five in the evening and to be really honest I did for three months I didn't do it for too long but like I was a really bad blueberry picker because I could only make like 40 or 50 bucks a day whereas like all the other folks who were there they're like these old Indian aunties and uncles and they were making like 150 bucks a day and I was like shit I really suck at this but it's but it's a humbling experience I knew

what not to do. So it was good in that sense, right? And then basically like over the next couple years, I basically, you know, myself online marketing, reading blogs, you know, and I remember this is like when I landed in 2005, my sister was going to university in Canada and she was like, hey, you got to check out this thing. It's called YouTube. And I was like, what?

What is YouTube? And she's like, you can watch whole movies on this. And this is like before the DMCA and all this fun stuff. And she was like showing me movies and you could literally, and I was like, remember 2005, man, I mean, people are gonna like laugh at me for the, but it's like, this is the first time I've seen like the, you don't, so.

you can stream stuff online and you don't really need to download it. And it's like, what? This is like awesome. So I was like, okay, there's some future in this thing, but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. And, and so, so I basically like, you know, myself online marketing, like I said, with blogs, got my first job at HSBC. Second job was at Best Buy and Best Buy wasn't a fantastic experience because I was a media buyer, like a media buyer for a company called Future Shop, which is Best Buy's other brand in Canada. And I used to get like a budget of like five

million

dollars. That's five million mistakes I've got to make on a yearly basis. And basically from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day I would be throwing campaigns and I learned retail from Best Buy because Best Buy is really good at pushing out deals like three deals a day. You need to know who to target. You need to know how to do this. And I worked with Facebook and Google on a daily basis just pushing these deals left right and center left right and center. I was like holy shit this is amazing right. And that's and so that's how

I got started and then I basically worked there for a couple of years and I said, look, I want to do something by myself. And then somehow in a magazine, this is the era of magazines, unfortunately, I opened up The Economist and I found out.

that the margins in watches, quartz watches specifically, was about 80%. And I was like, shit, why am I not doing this? So was looking around for a job. Or it was like a job, 10 grand in the bank account, and try and try something and see how you go about it. And that's how I got started, man. That was me and I'll take, sorry if I spoke too much, but that's exactly how I did. was no job, next chapter of my life.

10 grand in the bank account, go work for somebody else or try and take a chance on yourself. So that's the story.

Dan (06:34)
That's amazing. I love the start. So we got to go back to the blueberry story. I think lots of people, myself included, can learn and get motivated about what you do want to do by working in something that you don't want to do. And I've had a fair amount of manual labor jobs and things where I'm like, ooh, I do not want to be doing this for the next 60 years. This is super hard work. So were you getting paid by the bushel of blueberries or something?

Ronnie Teja (06:58)
Yeah, yeah, it was

basically what they would do is by the end of the day you would have to like go and weigh these buckets in and you would weigh and they would pay you by the weight. So you can imagine how much weight I was pulling. Not much to be honest.

Dan (07:10)
Gotcha. Gotcha.

Ronnie Teja (07:12)
Yeah, I

mean, it's, it's, I'd never done manual labor before, right? You know, like kids in the West, like when you're growing up, you do some sort of manual labor, like it's okay. You go fix the yard. You'll go mow the lawns. You'll do all this kind of stuff in India because you have, I mean, I hate to sound spoiled, but you have help because labor's so cheap. You've got a billion and a half people that even, you know, I didn't know anything about this. So it's okay. You learn at 20. I started doing it. I was pretty late. Yeah.

Dan (07:35)
Gotcha, so how

has that affected you now when you look at blueberries? Do you enjoy them? Do you appreciate them more? Well, how's that?

Ronnie Teja (07:43)
I love them.

I love them. Till the time I don't have to pick them, I'm good with them.

Dan (07:47)
That's awesome. Nice. Yeah, they're super tasty. They're good for you. yeah, it's a nice reminder. And Oxidants, and it's a nice reminder that this whole digital marketing thing is really nice. Awesome. OK, so fantastic. So at Best Buy, it sounds like that was a really cool.

Ronnie Teja (07:54)
Adrogen antioxidants man, I'll take them.

Dan (08:08)
time in your life from learning e-commerce and retail. Was there anybody there who was showing you the ropes or were you literally learning everything online, figuring stuff out as you went and then you had this budget that you could then test with?

Ronnie Teja (08:21)
Yeah, so there's a couple of things that have happened there, right? So let's say three things happened. Number one, most of my education came from like Google and meta reps who were there. They were the guys who would explain to me what to do, what not to do. Remember, this was a time that in Canada, I could buy the homepage of Facebook for like 30 grand. Like I could literally take over all impressions, 100 % impression share on Facebook for $30,000. Imagine trying to do that today. I'd be like, holy shit, this is crazy, right?

And YouTube pages used to call me 40 grand. So I was like crazy but but you know you I learned a little bit about how retail works in terms of deals in terms of brands because of a guy I worked with as a marketing manager so the way it worked was you had a marketing manager and then the marketing manager would work with the media buyer and a promotions team to like cycle out deals as quickly as possible and so this guy he was a very soft-spoken Taiwanese Taiwanese Canadian fellow by the name of Alan and He taught me a lot about these kind of things and he was very patient with me keep it

mind I mean back then I was pretty like cowboy, gang ho type of thing. I still have a big personality but not as big as I used to and he knew how to communicate with me in a very logical way which is the reason I'm talking about him here and then to add to that I also had a very patient manager.

And that manager was also like, like, you look, don't, you you do your job. We don't really care. You know, till the time, till the time I don't hear about you, go do whatever you want. was like, perfect, man. Love you. And so, so it ended up being, it's a, so it was a good, good way of like doing it. But like in terms of most of my education, like coming back to that question was mostly through Google and Facebook reps and online. But, but imagine this is 2012, right? This is like the heyday of online advertising.

Shopify was just coming up like this.

Dan (10:00)
Yep, that's amazing. Yeah, I remember the days where you could buy full page takeovers on some of the big platforms. I used to call on Facebook to buy AdSpace before they were actually selling AdSpace. I was like, come on guys, I just want to buy some pop-ups, it's no problem. They're like, let's go talk to Mark and figure this out. And yeah, I was trying to get pop-ups on Facebook but.

Ronnie Teja (10:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, and Microsoft's

teams in local markets used to lead Facebook sales. Because Microsoft back then owned 20 % of Facebook, if I'm not mistaken.

Dan (10:23)
Yep.

Yep, Yeah, and this is also when the Facebook login was on all sorts of other random sites. I remember speaking with tech companies and they would use the Facebook login where you could use your user ID from Facebook to log in as their sort of outsourced login. I remember seeing that for the first time. Like, what's wrong with you guys? Why are you using this Facebook thing to log in? Is this gonna be a thing now? It's like you can use Facebook to log in everywhere. nice. Okay, come a long way. okay, so then you get to the point where you're like, do I?

Ronnie Teja (10:40)
Yeah.

That's crazy.

Dan (10:55)
make the leap and go into e-commerce for myself, you recognize that watch has had a pretty nice markup. So what happened from there? How did you get things started?

Ronnie Teja (11:05)
Yeah, so there's two things that happened primarily in life. Number one is I did what everybody else, the mistake that everybody else makes is which is basically go to Alibaba and try and sell through Alibaba. I still make that mistake today because I tried to do it six months ago and then failed miserably. But the problem is if you're not on the ground, if you ever want to do business in China or whatever country you my two cents that I would always say from all the failures that I've had is you need to go to the place where you want to manufacture.

And what you have to be worried of is there's middlemen, right, which is traders, which is fine. mean, there's no harm in making a buck. But how much bucks you're going to make is a problem, right? Some people make a 2-300 % markup on your coin and some people, you know, because you are a babe in the woods and that's short-term business, they'll discard you. Or some people will make a 20 % markup and then you'll be friends forever.

I unfortunately found a 300 % markup guy and then we got screwed. And then I said, look, and by that time I was eating into my savings and I was like, shit, there's something wrong here. So then I found out that in Hong Kong,

Every year there's a watch and clock fair. It happens twice a year. And so I called up a buddy. Of course I was bootstrapped. called a buddy, is, bootstrap is code for poor. And then basically I called up my buddy and I said, look, can I come crash on your couch? He's like, well, you're welcome to come. So I basically ended up crashed on his couch, couch surfing. And I was supposed to stay like a week. I ended up staying a month while this fair was going on. I mean, it's a big fair. Like it happens for two, over two, three weeks. Ended up at the fair every day. I used to go and comb each and every stall, ask these like, ask questions.

Ask questions ask questions right like it's like every floor till it like these guys on like by the end of week to the new I was they're like this guy is just he's a tyke a guy he's wasting our time blah blah blah but there was one guy right at the end of the day there was this one gentleman who was there and he said do you want to see how watches are made I'm like yeah I'd love to and you know he said come on down he says he was as enthusiastic come on down come and see my watch factory hoping that he'd get like a little bit of business but then long story short he invited me to his house which is a big mistake I ended up staying with him

for another couple of weeks, right? So I ended up spending time with him, his family, and at the end of it all, you know, he said, I said, I said, look, I don't have much money. And I, know, he was a bit disappointed at part time, but I told him my plan, my plan to sell online, use Facebook ads, to scale using everything, right? And he said, I'll tell you what, he says, if you want the cheap and cheerful stuff, what I can do for you, right, is that I have all these OEM stuff.

that a customer doesn't want. Why don't I just put your logo on this and I'll give it to you for free, right? You just pay for the logo printing, I said sure, right? So your cost of market entry is basically like.

maybe a thousand bucks for, know, 2000, 3000 watches, which is next to nothing. So you're like, perfect, this is like a sale. So you take what you had, which is about five, $6,000, you put it back into the Facebook ads machine and then you just watch it grow. I got lucky because of the kindness of my friend in Hong Kong, this factory owner, and that was mostly it, right? Because nobody would have just given me something like at these giveaway prices.

Dan (14:12)
Well, I would say it's more than luck, right? You leverage what you had, you leverage a relationship from a buddy, you had the initiative to go over there and find where all of these watch manufacturers would be. And then you spent weeks learning the inside scoop of how watches are made and I imagine, you what makes a quality watch versus a low quality watch and what are the important things to look for when you're purchasing and then you built a relationship with the manufacturer.

Ronnie Teja (14:33)
Yeah.

Dan (14:36)
cut you a killer deal, so that's amazing. Okay, so you get a couple thousand watches, you've got some budget to invest in Facebook, and then where do things go from there? How do you grow from there?

Ronnie Teja (14:45)
Yeah.

Lots of lots of fun failures along the way. Number one, PayPal banned my account within a few weeks of launch because PayPal thought I was up to no good. And that's what happened. Number one. Number two, Stripe, Stripe held my funds. That was for 50 percent of the funds. I was like, this is a cash flow business, man. I need I need to keep reinvesting money. I think it was like so we were growing pretty quickly. And then, you know, the powers that be, which is platforms basically started holding onto the money. Facebook.

Well, no, Facebook was okay. Got an account ban, but got it back after a few weeks. So it's like all these things, because I'm a babe in the woods, right? I don't know all these things that are going to happen. And the thing is you're starting a business, so you're stressed out. So, you you got to maintain your Facebook account, you got to maintain your PayPal account, you got to maintain your Stripe account, you got to keep all these guys in good standing, you got to do all the shit and then hopefully things come through, right? So it's an interesting process. I mean, the PayPal thing ended up being good because the Canadian dollar dropped against the US dollar. So I got like, you

It was 1.2, I got 1.4 back, so it was like a solid 10 % return for six months of PayPal keeping my money. Shopify was just coming up, so Shopify made things a lot more interesting. The problem is also like there's a lot of people out there, I'm sure that for entrepreneurs who...

And this is something I think I've learned over the years, people, like same example as Chinese suppliers, they occur anywhere in the world, right? People who do short-term business, people who basically come in, they overcharge you, they overcoat you, and then they basically screw you, and then they disappear, right? This has been my experience with contractors and everybody else. To this day, I just trust people.

at face value because I think that's what humanity is all about because I believe they're good people but what they do with their karma is their problem, right? My job is to trust people the first time they say their story. And then of course, there's a few things that I think.

Personally that happened. think the first thing if I were to recall was, sorry if I'm just recalling it is I burnt out. I burnt out within three months because that's what not a lot of people will tell you. I can tell you all these stories of guts and glory and the roads are paved with gold but it's also like...

I was John from customer service. I was John on email. was the guy, you know, now that people are telling you we call court abandonment calls and stuff, I was the guy who used to proactively do it in 2014 myself. And my accident was a lot deeper so they thought it was a scam call from India, which I don't blame them for. That's okay, man, it's funny. And what else was there? And I was sitting around trying to figure out how to code and I couldn't do it so I had this Ukrainian developer.

developer who spoke next to no English, so we were communicating via Google Translate, which kind of was interesting. And then three months in, I just...

I hit the bottle, man. was like, shit, I need to, need to de-stress. And that was probably the worst mistake, right? Cause nobody teaches you these things. Like under, underpinotia is a roller coaster, right? It's like, you gotta, I don't drink now. It's been five years or six years for the better, it's kind of like, nobody explains that roller coaster that goes on in your head and the roller coaster that's happening in your life. And I, and I wish there was somebody who would have told me about it. But luckily I had a friend who basically read about, you know, the Tim Ferriss for work week. knew the whole BA situation, introduced me to remote work.

employees in the Philippines and India and it kind of and from there I kind of understood okay well you know I don't need to do everything I can source a bunch of stuff out here which is pretty good.

Dan (18:02)
That's great, so you mentioned a couple things there. One is treating people the way you sort of would want to view humanity, and if somebody doesn't react well to that, if they kinda show their cars and they're not being good people, that's in their karma, yours. I love that, where you don't want to alter who you are.

in case you're dealing with somebody who might not be the best person or the best long-term business person, but you're still gonna act as if they are. So that's fantastic. And I also love that you're keeping it real about entrepreneurship, because it can be a super lonely ride and a very tumultuous one, lots of ups, lots of downs. And especially if you're on the solo-preneur path. So what did you do to get out of that rut? Was it as simple as, you know,

a friend recommended the four hour work week and then you started to learn, can do some of this, I can outsource some of this stuff and I don't have to be as much in the weeds or was there other stuff that you did to get out of it?

Ronnie Teja (18:53)
I think the first thing was I actually just asked him, because I, it's okay, so I know I should have read the book. I still have not read the book. I literally just went and talked to people who read the book and asked them how exactly they started their processes.

I learned by osmosis. In my case, osmosis basically means that I'm going to talk to Dan or I'm going to talk to the three smartest people I know in this field and I'm just going to go learn from them. Maybe I'll just probably sit next to them and by definition of their smartness, I'll get smart, right? Do you know what I mean? So I just learned by talking to people. I'm not a guy who's going to... Now you've got GPT, which is far more interesting. Trust me, and it's changed my life. But...

But I think that that's how I learned. So that's how I learned about how people are hiring VAs, people are doing, people are digital nomads, people are living all around the world, they're traveling.

And they're doing all these crazy things. So was easy for me to like set up my first base operation in the Philippines, right? But then about three years in and this is another thing that people are gonna tell you at some point of time is what happens is if you have a large enough team, we found that whoever team leader there was, was, basically, you know, I think she knew that I trusted her and the operations constantly broke down. then the truth came out was the fact that I think she and there was affairs going on in this team and there was basically like

a

lot of favoritism and everything else. was generally ruining the sort of outlook of the team in general. So we had a consultant who basically came in to get...

get the team involved in EOS, know, so like traction, get a grip, all that fun stuff by Gina Wickman. So our team does a mix of like Rockefeller habits and traction. And then basically that's where we grew. You know, we cleaned out house, we fired a lot of people. We got restarted on this journey of like trying to get, you know, air players and trying to, you know, got it, it, and you know, has the ability to undertake it. So that's how we got started in that process. And that took about a year to sort of

settle in and do I mean, I was fired from my own company for a couple of weeks. They're like, look, you're the guy who's going to keep breaking down processes. You need to go take a chill pill. Maybe we'll run things here. And it was good. I'm at two weeks off, you know, uh, I was good. I was good on, on, on the Slack front because I was made to delete Slack on my phone because I would constantly just like be on it. Uh, I just reinstalled it six months ago and I think I, I kind of like my time without it. But the thing is, you know, we're running a new business. We're running everything new. So I'm, I'm

far more hands on on it.

Dan (21:16)
So what advice do you have for brand owners or any business owner who is either working with, let's say, an outsourced team where they've got freelancers or just an outsourced team that's not local, or they've got a local team? Like how do you lead the team without being, sounds like you were changing processes and just being.

very, very hands-on, which is, I think, natural for lots of people to do because of your business and you care about it, so you want to get in the weeds and kind of make sure you're fixing everything. But what advice do you have for people to lead a team in a way where you can get a sense of if there are problems. So if there's affairs or favoritism or other things that are happening, you can be aware of it and try to fix it, but also not be too much up in the stuff where, you know, maybe you're doing a little...

Ronnie Teja (22:02)
Yeah, so I think there's two things here. I think you need to hire a good middle level management, like hire good people in the middle and then trust from them to do their job. Like most, like because I know, I'm not an operations guy. Operations annoy the shit out of me and admin annoy the shit out of me, right? It's like, so we found two people who basically are really good at these jobs and they enjoy it. I'm like, hey, go, don't want to be involved in this. And then marketing, the marketing, unfortunately got the short end of the stick cause me and him talk each

to each other every day for like 10 minutes. It's a stand-up call. 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes. And then they know. I'm just like, hey man, you have 10 minutes and we'll just, sometimes it's, there's a lot of work that 10 minutes becomes 30 minutes. And sometimes 10 minutes is just 10 minutes of me shooting the shit, right? And then it's their job to go lead the teams and just be dependable, right? So the goal behind this whole process is to check in.

And we have weekly calls with all the whole team, which is basically our leadership management team. It's four people, but fair enough, we have the conversation. And then it's up to them to go manage their teams. And they have teams on a weekly, calls on a weekly basis with their teams. It's important that we always focus on what the long-term vision of the company is. It's always important for them to understand why they're working and what that sort of purpose is gonna drive.

Over a period of time, it's also about like, know, our goal is to enrich these people's lives. And the question is, how do we do that? Right? So it's not always monetarily. Everybody defaults to monetarily. I've done that a lot of times. But I think it's also the fact that you need to, you need to emote with everybody. If somebody's mom is sick or daughter is sick, you got to go out of your way to make sure that you are able to, as an employer or a company, give them the best healthcare that you can.

Right? So if you hear something like that happen for any employee, you just don't ask questions. You blindly just do it. Right? That's always been my, I guess, the way I work. Or that's how we work in general as a company. So if there's something that, like a calamity befalls you or there are floods and somebody says things, okay, what can we do? How can we help your family? How can we help your immediate family and friends? That, I think, goes a long way.

Dan (24:10)
Well, that's a great way to be in personal relationships and professional relationships and leading a team even more so important. So good for you for doing that. So when did you start, Bransio? What year was that? 2013.

Ronnie Teja (24:22)
2015, right? So about a

decade in business. 10 years, got my 10,000 hours now.

Dan (24:26)
Gotcha,

yeah, nice, nice, nice. So over, so about 10 years or just over 10 years. So a lot has changed, I'm sure, in the past decade for your brand, especially when it comes to marketing. When you first got things going, that was around the time when Facebook ads were much easier than they are today. There was less competition and there was much more upside.

Ronnie Teja (24:50)
$8 CPMs bro.

$8 CPM. Yeah.

Dan (24:52)
I know, know, yeah, exactly,

exactly, crazy. So what are you seeing working now that is quite different than when you first started?

Ronnie Teja (25:02)
That's an interesting question. think the way Keep in mind when we started online advertising, right?

We were the gung-ho kids. And what gung-ho kids basically means is the big brands didn't want to touch it. It was like hot potato. It's like, what is this online thing? What's going to happen? We will let other people test it out. Nike wasn't in there. Under Armour wasn't in there. Everybody's not in there. And then came Nike. And I think for the last three years, what Nike did was they just spent all their money on online marketing. And then they basically got screwed as a brand. There's a mix here. And we were all performance marketers, which is basically we were looking at things in dollar in, dollar out. What is my advice?

Everything has to be calculated to like, well, how much dollars am I putting on marketing? How much money am I gonna get out of it? Today, I think that mindset has shifted. The mindset is basically what is your, what is the, if you're putting a dollar in, into Facebook ads, what are you looking at from a broader perspective? Are people looking on TikTok for your product? Are people searching on Amazon for your product? Are people looking for your brand on Google for your product? Same with YouTube ads. It's just all encompassing, right? I mean, when we, I think 2013, what, 2015, when I started advertising,

the first time, the average, you know, could put retargeting limits on your audience and that retargeting limit was between eight and 12, right? After eight people would get annoyed with it. Now 22, 30, 32, you don't really give a shit. I think now it's more like the more I show this to you, the more annoyed I want you to be so that you remember what the top of mind brand recall is, right? So that's another thing that's changed. So, you know, the overall ecosystem when I think about like advertising and when I think about marketing is like, know, performance driven media doesn't exist anymore.

It's more like an all-encompassing thing when you got to look at the complete picture because you can't be...

pigeonholed into one platform. Everybody just switches over from all these platforms on a daily basis, right? The second thing that I realized was, of course, that what is the value of the brand? We failed miserably at it, I'll be frank. I think we're okay. I think we've done okay at it. I think we could have done a lot better, but that's something I'm educating myself on at the moment, which is basically hanging out with people, be like, look, explain this to me. Because it's very hard to go from a performance-driven mindset to a brand-driven mindset.

Once you get to the brand-driven mindset, which is basically how you tell your story, how you evolve, how you are able to give the people the reason why, the organic stuff, and it's a waterfall effect, right? So I would say I've maximum been able to be a good performance marketer with an e-commerce brand, but I still have a lot to learn from a brand marketing perspective. I'd love to give you all this big spiel, but I don't want to bullshit anyone. That's true.

Dan (27:34)
It's good to be self-aware and everybody, we all have gaps, we all have things that we're good at, we all have things that we need to learn and what's fun about working in digital or just marketing in general is that there's always something new, even if you think you know something, it's gonna change in six months. Yeah, I like that you're talking about branding versus performance marketing because for a long time it was very much there were the performance marketers, then there were the brand marketers, right? And the brand marketers were looking at things like awareness and creativity and.

homepage takeovers as a way to just get in front of lots of people, know, have lots of reach. And then you can also get into like outdoor and sponsorships and all sorts of other things. But it was kind of hard to track ROI for that stuff. And then you've got your direct response marketers who are very much, yeah, we'll spend a dollar. We got $3.4 back and we're going to scale that as high as possible just to, you know, to have a cash machine. But I agree 100%. I think we're living a little bit in the world of

Ronnie Teja (28:03)
Yeah.

Dan (28:28)
people will say the term brand formants, right? Where it's like, you've gotta grow your brand, you've got to tell your story, but you've also gotta do it in a way that's profitable, because otherwise you don't know if you're spending money and if that is gonna be return, but some people have said that a nice way to think about brand is if you turn off all of your performance ads, or just all of your paid ads,

what happens and are you still gonna generate sales, right? And that is a good, I guess, sign of how strong your brand is and that includes like organic search results, organic branded search results, what your organic social looks like. And every brand is gonna be a little bit different but I think that's one nice way to look at, I guess, the long-term health of a brand is to say, okay, if we turn everything off, do we just stop making sales in that moment or are there some sales that are still gonna come through and are people still interested?

in the brand after we stop the performance marketing.

Ronnie Teja (29:23)
Correct.

Dan (29:23)
Awesome, awesome. So what are you seeing now from a let's stay within the lens of performance marketing and generating as efficient of growing e-commerce sales as efficiently as possible. What are you seeing work well now? Are there certain platforms you're seeing outperform others or you've seen certain strategies outperform others?

Ronnie Teja (29:41)
Yeah.

Well, Meta is always king, right? Meta is always good for driving awareness, top level, top funnels, all Meta, Meta, Meta, Meta, right? I mean, there's a big craze about Applovin. I haven't tested it out myself, but a lot of my friends who are on Applovin, love

love it. It's just like it's amazing. They're like, holy shit, like whatever. The thing is you just take your top performing creators on meta and then you just run it on Applovin. Right? So if you, if you have a way to get on Applovin, I suggest you do because they have this beta open right now. If you're spending 10k a day or something on meta, then you can get qualified to get onto their program right now. So it's like a, it's a closed beta, but I think it's worth it. Like a lot of people I know, they, they, they, they, can't stop speaking about it. Right? So I think it's worth it. Applovin has been the biggest story in advertising for the last like, you know, year.

before that was TikTok shop and TikTok creators right that's another thing I need to know how to scale because I'm not really good at that but I would really love to know how to get that blueprint out and they just like hammer it down you know top to bottom I think most people most successful ecom store owners that I know and this is a thing a story I'll share they take one channel

they go top to bottom of that channel and then exhaust that channel before they move on. And some people will take like, I think BKBeauty, Paul Goumano, he's a good friend, he did a presentation on this. He says, have six months, six months is all I'm gonna spend on TikTok.

dominating TikTok shop and today I think he's in his category is number two or number three, which is quite interesting, right? So it's very, very interesting that he's able to do that. And most people are switched on focus on that six months, right? Just day in and day out, you become a student of the game, right? And that's all you're gonna do. If you wanna crush influencers, that's six months, you just crush influencers. If you wanna crush creators, you just crush creators for six months. That's, you can't do 10 things in one go. And that's where we all fail.

Dan (31:30)
That's great insight. think that's good for personal goals too. If there's a certain hobby you wanna learn, whether it's playing the piano or becoming, know, learning another language, just going all in instead of spreading yourself too thin with lots of different hobbies or things that can be distractions. So one thing you mentioned earlier is that chat GBT changed your life. What are you doing with AI now and how are you using it for personal and professional use?

Ronnie Teja (31:51)
I'm doing

I think I'm doing what everybody else does which is basically create a lot of meta static ads after the chat GPT's last release like it's become like a drug like in between my sets at the gym I find myself making like ads on my phone with meta and giving it prompts I swear to God and it's like my trainers looking at me like what is wrong with this guy and I'm like shhh don't judge me I just want to create some meta ads at the gym

I know, I know, I know man, this is my life right now. I think there's a lot more applications than just creating meta ads, right? All our company data is analyzed by it. All the creative analysis that I do for meta ads is done on it. All the LTV projections and calculating like, what do you call it, blended ROAS targets are done on it. I think it's just, I use it as a therapist.

I use it as somebody to talk to back and forth about business decisions. use it like, you know, act as a McKinsey consultant and tell me about XYZ, know, tariffs are gonna hit, what are the other roots that I have, what can I do, blah, blah, blah. So I, you know, there's daily things, there's personal things, there's like, you know, shoot the shit things or hey, tell me a joke or something. It does have really good dad jokes, if you wanna know. So I promise you, you can ask him for some.

Or them? I don't know what open is it a guy or a girl? I don't know them I guess is the right word?

Dan (33:14)
You

Ronnie Teja (33:15)
Ask chat GPT for it and then There's all this fun stuff, right? So it's like it's it's literally you have the world It's how Google did to us in 1997 in India. I remember in 2000. Okay, so not 90s Google launched in 98 and then to the 2001 to the 2000 2002 2001 Google ran a front page ad in the Times of India, right? Which is basically back then when we had news and people used read newspapers and they literally said we will beat Yahoo search

by, you know, I think it was like, at least two seconds. If we don't beat them, you'll get an hour of internet free, which is basically, so they give you coupons to go to internet cafes. This is when internet cafes were a thing. So as a student, you're like, well, I'm gonna go test this out for 25 bucks off. You know, the Indian is like, good deal, we'll go check it out. And then we tested it. And that's how Google got its first customers. Crazy. And then we're going through this thing with.

with OpenAI, I mean, it's not just OpenAI. mean, remember six months ago, everybody used to talk about mid-journey for AI generation. Nobody talks about mid-journey today, right? It's gone. It's dead, right? Claude is still there. Claude is a better prompter. Claude writes better prompts than GPT. Claude does better copy than GPT. Claude does a lot of things much better than OpenAI. But then on the other side, have Magnus, which does deep research better than GPT, for example.

So there's two, three tools to play with, I think, on a daily basis. But if you're a lay person, think then stick to GPD. It's pretty good. It's a good driver of free traffic, by the way, like for organic SEO.

Dan (34:54)
How so?

Ronnie Teja (34:54)
If you... So my background is in SEO. Not... It's a little bit. I would say I know a little bit, but not as much as like a lot of my friends. Like again, osmosis, right?

Those guys taught me. I don't know as much as these guys do. But they're seeing that because GPT calls Bing and if you have pages that rank extremely high on Bing and Bing data is being fed into it, you will start ranking for organic search results. So if you're asking it for product-related search results, it'll work extremely well on ChatGPD. Now the other thing is, if you've heard about Amazon's new Shopping Assistant, that's another game killer, right? Which just came out, which is basically you can ask it for a product.

and it doesn't even shop at Amazon for your product. It can actually go around the web to all the e-commerce sites and all the e-commerce system and then give you a product to buy. But I'm like, why isn't Shopify doing it? Because Shopify has all the data. You're sitting on a treasure trove of information. you just killed all the, yeah. Overnight what you've done is you basically changed e-commerce. you don't, mean, Meta got eaten for lunch, dude. So, yeah, I don't know.

Dan (35:58)
So what are some ways for any brand owners who listening right now, whether they're on Shopify or a different e-commerce platform, how can they best use AI? So you mentioned that you're using it for business analytics and decision making, you're using it for copy, you're using it for ad creation. Let's just say if if...

Brand owner wanted to better analyze their business and get recommendations on which direction to go in. Let's say from a marketing standpoint or strategic standpoint, what would the steps be for them to take in order to get there?

Ronnie Teja (36:31)
I think it's mostly depending on your prompt, right? So I think what I would do is first of all, I would go to Claude and I would explain to them the problem in detail. The thing about like all these prompt things is the more detailed you go and you have to act like a persona, right? So the persona is extremely important, the persona that you want them to assume. if you're looking at like SEO, let's take an example. It's like, oh, act like Neil Patel, the number one SEO in the world or whatever it is, right? Or like two, three guys. mean, Neil Patel is not number one. I'm sure there's smarter guys out there, but he's got the number one brand personality for that, right?

right?

And then you can just say, take that and then act like so and so give me an AI generated content strategy that I should be executing for the next three to six months, label it out for me on a weekly basis, tell me what I need to tell my team what to do. And then basically let's stick to the plan and that's it, right? So then, so then it, and then you'll have to give it like maybe five or six more prompts after that to refine it. Cause the first prompt is going to be shit. And then, and then you take the cloud prompt,

and then take it and copy paste it into chat GPT. And because cloud prompts are much better, it's well structured and the paste into chat GPT, you make a project which says, Ronnie and Co's SEO plan next six months and then you just follow it. And then what you can do is, what's really good, is you can ask it to give you calendar invites for it. So then you can make it into a G-cal or a Apple Cal invite so that every morning you have this notification waiting for you on what you should be doing.

and then what you need to execute at what point of time in the day to sort of fill it up for you. I mean, I'm a workaholic, so like I usually have like, I think like in my calendar, most of my stuff starting at seven till 10 is all booked up with blocks, which says, okay, know, sorry, just to give you an example. So for example, like in the morning I'll have, there's a block for...

you know, high output work. Like this is just, in high output work, I have tomorrow like SEO, which is my priority. Then I have, know, then I have prompting for meta ads, then I have analysis for meta ads. And then, you know, so then I have strategy session, email catch-ups, focus work and meetings, like all these things like done in blocks, so it's just easier.

Dan (38:38)
That's amazing. if you were to, so you mentioned SEO, using AI for SEO. So outside of strategic advice where you could kind of train the AI to be a persona, some type of SEO expert, and then ask for recommendations, are there other ways you would use AI from an e-commerce standpoint for organic search results to create content in order to rank better? Like can you use AI to create content?

Ronnie Teja (39:06)
He

Dan (39:07)
that is designed to rank for AI search results.

Ronnie Teja (39:10)
You can,

mean, Google's also said they accept AI generated content now. You just have to, you just have to, so they're like AI, there was a thing where they had this AI penalty where Google didn't like duplicated content, because everybody's going to go to chat GPD and get the same content. So what you do is you basically take the content, then you put it in cloud, and then you basically get cloud to rewrite it as a non-duplicated content expert. So basically then it will rewrite it as a non-duplicated content expert. And then you double check it on, there's different websites out there where you can actually check, is this an AI due to,

Will Google detect this as AI generated content? If it doesn't, 99 % then you're to go. Push it live.

Dan (39:47)
Love it, love it.

Right, if you were starting over and wanted to build a business, let's say to your first seven figures, and you're focused on some type of e-commerce business, you had a shoestring budget, think back to 10K to get things started, what would your game plan be? What that look like?

Ronnie Teja (39:50)
Yeah.

Well, I am in that phase. I'm rebuilding another business. And I can tell you what I did. Number one was I flew to China. I went to meet with suppliers. I found the lowest cost product that I needed to do again because I'd made that mistake the first time of trusting people. And then basically set up a supply chain line. And all I needed to do was put my eggs in basket with one supplier whom I know can produce.

50 different variations of the product that I want. So I knew that if I wanted to launch, so for example, for Q2, I have 20 new product launches to do, and they have everything boom, on a weekly basis ready to go. So if I can outsource that, I can outsource fulfillment, then what I can focus on is the things I like, which is meta ads, running ads, running traffic. Of course, I was a little late to the funnels game, which is more like how to make...

good funnels. I think understanding good funnels and good offers is really important because it sets you apart from everybody's e-commerce store. Everybody just thinks it's a race to the bottom. But I think showing value as to why you're doing certain things is extremely important. Yeah.

Dan (41:07)
How did you choose the niche that you're in for the new brand?

Ronnie Teja (41:10)
margins man it has to be two things you need a you need a with with the CPAs that you see on Facebook today you need something that's at least 80 % margin 60 to 80 percent margin plus product or you need something that is very subscription heavy without those two it's going to be possible to because you're gonna get eaten for lunch on Amazon that's for sure

Dan (41:27)
All right, let's move to the speed round. So each answer about 60 seconds or less. So this will be an interesting one based on what you said before, but what is one of your most recommended books that you've read?

Ronnie Teja (41:31)
Ciao.

you know what? I would say it's a big shot or barbarians at the gate. The barbarians at the gate I actually like because that's about a hostile takeover situation. remember. my, sorry if I go over on this, but my guilty pleasure is reading books about financial crime.

Dan (41:58)
That's fun. That's a good way to I guess have insights in case you ever have suspicions about financial crap happening at your business.

Ronnie Teja (42:04)
Correct. I don't

know why, I just find it interesting.

Dan (42:09)
Nice, nice, awesome. So what is an under the radar product or brand that you've used and like but most people don't know about?

Ronnie Teja (42:18)
Ooh, hmm, that's quite interesting. What did I buy recently? I mean, look, I'm a watch guy, right? So I can talk about like, you know what? I'm gonna blow your mind with this. If you're ever looking for a watch and if you wanna test out like a really good watch, like which looks like a Rolex or which looks like any of these high-end fancy watches, go to AliExpress and look for a watch. And you can buy the same watch for like 100 bucks.

I buy my watches sometimes on AliExpress. I'm in the watch business and I still go to AliExpress to buy watches because some of these watches, Chinese watchmaking industry is growing like this right now compared to Switzerland. And they're doing so much cool shit and for like a hundred bucks, you can't really go wrong.

Dan (42:56)
And will the quality be there or will it just be a replica?

Ronnie Teja (42:58)
Oh great quality

they're using they're using nh35 seiko movements seiko and casio movement. It's the same movement The the only thing they don't have made in Switzerland and i'm in most of the swiss brands like at least 40 percent of them are made in china, man, They're not 100 made in switzerland believed or not

Dan (43:13)
I

think everybody listening to this is getting their Christmas list ready or birthday list ready for anybody. Anybody they would normally buy a watch for, like, I can't get a watch for them because I don't want to drop, you know, five grand. Now you just found your gifting hack. Nice. Tell us about your favorite shopping experience online or offline.

Ronnie Teja (43:20)
What you saying, Zach?

Exactly.

interesting one. You know I'm a sucker for service right? Maybe because I live in Thailand and I'm spoiled.

But I remember the four seasons. I always compare my experience to the four seasons experience. And there's a four season in Chiang Mai. I went and stayed there during COVID. And end to end, that experience was just something. And then I realized what the four seasons experience actually means because I went there to like stay for a couple of days. They upgraded my room. Fantastic. Since I arrived, then they basically, I wanted to play tennis with them or like, you know, was talking to the coach. was like, hey, look, I'm just trying to lose some weight. At dinner, this guy, the chef comes out with like a health menu. He's like,

I've heard through the grapevine that you're trying to lose weight and they basically had like all these calorie conscious meals with how much calories you're gonna consume on a daily basis. He for your breakfast and lunch, I can prepare special meals for you if you just tell me a calorie, what you wanna eat between and I'll just make it for you. And when I checked out, they basically gave me like a nice packed lunch of like, know, a thousand calorie yeast and they're like, this is for you, thanks for coming by and stuff. I was like, what the hell is this? And then...

You know, how do you beat that? How do you beat that? How do you beat that? You can't.

Dan (44:40)
Yeah, I love it. They're experts at listening and then they find one nugget and then going all in with it and just understanding the customer better than most other brands. That's fantastic.

Ronnie Teja (44:51)
Yeah,

I wish we could do this in Ecom, right? I wish there was somebody could dial in your customers every day and just be like, hey, thanks for being a part of a brand, you know, what can we do to make it better? Some guys do it better than others, but not to that level of Four Seasons, right?

Dan (45:06)
Yep. What's one thing in life you do better than most people, just naturally, and how do you do it?

Ronnie Teja (45:12)
I don't know, man. I do a lot of, I'll do a lot of shit things. I think one thing I might be able to do naturally better is connecting people. I'm a connector. So, which is like, if you know somebody, if you're looking for somebody who knows somebody and be like, hey, do know somebody who does this? I'm like, maybe, right? I like to connect people. So in Malcolm Gladwell's realm of things, I'd be a super connector. That's the way.

Dan (45:33)
So how do you do that? How do you know who to connect to who and how have you built your network to have enough people in it where you can connect people?

Ronnie Teja (45:40)
Yeah,

yeah, I'm not very shy of going to talk to people, right? So I'll just usually talk to people about what they do, what they can or I'll ask people, hey, like, hey, do know somebody who does this? And then we'll go, I'll go approach them. You know, pretty, pretty social in that sense. But, but then when people want to be connected to someone, I'm always like open to that, right? It's like, hey, let me just, I think this is something I learned from a friend in Hong Kong where, know, his name is Roman, he's in e-commerce and he basically said he always gives and he gives and he's very open and giving. So this is something I took from him maybe four, five years ago, which is basically like.

You just give freely. Don't worry about the ROI because some people want to take skim a connection, a connection commission. And I think it's kind of bizarre if you do that to mates or if you do that to people, you know, and I'm just like, here you go. Whatever you guys do together, it's your problem. I'm out of the situation. That's basically it.

Dan (46:25)
Fantastic, we're gonna wrap up in a minute, but I gotta say there was a reason why I have this mug for my coffee today. So this is the saying on it is good things come to those who go out and fucking hustle. And I think it's very appropriate for this interview with you, because you're a hustler man, you're out there getting it, you got several businesses, you've been in e-commerce for a while, you're doing a lot of stuff with marketing, AI, you're doing some super cool stuff. So I think it was meant to be that I pulled that mug out. So before we wrap up, where can people connect with you to learn more?

Ronnie Teja (46:36)
Yeah.

Thanks, bud.

Well yeah, I mean it's always good. You can just go to Google type in my name Ronnie Teja. You'll find my LinkedIn, my Instagram, everything on there. It's quite easy too.

Dan (47:04)
Awesome, fantastic. Ronnie, thank you so much for bringing Brandzio to market, all the other businesses that you're invested in and bringing to market as well. Thanks for sharing your expertise and insights with our audience on artificial intelligence, marketing, e-commerce, all of it, and for joining us on the Shopify happy hour.

Ronnie Teja (47:23)
Thanks bud, appreciate you.