#471 – Why “The Money Man” Says LinkedIn Is the New Goldmine for Sellers

Welcome to episode 471 of the AMM podcast. This week I'm speaking with Rob Stanley. Rob's been in e-commerce since 1998. Started out on eBay, evolved, and he's worked for several companies within the e-commerce space. You might know him as the money man, but now he's with another company that's a competitor to Shopify. We talk about maximizing your LinkedIn presence as an e-commerce person or brand. talk about some UGC strategies and a whole bunch more in this episode. I think you're going to enjoy it. Welcome to the AM PM podcast. Welcome to the AM PM podcast where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, plus this is the podcast for money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you you ready? Ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host. Here's your host, Kevin King. Kevin King. [Music] Rob Stanley, the money man. No, you're not the money man anymore. You're you're always going to be known as the money. I'm always going to be known as the money man. Mr. Rob Stanley on the AM podcast today. How you doing, man? Doing great, Kevin. Thanks for having me on. Big fan of AMM podcast for a long time. Always wanted to be on it. Oh, now now you are now now you're on the AM PM podcast. Uh, that's awesome. And this, you know, this podcast goes back to the early days. This is one of the very first podcast. Um, some people don't realize that, but there was like Kevin, I don't know how far when did you get into the Amazon game? When what uh I Well, I was in the Amazon game as a seller for quite a while, but when I jumped in the SAS side was probably around uh 20 late 2018, early 2019. But so sell you were selling like 2015 then? Uh 2010 is when I started 2010. Okay. 2010 about 2014 2015 is when really the the current little FBA model of go to Alibaba and find something and put it on Amazon. That kind of started. But around that time I think Kevin Riser had a podcast. Um Scott Vulkar had a podcast and then there's one or two others that had a podcast. Um but right around that time Manny started this podcast to document his journey as a seller. there was no Helium 10 and I I remember I think I caught it or found out about it like on the sixth or seventh episode and I started listening to it and then you know in 2022 summer of 2022 I've took it over so almost three and a half years now I've been uh hosting the AMM podcast looking the other day it's like 175 episodes or something like that of the several several hosts who knows what the future holds uh for the AMM podcast but um so you you started as a seller you doing like YouTube stuff and eBay and stuff, right? What give us a little bit about your your your old school history. Yeah, I I'll give you a little background. Back in 98, I was selling I guess I just went way back actually. Now, back in 1998, I was actually uh selling on eBay and I was selling electronic parts, parts for Palm Pilots. uh saw a business there to sell parts for the handheld devices I guess we could say which really evolved into opening a website around 2001 uh and selling just parts and it kept evolving into these different devices right so we had the the trio from uh Palm we had the Blackberry come out really where it kind of took off was uh about dece uh I'm sorry it was probably July of 2007 when the iPhone came out uh that I got a hold of that we already doing videos prior to that, but we were hosting them on our own website. YouTube, I think, was around 06 starting to pick up. It got really popular in ' 07. We put the very first video uh ever on YouTube of how to take apart your iPhone and that just shot our sales through the roof. Uh people started just coming over from it, the video looking on our website. Of course, we didn't have parts at then, but uh you know, they were looking for parts to fix their iPhone. And that I saw as a niche that I could just jump into and just really take hold of it and start duplicating the model that worked. And that was let's start making how-to repair videos, putting them on YouTube and driving that traffic back to our website for people to buy the parts or the accessory or whatever they wanted for their device. And we kind of stayed in that sort of handheld space uh which now would be pretty much the cell phone space. and uh ran that all the way until about 2018. Uh, backing up slightly, 2010, I started a separate company selling on Amazon. Uh, gosh, I think Sears.com back then, all the old school places, right? Even Groupon, we sold to Groupon. And, um, with a different uh, business partner and I and that was around 2010. By 2018, I had an option to exit the uh, iPhone space. Uh, and at the time, you got to remember like iPhones were being repaired on every corner. So, kind of the do-it-yourself wasn't really a thing or it was definitely uh going away quickly, but our Amazon business was really taking off. So, I wanted to get rid of the iPhone business, really shift over to the Amazon side uh that we had already been doing, you know, for about eight years at that point. Had an offer from a competitor to buy me out. He just wanted me out of the way uh on the iPhone side. Went ahead and took that offer. And then within several months, my business partner on the Amazon side wanted to buy me out. So, I said, "Cool." So, I had actually double buyout in 2018, uh, which was really neat. And then I kind of took about 6 months off, retired, and I was just like living in Silicon Valley, uh, California, San Jose specifically, and, you know, I was just like, I got to get back into this. My wife's like, start another company. I go, I just did 20 years of a company. I don't know if I want to do that again. So, I was kind of looking at uh, I think it was like Angel List or something back then that had all the startups in it. and I came across this ad that was looking for a marketing guy and it was in the Amazon industry and it was a startup and that's when I actually uh came over to Feedback Wiz. So that was the real early days. I was employee first employee other than the two uh co-founders. I was the first employee to get hired at Feedback Wiz and uh probably a lot of you know the story from that point on. So I'll kind of just stop right around there. So So Feedback Wiz for those listening and don't know that was to help you get feedback. you know, that's to help automate the process to to get feedback, i.e. reviews. Um, and there were several of those companies at one point doing that where they had automate the whole process before Amazon kind of started doing some of that. So then you ended up at Gita and had a good run at at Gita for for like seven years almost four years almost four years actually almost almost four years known as the money man wearing the money suits at all the events and then now you've moved back kind of come full circle to uh to mirror which is a software platform kind of like uh Shopify but more for people with large cataloges of products right yeah so MVA MVA is the platform sorry not me sorry no it's all right so I used MEA from 2003 to 2018. Uh we're definitely a direct competitor. Shopify Plus. So we're enterprise level. Uh so we go after anybody who's basically on Shopify Plus, Woo Commerce, Big Commerce, any of those are direct competitors of us and we're trying to transition them over. And one of the things that really sets me apart is yeah, large cataloges. Also a lot of the things that you'd want that you'd have to get, let's say, a plugin or a add-on to really make work, it's already built into MEA. So, a lot of people are like, "By the way, MEVA has been around since 1997. So, we were around before even Google started." Uh, so a lot of people are like, "Well, why haven't I heard of it?" Well, it's because now you're going to hear from it because I'm there and I'm thumping on the drum making sure everybody knows about MEVA and how great it is and what the difference is. But, I'm glad you brought up Kevin uh the money man. I want to talk a little bit about trade shows. So, some of y'all probably a lot of you know me as the money man. What some of you don't know is I was actually the feedback wizard, which if you go look around, there's some photos and people even have photos with me. So, back at Feedback Wiz, I think it was pretty early into when I just started with the company, they're like, "Hey, we're going to this this Prosper show and you got to come with." And it was the first time I ever gone to Prosper. And I remember sitting there and I was like trying to come up with an idea because they were telling me about trade shows. Now, I had been to CES and a lot of other types of trade shows. And Kev, what's the one thing when you go to a trade show that the booths look the same, right? It's like, yeah, same booth, same booth, same booth, right? And you occasionally get a salesperson or a marketing person standing out there talking to you. But I was just like, how do we stand out? How do we come in and do something different? And this is this is the precursor to the money man was I I was like online. It was after I think at that time uh we were already after Halloween and I was looking I was like what if I was the feedback wizard and we came up with that name and I was like so I got this wizard outfit. The funny thing is this outfit you couldn't even tell who I was. A big gray beard, a big hat. Um I'm sure there's a photo out there. You got to just go look on my social media. You'll definitely find it. Um so we went there and I think we ended up scanning something like 300 plus badges. People were coming by to take photos. People were coming by to say hi. They're like, "Who is this?" You know, and it was just such a hit. And I looked at how many and they said, "We, you know, we had never got that many scans at a show ever." So, of course, COVID happened as I was transitioning over to Gata and stuff and, uh, you know, trade shows kind of went away for a bit and I, you know, I knew there was uh, Prosper again. So, Prosper was kind of my platform actually. So, I love Prosper. Big shout out to them. And uh so that was when they did the July Prosper and I'd come up with this money man idea and I was kind of just sitting on it and I was like well we did refunds let's you know money that's all about money right and there was a couple different outfits and I was like man I got to get a good quality one. So so everybody knows the money man suit is not custom made. I got that straight off Amazon. You can probably go get it right now. The owner of the uh company actually is now a friend of mine. But I went and got that off there. I show up at Yonyi and Eton's hotel room. They had no clue I was doing this, by the way. I told them, "Just trust me." I show up at the room. I have like five different hats, three different chains, you know, all these like accessories, right? And we're trying to like figure it out. And I remember we got kind of the basic of it done. And I think I didn't even have the hat on. I had like a baseball hat, a Gita, a baseball hat. And we go downstairs and I remember Eton in the elevator saying something to the effect of this is either going to be a big success or a big failure. And I was like, and which is true, right? You you were trying something really new here. We're between walking from the elevator to the conference, which back then it was uh in a different location, the Prosper Show was. I remember getting stopped by just random people, not even Prosper Show people, and taking photos. We get to the booth and it just goes nuts. I'm not going to go into tons of detail, but listen, that just became a thing. We didn't even call it the money man then. I think it was a couple trade shows in of wearing it that we really came up with the money man idea and just ran with it. So, uh, yeah, that's that's kind of the whole backstory to the money man. But, you know what I'm getting at is that you've got to have a hook. So, people that do these trade shows, you know, they'll go in and they set up a booth. I'll see him sit behind the, you know, table and they just expect people to come to them. The whole idea of the money man thing was to get people to stop, whether it's taking a photo, which gives me a couple seconds to give them a quick pitch or, you know, at least tell them about the service we're providing. Now, I'm not saying you have to all be the money man, but come up with an idea. Get something that basically will get somebody's attention when they're walking by. Now, somebody asked me once, they said, "So, Rob, you know, when you're outside the money man outfit, are you the same way?" And I'm I'm exactly the same guy. So, great example. I I I go over to MEA recently, and I three three weeks into MEA, they're like, "Come to the SEMA show." And luckily, our CEO, he kind of knew I did a lot of shows. So, at SEMA, I didn't wear the moneyman outfit. I was just me. In fact, I pretty much was wearing a red shirt like I like you're seeing me right now. And uh I'm the same way. I'm going to stop every person walking by. I'm going to ask them what they do in the industry and try to see if there's a way to connect that what we do could help them. Like find their pain point and help them. So, that's kind of what I'm getting at is is, you know, when you go do these shows, a lot of people spend a lot of money to do these shows. You should be doing some promotions ahead of time of the shows, telling people you're going to be there. Send out a newsletter saying what booth you're at. Come by and see us. And then when you get to the show, make sure you're doing something to get their attention or stop them. whether it's a uh promotion uh you know some of the other companies I've seen that this always worked good is uh they they would give away a really cool expensive item right and hey put your business card in or let us scan your badge type thing those are great too because really as a exhibitor your goal is to collect as many basically uh potential clients information as possible so the sales team if you know if you're marketing the sales team to follow up with and try to close those deals. So, and I don't see that happen a lot. And and listen, Kevin, you've been to a ton of shows. How many times do you see people just sitting behind the booth are not hustling out there trying to get leads? I mean, there a lot. They just sitting back there checking their phone or something and it's it's it boggles my mind. Why would you pay you Prosper what 8 grand 8,500 for a basic cheapest booth and it goes up from there plus all your cost of of uh electricity and decoration and everything. You're in this thing uh you know well into the over 10,000 bucks and just to sit there um and not have it boggle it boggles my mind how people expect anything out of that. I mean you saw our booth at Prosper we had a huge screen 120 in screen behind it. Next year we're taking twice the amount of space and we're not using that screen. We're doing something a little bit different but it'll it'll stand out uh completely. And this last prosper we did the passport game where we had everybody running around, you know, getting a passport stamp which worked worked really well. And the prize was get enough stamps you get to come to a podcast recording with me and Norm, a little party. Uh and that that that worked really well. But yeah, trade shows if you're those listening that exhibit at them, you got to come out. You got to you got to do something that stands out. Otherwise, you're just going to blend in. And it's it's it's not not just having, you know, candy or or something at the deal or a stack of brochures uh or a pretty booth girl. It it it's a lot more than that. And I think that's where a lot of people are just dropped the ball when it comes to and then there's some I mean you guys when you were with Kita y'all did a lot of trade shows. How would how should someone listening to this if they're a service provider they're actually looking to do a trade show or maybe they're they're going to do a trade show for their brand because they want to go to the pet expo and you know promote their their bully sticks or something. What how do you choose what's a good show and what's a not good show? You talked about the one Mar with with uh the feedback guys. You got 300 leads, but are is that are those leads I don't know what the cost of feedback whiz was with if it's 30 bucks a month. If you converted all 300 of those people and they average three months, that's $27,000. Does that pay for the pay to be there or you know, how do you evaluate what's a good show to go to and what's a good ROI on a show? focus. A lot of people spend money, go to these shows, and there's no RORI. Well, I think you hit it on the head. You got to understand like what is your lifetime value, right? You got to understand like, okay, what's your average customer that you signed up? How long are they going to stay with you and your service and what's that going to what are you going to generate revenue-wise off of that, right? And then you got to also factor in, you know, what's the cost of the show? You got your flying, you got hotels, you got the cost of the show itself. So, there there is going to be like a base price you need to look at. So for somebody who's let's say a service provider and they're looking evaluating shows on what they should go to and whether they should get a booth and how much that booth's going to cost. Yeah, I would definitely be looking that over 100 shows and you learn quite a few things. You know, it's like even if it's a show, let's say even like BDSS, there's not traditional booth like at the show you have, but interacting with everybody, getting to know everybody, participating in everything. There was so many times uh you know, I'm thinking back to what was it? Hawaii. We just did uh you know that we were like we're going to be a part of everything that Kevin does. And we did that at every show. We were always a part of everything that you did. Uh because okay, maybe it's only talking to one or two people, but if they're big sellers, which you bring in big sellers at that show, uh it only takes a few to make our ROI back. One or two. So really, you know, something like a Prosper, it might take more, you know, depending on the size of them. And what but you don't want to discount. Let's say it's a smaller seller. Let's say they're doing, you know, half a million. That could a year from now they could be doing 10 20 million. You just don't know. So, you really want to take advantage of just collecting that information. Then the sales team, which I'm not a part of, you got to have a good sales team that does sequencing, right? Sequencing, making sure that there's always a follow-up. You're always your name's in front of them. Now, not overdoing it, but you got to make sure and then maybe let's say after 3 months of sequencing them and hitting them up if they haven't hit you yet, maybe you, you know, recommend putting them on the newsletter and that way at least they're getting a monthly reminder or weekly reminder of your company, what you guys do, maybe there's a new update that came out, maybe a new service that you're providing. So, ROI wise, yeah, I would say you want to evaluate what it's going to cost and what your lifetime value of your customer is. And then you're it's going to be investment. You're definitely investing in the future of your company by going to these shows if the payout's going to take a little time. Yeah. Since you left uh with Gita, they don't I don't think they're doing any shows anymore. Uh there are maybe one or two here or there, and they're not doing the newsletter. They're not doing podcasts. They they cut back on a lot of that. So, some people would say, why do you need to spend all this money and go and do all this? You can just do this on LinkedIn or, you know, on social media. And I know you've been doing some LinkedIn stuff recently and having some good success. Um, and I see, you know, I wasn't on LinkedIn for a long till like two years ago. I didn't have a presence at all on LinkedIn. I think I had three followers or something. And I I noticed LinkedIn and X seems to be where the vast majority of business stuff is happening online. So, I decided to to focus on LinkedIn. I do a little bit on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it, but primarily LinkedIn and a little bit Facebook, but I've grown now to close to 14,000, I think, uh, followers on on LinkedIn. So, what is it about LinkedIn that attracts, you know, our e-commerce crowd? And what are some ways that you've seen that you've been able to really ramp that up? Yeah, absolutely. I really got into LinkedIn. really I mean I've been doing LinkedIn since uh Feedback Whiz days uh but didn't really understand what I was doing. Uh I got really lucky coming over to MEA. So our CRO uh MJ uh is our CRO over here at MEVA and he's actually been shown as like a top 10 LinkedIn influencer and I thought I knew LinkedIn until I met him and wow what a perspective he has of understanding the dynamics of what makes LinkedIn really work. So, I'm going to give some quick tips. And these tips aren't for me. These are actually from MJ. And I started applying these tips. And I saw my LinkedIn just take off. Just all the people interacting with my post. The amount of people now following me, subscribing to, you know, be a part of anything I put out now has just grown exponentially since I've done these changes. Couple things you want to do is let's start with the first two lines of your post. That is the most important and that's the hook, right? So, you're going to have u usually about five to six words in the first sentence. Then you're going to have a space and you're going to have another five to six words. Now, there's a couple ways to do that. A, you want to have that five to six words because you want people, most people are looking at LinkedIn on their phone. I look at it on my computer and my phone, but most are looking on their phone. You don't want it to go to the next line. Plus, you want to have it where it cuts off to more, but doesn't cut off the word. So, that's on the second sentence. And the reason you have that space is to push that second sentence down. Now, you got to have that hook. Things like uh X without Y, right? That's one of the formulas that's usually used. If you have X, you get Y, you know? So, you have this issue and give a little bit of here's possibly the solution because you want to click get them to click more and read more of that article, right? Or that post. So, other ones that work really good like how I how I started LinkedIn, how I, you know, uh did well at trade shows, right? So, some of my post on I think it's on uh Thursdays, I talk a lot about trade shows and what's going right, what's going wrong. Uh my Tuesday ones are usually a bit of an interactive of uh images. You know, it could be something personal about me, but it still has that hook. So, anywhere from X without Y, how I and then fill in the blank or the big mistake was, you know, whatever was the big mistake. So, those three hooks seem to do really well. Uh again, keep it under about six words. So, five to six words max per line. Just try making that simple change. Even that simple change can really make a difference. Now, the other one, if you really want to get deep, first of all, I'm posting five days a week. So, I Monday through Friday, I'm always posting. I have a post that goes out every morning. Um, I'm actually just using uh LinkedIn schedule, which they don't tell you to use, by the way. You should be manually posting. I just don't have time. I mean, so for those that don't have time, use the built-in manualuler in uh LinkedIn. I think I'm posted I'm like scheduled about three weeks out even just because I'm traveling still a lot. But carousels carousels are understand how to make a carousel. It's got to be a PDF. I make mine in Canva. So the carousels make them probably about anywhere from six to 10 pages long, but that main image on that carousel. So that's going to go along with your first two lines. So you have the hook, then you have a visual. So, the visual is going to be also a hook and that's going to get people to click on that carousel and look through those basically slides, right, of that PDF. Uh, you want a bold title, clean image, uh, you know, two two to four words. Don't put a lot of text on that image. The whole idea is to get them with the hook of the first two lines. get them within the visual and then have them click on your carousel and put really good information from slide two all the way to call it slide six or something like that. Uh slide seven I usually use that as kind of a wrap-up slide like hey if you want to know more about me be sure to follow me. So that's another uh thing I would do. And then make it short punchy right make it a little bit fun sometimes. I've even tried some that are kind of funny. You know, I I wrote something up and I went over to chat GPT and I'm like, "Hey, make this a little funny. Let's redo this a little bit, you know, because I feel like if it always looks business-like, even on LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn is more business style, um they just you start getting fatigue, right? Seeing the same thing over and over again. So, I've switched colors. I've switched uh what I post. Um don't just do carousels five days a week. So, if you notice, I'm doing basically carousels Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And on Tuesday, I have an image I post. And on Thursday, I have another image I post. Two different ones. Like I said, Tuesday's a little more personal. Thursdays are business related, but about me. So, I have like past images of me in the money man suit. Even technically there's one of me in the Feedback Wiz outfit. So, you got to mix it up a little because otherwise the algorithm just sees nothing but carousels and it'll start avoiding. Now, what is the whole reason we're doing all this? The whole reason we're doing this is because the algorithm with LinkedIn wants to see that somebody stopped, clicked more, and read more of your post or they started clicking the carousel to read more of it. And then what it does is it'll send that first initial out to a small amount of people and see how they react to it. So if they react where they're reading it and they're and they're clicking through it, then it'll start expanding who sees that actual post. And that's the algorithm you're trying to crack. Now, how does this go when it comes to somebody who has a product or a brand? Same thing. Talk about the brand. Maybe you talk about something related to brand. So, I always like to use uh camping gear, right? Outdoor stoves. Well, you can only put so much about an outdoor stove, but maybe it's how somebody cooked or what somebody cooked on the outdoor stove or here's the crazy place I took an outdoor stove, right? So, it could be things like that. You can definitely vary it. uh AI like ChatGpt can help you come up with tons of ideas and different things that you can post about or talk about on any product or any brand out there. So you don't have to just be you know one little niche of of it. You can definitely expand beyond it and you know think of different ways you can uh do it to promote your brand, promote your product or your service and you know LinkedIn probably more of a service area. Uh so you know you can promote your service and see who connects. And then the other thing is follow up. When people post a reply, try to follow up as quickly as possible within the same day usually because then it shows that interaction, that back and forth. You mean reply? You mean you mean hit reply? Yeah. Comment reply to their comments. And then also go out and comment on other people's that are maybe in the same industry. Maybe they're somebody who uh is a, you know, similar industry but not the same product you're selling or the same service you're offering. So that shows also that you're out there actually working or doing stuff within LinkedIn. Now time- wise, everybody's like, "God, Rob, that sounds like this will take forever to do this." Set aside one hour every morning. That's it. One hour every morning. That's all you need to do. And you can do a lot within that hour once you get those things going, especially if you're using AI to help generate some of this for you. And you've seen that grow your LinkedIn dramatically. Dramatically. I've gotten tons of followers increase since I started doing this. So I think I'm on post 137. Remember, five per week uh every week and I'm at post 137 right now. And uh tremendous increase. I I think when I first started doing this, I had 9,500. I think I know 90 I think I had 9500 now I'm at 11,000 and change and it's going up like I think it's 11,500 as of recording this and it's probably going to be up even more you know and and sometimes you get lucky and they they just go through the roof and sometimes they just do okay but the thing is you need to keep them going you need to be consistent and it's also helps uh for AI too because AI is looking at LinkedIn it's looking at Reddit is looking at some of that social media signals so you can you've been doing it primar primarily for yourself, for Rob as a brand or you've been doing it for the company or both? Uh, specifically for the company. So, everything I've ever done ever since even Feedback Wiz, all my social media was dedicated to whatever company I was working with. Uh, of course, I put some of my personal stuff in there if I'm on vacation and stuff like that cuz I am human. But, um, you know, I don't use it. I don't there's nothing on there about politics or any of that stuff. I'm just there strictly to use it as a platform because everybody in my LinkedIn, they're all handpicked. I don't have VAS from the Philippines in there. These are all like people I've been collecting and and connecting with since Feedback Wiz. So, they're almost all Amazon sellers, e-commerce sellers. So, why would I tailor why wouldn't I tailor my content to the audience that's following me, you know, and that's what people should be doing is is take that those items you're posting and make sure that there's something that relates. So, right now, the topic I'm posting about is actually AI tools for e-commerce sellers. So those three days a week that I'm doing the carousels, it's telling you here's different u AI tools. So I'll pick a topic. So let's say uh how to avoid fraud, right, on your e-commerce website. So uh you know, I will go in there and say these are the AI tools that I've looked into. I go do some research on them. I make sure they're the right tools. Make sure they're live because so many tools come and go. And then I'll turn around and say like, here's the tools I suggest. Here's a link to them. Here's the name of them. Now, I don't put the link in there. That's another thing, by the way, Kevin. Don't put a link in your LinkedIn post. If you want to put any link to anything, put it in the first comments. I forgot to mention that one. Sorry about that. But, uh, go check out some of my, uh, carousels. You know, they're all for e-commerce sellers because that's who follows me, you know. I'll throw ones that are related to Amazon. I'll throw ones that are related to even non-MEVA uh, hosting sites, you know, and of course, I'll throw a MEVA one in there when it's appropriate. Yeah. Yeah. So, if you're doing this as for a brand, I mean, you can do it under your brand or you can also get a brand uh account and do it under that. And you can do it like, you know, if you're selling dog bully sticks, you're not going to do it all about your bully sticks. You're going to do it about dog training tips or dog uh uh how to how to calm your dog down when they're going when they got the zooies, you know, which one of the things is give them a bully stick or whatever. But you're you're going to doformational stories like how like you said, how to or you have this issue, your dog just won't be you're trying to do work and it just won't leave you alone. Here's seven tips and you know one of those tips is give it a bully stick and you know we happen to have the best bully sticks. So they can be it can be very very very effective. Now you're also doing some stuff though besides LinkedIn which is more I guess businessoriented. you're seeing some people and doing some stuff where you're using this UGC like just massive blitz kind of thing, right? Uh where you're seeing people that need to launch a new product and there's like a new strategy that a lot of people are doing is um just blitzing the entire like we called it I call it a storm and they're just making it just making it rain. um yeah out there by by hitting everything in I mean Alex Herozi did this back in August if you remember Alex Alexi's deal that he did in August where he did $100 million he was hitting I think he spent 7 million bucks is what uh some insiders told me on on his blitz and he just blitzed everything from YouTube TV to social media to billboards to uh Twitch stuff to you name it and to get get those people in into uh to to that webinar on that Saturday. So, what what is what is this that you're doing? Explain to me or explain to the audience what this this kind of blitz thing is you're doing. Yeah. So, I'm not taking credit for this. Uh this is something I've been reading a lot about. Uh it's called Super UGC is the name, but I'm I'm sure it's been under different names. I mean, Kevin and I have been on podcast together. I had Kevin on and and we talk about it's so funny, Kevin, all these things that come back around, right? So, you know, newsletters, mailers, I mean, you know, all kinds of things just come back around. They they threw a different name on it. I feel like this has been sort of done, but user generated content is somewhat new when it came to social media. So, that only goes back so far. So, super UGC or super usergenerated content strategy. Uh, again, I' I've been reading heavily into this, been really uh diving deep into this. So, let's just kind of go we'll go a little high level. I don't want to go too deep into this, but basically what it is, let's say you're getting ready to launch a product, a brand, or a service, right? You're going to you're going to launch something and it's new. So, if it's a service, maybe it's a new service you're providing. If it's a product, maybe it's a new uh version of your product. So, what you do is you want to go out there and find all these like micro influencers in the niche space you're in. So, there's a couple different tools you can use. Uh Mod Dash is one of them. Find these micro creators. I'm sure there's tons of them. So, that's just happened to be one that I've I've looked into. So, go out, you find these micro influencers, and you get a whole bunch of them. Now, some of these micro influencers might just do the video for the product itself, or they might just go ahead and actually do it for uh, you know, an actual flat rate or maybe they want a percentage. So, you establish that with them, but you want to get a lot of them. Now, the idea is not just the micro influencers. Maybe you're going to do a press release on top of this. you're gonna do uh you know anything from like micro influencers to a YouTube to promoting yourself. You're trying to think of what is the different types of media that you could hit all at the same time within let's say a 3day to one week time frame that it's just a blitz. Your name just comes up all the time in all these different you know media. Heck, it could be even mailers. Maybe you're mailing out something a postcard mail or announcing a new product at the same time and you're going to make sure it hits that same time that it's getting blitzed by these micro influencers. Now, you want to make sure that they have their own creative. So, make sure the micro influencers do it themselves. Do it on their own account and make sure that it's authentic. You know, you want to have them give their actual opinion on this. Uh provide some value and examples. You can give them examples of like here's some scripts you can use, but unfortunately if you do that, I would make sure the script's different for each one because you don't want them all sounding the same, right? Then it sounds a little too suspicious and and a little too weird. Um, but then what you want to end up doing after you kind of blitz this whole thing with a different ways of doing it is, you know, kind of look at uh identify the ones that did really well and maybe loop back around to those influencers and do a second round with them and promote it again. Now, what's the whole idea? what what are we trying to do here? Well, I think you kind of already said it, Kevin. The whole idea is to have everywhere on social media talking about you, right? And and of course, Google's going to pick up on this. All the social medias are going to pick up on it, especially if they see multiple people on multiple different platforms mentioning your product, tagging your product, talking about your product, right? And then it's just a big blitz. So, it could be Facebook. Let's say there's a uh people are posting on Facebook talking about it. People are on Instagram doing videos about your product. They're on YouTube doing videos, you know, or talking about it. Maybe you have a podcast that you did or several podcasts that you've done and you ask them to, you know, could they post it that same week. The idea is that somebody in that niche space is so, you know, we'll use the camping one I always like to talk about, right? If I'm in the camping industry, I'm probably connected to a bunch of different like groups that maybe do for buying or they go hiking and camping. If I all of a sudden see like just massive amount of posts and videos coming out that are turnaround and they're all talking about this one product, I want to go see what this product is. I want to go see what's going on. Why are people talking about this product? And what is the big hoo-ha, I guess you could say, about this product. So that's the whole idea of the super UGC strategy. So that's that's one idea to kind of take a look at. It's been done before, but it's just, you know, people kind of these different things that work, they kind of go by the wayside and they come back. So I would uh definitely take a look at that again. So how do you get them to all post around the same time rather than just, you know, trip dribbling it along? How do you get them to all like focus it in on this like one, I don't know, three days, two days, a week or whatever it is? Yeah. So what we do would and I've seen this done talking to a couple people who have done this uh especially when it comes to the micro influencers or micro creators uh you know you already usually are going to be paying them like a fat flat fee. I would almost like think of it this way, Kevin. It's a marketing. Make it part of your marketing budget, right? So, when you go to launch something, you know, you're going to do paid ads, you're going to spend x amount of money. So, this is just another thing you're going to spend money on. Go find these micro influencers, pay them, and make sure that they know like, hey, you're going to post these days, so and so is going to post these days, and kind of coordinate it. So, think of it as a marketing uh kind of calendar. You're going to lay this out. you're going to even ask them certain times to post, you know, that way uh it's all hitting and it's just being seen multiple times within that same let's say 24 to 48 hour time frame or maybe within that whole week. Uh so you could definitely do it. It's just a matter of coordinating it and taking some time to really kind of map it out almost like you would with a marketing calendar. And you spoke about trade shows earlier, but what about events? You guys at MEVA hosted an event. Uh I guess your next one's coming up what in uh uh March. Is that is that right? Of uh next year. What what's what's that event about? Yeah. So it's called Camp MVA. It's actually been around gosh a long time. I remember doing it let's say I think the first one I went to back in the day was 2009. And uh Campa has been around a long time. So it's a kind of a specific industry event uh where we bring a lot of our uh people who are on our platform in and kind of tell them about what's coming out new from MEVA and also we bring in a bunch of people to come talk about you know different subjects. So, uh, there could be somebody in there talking about, let's say, using images, AI images to turn around and, uh, make different lifestyle images out of your product, right? Isolating your product in an image and turn around and making lifestyle images with that. So, which by the way, just to bring that up, that uh, have you played around yet uh, with Gemini, the the nano nano banana? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Oh my god, so good. Not to get off track from Camp Neva, but man, that was so cool. I I took a a product that I just went and randomly brought off Amazon, isolated it, and started making like different things. Then I took myself and started isolating in different scenarios. Anyways, back to Cam. Cam is a industry event for MEA. Uh customers are anybody in the e-commerce industry that wants to come learn about not just MEA, but just great clients. We had uh Steve Simson came in, did a great presentation. John Lawson came in. Uh Eddie Maloof, if you're familiar with Eddie, talked about paid ads, what people are missing. Um I had Brian Kelsey come in and talk about Tik Tok shop and absolutely just demolish the whole place. Uh a lot of these people there, they're usually niched into the MEVA platform. Uh and you know, we're there to try to provide them that hey, there's a lot of solutions out there, a lot of people out there, and a lot of information out there other than just MEVA. And uh even actually uh I had Jamie Davidson come in and speak and of course he uh a lot of people were asking Jamie about you know how to get on Amazon. So it was it was pretty interesting. Uh you know I really got a hold of it. I've been attending it for many years and now that I'm on the other side of the fence and not a customer and I'm an employee uh our CEO Rick Wilson I've known for many years uh kind of gave me a really kind of just Rob how would you make this show better and we absolutely crushed it. We got a lot of people. I think we had, now remember, this is very industry industry specific for us. So, we got like 150 people to show up. They just, this is only second one they've done since COVID. Uh, and I think this year we're going to have probably 200 to 250 people show up to this. Unfortunately, I'm going to mention this right now. It is the same time as Prosper. Um, which on the last day of the MEA show, I'm jumping on a flight and coming out to Prosper uh to at least see everybody for a day or two. I think that's on the 11th. So, uh you can if you want more information, you can look at campa.com. Uh we're just getting that website kind of regoing for the 2026 uh show that will be coming up and we'll start posting who's going to be speaking and some of the uh tracks you can do. It's a great event. Uh but if you're in that Amazon industry, you'll probably end up at Prosper and that's okay. That's okay. So, so what you you talked about MEA as a tool explain again a little bit about how it's different than Shopify. Why should someone because right now there is a big push to a lot of people that are selling on Amazon like they need to become omni channel. They need to get out and they need to actually um get onto Shopify, get onto Tik Tok shop or maybe it's Walmart or or something else. But I think it should be Tik Tok shop for discoverability than a Shopify or or similar WooCommerce or similar site. Who why should some of the sellers listening to this maybe instead of doing Shopify, why should they consider taking a look at at MEA, what what who who would be the right uh fit for for what MEVA can do? Yeah, absolutely. So, if you're on Shopify Plus specifically? Uh if you're on regular Shopify, we're probably not the right fit for you. Uh we are enterprise level which also means there's a price tag that goes with that. We are cheaper than Shopify Plus and we're going to offer a lot more plugins. So if you are a large cattle let's say if you're doing probably about a million dollars a year uh on Amazon or on just you know wherever you're selling basically even if it's Shopify plus if you're a million dollars and up a year if you're looking for a lot more integration that works together. If you're looking for, let's say, uh, let's say you have to have uh, automotive space in your year, make model, you sell windshield wiper blades and you're like, man, I have to have year make, model for each of these wiper blades. We have that already built in large SKs. We have uh, one of our customers is already over two million SKs uh, on our platform and it runs perfect. You're welcome to go to g2.com, take a look at how we perform against, by the way, we beat all of them on performance, speed, reliability, uh, customer satisfaction. But to break it down, if you're doing a basically about a million dollars up, and let's say you need ERP integration to your catalog, or you have large skew count, and you're looking for a reliable US-based uh, US-based customer support, US-based company, US-based servers. We're all in the US. Our developers are US by the way. So, uh we we tend to like lean a little more towards the automotive industry. Uh but it can work for anything. We have a bunch of textile people because anything that requires let's say a variation. Uh I'm trying to push us into the pet industry. So, I'm sorry on the textile, you know, you have uh small, medium, large, extra large, triple X, and all these different colors. You know, we have that capability already built in. Uh and then the pet industry, you know, the pet collars could be anything from small, medium, large to extra large, you know, red, white, blue, yellow, green, whatever, sparkly. Uh you know, we have that already built in. Uh but again, uh probably more if you're in the Shopify plus, Woo Commerce, Big Commerce, Magento, uh take a look as option. You can always hit me up. Happy to give you more specifics on, you know, your particular company and if it's a good fit and schedule something with one of our salespeople. What have you seen since you got into e-commerce back in 1998, but more specifically probably around 2015, 2016? What have you seen change in these last 10 years? Like what's radically shifted and changed and and and then where do you see this going? Yeah, you know, the easy answer is say AI, but I'm I'm going to say social media. Uh social media platforms going from just posting uh hey, I took my dog for a walk or I'm eating pizza to now more of a sales platform. Uh you've definitely seen a big shift of that social media being just like here's what I did today to a selling platform. you know, Tik Tok really jumped in jumped in and took over that whole with Tik Tok shops and a lot of them are catching up to that. I'm hearing uh something about Instagram now starting to do something similar um to Tik Tok shops. I'm sure we're going to see it with uh you know, Facebook's got Facebook Marketplace, but I'm sure they're going to transition into there. Then I see things like, you know, Amazon's probably going to try to shift somewhat back to go after Tik Tok, right? Like there's there's a whole thing there. So besides that, I mean AI's been revolutionary. I mean, especially from a marketing point of view, uh, from even a brand point of view, I see so many brands taking advantage of AI and AI tools. Uh, you know, one of my favorite, by the way, uh, would probably be uh, a couple things for a brand. If you're looking to do something, let's say, uh, with uh, blog articles, because you should have blog articles going out, take a look at by word, bwd.ai. probably one of the best ones out there for writing blog articles. Great SEO. I know there's probably different ones and more of them out there. That happens to be one that I really like. Uh we talked about Gemini already when it comes to images, isolating that image and putting it into lifestyle. Heck, you almost don't uh need a photographer nowadays. You just take a picture with your phone and it'll clean it up and then turn around and put it into any scenario you want. Uh but I do want to mention though, Kevin, and that is the geo, right? So, if you're not familiar with generative engine optimization, go some some people call it AEO or AIO. Yeah, there there's different uh acronyms for it, but it's all answer engine optimization. Yeah. Yeah. So, let's go over the basics of what this is. So, uh for instance, one of the things you might, you know, people might do is uh going back to my camping thing, they might say, you know, maybe my brand's called XYZ. Uh who's similar to brand XYZ in the camping space in chat GPT? and it's going to come up with a list. It's going to have a list in there. Now, you want to make sure that if somebody mentions somebody else's brand and says who's similar to their brand, you want your XYZ brand to come up. So, think uh search engine optimization for AI basically is the best way to put. You want your name and your brand to come up in certain scenarios when it pertains to somebody looking up uh whether it's looking up for something similar to say a Shopify plus or it's looking up something it's similar to why is this campaign stove better and who else has something like it. So what I would do is that's that's the basics of kind of the geo I I call it uh generative up engine optimization. take a look at. So, we actually just signed with a Zoma.ai. So, Max Sinclair's been around a long time. He's been doing some really cool to tools. I've had him on my podcast before. Uh, a Zoma.AI will help you basically show up. So, if you're not showing up under certain keywords that people are typing in when they're doing AI or asking AI and and by the way, this also you can do it with uh, if I'm not mistaken, Rufus is one of the ones he can do it with. I think even Google AI search, he can help you show up in there. So, take a look at that tool. There's so many great tools out there and I'm sure there's others that do it. What have you seen, Kevin? Uh, yeah, Zoma, he's one of the Max is one of the leaders. They they just changed the name to that. It used to be a um uh they started as a photo. Yeah, content as a photo thing and they they've made that switch. It's interesting you say that. uh Norm Ferrar and I have a company called Dragonfish that does that exact same thing. It's not a software tool that you just go and do it yourself is that we do that for you. We do AEO uh both on Amazon and off Amazon full optimization uh and getting you ranked and all the uh all seven of the frontier platforms and uh beyond. Um that that's something that that we do. We just started doing that back in uh in September. Um excellent with the dragon fish then. Yeah, it's dragonfish.co and we also do email uh for people. So those we we found that those are the two weaknesses. There's tons of people doing PPC, tons of people doing all these other things, but no one for e-commerce sol is really focusing well there's not not I I can't say no one very few people are focusing on the the AEO or GEO as you call it or the email side. So that's what uh Dragonfish is is doing um as well because yeah it's an interesting time to it's it's a small the the GEO stuff is a small percentage of of everything right now but it's rapidly growing and it's not not this not you know Murphy's law is that technology everything doubles every 18 months but it's if you look at some of the linear curves of how fast things are going it's not it's basically everything doubles or triples in 6 months and it's it's moving super super fast and it's hard to keep up with what's working and what's what's not working and what's the latest way to get ranked. But I agree with you that more and more people are going to be going to chat GBT for instance and typing in um what's the what's the correct uh wind windshield wiper for 1967 Ford Mustang XY32. Uh, and especially if I live in this climate or something and it's going to come back and recommend something, then you want to be you want to if you're on on MVA, you want to make sure it's recommending your link straight into MEA for that. Um, and that that's different than just going and typing in to Google and having to search around, try to find the right one, look at 10 different ones until you find the right one. It's going to hone in on it better. and you you want to be that answer. And I liken it to right now I think the opportunity in that is similar to Amazon 2013 2014 where if you were selling vitamin C serum you could put up a private label of vitamin C serum get on Amazon 2013 2014 you might have been selling a couple hundred units a week or something at that point. Now you're selling a couple hundred units an hour or or whatever because Amazon's grown so much and you have a moat around you with reviews. And I I think the same thing is true with with GEO or I call it AEO. Um if if you get optimized now, you're going to ride that wave. It's not going to add a huge amount to your bottom line. A little bit if you do it right, but it's going to becoming more and more and more important. And I think everybody needs to be paying attention to that. So that's that's that's my take. Now, you've got a couple other cool tools that you've stumbled across, right? That you you said Nano Banana and uh um Zoma is is is a good one. What What else are you uh messing around with these days? Yeah, we we talked about the the buy word.ai uh for blogs. That's been around a while. You know, oldie but a goodie still is opus.pro, you know, or opus clips. Uh still a great one to use. A lot of people still use it. Uh, I use it in our marketing quite a bit. Um, you know, I'm still a big fan for uh podcasting on StreamYard uh because I I can literally uh you know, just schedule it to go up, get clips. Actually, it's funny because Streamyard's actually doing AI clips now just like Opus. Opus does. So, I'm actually it's got that built in now. So, that that's one that I've been using quite a bit. I'll give you a crazy I want to give you a crazy chat GPT story. Not not necessarily related to e-commerce, but just what you can do with it. And I'll make it short. So my wife and I moved to Arizona here a couple years ago, Phoenix area and uh we're living in one of our rentals and we've been you know looking for houses and I was like but you know I don't know Phoenix all that great. So I had chat GPT I actually put enough information into chat GPT that it helped me based on what my criteria was to help me figure out what area I wanted to live. Then it started even going down further into what communities I should live in based on my criteria. Give you the basics of the criteria. you want to live in a gated uh golf community is what my wife wife and I both golf. So, uh you know, it actually broke those down. So, then I was able to take that information, go over to realer.com and start looking at those areas and keep an eye on houses. So, here's a crazy thing. We we got a couple about 3 months ago, we got into a we were going to make an offer on a house. I found out there was actual a GPT in chat GPT that I could use that would help me make the offer in the sense of at least help with what it understood going out and and checking all the uh dynamics of who's selling in that area, how much is it selling for, what are some of the issues. Long story short, I we ended up getting that house. We ended up not closing on it because there was more issues than they were willing to step up and help take care of. Uh, and a couple houses later, just about a week ago, uh, as of this recording, a week ago, uh, we actually closed on a house, but I had it actually helped me with the offer. I knew what offer I wanted to make, and it kind of told me like that's a really either, uh, great offer or you're too low or hey, that you probably won't get accepted if you do that. And then uh you know when we went through uh basically getting inspections and stuff, I was uploading the inspection reports and it was helping me you know pinpoint the different things we might want to look for and ask for when we're closing. So just different ways you can use chat GBT and how AI is really just expanding out there so quickly and just capable of so much. Uh, you know, another crazy one, I went through my kitchen one night and I told into my phone to chat GPT all the different ingredients I had and it helped me make a meal. I mean, just from basically uh putting all the different items I had. It It's crazy how AI is just going absolutely nuts. You know, you and I have talked about AI a bunch, but uh yeah, just a fun couple just touching the surface of what it can do, but like you said, the the agentic stuff and what's coming is pretty mind-blowing and it's I follow it. I'm on the cutting edge of it and I follow it quite a bit and it it it's it's very impressive where where we're headed. Um and I'm I'm here. You're in Phoenix. We have the Whimos. You know, you you have them too. Uh there I think y'all are a little bit more expensive. you can do the entire city pretty much in Phoenix. Uh my understanding is they don't they don't go on the freeways. Uh so they'll take the this the the streets with all the lights. Um but here in Austin, we have we have Whimo and they just expanded. It was just doing the downtown area and it just expanded out and I was like I'm not I don't know if I trust to get in one of these driverless cars. And then I got a Tesla and it has the full self-drive on it and I'm sitting behind the the wheel and so I have some control if it something goes wrong. But I've been thoroughly impressed with how good it is. Uh and so I I totally trust the Whimo now way way more than I would have ever trusted it um before having my own driverless car. But yeah, it and you're going to see that there's going to be driverless uh e-commerce too coming uh where you just going to hit a couple buttons and approve a few things and uh dig in when there's a problem and and sort that out. But uh you know one of the other podcasts I had someone on that they're like I think there's going to be a $30 million two or three person company uh easily in the Amazon space um working with agents that are doing a lot of the stuff. Uh so it's exciting time exciting time to be in e-commerce. Things are changing um but uh it's still a great place to be. Well Rob I really appreciate you coming on man. Uh if if people wanted to reach out I'm sure they could find you on LinkedIn right? You got 11,000 people there. How how do they reach out uh to you if they want to check check you out or learn more about what you're up to? Yeah, absolutely. You can I'm on all social media platforms. It's uh I think all of them are set up as Rob Stanley Ro Sa and LY. Just search Rob Stanley on any of the platforms. Look for the ball guy. Uh I'm on Facebook, uh Instagram, LinkedIn, pretty much name it, I'm on there. Uh and you can just message me. Message me directly through any of those platforms. Happy to answer any questions. Uh, and yeah, that's the easiest way to reach out to me. Always happy to, you know, give any advice, tell you what I'm working on, the latest thing. Uh, follow me on LinkedIn for all the great, you know, AI post I'm doing regarding e-commerce and different tools out there. You know, Kevin, I mean, the whole idea of coming on these shows for everybody, if you if you kind of look at what Kevin and I talk about and what we're kind of saying, it's keep up. You know, pay attention, stay up. So if you're a brand and you know you can be something as simple as a uh candle company uh making candles which you think is not very sophisticated but you know there's a lot you can do with that and uh there's so many AI tools out there and so many tools in general that you got to stay up with what's going on out there or you're going to get left behind. And I think that's been true uh with yourself and myself even Kevin. We've been in this industry a long time and I'm always looking to evolve, looking to learn anything new out there and try to stay current as I can. Yeah. And one thing that's uh we talk about the GEO. One thing that's important in GEO is authority either for yourself if you're you know if you're a content creator or educator or for your brand. And one of the best ways to get authority is through video and through podcast. Podcasts are a major uh feeder for a GEO engines and what they're indexing. So, if you're listening to this, get on as many maybe start a podcast for your brand or if not, get on as many podcasts as you can either on your behalf if if you're trying to get your own personal brand out there or on the company's behalf to get it out there. It can be a major a major mover of the needle uh when it comes to GEO. Uh it's just one of the major movers. But, uh Rob, I really appreciate you coming on today. Uh I'm sure I'll see you uh at that Prosper show when you're popping out there for a day. We have a booth there. or if not, I'll probably see you for a cigar or something uh sometime uh before then. Um but I appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Kevin. I really appreciate being on and always a big fan of the AM podcast. So, thank you so much. Thank you. Always fun to talk to some e-commerce old-timers that have been doing this for a while. Rob's a good guy. Uh make sure you follow him on LinkedIn for the latest strategies of what's working in e-commerce and beyond. Don't forget also make sure you subscribe to the billiondollers newsletter, billiondollarellers.com. And also coming up in just a couple weeks is Market Masters in Austin. You can go to billiondollarcellersummit.com and check that out. It's one of the most game-changing events in the entire space. Market masters uh happening the third one just a couple weeks here in Austin. We'll be back again next week with another awesome episode of the AM PM podcast. Until then, have a great weekend and rest of your week. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]