#693 - Ezra Firestone talks Shopify, Sumo, Amazon, & More!

#693 - Ezra Firestone talks Shopify, Sumo, Amazon, & More! Speaker 2: Today, you're hearing from the two biggest sumo wrestling fans in all of e-commerce, myself and today's guest, who just happens to be one of the most legendary figures in e-commerce, having sold hundreds of millions of dollars online, Ezra Firestone. And we're going to be talking about all things from sumo to Shopify and everything in between. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we have got one of the legends in all of the e-com game back on the show. Privilege to have him here. Ezra Firestone. Ezra, how's it going? Speaker 1: Let's go, baby. Serious Sellers. And we got the sumo shirt going down. What's up with your boy? Koto Shoho getting the win. Speaker 2: I was like, what in the world? How in the world did Koto Shoho win the tournament at his rank? And he was just been an underperformer for years. Speaker 1: I can never say his name right, but my boy out of Ukraine, man, coming up. Who saw that coming? I certainly didn't. Speaker 2: He would have done better. I heard he got injured halfway through the tournament. I was reading some forums and other than that, I think he would have taken it, but he's like… I mean, to put up an 11-4 record though, I mean, that's dude, out of Ukraine. Speaker 1: We haven't had since Tochin Ocean, we haven't had a white guy. At that level, you know, and also I have a soft spot in my heart for Ukraine because my business partner in Zipify is Ukrainian and I have, you know, 50, 60 employees in Ukraine and I've been, you know, doing business in Ukraine for over a decade and I just, yeah, I have a soft spot for Ukrainians and I know that culture pretty well and so for us to have a Ukrainian guy at the top of sumo is wild. Speaker 2: I referee the US Sumo Open every year. When he was 19 or something, he won a silver medal there, but I was refereeing when he was an amateur there and it was kind of cool to see him now, to see what he's doing. It's interesting. At the height of the Ukraine-Russia war, there's he doesn't look it, but there's a Russian in the top, but he's from the part of Russia where they have Asian features. And so he looks almost Japanese. His name is Rojo. And so like they're making a big deal last year whenever they would go against like here we got Ukraine versus Russia. Speaker 1: But yeah, I'd like the I don't know about Rojo, but I go check him out. Speaker 2: So, guys, you're going to have to put up with it. You got two of the biggest sumo fans in e-commerce. You're going to have to put up with a little bit of this conversation. How did you get into sumo? I don't know about the only, but at least the biggest two. Speaker 1: I grew up in Hawaii. In Hawaii, we had Akebono, we had Musashi Maru, and we had Konishiki. When I was growing up in Hawaii, these were our heroes. These were like island boys who went out there on the world stage and became champions. Hawaii is very influenced by Japan. Hawaii is where America's best judo is a lot of the time, California as well. There's a lot of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii and there's also a lot of Japanese tourism in Hawaii because it's close or it's closer than America anyway, mainland America. So there's a really strong Japanese influence and I grew up doing judo in Hawaii and I grew up watching sumo and it was just a big part of my childhood and we were very proud as Hawaii boys to have Hawaiians out there on the world stage and so we haven't had a Hawaiian sumo player since basically, since then. Speaker 2: Who has never done much, yeah. There actually is a new one. He just started two tournaments ago. There used to be, I forgot his name, but there was another guy, he was there for a while, but he never got past the Makushita ranks, and then he retired. It's his younger brother, so he's in Musashimaru's stable. He's still in the lower, like Jonidon or something like that, but yeah, nobody has ever reached the high, no Hawaiians have ever reached the high ones. Other than those that you mentioned for a while. Speaker 1: Yeah, we had three dogs, man. We were battling it out. It was cool for a while. And then, you know, I kind of moved away and lost track. But recently, in the last like five or ten years, I've gotten back deep. You know, it's like when you become older and you become nostalgic for your childhood and, you know, start reaching up towards 40. I'm 39. So, you know, when I started at about 29, 30, I got back into sumo. Speaker 2: Now, you actually have like your own like judo dojo or also I see on your Instagram sometimes. Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a little judo, little miniature dojo in my house. I have a cool little setup where I have three, I have like a little crescent moon village where it's like three houses all connected and one of them is my office and gym and dojo, so I train here. But actually, buying a laundromat in the small town that I live in and starting a judo club. It will be upstate New York. We don't have a lot of judo. You know, it's like not there's a couple there's some good judo in New Jersey and there's some good judo in New York City, but where I live upstate. There's not a lot of judo and so I teach a judo class at a local jujitsu gym, which is really fun. I'm going to start an actual judo dojo here. So if you ever find yourself in upstate New York, about two and a half hours north of New York City, by the way, if you actually live in upstate New York, you think it's hilarious that I call where I live upstate, but there's like this battle where it's like because New York's giant and you could drive seven hours out of the city and still be in New York. People who live actually in upstate Rochester, Buffalo, they're like, dude, you do not live in upstate. But if you came from New York City like me, then everyone calls this upstate. So I'm sorry. This is what people call it. I did not invent this. Speaker 2: I think, you know, this is actually, you know, kind of a segue to talking about e-commerce. But, you know, you and I just offline we're talking about, you know, my previous health issues and heart attacks and stuff like that. But I think it's important as e-commerce professionals, especially those who now work from home, like it's the you're so What's the word? Sedentary. Sedentary, whatever the word is, like where you just forget that you have to work out because you're just at home and stuff and having hobbies like that, like a sport to do, I think is super important for anybody out there. Would you agree? Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a study that's talking about sitting as the new smoking for our generation. Everybody's hunched over, they're on their phones, they're sitting, they're sedentary. It's like there are a few things that are required for thriving human and your mind and your body are not disconnected. Your mind and your body are very connected. So if your whole day is like in your head and you're all tight and you're thinking, it's like that goes through your whole system. It's like you've got to sleep well, you've got to eat well and you have to move, man. It could be as simple as an hour walk once a day. It's like you don't have to do rigorous movement. I'm a fan of rigorous movement but you've got to move. You've got to like move the energy within your body or you get sick. I mean that is just what happens to us. Yeah, I've been fortunate to have hobbies that are, you know, and be super interested in athletics, but I'll tell you what, from 20 to 30 basically, well, from like 18 to 28, I basically did nothing. I sat in front of my computer and built my businesses. Now, I luckily, like, I was starting to feel the effects of it. I was all stiff. I was like, I never really got to be overweight, but I was like soft and like, I just was having physical issues and it was like, oh, I got to start moving my body and I started then. That's now 11 years ago for me and so Now, I've been going straight for 11 years. I'm in great shape. I feel really good. You know, it's like I caught it when I was in my end of my 20s, which you, okay, I had a grace period. I was an athlete as a kid. I had a 10-year grace period from 18 to 28 where I didn't do anything. But if you do that from, you know, 20 to 40, now, you've been 20 years sedentary. Now, you start up. It's like it's hard. You know what? You're never too old. It's never too late. You're never too far gone. The human body is so resilient. I cannot tell you. I, for the first time in my life, experienced chronic pain when I had a mold poisoning issue during COVID, and it was a couple of years long, and I have so much compassion for people who are in chronic pain or who have some form of disease because it's really hard to have a positive attitude and show up and be when you are suffering. But the cool thing is you can come back from pretty far gone, man. You can be real far gone and still recover yourself. Speaker 2: You can be dead, like me, and come back. Speaker 1: Yeah, you can come back to the line, baby. Hope is never lost, man. Speaker 2: If this is your first time listening to Ezra on our podcast, you want to get a little bit more of his backstory. Make sure to check out Mel Roda down here, episodes 96, first time he was on the episode. He was one of the first 100 guests here in 2019 and then episode 249 way back in 2021. And so I think this is great because 2020 from 2021 to 2025, the amount of stuff that have changed. In e-commerce and just, you know, with AI and now all of a sudden there's marketplaces like TikTok shop. I think it's interesting to note. So like way back when the big or in 2021, you know, you were always, you've been, you know, known as one of the top Shopify wizards in the game for years, but then you were just getting into Amazon like way back in 2020, 2021 around that time. What's happened in the last four years just on the Amazon side? Did you grow it up? Did you scale back? Speaker 1: To be fair to myself, I launched an Amazon brand back in 2013 that I then sold in 2018 for a couple million bucks. I got it up to 2 or 3 million a year, so it was never a huge company. But I was deep in the Amazon game early, right? I actually built a piece of software that was very popular from let's call it 2013 to 2015 called BoosterPage and it was before – it was like when Amazon was fine with you giving away coupons to generate reviews. There was no – this was not against the rules. This wasn't even a gray hat. It was like you as a seller were totally allowed. To offer somebody a coupon in exchange for trying your product and giving their feedback. I was in the Amazon game, but I got out of it. I got out of it in 2018. I sold that business. I was always the e-commerce direct response guy, Shopify, Magento, Xcart, Yahoo Store, OS Commerce, Big Commerce, Volusion. I've been deep in that world and that's where I've made most of my money, but I had a very successful brand. We had done already with this brand by the time I went on Amazon over $100 million in And I wasn't doing Amazon because I was meeting the capacity of my own supply chain through direct response. I was like, why would I go to Amazon where they keep the customer data? People can negatively review bomb you. Amazon finds out who your manufacturer is and backdoors you and creates their own version of your 360 or whatever it's called, version of your product. I was anti-Amazon because of the ruthless nature of it. But what I realized once I fixed my supply chain, I was like, okay, now I actually could support additional channels beyond my own paid advertising and Shopify site. What I realized was that, hey man, 45 or 50 cents out of every dollar is spent on Amazon and I've got seven or eight knockoff brands on Amazon that are selling my products, ranking for my keywords and just to defend my own brand position, I think I need to be on Amazon. So I went on there and year one, I did $6 million. Just defending my brand position because there's so many people searching for me already, right? And yeah, do I love Amazon as a… Do I love the work that is an Amazon business? I probably don't love it as much as I like Shopify business, the work that it takes to run a Shopify business, but am I super grateful that Amazon exists and that I as a seller have the opportunity to be there and that I can go out there now and I can get creators making videos for me and selling my product as affiliates? I can go out there and rank organically. I can go out there and optimize my A-plus content and build out dope listings and do all kinds of tips and tricks and send in a bunch of inventory so Amazon pushes me and send outside traffic into Amazon to build sales velocity and all that. I'm in the game. I like it. I'm grateful for it. I think the thing about Amazon for us is we treat it kind of like an extension of our brand in as much as like I have a business right now that does $100 million a year so it's a really big company and Amazon is about 30% of that revenue. I have another business that does about $30 million. Amazon is probably 35% of that revenue. I have several other businesses that I'm invested in that I'm not like directly operating, but I'm like an investor, owner, advisor. Amazon for us is always in that 20% to 40% of our business. I have only one little conglomerate of businesses that are Amazon only and our revenue there is, let's call it 7 million amongst the three or four brands, so it's not a big sort of We're working on it. I'm acquiring new brands. I'm building new Amazon only brands, but that's the only company I have where we're just like the thesis is build out Amazon only. We're not doing direct response. We're not doing Shopify. We're not running ads. We're just focused solely on Amazon because the cool thing about Amazon when you do that is your margin structure is a little better than if you're a Shopify brand that comes over to Amazon because I'm not spending a bunch of money on Facebook ads. I'm not spending a bunch of money on I'm not spending a bunch of money on other marketing. I'm only spending money on cost of goods sold, Amazon ads, and then a little bit of Amazon direct response marketing. So it's like my cost of marketing for that company is lower than my cost of marketing for Shopify side. Now of course, I still have team members. I still have Cost Of Goods but I don't need as many team members to run an Amazon business as I do to run a Shopify business and Cost Of Goods is pretty much the same across any company that you're running. You want to be spending between 10% and 20% of your total revenue on Cost Of Goods. You're spending more than 20% of total revenue on Cost Of Goods, you don't have enough margin. So that's kind of like how we're operating. Speaker 2: Interesting, interesting. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba, or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension demand analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon For those keywords on these other websites or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension which you can download for free at h10.me forward slash extension. How has AI changed the way you do business, if at all? How you run your businesses, how you reach out to customers, whatever the case is. Speaker 1: Made certain human interaction unnecessary. So we have AI bots doing follow up with influencers to get us assets. You know, we have AI doing a lot of our customer support. We're using AI in our creative production ads, emails, videos. So there's a lot of like low level and mid level knowledge work that humans were doing for us that AI now does. And that I think is an unfortunate trend. And I think we as a society are going to have to revisit the social contract because right now in America, unemployment is what, like 3% to 5%? Maybe somewhere in that neighborhood, probably not quite as high as 5%, but it fluctuates. I think in five years, it's going to be 20%. I mean, what are these entry-level white-collar workers going to do? I don't know. There's so many less jobs that are going to be available because it's automated via AI and we use AI for data analysis. We use AI to help us, you know, so we're using it in a number of ways that are wonderful. You know, I have an application called Zipify and it's an app that helps your Shopify store increase your average order value and like, dude, the AI is, so basically the idea is like, let's imagine somebody is shopping your store and they, you know, come to your homepage. Do you display an offer there or do you wait for them to view a product? You know, the AI will figure that out and then it'll basically do it or not based on what it knows about that user, how long they're browsing, what they've looked at before on the product page when they. Are you viewing a product? Do you pop up an offer for another one? Do you let them add to cart? When they add to cart, what do you show them? So on and so forth throughout the purchase cycle, we're sort of like making additional relevant offers and it could be things like, hey, take the thing that's in your cart, replace it with this bundle that also includes it but gives you additional items and makes, you know, overall you save money. So you get the product that you were going to get but you also get other items in a bundle and you save money. So the AI is beating humans at figuring out what to upsell and cross sell. It's like, so now, Now, marketing, now deep, this isn't low-level or mid-level. That's high-level knowledge work, figuring out what your merchandising plan is. If somebody shops your store, AI is doing it. So it's like, dude, what can it do? It's now doing voiceovers. It's doing videos. Where is it going to go? It's wild and I'm a little afraid of it for our young people coming up because I think it really reduces the amount of roles that companies are going to need so you can run companies Think about every nurse's office, every doctor's office, every dentist's office, every law firm, the desk people. Think about you're checking out at a store like self-checkout with AI, not just self-checkout, but self-checkout with AI robots. The people who – they already did this at the toll booths at the bridges, but it's like you don't need people there anymore. Just all these What happens when it starts driving the cars? I just feel like it's terrifying frankly, but we are using it and it is useful and it's like the unfortunate thing is do you want to keep up? You have to. You got to use it. You got to stay lean. You got to optimize. You got to stay profitable. So you kind of have to use it where it's good and it keeps getting good in more and more places. And so what we're doing is we're teaching our team how to leverage it. So we built this thing called the, this is not very revolutionary, but a GPT for our brands. So basically every brand has a GPT where it has all the data. It has every email we've ever sent. It has every video we've ever made. It knows all of our ads. It knows every one of our products and all the info about the product. It just knows everything about us, the brain for the brand, and then we can ask it, hey, this was last year's Mother's Day promotion. We did six emails, two each day for three days. We did two SMSs. These were the ads we ran, so on and so forth. Write us a landing page. Write us an email sequence. Write us an SMS, and it's based off all of our historical data, and then our human can go in there and modify that. The other thing that is freaky about it is I'm specifically thinking about America. I believe in supporting my country and hiring. I stayed in America, dude, for customer support for the last 12 years. I've been in America. I have not been in the Philippines. I have not been in India where everyone else went. I stayed hiring stay-at-home moms in America because I want to keep jobs here. Well, now, dude, the AI can do those jobs. It can filter. We have 50% less tickets because it's filtering people out, giving them information. Now, they have the people out there in the Philippines and in India and wherever else with an AI. They sound American. Like English as a first language, I mean, maybe not America, but they sound like English is their first language, whereas before they didn't. And so now, even though I'm still with my own businesses trying to stay in the US, more and more people are leaving because the AI is enabling the knowledge workers in these economies where you can pay them literally, you can just pay people less in India and the Philippines and they can navigate in that economy with half of what you could navigate in in America. And now they're taking jobs. So it's like, it's really an interesting Time. Speaker 2: I agree. I agree. Going back to what you said before about how you have some brands that are only on Amazon, you have some that are only on, you know, Shopify. Speaker 1: So I no longer have any that are only Shopify. I have, I knew one of my Shopify brands also on Amazon, but I do have a little conglomerate of brands, sub 10 million in revenue. That's Amazon only. And our goal is to build that up to $50 million a year in Amazon only revenue. And we're doing that by launching many brands and by launching many products within those brands. Trying to get base hits and home runs and discontinuing anything that's not a base hit or a home run. Speaker 2: For, for people like that, who, who, I mean, a lot of our listeners are probably only on Amazon or at most Amazon plus TikTok shop. Who should be thinking about Shopify and who should be doing like what you're doing where like, you know what, Hey, we're just going to stay Amazon. Speaker 1: If you're not at $10,000 a month in revenue, ignore Shopify altogether. Um, If you get to $10K a month in revenue and you've got, let's call it $2K in EBITDA profit, I don't know what the average EBITDA margin for an Amazon business is these days, but you're probably running between 15% and 20%, I would hope. If not, you've got to raise your prices or reduce your COGS. It's hard to run a business on a 10% EBITDA margin. You just don't have a lot of profit there. So if you're making $10K a month, you only have $1,000 in profit if you're at a 10% EBITDA margin. But if you're sitting there at $2K a month or more or let's say you're doing $100,000 a month in revenue and you got $20K, Now, you have money to expand and Shopify will do by default 5% of your Amazon sales the same way Walmart will do by default 5% of your Amazon sales just from you being on Amazon. I have a little soap company. I slapped up a little website for it. Simple Shopify website got it ranking in Google for its brand name, and it does literally to the number 5% of its Amazon sales. I don't run any ads. I don't run Google ads. I don't run Facebook ads. I don't run Instagram ads, nothing. It just does it from people searching for the brand because it's going pretty well on Amazon. So if you just build out, the other benefit is if you ever want to sell that Amazon company, if you have an email list, If you have a Shopify website and it has any amount of sales, you've increased the multiple that you can sell that brand for. So you now look like a real brand. You're diversified a little bit. You got a little bit of income coming from another channel. So I would say minimum $120K a year Amazon brand is when I would start thinking about Shopify. Before that, it's irrelevant. And frankly, if you're at $120K, you probably can double or triple that on Amazon without doing anything on Shopify. So it's like I believe in the old saying from the American South, I probably said it on this podcast before. I need a better analogy. It's kind of mean to the ponies, but feed your stallions and starve your ponies, man. Starve your ponies and feed your stallions. So Amazon's your stallion. Feed it. Can you double that with the same amount of effort that you would have used to open up Shopify? Yeah, you can. So double that first. Then look, at some point, you're going to want to expand. Shopify is a great expansion tool but you don't have the skill set. You don't know how to build a store. You don't know how to build landing pages. You don't know how to make ads. You don't know how to run emails. You don't know how to like – there are some skills that you've got to acquire and so it's like – You're a specialist at Amazon. You're not a generalist at e-commerce, and eventually, it makes sense to do so. So I would say, you know, if you get to half a million a year in revenue on Amazon, it's time. Before that, you could argue. Speaker 2: What would be those beginning steps other than obviously, like you said, building the store? How do you get organically ranked? What should be your advertising strategy when you're new on Shopify, etc.? Speaker 1: So here's what you do. And I have a whole article on this that I can send your audience of like, how do I expand off of Amazon? I did a whole webinar, like a one and a half hour webinar. If you're on Amazon, here's how you expand off and build out Shopify properly. But you slap up a Shopify website, maybe use Zipify pages. We got a landing page builder, makes it real easy. You make sure that every one of those pages is optimized for your brand name and any long tail keywords associated with your brand. You get that set up with ShopPay so you can accept money, you get all that going. Then you start running Google AdWords traffic for your brand name. Because people are going to be searching for your brand once you're at the size that we are talking about running to your Shopify website. That's the simplest, most basic way. Then, okay, maybe you want to build out sort of a direct response long form sales page where you're trying to sell to cold traffic. The base assets you need for Shopify are a video ad and a long form sales page. If you think about like a super optimized A plus Amazon page, that could be the equivalent of a long form sales page, but on e-commerce, usually it's going to be even more sales material. It's going to be like a sales letter and social proof videos and a story about how the product was made and the information on where the ingredients came from. It's still going to have the Amazon buy box, but imagine an Amazon A-plus listing fully filled out on steroids, an Amazon A-plus listing that's got everything, that's got the creator content at the bottom, and it's got videos in the carousel, and it's got all that. So you're going to build one of those out for Shopify. You're going to go ahead and go and take your Amazon creator videos that you've probably done. For Amazon, you're going to slice those up so you've got one that's fast-paced where it's like a video that's Ownership benefit demonstration. So it's demonstrating what is the benefit of this product to somebody who buys it. And then you can run that ad on Meta and Facebook and you can run it to this long form sales page with, you know, cause the idea is like take 10% of your profit, 10% act like it doesn't exist and use it to market your Shopify store. Even if you lose money, does not matter. The goal is you're building up an email list. You're building up social followers from these ads. You're running, you're getting some sales. You're starting to get a customer database. And there's this like compounding effect. If you just do that, if you just say 10% of my Amazon profit goes to expansion, it doesn't have to be profitable. It's just for brand expansion over three to five years. First of all, you'll figure it out. It'll start being profitable. It'll start making it work. But the compounding effect of that, you'll eventually have a pretty sweet Shopify business that then makes your overall brand more valuable when you go to sell it. Speaker 2: I like it. I like it. You're doing an event in Colorado, a smart marketer event. I think you do this like yearly. So what kind of things, like who should be going to that? What kind of things are you going to be talking about? And then maybe we could just maybe have a little preview of some of those topics with you. Speaker 1: Yeah, man. We're talking about AI. We're talking about paid advertising, Facebook, Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Google, YouTube. We're talking about optimization of your sales process. We're talking about email marketing, SMS marketing. We're talking about Systems, processes, delegation, team building. Anyone who is in a marketing role at a company or anyone who's a CEO or founder, we only have 300 seats. We sell out pretty quick. I don't know how many tickets there are available still, but it's a wonderful event and it's got a good vibe. We have fun. We work hard. It's not one of those events where you're going to be partying all night. I mean, sure, there's a party or two here and there, but it's like we go, we show up at – we have a yoga class in the morning. We show up at 10 a.m. and we get after it. And we spend all day looking at how to move the businesses forward. And the cool thing is like, you know, we have these roundtables. We'll have like 50 or 60 experts and they'll be leading a table. So you can go to the AI table. You can go to the Google table or you can go to the, you know, add creative table. You can go to the Amazon table and you can network and talk about that particular topic. It's a pretty sweet event and I have to give all credit to Molly Pittman. She's my CEO and business partner and smart marketer and this event is her vision. I used to do events. I stopped doing events when my daughter got sick and died and so I just kind of didn't want to – I just didn't have it anymore. I just didn't have it anymore and she really wanted to do it and so I come and I speak and I'm a part of it but it's really her vision and her show. Speaker 2: Okay, and so smartmarketer.com if anybody wants to get more information now two of the things you mentioned there kind of piqued my interest I think we've talked a little bit about it before but something that in the Amazon space You know people used to it. We don't talk about because there is no email there is no You know phone numbers for customers, but once you start branching out, which is the other reason like you said to do You know Shopify is you can start owning your own customers and be able to market to them What is the latest trends? Speaker 1: How are you leveraging SMS and email marketing in 2025? The interesting thing about email and SMS is every year it gets a little harder to reach people because every year more brands are doing it and every year people are getting more and more communication. So it's like as an average adult, you get something like 300 plus emails a day. So it's like you're not or maybe not quite that many but somewhere in the range of hundreds. Speaker 2: I think I get that. Speaker 1: Yeah, I get that for sure but somewhere like that. You're getting a lot of email every day and so you don't see them all and you don't open them all. Now, you got the promotions inbox. So it's like basically the deal with email marketing and SMS marketing is you have two goals in e-commerce. One, get somebody to view your products. Two, get them to give you their personal information. That's it. If you're ever doing e-commerce marketing off of Amazon, that's all you're trying to do. Get them to see your products and get after them and get them to give you their personal information. Only two goals any website page ever has. My homepage Hey, I want you to go forward and check out products. Hey, can I have your email address or SMS? Okay, so there's a bunch of ways to acquire these assets when you're doing the Shopify side of things. Of course, Amazon sellers are doing it. They're putting inserts in the box and saying, hey, sign up for your free warranty or go get a free gift, and they're trying to get people's customer data that way. It's like, okay, Amazon people are trying to do it too, but the key with email and SMS is you need to do way more than you think you do. Because people aren't seeing what you are sending. So it's like three to four times as much as you think you should be doing is what you should be doing. And you have to think of yourself when you're outside of Amazon like a media company and a product company. And so what I mean by that is like your brand is made up of a group of consumers who are sharing a collective experience. Women over the age of 50 who are aging and everybody telling them that it's dirty, bad and wrong. Their hair is turning silver. Their skin is wrinkling. Their hormones are changing. They're going through menopause. Your job is to engage with and relate with and communicate with that group of people who are sharing that collective experience about that experience and then offer them solutions to the problems that they face, which are your products. When you're doing email and SMS, you want a mix of content that is relevant to their life experience. So for example, Helium 10, you guys are doing this, right? You and I are creating a piece of content that is relevant to the life experience of someone who sells on Amazon. We're giving it to them for free, hoping that it will add value to their life. And then tangentially, we're talking about SmartMarketer Live, Zipify Apps, Helium 10 saying, hey, look, also, in addition to this content that we think is gonna be useful for you and hopefully help you with your business and your life, We have products that we think are cool, that we think you would enjoy, that we think would be useful as well. Check them out. And so you got to be doing that kind of thing and you got to be doing straight selling. Hey, this product is 25% off today only. There's three things that sell with email and SMS, incentive, deadline, and ownership benefit demonstration. You need an incentive. Why buy now? Because you could buy tomorrow. There's 300 other people trying to get you to buy today. What is the incentive? Buy one, get one, buy one, get one half off, limited time discount, special new product, bundle, whatever, some incentive, deadline. The last chance is today, is tomorrow. It ends in a week and this is the benefit for you. This is what you will become, feel, be perceived as, have, right, like ownership, benefit, explanation, demonstration, communication is what marketing is about. It's how you sell to somebody as you demonstrate to them and explain to them the after state of using your product. And if you do that, like what's interesting about marketing outside of Amazon, guess what? The best product doesn't win. The best promise wins. The best promise wins in the marketplace, not the best product. The product just has to live up to the promise that you make. You got to keep making it better. So you got to learn how to make a really good promise. And there's some things that work really well. There's nostalgia. You know, Forrest Gump was the best movie of its time because it packaged up all the memories of the baby boomers and sold it to them, right? I use this in my marketing for my apps. You'll see me doing like parodies of movies, right? You know, the big Lebowski and good sellers and like people like, man, I really love your ads because it brings me back. And then yeah, I checked out, yeah, I like your product too, you know, so there's a lot of like little things we can use in marketing. But for email and SMS, it's like incentive deadline and ownership benefit are kind of the three keys. Speaker 2: I love it. I love it. All right. Before we get into your, you know, 60 seconds strategy of the week. Can you let us know how people – we already know about the SmartMarketer website. How can people find you on the interwebs out there? Speaker 1: Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever. I'm at Ezra Firestone. I'd love to connect. I love the entrepreneur. Listen, I'm a do-it-yourself entrepreneur. I worked a full-time job. I grew up without money. I didn't get out of high school. I'm some bum off a couch in Brooklyn and I have Done really well, you know, and so you can too. And the key is show up every day with a positive attitude and take the next step you can take in the direction of your goals. And, you know, burnout happens to entrepreneurs and I have not burned out and I've been taking care of myself mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, energetically, so that I can show up and have a good time and do what it takes to bring enthusiasm and joy to my work. And it's like, there's no reason I should be as successful as I am. But if you just keep at it, this is a game of decades. I'm 20 years in. And in the last 10 years is when all my success came. It didn't come in the first 10 years. I was doing all right. I'm making it, you know, but like real true wealth creation has been in the last decade. So, you know, give it 10 years. If you're two years in and you don't, you're not where you want to be, I don't, and you're not like you're ready to quit. It's like, no, don't quit before the miracle. You need 36 months with a new project before you can judge it, you know, and decide, do I want to continue or not? 36 months of working at it weekly. So yeah, you can find me on social media and smartmarketer.com, zipify.com. And loverunnethover.com. L-E-V-R-U-N-N-E-T-H-O-V-E-R.com. You could read the story about my daughter and check out her charity. Speaker 2: Any last tips, you know, quick hitting tip about e-commerce, about judo, about sumo, about Hawaii, anything at all? Speaker 1: Let's see. Well, I discovered that if I was, I did a parody video as a rock star and I started, I was like, I want to live the life. I'm a method actor. I started drinking tequila at 10 a.m. I was smoking blunts. I was doing it and I was like, dude, I would be a drug addict if I was a rock star. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I only lasted one day, but it's like, listen, you got to party too, man. Have the fun that you want to have in your life now because you don't know how long you got. You're not promised tomorrow, really, truly, and it's like if you're not enjoying the ride, you're missing the point of this game that we call life. Do what it takes to enjoy yourself. Have hobbies. Have relationships. Have a social life. Have a spiritual connection. Put some energy. It's so easy to get wrapped up in your business. You're connected to it all the time. It's right here on your phone. You can't get away from it. It's like this crazy thing. It can very easily become myopic, like the only thing that you think about. I would encourage you to have some kind of life that brings you joy and pleasure so that you can show up to work and work hard, but that it's not the only thing in your existence because who knows? You want to look back and have a good ride, man. Speaker 2: I just realized we had talked about linking up in September here in San Diego, but that is right in the middle of the next sumo tournament, so we can have whatever day that is, we can have a nice free watch together. Speaker 1: Yes, we should do that for sure. Speaker 2: There actually is a local sumo club down here in San Diego too. I haven't been there, but I know they're pretty active, and so who knows, maybe we can get a Mawashi on you and see what you got. Speaker 1: Listen, I almost competed at the sumo tournament, they did a New York City sumo tournament, but it's like, it was like under 190 pounds, and then yeah, light weight is under 187. Yeah, and it's like dude, I'm 160. I'm not – I just don't – I don't want to get smashed, bro. So I thought about doing it but then the guy who won of course was like 190 on the dot or 188 or whatever it was. He was a beast and it was like – I just feel like 30 pounds, 20, 30 pounds is a lot when it comes to sumo at the smaller weight. Obviously at a bigger weight when a guy is 350 and a guy is 380, it's not as big a deal. But I'd be down to get in there and mix it up. I'd like to put on a Mawashi for the experience of it. Speaker 2: I love it. All right. Well, guys, like I said, this is the only podcast you'll ever hear where we talk sumo, we talk Shopify and everything in between. So we'd love to have you on the next couple of years and see what you've been up to and congrats on all the success and look forward to seeing you in person soon. Speaker 1: Thanks, brother. See you in September. I appreciate you all listening.