The Exchanges

Q Okay, boom by CindyJoseph.com. And folks, again, we'll put that in the show notes, okay? You can just go to my website, Nathan Latka, search for episode two oh seven here with Ezra. Okay, so Ezra, why don't you tell us first, we, nobody knows who Cindy Joseph is, unless folks obviously are in that world. Tell us who she is and how you met up.

A Sure. Cindy Joseph is a, um, makeup artist turned supermodel. She became a model when she was in her fifties because she Advertisers were starting to realize that the baby boomer generation had all the discretionary income and they needed to put people who looked like them in ads. And, um, I grew up on in an alternative lifestyle experiment, sort of a hippie commune, if you will. And, you know, she would come take courses at my house. And when I was like 1718, we became friends. I decided to move to New York. I asked her if I can move in with her. She said yes. So when I was 18, I moved to New York and I was playing poker for a living and learning about online marketing. And I had the idea that, you know, I'd like to do an e-commerce business. And I said, Hey, you know, we should start a, a product line. And it just kind of, you know, we would have all these conversations because she was a 50 year old woman. I was an 18 year old guy about ageism, what it's like to be a guy in society, what it's like to be a woman in society and sort of out of that came this company.

AI assessment note: “Cindy Joseph is a, um, makeup artist turned supermodel... she would come take courses”

Q I would love, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall. So I'm, I'm on the website right now. Help us understand. Let's talk about December, Best selling item. Which one was it?

A Sure. It's our boomstick trio. And what's interesting is people come for the cosmetics and you know, we don't send people directly to that website. We use a, a pre-sale sales funnel. So we spend about 15 to 20,000 dollars a day on advertising, 90% on Facebook, but we also use Instagram, Pinterest, and Google. And we've been using the same sales funnel in pretty much all of our businesses for the better part of a decade now. And essentially what that is, it's gotten popular within our community Is we drive traffic to a piece of content that engages a prospect in a conversation. So an article based presale page. And then that piece of content sort of alludes to a solution, which is our offer. And then they click through and they check out our sales offer. And we have other things happening. Like when they land on that article, we have, you know, uh, we're putting them on a retargeting list. We have exit intent offers popping up, but fundamentally, you know, that's the game. We engage people with content and then we make them offers, which, you know, is what you do in your software business, right? You like, Have a case study, which is a piece of content about, you know, that's valuable to a business owner. And then they click through and they see your software.

AI assessment note: “Sure. It's our boomstick trio.”

Q Great. So people land there. You're articulating a story or piece of content. I imagine your philosophy, your philosophy is really built into that article as well. Well, people then click the link to the solution. What happens after that?

A You know, in our case, they land on a straight up category page for an e-commerce store. So we don't send them to a long form sales page. We don't send them to a webinar opt in. It's just a category page on an e-commerce store. They then look at our products. They decide which one they want to view. They go to the product detail page from there, they move through the funnel. But I also use this in my information based business where I'll do a pre-sell article about how I'm using Pinterest ads to make money. And that pre-sell article will lead to a webinar opt in. And I use this in my software as a service business where I'll do an article about how this software is working so well, and then it will lead to a long form sales page about the software itself. So the same sort of funnel, um, works no matter what product you're selling.

AI assessment note: “in our case, they land on a straight up category page for an e-commerce store”

Q Twenty-five-ish percent. Ok, so, walk me through average, like, order size. I see boomstick colors, 27 bucks. Are people buying one product, many?

A So, our initial average order value is about 77 dollars, and we're buying conversions on average, um, across all of our marketplaces at around 45 to 50. So, that first front-end conversion is basically Essentially break even, but what we have are, um, post purchase engagement sequences, automation sequences that cross sell people, other products that they haven't yet purchased. So it's essentially, we dynamically tag them based on what they have purchased and put them on email sequences to cross sell them other products, uh, that they haven't yet purchased. And, and on the backend, we use things like long form video events or webinars to sell physical products. And we also, um, There's something I wanted to say that I just lost my train of thought. So that's okay.

AI assessment note: “our initial average order value is about 77 dollars”

Q No, it makes perfect sense. Uh, walk or tell us what ultimately the goal is with this thing. You have your hands in multiple different business lines for this one. Is it to scale and sell it or what?

A Well, that was initially the bit that the model until we, until it, um, started doing as well as it did. And now the profit is really great. And it's also sort of a permaculture business model in that I have an information marketing business where I sell digital information products and experiences and coaching and masterminds. And so essentially, um, These e-commerce businesses, they don't make a lot of profit, right? Like, all the money goes back into advertising and more product, and like, a lot of it is wrapped up in the actual asset itself. The asset is worth something if I were to sell it, but the cash flow is not as great as, say, an information marketing business where you're making a lot more profit. Like, for example, let's take 2014, right? 20 14, boom, did about three million dollars, and it had maybe five, 600,000 in profit. Smart marketer did 2.3 million in that same year with like a million in profit. So, uh, but smart marketer has no value.

AI assessment note: “Well, that was initially the bit that the model until we”

Q age. And this is a hyperlink. Her new line on hyperlink is a super multitasker. And when I click her new line, like you said, it takes me to a little e-commerce page and you're doing something interesting here. You've actually got videos right next to the product and then a pink add to cart button. I'm sure you AB tested kind of video versus non-video. What was the lift?

A We've been testing like mad people. And what we found was that, you know, different people prefer to consume content in different formats. Some people want to see your hero shot of the product. Some people want to read a little blurb and some people want to watch a video. And we used to think you have to put all of the products above the fold because no one will scroll. And, uh, we looked at our heat maps and basically nobody knew where to click on this page. I'd love to give you a copy of the heat map of before this page and after the page. Because when we put these videos in the middle and we made the page much longer, what we found was that we had a All of the clicks concentrated on the video. So people knew what to do on the page rather than before they didn't know where to click. So it was more about, you know, what do we want people to do? We want them to, you know, we want to get face time with them. We want to build some intimacy and the best way to do that we think is through video.

AI assessment note: “when we put these videos in the middle... All of the clicks concentrated”