Ricky Hayes - Discover Debutify and Start Your Business Today

all these marketing and getting sales it's a skill it's not a it's not just some talent people just get um it's a skill and so with it being a skill anyone can obtain it anyone can learn it and anyone can apply it so as long as you keep doing it consistently you'll be able to obtain that skill and you'll be able to slowly build the the the lifestyle that you envision that you want to live you're listening to ecomodix a debutify podcast your resource for one-of-a-kind insights into the world of e-commerce and business in the modern age this is joseph i'll be presenting a wealth of industry knowledge from interviews with successful business people and our own state-of-the-art research your time is valuable so let's go [Music] welcome to ecomonics good to have you here you're about to listen to the first of many many interviews on this show for our first interview episode we decided to start with one of the minds who brought you to beautify as you know it ricky hayes it's someone had to do with making sure all the recording software works but it was 95 we felt he was the best place to start in this episode you'll get to know more about what drives him what makes the beautify so significant and what mindset you might want to adopt in the pursuit of lasting success we don't waste any time in the interview getting to the good stuff so let's adopt that principle here and hop in good to have you here ricky we've got a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs out there and i want to show them how much we value their time so let's get right into the good stuff what is debutify and why should i have signed up five minutes ago uh dave beautifier is a shopify ecommerce theme specifically designed for shopify that is to help drop shippers brand store owners one product stores print on demand stores any type of store realistically to build a high converting store because in order to scale your business you need to effectively be able to get as many sales as possible and increase your conversion rate beautify sort of steps in to sort of help facilitate that problem because uh otherwise you normally need a number of apps to have to try and fill that gap whereas debutify is an all-in-one solution where basically it is just a theme plus a heap of apps all embedded into it that's designed to be quick easy fast and uh really make your store get a lot more sales and allow you to scale your business quite easily and the best part is you know uh it really only takes a couple of minutes to get set up so at the end of the day your website's done and then you can focus on your marketing and that's the goal of debutify now would you say that the marketing is one of the major components that separates it from the competition or what do you think it really gives to beautify the edge compared to a lot of the other uh apps and services out there because there are quite a few yeah so from my perspective i would say that is definitely the actual speed of it speed of a of a theme is very very important because most of the buyers in the e-commerce space buy on mobile so it has to be very mobile optimized and very very fast for mobile so that'd be one of the biggest things as well as the fact that when it comes to building websites a lot of people aren't fully aware how to do it so with our solution we have it all sort of in one where uh it's all sort of they're pretty much uh copy paste for you it's all pretty much plug and play and set up and if you have any problems the thing i love the most is we've set up a really strong support channel so if you have any problems our support team will always be there for you and i think that's really important because if you don't have that support um i know as someone if i didn't have that support to be able to help me build my website i just wouldn't be able to do it effectively and i'd probably just stop right then and there so to me those are the biggest things the most important things yeah i noticed that too i was as i'm going through uh this learning process one of the things i'm doing is i'm setting up a store uh through debutify and so each time i would go to a different page there would be a message that would pop up from one of the customer service agents now i assume that they're not sitting there ready to type as soon as somebody enters in but it is still really good to see that they understand what might be going through somebody's mind as soon as they uh enter each page um i don't know if you get the stats on this but have you noticed uh any major trends in the kinds of people that are that you're working with is it like a lot of dropshippers have you gotten many people who are manufacturing product on their own and then selling through uh shopify slash debutify yeah so the majority of our customer base are uh drop shippers um generally then followed by brand store owners and then those a number of those brand store owners would have and do have their own custom labeled manufactured products that is a more small minority of our overall um overall audience most of them as i said are the overall dropshippers but a good number of them also are building their own products and their own brands from scratch using the dave beautify uh debutify theme as their basis but have you done any uh brand store earnings on your own or have you largely been a drop shipper for one of the things i've been very passionate about part of the reason that i built debutify is is that to me building a brand is always the goal in any business and uh and that obviously very much goes for e-commerce as well so for me i've always very much i started out like a lot of people doing drop shipping but i personally have never been in agreeance with the model especially as a long-term sustainable model because you know you in order to really satisfy a customer you can't get them to wait three four five six seven weeks for an item to be delivered to them um i've never been in agreeance with that so to me i've always focused my stores on on building a brand to me building a brand is more just having a good customer service good product and good shipping those are the the core three fundamentals and that's where i've always personally focused on my own stores and that's part of the reason that with debutify we have all those tools and resources so that people can try and achieve that themselves as well and because a lot of our audience are beginner to intermediate and advanced giving them those tools allows them to to basically skip what i had to go through initially and more from the beginning build a brand that's really going to actually create long-term sustainable income for the business owner well one thing i can tell you as somebody who's done a lot of online shopping um and this pre lockdown by the way is i have experienced every possible kind of order turn around i've had stuff show up a day after i ordered and i was quite surprised about that i had this one product i ordered it was called a hands-free bracket and it never showed up i i checked the tracking for it and it ended up getting delivered to somebody in quebec and then i go to the website to let them know and the website went down so there is a pretty uh disparate there's there's a lot of different reactions a lot of different results i can get from ordering things online well it's it's shipping um it's a really interesting thing like you know amazon and jeff bezos that's why they're so passionate about that um one day shipping because it is statistically proven that the faster someone gets an item the more happy they're going to be the more likely they are to buy from you again so you know and uh to me that is is a very important fundamental and and someone is myself that buys a lot online too the sooner i get an item the happier i am because who wants to wait months potentially for an item you'll forget about it yeah i mean i i don't mind i don't mind like a little bit of anticipation just to build excitement but for the most part i order stuff that i need and when i get get it going right away so what would a what was the design process for debutify how did this idea start and let's go through the process of starting to realization yeah so with debutify um i actually approached my current business partner about it who had initially designed debutify and and uh i i really loved it so i wasn't the original original creator i just worked on it a lot more to improve it so i can't be 100 saying that i'm the sole creator of it um but in relation to it though um so it came about from the fact that uh my business partner actually um approached me to do a shout out for it um as an influencer myself and i had a look and i really liked it it resonated with me i've always been very interested in software as a service as a as a business model i've been you know traditionally doing e-commerce um it was my main income but i always loved software as a service because of the the scalability you know i can scale anywhere in the world i don't have to worry about logistics and i saw this as a fantastic solution as an e-commerce store owner i always knew that one of the pains was trying to set up a high converting store uh quickly and easily but it would end up taking me so many hours you have all these integration problems all and it's just an ongoing thing and it just really annoys me as a as a business owner in my opinion the fewer problems you have to worry about the more you can just grow your business rather than having to do all these hot fixes all the time so when i when i found out about uh about day beautiful i had a closer look into it and tested myself i i really fell in love with the model it basically just you know had a a lovely base theme and then had add-ons in integrated within it that basically allow you to um without having to get third-party apps have it all embedded within the theme and i just saw it as a a fantastic business model that was highly scalable that i could definitely uh market and sell to an audience of people that would be very interested in because i knew myself that this was a fantastic thing and i knew that many others would love it themselves because many struggle with this and so i really wanted to present that to help them so that because to me when i first started out in e-commerce i spent months building my first store and i and i learnt a lot from it but it was a complete waste of time uh in the sense that the most important part of building a business is not having the perfect website it's getting eyeballs to the website you don't your website comes secondary your marketing is first so i as a business owner i want to build a high converting store quickly and easily and know that i can do it quickly and easily time and time again so that i can purely focus on getting my product out there and getting eyeballs onto it and start getting sales and that's why uh that's where it all sort of came to fruition and then pretty much uh there was a lot of gaps in there in the actual theme that i from my experience really wanted to have further uh integrated into it to further help boost conversions and and help people to save money as well by not having to use a lot of third-party apps and so that's sort of where it sort of um all started when i started working as the co-founder of debutify to where it is today well one thing i wanted to zero in on that you mentioned about solving uh problems for uh entrepreneurs and e-commerce and dropshippers is that i don't think we want to live a life where we don't have problems to solve but i think it's a matter of we want to solve the problems that we want to deal with you know as opposed to having to do intensive labor and have to waste all this time on something we don't really care so much about like what are what problems do you enjoy solving uh when it comes to uh business uh monetary problems but like uh what i mean by that is for me i enjoy um solving um the marketing problems okay one thing i've learned through my years of being doing this is that marketing is the key and as you said yourself basically being a business owner in e-commerce it's just a matter of time consistency money and problem solving and uh the reality is i just don't want to focus on having a website where i'm going to have a million different issues from all these third-party apps i just want to have something that i know is working that's going to do the job so that i eliminate that as a possible in my chain so that i can focus more on the problem solving at the marketing level because you know for me it's far more worthwhile for me to be spending a lot more of my time and energy um on different creatives different marketing strategies to scale my overall marketing campaigns profitably and get sales through my website than it is for me to spend hours a day on my website trying to make it perfect so the most important thing to me is always about making my marketing ad spend whether it's through facebook google youtube being so on and so forth uh make me as much money as possible through those marketing mediums so what i was doing was i was going through the website and i wanted to put myself in the position of somebody who might use it uh which ended up not being hypothetical because now i am but there are going to be ops some natural obstacles people are going to go up against in the short term in the long term so what do you think people are going to be facing once they get started on their website was that your question on me um well not the website because uh make the website part of it easy but yeah in general what sort of obstacles are people gonna be uh going up against oh there's a lot and that's the fun thing uh with building a business um you know so straight out the gate the first problem you're gonna have is getting sales okay i still remember my first sale it is like a dream come true the reality become like it becomes not just fiction it becomes an actual reality um that you can actually live consistently um so that's sort of your first problem the the problems range from anything and everything in in the business world you're always going to be uh push your boundaries are always going to be pushed and so for instance every day is different you're going to have issues from logistics you're going to have a day where you're going to potentially get the worst customer you've ever had you might have the best customer you've ever had um you um staff you if you have staff your staff might um you know something might happen in their lives they might not be able to work and you might have to fill in the gaps yourself or find someone else um your marketing one of your ad accounts might have issues or um one of your you might be massively overspending you might have financial problems um then you might have taxation legal legal problems the list sort of goes on um on and on and that's one of the things that i actually very much enjoy business as a whole and especially e-commerce is all the problems it presents um every one of these problems can be fixed it's just a matter of approaching it in how to fix it and you know not trying to avoid it just trying to tackle it straight on um learning from it and consistently applying that every day and for me i personally find that by doing that it just every day it becomes easier and easier and easier i'm always going to find problems that are going to challenge me but as a whole it becomes easier because of my past knowledge and experience so um you know the the thing that i see most people have is obviously sales getting consistent sales being profitable sales scaling their business payment processor issues chargebacks refunds returns exchanges just in terms of that the customer service in terms of all the questions you get about your products just right now like every e-commerce business whether people realize it or not you know covered for every especially uh e-commerce and retail business is causing huge logistical uh nightmares and that usually translates to a huge amount more demand on customer service to make sure that your customers are always answered so uh so that means that we have to take action like being very proactive with customers and advising them that that there is going to be delays that you are going to order this and there's going to be expected delays and um and supporting them through that journey as well as an example yeah i mean but just touching on covet very briefly and i'm hoping that we you know by like interview seven we won't have to talk about covert anymore but 14 days of flatten the curve uh i think to some extent people get that with the the coronavirus this is it there is a mass slow down so i so i think people are going to be they should be a little bit more patient but you know generally most people are but the the the sky is the limit when it comes to customers at the end of the day um some customers most 99 of customers will be very understanding i mean you know it's out of our control i understand but every now and again you are going to get someone where whatever the reason he or she will have unrealistic expectations in their mind um and you can't control it so it's that's just always done anomaly in business um and it's it's just about how you handle that that's the important thing from my perspective yeah you know one thing i was relating to is you mentioned how good it felt to get you know your first e-commerce sale and i i don't i don't exactly have that that yet to my credit but when i started freelancing uh it was the first time i decided i was just gonna be my own boss and you know i had to to get paid by my first client i had to take a trip all the way downtown it took me an hour and a half caught up on the streetcar and he pulls out a lot of cash out of the atm and gives it to me the most like ghetto way to get paid but i said yeah i did it it's mine it's mine now uh what was what was the first sale you had on on e-commerce uh the first sale i had was i um so i had an old store my this store took me months it was called the everyday diary um i for some reason my first store thought ah i'm going to make a stationery store selling pencils and diaries and i thought what an ingenious idea no one's doing this and uh yeah anyway that was a bit naive but part of the fun no i'm laughing because that was one of my ideas ah yeah well uh probably steer clear anyway but um um my first sale was an actual diary and i remember it was this um the thing that made the diary unique was it was just a small hand hand diary that's quite portable and it had a nice um graphic on the front of it of a panda eating you know some bamboo and um when i got that sale i think i sold it for i think it was twenty dollars 19.99 i can't fully remember and uh you know i was ecstatic that someone actually purchased it now on that store that was the only purchase i got before i shut it down but um it was it was uh something that really sort of changed my perspective that i can actually make this a reality someone out there is actually interested enough into buying my actual product uh yeah i mean that's uh that's awesome you also mentioned that as you as you go and as you're i'm not exactly sure how to characterize this but as you as you advance through your your career you are facing new challenges what are like some of the newer problems that you had to solve once you've reached the point that you've uh that you've reached more lately for e-commerce specifically yeah yeah so the the biggest problem like honestly for me right now is logistics um that that is entirely my problem i have a number of products that i'm waiting to to scale credit quite aggressively that i'm very confident i can scale uh very easily in fact but my problem is logistics um getting it into warehouses so um our prime my primary markets i market to being united states australia canada in the united kingdom the you know the stock has been purchased the stock has been created uh the problem is obviously getting it into the warehouse which you know to just to get it to america via um by sea freight takes a month alone then through customs it takes uh upwards of a week and then it can take another week or two two weeks just to even get it into the warehouse so you know you're looking at like a a two-month period and um so my actual biggest focus right now is more running the businesses in a hibernation state purely for the fact of uh for the sole objective of q4 um so so that obviously you know sales going to dramatically increase then so that's sort of been my primary focus and that's sort of my biggest challenge right now so in addition to debutify you're also a youtuber you're a mentor you're an e-commerce expert do you do investing as well that wasn't really like the main question but are you an investor as well uh yeah in the share market correct okay so i invest in shares i'm more a long-term trader personally um i i wouldn't call myself uh an absolute expert i do very much enjoy following it every single day um for those that wonder what type of shares that i would be interested in uh being someone that i've always loved technology i actually my career was orientated around being in the technology field uh a lot of my shares are um actually doing quite well funnily enough because obviously technology is doing very well because of the the covered situation and i've invested most of my uh most of my portfolio into that type of strategy so on to the the main brunt of this uh two-part question is that is there any from that list did i miss anything like is there anything else that you get involved in that uh i couldn't find through my research uh no that that's pretty much it yeah so i do um i do offer mentoring to people i uh sell my course have a youtube channel i have my website which you know just basically offers free resources um and then i have my e-commerce businesses and also i do have a digital marketing agency so that was probably the one that was overlooked there so um for for specific businesses i uh have built a team where we um help people that have e-commerce businesses because that's our speciality um run their facebook ads google ads bing ads youtube ads predominantly and help them uh further optimize the backend like their actual store to further increase their sales volume so we only work uh with specific clients that have an established brand i don't really work with let's say um with someone that's completely new to the business because i can't really help grow your business if you don't have an already established business so that's sort of one of the other projects that's being scaled up currently as well yeah and also creatively too is that you don't want to tell them what their voice is they need to find their own voice themselves and then you can help to enhance that voice that's correct exactly yeah so what are your goals on a week-to-week basis and what's your uh five to ten year window looking like that's a great great question i know the five to ten year one my week to week basis is uh uh basically just doing whatever needs to be done at this stage to to get the businesses to where i want it to be because because i'm very much a very long-term thinker i don't really think about the week to week personally all that much i do obviously like anyone i do to some extent my week to week would be more about what staff do i need to fill what roles what what budget do i want to apply to what marketing channels um how much do i want to be spending on stock to replenish stock those are sort of the more week to week administrative tasks but my five to ten year goal is that personally i i don't know why but i've always been very fixated on this um my goal is in five to ten years that i want to have 15 companies so i don't know why i have a very ambitious goal like that but i just really do and i know i can make it happen a lot of people think that i wouldn't be able to but it's actually a challenge of mine to prove them wrong because i'm so confident that i can and it's just a matter of time so my goal initially is to build two companies every six sorry 12 months so a company every six months on average build it grow it scale it get the team in place and continue scaling it manage it day-to-day and then build another company and keep repeating that process so my goal over the next five to ten years is is a very very high risk but high reward strategy because i know i have the skills and capacity and mindset to do it is to consistently reinvest into multiple companies and build them from scratch and build great teams great processes provide a great experience for customers around the world and that sort of ties into my long-term vision that i very much enjoy being being a boss in that regard and having multiple income sources that i have direct control over myself uh that does mean that there's a lot more responsibility and expectation there but that's why i take a very high risk approach of that my goal is to ensure that the business operates consistently is through a lot of reinvestment into staff marketing systems automations to make it so that the company will always run regardless of my contribution um at any point in time so any particular reason why it was 15 just seemed like a that's a pretty good isn't it i like it it's just a good number i don't know why like i'm a seventeener like i'm born in the 17th and i keep seeing that number pop up like if they're 17 on the lottery i go buy a lottery ticket no sometimes we're just drawn to certain numbers i i i just like that as a as a round number personally i would expect that if if i hit that goal of 15 i'll probably say i want 30 companies or something um and one could easily argue and say to me that i'd be stretching myself too thin but when you don't have much of a life and all you do is work i would argue that very differently well i mean if uh uh running a bunch of companies and making good money is doesn't characterize as having a life then i don't want to know what the other form of it is let's get into this uh next uh bad boy here so you uh when you brought me on you took me through the uh your university course and my initial impression of you was that this was someone who had been at this basically for a lifetime uh and i don't think that's the case if i understand this you you've been at it for a little while but you haven't been at it for as long as somebody might think so when did you get interested into this and what were you doing uh prior to this yeah i mean e-commerce in general so firstly i'm flattered thank you i appreciate that um secondly secondly uh it's actually been i've been doing this for just collectively from when i first started to get even the idea of trying to build my own business uh was three years ago just over three years ago um and uh prior to that i was just a standard uh worker in an office um i worked in uh information technology so i come from a very tech orientated background and i was more in the help desk support so i did a lot of troubleshooting and stuff so that's why that's why our sort of the business world really tied in well because i was already very used to troubleshooting um and especially technology and so it just sort of molded into a very strong skill set that i had already built over many years and uh how it all actually came to fruition was i was um in my previous um employment one of my colleagues had uh resigned found another position and naturally we had a uh a going away party um or whatever you call it now i'm not by any means a social person i was actually very hesitant to go into this because i personally wanted to play my console but i decided to go nonetheless and uh one of my other colleagues who i'm still friends with to this day and speak to you regularly uh we're just sitting beside each other and it was about 11 o'clock at night you know just having a nice drink around the fire and uh was just i just posed the question to him so you know like what's your ambition outside of our current uh current department and he just told me look man you know my ambition is that i want to make money online and to me that whole concept seemed so foreign so so uh fictional it just seemed so unattainable i just i've been brought up my parents have brought me up about that you know you become an adult you get a good education and then you work you get a job so on and so forth you sort of get the frame and the picture and uh but this really fascinated me because i knew a lot of people were making money online i just had no idea how so uh he actually started with what was called merch by amazon which is basically print on demand through amazon service and uh it really grab captured me and and i listened to funnily enough i listened to a number of podcasts myself and uh to learn all about this and tried a number of things and and that's sort of where it all started and it sort of fueled a fire within me that i just absolutely loved learning all about this and all about the business world and uh it all sort of started from there it took me it took me 12 months after which uh before i um actually uh was it 12 months yeah 12 months before i resigned from my position where i had what i defined as a form of stability where i could comfortably leave my position and pursue e-commerce uh full-time to be able to be sustainable because i didn't want to leave my job uh straight away um i i wanted to make sure that i knew this was going to be a tough thing that there's going to be a lot of unexpected turns twists and things that happen taxations it's going to be more expensive than i thought and i was very glad i did it was very challenging 12 months where i was working working a full-time position plus i was working at least eight hours every day at home so part of what you said about like where my lifetime of knowledge has come from is for the last pretty much two and a half to three years um it's only recent that i've sort of changed that um i've typically worked about 15 to 18 hours every day and that's partly because i just love it so much and so i've just sort of i guess accelerated my my knowledge in in this space from that naturally i'm just gonna skip ahead because uh you transition pretty perfectly to question nine but i've got seven and eight still uh in the chamber so when i was going through a university course i did spot your um you know your blizzard uh account and uh some other like some of your hobbies uh have you managed to balance your time for activity like how have you been throughout the course of your week do you have you found enough apple time for down time yeah i have now um after two and a half years two and a half years it took me collectively if i were to summon my whole journey it took me two and a half years now i know a number of people have probably done it in in a fraction of that time and maybe they're much better than me i don't know but um it's only been the last six months that that's actively changed and that's from a big shift in mindset where i forced myself where uh for a long period of time i was making a lot more money than i am now but now i may i don't make as much but i have more time so it's it's a and i know that that will change again over time as i start to scale the businesses more that that that will change again et cetera et cetera but in the last six months it's changed quite a lot where you know i've gone from 18 hours a day to probably 10 hours you know i still i just love to work truthfully um i'm a workaholic so i'll always work but now i have a lot more balance where i can i mean i would socialize with my friends but obviously i can't visit them wearing block down here but like they're um i can play more computer games so like what you said with blizzard i i'm a computer gamer i play console games i spend time with my wife watching shows we go for walks and stuff so it collectively in my journey has taken me two and a half years to one get financially stable and to also have the right mindset and capacity to be able to take a bit more of a step back because it is very hard because for me to take a step back required me to basically hire a lot more people and train them up and get them to fill the gaps means that i collectively earn less means that overall though that i have more time but at the same point is that fine balancing act between having someone that is reliable in in that position that you can depend on so um that's been a big big hurdle for me as well and uh sort of at a point now where it's actually it's quite stable and comfortable now i want to ask what was your first uh major breakthrough but i think you answered that one which was when you sold that diary but would you offer up a different answer to the question uh yeah so that was a i defined that as a fluke sale truthfully like that that gave me the the the reality check that this is a fees ability and that this is a reality but it didn't definitely give me uh any real taste into what e-commerce can really be like and it wasn't until i found what i define as properly my first winning product which uh i didn't make any money out of because i didn't know my financials at all uh was a baby gyro ball you may have seen it like um just a plastic yeah all right yeah yeah um so yeah it's it's part of your uh it's part of your course i don't even remember it's a it's a scenario where you can balance it around and babies probably have a blast yeah exactly so that item and uh so it was a winning item for me that i that actually uh sold very well through instagram to um to younger mothers um and i was selling it for twenty dollars each and a lot of people were buying two or three um at any given time so it was a great item i just uh i just didn't have the skills and mindset to properly be able to scale that product to i think i did about 50 000 in sales and i could have easily done a lot more but you know that was that was the the defining moment where i hit you know two thousand dollars in sales in revenue in a in a single day and you're like well you know when you think about that that's sixty thousand dollars a month and you know that's that's three quarters of a million dollars in in revenue a year if i made 10 of that i've got a full-time income um after all expenses and so you know for me that sort of really opened my eyes that you know from little things big things grow and uh that was for me the real defining moment if i'll if i'm honest you know one thing i'm curious about is if uh once those bowls really hit the market if that actually led to a drop in overall sales by the cereal industry because there was less spillage but that's that's me just like pontificating you don't have to answer i don't think my sales volume was near high enough for that to cause any form of dent if i would be honest there fair enough so one of your key values um which stood out to me when i was first uh looking into uh joining the company has been honesty and transparency which is something that i value a great deal too but businesses can get pretty nasty people uh could lift material from when another ideas can be stolen disinformation can be disseminated uh there's bullying and i don't wanna point fingers or anything like that but what have been your guiding principles for living a good honest life and doing equally good in your business uh well as you sort of said yourself like for me um honesty transparency um are the two linchpins in my opinion and then you know feedback you know like um uh feedback is very important um having an a very open mind is also very important as well like um uh i i i think that being open to learning new things open to understanding more about yourself and that you are never perfect and that it's only when you work as a team that um as an individual individuals are imperfect but when you build a team that's when you start to perfect every one of each other's uh flaws because we all have them and that's all perfectly fine and natural that's just a part of life no one can ever do any um everything in life so to me those are sort of the most important things and again as i said to me just being honest and that's why like i like to tell people i've always said that business is never easy and one of the things that i would say to anyone that i've always said and being very passionate about is approach business as if it's the hardest thing you'll ever do um business it doesn't mean you have to have a physical brick-and-mortar business or e-commerce business business is just you know you making an income from either your service um or your product primarily and always to me that's where it's always very important to accept the reality that business is incredibly hard you know i've been doing this for three years and i i am very experienced in a lot of areas but i still find this very hard um i just find it easier a lot easier than i did three years ago and um and that's why honesty and transparency is so important because um you know if you if you think that business is easy you will get burnt in five seconds business is a very harsh mistress it will wake you up in five seconds it doesn't care but all business all the business world cares about as you sort of said yourself at the end of the day all business world cares about is money okay it doesn't care about human emotion it doesn't care about you as a person it cares about the exchange of ones and zeroes between different bank accounts and that's the harsh reality and so i've always used that as my foundation uh to how i approach business that the the very foundation of business is money so i need to approach it in that regard and that business is very hard and if i approach it like that um and always think that business is never going to be easy then i i generally find that i come out on top so that's sort of how i generally sort of approach it now i hope i think did i go off on a tangent there i think i did didn't i sorry i'm i'm quite pro tangent i'm all about tangents ah okay yeah i'll never stop a tangent okay so when i was when i was putting these questions together uh debutify had 115 117 downloads and that's definitely changed since then because i wrote these questions i think like a couple of weeks ago and i also think it's interesting how 15 and 17 the two numbers we talked about earlier ended up showing up here that life is really weird like that so theoretically that's as many new stores on the market which is quite a bit so what do you see for the future of debutify as well as e-commerce in the next five years um the future of debutify is going to be changing quite a lot um uh the the last ten and a half months that i've been uh growing and scaling this company um has all been laying the foundational work and uh by me for foundational work as i said earlier and this was marketing to me is the linchpin um and uh so very much building a very versatile um and strong and stern marketing team and also then now we're really starting to build on our development team and uh that's where things will get really exciting because from the development team obviously the next linchpin where our goal is to now go into complete overdrive in terms of um there's been a lot of work now done to release a lot more updates um and now once those updates are done and we get that consistent um i plan for debutify to not just be a theme um so i plan to uh as i said i'm i like to take opportunity when i see it so debutify we're going to be developing tons of different apps um uh that's all going to be under the debutify umbrella and again the goal is is to bring that all in house integrate it all so that people have all those tools and resources straight out the gate that they can use as examples sms messenger push email marketing um one page checkouts thank you page upsells um just to name sort of a couple are all things being worked on um influencer marketing tools uh video editing tools graphic design tools um all to have embedded within the debutify umbrella so that at the end of the day my goal is that people can use the debutify products and then they pretty much have uh one source that they go to where they basically use shopify and they beautify and you have your whole ecommerce business sorted so that's our uh you know our goal over the next five years is to very aggressively um invest into all of that and uh and uh look at trying to take market share in each of those industries respectively so that's pretty much sort of how i'm looking at over the next five years well i think a lot of people are pretty eager to get started uh before they do what are the anywhere between three to five key things that you encourage entrepreneurs to have ready uh before they start their debutifying sorry can you ask that again in a sec but you also said as well where i see e-commerce going to be in five years so i apologize i forgot about that question too oh oh that's fine that's fine so e-commerce will be in my opinion e-commerce is only going to especially because of the accelerated growth with the the covert uh e-commerce is is now what is many people define as the next big gold rush uh so it's going to absolutely go ballistic well what we're going to see is we're going to see over the next five years a big continued shift uh from brick and mortar retail stores to them a lot of them closing and then purely going to online everything's going to over the next however many years it might take it's going to continue transitioning to online more and more so we're going to see an increase in competitiveness marketing competitiveness because naturally everyone's going to be doing digital marketing so that means that facebook instagram google youtube all of these platforms are going to start to see more competition and that means for people getting into this space that it's very important that if you do want to uh enter this space and you do want to build a sustainable business i would recommend trying to learn and educate yourself on it um now because it's it's there's going to be plenty of opportunities in five years time but it's going to be a lot more competitive and so the way i look at it is i want to be geared up ready for that because in that five years as well it's going to pretty much um i would expect there's just going to be such a huge shift like what we've already seen this year to just everything being online purchase because uh what this year has really done i look at it is it's changed culture our our cultures at a core fundamental and uh so what that means basically is you know historically shopping for a lot of people would still be brick and mortar which don't get me wrong that'll always be there but with everything covered and people being forced at home in that it is forcing a cultural change where people are going to be shopping online and once you change the culture of a society it nearly becomes impossible to change and that becomes the new standard that's from my perspective so i that's sort of how i see the ecommerce space continuing to go down that path over the next five years does that answer that question oh absolutely and one thing that stuck out to me is that this is the year 2020 and 2020 has cloakly been referred to as you know the number of hindsight and so it's it's fascinating to me that everyone is stuck in their homes and are forced to reflect more often than they normally do in the year 2020 so i i i i just thought that was a pretty interesting coincidence so i've got a couple of uh quick ones here that we usually have prepared for guests but um we covered a lot of these so uh most of these i don't really need to go through but for the ones that i can do um what's one lesson that you would want to teach your former self you can go back in time and change things oh um that's a that's a really good one for me it would be it would have been doing a lot more research up front initially when i started i sort of did things on a bit of a whim i would see something and i'd be like i'll just market that and it'll you know hopefully work itself out what i've learned is one of the the very strong foundations to a successful business initially is uh research and that that teaches you about the industry how the industry works what your customers are like what your products should be like how you should market your product why your product is such a good product how you can beat your competitors uh what platforms you should market it on and so on and so forth so to me my my number one lesson that i would say to myself if i would start again is do a lot more upfront research rather than just like seeing a product marketing it do a lot of research around that product understand everything about that product and then sell it my experience for myself and many other people i've worked with and clients and that is that the most successful people let's say in e-commerce are generally the ones that have a huge profound amount of knowledge about their product it's like it might be just a passion okay uh let's say that you're into let's say i'm into um computer parts i know a huge amount about that so i'll be able to more confidently try and sell that to to my potential audience of customers because i generally just know a lot more about it rather than a product that i just see in like oh i can sell that make a lot of money i have no idea about this product it generally is reflected in how you actually market it to them because the more you know about it the more you can resonate with customers because you personally understand what the customer will be going through and so that's why to me research is probably my biggest hindsight um what's one business hack that uh you personally uh favor that you'd be willing to share with us a business hack that i favor um well that's a that's a bit of a broad one i'm trying to think about what i could pin that to there's there's a lot out there for me i would say the biggest business hack is approach business like it i sort of said this earlier um approach business like it's the hardest thing you'll ever do uh i know it sounds incredibly vague and and useless so like i um i would personally say that approach business that it's a it's the hardest thing you'll ever do it's going to challenge your core beliefs it's going to challenge you to every extent it's going to it's going to change you as a person and um so to me the biggest business hack is having the right mindset that this is going to be difficult and if you really want to be successful you have to be committed not just for a year not just for two years for the rest of your life um business is a lifelong commitment in my opinion and uh so my biggest hack that i always apply to myself every day is that every day is going to be a challenge and every day i just need to do it because business is not going to do itself i have to do it and so to me that would be my my number one tip business hack i guess you could say amazing so i think we're just about ready to wrap up so get do your research up front be prepared for a hard but rewarding journey anything else that we glossed over any other advice you would give to entrepreneurs before they get started um not really like well the thing i want well if i were to say the thing that i'll i'll encourage everyone regardless of where you're at in your journey is just be proud of yourself one of the things that i still do to this day if i'm honest and in hindsight i shouldn't is uh entrepreneurs can be notoriously hard on themselves and that isn't necessarily a bad thing it's always good to be self-reflective and understanding who what you are and your strengths and weaknesses but it's also important that we all understand and respect that you know no one's perfect and don't be so hard on yourself if you see other people succeeding okay that's great for them okay um but remember that they will have gone through just as many hardships as you have whether it's just a matter of do you know that reality uh do you know the truth of their backstory you don't know so to me i'll i just always like to very much encourage people that everyone's journey is is unique everyone's journey is fantastic and you should always be proud of yourself for venturing down this journey into the unknown the reality is most people don't even try to attempt to get into business because they don't want to fear the unknown which is fine some people want to be like that but we're entrepreneurs we we embrace the unknown and by embracing the unknown that in my opinion is something you should always be proud of and happy that you're actually doing because it is it is very tough you're going to get a a lot of people uh whether it's directly or indirectly putting you down about that your decision in life is not the right one that you should be uh you should be in a nine-to-five job okay you should be just working a typical job like like most people and that's why to me i always say that you know being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely lifestyle at times and uh so very important that you should always be proud of yourself and i very much encourage people to to network with other entrepreneurs and don't get don't get jealous or upset if someone else has more success than you or whatever just be proud of where you're at in your journey and just keep doing it consistently and you will see the success okay remember being in e-commerce and that um everyone all these marketing and getting sales it's a skill it's not a it's not just some talent people just get um it's a skill and so with it being a skill anyone can obtain it anyone can learn it and anyone can apply it so as long as you keep doing it consistently you'll be able to obtain that skill and you'll be able to slowly build the the lifestyle that you envision that you want to live well that's outstanding you know one thing that uh crossed my mind as you were saying that is you know i i look at the potential of of e-commerce and and i see that people can you know do do pretty well with it and i wonder you know what what holds back so many people from wanting to do this too and i think a lot of people they don't want to take the initiative they don't want to be a leader in something but because there's a lot more risk involved whereas people who pick up employment and they work for somebody else i'm a mix of both right you know i you know i work for you guys but i also work for myself too and people don't want to get uh they don't want to they have a lot of the things they have to worry about maybe they got kids so not everybody has the means to to take the journey so if you do have the means and you have the desire you should go for it well it's a it's an it's an interesting um discussion and i think that 2020 has uh uh to me um i speak to my wife about this regularly um 2020 to me has very much highlighted uh how that being in a nine-to-five job is not technically a stable job it's not stable okay a number of my friends that have had uh you know being in large companies have been have been laid off okay and they were in ongoing ongoing full-time positions being in an ongoing full-time position is is not uh it is in some regard more stable than being an entrepreneur in many regards but if you look at what 2020 has done millions of people have lost their jobs that have been in a full-time ongoing position anyway so the definition of stability to me has really changed as a result of covert anyway and that you know peop being in a job does not necessarily mean because at the end of the day as i said earlier what runs a business is money if a business isn't making money then you're probably not going to be employed by that business okay so you know the um the important thing is understanding that uh a nine-to-five job isn't isn't a hundred percent okay just the same as being an entrepreneur everything in life is a risk in my opinion no matter what decision you're making that's uh that's true too i mean i think that the core point i was trying to make is simply like taking orders from somebody else to to earn a pay rather than ordering yourself around but you're right yeah uh i mean nine uh full-time positions depending on the industry a lot of them have gone under even before uh kovaid so i think things changed quite rapidly well some people um just don't some people just don't want to be a leader as you said as well like it can be pretty daunting um some people just step up to being a leader like it's natural some people uh it takes a long period of time to build that confidence and skill set and that too so it's a it's a fine balancing act and it's based on everyone's own exactly comfort zones i guess so we hit an hour ricky thank you so much for your time uh we're gonna get going no worries thanks for uh letting me on the show it was it was an absolute blast thanks for your time i'm glad i could do it you might have found this show on many number of platforms apple podcasts spotify google play stitcher or right here on debutify whatever the case if you enjoy this content and want to help us thrive please take a few moments to leave a review on apple podcast or wherever you think is best we also want to hear from you so whether you think you'd be a good guest or want to weigh in on anything related to our show you can email podcast debutify.com or connect with us on facebook twitter instagram and tick tock finally this podcast is created by the passionate team at debutify if you're ready to take the plunge into e-commerce or are looking to up your game head over to debutify.com and see how it

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2021-07-24 16:07

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