Customer phone support has been a huge burden for Beardbrand, host Eric Bandholz's company, with its small staff. His solution was an AI voice bot, which he recently built in about a day. He used Grok Bot, xAI’s agent platform, and SpaceXAI’s Grok Voice API. In this episode, he describes how he built the bot…
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Alex Walser launched his North Carolina-based marketing agency, Savant Syndicate, in 2024. The firm manages advertising campaigns for ecommerce brands, with a focus on Google Ads. He says YouTube ads provide the most upside, especially YouTube TV. “I'm more bullish on connected TV ads than traditional YouTube,” he states. In this episode, Alex addresses his…
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Please enjoy this episode first aired in February 2023. Zach Stuck is an agency founder turned ecommerce owner. The agency, called Homestead, runs marketing campaigns for direct-to-consumer businesses. And lessons from those campaigns drive his second venture: acquiring and launching his own brands. His top lesson? A customer from paid acquisition has to be profitable…
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We asked Rok Hladnik, an ecommerce merchant turned agency owner, how to launch a new product line without confusing existing customers and diverting staff. He advised creating a new brand. “There's nothing wrong with applying learnings to a new company,” he stated. Rok's agency, Flat Circle, is based in Slovenia and serves ecommerce businesses worldwide….
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Cheryl Sew Hoy says her company deals with poop. The Austin, Texas-based serial entrepreneur launched Tiny Health in 2020 to help folks monitor essential microorganisms in their digestive systems, which are critical for overall wellness. The process once required in-person doctor visits with cumbersome stool collection. Tiny Health offers the same service with a streamlined…
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Many pro content marketers insist AI-generated text is inferior to humans'. But not Neville Medhora. He's a seasoned copywriter who claims AI is 95% as good as human writing, even for the most complicated work. “It's a hard pill to swallow, but you've got to adapt,” he says. Neville is the founder of Swipe File,…
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Hal Smith says lowering clients' customer acquisition cost on Meta and Google is a focus of his agency, H Street Digital. He cites 5 performance levers, starting with the offer. Hal founded the D2C-focused agency in 2020 after stints managing political fundraising campaigns. “I learned the importance of the right message,” he told me. In…
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Host Eric Banholz asked Kenny Trusnik, founder of the agency Forest City Digital, how an ecommerce startup can attract customers amid today's AI tumult. “Focus on getting the product data as deep and clean as possible in a structured environment,” he replied, adding additional tactics for LLM citations and referrals. In this episode, Kenny shares…
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Please enjoy this repeat of a popular episode aired in August 2024. Mike Tecku first appeared on this podcast in 2019 as an Amazon marketplace seller. He then sold that business, a maker of floor mats, shortly afterward. He retired, became bored, and in 2022 launched Momentum, a direct-to-consumer nutritional shake producer. He and I…
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We've followed the growth of BK Beauty since its launch seven years ago. Paul Jauregui co-founded the direct-to-consumer cosmetics brand in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Lisa. Host Eric Bandholz has interviewed him multiple times since then. The company had hit $1 million in first-year revenue when they first spoke in 2020. Then in 2023,…
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