Podcast appearances and mentions of jordan gal

Aaron is joined this week by Jordan Gal (Ian's off at Disney World) to discuss everything from finding product market fit for his new product Rosie to the Try Hard business model and so much more.Sponsored by Bento, Stream, Laravel Cloud, and PHP Tek 2025.Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.(00:00) - #1 Topic (02:47) - What Makes A Podcast Compelling? (33:43) - Early Product Market Fit (57:06) - Fighting The Bootstrap Ideology (01:15:58) - The Try Hard Business Model (01:30:24) - It's Business Time (01:48:22) - Making Friends (02:02:55) - Disneyland vs. Disney World Links:Jordan GalEpisode 764 of Startups for the Rest of Ushttp://youcanjustdothings.com/RosieDavid ChangICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles)BrickCartHookJustin McGillBryan ShankmanNewFormDan ShipperRob Walling

Dan sits down with Neel Parekh (CEO of MaidThis Franchise) to talk about the shifts that drive real business growth—why decision-making matters more than productivity, how time compression accelerates success, and why bigger businesses can create more freedom. They dive into the power of accountability, hiring smarter, and using personal branding to attract the right opportunities. Plus, Neel shares how he scaled through franchising—an unconventional path for a lifestyle business—balancing hustle, risk, and long-term rewards. What's missing in your business that's keeping you stuck? Connect with 1000+ global founders running profitable online businesses without sacrificing their unique lifestyles @ dynamitecircle.com (http://dynamitecircle.com/). CHAPTERS (00:02:02) Compressing Time for Success (00:04:17) The Law of a Thousand Hours (00:07:43) Staying Motivated Through Accountability (00:11:28) Building Confidence in Your Business Model (00:17:25) The Paradox of Growth and Lifestyle (00:24:35) Understanding the Franchise Model and Its Costs (00:26:16) The Challenges of Running a Franchise (00:26:31) The Decision to Franchise vs. Self-Expansion (00:30:44) Vetting Franchisees: Finding the Right Fit (00:31:22) Success Rates and Expectations in Franchising (00:37:01) The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Risk and Reward (00:39:51) The Durability of the Cleaning Business Model (00:43:51) Finding Excitement in Business and Life (00:44:09) Expanding Business Opportunities (00:44:50) The Hustle-Life Balance (00:46:49) The Power of Decision Making CONNECT Dan “at” tropicalmba dot com Ian “at” tropicalmba dot com LINKS Join the DC (http://dynamitecircle.com/) Follow us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) PLAYLIST "The Tailwind Index" & Dodging Business Blindspots (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/tailwind-index-dodging-business) The Unexpected Downsides of Selling Your Business (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/exit-founders-disappointed) Success Without Sacrifice? (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/success-without-sacrifice) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal

The team takes you inside the DC. Who we are, what to expect, and how you can grow your business with the support of other founders on the same journey. Connect with 1000+ global founders running profitable online businesses without sacrificing their unique lifestyles. Join Dynamite Circle. (https://dynamitecircle.com/) CHAPTERS (00:03:36) Introduction to DC (00:05:11) Genesis of DC (00:06:55) Culture & Composition (00:09:59) Application Process and Vetting (00:19:06) Events and Networking Opportunities (00:25:20) Support for High-Level Founders (00:29:14) Joining the Dynamite Circle CONNECT Email Dan “at” tropicalmba dot com Follow on X (https://x.com/TropicalMBA) Follow on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) LINKS Join Dynamite Circle (https://dynamitecircle.com/) Subscribe to the newsletter (tropicalmba.com/subscribe) Get our book: Before the Exit (https://www.amazon.com/Before-Exit-Thought-Experiments-Entrepreneurs-ebook/dp/B07BN2KD1J) PLAYLIST Niche B2B Content = Big Revenue on YouTube (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/b2b-content-youtube) The Unexpected Downsides of Selling Your Business (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/exit-founders-disappointed) Is Your Biggest Expense Helping or Hurting? (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/your-biggest-expense) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal

The stories we tell ourselves shape our businesses—but how much of it is true? External validation, from market response to honest feedback, is key. Dan & Jeff break down common entrepreneurial mistakes, business strategy, product-market fit, sales, opportunity assessment, and why knowing your numbers (even without a finance background) matters. P.S. Still taking all the sales calls for your business? You need a wingman (https://meetwingman.com/). CHAPTERS (00:02:43) Building entrepreneurial endurance (00:03:35) It's easy to be dishonest with yourself (00:06:49) Tailwind index helps assess market needs (00:15:43) Focus on solving immediate pain points (00:18:38) Communicate effectively with your target market (00:23:39) Monthly business reviews (MBR) (00:25:18) Basic financial hygiene is crucial (00:27:08) Having the courage to be disliked (00:31:52) Contribution vs validation (00:34:22) Tasks vs responsibilities CONNECT Dan “at” tropicalmba dot com Ian “at” tropicalmba dot com LINKS Join the DC (http://dynamitecircle.com/) Follow us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) PLAYLIST Niche B2B Content = Big Revenue on YouTube (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/b2b-content-youtube) The Unexpected Downsides of Selling Your Business (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/exit-founders-disappointed) Is Your Biggest Expense Helping or Hurting? (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/your-biggest-expense) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal

Sign up at HeyRosie.com and use code TKO50 for 50% off your first monthI sat down with Jordan Gal (https://x.com/JordanGal) about how he built Hey Rosie, an AI voice answering service for small businesses, leveraging AI to provide a better alternative to traditional answering services. Jordan shared how his GPT wrapper addresses the challenges small business owners face with handling phone calls and converting leads, emphasizing focusing on solving customer problems rather than getting caught up in the tech. Hey Rosie is experiencing impressive growth, doubling every month, with a low churn rate. We also touched on the various business categories that Hey Rosie serves. And very importantly, Jordan offered advice on building AI wrappers.Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome00:53 Introducing Rosie: The AI Answering Service01:36 Challenges with Traditional Answering Services02:24 AI's Potential in Business Communication04:39 Real-World Use Cases for Rosie07:09 Customer Interaction and AI Transparency10:55 The Journey to Building Rosie17:38 Pricing and Positioning Strategies20:54 Unexpected Business Applications21:28 Understanding the Role of Phone Calls in Business21:45 Exploring the Diverse Landscape of Small Businesses22:10 Innovative Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses23:51 The Broad Approach to AI in Business25:06 Opportunities in AI Sales Coaching27:34 Advice for Aspiring Business Owners30:27 Customer Acquisition and Market Demand32:50 Live Demo: Setting Up a Rosie Agent37:07 Customizing Your AI Agent39:05 Conclusion and Special Offer

Dan breaks down five key mindset shifts for business owners in the thick of the growth grind. Inspired by Alex Hormozi's tweet on sacrifice, he explores what it really takes to succeed—reflecting on courage, relationships, and balance—with actionable takeaways to stay productive and happy. Book referenced in the episode is The Power to be Disliked (https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Be-Disliked-Phenomenon-Happiness/dp/1668065967/ref=asc_df_1668065967?mcid=0db73a9ea9f13b728a2cf3eb593e7720&hvocijid=13369597873068056788-1668065967-&hvexpln=73&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=730432682330&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13369597873068056788&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007527&hvtargid=pla-2281435176698&psc=1). Connect with 1000+ global founders running profitable online businesses without sacrificing their unique lifestyles @ dynamitecircle.com (http://dynamitecircle.com/). CHAPTERS (00:00:35) Hormozi's 10-year formula for success (00:04:29) “The Courage to Be Disliked” (00:11:01) Change your relationships (00:15:12) Accept your responsibility (00:16:33) Take on a six-week sprint (00:18:26) Baseline & Brenwall (00:20:50) Do it for the right reasons CONNECT Dan “at” tropicalmba dot com Ian “at” tropicalmba dot com LINKS Join the DC (http://dynamitecircle.com/) Follow us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) PLAYLIST Niche B2B Content = Big Revenue on YouTube (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/b2b-content-youtube) The Unexpected Downsides of Selling Your Business (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/exit-founders-disappointed) Is Your Biggest Expense Helping or Hurting? (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/your-biggest-expense) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal

The hard part shouldn't be how to implement an OS in your organization. The hard part is answering the question: Are the right people in the right roles at your company? In this episode, Dan and Ian share their own OS that's extremely simple. It's called GPS. They'll explain how GPS helps you put a plan in place to meet your goals, and deliver on that plan. That's it. Also, hiring for specific tasks, the impact of remote work on hiring, and more. Dan & Ian's Stuff: Our book: Before the Exit (https://www.amazon.com/Before-Exit-Thought-Experiments-Entrepreneurs/dp/1980628823/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3E5PMCCM0TDZ0&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.GnIb36rltn6NgcjHBCs8zg.waeKvE3zKoAbCt6Adoo5o5vv7M4PDyOj9pMXE7dM82A&dib_tag=se&keywords=before+the+exit+dan+andrews&qid=1711510466&s=books&sprefix=before+the+exit+dan+andrews%2Cstripbooks%2C101&sr=1-1) The Newsletter (https://tropicalmba.com/subscribe) “The DC” (https://dynamitecircle.com/join-dc/) DC Black (https://dynamitecircle.com/dc-black) Global events (https://dynamitecircle.com/events) Hire remote talent (https://remotefirstrecruiting.com/) Find a remote job (https://dynamitejobs.com/) Listen on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialTropicalMBA) Follow on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) @TropicalMBA (https://twitter.com/TropicalMBA) @AnythingIan (https://twitter.com/AnythingIan) Chapters ● (00:00:41) Introduction and 'Meaty Shorts' Format ● (00:06:48) Hiring for Specific Tasks in a Business ● (00:15:55) Minimum Viable EOS (GPS) Implementation ● (00:16:27) Implementing the EOS System: The GPS Framework ● (00:18:54) Using Scorecards for Clarity and Accountability ● (00:25:06) The Importance of Regular Check-ins and Standing Meetings Links: - Dan Martell - Who to Hire Next (https://www.danmartell.com/who-to-hire-next/) - The EOS Business Model (https://www.eosworldwide.com/eos-model) - Scorecard template (G doc) (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vJdgiTXIrtnGJB-ywe4goraLyQhp3oHMOCeKHbBOuAY/edit?usp=sharing) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Tommy Griffith, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Travis Jamison, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Tynan, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal Additional episodes you might enjoy: Do Things That Don't Scale (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/things-dont-scale) Three Phases to 1 Million in Revenue (https://tropicalmba.squarespace.com/config/) Quiet Crypto, The Demand Question, and Difficult Decisions ft. Jordan Gal (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/quiet-crypto-difficult-decisions)

In this episode, Ian and Dan discuss the concept of doing things that don't scale, inspired by Paul Graham's influential article 'Do Things That Don't Scale.' They explore the idea of taking risks and gambling in entrepreneurship, and how it relates to increasing one's locus of control. The conversation covers various strategies for founders, including recruiting users manually, building something fragile, delighting users, focusing on experience, and niche marketing. In this conversation, Ian and Dan discuss Paul Graham's article 'Do Things That Don't Scale' and explore the principal themes and takeaways. They cover topics such as the idea of scaling, fabricating products yourself, consulting and acting as an anchor client, going manual and doing unscalable laborious tasks, the illusion of big launches and partnerships, vectors vs. scalars (ideas and execution), and the temptation to gamble and the importance of locus of control. Our book: Before the Exit (https://www.amazon.com/Before-Exit-Thought-Experiments-Entrepreneurs/dp/1980628823/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3E5PMCCM0TDZ0&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.GnIb36rltn6NgcjHBCs8zg.waeKvE3zKoAbCt6Adoo5o5vv7M4PDyOj9pMXE7dM82A&dib_tag=se&keywords=before+the+exit+dan+andrews&qid=1711510466&s=books&sprefix=before+the+exit+dan+andrews%2Cstripbooks%2C101&sr=1-1) The Newsletter (https://tropicalmba.com/subscribe) “The DC” (https://dynamitecircle.com/join-dc/) DC Black (https://dynamitecircle.com/dc-black) Global events (https://dynamitecircle.com/events) Hire remote talent (https://remotefirstrecruiting.com/) Find a remote job (https://dynamitejobs.com/) Listen on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialTropicalMBA) Follow on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) @TropicalMBA (https://twitter.com/TropicalMBA) @AnythingIan (https://twitter.com/AnythingIan) Chapters ● (00:00:47) Introduction and Waking Up Early ● (00:01:58) The Concept of Taking Risks and Gambling ● (00:03:52) Introduction to Paul Graham and Y Combinator ● (00:05:37) The Importance of Doing Things That Don't Scale ● (00:10:00) Recruiting Users Manually ● (00:12:48) Building Something Fragile ● (00:20:48) Niche Marketing ● (00:23:02) The Facebook and the Idea of Scaling ● (00:24:53) Consulting and Acting as an Anchor Client ● (00:27:17) Going Manual and Doing Unscalable Laborious Tasks ● (00:30:08) The Illusion of Big Launches and Partnerships ● (00:34:54) Vectors vs. Scalars: Ideas and Execution ● (00:38:36) The Temptation to Gamble and the Importance of Locus of Control Links: - Paul Graham's Article “Do Things That Don't Scale” (https://paulgraham.com/ds.html) - Lao Tzu - Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Tommy Griffith, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Travis Jamison, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Tynan, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal Additional episodes you might enjoy: Three Phases to 1 Million in Revenue (https://tropicalmba.squarespace.com/config/) Quiet Crypto, The Demand Question, and Difficult Decisions ft. Jordan Gal (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/quiet-crypto-difficult-decisions) “3 Million in Revenue is a Death Zone" - Financial Strategy with Greg Crabtree (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/3-million-death-zone)

Dan and Ian discuss the different phases of bootstrapping a business and the common challenges that arise at each stage. They walk through three phases: Zero to $250k “Mindset”; $250k to 1 million "We're seeking a reliable/repeatable source of new customers"; and $1 million + "We need to hire, fire, improve/change team members more effectively”. They explore everything from adjusting the offer to the marketplace and developing a strong customer base to making a rule that the founder should be responsible for growth up to $5M. They also explore the crucial role that team composition plays in the professionalization of the company. Finally, they discuss the decision between maximizing profitability and scaling the business. Dan & Ian's Stuff: Our book: Before the Exit (https://www.amazon.com/Before-Exit-Thought-Experiments-Entrepreneurs/dp/1980628823/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3E5PMCCM0TDZ0&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.GnIb36rltn6NgcjHBCs8zg.waeKvE3zKoAbCt6Adoo5o5vv7M4PDyOj9pMXE7dM82A&dib_tag=se&keywords=before+the+exit+dan+andrews&qid=1711510466&s=books&sprefix=before+the+exit+dan+andrews%2Cstripbooks%2C101&sr=1-1) The Newsletter (https://tropicalmba.com/subscribe) “The DC” (https://dynamitecircle.com/join-dc/) DC Black (https://dynamitecircle.com/dc-black) Global events (https://dynamitecircle.com/events) Hire remote talent (https://remotefirstrecruiting.com/) Find a remote job (https://dynamitejobs.com/) Listen on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialTropicalMBA) Follow on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) @TropicalMBA (https://twitter.com/TropicalMBA) @AnythingIan (https://twitter.com/AnythingIan) Chapters ● (00:00:43) Introduction and Era Change ● (00:04:28) Mindset for Early Stage Bootstrapping ● (00:08:35) Running a Shit Ton of Experiments ● (00:19:34) Customer Development and Adjusting the Offer ● (00:23:37) Founder's Responsibility for Growth ● (00:24:28) Founder's Role in Growth Until $5 Million ● (00:25:29) Following Strategies That Work for the Majority ● (00:26:41) Celebrating the Achievement of $1 Million in Revenue ● (00:29:18) Transitioning from $1 Million to $5 Million ● (00:34:07) The Importance of Team Composition ● (00:34:22) Shifting Focus to Managing a Team ● (00:39:19) Maximizing Profitability vs. Scaling Links: Simple Numbers by Greg Crabtree (https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Numbers-Straight-Talk-Profits/dp/1608320561) Exploitative Play in Live Poker (https://www.amazon.com/Exploitative-Play-Live-Poker-Manipulate/dp/1909457922) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Tommy Griffith, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Travis Jamison, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Tynan, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal Additional episodes you might enjoy: Quiet Crypto, The Demand Question, and Difficult Decisions ft. Jordan Gal (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/quiet-crypto-difficult-decisions) “3 Million in Revenue is a Death Zone" - Financial Strategy with Greg Crabtree (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/3-million-death-zone) A Podcast About Shiny Object Syndrome (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/shiny-object-syndrome)

Dan talks to Jordan Gal, founder of Rally and co-host of the Bootsrapped Web podcast about challenges in the ecommerce space, product-market fit and demand, partnerships and veto power, the quietness of crypto, risking other people's money, and more… There's one thing that founders tend to really struggle with when it comes to growing their business and that's getting the right team in place. Listen as Jordan shows Dan how and why he fires unfit team members. Dan & Ian's Stuff: The Newsletter (https://tropicalmba.com/subscribe) “The DC” (https://dynamitecircle.com/join-dc/) DC Black (https://dynamitecircle.com/dc-black) Global events (https://dynamitecircle.com/events) Hire remote talent (https://remotefirstrecruiting.com/) Find a remote job (https://dynamitejobs.com/) Listen on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialTropicalMBA) Follow on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tropicalmba/) @TropicalMBA (https://twitter.com/TropicalMBA) @AnythingIan (https://twitter.com/AnythingIan) Chapters (00:04:22) News Update (00:05:58) From Player to Coach (00:06:50) Jack Welch (00:12:10) Bootstrapping vs Raising Money (00:15:52) Product-Market Fit and Adjustments (00:18:57) Partnerships and Veto Power (00:20:42) Deciding When to Pivot (00:36:27) Firing and Personnel Decisions (00:43:30) The Quietness of Crypto (00:48:05) Challenges in E-commerce (00:57:30) Impact of Having a Family Links: Bootsrapped Web podcast (https://bootstrappedweb.com/) Jordan on Twitter (https://twitter.com/JordanGal) Rally (https://rallyon.com/) Winning (https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Jack-Welch/dp/0060753943/ref=asc_df_0060753943/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312243616995&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11970474335439880872&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007527&hvtargid=pla-450103671560&psc=1&mcid=a2b7a51b49653a50bccb79bc40fad30e&gclid=CjwKCAjw7-SvBhB6EiwAwYdCAdfAqSQ363qg9bY5hlyYGlv0cq2jEW-yDnybdlYnB8VXaJLA1SiDbBoCpEAQAvD_BwE) Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Tommy Griffith, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Travis Jamison, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Tynan, Lucy Bella Simkins, Brian Balfour, Nick Huber, Mike Michalowicz, Greg Crabtree, Jordan Gal Additional episodes you might enjoy: A Shopify Software Business Success Story (Jordan Gal) (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/jordan-gal-carthook-shopify) How Transparent Should You Be? Thoughts on Queen Bee Roles & a Ticket Giveaway (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/transparent-queen-bee-role) A Podcast About Shiny Object Syndrome (https://tropicalmba.com/episodes/shiny-object-syndrome)

Looking to optimize your online store's checkout process and boost your conversion rates? In this episode of PayPod, host Jacob Hollabaugh sits down with Jordan Gal of Rally for a deep dive into the benefits of using a neutral payment processing platform. Rally offers a headless and fully optimized one-click checkout solution. Watch this episode for a fun and interesting dive into this latest development in payments and fintech. www.soarpay.com/2023/07/rally

I’ve been waiting for literally years to do this interview. I’ve known some inside information about this startup for a long time but because it involved Shopify–we couldn’t talk about it. Today Jordan Gal is here to talk about what happened. Jordan Gal is the founder of Rally, a headless checkout for modern brands. Sponsored byOrigami – If you’ve heard about DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and you want to find out how to set one up for yourself, go to JoinOrigami.com. Even if you’re just interested in how these things work and want to learn more, the Origami blog is a great place to start. Lemon.io – Why squander time and money on developers who aren't perfect for your startup? Let Lemon match you with engineers that can transform your vision into reality — diabolically fast. Go to Lemon.io/mixergy for a 15% discount on your first 4 weeks with one of their devs. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

https://youtu.be/LlBWS-yBgVY Jordan Gal is the Founder of Rally, a technology solution that creates a seamless checkout experience for customers. We discuss the benefits of building a unique business, ways to create a satisfactory store experience for your clients, and how the unbundling of marketplaces is redefining ecommerce.  --- Give Your Customers an ROI with Jordan Gal Our guest is Jordan Gal, the founder of Rally, a technology solution that creates a seamless checkout experience for customers. Jordan, you have a unique product and we'll get into uniqueness in a few minutes, but let's start at the beginning, at least the beginning of your company. How did you get to stumble upon this opportunity and what does Rally do and what kind of road leads you to that, to founding this business? Yeah, if I look back at the origin of the business, the business was started two years ago, but it has its origins like 10 years ago when I started an e-commerce company with my brothers. So we were merchants ourselves, we were selling physical products online. And in many ways, even though it's 10 years later and the tech, overall tech has gotten immensely better, in many ways, the things we're building now are a lot of the things that I wanted as a merchant 10 years ago. And it's sometimes surprising that it hasn't happened yet, but we can also get into why I think it hasn't happened. Okay, so tell me a little bit about your journey of getting there. So you said you had the previous e-commerce business, what happened to that? And then how did you come up with this idea? I get it that you wanted some of these solutions, when did you decide to go for it? So just give a little bit more detail if you can. Yeah, sure. So, so for me, it really goes back to growing up in an immigrant entrepreneur household. My parents moved this year from Israel when I was six. My dad was an entrepreneur and that, you know, when you grow up in that environment, you kind of get marinated in it and it ends up being the only thing that makes sense to you, at least in my case. So I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years, but I got into e-commerce with selling online. Being our own store, we built on Volusion, one of the early platforms that really allowed you a lot more control. We were originally on Yahoo stores, and that was very frustrating, because you couldn't change anything yourself. You always had to go to a developer or an agency. And moving over to Volusion was like revolutionary, because we were then directly in control. And that control is what got me very interested in conversion optimization. So when we ran our own e-commerce business, I was the one responsible for conversion. And that's what got me staring at a website and thinking, what can I do to this page that creates a scenario where a higher percentage of people take the actions that I want them to take and that being empowered in that way is really really interesting from like a marketer point of view. So that business grew pretty well but we we didn't like where it was going. We were selling products that were available elsewhere and so you're really competing on like thin margins and you and back then a lot of it was competing on you know being better at Google AdWords. And in an Amazon world, we didn't like where that was going. So we really faced the decision of either creating our own brand, that way you can only get it from us, or selling the business. We ended up selling the business, and it was a pretty good exit. Nothing crazy, but it got me my start in e-commerce. And after that, I started a software company focused on e-commerce merchants. That software company was called Cart Hook. We originally came out with a product called an abandoned cart app, which emails people that have abandoned the checkout process. After about two years of running that, we stumbled upon a much bigger idea, which was just replacing the checkout entirely.

Jordan Gal is the Founder of Rally, a technology solution that creates a seamless checkout experience for customers. We discuss the benefits of building a unique business, ways to create a satisfactory store experience for your clients, and how the unbundling of marketplaces is redefining ecommerce.    Time Stamps [00:30] Jordan's entrepreneurial journey [04:10] Jordan's experience with management blueprints [06:16] Why you're better off building a unique business [08:40] What is unbundling and why it matters in eCommerce [12:42] Understanding the buying process of the future [16:13] The biggest shifts in eCommerce happening today [19:04] Trends accelerating the future of eCommerce  [21:48] How Jordan and his team finance business growth [23:40] How to create a novel storefront experience [26:59] Why you need to create a friction-free buying experience [28:32] Parting thoughts   Links and Resources Steve and Greg Cleary's Book: Pinnacle: Five Principles that Take Your Business to the Top of the Mountain Work with Steve - Stevepreda.com Jordan's LinkedIn Rallyon.com The Bootstrapped Web Podcast Connect with Jordan on Twitter

In this episode, I am joined by Jordan Gal, co-founder of Rally, a company on a mission to empower merchants and app developers by providing them with a headless, fully optimized, one-click checkout solution. Rally is revolutionizing the modern headless e-commerce ecosystem, bridging front- and back-end platforms, and creating seamless customer checkout experiences. Listen in as Jordan shares the origin story of Rally and the problems it aims to solve with technology and how Rally collaborates with Swell, Klarna, and Stripe to help small businesses scale without being tied to Shopify, acting as a 'headless' checkout option. He also shares s use case to help listeners understand how Rally can work in their world Jordan also talks about his experience raising $6M in 2021, along with advice for startup founders looking to follow in his footsteps. In addition, he evem finds time to share a few tips for early-stage founders looking to grow a business in this area, and his passion for ensuring small business owners can operate on their terms. Join us for an insightful conversation with Jordan Gal as we explore the power of Rally's innovative checkout solution and the future of e-commerce.

  Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Jordan Gal, CEO & Co-Founder of Rally, a checkout payment platform that's raised $6 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Innovative Checkout Solutions: Rally offers an alternative checkout solution for e-commerce merchants, challenging the standard platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce. Experience with Competitors: Jordan discusses the impact of competitors like Fast and Bolt on the market and Rally's strategy to navigate this noisy space. Post-Purchase Offers: A key feature of Rally is post-purchase offers, enabling merchants to increase revenue without risking the initial sale. Transition from Bootstrapping to VC: Jordan shares insights on his journey from bootstrapping his previous company to raising venture capital for Rally. New Market Categories: Rally aims to redefine e-commerce checkout with a focus on headless commerce, offering greater flexibility and customization. Future Vision: Jordan envisions Rally integrating crypto tokens to provide true ownership to merchants and shoppers, fostering a more engaged network.  

Jack and Jordan share stories from the front lines of indie companies. Starting and running a software business, mistakes made along the way, exiting a company built from the ground up, living with bigger competitors who get all the industry press, and so much more. They also get into the rise and meteoric fall of Fast, who raised over $120m in funding, ended up only making around $600k in revenue total, and then shutting down. Jordan discusses his point of view on what mistakes they made as a company and how they moved far too fast (pun intended). Jordan's company Rally helps online merchants offer a more profitable checkout, post-purchase offers, and helping boost conversions.

Jordan is the CEO and Founder of Rally, a headless checkout for modern brands. The company offers ecommerce merchants a better converting, more profitable, one-click checkout.Rally is on a mission to bring power back to merchants and app developers by equipping them with a headless and fully optimized one-click checkout solution. Rally is central to the modern headless ecommerce ecosystem bridging front- and back-end platforms, and plays a critical role in creating a seamless checkout experience for customers. Rally's team of industry leaders pioneered the post-purchase offer technology for DTC brands, driving over $200m in post-purchase revenue and processed $3B in sales. Rally appreciates a decentralized ethos and is merchant and revenue-focused, always.Jordan's podcast, Boostrapped Web, can be found here!https://bootstrappedweb.com/

From checkout to tokens, an app store to pricing, Jordan Gal gives us insights into the future around the WooCommerce ecosystem.

From checkout to tokens, an app store to pricing, Jordan Gal gives us insights into the future around the WooCommerce ecosystem.

The Title of the Interview "Community-Owned Headless Checkout for E-commerce Platforms" Main Interview Questions #1 - Maybe you can give the audience some background history info connected to founding CartHook and your new company Rallyon? #2 - Your company CartHook ingrates with Shopify and you have been quite public on the "good, bad and ugly" parts of semi relying on somebody else's eco-system can you give the audience some quick insights connectedto this? #3 - Can you give some 2 to 3 of the most important lessons you have learned connected to founding CartHook which would be the most important to share with our audience? #4 - Your new company Rallyon you state that it's a "Community-Owned Ecosystem" what does this really mean and why should people care? #5 - How hard was it to raise $6 million for the project and what are some of the things you have learned from the process? #6 - Can you give us three people of books that have influenced you the most in your business or personal journey? More about Jordan Gal and Rallyon We're excited to announce that we've raised $6m in seed financing to build a world-class eCommerce checkout and a community-owned eCommerce ecosystem. You can read more about it here: https://lnkd.in/g55-u8BR A very big thank you to our investor group. The round was led by Rainfall Ventures with participation from Felix Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Afore VC, Commerce VC, and some extremely helpful angel investors. If you're a merchant on BigCommerce or WooCommerce, sign up for early access here: https://www.rallyon.com/ https://www.rallyon.com/ https://jordangal.com/

A tricky part about all of this stuff we do in business and online is to not let the work consume you. I know people say that your work is not your worth, and I get it, but it's really hard for me to disconnect from that. To show the world what you've built and put it into the hands of your super fans. To punch up as the underdog and prove to the Goliath that you can win in this arena too. It's addictive, it's fulfilling, it's enriching for us and hopefully those around us. Jordan Gal returns to the Matt Report to share in his next chapter, Rally. Jordan brings the passion, he's a business builder I'm on the sidelines rooting for. We'll explore his challenges with building on a platform like Shopify and how he plans to disrupt that with his latest play in decentralized (and headless) e-commerce. ★ Support this podcast ★

A tricky part about all of this stuff we do in business and online is to not let the work consume you. I know people say that your work is not your worth, and I get it, but it's really hard for me to disconnect from that. To show the world what you've built and put it into the hands of your super fans. To punch up as the underdog and prove to the Goliath that you can win in this arena too. It's addictive, it's fulfilling, it's enriching for us and hopefully those around us. Jordan Gal returns to the Matt Report to share in his next chapter, Rally. Jordan brings the passion, he's a business builder I'm on the sidelines rooting for. We'll explore his challenges with building on a platform like Shopify and how he plans to disrupt that with his latest play in decentralized (and headless) e-commerce.

Jordan Gal is the co-founder of Rally, a headless checkout that gives e-commerce merchants more control over their checkout experience. Show Notes: https://saasclub.io/302 Join Our Email List Get weekly SaaS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right in your inbox: https://saasclub.io/email/ Join Our Community for Free SaaS Club is the community for early-stage SaaS founders and entrepreneurs. https://saasclub.co/join

Jordan Gal is the co-founder of Rally and Carthook. During his time building Carthook, he learned some hard lessons about building on an existing platform, challenges to overcome bootstrapping, and how to implement those lessons into your next business.

Jordan Gal is the co-founder of Rally, a headless checkout that gives e-commerce merchants more control over their checkout experience.Show Notes:https://saasclub.io/302Join Our Email ListGet weekly SaaS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right in your inbox:https://saasclub.io/email/Join Our Community for FreeSaaS Club is the community for early-stage SaaS founders and entrepreneurs.https://saasclub.co/join

Jordan Gal is the co-founder of Rally and Carthook. During his time building Carthook, he learned some hard lessons about building on an existing platform, challenges to overcome bootstrapping, and how to implement those lessons into your next business.

Christian has an idea for a financial visualization app and we talk about how to market it. Chris has been doing C++ recently, and has just started GPU programming. 00:00 Intro 00:16 What to do with GPT-3? 05:08 C++ 07:41 Programming video games 09:38 CUDA GPU programming 13:23 AI loss functions 14:20 How Chris learns new things 15:34 Reading an ebook like a tree 24:43 Releasing an audiobook as a private podcast 25:43 Hot Take: visualizing finances with a treemap 30:11 Business accounting - do we have to itemize expenses? 35:17 Better understanding business expenses 37:37 Marketing a finance visualizer 41:52 Pricing a financial SaaS 42:35 Competition is good Timestamps created with https://clips.marketing by @cgenco

The important role of an in-house media creator (or content creator) to a brand, especially in the software space, has been a topic weighing on my mind for a while. In today’s episode, I break down a few clips from a recent episode of Bootstrapped Web, where hosts Brian & Joran discuss their challenge of filling this role. I refer to this as Founder Marketing. When a young company is hiring for this role, it’s a responsibility that can’t be left to the fundamental content creation tasks. A capable candidate must be able to channel their inner founder in order to create content that resonates across: sales, marketing, product, and support. Someone that not only knows how to create a piece of content, but that also is as passionate for the business as they are the audience. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or engage with the following Twitter thread. My friends @CasJam and @JordanGal are looking to hire for the "Media Creator" role. I do this for @CastosHQ and have lots of thoughts. Someone that can execute, what I call, "Founder Marketing." Let's start a — Matt Medeiros (@mattmedeiros) June 17, 2021 Transcription This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Well, let me read some of these features.[00:00:15] Deep malware scanning. They know about malware that other plugins don’t. Number two, that one click malware removal process makes it super easy to remove from your WordPress website and number three, a new feature called auto bot ultra defense system. Okay. I made that ultra defense system part up, but get this, it automatically blocks the bots hitting your website.[00:00:35]So, not only does that protect your website, but in the long run, it’ll improve speed of your site from not letting those bots through the doors. Check out mal care at care.com that’s mal care.com. I don’t want to be a malware specialist. You don’t either check out mal. care.com. thanks for supporting the show[00:00:56] Matt: This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by lockdown SEO, you can find it at lockdown. seo.com. That’s luck. With an E. LOC K E D O w N S E o.com. Lock down seo.com. His name’s John Locke. He helps industrial companies with search engine optimization so they can get more qualified leads. If you’re a WordPress developer.[00:01:18] Helping. This customer type. Industrial companies. Manufacturing companies. Reach out to lock down seo.com. See if John can help on the SEO side, if you just do design development. You don’t want to do the SEO part of it, nor should you. John Locke can help you@lockdownseo.com. He also does site audits. So if you want to partner up with John on your next WordPress venture with someone, he can do some SEO audits for you and your John’s a great guy and super helpful. He can help you with your SEO or web design needs. Again, if you don’t service customers in the industrial space manufacturing space, but you do get leads in that space. Send them over to John. At lock with an E lockdown seo.com.[00:02:02] Welcome back to another episode of the Maryport podcast. This is a topic that we’re going to talk about today. It’s called something. I call founder marketing. Uh, my friends, Brian castle and Jordan Goll recently talked about this on their podcasts. They’re both hiring. For this media creator role.[00:02:19] And I guess it’s going to come in many forms. Uh, and fashions. This is something that I do here at my day job at Casos where I create the podcast. I do the YouTube channel. I do some marketing stuff generally is about creating this content. To help. Not only promote, uh, the Castle’s product and the brand.[00:02:38] But to know where the synergies needed to create. You know, sales. Um, onboarding product enhancements, support enhancements, building out community. It’s not just do a podcast. Get listeners get downloads, that kind of thing. Or do a YouTube create a YouTube video. And try to get likes and views and subscribers, although.[00:03:03] It does contain the sum of those many pieces. This founder marketing thing or this creator It’s a bit of a unicorn. If, if I pat myself on the back just a little bit, it’s a bit of a unicorn. Because when you’re hiring for this role, As Brian and Jordan, uh, find themselves in. The challenge is to find somebody who can, can understand.[00:03:25] The business and the opportunity in the market and the customers. Just like the founder. So, this is where I get the founder marketing title from it. Maybe could be ironed out a little bit more, you know, into something else or a little bit something more direct that you could put into a job listing. But the way I see it is as you have to.[00:03:44] Feel like the founder and know the market and the product and the customer, like the founder in order to create the content that attracts. And the customers to it. Otherwise you’re just telling somebody to go create this piece of content and they can shoehorn it. Right. And they people do it all the time. People outsource this to agencies and there’s nothing wrong with it.[00:04:04] But it’s very much from a. A strategic standpoint. Uh, almost utilitarian, I guess, where you make a top 10 list or, you know, do a tutorial or a how to, or comparison piece of content, which can be researched. And understood at that capacity, but the emotional side of it is, is very hard to fine tune.[00:04:28] So on bootstrap web, where Jordan and Brian host their podcast, uh, I’ve had both of them on the show before countless times. They started talking about this journey of hiring this media creator person. So number one, if that’s you check out that episode, it’ll be in the show notes. And reach out to either Brian and Jordan for a potential role. It’s going to be kind of interesting to see them.[00:04:48] Going head to head. In this space and seeing who they hire and how they hire. Uh, I think it’s a great time. It’s a great opportunity for us creators that are out there. So if that’s you. Creating your own little, uh, YouTube channel or podcast. And by little, I mean, maybe you’re just starting out and you’re trying to gain traction, but this could be a great opportunity to say, you know what.[00:05:09] I have a small audience here it’s growing might not be growing as fast as I’d like, but this is an opportunity for us. It really puts the power in the hands of the creators. I think. When software businesses, or any businesses in general think like media companies. Because if you looked at. Traditional Hollywood, let’s say.[00:05:28] And how much of a closed ecosystem that. Well, probably still is, but was definitely 20 years ago. Four. You know anybody to produce a movie, any actors to show up comedians, et cetera, et cetera. And then you look at. Introduction of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. Everybody is now. Now has this secondary market of content.[00:05:53] Where it’s not just the big television channels and the big movies. So that’s the only distribution points anymore. There are far more distribution points, far more opportunities. For creators to create no, the traditional media that we, that we think about movies and television. Let’s break down a few clips. Uh, I also have a Twitter thread on this, which will be in the show notes. If you want to engage with the Twitter thread and see some of the activity happening over there. So we’re gonna play each clip from.[00:06:20]This episode, the most important clips I think from their conversation. And then i’m gonna break it down uh verbally here okay so let’s dive into the first clip[00:06:28]Brian Casel: The first and most important position I think is, is the media creator, uh, role. And so this is a person who I’m, I’ve been talking to a couple people, but it is a really difficult one to find potential candidates.[00:06:42] So I’m looking for somebody to essentially like co-host podcasts, be a show runner for, for new podcasts, video content produce videos. Um, so somebody who is like a great storyteller and has the technical chops, like the video production podcast, chops, you know, doing interviews with other people, uh, coming up with creative, uh, premises for a new show and just, you know, being like just driving the creative content that comes out of this.[00:07:10][00:07:10]Matt: So we go back to, this is the founder marketing role, right? This is why it’s so important to me. For somebody to have that founder, like experience. Which again, I know it was very difficult. It’s that unicorn position, but I think the best candidate for what Brian. Is looking for. Is going to be somebody who has, uh, that close relationship to the customer, to the product, into the market. Somebody who’s as excited.[00:07:37] For his product. Uh, as they would be, if it were their own product now, again, very difficult to find, but I think that’s where he’s going to find. Uh the best candidate for[00:07:47] Jordan Gal: it feels like what you’re really what you’re saying is that there needs to be a function. That creates an audience and does that by understanding what the audience wants and providing value to it.[00:08:00] And then the media that supports it and delivers that value,[00:08:04] Brian Casel: I would say yes. And coming up with creative, new ideas, like a new new premise, not just find a hundred founders to go interview every week. Like. New angles, new, new premise.[00:08:18]Jordan Gal: that you, you emphasize that in the job listing where it was like, we don’t want to do the same stuff.[00:08:24] We want to really think about why we would do something. And then, and then look at the format that way. Not just, well, let’s just do another podcast because that’s what everyone does.[00:08:34]And this is on the flip side. This is where a great creator is going to really enjoy a role like this because. Which, and I’ll preface this preface, this breath preface with saying that. This is also a challenge for, uh, Brian and Jordan. I feel. Because they have to be hands off. They have to let the creator create because that’s, what’s going to yield the best result.[00:09:01] And if you’re a creator out there, Doing your thing. You know this, you know, that. If there’s less restrictions. Uh, You know, unless sort of control and you have more autonomy to do. What you need to do to create a great piece of content. That doesn’t have to be just a podcast. It spans across podcasts, audio, video.[00:09:21] Written, uh, email newsletter, even if you were doing some kind of like social campaign. You understand where. Your strengths are and how you’re going to communicate this message. And if Brian and Jordan can, can let the creators create, I think that’s going to be the best outcome, but also the hardest for them.[00:09:42] To not manage, but I have expectations for, because I think so many founders might be. Uh, so goal oriented or developer oriented where there’s sprints and there’s sales goals. And there’s marketing goals where like visits and conversions that the creative side is very hard to measure, especially when you turn to them and you say, Hey, I need, I need time.[00:10:05] To do this. The more time you give me the better it’s going to get, but it’s not going to be like this constant production wheel happening. I mean, it eventually will write, like I found a pretty good stride at Casos. But in the beginning it’s like i just need time to absorb this I need the time to look at my creator canvas and i think that’ll be the biggest challenge for brian and jordan moving forward[00:10:27]Jordan Gal: So first step. Audience. And now this technical marketer role is really the transition between the audience and the product.[00:10:37] It’s like the bridge on identifying some people in the audience. Are are, are going to be interested in what we’re doing as a product, not everyone. And, and you’re not building the audience solely for the purpose, like, cause that people see through that you want the authentic version of media and an audience and value and then allowing for a bridge from there over to the[00:10:58] Brian Casel: product.[00:10:59][00:10:59]Matt: And just to wrap some context around this. This is Jordan, uh, explaining back the technical marketing role that Brian also wants to hire. So he wants to. Hire it in tandem. This content media creator, plus a technical marketer to sort of carry the ball. The other. Uh, half of the way down, down the field to use a sports analogy, terrible one at that. But.[00:11:23] Hiring the media creator go out and do the creative. Do the show running, create the actual content, hire a marketing technical marketing lead. To help distribute the content, help convert the content and, and measure the success. Of the content. So number one, very smart move for, uh, for Brian to be thinking that because it can’t, it can be two people.[00:11:47] In a very low pressured setting. Um, and by pressures, not even just the pressures of, uh, of the owners or the other teams, but just the market in general, like how much content do you need to create to compete with others? Uh, how much time do you need for each piece of content? Having somebody else carry the ball. The rest of the way on the marketing side is very smart.[00:12:09] Uh, you definitely gonna need a budget to do that. You need to be able to hire two people at once. Um, you can do it in the beginning. It really depends on what your capacity is as a creator, but also, uh, how you can streamline your processes and, and what the actual overall goals are. So very smart to have these two separate roles, because largely they are two separate. Parts of your brain thinking about how to approach this stuff[00:12:33]Brian Casel: it’s about thinking about that target audience and distribution before we even create. The content. So if the technical marker and myself are in the mix on coming up with ideas in collaboration with our, with our, uh, media creator, It’s about, we know that at the end of the day, we want to reach this segment of people.[00:12:57] So how can we start to come up with creative ideas for, for a show, with an awesome premise for, for that, that, that, that audience would just eat up every single day. And the technical marketer can think about as we’re ideating on this stuff. Okay. If we’re going after that audience, these are the types of channels that we can go to distribute that, that show and grow the audience for it.[00:13:19][00:13:19]Again, this is where I go back. Let the creators create. This will be the challenge. All right. How do we give somebody the freedom, but also at the same time, like push this marketing and promotional thing forward so that we know it’s working. I would say it’s going to take a solid six months in order to really hit a stride.[00:13:37] You know, working together. How content calendars are created, how content is created, how it’s shipped, how it’s promoted, how it’s repurposed. Which is very, very difficult. Two. Even like, think about and make time for it because you, you create so much content. That you just don’t want to let it.[00:13:57] Be done. Right. You spend all of this time, all this investment in it. How do you keep that? Content fresh. Newsletters communities, et cetera, et cetera. So things like that big challenge, but good that Brian’s thinking about it as two independent. Uh[00:14:12] responses.[00:14:13]Jordan Gal: I’m going to argue that there’s a third function, a third role that we we’re going to bump up against immediately.[00:14:23] And that is of community. Because it is a really tall task to ask someone to lead the media creation efforts and also focus on community. Some people are like magically talented and do that almost like inherently. They just can’t even help it. They just create media and form an audience around it and communicate with that community at the same time.[00:14:49] And it can be the same person for a certain amount of time, but they are like, Uh, there’s a third element there around community and fostering it and, and kind of[00:15:00] Brian Casel: communicating with, for that community piece[00:15:03][00:15:03]So my last comment, just foreshadowed this clip. Uh, in, it’s interesting to see Jordan already with the wheels turning you’re you’re already thinking about, okay, what’s that third pillar that comes next and he’s saying it’s it’s community. And it most certainly is maybe not for every product and brand that’s out there.[00:15:22] But the key thing here is that, that. That, even those two people, the creator and the technical marketer. Can not be responsible for. Building and cultivating and supporting a longterm community. Again, everything can be done temporarily. Just won’t be done. Great. And it. Won’t be done. Very organized.[00:15:44] And there’ll be a lot of pressure on one person to do everything. But hopefully what this does is bring it to light. Because a lot of people just say, oh, I’m going to hire somebody who does marketing, oh, by the way, do a podcast, do a YouTube channel, do this marketing thing, report on the metrics. Tell me what the conversions are, do the email newsletter. And can we do it a community with that? I mean, sure. Anyone can tackle all three of those at once, but it’s just going to be done poorly to the point where the person who’s responsible for it is ultimately just going to burn out because.[00:16:16] Uh, approaching a community, which is something that I even struggle with at Casto. So it’s something that I want to do, but I’m quickly realizing I can’t do all the content creation. And do the community well. What I can do is I can see the foundation of the, of the community. I hope. And then that can be carried through.[00:16:34] By somebody else in the future. Uh, or I take it at a really. Minimal viable product approach, where it’s just very, very. Small chunks of what a community aspect might be. And that could just be conversations that are happening. Uh, in a circle app. Right. But a true community is going to be just constant engagement.[00:16:53] Constant engagement, constant, you know, pruning and supporting and making sure people are engaged and that there’s. Value being taken away from it, because if there’s not somebody doing that, it’s very, very hard to get the momentum for our community to take off where it just supports itself. I think a lot of people think community cause they’re like, oh great.[00:17:12] This will be interaction that’s just on autopilot. Yeah, everybody gets into a room and of course they want to talk about. The product, the brand and you know, what their experiences are. But you need somebody. Constantly engaging in that. Again, whole new responsibility, smart to think about it. Smart to think about it as an independent responsibility[00:17:32]Brian Casel: My thinking on that is now if you want like a, like a, an engaged community who, who is interacting with each other. The audience has to come first,[00:17:42] Jordan Gal: the audiences, the is the raw material in some ways that, yeah.[00:17:46] Brian Casel: And, and like for a brand new community, like if you want to start slack group or a circle or whatever you’re going to use for your community, it’s just such an insanely difficult Boulder to push up a hill.[00:17:59] If you don’t have an audience to begin with, or if your audience is very small, because truth of the matter is for every hundred people who follow you. Only five of them or less are the type of people who will actually leave a comment in the community. The other 95 might lurk. They might watch, but they’re just not commenters.[00:18:18] That’s just the nature. So you need thousands and thousands of followers to just spark a community[00:18:25]I think that too early on trying to create a community out of a very small audience, you’re going to waste resources.[00:18:32] You’re going to waste like people or waste hours waste money on a extremely difficult uphill battle.[00:18:40]And that’s Brian, just proving my point. He’s been doing it now for a while. He understands. Um, The challenge of community so i have nothing much more to say on that other than what i just said previous to brian what brian just said in that statement[00:18:56]Brian Casel: especially for that media creator role, it’s a really difficult, I am talking to a couple people, but I think what I’m also starting to look at, I don’t even know how viable this is, is to sort of be like a scout and try to find.[00:19:10] People who have like a small, like a young podcast or YouTube channel or both sort of in the space. And maybe look to acquire them and that show and, and enroll with that, you know, but like how do you find someone who hasn’t blown up yet? You know, um, this is what we talk. You can see, you can see the talent, like on the page and it’s.[00:19:36] So, yeah, so about that[00:19:38] Jordan Gal: too, and this is kind of an opportunity for someone listening or someone that they’re familiar with to just raise your hand and basically say, well, I’m talented. I just need a chance. I just need some budget. I need, I need a bigger stage to perform on[00:19:53][00:19:53]Again, finding this person is. We’ve been talking about all these challenges, but it’s going to be finding this person who, who meets this criteria. Who’s able to produce this kind of content. Uh, it’s just a super challenge. So I’ll speak towards just who the creators are. If you’re a creator out there listening to this, and I can tell you from my firsthand experiences,[00:20:13] You start running with a project. You love the project. You never want to see that project go away. Uh, or yet you could never consider yourself part of another brand. You just let it go. Right. Like at some point you realize like, okay, In order to get better as a creator in order to challenge myself and then move on to something else.[00:20:33] Then, if this is something that’s interesting to you, what Brian and Jordan are talking about. Look. Being able to, Hey, I got my, my YouTube channel up to whatever, whatever your number is, a thousand subscribers, 5,000 subscribers or whatever it is. And you’re, and you’re feeling like you’re hitting a plateau, both from the growth side and from the creative side.[00:20:54] Then you have leveraged there. So I guess what I’m getting at is if you’re building something and you’re not super happy with it, It’s valuable to somebody else valuable to somebody in this position and Brian and Jordan, aren’t going to be the last brands, hiring somebody to create content for them and create to create content well.[00:21:11] That you can leverage that. And I’m not even saying you necessarily get rid of it. Uh, or give up on it or, or, or sell it so where maybe you do sell it. Right. So if you are in the technical space, cause there’s lots of us. That do the technical review, the software. The plugins, the tutorials, that kind of thing.[00:21:29] This would be a great. In road to say, well, look, I’ve, I’ve built up this. Audience. This brand, I have this many subscribers. I’ve had this many videos or this many listeners. Let me sell this value to you and, um, I think that’s perfectly fine. And one that you know is only up to you as a creator, whether or not you want to do it.[00:21:49] But the options are there and the options are, are going to keep coming. I think. Um as more people invest in this space[00:21:56]Jordan Gal: I can’t help, but I keep going back to news, like what’s happening here, industry. Who’s doing what who’s collaborating with, who, who raised money, who hired, who, who left this, who starting something new? Like that’s the stuff you talk about on a day-to-day basis. And I think there’s an opportunity.[00:22:11] To create media around that, that turns that media brand into a destination and somewhere that people look to regularly, and that would be, that would be power.[00:22:24][00:22:24]Uh, the context around this clip. From Jordan was he’s looking for something that’s that’s unique. Like what could he produce? At his new company rally, that would be a unique twist on content creation that isn’t just the interview trans. Uh, the interview podcast or even well, a high produced podcast where it’s more storytelling and engaging.[00:22:46] Um, you know, in much, in much higher production. Is thinking about news and sort of just staking a claim in whatever market you’re in, you can’t report the news and have your unique angle on it. And I totally agree. This is a huge opportunity in this space. For many reasons. One it’s more topical and.[00:23:05] When you’re creating content like this, like I do with the WP minute.com podcast. It’s very specific. It’s very specific to WordPress news. It’s very specific to only five minutes. And that is. The premise there because. I’m serving. I have clear definition of the audience that I’m serving no more, no less.[00:23:26] It’s it’s targeted. So. I know who I’m serving. I know why they listen. And I know how to produce it on repeat. Whereas even a show like this, which is much more long form. Sometimes it’s solo shows sometimes. We’re talking to somebody and doing an interview. You know, it’s 30, 40, 30 to 45 minutes, maybe sometimes an hour. There’s a lot of stuff that can happen. It’s it attracts different types.[00:23:52] Uh, of listeners production is always different. Uh, shownotes are always different. Value is always different. And while it’s it’s great. And it’s, it’s a brand building experience and it’s engaging for a lot of people. Uh, the audience that tunes in and the brand awareness that it raises can kind of be all over the board, which is.[00:24:14] It’s good. It’s still good. Um, but when you do something hyper-focused as a news, Or a super, super hyper-focused, um, maybe educational podcast. Then you just have clear definitions and things or. Are much easier that way. Um, From, uh, from an audience perspective, maybe from the creator’s perspective.[00:24:36] A little bit harder to just stay within those lines all the time. Depending on what it is that you’re, that you’re doing and covering. Uh but definitely easier to create a process for and ultimately uh raise awareness[00:24:49]Jordan Gal: This is the same thing that we talked about with Barstool. Sports wear is a draft Kings, right? The gambling site, they just bought the exact audience that gambles. So it’s very natural alignment. Yep. Yep. Cool man. Well, I have a feeling we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk a lot more about this and we’re going to pretend not to be fighting over people for the same world.[00:25:13] Right. But we,[00:25:17] Brian Casel: so, uh, yeah. What, what else you got going on?[00:25:19][00:25:19]So I’m really interested to see how Brian and Jordan end up, uh, sort of tongue in cheek here, like feuding with one another. Right? Sort of you think about like big Hollywood executives sort of sparring over the, the, the, the best actors and actresses and best, uh, directors and, and scripts to buy. And, and, and it’s almost like that huge.[00:25:40] You know, world of Hollywood that’s feels so water out of touch being really shrunk down to this, you know, finite thing that could be. Uh, happening across many brands trying to hire talent. Um, trying to find the talent is a challenge at a higher them trying to acquire them. Put a number on it. It’s very difficult.[00:26:01] Uh, and to find the right person to do it all. So it’s, uh, I I’m sitting here smiling ear to ear because I’m really interested to see this challenge unfold for both of them and how they both go about it. And interested to see if they do cross paths and find somebody who has applied to both because they have a strong listenership. And if you are listening to this, you could be applying to, to their job openings as well.[00:26:23] Um, But at the same time, lots of opportunity in this space now. And I think this is sort of validating it. This founder marketing role. Um, And I think that there’s going to be a lot more of this happening. Because there’s a lot of, at least in the WordPress space. And even the people that I talk to now and know code and software as a service.[00:26:44] Founders are either. Hyper-focused on sales. And growth. So that’s the other angle of it. This is stuff that you need sort of after, I’ll say with air quotes, after the content creation. Um, or they’re they’re founders and they’re the founder developer, right? So they’re actually building the product. There’s no time.[00:27:00] Uh, there’s no creative aspect. There’s no social aspect for some to just get out there and create that content. So. Big big opportunities ahead. I don’t know. Let me know what you think if you, uh, are interested in, uh, number one, applying for that role, check out the bootstrap web podcast. What Brian and Jordan are doing. Jump on that Twitter thread, click on that in the show notes. And you can just engage with them right there. If that’s the quickest route to it. I have a let me know what you think about founder marketing right on twitter okay that’s it that’s the Matt report. we’ll see you in the next episode[00:27:30]

In Episode 439, Rob Walling is joined by Jordan Gal to answer listener questions about starting an e-commerce SaaS and the laws and regulations, and compliance requirements required. They talk about managing enterprise perceptions of risk towards bootstrap startups. They also answer questions about bootstrapping and enterprise SaaS as well as hiring a growth role […]       

Can a SaaS company restrict signups without putting their revenue at risk? Our guest today is Jordan Gal, co-founder of CartHook. You'll learn all about the company's famous onboarding breakthrough, Jordan's take on product-user fit, as well as his advice for SaaS founders looking to make a real change.Visit our website for the detailed episode recap with key learnings.Show notesCartHook — Jordan's SaaS productClickFunnels — a digital marketing product that inspired CartHookHubspot — a popular marketing tool they use for analyticsSuccess Potential: The Foundation of Customer Success — the Lincoln Murphy article that inspired JordanConvertKit — the popular email automation tool by Nathan BarryUI Breakfast Podcast. Episode 183: Customer Success with Anna JacobsenCartHook Post Purchase Offers — CartHook's new Shopify appFollow Jordan on TwitterThanks for listening! If you found the episode useful, please spread the word about this new show on Twitter mentioning @userlist, or leave us a review on iTunes.SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — the best tool for sending onboarding emails and segmenting your SaaS users. To follow the best practices, download our free printable email planning worksheets at userlist.com/worksheets.

While third-party apps like Shopify have made it possible for a company to get a virtual store up and running quickly, scaling that company requires higher levels of flexibility and control. Enter headless architecture, which allows companies to decouple the front end of the commerce platform (where the virtual storefront and content lives) from the back end, where all the data resides. Greylock general partner Mike Duboe sat down with Builder.io CEO and founder Steve Sewell, whose company provides a headless CMS with full drag and drop editing, and Carthook founder Jordan Gal, whose company offers a checkout optimization tool for stores in the Shopify ecosystem. This episode is the first in a series of Greymatter conversations focused on the evolving ecommerce ecosystem.

For many Ecommerce brands, converting a prospect into a customer is the holy grail. But too many merchants consider their job done once that first order is placed, which results in them leaving millions (literally) of dollars on the table.In this episode, we talk to Jordan Gal, the founder of a Shopify app called Carthook, about the million dollar potential in post-purchase offers, and how merchants can capitalize on that opportunity quickly and easily. We cover everything from how to structure your offer, the best time to present it to your customers, and the results that real brands are seeing by adding this to their marketing stack.Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We'll be keeping an eye on that inbox. :)The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Meeting your customers where they are and building deeper relationships with them is coming to the forefront of DTC in 2020 and today I’m joined by founder and CEO of Carthook Jordan Gal to chat about how brands can start building longer-term relationships with customers from their very first checkout experience.

We've been devoting a lot of time to talking about software businesses in recent weeks. One of the reasons we are so fascinated by them is that despite how difficult it can be to start one, these types of businesses can have tremendous upside. Jordan Gal is the founder of CartHook, a software company that helps Shopify merchants present offers to shoppers at checkout. Jordan first reached out to us back in 2015 with an investment opportunity (and we turned him down!). It really shouldn't come as a surprise then that Carthook has grown exponentially in the years since, with its user base having made more than a billion dollars worth of sales. Jordan joins us on today's podcast to share the story of CartHook.

Think you can't aggressively acquire customers using outbound sales for SaaS? Think it's too expensive, too inefficient, too distracting? Think again. You can do it. Jordan Gal show you how he and his team does it for CartHook. From list building, to qualification research, to cold email automation, to scheduling demos. Everything from faceless prospect to free trial to paying customer. It's all outsourced, affordable, and scalable. And Jordan will show you how to put the whole thing together. https://microconf.com #microconf #microconf2015 MicroConf 2015 Check out Jordan’s MicroConf speakers page for more talks → https://microconf.com/speakers/jordan... MicroConf Connect → http://microconfconnect.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail → support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners ► Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Stripe ► Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Basecamp

Think you can't aggressively acquire customers using outbound sales for SaaS? Think it's too expensive, too inefficient, too distracting? Think again. You can do it. Jordan Gal show you how he and his team does it for CartHook. From list building, to qualification research, to cold email automation, to scheduling demos. Everything from faceless prospect to free trial to paying customer. It's all outsourced, affordable, and scalable. And Jordan will show you how to put the whole thing together. https://microconf.com #microconf #microconf2015 MicroConf 2015 Check out Jordan’s MicroConf speakers page for more talks → https://microconf.com/speakers/jordan... MicroConf Connect → http://microconfconnect.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail → support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners ► Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Stripe ► Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter → https://twitter.com/Basecamp

Former ecommerce merchant turned SaaS founder Jordan Gal walks through the history of post-purchase selling to build loyalty, increase ARPU, and expand Lifetime value in a super interesting conversation.

In the words of founder and CEO Jordan Gal, CartHook is “expanding the canvas on which a brand can operate.” That means a customizable checkout for better customer experiences all the way through the journey. CartHook has evolved alongside the DTC market, and this conversation is loaded with tips for community-building, upselling, creating great landing pages, and more.

This episode is part two in a two-part conversation. If you haven’t already, listen to Part 1 first. This week is the second part of a conversation between Rob and Jordan Gal, the founder of CartHook. In the episode, Rob and Jordan dig into the 4th, 5th and 6th stages of SaaS growth and compare […]       Related StoriesEpisode 499 | The (First) Six Stages of SaaS Growth – Part 1Episode 477 | Assessing Product-Market Fit, How to Find a Mastermind, and More Listener Questions with Brian CaselEpisode 472 | From Amazing Launch to Near Bankruptcy to Profitability with Shai Shechter 

This week is a conversation between Rob and Jordan Gal, the founder of Cart Hook. We dig into the six stages of SaaS growth. We compare our journeys 1:1 between growing Drip and growing CartHook. It’s shocking how well the journeys line up with each other. Some of the differences in the journey are also […]       Related StoriesEpisode 499.5 | The (First) Six Stages of SaaS Growth – Part 2Episode 477 | Assessing Product-Market Fit, How to Find a Mastermind, and More Listener Questions with Brian CaselEpisode 472 | From Amazing Launch to Near Bankruptcy to Profitability with Shai Shechter 

Jordan Gal is the Founder of Carthook, a checkout optimization platform for DTC brands that has processed over $1 billion on behalf of merchants. The SaaS allows eCommerce brands to open up a new revenue channel in their checkout through post-purchase upsells. Jordan is a Co-Host on the Bootstrapped Web Podcast, a podcast about bootstrapping an online business In this episode… When building a SaaS product there are a lot of things to consider and polish out, even for software developers and engineers. But Jordan Gal defied the odds and built a SaaS product doing upwards of 80,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) without having written a single line of code in his life.  Jordan is the founder of CartHook which helps online stores take control of their checkout process and enable post-purchase upsells. He says that while the start was a tedious process of finding the right things to make your software work and finding the right people to work with was a challenge, all the risks were worth it when their big break came. Join Geordie Wardman in this episode of the Big Break Software as he interviews Jordan Gal of Carthook about how he created, launched, and marketed his SaaS product with virtually zero technical know-how. Find out how he grew his business to $80,000 MRR, how he found the right partners to work with and how he addressed the integration of their software to different platforms. Stay tuned.

From a job in finance to $600 Million dollars in processing orders through CartHook, Jordan Gal is bringing us in his entrepreneur journey while constantly reinventing himself.

Show Notes In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob is joined by Jordan Gal and Tracy Osborn for a roundtable discussion. Some of the topics in this episode including Basecamp reinventing email with Hey.com, Leadpages being acquired by Redbrick, the growing popularity of subscription based pricing and how many active subscriptions […]       

Jordan Gal is the Co-founder and CEO of Carthook, a company offering customizable checkout processes for some of the most groundbreaking eCommerce brands. He and his team are partnering with clients to implement one of the most overlooked strategies in eCom, the post purchase upsell. Carthook clients have seen as much as 42% of past 30 day total revenue be driven by post purchase upsells.   In this episode, you'll learn how to implement product upsells to increase revenue and how you can use product funnels to customize the buying experience for your customers to increase conversion rate.    “This allows you to make an upsell without adding any friction to the buying process that can drive up your average order value.” - Jordan Gal   Some topics that were discussed include:   How to use a "one click upsell" after the checkout to upsell your customer without adding friction to the buying process Leveraging consumer psychology to increase hit rate of an upsell Using "product funnels" to sell more with a better customer journey   Contact Jordan Gal:   Connect with Jordan on Twitter Learn more about CartHook  Carthook on Facebook    References & links mentioned:   Jordan Co-hosts The Bootstrapped Web, a podcast centered on the highs and lows encountered while bootstrapping an online business.    Subscribe & Review The Commerce Lab Podcast:   Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of The Commerce Lab Podcast! If the information shared in these weekly conversations and interviews have helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you!  

Show Notes In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob talks with Jordan Gal of CartHook about his big move to stop his free trials, move to demos, and increase his prices. Items mentioned in this episode: CartHook Bootstrapped Web Podcast CartHook Pricing Change Blog Post Lincoln Murphy blog post about Qualification […]       

Jordan Gal joins the podcast today to review the 5-year journey he's been on with CartHook. I know many of you might know him from co-hosting the Bootstrapped Web podcast with friend-of-the-show, Brian Casel. But if you're like me, the half-decade old story of CartHook starting out as cart abandonment tool, to now a full-on checkout replacement for Shopify, has become a little blurry. Keeping up with Jordan's roller-coaster ride has been exciting and today's interview sticks the bookmarks at all the right places. When & why did Jordan decide to build a new product? When did they decide to pair down two products into one? How did they move upmarket with pricing and customer applications? All of these pivots, while not easy, has made the company stronger across culture and lowering churn. It has been an amazing ride, and I hope you find some lessons you can learn from in today's episode -- I know I have. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook! ★ Support this podcast ★

Jordan Gal joins the podcast today to review the 5-year journey he's been on with CartHook. I know many of you might know him from co-hosting the Bootstrapped Web podcast with friend-of-the-show, Brian Casel. But if you're like me, the half-decade old story of CartHook starting out as cart abandonment tool, to now a full-on checkout replacement for Shopify, has become a little blurry. Keeping up with Jordan's roller-coaster ride has been exciting and today's interview sticks the bookmarks at all the right places. When & why did Jordan decide to build a new product? When did they decide to pair down two products into one? How did they move upmarket with pricing and customer applications? All of these pivots, while not easy, has made the company stronger across culture and lowering churn. It has been an amazing ride, and I hope you find some lessons you can learn from in today's episode — I know I have. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook! ★ Support this podcast ★

Jordan Gal joins the podcast today to review the 5-year journey he’s been on with CartHook. I know many of you might know him from co-hosting the Bootstrapped Web podcast with friend-of-the-show, Brian Casel. But if you’re like me, the half-decade old story of CartHook starting out as cart abandonment tool, to now a full-on…

Jordan Gal joins the podcast today to review the 5-year journey he’s been on with CartHook. I know many of you might know him from co-hosting the Bootstrapped Web podcast with friend-of-the-show, Brian Casel. But if you’re like me, the half-decade old story of CartHook starting out as cart abandonment tool, to now a full-on…

Why is retention so hard for DTC brands to focus on, despite knowing how powerful it is? I've been pounding my head against the desk asking this question again and again. Data proves it's one of the biggest growth levers, CAC is too high to keep chasing, and yet, ecommerce brands still aren't shifting enough focus and effort to this side of the equation. I couldn't figure it out, so I tapped the experts for this one. Hear from Web Smith, Reza Khadjavi, Jarid Lukin (KIND Snacks), Kaitlin Holliday (Four Sigmatic), Val Geisler, Jordan Gal, Aaron Orendorff, Taylor Holiday, Brandon Doyle, Matt Goldman, Ken Johnson (previously Manpacks) and more. Learn what's holding YOU back, and what you can do about it, b/c the brands brave enough to shift perspective will be the ones thriving in 3-5 years.

This episode of Rogue Startups, Craig chats with fellow entrepreneur Jordan Gal.  Jordan is the founder and CEO of CartHook, which is a software company that provides an e-commerce platform for online businesses and the Bootstrapped Web podcast. Craig and Jordan talk about product development and process; the difference between “hovering” and managing; the role […]

In this episode, we discuss how Jordan had an eCommerce store making $75k/mo, which gave him a lot of insight into making eCommerce products. He started out with a cart abandonment solution for multiple platforms (I even tried this out for Easy Digital Downloads). He actually avoided integrating with Shopify, but he had an idea to make a checkout that was customizable. He released an MVP and he was overwhelmed with the response. Jordan talks about how they may have released too early, which reminds me of this post by Jason Cohen about why they don't build MVPs. They are now sunsetting the cart abandonment product because the checkout solution is going so well. Jordan says Carthook's checkout solution is popular because it brings the customization of ClickFunnels to Shopify. We also discussed how his product is risky, because it's not officially working on Shopify APIs. They are not in the Shopify app store, and technically Shopify could kill their business if they wanted to.

On today’s episode, we meet Jordan Gal, CEO of CartHook. Up until CartHook, Jordan came from an immigrant entrepreneur household, and when you grow up around that it’s hard to get away from it. He’s started several different businesses, and eventually landed on his own ecommerce site. He sold the business off, and then got into the software game, but he wanted to stay in the ecommerce world. He looked at the apps they were using and took one, a cart abandon apps, and realized this app was awful but still made him thousands of dollars a month, maybe there would be a business in making a better version of that app?   Two years into marketing this cart abandon project, he realized he’s just been staring at different checkout pages all day. Eventually it dawns on him, wouldn’t it be more valuable if instead of capturing lost sales, they just developed a better checkout page that had fewer abandoned carts to begin with? That was the genesis of his product, a better converting checkout page.   Today, you’ll learn about what CartHook can do for your ecommerce site, as well as where Jordan thinks the future of ecommerce is headed.   To learn more, visit: https://electriceye.io/podcast   Resources: Learn more at https://carthook.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carthook Twitter: https://twitter.com/carthook Start a Simplr free trial: simplr.ai/honest Honest eCommerce is produced by Crate Media

My guest on today's episode is Jordan Gal, the Founder & CEO of CartHook. We chat about how they help Shopify merchants to improve conversion rate and grow average order value through their checkout and funnel solution. What You Will Learn Today…Learn how CartHook allows for complete control over the entire checkout process with your Shopify store, including a customizable one-page checkout to increase your store’s conversion rate and a one-click, post-purchase upsells to increase your average order value. It’s a compelling solution used by Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants.Links And Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeCartHookNatural StacksOrganifyBombtech GolfKettle & FireKinobodyThank You For ListeningI really appreciate you choosing to listen to the show and for supporting the podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it using the social media buttons on this page.I would also be so grateful if you would consider taking a minute or two to leave an honest review and rating for the show in iTunes. They’re extremely helpful when it comes to reaching our audience and I read each and everyone personally!New Strategies Each Week To Help You Build And Scale Lifetime Customer Loyalty. SUBSCRIBE HERE!Being an entrepreneur is a life of learning. All it would take is a new idea, strategy, Shopify app, or marketing platform to be the next thing you need to drive more revenue and lifetime loyalty for your Shopify store. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or Spotify. Don’t miss a single episode!Episode SponsorThis episode was brought to you by Omnisend, makers of sophisticated omnichannel marketing automation tools for sales-driven Shopify brands that have outgrown generic email marketing platforms. Engage your customers and boost your sales with dynamic emails, text messages, web push notifications, Facebook Messenger, and retargeting ads on Facebook and Google – all from one platform.Try Omnisend for free for 14 days. Check them out at Omnisend.com and use the code “fastlane” when you signup to get an extra 50% off for the first 3 months. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Jordan Gal answer a number of listener questions on topics including LinkIn outreach, building features versus fixing bugs and more.       

Today, I'm talking with , the Founder and CEO at , a SaaS startup that helps ecommerce businesses maximize conversion rate and grow average order value. I've been following Jordan's story for years through , the podcast he co-hosts with Brian Casel. It's been amazing watching him build CartHook from the sidelines and today I'm excited to have a more active role in things. In our chat, we learn what it's been like building his business to a team of 24 (and counting), everything from his successes to his failures and how these lessons can help make you a better founder. Jordan is trying to build something big with CartHook and has approached it all very deliberately, so it was super interesting hearing how he approaches that, like how he balances growth and profitability and how he keeps leveling up the skills of his team and of himself. There were a lot of lessons from this chat that I've immediately applied to my own business, so I'm sure you'll get a lot out of it as well.

Rob talks to Jordan Gal about a pivotal moment in his business where he made the decision to protect something fragile; his confidence, and why it's been key to his success at CartHook ever since.

Ben Orenstein, Jordan Gal, Patrick Campbell, and I discuss SaaS pricing

GUEST BIO: Jordan Gal is the founder and CEO of CartHook. CartHook serves eCommerce business owners to maximize average order value and give back control to merchants on Shopify by directing customers to high-converting checkout pages. Jordan's career started on Wall Street, where he discovered that he wasn't happy and decided to pursue a new career. He joined his family's eCommerce business and was able to scale to $70,000 in revenue per month. Shortly after, he sold the company and created CartHook to solve the pain points of eCommerce that he had experienced as an eCommerce business owner. Jordan is also the host of The Bootstrap Podcast. SHOW SUMMARY: Jordan Gal is the founder and CEO of CartHook, helping eCommerce business owners increase their order values with high-converting checkout pages. His eCommerce expertise is increasing sales by over 30% for eCommerce businesses around the world. In this episode, we talk about Jordan's initial leap into entrepreneurship and how he was able to identify a pain point in the eCommerce industry. Jordan explains checkout upselling strategies, how to capitalize your most popular product, and the future of eCommerce marketing. This is The Lean Commerce Podcast. TOPICS: What does CartHook provide customers? 0:55 Our mission is to help eCommerce merchants thrive by providing them with control over the most important pages of their website, aka where the payment happens. Our app gives merchants complete control over their checkout process. How did you figure out this was a pain point in eCommerce? 3:14 It has been an eight year process. I started off on Wall Street, hated it and left. Then, I joined my family's business and brought it online. Within a span of six months, we were making $70,000 a month and we sold the company a year later. 5:16 Customers are more likely to convert when an entire store is dedicated to the product they are interested in purchasing. For example, instead of being an entire sports store, we were just a fishing rod store. We remained extremely niched. 6:25 After selling that business, I started CartHook as a cart abandonment app that triggered an ad campaign if a user didn't purchase the items in their cart. After two years, I realized this wasn't the only problem on the check out page and I asked myself, “How do we reduce the amount of people abandoning their cart in checkout?” How do customers experience post purchase upsells? 11:28 The eCommerce businesses that create relationships with their customers are the ones that last the longest. When approaching post purchase upsells, ask, “How do we respect the relationship with the customer?”. Offer products that are genuinely useful to the customer, for example, a second unit of the same product at a discounted price. 14:38 Upselling into subscription is another popular upsell. For example, ordering a product weekly, monthly, quarterly etc. 15;13 Our software lets you identify which upsell funnel should be seen by the shopper based on what product they are buying. 16:35 The only thing that individual merchants can do that Amazon can't, is build up a relationship with them. What are the best current practices for post purchase upsells? 17:17 Start off on the checkout page, ad trust symbols, a testimonial, identify the design that is congruent with your website and fan base. Then, create a simple upsell funnel of more of the same product and then an adjacent product. Generally speaking, upsells do better when they are lower priced than the original purchase. 21:14 Set up a stand alone landing page for your winning products and load it up with copy, video, testimonials, images, etc. We have a big feature launching in a few months that is a template for these dedicated landing pages. How do you approach post purchase upsells? 24:03 We see three main strategies: Video with a buy button, Short-form, above-the-fold Offer, Long-Form (correlating to a higher priced product).

GUEST BIO: Jordan Gal is the founder and CEO of CartHook. CartHook serves eCommerce business owners to maximize average order value and give back control to merchants on Shopify by directing customers to high-converting checkout pages. Jordan’s career started on Wall Street, where he discovered that he wasn’t happy and decided to pursue a new career. He joined his family’s eCommerce business and was able to scale to $70,000 in revenue per month. Shortly after, he sold the company and created CartHook to solve the pain points of eCommerce that he had experienced as an eCommerce business owner. Jordan is also the host of The Bootstrap Podcast. SHOW SUMMARY: Jordan Gal is the founder and CEO of CartHook, helping eCommerce business owners increase their order values with high-converting checkout pages. His eCommerce expertise is increasing sales by over 30% for eCommerce businesses around the world. In this episode, we talk about Jordan’s initial leap into entrepreneurship and how he was able to identify a pain point in the eCommerce industry. Jordan explains checkout upselling strategies, how to capitalize your most popular product, and the future of eCommerce marketing. This is The Lean Commerce Podcast. TOPICS: What does CartHook provide customers? 0:55 Our mission is to help eCommerce merchants thrive by providing them with control over the most important pages of their website, aka where the payment happens. Our app gives merchants complete control over their checkout process. How did you figure out this was a pain point in eCommerce? 3:14 It has been an eight year process. I started off on Wall Street, hated it and left. Then, I joined my family’s business and brought it online. Within a span of six months, we were making $70,000 a month and we sold the company a year later. 5:16 Customers are more likely to convert when an entire store is dedicated to the product they are interested in purchasing. For example, instead of being an entire sports store, we were just a fishing rod store. We remained extremely niched. 6:25 After selling that business, I started CartHook as a cart abandonment app that triggered an ad campaign if a user didn’t purchase the items in their cart. After two years, I realized this wasn’t the only problem on the check out page and I asked myself, “How do we reduce the amount of people abandoning their cart in checkout?” How do customers experience post purchase upsells? 11:28 The eCommerce businesses that create relationships with their customers are the ones that last the longest. When approaching post purchase upsells, ask, “How do we respect the relationship with the customer?”. Offer products that are genuinely useful to the customer, for example, a second unit of the same product at a discounted price. 14:38 Upselling into subscription is another popular upsell. For example, ordering a product weekly, monthly, quarterly etc. 15;13 Our software lets you identify which upsell funnel should be seen by the shopper based on what product they are buying. 16:35 The only thing that individual merchants can do that Amazon can’t, is build up a relationship with them. What are the best current practices for post purchase upsells? 17:17 Start off on the checkout page, ad trust symbols, a testimonial, identify the design that is congruent with your website and fan base. Then, create a simple upsell funnel of more of the same product and then an adjacent product. Generally speaking, upsells do better when they are lower priced than the original purchase. 21:14 Set up a stand alone landing page for your winning products and load it up with copy, video, testimonials, images, etc. We have a big feature launching in a few months that is a template for these dedicated landing pages. How do you approach post purchase upsells? 24:03 We see three main strategies: Video with a buy button, Short-form, above-the-fold Offer, Long-Form (correlating to a higher priced product). What does the check out process look like for an upsell over a product landing page? 28:42 There is a Tag Funnel that let’s the software know what product to show to upsell and there is a Product Funnel where people go from product page to checkout page (there is no checkout summary page). What failures have you faced in your business? 34:14 We are consistently facing failure. The highlights are boring, the best moments are in your failures. I have a podcast, The Bootstrapped Web Podcast, where I pretty much only talk about my failures. What are you looking forward to for the future of eCommerce in 2019? 42:30 We’ve hit, what feels like, a peak in direct to consumer advertising. The ads for B2C are becoming really expensive. We’re starting to see the war for ad dollars and customer acquisition. That’s what’s going to happen in 2019. Resources Mentioned in the Podcast: CartHook The Bootstrapped Web Podcast Ryan Caldbeck on Twitter Wilson Hung on Twitter Contact Julie: Jordan on LinkedIn

Today Dave and Craig talk about the difficulties of finding product/market fit in a business. The ‘desert’ in business is that time where you’ve ventured out to try something new, have an inkling of where it might lead, but still have a long way to go before you realize that vision. Thanks to Jordan Gal […]

Interview with: Jordan Gal Founder and CEO of CartHook Bio: Jordan is the Founder and CEO of CartHook, a solution that provides a customizable one-page checkout with post-purchase upsells. Links: CartHook Jordan Gal [Twitter] The Bootstrapped Web [Podcast] Sponsored by: Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation 

Jordan Gal is the Founder of Carthook, which is a cart abandonment software solution that recovers lost revenue by following up with potential customers who don’t complete the checkout process. Their flagship product is a customizable checkout with post-purchase upsells for Shopify stores. Jordan currently lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and three daughters. He is also currently co-hosting the Bootstrapped Web Podcast, which is a podcast about bootstrapping an online business. *** For Show Notes, Key Points, Contact Info, & Resources Mentioned on this episode visit here: Jordan Gal Interview. ***  

Funnels... you've probably heard of them. More and more Shopify stores are taking advantage of funnels and selling millions of dollars of products with them. Today on the show is Jordan Gal, the cofounder and CEO of CartHook. He explains exactly how people are selling crazy amounts of products with funnels and how you can do the same. Links: CartHook Jordan's Twitter Shogun Recharge Listen on iTunes Get new episodes via email Learn more about Wavebreak "I know I could do better with my email marketing" Does that sound familiar? Do you feel like you're leaving money on the table with your current email marketing situation? Download my free 31-point Email Revenue Checklist to find out how to take your email marketing to the next level. Get it at EmailRevenueChecklist.com

On this episode I talk with my buddy Jordan Gal from carthook.com who is building a SaaS. We talk about what we are trying to achieve financially through online business and what life looks like at different levels of success. We discuss what was Jordan's motivation for moving into SaaS after building and selling a profitable ecommerce store. Hint: Monthly Recurring Revenue! Show notes at >> https://richardpatey.com/carthook

Brian Casel is an entrepreneur focused on bootstrapping online businesses that combine software with productized services. Since starting his self-employed career as a professional freelance web designer back in 2008, he has built and later sold web design/SaaS business in 2015. He now runs Audience Ops, a content marketing service focused on helping B2B software companies grow their audience and customer-base.  He writes and teaches about entrepreneurship and freelancing through his blog and newsletter at casjam.com. He also creates and sells courses and ebooks there, most notably his course, Productize, which teaches consultants how to build, launch, and grow a productized service business.   His work and articles have been featured or published in Mashable, Smashing Magazine, Mixergy, Entrepreneur Magazine, and others. He has spoken at industry conferences such as MicroConf and Double Your Freelancing Conf. He also co-hosts the Bootstrapped Web podcast with Jordan Gal, where they talk behind-the-scenes of bootstrapping their online businesses.  Being in full-time business  Brian left his last full-time job at a wed design agency in January 2008 which translates to about 9 years in business. He started doing freelance web design while also working on different product ideas that didn't take off. Started RestaurantEngine in 2011 while still doing other freelance work. Launched RestaurantEngine in 2012 and in 2013 starting working on it full-time till 2015 when he sold it.     First product  The first product business that Brian worked on was creating Wordpress themes that he would sell as digital downloads. This made him some income every month but he sold the business to someone else in 2015.  Inspiration behind leaving formal employment to freelancing then to business  While still working at the web design agency, Brian noticed that the company used to hire freelancers occasionally. He realised that the freelancers were making a living from that, which prompted him to learn freelancing through free online resources. In 2008, he decided to start doing freelance work which actually helped him through the economic downturn and gradually led him towards starting his own business.  RestaurantEngine idea  While building websites for different clients in diverse industries, he realised how difficult it was for small business owners to build and set up their websites even on platforms like Wordpress. That inspired him to create a hosted platform built on top of Wordpress in order to make it easier for business owners to build websites for their businesses. While in the planning process he realised that he could not standardize the platform for all types of businesses so he had to specialize it to one business sector and he settled for the restaurant sector because restaurants always require the same content on their websites like menus, etc. Focusing on one industry/niche made it easier for him to market the product.  Going full-time into RestaurantEngine  Brian was balancing his freelance work with working on RestaurantEngine for 2 years before he could go full-time into it. He had three people working for him in customer support, one in sales and one in content marketing. He built the site himself and had one developer on-call to support when needed.  Determining the viability of the RestaurantEngine idea  Brian didn't know whether the idea would work but it worked out eventually. He had to invest a lot in terms of time, hard work and personal finances in order to build the platform before it even launched and started generating revenue.   Tip: Validating a new product idea or business idea before going into it is very important  Transition from RestaurantEngine to Audience Ops  By the time he was selling RestaurantEngine, he had already started building Audience Ops. The sale closed in June 2015, and Audience Ops had launched and gotten its first clients in May 2015.  Reason for the sale...

 How Brian Casel, Founder of Audience Ops, Has Built a Virtual Team of Specialists to Help Grow His Online Content Marketing BusinessWant the transcript? Download it here. In this episode, special guest and founder of Audience Ops, Brian Casel, shares with us his experience of building a virtual team of content marketing specialists and how you may not always get it right the first time. Brian reveals that in order to grow a successful business in today's constantly evolving marketplace, business owners must remain responsive and ensure their own businesses continue to evolve. Some of the areas covered include:The initial challenges faced when building a virtual team of specialistsWhy systems and processes are so important in building your team up for successThe need for effective communication tools within your virtual teamEnsuring you have a sound onboarding and training process for new recruits Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group. Resources mentioned in this show:Audience OpsCasjamSlackTrelloHelp Scout  In this episode:02:28 – Who is Brian Casel?05:57 – Initial challenges with building teams09:55 – The importance of systems and processes12:14 – Do you need a VA or someone else?13:04 – Firing yourself from business processes14:48 – Business processes are constantly evolving16:50 – Brian's business processes22:30 – Challenges of bringing new people into your team25:42 – Getting the onboarding process right26:36 – How to deal with an underperforming team member27:48 – Have your team suggest ways to improve processes29:56 – Outsourcing a task that requires talent or expertise33:18 – The need for good online content35:37 – Brian's #1 tool that has streamlined his business40:20 – Wrapping things up Barbara:  Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the Virtual Success Show, where today I'm flying solo without my co-host Matt Malouf. When we have guests on the show, which we do today, often we find it's easier to get really good guests if we can split the shows up and not have our own schedules getting in the way, so on today's show I'm really excited because I'm talking to Brian Casel, who is the founder of Audience Ops and also has a fantastic podcast called… it's called the Productize Podcast, Brian is it? Brian:  Yeah actually I have two podcasts, but yeah Productize Podcast and the other one that I co-host with Jordan Gal is called Bootstrapped Web. Barbara:  Oh fantastic, fantastic! So guys today we're going to talk all about all things content and managing team's when it comes to content and how to get content up on your site without it overwhelming you. I know one of the questions I get a lot Virtual Angel Hub is clients who have VA's through us will say, “Well how do I get a consistent stream of content?”, particularly when the VA's able to do quite a lot of work with that content but one of the challenges is trying to actually get consistency in this area. So Brian's going to talk to us all about this today and his own journey with managing teams in this area. So Brian, welcome to the show. Brian:  Well thanks Barbara. It's great to talk to you. I just love talking about this stuff, whether it's outsourcing, working with a team, collaborating, managing people, growing, yeah. Barbara:  Me too because I think one of the key things to actually growing or scaling is getting this right, cause so many people can't nail this and it will trip you up if you can't figure out how to manage a team once you start to grow, as you and I've just been talking about off air Brian. Brian:  Yep, absolutely. Barbara:  The whole challenge of it. Okay so to kick off the show, give us first a quick Audience Ops, the Productize Podcast, all about you so give us the quick what are you doing these days with your businesses. Who is Brian Casel? Brian:  Sure. Yeah I tend to like to work backwards in this story.

In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike interviews Jordan Gal, Cofounder of CartHook, about his lessons learned from doing demos for customers. Jordan gives a background on CartHook as well as the journey from one-on-one demos to the possibilities of scaling the sales process.       

At Shopify Unite, we heard that Shopify is advancing their checkout process by adding new features like Shopify Pay. Advancement in the checkout process is great for merchants, and especially important for Shopify. It's important because the Shopify checkout process is tightly controlled. There's limited customization options, and unless you're on Shopify Plus, you're not given access to edit the checkout process. This brings us to a controversial point: is it not being able to edit that checkout process good or bad? And if we wanted to edit it, how could we do it? Then, what would do to improve the checkout process for the better? Joining me on the show to discuss it is Jordan Gal. Jordan is the Cofounder and CEO of CartHook, a software company that offers products that make your ecommerce business more successful. — Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via Email Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS Join The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Work with Kurt — Learn: The coming battle for your Shopify checkout The arguments for and against replacing your Shopify checkout Customizations to consider that may improve conversion at checkout The one trend in ecommerce you need to know about The power of free plus shipping offers The strategy used by the most sophisticated Shopify store owners to dramatically increase ROI on ad spend Links Mentioned: CartHook Bold Apps Cashier (Beta) Zipify One Click Upsell Shopify Pay Address Auto Completion ClickFunnels Free Guide I want to send you a sample chapter of Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com Transcript Kurt: One of the interesting and perhaps blessed things that happen in Shopify is that unless you're on plus you can't mess with the checkout, and even on plus you can mess with it a little bit but totally rewriting the thing just probably isn't a great idea. The reason I say I like this about Shopify is the Shopify checkout is based on millions of data points, so in theory they're always optimizing this thing and we know it works well. I've seen really optimized stores with conversion rates at 3% and 5% and those that really juice their traffic to the store, conversion rates in the low double digits, so we know the checkout works. We've certainly seen it work a number of times, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to improve it, and not just in terms of conversion rate but there are other features maybe we would like to add to the checkout which would be cool. There's a controversial practice that happens and we'll go into why, but it's replacing the checkout. If you've ever used a subscription app, Bold app's recurring orders is a wonderful way to do subscription. It actually when someone goes through the checkout to place their subscription, it entirely circumvents the Shopify checkout, replaces it with Bold's that is just a duplicate. They have remade the standard Shopify checkout so that they can do their own payment processing, and then just funnels all that stuff back into your Shopify store via the API. It's kind of crazy and early on we were like, "Oh damn, that's how they solved that? That's nuts." And now we're seeing more people do it. You've probably heard about Ezra Firestone's Zipify, his company Zipify. Zipify's one click upsell. Bold Apps has one in beta. I've seen it enough places now I'm comfortable mentioning it, that we got a replacement called Bold Apps Cashier that's designed to try and pull all these things together, add a bunch of features to the checkout. And of course we have heard from him before. Jordan Gal from CartHook, who joins me today to talk about what's going on in this space, why and how it's heating up, and why it's controversial, what the trends are and what's going on. It's a more high level discussion but I think this should be very interesting. Jordan, welcome. Jordan: Thank you very much, Kurt. Thanks for having me on. I had to bite my tongue through the intro because I have a lot of interjections to make. Not disagreements but adding to the richness of the debate. How about that? I think we can get into it. I think it's a good, good topic. Kurt: I don't even know where I fall on this, so we'll see if you sway me. You probably will. You're a charismatic gentleman. Jordan: I don't even know if it's about swaying. It's a laissez faire argument. The checkout on Shopify right now is good. It converts well. Once people get into the checkout, it converts and it's standardized and it looks great on mobile and it's super stable and super fast, so there's not an argument to be made about how Shopify's checkout is terrible. That's not the argument. The argument is, should the eCommerce merchant have control over their checkout? And if so, then why? What are people trying to do with the checkout? And we saw the first rumblings of it with the subscription apps, and now it's starting to blossom a little bit in that space and we've got a few different companies playing in that space. Our company, CartHook, has a one page checkout and post purchase upsell app, and then Ezra's got OCU and then Bold's coming out, so it's getting interesting and my only argument is to let the merchant do what they want with their store. Kurt: When you phrase it like that then it's hard to argue with it. I'll play devil's advocate. The argument against it would be, protect people from themselves. If the checkout is based on ... It works and it's got these millions of data points, then lock it down. It's so important. Don't let people mess with it. But then I have said that and we've heard that on the show, but then I've also said if you want to add predictable, recurring revenue to your store, you should try selling subscriptions, in which case you got to replace the damn checkout. Jordan: And it may not even be like that forever. This very well may be a temporary period where things are in transition around the checkout. That's one of the things that we keep an eye on. We say to ourselves, how long does this last? This period where Shopify's checkout is locked down and then people are replacing it. Maybe there's something that we're transitioning into with some of Shopify's new APIs that allow for more features to be built into the Shopify checkout instead of replacing. I think it's a very fluid thing. To back up a touch, our product, it originated years ago when I ran an eCommerce business on Volusion where I ran the company with my three brothers. One brother was in charge of getting traffic to the store. I was in charge of converting that traffic into sales, and my other brother was in charge of everything that happened after the sale, from customer service to shipping, inventory, and so forth. So I spent my days staring at, okay, how do I convert more of this traffic into sales? The truth is I spent a considerable amount of my time on the checkout process or the cart page and the checkout page and trust symbols and error notifications and as everyone knows, every little tweak can make a difference. Sometimes you don't know which tweak makes a difference so you start off with your best practices and you make it super simple, and then you start to work from there and a lot of unexpected things happen. That's where it originated and now what we're really doing is we're bringing that same mindset and that same situation into Shopify. We're saying what works for one store may not be optimal for another store, so let's give control over to the merchant to experiment. Kurt: If we hand control over to the merchant, what are the things that people are going to do? What are they missing out on now that they could be doing if they had access to this checkout, or swap it to one of these other replacements such as CartHook? Jordan: We're seeing it happen in two different ways. The first is on the checkout page itself, and the second is what's happening after the checkout. I don't even know where we should focus first. I guess the first one's almost easier. Kurt: We'll do it in order. Jordan: Sure. I think it's more straightforward too and then the second part that the upsells after the purchase go deeper, so we can go deeper into that side. The first part is the checkout page itself. Shopify has a three step checkout and it's debatable whether or not that is the right way to go compared to a one page checkout. These days with more and more traffic and more and more conversions happening on mobile, you want it to be as fast as possible. Again, it's not straightforward that a one page checkout is faster and easier and converts better, but you can't tell without experimentation. What our customers are doing is they're trying to match up their checkout page with their brand so that it's on their own domain and it has trust symbols, testimonials, images, design that match the rest of the company's site so that there's a consistency from the product page to the cart page to the checkout page and then that consistency is generally understood to help conversions. Kurt: So the first is we want access to design for two reasons. One to make it match the store so you have a cohesive experience. You don't have this jarring, suddenly I'm on a different domain name with a different feel, a different look entirely. That's usually the first objection is listen, I just want this thing to look the same. Okay, cool. Then the second would be, all right, you're asking a lot saying to a stranger, "Hey, give me your credit card details and your home address, buddy." That's a big ask, so you want to add some psychological triggers in there like social proof, trust indicators. Even just, "Hey, if you have questions call us. Here's our toll free number." That kind of thing. Then of course remove all the friction. Make it as easy to use as possible. Add fancy features like address auto-completion would be a not atypical customization we see. Jordan: Yeah, and along with that just the desire to experiment with whether or not one page checkout will convert better for you than the multistep, and it's not straightforward. Kurt: It really does depend on the audience, because before we hitched our cart and did only Shopify, and obviously this was years ago so things have changed wildly, but we saw situations where some stores did better where you gave people the option to register as customers versus be guests. Some stores did better when you did one page checkout versus multistep. It really was dependent on the audience. Jordan: Yeah, it makes sense and that's what we're seeing too. It is not a straightforward, the second you add a one page checkout it converts better. It's not straightforward like that, so it's an experimentation piece. Kurt: And the end goal there to have those options, to have those features, is to increase the conversion rate. We make it as easy as possible, remove all those barriers, all that friction and we just make it easier for people to buy, and in theory our purchased rate goes up, right? Jordan: Yes, and one of the interesting things that we have an eye on is it's my opinion that the thumbprint wins. That's where I think everything is going on checkout. What I say is that my ideal is that 12 months from today, our default checkout page has no fields. Like the cart summary where you don't see the cart summary until you click on it and then it opens up and extends the cart summary. My hope is that the fields are hidden and you have to click on it to open up the fields to put your name and address in, because the thumbprint purchase will be that prevalent. That's what I hope things get to for merchants, because once ... There are a few different options. Apple Pay, Android Pay, some type of a Shopify Pay, Stripe. Whatever comes out over the next year I think the thumbprint is the thing that wins. Kurt: We see that with Apple Pay now and really I've only used it in maybe two or three situations and it was absolutely magical. Like oh my gosh, this is the easiest thing ever. How long has it been around? A year? And it's stunning to see how few ... This is not a criticism of just Shopify stores. Of just eCommerce and mobile in general that just don't use Apple Pay and that confuses me. Jordan: I think these things happen all at once. They grow and then all of a sudden you look at it and you say, "Whoa,". It wasn't that big last year and it's bigger this year and it's anticipated to be big, and the next thing you know it's huge and then everyone adopts it all at once. Over a 12 month period everyone will add it. That's my ... It's just inefficient, man. To be on a phone and punch in all those buttons when you're just using the credit card that you already have in your wallet and then you will eventually have inside your phone. It seems inevitable to me. Kurt: Absolutely. I'm confused as to why it didn't happen sooner. Jordan: I agree. Kurt: That's our dream as we get to, I want to check out. I just tap my thumb and it's like, "Hey, you want to pay with this card and send it to this address, right?" Yeah. Done. Send. No more thinking about it. It's done. It's over. It's one step. It works on our mobile devices and soon we'll see touch ID on everything. Jordan: It's a bit scary, isn't it? Kurt: A little bit. Jordan: The fact that the entire Internet will be as easy to purchase from as Amazon is scary. Kurt: Yeah. I ... It's a total rabbit hole here. I don't keep Amazon on my phone to prevent impulse purchases. When I need to shop on Amazon, I download the app and then I have to log in, make a purchase, then delete it. Jordan: Wow, good for you. Kurt: Because it's too easy. Jordan: If I were a Shopify merchant, that's what I would want. I want it to be too damn easy to buy from my store. Kurt: Right and fundamentally, with conversion rate optimization, that's the end goal is it is too damn easy to buy from this store. That's number one is, give me access to design so I can optimize this thing tailored to my specific audience. Then the pushback against that would be, "Well, if we do that we're giving you enough rope to hang yourself or you could mess it up and make it harder to use." In theory you're sophisticated enough. You can test it. You would know that your conversion rate goes down. Jordan: Yes. Like all business. I have plenty of rope to hang myself with in my business, just like you do and just like everyone else does. Kurt: There are other places I could through things up like uploading 12 meg PNGs to my carousel slider and that kind of thing. Then the other is this post purchase stuff, which I think is really exciting and is an untapped opportunity. Talk to me about that. Jordan: I think it's fascinating, and I have really enjoyed my job for the past year working in this space because it's just genuinely interesting and new. Once again, let's back up two steps. Here's what I see that happened over the past year or two. What's happening is that the marketers, the army of marketers that move around the web and identify opportunities, they have been moving from digital products to physical products en masse. Just a gigantic trend. It was not kicked off but accelerated by ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels brought marketing innovation in their platform. They basically said, "Okay, Leadpages, you guys have awesome landing pages, but people don't build landing pages on their own. They build them together in a funnel." So ClickFunnels just put that concept into play and said, "Now instead of building standalone landing pages, we're going to help you build landing pages that connect in a funnel," and then on top of that they provided a ton of education around how to use that. How to sell both digital and physical products through a funnel, and one of the key components of the funnel is the post purchase upsell. It's not just an opportunity to add something to someone's order. It is an opportunity to completely change the way you actually sell. The strategy from the starting point can be changed because of the fact that the post purchase upsell exists. A popular example is the free plus shipping offer. The free plus shipping offer, the way it works is what you want to do is offer something on the front end on your checkout page that's really low, low price. Ideally it's free. It's, "Hey, I just wrote a book. Buy my new book. I'll give it to you for free. All you need to do is pay for shipping." So the book is free, $0, and the shipping is call it $6.95, hence the free plus shipping nomenclature. Kurt: If you want to see this in action, if you've ever seen ads ... Clearly Facebook has considered me an info-marketer because I see ads for this stuff all the time. I got ads continuously for Russell Brunson, the owner, creator, of ClickFunnels, for his book DotCom Secrets, which was offered to me as free plus shipping and sure enough, after seeing enough ads, I did end up buying it for free plus shipping and it was like $7. Jordan: Right. And now after- Kurt: Then it worked on me a second time. He just came out with another book. Did it again. Jordan: That's right. So look, it works. It's a great offer, and so what that does is it gets the person into your funnel. All of a sudden your checkout page, what you're selling on the front end becomes an entryway. It's not the point. It is the beginning of the point. Once you put in your credit card information to pay $6.95 in shipping, what happens is that payment token can then be used again, which means ... Kurt, when you bought that book, what happened after you made the purchase? Kurt: Immediately afterward it's like, thanks. That's great. You purchased it. By the way, one time offer. You'll never be able to get this again. For $150 or something, add this extra package of just amazing value and it had a video and it was it's own amazing landing splash page and I said no thanks. But I also made sure to not read it because I'm sure it was very compelling and I might have bought it, and then when I said no thanks, it offered me another different thing. Jordan: A downsell. Kurt: A downsell, which is always going to be cheaper than the first thing it offered me. It always seemed way cheaper because I was just price anchored to the other thing. Jordan: Right. So if you had decided to purchase, in order to purchase all you would've had to do is click on the button that said, "Yes, I want to purchase." You would not have needed to reenter your credit card again. The credit card would have been stored in the payment token stored from the checkout page. That became very, very popular in the ClickFunnels world, and then the next phase what happened is a lot of people on ClickFunnels started selling physical products in this way. They'd say, "Okay, here's one unit of skin cream," and then after the purchase it's, "Hey, do you want to buy another one for a different price?" And, "Hey, do you want to subscribe and just save and get it every month without you having to do anything?" So then it started to creep into the physical product world. People started making a lot of money being really successful in the physical product world, and then what do they realize, Kurt? They realize, "Oh man, I really want to use Shopify to do the order management because it's really good at it." Then you had this strange gap where you said, "Okay, I want to sell like ClickFunnels but I want to manage like Shopify," and that's really what's happening in the market right now. You have a ton of these marketers coming into Shopify and they're introducing all these marketing concepts and now they're slowly seeping into the regular retailer world, not just the marketer world, and now there's this crazy [crosspollinization 00:19:30] around post purchase upsells are ... It's a legitimate strategy. It works. Kurt: Right. Initially, as soon as I think retailers and eCommerce folk in general hear info-marketer, they're like, "Oh, it's sleazy. I don't want to do it." Then over time they open their mind to it. It works for them for reasons, and a lot of the stuff is based on 50, 100 year old direct response marketing ideas. We've seen that with the power of landing pages and people's desires to rather than just have a product page, make these much more sophisticated, compelling landing pages for their Shopify store that are borrowed straight out of this info-marketing world. Jordan: Yes, and I actually want to make sure we talk about the landing page thing. That's probably the biggest insight I can give to your audience based on what we're seeing, so let's put a marker on that. I just wrote that down as a note. The process of normalization. I remember three years ago when we first launched our abandoned cart application, CartHook started off as an abandoned cart email app. We used to get people who saw our site and email us in such anger. Just, "I cannot believe what you guys are doing, that you are horrible, evil people who do this," and it's because we're sending emails to people after they abandon their cart. Do you know anyone who thinks that's a horrible, controversial, sleazy practice? No, it's normal. It works. It's inevitable. You need to do it in a tasteful way. It's always in the way you do it. Kurt: Yeah. Don't damn the tools. It's what you do with them. Jordan: Exactly right. I think there is now a process of normalization around upsells. I think within a year, basically not every single time but most of the time you buy something online you will have a post purchase upsell, and people will start to learn about it and be conditioned to it and understand that they're going to get certain offers and then they'll start to try to game it to see what kind of offers they get after the purchase. It's just a totally normal process. Kurt: I had not thought of it that way but yeah, we're already doing that as a standard practice in email marketing automation. You've got to be doing an upsell after the fact to extend customer lifetime value. Even the previous episode to this one that's literally what we discussed. Like a third of the emphasis was devoted to those post purchase sequences. At no point did we think it was strange, sleazy, or anything like that. Jordan: No, it's just a normal part of retail. Anyway, so that's the second piece. The first piece is the checkout. The second piece is what happens after the checkout. Now there's this amazing experimentation. What can you do ... If it's helpful I can give you what a typical post purchase funnel looks like. Kurt: I love examples. Really solidify it, picture it, so lay it on me brother. Jordan: Yeah, let's do it. Let's say you are selling flip flops. Okay. You sell flip flops from Brazil, so it's cool. You've got a brand going. A typical post purchase upsell funnel would look something like this. Visitor puts a pair of your flip flops in the cart, goes to the checkout page, fills out the forms, puts in their payment information, and clicks "complete purchase." After that checkout page the first page they would see would be an offer for more of the same. Meaning, the product you just bought, I'm going to offer you the same thing but for a better deal. Basically say, "You want to get a second pair of flip flops for 20% less?" And it's positioned as a one time offer because literally on the site publicly, it's offered for call it $40, but because you just purchased it, it's a thank you to someone who just purchased it. It's a one time offer. Add a second pair for you, for your spouse, for safekeeping, whatever. You get it for $30. Then, if they accept it, let's not get into downsells because that gets complicated, so let's just say three upsells in a row. Let's say they have two pairs of flip flops and they got a good deal on the second one and they're happy. The second would be for a complimentary product. What goes along with your flip flops? It is your flip flop cleaning kit. Then again you can say a one time offer, publicly or it may not even be available publicly on the website, or on the website the cleaning kit is available for $10 but now you can add it to your order for $5. So upsell number one is more of the same. Upsell number two is complimentary. Then what some people do, upsell number three is expedited shipping. What you're doing is you're saying, "This person is really interested. They just purchased. Maybe they want to get their product faster," and so instead of trying to convert them to upgraded shipping on the checkout page which creates friction, you can add an upsell as the third upsell for expedited shipping. Basically offering the same type of upgrade in shipping that you would've on the checkout page but this time you're not adding the friction up front. You're making an offer after the fact, then they can decide whether they want expedited shipping or not. That would be a typical post purchase upsell. More of the same, complimentary product, expedited shipping. Kurt: I love it. I love it and I can't do it right now. Jordan: Right. The point of this is really to change your average order value. Kurt: Right, obviously you're increase customer lifetime value but we're doing it in a much faster way. Where normally it'd be they make the purchase and then you email them their upsell offers, versus now we're doing it like, they have already committed to the first purchase, and in that same transaction now we're increasing that average order value, I think in theory extending their customer lifetime value through these upsells. Jordan: Right and the whole theory is, because these offers come after the checkout they don't interfere with the conversion rate on the front end. Kurt: Right and that's the risk. Right now if I want to do something similar I would use an app like Bold Apps Product Upsell [inaudible 00:25:51] pops up in the cart based on what's in the cart and offers me additional items. It's like, "Oh, you bought this beach towel. Did you also want to buy this suntan lotion?" So it pops this thing up. But they haven't bought the first item yet, so there's always the fear that this is going to increase bounce rate on the cart page. It's going to impact that conversion rate. Jordan: You got it. So it should be the same math on the front end. If you spend $10,000 a month in advertising and that usually results in let's just say 100 orders and the average order value is $100, that makes you $10,000 in revenue. Cool. Now, if you add post purchase upsells, that doesn't change at all. It's still the same spend, the same conversion rate, the same revenue but now 20% of those 100 purchases also add an additional average of $10, so now you've just made an extra $200. It shouldn't change the math on the front end at all on the conversion rate. Now what you're doing is just X% of customers are also taking an upsell, so you spend the exact same amount on ads but you make more revenue as a result. Kurt: So I'm getting a higher ... My initial order, my customer value goes way up but my cost per acquisition of customers doesn't change in the slightest. Jordan: Right. Shouldn't change, but the average order value goes up, and what does that allow you to do? It allows you to spend more on ads, and then you can make more money, and then spend more on ads, and make more money. Kurt: Right, you step on the gas and just keep this ... which I learned from you in a previous episode. If you get a funnel that works, it's profitable, step on the gas. See what you can do. Jordan: Yeah, step on the gas. Kurt: See how far you can scale it. That's a good example of how one might use upsells in eCommerce. Can I do this in Shopify right now? Jordan: You can do it in Shopify right now and there are a few options for merchants. Between ourselves and Ezra's OCU, there's starting to be some innovation in the space. Bold just came out with their Cashier. That's in beta, so the features there, we don't know what they're going to do but right now in the market you can use our product, CartHook Checkout or you can use Zipify OCU and people are doing it. We are getting a healthy amount of demand and we are kind of quiet. We don't really do any advertising and marketing, and we're just getting a wave of people who are talking about it in Facebook and then wanting to try it. It's starting to grow very organically and I think it's going to tip at some point over the next few months where it's just going to be more standard practice as opposed to the innovators on the marketing side. We're already talking to some really well known merchants that I don't want to mention, so it's already seeping into the ... The mean. The one standard deviation away from the normal. It's already creeping into the norm for them. Kurt: Right. Once we have these big ... You have some hero stores. Some stores that you aspire to be like. Very large, work in public Shopify stores. A good example would be [Beer Brand 00:29:18] or I always reference [Everest Bands 00:29:19] on here where you hear a lot about them and you're just like man, I want a store like that. Once you see those people, because we perceive they're successful and therefore when we see them adopting these things we go, "Well, they must know what they're doing." Everybody has that thought, even if they're just experimenting. That's what's going to normalize this and we're going to see more demand for it, and then we'll see more education about it, more people talking about it in Facebook groups, and you're right about that. I start seeing more and more mentions, especially in the Shopify Plus Facebook group. See mentions like, "Hey, how do I do this?" Then, "How do I do upsells? How do I do this?" And you hear people like, "Oh, check out CartHook. Check out OCU. Have you heard about this new thing from Bold?" I keep seeing this in the last month this conversation keep happening. Jordan: I think it's a great thing for Shopify merchants. I think it's a good thing for our market specifically. I expect more competition. Ezra and I are in touch and we're both supporting what the other person's doing and I think it's good for everybody. Kurt: That's one of the wonderful things about this community in general. Everybody works together for the greater good. Jordan: Yeah, and it's big enough. It's all good. Kurt: There's 400,000 Shopify stores. Jordan: That's wild. Kurt: It's all good, man. Jordan: Kurt, how we doing on time? I want to get to this one thing that we see that I don't want to leave out. Kurt: Right. We're at 30 minutes recording so I do want to wrap it up after this, but give me that one hit. Give me the tremendous value. Lay it on me. Jordan: All right, here's what we're seeing. People who are heavy into Facebook advertising, the people who really, really care about their ROI every single day for every dollar spent. What they are doing is they are first figuring out which product on their store sells, and then they are no longer sending the traffic to the product page. They are building a landing page and sending the traffic there and they are getting much more success from it. In theory you and I know that works. We know that a landing page converts better than a homepage let's say, but it is being put into practice in a big way in the Shopify world. People will figure out which of their products sell best and then they will do more work on the page to sell. Instead of just sending to a standard page where there's some photos on the left and then on the right there's some bullet points and a description, they'll put together a full blown landing page that does away with the navigation, keeps a super focus on the product, and does a lot more work with videos, additional testimonials, additional images, more copy, and they are being rewarded for going that next step in effort beyond just the standard page on the Shopify store. Kurt: I'm totally with you. I absolutely believe it. Just to give the crash course in Shopify landing pages, imagine a more purposeful product page. Often that is how we do it is if you've got access to a front end designer developer, we make a longer form version of the product page where we've got longer sales copy. We go through the whole pain, dream, fix format. We include social proof. Maybe we include urgency on there, scarcity. We'll do little hacks with that stuff ... And you can't do this for every product, right? So either you sell a few products, you could do it for all of them. Do it for your flagship product or use the 80/20 rule. Figure out, this is the big bad boy. Do it on just this one. Then take that same page, make a version of it where you just throw in some extra style tags and hide, display none, all the extraneous links that would get someone to leave the page. The fundamental thing that makes a landing page is in theory, it only has one call to action. Generally that means you got to strip out your navigation from your header/footer, so there you go. There's the easy crash course in Shopify product landing pages. Jordan: Just to plug my own product a little bit, what they're doing from there is they're using ... This is what our most successful merchants are doing. They're using what we call product funnels. In CartHook you can build something called a product funnel which links up directly to one specific product in your Shopify store and then provides you with a URL that goes right to a checkout page that has that product preloaded. They don't go from the landing page to the cart. They go directly from the landing page, they put the funnel URL from the CartHook product funnel, and then they go straight from landing page into the checkout page with that product preloaded, and then all the post purchase upsells after it and because you know exactly where the traffic is coming from, that one landing page, you know which product they bought so you can put testimonials that are specific to that product on the checkout page and then you can have a post purchase upsell sequence that's very specific to that product. It's a super, super focused funnel that you have full control over. You have control of the landing page, checkout page, upsell pages, thank you page. That's where our most successful merchants are dialing in their ad spend. Kurt: Just thinking out loud, if you are just starting out with a Shopify store, is this something you want to worry about or is this once you've got where your processes, your product validated, dialed in, then you want to start exploring this stuff? At what point do I start doing this, I think is my question. Jordan: I'm going to say that this is not something you should do as one of the first things. There are so many other foundational elements to your store that you need to get right, between the positioning and copy, navigation, and so on. I would work on that first. This is an optimization. This is, okay, how do I make things better? I think maybe eventually it will get to the point where, okay, I need an email app. I need a cart abandonment app. I need an exit intent popup app, and I need a checkout app. That's where I hope it gets to where every single person that starts a store just grabs these few fundamental apps that they need to add. I don't think it's quite there yet. I think this is a bit more advanced. Kurt: I want to wrap this up but now I got more questions. You rattled off here's the four apps you need to have. Do you have a preferred one or recommendation for an exit intent popup app? Jordan: No. I don't know. I don't know. I know OptinMonster. I know OptiMonk. I know Bounce Exchange for bigger stores, but I'm not as familiar with the app ecosystem to recommend exactly what to use. We partner with certain apps like ReCharge Apps on the subscription billing so people can sell subscription products inside the funnel and so on, but beyond the larger market, I'm not the right person to make those recommendations. Kurt: Okay. All good. I'll throw in my recommendation. I really like OptiMonk, but I've also heard fantastic things about Justuno but I have not personally played with it. I think in theory the thing I'd like to do and I never get around to because these other exit intent popup builders are so convenient, would be just coding our own using Ouibounce which is just an open source JavaScript snippet. It's O-U-I bounce, Ouibounce. I will throw those into the notes, the links mentioned. Jordan, where can people go to learn more about you? Jordan: Go to CartHook.com/checkout and you'll see more about the products, and then we interact with our customers and people on the site a lot so if you have questions just click on that chat button in the bottom right or hit us up at support@CartHook.com and if you are feeling podcasty, check out BootstrappedWeb.com which is my weekly podcast. Kurt: Who do you host that with? Jordan: Brian Casel. Kurt: He is a good dude. Jordan: My man. Kurt: Wonderful man. I will not go down any more rabbit holes as I was about to do. No, this is good. We're going to wrap it up here. Jordan: Cool. Kurt: Thank you, Jordan. I greatly, greatly appreciate it. I think that's all for us today at the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. And to our listeners, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you've heard come out of this discussion, so join our Facebook group. Just search the Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. You'll find it. Apply to join. I will approve you, and come talk to us. I post every episode there. Or, you can always sign up for my newsletter at KurtElster.com. Shoot me an email. Either way, you'll be notified when a new episode goes live. And of course if you want to work with me, I'd love to have you. Go apply at Ethercycle.com. That's my consultancy. As always, thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.

Today is a basic update episode, but we have a special guest as well. Justin McGill is the co-founder of LeadFuze and co-host of the podcast Zero to Scale. He joins us on the update train today and gives us an idea of what the future holds for LeadFuze. Jordan tells us how his team meetup is going and Brian fills us in on what is going on with Audience Ops. [tweetthis]Finding talent is so hard & to limit to just my zipcode is... I don't see how that would have worked. - Brian Casel[/tweetthis] We cover a lot of topics today. Our main discussion boils down to the pros and cons of remote teams. A lot of founders find remote works well for them, but today we discuss the virtues of a brick and mortar office space. Here are today's topics: Jordan's meetup progress. The pressures of being the boss and having a life. Jordan's product development troubles. Jordan's new website and onboarding process for the check-out product. Brian's 50k milestone. Brian's search for a good writer. Brian's return to sale calls. Justin's LeadFuze issues. The stress of going from remote team to office space. The importance of office culture to a business. How to decompress while working at home. Slack vs. e-Mail What's going on with Audience Ops' software. [tweetthis]There is a point in time where you just say 'Screw it, I'm going to start marketing.' - Jordan Gal[/tweetthis] Resources Mentioned Today: Zero to Scale LeadFuze CartHook Audience Ops Calendar Sponsor Indeed Prime - Get a $5,000 bonus when you get hired through Indeed Prime using Bootstrapped Web's link.   As always, thanks for tuning in. Head here to leave a  review in iTunes.

Jordan Gal, Ecommerce expert and cofounder of Carthook, a product that helps sellers unlock lost revenue by automatically tracking and emailing shoppers who start, but don’t finish the checkout process, shares his insights on the proven practices you can use to make your Ecommerce selling more successful.

Jordan Gal is founder of Carthook, a cart abandonment software solution that recovers lost revenue by following up with potential customers who don’t complete the checkout process.  Jordan previously ran a successful ecommerce business that was acquired.   Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [0:15] Jeremy’s introduction of Jordan Gal, ecommerce software developer. [1:28] The most important thing Jordan did: found a good Volusion developer. [6:03] Mistakes made on the checkout page. [7:25] The most common reasons people abandon a cart. [9:06] The power of a live chat functionality that tracks user activity on the site. [12:19] Why people abandon SaaS purchases. [14:28] Observations from working with ecommerce vendors. [20:05] A story that illustrates the importance of phone contact with prospects and customers. [24:50] The good and difficult parts of scaling an ecommerce business. [28:34] Mistakes ecommerce builders should avoid. [31:37] The major skillsets Jordan had that he would never pass to someone else. [37:00] Mistakes Jordan made building an ecommerce business. [42:01] Platforms Jordan recommends - and know that no platform is perfect. [44:38] The power of reviews on your ecommerce site. [46:00] The type of software you must have for effective ecommerce. [55:49] Best time frames for follow up of abandoned carts. [58:00] Email sequence recommendations. [1:03:51] Things Jordan has implemented because of customer feedback. [1:10:04] Things ecommerce people need to check in their business. [1:14:23] Jordan’s typical schedule to balance work and life. [1:17:30] Jordan’s journey from Israel to the U.S. and his family life. [1:25:27] Things Jordan learned from his Dad’s direct response business. [1:33:28] The highest priority step ecommerce owners should do now. In this episode… Cart abandonment is a big issue in the ecommerce space. If you can close that loop you’ll significantly increase your revenue and build a more effective follow up sequence with your customers. This episode is about helping you make cart abandonment a thing of the past. Instead of hitting on the generalities of ecommerce, this episode drills down into some of the most important aspects of how you can optimize your process to convert more shoppers on your website into paying customers.   Today’s guest, Jordan Gal has a wealth of experience in direct response sales, the creation and operation of his own successful ecommerce business, and now as a software entrepreneur for Carthook, one of the best shopping cart abandonment solutions in existence. If you want to increase your revenue through capitalizing on the customers that are already visiting your ecommerce site, this episode is for you. Jordan Gal shares best practices for on page optimization, checkout page improvements, and follow up sequences for those who have abandoned the cart on your site. If you’re ready to make cart abandonment a thing of the past on your ecommerce site, this episode with Jordan Gal can move you a long way toward making sure it’s a reality. Don’t miss this one. Resources Mentioned on this episode www.Skubana.com Carthook Jordan on Twitter: @JordanGal Jordan’s blog post: The 10 Foot Test Good Morning America: How to Find and Use Online Coupon Codes GetDrip Grasshopper SiteTuners Google Docs www.GardenGnomes.com Shopify LemonStand WooCommerce Yotpo review software HelpScout Groove AdWords AutoResponder Max Magento BOOK: Startup Nation

Jordan Gal is founder of CartHook. Their software recovers lost revenue by contacting people who don’t finish the checkout process. He previously ran a successful ecommerce business that was acquired. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [0:43] Jeremy’s introduction of Jordan Gal, founder of CartHook. [1:08] What are some of the best things ecommerce business owners should take action on right now? In this episode… For any business owner, finding ways to grow and connect with the target market are the keys to success. Jordan Gal is no stranger to growing an ecommerce business into a resounding success, so much so his last business was acquired. In this short chat with Jeremy, Jordan shares some tips and strategies to help you connect with areas of opportunity in order to grow your ecommerce business. He offers insight into how you can analyze all areas of your business to identify what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve. Jordan discusses the value of “doing a sweep” of your business. He talks about what areas to look at, what to look for, and some tactical steps to take to make improvements. From optimizing your shopping cart page to analyzing various channels, it’s clear Jordan understand how to help you connect with your market in order to make a bigger impact. Resources Mentioned on this episode CartHook

This Small Biz Chat is with ecommerce expert Jordan Gal. Today Jordan owns CartHook, a successful software company that helps ecommerce entrepreneurs reduce shopping cart abandonments, but before that he was creating a streamlined conversion pipeline in his own ecommerce business! After discovering the levers that could bring in and convert the most leads, Jordan was able to rapidly grow the business and sell it in just 13 months. So if you’re a ready to learn how you can supercharge your conversion funnel, stay tuned for my conversation with Jordan Gal.

Jordan Gal is the Co-Founder and CEO of CartHook, an effective abandoned cart recovery solution. CartHook tracks and captures the email addresses of visitors going through your checkout process. When a visitor abandons a purchase, an automated email campaign is triggered that is designed to bring the customer back to the site to complete the purchase. CartHook customers are recovering an average of 10% to 20% of abandoned carts and boosting revenue by up to 15%. Previously he was the Co-Founder of YCA Shops which operated a network of niche ecommerce stores. That company grew quickly and was acquired in mid-2009, so Jordan knows a thing or two about successful ecommerce. On top of that, he hosts the popular Bootstrapped Web Podcast. So what we're saying is Jordan knows a thing or two about ecommerce, and optimization in general. He joins us today to share his experience, and in particular, two powerful anecdotes about learning from your customers that you won't want to miss. Be sure to check out CartHook as well as follow Jordan on Twitter.

Jordan Gal of CartHook talks about how he found his technical co-founder, how he de-risked his app before building it, and the tension between business and technology requirements.