Ep 04: How eCommerce Brands Can Leverage Zero-Party Data

Transcript

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How eCommerce Brands Can Leverage Zero-Party Data

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Alex Ivanoff

All right, welcome to our next episode of Mission Control. I am your host, Alex Ivanoff with my partner and co-host Dave Pancham. Today, all the way from Singapore calling in, we have Josh Chin from Chronos agency. Super excited to have you on, Josh.

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Josh Chin

Thanks for having me.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, absolutely, and thank you so much. I know it's very early your time and late our time. You know, the- the time difference is a big thing when you're so far across the world. So thank you so much for making time early in the morning to talk to us, of course,

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Josh Chin

Of course, yep. I'm used to it. It's a whole thing, the timezone issue. Having across, having our teammates across 14, I believe it's 14 counties now, it’s difficult to make things work out, especially when you have people from the US, Asia, and the UK, that's basically an impossible task to get done, one of us would have to wake up at, like, 2 am which is crazy but that rarely ever happens. That's kind of the name of the game. It's interesting, because when I, when I speak with friends in the business space, they often think about expansion of business in terms of geography, and moving from country to country and tackling different markets one at a time. I've never thought about it that way. And it comes from, and we'll talk about my my background a little bit but,

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, let’s get into it, tell us.

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Josh Chin

Expansion and geographically, which is not in the, at least not in the mindset that I come with, which is really surprising to think about. And on hindsight, I suppose. My background is in, I was an ex-student. That was how I got started, I was a student in the University, started Chronos, back in 2017. And we started things out as kind of a side hustle type of project while I was in school. That kind of got serious over time, when we got way too many clients that I couldn't handle it all myself. And I had to build a team and I had to build systems around what I was doing and scale that out into a proper business. I had a, at one point in time, I had a decision to make between turning what I was doing into a really profitable side venture.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah.

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Or I could turn it into a career, which hopefully was going to be profitable as well. And I chose to turn what I was doing into a career. And that was really interesting, because I never held a job. I've never had a full time job prior to running Chronos. So everything that I've learned has been through trial and error, learning from others, investing a lot of time, energy and money into questions that we had, and kind of building things from what we believed in, and our principles versus what has been done before, if that makes sense. So that gave us a lot less baggage to carry with. And that's also a big reason why we don't think about expansion in geographies, and countries and markets. Because we have been global and remote since day one.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah.

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We've hired from all around the world. We've been working with clients from all around the world, primarily- today, primarily in the US, about 70% of our clients are based in the US. 20% of them are based in Australia, the rest spread across the world. And I'm based in Singapore. And my teammates are spread out across Asia, the UK and Australia and the US. So it's really kind of hard to pinpoint exactly what kind of a business Chronos is, and where our HQ is, I suppose that will be Asia and Singapore. That's where I'm at. .

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Dave Pancham

So, here is my question on that. So for us, you know, our team is all across the United States. And then we have a lot of team members in the Philippines. You know, and I think like for us a lot of the Philippines and like anybody overseas, like they adapt to our timezone but still, within the US, we're dealing with three time zones, right? So how do you manage your day like that? Because it's very easy, where maybe your day should be eight hours, but because you're accommodating for multiple time zones, all of a sudden your day is 11,15, even more than that. How do you deal with that?

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Josh Chin

I set boundaries. My time, my working hours start at typically 6 am. Well, depends on how early I set my meetings at. So I start my day super early. And I end my day, pretty, typically around 5. So it's a relatively longer day. But I have the freedom and choice to break things down in a way where it works for me. So typically take a break in the middle of the day, take a walk, go for a workout, come back and get re-energized. There's a block of time in the morning where I am highly energized and present. And that kind of wanes over time as I make more decisions and have more meetings and do more things. Eventually, it kind of goes down close to zero, that I need to recharge. So I go out and I do whatever I need to do, have a cup of coffee. I mean, in a location where things are really accessible to me without having to travel far away. So I've kind of set up my life in a way where things are very close to me, I don't have a car. And in Singapore, you don't necessarily need a car, unless you have a family and all that stuff. So I'm, it's very lightweight, everything is really lightweight with me. No assets, no liabilities, same with our business as well. So by extension, that's kind of how I've set up my life. And I like it that way. So I get to move much quicker. The downside is that sometimes I kind of have to react to things that do pop-up every now and then. At this stage of our business, things do pop-up at, like, 11pm, typically it’s pre-scheduled, and I have to take a call at 11pm. And it kind of throws my schedule off every now and then. But I try my best to kind of set guardrails around things so that it doesn't happen again. And so it’s only a one-off occurrence.

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Alex Ivanoff

So I want to go, I want to go, take a quick step back, back to I guess, the journey, because we kind of went real quick from you know, five years ago starting a business to now becoming what seems like a global superpower. So first of all, how old are you, Josh?

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Josh Chin: I'm 20… turning 26 this year.

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Alex vanoff: Okay, so you're my age, I'm 25 as well. So at 21 You started your business around there. What made you start Chronos agency? What…What were you studying at school? Like you said, you made the decision to go full time into this. And hopefully it's profitable. And you had to make the decision based on whether you know, you want to get a job or you know, kind of go to take the regular route. Or if you want to take the entrepreneur route. What made you start Chronos agency? And then how did that grow?

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Josh Chin: It started out as a side project, I was drop-shipping on eBay, really arbitrage selling. So I was taking things off of discounts on places like walmart.com, Amazon, Home depot.com and selling them off full price on eBay, I was making a little bit of money off that arbitrage. And I made my first four figures as a broke university college kid. It was incredible. Because I've never seen that amount of money coming from not a human being paying me money. Right? So it came from, it was online money. My first taste of online money. And that gave me the sense of accomplishment. And I think the validation that I needed to move forward in the industry. And I took that money and I started asking around, alright, what should I do with the 2000 bucks that I've saved up, just slightly under 2000, I remembered. And I have a bunch of different options. I have forex trading, I could take that money and flip that up to a million bucks. I could spend that money into Shopify drop-shipping, I could do all kinds of different stuff. And at the end of the day, I realized that 1000 bucks isn't a lot of money. 2000 bucks isn't a lot of money. And you can't really do much of it. To get the biggest bang for my buck. I had to reinvest that money into myself, into my education. So I bought a bunch of courses. Having seen a bunch of advertising on Facebook, and YouTube, and all that stuff. YouTube's a great friend by the way. YouTube has helped me so much at the start especially, kind of picking things up and learning about the space, what my options are. And, so I bought a bunch of courses, came across Shopify as an ecosystem. I saw that it was booming. And this was back in 2017, middle of 2017. And it was kind of at the, towards the end of that initial spike of new merchants coming on to Shopify. And I saw, I saw that happening. And in the back of my mind, I knew that with a market that's growing as quickly as Shopify, lots of new entrepreneurs are coming in, I could either be a part of that boat and be a Shopify entrepreneur, or I could be a service provider that helped Shopify brand owners scale and be successful. So that's what I did. And I took more courses. And I saved up more money from being a waiter, being a private tutor, that paid a lot of money. And I bought, I remember Azureus course, Ezra Firestone’s email course. And that blew my mind, I saw what he was doing. It was super transparent. I learned a lot from him. And I took that and I implemented it all in my clients’ businesses. And it worked like a charm. And that was the beginning of what eventually became Chronos. So yeah, in a nutshell, I just wanted to make money. I just wanted to make money. And that eventually became a challenge and career that I could pursue.

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Alex Ivanoff

That's an awesome story. I love that, I love that you emphasize reinvesting in yourself. And for you know, all the entrepreneurs listening, Josh pointed out  a lot of very important things there. One, you know, not taking the money and switching like passions or niches and trying to, like, get rich off of it with, like, forex trading, right, like doubling down on what it is that you're passionate about. Two, using free resources like YouTube, and then three, using paid resources when the time is right, like buying Azureus Firestone’s course, I think all of those things are super important for any entrepreneur getting started or looking to double down on what it is that they're already doing. Now taking it into a deeper level, because you said like you just wanted to be successful, you wanted to be a service provider and make money doing so, to do that you have to be really good at what you do. And you have to make clients really want to work with you for a long time. Fast forward to today, tell us more about Chronos agency and why clients work with you, and exactly, you know, what it is that you do so well that makes clients want to stick around and keep working with you?

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Josh Chin

For sure. Today, Chronos is a direct consumer growth agency that specializes in lifecycle marketing. So that's email, SMS, mobile push marketing and the stuff that makes you the profit off after the traffic is acquired. And that's very meaningful for clients because now that profit can then be reinvested back into growing the business, acquiring more customers, or building operations. And we get to then be a big part of what makes a brand successful. So now the conversation becomes: now that we've made all this money with email, and SMS, and mobile push, what do we do next with our clients? And the next thing that we're looking at is CRO because we're seeing a bunch of traffic onto landing pages and if it's not conversion optimized, it's going to be a waste. So that's the next piece that we're tackling. And today, we have a team of about 90+ people, of which about 10 are contractors. And the rest are full timers spread across 10+ countries. And in 2021, alone, we made 90 million for clients through email and SMS marketing. So that was super exciting.

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DavePancham

Nineteen, one nine or nine zeo?

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Josh Chin

Nine zero..

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Dave Pancham

Wow! Nice.

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Alex Ivanoff

And this is among how many clients, how many brands?

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Josh Chin

In 2021, we worked with, I believe it's over a 100 brands. There are a couple of projects that were… Yeah, over a 100 brands, I’d say. And that spreads out across different industries. The common theme is that, and you asked me why clients choose to work with us and it's that these brands are fast-scaling and fast-growing. And we act as a scalable extension of your brand. That's really important because hiring a team is incredibly difficult. In the eCommerce space, hiring people is often a key roadblock that I hear over and over again, and having amazing people on your team is going to make or break the success of your business. So we become a scalable extension of specifically our clients’ marketing departments, which makes it really easy to scale. So, that's what we come in to do, most of our clients rely on us to execute, strategize, implement, and document and report on email, SMS, and all the channels that we partake in. And that gives us a, effectively puts us in a seat of being a partner to our clients, which is really interesting, because we, being an email and SMS specialist, it's, it's strange that our clients would come to us for recommendations on who they should work with, for Facebook, for Google and all these other channels, but it happens, and I think we're really in a privileged position to be doing that.

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Dave Pancham

Why do you think that they? Why do you think that that ends up happening? Is it because you, they've just worked with you, is it that just happened to be clients that have worked with you for a long time? And maybe they had somebody in-house and they're looking to get an agency? Like, what do you think is causing that to happen? Why do they have so much trust there?

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Josh Chin

When you, when you scale from, from, say, one mil a year to 10 mil a year, things break. And if you make that happen in the course of a year, two years, that's even scarier. That's very nerve-wracking.

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Alex Ivanoff

Absolutely!

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Josh Chin

Having an agency that you can trust, that who's able to scale with you, as you scale is incredibly important. Because then you have a reliable partner that you can kind of count on for channels that you know are incredibly important, knowing that you're not leaving any money on the table, someone's working just as hard as you are, for you, because incentives are aligned. So that's incredibly valuable. And finding the right fit with an agency who can do that is often a game changer for businesses.

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Alex Ivanoff

And you know, just going back to what you said, a couple of moments ago, you talked about scalable extension of someone's business, of a brand's business. That's so important, because when you think about, we've talked about this before, why should a brand hire an agency? I mean, obviously, number one is to hire a company to do a certain service or skill set that you don't have. But two and most importantly, when you talk about scaling, the agency knows how to hire the necessary people at scale to fulfill those services, so that when you continuously grow, to be a business owner that is successful in a big business, you have to delegate those things. And you're hiring an agency to do that. So number one, you're getting the service expertise, but two the expertise to hire in scale, you know, the people that you need for those different services. And of course, number three, it's all cost-effective at the end of the day. So, I really liked that, that's super important to note for any brand owner listening, or any entrepreneur listening, really.

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Josh Chin

Exactly. The cost piece where people kind of don't don't realize. It's not just about the money that you pay immediately, but also the cost that you save, and the pain that you get to save from having to build your in-house team and you can do it concurrently as well. We have a number of clients who have scaled from low eight figures a year in revenue, to now close to, or over, nine figures in revenue a year in the course of two, three years, which is incredible growth. And teams scale really quickly over the course of those two to three years. And there are times where people come and go in our clients’ departments. And the only constant is that we've been by their side throughout that journey. So there are clients that leave us because they've scaled so quickly, and they've hired enough people to replace the functions that we serve. And we gradually kind of scaled back and they realized that: “You know what, the risk is way too high to rely on just my in-house team and there are often gaps that my agency Chronos can fill, that my team just cannot fill.” So right now, what often happens is that we have our clients hire us to work with their existing in-house team and scale alongside them, and help them make decisions on a side-by-side basis.

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Dave Pancham

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense So it just makes a lot of sense because you, you're out there, you know, you dealt with over a 100 Different brands last year, like your insights are going to be so vast, because you're pulling from so many different data points out there, versus, an in-house team can have its own experience, but like you're constantly getting a lot of real-time data as to what's working and what's not working in the marketplace right now.

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Josh Chin

Absolutely, it's, it's key, and those insights from different industries and different different businesses, it's really important. And it saves a lot of time and pain, because those split tests and those learnings and conclusions from those tests can be applied immediately to the new clients that we work with. So we get better and better over time. And our clients get to benefit from that process.

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Alex Ivanoff

So, you said that 70% of your clients are in the US, correct? And then 20% Australia, 10% among other countries? What are some of those other countries in that 10%? Just curious.

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Josh Chin

We got UK , Singapore, Malaysia. We have the Philippines interestingly, clients in the Philippines, we have clients based out of, I want to say, one of the Western Europe countries, West Europe countries, I'm not entirely sure where exactly, but it's kind of spread out, we have single points. And I'll tell you why. The reason that happens is because we have about, there are- 60% of our clients come from direct referral of some kind. That means someone made an email introduction, in the phone introduction to us, the rest of that 40%, about 20% of which are just brand new prospects that come as a result of marketing, events, and stuff. The other 20% are the result of word of mouth marketing. Oh, I heard about you from this person who talked about you, and or this partner of yours that talked about you.

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Alex Ivanoff

So, basically a non-direct referral.

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Josh Chin

Yeah, indirect referral, and there are tons and tons of these conversations happening. And because of that, we don't exactly have a ton of control over who we get to speak to, good and bad. And we get to work with, if they're a great client, it doesn't matter where they're at, where they're from, as long as they're selling to an English-speaking country, we typically will be able to help them. And just coincidentally, most of our clients sell to the US in some capacity. Most of them exclusively, some of them, majority, some of them across multiple geographies. So, that's kind of the way that setup, that we have set things up. The downside is that we don't have a lot of control over scale and growth. So I don't have a knob that I can immediately switch on and say, I'm going to run more ads, or I'm going to do more of this and get a lot more clients. So that's a little bit frustrating. And one of the things I'm working on this quarter.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, that's, that's a knob that every business wants to have, really. Yeah, on the topic of international clients, you know, for any international brands listening, that are selling domestically or internationally, or a domestic brand, listening, that’s selling internationally, what have you learned in the past few years about, specifically with SMS, but it could apply, of course, to email, and website development, and stuff like that, about compliance, you know, regulations, legislation they have to follow like, a great one in Europe is, for example is GDPR. Yeah,  so what have you learned? Like, what is it? What's an actionable thing that brands should know to look up and stay compliant?

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Josh Chin

You're never alone in these situations. You're never alone trying to figure out GDPR or SMS legislation and regulations. You typically are working with at the very least a software provider, you wouldn't be building a software from scratch. Most of the time. For that reason, one of the most important decisions that you can be making is, which partner would I want to work with. And are they making sure that they're in line with these legislations that matter. And by proxy, I'm often skipping steps in making these decisions myself. So I would typically have one round of due diligence with the software partner that I'm working with. And once they pass that kind of due diligence process, that they're compliant, they're making sure that things are compliant for the long run, they have a compliance team. And they have members exclusively dedicated to making sure that things are compliant. I'm confident to move forward with sort of a software partner like that, and I wouldn't worry too much about whether I'm stepping out of bounds or not, as long as I'm playing within the bounds of that software, because they're going to make sure that we're not going to go out of bounds within their software. So that makes things really easy. And I don't have to worry too much about making sure that things are within compliance.

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Alex Ivanoff

That makes a lot of sense. So off the top of your head, which ones do you know, like software providers that are pretty much green-light, you know, safe to use. And they're also going to provide the necessary guidance to make sure that you are compliant when you use their software because obviously, they want to protect themselves.

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Josh Chin

For sure. With SMS specifically, it's, it's going to, it's going to be any of the major SMS software providers. Klaviyo is one of them. Postscript is a great partner of ours, Attentive, I know there are a couple of others out there with emotive SMS, but definitely do your own due diligence, check them out, make sure that they're compliant. But most of the larger software providers would have a compliance team, they would have checks and balances in your account, in your software license to make sure that you don't go out of bounds. Things like with SMS, it's pretty clear cut, only send text to people who have opted in to receiving texts, and always give them an option to unsubscribe. Those are some of the key things and it's already pre-built into the software that they make sure that you do that. Otherwise, the risk of not doing so. And going out of bounds is that you'll be paying anywhere between 500 bucks to 1500 bucks per text that’s sent, if someone ends up suing you. And that is effectively life-ending for a business at the scale of SMS sent.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, I mean, that's, we're talking about 1000s and 1000s of dollars at scale. 

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Josh Chin

Millions.

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Alex Ivanoff

Millions, yes. Even for a small brand.

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Josh Chin

Even for a small, small brand, it doesn't take a lot. Say, even if you have a 100 customers, a 100 contacts that have never opted in, and you wanted to try luck with an SMS. And you did a cold SMS campaign to a list of say a 100, or a 1000 people, that's 500,000 bucks in finds, at the very minimum. It's never worth it.

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Alex Ivanoff

That's a pretty penny.

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Dave Pancham

Have clients asked you to do it?

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Josh Chin

No, primarily because we are pretty conservative with SMS with our clients. And our recommendations are typically leaning towards the conservative side. And our software partners that we work with very closely set guardrails to make sure that that doesn't happen as well. 

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Dave Pancham

So, what does conservative look like in terms of texting, how often would you suggest a brand that you're working with texts their opt in list?

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Josh Chin

Conservative would be about once or twice every other week? So, that's, that's conservative. I typically wouldn't go as conservative as that. I'd recommend brands couple that up with automations. So new customers would receive anywhere between one to two texts per week, typically, with cart abandonment texts, with welcome texts, post-purchase texts, and all that fun stuff. That being said, that's kind of said and done. And people typically know what those are. And you can kind of Google that online. What I'm excited about are conversations with texts because that's where the real power of SMS comes in. With conversations, you get to hear conversations that could drive the needle forward, if you're coupling that up with humans on the backend, when humans are required. So with platforms like Postscript, Klavyio is introducing their two-way feature as well. I believe it's live. And all of that coupled with a tool like Gorgias a Helpdesk, or Zendesk, we prefer Gorgias, that's going to help you control the conversations that's happening with both prospects, prospective customers and existing customers. And you get to build in lots of additional sequences on a back end, with your customer support team, then you can turn into a profit center, versus just a cost center, which is incredibly powerful. And that one on one relationship that you're typically able to build offline, the retail store where you go to your favorite store, and you know your guy, you can now do that online with conversations. So that's what I'm excited about.

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Alex Ivanoff

So can you give us an example. So let's say you know, a good example is, you’re in your department store and shopping for clothes in the real world. Give us an example how that is going to change going forward with technology and societal standards for two way texting.

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Josh Chin

So to start, at the start of the interaction, let's say you're, you're selling a bunch of different products. And customers typically come in with an exploration discovery mindset, and they're trying to figure out what's best for them. You have a supplement store, and you have all kinds of supplements, and all kinds of health concerns and all kinds of health benefits. If you're in a say, what's a, what's a popular supplement store in the US, GNC?

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Dave Pancham

GNC,

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Alex Ivanoff

GNC yeah.

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Josh Chin

We walk into GNC, you ask your retail assistant, hey, I'm looking to improve my sleep. Where should I look? And they're going to point you to the sleep section and you're gonna go, alright, I have supplement A in my cabinet. I'm looking for something else a little bit stronger. What do you recommend? And they're gonna point you out to this supplement, and you're gonna buy that supplement. And if the retail assistant is doing their job, they're gonna be like, “Hey, by the way, when you wake up in the morning, you might want more energy. This is the best supplement to complement what you just bought.” And upsell, right? So imagine all of that…

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Josh Chin

You picked a great example because GNC is so good at that. You walk into a GNC, they're gonna try and sell you for days, you spent three times the amount of money that you expected to.

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Josh Chin

That's training systems and SOPs, right? Imagine putting all of that together and automating the first half of the interaction. So going into a store, or website and initiating a conversation through SMS, or coming in from social media, and having someone text a keyword to a shortcode, a number, and initiating conversation that way. And starting that, that process, right? Hey, what are you looking for? If you're looking for sleep supplements, press one, energy supplements, press two, and so on and so forth. This is a bot. By the way, if you need any help, press zero and we'll send a real human being right with you. And that kind of self-serve process can happen, say 50% of the time, and you're gonna find the results that they want. And we're gonna get to the outcome that they want and make that purchase and you can build-in upsells. Hey, people who bought this supplement also bought these other supplements, you might want, you might like, like these. For instances where conversations get rerouted into the help desk, you got to make sure that your people are well-informed and well-prepared. So that's where your SOPs come in your presets with Gorgias, it's pretty easy. You could kind of preset responses for your people and put in place automations that allow for personalization to happen at scale as well. And I won't go too much into detail with that. I'm definitely not an expert in Gorgias, they're a great partner. Definitely check that out it’s G O R G I A S. Amazing tool. But yeah, that's kind of the progression of where I think conversational marketing would go to.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yes, that’s huge. I mean, it's essentially taking that chatbot that you would see on Facebook Messenger, but just, you know, obviously, those aren't as prevalent as texting. So texting bots and texting flows, you know, advancing the sophistication of those is going to be huge.

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Josh Chin

Exactly, exactly. It's interesting, because when you, when you look at texting and IMessage, outside of the US, it's not that big of a thing. The US is one of the biggest countries that doesn't use WhatsApp, all that much. outside of the US and UK, in Australia. And in Asia. We use whatsapp primarily, that has kind of by default replaced text, which isn't all that favorable, because that's controlled by Meta by Facebook. So, text remains one of the channels where brands are truly owned. They actually own that channel, because you own your email list. With WhatsApp, you're still kind of being throttled by the software by the service provider. And you're going through a massive conglomerate, massive company before reaching your audience. So it's kind of a different route.

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Alex Ivanoff

Do people in most international countries, I don't even know maybe you do. Did it like in Singapore, Do they exchange phone numbers or WhatsApp?

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Josh Chin

So the phone number is your whatsapp number which is fantastic.

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Alex Ivanoff

But is it like hey, text me or is it like, send me a message on WhatsApp?

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Josh Chin

They say “WhatApp me” It's become a verb now, yeah.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah. Almost like “Skype me” or, you know, “Slack me.”

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Josh Chin

Yeah, exactly!

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Alex Ivanoff

So, guys are at the bar picking up girls saying, hey, I’ll WhatsApp you?

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Josh Chin

Could, maybe, I’ve been out of that scene for a long time now. Yeah. Instagram, I mean, Instagram’s still a thing, right? Interesting. So the less intrusive way of, interestingly, Instagram still remains one of the less intrusive ways of staying in touch and getting connected, I realized. Oh, that's, that's the case for the US as well.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, and for the younger generation, I think Snapchat has taken the reins on in terms of communication, like, interesting. Speaking of picking up girls, I think like the younger kids, now the guys, with the boys, will be like, hey, you know, give me your Snapchat type of thing.

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Josh Chin

Do you think we'll ever come to a point where people go, “Hey, give me a TikTok. What's your TikTok?”

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Alex Ivanoff

I don't know. Maybe, maybe TikTok is, maybe they'll develop you know, sort of like their own messaging platform, kind of like Facebook did.

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Dave Ivanoff

I think it'll happen in time for the younger generation.

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Josh Chin

It's likely I mean, there's so much activity going on there. They want to keep people on maybe… Maybe texting on TikTok might just be a distraction to what, what people want, what TikTok wants people to do anyways,

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Dave Pancham

That’s true. They do have hours and hours of viewership and going into a conversation they take away from that and break from that. Someone sliding into your TikTok DMs, you know. You don't want that kind of thing

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Alex Ivanoff

Possibly. Going down in the TikTok DMs. So with the texting flows that you're talking about for SMS, primarily in the US, is that technology, is that software technology available for whatsapp internationally?

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Josh Chin

There are limitations, I'm not the most educated on what's happening in the WhatsApp space. But there are limitations with WhatsApp automations. You can, you can make that happen with a WhatsApp business account. I haven't seen a really good example of that happening yet. The interesting thing is that outside of the US especially in Southeast Asia, because WhatsApp is so prominent, businesses are often using WhatsApp as a business communication tool. It replaces Slack.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah.

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Josh Chin

Which I hate. Which is insane, So we don't, we don't do that. We have everybody come on to Slack. And if they don't have a Slack workspace we’ll create guest accounts for our clients. With WhatsApp because it's so commonly used by businesses and in work and in your personal life, it becomes just commonplace for WhatsApp messages to be opened up at open rates. Again, just like text is going to be like 90+ percent, it's impossible to leave a WhatsApp message unopened. And go left, left alone.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, no, I agree. I hate that too. Anytime anybody in business wants to WhatsApp me, I'm kind of just like, Can you do something else, can email me, hop on my Slack, you know, do something, maybe even Instagram because your, your personal number is attached to it. And it's kind of, you know, just you kind of want to separate the two. And that's what shocked me the most about businesses wanting to interact with their customers through WhatsApp, because they're, you know, I guess they're asking them for their phone number anyways, but you know, peer to peer, you're asking for your number, instead of like a business relationship platform, but.

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Josh Chin

Well, it works. And I think it's, it's a, it really depends on… If you look at the landscape of eCommerce and consumer behavior as a whole. It's largely controlled by three or four major corporations, major companies, you got Facebook, Google, Amazon, and now maybe, Apple. That's it. That's a whole eCommerce landscape, every tiny shift that these companies make sends waves down our industry in eCommerce. And as much as we try to optimize for media buying ad spend, and all these paid channels, and all these tech channels that we feel where we have control over, we are largely controlled by the major shifts happening externally, beyond our control. So that's a stark reality of a world that we live in today, where every little change can make or break waves and waves of businesses in the small and medium sized sector.

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Dave Pancham

Yeah, all the Apple changes, how much does that affect the whole eCommerce industry, you know, from Facebook to email.

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Josh Chin

Massive Q1 was incredibly tough for a lot of our clients. And by extension, us. The changes that were made, have, plus everything that's happening in the world today, kind of all added together and caused a massive impact on businesses that we worked with.

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Dave Pancham

Can you talk about brands?

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Josh Chin

I was just gonna say that the brands that were profitable before, that are now not profitable, because of rising freight costs, manufacturing costs, as well as shipping costs. And topping that off with a 3X CPM cost. So, not fun, not not the most fun environment to be in.

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Dave Pancham

What are…I know that last year, email had iOS 15, right? And what has, have there been other developments in email that have made it challenging for you, know, eCommerce brands?

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Josh Chin

Not, not entirely, we're still kind of consolidating and understanding what IOS 15 means for eCommerce brands today. And what I'll say is this, with IOS 15, the power has shifted to the consumer. And it means that tracking things on a high level and engagement metrics, especially in the high level will be really, really hard. There are some workarounds. So Klaviyo has implemented an alternative attribution model where it automatically excludes Apple opens and clicks. So as a proxy, you kind of have a pseudo understanding of what your true open rates are, and what your true engagement metrics are. The one thing that it really affects, is open rates. So for people listening who are not aware of what's happened with IOS 15. Apple users now have, Apple Mail users now have the option to mask their open behavior, which means that emails that they receive are going to be automatically routed through a proxy opened and having all the links kind of cleared up and all the little things happen. And then rerouted back to your inbox once you decide to actually open it. So what we see on our dashboard and on our email softwares is that open rates for Apple Mail users are going to be 100%. Because all of them are gonna be opened. So it skews our data significantly. That being said, click rates are still accurate. So that's still a good measure of success. We still have best practices that we can rely upon based on data that we've built over time. And learnings built over time. There are alternative methods of in…and indications of engagement, including zero, building zero-party data, and first-party data using quizzes. So quizzes have been a great friend. So tools like Octane AI, and Prehook.com. Those are really great tools to build quizzes and collect first, zero-party information from your customers, which means that these are things that your customers tell you. That's zero-party.

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Dave Pancham

I've never heard of zero-party data before. So, is that like when they take a survey and they voluntarily give date that way?

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Josh Chin

Correct. So is zero-party data, That's data that's voluntarily given. First-party data is what's information that's gathered on your website and that's what, that's the behavioral information that you gather from a subscriber’s in, or visitor’s interactions with your, with your business. So with zero-party data that's powerful, because you get to build a set of preferences, preferences, behaviors, and things here normally wouldn't be able to know about your audience, unless you asked. So things like coming back to the supplement example, what age you are, that's gonna give you an idea around the actual supplements that would make sense for that age range? What gender you are, what? Well, that's a tricky one, gender, maybe sex, right? What sex you are, what ailments you, you, you struggle with, what are your health goals, those are things that you could build in as automations. On the back end, once you've gathered enough information, you could upsell, cross sell, and build automated promotions and sequences around those preferences and information. So that becomes super powerful, you get to kind of route, kind of go around the whole open rates issue, because what we're doing with open rates and testing for higher open rates, is we're testing for which audience segments respond better to which angle and which style of copy, which gives us an, a kind of a pseudo indication on what their preferences are. So if you're able to kind of go directly to the consumer and say, Hey, tell me what you want, and tell me what your preferences are, you're able to kind of bypass all that. All that nonsense.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah. I mean, the best example of this zero-party data thing is Facebook's advertising model, right? You know, everybody, willingly when signing up for Facebook gives their age, gender, where they work, what they're interested in, you know, all of these different demographics and psychographics, that you pretty much don't give any other platform ever. And they built, you know, with that information, the world's most sophisticated, profitable, prosperous advertising system ever in history, because they had so much data about the user that they didn't even have to like, spy on you for that data. Obviously, they do spy on you, but just with the zero-party data that you're willingly giving them. That was enough at noon, the glory days of Facebook to create the world's best advertising system ever.

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Josh Chin

Yeah, I think that's what people don't realize as well. They're not spying on you. They know you already. Which is crazy.

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Alex Ivnaoff

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's probably 5-10 data points of information, just from signing up on Facebook, of what you're giving them for their advertising.

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Josh Chin

Yeah. And I read somewhere that Facebook has on average, like 10s and 10s, close to 50 data points per person, per user, on the platform.

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Dave Pancham

I think it's way higher than that actually.

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Alex Ivanoff

That's probably like a demographic type of thing. But in terms of behavior, they probably collect thousands, like, how long did I look at this dog video, right? Or, you know, how many people do I interact with in the marketing space? Like, that's more of like a psychographic thing that they collect? But in terms of like, yeah, like you said, Josh, like, how old you are, you know, where you live? Where you, where you work, Where do you travel, That's probably, you know, dozens and dozens of data points right there.

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Josh Chin

Fun.

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Dave pancham

You know about yourself, probably.

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Josh Chin

It's true. Yeah. It's true.

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Alex Ivanoff

So on the topic of tracking, Josh, you know, Chronos agency talks a lot about increasing revenue, and tracking the lifetime value. That's what LTV is for anyone listening? Can you walk us through when you're working with a brand? Or even just getting started with them? How do you track the lifetime value of a direct consumer brand customer? Like how do you actually calculate that?

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Josh Chin

It's, it's easy. If you're in Shopify, way easier, you could just pull out the total revenue of your business divided by the total number of customers you've served. And that gives you the average lifetime value per customer. And your goal is to increase that over time. So that's historical, right? That's the historical LTV. And that's going to kind of fluctuate over time. If you use a tool like Glue.io, or I believe Triple Wahle as well does that, you can see this happening kind of over time, and what that LTV looks like and can optimize for your LTV by making decisions in your business, like upsells, extensions of subscription, and things of that nature. So that kind of streamlines everything you do into a single north star metric, which is really important, because now you're effectively growing your return, your total return on ad spend. And obviously, I'm not on the paid side of things. But what I understand is that ad costs are rising. And it's…

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Alex Ivanoff

You understand correctly.

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Josh Chin

It's way more difficult to acquire a new customer. Right? So for that reason, it's really important to think about, how are you liquidating that ad costs as quickly as you can, but also how you're profiting over the long run with that customer? And how long does it take for you to get to profitability with a single customer, then that gives you the confidence to say, alright, I know that I'm going to get profitable by month two, because a typical customer stays with me for six months, and they spend 50 bucks on average per session, and they purchase three times over the course of six months, right? All of that information is going to give you the confidence to say, This is my, this is what I'm willing to spend per acquisition. This is how aggressive I can get. And this is how I can optimize my front end and acquire traffic in a way that suits my business. So that gives you a lot of clarity and a lot more control over your competitor. The business that wins isn't necessarily the one that has the cheapest CPA per se, not always, the business that wins is the one that understands your numbers the best because that gives you the power to optimize and make decisions around those numbers. The LTV piece with email, specifically, if you're in Klaviyo, which I suspect today most Shopify brand owners have Klaviyo installed, you can look at predict, predictive customer lifetime value, which gives you a sense of and what I don't like about that that feature is that it's relatively unknown how that's calculated. So it's a black box. But it gives you a good indication over how well you're progressing over time with how much your customers are going to be spending with you over the lifetime of that customer. So predictive lifetime value takes into account the historical spend of the customer, plus what they're expected to spend over the next, the remainder of their lifetime. And for however long that lasts. So that gives you a kind of a good picture of, as if you have like a set of 10,000 customers, how much more value is there in this set to optimize for that additional value? And how do I capture that additional value with tools like email, SMS and all the owned channels that you have. plus retargeting through advertising.

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Alex Ivanoff

You know, I wish, we in the production editing of the episode, what you said about the businesses that succeed know their numbers, we should we should drop some fire emojis all over the screen because that was some, that was some good stuff. So I hope, why don't you repeat that Josh, for everyone listening? The businesses that succeed are not the ones that have the cheapest CPA, but, what was it?

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Josh Chin

Yeah, so the businesses that succeed. And again, disclaimer, this doesn't come from me, it's probably a combination of stuff that I've heard from different people. But the businesses that win are not the ones that have the lowest CPA, but they are the ones who know their numbers the best, because that allows you to make the decisions that you need to make to succeed and optimize for profitability.

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Alex ivanoff

It's just math.

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Josh Chin

Yeah, math. Some people don't realize there are businesses that spend 1000s to acquire a single customer, especially in the service space, and they're still profitable. So what's a cheap CPA? And what's an expensive CPA? That's not a good question to ask. Right? So yeah, but the return on that CPA is what matters most.

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alex Ivanoff

So speaking of spending money, you know, whether it's acquiring customers or not, based on your knowledge in the email, SMS website development space, what is something that people spend money and time and resources on, energy, but it's not worth it? Generally?

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Josh Chin

Interesting question. Very good question. I think it's very easy to get caught up in doing things that your competitors are doing, and kind of imitating what your competitors are doing. And if it's working for them, and must work for me, kind of a mindset. That's a trap. That's a really big trap, because you don't know the ins and outs of their business. There is contextual information that you're definitely missing. And if you're kind of, if you're trying to duplicate exactly what someone else is doing in your business, it may work. But, and it may not work, but you won't know why. Which is the toughest thing to overcome, because you want to be able to make decisions repeatedly, over and over again, so that you find success. repeatedly. There's, there's a, there are decisions that are made that are good in hindsight. And there are decisions that are made that are good by virtue of the decision itself. So the outcome could be good. It could be bad. If you play poker, there's, you get what I mean, the outcome doesn't matter as much as the quality of your decisions, because that's going to allow you to succeed over the long run. In the short term, there might be variants, if you made a good decision, bad variants, bad outcome. Sometimes you make a bad decision, but good variant, good outcome. That's what we call dumb luck. And that's not repeatable. Right? That's great. We should celebrate. I mean, if you, if you, if you won some money from the jackpot, great, celebrate! But it's not something you can repeat. And that's not what you want in business, right? So that's how I think about customer's lifetime value.

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Alex Ivanoff

So my favorite quote of all time is Pablo Picasso, good artists copy but great artists steal. And I think a lot of people, especially in the marketing world, or you know, creative world, they apply this, which I think is good, but to your point, you have to do it in a way that when you're copying, quote on qoute copying another brand or competitor, do it in a way that is contextual to yourself and in a measurable way. But also don't just, exactly like stealing, you know, if you see a brand, running an ad or an email, don't steal their exact copy, don't steal their exact idea, steal their creativity behind that idea, and steal the mindset and the work ethic that went behind it. And then apply that to your business because you know, if you're, if you're stuck stealing everything, word for word, right, that doesn't get you anywhere because you don't know what like you said you don't know why it works for that brand. You have to know why, what works for you.

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Josh Chin

Exactly. Yeah, Alex, you got it exactly right. But that, there is a counter example of that as well. So I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot here but for example, there are instances where it kind of copying wholesale and having, copying as a strategy could work. as well, chances are the things that we're trying to do in business and life are probably not new and they've probably been done before. So it's not going to be surprising to come to a point where you're kind of just redoing things that have been done before, maybe in a better way, maybe in a different way, but they’ve been done before. So where does the line get drawn? I watched this really interesting mini-documentary, kind of a thing on YouTube, on this channel called the, I forgot, I think it's The Stokes Twins. Or, I don't know, check that out. So basically, what they've done is, they have millions and millions of subscribers. And at the beginning, they were, so it's a, they are twins, right? Stokes Twins, I think they're twins. And they're making videos and they weren't getting any traction, so they ended up copying another creator’s video idea, including its thumbnail, the title of the video, and the content of the video, and they just re-enacted the entire thing in their own way. At the beginning, it was kind of an adaptation sort of thing with a complete duplicate of the thumbnail and the title, what ended up happening is that that video that they made, the copy ended up outperforming the original by four times. So not ethical and they continued doing that over and over again… I thought that story was gonna go completely the other way, I thought, you're gonna say it bombed. It crushed, it crushed. And if they've done it many, many times over. And YouTube is not doing anything about it. They don't care. But well, creators are mad, they're incredibly, incredibly angry. And they've copied pretty much every single, large scale YouTuber that they could  possibly copy. They even copied Mr. Beast in one of their videos.

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Dave Pancham

I was about to ask If they could copy him.

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Josh Chin

That's the thing, right? So Mr. Beast, I would have expected him to retaliate, sue or do something about it. What he ended up doing was just spend more, and create a moat that's so massive, that is so defensible, because nobody else can outspend him in his videos. So it's impossible to copy, it’s literally impossible to copy his videos now. Because he spends millions and millions of dollars on every single video. And in order to achieve that skill, you've, you've kind of get, get to that point where you can do things like that. But at the same time that the lesson there is that now, there now Mr. Beast has built such a defensible strategy where it is impenetrable because it's based on, it's based on a strategy that…that cannot be exploited. It's literally just money unless a billionaire comes in and says I'm going to start a YouTube channel and I'm going to compete with Mr. Beast, against Mr. Beast. I'm gonna spend millions of dollars on every single video, I'm gonna lose a shit ton of money but I'm gonna beat Mr. Beast, which is highly unlikely, he's gonna win. So I think that's really interesting.

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Dave Pancham

So are you a poker player?

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Josh Chin

Yeah. So one thing you got to know about me is that I'm an obsessive personality. And that means when I find interest in anything, right now, it's longboarding. Before that it was tennis. Before that it was, and I get, I get bored very quickly. So I move from one thing to another, I go really deep into each of these things. And poker happened to be one of the things that kind of latched on, and have been with me for a long time. And I go really deep into the mechanics of poker, why it works, the strategies that make it successful. I spent a lot of time studying poker back in the day, so yeah.

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Alex Ivanoff

You're just like me, man. Last year for me the past 12 months or so it was chess, and I'm starting to think it's going to, for the next 12 months be golf because I've been trying to get more into golf. So maybe if I talk to you in a year I'll be on the pro tour.

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Josh Chin

Very cool. Very cool.

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Alex Ivanoff

Just kidding. It's unlikely to happen. Yeah, it's not gonna happen.

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Josh Chin

Let’s see.

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Dave Pancham

I think an addictive personality is definitely an entrepreneur thing. You know? Common at least.

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Alex Ivanoff

The same you know, psychological tendencies that get you to start your own business gets you addicted to a certain hobby for sure.

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Josh Chin

I'm definitely not surprised, definitely not surprised. I think that it takes, to build something from scratch and persevere through it all, and not see any results for quite a bit of time. It's challenging and it’s demanding, and it takes motivation that's beyond motivation that they can find off a YouTube video.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah. It's funny. Josh, going back looking at the past five years. What do you wish that you knew when you first started that you know now?

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Josh Chin

How to Speak Korean. No, I'm kidding.

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Alex Ivanoff

Why Korean?

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Josh Chin

Just came to my mind. One thing that I wish I knew. I wish that I could have spent more time defining problems and spending more money finding solutions than I did. More time defining problems, defining and refining problems, problem statements and spend more money finding solutions.

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Alex Ivanoff

So essentially failing faster. Failing faster and more expensive.

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Dave pancham

Do you feel like you did not spend enough? Or you were,

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Josh Chin

Too slowly. I think we moved a little bit too slowly. And then, then again, on the flip side, I didn't exactly have a ton of experience to draw from and I was doing things as I learnt them and it was kind of like building a spaceship while it took off. So on one hand, I don't think that I would have been able to do it any other way. On the other hand, knowing what I know now, I think I could have spent a lot more money fixing problems, and spending a lot more time defining those problems in the first place.

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Dave Pancham

If I remember correctly, didn't your agency grow really fast, in the beginning?

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Josh Chin

We made over 1 million in revenue in the first year. Very profitable, massive lesson, you're incredibly profitable, but incredibly unsustainable. Because a lot of the workload ended up coming back to me and to my co-founder. And we had basically no middle management, no operational team and it was incredibly painful. So, we took a lot of that profits and built a really sizable operational team and in the agency space, it's just three things…isn't it? It’s acquiring customers, servicing those customers, and, and making sure that things don't break off operations. And we broke things because we had no operational foundation. So that's what we've kind of spent money building over the past couple of years.

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Alex Ivanoff

Wow, that's impressive, man. Good for you. I know, I know we said this a couple of months ago when we last talked, but I really tip my hat off to you and what you've done in just a few years. It's really fascinating and admirable. 

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Josh Chin

Appreciate that. Appreciate that. Yeah, a lot of times, I feel like it's not deserved. A lot of times the, and this is the kind of, I think the mindset of, I'm not sure if people go through this, but this is something that I deal with a lot, the self-talk, right? And the self-talk always ends up with: “I was just lucky and I'm not sure if I can repeat this. Is this dumb luck? Or is this something I can do again?” And it's really hard to answer, and it's really hard to kind of think about. I guess some people call it impostor syndrome, right?

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah. But I think every entrepreneur suffers from that a little bit. And I think it's important to note that I know Mark Cuban, one of my favorite entrepreneurs, says, all the time, like all the best, the most successful of us are always like a little lucky. Like you, you know, I mean, you can't, somewhere along the way, something happened coincidentally, in your favor, and, you know, wouldn't have happened otherwise, nobody knows. But you know, there's some luck for sure.

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Josh Chin

Yup. Don't deny the variants.

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Dave Pancham

Yeah. But you're putting yourself in a position to get lucky though. Right? Right. Right. 

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Josh Chin

It's true, sure, I don't deny that. And I acknowledged I've put in a lot of hard work, and my team has put in a lot of hard work to make things happen and put us in the position that we're at today. But it still is nerve-wracking. Because now here's the conundrum. On one hand, you kind of want to be thinking this way, and always kind of be on your toes, and not settle and not be satisfied, but at the same time, that's gonna cause a shit ton of anxiety if you're not present and grateful for what we have today and where we've come from. So I think I'm just trying to find a balance between the two right now.

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Dave Pancham

I definitely suffer from anxiety as well. And it's, it's funny, one thing that resonated with me in your story, what you were saying earlier, was that you took a course by Ezra, and you did what he said to do and you're like, and it worked. When you said that earlier, I'm like, it's always nice when you take a course and you actually learn something that actually works. And then, but then it's so funny, it's like, because if I understand correctly, or what was resonating for me, because that happened with me too. It's like I learned something in a program, I implemented it in your work and that started the business and you're like, I wasn't the genius to figure this out. I just copied and pasted it.

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Alex Ivanoff

Well, a lot of the times, you know, in the service industry, we're not doing anything, you know, we're not, we're not creating a new technology or product that we're taking to venture capital in Silicon Valley, right, we're just we're taking a model that has been proven. We're applying our own culture and kind of our own funk to it, and just building our own thing. And it's, it's a proven model before, from someone before us, and we're just applying it to our clients. So I think that's going to happen a lot with any eCommerce brand listening, same thing, right? If you're starting out, you know, a new headphone, right? You're gonna copy a lot of the things that you can learn from Apple and Samsung, it's the same idea.

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Josh Chin

Precisely. And you guys are doing it really well. You guys are crushing it, you have over a 100, hundreds of clients every single month paying you money?

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, we have about 150 or so.

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Josh Chin

Crazy. 150. Think about that. Think about that man. 150 businesses paying you money every single month.

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Alex Ivanoff

And if you're a brand, think about if you're a brand, right? How many customers you have like your, your clients, Josh, I imagine like, you know, degenerating millions of dollars in revenue per client or per…Yeah, per client. They're, they're looking at 1000s and 1000s of customers every month. That's a success. That's an accomplishment to look at your customer base and say, Oh my God, look how many people are buying my shit every month! 

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Josh Chin

True. Yeah. That’s true.

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Dave Pancham

So another question for you, Josh, here on the entrepreneur side, how do you, with I know your business being sizable too. How do you handle stress? How, you know, I think we've kind of on the topic here on mindset, right? Like, how do you train that other side? And how do you manage stress? How do you make sure that you're ideally a high performance entrepreneur?

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Josh Chin

I have, I naturally have a really high stress tolerance. But I'm also very aware of how I deal with stress, what's my fight response? And it's typically an escape of some kind. Longboarding? That's why I tend to get obsessed with things outside of work. And there is, there's always going to be new stressors that come by, that is going to be challenging, based on where I'm at right now in my life and my business. Looking back at the stressors that I've faced over the years, obviously, they're insignificant now, and it seems like it's stupid. For, it seemed like it's, it was for nothing. Stressing out for nothing, right? But knowing, that it's also important to kind of keep in mind, at least for me, that there are more important things in life than what I'm dealing with right now. And I guess that partly comes from gratefulness. And Gary Vee is a great, great guy, to remind us all of that. Being grateful for where we're at and what we have today and doing something nice for someone else, I think that puts us in the position of removing from our self-centeredness, and putting our attention towards something else that's worthwhile, and someone else that’s worthwhile. That helps a lot with the stresses and the issues and the problems that you, that I just cannot avoid. One of the things that's been really helpful for me is, surprisingly, a supplement called Ashwagandha. It might be placebo, but I feel a lot more in control and just, just a lot more present. But I mean, whatever works, right? Whatever your little ritual could be minus just swallowing a bunch of pills in the morning, or a bunch of herbs. Whatever gets you in the, in the position to tackle.

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Alex Ivanoff

What kind of herbs Josh?

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Josh Chin

I'm in Singapore, so you don't get a lot of variety. There's a bunch of other stuff. L-Theanine, that's not an herb. A bunch of neotropics. I got an, Oh Lion's Mane, Lion's Mane mushroom. That works like a charm. I swallow a bunch of those in the morning as well.

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Alex Ivanoff

Gotcha! Yeah. Now there's a lot of helpful ones out there. So I know we're running low on time here, I want to move on to our signature question that we like to use to round out every episode with every guest. If you could sit in a room with a bunch of mentors once every morning to help guide you, who would be in that room, that could be alive or dead?

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Josh Chin

It's a good one. I would have Ray Dalio in that room. Ray Dalio’s book Principles was a huge inspiration to the culture that we've built at Chronos, and the beliefs and the values that we hold at work today. And I’d love to take his opinion on the decisions that we're making.

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Alex Ivanoff

That's a good one.

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Josh Chin

Yeah, I would have a, I would probably spend some time selecting the key executives of my competitors, way ahead of me, way ahead of me, and have them all in that same room as well and I'll ask them questions around how they've done what they've done. And the surprising thing is that, this is one of the things that I, I really, truly admire and enjoy about our industry is that people are generally very open and very giving, especially if they're way ahead of you, or just a couple of steps ahead of you because those are ahead of you, have the mind, have gotten to where they're at by having the mindset of abundance, and knowing that if I help you, it's going to come back to me someday, and I'm growing the industry and I'm not shooting myself in the foot. And if you step outside of the internet marketing space, in the marketing space in general, and say you go into what kind of clients do you work with, Alex?

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Alex Ivanoff

We work with that with fitness clients, fitness studios, and eCommerce brands.

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Josh Chin

Now, so, do you see a difference between eCommerce brands and how they kind of operate and collaborate across like competitors versus fitness brands? And how they can collaborate or compete with their competitors. Do you see a difference in that, that regard?

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Alex Ivanoff

Oh, yeah, I mean, just from a locality standpoint, geographical standpoint, you know, a gym owner is just really looking at who's across the street, down the street? And how can they, how can they beat them, whereas an eCommerce brand is hot, right? What other national brands are there in my sector? So that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is, you know, the model is completely different. And so, an eCommerce brand has to look at everything from, you know, their advertising funnel to their website, to their product design, you know, different things like that. A gym, they're really looking at, they don't care so much about their website as they do their marketing, their sales system, when people walk in the door, what the experience inside the gym is like, in person physical, you know, it's a lot, everything is so, so different in terms of how you're looking at your competition. I hope that answers your question.

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Josh Chin

I find that in the eCommerce sector, people are generally much more open to sharing their trade secrets and how they do what they do. And I think that's really, really helpful for someone who's really new, relatively new in the business space and the eCommerce space. And being able to collaborate and latch on to the learnings of others and being able to contribute and share my learnings and, and understanding to others have been a big part of how we've been able to grow so quickly. I've recently had a conversation about asking a, so I've had a, I had a friend who reached out on Facebook, he had a bunch of these questions for me and I ended up introducing or turning him to a competitor of his and kind of having him connect with that person. And that the response I got was "how would I be able to collaborate with this person? How would I be able to have an open discussion?". I was like: :Just do it". Some of my best ideas and best insights come from direct competitors that I compete with on a very regular basis and that's been game changing because we know that the industry and the pie is so big, so large that no single business can consume the entirety of it. So if the industry is growing and scaling really quickly, as is with eCommerce you're typically going to find situations like this.

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Alex Ivanoff

Yeah, I totally agree. Like you said, a mindset of abundance, right? This is not Apple versus Samsung where they can exchange or leak out trade secrets on, on their new phone model, right? You know, this is, it's completely different, much more segmented so, I love that, love that answer. I love that it's a very interesting answer. Nobody's ever given an answer that I would love to have my competitors’ executives in the room with me every morning, that's very interesting. Hopefully, they're listening to this. Cool, so Josh thank you so much for hopping on with us, like I said, early morning your time and just dropping so much fire so many fire emoji, so much knowledge. The brand owners listening to this, they're gonna have a field day with this information. Where can they follow you, learn more about Chronos agency? I'm sure we'll put links in the description but what's the best place to learn from you and you know, work with Chronos if they're interested?

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Josh Chin

Yeah, so first place Twitter. I'm trying to be a little more active on Twitter. So it's, you'll find Joshua Chin, or you can go to Chronos.agency. That's Chronos.agency. No dot com. That's it. And you can email me at Joshua@Chronos.agency. That's my actual email. I respond.

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Alex Ivanoff

Dropping the personal email on this show Love it.

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Josh Chin

I love to have a good conversation, that's, that's why I do what I do, so reach out.

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Alex Ivanoff

For sure. I'm sure people will. Awesome! Thanks so much, Josh again, and for everyone listening. And we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks, Josh.

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Josh Chin

Thank you. Cheers!

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