Welcome to the Effective Ecommerce podcast I’m your host Travis Marziani. So I want to talk a little bit about what this podcast is all about and then I want to go into my story. So this first episode we’re just gonna give a general overview of what this podcast is about and how I got started in Ecommerce. So first off the first thing I want to say is this podcast the first  40  episodes or. So I want to do a complete ecommerce course everything I wish I would have known when I first was starting my ecommerce company and I learned a lot from listening to podcasts and I wish someone would have just said hey here’s step    here’s the A through Z now obviously this isn’t gonna be as complete as it possibly could there’s things that I don’t know about Ecommerce still there’s a lot I still don’t know about Ecommerce but my goal is to take everything I know about Ecommerce and condense it down into this let’s call it an audio course that I’m giving out for free as a podcast. So first off let’s talk a little bit about my story. So my name is Travis Marziani and I started in Ecommerce about five years ago I had a job at a corporate job I quit that a little over four and a half years ago I pretty much quit it cold turkey I wasn’t making any money on ecommerce and I don’t recommend that for everybody I think if you’re young and you don’t have a lot of responsibilities that makes sense which I was and still I am but for a lot of people that I know the right route is to instead just do it as a side hustle. So a little over four years ago I quit my job to start my first Ecommerce company be dance where it’s a dance clothing company the way I got into it is my mom I actually Cohen it with my mom and she had a lot of people come up to her and say she used to do custom dance clothing. So a lot of people would come up to her and say hey I want a pair of shorts and light purple and she’s you know she’d say that’s not really what I do I do more custom costumes. So what she would do is the fancy complete custom costumes think $ and they’d say you know. So she’d tell the people go online just go buy a pair of your light purple shirts I’m sure you’ll find it some shorts I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere they’d come back and they’d say no I can’t find it can you make it for me and she’d say sure it’s gonna be you know $100 or some premium price. So this happened again again and again. So when I was quitting my job I asked everybody and I told everybody that I wanted to start an online store I wanted to start something where I could be location independent where I could work on my own time I could be my own boss basically and when you start telling people that everybody has an idea for you it’s like if you tell people I want to develop an app everybody’s got an app idea and I probably had five or six different people that told me oh here’s an idea for an online store you know maybe we could work on this together but of all the ideas my mom’s idea made the most sense. So even though she was doing the custom dance clothing this was a new company that we were gonna start from scratch together because this the difference between this company and her last company was we just were gonna do the basic pieces we were gonna do the shorts and our USP was plus colors all handmade in the United States and it was perfectly scalable because if we just sold one item a week my mom could sew it we could you know cut it. So it ship it but then as we grew we hired someone to do the cutting. So as we started selling  items a day we hired someone to do cutting and then we hired someone to do the shipping and then before you know it now we have about  to  employees depends on what time of the year it is probably closer to  especially right now  employees that do the cutting sewing shipping everything it’s all it’s all done by our employees my mom runs everything she’s more of like a manager position she rarely does any cutting sewing shipping any of the more boring tasks we’ll call it. So that’s how I got started a little over four years ago I also just launched a new company called performance nut butter it’s a macadamia coconut cashew blended nut butter tastes absolutely amazing you go to performance nut butter calm if you want to try it out its. So it’s. So good but anyways it comes in individual serving packs and what makes my company different is not only is it a superior product that has higher quality ingredients higher quality nuts it’s also the marketing and this is something you’re gonna hear me repeat over and over again in this podcast is it’s not just about having a better product it’s about mitching down and having a market that you dominate. So my company is called performance nut butter it specifically targeted towards athletic type people people that run triathlons or CrossFit people things like that as opposed to the other nut butters that are out there and there are other premium nut butters that are out there that are really good but their marketing and their branding is off I do think mine that’s better but I’m obviously a little partial I have not impartial with that. So the other thing I want to talk about what that company is I did it as an experiment I said could I launch a Kickstarter in  days and you can go to my YouTube channel if you go to Effective Ecommerce.com YouTube it’ll-it’ll Ford you there or just go to YouTube and search for Effective Ecommerce but if you go to my YouTube channel I documented all  days of creating the company and then I documented all  days of the actual Kickstarter and my goal is and I’ve been trying to do it I’ve been doing a decent job my goal is to work on this project at least one day a week and probably only one day a week maybe two days a week during more crucial times but document more importantly document the entire process I’m hoping for this to become a million dollar company and I’m hoping to be able to show people hey this is exactly what I did this is how I did it if I can do it you can do it as well I think when you’re starting off with anything new especially with Ecommerce or internet marketing it’s very easy to get discouraged and say hey this isn’t possible it is possible it takes hard work and that’s another thing I would think I want to reiterate and you’ll hear me talk about again and again if you’re looking just for some easy cash which I know a lot of people get seduced into Ecommerce because if you’re looking for easy cash this is not the right thing for you might get lucky you might get lucky and find a niche that nobody ever thought about and I’ve seen it I’ve had friends I’ve seen people that aren’t necessarily friends but people that are also in the space I’ve seen them get lucky and make a lot of money in Ecommerce or internet marketing that shouldn’t be your plan your plan should be this is it’ll work if you keep going at it I like to talk about the Native Americans the Native American rain dance. So there’s an old phrase that I heard is the reason that the rain dance always working if you don’t remember that was the Native American are supposedly the Native American tribes would dance until it would rain and they were supposed to like their dancing was supposed to bring about the rain but I say the reason it worked is they kept dancing until it rained and if you dance for long enough if you work at ecommerce or internet-marketing long enough of course you’re gonna crack it and it might not be your first company it might not be your second company another thing people always say is four out of five businesses fail well first off that’s not actually true it’s four out of five businesses fail within the first five years or after yeah within the first five years you can make a lot of money in five years. So that’s not bad. So that’s the first thing I’d say the second thing I’d say is four out of five people aren’t listening to this podcast or watching YouTube videos. So you’ve already got a leg up on them I think that’s very important if you’re the kind of person that listens up listen to podcasts or watches YouTube videos you’re doing better than most people because you’re trying to educate yourself on the last thing though I want to say on that is when people would tell me that when I was first quitting my job I would always tell them okay I’ll start five businesses statistically one of them will succeed if four out of five businesses fail and obviously that’s a joke but the truth is if you start one business that fails just know that you’re gonna learn lessons from that and then the second business will come along and you’ll do better on the second business and if that still fails the third business will come along the other good part about Ecommerce is generally speaking it’s lower overhead especially in the initial stages. So it’s a lot harder for it to quote unquote fail. So that’s a little bit of my rant I think if you’re listening to just the podcast version of this it’s important to note that I do have a YouTube channel like I said Effective Ecommerce where a lot of the topics that we’re gonna be covering in this podcast I go into depth about on my YouTube channel I show two toriel’s because a lot of things it’s hard for me to really explain over a podcast it’s much easier to show on a actual you know YouTube video. So with that being said that’s I think a decent amount about myself I can probably talk more if this is something that you want to you want to know more about me definitely let me know I’ll throw out a few other quick tidbits I’m based currently in Los Angeles California. So if you’re in Los Angeles please send me an email Travis at Effective Ecommerce calm or even if you’re just traveling through I yea currently actually I’m in Santa Monica. So definitely if you’re ever in the area send me an email but with that being said I want to let you know about a way that you can get a free one-on-one consulting session with me I am available for hire but I try to charge a high enough price that for most people it’s not going to make sense because I don’t really love the idea of trading my time for money but you know if you can afford me I am available you can email me Travis at Effective Ecommerce.com for details on that my rates fluctuate based on how busy I am I will say though if you want to get a free one-on-one consulting session if you don’t already have a Shopify store you go to Effective Ecommerce.com/ Shopify and if you are thinking about signing up for Shopify which I highly recommend doing I think it’s the best platform out there use my link and I’ll give you a free one-on-one consulting session plus you get a free -day trial on top of that and this is the big thing if you go to iTunes look for the Effective Ecommerce podcast subscribe and leave a -star review every month I’m going to be picking someone at random to get a free one-on-one consulting session with. So whether you want the consulting session or not it really helps out if you go to iTunes and leave that five-star review because the more five-star reviews we can get on this podcast the more energy I can spend on it and the higher quality guests we can have basically the better podcast it’s gonna be for you and I know a lot of times people say go leave that five-star review and it’s easy to forget but that’s why I’m hoping to incentivize you with the free one-on-one consulting session but either way whether you want that or not go leave that five-star review on iTunes definitely check out my YouTube video i do have ecommerce courses as well i currently have two courses a general how to start an Ecommerce store course and a facebook ads course you go to Effective Ecommerce calm to check those out i’m gonna be coming out with an AdWords in an email marketing course very soon and some other big news i’m looking to take a group of people probably in the new year  January of  take them from A to Z together will probably get a group of  us and try to go from very beginning of maybe coming up with an idea or people that already have an idea all the way to having a built ecommerce store we’re gonna it’s a five week course if you’re interested in that you can go to effective ecommerce.com/ a-z just the lowercase letters a Z and right now it’s a waiting list but pretty soon that’s gonna be an active page like I said it’s a it’s gonna be a complete course where you have access to me we meet once a week as a group and go from beginning to end. So that’s pretty much everything like I said if you want to sign up for Shopify Effective Ecommerce.com / Shopify leave a five star review on iTunes for a chance to win a free consulting session plus I’m just it’d be a huge thank you I’d really appreciate that you can check out my courses at Effective Ecommerce.com and Effective Ecommerce.com/az to look at the the hand held course where I walk you through on how to start a store. So thank you. So much for listening to this first podcast we have a lot more episodes coming out the podcast currently is going to be coming out every Monday and Thursday and there’s good reasons why Monday and Thursday but. So right now every Monday and Thursday is gonna be a new lesson on how to start an Ecommerce store I hope you enjoyed this video this podcast and thank you. So much for listening.