Ready to embark on an entrepreneurial adventure?
Join us as we sit down with Justin Snyder, the formidable force behind Forest Super Foods, who demystifies a two-decade journey in the e-commerce world.
Get the insider scoop as he candidly shares his evolution from selling handmade leather bags door-to-door to building a thriving business online.
With Justin as our guide, we traverse the many challenges of crafting a website from scratch, and explore the merits of WordPress over Shopify.
We'll uncover why speed and reliability are the holy grail in e-commerce, and why obsessing over metrics can be a slippery slope. Justin also highlights the transformative power of rebranding 'cheap' to 'good quality' and how it upgraded his customers' perception.
He advocates for a strong value system in business, emphasising relationships over transactions and the significance of aligning business and personal values.
We delve into his unique marketing strategies, the untapped potential of community groups, and the magic of crafting emails that provide value.
We discuss the pivotal role of customer experience, the art of authentic advertising, and why product quality is king.
As we wrap up, Justin shares his future plans for Forest Super Foods, the significance of authentic reviews, and a peek into the boundless opportunities in e-commerce.
This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone interested in e-commerce, so don’t miss out!
Join us for this Remarkable conversation with Justin Snyder and get ready to ignite your entrepreneurial spirit!
Join 'A Remarkable Newsletter' for weekly high performance marketing and content actionable tips.
Ready to embark on an entrepreneurial adventure?
Join us as we sit down with Justin Snyder, the formidable force behind Forest Super Foods, who demystifies a two-decade journey in the e-commerce world.
Get the insider scoop as he candidly shares his evolution from selling handmade leather bags door-to-door to building a thriving business online.
With Justin as our guide, we traverse the many challenges of crafting a website from scratch, and explore the merits of WordPress over Shopify.
We'll uncover why speed and reliability are the holy grail in e-commerce, and why obsessing over metrics can be a slippery slope. Justin also highlights the transformative power of rebranding 'cheap' to 'good quality' and how it upgraded his customers' perception.
He advocates for a strong value system in business, emphasising relationships over transactions and the significance of aligning business and personal values.
We delve into his unique marketing strategies, the untapped potential of community groups, and the magic of crafting emails that provide value.
We discuss the pivotal role of customer experience, the art of authentic advertising, and why product quality is king.
As we wrap up, Justin shares his future plans for Forest Super Foods, the significance of authentic reviews, and a peek into the boundless opportunities in e-commerce.
This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone interested in e-commerce, so don’t miss out!
Join us for this Remarkable conversation with Justin Snyder and get ready to ignite your entrepreneurial spirit!
Join 'A Remarkable Newsletter' for weekly high performance marketing and content actionable tips.
Welcome to the Ecommerce Australia Podcast. Welcome to Ecommerce Australia. I'm your host, ryan Martin, founder of Remarkable Digital. This podcast is aimed at those who have their own online business, e-commerce professionals looking to keep current on the trends, and for anyone interested in learning more about the world of Ecom. For those of you seeking direct assistance, remarkable Digital is just a call away. Our mission is to be remarkable, doing great things for great people and great businesses. I understand how much choice you have and how many podcasts are out there, so I'm truly grateful you've tuned in. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or topics you'd like covered. Let's get started. Welcome to Ecommerce Australia.
Speaker 1:Today's guest is the founder of Forest Superfoods, the e-commerce store in, justin Snyder. So Justin's been working in e-commerce since 2003, and for the people who are bad at maths like myself, that's a good 20-year career. So, whilst building other brands throughout his journey, forest Superfoods is a market leader in Australian-grown superfoods. They're all sent express, which is super good to hear, so you receive them fresh and fast. They have over 5,000 product reviews. Now this isn't a sponsored post, but you should definitely jump on their website purely, even if you're just an e-com nerd like me Within the first fold. They have social proof. They make it super easy to find products, they have a quiz which helps you find the best product for you, and they have the best sellers, so you know what they're best known for, which ensures the least amount of friction for first-time users. So that's a long intro, but, mate, welcome to the podcast. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Ryan, it's great to be here and that was an excellent introduction.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I'm hopefully getting better. So no, mate, look, I appreciate you taking the time to tell us a bit about your e-com journey. Obviously, 20 years is a long time to be in an industry like this, so it would be interesting to sort of see how that started and where that's led to. But what was your first sort of foray into e-com back in 2003?
Speaker 2:Well, I finished high school in 2002, and I had this business, which I still got called Happy Cow, which does like handmade leather bags, and I was going door-to-door selling these bags and I'd go into you know, 100 different clothing stores At 99 people would say I'm not interested to get out, and the other one out of 100 would say the boss isn't here, come back later. And I just thought there's got to be a better way to spend my time than just like door-knocking and getting nowhere. And internet sales were just starting to really become a thing and having like websites was just really starting to become a legitimate thing. And I thought, through this website, if I set up a website, I could sell even when I'm asleep. I don't have to be on the street knocking on doors, and it means I could also reach people all over the world. So it made sense for me to get into that and I didn't have any money. So I'd spend, you know, days and nights learning how to code and learning how to program. And my first website was a bit like the I don't know if you've seen the Sims 7 series about how I build a website and it's just got all the twirling gifs everywhere and just like animations that don't make any sense and that was very similar to my first website. But I loved it, you know, and I loved the idea of like learning how do I put a banner on and how do I like make that image bigger and how do I like put this in a more like logical sequence and all that kind of stuff around e-commerce. I really enjoyed it and it was kind of it was fun to me to stay up and do it and when you get those first few sales, they motivate you to keep going into like push harder.
Speaker 2:And really since then for that business, 90% of customers have been in the US, and having it as e-commerce has allowed me to reach those customers, you know, even when I didn't have any money to be able to market to them. And of course, e-commerce has changed a lot now, but back then there was no just drag and drop to make a website. You know you had to code it in, and so I was coding it in and I think I was doing it just plain HTML website in the beginning. And then Magento came out and I moved to Magento and for people who don't know what Magento is, it's great if you've got a team of 100 developers and it's a nightmare if you're a 20-year-old kid on your own trying to work out what to do. But that was all I had access to and so I was teaching myself how to use Magento and every time you try and update a plug in the whole thing would crash and it was a nightmare. But I didn't know any different and so I was using that for that business and that business is they're really cool, like I think they're cool, but these really cool like high-end bum bags is basically what they are, and there was never really an industry for that. It was always like I had to, and this was before the days of social media. So it was trying to like create demand for a product where the demand didn't exist there, and that was that's really hard without having a lot of money to put behind marketing, and so I was always looking for something else to do as well, because that business was always like I paid the bills and I quit my job when I was 21. And you know it was good, but it didn't. I could see that it wasn't going to scale because it didn't have the demand behind it and at around the same time as I was kind of learning to code and building these websites.
Speaker 2:I was traveling a lot around the world. I spent a lot of time in India and I found these things called spirulina and they actually had spirulina chips, which sound disgusting, but it was amazing and so I would, and I was vegetarian and so I was eating spirulina chips and I felt great. I could feel that my body was getting all the iron and protein and lots of micronutrients and all the different stuff it needed. And it was just a food. It's just an algae that grows on top of water and I it always blew me away that there were foods out there that could improve my health and improve my well-being and there was no side effects and there was no pills to take and there was no prescriptions and there was no, there was nothing artificial, it's just a food. And that always kind of stuck in my head and I always was fascinated by that.
Speaker 2:And then when I got to maybe I think about 28, I said to a good friend of mine at the time who's an amazing graphic designer. I said he had a job in a mining company that he wasn't particularly enjoying and he wanted to get out of there and I said I've got this idea for a business. What if we start this business that's just selling these high quality, nutritious foods to people? And back then there was probably two other companies selling super foods online and they were really expensive. So I thought what we'll do is we'll come in and make it affordable for people and so we'll call it cheap super foods, and at the time that made sense because we were like the cheaper end of the market. But we're also doing certified organic whole food, highest quality super foods on the market.
Speaker 2:Cause my whole thing is like I don't want to sell something that I wouldn't want to take, and I wouldn't take a low quality food or a low quality product of any kind I wouldn't be happy with. I'd much rather spend a bit more and get the highest quality possible. And so we do this for years. We call it cheap super foods. And it didn't arrive and it got. You know, it got legs and it was growing.
Speaker 2:And then one day I turned around to him. I looked over at him from my desk to his and I said how do you feel about the name cheap super foods? And he goes. I hate it and I go. I feel so embarrassed telling people we're called cheap super foods.
Speaker 2:And that day we went what can we change it to? And we went well, lots of these foods come from the jungle, they come from the forest. It's all whole foods. Why don't we go with forest super foods? And so we changed overnight from cheap super food to forest super foods and that was a really good lesson for me in terms of, like being really clear with what part of the market you're serving, and I didn't want to serve the cheap end of the market. And it was a good change to make, because now you can get cheap versions of most of our products in the supermarket and in the pharmacy and there's, you know, plenty of people. You know there's a hundred sellers online selling, like we do, all these strain grown, freeze, dried whole lines, whole mushrooms. But there's, you know, a hundred sells online selling the imported, you know extracts that are like spray dried, and you know you can buy the similar products that we sell but a lot cheaper.
Speaker 2:And I didn't want to do that because I don't want to put cheap stuff in my body and also I don't know why this and I don't know whether you feel the same, but I feel like if you're taking something for your health, it doesn't make sense to take something which is like questionable in terms of like how good the quality is or whether it's got heavy metals, or whether it's got grown in pollution, environment or what fillers they put in or any of that crap. But, like I'm taking something for health, you know I'm happy to spend an extra 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month to get like a really good quality product that I know is doing good for me, because if you're taking saying that, you know you could be taking some cheap product that's doing more damage than what you had to begin with. Yeah, yeah, 100%, you know, and so changing that name from cheap to for a soup foods made a huge difference in terms of how I felt about the bread and being able to communicate to the customer. What is we do? And I think we've had 100% year on year growth, I think for five years. I think this is the fifth year. Good on you and during a recession as well.
Speaker 2:I think the majority of that is just because we have a reputation for integrity in the market and people tell other people hey, you can trust this brand, you know, and even like you know, like on social media, if we get like, you know there occasionally be a troll coming on and going like I don't know what they say, but like a troll coming on and say, you know, this is garbage or this is hype or whatever, and then the customers will all come in and go.
Speaker 2:You obviously don't know who you're talking about. You obviously don't know who this brand is. Maybe do some research before you start trolling. You know like, and I even have to get involved. I think a lot of that is like it's just about value system integrity, and I think a lot of people have one set of values and integrity in their personal life and with their family and friends and another in business, and I don't understand that. I think you have to have the same values, integrity across the board. I mean I'm a big believer that, like I'd rather make no money and sleep well at night, knowing that I'm doing the best I can to provide people with the best quality products, then make a huge amount of money and inside feel like I'm not doing the right thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I think it might be on my website, but I say a clear conscience is a soft pillow, exactly. You put your head on the pillow each night. You know that you've done the right thing by everyone that you've spoken to today, and relationship over transactions, another one where it's yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that comes back in spades as well. Like 50% of our sales are to returning customers and I think that's massive in this space when there's so much competition and so many people doing similar things and offering a cheaper version of what we're doing. And I think that speaks volumes to the fact that people really get a lot of benefit from the products. And I mean, it sounds so simple, but I think too often we get caught up in making a beautiful website and amazing photography and really clever marketing and videos and stuff and we forget to make sure that we've got a really good product.
Speaker 2:You know, I think like that's the most important thing is that Alex Homozi, who I went really deep on for a while on YouTube, you know he always says that like, if you want to scale, you have to have a product that people love. It's that simple. If people don't love it, you're not going to scale. And I think a lot of these kind of you know, every day I feel like I see a new mushroom brand pop up on Facebook, doing like mushroom coffee or doing like, you know, mushroom extracts or whatever, and they're also an exact same product as each other and I just don't know how I think that's like kind of just jumping on the bandwagon. I think you really need to be doing something unique that your customers love, or you're just not going to scale long term.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that probably is the rise of, you know, e-commerce and dropshipping and the rise that's been around for a while. But, yeah, people think that they have a good idea that they can sell something that's got high margin and do all this stuff. But at the end of the day, if they don't love the product, you know, or they're not passionate about it or it's not a great product, it's yeah, it's going to be limited, you know, a short term fix.
Speaker 2:A couple of years ago there was this hot, maybe even five years ago there was this there was always people selling these courses to make a million dollars a month of Amazon, you know, and they tell you what products to sell and you put them on and make and it turns out actually you don't make a million dollars a month because there's a thousand other people selling the exact same product from the exact same supplier in China and you can't get any margin and the price keeps going down and down and down because you're all just competing on price, because there's nothing else to differentiate you, and all that. All that's kind of fallen away now. You know that whole like making million dollars a month on Amazon thing because it was just. I think the only people that really won out of that was, you know, it was Amazon and the people selling the courses. I think, like you know, you have to have a really good product first and foremost, and I think it's probably worth taking a bit more time to launch to make sure you've got a really good product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's very sound advice, mate, Before we get into some more e-commerce specifics around your business. We chatted off air, but WordPress over Shopify I noticed that you built on WordPress. Yeah, what was your deciding factors within that?
Speaker 2:I'm the kind of person that's like always, like I love the game of chess. I don't know if you play chess, but like, I grew up playing chess and I love chess and I think one of the main lessons I learned from chess is that, like, you need to evaluate all the different options. There's a finite amount of options and you need to look through those options and choose the best one. And so I'm always looking at different options. And so I looked at Shopify and I love the Shopify layout and I love how simple it seems and I love how, you know, you can get plugins for everything and it's all kind of like one system, rather than WordPress, where it's like different developers making plugins and sometimes they don't work properly in their speed issues and all that kind of thing. But when you have a website on Shopify, they own your website, you know, and they can shut you down at any time they like.
Speaker 2:And we still have products and hemp products are still. I don't know why. It's got no marijuana in it, it's got no THC, it's complete. You're not going to get stoned off hemp seeds, you know. I looked into it once and you would actually like there was some article that said if you ate 15 kilos you might be able to. It might show up on a THC test.
Speaker 1:Like it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Like, and so I don't want to be in a position where they can go. Well, you know, hemp seed is a bit of a gray area. We're showing you down and I've heard those stories of them doing that. I want to retain ownership over my website and it's same. I'd kind of.
Speaker 2:I got very close to doing a crowdfunding campaign. I don't know if it was end of last year or the year before, but I got very close to doing a crowdfunding campaign and I put months of work into it and money and lawyers fees and all that kind of stuff. Literally three months of my life went towards it. And the night before we're about to launch, I got a phone call from a, an older lady, who said to me you know, I've been following you for years. I love what you do. I've got $200 saved up. I'd love to invest it with you guys when you go live with the crowdfunding.
Speaker 2:I was blown away by someone putting their life savings, trusting me with their life savings, but it also made me realize that, like I would no longer be free to make the hard decisions. And so if we couldn't get our normal lines main and and I decided I'm going to get lines main from China. You know I'd have to decide whether to have no lines made or have you know lines made, poor quality extract. Then you know I've got to go.
Speaker 2:Well, what about that lady? You know she's relying on me in order to get a return on her $200 life savings and all of a sudden that could compromise my integrity, and so I decided not to go ahead with it. And that was about maintaining control. I don't have any investors, I don't have any loans from the bank. I don't have anything. It's just me doing things with my team the way that I think is the right way to do them. So if I went to Shopify, that would again, I think, make me concerned that they could shut me down at any moment. And so, yeah, I just want to be able to maintain control so I can do what I feel is the right thing for my customers.
Speaker 2:So, that's why we're with WordPress, and WordPress actually it's really good. You know, like they put out a lot of updates all the time, even though it doesn't cost, you know, and I think they're they're working on making more money for WordPress. So they're like they charge for, like for the plugins they make in house and they've got subscription services for payments and all that kind of thing, and I think, because they've moved away from this kind of free, open source model more towards profitable business, it's getting much better as well. Yeah, true, the next update that's coming out next month has got some massive improvements for LCP, you know, in terms of like the speed stuff a lot of content payments and which is a major issue with WordPress sites, because, of course, I want to have the fastest site possible.
Speaker 2:So I've always worked here on how to make the site faster and how to optimize that and.
Speaker 2:But at the end of the day, if the core, fundamental code of WordPress is slow, there's only so much you can do, and so they're aware of that and they work in that as well, and there's heaps of you know you get plugins for everything you want, and so I'm pretty happy with WordPress.
Speaker 2:I really I think Shopify is probably a lot better for people who are starting out, people who don't know how to code and don't know you know, as just learning about eCobber, shopify is probably really good because it's so easy and there's no learning curve and you just kind of you know, choose your theme and put in your text and your images and you're done. Well, you go, yeah. But if you've been in this space for a long time and you want to have more ability to change things and to modify things and have control over your site and all that kind of thing, I think WordPress is a really good part of middle ground between Magento 2 and Shopify, and because they don't have a team of 100 developers. I'm not on Magento and I yeah. I think WordPress works really good for us in our business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, brilliant. It's a very, very comprehensive and an articulate answer. I like it. What's the first metric you look at each morning for your business?
Speaker 2:I don't really look at metrics all that much. For a long time I did and I think you can go a little bit stir crazy checking metrics every day because they change from day to day and I've had days where sales were consistent and they dropped by 40% and I just freaked out. I just said to my wife I might have to lay off some people. I've got to reduce the stock purchase. I've got to do this. The next day is back to where it was before. I think that looking at metrics every day, thinking you'd be a bit dangerous. I do check revenue from the day before because I have certain targets I want to meet in terms of how much I spend on marketing compared to the revenue. I do check that. But I've also got a really good team around me. I've got someone who handles all of my social media advertising, who I trust, and I've got someone else who handles all of the purchasing and I've got someone else who handles all the warehouses. I've got a team, maybe like seven or eight people around me and they each have a special function in the business that they hold on to. I'm really lucky that I've got them to a stage in the business where I think it might have been Alex Hamozi who said the hardest business is the business turning over less than a million, because you're doing everything yourself. Once you get past that level, you start getting people involved and I get to spend my days working on new products, working on cool new promotional ideas and just growing the business, rather than that day-to-day stuff in the business, because I've been running.
Speaker 2:My uncle back in the day would compete with Microsoft for Google number one positioning with Google Ads. He does that. He still does it. I don't know it's been decades but he still does, just for fun. He runs Google Ads for different businesses. I wanted him to do it for me because I had no idea how to do it, maybe 18 years ago or something, when it first became a viable thing. He said I'm not going to do it for you because I don't work with family, but I'll teach you everything I know. I sat with him for multiple days over and over again and over the span of a couple of years and learned everything that he knew about Google Ads and was able to develop a really solid Google Ads account whereby I don't actually need to check it very much anymore and I know that I'm going to get good value for money from it and I'm going to be targeting the right people with the right keywords and the right locations and the right demographic. I really just check the revenue from the day before. That's all I check.
Speaker 1:Interesting it made, just whilst I think of it. When you touched on social media, I noticed that, to the best of my knowledge, that I can't see any links to your social media on your website. Is that planned or is there a reason for that? You don't want people to click off the page, or are they there and I just didn't see them?
Speaker 2:In the foot art there's images of people holding the products and that links to the community group. We've got 5,500 customers in the community group. I want to lead people there instead of to the Facebook page, because I know that Facebook doesn't really. When you follow a page, you're not really going to see very much from that business unless they're advertising, whereas in a group you're going to see virtually everything that goes through that group. If you've decided to join that group.
Speaker 2:I really like people to go into the group rather than into the granted forest page. It's not just because they're going to see more content in my exposure, but it's because people often have questions and people often coming saying can I give hemp oil to my dog and is this good for X? Is it okay to take Lion's mane and Naked Greens at the same time? Always kind of questions by having them in the community. They get answers straight away from people in the community who have had that experience already and who can say well, I take Lion's mane with Naked Greens every day and I don't have a problem. I give my dog, who's a Labrador, x amount of hemp oil. There's that communication and that community going on, which I think is also part of what I'm trying to create is I don't want to just have where selling to people. I want to have, like it's, a two-way street and we're there to support our customers to be able to get the most out of the superfoods. The community is a big part of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant, because sometimes you think about the limitations so you can't advertise within that group. Can you Do you run a Facebook page that you run MetaRads and Instagram ads through as well as that?
Speaker 2:We run a lot of ads and we run through a lot of different platforms, mostly in terms of social media, it is Facebook and Instagram. But yeah, we run ads through our page and you can't I mean, I don't think you can put an ad through the community group, but I could post in the community group and go hey, you know, we've just started doing Activated Charcoal and I can post it there and virtually as long as there's a little bit of interest and there's a few likes and a few comments, virtually everyone in the group is going to see it, or a huge percentage of people are going to see it, and it doesn't cost anything to put that out there. Yeah, brilliant. Yeah, so you do get a lot more views in the groups than you do get from the pages. But yeah, it's a different method and that might change as well. Facebook might get to a stage where they go well, actually we're not going to promote the groups anymore in people's feeds, we're just going to do more promotion of the ads or something. But I think from Facebook's point of view, it's all about engagement and if people have joined a group, then they're interested in that group and that's going to help them stay engaged by showing them the stuff that's happening in that group. So I think that could be a route for a long time to come. Yeah, it's really cool just to be able to chat with people.
Speaker 2:I think I'm really nervous about sending out emails because I don't want to annoy people, and I think there's a real fine line between, you know, helping people give the information they need and then annoying people, and so we'll often write emails and then not ever send them, because we're like is this giving people enough information, enough value, that they're not going to feel like they're just being annoyed with an email, whereas in the group and it's just funny about how we have different mentalities in the group I can post hey, what do you guys think about this new packaging? You know, what do you guys think about if we started doing this product, or what should be the next topic for our newsletter or whatever it is? And people are really happy to engage and really seem to enjoy engaging in the group, and it's a really good way to get that feedback happening with the customers. And I kind of just yeah, even though I do send quite a lot of emails, I'm always really hesitant to send them because I want to make sure that people are getting really good value and they're really liking the emails and I think if you're sending an email, the intention that email should be, you know that people save it and send it to other people. You know that's how good quality the email should be. If you're wondering, are people going to unsubscribe from this email, you shouldn't be sending it in the first place.
Speaker 2:I think Perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it, make great insights into that. Most business owners that I've spoken to, or me e-commerce owners, have paid for pages, but that community is really a brilliant strategy. I really like the sound of that, so let's touch on that a little bit further. Around your customer journey, it sounds like you put a lot of thought into each customer journey, from you know, acquiring your customers to how they interact with the brand. Is that something that you continue to evolve and kind of look at as to how to best have that customer journey as efficient and, you know, as nice as possible for them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I was. You might have read me ranting about when I was growing up on the blog, but when I was from about six years old, I was working with my grandfather and his jewellery store in Coburg on the weekends and I loved it. It was my favorite time of the week. But he would always say, like you don't give someone a reason to go somewhere else. You know, if someone buys from you and they have this great experience and they love the products and they had a wonderful interaction with you and everything went smoothly, they're going to come and buy from you again. But if shipping slow or you bombard them with annoying emails or you know the website doesn't work or whatever any kind of roadblocks along that journey is, you're giving them reasons to go somewhere else. And so I'm always thinking about, like, how do I make this experience better for my customers and make it a smooth experience? Do they enjoy purchasing from us and they want to come back again and they want to tell everyone else, because you know you can spend a fortune on advertising, but if you can communicate to someone your values and your integrity and they can see that it's a great product, it gives them lots of benefit. They're going to go and tell 10 other people about it and they're going to bring 10 other people to your website and that's you. Don't pay anything for those customers. You know and I think that's the cheapest customer, and they're also the people that come just by typing in the URL will always convert at five times what the normal conversion rate is, because they've already decided they're buying from you, as opposed to someone on Google who's looking through five different products and like, for example, b-pollin is a product that we do. That's really good seller for us, but we're the only ones that I'm aware of doing Australian grown B-Pollin. Most of it's coming from overseas and they put it in capsules because it tastes really weird, whereas ours is just the B-Pollin you just eat it by the hand, for this is because it's delicious honey flavor and you could tell that it's good quality.
Speaker 2:But when you go into Google, you might look at ours and goes, oh wow, ours is $54. And the other suppliers are all $35. And so people go. Well, why would I spend more? And so there's a big part of that is like people come to the website and you have to communicate to them why it's in their best interest to spend a little bit more to get the high quality product and you know and what the benefits of that are going to be for them. And so I think those people, some of those people, a lot of people don't won't even read when they come to the website. They just go it's $54. I'm going to buy it, I'll go somewhere else and that's OK. But that's very different to someone who their cousin told them, hey, check out this B-Pollin, it's amazing. And they got the website and buy it, yeah, yeah. I think it's always best to just kind of be focused on giving people the best quality product. I can't remember why I got onto that, but no, that's, that's great.
Speaker 1:I was just asking around the customer journey and how you sort of curate that for you know the best sort of experience customer experience, yeah, what strategies have worked best? We sort of touched on that a little bit from an ROI point of view. From what I can understand and listening to you, the best ROI is just sell a great product, give them a great experience and then they go and tell 10 people yeah, from you know you said you've learned Google Ads yourself and send that. You're doing a really good job of that. Seo email TikTok. What channels are sort of working for you when it comes to acquiring your customers in and outside of referrals?
Speaker 2:Yeah, google has always been our biggest one Google Ads and Google Organic and it still is now. I think there's a lot of noise on social media and I think it's really hard to stand out from the rest of the noise and we have a really good return through social media now. But because I'm not much of a social media kind of person, I never really wanted to run the ads myself and it's not something that I'm. Social media is not something I'm passionate about, and so I went through maybe a dozen different people running our social media ads and it was hopeless and I lost. I don't think about you know how much money is actually like gone down the drain with no return, but it's taken. You know, it's probably taken six, seven years to get to a stage now where it's really working and it's really giving a good return for us and I think it's really easy to lose a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Advertising on any platform. It's something that you have to really be on to and it really pays to be really to put some, really put a lot of time into it and making sure you've got a really good product and make sure you can communicate that in two seconds through your ads. We don't do a lot of TikTok at all. We're about to start doing a bit of TikTok, but I don't know whether that's. I mean, we do stuff on TikTok that gets a lot of views but it never seems to translate into sales and I don't know. If that's the nature of the platform, then it's all just scroll, scroll, scroll, whereas Facebook is a bit of an older demographic and it's people who are more kind of like. I feel like it's easier to target our people on Facebook than it is on TikTok.
Speaker 2:I mean, for us it's always been Google ads and I think a lot of that is because and it goes back to what I said before about Happy Cow in that there's demand for the products that we sell. There are people out there looking for Lion's Main Mushroom, there are people out there looking for Beephole and there are people looking out there for Black Macca or Greens Mix or whatever it is, and by making sure that we're really solid through Google ads and through SEO, we're able to get in front of those people and so that's really our biggest return in terms of advertising. But I've had Google ads shut down our account before because of the hemp stuff or because of something they think is a gray area and the sales didn't drop as much as I expected them to at all and I think a lot of that is because we've got the returning customer base, kind of We've got really good lifetime customer value because you've got low energy and you go and buy Beephole and it helps you to have more energy throughout the day with no crash, with no caffeine, and it makes you feel better and it's $50 a month. You're going to keep buying it because it's giving you the benefits and I think that's a really good thing about this industry.
Speaker 2:And I think it'd be really hard if you're selling car batteries, because people just come once and they buy it and then they never want to hear from you again and I think something like that would be really hard. But in the health of wellness space, if you have a good product, people should be coming back and buying it again and again. If they're not, then there's something wrong there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you have subscription services, or do you offer subscriptions at the moment, or did just people come back and purchase whenever they need to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the 50% returning customers doesn't include subscriptions, but we do have subscriptions as well. So I've seen a lot of websites that do subscriptions and they go. You can cancel after three months and in the small print there's a fee for cancelling and stuff. And I wanted to provide subscriptions as a source for people, because we're all so busy and everyone's got so much they're juggling so many different things. I thought if someone wants to be buying our lines made mushroom every month, I can make it easy for them and they can go on a subscription. But people can place an order and then cancel the subscription a second after they place the order. So every subscription gets 15 to 20% off every month. Yeah, there's no cancellation fees, there's no minimum term, there's no contracts, there's nothing, and they get priority stock. So if we're running low on a product, we take it offline and we save it for our subscriptions. Okay, and so the subscription thing is not and I guess it comes down to values as well but the subscription. I'm not putting the subscription on there as a way to try and lock people into a contract. It's not what I want to do. I'm not. I'm not interested in locking people into saying they don't want.
Speaker 2:And even before I started happy cow, I was doing door to door sales. So all through high school and as when I first finished high school, I was in door to door selling knives, selling alarm systems, selling all kinds of different things door to door and even doing like on the phone, telemarketing and all that stuff. And I hated it because the whole thing is you have to do the hard sell. You don't know what, once you're knocking on their door during dinner time, no one wants to be called on their phone and sold optis over Telstra. You know none of that stuff. And so the whole industry what I saw of the whole industry is based around kind of putting the hard sell on, even building rapport with people in order to put the hard sell on.
Speaker 2:You know it's all just about like pushing sales. And after I did that and after I did the door to door with the leather bags and stuff, I realized I don't want to do that, I'm not interested. I'm not interested in that way of living. You know, I'm not interested in trying to push people to buy, saying they don't want. And so my whole ethos with Forest Superfood has been if you want the best quality stuff and you're happy to payable, buy from us. If you don't, then don't buy it. You know I don't want people to buy stuff because they've been tricked into it or because they're in a contract or anything like that.
Speaker 2:And so when we put the subscription service in 18 months ago, I had the same philosophies that like, if you want to get this every month, you could sign up for a subscription. If you don't want a subscription, you can cancel anytime, you can suspend anytime. People have got subscriptions that they started 18 months ago and they've got it on hold because they went away or whatever. And then they come back and they resume it and they've still locked in that same price from 18 months ago, before inflation went crazy, you know. And so they've still got like, they've still got that price in there and so that's just. The whole ethos is like I think it's a subscription service is really good.
Speaker 2:But I think those who put subscription services in and then put in the small print that you're going to be charged when you cancel and you can't cancel for first six months, and all these extra terms and conditions around the subscription, I think that's why people have a real kind of suspicion around subscriptions.
Speaker 2:And I guess we use the subscriptions from the pre-internet days with, you know, when you have a Telstra subscription or you have like a subscription for your TV or whatever it is, and people, yeah, exactly, and you're used to being locked into something. But you know, I always say you know the customer service team, you know they get the same people caught If someone calls up and they go, hey, order for me guys last month and I want to order again this month, and I'm like, well, why don't you go on a subscription? You know, you know you want it, there's no fees, there's no cancellation, there's no, there's no small print, you just get 15% off and you cancel whenever you want. And so our subscription service works really good like that and I think a lot of people trust it because they see that like we're not trying to trick anyone you know, I think that's for me.
Speaker 2:That's not how I want to do business. I don't want to be trying to trick people into things. It's like I'm doing the best I can do it. I'm doing what I think is a really good product that I would want to buy. If you want it, it's here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant and, to be honest, mate, even the same in my industry with digital marketing and agencies. There are agencies there that are still trying to lock in clients for 12 months and SEO packages and all that sort of stuff. People don't want that anymore. If it's not working, then why are you going to keep someone on a contract for 12? Just let them be If it's not working. If they're not happy with the service, they should be able to leave at any time. So I'm really aligned with you.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and why would you want to work with? You know, if someone's there and they're miserable and they don't want to work with you, why would you want to work with them? You know it's like.
Speaker 1:You know what I'm saying? Sorry, yeah, you've locked in on a contract. It's like let's just yeah you don't want to work with me. I don't want to work with you, or you know it's not working, or for whatever reason. If you're not happy, then the best experience you can give them is the chance to exit. That's just sort of the way it is.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I hope that kind of that whole thing is changing, because back in the day, you know that was kind of, I think, how a lot of people just did business. You know, it was just like you've got to put the hard sell on, you've got to grind, you've got to get people locked in, you've got to make them think you're their best friends. They buy. And I just don't think I think with, Especially with like e-commerce, you can start a business with $100, you know a list Like you don't need capital behind you to start an e-commerce business. And because you don't need capital behind you means there shouldn't be that pressure to do the wrong thing by your customers, you know, and you can keep, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, if you've got an idea for an online business, you should do that while you know you can do that in the evenings for other TV while you're still working your job. You know it doesn't have to be something that you take out of. You know, in the old days, when you had to open a store and you need to borrow $250,000 from family members or from the bank or whatever, there's a lot of pressure on you. There's a sound of the crowdfunding. You know, if you're taking money from other people, all of a sudden there's pressure on you to provide a return, and someone who's investing in your business a bank or even a family member or crowdfunding whatever they don't necessarily care about your values. They want to get a return for their money. It's not their business. They're investing money. They're investing, you know, $200,000 because they want to get $400,000 back, and I think that makes it really tricky and puts a lot of pressure on people to do things that they don't necessarily feel comfortable doing, and I think it's not.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's necessary to go down that route. I've never taken a cent from anybody. I've never taken out a loan from anybody, and I think you can start small and you can grow organically and you can as you grow, you know you can invest more and you can put more money back into the business. And I think you can do all of that without having to compromise your values and without having to take money from someone else who just cares about the bottom line, because at the end of the day, like you know it's about, are you in here to make a quick buck or are you in it for a long-term business? And if it's long-term, you have a very different focus and a very different value system, a very different way of doing things to. If you're just trying to ride the latest mushroom crates, you know yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's brilliant words of advice. Yeah, I really love it. So a couple more questions made before we finish up. You mentioned social media and I did jump on the TikTok there and I've seen a few TikToks around caffeine and giving up coffee I think was one of the posts. But have you dabbled much into that influencer marketing list? Park social for the minute, but more influencer marketing. Have you done much in that space? Have you looked in that space? Is that something that's going to be a play for you sort of going forward?
Speaker 2:I have definitely looked into it and that was. I feel like that fad has kind of died down a bit. I think that was massive last year and the year before and the year before that, I think the whole influencer UGC stuff was really the user-generated content. All that stuff was really big. I don't feel particularly good about paying someone to review my product. I understand that, you know it's very obvious that it's an ad and that you know these people are getting paid, but I still feel like there's something a bit misleading about it. Yeah, so focus more on customer real customer review videos and using those in our ads with the customer's permission, of course, and then also videos with ourselves.
Speaker 2:So we've got a nutritionist on the team and so she does a lot of videos talking about super foods and whole foods and why you should have, you know, the whole mushroom over an extract and you know why adding more greens to your diet could be really good and certain ingredients to look for. You know, like, like. For example, we've got this product naked greens, which is just wheat grass, barley grass, maringa, spirulina and clorella and nothing else, just blended together. But then you go and look at some of the other greens Blends on the market and they've got stevia and they've got fillers and they've got colors and they've got you know all kinds of different ingredients in. So she does a lot of those kind of education based videos, talking to people about Read the ingredients before you buy something, you know, have a look at what's in it before you buy. Don't just go, it's a greens blend I'm gonna buy, you know.
Speaker 2:And she is a product developer as well. So she really works on what products we should bring out and why, and she looks into the safety of the products and you know where to get the best ones from and what's gonna be the most bioactive and all that kind of thing. And so we look at things from an nutrition point of view and we see our role is kind of educating people about why they should choose, why our products are better than other products. We make a lot of videos and, yeah, we're just about getting the information out there. Really, we just about educating people and we kind of feel like In the similar to Alex Homozy as well, you know like we just want to get the information out there and educate people and help people to be healthier and live better lives and we have faith that, like from putting that out there and helping people, sales are gonna come back, yeah, and so we just kind of focus on giving people the information, help people, rather than again doing the hard sell, which is I'm scared from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, beautiful. Do you have a YouTube channel? Is that on Facebook? Is that in the group, the community group? Where do you sort of amplify that message? Is it YouTube? From a search engine point of view, yeah, how do people find the videos? Or is it all just on the website?
Speaker 2:yeah, so almost every product has its own product video which is got customers on the website, customers talking about their experience with that product, and they're all legitimate. There's no one that's been, you know, paid as an influencer, anything like that. People just get a voucher as a thank you for their time for making the video for forest superfoods. They don't actually get paid or anything. And we have YouTube. We have YouTube videos and we're using them in ads as well. So it's over social media. But like to watch the videos. Yeah, youtube's probably the best. Youtube is where they all go, so that's the place where all the views are. I think we've probably got like 200 different. I'm gonna put them all up because I haven't had a chance to put them up, but we've got probably 200 videos from customers. So good, and it doesn't sound like that much.
Speaker 2:But I think people have a real kind of aversion to making videos and put themselves on the video and I think that's kind of changing now with the tick tock and the new generation.
Speaker 2:You know, I think, like I've got a five year old and I think for his son, for his generation, making videos is just gonna be like brushing their teeth.
Speaker 2:It's just like it's just gonna be a normal thing but for for older people were a bit funny about making views and a bit shy and a bit uncomfortable being on screen, but I think that's the genuine and it doesn't.
Speaker 2:It probably doesn't convert as well as what the influencer based videos would be, but at least it's authentic and it's real and I think that comes through in the videos, and so the idea is just to give people more information so they can make informed decisions, and I think when someone's getting paid to make a video about how you know this product solve their problems, I don't think that's really giving people information, to helping them make a decision, because that person's not gonna make a bad video, you know, or if they do, you're not gonna put it online.
Speaker 2:Where is? With people's actual reviews, you get a real idea of what their experience was and how they felt using the product, and I think the reason why we have, you know, we've got a really strong conversion rate on the website, and I think a lot of that is because, after 20 years, I've kind of been able to tweak how we go about communicating to customers what our product is and why it might be right for them and what other people think about it and that gives people confidence to then make a purchase.
Speaker 1:I can clearly see how that would work with them. With all just the organic reviews and the community group and your whole sort of philosophy, I can really feel why you have such a high conversion rate and a huge Return in customer base, which is awesome, right? One last question before we wrap up what is the next 12 months look like for For super food? To you bring it out? You mentioned that you're always working on new ranges, new products. Yeah, what do you think the next 12 months looks like for you guys?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're always bringing out new products. I wish we were, because it just gets more complicated, but we just find more stuff that we want to take, you know. So we go, like the activated charcoal. You know, like I had my stomach filled with, my stomach was a bit kind of twisted the other day, so I just had a couple of capsules of activated charcoal and I just kind of absorbs whatever's in your stomach and then binds to it and helps you budget, flush it out, and we're like we should be offering that to our customers as well, you know, and so we've got a whole lot of other products in the pipe, in the pipeline that are coming on board, which I'm really excited about.
Speaker 2:But really we're all just it's just about doing better things for the customer. You know, I'm just always like how can we do things better? And so we're always kind of focused on improving the customer experience and getting in front of the people who want our products. And yeah, so it's just, you know, onwards and upwards, keep. I think what we're doing is working, and so we're just going to keep doing more of it.
Speaker 1:Fantastic bait. As I said, I'm off the top. Yeah, I think for anyone who just looking to improve their income, you know, irrespective of whether they want superfoods or not, to check out your website, it's really best practice for me. We haven't even touched on the quiz. What percentage of people fill out the quiz? Just as a PS question. I don't know if the time I had.
Speaker 2:What percentage is quite a lot of people that are doing the quiz and I think the quiz really makes a lot of sense for a brand like us, where we have, I think, probably 50 or 60 different products now and people might come to the website looking for, looking for lines, main, you know and then they sell these other products and they want to know what's going to work for them. And so the quiz really helps people to kind of it was a nutritionist that made the quiz but it really helps people to kind of work out what products going to work for their circumstances and, again, it helps people find the products that work well for them. And I think if I had a business that had, you know, 50 or more products, I would definitely put a quiz on there because I think it really helps people. But I don't know what percentage.
Speaker 2:I think what I try to do is what I imagine might might have is people.
Speaker 2:I want people who come to the website, and they come to the website because they're looking at black mac and then they read about black mac and they go, actually that's not for me, and they go, oh, do the quiz and work out what is for me and so I use the quiz is like an opportunity, kind of like grab people who might have left otherwise, to kind of help educate them about other products that could work for them. And I really like the whole quiz idea. And also then you know you get information about people. You know people put in the quiz that you know they have trouble sleeping and then I can say to them Okay, have you seen this product? You know I, have you thought about not using your phone in bed or have you thought about, you know, not having caffeine within eight hours ago and asleep or whatever. But like you can really start to learn about your customer and what they're looking for and what could help them from the information you get from the quiz.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant mate. I better wrap it up there, but I don't know what I expected. But it's a lot better than what I expected. I hope that comes across as a compliment. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:We should do it again sometime. I love e-commerce and you know, and I think it's been an incredible journey for 20 years. I think e-commerce is amazing. I think the more people that get out of jobs they hate and get into building businesses they're passionate about, the better, and I think e-commerce provides that ability. You know you could. There's no excuse not to start a website Now. With Shopify and WordPress, you can literally drag and drop whatever you want into your page, put your page, put online, spend a bit of money buying some products and some pamphlets and taking some nice photos and you've got a business, you know, and you can just keep chipping away.
Speaker 2:I didn't, you know, please don't. I don't want people to go out and quit their job and take out a loan against their family home for 200 grand to start a business because it's not necessary. You know it took me years and probably took me 10 years really to get to a stage. You know, even like seven or eight years ago, I wasn't even making a wage from forest, because you know we went through a difficult patch, you know. You know, and it wasn't. It wasn't working as well as it should, but like I persisted at it because I believed in it and because I wasn't losing money Like I wasn't making money but I wasn't losing money either and so I could keep working at it and I could keep grinding, and I could keep improving it and focusing on my customer and tweaking things till it did start working.
Speaker 2:And I think life's too short to stay in a job you hate, like, yeah, don't let a crappy job be a dead end. You know, that's what. That's maybe what people should go away with. Don't let you know. If you're in a job you don't, like it's not fulfilling you, don't let it be a dead end. Let it be your cushion while you start something that you do care about, you know, and, in your evening, start something you care about you know, do it online or do it. However, it is that you need to do it and and keep working until it works, and once you're making a bit of money, you can quit that job. But if you just work this job you hate and you don't make any changes, you don't have any plan to get out of it. You're just wasting your time, and the time is the only thing that really matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah my preaching to the convert here. I love it, but just even some of the different takes that you have on e-commerce has been really insightful, really fascinating. So I appreciate your time, all the best with it and you will definitely have a part two. Yeah, fantastic, good to chat with you.