Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hello Ecommerce fans, and welcome to Ten Minute Ecom, an AOV Lab podcast. Every episode we break down a new and different tactic that can help you improve your ecommerce. KPIs key performance indicators. I'm your host, Andrew Figgins, and like most of you, I'm an e commerce professional. You may know me as the founder of AOV Lab, the former VP of Digital Product Innovation at Scrubs and beyond or as the former director of Ecommerce Technology at Rural King or just from LinkedIn.
Today I'm excited to be talking to Caleb Madsen, an e commerce colleague that is doing great work in e commerce for a company called Win Brands, which includes under its hat brands like Love Your Melon, Gravity Homesick and Qualo. Caleb, you brought a slightly nontraditional tactic on the show today to share with your Ecommerce colleagues, right?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Dropping out of college.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Dropping out of college. That's right. Thank you, Caleb. And after the ad, we'll get right into the chat.
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[00:01:50] Speaker C: Caleb, thanks so much for being on the show today. I can't wait to hear more about this topic and this tactic. It's not something that we've had on Ten Minute Ecom before, but tell me a little bit about what you mean by that.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: I think one of the things that I've learned over the years is that where you went to school and what your degree was in just doesn't apply. Typically I've had people who worked for me or I've worked with one person comes to mind, had a history degree and they were in charge of our partnerships. And the whole point of a degree is to get in the door, really, and then after that it goes away. And so for me, I dropped out of college when I was 2021 years old. I initially went to school to be an airline pilot. That was my initial goal and luckily stepped into a position where I was working at a family startup. They got acquired by this huge corporation called THG, which IPO in the past few years. It's one of the largest companies in all the UK. And I was working customer service there, just part time answering phones. A person who turned into my mentor, James Bonner, and then another person named Adam Nappy, both still at THG. One's the CMO there and then another one he's currently over the US office there in New York City for them, but they took a liking to me and they saw some potential in me and just started giving me more data analysis sort of things to do and one thing to another. In a couple of years, I was managing a team of ten. I was 21, 22 years old, and got to the point where I was like, wait, I'm going to school to get a degree to do what I'm doing now.
What's the point of that? I've already in the door that I'm supposed to get the degree to get in the door with. So talked to them, talked to some friends who had also dropped out and ended up dropping out of school. And it's one of those fallacies and things people are so focused on. You need to get the degree, you need to get the degree. It's just something that never even comes up.
[00:03:43] Speaker C: If you have a degree from Stanford, that's fantastic. But something like that doesn't typically apply immediately to ecommerce or even product development, which is like a big thing in software and tends to bleed into ecom a little bit.
What makes a good ecom person these days?
[00:04:04] Speaker B: I think it's a lot of it's just the ability to figure stuff out. I think it's such an underrated skill where you can have all the training in the world, but things change so often that you just have to be able to adjust on the and like, when I first got into ecom, I didn't know formal training. And what happened is I was working as a data analyst and James Bonner, who I mentioned before, was really just my mentor training me how to use SQL and using all these tools. And then one day, pretty much most of the paid social team quit and they just came to me and said, hey, you've been doing some analysis on paid social with the guy that just left, can you take over the account? And I think I was 21 and it was over $10,000 a day that I was supposed to manage and spend. And I'd never run an account once, and I just found some random YouTube videos and watched them and figured out how to create ads and how to do that. And I worked ridiculous hours for that first few months just trying to figure out how to make things work. And it ended up turning around. Like, we saw 110% new customer growth across the businesses after that three months, and our paid social accounts was like 340 something percent growth as well. And it wasn't because I knew what I was doing, it was purely just, okay, I've got this issue, I'll just watch some YouTube videos, google some stuff like, what does this mean? And try to figure it out. And a lot of that comes down to also having good mentors. Like, they would really go out of their way to really sit down with me and help me. But I think it's such an underrated skill, like the ability just to Google stuff and figure it out. I always thought it's something people could just do, but then you meet people and you're like, oh, this is something that doesn't innately happen for some people. Some people, they just need that extra guidance. And then there's other people you meet that you literally can just say, I have this problem. They're like, I've never done it before. Give me two days.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: And they just figure it, that's awesome. And I remember how it was like 20 years ago or so. I remember interviewing I was like a coder guy back then. I think I was interviewing for a beginner project manager role for a web development company. And they asked me to code JavaScript for this job interview. And it was, like, so different than it is now. Like, I was on site at their office. They asked me to code something in JavaScript, and my first move was to go to Google and put it in there and try to figure it out by asking Google a question. And I felt like it was almost like cheating at the time. But they came back in the room and I was like, hey, I use Google for this. And back then, they were cool. It was like high fives. They were cool with it because of what you just mentioned. They saw that I was willing to take a step for several to try to solve something. And I think you hit it on the head. It's like you got to have some kind of problem solving skills that you.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Bring to the table.
[00:06:56] Speaker C: And it sounds like in your career, Kayla, you've been able to bring that time and again.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's been the biggest thing for me. I know we're running close on time, but like, one quick story here. I had somebody once that when I was first starting to do the data analysis stuff, and I was really working more on the operational side, but someone saw that my title was Data Analyst, and they shot me a message on Slack saying, hey, I want to learn more about assistant conversions on Google Analytics. Can I come over to your desk and ask you some questions? And I was like, oh, yeah, give me 20 minutes. I'm working on something. I never walked into Google Analytics in my life, and I just found a YouTube video and a blog post read up on assisted conversions. He comes over, sits by me, and I go, yeah, it's simple. Let me show you. And I showed him what it was, and then he left. And a couple of years later, me and him had that conversation about that moment. And he was like, oh man, it must have been nice to have all that formal training on that sort of stuff. And I was like, I didn't know what it was. And I don't know, maybe it's not even trying to be sly or slimy. It's just like just figure stuff out. And that's been my career path is just thrown into situations going, okay, yeah, let's figure it out.
[00:08:02] Speaker C: I love it, and I love it not only because it worked then, but it seems like it's working today still. I feel like every day in Ecommerce, you're going to encounter new problems, whether it's bots coming to the website and conversions going down, and it's a big mystery, right? Whenever conversion dips, whenever paid advertising dips a little bit, it's got to find out the reason. I know we probably are over time, but I have to ask you, what are some of your go to's when you have one of those problems happen? Let's say you're working with a client or even your own website.
How do you handle that situation? What do you typically do?
[00:08:40] Speaker B: I think the first thing I like to do, and this is something I learned from someone years ago, is I always try to take two approaches. One is I try to find a quick win. And the reason to do that is it buys you time with the person who's pointed out there's issues. So typically like a C level saying, look, we know there's this core issue. We found this issue here that fixed it. Now we've seen a little bit of a bump. We're investigating the rest. And partially is because then it just shows, like, there's action that's been made. There's a small fix here, and it can be as small as something as, hey, we found a pricing error. We're fixing this. We've seen the go up. We're investigating the rest. And I find that just sets people at ease immediately. So it buys you the time to actually do the actual analysis versus everyone's running around and trying to figure stuff out. So that's the first thing that I like to do. The second thing that I like to do is just trend analysis because a lot of the times we focus in on today moment, and very often I find that it's a trend that has just been hiding for a couple of months. So maybe you just came off promo and all of a sudden conversion just tanks, and that promo was covering up two months worth of issues that have just slowly been happening. But I think it's that first part is just really like showing the initiative that this has changed. Something is happening because people are antsy. People want an action immediately, and sometimes you just can't do that. But it just helps to kind of show, okay, here's the actions being taken. Here's the quick fix that we're trying now, just so then that way it calms everyone down to buy you that week. That buys you that couple days that you actually need to dig into.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: It looking like a true expert in e commerce. So, Caleb, even without the paper degree, I think you get an official non paper degree today in e commerce from University of ALP Lab. Thanks so much again for coming on the show, sharing your expertise. Is there anything that you'd like to share before we go today with all your colleagues in Ecommerce that are listening? You've shared a ton of awesome stuff already, which we appreciate, I think a.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Lot of times just take the leap.
There's so many things I think everyone's faking it not in a bad way. Just like everyone's trying to figure stuff out. And it changes so often, like we mentioned before. And sometimes it just takes the person with either abnormal amount of confidence or the person who can just say, okay, let's just jump in and figure it out. And I think for me, because I started with so young and managing teams and doing all that, I've had to accept, like, there are people who know more than me and just swallowing my ego and just accepting that and going into a room with people and being like, you're the expert at X, y and Z. What do you think we should do? And just swallowing your pride and just going in full guns ahead. It just makes it so much easier to manage a team, to work with other people that way, and also makes it so you can grow in your career because you're not scared to try to fake it. I've always been the youngest person in the room, and that hasn't stopped me because I'm not trying to prove that I'm smarter than someone. I want people smarter than me around me. That makes me better at my job. So, yeah, that would be the last thing I would say.
[00:11:38] Speaker C: Awesome. Thanks so much again for coming on the show. Of course.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: No, it was fun. It was great to meet you as well. Thank you so much.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: Yeah, have a good one.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: You too.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Well, we have hit that ten minute mark, so that's a wrap for today's episode. I want to again thank our guest Caleb Matson. If you have a moment, be sure to subscribe, follow or like the show on Apple podcasts Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or wherever it is that you listen. If you have a topic suggestion or if you're an ecommerce professional that would like to join for an upcoming episode, reach out to humans at AOV Lab and I guarantee that a human will read and respond to your inquiry and I will just come out and admit that I am that human.
I hope you're enjoying these first episodes of the show. I know I sure am. Until next time, this is Andrew Figgins signing off and saying, have a good one.
