How AI Is Changing DTC Forever - Are You Ready?
Episode Summary
In this episode, Jon Blair interviews Justin Mitchell, a seasoned content creator and entrepreneur, discussing the transformative impact of AI on e-commerce and content creation. They explore misconceptions about AI, practical applications for e-commerce brands, and the importance of data in understanding customer behavior. Justin shares insights on content strategies, the long-term value of content, and the shift in marketing strategies due to AI advancements. The conversation also touches on the future of AI, the significance of recording conversations for insights, and rapid-fire questions that reveal Justin's thoughts on various tools and trends in the industry.
Key Takeaways
AI can help brands understand customer behavior better than ever before.
The future of marketing will heavily rely on content-driven strategies.
AI is not just a tool; it's a transformative force in e-commerce.
E-commerce brands should focus on building processes before automating.
Episode Links
Jon Blair - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathon-albert-blair/
Justin Mitchel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmitchel/
Free to Grow CFO - https://www.freetogrowcfo.com/
Coding For Entrepreneurs - https://codingforentrepreneurs.com/
Meet Justin Mitchel
Justin Mitchel is a teacher, entrepreneur, and software engineer with over a decade of experience teaching and building software. As the founder of Coding for Entrepreneurs, Justin has helped more than 820k+ students on Udemy and 380k+ YouTube subscribers with over 25M views helping aspiring software developers and business owners to leverage modern technology for real-world problem solving.
Transcript
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00:00 Introduction to Justin Mitchel and His Journey
05:01 Understanding AI Misconceptions
09:54 Leveraging AI in E-commerce
14:48 The Role of Content in AI and E-commerce
19:53 The Future of AI and Unstructured Data
24:56 The Impact of AI on Consumer Behavior
29:51 Opportunities for Brands in the AI Era
35:35 The Power of Meaningful Connections
38:09 Long-Tail Returns on Content
40:01 The Joy of Helping Others
41:46 Automation and Systems in Business
43:00 Underexplored AI Use Cases in E-Commerce
45:34 The Fun Side of Domain Names
48:32 Where to Find Justin and His Work
50:14 Future Opportunities in Content Creation
Jon Blair (00:00)
AI is changing the DTC landscape forever. Is your brand ready for it? Today's guest is gonna help you prepare. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Free to Grow CFO podcast where we dive deep into conversations about scaling a profitable DTC brand. I'm your host, Jon Blair, founder of Free to Grow CFO. We are the go-to outsource finance and accounting firm for eight and nine figure DTC brands.
Alright, today I'm here with, I don't know if this is fortunate or unfortunate. I think it's fortunate. Fortunately, one of my best friends, Justin Mitchel. Justin, what's up, bro?
Justin Mitchel (00:35)
What's up, Jon? Thanks for having me.
Jon Blair (00:37)
Had to start off with a bang there. Justin's more connected to Free to Grow than most would know he I'll let him introduce himself, but I know him from the Guardian Bikes days we worked together there and became friends there, but Justin has been a
He has been an ear that I've gabbed into many times leading up to the launching of Free to Grow and throughout the time that we have been scaling Free to Grow and we've I probably when I went when I when I launched the podcast, I'm pretty sure Justin's the first person I ever talked to about coming on him. He just we've just never scheduled it. So it's it's somewhat ironic that you're finally joining in on the content that by the way,
Justin is a content creator and he's been telling me for years that I need to create content. And so he's in some ways behind the whole Jon Blair personal brand. And people don't even know it. So anyways, it's fun to have you on, man. Tell everyone a little bit about yourself.
Justin Mitchel (01:42)
Thanks, Jon, it's fun to be on and I'm glad you're doing this. yeah, I'm Justin Mitchel as Jon said. I have been doing content for over a decade and I've made a whole career out of it mostly because I'm obsessed with technology and software and entrepreneurship. So I teach software and entrepreneurship and a big part of the reason
that
I got into software was because of entrepreneurship. I had a partner that was technical, had to get a visa sponsorship to stay here, he had to leave, all this sort of stuff. It led me down this path of learning how to code. And as soon as I learned how to code, I'm like, I gotta tell everybody how to do it. And if you talk to Jon, as soon as I get fixated on something, I'll tell Jon over and over and over again about content because it really made my thing. So yeah, I learned how to code and then I decided, I'm gonna teach all these other people how to do,
how to code through content. I learned that way and then I started making a YouTube channel and Udemy courses and stuff like that. I did some stuff on Kickstarter and here I am a decade plus later still doing content, telling all my friends to do content, telling all my friends to be entrepreneurs. I've told Jon many times he should learn how to code but he didn't want to do that. He wanted to talk about gap accounting, all that sort of stuff.
Jon Blair (02:52)
Yeah ⁓
Oh man, this is great. okay, so a couple of things. Justin has helped more than 820,000 students on Udemy. He was like an OG on Udemy. When we met, was like, hey, I've actually bought your course. I never completed it, but I was like, oh, you're that guy? 380,000 YouTube subscribers, over 25 million views. So he's legit in terms of being a content creator. What the...
Justin Mitchel (03:13)
You
Yeah, that's so funny.
Jon Blair (03:25)
when I was trying to think about how to explain this to the audience, it's like, he's the most nerdy content creator you've never heard of before, but now you have. But, but anyway, sorry, as you can tell, we're actually really good friends. So why do I have Justin on today? We're going talk about, well, we're going to talk about a lot of things. I don't know where this conversation is going to go because Justin and I have, Justin and I have had over the phone, probably 50 podcasts worth of
Justin Mitchel (03:33)
Thanks, that never heard of. ⁓
Jon Blair (03:53)
Of conversations, that probably should have been recorded. We've joked many times about recording our conversations. So we're going to finally do it. I don't know where this is going to go, but what the reason I brought Justin on. It's because being a, yeah, he's a content creator in the coding software coding space, but he's a student of coding and really a student of technology. He's been talking to me about AI for years. We were talking about AI at Guardian Bikes, like five.
Justin Mitchel (03:57)
should have been. Yeah.
Jon Blair (04:22)
plus years ago and talking about machine learning. There's very few times I call Justin where he doesn't say the word or the phrase machine learning. and, and. You know, with all the advances in AI and obviously in, think in, many different spaces, there's a lot of hype around AI, but in e-commerce, there's a lot of talk about what AI is going to do to change e-commerce. And, ⁓ I couldn't think of a better person to come on and
Justin Mitchel (04:29)
Alright. ⁓
Jon Blair (04:48)
and kind of kick the can around about the subject than, you know, Justin. So I want to start more general, Justin, before we get into like Ecom DTC What, in your opinion, what's the single biggest misconception out in the marketplace about AI?
Justin Mitchel (05:06)
Ooh, this changes all the time, so it's like a tricky one to answer. I would say that everyone needs to be an AI expert. I don't think that's the case.
but we should all be using it. We should be using it like a team of interns that we have at our disposal for all sorts of things. So I use it for software. Not everyone should use it for software. In fact, I would say most people should stop using it for software other than for advice on what systems they should be building, kind of like a high-level overview, like an executive meeting. Hey, what should we be building here? And then send the details to someone who's obsessed with it, who wants to own that, who will also use software.
So
it's sort of a AI and software, of course. So it's sort of like a a partner, a buddy that you use and there's all of them. So you want to use all of them to not stick to one because they all do things really differently. But I feel like that's pretty general advice. I would be shocked if there's people who haven't heard that and haven't tried it. I would say just making it one of your go to things before you are really trying to make a big decision. I mean, I had a conversation with I don't even remember which
AI system it was because I've used ChatGPT a lot, Claude. I even use this one called Vapi where I called into their system, their sales tool and talked to it for 30 minutes on how it worked and how the system was broken down. So I would say you reach for that. Do the voice version because typing is so slow. The voice version is actually really, really good. It's gotten great.
Jon Blair (06:32)
Yeah.
Justin Mitchel (06:35)
But yeah, I'm trying to think of what people get wrong. I think the assumption that you can build really good systems beyond a small proof of concept is still like a lot of non-technicals will come out and say, ⁓ you don't even need a coder anymore. You don't need all these people because of how good these tools are. While that may be true to some degree, it really does start to fall apart once you really get into it and start relying
heavily on these systems. If you're not technical and you're wanting to use it for automations, you might get 95 % of the way there, but that 5%, just like learning how to code, is incredibly hard and it takes a lot of time to get there. So, yeah.
Jon Blair (07:17)
It's interesting. No, I mean,
I see the same thing in like financial data analysis, right? Is that like, can, there's a lot of hype out there that like, you know, AI is gonna completely replace FP&A or the office of the CFO. And the reality is, I see the same issues as what you're talking about with like software.
development that like, even if, even if you can get it to go like 95 % of the analysis, the last five is very multi-dimensional. It takes a lot of judgment. There's lots of different trade-offs. There's not, there's not a black and white answer. There's a lot of gray in the interpretation. And that's, that's the thing is like, we as CFOs, we spend a lot of time saying there's a group of
Justin Mitchel (07:53)
No. Yes.
Jon Blair (08:03)
paths or there's a, there's a number of paths we could take. Let's talk about the trade-offs. Every path has a potential return with also potential risks, right? And the two different brands or two different brand founders will oftentimes choose different paths based on their own, risk tolerance and the bets that they're willing to place to get to a unknown.
potential return. so the, really good CFO is actually helping make decisions in a lot of gray area, but we use black and white data analysis to give us a mental model of the world, which again, a model by definition is a representation, not a complete replication. It's a simplified representation of reality. It's not a complete and comprehensive reprint.
of reality, right? And so you even have to interpret this thing that's simpler than the real world to then translate into real world decisions. And like the human mind, the human brain is still better positioned to do that at this point. I'm curious, like when you think about, like we worked together at a DTC brand, we had a lot of conversations about what we could use machine learning for,
What do you see as like maybe one or two things that just come to mind right away about like where an e-comm brand should consider using automation or AI to like get some quick wins that they may not be getting without it.
Justin Mitchel (09:42)
figuring out how to use n8n and collecting your data in one place. That would be a big one. Figuring out how to do those automations. I think n8n is the tool mostly because it is technical, so a software developer could go in there and do a bunch of stuff. But you could also use something like ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or any of them to really help diagnose some of these issues so you can get them in one place. That one place can be
like a Google Sheet. This is a fairly straightforward process. And so that you as a decision maker or anyone on your team would be able to have access to these things in a structured format. So one of the things about a lot of software developers and a lot of the work we did back at Guardian was about getting data from one place to a structured place, cleaned up and ready to be used in some format, whether that's using some sort of like charting or graphing system or otherwise.
or giving it over to a developer to build some sort of user interface on top of it.
collecting that data into one place, even if it's a Google Sheet, I think is one of the low hanging fruits of something you can do. So like for example, you get customer service emails, you want to put all of those into one sheet, you can remove the email address from the customer and just have some sort of unique ID associated. A lot of these systems have those unique IDs, so you don't have to expose the customer data. That's a key part of that. But you get all of these customer information
and then you feed the actual messages that they're sending through to the Grok and giving a sentiment analysis. This is a simple thing of are they happy? Are they not happy? I realize a lot of customer service systems do this for you on their behalf, but are they doing it in a way that you want using something like open AI? You can say what a good sentiment looks like and what a bad sentiment looks like and you can market how you see fit based on like what
Jon Blair (11:21)
Mm.
Justin Mitchel (11:43)
whatever goal you're having with your customer systems. So that's one. I think that's a really straightforward and easy one. Another one, I suppose, for AI automations would be like...
think something along the lines of call volume and how long calls are taking and really investigating that and having a system that automatically flags when calls go really long. So you can dive in and see what this edge case is happening. What's this customer asking about? And of course in those calls, if you're recording them, having those also being transcribed so you can see those things at a high level, all of that could be automated and done so where you don't even have to touch it, but you can get these high,
Jon Blair (12:08)
Mm.
Justin Mitchel (12:21)
systems where you're just looking at them and just diving in really quick. mean another obvious one to me would be podcasts or any calls you could record everything. I would recommend doing that anyway from a content perspective absolutely you record every call that you have and then from an AI automation system once you have everything recorded in a specific place you could use something like Dropbox or Google Drive to store these raw recordings. You would want as much of a system as possible we go into that but the idea of here being
is recording every call that you have and eventually being able to feed it through some sort of pipeline where you can extract the actual text from it, whether it's for content like what we're doing here, which content comes all over places, we can talk about that, or for repeated patterns on things that are being discussed all the time in the team that's not being taken action on, or for things that are just like falling apart. I mean, there's just so much you can do once you actually have that content for like these specific meetings recorded and then the actual transcription
Jon Blair (13:14)
Yeah.
Justin Mitchel (13:19)
that's going through. I mean I would start doing that as soon as possible so it sort of mixes the automation and content there a little bit but I mean we could.
Jon Blair (13:27)
Well, what I love about
like recording calls and first off it's super commonplace now, right? Like when you get on a call, like when we get on a Google meet, like, like we have a fire, we use fireflies.ai, but usually the prospect or the brand has their own like AI note taker as well. And it's like, everyone is doing it. So it's very commonplace. It's not, I remember a few years ago when it was like kind of weird when like the note taker would show up cause it was like a, it was a more nascent technology.
It's everyone's doing it right now. So it's like not, not a weird thing, but I've used it for so many different things. ⁓ in fact, one, one of the people on, our sales team, she went back through the transcripts of, ⁓ she took a call with a prospect and then I took a call at the prospect and then I took another one. We were not on each other's calls, but when she was following up on our proposal, she went through fire, fireflies, AI's transcripts and she fed it through chat ChatGPT and she was able to pull out.
three common, like three bullet points of things that were discussed in all three calls that the client or the prospect said they were looking for. And that I showed them in our Free CFO audit, how we would overcome those challenges. And she reminded them, Hey, remember you talked with me about this and Jon showed you this. And then you mentioned this again to Jon and it closed the deal. And it's just, it's all true. We didn't manufacture any like fake information.
It was all true, but we were able to quickly mine that and remind ourselves and them of the value we had demonstrated of how we're going to solve their problem. And then we closed the deal. Right. And so I actually think of it a lot going back to your answer to my first question about the misconception and you were like, Hey, like just get using it as a virtual assistant or a team of virtual assistants. You know what I think of it as my external brain.
that like, if I'm recording calls, if I'm feeding as much written and oral communication that I'm actually just engaged in every single day into into ChatGPT, it can help me remember things that my brain can't recall, right? And so one thing that I've used it for is I downloaded the ChatGPT app on my phone.
Justin Mitchel (15:23)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (15:45)
And when I, when I'm ready to write content, but I'm like, kind of stuck, right? I, I think to myself, what's the last prospect or client story that I was involved in? And it's usually a call and I'm like, this is a good one. I open it up and I will actually tell ChatGPT. I'll talk into it I'll tell ChatGPT the story.
of this call and I did this on, I did this yesterday. I was on like a really cool prospect call last Friday and he was like, hey man, listen, I feel like I really know my I'm like intrigued by a CFO but it's just like, I feel like I already know all of this stuff. What can a CFO do for me? And I sat down and I basically was like, hey man, it's a thought partner. Do you have anyone else you can bounce ideas off of?
Do you have anyone else who's working with multiple other e-comm brands who can go, hey, did you know that this is working for brands or this isn't working for brands? And so anyways, I downloaded the transcript from Fireflies AI, fed it into ChatGPT, but then I got on and told ChatGPT the story again from my perspective and what I thought was important in it. So it had the full original transcript and then it had me talking to it, telling it what I wanted to pull out of there and what I thought was important.
And it wrote me five LinkedIn posts about this story where I was telling a skeptical prospect why he needed a CFO, even though he knew his numbers cold. And I got this all done in about 45 seconds. ⁓ the other thing is I, this is just me and you're probably that you're pro I'm just guessing that you're you're at least somewhat like this. Cause you and I both are verbal processors. We can talk.
Justin Mitchel (17:19)
Yep.
and talk.
Jon Blair (17:31)
ask our wives how much we can talk to one another. Like, we can talk way too long about nothing and everything. And I come up with my best content ideas talking. So I go on walks with my ChatGPT app and I talk to ChatGPT about all these crazy ideas going through my head and then I come back to my computer and I work with ChatGPT to turn it into written content. And I come up with way better content.
than when I sit down and go, what am I gonna write about right now? And so I think the point that I'm making is I'm not coding with it. I've tried to use it for a little bit of data analysis. I know there's opportunity there, but I'm using it within the context that works for me today, right? And I'm starting to learn the capabilities and I'm starting to learn, I'm starting to learn.
Justin Mitchel (18:03)
Ha
Jon Blair (18:24)
how it can help me and I'm just starting to realize it's a brainstorming partner and it's an external brain and the more that you can feed your communication into it, the more that it kind of becomes like a legitimate external brain of yours. It's crazy.
Justin Mitchel (18:41)
Yeah.
I mean, that's super cool. That totally makes sense that you're doing that. I think adding to that conversation, having your face in these calls and recording the actual video as well to get reactions from their face. This is something that maybe isn't that possible yet with a bunch of tinkering. It is possible, but the AI systems will absolutely do this. So imagine if you're on a call, let's say a phone call, and you just have a camera in your face,
Jon Blair (18:55)
Mmm.
Justin Mitchel (19:10)
and you get super excited about something, but it's not really shown in your responses there. And then six months later, you want to come back to it. At some point, our AI systems will be able to read what the video is doing as well. So like getting that raw video is, I think, a big part of it. So if you're doing calls, they should be on Riverside. I would say something like Riverside or any other other ones. think Zoom, can download them as well. But Riverside is made for it, right? We're on. OK.
Jon Blair (19:36)
You can on Fireflies too. Fireflies records video and
the transcript of all of our calls.
Justin Mitchel (19:41)
that's great. mean, the actual physical tool that does it isn't nearly as important as it once was because so much of code now and user interfaces is ephemeral. That means it can just be deleted and just re brought back up because of a lot of these AI tools. But the point being is that in the near future, we'll be able to have much better sight into video. So like if you think of your three PLs as well, if you wanted to have if I was a three PL, I would have HD cameras recording everything.
all time right now. Like at least 720 if not 1080, the cost of all of that is a lot less. You don't need to store it on the cloud. You could build out your own little Raspberry Pi server. Like if you're a technical person, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You can store things on there. You store them for years and years and years until you actually need them because the visual AI stuff is coming and it's coming rapidly and it's gonna be really, really good. So if you're a 3PL, the reason you'd want that... Yeah.
Jon Blair (20:35)
Hold on. want to say something. I want to say something that you're making me think of which is
and I know this is gonna spawn a whole nother conversation maybe a whole nother podcast episode most likely but I want to say that generally and I'm not saying everyone's leveraging it but generally before this AI really started taking off more mainstream the last we'll call it 18 months, right? and I'll say it I feel like it's taking off more like at the consumer level like
Justin Mitchel (20:45)
Let's do it.
Jon Blair (21:03)
It's been available for a long time, but it's more like available mass market, at like a consumer level, so to speak. what this now makes, but before this, think the average consumer in business was okay at accessing structured data to do data analytics. And even though there may be some ETL data cleansing to get it structured the right way.
It's still coming out of a database or it's coming out of another platform. It's coming out of API. It's fairly structured. What you're talking about is unstructured, like very unstructured data from the traditional sense that we're used to it, right? Like that things can be extracted from video, right? That ability to analyze and draw insights or even make prescriptive recommendations off of unstructured video, like is...
Justin Mitchel (21:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Yes.
Jon Blair (21:56)
That has massive implications for, I mean, just for everything, right? Like, what are, is there anything else that like, the average person may not be aware of that's coming, that you see coming with AI being able to take quote unstructured data and make sense of it besides just video?
Justin Mitchel (22:18)
Yeah, mean, certainly sensors as well. So all kinds of sensors, you would be able to feed into that. But like what I think is going to happen in the very near future is you will have like if you want to talk to Jon Blair or someone like Jon Blair, assuming he continues to put out content, you will have the ability to grab all of his podcasts, get his side of the story, feed it into some sort of AI system. I don't want to give a name because the system's not out necessarily, but you'll be able to
feed it into some sort of system and have chats with Jon, like his AI avatar that you decided to build yourself based off of all of his content, right? And then you could do that and you could mix in a few different podcasts in there as well that you're like, ⁓ what would Jon probably say about this? And this stuff is coming, right? And then of course,
Jon Blair (23:05)
You
Yeah.
Justin Mitchel (23:10)
then you can actually have a real conversation with Jon about it and get probably similar or very close to the same answers. I don't know. Not necessarily about general or specific data that you're kind of trying to look at, but more general thought processes and stuff like that. But at some point, maybe the specific data, that might happen in 10 years. That might be a ways away. But I would say most of the sensors are becoming so much more valuable now. What I mean by sensors is a video camera, audio. You can put these things all over the place and start recording them.
Jon Blair (23:22)
Sure.
Justin Mitchel (23:39)
The cost to store those recordings has gone down a lot. You can use time series databases to like time scale DB to like store this data that's happening over time. So I would say going back to like the raw data collecting as much of that as possible. And you can look at someone like Tesla that has been doing this for years and years and years like whether or not their strategy is going to work out for them specifically who knows but the fact that they put these cameras on there they've been recording this data on all of their cars.
Jon Blair (24:04)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Mitchel (24:08)
for years, I would imagine their actual manufacturing facilities are very similar where they have all this recording going on and they'll have this historical data that they'll be able to look at and make something of it. Now, can the AI do it now? Maybe. Can people do it now? Maybe. The point is that raw data, once you don't record it, you'll never have it. So any of that sensor data that you want to have and including analytic data on your website. So if your website doesn't have all of the analytics you might want, well,
You should probably get on there. I would imagine most people listen to this have all the analytics tools installed already So you are capturing that data? But there's a lot of other data that maybe you're not capturing that you might want to think about that You probably should capture now and a lot of these AI systems can help you solve that problem, too You could be like hey, you're now an expert developer. What analytic tools do I need to? Implement now to actually start recording all of this stuff, even if I'm not using it yet And so that's I mean, that's an odd
low hanging fruit to me because you will be using it in the near future. And so I would also imagine that we will all have cameras facing both ways at some point too. Reading our facial expressions and then also reading other people's you know like those meta glasses that's gonna be a very common place I think in the near future. And the near future might be five or ten years for something like that but the fact that we want to have these like partners with us now Jon's on a call you know walking around with ChatGPT like
the fact that that's happening and so many more people are doing it we will definitely see like the visual space be a big part of what we do in the near future too so yeah
Jon Blair (25:42)
Makes sense.
Yeah, that's interesting, man. So I was actually reading a LinkedIn post while I was waiting for you to hop in to record this pod. And I don't know if this is true or not. I'll have to look into it further. But this guy was claiming that Shopify and OpenAI are working on a collaboration right now whereby you can start purchasing goods directly within
ChatGPT without ever leaving ChatGPT. So not only can you do the search, right, but you can actually execute the transaction natively right there in the chat. I think I've told you about this before. We've now had a couple of different brands who have found us and cited that they found us through ChatGPT when they were doing research on like the best DTC or e-com fractional CFO firm.
⁓ There's a lot of talk about SEM, search engine marketing, us being really not that far away from it getting flipped completely upside down and no longer are we bidding on the Google and Amazon keywords, but instead AI is going to effectively be doing the search. What are your thoughts on that and do you have any advice on what brands should be potentially considering doing now to be able to take advantage of that trend?
Justin Mitchel (26:59)
Content, content, content, content. I could say that a million times. And it doesn't have to be on your brand, right? So if you're learning a bunch of things from your brand, that's probably not necessarily like what 3PL to pick or something, right? We could go over those specific things. Those don't need to be on your brand's website necessarily, right? You can share that stuff on a different website. If you want to become the brand yourself, which a lot of brand founders, it makes a whole lot of sense for them to be the brand.
Jon Blair (27:21)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Mitchel (27:29)
like yourself, Jon. In some cases, it doesn't. I think of the company called 37signals. make a tool called Basecamp, very well known in the tech space for a lot of their early work in sharing what they learned. So they have a number of books out there. I've been a customer of theirs many, many times in terms of their content, never in terms of their actual service. I don't actually use their service. But the point here is that you probably have all of these
things that you've learned that you can now share, whether it's on your direct brand or not. I think that's going to help influence how your brand is also discovered. So that is definitely something I would start getting out there and doing right away because what ChatGPT is going to look for are all of these signals of things that people can learn from. And if you're not necessarily sharing those things, then they're not necessarily going to find you. ChatGPT is not going look for you. The AI systems aren't going look for you.
So
that's one sort of way to do it. The other way would be actually building content for your brand and all sorts of it, right? Try to jump on the latest TikTok trend and do something that makes sense for your brand with that trend. Not always selling, of course, like I think Gary Vaynerchuk talks about jab, jab, jab, right hook. Do a bunch of jabs. Just put a bunch of content out there. Sometimes it's entertaining. Sometimes it makes sense for education. Sometimes it's a combination of both.
Jon Blair (28:45)
Yeah.
Justin Mitchel (28:53)
and putting out more content than you realize you should probably do. I would say ChatGPT can probably help you with the strategy there, but really just trying out a bunch of things because these AI systems are looking for what's most relevant. And if your most recent blog post is from 2024 or 2023, then you're probably doing something wrong in the content realm. I would recommend that you build those things up and do it as much as possible.
Jon Blair (29:18)
Well, know what's,
Casey, you know what's cool about this? Man, there's a lot to talk about here. First off, jab, jab, jab. That's my initials, Jon Albert Blair. So, I had a Spanish teacher in high school who used to say like, you have the perfect initials for to be a professional boxer. He thought it was funny. ⁓ But, ⁓
Justin Mitchel (29:23)
Yeah, totally. ⁓
Haha!
Hey, me too, because
my initials are J-I-M, gym. You jab at the gym, you know? Anyways, keep going. Totally.
Jon Blair (29:39)
This is what our phone conversations are like. Sorry everyone. Yeah.
What I was going to say is like, that's the reason why ChatGPT found us with the couple of prospects is because we are, there's not a lot of accounting and finance firms in that are doing content, let alone in the DTC space. We probably are the one that's cranking out the most.
relevant and frequent or like consistent flow of content. But we're doing, for the most part, we're doing 100 % just like educational. Like we don't have any hard sells in any of our content. Like there's always like in our emails and stuff, there's a very soft like CTA, like if you're ready to hear more about how we can help you click here, right? But like we're just, I'm of the opinion that like if you just are generous,
Right? And helpful that like over time you're going to be seen as a resource that is valuable to people. And eventually there'll be a transaction when there's the right person at the right time. we have a, we had a prospect that I talked to six months ago. We went through our whole process and he's like, I don't see the value in a CFO. He got it. He was in market to raise a debt financing round and he got an email from us that led him to a podcast episode about it. And when he heard it, he's like,
these guys understand debt. I didn't realize how much I don't understand debt until I heard this podcast episode. I do need these guys and he reached out and we're working with them a week later. What's the point? The point is like to just be helpful and valuable about like actual things, actual problems and actual situations that actually happen in the real world, right? And the cool thing that I, I think the cool thing about this is that like there's a lot of e-comm brands
Justin Mitchel (31:05)
you
Totally.
Jon Blair (31:28)
who in the early days, like, shoot, it's escaping me, that brand, the men's shaving brand, no, not Dollar Shave Club, no, no, no, the funny guys, the ones with the, they have the ball shaver. What is their name? Manscape, Manscape. You never heard of Manscape?
Justin Mitchel (31:39)
Dollar Shave Club? Dollar Shave Club. No? Harry's?
I don't know. ⁓ yeah, yeah.
Jon Blair (31:55)
they, there was a bunch, there was a group of guys who ran organic content for them. You know, they did the old school like, you know, backlinks and you know, blogs and all this kind of stuff. And they, that got them to rank SEO like top for all these search terms. You could crush it back then, like on that kind of an organic content strategy.
It's really hard to do that now and take out the incumbent that got themselves seated in first position a decade ago, right? Through these old traditional methods of like SEO marketing. But now you can bypass all of that and take out the incumbent on who's got the first position on Google because of AI, which I think is amazing. It gives guys like me who, you know, I'm just like a
whatever you want to call it, I'm a micro influencer. I have a small niche following, but I'm a dude who came out of nowhere who just wanted to be helpful. Started creating all this content. And now even though I don't rank first on Google, I can bypass all that and go straight to AI. Right. And, and so like the point I'm making for the people that are listening is, is this is an opportunity. This is a huge opportunity, right. To like actually make organic content work for your brand.
when for the last decade plus, it's been really hard to take out whoever owns that first page of Google historically. And so I think it's really, really exciting for someone who's hungry and ready to get out there and crank out content. What?
Justin Mitchel (33:34)
Along those lines,
you only need...
the right person to see it or the right five people. So if you get 20 views and five of those people are the ones you wanna talk to, perfect, that's all you need. And the algorithms more so than ever have become dependent on good content, not so much the following count. This has been talked about a lot in the content space, but basically if you bring out good content, the algorithm will help serve it to who's looking for it. This is true with ads, we're seeing this a lot with ads as well.
Jon Blair (33:40)
Totally.
Justin Mitchel (34:07)
But
the idea being that if you're putting out that content that's talking to that specific avatar versus trying to just get notoriety or a bunch of people following you, then you're going to be able to land a lot more of those like really meaningful connections. And like you said, being generous, that's a big part of it. That's also why I kind of lean on the education part where you share stuff. Educating is about sharing. It's about being like open and willing to share what you know, not necessarily like holding
Jon Blair (34:35)
Holy.
Justin Mitchel (34:37)
things back so it's inherently often a very generous thing. Granted if you put a payroll in front of it it's not always as generous but it still can be very generous even with all that. So yeah I think I think getting the right content is more important than the number of eyeballs that see it. This has been I think it's been more true now than ever before but the algorithms want to keep people there. So if you think about LinkedIn or Twitter or X whatever and TikTok YouTube all of
these places just want to keep their people on there. So they're going to continue to reengage their audience with the content that speaks to that person. And these AI systems, the machine learning systems are getting a lot better at recommending very specific things. So when you hear people say like, ⁓ I talked about, you know, an RV and now I get ads for RVs. Like what's going on here? No, it's because of all of the content you engaged with. It's not because Facebook or Metta is listening to your conversation.
Because you might have you know, your facial reaction might have been a little bit longer on a specific ad that you just like this looks cool right away. Boom. It's a signal to send you more content related to that. And then when you see more of this content, you're engaging with it. And so that's where ads are too, right? So ads are also along those lines where they might start converting better because of the fact that these AI systems are going to be finding very specific avatars that fit with that.
much of a general one like it once was. So yes, it's a pretty cool time in terms of content, I think. So yeah.
Jon Blair (36:09)
I'm
excited, man, I'm glad I started doing it three years ago. ⁓ you know what, the other piece of advice I'll give people on content is content, the return on content, generally speaking, exists in the long, it's a long tail return, right? And so it's, I don't know, it's maybe the antithesis of direct response marketing, which is put a dollar into ads and.
Justin Mitchel (36:13)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (36:33)
get a $3 ROAS out, right? But the return, the long tail return can be massive, right? If you're willing to invest in it. And so my advice is get on a content journey that you enjoy, right? And do it for the journey and the return comes in the long tail, like the long tail end of the journey. ⁓ But if you get on a journey,
Justin Mitchel (36:48)
Yeah, yeah, that's a point.
Yep.
Jon Blair (36:57)
that you enjoy and you just start doing it consistently. Once your competitors realize that you're getting a return on it, they're that much behind you, right? They can't just go plug a dollar into advertising. That's the thing about digital advertising. Like if you have seen this happen with a brand where they had no competition, then all of a sudden a big competitor with deep pockets came in and started bidding up CPMs and it could change the economics overnight.
Justin Mitchel (37:10)
Yes.
Jon Blair (37:24)
If you start crushing it with following of organic content and it takes you one, two, three years and your competitors aren't doing it, by the time they realize you're getting a return on it, they need one, two, three years, assuming they'll be even as consistent as you were, right? So just find a journey you enjoy, get on that journey and stay on that journey. And eventually there will be a return. And I would even venture to say, I'm sure you feel the same way, man, being a content creator.
When someone tells me that my content helped them, it's like one of the greatest joys for me personally, vocationally. It's like, that's cool because all I was doing was just talking about something that I have learned and that I'm nerdy about and that I enjoy and that it feels like very few people care, but ⁓ I just was hoping that it would help someone when I hear that it's helped someone. It's like, it's so awesome. Someone sent me a LinkedIn DM yesterday and said, hey, I'm a...
seven figure brand founder, I've been listening to your podcast and it's truly helped me run my business better. I just gave you your first review on Spotify. So I just got my first Spotify review yesterday, but the guy said it was, this has been helping me actually run my business and I'm like, bam, that's all I need, man. So, okay, really quick. I want to transition over here to some rapid fire questions, okay? So, here we go. First thing that comes to mind.
Justin Mitchel (38:30)
⁓ nice.
Yeah, let's do it.
Jon Blair (38:48)
What's a tool that you're obsessed with right now?
Justin Mitchel (38:51)
Cursor.
Jon Blair (38:52)
All right, AI, mostly hype or truly transformative for e-comm in the next five years?
Justin Mitchel (38:59)
transformative for every industry. AI is the new electricity.
Jon Blair (39:03)
Yes, I love it. One piece of software that you wish did not exist.
Justin Mitchel (39:08)
QuickBooks. Just kidding. QuickBooks API is stable. It works really well, but it is quite a mess out there. ⁓ Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, we have.
Jon Blair (39:09)
HAHAHAHA
I'm laughing because Justin and have spent too much time talking about the QuickBooks API in the last four years. ⁓
Automation. What's the first thing every DTC founder should automate?
Justin Mitchel (39:36)
Well, you need to have processes first. We've talked about this a lot. You got to eliminate before you start automating. So remove things, get it into a process if it's not. So think of anything that you do regularly. If it's not written down as a process, it's not a process. The system is the solution. AT &T said that a long time ago. And like McDonald's, any of us can walk into McDonald's and be a very valuable employee for McDonald's at that McDonald's. That's a system, right?
Jon Blair (39:56)
Hahaha
Justin Mitchel (40:06)
have those things in place. What's funny is this whiteboard at this co-working space on that has systems circled on this whiteboard. I didn't even do it. I wish I could show you. But creating a system, that is the first step before you start doing the automation stuff.
To me, the system of outputting your raw videos, like we talked about before, that is just a process that you need in place that AI tools, any sort of technology, won't do for you. You have to actually put it in place yourself.
Jon Blair (40:37)
what's one AI use case in e-comm that you feel is under explored by the vast majority of brands?
Justin Mitchel (40:46)
probably related to generating the user interface for the reports that your team cares about.
that would like, cause you can do that now. You could feed in the structure of the raw data and generate a front end, a full on front end, just like that. So you don't need to know how to build the charts and graphs. You would just need to say what it is that you're looking to do. And then it'll be able to do that. I think that's really, really straightforward as to what you could do. spin up, Claude is really good at this. A tool called Cursor is really good at this because it uses Claude. Cursor is a code tool. Like you can write code in it.
Jon Blair (41:11)
Interesting.
Justin Mitchel (41:26)
but you can just use a chat and like ask it, hey, build this user interface. You can give it screenshots. It will build the user interface for you and then you can pipe in data there. That way you could build your report. You could do a screenshot of the user interface it builds. You can share this with whoever your team is. You don't need it to be super interactive because you can do it at any time.
and you can change it as need be. So it's really, really easy to do now, which is wild. And you'd use a tool called Next.js or React.js. So React.js you'd say, specifically, I mean, we could go into the actual nitty gritty, but you'd say, like, I need a bar graph for React.js and build it out for me with this data structure, and then I'll pipe in a spreadsheet that it can read from, and it'll just do it. And it's so good. So user interfaces are ephemeral. Like, a long time,
Jon Blair (41:50)
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
Justin Mitchel (42:17)
We would think user interfaces is this thing that you didn't you spend all this time on and you'd never want to delete any code Ask any coder that's been doing it for a while. They never wanted to delete code. You'd have something called Git which is this version control system to store code. Like that right there used to be this big old thing a big job a lot of a lot of work would go in and coders would be afraid to lose their user interface. Now, it's like oh just delete the user interface and start over again It's it's wild wild
Jon Blair (42:43)
and just create it again. That's so cool. That's cool.
Justin Mitchel (42:47)
And this is true about workflow suit.
Jon Blair (42:47)
Okay, so my last question is fine. I've been dying to ask this. So when we were preparing, Justin told me that he owns 200 plus domain names. So my final question for you is, what's the funniest domain name that you own?
Justin Mitchel (42:59)
Yes.
Man,
I don't even remember all of the domain names I own, honestly. No, I do not, definitely not. I think one of them was like, I once owned this one called Simplae, which I thought was kind of a cool idea, but it was a play on words. was P-L-A-E, but that's not that funny. I mean, own, I own, I own Tight AI. You've seen that one, Tight.ai. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a funny one, though.
Jon Blair (43:08)
You don't remember all 200?
Yeah
Hi there, yeah.
Justin Mitchel (43:32)
The thing is like, Banana Build was one of them that I did. Yeah, I still have it somewhere.
Jon Blair (43:34)
Yo, don't, you, didn't you make a tight AI hat? You should have been wearing that this whole,
this whole recording.
Justin Mitchel (43:41)
Should have been wearing it, I know. I've got big sky on instead.
So let's see, I mean, yeah, don't really have that funny of ones. I have a lot of ones that are like, this would be a cool project. And sometimes it's for class. So I own domain names that I use specifically for teaching to like kind of fit along with the project and stuff. Other ones were like just my popcorn head going wild on ideas. like, yeah, I gotta do this one. And if you listen to any entrepreneurship programs,
Jon Blair (44:05)
Yeah.
Justin Mitchel (44:10)
these days, especially talking about AI, it's like, that would be really cool to start. I should go buy the domain name because it's like property, right? It's like a residential property. Yeah, so I...
Jon Blair (44:20)
You can sell to a VC firm at some
point, right? When they decide to spin up and invest in that dot AI.
Justin Mitchel (44:28)
Yeah, totally. Like when Apple decides to transition to tight.ai, I own the domain, they're gonna have to buy it from me. $20 million, it's ready for you. ⁓ But yeah, I a lot of silly ones, so.
Jon Blair (44:35)
man. Well,
I mean, tight AI is funny. We'll have to have you on next time you come on. You'll have to wear the tight AI hat for sure.
Justin Mitchel (44:50)
Yeah, that's if I'm back. We're doing an RV life for the summer. It's been great. That's why I'm in this co-working space. So me and my family, that's what we've been doing. it's like, I don't know, just going and venturing out, seeing the world, you know?
Jon Blair (45:06)
Heck yeah man, we got through a lot more than I thought we would. I think that we definitely need to have you come back on because there's a lot more that we can talk about. But before we land the plane here, where can people find more about you and coding for entrepreneurs?
Justin Mitchel (45:23)
Yes, so my business is codingforentrepreneurs.com or cfe.sh is a little bit easier. A lot of people misspell entrepreneur or join CFE even. So that's my website, that's my business. I have a YouTube channel as well, so cfe.sh slash YouTube. You can check out all of my coding content on there. I'm also on LinkedIn. My name's Justin Mitchel with one L, so M-I-T-C-H-E-L. I think I'm the only Justin Mitchel on there.
I'm sure this will be linked somewhere in the show notes too. But the idea is you can also get me on X, I'm on there as well. You can DM me on X, also just at Justin Mitchel. So yeah, lot of different places that you can find me.
I would love to hear from you. I wanna know questions that you have about what automations that you wanna build in because that's what I'm really nerdy about. That's what I use AI stuff about all the time. I think automation is like the path towards freedom for entrepreneurs in many different ways. And it's not always technical automation. It's about those processes that we talked about earlier. So I wanna hear what questions you have related to that. So feel free to shoot me a DM. I would even jump on a call potentially if you are working on a...
of this. ⁓
Jon Blair (46:33)
We'll link Justin's cell phone number in the show notes. I'll put it in there for everyone to text him. An AI says, yeah. Well, shoot, man. It's been a long time coming. I'm super glad that you came on. I'm dead serious about having you on to dive deeper into some of these other ⁓ things that we only got to barely scratch the surface on. But yeah, man, look, I think
Justin Mitchel (46:38)
Oh perfect, yeah yeah, I'll just put up a system that forwards it directly to Jon Blair's cell phone.
anytime.
Jon Blair (46:58)
For those of you listening, hopefully this was helpful. Definitely encourage you to reach out to Justin and check out his content, Coding for Entrepreneurs content. He's doing a lot, putting a lot of stuff out related to AI these days. So if you want a place, someone to follow who can kind of keep you up to date on the ⁓ kind technical happenings in the AI world, definitely consider giving Justin a follow. But yeah man, this is a good one. Have you back on soon and already looking forward to the next chat.
Justin Mitchel (47:30)
Thanks so much, Jon. I'm looking forward to it too.
Jon Blair (47:33)
Don't forget, if you liked today's episode, please hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening and leave us a review. It helps us reach more people like you. Also, if you want more tips on scaling a profitable DTC brand, follow me, Jon Blair, on LinkedIn. And if you're interested in learning more about how Free to Grow CFO can help your brand increase profit and cash flow as you scale, check us out at freetogrowcfo.com.
