The Podcast
Show Links
Help the Podcast
Transcript
Hey, Scott Austin here. And for this episode, I'll be having another conversation with a Shopify store owner. I'll be talking with Todd Hamric of Piano Gift Ideas.com. Todd and his business are in the very early days, so our conversation covers a lot of foundational principles of finding product / market fit that many other new or aspiring store owners may benefit from.
A couple of quick notes. I didn't start the conversation with the intention of it being a podcast. It was just a normal online consult. So you'll be dropped right into the conversation without a typical introduction. And once again, apologies for the audio quality as it was less than ideal.
OK, so here we go.
Scott Austin:
You know, why this piano gift idea came up and if you had, you know, is it a passion project or was there some unique differentiator behind it that you were thinking about from a business standpoint or, or that kind of thing?
Todd Hamric:
No, I mean, I just went with went with a, a music or three with a piano thing cause that's my background. So my I'm basically, I spent 25 years in the music industry as a performer and recording engineer and on that side of things and I'm transitioning away from that. And so a few years ago it was kind of scrambling around trying to figure out what else can I possibly do. And, you know, I love, I really like what I'm seeing on the, on what e-commerce has to offer. So I ended up in this course and they just kind of had a a formula for how to pick, you know, your your niche and, and that's kind of where I landed and I was thinking, well, I'll start with, with piano just because it's stuff that I can, I can relate to people who are interested in piano stuff.
Todd Hamric:
I don't, you know, I don't have a business background. I kind of, it's been a pretty rough transition going from somebody who cared purely about the quality of art to caring about finance and, you know, generating income. So that's, I'm basically, I've just been kind of scratching the surface and scrambling around for the last few years, trying to familiarize myself with how to build a business. And this, this was just kind of a first shop. So what you're seeing is, you know, I was, I was thinking that, okay, I'll start with piano. I don't think the name having piano, the name, I created that before I knew anything about SEO. And I figured, well, if I just pre put piano gift ideas in the name, when somebody Googles piano, piano gift ideas, this'll be the first thing that pops up. Now. I know that's not necessarily the case, but
Scott Austin:
Yes, it's a little more complex than that. Yeah. You understand now?
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. Well, I was thinking that doesn't have to limit me from moving into other markets, you know, basically any sort of gift then it's music themed, you know, guitars and basis or players. And now I'm kind of thinking that, you know, I'm looking at possibly doing affiliate links because if I'm looking up, if I search for piano gift ideas, I see blog posts that are like 25 best gifts for piano player and a piano. Okay, well maybe this, maybe that's an actually an easier model to focus on first. It's just, I mean, I got my Amazon affiliate account set up and so I'm kind of getting ready to start working on that angle, but I don't know the market size. And in fact, I, I figured you were going to start there and I went and I tried to do my keyword stuff and I realized I was using keywords everywhere. And since the last time I used it, it's a paid service now. So it was free. I don't know if you're familiar with that Chrome extension. No, no.
Scott Austin:
I just usually go into Google ad words and use their keyword planning tool.
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. Okay. So, no, I, I don't know the data on how big the market size is and that's, that's it, as soon as you came back and said, let's see if this makes sense. I figured that we would look at what the potential is. And I really don't know how to measure that
Scott Austin:
In this, in this call. So that that'll be the fun part. So, but before that, so there's the total number of people that you can get to, you know, let's just say you're United States only. So there's 330 million people. And then, you know, your people that are piano, you know, affects Yano is, and we'll get to that number. We'll figure that out and that's and once guests, right. And that's always good enough. So that's at the macro level, it's it kind of from the micro level for a second. So right now your products are sourced from where.
Todd Hamric:
So I've got a mixture. I started out when I built a course, it was all Ali express. And I want to I want to get away from that because I don't want to have, if I'm a customer, I don't want to see four to six weeks on delivery time. Yup. I know I could change that if I was actually purchasing inventory and storing it, but I'm not going here. And yeah. So, so what I've started to do is create print on demand products. So that's a lot of what you're seeing on the front page of the site is print on demand with I can't remember. I always get these confused Printful or print defy. I don't know,
Scott Austin:
In your Shopify store, you can have both of those installed if you wanted to. And I've done that for a lot of people where we do two or three print on demand providers, because each one has different products and different things that their quality is better at and worse, that kind of thing. So you can have more than one in there if you want to. So let's talk, let's talk about your, you know, whether it's Ali express or print on demand, right? So you're buying a product. You're not holding inventory, so you're buying it when it's sold. Right. And then, you know, you sell it for X dollars, you buy it from them for Y dollars. And that gives you Z profit right now. Do you know what that profit margin is from a dollar standpoint or a percentage standpoint for your products? You know, let's just pull up, you know, I, I see you got a lot of mugs. If we were to use a mug as an example where you're selling this one here for $25, what does that cost you? When someone buys it
Todd Hamric:
I'm I'm following the formula. There were a couple of different formulas I was given in the course of taking, so the print on demand stuff, they said to price the Island two and a half times the cost plus whatever your shipping cost is. Are you providing free shipping? Yes. Okay.
Scott Austin:
So this product here, do you know what this one costs you just, just around number 10, 15, 20.
Todd Hamric:
Don't worry. Let me sorry, let me switch back over here to you. So that's a, that's an Ali express.
Scott Austin:
What do you think that costs you from AliExpress?
Todd Hamric:
I don't remember. I'm going to guess 10, 12 maybe. Is that include shipping? So when I calculate the price, it's, I'm adding in a shipping costs to that. Oh, so maybe, yeah, it was probably 12. Okay. So for the cost and the shipping, so
Scott Austin:
You're selling it for 39 95, which I'm just going to say is 40 and it costs you $12. So there's a profit in there of $28 when you sell one. Right? Right. Now, how many of these do you think you have sold? Zero. Yep. And why do you think that is?
Scott Austin:
Let me put it to you this way. Would you buy this mug for $40?
Todd Hamric:
Oh,
Scott Austin:
What would you buy this mug for?
Todd Hamric:
I wouldn't buy this book. Okay. Okay.
Scott Austin:
And, and I'm going to give you a real example. So my best friend bought me 10 years ago, a mug with my name on it. Cause in 2008, Starbucks did a series of mugs, right. For cities in America. And my name is Austin. It's actually a really big mug. I've used it for 10 years every day, twice a day. It's not here right now. This is in the kitchen. And I dropped it the other day. Like literally just the other day I dropped it and there's a long crack down the side. It didn't break. So it's super strong. There's a long crack down the side. Now the coffee is actually stained that crack in and I want to replace this mug. And I just brought up, you know, and people were selling, it used and all that kind of stuff. Here's $25 to give from my best friend that I've used every day for 10 years. And I'm still like 25 bucks. Right. Kind of thing. Right. And that, that's just me, that's a test case to one, this here for $40, I'm kind of Frank about things. It seems ludicrous.
Todd Hamric:
This
Scott Austin:
At $20 seems high to me, but you know, maybe the fact that it's got the little piano in the handles, you know, kind of cool. And there's an audience sports that it could be totally wrong in that, but this price seems really, really, really high. Right?
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. No, no. Yeah. And I think part of what might be happening with that is that I, I had it set there and then I had it priced and there was like a 50% off sale. So like there was a huge discount and
Scott Austin:
Well, no, no. So you, you don't have to get to you, you don't have to defend it. Right. Cause, cause I think the root cause to this is you've been giving some really bad fricking advice. Right. Which is normal. Right. There's there's, you know, the beautiful thing about Shopify or e-commerce in general is an ecosystem, right. Is this concept that was started, you know, the, the, the four hour workweek, right. We've all, you know, we haven't, I never read the book, but I know all the concept behind it. I understand it pretty well. Right. And, but that book was also written, I think in 2006 or 2008, when setting up an e-commerce website was really, really hard. Right. And getting products shipped over from China was really, really, really hard. So in 2008, if you could source this mug and build a website around it, you could sell it really easily, relatively speaking.
Scott Austin:
Right. Nothing's easy. But, but today in 2020, right, 12 or 14 years later, everything is so easy. The whole world is so interconnected that, you know, as you well know, you can get a Shopify website up and spinning in literally an hour's time, you know, a full day, if you to, you know, have it have a decent looking kind of thing. We're back when the four hour work week was written, you know, you had to buy your own servers or, you know, install, you know, software and get it up and running. It was really, really hard. Right. So today, because it's so easy, you know, all these best practices that have been lying around for 12, 15 years of, Hey, if you can do this and that, you know, you just make money by sitting back and resting on your laurels. Right. So that part of it, it's so easy now everybody can do it.
Scott Austin:
Right. So the, the business dynamics from back then are no longer true. And then the opposite side is also true in that everybody's on the internet, everybody's, you know, connected on their phone all the time. So it's just like, if I can get my website up and running, I'm going to have a ton of users coming to me. That's no longer true, right. Because there's so many people supplying so many stores that the demand for customers' attention has also gone up so much higher that it's hard to get customers to your store. So back in 2008, this store would have had a much easier time being successful because there was less competition from a number of stores standpoint. And there was also less competition for customers eyeballs or their wallet. Right. Kind of thing. So, you know, there's a lot of best practices out there that espouse a whole bunch of things that are based on things that are no longer true.
Scott Austin:
So, you know, let's take this, you know, coffee mug as an example where someone told you, Oh, you got to sell it for two and a half times. You know, what you bought it for. Right. And that's it in the retail world, that kind of makes sense. But the problem is you're not paying wholesale price for this product, right. This product at a $12, fully burdened costs, you know, is relatively low. If you're buying just one of them makes sense. But if you're a big, you know, if you're, you know, a store that's on Amazon selling this mug and you have an inventory of 10,000 and have them in your warehouse, you paid way, way, way less than that. Right. So that's why it's easy on Amazon or any other store to find products, it's amazing to me how cheap things are today, right?
Scott Austin:
You buy things and it's like 10, $20. I bought a scale the other day. That's like Bluetooth and talks to my phone. That was 22 bucks. I'm like, that blew my mind how cheap it was because, you know, things are so efficient in the world, but then you come out with a coffee mug and someone tells you, Oh, two and a half times that you bought it for, you know, which is, you know, two and a half times of volume price makes sense, two and a half times a print on demand price or Ali express prices doesn't make as much sense. So then you Mark it up by that factor. Cause that's, you know, the metric somebody gave you and now you have a coffee mug whose prices, like I said, ludicrous it, I don't see this ever. So at, at 39 95, and then someone else gave you another best practice that said, well, then Jack your prices up to two X and then do everything 50% off.
Scott Austin:
Right. And that to me is even worse because it's, it's so transparent. I saw that on one of your prices somewhere I was on maybe it was on your mugs, right? Yeah. Here we go. The truck piano teacher mug, regular their price, $50. Now it's only 25. Right. That to me, just screams, I'm here to review off and forget the customer perception side of it. Right. But even at $25, you know, that seems kind of expensive to me now, from your cost standpoint, it's a reasonable price to charge, which is one side, right. One side is what you price it at, based on your costs, the profit margin going after the other side need to price it at is what are consumers willing to pay for it? And those two, sometimes don't meet. Right. And that's probably the situation you're in right now, where to be a profitable business, your pricing is a precipitation, people buying. Right. It's preventing.
Todd Hamric:
And I, yeah, I, I hear you loud and clear. And I think one of the things that I was confused about on pricing, and I think I, this sort of clicked for me recently is that the two and a half times is supposed to have the sale built, built in underneath that. So, so the 24 95 is supposed to be the two and a half times. And then I'm supposed to put it on sale from there and still be able to profit
Scott Austin:
Agreed. But I'm gonna take a step back and say, you're, you're playing with an equation, which I'm just going to say is false. The way you need to price products is what is competitive in your marketplace. And, you know, I've talked to people who price it up because their quality's higher and it's unique product. And that all makes sense, right? On a product that you're making yourself, your profit margin is going to end up being much higher. What I was talking about was, you know, on the pricing side of things, where if you price it just based on your metrics, right. Two and a half times, my cost, you're not thinking about the other half of the equation, which is what is the competitive set going to allow you to charge for this kind of thing? You know, there are times where you charge a hundred times your costs because you've got a unique product and there's high demand, right?
Scott Austin:
And there's other times where you don't charge, you know, twice as much, or, you know, you don't Mark it up 50% because it's competitive and your costs are high for whatever reason, but the market won't bear that markup. So just, just blindly saying the rule is two and a half times for markup just ignores one half of the equation. Right. And in that your costs are just higher than your competition, by the nature of you doing print on demand and Ali express, you know, stuff, mining them one at a time. Some print-on-demand demand stores that I've seen before. I think pretend demand is a really tough business, right? Especially if that's your whole business or most of your business, because the print on demand guys, you know, for, for a t-shirt or whatever, I'm just going to use it a general number. It may not be a hundred percent accurate, but for a t-shirt printed, you know, including shipping, they're going to charge you $17 or whatever.
Scott Austin:
And it's really hard to charge more than 25 bucks for a t-shirt. And that two and a half things said it should be $40, right? If you charge 25, a reasonable number for that, t-shirt your margin is only $8, which we haven't even talked about. The customer acquisition side of the cost of things, right. You know, customer acquisition cost is. And we'll get into that in a second. Here is a really big expense, a massive expense, right? You know, businesses that are doing large volumes that are doing advertising as, as a revenue stream, which all big businesses are, nobody's purely organic with the exception of maybe Tesla or something. Right. But all the e-commerce stores out there they're, they're doing ads and, you know, the cost per customer is really high. So the point I'm making is a couple fold. One is when you think about pricing, you need to think about the customer in that equation and what is a reasonable price for this product. And the other side of it is you need to have products that allow you to price it reasonably and still give you enough margin to at the end of the day, have a profit, quite frankly, where you're at right now with the market's come from Ali express and print on demand. It doesn't leave you a lot of margin. Are you selling t-shirts in your store?
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. I have a few. Okay.
Scott Austin:
Yanno. T-Shirt right. Would you pay $30?
Todd Hamric:
I don't know.
Scott Austin:
It's close, right? That's a tough one. Yeah. I can see that t-shirt at target for, you know, literally, you know, eight 95, right. Kind of thing. And the quality of your t-shirts are from the print on demand company. So the quality is not that high. I've seen, you know, t-shirt businesses that are really successful and they bring their t-shirt production. In-House because the quality of the print on demand guys isn't good enough for them. Long-Term because in the reality of this is, you know, the hardest part of an e-commerce store is customer acquisition. In my mind building the stores is the easiest part coming up with products is hard, fulfilling. It is hard, but you're trying to automate that process, which is what's eating weight, your margin, right? Because you're automating that and giving someone else that money. And therefore the customer acquisition side is the hardest part, right?
Scott Austin:
A lot of new store owners. And I'm not saying this is yours, but a lot of these store owners like, well, I'm just gonna build a store. And, you know, because I'm popular on Facebook or Instagram or because I got a good, you know, keyword strategy, I'm going to become competitive in SEO and social and free social and get a lot of traffic that way. Right. The reality is for a new store that is really, really, really, really hard. Right. You know, I have one client, we just did an SEO investigation on and found that, you know, they have better content than their competition. From an SEO standpoint, their store gets index better. We learn all the technical things. Right. But have them in their 20 competitive stores cause they're in their niche space also. Right. And there's like 20 other stores on the internet that are competing against them. And we think they have the best quality of content, maybe the second or third best kind of thing. But they're only getting to the second page in se in, in Google and not onto the first page. And the reason for that is they have the least number of inbound links of all their competition by an order of magnitude. Right. Most of those stores have an average of a thousand inbound links and they've got a hundred, so,
Todd Hamric:
Okay. So wait, what's the name about like someone else
Scott Austin:
It's on the internet linking to your store, right.
Todd Hamric:
Okay. So the number one
Scott Austin:
Thing that is going to get you to the Google's top search result is people linking to your store. And if no one is linking to your store, no matter what you do on your site, unless it's the most fringe thing in the planet, you're not going to rank on the first page for right. So for these guys, what we did for NCO strategy, next step is all right. We need to build a link building strategy. And that just says, we're going to figure out how, and there's a thousand different ways to do this, to get people, to link to our website. So SEO is a long-term game and B you need inbound links to be successful at it. A lot of people try to be successful with SEO, with just what they do on their site. You got to do all that. That's like table stakes, doing all the right onsite, onsite optimizations you must do.
Scott Austin:
But then to actually be successful, you'd have a link building strategy where people are linking to you, right? And that could be a whole number of different things. So the point being for customer acquisition, you need to think about paid customer acquisition for a new store, because you're not going to be competitive in SEO, even though you should be invested in that over the longterm. Absolutely because it'll pay off down the road, but in a new store, in the beginning, it's going to be paid advertisement. Or, you know, if you are, you know, Justin Timberlake or something, maybe you have enough of a social following to do it. Right. I I've met store owners who tried to build their store and their business around their, you know, 10 50,000. And I think 50,000 was their number of Instagram followers, which is a great number, right.
Scott Austin:
A fabulous number, but you can't build a business behind it. Right. You just do the math of 50,000 Instagram followers. And I'm just gonna off the top of my head, make broad generalizations of 50,000 Instagram followers. Let's say half of them are real, right. Because the other half would probably fake. Half of them are fake. We now have 25,000 and let's say we can get 8% of those people to come to our website. And I just pulled that number out of the air. Right. Let's see, we can get 8% of those people to come to our website. Right. So point 0.08, that's 2000 people to our website. Okay. That's 2000 people. Now let's say we have an average site conversion rate of 3%. So let's multiply that times 3%. Now we have 60 sales. So my 50,000 user audit following on Instagram, yields me 60 sales. Now what's the frequency. I can get that number of sales out of those people once a year. It's not once a day. It's not once a month, right? Maybe once a year, twice a year. So your 50,000 Instagram followers gets you 60 sales a year or 120 sales a year, whatever, whatever number point being that doesn't build you a business. Right. So you're going to have, you're paying for your customers on Facebook. You know how I think you said you were testing some Facebook ads. Right?
Todd Hamric:
Right. And
Scott Austin:
What do you think the, how much dollars did you spend to make one sale? Do you know that number?
Todd Hamric:
So what I, what I have is like a four day, $5 a day cycle for each. And if, if it's not profitable, then cut it and move on to the next product. And you know, you're basically looking for something that really the people respond to. So you get that the one sale, I mean, it was within one of those actually without one, it was the the neck warmer thing at the time I was calling it a neck Gator.
Scott Austin:
So, so is that a COVID mask? Is that a COVID man?
Todd Hamric:
That was the idea.
Scott Austin:
So you've had one product that's sold. Right. And it be,
Todd Hamric:
I actually do without, when I didn't do one ad, I tested, I ran three ads of three. So I get to ask, like I created a little video and then I did, I compared two different images and one of those led to a sale. So it was part of a $20 cycle.
Scott Austin:
So that costs you $20 for a customer. Let's just say that. Right, right. Yeah. Which is actually, and that's one of your products and all the other tests you did didn't work out yet. Right. So let's just assume for a second that you could sell more of those at $20 per customer. Is that profitable for you? So if I look at your net Gator, let's see what your prices, it's $44.
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. I probably sold it at, not at 44, but at 22.
Scott Austin:
So it cost you $20 to sell something for $22. So your total cost for that, that sale, let's just assume this net Gator printed on demand cost you 12 bucks with shipping.
Todd Hamric:
Okay. So 12
Scott Austin:
Plus 20 for the cost of acquisition, it's $32 and you sold it for 22. So you lost $10 on that sale, which that's not a problem, right? Because you know, when you begin, you're going to lose money and you're learning, right. You're testing and learning. But the Uber point to make from that is $20 for a cost of acquisition on Facebook is actually kind of low. And it's going to depend on a whole bunch of dynamics, right? Everything always depends on your situation, but you know, $25 is like an average cost of acquisition for a customer on Facebook. So like I had customers who, who sell a product for 20 bucks and they have huge profit margin and they make it in China and delivered to them in the United States, custom a dollar. Right. And it's actually a pretty cool product. So it's reasonable to sell it at $20.
Scott Austin:
So it gives them $19 in margin and a huge percentage wise margin, but it's still not enough to buy Facebook ads because Facebook is too expensive, right. So they have to go to other ad sources, whether it's Pinterest or Instagram or Google or whatever else, kind of thing, or influencers and that kind of thing, because Facebook today is really, really, really, really, really competitive from an advertising cost standpoint. We're Facebook in 2012 when a lot of these best practices were started was really competitive because nobody was advertising on Facebook yet. But now everybody in the world advertises on Facebook first and Google second, we're used to be Google first, nobody's set up in the past, right. So now, and in the, and the, the beauty of Facebook versus Google, right? So Google search is going to get you what I call the intended shopper, right?
Scott Austin:
Someone's in a shopping mode and they actually searched for piano gift ideas, right? And so there they, the intentions already there, and the keywords that you're targeting in Facebook, what you're doing is you're going after the unintended shopper. So they're on Facebook looking at baby pictures or cat names or whatever they're doing. And all of a sudden, an ad pops up that says, Hey, you know, could you target in, you know, people that like piano or whatever you're doing for targeting, Hey, how about this cool piano gift idea? Right. And they're like, Oh, that's interesting. They had no intention of shopping today, but you, you attracted them. Right. So that's the beauty of Facebook is you can go out and proactively pull your customers in, into a shopping experience. But that also means it's really, really competitive because everybody wants to do that. So Facebook becomes really expensive and because the system has got a lot of power to it, it's easier to start on that platform, but it's also way, way more expensive to start on that platform where, you know, one thing to look, you know, so, so the point being, you know, you're going to have to pay for customers and that's going to cost you a lot of dollars, right.
Scott Austin:
And then add to that, you're in a low margin. Well, you're priced too high based on this two and a half rule because your costs, your cogs are high, right? So just because your cogs are high, doesn't mean you can charge a higher price. So that means, you know, your prices have to come down to be a more competitive price sample size of one. My net Gator that I bought on Amazon, I bought that in Amazon three 95. Right. And it was in my house the next day. So this for, you know, 44 95, you've really got to get someone who loves that design and, you know, your designs aren't that differentiated, or I don't think there were that much of an increase and maybe they are, I could be totally wrong in that, but you've got this you're priced too high. Your costs are high because of the business model you're in and customer acquisition can only be done through paid channels.
Scott Austin:
And that it was cost a lot of money and it only gets higher for that, you know, every year, right? Because more and more ad dollars go online, we'll get more successful at it. So all of that leads up to, you know, it's, you know, you're in a tough space, right? And you're, you're, you, you, you listen to these people who are either full of crap to be perfectly Frank or based their learnings and what they're sharing with you on business dynamics and internet dynamics that no longer exist. So because everybody average, you know, everybody buys internet ads today and anybody can build a website and it's so easy to source stuff, reasonably cheaply. You know what you're, you know, I can build your store and be in competition with you by the end of the day. Right. You know, this is so easy to do that.
Scott Austin:
What you have to do is distinguish yourself. And a lot of my clients distinguish themselves with their products and they make their own products. There was something unique about the products. A I love the fact you picked a niche, right? You picked a niche. So that, that to me is a good thing early on in my Shopify days as client come to me and my most expensive project at the time, because they wanted to incorporate all these data feeds for all these sporting good products. And I'm like, don't, you want to just focus on something like, you know, hiking or hunting or whatever, like, no, I want everything. So I was like, I don't advise this, but I built it for him. Right. And he had like 45,000 products in his store and also to navigation and taxonomy, all the stuff going on. And then he realized just because he had the store with 45,000 products in, it doesn't mean it's going, gonna sell a single one.
Scott Austin:
And customer acquisition is the hardest thing. And he had no margin to do that with kind of thing. He literally shut a store down before we launched it, because you realize that being broad in generalist is actually a negative for small stores. Right. Being focused is a good thing. So you know what you did the decision, you'd like the decision you made that I like is I'm going to focus on this audience that I know and can build rapport with right now that said, you know, some of the things that if you're going to do that, you know, what about you? And I'm going to start with the product, right? What about your products are great. Good, good. Isn't good enough today. Right? On the end, you know, good products, you know, you're going to find mediocre and good products on Amazon. Why are people going to leave Amazon and come to you from a product standpoint?
Scott Austin:
You don't have to answer that question because it's a hard question to answer. A lot of my, a lot of my clients do it by a couple of different ways, right? One way is to have their own products. And so their products are unique or you can't get them elsewhere. There may be competitions. Like I have a lot of clients whose products are patented and they defend their patents as, as you should, if you have a patent kind of thing. So they are the only place you can get it kind of thing. So other clients, you know, make their site a better shopping experience by having more information about them. Like I have a lot of people who resell commercial or industrial types of products. I wanted those water fountains, for example. But on their water fountains site, they're doing a better job educating you.
Scott Austin:
Now, you know, this isn't for consumers, obviously consumers don't buy water fountains, it's for your park and recs and gyms and that kind of stuff. But they do a really great job in educating the customer about different types of water fountains and the pros and cons. You need this one for this situation and that one for them. So their value add is consultation, right? And also get on the phone with them and talk them through things and all that kind of stuff. So your store asked to be unique, differentiated somehow by products, by price, and don't ever compete on price because you'll never win against the big players or by quality or authenticity. You know, there's a lot of stores that are built based on a personality of a person, you know, Kylie Jenner or something like that. Or people become celebrities in their own little space and build on that over time also.
Scott Austin:
So it's really hard to say, I'm going to focus on this thing. Just gather the pieces that are around that are easy to do and build a store. So you saw how easy it was to build a store. And I'm not saying I'm super, super easy, right? I'm sure there's a ton of, you know, frustration and figuring things out. But in general, you know, you couldn't have done this 10 years ago would have been impossible, right. Even five years ago would have been hard, but today that not too hard, you know, relatively speaking. Yeah. So what about your store is going to be something that is going to engage people or be unique? Great. What what's unique in your store. And right now I'm not seeing right. And, and I, I built many a print on demand store and very, very, very few of them are still around because they are so easy and I've even done ones that are very focused with all unique designs.
Scott Austin:
The customer, I had one customer and he was like a, it was a, it was a sports thing. He was actually really good. It's a small, you know, insular sport, sporting community. And he competed at the national level at that. And he thought if he could just build something because he was so well known in that space, it would just sell. And it's like, no, it's a full-time job selling, right. Just because you build a great site and have great content, you know, any one of my clients who's successful is constantly working to bring sales in. You just can't set up a bunch of ads and put it on autopilot. And it just runs on its own. You're always doing something from a marketing sales standpoint to attract people to the site, new copy, new creative, new channels, new PR, talking to people, you know, reaching out all that good stuff.
Scott Austin:
And I have one client who who literally spends, you know, two or three hours a week and has been doing this for like eight years now, reaching out to influencers. And every week he sits down and does it, and he has a whole process. He goes through always looking for new influencers, but he never skips a week. And he's super successful because he never skips a week. Right. He's always doing that work. The Uber point being the four hour workweek concept, really hard to do with a new store like this. Right. It's, you know, it's a full-time job. Even you already have a full-time job. This is another full-time job. Kind of thing, as I'm sure you're realizing already so
Todd Hamric:
Well, is this, I mean, overall, do you think, I mean, how do we decide, or, or what's your opinion on if this is a worthwhile endeavor, you know, this, this niche, and can I take kind of the concept that you're seeing and start doing some things right. And have it be something worth pursuing.
Scott Austin:
So let's, let's look at it from the other end. That's a great question. Right? So, cause you know, the reality is there are some niches that are just too small, right? Like I used to play roller Derby. I coach roller Derby for kids now. And the roller Derby world is bigger now than when I started doing it like 10 years ago. But back then they were like 4,000 people playing roller Derby in America, just too small. Right. Even if you sold to every one of them, there's not enough money in that kind of thing. So some niches are too small. So let's actually look at this, how many pianos in the United States, at least 20% have pianos in their home today of households, right? There's a hundred million households and we can estimate the 20% and look at us. You know, I just searched for how many pianos in the United States on Google.
Scott Austin:
And I'm not even on a website, right? The first three lines are the answer, right? So the, the research, you know, who knows how accurate these numbers are, but I'm going to guess they're close enough. Right. It gives me what I need to know. Right. So assuming there had been at one time 28 million pianos in the U S there are a hundred million households. We could estimate that at least 20% of happiness in their homes, another, another stat down here, I'm looking at says 31,000 pianos were sold in the United States in a year. This, you know, 31,000 pianos is not a lot, but you know, 20 million homes is a lot. And you know, every piano, you know, house, there's more than one person. There may be more than one person that plays it. Piano is, you know, people have digital, you know, synthesizers or play piano on, on their iPhone kind of stuff.
Scott Austin:
But this says, you know, there, there there's a market, right. As opposed to if we did this. And it said, well, you know, there's, there's 5,000 people that play piano. There's, there's probably more than, I think the 20 million number is high, to be honest with you, right. Even if there's 20 million pianos in homes today, like I have a friend who was a piano in their house and it's, it's beautiful. And it's literally decoration that we can always argue one or two, you know, we can always prove our point with an, a sample set of one. And I just like to look at things in really broad numbers, but let's just say, there's, you know, it says 20 million homes today have a piano. Let's say half of them are in use there's 10 million people. So somehow you have to find a way to target 10 million people, 10 million people is enough to build a business of, so I'm just saying off the top of my head, there's 10 million piano players players in the United States. That number may be higher. It may be lower, but you can build off of that. But to do that, how much is it going to cost you to find those people? And, and can you target them? And that's the kind of stuff that, you know, with your Facebook testing, you know, I don't know what sort of targeting you're doing, but is, you know, plays piano. Is that an easy thing to find through the ad targeting systems that exist today?
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, the, the audience that aiming at, or supposed to aim at from my, you know, instructions is between a hundred thousand and 500,000. So that they they're saying that should be scalable somewhere in that, that number. So, yeah, it's, it's pretty easy for me to there's, there's something like Oh, maybe 13 million in the piano interest category, but that's pretty broad. I mean, I'm going super specific people who obviously have a deep passion for it. So I'm going with people who teach piano or study piano. And then sometimes I also cross it with, like, if I'm selling a club, I'll cross that with coffee and do this. It will be people who love coffee should be able to sell them a mug.
Scott Austin:
So what I'm looking at right now is, is the study of piano declining the United States of America. I like to do a bunch of internet searches and just read as much as I can. Just to understand, but also just start reading this, you may start figuring out things you can focus on. You said one already, right? Piano, teachers, piano lessons. So maybe, you know, you've, you know, figure out a way to target people that are teachers or lessons and that kind of thing, and figure out, you know, not only what your broad niches of piano, you know, people with a piano affinity, but how are you going to find them? And what is the purpose? Is this actually a piano gift? Or is this a, I'm a piano person? And I buy this for myself. Right? Cause a lot of times, you know, there are certain products that are greatest gifts and there are certain products that are purchased by the person themselves, because some of the decision making criteria is really, really hard.
Scott Austin:
Right. And you know, my poor mom, you know, I, I got in my head where I, as a kid, there were certain things my mom liked, like she liked brass and Cardinals. So every gift I gave her was either brass or a Cardinal. And I'm sure, you know, by the time I was 12, she just rolled her eyes the whole time. Oh God, another card or another brass thing. Right. Kind of thing. But you know, th that's a you'll figure those kind of things out. The question becomes, you know, step one and you'll learn this over time. Do people buy this for themselves? Or are they buying it as a gift? And the gift idea, I actually is a pretty good one. Right? If you know, someone that plays piano gift-giving is really hard and to have that's particular to them is pretty good. Now, if you're a piano teacher, everybody just may give you piano gifts all the time.
Scott Austin:
It used annoyed by it. But you know, it in general, it's not a bad idea to start with that. This is going to be a gift giver, Hey, you know, give this to your piano teacher or give it to your mom who likes piano or gives you your student. Who's studying piano, your child, whatever. That's an assumption you're making. Right? So one of things you need to figure out is do people actually buy piano theme gifts for other people, or when people buy a piano theme things, are they buying it for themselves? There's no, I don't know of a way to know that today, other than starting to talk to people, right. You know, you you've done a sale. You have you called that person and said, Hey, did you buy this for yourself? Or did you buy it for someone else? Right. Kind of thing.
Scott Austin:
And literally when you're first starting out, calling your customers and asking them questions like that makes total sense. It is a total non-scalable thing, right. When you're selling 10 million items a year, you would never ever do. But every single person who, you know, call, you know, who makes a sale with you, call them up. If you've got a phone number, give them a call. And you know, if you're inhibited by that and shy by that, which I personally would be get over it, figure it out. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, when I first started doing things like that, all I would force myself like I'm going to call 10 potential customers today. Right. And I would not allow myself to get out of my chair at those 10 were done. And it was physically painful for me to do that. But you have to do that kind of research to start knowing the answers to the questions.
Scott Austin:
So right now everything's in assumption and we need to do is turn our assumptions into, into facts are things that we know, right. Validating our assumptions is, is the the term they use. A lot of times, you need to validate those assumptions and understand your customer. When I talk to a store owner that's really successful, or even, you know, large businesses, it's amazing to me how much they know about their customer and their customer's thought process and the value prop that their product or service provides to those customers. That level of understanding is going to make you successful. It's hard. Like all this stuff is hard. You know, people told G Congress was gonna be easy. We're lying to you or basing their, their, their evaluation on a world that no longer exists because e-commerce, today is hard. It's easy. Technically it's, you know, easy to have a store, all that kind of stuff and source products.
Scott Austin:
It's hard to turn that into a profitable revenue stream. You know, the question you were asking is, you know, is this the, have you made some of the right decisions, picking a niche, I think is a great decision going to print on demand and Ali express, not a fan of that for the reasons we talked about. And that's basically a margin thing and a differentiation thing, but that said, you know, what are your options if were to, you know, because what you're trying to do here is to have a, have a broad list of products that appeal to customers, you know, cause maybe the net Gator doesn't apply to everybody. Right? And there, there are certain companies and all they do is the, the latest bad of the season. And they do one product at a time that really well that's really, really hard to do also.
Scott Austin:
So there's all these things against, you know, this being successful. So the way it's going to be successful is if you're really good at figuring these things out and making some decisions and understanding things, you know, the, the business owners that I work with that are really, really good, understand their business really well, their business, their customers, their products, all that kind of stuff, and are able to make decisions based on their business versus just, you know, like, like you took a course, they give you some equations. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a great starting point, but the next thing should be all right. That's, that's my base point. What have I learned from that? And how am I going to, how am I going to use that knowledge to make my next set of decisions that are no longer based on that incoming assumptions that my course gave me, because the course is generic for everybody in every situation and successful people are going to be very specific to their customers and their business.
Scott Austin:
So I think it'd be really hard to be successful with a store like this, but to be successful in this, you're going to have to some unique value prop, whether that's product or something else and product in a store is, is the place to start with. If you're going to be successful in this space piano theme products for people that are either buying for piano fans or for piano fence to buy for themselves, then a site of products that are obviously print on demand and random things pulled off of container ships coming from China probably is not going to be a successful route. Right? You might start out with that to have conversations with people and talk to them. If you could sell 10 of your products and talk to 10 people on the phone. And then the next one questions I'd ask them is, you know, you buy this for you or for your, for someone else's gift.
Scott Austin:
Next question is, what do you want? What is the product that you're missing today that would be really useful for you that you, that you're looking for and then figure out, well, this is what people want. How do I, how do I get that? You know, the, the short summary is a business where you're just going to buy things that are too expensive. Cause it's quantity of one on time of a purchase. It's going to be really, really, really, really hard when I say really four or five times, I mean, impossible to build a profit business, doing that because your margins are too small, your and your, your cost of acquisition, your advertising costs. It can be so high because it's not differentiated. If your product is more differentiated, it's easier for you to figure out or to find people that it resonates with because there's no competition. Like I don't have a wallet with me, but my wallet is made by this company here.
Speaker 3:
[Inaudible]
Scott Austin:
And I absolutely love my wallet. I bought it during their first Kickstarter which was, I dunno, 2014 now, a long, long time ago. And it's still my, my wallet every day, but it's the only wall like this, right? There's a lot of minimalist wallets out there. It's actually this piece of metal it's milled down to be a you and your credit cards is sliding and they literally click, right. There's a natural springiness to this. And I just love the technology and engineering behind this. Right.
Todd Hamric:
I've never seen that. Yeah.
Scott Austin:
Oh, it's bad as it is. Fabulous. I love my wallet. Right. Kind of thing. But the point being here is they're the only ones who make it, he's got a patent on it. He's got a good story behind it. You know, they built it when he's in Stanford, grad school and that kind of stuff. Didn't Kickstarter. So this is a unique wallet. And if you, if you love it, there's only one place you're going to get it from. And that's him. Now, there are other competition, you know, competitive wallets, but none, exactly like this it's unique. Right? So it's point being, if your products that unique or you put it in front of people, they either like it, or they don't like a metal wallet. I don't want that. That's, you know, no other people like me where like a metal wallet, tell me more. Right. Kind of thing. The more unique your product is the easier it is to get a response. Whether it response is just to know you're getting a response and understanding, does it work or does it not? So for you, let me, let me turn this around to you. What do you think about everything I've said so far? What is your conclusion or just, you know, thoughts of, does this make sense?
Todd Hamric:
I don't know. That's, I mean, it's, it's not, I still, I feel pretty optimistic about it, but not, I mean, I don't, I obviously, I don't hear that tone from you in it, but I also know that I haven't really done a great job with communicating everything. I haven't been executing what I'm supposed to very well, nor have I really communicated some of the, some of the strategies that are supposed to have, you know what I mean? I'm supposed to be drawing people in for, with products that are under $10. So you're sourcing for like $3 and then there's an upsell and then,
Scott Austin:
Oh no, no, no. Someone told you that garbage and then another complete lie. They told you right here, here's the truth, right? In your store in the beginning, expect an average customer lifetime value of one order, one order, okay. So there's this whole concept of, Hey, you're going to acquire this customer. You're going to monetize them over, over a lifetime of, you know, 15 years kind of thing, which is great. And you should be shooting for that. Don't get me wrong. Right? And like, I have clients who sell coffee, I have multiple of them. And their whole thing is, you know, buy our coffee, you get a subscription and, you know, get that customer lifetime value going. But here's the thing. If, if you're doing piano and gifts right now, and I buy a piano gift for my piano friend for Christmas, am I going to buy them another piano gift? And if so, when I, the likelihood of me buying multiple times from you is fairly small. So, and this goes back to the it's needed to take the best practices. People are telling you and apply it to your business. Now, if I'm a piano fan, how many piano theme products do I want my life? Do I want to be that person who wears a piano scarf every day to work for a next step? Who's your target audience? Give me a persona, a type of person. Who's your, who's your audience?
Todd Hamric:
Well, yeah. I mean, that's, that's something I, I don't know,
Scott Austin:
Three to make mixing guesses.
Todd Hamric:
Okay. I'm guesses probably. I mean, I'm thinking that it's probably gonna end up leaning more towards women. So a female teacher or a long pursued gift for kid or, you know, I was kind of, I probably, my, my process was, was backwards where I was thinking, well, I will target the audience. I will see who it attracts. And then that will tell me, who is really demographic is, you know?
Scott Austin:
Yeah. And, and, and what you're realizing right, is when you take spaghetti and throw it against the wall and see what sticks, the amazing thing is nothing sticks, nothing. Right? So you're right. You need to, you need to reverse that. So let's just take your two personas. You just came up with one was piano teacher and the other was a parent. Who's trying to keep their kid excited about the parent force, passion around piano, which, you know, I said that a little sarcastically, but I probably also mean that a little literally, right. I doubt the kid is that into piano. And it's probably the parent that's that into piano and wants their kid to be in the piano. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Right. Kind of thing. So let's take those two. One is a gift or a bribe. And the other is I'm purchasing it for myself. Cause it's the passionate about my life go find. So where do you live
Todd Hamric:
In Ohio Columbus?
Scott Austin:
So you live, I think in the third, most popular state in America or the fourth or fifth, you in Ohio is not a small state and population. So there's people around you is my point. You can find people that are, that persona, find five piano teachers and five piano moms and ask them, what do they want now? How do you find them? Are there?
Todd Hamric:
Well, I I'm plugged in to the piano community here. There you go. I mean, I taught for 10 years.
Scott Austin:
Yeah. Okay. So, you know, these people ask them the question. So I used to make products. I used to make furniture and stuff like that. Tell us you got to stop shop. I was selling my own stuff and now I no longer do that at all. But I would like make certain things on the cutter and, you know, make full products out of them. And I would literally carry them with me and I would be hanging out with my friends and I would put it down on the table and say, and just, just put it, put a product on the table and let them play with it and let them interact with it and just listen. And then I started asking directed questions. Well, what do you like about this? What do you not like about this? What color would you want this in? What sizes do you want to say? Always asking questions and getting feedback. Yeah. So yeah.
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. That's definitely a missing piece in my life. I mean, part of going towards e-commerce and actually part, part of getting out of teaching was like some social anxiety stuff, but you're right. You're not wrong.
Scott Austin:
I I've gone to a certain year, a little startup weekends kind of stuff years ago now. And the first thing they said is, all right, get out of your chair and go outside and start asking questions to people. Come on, put assumption, start going, asking questions to the first person you see. And the whole point of that was to get you over that. And I'm believing, I love working alone and not having to interact with people. Right. I have that same. I don't want to talk to people. I don't want to bother them. I don't want to do beans them. It, it sickens me when I have to do those things, but you have to do those things. And then, you know, what you start realizing is the other side of it. If, if, if I'm a piano teacher and somebody asked me, what kind of piano products do you want your life?
Scott Austin:
Or, you know, what do you think of this? You know, necklace that I just designed, you know, with the little keys on it, kind of thing, they want to give you their feedback. You wanted to talk to me, right? I do my podcasts and you reached out and like, I want to talk to this guy, right? People want to give their opinions. So even though you may have that social anxiety about, you know, inconveniences, the way I always think about is I don't want to inconvenience people. Right? But in the end, if you're talking to the right person about the right topic, all they want to do is talk to you about it. And when they don't, then you move on kind of thing. But people want their voice, heard, people want to express their opinions. So it's not like you're, you know, I have this guy in my neighborhood, he sells meat out of his truck for whatever reason.
Scott Austin:
And he used to knock on my door and like, try to sell me meat at the end of it. Like, my I've still got meat left in my truck. You want to buy some kind of thing or the, you know, whatever other people knocking on my door, that's an inconvenience because they don't know a thing about me and they're not targeting me. But if you target people, you know, if you're trying to help a mom figure out a way to keep their kid playing piano, Oh, they will love you. Right. You're not an inconvenience at all.
Todd Hamric:
That's a cool angle. And I hadn't thought about it that way because my, you know, my experience was with music and with piano was my choice. I was never forced to do anything. And therefore the love of it is still intact. That's, that's interesting though. That's an interesting angle to think about the parent. That's trying to keep, keep the interest there. But you know, I think what I'm feeling, what I'm seeing and if it could be misguided or, or stubborn, but I just, I feel like there's so much good information, especially just from your podcast that I could be putting into practice. It still makes me want to put that in to practice on this site. Like, for example when you were, you were, you were talking about having basically filter option, like filter options so that you can help guide, help the customer, make decisions, guide them to exactly what they're looking for. And I realized, Whoa, why, you know, if I'm trying to do this site that has all these gifts available, you know, I need to have filters by price available and all kinds of foot, but everything in their face that I can possibly think of that they might be looking for filter wise. And that was a big aha moment for me. But, you know, I mean, if it's not, how do I determine if I shouldn't even be wasting time on it? Should I have a wipe, the slate clean and start with something else? Or
Scott Austin:
I don't know. I think it goes back to customer research. So I think it goes back to finding five teachers and five, five moms talking to them because what's going to happen when that conversation is a couple of things in one thing you're going to be doing is you're going to be understanding what products they're interested in. And another is you're gonna understand what their motivations behind those products are, right? I'm kind of sarcastically saying moms bribing their kids that may or may not be true. Right. maybe all the kids do have passion and don't need that kind of thing. And another thing I've been learning is the language they use to describe those things. Is this about showing your piano pride? Is it about celebrating the milestone of achievement? You know, all those kinds of things. So what you're doing when you're talking to your customers, you're realizing what products they want.
Scott Austin:
And you're also realizing what way to message those products to them, right? Like, you know, I'm going to use karate as an example. If you're a mom, your kids in karate and they get their Brown belt or whatever, right. That's a milestone and you want to give them their Brown belt. You know? So if I was a karate gift store, I'd start coming up with what's the appropriate gift for every color belt that your kid achieves kind of thing. And you know, here, here's this cool squirt gun. They give them when they get their Brown belt or whatever kind of thing. And that's a complete, you know, random example. But just to give you, you know, to think about why are they buying these things? What's the purpose behind it and, and how did they work? So that you're taught. So when you go out with your Facebook ads or your Google ads or whatever ads you're going to do, you start using the language that resonates with them.
Scott Austin:
And this is all stuff you need to do before you even get to the website. Do you have a website kind of thing, but you've got to attract them with the right message and the right products, not just the right product, it's the right message also. So in your conversations, those are the things you're learning. I hear you saying, like what kind of do on the site? I wouldn't start with that today. I'd start with the talk to the customers. First five teachers, five moms, if not five, 10 of each, right? The more you talk to the better, but just pick those two audiences. Don't, don't go out to, you know, Billy Joel and that kind of stuff. Right. Just stick with those two for right now and talk to five to 10 of them each and then ask you, you know, and have, have like three questions in your mind that you want to get answered.
Scott Austin:
One question is what sort of products do they want? Is it a gift or for themselves, which you kind of know where those two audiences already and you know, why would they buy them? Is this for Christmas? Or is it for their recital for the mom? Maybe they want to get a, Hey, you did a great recital kind of thing here. Here's a gift to commemorate that event. Or it might be, you know, Hey Johnny, if you do lessons for another year, I'll give you this thing here. So you wanna start figuring out those things and the words that they use to describe that, and they're going to be different, right? A mom's motivation is going to be completely different than the piano teacher is motivation. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? Because there are different scenarios. But with those two Senate, now you've got two options a or B. And in those conversations, what you want to figure out is which one of those two is lower hanging fruit for you, and then come up with a product and a message that resonates and then test that out.
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. That's, that's great. I like that. That's cool. I've never thought of it that way. That that's, that's really streamlined. Yeah.
Scott Austin:
I did a recent podcast and the basic wording of it was let your customer design your website. And, and all I'm saying here is let your customer design your business. What products are you going to go after? How are you going to message them? Let them tell you that. Remember, I was talking about the really successful businesses. It's amazing how well they understand their customer because they do all this stuff that we're talking about. Awesome. Does that give you a, like an actionable next step now, if you were to set a deadline behind that, what would it be?
Todd Hamric:
Oh, let's see. That's a good question. It, it's totally actionable and it's uncomfortable, but that's a good thing. That is very good thing. Let's see deadline. I mean, what should it be? What, what would you what would you expect?
Scott Austin:
Let's do this, let's say, you know, because next week is Christmas and you know, everybody's, everybody's preoccupied first week of the, of the year, January 4th or whatever, you talk to three people per week for the month of June.
Todd Hamric:
Oh, okay. That's great.
Scott Austin:
And in what we're doing there, instead of saying, you know, you have to talk to 10 people total by the end of January, which means on January 29th, you talked to nobody, we're going to make you do it every week with fewer people. So that you're getting towards that goal.
Todd Hamric:
That's great. That was good. I like that angle. And then the goal that is to
Scott Austin:
Make a decision on which one of those two personas is the first one to target and what sort of product to target them with and what sort of message
Todd Hamric:
Your decision on which persona to target. And then what was that after that?
Scott Austin:
What's the message like, get the best gift for your child's recital or, you know, or, you know, reward yourself for a piano seat, you know, teaching season kind of thing. Great. That's awesome. And then, you know, once you make those decisions, then, then you can figure things out. And I'm a big fan by the way of that's the next milestone. Don't think beyond that, right? Don't, don't start predicting the future and trying to figure out, you know, what things are going to be in February because come January 30th will be a whole lot smarter and can figure out what February should look like. So just take this next step and be open-minded like in, at the end, you know, look at the data, look at information and they go, all right, here's what I've learned. And here's what I'm going to do, you know, from this moving forward, you know, one of the things that I like is that you're like, well, no, you haven't talked me out of this yet, but I talked you out of it. That's totally fine too. But you know, stubbornness is, is half of success, right? Just showing up every day and doing the hard work, being stubborn is how people are successful, because that means they just do the work and doing the work and showing up every day is what's required to build any business, including an e-commerce business.
Todd Hamric:
Yeah. I'll stay. I mean, I think part of what I, I hadn't really put it into words that is unique about my effort. What I'm trying to do is that a lot of the music themed stuff I felt like is so lame for, for years, it's really boring and lame. And so I would like to offer people modern, you know, some things that are new and exciting and there's, you know, you can go onto Amazon, you can search, do a search for piano stuff, and there's stuff that's more exciting than what you can see here and there, like people crafting bottle openers out of piano, keys and stuff like that. But as somebody who's passionate about the piano itself, I think that's part of, of what keeps my, what drives my interest is having some exciting options for people that haven't been there before.
Scott Austin:
Yeah. So what I hear you saying is product your product. Isn't that exciting yet either. Right? So one of the things you need to figure out is, you know, there's this whole question of, well, this audience buy this at the price and profitability, which, you know, are always business dynamics and be thinking about, but you know, the first thing is what's different and unique about your products. You picked your audience, you're going to be researching them. And in that research, you're going to be asking them what kind of products they want. If you want to create something unique and differentiated, use them to give you some of feedback, let them tell you what that is. And you know, they won't, you know, there won't be this aha Holy grille moment where the sky has opened up and give you the answer. But there will be things you may not have thought of or things that reinforce what you're already thinking. You may find out for example, that the piano teachers totally willing to spend $200 on the perfect piano thing for herself, but the mom's only willing to spend 20 bucks. So these are the things you're gonna be thinking about and, and learning about. Yeah, that's great. Excellent. I love it. Cool. So you have your homework.