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Hey, Scott Austin here. And in this week's podcast episode, we have a guest for you and our guests this week is Bryce Hudson. And he's a man who wears many hats. He first off is an athlete. He's a, an X games medalist. And he's one of those people that, you know, does those motorcycle things on the X games? So he's absolutely freaking nuts, right? He's got metal flying around the air and doing back flips and all sorts of crazy things. But then he's also an inventor. He invented his own product, which is a hand cleaner. And you know, that's a lot of science and iterations over time. And then there's next hat he wears is an entrepreneur. He turned that invention of his hand cleaner into a Shopify store that's been going on, I think, five to seven years now. And he's been real successful that he's at a myriad of California and a welcome price.
Hey, Scott, big. Thanks for having me on man. That was quite the introduction. You pretty much got everything I need to say about myself. So I'm excited to be here and see what we can dive into.
We do a lot of really good introductory and about videos. So it's easy for me to go to your about website, you know, and you and your wife are sitting there and tell your story really, really well. I think you guys do a fabulous job with that, which gives me the, the information I need to do an intro for you. So thanks for that.
Nice, nice. And I guess we're doing something right. If all that made sense. So I like it. Thank you.
So beyond what I just said, do you want to give us a little background about you and your company? Anything that I, that I missed out on
Man, you pretty much nailed it. So I've grown up here in Southern California area and I grew up and always had a dream of being a motorcycle rider. And I was able to accomplish that dream in 2013, winning my first X games medal. So then from there, my career kind of took off and I rode motorcycles professionally for about seven, eight years. And throughout my involvement in that I always got dirty greasy, grimy hands. And that kind of led to the creation of what is grip clean today, my company, which is a heavy duty hand cleaner for automotive or motorcycle mechanics, because again, I was always working on my own equipment and got dirty hands. Didn't really like the products that were out there. So that's kind of where we're at the businesses, about six years in now. And it's it's healthy, it's running, we're happy. And yeah, we just got a lot of good things going on that hopefully I could share some insight as to what we have going on and maybe it helps some people out there.
Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. And here in this podcast, wait, we don't want to just talk about your background story and all that inspirational stuff. We want to get into the concrete details of one of your solutions, right? You've been very successful in a lot of things. And we recently emailed back and forth and I just, you know, ask him, Hey, how's it going, Bryce? And you, you answer back like things are going great. We've tripled our business through Tik TOK. And the second I heard that I'm like, I need to have Bryce on the podcast because I need to understand more about success on Tik TOK. So a little background for everybody, like I'm 54 years old. I've never been on Tik TOK till last night when I started looking at what you're doing on your website. Right. So I am completely here to learn from you about the potential behind Tik TOK.
Yeah. I mean, that's all great. I appreciate it. Yeah. If anyone wants to know the backstory more about me, there's plenty of stuff online yet to get into the concrete details. Yes, Scott, we've been working together for a few years now and I mean, I feel like Facebook and Instagram was great for us and we had a good brand presence on, on there, but it's kinda gotten stale and, and, and like you, I'm kind of getting older and kind of stayed away from pick talk until somebody finally convinced me to create an account. So we did and we posted some content for our brand and it didn't quite take off. And then we just kind of changed the content up a little bit, made it a little bit more organic and raw and posted a few videos and they seriously just started to blow up.
I feel like this might've been the old school, Instagram and Facebook before they really started to throttle it down for businesses. The last few years for the views have just gone off and it's been a really good and targeted demographic with when we're posting content. And I think that just has to do with pick talks and new and latest algorithm, whatever they're doing, but it really worked for our business and there's buyers on there. That was the best part is there's literal buyers, people out there whipping out their wallets that were going to our website and converting. So the amount of traffic that we sent to our website that is, that is new and engaging and interested in our product. And we've just reached a whole new audiences. So I'd love to answer some more questions.
Yeah. Let's start with the top level business results. And the fact you said people are buying that that's incredible. Right? So it's not just likes, it's not just follows it's actual purchases and conversions, which in any Shopify store is the ultimate metric, right?
Yeah. A hundred percent
Sort of what percentage of your traffic would you say now is coming from today?
Oh, probably like 70 to 80% of our traffic is coming from Tik TOK. Like it's literally tripled or quadrupled the traffic big time.
This is an incremental growth of your business. It's not cannibalizing any of your other traffic. It's just new people that you had not gotten access to before.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's just like another platform that, you know, my product specifically, they're not necessarily searching for hand cleaner on the internet all the time, but they would maybe be interested in it if it came across their face and pick talks a good place to go across their face.
Do do the chick talk users convert at a higher or lower or the same rate as other traffic to your Shopify?
For me personally, I would say they're converting at a way higher rate. We are getting a lot of international traffic. So that's hard to take into account. I haven't quite broke it down to what our us is, but I know just our conversion rates gone through for the Mt per person or per million, you know, much better. So I'd say, yeah, that tick-tock is a much higher converting rate than Google ad words. Then Facebook ads, Instagram, all of that
Seen any demographic difference between the customers from Tik TOK and other,
You know, I was kinda surprised by that. Cause I thought a lot of the demographic would be younger children and, and there really is, but it seems like the people that are actually clicking to our website are older people that are buying. And a lot of females actually I think, are on the platform purchasing and there for my product, they're purchasing it for their husband, which is awesome. But they're seeing our videos, a lot of females, I think it's maybe heavy towards that demographic, but yeah. Does that answer it?
Yeah, it totally does. So in looking at your Tik TOK, I don't know what these things are called, channels or pages or whatever. To me, there's a very definite strategy you have from your content. Do you want to walk through how you would summarize what this content strategy is for you?
Yeah. So that's a good question. You know, and each platform has its own taste and charisma to it. You know, Facebook should be curated content one way Instagram and you're right. Kick talk is different than those other platforms. One big thing to keep in mind is that it's a full screen format on your cell phone. So there's no cropping or anything. So you want to film your videos in vertical to cover as much real estate as you can. So that's like, number one, you don't want to do a sideways video. You want to cover as much of the screen. So, and other tactical stuff is like, it seems like less is more so in the beginning we posted some content that was like from some high-end commercials we made earlier in the year and just tried to chop that content up and throw it up thinking it was still, it was good footage, you know what I mean?
So I thought, and it didn't do that well, and it seems like again, less is more that just make a freaking video with your cell phone. Like no transitions, no crazy effects, go crazy pop in texts or anything like that. Like some of the most viral videos we made were made inside the Tik TOK platform. It's just like a simple, it's nearly like a movie for your phone, you know, where you can upload clips and shorten them and add music and stuff like that. But it does have its limitations. So if you have like a media guy or connection, we found it to be a little bit easier to edit outside of the platform in I either like I movie or Adobe premiere or final cut pro or something like that. So that's actually what we're doing now. That's a useful piece of information because tick-tock seems like it can just get glitchy and I've lost some like really hard drafts and I've almost finished it and then it glitches out or closes or something crazy. So w w it makes it easier to make it outside.
You're recording your video on a phone and it looks to me like you've got one person behind the phone slash camera, and then your, the person on the camera who's narrating and walking through the stories that is that correct? Is it two people? Yeah.
Yep. You got it. So we have a filmer and then there's myself, that's in the videos, you know what I mean? You kind of have to play with it for whatever your brand is, but for me, we've just made a really good impact. Just having me kind of be the face of it and the face of the Tik TOK. Now it seems to be working. So, yeah, there's one guy behind the camera and for us, we just go and find something that's relevant to our product. The first thing we do in our opening scenes, it's working is a shot that grabs your attention. Like within the first one to two seconds, the initial shot is that somebody is scrolling through their feed hats to stop you. Like, if it was just me and my face talking, which you will see in that video, Scott, but those don't pop in until like four or five seconds in.
Usually the first intro scene is something crazy on my hands or something where you're like, Holy, what is that? And you stop and you watch. And so that's like been a really big help for our videos. And it seems like Tik TOK, engagers, like they want to get excited about something and see something crazy and wild. So if you could stop them with something, you know, whether, I don't know, maybe you make cakes or pastries or something, you know, like an initial shot of something really freaking cool. And then you lead into how you made it or something like that, like who those are really helpful for us. And that's been a big tip right there.
Yup. Yup. And what amazes me, like I said, I'd never been on Tik TOK before. What amazed me is you don't have a ton of videos. You got a lot, but let's say, I don't know, 30, 50.
Yeah. We just got started. Not that long ago.
I assume that tick-tock was all dancing videos or, you know, maybe a company would you know, show a video about people going to lunch or something yours are purely about your product as far as I could see almost all of them, but you have hand cleaner and every video is about how your hand cleaner cleans hands.
Yeah, totally.
You get ludicrous and ridiculous about it in a good way. You're like, all right, I'm going to rub all this stuff all over my hands. Let's do a little of this. Let's do a little of that. And your hands get super messy. And then you also throw in a little bit of comedy about it. I remember one time you talks about a flux capacitor, which for those that don't know is a back to the future reference and a Tesla engine. That was obviously not an electric engine. You know, I'm being kind of funny and snarky, but in a really dry way. And, and I saw those as some of your magic ingredients, whereas, you know, you're just literally selling your product the whole time, but in an entertaining and engaging way.
Yeah, I agree. It was really letting our brand voice shine through. And that's something that we really only found the last few year. We didn't really have that at the beginning parts of running this company, but we really found that the last year. And I think that's really helping engage with our customers. You know, they just, they see through that and they like those types of dry humor and comments, like you're saying, and that helps. And just being ourselves and being authentic. Like, I dunno people can smell that from awhile, a mile away, you know, if you're just being fake on camera and nervous, and maybe you're not good on camera in the beginning, but just being yourself will go so much farther.
I'm going to dig into that, being yourself a little bit later, because I think that's so important. But before we get to that, how do you create these episodes? Are you, are you just coming up with it off the top of your head and Griffin, or do you actually write a script? How long do you prep before you film?
Yeah. So that's a good question. So for our videos, we have an idea of what we're going to like put on my hands. I mean, we kind of just make some stuff up the day of like, if I have something in my cabinet, it's like, I don't know. I'll just put it on my hands and let's wash it off, make a video really quick. So that, part's kind of easy for us because again, we try to not overthink it every time we've, over-thought a video and trying to like take all day film it that's when, you know, like we overdid it and it took too long and it's not gonna work. We over-thought it. So it should be quick and dirty and then we'll splice it together. And then the voiceovers that I'll do voiceovers sometimes inside the tick-tock app, which is pretty easy to use.
But right now, again, we're using it outside and Adobe premier, I'm doing my voiceovers and I'll do segments and takes. So sometimes in my videos, it sounds like I'll just do one run-through through the whole video. I've tried that in the beginning of my videos, but it didn't really work for me. I just didn't sound as good as it could be by starting stop. I'll do about 10 seconds segments. I'll just blurt some words that words out. And then if it still sounds good, I'll keep it. But if it not, sometimes it'll take five, 10, 15, 20 tries to get like one sentence down. I don't know. I wanted to tell people that because a lot of times they see it and maybe it sounds good on camera you're right. But dude, we need to do like a behind the scenes thing of someone recording me because I sound like an idiot recording over and over and over, but like, it comes out good. You know, we wait until it's good and we get the voiceover. So that takes me about, I don't know, 20 to 20 minutes probably to do a voiceover now, but take some time.
Yeah. Anywhere from, I think zero to one minute, you can't go over a minute 59 seconds actually to be exact,
How much time do you think total goes in into prepping and, and, and, you know, creating a script or whatever, thinking of what you're going to do, shooting the video and editing. What do you have the average number of hours for a one minute video is for you? Right.
You know, so it could vary when we first started and I was kind of doing it myself with my wife and we were just chopping up ourselves. It would between filming that would take, you know, 30 minutes to an hour and then chopping it up would take maybe another 30 minutes to one hour. But now we have a media guy that's helping out and we kind of stepped it up a little bit and he will probably spend an entire day almost he'll film it, download the clip, we'll splice it together, do a voiceover. So that's a lie probably about half a day. He can knock a video out as well. So yeah, no more than six hours max. You know,
I totally agree that, you know, it takes that amount of time to create a one minute video, like for my podcast and most of my single episodes for 20 minutes long, they take me six to eight hours to, from end to end to create them. And that's one of the things I want the audience here to understand is creating quality content, because I think you have really high quality content. You know, even though it's got the secret ingredients of not looking, you know, too structured or too formatted, it's really high quality. And for a one minute video, it's going to take you four to eight hours, average of six or whatever to create that. And that's an investment in time. Right. And I'm looking at your feed right now and it looks like you're creating a video a day for the past week.
We've been trying to, yeah. Some of them have not been like big bangers and I can tell when we're posting it, but at the same time, we're trying to not overthink and just getting content out daily, you know, staying relevant, staying in people's feed. And like, consistency is a big one, man. Like just gotta stay consistent.
When did you start this? You said you haven't been doing it long. If I look back, it looks like March 2nd was your first video on your feed right now? Is that accurate?
That is accurate. Yeah. So it's probably going on like 10 weeks. I think. Not too long
As we record this it's may six. So it's just a hair over two months. And here's the amazing thing is you have 107,000 followers. I have a check, that's a K and 1.5 million likes, and you're only following 52 other accounts. So it's not like a follow for follow kind of thing. How did you get so many followers
Again, it's just through this organic real content. To be honest, I, we try to experimenting with posting at different times and hashtags. And like, I don't think it really matters so much as if it's a good video. It gets liked and it gets shared and it comes down to being authentic behind the camera and being real and being yourself and letting that shine through and shoot that's, that's the secret sauce man and staying consistent. But I think the authenticity is the biggest one. I think that's it.
So are you saying that's 107,000 all organic? It's not like you signed up for any paid services or anything like that. It just grew organically based on your company.
Yeah, a hundred percent. That's just some people liking the video, tagging other people and commenting and it just showing up on the, for you page is what it's called. You know, this is the explore page, the main feed for everybody. And it showed up on there and it got a lot of views between some videos and, Oh, well, I don't know why I'm thinking about this. We've going to back up rewind something that helped is keeping up on the comment. Big, big thing. So the commenting, as soon as we post the video, if somebody starts commenting on it, we try to reply to every single one, like on all our videos, because sometimes people are asking honest questions, but I think just commenting on it, doubles the amount of comments and it just boosts the posts and just seems like there's way more interaction. So commenting on their back is a big tip that it's been working for us. So I would try that as well.
How much time do you think is spent responding to comments on your, your tuk-tuks
Dude on some of the viral ones? Like you could literally just sit there as long as you want. I mean, we almost can't respond to every single one. We, we tried to and I wasn't the beginning, but then we were getting like 3000 comments. And as soon as you responded to one, there was another four. So like you just literally physically could not do it. We kind of had to go through and respond to the decent ones, not the trolls on there necessarily, but I mean, you could spend as much time as you want, if it goes viral.
So correct me if I'm wrong, it looks to me like your number one video has gotten 3.1 million views.
That's our best one right there on
Belief. And, and a lot of them are over 300,000. Just amazing to me.
Yeah. That one got over 3.1 and then there's another one that's at 1.1 million and then most of them have a couple hundred thousand views consistently. Yeah.
That's, that's absolutely an and what blows my mind about it? You're I'm just speechless for this moment here. What blows my mind is, and those people are converting and buying your product on your website.
Yeah, that's the craziest part is I didn't think all these likes and comments would turn into that, but they're like clicking into our profile. They're clicking on our bio link and they're going to our website and purchasing. And it's really cool because Tik TOK has a whole pixel in itself so much like Facebook pixel, there's a Tik TOK pixel. And if you're going to get all this stuff set up, you need to get that set up as well. Just go to the app store. You can download. I think you just search Tik TOK, pixel boom. It's going to pop up from Tik TOK itself, download that, install it with the instructions. And then you can start retargeting for these people. And I haven't quite got the dabble into this yet only because I've oversold all my inventory and I have no more soap to sell, but I haven't even got to mess with the ad. But Tik TOK advertising manager in the backend looks phenomenal. You know, it's like competing with Facebook and I'm just thinking if the organic content is doing this well, I can't wait to start doing some more paid advertising on it.
Yup. That's a great problem to have being sold out because of your organic traffic.
Yeah. I didn't see it coming just, we, you know, we kept our normal inventory and then we posted some videos. Didn't expect anything, but we just straight up for X or five X on some of the hit days. Our sales, you know, nudge
Now, how do you get your, your tick tock followers at a posting to go to your website? Are there product links or is it a generic website link? Do you have landing pages set up? How do you get them from Tik TOK and where do you take them to on your site? And what's that customer experience look like?
So right now I'm taking them via, they have to click to our profile. So if they see our posts somewhere you'd click to our profile name, which would take you to our page in our feed, much like your Instagram profile. And then there's a link to my biologist grip, cleaned.com. We don't have a landing page built out. I just took them straight to the homepage. We built out our homepage to what it is now. And it was converting pretty well. I'm sure there's always some things we could do better, but that's what we're pointing them right now. And on top of that is in the comment. There's a lot of times people are just asking, where can I buy? Where can I buy, what do I get? We've been experimenting even just commenting back, going and use discount code, tick tock, tick tock 10, you know, for a 10% discount. We've been seeing that also getting used on the website. So it's just kind of obvious to see our sales jump and the traffic with the videos. Like you don't even need no pixel to tell that it's from pick, talk, you know, like it's of course it is.
Yep. Yep. And the fact that you got the tick-tock 10 as the discount code that helps you give some more data behind that too. There's no links inside of a video like Instagram has you have the product links and that kind of stuff or shopping links. There's none of that inside of tick-tock yet. It's all just through your top level profile information and
Yep. You got it. That is correct.
And it's still drive traffic once again. I'm I'm, I'm just speechless about it.
Well, it's good because it's like, they almost have to find the link. It's not super easy to wear. Like just the lazy click baiters waste, your cost per click, you know, go onto your website. Like by the time they're interested, they're like, all right, who are these guys that go to our page and look around? All right, cool. I'm checking out their site. And then boom. It's like really targeted traffic coming to our site.
It was, I got to jump through humps. They're a little more qualified.
Yeah, exactly. And so I think it's kind of nice working out. Yep. That's awesome.
It's one of the things that I always say is that technology makes it so that anybody can do certain things like anybody can set up a Shopify store. Anybody can create videos and post them on Tik TOK, but not everybody's going to be successful with that because it's more than just the technology that needs to happen to make that channel or thing that you're working on come to life. And for me, you know, people are, you know, listening right now, right up to this podcast. It's going, I'm going to go on Tik TOK tomorrow if they don't do it tonight. Right. Cause your, your story's amazing. And you know, anybody can, but not everybody's going to be successful. What do you think are some of the secrets or secret sauce things you have that makes your story? The one that is the success story, one of many I'm sure. But what do you think are the things that we haven't talked about that are the reasons that you're successful with this?
Well, yeah, you have a lot of good points that, you know, just because you get on there doesn't mean you're going to be successful. And even if you like made a cool video, maybe it just didn't go where it needed to go. You know, sometimes it just doesn't work out and we've had some good luck on there, but yeah, to answer that, I think a lot of people see the success now, but you'll still don't realize we've been doing this for six years. You know, we've been in business for six years and it hasn't quite hit like this. And we got on a lot of experience from YouTube and Instagram and Facebook videos in the past. And it's not like our first time kind of either me being behind the camera or somebody filming us. So we kind of knew what we were looking for.
So we've been at it a long time. So I guess that's one part of it. You know, it wasn't necessarily an overnight success. So we've gotten good at doing some camera work and stuff like that. So people just shouldn't get discouraged, I guess when they start. And maybe they're not really good in the beginning. Cause if you go back to all our videos, like we weren't good in the beginning and it's finally gotten better. So I think just having the perseverance to stick through it, stick through the bad con content to like break through, to get your good content. Most people don't want to, I don't know, they have this fear of being criticized or fear of losing because it's bad content and being made fun of, but you never get good until you post that stuff. You just have to like kind of push through that and maybe it takes you a year or maybe it takes you six months to get good. Who knows. But I think you just got to get over that hump and that wall. And that's a differentiator, you know, I think between a lot of entrepreneurs that make or not on the social platforms,
100% agree with you. I think your secret sauce is that, you know, Hey, you're so good at creating good videos, you know, from the editing, the writing and the filming of them and B, you were so comfortable
In front of a camera.
It looks to me like if someone was the point of camera you right now, you would just know what to say. You wouldn't stutter and you would get your, you know, your storyline out that you wanted to get out and that's a skill. How did you get that skill? Right? You said it was lots of practice and all that. And you know, for those that, that don't know, you know, grip clean and you were on shark tank, I think back in 2015 and your video back then was absolutely amazing. Like you've been really good on camera for a long time. How did, how did you get that skill? Cause you, you said practice, which I totally agree with, but a little more detail about that, please.
Yeah. Thank you, Scott. That's a really good question. I'm glad you asked it. I think it comes from just my history in life. And I think mainly from what I rode motorcycles professionally, I think that's where a lot of it came into it. Cause I had to network a lot with a lot of people and meet some, I dunno, people that I looked up to other riders in the industry and just networking and then having to go to live events and shows and demos and meeting crowds and signing autographs and stuff like that. Like I've just met a lot of people and walks of life and been able to kind of, I dunno, see what makes people tick. And it seems like it's comedy and just being authentic no matter where you are in the world. And I think the camera's just being on TV, man.
I think, you know, it's been X games for five years. I got five metals and being on the podiums and do a live interviews and whatnot, a shark tank, America's got talent and tons of other TV stuff and it's just, it's just been around. And I think just, I think that's the experience right there, professional motorcross. And I know that's not necessarily something that everybody does and should go out and do just to learn speaking skills, but you know, it was never comfortable doing it, just getting out of your comfort zone. And I think wherever you are in life, maybe you're not riding professional motorcycles, but just, I dunno, kind of being a leader and getting out of your comfort zone and talking to people and sending it. But I wouldn't say in Modo, you know, you're just going to send it, he's going to go for it.
And that's always kind of been my motto and I, when a camera gets in front of me and I don't really talk to the camera, I just talk to like, there's a person on the other side of it. You know what I mean? People always try to like change what they're going to say on camera, but then they always stutter and mess up what they're going to say, because they're trying to make something up. Versus if you just talk like you normally would, you wouldn't stutter, you wouldn't mess up because you're just talking like you normally would. And I think that's like a difference. People get behind camera and got to read the script and they forget the script all the time. Don't write the script, just be normal. That's helped me a lot.
Do you think you're a natural performer or do you think that's something that you learned along the way?
I think it's something I learned along the way. I think, I think I liked to perform and be athletic and I like to take chances and risks, but I'm also very introverted. So it's kinda odd. I've had to get out of my comfort zone would think being introverted. I don't want to be on camera and stuff, but it's kind of nice because I feel like I'm only talking to a camera a little, it's almost harder to like be on a stage somewhere. I'd have a little bit more stage fright, but again, I kind of have done that with X games being on the floor and the stadium's crowded and people are cheering you on. Like you just, you kind of get used to it and block it out. And I don't know the world, it's what you make of it. And I don't know. I feel like you kind of, don't worry about external forces, just focus on, on yourself. It's not worried about other people's opinions. It sounds tacky. I didn't want to go into like some sort of like motivational speech here, but that's kind of where I was tangent was going. Let's just, you know, not really caring about what people think and just being normal on cameras has helped a lot.
Well, and I totally agree with you and you know, I'm also an introvert and I was, you know, in a form of a lifetime, worked at Microsoft and an X-Box and I ended up being one of the spokespersons for Xbox. So I had to get in front of press all the time. And, and it's just a skill, you know, the first time I gave my spiel, it sucked right. The hundredth time I gave my spiel, it was rock solid. And it's one of those things. The more you do it, the more easy it becomes and the less, you know, what you're doing, just getting over your own inhibitions or own insecurities. And I think everybody has that. I was really happy to hear you say that you don't think you were a natural performer. Cause you know, from what I've seen of you from, you know, shark tank on up it's, you've, you've been awesome at it.
And it's reassuring for everybody out there listening that hasn't had that experience yet that it is just practice, right? This is something that if you put in the time and energy, you can learn, you know, one of my favorite examples has always been because of my age, I'm from the, you know, MTV when they did music videos back in the day generation. And if you ever watched Janet Jackson's first video, she was horrible on camera. And when you watch her, you know, more recent videos, she is amazing on camera, right? Same person, but just, you know, five, 10 years experience and how much she grew and developed just like everybody does. So I assume your advice would be because my advice is to everybody who wants to be the face of their business. And I think most Shopify store owners should be the face of their business. The only way you're going to get good at it is doing it and putting yourself out there and doing the uncomfortable work because it is hard, hard, hard.
Yeah. That's the truth, man. That's just pushing through it, just going for it. And whether you want to be the face of the brand, you better find somebody if see, if you want to hold the camera, go for it. But you got to find somebody to be on the other end of it and push that content out, man. It's, it's a crazy world that we can just flip, open the phone. And I just feel like that less is more, you know, these high-end production videos online are not converting as well as these chopped up phone ones. And it's such a good opportunity for these single store Shopify owners to just capitalize on this opportunity and make some cuts at home and see some rewards come in. You know, I think there's really good opportunity.
W what you're doing here with, you know, with your, your Tik TOK channel and your videos, your, your, your videos are more than just on Tik TOK. Like, I love the one in your homepage that, that astounded me when I looked at that. And I'm going to link to that in the show notes, because that video is incredible in my mind that that's like the dollar shave club video. That the one, yeah. Yeah.
Oh yeah. Actually I like that one.
I think it's better than the dollar shave club video. The very famous one that earned that company a billion dollars. Right. What I hear you saying is, you know, being that lower quality video is more authentic and lets you establish that personal one-to-one relationship with an audience. You know, the way I say that a lot is, you know, back in the day before the internet, when all the media, all the video we got was on television, it was highly edited. It was, you know, high production, quality, perfect lighting, most beautiful people and settings and all that kind of stuff. And then along came the internet and then cell phones and all of a sudden everybody had a camera and everybody had a, you know, a cam quarter of video recorder and all of a sudden everybody's putting up crap quality video. And that was the first time humans or at least Americans had seen poor quality video. So now poor quality video isn't seen as poor quality. It's authentic the high court, like you're saying the high production quality is not necessary anymore.
It's totally not. I have no idea how it comes full circle, but it has. And you totally nailed it.
How do you, you know, we talked about, you know, you getting comfortable from the camera by just being in front of the camera and you, you had the, you know, the fortunate opportunity to do that through interviews and stuff like that, to the nature of past work that you were doing, how did you get so good at telling the story and being funny?
Well, as far as like telling the story and being funny, man, that, that kinda came down to like sales and reading. I kind of just like learned a little bit sales and how to sell my products and whatnot, and what's learning for other companies. And honestly that was, again, a lender like learned skill that, you know, people want to be sold, but you kind of want to sell them on an engaging story in a sense. So it's just kind of coming up with a clever idea of crafting your story in a way that sells you or your product that's engaging, you know, and I kind of learned that through reading books. So it was crazy. That sounds,
Do you have a couple of books that, that you remember that were really notable?
Yeah, actually a grant Cardone and he's a good mentor that I like to follow online seller. B-Cells, he's, he's pretty good when it comes to sales and just telling stories and whatnot. I really liked that book. I think that was actually one of the clickers that really helped. Awesome. I think there was a second part of that question too though. What was it?
It's just how, how you got so good at being funny and, and telling a story. Right. Like,
I don't know. I know, I don't think I'm that funny and I'm really not in person, but I think it comes down to just doing some different takes. Don't some videos out there and just knowing my industry, like, I think that helps as well, like being able to crack jokes like that about a flux capacitor and taken out a six cylinder engine out of a Tesla, like things like that. I know motor sports automotive, so I can kind of crack jokes like that. So if you're in a specific industry, you know, you probably know a heck of a lot better than I do. So just crack some relevant jokes and like, know that you, you know, you want to be the industry leader with what you're selling, you know? And so really letting people know that, you know, that group terminology and vocabulary and just funny jokes in that thing, you know, really sets the brand voice that, you know, what you're talking about in this category. And so I think that's kind of where maybe where some of the, the funniness or wittiness comes from. I always try to relevant related that is to category we selling we're selling it, which is automotive.
That's a really good point that I didn't notice when I was watching the videos. I noticed the humor. I didn't make that connection. That it's, it's humor related to your industry, which makes it even more authentic and gives you that street cred. And another thing like in your videos, you're walking around garages, right? It's not like you're in some corporate headquarters. It's like, no, we're getting our hands dirty. That's what we do. We actually fix engines and get our hands greasing. We paint things and we stained cabinets and all that kind of stuff. And it's more off authenticity and street cred that you're earning, doing all those things.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like, we like to think that that is our office. You know, our office is filled with a bunch of people that would be using our product, which is construction workers and welders and farmers and stuff. So we just try to go to those environments that would really captivate people in our, in those industries, you know, grab their attention and whatnot. And that's, that's what we consider the office and it seems to work.
And the other people I see in your videos are those employees, because they're really good too.
I don't even know at this point, no, no, not all employees. No. Usually they're just customers of ours. Like we have some good relationships with customers that we've featured in some of the videos or the some gardeners outside. Like I just walk out now. I'm just like, Hey, we're making a Tik TOK video and we're featuring featuring people. Would you mind being in it? And I'll give you some free product at the end of it. And they're usually always stoked on that part. And then they're super stoked once they try our product and it works. So it's kind of cool. We get their reaction on camera and then they get some free goods at the end of it. And it's a win-win situation and it works out
That's some gold there. So let me just summarize, what I heard you say is when you, you need extras in your video, you go recruit them from around your community. So they're not like paid actors or anything they don't know about your product or may know very little about it. And all you do is pay them with products and because your product is actually so good, it's a customer acquisition tool for you.
Yeah. Basically you nailed it. I mean, they may or may not be customers of ours. Like we have some people that will just go and they already have a wall dispenser mounted up and we use it. But a lot of the times I try to like feature new people, you know, where like, I don't just solicit their review by giving them free products. That's definitely not it like, I'm like, Hey, I want you guys to try this product. We'll film it on Tik TOK. If you like it, we'll give you a bunch of it at the end. And they're like, all right, cool. And then they try the product out on camera and they like it. And then you're totally right. They turned into a customer themselves. They get some free product for their time. They got some nice clean hands at the end of it and they're turning into a customer for life.
That's great. I love that. And you know, just getting out there and talking to the community and engaging with people and it just shows that, you know, we probably overthink things too much like, Oh, I got to hire some actors and all that kind of stuff. We can still like recruit people around you. And, and you know, one of the things I should do in customer research and in software development is we would literally just go to the local coffee shop and start talking to people, Hey, you wanna look at this for a second for me and get their feedback and, and do customer research that way. And it's amazing how people are willing to engage in and just have fun. And, and, you know, they like to be taken by surprise and it, it makes you on the highlight of their day too.
I know it's totally true, but I mean, it's hard to get over that fear. Sometimes I'm nervous walking up to random people. I'm like, what are they going to say? Show me your hands. You know, Whoa, I just want to clean them. I swear.
I actually went to one, a startup conference or seminar over a weekend. And one of the, one of the main themes of the weekend was every four hours they would stop. And you had to go outside and engage X number of people and just talk to them and ask them questions just to force you to get over it. Cause I hate, you know, reaching out to it because I'm such an introvert and they're like, no, this is such a valuable tool. It's going to force you to read four hours over the whole weekend to go outside. Just talk to people.
Yeah. That's a good trait. A skill though. Actually, then that's actually really good. Yeah.
It, it does help. And it, the amazing thing is at the end of that, you know, going into the conversation, you know, my stomach's all bound up and I'm nervous and stuff. And into the conversation, I had a great time and they had a great time everybody.
Yeah. You know, it usually just takes you out of your comfort zone as soon as, as soon as you get out of that shell. It's amazing who you beat stories you can build and tell. You're totally right. It's just kind of jumping in head first. And like you said, I think through my professional motocross career, like I didn't really have much of a choice. They just threw me into the ocean and I had to learn to swim. So that's helped, but you know, people could, it's a, it's a learned skill and you can find it around you and in your community. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's just amazing people. Everywhere is what I, what I find let's put ourselves in the mind of a Shopify store owner, let's say like grip clean in January. Right. I don't have a Tik TOK presence. You know, if you were to start chick talk over again, what would be the steps that you would recommend another store to go through? What should they do to, you know, technically get everything started up and then, you know, figure out how to create videos and production with tools. Do they need, you know, just walk me through the steps that you recommend for them to get started on tick-tock
First step would be to download the app, create a user handle. It's just like Instagram. So you create a handle and try to get one that's obviously your brand name or whatever your other platforms are. And then I would spend day or two on the platform just browsing on the, for you page and searching either like other brands that you like and things like that. So you can kind of get familiar with the way that it is then the way it works and how people are interacting with it. And then to actually get it set up. I would, again, first install the tracking pixel inside your Shopify store. So going into the app store on Shopify, installing Tik TOK pixel, and getting the code all set up and connecting that with your new account, adding your profile description and a profile image, we're just using our brand logo.
I don't really honestly know what other competitors or other brands are using, but we just put our logo on there with a cool background. And that seems to be working for us for posting content. The first couple don't overthink it and try to make something outside of Tik TOK, just use your cell phone and see how it works. You can piece together some clips it's basically like creating one video, but you can't really go backwards. So you'd create a clip. You film it by holding it down, kind of like a Snapchat video. And then you'd add to it again. You can let go, and then you tap it again to add another part of the video and then let go, and then hold it again for a third part and just play around with all the features. There's like some sound effects and some transitions and stuff.
And it's pretty straightforward. They made it pretty easy for like a video editing software. So like you should be able to pick it up. I just play it around. And so what we did is we just posted a couple of random videos and to really get started, what we did is we started engaging with the comments we got on our videos. So I forgot I should have brought this up earlier, but something that's working on our videos now that you'll still see is you can reply to a comment. And when you reply to a comment, you can reply with a video comment and it posts to your page like a normal post. So when you do these replies, the customer's comment pops up on the screen of the video. Like you're replying to it like a quote block. So you'll see it on there. So what we did is that I really got customers to start engaging with our comp or with our content in the beginning, because then they knew like, Oh, we might get a chance to get our comment scene and get responded to. So kind of leaving like an open-ended question on a post or something, like, leave your comment below what you think. And then, you know, they would say something and we would respond to that with our next video. And then that got more people commenting. And then the next video about more people commenting. And now we're just getting tons of comments, which I think really helps boost engagement. That makes sense.
Yeah, it does. Once they get their first few videos out there and you know, most people are not going to see the results you saw on day one because you know, their, their videos, their new video. Right. So I'm going to assume it's going to get it going to be a slower crawl for them. How did you grow your audience? Or you just did nothing and it just happened on its own or, or were you just lucky enough that someone more famous on CIC talk noticed you and liked and you know, what drove some of that organic traffic for you?
No, it's, it's a little bit of both, a little bit of luck that just Tik TOK, put it in the right hands and people wanted to watch it. It's a little bit of luck, but it's also having the good content that people wanted to watch. And then it staying engaged with people. So again, responding to the comments, but finding relevant pages. So like we follow some other automotive theme pages and like we comment on other posts, either something funny or witty. Cause like, I don't know, you want to get the most liked comment kind of, you know, you want people to see your comment on somebody else's posts. So we just stay relevant, you know, engaged in the community of automotive, which you just do in your brand and industry to, you know, follow top influencers, comment on their posts and try to get seen in that area.
And that really helps with engagement. Something else that you can do that you want to make sure when you set up your account is there's a couple of features when you post a video called like do adding a video or stitching a video. And when you go to actually post your video, it'll, you'll see it on that same page. It's kind of like on Instagram, when you're going to click, like, do you want to post this to Facebook as well? There's like a little button. We will see this on Tik TOK. It says duet and stitch. And you want to make sure those are turned on all of the time. And basically what that means is now once you post that video, anybody out there that came across your video can, if they click the duet button, they can basically do like a side-by-side with your video where your videos up.
And they're doing like a review of your video. Sometimes at the absent viral content kids out there want to like do at your videos and it gets you more content and more likes, but that is not turned on by default. I believe when you set up Tik TOK, that's why I'm mentioning. You should mention, you should set it up. I'm trying to think of other tips and tricks, but man, honestly, it's just get on there and make some good content, you know, send it, produce some stuff inside of Tik TOK. Don't overthink it and go get an editor and use Adobe premiere and stuff. Like you can make some good videos inside the program using the cool effects that they have.
I call that the mighty ducks syndrome or the opposite of what you're saying. And in that a lot of people, if you ever watched the mighty ducks movie, right, they had the secret play that won the game because their coach was a genius, which is utter BS. The way you win at anything is through repetitive, hard work. And in what I hear you saying is that there's no magic bullet. There's no money, duct play. It's just a function of how good your quality or your content quality is. And the only way you're going to get good quality content is practice, practice, practice.
That's the truth, man. That's the hard, cold truth is just practice, practice, practice. And there is no secret sauce. What do they say is like good luck when opportunity meets preparation, you know, it's like, here's the platform and it's a good opportunity. Get prepared with your content and get practicing. And when it'll come together and you'll get some good strikes on some good posts and hopefully boost your business, I really hope it does.
Yeah. And I would guess that you'd recommend that stay at it if it doesn't in the beginning, because it, you know, the more energy you put in the more you're going to improve, you know, you just have to improve.
Yeah, totally. I mean, whether your account goes viral or not, that's not a promise that anybody can make, but it's just another platform that I think you need to be on. Regardless. Like if you're on Instagram and Facebook, like this don't fight it just because you're not a fan of some political party and they don't like Tik TOK or who cares, what, like, it's a good platform. There's good content on there and there's good crowd and democratic like get on it. So another social platform,
I also think that video is already dominant and is only going to be more dominant. Every e-commerce brand is going to have to have a in-house competency of video creation for their content.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think long-term, that is the play for your brand is to have something that like, that's how you advertise, that's it? You can't be known if you don't do it, that's it?
Yup. Yup. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video's worth a million words or something to that effect. And it's just a way to communicate so much so compellingly that, you know, the internet affords those, that regardless of what channel you're on Tik TOK or another, even on your own site, I highly recommend my clients, you know, put videos on their site as many as they can because people engage with them. That's how you create that human connection. You know? Cause I think Shopify stores it's, you know, a human connection happening, not an anonymous corporate brand to consumers. Right. And that video is the way you make that human connection.
It's quantity over quality right now. You know, when it comes to my product, I'll always do my quality top-notch. But when it comes to content like, dude, the more is better, just more and more and more. And that's kind of one thing we're learning. And like we can't put out too much. You're just going to get better and better. Like you said, you know,
So price in summary, you've given us lots of good advice. You know, what's like the Uber arching, you know, one piece of advice that people should think about when approaching,
You know, one thing that really comes to mind is just not overselling on the platform and the program. You know, people are on tick-tock because they want to learn a little life, hack, life hacks and tips and tricks and ways to improve their life or just cool content. You know, they want to be entertained at the end of the day. They did not go on there to buy something. But if you give them something entertaining, something that they can learn about or just, you know, keeps them entertained for a minute, then the buyers will come to you. They're going to click to your profile. They're going to want to learn a little bit more. They're going to respond in comments. They're going to find you. So I think just not abusing the platform, you know, and getting views down because you're pushing sales so much. Just, just push some good informational content.
Yeah. That that's, that's a great summary. I love what you just said. There there's a lot of, lot of good things to take away from that. So we're about to wrap up our time here. Do you want to give a plug for your business?
Yeah. I mean, I appreciate everybody listening in, you know, and again, my company is grip clean. That's G R I P clean. And that's our handle on Instagram, Tik, TOK, Facebook, just all one word grip, clean or grip, clean.com. So I'd love for everybody to check out our brand and kind of what we have going on with our store. And I'm always open to tips and tricks myself. So curious to keep listening to the podcast, you always got some good episodes dropping and I've learned a lot from you to improve my, this is a good place to learn. Scott's done our website in the past and we're really happy with all the work that you do, Scott. It's awesome.
Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot. This phone call was absolutely a pleasure. This is good talking to you and learn a lot more about tick-tock
Yeah. A hundred percent Scott. Well, thanks for having me on and yeah, take it easy everybody.