ďťżWelcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs, the podcast where we talk with business owners from around the world, and from all walks of life in the hopes that something you hear will leave your business a little richer.
We're your hosts, Vicki and Laura and today's guest is the great Josh Kropkof. Josh and his brother Ben founded The Email Agency in 2018 after their first business selling digital products failed. Josh started his online business journey while he was a law student in Miami. Known as the quiet kid growing up, he found his voice in the most remarkable way as a close-up magician and talk radio host, talk about extremes. He now hosts the Email Revolution Podcast where he'll tell the stories behind his entrepreneurship journey, he features guests who use email marketing to build their brands, this is a conversation we will be leaning in on. Josh has since generated 50 million plus in sales for e-commerce brands using email and SMS marketing. Let's go! Welcome, Josh.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, guys.
Well you know we're gonna be excited about this conversation because Vicki and I are marketing people, of course and we know how underrated email marketing is! People take it for granted for sure. So we definitely want to get more into that very soon with you Josh but first, Iâd love to learn a little bit more about you and your childhood experiences, you're an entrepreneur who works with other entrepreneurs, was that always part of your life? Did you grow up as an entrepreneurial kid?
Yes, actually, yes! And this is cool because no one ever asks this so I really like that you guys asked this question. But yeah, I was kind of into entrepreneurship stuff ever since I was a kid, me and my brother. We grew up in a place where I've really liked just coming up with things to do. We grew up outside of Philadelphia in Southern New Jersey, a place called Washington Township, a real mixed area in terms of.. it's pretty middle class, a lot of blue collar, a lot of different types of people, a pretty big high school, like I was in a graduating class of about 1000 kids and the school had 3000 to 4000 kids, so it was kind of hard to stand out. I was a quiet kid, as you alluded to in my intro there and I wasn't huge into sports, my brother definitely was more so than I was. I played baseball for a few years and even though that was fun, I was good at team stuff, I was awkward and I was super shy but what motivated me was anything I could create myself, and choose my own adventure, so that's where I gravitated towards entrepreneurship.
Me and my brother, we started a casino in our parents basement, this was our first entrepreneurship endeavor. Not a real one with real money but we basically, my parents got the basement finished when I was in the third to fourth grade and so now we had this big room down there with nothing in it. And we were not that far from Atlantic City, New Jersey so my grandmother was always going down to the casino, she liked the slot machines and the free buffets and stuff like that, they would comp her all kinds of stuff. Sometimes weâd go, and I don't know, it just inspired us to say, why don't we build something like that in the basement. And so we made all these things ourselves and learned how to do blackjack and different things like that. And then we recruited our friends who were just kids around the neighbourhood that we were friends with, to be the people working at the casino. And then we would have these parties where the neighbours would come over, people's parents would come over, different friends and kids and family members. And this went on for years, it grew! At first it was nothing and then it was still going on by the time I graduated high school; we had a real blackjack table, we had this craps table we had made ourselves, we had a roulette wheel, we had one of those big spinning wheels, all these things, the whole basement was like this. And we would have these parties where all these people would come over with play money and stuff but they would engage in this casino thing and it was one of those low key things that people in the area knew about and it was like you had know us to be able to come down and be a part of it. Yeah, it was just one of those weird things, that we were known as âthose people with that casinoâ when we were kids.
That is nuts! I love it so much! Wow. And to start that as kids and your parents, I guess they fully backed you on this?
Sort of. Here's the thing, you know who didn't like it so much was my grandmother, because she felt like, âOh I influenced them, they're into gamblingâ, at first, but then she would have fun, she realised why we were doing it. My parents, for the most part were okay with it but I think my mom definitely dealt with the challenge of us being that way, where we had to have, I think part of her was probably thinking âWhy can't you just go play sports like normal kids outside instead of having my house the centre of attention in the neighbourhood all the time?â, but at the same time I think she loved hosting my friends. And me and my brother, we're not super close in age, we're five years apart, it's not anything crazy but growing up I'd be in middle school while he was in elementary school, and I'm in high school and he's in middle school and what was interesting is, I would have friends that I was friends with that we're slightly older than me, and slightly younger, and then he had his group. And so our friend groups blended together, like we would have all these kids at our house ranging to where the oldest kid was I guess, eight or nine years older than the youngest. And we all just did this entrepreneurship thing together, which is now I look back on that, I get how that relates now to what I do in my life because I did have that, both of us did have that spirit of running an organisation with our friends. And now in our agency we actually do this same thing because we have, I would say our top general, our main operations person who manages all of our email marketing accounts, he is one of our best friends from back in the neighbourhood growing up and so we get to work with him now. He's been with us since early 2020, he's like our top guy so it's cool. And even all the people that work with us that are from other parts of the country, we all work remote but everybody's U.S, they're part of our friend group so we are really close with our team members, everybody's friends. And I think we've always wanted that having business with friends thing. And I think there are a lot of entrepreneurs, well maybe not entrepreneurs but business mentors out there that will say things like âDon't do that, don't get into business with your friendsâ, and we just reject that entirely. That's why we love doing business, because itâs with friends.
And that just speaks so well to the relationships, we always say on this podcast and with other guests how important relationships are, and a lot of it is with the service provider, the business owner and their client, but it also carries through to everyone who's working within the organisation. And I know people who make a point of becoming friends with their clients and their staff, if it's someone that they didn't know when they came on board. It's a pretty cool model because how can you not love doing what you do when you're doing it with a bunch of people you really value and your values are aligned, you have a lot of alignment there.
Yeah, and I guess it works both ways because you care so much about, I genuinely have this relationship with all the people on my team. So if they're ever struggling with something - business or otherwise, I feel that and it's like it's my responsibility too. So yeah, one of the coolest, I don't mean to jump around we'll probably get to some stuff but one of the coolest things lately in our business has been our friend, the one I just told you about who's our main operations guy, he was just able to buy a house for the first time and move in there with his longtime girlfriend. And that was a big, to me and my brother that feels like such an accomplishment that we were able to help that happen, so that's so cool.
Their success is your success. You really appreciate it in a different way. Before you built the now very successful Email Agency, in your intro we talked about your first business that it was a failure. We like to talk about failure on this channel not to bring anybody down but to really learn the lessons from it and how you build resilience through experiences like that. So if you don't mind, can you tell us a little about what happened there?
Yeah, so I have to give a little backdrop to that first. I got into digital marketing in a weird way, I fell into it by accident and I was, we go back about 10 years, I was in college, I was in school up in New Jersey, studying hospitality. And the reason was because to connect the casino thing, I thought, what's the best way I could own a hotel or casino or resort in real life. And it turned out that was the absolute wrong way to do that, a hospitality degree has nothing to do with that but I was trying to figure out what do I want to do. And at that same time, I had a bit of a, I guess you'd call it a personal thing I was dealing with and trying to get help with, which I'm not embarrassed to talk about, I've talked about it on shows before, I was not, this kind of relates to I was really shy and quiet growing up. So I wasn't good at dating, I was really shy around women and basically, I'm in college and there's these frat parties, and I'll go out with my friends to the party and all of them would within five minutes be hooking up with different girls and stuff like that. And not to get down that rabbit hole of hookup culture and stuff in college but I would always be the guy just standing there on the side of the room, not sure what to do, what do I say, I'm terrified to approach, all of that. So I went online trying to find help with this issue and I found this email newsletter called Dating Advice Daily and that was my first - I didn't realise it at the time, but that was my first intro to the digital marketing world. It was this guy who gave tips to men on dating and approaching different things like this. So fast forward to now, I just had to preface it with that, but basically that same entrepreneur later evolved his business to teach more about how he built his business with digital marketing. And so when I was in law school, a couple years later, this was at a stage where I'm just trying to figure out what to do with my life. I'm in law school because I don't know what I want to do really and I had people tell me I'd be good at law, so go into that, right? So I'm there and I'm hearing about this digital marketing thing. I didn't really know anything about it but I'm learning more and I'm thinking âWhy am I in law school when there are people who are making a million dollars on the internet right now, selling different programs and courses and things like that?â
So what ended up happening is I attended, me and my brother attended this conference out in Vegas, where it was a bunch of online internet entrepreneurs who had started online businesses, and they're revealing their secrets and this was our first exposure to this world. And we were just blown away. I had no idea you could send an email to a list and make 1000s of dollars from some course where you're teaching stuff. So try to make a long story short, we ended up deciding that we were going to start a business and I graduated law school. I didn't go I didn't take the bar, I didn't do anything to try to become a lawyer, I went full headfirst into this business idea, which when it started was, we were going to teach body language, this was the main thing, there are a few things but it was we were going to teach body language secrets to entrepreneurs, and professionals who could use body language knowledge. The reason body language because I had learned a bunch of stuff in law school and before that as a magician performing and things like that, that I felt like I could translate that, transfer that to people.
So you asked about the failure. So basically, what happened was a very dumb thing I did, which was, I didn't have any income, I just finished school, I had all this student loan debt, but I applied for a bunch of credit cards. And I was able to get something like $45,000 in credit. And I thought, I'm going to put this into a business, put this into all the stuff I would need to create this product and sell it online and also by the way, I'm going to live off this credit and then the business is going to blow up and I'm gonna make all this money, right. Terrible idea. But sometimes, if you don't know anything about business idea, and you're just watching what other people do that are successful and you feel, okay, I can just go do that. Ultimately, I'm glad it happened because it led to what I have now and it led to everything about the last several years, but I would never do that again. We spent a full year building this thing myself, my brother and our other business partner, we went into business initially with another friend and we spent a year building this thing, and we made one sale, one sale. And there was a point where I realised, this isn't gonna work. And unfortunately I put myself in a terrible position, my other business partner moved out. He had been one of my roommates at the time, moved out, I'm in Miami in an apartment on my own, I have no money, no income, all this debt, the business just failed - because we decided it failed. We were like, it's not worth it, we did all this, now I have all this debt and I have to figure out a way to pay rent, all this stuff. Iâm living in Miami at the time, which is where I had been for law school so I ended up really having to go into some other things: hustling and grinding, running an AirBnB out of my apartment and driving for Uber for seven months until I couldn't do that anymore. That's a lot I know, so you can ask me questions based on that, I could go more into any of that.
Itâs gold! Itâs gold Josh, itâs gold! I love the way you describe it. I'm right there with you on the journey. One burning question I have is, What would you have done differently do you think for that business to have been successful?
For that business to have been successful, I would not have started with digital products. Later what I learned and I think I learned this from Tai Lopez or someone, this was years later. But there's a, I think he called it a pyramid but basically it's a hierarchy of online business where the bottom level is e-commerce. The reason itâs at the bottom level, it's because it has the lowest barrier to entry, but it also has the lowest ceiling - you can pretty much anyone can start selling physical things online. But it's really hard to scale that without a lot of capital. So it's got a lower ceiling. Middle is service businesses like what I have now, where it's human capital, it's a little harder to get into because you need the experience and the knowledge to deliver the service but it's a little easier to grow. But then it also has the ceiling because you can only scale a human capital business so far. And then the top level is what is called an infinitely scalable brand. And that is digital products, courses, things that you can distribute infinitely, you can scale it to the moon, but it's the hardest barrier because you need so much capital and resources to put into it to make it profitable. That's what I didn't know at the time. What would have been.. to answer your question, if I wanted to make that business succeed today, I would start it as a service business, I would start it as coaching people on body language and get clients and help them fix their body language, if they're in these high stakes situations, I picture maybe a trial attorney, or something or somebody on stage, and then turn that into eventually group coaching and then courses and things like that. Alright, that's what I think I had no idea back then, zero clue that it was, should have been these, we just set ourselves up for failure because we did not have the experience or the understanding of what it would take to start a digital product business from scratch.
And also, we hadn't earned the right to be putting out products like that yet. Like now we have years of experience in email marketing so we have some email marketing courses, and I don't even call them courses, but we have different training programs we're able to help people with these very specific problems because we've been in the trenches. But at the time we hadn't earned that, we didn't know, we hadn't spent the time in the marketplace doing this.
I think that's called uninformed optimism. You don't really have a clue but you're really optimistic of what it's going to be. I love it. It's such a great story and I think it's a great lesson learned and there's some thought of maybe a little more perseverance, maybe a little bit of backing or someone to help you financially get through, could have changed it and maybe you would have turned it around in a different way. But now youâve built something, something pretty great and like you said, that middle pyramid style business of a service business. So tell us, why email? There's lots of ways that we market businesses that are so much easier to promote and sell like social media, because everybody needs social media, but why did you choose email?
So well for me, and for us, email for whatever reason had been the common thread that was always there for us. So going back to what I mentioned with that first newsletter I was on, Dating Advice Daily, we saw the email marketing thing happening. And at one point that guy that wrote that newsletter and later became a business mentor of mine, at one point he did this thing where he wanted to see how much money he could make. Basically he wanted to go to Vegas for a weekend where he knew he was going to spend a lot of money and blow money in Vegas, he wanted to do a test to see if I really quickly make a product and send an email to my list before I leave for Vegas, is it possible to break even, like make the money back that I'm going to spend. So he quickly made this video lesson on I forget what it was, but something to do with, it was still dating at the time, has something to do with that. And he sent out an email to his list on a Friday, I think he charged $47 to get the video programs, probably like seven or eight videos, right? Goes to Vegas, comes back. I think he spent over $10,000 in Vegas, comes back and that email had made him over $40,000. And he told that story to us and this was back in 2016 and that was when I first realised âthat's crazyâ that you can do that with an email.
But now, I think I want to bring up just one bigger point aside from me, there are 300, this is the latest data, you can look this up, 347 billion emails sent per day in the world, per day. So if you want to think about communication channels, okay, the other big one that you would think about is text messages, still pretty big, 23 billion a day so it's dwarfed by email. Now, first of all these are numbers we can't even conceive of right? Like it's up for like, okay, 347 billion, I don't know what that looks like. But what I do know is this, it dwarfs everything, it dwarfs all social media channels, it dwarfs texts, phone, it's literally the biggest communication channel in existence by far and hence, it is also the biggest marketplace. It's a huge economy.
So I think it's really cool to be in email marketing ad I actually think like, for me, the thing I love about it is, that it is not a one to many channel like Instagram, or anything like that, it is a one to one channel, it's a direct line between one person to another. And that's the way we treat email, which is why we've been able to help our clients get really successful, great results with this because we don't, we don't blast people with these. That's how people do email wrong. A lot of times they'll blast an advertisement, a very advertisement looking promotion and they're not taking advantage of the fact that you can really use email as a relationship channel, you can really forge a true connection with people, you can write to them like a person you can, you can have personality, and you can invite responses, and you can get them talking back to you. The possibilities of what you can do with email are insane. But yeah, there is a part in my story where we did have even when that one business failed the one thing that survived from it was our email list.
We had this email list that we had built, it was small, like 30 people, and it included family and friends, and when the rest of the business died that was like the beating heart that was still alive. So when we revived ourselves, when we came back from the ashes, what we decided to do was email marketing. We decided that we could use what we had learned because we had learned so much about it in that year when the business didn't work out, we learned so much about copywriting, so much about email, and digital marketing knowledge but more specifically email copywriting. And so we were like, what if we took that skill and helped other business owners? So that's the business we later started and that was also a big struggle to get off the ground - we can talk about that side of it. But it is, I'm really proud of what we've been able to accomplish and I do think we will continue to grow this business to pretty good heights and I can see a lot of things coming. But yeah, so that's why email and it's a long answer.
So can you speak to the side of email marketing, Josh, that speaks to the size or the quality of the list because you have this exciting story about going to Vegas, the guy spends 10 grand and comes back with 40 grand in his account. I know that didn't happen with a snap of a finger. There's a lot of work that goes on in building a good quality list. Can you give our listeners some tips on that? Or at least some insights into what to look for so they know where they're at?
Yeah, for sure. Great question. So I think I started to touch on this, the problem that so many businesses face is that they don't see email as its own thing, they really do see it as like, oh, it's one of many marketing channels. And so they treat it the same and they put out a general branding message or a general advertisement as if they're talking on a megaphone, and that's not what it is, it's a one on one channel. So what's cool is you can build a relationship with the people on your email list. And you do that through, I would say two things.
One is what I would call personality-based email marketing, where you do write emails that come from you as a person, and you are not afraid to share things and just write like you talk and have this conversational tone in your emails and even invite responses. And then when people have good responses, you can take that response and put it in your next email that goes out to everybody and says, âHey I got this really great email from Cheryl, or whoever on the list and so I wanted to respond to her right nowâ and then everybody's seeing that, right. And that's just one little example but basically over time the reason that.. his name is Jason Capital, by the way, the guy that I mentioned with the dating advice newsletter, it doesn't exist anymore but he has other businesses, but anyway the reason he was able to do that is because he spent years building a list where he was giving this advice to guys, right, and in everyone valued it, everyone that would stay on the list and be engaged, they valued that, they valued that communication, they valued that advice, you feel like you know this person, you're hearing from him every day. In the first email that you would get when you sign up to Dating Advice Daily it said at the top, âjust so you know I'm going to be sending you valuable emails every single day, there will rarely be a day where you don't get an email from me, if that bothers you get off the list - unsubscribe, we are here for people who want to take action in their lives in this way.â And so if you're on the list, you are expected to read those emails, you're expected to participate, right? It's just raising the bar. It's challenging people right? To be involved in this is the opposite of the mentality of another company sending me emails in my inbox and cluttering my inbox. And it's just like I'm tired of getting email from this, itâs the total opposite of how most brands market.
So the big thing is having a personality and the other thing is carrying on this conversation to where the people reading the emails don't feel like they're just being marketed to, they really do feel like there's something there, you want to give people value. And we do this with our clients that sell all kinds of things. Like the example I'm giving you with him was a coach, right? But none of our clients are coaches. All of our clients sell physical products online. We've done this with some of the most, I guess, dry topics, literally drywall one time, we had a huge corporate client that sells drywall and we did the same type of marketing with them and it worked. It worked like crazy.
I mean you can literally do it with anything, you just have to be willing to put yourself out there a little bit as an entrepreneur or, alternatively, create a character. They don't have to be a real person, you can create a character and give that character that they are the email lists, they are the the person behind the email, you have to be a little bit more creative on that one. But I've faced resistance over the years to this idea from some entrepreneurs who think that they, for whatever reason, they think that they don't want to do that type of marketing. I had, just a very quick story, I had a company who came to us a couple years ago now, they wanted to work with us and they were a new startup that got all this venture capital money. And they hadn't really, they weren't profitable yet or anything but they wanted their email program, they started working with us, and they were so resistant to everything that we were telling them and they were like, âNo, I don't want a person behind the emails, I want to seem like a big corporate brandâ, they used that word, and they were, âI just want the logo as if we're like this big corporate brand and I want our emails to look like thisâ. And it's the general advertisement, and we did it for them because they had hired us and we kept advising them against it, but we did it for them anyway, ultimately, ended that relationship we did, because it was just, your clients should listen to you and respect that you know what you're talking about.
But I think that there should be, especially today now we're post-COVID, where people want to connect with people and I think that entrepreneurs should not be afraid to put some element of personality into their email marketing.
Absolutely. I totally agree with you, because I know, I'm really good at getting on email lists and then unsubscribing if they don't make me happy after a few emails, because I do not like my email inbox flooded with tons of spam. And as soon as I see the email coming through as spam, and it's coming through two or three times a week, sometimes every day, I say No, forget it, you got to go. But it's funny, because as you're talking about it really made me think of this one email list I signed up for daily drop, it's about travelling and travel hacking. And pretty soon on I realised, I'm in Bermuda so a lot of the email that travel hacking stuff doesn't really quite work here the way it might in the US and I'm really a little disappointed. But the emails they're written are so interestingly, and there's always like a little nugget of something that I've enjoyed in it, that I'm hooked, I'll read it every day. Even though I know 90% I cannot apply, I still enjoy it because well, it's got personality, it's just the way that they put it into it. It's very personal, it's from a person, sometimes multiple people, can be different people on the team, but you feel so connected and it's really simple and easy to do. Although I get a lot of people want to be the big corporate brand. But guess what every big corporate brand started small, and they're still run by a person. And here's the thing, if somebody really wants to look at it, go to Instagram, look at Virgin and how many people follow the Virgin brand, and then go on Richard Branson and see how many people follow Richard Branson, tell me which numbers are bigger? That's the challenge. Go find the big brands and then the names behind the brands and see the difference between the people, the personality and the brand, people always wins. Because like you said, people like to connect with people. It's a really good point. It's really important. I think after COVID I think it feels more important now than ever to feel connected.
But okay, so a question. A lot of people I'm sure who are listening are gonna be asking is that sounds great, I want to do that, I'm an entrepreneur, I have a personality. I can write emails, this is fine. But how on earth do I even start building a list? Like, where do I start? I have people I know I email regularly but how do I get new people? How do I find new people to get on my list?
Yes. So this is good, because actually this is a point that goes back to something Vicki brought up to which is the quality of the list, right? And so it's actually, if you're just starting to try to figure it out, how do I build a list, it's actually really simple to start. People that go to your website, ask them for their email address, give them a good opt-in opportunity and a good place for them to subscribe to your email list. That's as simple as it gets. And that's how it should always start. And all it needs to be is something on your website that says enter your email here for benefit and the benefit should be something they want. Whether and I'm being intentionally broad here, but if youâre a CPA people on your website are looking for financial tips. And so it can be as simple as that, âenter your email here for regular good financial advice sent straight to your inboxâ. You can say something like, âwe don't spam youâ or whatever and don't spam. But yeah, so like that, that simple stuff. most people don't take it. But I think it's important to have some valuable emails that you're going to send, that's kind of the thing, a lot of people also collect email and they don't send email. And also, they may think, âOh, my list is too small.â
Might be guilty of that one.
Thatâs okay. I mean, look, you're in good company, right? The good news is it's really easy to break that. You absolutely have good stuff to send and I talk to podcasters all the time that say that to me, I'm like, you have a podcast that makes it super easy. Because if people are on your email list, they're like, you can pick a little nugget that we talked about in this conversation and write an email about it, that's like 100 words, it doesn't have to be anything crazy. And people will find that valuable. And to a general entrepreneur, it could be anything, I use the CPA example because there's a lot of CPAs and that's just the one that comes to mind. But there's so many, anything that you do as an entrepreneur, talking about your day, I've found is like, and when I say your day, I mean, you go throughout your day and you go throughout your week and your month and there are things that happen that are stories, that are good stories.
The simplest formula for an email newsletter, which.. and by the way, these things that I'm saying, don't actually apply to e-commerce brands, which is who I normally help my agency, it's a little different for an e-commerce brand. But I want to be a little bit more talking to the general entrepreneur with the service business, maybe because I feel like a lot of that might be the majority of your audience, for a lot of podcasts, it's the majority. So if you're an e-commerce business there's some other things you can do, we'll get to that, or I'll tell you where to find that. But for if you have a business as an entrepreneur, like I said, service business, you can write an email in this formula, I learned this from Justin Goff, he's a great email copywriter, definitely look him up if you've never heard of him, but the formula is: Story + Point. And all that means is you tell a story, and then you tell the point of the story. And that's your email. And you can make it long, you can make it short. As long as it's relevant. That's the thing, people care about relevancy. So if they signed up to hear from you, it's because what you're offering or what you do is relevant to their lives, they have problems that they want solved, they have desires that they want, they're looking for the things that they can find those benefits from you. So, take little things that happen, little things that you've observed, little things that you have knowledge or tips or any of that, and you just put it into an email and it doesn't always have to be a story, I just think stories are a great thing for email.
So that's the first thing is don't worry so much about growing the list. Because your list can be really small at first, it doesn't matter, youâve got to get into the habit first off of sending email, and having a good response to that, which in the beginning can just mean you ask for replies and people start to reply, and you get ideas from that as well. And then eventually, you can really monetise that list, but you have to have, engagement comes first. And this is with our clients too with e-commerce. If you don't have an engaged email list, it doesn't matter how many times you send that sale to them or you promote that product or you send that discount, it's not going to do well because you don't have them engaged. So engagement is always first then monetization. And when you get a little bit further along and build the email lists, you can do something like have a lead magnet where they're opting-in to receive a video or a PDF or some sort of advice that you give. And that's a great way to grow an email list and you can even run paid traffic to that, you can put that out on social and on podcasts and things like that to get organic traffic. It's actually not hard to build a list. But you have to start and I think most people, they just don't start or they collect emails, but they don't start sending to them. So that's the most important thing.
So would you say that it takes a while to get through this process? Or do you start to see results pretty quickly?
As in results in money?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the green stuff with your clients, how long does it take you generally to ramp them up from when you first meet them to getting the results they're looking for?
Well, okay. So two different questions. Because with our clients, they see results instantly and that's because usually, they have an existing e-commerce business, right. And so even if they don't have email, our clients we do work with clients of all different sizes so some of them are 8-figure companies, some of them are people who are fairly new to the e-commerce world, and they're not making a lot of revenue yet and that's fine. The thing is, they have to have an existing ecommerce business where people can go and buy stuff online from them. And then, as long as they have that, even if they don't have email started yet, once they start, that should show results and sales very quickly, because if you have an offer on your site that is already selling, then it's very easy right?
Now, for someone who is maybe in a different position where they're a service business, that's really going to depend, how long is it going to take to see results? Well, as soon as you are able to get someone who's connected with you, meaning they're getting your emails, and they're feeling like you can help them, then usually that turns into a phone call or a consultation, right, and then a sale. So that's definitely going to depend growing your email list, though, there are some hacks to grow faster, I guess the best one that I would say, in general, for people is what I would call list swapping, or affiliate promotions, meaning you find someone who has your audience, so for me, for my email list, I look for people whose audience is also ecommerce businesses, or other email marketers. And so if somebody has a much bigger audience than me, and includes the people that I want to connect with and market to, then I can do a list swap with them, where they will promote my email list or my lead magnet, or what have you to their much larger audience, and then I get those emails, and then I can grow my list a lot faster. And I won't get into the weeds, there's a lot of ways you can do that and if the person has a similar size audience to you, or a smaller audience then you can probably do that for free. But if they have a really big audience, then you are going to have to pay them. And so that's a different, a different way of doing it and that can be commissioned also. So that's how a lot of people grow their lists, at least in my industry. Ecommerce, it's as simple as having a popup on your website, where people can get a discount or money to spend or some kind of bonus or something good for entering their email. And since they're already on your shop, they're already on your website because they want to shop it's very easy to turn that person into a customer.
Yeah. And then it's easy to turn a customer into a repeat customer. Much easier to retain customers than find new ones. I mean, that's just general business. Right? Yeah brilliant.
Yeah, I was just gonna say that's what email is really good at is helping you get the repeat customers for sure.
Because it keeps you top of mind. And I think that's what a lot of people forget in business that we are so flooded with information, from social media, from email from all over the place, anything that we're watching, we're flooded with ads and stuff that often we forget, maybe somebody that we've worked with before that we appreciate has given us good value. But if you're there consistently giving good value sharing, engaging, entertaining, all these things that you can do with email, then you're much more likely to stay top of mind with Oh yeah, I need that gift for my grandma's birthday and you happen to sell beautiful candles. So you're gonna be the one they remember when they need that gift, for example, right? So it's brilliant and I really appreciate probably people understand a little bit more today, what value email can really bring to their business and not to undervalue it, because like you said, It was the one thing left when there was nothing else left, right, the brand had gone, the name, everything else had gone, you still had an email list. And that's incredible And that's the one thing we own in business. We don't own our social media, other people own social media companies, not us. So it's important to maintain a good email. So thank you for that. And of course, we are called Resilient Entrepreneurs, you are a resilient entrepreneur yourself, and you work with them. So tell us, do you have a definition for resilience? And what does it mean to you?
I was thinking about this when I first saw the name of your podcast, it felt like a vocab test, haha. Yeah, what is it? Well it's a couple of things to me, because I would say I think of this, I don't know, who told me this, is some mentor somewhere, I heard this, and maybe you guys have heard it before but it's like an aeroplane that takes off, and it's headed for a destination. It's never really on the exact course to that destination until the last few seconds before it touches down on the runway, but the whole way there it's just a series of course corrections. Like it's the nose points up, the nose points this way, that way, and it's and it's following this course, but it's constantly just correcting course, usually it's an autopilot that's correcting course, but I think that because somebody told me a long time ago, that's sort of what your entrepreneurship journey is like you're where you're headed. You should have a vision and that can change and does that evolve over time, if you don't have a vision, I'm sure that's something you guys talk about, having this idea of where you're trying to go and really something you want and where you want to get to. But everything along the way is gonna throw you off course, like it's gonna, you're gonna get cross winds, headwinds, tailwinds, you're gonna get all kinds of stuff, rain, lightning, and all kinds of things, maybe even a bird is going to hit you. But you are always course correcting and that's just what entrepreneurship is. So I think resilience to me, that's what I think of. And I think that in my day to day right now, I think of resilience, because we're in this stage where we're growing, but we are still a very small business, we have a team of nine people,
Weâre really in this period of trying to systematise everything we do, so that my brother and I can sort of pull ourselves more and more out of the day to day. And it's been this way for what feels like forever but it hasn't been that long. It's been a year and a half or two that we've really been in this systematising and trying to get ourselves out of it. And there's so much to get through with that. But in a typical day I'm always wearing so many hats bouncing back and forth from podcasts like this, my favourite thing by the way is this in my own podcast and writing emails to my list. But my day is taken up by everything but that right, and some of it is sales and trying to get new clients and others just like, the actual delivery and making sure that our clients are getting the results. And it's the team dynamics, it's all of that. So I think resilience is like being able to do these different things, knowing that they're all leading to this destination, but being able to bounce from one thing to the next. And then lastly, I'll say definitely being able to deal with, especially if you're an earlier entrepreneur during the first few years. I'm in year six right now, I guess so I'm not that far ahead. But I will say years one through four, really hard, really, really hard, being able to deal with stuff. My brother and I had another business partner, he left at the beginning of 2022, that was the hardest thing. He was a personal friend going back since we were kids and so that was hard.
Before that, just getting the business off the ground. And we went for months. And when I saw the topic of your show, I wanted to get the story in there so just a quick one on this. We moved into his college apartment while he was in his senior year of college. I slept on the floor, he had a studio apartment at the time just getting through senior year, my parents were not gonna let him drop out because we were doing a business, that wasn't gonna happen. So I moved in there. I had no money, this was after the first business failed and I had all this debt. And he was getting student loan money every semester for books and clothes and food and so he said just move in here, and we're gonna get this right, we're gonna get this off the ground, he supported me financially gave me food, I moved in there for what we were hoping would be quick, it ended up being four months, which is not that long when you look back at it, but at the time, it felt like 50 years. Every day, he would go to class and I would be on the laptop trying to get our first email marketing client reaching out to businesses directly, that's how it started. And we still do that method in our agency by the way, we still do the cold, like the cold email, like where we find businesses that we would really love to work with. And we send them an email. And that has always consistently worked. We have ads and other things now that work great, but that has always worked since day one.
But anyway, it took four months to work though, that was my point. So resilience, I didn't know anything about sales, I didn't, I was terrible. First no one would get on the phone and then when I did start getting people to get on the phone and talk to me about their email marketing, I failed at that, like probably like 20 some times, it was terrible. I felt like crap. So much rejection, one after another, just kind of highlighting for me, my inexperience and the fact that we hadn't had clients before that time, finally had a brand that said, Yeah, let's give this a shot. But it took so long. So resilience. The other thing that I think about is that time period for me because I wanted to quit so bad, I couldn't at the time, but actually I'll say this, and then I'll shut up. But the reason it worked is because at a certain point, we, my brother and I were kind of at our wits end with each other, just everything that had been happening. So he gave me an ultimatum where he said, it has to work now, or I can't do this anymore. So he was like, you're gonna go back to living in mom and dad's basement, you have one month to get this right. Because I was the one doing the calls, that was my job. And within two weeks of him giving me that ultimatum we got our first client, I think it really, it put something in it like I knew it was going to work eventually. But being faced with well, now it has to work or it's done and being so determined, I could not see a different path at that time. So I don't know but I think that stuff like to me I think that when you say like what's resilience?
I think that plane analogy, maybe my favourite definition ever resilience and entrepreneurship, the two together and I'm gonna steal it from you, I'll give you credit to definitely use that when we talk to clients too, because I just think it helps understand, it's all about the destination keep the destination in mind. And then your story about your brother giving you the ultimatum there's nothing like having no resources to make a super creative, right, you have to get super creative. So to have those so much value, this conversation has packed so much value.
I love it. And I appreciate you so much Josh for the time and the attention, the great stories. And I hope this has inspired lots of people to get out there to send that email tomorrow morning. And work on and build your list because we own that list and it's really important. So thanks, Josh. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs. I hope to see you again soon.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
