Starter Girlz Podcast

The eCommerce OG’s Secret Operating System Behind 90+ Winners (with Sabir Semerkant, Founder of Rapid2X & eCommerce Growth Strategist)

• Jennifer Loehding • Season 7 • Episode 106

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What does it really take to build, scale, and sustain a winning eCommerce brand in 2025? In this episode of the Starter Girlz Podcast, host Jennifer Loehding sits down with Sabir Semerkant, the eCommerce OG — one of the early pioneers who helped build online shopping for major global brands — and now mentors founders through his Rapid2X Operating System.

With experience scaling over 90+ successful brands, Sabir breaks down the exact principles, mindset, and metrics that separate eCommerce winners from the rest. From data-driven decisions and pricing discipline to the power of AI and the 1.7-second attention rule, this conversation is a masterclass in scaling smartly without burning out your team or budget.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✅ How the Rapid2X system helps brands double growth using focused six-week sprints
✅ Why data kills opinions and drives smarter marketing decisions
✅ The importance of understanding true costs and margins before scaling
✅ How to use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude as real growth multipliers
✅ Why site speed equals empathy, and how it impacts your conversion rate
✅ The founder mindset shifts required to build a profitable, resilient eCommerce business
✅ How asking “Why” before “What or How” can instantly reveal hidden growth opportunities

Why You Should Watch:

Whether you’re a DTC founder, startup entrepreneur, or marketing leader, this episode is packed with actionable insights on eCommerce growth strategy, operational excellence, and founder discipline straight from a true industry veteran.

If you’ve ever wondered how elite brands maintain consistent growth year after year, this is your blueprint. Sabir reveals the framework behind sustainable eCommerce success. You’ll walk away knowing how to scale faster, make smarter data decisions, and build a business that thrives in today’s competitive digital economy.

Connect with Sabir Semerkant:

🌐 Website: https://growthbysabir.com/

Connect with Starter Girlz Podcast:

🌐 Website: https://startergirlz.com

🙌 Partner: Walt Mills Productions

Love this episode?

Subscribe to the Starter Girlz Podcast for bold, inspiring conversations that fuel your personal and professional growth. Don’t forget to like, share, and leave a review — your support helps spread these stories further.

Sabir Semerkant:

I I I usually say is the on there are two groups of entrepreneurs. One group the Greedley loves this. They when they join in with that mindset, they do phenomenally well. And when I say phenomenally well, I'm talking about 118% increase in 12 weeks. The ones that come in from the mindset of, oh, let's see what this guy can do. No, listen, I'm Mr. Miyagi Daniels. I'm gonna teach you wax on, wax off. I'm gonna teach you what you need to do. I'm not in the tournament. You are going up against that big, big bad guy, and you need to defend, learn to defend yourself. I should not be part of your entrepreneurial journey for the rest of your life. I should be you should be in for 12 months. If you see value, continue, continue resubscribing because you continue uh getting value from it. But I should be in and I should be out.

Jennifer Loehding:

Welcome to the Starter Girls Podcast, your ultimate source of inspiration and empowerment. We're here to help women succeed in every area of their lives: career, money, relationships, and health and well-being. While celebrating the remarkable journeys of individuals from all walks of life who've achieved amazing things. Whether you're looking to supercharge your career, build financial independence, nurture meaningful relationships, or enhance your overall well-being. The Starter Girls Podcast is here to guide you. Join us as we explore the journeys of those who dare to dream big and achieve greatness. I'm your host, Jennifer Loading, and welcome to this episode. Welcome to another episode of the Starter Girls Podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Loading, and wherever you are tuning in today, we are so thrilled to have you. So here we are, another episode, another awesome guest. I'm so excited about this one. I've been waiting for this one for a while now. This is gonna be fun. So I'm gonna open this up today. From working alongside Gary V to helping some of the world's biggest brands scale, my guest has spent his career mastering the art of smart growth. With over 25 years in e-commerce, he knows how to unlock momentum without burning out, helping leaders and brands rise faster and smarter. And so you are gonna get to hear from him in just a few minutes. But before we do that, we do need to do a quick shout out to our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Walt Mills Productions. Need to add excitement to your YouTube videos or some expert hands for editing? Look no further. Walt Mills is the solution you've been searching for. Walt is not only your go-to guy for spicing up content, he's the force behind a thriving film production company with numerous titles in the pipeline. Always on the lookout for raw talent, Walt is eager to collaborate on film and internet productions. With a background deeply rooted in entertainment and promotion, Walt Mills leverages years of skills to give you the spotlight you deserve. Want to learn more about Walt and his work? Head on over to Walt Mills Productions.net and let your content shine. All right, and with that, I do want to say head on over to startergirls.com. I tell you this every single time. And why? Because one, if you've missed an episode, it's a great place to catch up. You can also sign up for our community newsletter and stay in the know, and hopefully you'll never miss an episode. And then, of course, if you are a creator or maybe you're already in the thick of it and you want to learn what your number one success block is, well, guess what? I've got a quiz over there that I have created. It's a two-minute quiz, and it will tell you what may be hindering your success right now. And so, as I say, head on over to startergirls.com and do your thing. All right. So, my guest today, are we ready? My guest today is Sabir Summerkant, a creator. He is the creator of the Rapid 2X protocol, a 12-month sprint system that has generated over $1 billion in revenue for 90 plus e-commerce brands in just the last 18 months. He has helped brands scale faster, boost margins, and eliminate debt. He's been endorsed by Gary Vee, Neil Patel, and Matt Higgins from Shark Tank. Sabir combines strategy, insight, and real world results to help e-commerce leaders grow smarter, not harder. So, Sabir, welcome to the Starter Girl Show. I am so excited to have you here today.

Sabir Semerkant:

Jen, it's great to be here.

Jennifer Loehding:

It's gonna be so much fun. I'm like reading my notes and I'm like, what did I even put on this paper here? It took me a minute to catch myself. It's always the fun thing. It's like the only part of the show that I have scripted is when I read the bios, but they're always my favorite because I get to brag about y'all when you come on the show.

Sabir Semerkant:

So and we all appreciate it. Thank you, Jen.

Jennifer Loehding:

Awesome. All right, Sabir, I want to talk about you. I want to talk about how you are helping your clients because you got it rocking. Like, I'm over your 1 billion in revenue for 90 plus e-commerce brands in just like the last 18 months. So tell us about this. Like, what are you doing over there? How's this doing this?

Sabir Semerkant:

So, the number one thing that we do is first of all, we kill opinion. Right?

Jennifer Loehding:

I like it.

Sabir Semerkant:

A lot of people have a lot of opinion, right? They they they tell you what they think is true or they heard is true or hearsay, whatever. Look, you're in e-commerce, everything is throwing data at you. Why aren't you just looking at the data? Look at the data. It tells you the truth, it tells you what's going on in your business. And if it if you're not paying attention to the numbers, like there are numbers from your email marketing, from meta ads, from your website, from how fast your page is loading, right? All of these things are giving you signals, true signals, to to for you to pay attention to it. And what do people do? Oh, I I saw this this TikToker say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever, you know. Okay. Uh, but your site is loading, your your product page is taking 30 seconds to load. Yeah, so what? The human attention span in 2025 is 1.7 seconds.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

The very thing that got your attention on TikTok, that's 1.7 seconds. Your product page needs to deliver that page and its value in 1.7 seconds. Why are you worried about what what that TikToker said to you and is for some reason it sounds exciting to you? Whatever he said, he may be right, maybe not be right, or she may be right or wrong, you know, it doesn't matter. But the fact is your site doesn't load fast enough. Fix that first. Right? Don't too many people try to be too fancy. I mean, this is my experience over 25 years, over well over 200 e-com brands, over 1 billion dollars, pretty deep scars. I know that Jen, I look pretty cool with this haircut, right? This is this is not a Dwayne Johnson cut. This is truly I lost all of my hair follicles because of e-commerce. Every one of those follicles was a million dollar incremental revenue for my clients. That it's all lost, it's gone. Uh it looks great. I mean, I'm I'm happy with it. You know, it during summer especially, it's very cool. You're one with the element, you know, with all the elements. But but but the thing is, uh, you know, it's uh that's the kind of a lesson I've learned. That when when you're operating a business, you have to know your numbers. You have to know it. If you don't know it, first get educated in that. Don't don't don't um don't give it off to your oh, my VA does my uh spreadsheets or uh or my agency gives me my meta ads report. No, no, I'm asking you what are you you doing with that data? How come you don't know what your site's bounce rate is? Yeah, you should know that, right? How much did you spend last week on on meta-ads? Most founders don't know that number.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Oh yeah, I gotta, I gotta, let me check with my agency. Let me see how much they spent how much money money you spent. Today is Tuesday. Monday morning, you should know how much they spent, you know. So all of this is part of a Rapid2X protocol. What we do in a year is we go through between eight to ten sprints. Uh each sprint is about six weeks. We focus on one thing. Okay. And everybody in Rapid2, all the Rapid2X members, they focus on that one thing. And then we kill it, basically. That thing that we worked on. For example, let's say everybody runs, pretty much everybody runs Clavio, right? If you run Shopify, you run Clavio. So for six weeks, all we are doing is everything we need to get right with with Clavio. It that means all of your email campaigns, all of your email calendar, automation, including AI. We actually actively use AI to run businesses and help them scale faster right now. It's not fancy things or look at this cool AI prompt and how cool things we could do with it. No, no, we're actually using it to help us get a lot done. And AI has come a long way in the past, I would say, 24 months, has done an incredible job. I mean, especially I'm I'm just blown away. The thing is, at my core, I'm a computer scientist. But when when I studied computer science, uh artificial intelligence was uh what was theory because we didn't have the CPU. There was no such thing as GPU, right? So we didn't have it, we didn't have the hardware to run it at back then, right? So what what did we do? We did data analysis, we did pivot tables. Those are the things that we have been doing. And past two years with with AI, with things like MANIS and cloud anthropic uh cloud AI and and Chat GPT, and all of these things are phenomenal, phenomenal tools. I mean, now you could weaponize scaling in your business. That's you have been given an incredible weapon to scale it. You have to be smart about it. You cannot, you cannot just uh treat it like a shiny new object and you're not gonna get anywhere with that.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, right. No, and and to your point with the chat GPT, I mean I can't even imagine not having it now because I feel like I use it every single day.

Sabir Semerkant:

It's like a calculator.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, it's like in everything, like just before I'm gonna.

Sabir Semerkant:

It's your iPhone, it's your calculator. That's what it is today, you know.

Jennifer Loehding:

I get all like how do I create my create my bios that I'm doing for my podcast? I'm having to go in there like taking the content. How do we create, you know, like I I feel like I use it for everything? It's like, you know, if I'm coming up with titles, I've I've used it to create, you know, like put presentations, not like full presentations, but like a like a sale, like a I'm I'm gonna a proposal, like basically like a proposal. I've used it to help me create that or to brainstorm ideas. I mean, yeah, you can do so much. I think I even told somebody was at our house. My my son's friend was here the other day, and he was trying to um get a car inspected, and and a code came up, and so you gotta drive X number of miles to get rid of the code. They couldn't figure out the number. I said, go look it up on Chat GPT, see if it'll give you an answer.

Sabir Semerkant:

Before before it used to be Google it.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

It used to be Google it or look it up on AOL, and then it was let's Google it, right? Yes. And now now it's just chat GPT, ask ChatGPT. And ChatGPT, it doesn't mean that chat you're going literally on Chat GPT. It could mean that if let's say you prefer Claude, you could be going on Claude and and doing it there, or Gemini, or Copilot, or any of these kind of tools, or Perplexity, or Elon Musk's uh Grok, you know, any of those things. Grok is phenomenal, by the way, right now.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, liking it.

Sabir Semerkant:

Oh, yeah. I mean, especially with voice, it does an incredible job. Like you could say that uh the thing is, I'm a New Yorker, so I I I uh the for my ultimate test was I said, uh you're a woman from the Bronx, right? I want I wanna when you talk to me, I want you to use that accent. And it did a phenomenal job. When you do the same thing on Chat GPT, it's the same woman. Same woman. It's the same woman. There is no inflection, there is no attitude.

Jennifer Loehding:

Okay.

Sabir Semerkant:

But when you do the same thing with Grok with voice, you get that specific type of personality that comes through. That means that also the content that you could generate with it could be pretty darn close to what you're trying to achieve. I mean, right now, the the best tool out there that that generates the best content, human-like uh sentences and inflections and stuff like that, is uh Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the latest one. Opus 4.1 before that. It did a phenomenal job. Nothing compares to it, but a close second I would say would be grok.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I like Claude. I've been using that, and I use that one to help me build out a course and stuff. So I've used that one too. There's a lot of them out there, but yeah, it's funny. I got I was mad at Chat GP today, so I told it to get lost. I love how it like argues with you sometimes. I mean, you're not giving me the answer I want. I'm done. I'm moving to a different one now. We're gonna go try that. So I'm gonna go.

Sabir Semerkant:

You know what does that don't you feel that uh tools like that we were so impressed with, like literally, maybe two less than two years ago. Yeah, uh uh Alexa and Siri. Right now you talk to it, go like, how come you cannot think about that? Go like, I'm sorry, I cannot help you with that. What do you mean you cannot help me with that? Chat GPT can't. One of my favorite lines is you're being too chatty. Can you be brief and concise?

Jennifer Loehding:

Great.

Sabir Semerkant:

I love that then Chat GPT actually keeps it. Chat GPT with voice is pretty good, also, right? I think that aspect of it is pretty good compared to the others, right? So that there I go, like, can you keep it brief and concise? Yeah, because it's it goes way overboard explaining things too much. Like, no, no, you know, keep it, keep it simple. First, give me the six-word answer, and then if I'm interested, I'm gonna ask you to give me more.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, yeah. No, it's funny. I love it. I'm gonna have to check the grow account. Then I haven't done that one. I've tried Perplexity and I'd use Chat GPD, and I like the claws. I'll have to check out a couple of these other ones. So, okay, so I want to know. Okay, so we talked a little bit about your what you're doing with your clients. Love it. I would love to know like how did you get into this field? Like, how did this happen for you? Because you're clearly you're good at it. You built some well-known common brands. I mean, like Canon, we've talked Tommy Hilberger. I mean, there's some great brands in there. We know you've worked with Gary Vee, helped him build up some of the commerce. I'm just how did this happen for you? Like, what brought you to this?

Sabir Semerkant:

I started with quitting. Oh. So it's good. You know, so quitting is not so bad, you know? Yeah. So my my very first one was before e-commerce, uh, internet was being commercialized, right? Remember, I'm an OG. I've I've I've been in this field for a long time, right? And back then, I was part of a big six consulting firm, management consulting firm. So pretty good position. Uh, Sabir in his 20s, right, out of college. Even though I was just out of college, I already had a lot of experience because I had been coding since the age of six. Yeah. So I I it to me it was like second nature coding and millions of lines of code, uh well over 20 different programming languages of coded in. So I'm really well versed. That's that's part of me that the new world, the the this recent 25 years doesn't even know that exists.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, right, right. Kind of like the AOL, you've got mail.

Sabir Semerkant:

So I um uh so at this at this uh management consulting firm, I went to the partner in charge and I said, look, look, you know, I've been I've been playing with this internet. It's it's coming about there is there's a huge commercialization effort that's going on right now. We should be focused on this back then the client server, meaning that the a server existed inside of your company and you and people from your company connected to that server in order to get services done, right? Before cloud, this is before any of this stuff, right? So I said that's where the world is going. I think we uh I can I can help with that. Like, can we do something with that? I don't know. That's this internet is a fad. I heard about it. I don't think it's gonna turn into a big thing, you know. I said, I I made my argument because remember, when you're in your 20s, you do argue a little bit more, you're more hot-headed. I did do that with this partner who was like five levels up uh above me, right? In the in the pecking order, yeah, this hierarchy. And it's a big big six consulting firm. So you can imagine like having that conversation at Anderson Consulting or Ernst and Young. So think of it like that, you know?

Jennifer Loehding:

Okay.

Sabir Semerkant:

So I I said that I bec felt defeated after he said, no, it's a fad, it's gonna go away. Nothing, I don't think it's gonna change that much. I think, yeah, you know, mainframe to the PC, but we even with PCs, you see some of the smaller companies. I he I I I don't think he understood how the PCs had been everywhere in every company in the world, you know. So that that that's what happened. So next day I went in, I I took my resignation with me. I said that uh respectfully, uh I'm going. This is the way the world is going. I believe in it. I here's my resignation letter. So I resigned because I was on my path. I was very successful. Yeah, I was on my path. If I had stayed on there for three to five years, I could have made partner, or maybe in seven years, right? One of the partners, right? But now I said, I'm gonna go in. What are you gonna do? I said, I'm gonna become an internet consultant. I was like, that's not a thing. It's like somebody saying that I'm a blockchain consultant.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah. Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Right? Well, like, what what is that? You know? So uh I'm gonna become uh an internet consultant, but that's not a thing. Now I said I'm gonna make it a thing, right? I'm gonna this is where it's going, right? I quit. I back then, by the way, LinkedIn doesn't exist. So it's not like I can post there with a flag saying that I'm available, hire me. No such thing. So I let my network know that hey, I I left uh my management consulting. Uh I'm I'm focused 100% on eco uh on internet, because there was no e-commerce at that time on internet. So if you have anyone that's interested in internet projects, send them my way. Because I was one of very few people in the world that understood that, you know?

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, so very few.

Sabir Semerkant:

So as soon as I I make that announcement, two of my people in my network contact me. One of them is trying, uh there is a project, internet project that's failing, and they want somebody to lead it. And that was Jim Kramer from CNBC, and that was the street.com. I'll like, yeah, not a problem. I'll go and do it. I because I knew every part of the infrastructure, all of every nuance, all of that stuff. No problem, I'll take that on. I said yes to that. And and another friend of mine contacted me. Go like, hey, I heard that you're providing internet uh consulting. Uh, we have uh a fashion brand that wants to do innovative things with with internet, and we're helping them, but there's no we don't have a tech lead that can lead this project. Like we have no idea where we're going with this. That project was Tommy Hilfiger.

Jennifer Loehding:

Wow.

Sabir Semerkant:

Those were my right out of my gate, I got two of them and I was barely sleeping. I was doing 16-hour days, eight hours each, you know, to help launch them. And I I did end up launching both of them at the same time. And then from there, it just spiraled, right? But but the thing is, uh, when we were doing uh uh Tommy, Tommy wanted to sell his book, but how do you sell you cannot take credit card over plain text, which was HTTP.

Jennifer Loehding:

Okay, yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Lucky for us, uh, you know, HTTPS became uh standard, and then we we were one of the first implementations of it. At the same this was at the same time Jeff Fazos was working on Amazon, right? At at the same time. So uh we actually uh started selling his book and used HTTPS. But the thing is, it's not just about taking a credit card, you have to process it. No PayPal. There is no PayPal, there is no Stripe. We had to actually build that with Chase Man Chase Bank to connect to it to say, hey, when we give you credit card, you need to approve it and take the money out and then give us a confirmation you did that. And they had an API called payment tax, so we implemented that. You know, you had to do all of those things because there was no Shopify. Right. So every new every aspect, every nook and cranny of e-commerce, even from a buildup standpoint, I know it really well from even from those days. And and nowadays, like people complain about hey, I couldn't get my Shopify going. Like, what are you talking about? You're working with Lego parts. I had I had to build Lego. I had to build Lego. What are you talking about? Now I I can literally launch an e-commerce company, launch it from scratch, and I've done it several times over a weekend. I could start Friday morning by Sunday night, it could be launched, and I could drive traffic to it, not from scratch, from zero, right? Without and especially, I believe that that statement I can even change it uh now because of AI, with especially with uh Cloud Sonnet 4.5. I strongly believe that with that, with Chat GPT and the new uh Sora 2 from uh shout out to OpenAI. They did a phenomenal job with video, right? So with those tools, I think e-commerce companies could be launched within like six hours. It doesn't have to even take a whole weekend anymore. Yeah, it used to take me nine months. Like literally, uh, I was pregnant, you know, I had to give birth in nine months.

Jennifer Loehding:

That's impressive. I'm like, wow, I don't even know anything about all that. So I think it's impressive. I can't imagine because it there's so much technology has changed so much. I mean, you're talking about that we use I use Stripe and all of those things now, and it's like for it's so incredible, incredibly convenient, you know.

Sabir Semerkant:

It's incredible.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right? And you're just like, you know, you're like, my it's kind of I guess like driving a you know stick shift car. Once you learn how to do that, you know how to do it, right? Like you know how to build these these platforms from bottom up. So you did a lot of things.

Sabir Semerkant:

What are you complaining about? You have you have these incredible Lego parts, and even with AI, that helps you even automate it. Yeah. What I realized is not everybody is at, you know, you know, uh there's a saying that I heard from uh from one of my mentors when I when I was younger, and it didn't make sense to me. And over time it started making more sense. Yeah, fast is slow, slow is fast. Yeah, right. Right when uh slow is fast, right? Uh for some people you think you're going so slow, but you're going too fast. They don't get it.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

And fast is slow. You you think as an entrepreneur, you might be going fast. I look at it from my perspective, you're going super slow. Right? Right, right. So uh it people get things at their own pace. It's their understanding, it's their they need to get there. Otherwise, what happens? You make a lot of mistakes by let me speed it up. I'm gonna go hire XYZ agency. I'm gonna go hire Gary Vaynerchuck. You're not ready for Gary Vaynerchuck. Your brand is not ready for Gary Vaynerchuck, even if you have the money to spend because you told investors that you're gonna you need money from them to give it to Gary, right? Right. You're you're not ready. Actually, on the other side, Gary has a lot of uh a lot of great people that actually vet that and see that, oh, you know what, you don't belong here. You need to go build build build these other things, go consume some of the Gary V content before you get here, and then we'll see you in about two, three years when you're ready. You're not ready yet, you know? Yeah, and and we do the same thing with even with Rapid2X, like you know, uh so the two types of uh entrepreneurs we don't take on. If you are a side hustler, you're not serious yet, you know, because you really need to seriously this needs to be your your full-time job. And if you don't make your sales and if you don't grow your this business, that means that you're not paying mortgage, right? You need to be serious, that level serious, right? And the number two is dropshipper. It's most side hustlers tend to be dropshippers too. Yeah, right. So we don't there's a very rare case. We have had like maybe two Rapid 2Xers that were uh drop shippers, uh, but the thing is they had already scaled their business over a million dollars a year. So they they knew what they were doing, and then when they became part of Rapid 2X, one of the first things that we did with them was to say that, like, look, this has proven itself. How much more do you want it to prove itself, right? Either either turn this business into a marketplace and go like we will never carry inventory, or you see that this these are the things, these are the top 10 things that actually worked. Let's go and private label it so that we can build a brand, you know, yeah and invest in it that way. So now it's time for you to pivot and take that road, uh road ahead. Which which way you want to go? You know, what are you waiting for? Already a million dollar in the bank tells you that this thing works, right? Yeah, you hit on you are one of the few that actually hit on something great here. So let's move in the right direction with that. But most of the businesses are e-com DTC businesses, it's their own products. We we touch almost every product category. It's not just US specific. We uh, you know, it's like a United Nations meeting every every two sessions I have, live sessions every week, right? Yeah. That's around the world. We have e-comm, e-commerce entrepreneurs from Dubai, from Belgium, from Australia, from New Zealand, uh Netherlands, UK, uh, quite a few from you uh from United States, from uh from Canada. Like we we have clients from all over the world. Does it work with different languages, different cultures? Yes. The answer is yes, right? Because the thing is we focus on we focus on the fundamentals of the business that that that goes cross-border. It doesn't matter where you are, you know. So we we need to fix those kinds of things first, you know, so that a consumer, uh, you know, TikTok and and Instagram reels have penetrated almost every part of the globe, right? That consumer attention span doesn't change from 1.7 seconds. Right. It doesn't matter if if you are from Dubai or from uh from South Africa or Botswana, doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter, it's the same attention span, right? Yeah you is your business set up to that attention span, and it's not just pages loading it fast enough, it's also your meta ads. Why is your meta ads not working? You're showing me your logo for the first 10 seconds. I oh you already lost me. How about you tell me in the first three seconds what are you trying to get my attention on?

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, right, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Why so there is an art and science to even generating video creatives, or even if you do static uh ads and stuff like that, you have to ultimately it goes down back to did you make your point in in one and a half to three seconds? And if you did not do that, you are definitely losing money. You're losing money on spending it on Meta and Google and TikTok and all of those paid platforms. You're losing it on the revenue side because you did get attention. Meta did its job of sending you that traffic, but your bounce rate is 90%. Meaning that 90% of that traffic that that Meta sent you, you did not cater to them. They left before you would even show your page properly because you're taking too long.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah. So bottom line is you need to know your numbers.

Sabir Semerkant:

You need to know your numbers. And you have not Jen, this will should this may or may not shock you. Yeah. So many entrepreneurs over my career, they did not even know the cost of goods that they sold.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

So how do you determine your price? How do you know you're profitable? Last I checked, you're not a non-profit organization.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Even nonprofit organization needs to make some margin in order to pay off volunteers and buy things like stickers and stuff to promote that nonprofit. But they don't know their numbers.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Like, no, no, we buy this thing from China. Uh we buy it at $7 a unit. Yeah, it was seven dollars a unit when it was in China. You have to put it on a boat to bring it over here.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Now it's not seven dollars. Maybe it's eight dollars sixty. Now it's sitting in somebody's warehouse in Canada or United States or whatever.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

They're charging you square footage for it to sit there before you even sell it. Now you sold it.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

You have to pay credit card fees, which is two to three percent. And if you do PayPal or installment plans or whatever, that's a little bit low even more.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Do you pay yourself? And and what about the pick pack and ship from that from that operations? Like that's gonna take your order packet for you. Oh, yeah, but Amazon is the best deal in town. Yeah, Amazon doesn't do it for free. They will charge you for every one of those orders that are going out. I know if FBM is pretty good, right? It's you know, or the MCA program that they have is pretty good. I get it, right? But you need to know your numbers, right? That seven dollar thing sitting in China was seven dollars. Once you actually sold it, your cost of goods could be ten dollars fifty cents. And you set the price, selling price of $9.95. Right. Because you thought that, oh, for every item I was collecting $2.95. No, right. Every time you're selling, you're owing $1.50. You're paying people to take this product off your hands.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much.

Sabir Semerkant:

Well, hopefully, and I've not run, I've not run meta ads yet.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Now, if I run meta ads on top of it, most of them have a less than uh a two ROAS, which is not profitable.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, right. Well, hopefully, I guess they better get that straight before they come work with you.

Sabir Semerkant:

No, no, this is the this is the part of it. I mean, a lot of there's a lot of data, and sometimes you know, with the overload of data, right, right, that also causes problems. So, what we do is there's too many KPIs, too much data, too much metrics, right? What do you pay attention to? That's one of the things that Rapid2X protocol does. It kind of hones you into like first, let's fix the consumer attention span. That's one metric. That's it. Everything we're gonna do for six weeks, we're gonna fix that one thing. So everything is fine-tuned to that attention span. Gotcha. Now we have real data. Now we have accurate data because you had errors before. Right, right. Any data you had before that point was based on the wrong assumptions. You thought that, oh, you know what, meta ads is the problem. So you went to an agency that sells meta ads, right? Meta ads services. What would they say? Oh, you have meta-ads problem, right? Yeah, right. You go to the Shopify place, they go like, oh, you know what? Your Shopify sites could be better. You need to rebuild the Shopify site. How much does it cost? Ten thousand dollars, twenty-five thousand dollars, whatever. And when the meta ads agency fails at delivering results, right? What happens? What's their excuse? Well, the the thing is you you don't have enough uh to product market fit, so they start blaming something else. Or it's your website, your website is bad. Then you think that, oh, you know what, the agency is right, I need to go fix my website. You you never fixed your business. Your business needs to be fixed from the ground up. From there are fundamental things that are wrong with your business that you need to correct. Once you do that, it's like saying that I have, you know, I have the wrong hammer. I have the wrong nails. But what are you trying to build? Like, do you really need a hammer? Do you really need nails? Can you do without without them with using a glue? Maybe it's a glue gun you need. You don't need a jackhammer.

Jennifer Loehding:

Oh my god. No, I feel like, yeah, I know, and I'm not even it's making me think of when I've worked with clients, not even on that level, but like when they're getting hung up on this one thing, but they're missing all the other pieces that need to be fixed, and they're hung up on that one thing, and they keep thinking it's that one thing they need to fix. And it's probably because they heard it from somebody else that told me that.

Sabir Semerkant:

I'll tell you where they heard it from. They heard it from this fancy resume that they just hired that says chief marketing officer at Nestle. You know, they were a director of marketing at Nestle, now they hired them as a CMO for their startup. They're so excited about this person. Oh my god, we have uh director of marketing from Nestle. They were handling these things. Now they became CMO of our company. Yeah, yeah, you know, that person, that director, that director had 50 people behind them that was supporting them to not make mistakes, right? Right. That person didn't do anything to get you hired. You'd think that, you know, because you have to be at the right stage, or it could be, oh, our board of director, advisory board guy, blah, blah, blah. There's always a guy, right? There's always a guy or gal, gal that they think that this magical pedestal that they need to be on. Yeah, that person said it is magical, right? And then they have to listen to that. That's one of the biggest mistakes. Ignore the data. Yeah, you know, pay attention to the data. Yeah, that person, whatever is coming, I'm telling you, with over a few hundred thousand tests I've run in my life, right? In over 25 years, over one billion dollars in my experience, right? My opinion does not matter. My opinion does not matter, even though it's well informed. Yeah, it does not matter. Because if you see me in my live sessions, go like, okay, if you're a fashion company, this data tells you this. But if you're a supplement vitamin supplements company, you're completely it's 180 degrees, it's completely different. It's not the same.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

So, why are you reading this blog article that's written by somebody who's in the supplements industry that says that this works blah blah blah with the customers and whatever subscription? Right. You're a fashion brand, it has nothing to do with you, yeah, and it has nothing to do with your brand. I learned this also early in my career when I was when I when I thought, okay, Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Alice, when you look at their clothing, is for men most of the time, right? It's it's 90% men, must be the same. Two very different brands. Yeah. Even though they both go after the same demographic, it's 25 to 48-year-old men, right? That's the age that they go for. Very different approach, very different branding, very different history, very different tastes. Like that's within the same industry and category and demographics, very different approaches.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Let alone if you go across different categories and you assume, like, oh, that it worked for that. It worked, it should work for me. No, you need to see how it can work for me, not that it will work for me. You need to get to the right answer. You don't have the right answer right now, right? Because you're going on an assumption, pure assumption. You read an article, somebody on advisory board told you XYZ. You were watching somebody's keynote speech and they said something and that sparked an idea. You listened to this podcast and you got some ideas from here, right? Great. Start with an A B test.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Does this work for me? Let me test it against my control group. Is this factual? That's what you need to do. Like even the words coming out of my mouth, right? Well informed, so much experience, you still need to test it. You still need to test it for you.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right. Yeah, no, I think I agree with you because I think I think so often we get too many ideas when we're working on things, and then we think we have to reinvent the wheel or change something up because we hear somebody else say that that worked for them. And so clearly we trans, you know, transfer that knowledge over to what we're doing and think we have to just mix it all up and and change it up. And so I yeah, I agree with that.

Sabir Semerkant:

I'll give you a ridiculous example, right? Uh you know, how people start solving problems and why it's it's maybe just a simple thing you need to look at, right? Uh this is one of my very early, uh earliest experiences. And by the way, these experiences don't die like 25 years ago. People repeat it. We're humans, we keep repeating it, right? Yeah, some other brand comes up with it, I go, like, oh yeah, I I know that you need to do this. So at Vitamin Shop, right? This was 25 years ago. We started noticing that in our data, when we when people were registering to check out and stuff like that, that's what they used to do back then, right? It was not a one-click checkout, it was it was you had to go through our registration process. We noticed that in every, you know, mm-bulk of our data had an asterisk after first name asterisk, last name asterisk, uh uh street address one asterisk, street address two didn't have it, uh city had an asterisk next to it, phone number had an asterisk next to it. They're going like they started looking into the code, going like, are we putting this in there? People, but if we are putting it in the code, we should be seeing it on all the data. We are not seeing it. Yeah. Yeah. So after analyzing it, we saw that no, it's not in the code. People are actively putting this in, right? So I said, okay, you know, everybody took the engineering route, even though I have a lot of engineering background. I said, okay, let me let me just go through the experience on the site. Let me see what what's happening. I I go through the experience through the site, and and I have a group of my engineers there they're looking at the code to see where's this, maybe it's a conditional. It says people who are blue-eyed, you should get an asterisk. People who are who are short, they should get an asterisk. I don't know, something like that. So they're a conditional, so they're they're putting that in. I I look at the site, I start laughing. Like I said, we are telling them to put the asterisk there. Like, are you effing kidding me? What do you what do you mean? On the forum it says asterisk denotes required fields. So we're instructing the consumers that whatever you think is required, put an asterisk next to it. So they put Susan asterisk, Cully asterisk, yeah, one Main Street asterisk, apartment one five, six, no, no asterisk. They whatever it would, we are asking their opinion, they're putting it. So what we did was instead we removed it and we put an error handling to say when they put it in, we would come back and tell them, Oh, you missed this, you need to give us this. This is required. We are telling them to put that asterisk, and they are that's why they're putting the asterisk there, right? This is where you know you have to look at common sense, you have to look at the data, you have to look at what the real problem is. Sometimes the problem does not require a jackhammer, it does not require a crane. It might be just you look at it and go, like, oh yeah, remove that sentence. That's it.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

We removed the sentence and went away. That's it. The problem went away. Where we told them that. So that's an example of a really stupid simple stuff, right? You think that hindsight when you go like, oh yeah, that's so obvious. No, when you're in it, it's not these problems are not so obvious. Yeah. Well, you know, if if um if your product returns, something that happens to every business, if your product returns are increasing because you introduced uh a revision of a product, you need to look at your product to see what that revision did to it, like maybe the lid company that you changed because the previous one was a nickel more. So you found a cheaper thing that had a better, you know, cheaper cap. But that cap keeps on coming coming off of your tomato sauce you're trying to sell online. And it's all over the box. It that the consumer doesn't even get a proper delivery or oily or whatever. You need to fix the product, has nothing to do with meta-ads, it has nothing to do with a better customer service people that you should hire.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

You really need to kill the problem. You have to identify, first of all, what the problem is, and then you have to kill the problem at its root, and you have to be very logical about these things. Otherwise, you start chasing things and try to solve things. And what what's what's happening? You're spending time on the wrong things, and worse, now you're gonna go get expertise because you think that you don't have the expertise or your team doesn't have the expertise. So let me bring out outside people who excel at this wrong problem. Yeah, like, oh, my problem is a Shopify rebuild. No, it's not. Like, have you looked at your pages that you could did you optimize everything that you could optimize using the Dawn theme, which is a free theme that Shopify gives you? That's a pretty powerful theme. Did you did you optimize that? No? Yeah. So why do you think your problem is you need to hire another Shopify agency? Right? That these are the kinds of things that actually ends up costing you a lot of money. It costs you a lot of aggravation. And unfortunately for some, you're gonna tap out, right? You're gonna have only so much on your credit card. You're gonna take you're gonna have a line of credit for your business if you're lucky, right? If you're old enough, right? If you if the business is mature enough, if you have a line of credit or business loan or something, eventually you're gonna tap out. And what happens? Bankruptcy. This is one of the reasons like you hear so many companies that report phenomenal Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Never did their homework on margin analysis. And then come January, bankruptcy filings go up.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, no, and I yeah, that's crazy. I think well, I hope I'm guessing that's all the stuff you're covering in your in your 12 months then. They're all you're solved solving the world problems, the OGs.

Sabir Semerkant:

Yeah, I mean, what one of the things that I I I usually say is the on there are two groups of entrepreneurs. One group, the greedly loves this, and they they when they join in with that mindset, they do phenomenally well. And when I say phenomenally well, I'm talking about 118% increase in 12 weeks, right? This is pretty immediate, right? Yeah, it's pretty immediate. They see the results and stuff. The ones that come in from the mindset of, oh, let's see what this guy can do. No, listen, I'm Mr. Miyagi, you're Daniel's son. Yeah, I'm gonna teach you wax on, wax off. I'm gonna teach you what you need to do. I'm not in the tournament. You are going up against that big, big bad guy, and you need to defend, learn to defend yourself. I I should not be part of your entrepreneurial journey for the rest of your life. I should be you should be in for 12 months. If you see value, continue, continue resubscribing because you continue uh getting value from it. But I should be in and I should be out, right? Not that uh you and I need to be married forever, right?

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, right, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

You need to fix your business. That's what that's the mindset that you need to be in when you're coming in in there. That should be the mindset. And the ones that do do marry marry up to that mindset do phenomenally well, right? Yeah. You know, literally they come in and go, like, well, I I've been misled by so many people. Uh, and this is a pretty recurring story we hear, you know, from from the Rapid2X members. That, you know, when we got into this program, it's just I'm focused on like what are the three things I need to work on this week? A lot of them have on you know, uninstalled Trello, Asana, Monday.com. They don't need it. Why? Right, because they're working on three things. Right. If I ask you, Jen, what are you working on this week? If you can name me, oh, A, B, and C. That's it. Why are you working on these three? Oh, these are my reasons behind it. Okay, cool. Just go and work on that. It's very, it's you don't need Trello for that. You don't even need Apple notes on your iPhone. Yeah, you're working on these three things, and these three things is gonna give you results uh from from working on those three things. Next week, you're working on three things, maybe two things, maybe four things. That's it. But these are very, very prescriptive. We have prescriptions every single week that you're working on. Yeah. So those six weeks that that we are focused on that one thing, like performance optimization, uh-huh. Every week you're given between three to five prescriptions that you need to work on. If you have the expertise, you can do it. If you don't have the expertise, we also have over time, we have built out a very robust Rapid2X uh implementation partners uh network. Yeah, and these people have been vetted by me like extremely that these guys are know the rapid to X protocol, they know what that needs to be implemented, and then we actually refer them to those guys. If you don't have, oh, I don't have the guy for that or gal for that. Yeah, we have a whole network of people who actually do those things and they know it really well.

Jennifer Loehding:

Cool. Okay, I got it. You know your no you know your stuff. I love it, I love it. No, and I like that you're you know, I was gonna ask that was one of the questions I was gonna ask is when when these people come in, who are the successful people in this? And I think he answered that. It's the people that are coming in with that mindset ready to go. And I think that's like everything, right? It's like I I noticed like my clients are not even doing, are not even probably at that level, but I can tell the difference between the ones that come in that are committed and the ones that are like, oh, I'm gonna see if this is gonna work. Because when you come in from a place of I'm committed, you figure out what you need to do to show up, right? It's a very different conversation. It's so funny. I have a gal right now that I'm sitting here thinking about, I'm like, I need to connect her to you. Um, because she's got a brand and she's building it out and she's doing phenomenal. And but it's the difference of an attitude, right? It's the difference of showing up and being committed versus being, oh, well, I'm gonna see what happens, you know.

Sabir Semerkant:

And we know what that's gonna you want, you're gonna waste time.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, exactly. You're gonna waste time.

Sabir Semerkant:

Wasting time, yeah. What wasting time is worse than losing money, exactly. I mean money you could make it back somehow, right? Yeah, yeah. But wasting time, you cannot, you cannot make the time back. Right. You you missed the Mother's Day. Okay, that's it. Yeah, what are you gonna do? It's it's the day after Mother's Day. You missed it.

Jennifer Loehding:

You missed that one too, right?

Sabir Semerkant:

You missed Black Friday.

Jennifer Loehding:

You're gonna miss Father's Day too.

Sabir Semerkant:

You missed you missed Father, you you missed Black Friday. You missed Cyber Monday. Yeah, it's the day after, it's one minute after Cyber Monday. You missed it.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

That's it. There's no way, okay. Next year. Next year, nothing's gonna change because your mindset is not different, right? One of the things I say every I remind all the Raptor2X members is that I'm not a Netflix documentary. If you're here to watch Netflix, you can you can go and watch Netflix. Don't waste your time. Don't waste anybody's time here, don't waste your money even, right? Because the thing is, uh, this program is pretty serious. We actually reject a lot more people because when when uh they can when they connect with us during our sales process, right? To we actually check for a fit. It's not a pro just a product market fit. Right. We're actually checking the psychology of the entrepreneur. Is the person fit? Is the founder fit? Because uh only founders attend and they bring on their teams to attend also. So we check the is the founder fit? Do they have the right mindset? And if if we see that there is a product market fit, but the cons but the founder does not have the right mindset because they're I don't know, they could be going through a divorce, they could be going through a whole bunch of other stuff, right? Right. They might be having partnership problems, money problems, some other things. They don't have they're not they don't have the right mindset. We actually tell them, sorry, you know, you got you're not ready, but my product, I'm I'm doing about two and a half million dollars a year. What do you mean I'm not ready? Well, your product is ready, you are not ready. You're not ready.

Jennifer Loehding:

No, and thank you for saying that because I think any business owner out there, whether you're large or small, should be doing this with anybody that's coming into their capacity, whether it be, you know, some of you're working with a client, whatever, because you're your brand, I think, and and whomever you associate with is your brand. They represent you. And so, yeah, I think, I mean, from your from listening to you in your perspective, I mean, I if I were running that, I'd be the same way. I in fact, I worked with a mentor for a couple years. Um, he was a guy from, I think he was from Sweden or wherever, amazing guy. He was building out a he had started out, he was in kind of in the coaching space, like he was a personal trainer, and then he went on to online. And he had, when we signed up to work with him, he kind of did the same process. We had to basically apply to work with him. So it wasn't just like we could just pay because we had the money. I mean, he wasn't cheap, but we had the money to pay. He wasn't just gonna take the money, we had to go through a process and actually apply to be in the program and to do that. And it made, it made the um the community was really good because we weren't allowing just anybody to come into that community. So it wasn't like we had these cancers in there that were bringing everybody down. It was just a very high-level community. I mean, there was like no gossiping, there really wasn't any of this back and forth, everything was wide open, transparent. I mean, he used to always talk about how we're in a meritocracy. You know, this is how we run this program, it's how we run the group. You know, if you got a problem, you say it in front of everybody. We all heard everybody could ask a question, you know. It was great.

Sabir Semerkant:

But I think over the past two years, we have actually kicked out, we have kicked out members because it was the problem was not them, it was always something else.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

You know, yeah, you gotta get that. You're you're the common denominator here, you know.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Uh the faster you can come to this conclusion, that you're gonna save time and money. Yeah, otherwise you're gonna blow through a lot of money and time, and you're gonna, you're gonna, you're, you, you it this can't be that you're the common denominator, you're the problem.

Jennifer Loehding:

You know, and so not everybody's willing to accept that. And I, but and I think that's yeah, they need to get out if they're not, because they're not gonna grow, nothing's gonna happen. They're wasting their money, their time, and everybody else's time with them. So that is the one thing I learned in my 22 years being in Mary Kay's about culture and community and wiping the cancer out of organizations, because when they're in your organization, they're toxic and they ruin everything for everybody. So, yes, you got to get them out. So, okay, so I want to ask you because you're you're doing like awesome. This is like some of this stuff is like so far over my head right now because I know nothing about all this e-commerce stuff, but whatever it is, I think it's amazing. And I think that you clearly have done some amazing things with some brands and have been essential in the growth of some of these. So I think it's awesome. I would like to know. This is kind of more of a personal question for you as an entrepreneur and having the significant growth that you've had. Like, what have you learned about yourself in this journey? What do you feel like has been the biggest takeaway for you?

Sabir Semerkant:

Uh I need to be more patient. Right. And I ironically, here's the irony. My name actually, my first name means patience. Yeah.

Jennifer Loehding:

Ah, interesting.

Sabir Semerkant:

There's a lot of there's a lot of irony in this, you know.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Uh I I think that, you know, I I think I've gotten better over time as as an individual, right? Being patient. But I think it uh that's a skill set, it's a very hard skill set to master over time, right? And I think it has taken me 25 plus years, right? If you if you talk to the team that worked with me at Vitamin Shop, right, 25 years ago, Sabir is a tyrant, right? Tyrant. Like either either you were great or you were garbage. That's it. There was no medical in that that's Sabir back then, right? I made people tear up, and I I thought that that was a that was a great accolade to have, right? And over time I've I've learned, you know, fast is slow, slow is fast, right? Like I said earlier, that it's it this is something that I uh over over time I've I've learned to become more and more patient, you know, and and uh you know and what from it one of the one of the outcome surprise outcome is that sometimes when somebody asks me a question, I I stay quiet for about 12 seconds. It's uncomfortable for some people it's uncomfortable because 12 seconds to them, because they're used to transactional, very transactional, right? I say something, you say something, I say something, you say something. Why? Right? I need to think about what you said, right? So uh, you know, if I take about 12 seconds, what what ends up happening is the other person goes through and starts solving it because now they're under pressure because they asked a question. The reason I'm not responding is maybe I'm thinking about their question and I'm judging them. I'm not, I'm just thinking about the question. That's all I'm telling you. And I'm being patient about when I'm coming back, I want to I want to give them not a quick answer, I want to give them the right answer, right? I want to get to I get them as close to the right answer as possible. And what ends up happening, this is the this is the interesting thing I found. They end up actually thinking through that in those 12 seconds that I've stayed quiet, they would not let me talk even after 12 seconds, and they start solving it themselves, which is an amazing thing for people to do. Because I don't have to keep on solving it for you. I need to teach you how to think about at least how to think about the questions, you know. Um in in a human language, not just English, right? In a human language, because I have I have clients in Rapid2X from all over the world, right? Most entrepreneurs ask the two wrong questions, and what are they? They start the question with what do I need to do? Yeah, how do I need to do it? No, that those are later questions. Yeah, why should you do it? That's the primary question you should be asking. Okay, it's good. Why should you be doing this? Why do you think that giving them a 50% Black Friday sale makes sense?

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Because everybody else does it. I'm gonna play mommy now. All of your friends were to jump off the cliff, would you just that's not an answer, right? Yes, right, yes, but smart ass kids could say that, oh, maybe it's a cliffside beach and they're jumping into the water, you know.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

So yeah, but but the thing is it's the why, why question is really, really critical. Why can save you the why question in your business when you question the why part of it? Not how do I do it? Sabir, do you have a lead magnet, the PDF I can download, blah blah blah? Or what do I need to do? What did you say? Let me write it down again. What did you say about the meta ads thing? Where's that flag? No, wrong, wrong questions. Sounded why, why should I do it, right?

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, they're not owning it if they're doing that, because you're just solving it for them. But no, I don't know.

Sabir Semerkant:

Yeah, because you need you should the the one thing that you understand about the why, then you could solve that why for a hundred different other situations once you get the why. Otherwise, you're gonna come back to me like if I was purely evil and transactional, I would teach you to always ask for the what and the how.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Why? Right because I'm gonna charge you every time you came back, I'll charge you five bucks. Yeah. Right? And I can I can bankroll this, right? This is pretty easy, right? But uh but the program, that's why this is very different, and it's meant to be for a very different type of entrepreneurs. Yeah, right. I can see that. Once they understand that, they become better entrepreneurs over time, they become more seasoned, right? Then they understand, like and and at the core of it, I'm a New Yorker, I have a bullshit meter. I actually teach these entrepreneurs to actually you know build up their bullshit meter. So they understand, like when somebody says this, they should not ask, Oh, what did you say that that we need to do? That's no, don't don't go with that. Go. Why do you think that's going to work?

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

Why is targeting or why is this discount? Why do you think you know your ad is gonna bet work better if I give you even deeper discount? Like I already gave you 30%. I told you that was my Black Friday sale. Now you're telling me I need to give you 40% or 50%. Why do I need to do that? Give me the reason, right? Yeah. When you start digging into that why question, you'll you'll find out two things. One, you will find out that you need to fire that agency because they don't have a good answer for the why. They don't. Yeah. Right? Because you will start detecting bullshit very quickly, right? You become really good at it, you know? So that you will once you stop that what and the how question, you will you will get really good at understanding your business, understanding your customers, understanding your products, understanding how cut consumers behave. And the the the closer you can shorten that journey, more customers are gonna buy from you because you're not wasting their time.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

You're not wasting their time, you're giving them great value, you're giving them great products, and they're getting that from you, and everybody else is giving them the runaround or they're confusing them.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah. No, that's good. Well, and I like that you mentioned the pause, because I do think that that's important. That, you know, especially for us. It's one of the things I said the other day, something about doing the podcast, because I am in pay and can be an impatient person. And podcasting has taught me a lot about being patient. Because there's so many times, like I'm just like, I'm ready to just be like, and I've had to learn. Well, and and I've actually learned, you know, I think podcasting has also taught me detective skills too, because I have to learn to listen and think at the same time. So I've learned a lot of great skills. But I that pause is important because I do think it allows you to have the time to think about what you're gonna how you're gonna respond, right? And not be reactive and everything, but you're you're saying something really good because you're actually giving them ownership to come up with their own answers and stuff. And so when you hand somebody the answer all the time, then well, that should be somebody we should be weeding out because they're just looking for you to give them the solution all the time and they're not really interested in in picking it up.

Sabir Semerkant:

And you're gonna become, as an entrepreneur, you're gonna become highly dependent. Exactly. How about at least you could be completely independent once you hit 20 and a half, five million, ten million, right? Then you can say that okay, now it makes sense. Or should you outsource it?

Jennifer Loehding:

Right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Or should you insource? Should you insource? Should you outsource your photo studio, or should you insource it, meaning that you will build a little uh photo studio inside of your company that acts like an agency to do all the work for you. Yeah. Not that you're outsourcing it and and and giving it, giving, giving giving up that uh creative control over that process. That's why you have to think through these kinds of things. Like when when you give up that control, that's what ends up happening. You're giving up your learning, and that's critical. And when you don't get that learning and you want you think that, oh, you know what, I'm gonna spend my way through that, you're gonna spend your money, you're not gonna get your learning.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, you're not gonna be able to do that.

Sabir Semerkant:

And you're gonna keep on making mistakes. Like, for example, uh, if somebody is fixing something in customer service, they just know, okay, we need to, if this problem occurs, this is our response to it, right? Yeah, they will do that 500 times. But if you are involved in that customer service and you go like, oh, it's missing, customers are complaining because it doesn't say it's it doesn't say that it's it's ammonia free on our product page.

Jennifer Loehding:

Right, right.

Sabir Semerkant:

Oh, that could be a bullet point. That bullet point can avoid 500 inquiries, future inquiries by if I do every single month, you know? Yeah, because we're missing it from the product page, we're missing it in the carousel and the product highlights. Is this vegan? Is it ethically sourced? Is it sustainable? People are asking these questions. How can I answer that directly on the product page so that it doesn't become an never-ending customer service ticket all the time?

Jennifer Loehding:

Yes, I agree. Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

That's that's one that's another example of that. Like, this is why the founders in that first million dollar journey from zero to one million, yeah, you really, really need to be part of it. You should be intimately involved, right? That that you should know every nuance of it, every, you know, like literally you have to put on, be in those shoes every One of those roles. You know, why is it that you you proudly say to people that, oh, I'm an entrepreneur, I wear all the hats. No, you're not. You're not wearing all the hats. You're not. It's a nice saying, but I don't see you wearing all the hats because you gave it off to all these other people and they're making mistakes, gigantic mistakes. That you, if you were paying attention to it, you could save a lot of money and time and grow faster, you know, by by by correcting that.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, no, that makes sense. It makes sense. Um, okay. So um one less we've been I we could just keep going forever. You got like so much. I love it. And lots of energy too. I love it's like, man, we can pin plug this for a while. Okay, so I do want to know like what is because you've worked with so many cool brands. I would like to know like what has been like the it's kind of a fun might more of a fun question. What has been the most fun brand that you've gotten to work with? Like the butt, I guess maybe the most interesting, fun, I don't know. They're probably all fun, but one that stands out.

Sabir Semerkant:

Uh it was it was very odd, right? So it I wouldn't say fun. It was it led to fun. But but it was it was something that I um one, I don't drink at all. I don't drink alcohol at all. So that's so if you ask me anything about the like the wine culture, people drinking in you know, yeah, uh spirits or makers make or whatever, no idea.

Jennifer Loehding:

I probably wouldn't get an answer that either.

Sabir Semerkant:

And and what's what's interesting is over time, over my career, what I've found is if I don't know a uh an industry, yeah, that's an amazing blessing. You know why? Because I don't have the blinders on. You don't have the oh, I'm a fashion guy. All the fashion brands do this. No, I'm not a fashion guy. I'm I'm this other guy. Right. I'm gonna see what what needs to be done that you're not doing, right? Yeah, otherwise you have such blinders on that you don't even realize all of the biases and stuff like that. Right. If you have it in you, you don't even realize that you have those biases when you're part of an industry, right? Yeah. So this happened at Vayner Commerce, right? Uh when I was working with Gary, right? We've co-founded Vayner Commerce together, right? So we had uh uh a brand, but you know, you know, Budweiser. I don't drink at all, right? They wanted to export the concept of bar hopping uh in China, right? So it touches commerce behavior, it's it's it touches culture, right? Uh there is no concept of bar hopping in China.

Jennifer Loehding:

I'm sure it's a good thing.

Sabir Semerkant:

Doesn't exist, yeah, doesn't exist, right? So this is what what that was an interesting commerce challenge to me. That was one of them that that I did, that we ex exported the the uh culture to make it part of another culture that doesn't exist there. So that was the concept of bar hopping and stuff like that. With I mean lucky for us, there was uh uh ride hailing services and stuff like that. So that helped with that. So nobody was driving drunk or anything like that, right? So that was that was an interesting, uh interesting project. Another one was uh again uh in the spirits area that I had no business being in, right? Because I don't know anything about it, you know, I don't even drink, was Stella Atwais. Stella Atois in a meeting, we were at this was also at Vayner Commerce. Uh uh what their team said that we would love to do something with Amazon, but we can't sell spirit on we can't sell spirit, we cannot sell beer on on um on Amazon. You know, we're not allowed to. Yeah. So they started talking about I said, okay, so the thing is I'm not interested, I'm not interested in any kind of drinks, because I don't drink. I don't I'm not interested in any topics related to drink. So tell me anything other than drinking that Stella Atwa does. Right? That's a good challenging question. So tell me everything else it does. I don't I'm not interested in drinking because I don't drink. So and you told me already, you already know that Amazon is not gonna sell your product, right?

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

So tell me about that. So they started telling telling us about how they actually uh dig wells in water prone areas where there's water issues and stuff. And they that's amazing. That's great. So how do you fund it? We do different types of nonprofit, blah, blah, blah, events throughout the year, globally, and so on and so forth, right? I said, okay, that's good. Um, we can I said, great, we can we can do something on Amazon. Or like, didn't we just establish that we cannot sell beer? I said, I'm I don't want to sell beer. One, I uh it's against my personal beliefs, so I'm not gonna sell beer at all. I'm gonna leave the room if you want to sell beer, you know, because I cannot be part of the team. But I'm gonna sell everything but beer. So I'm gonna that's what I'm gonna sell. And we will benefit building of those wells. And this is gonna become a gigantic brand awareness about about what Stella Auto does for the world.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah.

Sabir Semerkant:

So what do we do? I so I at least I know by watching friends and TV about drinking. I don't I don't have any personal experience. I said, what are those big cups called that people pour their beer into? Oh, I don't even know the name of it. So oh, it's called chalices. So every chalice is gonna have a logo of the country or the region where we will be building brand the well. Consumers will come and buy a chalice 100% of that after we pay Amazon fees, yeah, 100% of those proceeds minus the expenses of paying Amazon fees will go towards building a well on that on that product that they we just sold. Okay, right? Huge brand awareness campaign. And Stella Aqua, by the way, that chalice in we first tried it in the UK market, became the number one selling chalice on Amazon in the UK. We we imported that and we did it in the United States, number one selling chalice in the United States for a beer brand that cannot sell alcohol and an e-commerce guy that would not sell alcohol.

Jennifer Loehding:

Would not sell it. Oh my goodness.

Sabir Semerkant:

And you have to you have to come up with this is where this is that this is why when somebody does not belong in your industry, would have would be considered an innovator, right? Yeah, because you're not thinking about oh, this I need to, oh, it's a box. So what what do we need to do? Why why can't Amazon buy Drizzly and Drizzly, we can do something with Drizzly? No, I I'm not gonna sell alcohol, and you cannot sell alcohol on Amazon, right? So if you want to do this, let's do it this way. And we did that, and it and and subsequently, that also helps uh raise their sales uh uh indirectly. I had nothing to do with that, you know, directly, but it builds such an awareness and by making it a number one selling, knowing that this is this product actually builds something that gives back uh to to the world by building wells around the world where there's uh water scarcity.

Jennifer Loehding:

Yeah, no, it's good, it's good. I love it. Built brand awareness, yeah. That's cool. Anyways, this has been awesome. I could sit here all day and listen to you tell all these stories. I think they're great. So my audience is gonna be hearing this and they're gonna be like, oh my goodness. So if they want to get in touch with you, they want to follow you, they want to learn more about this 12x program, whatever this is. I feel like I got people I need to send your way to just get connected with you. Where do we want to send them?

Sabir Semerkant:

So I'll I'll share the link with you, uh Jen, so you can include it in the program notes and the podcast description and stuff. We have actually set up a very special link just for your listeners. Okay. It's growth by sebir.com slash uh starter girls. Okay. So just like the name of the podcast, exactly spelled exactly the same way. So when they when they use that link, we know that it is one of your listeners that came to us, and we will give them a special offer also.

Jennifer Loehding:

Awesome. Well, very cool. Thank you. I'm gonna I'm I know we're already connected in LinkedIn, so I see your stuff in there when you come through. Exciting stuff. Well, you're doing you're doing great stuff, my friend. And you are the OG on this one because, like, look, I don't know anybody that's had all this amazing success in this webcommerce stuff. You know what you're doing, and that's awesome. And um, I just want to commend you and congratulate you and tell you to keep doing your thing.

Sabir Semerkant:

Thank you, Jen. And thank you for having me on your show.

Jennifer Loehding:

It's fun for listening to you. So, of course, I do want to say to our audience, we appreciate you, love you, hope you found this episode both inspiring and informative. I mean, I don't know how you didn't find it inspiring. Like, I'm excited now. It's like the end of the day, and now I'm thinking I need to go make some new plans here. Um, but, anyways, if you did find this episode inspiring and informative, please share it, comment, do all the things so we can keep sharing all of this fabulous content. And as I always say, in order to live the extraordinary, you must start. And every start begins with a decision. You guys take care, be safe, be kind to one another, and we will see you next time.

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Jennifer Loehding

Host
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Sabir Semerkant

Guest