Good morning.

Lots of people have been asking about how I found and ultimately decided to buy Magic Pop Mic.

After years of consulting and making recommendations to other businesses, I wanted to put the strategies I talk about to the test and put my money where my mouth is.

I also want to build a "low effort" type income stream that can cover the costs of our childcare.

I first tried to create my own thing with a buddy of mine, pickle-paddles. Where we were going to try and tap into the insane demand for pickle ball and sell paddles but that didn’t turn out to be as easy as we had envisioned.

So then I started browsing Acquire and Flippa, looking for something with a little bit of traction that I could pick up. Listening to the Acquisitions Anonymous also helped me know what to look for in these deals.

After a few months of exploring deals, I came across a listing for a turnkey, automated drop shipping Shopify store that was priced at 2.5x monthly profit. This felt like an insane deal, especially when looking at it on an annual valuation as that’d only be valued at 20% of annual profits.

Seemed like a no-brainer to me (or a total scam) so I made the move.

The deal also came with 40 hours of training from the owner so I learned his TikTok Ads strategy, which Shopify apps to use, how to find and deal with Chinese suppliers, and how to find more winning products for the future.

This training alone was worth the money.

Based on the listings that I’ve seen, I got lucky with this one. But there are plenty of deals out there. If you have the itch to start something, I think it’s WAY easier to buy something and turn it around rather than start from scratch.

If you find something and want my opinion (or want a partner), don’t hesitate to reach out!

See the last section below for the latest updates I've made to the business.

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As you can probably tell, I soak up a ton of marketing related content and I'm going to start highlighting my favorite pieces each week:

​This recent 20VC podcast with the founder of Butcher Box is a must-listen for any owners and operators. It talks about how they've grown to $600M in revenue without any funding by focusing on margins, blended performance marketing, and subscription box economics.

And you'll learn about their Cost Per Meat Cut (CPMC of course) metric. Which enabled them to find more margin to put back into marketing to acquire more customers.

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Let's talk about timing

I don’t think marketers or brand owners give nearly enough time to seeing if something worked or not.

To me, marketing is similar to going to the gym.

You don’t start lifting for a week and expect to get shredded.

Quite the opposite, you put in the work that week knowing that you're going to have to deal with an insane amount of soreness.

But you know your desired outcome, and some people are disciplined enough to fight through it and come out in 6-12 months with the results they wanted.

But most people give up too early.

Based on logged workout activity, Strava estimates that the third Thursday in January is the day when people start to fall of their New Years.

Three weeks 🤦.

I've read it takes about 7 touch points for a consumer to make a purchase. And if you're a heavy performance marketer, these are people who are in-market for what you’re selling.

The whole point of marketing is to hit people who haven't even thought about your product. You want to reach people before they are looking for a solution, so they come to you directly when the time arises.

​Look at this data from KnoCommerce, a post-purchase survey tool that actually asks insightful and actionable questions:

Aggregated data from responses of over 300 eCommerce brands shows that 48% of respondents (!!!) knew about this product more than one-month before placing their first purchase.

Tactically, there are a few common things I’ve seen in Google Ads accounts that go against this concept:

Conversion windows: many of you have your window set to a 30-day click-through conversion window (because it’s what’s recommended). But what many people don’t realize is that the AI bidding algorithm is optimizing towards this timeframe.

If you look at a bid strategy report, you’ll see an average Target ROAS and how the campaign(s) are performing relative to that target. Nine times out of ten, the algorithm hits its goal over the conversion window time period but many people are measuring performance against a shorter timeline.

So if you want a 7 day ROAS, change your conversion window to 7 days. But it's important to consider the tradeoff in doing so - as this will result in tighter timelines for the algorithm to work within and likely lead to targeting more bottom funnel traffic who require less time to convert (which will mean less volume).

Secondly is how Google Ads conversion reporting works. Conversions driven from a click are attributed back to when the click occurred.

So, if you have a 30 day conversion window, and a click happens on day 0 and the conversion happens on day 14, that conversion is going all the way back to Day 0.

That’s why your metrics always improve over time and also why YOU SHOULDN’T MEASURE THINGS ON A DAILY BASIS within Google Ads.

This was my biggest gripe from this past Black Friday & Cyber Monday. Daily reporting on this weekend completely missed consumers who had done their research a week prior to BFCM and waited for your deals to drop to purchase.

In-platform ROAS looked weak on BFCM but if you took a wider view, the days leading up to the weekend were incredibly too efficient.

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Alright, now for an update on Magic Pop Mic.

Here are the things I worked on this week:

Inventory: I went against every drop shipping gurus advice and ordered physical product so I could ship them from my house.

I couldn’t understand how people were buying this product with ~14 day shipping times and wanted to see if I could increase conversion rates by offering a quicker option.

So I ordered 100 microphones from China, 100 mailers and a portable label printer from Amazon, and created shipping labels in Shopify.

And I made cute little stickers on Canva to “brand” the packages.

I then added an ‘Express Shipping’ option to my Shopify checkout. This gave users an option to choose between 14 day free shipping or 2-6 day shipping for $3.99

What do you think happened?

About half of checkouts chose the Express Shipping option which increased my AOV by $3.99 on those orders (+17% in aggregate), giving me $3.99 more towards my CAC.

And conversion rate also increased by 86%. I think giving users the option, rather than forcing the insanely long shipping times really helped.

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Ad Creative: If you know me, you know I’m not a creative kind of guy. This was fine when working with Google Ads because it's mostly text and data based but it simply does not fly with Meta or TikTok.

Up until this week I had been using UGC video content for my ads which were working decently well. Then a few people started talking about image-only ads and at the same time I came across CreativeOS.

CreativeOS offers a super easy to edit Figma file of 50 top-performing image ads which I used to create these bad boys:

(you can use code “benistheman” for $10 off)

I loaded these ads into an ad set targeting people interested in creating content, microphones, and audio equipment and have been able to scale Meta more effectively this way. Unfortunately, I was placed on a $50 budget cap up until recently but things are humming along nicely.

Landing Pages: I started playing around with Replo and built a new version of a product page and a “listicle” to drop people on. I haven’t had the time to perfect these and decided to bring in an expert and purchased a landing page from @Matt Larsen that should be ready this week for me to test against my current page.

My goal is of course to increase conversion rate, but I’d actually be happier if we could increase AOV. Matt is very big on offering bundles to juice up transaction values, which would then give me more margin to play with in customer acquisition.

If you want to try a microphone, reply with your shipping address and I'll send you one for free in exchange for a video review!​
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