On this bonus episode of the Honest Ecommerce podcast, Kasim from Solutions 8 talks about how the recession can be actually good for your business, the Wild West of TikTok marketing, why paid marketing should be the last on an SMB’s priorities and so much more!
Kasim is the founder and CEO of Solutions 8, one of the world’s top ranked Google Ads agencies.
He's the Traffic Coach for Digital Marketer.com's ELITE coaching program, was hand-selected by Ryan Deiss to help create Digital Marketer's new Paid Traffic Certification, and is the co-host of Perpetual Traffic (one of the top marketing podcasts in the world).
Perpetual Traffic now ranks in the top 0.5% of all podcasts worldwide, has been downloaded over 8 million times and has helped tens of thousands of people grow their businesses through online traffic and conversion strategies.
Recipient of the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association’s 2017 TIM Award for Person of the Year, Kasim was also named one of the Top 50 Digital Marketing Thought Leaders in the United States by The University of Missouri in 2020.
His book, The 7 Critical Principles of Effective Digital Marketing, was featured as one of the Top 100 Digital Marketing Books of All Time by Book Authority.
As a professional speaker, Kasim has been a main-stage emcee for the Traffic & Conversion Summit (the largest marketing conference in North America) and speaks regularly at marketing conferences around the globe.
He and his wife have two sons; they split their time between Scottsdale, Arizona and Seattle, Washington.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Chase Clymer
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Kasim Aslam
The real question is: What product could or would you get behind and stay behind in a recession where sales did drop and things did get hard?
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today, we're welcoming to the show, a fantastic expert to answer all of our questions around Google Shopping and Google ads in general, and even YouTube. It's all under the same umbrella.
Kasim, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Kasim Aslam
Chase, I'm good. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
Oh absolutely. And first and foremost, I want everyone to go and check out the episode that I did on his podcast, and send some traffic there. It was a great conversation. But yeah, let's...
Just take me back in time, man. You've got so many awesome accolades on the website and awards. Everyone go check it out. This guy really knows he's talking about.
But my question to you is, what was interesting to you about paid advertising. Why did you get into this space?
Kasim Aslam
I failed miserably at everything else. So it wasn't, it wasn't a conscious decision at all. I had an agency called Solutions 8 that did everything. We did it all.
So your web, your content, your SEO, your video, your social… I'd watch your dog if you asked me to. And it was, it was a miserable existence, man. Just that “everything to everyone” thing.
And I had a business partner who was the one who identified that when somebody was successful with paid ads, that was the indication they were going to be successful long term.
And so we use paid ads in the beginning, just as a litmus test to see whether or not a client was going to survive. Because you invest so much into marketing. It's front loaded. It's top heavy.
You invest so much in these clients and then you go to market and the offer fails, they don't answer their phone, or they run out of inventory or whatever.
And so what I like about Google specifically, is you're taking your client and you're throwing them in the coliseum with all of their competitors. And then they have this bloody battle to the death.
And if they come out alive, it's like, "Okay, you can... You have an offer that people want. You have a price point that actually functions, we know that you can take a phone call and sell or your website actually converts or you have an adequate lifetime value of a customer. People retain or they come back or whatever.
Now, we can dig in and help grow your business." Which is... It's an interesting and very combative paradigm. Because I've heard people say, "Oh. I tried Facebook ads or I tried Google ads and they didn't work.
And in my mind, I'm always like, "No, no, no. Your business didn't work." The ad mechanism took what you wanted to say and put it in front of who you wanted to say it to. That's virtually guaranteed unless you screwed up something massively.
Now what you know is you're either saying it to the wrong person or you're saying the wrong thing. And let's go tweak that. But I just... I love the... This is gonna sound so douchey; I love the purity behind it. You know what I mean? It's just true.
We can sit here and talk about "Oh, it is my website. [It] reflects the feeling of my work." There's all this subjective... "Is this content indicative of our tone?" There's all this stuff in the creative world that just... It would drive me insane.
But what I like about paid ads is you can't hide. Did this make money? Yes or no? Did this convert? Did you get more subscribers? Did you get more likes, comments, shares? However it is that you're measuring, it's clear. And...
I don't know, that was a bit of a soapbox moment for you, Chase. I'm sorry. But...
Chase Clymer
No, it was great. You said something there that I am going to steal and I'm going to use forever.
And it was that concept of, "Oh, Facebook ads..." or "Oh, Google ads won't work for me." And it isn't the ads. And it isn't...
Most of the time it isn't even the marketer. It's the offer that you're putting in front of people and that didn't click for me until you just said it out loud to me.
And I think that's so impactful. I think a lot of people try something once and they don't think it should... Or they should ever try it again.
And oftentimes, especially with young entrepreneurs, they try it themselves and they don't have the chops or the expertise to do it the right way or they don't have the budget to actually give the thing a proper test.
So I guess that's gonna be my next question is like, I have a brand. We're getting some organic sales. We're actually given this a shot.
What are some insights that I should look into my business to be like, "Yeah, I should probably get into Google Shopping or Google ads or YouTube ads. This might be a good channel for me."
Kasim Aslam
Yeah. So I think that's such a brilliant question because it speaks to where the fail point is potentially from a paid traffic perspective: Where and how you're converting. And that's what I'm referring to where and how you're converting is really important.
Because if you're doing things organically, if you're doing things referral-based, if you're doing things because you have really strong affiliates...
Let's say you play the influencer marketing really well, all that traffic can be relatively inexpensive. As a matter of fact, what I tell brands...
And this is I'm just gonna go shoot the bet on my entire industry, okay. Paid traffic should be the last thing that you do. This is the worst place to go and try to prove a concept.
It's the best place to go and try to scale for sure without question and I'll fight to the death on that one. But if you're new, young, early-stage, small, low-budget or whatever, paid traffic is expensive, and it's competitive, and it's hard.
And so the very first question is, do you have the margins to support it? Because if you've been converting organically, I don't want to say organic traffic is free because we all know that that's not true. You have to invest time, effort, energy, sometimes money.
But the cost per acquisition, the cost of the traffic isn't tied directly to the sale of the product. And so as far as your individual product sale, that traffic is already paid for, let's say the investment is done. It's a sunk cost.
And there's so many folks that are doing really well with influencers or social [media], and then they go to paid [marketing]. And it's like, yeah. If you get a 300% ROAS, that's damn good. And you need to be able to eat off of [them]...
You need to at least be breaking even. 250% to 300%, if you're not breaking even... Which you need to back right into your margins from there. And I don't just mean product margins.
It's like, what does it take after your cost of goods, after shipping, fulfillment, customer service, lights on, more or less "Can I live off of 250 to 300% ROAS?"
And that, by the way, is a really consistent number across almost all paid traffic channels. I'm not telling you that you stop at 300%, I have a client that has a 15,000% ROAS. It's insane.
They have a phenomenal niche, they scale to the moon, it's awesome. But 250% to 300% is generally speaking, where we find stasis. And then from there, you can optimize. 300% becomes 305%, and 310%, and 400%, 450%...
But it's slow and incremental improvement. you're going to be at that 300% mark for, I don't know, 3, 6, 9, 12 months, especially depending on how much you can afford to spend.
So if you can't be profitable or at least sustain some level of breakeven at that threshold, don't do it. Period. And what gets worse --in the Ecom game, especially-- is there's so much money being flooding into this world. These private equity firms and venture capitalists...
Dude, I can't tell you...
And this is a new phenomenon for me. It's the last year or so where people are telling me "Hey, we don't need to profit on the ads. If you break even if you're at 1.1 ROI... ROAS. Not even ROI, ROAS and ROI are different, by the way, so I used the wrong word there.
But if you're at 1.1, we're golden. And it's because you have a hyper-sophisticated business owner or entrepreneur on the back end that realizes once they have the customer...
We're in consumables or with some level of repeating value, they're using the front-end acquisition --from an income perspective-- is their list building mechanism. It's unreal what they're willing to invest.
I've seen some smaller income brands now come to the table saying "Yeah, we don't need to be profitable for the first year. We got our funding."
And the people that are funding them, they know the game. And so the reason I say that is because everybody needs to know just how sophisticated this got. And it happened in the last 12 to 24 months. So all these kids, running around selling whatever...
Of course, they're selling about how you can make a million dollars a minute dropshipping, best of luck to you, man. Because I think that it's...
That actually used to be true, but we just saw major heavy hitters enter the arena and it happened in the last...
SaaS used to be the darling and it got exhausted. SaaS valuations are like 40, 40x EBIT or something insane so they had to go somewhere. And ecommerce is the next best thing because it's still... It's recurring revenue, it's brandable, it's buildable, it's predictive.
So all of these really sophisticated ---I don't even have to call them-- engines have entered the Ecommerce game. And we're all fighting against them now. So make sure you can compete in that ecosystem.
I didn't mean to just depress everybody. I'm so sorry.
Chase Clymer
Oh, no. I was taking notes over here. I don't know if you saw me. But the first is the idea of taking a course or watching some YouTube videos, building a dropshipping site and winning... "Now I'm on the beach with my Ferrari" is the state...
That's where Honest Ecommerce came from because I was like "That is a lie. I'm going to be honest about Ecommerce and building a business." and here we are 3 years later. So we're brothers in that perspective of "Good luck." Right?
Kasim Aslam
Yeah. Exactly. Right
Chase Clymer
People do what they want to do. But anyway, the 2 questions that I had from that is you talked a lot about margin there [at] the beginning of the conversation. What would you say...
And obviously, this is more of a rule of thumb and it's not hard and fast. But what's a good margin? What should I be thinking about, as a business owner, when I'm starting to build out my products?
Kasim Aslam
I'm gonna, I'm gonna twist this a little bit, and then you can tell me if I'm being dishonest.
Chase Clymer
Okay.
Kasim Aslam
Because I actually... I dislike any business model where we have to profit off of the first purchase. And that's where the margin conversation comes from.
What I'd rather do is talk about consumables or repeat purchases, or subscription models. And the reason I like that is because you could have effectively, very slim margins.
And on a long enough timeline, assuming people like your product, you could be very successful. So I like to lead people in that direction, because your customer acquisition cost is... It's the most expensive cost in your business.
When you compile all other things. It's more expensive than personnel, generally speaking, especially for Ecommerce brands. So if you pay that cost and you only profit from that customer one time, that's flawed. You know what I mean? Just the cash... We're just...
"We did the hardest thing, we got this person, they came and they bought, and then they left forever. and I'm gonna go do the hardest thing and have to do it again."
What I'd rather do is get them in the fold somehow and then sell to them forever. We had a client who did...
They've actually fired us since their campaign got so good. They hired somebody full-time and brought them in-house. God bless them. That happens to me a lot.
But they did an industrial type of tape that HVAC repair people use, and their initial order was $4. So people bought $4 roll of tape. It cost me about $80 to sell a $4 roll of tape. And you think, "Well, that's insane. Nobody's ever gonna do that."
Well, what they're doing is they buy the tape to see if it actually does what they say it's going to do, because it's new. It's something they're not acclimated to.
And then once they've proven the concept, then I think their lifetime value of a customer was something like $5000. $4,500 to $5,000.
So it's like, "Would you pay $80 to ultimately get $5,000 out of somebody?" "Yeah." So I'd like to lead people in that direction.
Now, let me go back and answer your question. Assuming that you're just not in that space, and you need to profit off of somebody, if you're not hovering in the 60% realm, I think you're gonna have a hard time with paid traffic.
Now, that's not always true. It depends on the commoditization of your industry. But that 60% margin is... That's healthy. That's nice and padded.
And then you come to me and say, "Well, okay. Kasim, I'm at 50%."
And I'm like, "Alright, we'll contest it."
"I'm at 40%."
"Well, let's see how competitive your market is."
"I'm at 30%."
It's like, "Look, you're just paying for people to buy your product now potentially, depending on the cost of your traffic."
So I did my best to answer that as directly as I could without knowing all the other variables.
Chase Clymer
Exactly. And that's the thing. There is no right way to do this. And every business is different. And you could look at 2... Let's just use...
There's a lot of fashion brands out there on the internet, right? And fashion is probably the hardest to answer this question on because there's so much competition, the barrier of entry is so easy, and it doesn't lend itself to a consumable or a subscription type model.
So it is often one and done purchasing. And so you really have to lean into driving up that lifetime value.
I don't know where I was going with that. But..
Kasim Aslam
You brought up something that's kind of a... If you don't mind me just bogarting what it is we're saying.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kasim Aslam
I wanted to show you the brand that I'm talking about, but I can't show them publicly. I had a clothing brand come to me and say we want to run Google ads, and they had the ugliest... I've never seen anything so repelling in my entire life.
It was just like, blech. "I was like there's no way anybody's gonna buy this." 1200% ROAS right out of the gate. Just flew off the racks, great return value, great customer value, whatever, juxtaposed to...
I had a gal come to me with the most... I'm a dad, and she came to me with these... It was like swaddles, baby clothes...
There was this baby brand,fashion-esque. And I was... The stuff was adorable. And it was really well backed with good guarantees. Then I was like, "Oh, this is gonna fly off the shelf. This is... We're gonna crush it."
[It] failed miserably.
So the thing about anything subjective like fashion as many just... I've been doing this for 15 years now. I have $54 million in ad spend under management. And I get it wrong all the damn time.
And in subjective worlds like fashion, that's... you're not selling nuts and bolts. It's not like "Does it do the thing?"
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kasim Aslam
Now it's "Do I like it? And if I like it today, am I gonna like it tomorrow?" That's a tough place to be. It's like being an artist.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kasim Aslam
You wrapped... I don't know.
Really feel confident in your ability to stay one step ahead of wherever the trend is gonna go.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. No, no. And I would never say that I'm an expert when it comes to Google ads. I can talk the language and it makes sense to me, but I'm not going to be in there pushing buttons or... That's very belittling to what you do. But I would say that fashion in general would be one of the harder verticals to use in Google.
And then something that is a little more like you said "Does it do the thing? Does it solve the problem?" Something that's less like "choose your own adventure" is going to perform better on the Google sense.
Now, on the flip side, I think that fashion does ridiculously well, on Facebook and Instagram. There's a visual component of "Do I like that thing? And will it look good on me?"
Kasim Aslam
Yeah. Do TikTok. I'm really interested to see how TikTok performs from a paid perspective, because it's so sticky.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kasim Aslam
And people are just ravenous for it. And to the point you just made, I think fashion brands will do really well on TikTok, if you know how to use the platform.
The thing aboutTikTok is if you don't know how to use it, you're going to get torn apart. And I'm saying this as somebody who does not know how to use TikTok.
The people that use it, use it well, gosh... That's just and that goes back to what we're talking about. I don't even think that's paid traffic, necessarily.
If you're good at TikTok, you don't need to pay for the visibility. You're gonna get it and you're gonna bank off of it.
Chase Clymer
I'm not an expert by any means but it's such a new platform, especially the advertising part of the TikTok, that if you can learn how to do it now...
This is what's going on right now with TikTok: In 2022, [this] is what was happening with Facebook 6 or 7 years ago, where it was just the Wild West and if you were sort of good, you were getting 5x to 10x.
Kasim Aslam
100%. Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's really, really well said.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. So obviously, we harped on fashion a lot there. What would you say is like a good vertical, where you're going to see some awesome returns for Google and YouTube as a rule of thumb.
Kasim Aslam
So it's funny because my partner and I, right now, we're trying to… We're either trying to buy or build the little Ecom brands, because [we're] sick of making everybody else all the money. And so we're having this conversation all the time.
And the things that I really like... Part of me doesn't want to even let the cat out of the bag, to be honest with you.
But I'm gonna do it because the name of the podcast is Honest Ecommerce.
And I have to be true to your mission here, Chase. Oh, here's what I like. I like enthusiast niches, for instance, bass fishing. Have you ever met a bass fisherman?
Chase Clymer
I knew you were gonna say fishing before you even said it.
Kasim Aslam
Yeah. Because those people are unbelievably plugged in, it's insane.
And so if you go get an enthusiast niche, A that you can source --the product, it gets really specific, you can compete in the realm against somebody like an Amazon because you can actually go for the quality over quantity and you can build in community and education, which is where a niche can survive in an ecosystem like this one, where Amazon just gonna go and build their own, version and basically try to replace you. And there's a billion of them, too. I just...
We had a client come in that, I think, we're taking on and they're doing cyclists, but hardcore like, the BMX, the mountain bikers... And they've got... Their site is so well done, because it's not just the product. It's the community.
And that's the thing to think about, "Can I build a community around this product?" And if the answer is yes, then I think that you're gonna have a lot of longevity. Because what you want to do ultimately is stop paying for traffic.
Use paid traffic to get you to where you want to go to scale up but the community is nice, because it's a well that you can continue to draw from.
So go find those little enthusiast niches [like] good pool players and billiards. Whatever it is, whatever you're super into, go think about that and see if you can build a little Ecom brand about that. Because that's the other thing too.
I've seen founders that were really plugged in to what they were selling. It's a whole different world. It's a whole different business. One of our clients is Yellowbird Salsa. And George is obsessed.
The guy that runs the company [and] owns a company, he's obsessed with salsa. He's really into it. He really cares. He really like... He'll talk to you about... He's like a culinary expert. And then I've seen founders who just don't...
They're like, "Oh, we thought this would make money." And there's something about that, where you're just... You can just feel it on their site. They've done everything right. You know what I mean?
If you could hold them side by side, and you couldn't even necessarily say what was different about the 2, but there's like...
This gets really weird, dude so feel free to just cut me off here. But there's like a spirit injected in the business, when a founder really cares about what it is they're doing.
Chase Clymer
Mm-hmm.
Kasim Aslam
So I'd go find something you're enthusiastic about that has a niche community and you can build a community around it.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Now this is definitely going to be inside baseball. Me and you both run agencies. When given the choice between that cash grab...
Ah, I buried the lead there.
But between that type of thing and someone that is really enthusiastic, every time I'm going with enthusiasm.
Kasim Aslam
100%
Chase Clymer
I'll even ask during those conversations where we're getting to know each other. If it starts to look like they're only in it for the money and I just go, "Is this a cash grab? Let's just be honest with each other."
And I'm like, "[If] we got nothing else going on, sure, we'll do the project."
But if I have to choose, I'm going to go with the one that's passionate about it because it's always going to be more fun, it's always gonna [have] better results, and it's always going to be a more longevity of a thing.
Kasim Aslam
Yeah. I was on a sales call with a guy, who's... He's shown me the site they have set up and he's pitching me on the product and, and I batted him down very kindly and I was like, "Hey, I don't think we're the right fit".
And then he stops and he goes, "Well, what do you think I should sell?" He goes, "I go to China 3 times." He's like, "I can source anything."
And I'm like, "Dude, you're doing this the wrong way. You're just gonna be... you're gonna be a 'me too', no matter what you do. Because when you play that game, you're always just looking for the next shiny object and it's going to be whatever the dropshippers are selling now. And you go and grab your own. And the minute that stops being popular, you immediately jump ship."
The real question is: "What product could or would you get behind and stay behind in a recession where sales did drop and things did get hard?" Like, "What's the thing that you would feel really passionate [about] sticking it out through?"
That's the thing to go get into. Because no matter what, on a long enough timeline, and hopefully this isn't (laughs) inappropriate, given the current economic turmoil, but...
Chase Clymer
No, it's very timely. This is...
Kasim Aslam
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
It's happening right now, folks.
Kasim Aslam
Yeah, you're gonna have your ebbs and you're gonna have your flows. And if you don't...
If you're not looking at this and think "I don't want to stick this out if it gets hard.", don't do it. Because it's going to get hard guaranteed no matter what. 100%.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And when it gets hard, those are learning moments. You've learned so much about your business and about business ownership, Ecommerce...
Kasim Aslam
Dude, when it gets hard, it's when you make the damn money.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kasim Aslam
All the competitors burn off. They all... This here is the other thing. This gets horrible to say, because a lot of people are gonna get hurt.
Dude, I got nailed in the '08 recession. [I] lost my house, my car, I was almost homeless. I was trolling Costco for free tryouts. It's horrible, so I'm not saying this lightly: Recessions are good in a lot of ways.
Because going back to what you were saying about all the dropshippers and this and that or whatever. There's a bunch of people, agencies included, that are in business that shouldn't be in business, that are making money that shouldn't be making money. And they muddy the waters.
They increase the cost of traffic, they take away visibility from legitimate organizations. And when the recession hits, they're the first ones to go. They get burned right off.
And then what sucks is, the market is overcorrected now. So then some legitimate businesses get burned off. But if you can just hold on... And I've experienced this myself, too...
We're the number one ranked Google ads agencies on the planet. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we've done the work. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I just stuck it out, when other people jumped ship. I was just the last one holding on.
So if you can just hold on, you're going to see all these competitors go away. It's going to be really hard, really painful.
But then when the sun starts to rise, you're the only one there. And when people actually start to come back and start to spend money and start , and they need a brand, now it's blue ocean.
Because for somebody else to come back in and start playing competitors, it's going to be really hard. And you've got a 12 tot 18 month runway of just cleaning up.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think right now is going to be a really interesting time to be a business, like just what... Labor costs are through the roof, inflation, and then the recession is hitting…
It's going to get rid of a lot of businesses that were barely holding on, like you said, that shouldn't have been in business, which...
You could look at it two ways. One, it's like, "Oh that sucks for them. They're going out of business. That person lost their job."
But on the other side, it's going to make it less competitive for you if you're actually passionate about what you're doing.
It comes down to, if you're passionate about solving a problem and you're smart about running a business, you should be fine.
Kasim Aslam
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
Chase Clymer
So you mentioned something there that I didn't highlight throughout the entire interview. And maybe the casual listener just didn't hear it.
You guys are the top ranked Google ad agency in the world. Let's talk a little bit about that.
Kasim Aslam
Yeah, it's a vanity metric.
And it changes because Google's ranking changes, as you know. But we've been the number one right Google Ads agency for the last year and a half to 2 years more often than not.
And if you don't want to go off of organic rankings, we're a Google Premier Partner which means we’re the top 3% of all Google Partners according to Google's measurements.
And then within the Premier Partner community, we're one of the few Premier Partners that has all of the certifications. And so that if you do the math, that puts us in the top 1% by Google's analysis.
I don't like or trust Google's analysis. If you're a Premier Partner, I actually think Google's ranking is based on how well you comply with their recommendations.
So in order to get our Premier Partner status, we had to go through every account that we have, and we had to skip every single one of the recommendations they make because that's how you resolve it. It used to be that you actually had to comply with it. Now you have to skip it.
So I don't really hold Premier Partner status in any level of esteem, whatsoever. But there are people that do and we have it for whatever that's worth.
We did the training and certification for Digital Marketer when they wanted a new paid traffic certification. Everybody who knows what they're doing...
And this is gonna sound really arrogant, Chase. Forgive me. But they refer to us.
If somebody really knows what's going on in the DM world, we're the ones that get that business. A lot of ivory tower agencies, too. There are these big bad...
We have zero polish, but they're these big, badass agencies with the 50th floor conference room and $12 croissants, they're sending their work to us. They're not... They don't...
Either that or they've got some intern that's hacking something together. But when it comes to Google, I think very few people know what we know.
And hopefully, that didn't come across as massively narcissistic.
Chase Clymer
Well, when you have the pedigree to back it up, it isn't narcissism, it's just being honest.
So there's a lot of ways to learn more about the business and you guys have a lot of free education tools out there. So just list off some places for people to go. They want to learn more about solutions.
Kasim Aslam
Go to YouTube. We shoot a video every single day. We give away literally everything. We hold nothing back.
So if you want to learn how to [do] Google ads yourself, I'm not here to tell you, “Oh, you got to sign up and buy my course and do…” We give away all of it. And then that pays us back. So YouTube's the best place.
I just got Twitter active recently. So you can check me out on Twitter.
The homepage is Solutions 8. It's S-O-L-8.com. And I hope that whatever we provide helps. I really want to... Especially small businesses. That's my passion.
I think the small businesses are... I think that entrepreneurs are a superhero and an unsung hero, because it's what moves the entire global economy. And entrepreneurs take on so much risk for a... A disproportionate amount of risk for the return.
If you look at everything that an entrepreneur goes through and everything that they put on the...
All the chips they've put on the table, all the people they employ, everything that they make possible, the problems that they solve…
I don't think enough people are talking about just how important that is.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kasim Aslam
And so if you're listening to this, and you've got a small business, good for you. Pat on the back. You're doing the damn thing.
And I hope whatever it is that we've provided from a content perspective is helpful.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely, man. And that's why I like doing this and running the agency, because it's so much more fun and rewarding. If you can...
You can be impactful for that million dollar business and change their life. But when you're doing it for an enterprise business, it gets a little less fun.
Kasim Aslam
It's soul sucking. Yeah. So we've got to... And actually really like the management team. We've got a publicly traded company that spends 7 figures a month, and they had a target that we hit, that was an insane target. It was unbelievable.
They had a new customer acquisition goal that was just... It just felt impossible. And we hit the goal, and everybody was happy and celebratory and whatever.
But then the very next month, they're like, "Alright, we've dropped it by 20%." And I was like, "Are you freaking kidding me?"
We didn't have the moment where with the mom and pop shop, there's that "Oh, we've just changed a life." We didn't.
We made a bunch of shareholders more money, and now they're gonna go try to squeeze them. You know what I mean? Like, it's just…
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Kasim Aslam
There's just something about it. That felt really deflating.
Chase Clymer
Alright, everybody. But if you're listening to this, let's end it on a good note. You can go and get all this awesome content from Kasim. It's all up for free on their YouTube channel.
You can also check out their podcast: Perpetual Traffic. It's in one of the top 0.5% of all podcasts worldwide as well. We didn't really mention that one.
All these links are going to be the show notes. Kasim, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Kasim Aslam
Thanks for having me, buddy. I appreciate you.
Chase Clymer
Alright. I can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us.
We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
Make sure you head over to honestecommerce.co to check out all the other amazing content that we have. Make sure you subscribe, leave a review.
And obviously if you're thinking about growing your business, check out our agency at electriceye.io. Until next time.