Emmanuel: All right. Welcome back to the Eleyae Systems Podcast. I'm your host, Emmanuel Eleyae, CEO of Eleyae Systems, where we build systems that build brands online and help e -commerce entrepreneurs go from six figures a year in revenue to seven figures a year in revenue to seven figures a month in revenue without wasting a fortune on ad spend or working themselves to death to do it. And we're fortunate today to be talking with a two -time founder, a successful exit under his belt already, Alex Back from Couch.com. Hi, Alex. Welcome to the podcast.
Alex Back: Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Emmanuel: It's good to have you. Do you mind introducing yourself so people kind of know who you are, what you're about, and what you're working on now?
Alex Back: Absolutely. So I'm Alex, Alex Back. Um, I am currently the CEO and founder of couch.com, which is a domain that I acquired, um, last year in about the middle of the year. And I'm trying to make it into something very, very special. It was never a thing was dormant for the last 25 years. And, uh, I was able to get my hands on it and, um, um, building a platform for people to be able to figure out the biggest question that plagues us all when we're shopping for furniture, which is quite simply where to buy the furniture. So that's what couch.com is all about. We're sort of like the match.com of couches where a customer comes, tells us a little bit about themselves, and we match them with the perfect couch or retailer based on their things that are most important to them. So sort of like start with what you need and then point you in the right direction. So that's what I'm working on now. We can talk about that more, but previously I founded with a partner of mine and ran an e -commerce startup called Apartment2B, which is a furniture brand. It's pretty popular in the direct to consumer space. It's, you know, there are a number of competitors that sprouted up over the years, but we always held our own and, and turned it from sort of nothing into something. We, we bootstrapped the whole way. We never had a capital infusion and we just sort of learned as we went on the Shopify platform with the, all the typical Shopify partners, like a lot of us are, have worked with before. Um, and, um, sort of worked our way up the ranks and, uh, stayed disciplined and focused and were able to sell the company a number of years ago, um, to, to a big furniture chain in, uh, in the industry. So that's a little bit about me and I live in California in Los Angeles. I think that's where you're based as well. So we're West Coast guys and I'm happy to be here.
Emmanuel: Good to have you. And first of all, congratulations on your success. I mean, that is the Holy grail. What we're trying to achieve here at Journey to an Eight Figure E -commerce Podcast is starting our brand with an idea that we had, bootstrapping it to a successful exit. Well done. Any, the thing that I want to start with, we're going to get into your advice for Shopify sellers, which I definitely want to dive into. And we have, I so many questions about that, but the thing that I immediately want to start with is just why do it again? You did it. You know, 95 % of businesses fail. You're in that top 5 % and you succeeded and you closed it. You were done. You were free, successful. You made it. And you're like, you know what I'm going to do now? Do it all over again. Why?
Alex Back: Right. Well, it's kind of like in Vegas, if you, uh, if you play a good hand and, and win some money at a table, I mean, do you immediately get up and, and leave? Not necessarily. Sometimes certain things draw you back, but no, quite simply. Um, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I left. I left my company about a year ago, apartment two B and, um, I was leaving the options very much open. I mean, I spent time with my kids. I like changed my lifestyle around a lot. And I was like, okay, well, you know what? If I can maintain this lifestyle, I could probably do another business. If I don't get too crazy about it, I think I can do it again. And so now I'm just trying to maintain that balance. But ultimately it was the idea for couch.com that the opportunity that I saw was interesting to me enough and got my creative juices flowing. And it was basically just compelling enough to sort of get me off the proverbial couch again.
Emmanuel: Yeah, and coming at it again, I'm curious, this opportunity, what exactly is it? Can you run me through the business fundamentals? Why do you see this as a lucrative opportunity?
Alex Back: Sure. So I already described sort of the main problem that we're trying to solve. And I know that it's a problem because I one have been serving hundreds of thousands of customers over the last 13, 14 years who are shopping for furniture. I'm pretty dialed into like what they're, what they ask, what they're looking for. And the biggest thing that stands out that differentiates in online furniture business from another one is the time to purchase the conversion funnel is very, very long. It's around three weeks or so, just to give you a sense. So during that three weeks, a lot can happen. Right? So you're paying all this money to acquire a new customer. And then you're have to hang on for dear life to them for three, three weeks to get them to spend a few thousand dollars. So it's a high consideration purchase to begin with because of the price point. But then you add in the fact that like no one really feels comfortable buying furniture. Like no one knows that much about couches. I mean, even me, a couch expert, I don't know everything about every couch. You can't really see what's inside of them. You don't really, you're not able to compare them very easily. There are a lot of factors in this specific industry that contribute to a lack of comfort on the customer side. And the lack of comfort means lack of conversion. Conversion rates in the furniture industry online are incredibly low, like 0.3%, 0.03%, like incredibly low. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to reduce that conversion time. And I think the key is kind of where I'm going with this is making the customers feel comfortable, making them feel like they're really being catered to and not just like a lost in a sea of options. So you come to couch.com, we have an AI powered quiz that we're building that we're going to ask you a whole bunch of questions to really get dialed into you, just like you do on the dating profiles, or on the dating apps. You get asked like a million questions, and ask me how I know, and then you essentially get matched up with people. And some people are like, well, it's all BS, I don't know, but there's some merit to it, like to have that filter on. Like if you have a very strong preference about something and you only want to date vegetarians, like match .com is not going to show you any meat eaters. And that's not the case when shopping for furniture right now. It's very hard for people to feel like we're actually catering to them. So that's the general concept here of couch.com is to make, give people a place so they can find a couch or find the retailer across the country that fits their specific needs or desires.
Emmanuel: I wonder though, high consideration purchase, was that enough to start a business around? You know, that's kind of what, like it's a high consideration purchase. Do you found a problem? Which by the way, I want to say kudos to you. That's one of the things we talk about a lot for Journey to an Eight Figure E -commerce business. And when you're starting out, the first four episodes that this podcast is, find a problem. I love that you started with a problem first. The worst is when people are like, I have a great solution. Let me go find a market. It's so much harder that way. But you're doing it the other way. Let me find a problem first. But is the solution enough? Basically, I heard a quiz. Is the business put out content, make a quiz, and that's how I'm solving this problem.
Alex Back: No. So the other, there's a, there's another problem that's being solved by couch.com and that is on the retailer side. Retailers in the furniture industry have no singular platform or place, let alone in the online space. I'm just saying in general, being a marketer in the furniture space, you have to basically go to the town square, so to speak, and be like, is anyone shopping for furniture? You, Can I interest you? There's no place to go for them to find people who are actually warm leads. And this exists in almost every other industry, like where you can go and you can be assured that someone's looking to shopping for clothes or shopping for a car. In this case, we're really going out there and we're having to like spray and pray a little bit. So creating a platform where retailers can market to people who are literally looking for couches or engaging with content about couches is solving an advertising problem for them where they can be much more efficient with their advertising dollars by spending them on couch.com. Now, what we're allowing retailers to do is having their own sort of branded page, like a Yelp page supercharged to give you just a very broad example. So in this case, they're able to sort of manage their own page or images. They're, their star ratings, they're able to communicate with customers directly through his profile. They'll be able to set showroom appointments and things like that. Using some of the bells and whistles that exist in piecemeal in various other places online, but we're sort of bringing them all together to focus on one specific industry and have a marketing platform that caters to that industry very well.
Emmanuel: Double -sided marketplace in a way and it almost sounds like your ad platform but is this it feels like this is kind of like an affiliate kind of thing like how do you in all of that I'm hearing you I'm see you're solving problems for customers you're solving problems for retailers but how does the business itself your business make?
Alex Back: Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, it is, it is by and large an affiliate model in the sense that we are an advertising partner to our retailers, but it will, it will cost the customers, the users, zero dollars, unless perhaps we sell them, um, some sort of a, uh, managed service like interior design or things of that nature. But my sense is that that is not going to be as lucrative as it seems. And that's a, you know, a phase two or phase three thing that we have on our roadmap. The monetization model is various forms of advertising for the marketers. In this case, the furniture retailers of America. So, uh, this comes into a few different forms. There will be affiliate like true affiliate, like commission or performance based, um, advertising. Um, and there will be sort of more traditional display advertising and banner ads, dedicated email blasts about, you know, Bob's discount furniture or, you know, Ashley or Wayfair. Um, they may pay to advertise to our audience. And that's more of like a traditional sort of model. Um, and there are other sort of ways to, to monetize those relationships, but those are just an example. It's not pure like affiliate commission that everybody we send through. Um, we also just want to send everybody we send through. We get a commission on whatever they buy, but we also want to send traffic to stores. We want to bring brick and mortar in the furniture industry back into the online space. So the traditional affiliate marketing model of like, I send you this person and if they buy something, I get a commission. That's not going to work for every single instance. So we have to be a little bit dynamic in our approach, if that makes sense.
Emmanuel: It does. And I can see from your explanation how I benefit as a customer. I get a much more nurtured purchase. I feel heard the kind of the dating profile scenario you described with the questionnaire makes it easier for the buying process, buying furniture online. And I see how I benefit as a retailer where I get more targeted. I don't have to put my ads out into the ether to see who's even interested first before then advertising. So you have people ready to buy. You're like the Amazon of furniture essentially. But I'm wondering from a business perspective, how do you convince an investor or a business partner? Like, are you in this yourself or did you have to convince others to come on board with you for this?
Alex Back: Um, well so far, um, I have a fantastic tech partner, um, who is, uh, very, very highly regarded in the, um, development world and the, in the web development world. They are sort of like a true Shopify master and are often asked by Shopify to help them pilot, uh, new, uh, new widgets and, and, um, and applications and things that are just a little bit higher level. They're just incredibly dialed in. So I think the URL is very helpful to this because it has an X factor that like, if this becomes really special, it could be, or if we build it the right way, it's something that could become really special. And that's something that can make us all, you know, feel great. And ultimately can be a very lucrative endeavor in the end. Um, and also I think there's just like a lot of clear opportunity here. So even though I don't have the entire, you know, financial model worked out yet, cause I don't transparently, uh, we're just testing certain things and figuring out, you know, where we sort of fit in certain areas. But ultimately I think there's a lot of opportunity. And I think that's very enticing to everybody that I've talked to, whether it's. Okay. You know, money people or partners or retailers that I've already pitched this to, like everybody wants to be a part of it. I just have to execute.
Emmanuel: And then do you mind sharing who this person is, this mystery developer?
Alex Back: The mystery about, no, they're, yeah, they're called stack labs. So if I know your audience is in like the Shopify versus I call it. So they, they, um, were a development house and web building company called lucid fusion. Um, they had sold their company to, uh, Gary Vaynerchuk company, uh, Vayner media, but they ended up becoming Vayner commerce. And so we were with them with my former company during that evolution. Um, and, uh, now the development part of that business has sort of, they were so popular and doing so well that they sort of sprouted into their own entity called stack labs. So stack labs is, is our, our dev partner and, um, yeah, we're doing some really, we're having some really cool conversations and we've already done some great work.
Emmanuel: Interesting. And then are you funding this yourself? Bootstrapping or did you raise money for this?
Alex Back: Um, well, if you call spending my entire life savings on the domain couch.com self -funded then Emmanuel, Yes. No. Yeah. Yeah. So far, I mean, I'm really, um, you know, that's something that's really would be important to me as an investor, um, to make sure that the founder has some real skin in the game. Um, that's not just something you read. I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's something real. And, uh, I really, I have, I have no issue betting on myself and I want to create some value in this company before I really start getting it out there. So, um, to me, the opportunity and the investment is seems low risk to me because I believe in myself, but yeah, on paper, it's, I've spent a lot of money so far to get it to this point. Um, but I'm excited to see where it goes. And I think it will be money well spent.
Emmanuel: And is there a story behind getting the URL? That seems like it's not an easy thing to acquire a five letter domain like that.
Alex Back: Yeah. Have you ever acquired any domains? Have you ever been in that space?
Emmanuel: Just the free ones. I've never like negotiated for one. Go Daddy 12 bucks a year.
Alex Back: Yeah. Yeah. Same here, but okay. So the domain acquisition story is a good one. And the first thing I'll say, and I learned, I had knew nothing about nothing. I'd never done this before, but like sometimes you'll type in a type in a URL and you're like, I wonder if that's taken. And it'll be like, this is for sale, we can help get it for you for the low price of $69.99 for the brokerage services or whatever. So you see like there's like an industry surrounding this that I never really knew existed and it's growing and growing and growing. So someone brought us my attention that it was available. I took a look at it and it was available through a brokerage. This brokerage specializes in like three letter domains and single word domains. And that's all they focus on. They're like a, like the equivalent of like a, uh, um, Sotheby's real estate or whatever, like high end domains. I'm like, wow, that exists. Interesting. So it was listed for a price that was very expensive. And I was like, I'm not doing that. And then I thought about it more and I'm like, well, okay. It's a big, it's a big investment, but I think there's a much bigger opportunity here. So I think comparatively, like, I think I can make something work here. So I was like, let me try to negotiate. So I sort of got educated myself more on the subject, reached out to the broker. The broker was extremely sharp. We talked on the phone for like an hour. I really had a great conversation. But what I learned was that the owner of the domain was had owned it since like 1998. And they were part of a two person team. These two brothers that created the product that became Google adsense. And they sold it to Google about 20 something years ago for a large sum of money. So there wouldn't be much financial negotiation. The money wasn't the biggest thing. However, I reached out to that individual and pitched to my idea and I was like, look, maybe there's something we could do. Maybe there's like an equity.
partnership or some kind of arrangement we can make. And we ended up making a financial agreement where, um, it made sense for both parties. Um, and essentially it's like a lease to own type of a deal. It's hard to explain. It's much more dynamic than that, but where it's sort of, you know, I'm a, I'm allowed accents and full, a revocable license to it. Um, and my job right now is to see if I can really make it into something special. And if the URL and domain itself is worth the price tag, um, that I'm paying for it. So that's my job in year one.
Emmanuel: Nice, just to complete the purchase and prove it out.
Alex Back: More or less just make sure that it's, yeah, it's something I want to continue to invest in. Um, but I do so far, I think the X factor and just the doors that it's open for me is, is really worth more than the actual URL. Cause from a, from a ranking perspective, I don't think that the, that URLs play as much of a part in Google rankings, for instance, as we hope they would. It's not a big ranking factor from what I can tell so far.
Emmanuel: Interesting. So if someone types in couch, it's not just because you have the domain, you're not necessarily going to be number one.
Alex Back: We're going to be there for a long time. Like it's going to take a few years for, but yeah, but that was the hope, right? You're like all couch.com. Maybe there's a chance that we'll show up on page one right away. Once we turn the website on, not the case. Um, but we are ranking for other terms and things like that. So it could be a bigger factor than, than I'm giving you credit for right now. I'm not sure.
Emmanuel: And do you mind, just so we have some context to the degree of scale financially of what this would, I mean, a five -letter domain, when I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking huge numbers. So do you feel comfortable sharing what it is? And if not a range, ballpark. Sure.
Alex Back: I'll share the range just cause this, this is a co it is technically confidential, but like generally if you were to go, I'll share the brokerage name. It's an interesting name for brokerage to Q E I P and they have all their domains for sale. You know, it'll be like, I don't know, microphone.com or, you know, cup.com and they're generally somewhere between like in the 250 grand to a million dollar range for these like single name domains. The really interesting thing about this whole experience that I learned was that it's like the wild west. Like there's, you know, when you buy real estate, it's sort of, you can name your price and people can pay whatever they want for it. But if you're trying to get a mortgage on a property, it needs to, like a bank or a lender needs to compare against comps, your comparables in the area, like. It had the price needs to make some sense for everybody to sign off on it. In the world of domain, someone can charge $20 million for one, if they want it. If they want to, and if someone's willing to pay that much money. So it's very difficult to establish value and it's very difficult to figure out. It's basically like a free market thing, almost like, um, trading cards, collectibles, like baseball cards, basketball cards, like. It's basically worth whatever someone's willing to sell it for and whatever someone's willing to pay for it. It's not like a set price whatsoever. There's no, there's no way to really set a price. So the range I'm giving you is very broad. You know, someone could, you know, someone can have like iPhone.com and be hanging onto that and they're only going to sell it to Apple for $30 million and hope they cave one day. I don't know. It's crazy.
Emmanuel: That's wild. So all of that then now creates this hurdle now that you have. You now have this going into this already. You've already exited one business. You're starting another one. The odds are stacked against you. Ninety five percent of businesses fail in the first five years. And you're not only starting with a new business, but you're starting with this monkey on your back. So how a giant liability. Yeah. Talk about motivation.
Alex Back: A giant liability. Is that what you're talking about?
Emmanuel: You know, how are you planning to make this thing make money and succeed?
Alex Back: So there's some early, in the long run, not concerned. And I think there are a lot of ways that this business can make money. I've been talking to a lot of people in the content marketing space who have websites and properties that are of a somewhat similar nature. And, you know, everyone has their own idea in the different industries, but there's some big numbers being thrown around, like a lot of these websites, if you do them right and you optimize them well and the opportunities there, you can do a lot of business and generate a lot of revenue with an SEO focused content site. So, um, there's been a lot of encouragement there, but In the short terms, some of the small wins that have made me feel like it's worth keeping going, isn't that, isn't that the thing it's like. If you think about in the longterm and your ultimate goals, when you're starting a business as most of your listeners probably know, it's like, you can get really overwhelmed and start convincing yourself out of it, but if you smoke, if you smoke, if you focus on smoke, no, don't smoke while you're working. No, if you focus on small milestones, goals that you're hitting and you're hitting those continuously, that that's, I think, a healthier way to look at it. And that's sort of my approach right now. So we wrote a bunch of really robust brand reviews about furniture brands in the industry. And for a few of them, few of them were already ranking on page one for terms surrounding that brand. So if someone's considering buying a couch from certain companies like Inside Weather is one that's popular in our world. If you type an Inside Weather review or Inside Weather couch, we're going to be showing up on page one. And those placements generate reasonable enough traffic and interested enough customers to be able to help them convert and generate some real affiliate revenue in the short term. And I know this from being on the other side of it as a marketer, like we had some affiliates that were focused on reviews for our brand department to be. And we would pay them a lot of money. They helped close the deal, but they're really just, sort of poaching in a way our interested customers and users that were already sort of Googling our brand name. So that's a strategy that we're doubling down on currently to really try to one rank for these terms to generate some revenue in the short term and two to actually provide value and give real reviews from real couch experts or not just like playing, gamifying this, like this is an industry that me and the people writing about it are really, really knowledgeable about.
Emmanuel: Got it. And in SEO focused content side, I love that that's the term they're using for it so we can use that to discuss it. When I think about that, I'm thinking reviews, I'm thinking blog posts, I'm thinking maybe videos, YouTube, Google and reviews, but is there more to marketing that? Like how are you growing this or marketing this business? What strategies are you using?
Alex Back: So yeah, no, you just hit upon sort of like the big three or like the big videos, blog posts, reviews. Like these are sort of the things that we've already been focused on over the last six to nine months. The next phase is going to be much larger in scope. And you see there are some companies that are doing this very well. What I'm trying to describe now, which is finding sort of a way to create opportunities for local SEO as well. And you do that by, you know, like back in the day, it used to be like, you have a lot of users in Texas. You should have a, we love Texas page. So we would make like one, we love Texas page and like cross our fingers and hope that would work. But now if you go to certain sites, like a good prototype is apartments.com. A lot of these are like an Angie's list or it's now called Angie. Um, another one I've been like super, super hot on is the not a wedding website, all of these have hyper local listings and pages that are probably dynamically created in some way. Um, but pages that rank for like zip codes for like, um, you know, Southeastern San Antonio caterers will have its own page on the knot, the wedding website. So for users in that area, Google is ranking those sites in a hyper relevant way because they think that that's what the user and likely that is what the user is looking for. So creating a lot of these brand pages throughout the country creates an opportunity for furniture stores and things like that. When I say brand pages, that's what I mean, creates an opportunity for local SEO to be a major factor for us. Same thing with product listings, like there are not a lot of these content sites are going to have a major marketplace, which is something we're building as well. So we're attempting to have a marketplace where you can compare different brands against each other, different products against each other, all couches, and that creates a lot of opportunity for SEO as well. So you can sort of stick to the straight and narrow and stick to like the everything that would normally fall in the content column, but we're taking it sort of one step further to create these like brand pages and a lot of them, um, and a lot of products too.
Emmanuel: Logo, SEO, product listings, brand pages, my head spinning. Like all I can think is that sounds hard. Really hard.
Alex Back: Yeah, why do we like pain so much?
Emmanuel: Yeah, why?
Alex Back: Yeah, it can be. I mean, this, so it depends. It's just like anything else. It's like what I was saying a few minutes ago, I think like, if you think about it all at once, it'll make your head spin. Um, but I think if you focus on one goal at a time and one milestone, you know, it's not, it's not too outside of the realm of possibility. Um, and it's not too dissimilar from all the crazy things that we used to manage as a full fledged e-commerce operator. I mean, I'm sure you know, like, what are some things you've heard from, you have clients who are like owner operators and they handle like the fulfillment and customer service. I mean, like, aren't there a thousand things to do within, isn't it crazy to manage the supply chain and marketing at the same time? Like you tell me, what do you think people do to manage their, to that kind of a flow or variety?
Emmanuel: And I hear you loud and clear, it's basically pick your poison. It's going to be hard no matter what, right? Whatever business model you choose, whatever type of business you, you choose is going to be hard. It's going to be a lot of work. And the one we choose is, you know, the building our own physical product and managing the supply chain on Shopify and finding a contract manufacturer, which is all the first 10 episodes of the Journey to an Eight Figure E-commerce podcast, I went deep in detail teaching how to do that, but that's, that is equally hard. I see what you're saying, right? Like it's very, very hard. And it's actually one of the reasons why I'm appreciating talking to you because you've seen both sides, right? Because a lot of us, we sit behind the computer, right? So we'll make our product and we'll send it out there into the world and maybe get some influencers and get some ads and we'll push it, but we're not out there the face of the marketing. You've taken a different approach. You've done that, what we've done, but then also this brand is entirely SEO focused. This is all marketing. It's pure play marketing. So let me step back and answer your question. Like, yeah, for us, it is very difficult to manage the manufacturing, having to come up with a product, do the product development, come up with the product, get it produced, get the production going, get it into a fulfillment center that can ship it accurately, then find a way to have people hear about it. That's getting your Shopify set up, getting your email marketing set up, getting your Facebook, Google, and TikTok ads, all of that stuff set up to then bring people to your platforms and managing an organic presence on all the socials. It's hard all around.
Alex Back: Yeah. And I can throw it back on you too. I mean, what, you know, we don't know each other very well, but I know you were just halfway across the world working on some supply chain stuff. I mean, you want to talk about difficult. Maybe to you, that was easy. But to some, some people going to Kenya might be harder, harder than writing like a hundred blog posts.
Emmanuel: Yeah, I like that what you transitioned there, because that's true, there's something to a bent, right? Like what you feel comfortable with. Yeah, I almost hear like what you're saying is you were attracted to something you felt comfortable with. Like for me, going and traipsing around manufacturing facilities or fulfillment centers, industry, like heavy machinery, like that's where I feel most comfortable. That's my happy place. Seeing all the machines just churning out consistently, products, seeing people just hard at work. I love that. So when the opportunity came up to build a sourcing operation where we can source from Kenya and also help other clients figure out how they can source from East Africa, I jumped at the chance. Cause it was like, sure, I'll fly 10,000 miles across the world to a third world country on a continent from that's on the other side of the world and just figure out if we can manufacture there, why not? You know, the next China is kind of what we're looking at and we're going to be putting out a lot of content around that later, but yeah, I felt comfortable with it. So I'm wondering, is that kind of what you're getting at with you know, even though it seems hard to me what you're doing is just because it's not my bent, but to you, it's, you're comfortable with it.
Alex Back: What you just described seemed incredibly hard to me. And it's funny because like, I, um, we always had sort of like, uh, we had some deep factory partnerships, um, and a lot of sort of deep sourcing relationships. But I have many colleagues who were like going to China once a month or going to various Asian countries to, you know, work on supply chain and, and meet with their actual producers. I never went that far. So, so to me, like anything, it's like, if you do it a few times, you know, it seems a lot more reasonable, but to me going to Kenya, going to another country, let alone, you know, a third world country, like, and figuring it out. I mean, one, it seems very exciting, but two, it does seem very hard. So it's all relative, right? I mean, but yeah, it's not gonna be easy. I mean, it's not gonna be easy.
Emmanuel: True, true. But the thing that, yeah, what unites us, I think, and this is the big answer to the why question, I think that doesn't get said often. I think you just have to be a little bit crazy to want to do this kind of really, really hard stuff. And there's a certain bent you have, and there's a book that I love pointing people to, and this answers the why question I asked you earlier. Why do this again? Why does this again? And you kind of demurred. you were shy about answering, which I appreciate because we all are, right? It's because it's just what we do. Like it's just who we are. And that book, I love pointing people to The Hard Thing About Hard Things is that this guy has taken three companies public and every time he feels like a failure the whole way through. Right. And he loves he talks about how ridiculously hard it is. But the thing is, and that no one should do it. Like, it's so hard that the only people if you fail at it, go be the president. Go be an astronaut. Which are like really hard jobs. And you're like, wait, that's, he's like, yeah, it's not, it has nothing to do with your intellect, your experience, your, it's just, you just have to really enjoy it. You have to be really passionate about it. And so it's, it's hard to say why, why do I want to do that? Why do I do this thing? That's remarkably hard to everyone. Cause I just, I just want to, I can't do anything else. I just have to.
Alex Back: Yeah, that totally resonates with all of that. And yeah, you know, it's also just like, why does anybody own or operate their own business? I mean, there are certain character traits or life goals that go along with that, whether it's like the bigger upside of everything you're doing is just, you could, it could be worth, time could be worth exponentially more than, than it is if you were working for someone else. Um, or maybe it's more of a lifestyle that you just love to be in control. Guilty. Um, no, you know, like you want to just, I want to be the one to make the decisions. Like there's different things for every person. It's a really interesting existential question. The why.
Emmanuel: Yeah, I love that question because I do, and I love talking about it with as many people as we can because people need to feel comfortable with the idea that even though you feel like a failure, you're not doing it right and you don't think you're in the right place, but somehow you just keep being drawn to it, you're okay. We're just like us, so are we. We're the same way. I can't not do this. I'm spoiled as an employee. I can't be an employee. I'm terrible. I'm sorry, anyone that I used to work for, I didn't know. I should have done this a lot longer ago before I came to work for you as a nightmare of an employee. No, I was driven and I was one of those people that was always like, just put your hand down. Aleya, put your hand down. You've asked enough questions. Stop trying so hard. Stop pushing so much. It's enough. Relax. Go home. You've been here two days straight. Go away. I was that guy just pushing, pushing. And then I quit and learned the saying that entrepreneurs are people that work twice as much for half as much pay, right? Twice as many, 80 hours to work, you know, make half as much, you know, and I get that. I just love that, like you said, the control, you know? And twice as happy, yeah. So I'm curious, going back to your business idea as well, I'm sure when you explain this to people, the Wayfair comes up in conversation and they start to ask kind of like, it sounds a lot like Wayfair, kind of what's going on. Do you, how do you compare it to it? Or how do you just handle that conversation about is this what Wayfair did, has it been done?
Alex Back: Yeah. So I think I like when people make that parallel because the, the scale that I am envisioning for couch.com is similar to that of what Wayfair has achieved. Um, and I've monitored Wayfair from the, the beginning. In fact, like we, I, we got into the online furniture business because my business partner was a wholesale rep for a couch company, right? He would sell to like couch retailers in, in California. And one day he got a call from someone who wanted to open an online account from this company called CSN that no one had ever heard of. And he asked his managers, Hey, can I open up this internet account? They're like, well, we don't have any yet, but yeah, what do they need? He's like, I don't know. It was like images and information. So, okay. So my friend opens them up and the next day he wakes up to his first order. He's like, what? That was incredibly fast, day after that three orders, the day after that 10 orders, and they're all going to different parts of the country. He's like, whoa, this is crazy. What's going on here? And that CSN famously became Wayfair. So we saw Wayfair and we're like working with them at the very beginning. So anyway, let's just aside the little story I love to tell, but the scalability is vast. The opportunity is vast. Wayfair has a big market share, but they're only, 20% of the commerce is done in the furniture industry online. 80% is still done on the in store level. So marketing for the retailers is perhaps you can argue an even more scalable opportunity. There's so much business, billions and billions of dollars being done. And all these brick and mortar stores that are struggling to stay in business, they don't really know how to market themselves online. Now, Wayfair is basically a big giant retailer. They hook up with the manufacturers. They provide manufacturers the online platform that they never had. They don't have to find 40,000 different customers and accounts and people to sell their furniture. They could just go to Wayfair and they could sell their product directly through Wayfair and make a King's ransom. What Couch.com is, is we're serving the retailers who have no outlet for figuring out where to put their marketing dollars and spend them wisely. So where's Wayfair serving manufacturers, we are serving the retailers of the same industry.
Emmanuel: Interesting. See the slight difference there. You're serving, they're serving the manufacturer, you're serving the retailer. But in terms of how they succeeded, do you mind for people who aren't familiar with how they came up and like your friend noticed, you know, they went from one sale a day, three to 10. What is it that they did that you are, I'm sure you're probably copying some of that, right? But what are their techniques and how did they succeed and what are you taking from that?
Alex Back: Yeah. So one thing is they employed and these guys were not furniture guys, the founders of Wayfair. They were internet marketers essentially. And they saw an opportunity in the furniture space as an incredibly scalable place because there was a scalable industry, because there was no online presence for furniture at the time they were coming up. It took years for people to start selling furniture online, way, way later than any other vertical, I think. So they started with what at the time was an awesome SEO strategy. They went for quantity. They started with a whole bunch of different domains, selling the same products, and sort of keyed into the same ERP system that managed all of them. So they had barstools.com, they had Bigbarstools.com, they had bluebarstools.com and they bought up all of these domains, probably for very little, if anything at all, and just essentially syndicated the same content and the same products on all of them. So an SEO copied the crap out of every single one of these pages and sites so that they ranked really high, had to spend virtually $0 on paid advertising. And really that's sort of I'm trying to do a very modern sort of today's version of that in a way to get the word out there. It's like, what are people searching for today? And how do we bring that to our site in mass to get ranked on Google and to win a lot of these categories?
Emmanuel: Fascinating and that's what you meant by moving towards that hyper local and brand pages strategies Because you said the URL thing doesn't work as much anymore, but you're doing a modern approach
Alex Back: Yeah. I mean, that, that may work, but I think like Google is hip to things now, like duplicate content, like if you're selling the exact same product with the same product description on 10 different sites, um, it's likely that not all 10 of those sites will rank. Um, it's just a different ecosystem than it was, you know, 15 years ago when this was happening. Um, but yes, to answer your question directly, that's an example. Like that's a strategy that we have a hypothesis of something that we think is going to work. And we're going to give it a shot. We've seen it work other places like apartments.com and what I was mentioning before, um, so we're going to give that a shot and whatever ends up working, you know, we'll double, triple down on it and we'll, we'll sort of go in that direction.
Emmanuel: And then this is something, so for the people listening, clearly there's a big SEO push here. That's the secret, the strategy, the hypothesis as well. What can they take away if they're sitting back, they have their Shopify store, maybe they have 10, 20, 100 products on their Shopify store, they built a brand, they have a social media following. What types of things can they take away from listening to you and your experience that will help them with their SEO? Because I get that question all the time. SEO, and it's like, no one's searching for your stuff anyway, and my advice is always a blanket. Don't worry about SEO. You know, for most of these brands, they need to be on social media. They need to be building demands, but you've done both. You've been a Shopify seller and now you're doing hardcore SEO. Are there lessons that we can take away to be more than just don't worry about SEO? Like, is there SEO support that you can give our listeners that will help them with their Shopify brand?
Alex Back: Well, first of all, I don't have, I employed a fairly similar strategy to yours where we focused on SEO at my former company, Apartments UB, but it certainly wasn't the primary focus whatsoever. We always made sure that we were healthy but not even for the first few years. So sort of employing the exact same approach that you're maybe advising your clients. It may not be the best investment of time or resources when you're starting out with a, a true e-commerce business or direct to consumer business. Um, and that's for a specific reason. Specific reason is with paid advertising for most products that people can sell online using paid advertising, you can establish a positive return on investment. You can get a positive ROI by advertising on Facebook and Instagram and doing a really good job of that without having any real organic presence on search engines like Google. And I think that that's, um, a major differentiator, uh, between a content site where we are monetizing based on, we're not selling a product. So, and, and an actual pure pay retailer. So just to give you an example, apartment to be, let's say my former company, we're selling a thousand dollar sofa and our cost of advertising, let's say like we can spend up to maybe 150 to $200 to acquire that customer to get that sale. In my business though, we're selling that same a thousand dollar sofa, but we're sending people to the retailer to maybe buy that sofa to then get a percentage commission or a small CPC. So my business model doesn't really work with traditional paid advertising in the furniture space because a click from Google about best couch to buy, best red couch is going to cost me the same as it is the person who's selling that product directly. So the finances don't really work out for content sites or affiliate or marketing focused sites to compete with e-commerce sites. Um, in the paid advertising space, because the ROI wasn't just not going to be there for us. So in a sense, this is the only strategy for us to employ to be successful. We need to have an organic audience. Whereas pure play e-commerce retailers can rely on a paid advertising, um, audience to produce a lot of their revenue.
Emmanuel: Interesting. I think that's the best description of why not to worry about SEO so much that I've ever heard. Thank you for that. And but then I wonder though, it begs the question, the answer was because basically we have the margin to afford paid. But then in an environment where people are like, well, I don't have the margin to afford paid. Why don't I do what he's doing for SEO? And how would you answer that person as well? Because what I heard with you saying basically is you don't have the margin to content you have to do it another way. But all the things you recommended on how you're going to do the content in the SEO, that takes either time or money to build all that out and lots of tech and infrastructure. So it seems to me that's also expensive. So how do you recommend or advise someone who's an e-commerce person? They're like, I don't have the margin for paid, but I want to do what Alex Back is doing for SEO stuff for my e-commerce brand.
Alex Back: So when you say that SEO optimization is expensive and costly, it is. And it can be as expensive and costly as a traditional paid advertising strategy on Facebook, Instagram, or Google. The difference is that it is the type of thing that is more of a long term investment. We all know that, that SEO is a long term investment, but in the sense that it can pay dividends down the road. So a thousand dollars spent on copywriting for blog posts for couch.com right now versus thousand dollars spent on Facebook ads, getting people to come to couch.com right now. One is a short term play and one is a long term play because that thousand dollars may generate $200,000 of revenue over time, over the next decade. You know, we're, we're paying upfront. We're investing upfront, uh, versus paying on performance, like in traditional paid advertising models where you're, you know, paying per click or paying a commission based on an action that has been taken. So it's a tough one. And I think every business just has to find their marketing mix. Like whatever that is, like, first of all, if you can't find it, then you probably don't have a viable business idea. There has to be a place to market your product. Um,
If you're selling like, uh, an awesome coffee, like I have a friend who has this like amazing, uh, ice coffee is like special, a special Mexican coffee blend, um, and yeah, it probably doesn't work to sell that online or sell it, but it does work to go and sell it like at a food truck or at church events or things like that on a different scale. And maybe that model is scalable. Like, okay, well, there's 40,000 churches in Los Angeles. Maybe we just like have a little stand every Sunday and that's our niche. There's always an angle, an organic angle even, or one that doesn't require a lot of upfront investment. For a lot of people that's been social media, really cracking that code, that can be an organic way to get in there. That's why you see so many people pushing product of lower average order value product, like apparel or food items or things like that on social because they simply can't afford a paid media strategy and they don't want to invest big in an SEO strategy. So it's like, all right, well, this is probably my best shot at getting an audience and selling these goods. So I think just everyone has to just find out what works and try things until you find something that does. Usually you'll find something.
Emmanuel: And in that, I think I heard another reason too, that has popped out, I'd never really given enough weight to is the idea of, you know, yes, it might be, you know, it's cheaper than a paid strategy, but there's still costs associated with it, and it's a longer term time horizon. But if you're an e-commerce seller, you don't have the ability to wait, like if you're a content site, because you have fulfillment fees, manufacturing fees, like there's holding costs that I'm guessing probably a content site probably doesn't have that makes it harder to wait for that content to start working, right?
Alex Back: Exactly. And a very specific example of that is, um, there were products that we had on our website at apartment to be that were, we knew we're going to be around for like the next four or five years because they were made to order. They were not inventory items that would go out of production or be discontinued or anything like that. Like we were in control of the production. So it was in those products that we invested in SEO, like rich SEO descriptions and a lot of analysis and things like that. Something where I like bought, you know, 15 of these and when they're, when they're gone, they're gone. Yeah. I'm probably not going to spend $300 having a copywriter, you know, sit there and come up with the absolute best, you know, rich SEO description, 19 paragraphs on that product page. I think there's like, I think you have to consider how long a products to your point going to be around.
Emmanuel: Perfect. And when you said 15 of these, what was it for the listeners listening on the podcast? What was that item?
Alex Back: Oh, I just mean like anything. Like I'm just holding this. Exactly. Well, this is actually like a laptop case. So it's a fairly decent example. It's like something that's made in small batch production, like by hand, you know, you go on a website to buy this. It's like a boutique company, let's say, and there's, you know, 20 of this, 10 of that, it's probably similar to, you know, some of your clients that, that you work with who are buying maybe some artisan goods, just guessing, um, but like things that are maybe smaller batch in nature or more, you know, handmade, those are not good cat candidates for like rich SEO, um, optimization, whereas something that's going to be around for the next 10 years, like, yeah, you might as well spend a few hundred dollars now because it's going to pay dividends in the future to get this ranked with Google and just do all the bells and whistles.
Emmanuel: Perfect. Love it. Thank you for that deep explanation. Because yeah, we get that question all the time. What about SEO? And most people are just trying to save on costs. And so you've given a bunch more reasons why it's not probably the preferable go-to-market strategy to sit and wait for nine months for your small batch invention that you created that you're trying to sell. So then I'm curious, you've succeeded in e-commerce. You've done what we want to do, most of us want to do, why then pick a content site after succeeding, why not another e-commerce brand?
Alex Back: I'm gonna be 100% honest with you and your listeners.
Emmanuel: Please.
Alex Back: I was like, how do I do another couch business, but with no customers?
Emmanuel: Ha! Ha ha ha. Oh. Yes, we're gonna dig into that.
Alex Back: I mean, look, why does any, well, why does any good idea start? Like, where does any good idea come from? It comes from, you know, usually one person's thought, usually a personal desire or need of some kind, or, you know, we sort of back into a good business idea in various ways. Um, but for me, the aha moment and the reason I decided to do couch.com, cause I was considering doing like, like having the couch and be like, if you have couch.com, I guarantee you, I can sell a lot of freaking couches just with people's trust thinking that this is the place to buy a couch and I still can, I may do that if I need to pivot at some point or add that, but for me, it was like the aha moment was, Oh my God, no, this is scalable in a different direction. This is something that has much bigger life and legs. If we don't have to deal with the supply chain operations or customer service. That this is something that could actually scale to be much bigger. And side note, I don't really want to manage the logistical operation anymore. I mean, that was a huge part of my life. You know, 80% of my, 85% of my staff for years was focused on customer service and fulfillment. And in furniture, it is not easy. We are not shipping things with return labels and return boxes like. It's huge pieces of furniture. It's very costly to ship a lot of challenges. Uh, we were good at it, but you know, it just take, it took a lot of my energy and focus and I want to focus what I'm really good at being creative, having fun, talking about furniture, talking about business. That's what I want to do. So that's how we ended up here.
Emmanuel: I love it and it also speaks to that question of why start this business again too is once you know the first business I like to tell people your first business is the practice one don't fall in love with it because you're learning how to do business and what you like and if you get the opportunity to do another one some people get burned so bad they never want to do it again but if you do another one you can really focus on what you enjoy and it sounds like that's kind of what you've landed on it's like you were like look if I'm going to do this again I'm going to do what I feel strongest at and enjoy.
Alex Back: Yeah. And what a gift to be able to know what that is. And it just takes, sometimes it takes time to figure that out. Like, what am I good at? What do I really like doing? But again, that's pretty existential. I think it's, I think it's relevant to everybody that you work with too, probably just, you know, making sure that you're doing this for the right reasons and, and that there's something that you really enjoy about this and that you're, or that you're really good at. And, um, before you really go all in on it. I wish I figured that out a few years before I did, I think. But I'm happy with the way things went.
Emmanuel: What I loved about what you said is I want to add on to it because it's how much you're giving people permission to focus on their strengths, right? Because if the business is not built around that, you're working harder than you need to, in essence, right? Like even if you're not on your second business, in your first business, what is it you're really good at? Delegate the rest. We have some of those, there's a couple episodes like when I talked with a couple of different folks about delegation. Those are the things to delegate, the things you don't enjoy. And it's okay to not enjoy them. Some people think they have to be good at customer service. They have to be good at manufacturing, product development, or marketing because they're the founder. No, you don't. You can outsource that stuff. And I'm wondering, do you feel like that's something we can say yes to in our business?
Alex Back: Absolutely. I mean, I have dabbled and spent a lot of time in my life doing things that I probably had no business doing simply because I felt the need to control them or that I wanted to challenge myself to be extremely good at everything that I did or, um, but that's a fool's errand. As you sort of just pointed out, it's like, if, if you can delegate something to someone you trust, find a way to do it because otherwise you're going to be really in the weeds in a place where you can't get out of. And I genuinely spent years in that place. Um, taking, you know, I mean, taking on way too many things that I should have, because I wasn't willing to relinquish control or I wasn't, or I was scared of doing the work that it took to get somebody else prepped enough to do it for me.
Emmanuel: Love it. And so can we dive into that a bit? You're building apartment 2B. What did you learn from that? What can you pass on to our listeners who are trying to get to where you got in building an e -commerce brand, especially a furniture brand? That's bulky stuff.
Alex Back: It is bulky stuff. I mean, I think we just, what we just talked about was very, very, very poignant, you know, focusing on what you're really good at and not trying to be all things to all people. And I think that applies to sort of the backend operations of a business, but also the front end, the customer facing, um, you know, we offer too many products at apartment two B, but we are really good at is selling couches and, and they, I mean, apartment, you still in business. We, um, and they, you know, sell too many different categories. It's really hard to be really good at selling couches and dining tables. It's almost like selling like tennis rackets and coffee. Like it's two different things completely. It's like two different customers, you know, um, they overlap in some ways, but so ultimately my message to most like small business people that I speak with, if I ever have something to say, is just to not ignore the noise, not get, not get brought in to something you shouldn't be doing or shouldn't be trying just because you have like the FOMO, the fear of missing out of something you could be missing, right? You see something on social media. I got to do that. I see, I read an article. We have to try this. And the fact is what makes your business successful is generally like hyper -focus on a few key things not a little bit of focus on a lot of things. And I think once we learned that with my former business at Apartment 2B and just weren't trying to be all things to all people, we stuck to a formula and a mold that worked. It wasn't sexy. We ignored plenty of things and we just stuck to our advertising mix. We stuck to our product. We stuck to our guns, like of what was working, our marketing mix, product mix. Once we figured out what the formula was, it was so hard to not get sucked into doing all these interesting, fun things that are out there that you see. But the discipline of staying on track and sticking to what does work. Once you figure that out, that's a blessing to have something that's, that you that's working in your business. Stick to that. Don't go too far outside of your lane. Cause that can almost always be a pitfall in my opinion.
Emmanuel: I love hearing you say that because that's literally what we talk about. I think it's episode eight, nine or 10, where we talk about the anatomy of a seven figure a month business. You probably have the answers already in the business. You just have not spent enough focus and time on it. You're too busy doing all these other things that that thing that's a deep well of customer acquisition, you've missed it. You just glossed over it. For us, it was like influencer marketing. We had 10, 20 different influencers that had done well. Why don't we make that 300 and completely double down, triple down and focus on that and that worked for us. And then when they stopped working, then we moved on to the next one. And that's what I think a lot of people miss is they want to keep moving from thing to thing to thing. What was it that worked when you guys finally figured out what worked, what were those things?
Alex Back: I think a lot of that has to do with our, with marketing. Um, because that's the area where like, especially as a founder, I'm sure most of your listeners know we get emails, cold calls from people all day long. It's like you register for a Shopify account and like the world has your phone number. I don't know how. Um, but it's hard to not be swayed by some of these things, but we had, you know, a great mix, very formulaic approach of what our budget was and what our allocation of that budget was to the different channels, whether that was Meta, Facebook, Instagram, or sorry, Google, forgot the name for a second, Google advertising. We had certain amount of allocated to affiliate marketing. And then we had a certain amount allocated to experimental or trying something new, but that wasn't a lot. We focused, you know, 90 something percent of our ad spend on things that we knew worked. And even though you're, you're tired of seeing the same ads, you're like, it's embarrassing that I have the same ad that I had nine months ago or a year or two ago. Yo, if it works, keep doing it. That's the whole thing. It's if it works, you have to keep doubling and tripling down and the best businesses do that. Like McDonald's comes out with fun, new things every now and again, but like 99% of the people are there for the things they've been eating since they were a kid. That's a good thing to remember.
Emmanuel: That's a great point. Love that. Big Mac, double quarter pounder with cheese. One of the two. That's it. I don't care what the new thing is. That's it. Yeah. And so do you mind to give us some context? Because a lot of us want to exit. How big did the business get before you were attracted and exited?
Alex Back: We were pretty big, but not as big as our competitors. So I think that's the one thing, because I'm not going to give any specific numbers here, although you're an excellent interviewer. You've gotten a lot of deep, dark things out of me today. But I think the main thing that can be of universal interest is that we were big enough that we were able to show regular profitability and a regular growing revenue stream, but small enough that we were able to be acquired by a larger group of potential suitors. So it's like you grow your company to $30 million a year in manual revenue, let's say. The pool of people who are going to be able to buy you is very small and you're almost like sort of limiting yourselves in a way. Um, just to point that out and maybe fine, but then if you are doing only a few million dollars a year or a little bit less, even you could be attractive to, um, to many more buyers out there. So if that is a goal, um, I guess what I would consider is like, or what's the end game there is there aren't exactly, there isn't just one path to getting there, being as big as possible. You could join forces or, you know, get acquired or sell a good portion of your company to a mid -size player while your company's growing and then grow with them, which is a big part, sort of essentially what we did. I stayed on a COO for four years after that and we grew the company immensely from the point of where we were actually acquired to where it was when I left. And that was very lucrative for all parties.
Emmanuel: I'm fascinated by what you're saying. So it's almost like, cause a lot of people try to grow their bit, grow, grow, I'm going to be at $30 million coming 40, 50. But in essence, maybe that's not really the, the be all and end all. And now there is a point where it's enough. Like you got it to this point, sell it off, stay on, help them grow it. But at least that is a potential exit. It's good enough.
Alex Back: Right. And I think as far as goal setting is concerned, like setting a goal when you're starting a company to be a $50 million a year company is like, Hmm, probably impossible. It's like very difficult to imagine or fathom growing that much and creating a roadmap for that would just be irrelevant. It's too much to create a roadmap from zero to $50 million from the very beginning is, is, is, is, is a ridiculous task. It's not going to work, but getting to be a $2 million a year company from, from zero revenue. That's like a, you know, a few years modeling and projection that you can actually do. And there are real buyers for companies of that size or even smaller. So, you know, really considering what, what you want out of it. Maybe you just want to get your first acquisition under your belt. Um, That may be building a very small, but very profitable, you know, single location business. So really think about what your goals are and setting, setting them accordingly. Um, I think it's very important. So you're not just everyone's needing to build a hundred million dollar behemoth.
Emmanuel: And you said there's buyers for that. Where if I'm like, oh man, I'm listening to this podcast. That's amazing. I'm there and I would love to exit. Where would I find these people?
Alex Back: forget the, there are a few marketplaces that literally are for e -commerce businesses that are small to midsize where you can list your own business. It's like there are various, um, mergers and acquisitions, M and a platforms that people can go to, to list their businesses and buy and sell them and stuff like that, much like the brokerage that we talked about before that sells by and sells domains. Um, I haven't looked in a while, so I forget the names, but.
Emmanuel: Is it like Empire Flippers, Empire Flippers, Quiet Light Brokerage?
Alex Back: Guarantee you Google your way into it. Something, that those names sound very familiar. So I think if you go there, they'll have like business profiles and you can, you just like register for a free account and you can sort of look around. And I think that's a very advisable thing to do. Like see what other people in your space are doing. If you have like a, an e -commerce laundry startup or something, like see if anyone's doing that. And if they're selling a business and what are their numbers and what, what sort of free insider information can you get by looking at one of these marketplaces?
Emmanuel: Nice. And what's fascinating about what you did too is you built a furniture brand and you said that you were profitable, which is obviously one of the things that made it attractive to sell. I can't fathom that from looking at how much it costs to ship product, how much it costs to import furniture, and this is a big bulky item, which is the most expensive stuff to ship. How did you build the business so that it was profitable?
Alex Back: It's very difficult. So difficult in fact, that I would say a tiny percentage of furniture online retailers are profitable. And I can say that because I know how hard it was to do. It's like the margin of error on, in all sides from the supply chain, customer service, logistics, marketing, everything has to be just so. Um, I wouldn't advise going into furniture e -commerce to anybody who wasn't like an actual expert in it already. Uh, because it's, it's just a really hard industry to get right. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's, it was, it was hard to get there, but then again, you know, when you, just like in any business, if you stay disciplined and focused and you stay close to your data and numbers, you can logically figure out like how to make it profitable. We have to tweak this. Otherwise it's not going to work. Okay. We're going to figure it out. We got to get a new logistics provider. We've got to save 20 % on this. Otherwise it's not going to work. That kind of thing. Those things, hard decisions need to be made sometimes.
Emmanuel: And one of the focuses of our podcast and our platform is all about systems and systems thinking. What would you say, especially the ones that helped you get profitable, were the systems that you're most proud of, where they were most impactful in helping you make a profitable furniture company when less than 1 % are able to do that? You did it.
Alex Back: Yeah, that's one of the things about your business that I've liked since I found out about you is just, I love the idea of systems. And I think I've already said a number of things that sort of that cater to that idea, just because that's the way I think. When you can get a business to a point of a system or having an organizational structure that works, I think you've won. Like that's the thing when you can identify patterns. And that's what I'm personally feel like I'm good at. It's like identifying what's working, getting into it a little bit deeper, doubling down on it and creating a system or pattern surrounding that thing. And then trying to repeat that in various parts of your business, whether that's like automating your customer service inflow or like coming up with systems of, of how to analyze your marketing and allocate spend or, you know, those things are incredibly valuable. And every time you come up with one that works, it should be celebrated. Because that's the stuff I think that builds businesses into being very successful formulaic approaches to various parts of their business that work.
Emmanuel: Love it. And second to last question, going back to the business you're building, it's a content play and it's fully hardcore SEO. What platform are you building this on?
Alex Back: Yeah. So interestingly, we have decided to build this platform, not on WordPress, like every other content site in the world, but rather the Shopify platform. And part of that has to do with our specific needs of wanting to have a very robust marketplace. So rather than taking like a WordPress or WooCommerce and trying to make like a, you know, 20 ,000 skew marketplace on a platform that wasn't built for that. Let's just take the hardest like need of our business and go to the platform that works for that need. In this case, it's Shopify. The other thing about Shopify is it's just like, it used to be very sort of straightforward. And if you want it to stray from the norm, like you had to use an application or it just wasn't possible. But now there's so, Shopify is so big and caters to so many different types of customers. If there are so many out of the box features and benefits of being with Shopify that it's possible to have an awesome content site on Shopify, like with their new meta fields and meta objects that wasn't possible like three years ago. But today you can do a lot of things with Shopify and getting awesome content to show the same way that it would show on a WordPress site. And in many ways, a lot of the service providers, things like Klaviyo. Like I have Klaviyo on, we have a WordPress site right now as a staging website while we're building our Shopify. I have Klaviyo hooked up to, to our WordPress site. And I've worked with Klaviyo for many years hooked up to Shopify. Like the WordPress instance is, is bug. Like it's, it's too hard to use. So why not just go to the place where all this things work? On Shopify everything works. Every third party logistics provider is integrated with Shopify. All these marketing platforms integrated with Shopify. They've done all the work so that you don't have to do it. It's the perfect platform. It should be like the right of first refusal type of thing. Do Shopify unless you prove to yourself that it's not gonna work for you.
Emmanuel: I love that and especially because all those people out there who are complaining about I need to do, you know, Shopify is not good for SEO. Here's someone who's building an entire content site built with pure play SEO is the strategy to grow on Shopify. And he's not worried. Like a lot of people are like, I'm going to do Shopify for my e -commerce and then WordPress for my content side of things. Like, do you feel like that's necessary anymore?
Alex Back: Well, it depends on what your goals are, right? If you don't really need the marketplace aspect, you know, that is a sound strategy that a lot of people employ. And most of that has to do with Shopify's site speed. But if you keep your Shopify store pretty lean of applications and you keep your page load time pretty quick, it shouldn't be that much of a problem. There shouldn't be that much of a difference outside of that, I don't, I don't see that there's that many more measurable things that would affect SEO outside of site speed, uh, between WordPress and Shopify instance of like a blog post or whatever else.
Emmanuel: Thank you for clarifying that. Thank you so much. And the last question I'd like to ask on my guess is with the success that you've seen with your e -commerce brand, you've exited a profitable furniture company that less than 1 % of people are even able to achieve, and you're now building out a content site. You've already secured the domain. Are you a success?
Alex Back: It's funny. Like, and there are, there are times when I do feel that way. And I like felt that way, um, for a number of years after selling my company, I was like, wow, I did. And that's the reason to sell a company. That's the reason to start your own company is like the sort of deep feeling of just like, like I, I, I did something, I accomplished something really, really great. Like that's a nice feeling to have. However, I have found that that's a little bit fleeting and I don't feel like that right now because I'm hustling. I'm out there. I'm spreading the word about couch.com. That's why I'm talking to you today. That's why I'm, I'm doing like a world PR tour for it. And I don't feel like I've been successful yet in this. So it's almost like I reset the clock on that, which doesn't feel amazing. But it's also invigorating because I know how good it can feel to feel like you, you, you won. It's just like sports. It's like, you, you see these people win a championship. You're like, they're doing their whole holding trophy. They're kissing it. They're jumping around like, how the they're going to get back and do this again next year. Like, why would they even want to it's because you just, you're chasing that same feeling again. And you, you work with just like so many things, so many systems. It's a cycle. So you, I'm just spending a different part of the cycle right now.
Emmanuel: I love it. I know I put you on the spot. Thank you for being a good sport about it. But I love asking that question because I feel especially a lot of the hard charging entrepreneur types, we get a lot of imposter syndrome and we feel not successful. We don't feel, I ask it specifically, are you successful? I guess in becoming a success. Because the question becomes, am I good enough? And I always wonder how people answer that for themselves. When do you know you're good enough? When do you know enough is enough? That you've done enough and you're okay as you are. How do you advise people or coach people when they bring that issue to you?
Alex Back: I don't know. I mean, I don't think I'd be a good person to advise others on that right now, simply because like that's what I'm going through. I feel some days I feel so, so jacked up about this business. I, I'm so happy. And then other days I'm like, Oh my God, what am I doing? Or like you have a little setback and it's you have that imposter syndrome that you described. And like, maybe I don't have the skills to do a content site right now. Like why there's people have been doing this for years. Why am I trying this? That's an example of a thought that I'll have. But then you have, you know, affirming conversations like this, where you, you get to talk shop with a really smart person who gets you and it's like, it feels much better again. So thank you for asking me such great questions to make me feel good.
Emmanuel: You're welcome. And you are not alone, my friend. I've got your back anytime. And for anyone listening, you just heard him describe that feeling that you probably have felt. I know I felt it before I heard some people talking about this topic on a podcast and I felt alone until I heard that. And so hopefully you feel that as well, that you are not alone. We're also going through the same things, no matter what level you're at. And I want to thank you, Alex Back, for coming and gracing us with your presence and dropping all these knowledge bombs, and sharing your experience. Thank you so much.
Alex Back: Pleasure, happy to come back anytime and it was really nice talking to you. Thank you.
Emmanuel: Wonderful. Oh, and one thing we need to do is if people want to get a hold of you or find out what you're doing and learn more about you, where should they go?
Alex Back: Yeah. So I'm a very communicative person. If you can't tell by how much I've talked to your ear off today, but I love chatting with people. If you want to reach out to me directly, my email is quite simple. It's [email protected]. Um, and, um, I'll do my best to get back to you. If anybody wants to reach out to me, maybe any of your listeners, we're also just for some fun stuff. Like we're doing tons of co -branded giveaways right now. So we're giving away all these free couches. It's part of our audience building strategy. Um, but they're like real giveaways and some of them don't have that many entries in them. So, um, sometimes you can, you can have a pretty good chance of winning something. And, um, anyway, we have a giveaways page on our websites and the footer on couch.com. If you go there, um, you should look for giveaways and you can enter them in like two seconds.
Emmanuel: Perfect, that's very high odds to win a couch. Well done. Everyone take advantage of that. Alex Back from Couch.com. Thank you so much.
Alex Back: Thank you.
