#119 – Can’t Decide? Let this Split Testing Platform (And Thousands of Curated Panel Members) Help You Decide

This software engineer and his partner had split off from their previous employer in order to concentrate on building a website. Often times they were torn between what they considered two good ideas.

How to choose between the two?

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton welcomes Justin Chen, co-founder of the PickFu customer research split-testing platform. PickFu has become the way that everyone from small Amazon sellers to top companies unleash the power of instant market feedback. PickFu is so effective that a leading reseller of Amazon businesses used it to quickly make a million dollars on a recent acquisition.”

Listen in to see how you can put PickFu to work for you.

In episode 119 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Justin discuss:

• 01:20 – Justin’s Origin Story
• 02:30 – Business Partners Split Off to Start a Website
• 03:50 – PickFu was Born from a Need for Honest, Accurate Feedback
• 04:40 – A Pivot, and PickFu Takes Center Stage
• 07:00 – Split Testing was Already a Force in the Publishing World
• 09:00 – Sometimes You Don’t Want Your Testing Out “In the Wild”
• 12:00 – Possible Negative Impacts of Live Testing
• 13:00 – How He Creates a Hyper-Competent Panel Base
• 17:20 – Open-Ended Feedback Offers a Curated Overview
• 19:40 – Split Testing Isn’t Just for Images
• 22:00 – Helping a Premier Amazon Reseller Make a Big Profit
• 25:00 – What Has He Learned About Listings from All this Data?
• 27:50 – Bradley’s Search Volume Game
• 29:50 – Justin’s 30 Second Tip   

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today, we’re going to be going over a unique split-testing method where you can get all the insight you need before you even have a product or listing. How valuable has this been for some?  One company we talk about today increased their sales by $1 million using this method. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10.  I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS, free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the eCommerce world. And I’ve got somebody on the line with me today who is kind of very integral to the kind of things that we teach here at Helium 10 and things that you could do to Test. He’s in the eCommerce world, not necessarily an Amazon seller, at least I don’t think so. We’re going to find that out today. But anyways. Justin, how’s it going?

Justin Chen: Great. Thanks for having me. Bradley.

Bradley Sutton: Where are you calling in from?

Justin Chen: I’m in Los Angeles. I’m in Culver City.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Were you born and raised in Southern California?

Justin Chen: Yeah.  Actually in Irvine.  I grew up mostly in Orange County. I went up to Berkeley, spent some time in the Bay area. yeah, back in Southern California now.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. like as a high school student, how did you envision your career path going? Like, did you have any aspirations?

Justin Chen: You know, it’s kind of, I was a little one to be an engineer, and that’s when I went to Berkeley for, I did computer science there and I’ve been in the software world ever since. yeah, I mean, I think it’s turned out the way that I thought it would.

Bradley Sutton: Then that was your major and then upon getting your degree, did you start working for a company? Did you do a startup yourself or?

Justin Chen: Yeah, when I went to college,  it was kind of right around the dot com boom and bust. So, you know, I was working at a startup during college, which was exciting and, earning options that were eventually not worth anything. But, once it busted, I went to Hewlett Packard, up in the Bay area in Palo Alto.  I did a few years there. kind of got my big company experience in and that was kind of a safe spot during the bust. But, probably about four and a half years into that and my business partner and I decided to quit our corporate jobs. He was up in Microsoft in Seattle and we always wanted to do a startup together, we decided to quit. And that was probably 14 years ago. Yeah. We started working together and we quit to do a software startup and we’ve been at it ever since.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Was what you’re doing now, what you started 14 years ago or what was the kind of trajectory there of the kind of things that you started doing?

Justin Chen: Yeah, sure. when we first started, we started, a restaurant review and menu aggregator website, Menuism and that’s still up and running today. it’s a, you know, kind of a restaurant directory website and, we didn’t have any experience in this space, but it was, it was all about learning, right. We built the site from scratch and we did all the marketing and everything for it. And, yeah, it was a great learning experience. We self-funded it and we never took any investment. And that was kind of the goal, of doing this venture together was that we just wanted to get as much experience in all aspects of the business as we could. And so, it was a great experience. Still, it is a great experience. And we, we kept running the menu is,  for a really long time.

Justin Chen: And along the way, we built PickFu, probably back in 2008 actually. As, as a tool that, you know, just a scratch an itch that we had, we were working on a redesign and we’re both engineers like we didn’t have a ton of design sense and we wanted to get feedback on a redesign. Being engineers, we built a solution to get feedback and yeah, that’s kind of where PickFu started. We threw it up to the startup community and people enjoyed it and we’re kind of just left it there cause we were still really, really focused on our other business. And yeah. we left it there for about another five or six years as we were focused on Menuism. And probably about five years ago,  take food, really started picking up traction on its own as the whole like lean startup movement, like really started taking hold and people were really getting into data validation,  and talking to your customers and all that kind of stuff. And they started picking up on its own and that’s when we decided to start pivoting all of our energy over to PickFu. And yeah, it’s been a really interesting ride ever since.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Now what’s the origin of the name? How did you, how did he come across? How did you come to this name?

Justin Chen: No, you’re, you’re spot on. Yeah. we, we figured like dash – fu as a suffix typically means, like a proficiency, really good at something. And there’s like Kungfu people had Google-fu or code fu back in the day. People were talking about that kind of stuff. And PickFu, that’s a service that’s really good at picking for you. Kind of had the sound of like, I’ll pick for you. That’s kind of where it came from.  it’s, it’s kind of catchy cause people get caught off guard when they see it and when they sound it out and

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, it’s Pick FU.

Justin Chen: Okay. It’s catchy.

Bradley Sutton: Now the original iteration, like what was your target market or you know, back in those days it wasn’t, you know, it might not have been Shopify or, or Amazon sellers or things like that. Cause those weren’t as established as they are today. like who did you originally develop this software for?

Justin Chen: Yeah, it was mainly for other entrepreneurs and startups like ourselves. And we had initially it onto Hacker News, which is a forum for startups and entrepreneurs and,  had some really good feedback. One of our early customers was, Gabriel Weinberg, who’s the founder of Duck Duck Go, which is a privacy-oriented search engine that’s gaining a lot of popularity right now. And there’s some, one of our biggest customers. And we have kind of like a, a core audience within the really data-driven startup organizations where they like to test and iterate on kind of all their different decisions and collect data. And that’s where we started. We always wanted to help other entrepreneurs like ourselves. I think the difficult thing with really early-stage startups and entrepreneurs is they’re, you know, cost adverse I guess.  and they’re not willing to spend is kind of hard to reach that customer base.

Justin Chen: Actually the first audience that became really interesting to us was the self-publishing author space. And we had a lot of authors testing their book titles and book covers. If you remember Tim Ferriss’s four-hour workweek, we actually talked about how four hour work week wasn’t the book title that he was planning to use. And he had run some ads, Google ads to test out different titles. And it was kind of ingrained in the publishing world. They’re like, Oh, you should do some testing under titles because you may end up something like, you know, with Tim Ferriss a situation where the title that you think did the title that you want necessarily with the title that other people like. PickFu became a really popular option for testing book titles and book covers, kind of anything that you’re going to publish life and you can’t test life and you can’t take it back. So, books really became an interesting segment for us.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, now talk a little bit about this. Cause split testing is not something that’s a new concept to people. But I think normally at least in the Amazon world when people are thinking of having split testing or even like, you know in the copywriting world when they’re talking about emails or things, it’s kind of like they do it on the go. Like, Hey we’re, a company that does email marketing and we’re going to send out the first 2000 of our emails with this subject and in the next 2000 with this. And then we’ll adjust as we go. You know, an Amazon seller might say, Hey, all right, I’m going to test this main image for like five days and check my impressions, check my sales, and then the next five days do this. So, you know, a lot of people when they think of the traditional split testing, it’s something you’re doing live like on an active listing or an active campaign or something. But, but your approach is a little bit different because it’s, it’s kind of like even before you have the product, before you have the listing or without actually no, testing it with sales and things. Can you explain like the pros and cons of either side and why, what are the circumstances where one, you know, doing this might be better than the other and vice versa.

Justin Chen: Yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s an important distinction to make that it is. You can test things even beforehand. I think what’s nice about our platform is that you can test privately. Maybe you’re experimenting with vastly different variations of marketing copy or imagery or even product design. And that’s not something you would necessarily want out in the wild. Right. And when you’re live testing on your website or your email copy, you know, half the people or a certain percentage of people are going to see both variations and maybe, maybe you’re okay with that, but sometimes you just run an experiment and you want to see directionally, like, which way should we go. I think those are situations where this could work.  Complimentarily to live testing, right? Maybe you’re experimenting with vastly different directions on PickFu and you see like we’re going to go with this very aggressive copy.

Justin Chen: And then we can fine-tune it with the live, split testing using your email provider. But to the point that you also made is that it’s what’s great is that you can test concepts even before you start to develop them. So, this can be a super early stage where you’re just testing out like a, even a verbal description of like a solution that you’re thinking about. That can be a startup idea or a product idea. Like, hey, does this even sound interesting? And then as you’re iterating on that, and you can be working on 3 D renders or a product concept images and really see how the, your customer base is reacting to it, right? Like, oh, do they like it with the handle without the handle or this backpack with these straps or that straps. and that’s even before you submit, spent any money on manufacturing or prototype or anything like that. And that’s really invaluable too. Give you the directional feedback that you need at a really early stage.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I’ve used it myself, a variety of times. A lot of the case studies we do here, some of my use cases are testing a title or testing images. Something I always tell Amazon sellers is yeah, you have your own personal preference and you might be an expert in your field or you know, you think you’re an expert at least, but well, many times what your preference might be, what you think regardless of your knowledge in a field or a niche or something, it does not necessarily reflect your audience as a whole. It’s important to kind of test these things on larger sample size. And what you’ll find a lot of times is what you thought would’ve been the best image or would have been the best title or, or the best keyword or something is not always what, what your target avatar customer my wants.

Bradley Sutton: It’s important to do this and then I think it’s kind of cool sometimes is, I can see the value in split testing and pricing and things that are alive, but then by definition one is going to be worse than the other. Maybe you spent a week and a half of kind of like tanking your sales or something because you’re using the wrong image and yeah, now you know which image is great, but wouldn’t it be better just to test it offline you don’t have to go through that processes is my opinion.

Justin Chen: Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely the issue of cannibalizing sales. There’s a lot of negatives, other potential negative impacts of maybe search algorithms or whatever. There’s a lot of confounding factors that, and make the live testing a little bit dangerous. Obviously sales data is king, but, are you willing to take that risk and willing to take that sacrifice to test on, on life, traffic essentially.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, one thing that I think, there are always skeptics out there, people might say, okay, yeah, well if we’re live testing it, these are people who are actually paying for it. Can I trust this data?  You know, how do I know that there’s just not a bunch of, you know, hundreds of people that are in one of these companies, like a call center company, like in Bangladesh or the Philippines or somewhere else where they’re just clicking. Oh yes, I like this. No, I don’t like this one. Talk a little bit about why we can trust your customer base, I guess. Or, or your, what’s the word? It’s not a customer base. They’re called . . .

Justin Chen: We call it a panel. And yeah, we work with a third party to reach our a panel and it’s all US respondents. Like, we don’t take anyone from outside the US at this point, they’re all people that we pay to answer it. These aren’t people that are being blocked to look at the content or they’re through ads on, on websites or anything like that. They’re opting into a response to these surveys that we send to them. We pay them to do it. We have a pretty vigorous vetting system and quality control system. All of their responses are pass-through machine learning algorithms where we’re looking at their content and making sure that they’re genuinely trying to answer it. We score all of that content. We have an editor who goes through and curates, responds and kicks people off and we give bonuses to people who are doing well.

Justin Chen: We really try to curate an earnest pool of people that want to respond to these things. And as a customer, when you see the responses and you don’t think that they’re genuinely trying to answer your question, you can always mark it as not helpful. And that’ll feedback into the system as a negative response, negative feedback for that respondent. And what’s nice about a PickFu compared to doing ads or any other platform is that they’re required to give a written explanation of their answers. Not only do they say like, oh, I like option C or option B, but they had to explain why. So, they’re writing out why. And that’s the texts that we’re analyzing as they make these responses. And that’s what you can use to genuinely see like, Oh, are these real people? You look through any of our results. Just reading through that you’ll know that these are English speaking people and they know what they’re talking about.

Bradley Sutton: Is it the same people over and over again? Or how big approximately is your panel base?

Justin Chen: Yeah, we’ve got about 10,000 people in the US and we’ve got demographic information on them so you can do all kinds of different targeting. Within a poll, you will definitely not ever have any repeat respondents. We allow you to do up to 500 people in a given poll. Within a poll, if you’re trying to do 500, you’ll get no duplicates.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. One thing I think that is really valuable, especially depending on what kind of seller we’re talking about is, is the ability to kind of segment demographics on your website. Like you can even pick, I only want this question to go out to Amazon Prime members or something so you really know it’s valid.  Or maybe if somebody, I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but if somebody has brand registry on Amazon, they have access to something called brand analytics and they can actually see what the demographics are of their brands. Like maybe their existing products they see are mainly women from 35 to 45 or something like that. If I’m not mistaken, on PickFu, I can go in there and specify, Hey, only show this to Amazon Prime members of this age, things like that. Right. Well, what are some of those kinds of ways that we could segment your panel?

Justin Chen: Yeah, definitely. You’re, you’re spot on. we have the basics like gender and age, income, ethnicity. but we all have some behavioral things. So, do they take nutritional supplements? Do they use beauty products? Are they physically active? A lot of these different behavioral segmentations you can target on. So, we’re always adding more of those I guess as, as customers come to us and they ask like, Hey, what about this, you know,  I think cooking was a recent one that we added because there were a lot of sellers that were starting to do kitchen type things. And we added one, do they actively cook throughout the week? And that’s really helpful for reaching your target audience.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, I had a question now when I have used you guys, every single time I have used your option of, of the votes and explanations. basically that means, I’ll give out, three or four different things and people vote on it and they tell me what they do. But I all, I notice always and I always want, I was like, wow, under what use cases might this be, but well, you have an option there for like open-ended feedback. What’s that about?

Justin Chen: Yeah, what we found was that a lot of times people don’t have variations that they want to compare and they just want to get open-ended feedback on like a single thing or a single idea. So, a public use case now we’re seeing with sellers, in particular, is that they just want to get feedback on their listing, right? It’s like, okay, I know I need to optimize if something’s not doing well, let’s try this. And what they’ll do is they’ll put their listing URL and it’ll say, Hey, take a look at this listing. Like what feedback, what questions do you still have? What concerns do you still have? And people will take a look at it and they’ll just get feedback like, maybe it’s the images aren’t really appealing. I’m still confused. Is it edible? Is it washable?

Justin Chen: They’ll surface like all these questions and concerns that maybe you’re just not addressing clearly enough. Maybe you need to add more to like the question section. Maybe you need to update your images. But after reading through 50 to a hundred of those responses, you’re going to have like this little checklist of like, all right, these are the things I’m going to look at from my listing. From that point, you can maybe generate some image variations or copy variations and do like a normal PickFu test where you’re comparing those things. But it’s a really nice way just to get feedback on things. The way that we use it, and we’ve seen sellers use it for their products is, is to get customers or potential customers to describe things in their own words. Especially for search, whether it’s Google or Amazon, being able to be discovered through the language of your customers is really important. And you know, when you’re the creator of a product or a service, that how you describe it’s not necessarily how your customers might describe it. So, sometimes people will still have a product, the product image and say like, Hey, how would you describe this? And what surfaces are a lot of interesting terminology and phrases that can be used in a marketing copy on your descriptions or, may even change how you brand the product.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now let’s go back to the other kind again. I think the kind of standard thing that everybody thinks about when, when thinking about your service or something similar, is my images. And that’s very true. You know, the main image is important, especially the thumbnail that comes up in the search. Because if it doesn’t look great, that might be the reason somebody doesn’t click on it. Or is this the best lifestyle image? Like, am I making that emotional connection? What other things in your experience with working with thousands of sellers, what other things have people or maybe people not split testing that they should?

Justin Chen: We definitely see people testing, description, titles just by themselves.

Bradley Sutton: Like how would that work though? Like what would you be asking your panel?

Justin Chen: If it’s a description, it could just be which description sounds better, right? Like for a kitchen pot or something like that.  

Bradley Sutton: Then you like tell them like you tell the panel, Hey, if you were searching for a, a silicone spatula, which description makes you want to buy more? Or something like that?

Justin Chen: Yeah, exactly. And then just put both, and it’s usually pretty night and day. Like which one they gravitate towards because either maybe one is worded more clearly, one maybe sounds more spammy. Right. sometimes they can see through like some of the techniques that people are doing and like, Oh I clearly liked this one because maybe the formatting or the language just clearer. And obviously like when you’re doing these tests like you want to make some like meaningful differences. Like if you’re just changing like a couple of words, it’s going to be hard as you’re going to get a really close result. But it’s really useful when you’re testing big directional changes in like, all right, I’m going to try this kind of formatting or this kind of language. Maybe this aggressive language or maybe like, you know, more descriptive language or vice versa.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Everything on your website. It’s like I never even had to ask customer support to help me or, or talk to anybody. It’s pretty easy. I was able to do everything by myself, but I’m sure you know, you’ve had people you have interacted with some of your customers before, people giving you stories about how it works. Is there any cool story that you could give us like one of your, one of your users who said, Oh my goodness, you know, I was making $500,000 and I thought I was doing great. And then I use PickFu and I changed my image as an increased me to $600,000 or something like that. Some kind of a story that you could, you can tell us to show people the value of, of what this could do for you.

Justin Chen: Yeah, we just published a case study of one of our customers, Thrasio.

Bradley Sutton: Oh yeah.

Justin Chen: Yeah. they’re a big company that buys and buys Amazon FBA brands and they’re a huge customer of PickFu. And they, talked about this story where they bought this, pet deodorizer called angry orange and they wanted to do a rebrand. They basically made all these design variations of the new packaging and labeling and all this kind of stuff. And they tested it and validated it with PickFu.  They took that winning option from PickFu and they completely rebranded all the packaging and everything. And, just through that branding validation, they were able to add $1,000,000 a year run rate to that product line, through the validations that they’ve had with PickFu. And ever since then they’ve been huge PickFu fans and they use it when they’re testing all of their new products that they’re buying.

Bradley Sutton: Wow! A million dollars guys.

Justin Chen: Yeah. I mean immediately as soon as they put it up, sales went up and then they had the confidence to like add even more product variations based on that new packaging.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. you guys can see the potential now. Justin here is not guaranteeing that you’re going to increase your bottom line by $1 million. You know you might not be as big of a company as Thrasio, but it just shows you the potential and how valuable this is. What are your plans to expand in the future or are you getting more into, ha, do you have more customers who are doing other things like Walmart or things like that? Or maybe will you expand to other countries? maybe somebody selling in Amazon Europe may say, Hey let me split tests for the French market or something like that.

Justin Chen: Yeah. we definitely have long-term plans to expand outside the US. I think right now we’re focused on, just catering to the needs of the sellers that are selling into the US. One of the tests that you were asking before, the tests that people run and one of them is competitive tests and this is also something that you can’t really live test.  They’ll test like maybe it’s their product versus their competitors’ product image or maybe what they’ll do is they’ll take them screenshots of the search results of theirs and their competitors. Maybe they’ll normalize it and like take out the stars or the Amazon’s Choice labeling, all that kind of stuff. Try to hold some things consistent and say like, hey, based on these titles and images, which one would you choose and why? And this surfaces a lot of interesting stuff around why people are clicking on their competitors’ images. We’re planning on actually baking that in a little bit more as a, as a specific poll type. Maybe a click test for competitive searches, that kind of stuff. We’re really trying to take more feedback from our sellers and create tests that help them make decisions, in their selling process.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now you guys have much data that you can analyze and, and sounds like you do case studies and things like that. What are some overall things that you have seen just with how your customers have used the service and how, you know, your guys’ case studies and things? What are some general tips that, that you’ve seen the works, if we’re talking about title, like length or we’re talking about the images or the lifestyle images, but what are some of the trends, you know, since you have the access to a lot more data than, than a lot of people, what is something that you have learned that maybe you could help share with our audience?

Justin Chen: Yeah, I guess on the image side, it seems like the images that show, all the components of what you’re getting very clearly,  obviously do really well. sometimes that includes the packaging and also like laying out all the pieces that you’re going to get. I think some people, tend to over-design. Maybe a product that has like 50 different pieces and I’ve seen somewhere they, Oh, let’s arrange it in this neat like a floral shape or something, all the different pieces. But then it compared to one where they just like lay it out side by side and that wins, it doesn’t look as visually neat, but the point is that people can see all the different pieces, right?

Justin Chen: Or shirts. Maybe it’s like a, a package of five shirts and instead of like overlapping them when you can’t see all the designs, like if you just lay them out like in a grid, that works a lot better. Using all the white space of the image and just showing like as much information as possible, definitely is a huge benefit. Some people like seeing the packaging, it kind of depends on the type of product, but people like to see like if you’ve got nice packaging, show the packaging because it helps add to the appeal and maybe makes it feel a little bit worth more. The other one, let’s see. If it’s a, obviously if it’s a difficult product to grasp, I think the product and use having some kind of an image of the product and use it, is really important.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. We’re going to get to a part of the show where I always ask you the 30-second tip. I’m going to do that in a little bit, but before that, we’re going to do something else. A little game we play called the search volume game. All right. And I like doing it with non-Amazon sellers, but it kind of shows also, it’s funny because I started this game a few episodes back, but it was to really show people the importance of not relying on your own knowledge and that goes along with people who like what you think was the most search things is not always. How this game works is I’m going to give you three keywords. That people use to search on Amazon and using Helium 10’s search volume estimator.

Bradley Sutton: I have the search for the estimated search volume. About how many people search for these monthly. And I’m going to give you three search volumes and you’ve got to match the keyword with the search volume right now, you know by the way, I always kind of throw in curveballs. There might be a trick in here, there might not be, but in other words, you’re guessing. Because sometimes people think, oh, this is too obvious and it’s because it’s something that nobody would have expected. You have no idea what to expect. And since your company is PickFu, I use three keywords here that start with a pick. All right?. Here’s the three keywords. They are pickleball, pickled ginger and pickle Rick. All right, a couple of these, I’m not even sure what they are. These are just stuff I found. All right, now one of these keywords has the lowest one has about only 250 monthly searches. The middle one has about 6,000 and the one that has searched the most has over 13,000 monthly searches. Okay, the three words are pickleball, pickled ginger and pickle Rick. which one is which?

Justin Chen: Let’s see. I don’t know what pickle Rick is, I’m going to say that’s the lowest one. 

Bradley Sutton: I don’t know what that is either. I’m a matter of fact, I’m looking at that now. Okay. I think I know what it is now. All right, go ahead, continue.

Justin Chen: And then I’m going to guess a pickled ginger is the middle and pickleball on top.

Bradley Sutton: All right, you got as almost everybody does one right.  Out of 10 times we’ve done this game, only one person has gotten all three. Pickleball is the number one search, but pickle Rick, actually it’s number two and pickled ginger is the lower one. But I’m looking at pickle Rick on Amazon and it looks like a character from Rick and Morty or is what I’m thinking.

Justin Chen: Got it. Had I known that I would’ve swapped it.

Bradley Sutton: Anyways, let’s get back to serious things now. What is your 30 second tip for sellers out there or anybody in e-commerce? This could be about, you know, about split testing and it could be about being a software engineer. It could be about frat parties at Cal Berkeley. I mean, whatever you want that’s of value in 30 seconds or less for our listeners.

Justin Chen: Yeah, I mean, I think what I always advise a sellers or any entrepreneur is that you do have to test and you do need to validate your ideas at an early stage. And even for us as a, as a software company, we’re constantly talking to our customers and gathering data. And whether you’re doing that directly through conversations that you have with your customers or polling through PickFu or something like that, I think it’s super important to constantly be talking to your customers. And we do that all the time. I’ll set up calls with any customer that wants to chat. We still personally man the live chats and there’s just much valuable data that you can gather from asking them about how they use their product, how they discovered your product and what they would like to see improved.

Bradley Sutton: All right, that’s awesome. Now normally I, at this point I would ask the guests how we contact you, but actually we already have a website that we direct people to. Okay. guys out there, if you know, you know, we’re not like affiliates, you know, we have partnerships and we don’t really do affiliate programs with people. This is like the only one that I know of that we are actually affiliates because we like it much. Guys go to pickfu.com/helium10 and on that page you will be able to use a discount. I believe it’s like 50% your first one. But guys give it a try. If you’re selling on Amazon, if you’re selling on Shopify, if you’re writing a book like his, I never even thought about that. You know like the split testing the Tyler book. Give it a try guys, get 50% off. Are there any other ways that people can find you guys on the internet or reach out to you for more questions?

Justin Chen: Yeah, I mean you could head to any of our social accounts. PickFu on Twitter, PickFu polls on Instagram, or you can email me [email protected]

Bradley Sutton: All right, well Justin, thank you much for joining us on the show and, and maybe we’ll have you back next year and we’ll see if any of those things that you said you might be working on are in place we can let our listeners know.

Justin Chen: Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for having me, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton: Quick note, guys, don’t forget that regardless where you are listening to this podcast, whether it’s on your iPhone or on Stitcher, on Spotify, that you hit the subscribe button that you can be notified every time we drop a new episode.