Linda Bustos is the Founder and Content Creator at Ecom Ideas, a platform dedicated to unveiling the latest UX and technical trends in the e-commerce industry. In her role, she sources and publishes in-depth insights for digital marketers, product managers, and designers, including a comprehensive weekly newsletter. Having served as the Director of Digital Content Strategy at Elastic Path, the VP of eCommerce at CorporateGift.com, and the Founder and eCommerce Consultant at Edgacent, Linda has a wealth of experience in creating compelling online shopping environments.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [01:35] How Linda Bustos transitioned from content creation to founding Ecom Ideas
• [07:10] The importance of inclusivity in merchandising and how it's transforming online shopping
• [13:10] Leveraging visual search to preserve sales for out-of-stock items
• [18:01] The role of product finder quizzes in e-commerce and how they help refine customer choices
• [24:21] What are the challenges of evolving mobile e-commerce experiences?
• [27:04] How AI and emerging technologies may alter the future of online shopping
• [42:09] Efficient workflows and the creative process behind successful content creation
• [54:43] Personal growth: recognizing seasons of hustle and balance in work and life

In this episode…

eCommerce businesses must juggle multiple trends, new technology integrations, and sales strategies alongside evolving consumer demands and preferences. How can you elevate your online store with creative approaches to drive sales?

With deep involvement in various facets of content creation, Linda Bustos understands how to curate shopping experiences for diverse customers. You can leverage interactive digital shopping to allow consumers to view products in multiple settings. For instance, some apparel brands allow customers to select product models based on their unique body types, simulating in-store fitting experiences. Similarly, implementing visual searches to provide alternatives to out-of-stock items mitigates lost sales opportunities and increases customer retention while offering product finder quizzes personalizes the user experience and increases conversion rates.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris meets with Linda Bustos, the Founder and Content Creator at Ecom Ideas, to talk about e-commerce innovation through strategic website integrations. Linda breaks down the importance of detailed product data, the integration of UX design practices, and the constant evolution required to keep up with industry trends.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt
• Linda Bustos on LinkedIn
• Ecom Ideas
  ‍

Quotable Moments

• "eCommerce is not just about selling products; it's about creating experiences that resonate with diverse consumers."
• "The beauty of blogging is it lets you carve your path towards the area that you're passionate about."
• "AI isn't just a tool; it's the future artisan sculpting the online shopping journey."
• "Every product has a story, and inclusivity is part of telling that story holistically."
• "Staying ahead in e-commerce means listening to the community and acting on emerging trends."

Action Steps

1. Embrace the diverse expectations of your online audience by including inclusive features on your e-commerce site: This is effective because it caters to a broader customer base and enhances the shopping experience.
2. Leverage visual search and AI to provide customers with alternatives for out-of-stock items: This strategy can save potential lost sales and improve customer satisfaction.
3. Incorporate product finder quizzes to help guide customers to the products that best match their preferences: This personalized approach can significantly enhance the online shopping experience and increase conversions.
4. Stay up-to-date with the latest e-commerce strategies by following industry experts and resources like Ecom Ideas: Learning from trendsetters like Linda Bustos ensures you're implementing forward-thinking practices that align with current market demands.
5. Explore the implementation of AR technology to improve product visualization for your customers: AR can offer a more immersive and convincing shopping experience, ultimately driving higher engagement and sales.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the show.

William Harris  0:13  

Hey, everyone, I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt, and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as your apparel, your business and your personal life. I'm excited about the guests that I have today. Linda Bustos, Linda is the founder and chief e-commerce truffle pig. Wait a minute, am I allowed to say this? I just need to call out that you wrote that. I would never call someone a pig. But I'm reading what you wrote to me here. So okay. Yes, yes. e-comm. Okay, at ecomideas.com. We're just gonna keep going on here. A free in depth resource for e-commerce marketers, product managers, conversion, optimizers. And designers. Her career has spanned from being the head of content at Elastic Path to being the founder, e-commerce consultant that Edgacent to being an in house VP of e-commerce at corporategift.com. And now back to content creation at Ecom Ideas. We'll get into that a bit later, Linda now focuses full time on finding and sharing the breaking UX and technical trends in e-commerce. She posts daily inspiration to the Ecom Ideas LinkedIn page and publishes an in depth weekly newsletter. Linda, I'm really excited to have you here today. Thank

Linda Bustos  1:35  

you for that intro. William. It's been a year in the making this podcast. So

William Harris  1:42  

it has Yeah, we started well, I mean, I've known you for years. I want to say that we met I think I just reached out to you, when you were still leading content at Elastic Path. And some of the stuff that you wrote, and I had just gotten into the e-commerce space. And we kind of have been friends ever since. But yeah, this podcast, we started working on this nearly a year ago. So it's exciting to kind of dig into it with you. Yeah, it's funny, because you

Linda Bustos  2:05  

know, a year ago, this was sort of like just a little seedling, in my mind, I bought the domain. And I started hacking on a website in Webflow. And I kind of got stuck in whole bunch of areas. And then when he reached out, he said, Hey, I'm having a podcast I want to have you on I'm like, yeah, let me build something first, because I don't think I'm gonna be a very interesting guest at this point in my life right now. And it kind of gave me a little bit more nudge to like, keep working on the project. Gotta get interesting at any

William Harris  2:33  

point. Yeah, well, so I'm excited because we're gonna be talking about what to build next, and just finding Feature Ideas for your online store. And that's kind of like the culmination of what Ecom Ieas is, is like ideas and inspiration, but why don't you take me through what, what is Ecom Ideas.

Linda Bustos  2:54  

So it's kind of a hodgepodge of a bunch of things. So essentially, my original idea was, I am a huge fan of Animaniacs, ever since I was a kid, I think, is really smart. So they had this one little segment where it was like, Good idea, bad idea. And they kind of, you know, made jokes. And I always kind of thought that like, it would be fun to do kind of like a tick tock video kind of series of good idea, bad idea, you know, for e-commerce UX, and stuff like that. So that was like my original idea going back to like 2019. And I went back to Elastic Path to do content and stuff like that. And then you know, my journey went, here, there and everywhere. But that was always kind of in the back of my mind, I was like, okay, like, I actually want to try this. And I can't do it while I'm working full time, because it's just, it's too much, it's too much work to put in, too, because you actually have to go out and do the survey and like look at 600 sites. And that's always been my process with blogging or consulting or in house, you know, you have to communicate as a business, you know, VP of e-commerce or whatever you need to communicate to you designers and developers on like, what the business case is what the use cases. And you always want to find live examples, designers like that, you know, you want to look under the hood of how other people have executed their solutions. So I've just always had like a big database like inside my head and actually, in my files on my machine, have screenshots and reference examples and all that kind of stuff, like my little fan deck that I would use if I'm building a deck for a client or whatever. And I kind of also thought about that I would like to one day, organize that and publish that in a website. But all of those screenshots need some kind of context around it to be meaningful, some kind of story around it in some kind of organization. And that takes time. So I didn't think I ever really wanted to blog again, because reading is taxing and mobile screens, you know, it's just hard to scroll. So I wanted to build I wanted to build a resource where it was more database like and where you could hone in directly like you're a product team that's working on the cart, right maybe you found in your analytics that you're underperforming, and you've got a huge abandoned Then at the current stage, and now you got to say like, Okay, we want to run some AV tests, or we want to see like how we can evolve the experience, or we want to increase average order value, whatever your goal is. So I wanted to build something where when you're in the moment, you could just be lined there, you don't need to read an article, you don't need to go through stuff, you get kind of like a list. And if you want more detail, you can kind of expand it open and get that. But through the last year of me sort of like building that under ground, like in the background, it took me a year to build this, I have been posting stuff on LinkedIn. And I also found that just sharing little examples are like cool things that sites are doing that that got kind of popular on LinkedIn. So I kind of branched it out to where Ecom Ideas is not just the database of stuff that you can work on, but also something that you can kind of get snackable content every day, you know, nibble over here, and like, oh, there's that cool thing. So you can remember it maybe two months or three months later, like, Oh, I remember there was that site that did that cool thing with the image gallery or something might be useful for a client or your own project.

William Harris  6:05  

I like that. Um, you break in the back with the Animaniacs. You remember? Because I especially like that you brought up good idea. Bad idea. Do you remember my favorite good idea? Bad idea was whistling while you work? Versus Do you remember what the antithesis was?

Linda Bustos  6:21  

I have seen that one. I can't remember the punch line. Versus

William Harris  6:25  

whistling while you eat. There was always hilarious to me. Like you see him like whistling while you were good. I do. Right? And then like whistling while you eaten is like blowing crumbs everywhere. That's good. So I like Ecom Ideas. I like this idea of some snackable content, I have enjoyed your daily posts, and you are finding some very interesting things on on the internet, just different websites. There's a couple of topics that I feel like have really been four topics that you've been showing more and more of lately. Let's call them almost trends, if you would, one of those that you've been talking about a lot lately is brands bringing inclusivity to merchandising, what do you what do you mean by that?

Linda Bustos  7:10  

Well, I think that for a long time brands have been, you know, like consumers themselves have been asking and demanding, you know, have more size inclusivity have more skin tone inclusivity in the products that you're developing in your advertising, that's what we want to see. And that needs to trickle down into digital experiences, too. So I've started to see some first movers implement, you know, useful features. The first one that I saw was Aloe yoga. And they had on their product page, you could they had a little like flag on the Image Gallery, where if you click that you could swap out the model, and totally like, replace all the images with a different body body model. And then I saw on brilliant Earth, they had this AR thing with a skin tone slider where you can kind of roll it up and down. And it will demonstrate the piece of jewelry on different skin tones and stuff. So those two things was like, Okay, this is how brands are translating that into a digital experience. And then I started seeing that pick up more and more like now I can probably rattle off like six or seven different apparel sites that have brought in the toggle swap model thing. And I'm noticing some other stuff. So as I'm working through them, we don't just talk about it. collect those things.

William Harris  8:22  

You aren't showing them you actually sent me Yeah, well, you you send me some examples. So I want to I want to pull up let's actually just go through these. Let's see if the right here. Okay, so we've got these right here, you put this together. So okay, homepage, do classic tees Is this one of the ones that we should show.

Linda Bustos  8:42  

This is one of them. So here you've got like a hero banner, where you've got originally, they just started with that first one that you saw there. That one guy that was the hero banner, and then they layered in this tabbed experience where you can actually pick which which version you want to see. And now this is like micro, right? This isn't inclusive across the entire board. But it's a start. And and it's nice to put the user in control. And so my little dopamine receptors lit up when I saw this, you know, kind of very unique experience.

William Harris  9:22  

It is and I haven't seen that on any other website. So I like you said it's a unique experience. And it's one of those like subtle little ways that you can say, Hey, we are listening to you. We care about you. Yeah, let's see. What about what's the next one I should pull up? Let's

Linda Bustos  9:37  

pull up this Dick's Sporting Goods one because, you know, extended sizes and widths and that can also be tall, right? Those kinds of things are hard to find in product catalogs. And especially for Dick's Sporting Goods. They have a cross brand catalog, right? So it's nice to be able to scroll through something and see a badge here like that this product has extended sizes but also to have a collection filter or a category filter to be able to hone in on that. And that comes back to product data, right? You have to be mindful about that. And actually, you know, put that into your, into your back end and into your filters and, you know, create that filter. It takes initiative on the retailer's part, but it ends up being really helpful. I mean, I'm an awkward size and a bunch of different things. So I really appreciate, you know, being able to filter. And sometimes, you know, you have to actually provide those filters.

William Harris  10:33  

Do they have one here for monkey arms, because similar to you, I am awkward sizes from my arms, I was always told anytime I'd go fitted for like a tux or something that like, wow, you have monkey arms, got long, long arms for that. Maybe. So the thing that I like about this is you caught up the data being an important piece of this, like, somebody can't just throw this up there, if they don't have the data that supports that they have these different things that would be able to be toggles. As we continue more and more into AI, I see this next level of data being even more imperative, because your AI agent is going to browse through all of these different websites and find the ones that only are relevant to the sizes that you actually could wear. And so having that date, I think is imperative to success in the future of e-commerce.

Linda Bustos  11:25  

I agree. And we can't put all the onus on AI to figure things out, you know, just visually, like, if you looked at that thumbnail, would the AI be able to tell that there are additional variants, you know, an extended sizes, it can't read that just from an image or a title. You have to I mean, maybe it could read the size variant values. But the models need to be trained, like the AI models need to be trained. And I'm not sure we're there yet. But I'd love to be part of that a requirements gathering for AI company. Yes. Getting you there.

William Harris  12:04  

Yes. What's the next one that we should look at the good American,

Linda Bustos  12:09  

the good American and the aloe together? This is what I was talking about, about being able to change sizes. And this is what I love about posting things on LinkedIn, because I was chipped off of those things by the community. So somebody who works on good American said, hey, here, we're doing that. And then someone who works with athletic say, Hey, we're doing this, and I wouldn't have found that on my own. So I really appreciate, you know, people helping me out and being my third pair of eyes. And so yeah, this is like kind of a cool experience, you'll notice that not every single product has alternative images. So it's on the way there, it's not completely there. And the other question is, how many how many sizes should you have like is three enough, but these things are very labor intensive to get, you know, additional photoshoots additional product, you know, like on the operations side, so I'm not knocking anyone here for you know, having an MVP. But yeah, it's really interesting, because this is totally starting to trend after I saw it, I want to three sides. Now I'm starting to see it everywhere.

William Harris  13:10  

Oh, that's great. Well, and I'm going to call this out for people that are listening and maybe aren't watching the YouTube video or anything is, you know, there's there's literally just a size thing says view model size, and it's got 08 16. And when you click on one of those options, that it shows you all of these clothes in a model of that size, which I think is just visually able to help see what this would look like, maybe on your body type, where I want to see this goat next. And I think we're getting close to that. I've got the apple vision Pro, I don't know if you've had a chance to play around with it or not. But you can actually see this on a 3d model allo Yoga does as well, again, we'll call them out. J Crew actually has a really good one too. I like their app on there. But I want to see this for my actual body. And so I feel like we can't be that far from me. We don't have you know, your your 3d scan. And when I go to that I actually see me I see my body, my face on all the products so I can see what do I actually look like in this particular, you know, piece of apparel or whatever this shirt, these pants or whatever that might be? Yeah.

Linda Bustos  14:23  

Have you played with any of the like, there's a few of them. AR just using your mobile phone, I think are some of those that will take take selfie kind of version of that. My question around that is how the rendering is done. Is it just math that takes you know, they have a base image and then it overlays it superimposes it on you? How realistic is that? I haven't looked into it.

William Harris  14:54  

That's where that's where it's I like this as an option here and I'll bring it the logo on here too. Just because you called them out. But that's where I think we're not quite there yet. Because I don't know that there's good enough data on the actual products themselves to know how it would fit every different possible body shape algorithmically like like the there's no way for that overlay or that that AI to understand, oh, this is exactly the exact cut in dimension at every different unless you've uploaded that data, I just don't think that's there for most people.

Linda Bustos  15:32  

That's when it comes to product data, right? Because I think that would require brands to first of all, like, there can be a lot of variants within even a single brands size family, you can buy Levi's, three different styles need to size up on a style of size down. And then there's also like just body proportions and where things fit. So you would almost need like a point by point, like, you'd need to run the garment through a scanner, maybe for the cut. And then like, I think it's possible, but I think it needs a lot of brand participation. And then that's a lot of data that I don't know, anybody has, you know, really taken that project on. And then you might be a reseller. Like if you're a DTC brand, fine. You're getting it all from the same manufacturer. But if you're a reseller, like your Dick's Sporting Goods, you might have kind of like, a lot of gaps in that experience. And

William Harris  16:22  

I think that's where, you know, Wayfair has the you can, you know, the 3d AR stuff that you can see, but it's not for every product, right? And so the same concept, I think, would be where, if you are a reseller, the ones that supply you with the data that you need to be able to do that you do and the ones that don't, you don't. But yeah, I agree with you.

Linda Bustos  16:40  

So, so here's the, but then that, you know, if you promote as like a merchandiser, you promote the brands that give you richer data, then maybe that motivates brands, like if they want to be on the first page of Nordstrom, in their collections and stuff, and they want to actually get seen and sold then they have to absolutely, yeah,

William Harris  17:02  

data intensive. I think we're, we have the capability. I don't know anybody. I haven't seen anybody doing it yet, but I think that it's around the corner. Um, I've got the aloe yoga one pulled up for a lot of people. Yes. I've got the aloe yoga one pulled up. So what's happening here? Is it this little button looks like change model and that you can pick the different model in

Linda Bustos  17:23  

Nice. Yeah. And when one of the downsides of my little auto looping animations is it kind of, it kind of looks like it's doing it itself. I took I took a screen recording of this. So this is not flipping back and forth. I see

William Harris  17:41  

your cursor right here. I like that. Yeah, so now we've got savage X. Fenty. I didn't even pronounce it correctly. I'm not cool. I don't know. If I mispronounce anything. So I think if I ever mispronounce, let me know. Alright, so what's going on here with this one?

Linda Bustos  18:01  

It's lavage servoz. So these are like just different. I mean, this is what I love about UX designers, and, you know, creativity, and people owning their own templates. So this is a different approach for the same sort of idea. They presented it differently. And they've also, you know, added a little bit of annotation about the size, you know, the height and the size and the name of the models, and also thrown in, you know, different genders in here. So, definitely, this is the principle is one thing, but the actual implementation and the design patterns that you choose is up to you. And I like to see the variety. I think there's another example in there too, where they've tried a different approach to the same thing as well, which is a Dormy here. So they've decided to bake the very obvious chips, like right into the buy box on the right, so you can't really miss it. And again, this isn't animating on its own. That's me clicking. But I noticed on these sites, it's not going to be on every single SKU. Sometimes I've had to painfully go through the catalog to find examples. And so they're probably either taking an incremental approach on like their best sellers and doing those first, or some other method.

William Harris  19:17  

But it makes sense. Again, there's a lot of time, you definitely don't need to do it. Yeah, once there's a lot of time take your best sellers. And I would imagine, run the A B tests. I don't know if I've seen any A B tests around this. Have you seen any data to suggest that this is working better or worse at let's say, either one, driving sales or to reducing returns?

Linda Bustos  19:44  

Yeah, if I can ask the G for one superpower I wish I had, what I call it X ray vision into the product teams and if their testing and what their you know, decision making is behind these kinds of things, because sometimes I hack it by like Returning to a site a month later and seeing if they're still doing it the same way. And sometimes features get dropped. And that's a clue. Oh, man, I really wish I really wish people would share it publicly,

William Harris  20:11  

somebody will. Right. But I'm curious. I don't know that I've seen any, any studies about this yet? And I'd be curious to see whether or not it's making a business difference. This is a you can make a social difference. But also just curious if it's making a business difference as well.

Linda Bustos  20:28  

Yeah, it's hard to it's hard to quantify too, because you can always measure lift and sales and even engagement, but you have to match that back to the cost, like the operational cost of the production and all that kind of stuff. And that doesn't really get fed into the tools, that's not part of your cost of goods sold. Like even in your accounting package. It's kind of like a, it's a bigger thing. So I think even if it wins in a B test, then you have to still make a decision whether you're going to roll this out just for flagship products, or you're going to make this a core part of your experience and your brand point. It's tough. It's a tough one. What's

William Harris  21:04  

going on with this last one, I think in this category GIMs will be watching here.

Linda Bustos  21:12  

Yeah, so this is just another twist on implementing this. And skins is another? I mean, a lot of them do. I'll tell you something, a lot of them do it more for like the lingerie category. And I just don't want to have my LinkedIn feed full of like half naked people. So I was looking for, I'm always looking for like, Okay, what's in the lounge where what's in the t shirt. So I apologize. This is like, this screen keeps looping back and forth. But it's hard to find skews is what I'm trying to say with within the skins catalog. This one I found they had like two sizes that were flippable in there. But definitely not every product has this. So again, I think it's just you know, there's a high cost to this. And they're trying to, you know, hedge their.

William Harris  22:01  

Here's the brilliant earth one that you were talking about. Right? You're talking about the skin tone right here. Yeah. And here's the example of that.

Linda Bustos  22:14

That is cool. Yeah, and this is totally custom. This is not like a commercial outfit. You can get

William Harris  22:21  

Yeah, so there's just like a dragger little slider here that they have where you can click on this to see lighter skin tone down to darker skin tone. So you can see how the jury looks on you, which makes a lot of sense, because, you know, different jewelry could look significantly different, depending on your skin tone.

Linda Bustos  22:38

Literally, something to do with like metals, different metals are supposed to complement different undertones and all that kind of stuff. So it's nice to be able to have some kind of visualizer. Especially this is an $1,850 Canadian, which is probably like $300 us with this exchange rate. But no, but like, you know, high ticket stuff, you want to have as much visualization where it's not cartoony and artificial, but like as general life as possible.

William Harris  23:07  

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that looks that looks pretty impressive. Okay, it looks like we got a couple more on these ones here. There's the 1999. What's going on with this one?

Linda Bustos  23:24  

Yeah, so this is like, this is just cool. I mean, they're not doing this on mobile, sadly. But I thought that that like kind of it reminds me like a billboard, you know, that you can just see like, they have diversity and skin tones and ages here. And I think a beauty beauty category that's really important and highly on trend. If you're ever on Instagram, and you watch like there's some, there's some accounts that post like what brands are dropping soon. And if it doesn't have an inclusive shade range, it gets called out by the community right away. So I think brands are like really responding and making sure every touchpoint is you know, they've got the right. Just merchandising, right, the right visuals to help you not just preview stuff. I mean, everything is going to look different on individuals, but it's bringing inclusivity into product content.

William Harris  24:21  

And then you've got Jones road here too.

Linda Bustos  24:26  

Yeah, and this is kind of interesting. I have suspect that this is like a creative use of the meta objects property and Shopify because this is like a secondary gallery. And this is like a compare shades so you can just flip through the shade and then kind of eyeball it by skin tone now I mean, they could take this a bit further by you, you choose your skin tone first, then you don't have to look at everybody and you don't have to have the light skin as the default there. I think that might also be a miss but it's it's very interesting, like explore against that they built and I think I've only seen it on Jones road here, done like this, that

William Harris  25:04

is really cool. And it is, I can only imagine how different every one of these different shades could look on each individual person. So being able to see it on a wide variety helps you to get a better sense of what you'd probably be getting into. Yeah, that's cool. So okay, you can kind of see if you're looking at this, the next topic that I know that I've been seeing you bring up more than once, at least on LinkedIn here, which is features to save sales for out of Scott stock skews. Let's say conceptually, tell me what's going on with this. And then we'll look at some of these examples as well.

Linda Bustos  25:44

Yeah, so like this is talking about stuff that's already out of stock, you've always had the kind of traditional you may like, but I think that technology and particularly visual search API's are able to actually do a better job at showing you something close to what you just missed out on. So I like this ASOS feature in their wish list. Because oftentimes you build a wish list and it's months or years before you come back to it. And that thing's long gone. So I like how they've kind of, you know, just made it a simple one click and now you've got a pre filtered and visually relevant set. Yeah. So I really love that one. They're not on Shopify. They're the only one I've ever seen do it this way. But there is there are some Shopify sites using this also on the product pages to do the same kind of thing. So I think we've got here ello. Again, they're doing aloes, one of my favorites. Yeah, they're like, they're like the Crutchfield

William Harris  26:48  

sharpener, and said like that,

Linda Bustos  26:51

like, shooting fish in the barrel of like, cool and unique and innovative solutions. But yeah, so here, how they've implemented is like, if you have this stock notifier. And you're just don't want to wait an indefinite amount of time for something that may never come back, you can just pop down to visually similar items. And it's hyper relevant to what you're looking at. And there is a there's a solution that does it on that Princess Polly one that I showed you after. Because Princess Polly is doing it kind of more in a different style of widget, they put it into the panel here. But I connected with the vendor that does this chip to me off of it. And now I'm I've got stage fright. I don't remember what their tool is called. But I asked them, I'm like, so are you actually scoping these recommended skews to what matches the size variance that is out of stock that they clicked on? And they said yes. So I think that's important, too, right? Because you don't want to be pogo sticking through a bunch of different skews and just be back at square one with not having your available. Yeah, yeah, things that you can do with

William Harris  28:06

for 132 ways, right? And so it's like if all of a sudden I click over see similar items, and it shows me a bunch of things that I like, and it's like, yeah, but we don't have 32 You're like well, that's a bummer. You just wasted my time and got me excited. And now I'm frustrated right so I can see how that's important. Yeah, go back to the aloe one though to you. I want to go back to the other one. I really liked this right up here then too. So let's say that you do click on this show see similar items and you go down there, but then they said there's really good bar that they're adding right up above here. It still says notify me once in stock. And I think that's really good because what if I don't want the other sort of things I looked at it but I don't want that rather than scrolling back up. It's just still one click to say yep, notify me when back in stock and I like that. Totally. Especially

Linda Bustos  28:55  

when you've got an evergreen catalog like aloe has right like if you're anything like me you find something you like you buy every single color. So I'll wait a month for that variance to come back in. And speaking of here's Lululemon, right I have a few defined jackets myself and different variants and but what I really liked about this was when the color in the cart was no longer available it's just like pick a different color. Like why start your journey over again like just try another color there's something in your size still available and I frictionless or low low

William Harris  29:32  

I has a call out Lululemon here real quick right now because I've got teenage daughters and it's wild to me how well Lulu has done in that demo, where even the bag is the thing that is a must have like you have to have the bag to carry around the stuff which a lot of other brands can't say that they've got their bag is the thing that people also want that well so well done to Lulu Lemon is like the Stanley Cup of Absolutely 100% That's well, okay. So okay, you've also got the third thing that we wanted to talk about that have been really let's just say, you've been finding a lot of interesting innovations in lately are the product finder quiz trends and, and this has been around for a few years, but I feel like people have been leveling up what this actually takes place, especially with the introduction of better AI generative AI that's just more capable of understanding. So let's dig into some of these ones. What are what are we looking at for this one here?

Linda Bustos  30:37  

Well, one of the reasons why quiz quizzes and product finders there's a few different reasons but like one of the big ones is to try and get some first party data that we're losing with the cookie pocalypse, which we just got a little extension on, we found out last week from the Google site. Google Chrome is gonna like, again, for like, yeah, he's gonna live for Yeah. So so we'll see what happens with that. But you know, these kinds of things are like alternatives to going through, especially on mobile devices, alternatives to going through big long collection lists, and then applying filters, which are hard to fiddle with. And everything like this is more of like replicating that helpful, knowledgeable sales associate in the physical world that would ask you some probing questions and then give you a recommendation. And it's also better than Well, I should use, I shouldn't claim better, but, you know, personalize that personalization engines try and attempt this kind of stuff. But they often don't have that explicit, you know, user input stuff, it's trying to do it on the back end through like all different other types of Wizardry. So this is like, a little bit more focused and putting the user in control. And the user understands why you've presented these, you know, recommendations for them. And it can also give them an idea of what kind of attributes and what kind of product attributes they should be thinking about. Because sometimes you're browsing something, and you're not even thinking, Oh, I should be thinking about my hair type in this or like how frequently I wash my hair. Maybe that matters. So yeah, I'm seeing creative places to put these quizzes like interesting touch points. So I like this in the banner here, where it's kind of like, I don't think a lot of people are gonna notice it necessarily. But a mica has this quiz, they put it here in the banner, they also put it in the PDP as like a chat bot. I don't know if I sent you that example in this template here. But we might, if we get to it, I'll call it out again. But this is like at the collection page. Okay, these ones I'm showing you the touch point at the collections where people are embedding quizzes. So Oxford takes that Amiga banner idea and takes it a little bit further, by putting the interactivity actually into the hero block itself. And this, they also do this on mobile, it works on mobile in like just a different orientation. But I don't love the layout shift in this particular one, you know, kind of goes back and forth, I would, I would massage the UI a little bit, but I liked how it was. It was visible. So that's a user cue to start using it rather than a little button. And also, you know, you don't really have to leave the experience or doesn't feel like you leave and experience. So what I didn't like about this too, and something to watch out when you're using apps to capture this functionality is you can see this as their collection template that they have in their theme. But then when they're using, when you actually get your results, it goes to the apps UI, which is very stripped down and basic and not as not as not as optimized as the actual brand template. So I think you can use apps to kind of kick the tires and see if customers actually engage in it and use it as an MVP. And then if it really works, and look at your product team building something native for you. But there's always a risk of just going ahead and building something without having data. So yeah, I think this is fine to kind of practice Yeah,

William Harris  34:07  

get the data started, right? which one comes first the chicken or the egg, the data or the what happens after so? Yeah, okay.

Linda Bustos  34:18  

This example here, I like they kind of took this madlib style and baked it to the bottom of the page. So what I like about this idea is like, yeah, if you browse, and you didn't click anything at the bottom of the list, maybe there were some filters or maybe we can just help you like scope this down, and and get a little bit more focused results set before you click through to another paginated page or before you abandon the site. I really liked that. And then I posted this last week, and then someone in the community said that they're using it, I think, I think they're from a jewelry site, but that they've used it and it's doing really well for them. They put it at the bottom of the page, and then they asked something very short like this and they said it's working well for Lisa Well, anecdotal evidence points,

William Harris  35:02  

if you get to the very bottom of a collection page, you didn't find what you were looking for. And so that's the perfect chance to ask somebody a question. Like you said, if I like thinking about things where if you were in store, what would take place? How would the next interaction go? And one of the things that I used to tell clients of mine at the time, maybe back in 2015, was, I wanted them to be the like, neighborhood, RC car online RC car store. Just that idea that it's like, I want it to feel as if you walked into your neighborhood store, right? That's the kind of like emotion that I want to pull out of people. And so this is that example where you're like, okay, great as a human being, if I walked in here, and I'm browsing the aisles, ideally, there would be somebody that says, Hey, can I help you find what you're looking for? Yeah, like, you're like, Yeah, I've got this skin type. And I'm looking for sunscreen, like, okay, great. We show you that, right. But a lot of times, we like to start off with a quick little browse first.

Linda Bustos  36:03  

Totally, I mean, I used to work in retail in high school, I sold shoes. I'm an alibi alumni. But they teach you, you get taught. I mean, if you're on commission sales and stuff like that, like you get taught to kind of read people when they when they enter, and to back off, and you know, kind of approach people different based on sort of like, maybe the state that they appear to be in, you know, like, Are they happy? Do they have their headphones on? are they picking things up? You know, do they look like they're on a mission or just killing time while their kids are at dance? Practice? Or like what, right? And that kind of digital body language gets lost on the website. But if you're a salesperson in the store, you you sometimes craft your approach, and what what you're gonna say, just based on like, it's just human interaction, right? You you try and be sensitive to people and try and like, talk to them in a human way. And it's hard to do with tools. I think there's AI that is trying to do that they're trying to pick up on, I've always talked about, like, even going back to the get elastic days, like look at how somebody sorts a collection, are they sorting by new arrivals, or by percent off or top rated? Or what? Price high to low price low to high? And that will tell you a little bit of something? How quickly are they scrolling up and down on a page by tell you what kind of, you know, energetic state they're in? But yeah, I think there's still ways to go to like bake that into digital experiences well,

William Harris  37:34

so let's take this a step further. One of the things that I brought up to someone recently is, you see, you've got sezzle, or afterpay, or some of these other Buy now pay later options. And while you have your settings, maybe with that particular website, you also have your settings with sezzle, that light carries with you to every other website that uses sezzle. Hi, the quizzes are great. But there's a lot of times where you're like, Well, I have the same list of attributes about B already across every website that I go. And I know we're talking about we're getting rid of cookies, right. But let's just say that, let's just say that there is an AI agent in the future that is your shopping AI agent that already knows that I have oily skin, I wear size, you know, 32 ways that knows all of this information about me. So now, when I do go to these different websites, I don't have to go through the same quiz on every single website just to get there. Maybe it can also say, Oh, great, you know, we integrate with XYZ AI bot that you're using. Here's the three other questions that we ask that aren't already all those other ones. So that way now, we can get more information about you that's specific to it, like what we think is necessary for us to get there. But we've already got all the other information, you don't have to go through the 15 different slides. That's what I'd like to see. Maybe I'm just getting lazy, but I don't want to answer the same questions on every single website anymore.

Linda Bustos  39:04  

Kind of like a last pass for your e-comm shopping. It's interesting because sharp, the shop app, right, they kind of track your one account across at least the Shopify ecosystem. So I think they may have something to do with that later. Or they may also share that data with like, there are some sort of what would you call it not customer data platforms, but there's like, you know, you get the epsilon ACCION like the really big ones, but there are a couple of smaller ones that I was looking at, like that fit Shopify use cases and stuff like that. And just the names of the vendors escaped me. But I was I was talking to one of their sales guys and asking about, like, can you connect the shop, you know, data into there and I think they said yes, don't quote me on that. But like if this is something you're looking into just customer data, because it takes a try personalize the site without knowing anything really about that it's a new visitor, but you've got data from other browsing and stuff, which is so anti privacy, but, you know, advertisers, it does make it does make for a more personalized web experience a shopping experience. So I think there are some, I'm just trying to figure out what that name was.

William Harris  40:21

You remember later, we can add it to the show notes accompany Sure. What's going on in this 1am I looking at here?

Linda Bustos  40:34  

What are we looking at? Oh, yes. Okay. So I'll just show you that one little one seat at the bottom, it says Get your skin decoded. This is a very subtle CTA compared to that madlib one that we just looked at. But I think that's a neat touch point to put it down at the bottom there. And then here's another clever one is that the end of the this is Fitbit here. So they have their kind of product compare tool. And then like if all of this data attributes and all the specs, you know, you're like, I don't know, this is a table full of specs. What do I do with this? Okay, how about you take a quiz instead, I thought that was a great idea to pop that call to action at the bottom of a compare table, you

William Harris  41:11  

do looking at a table full of you know, specs going back and forth. You're like, I don't know what, like, do I need this? You know, one gazillion terabytes do I do I need that I don't know how much I need, right? Or whatever this is that you're looking at. You're saying, Okay, you're just taking the quiz, we'll help you figure it out. Yeah, tell

Linda Bustos  41:30  

me the value. You know when to talk about feature benefits, like the quiz should be talking about your lifestyle benefits your needs, rather than the actual specifications? Absolutely. Here we are with this. We were talking just before about a mica with our quiz in the banner. But then they've also put it in the chat bot thing here. So this is an AI, little quiz. It's interactive. kind of pops up there

William Harris  41:58  

and very visual, right, versus just saying like, I have straight hair, it's like looking at a picture of straight hair.

Linda Bustos  42:07  

Yeah. And this is like any form to write I haven't seen too much too much written or published about like best practices for quizzes, and, you know, interactive forms like that. But you want to do less, less questions and everything. But this EVO example, so this is the Alby app. And I actually did, I'm not a podcaster. But I did a video that I'm going to be releasing soon with the founder of this company. Because after I posted this, we got connected. And it was very interesting use case because this uses AI to kind of self learn and optimize the right questions to serve to people so that Emika was more like a dialogue tree that somebody set up on the back end and kind of you know, the static questions. This is more, it'll learn over time on what not only what questions people click on, it's kind of like a choose your own adventure chat. GPT kind of thing. But it also can tie it back to revenue and other metrics. So it can self optimize over time.

William Harris  43:11

I like that. So do you know why they called this app Albie?

Linda Bustos  43:20  

I have no idea. I'll be darned.

William Harris  43:21  

Well, okay. You already sold? I was gonna say I was gonna say because every time somebody looks at how this works, they go well, that was my dad joke of the day. We're sharing your brain. That's good. So okay, we've looked at a lot of really great examples. I'm going to stop sharing right now. Three, three main things inclusivity. And merchandising that you're seeing is big trends, visual search to save out of stock sales. In the product finder, quiz trends. Let's talk about other trends that we're seeing in the future of e-commerce and where it's going, we hinted at some of our thoughts around AI in VR, the future but what do you think is? What do you think is actually novel? And here to stay versus, you know, this is this is going away?

Linda Bustos  44:09  

That's a really good question. I'm kind of not for just adding bells and whistles for the sake of adding features. You know, like, I think that's every product teams dilemma is like, I mean, simple and stripped down, websites tend to convert better, they load faster, they're simpler, there's less to weed through. So we don't want to have a pancake stack of apps and features and bells and whistles. So I think in terms of experience, I know that there is AI everywhere and I know that there's going to be some kind of product at some point where an AI is going to optimize sites. What I would be concerned is that those API's if it's like one vendor that provides that tool to say Shopify, that it'll self learn and it will make everything look the same. That's my, my fear, we

William Harris  45:05  

see that we see that a lot of other spaces, right, we see that in SAS, like, for the most part, there's a trend that happens. And then every SAS website looks identical basically for a while and, and we do see that in e-commerce as well, where there's a lot of things that ends up looking very identical. But then there's, there's iterations, right? Somebody breaks out of that mold and says, we're going to do something different. And everybody goes, Wow, that's amazing. We need to get on that. From a usability standpoint, it's nice. I do like going through Shopify checkout, because I know exactly what I'm going to experience. And so there's, there's benefits to that. But I see your point about like, losing the, the different flavors and colors of the world to just one vanilla experience. Yeah, yeah.

Linda Bustos  45:53  

One thing that I hope that happens is that mobile hardware or mobile, maybe maybe we get HTML six, or something that can solve for some of the interactivity limitations of mobile, because desktop seems to have all the fun. And all the creative stuff that I'm finding, and I'm trying to be mindful not to post desktop after desktop after desktop example, on Ecom Ideas, because, you know, it's a mobile first world and, you know, people who have been make solutions are like, Great, how do we do this on mobile? Well, you have to hide it. And now you've got more CSS or more HTML in your file or whatever, right? So mobile has so many limitations, like a hover state, you can't do and like, you know, so just those limitations. So I don't know, I hope that we somehow figure out how to get maybe even higher bandwidth so that things can be more interactive and more video game like to shop. And we move away from collection pages with like how we've always done it and product pages that are kind of grid like and scrolling and all that kind of stuff to where it is conversational, to where it is. More that like, you would be able to in product data has to match it to you, right, like we talked about, but where you could say like, Hey, I'm kind of looking for like shoes that you know, are comfortable. And I have gotten narrow foot and I want them to be yea high. And I want them to be bold. And you just say that. And then the website gives you a really focused set of result results. But that is also not missing anything. Because I think right now, if you were to do that, like there's a chance that like 50% of the available skews wouldn't match just because of semantic data or like missing attributes or something like this. So I think that it has to everything that's moving forward and progressing. Like in everything, not just commerce, and shopping, is just removing the pain points out of stuff, right? Like, everything just gets a little bit better, a little bit more convenient. And you take away a piece of friction. And that's how everything gets better and better over time. And product, like physical products always have to be looking for that one little next thing little step into the adjacent possible, right. So same with with e-commerce, you know, we got to get searched better, we got to get visual search better, we got to get personalization, that's good that isn't too generically personalized, and that doesn't slow down the site too much. And it doesn't accidentally exclude you out of a good match. Because of what we just talked Yeah, you bring

William Harris  48:28  

up a lot of good points. Maybe this is just me getting old, almost 40 here this year. And we had my wife and I we had to pick up our daughter from a birthday party the other day, and it was right next to the Mall of America. So while we were waiting for the birthday party we we just bought go to the Mall of America, and we just browse around and we walked around the mall and we walked into stores physically, I gotta say, feel kind of nice. from an efficiency standpoint, shopping online, you know, you can't Trump it. But there's something about the I don't know, walking in and seeing the way things are displayed, like you said, not just like grids and columns, but like a very much more organic look to it. And I guess that's why I kind of hope the apple vision pro continues to help solve that in some way. And they there are some decent things like I said, the aloe yoga one, it was it was kind of like you're in the environment that you would shop for it. But the product is still very much displayed in a grid like fashion. And so I don't know where how that gets solved. But I am hoping kind of like you were saying that there's a better way of maybe visualizing things that comes in the future. But on the flip side, I would say there's also a lot less potential for some of those things because I think that AI is going to remove a lot of that individual browsing where rather than saying show me similar items on a particular website, it would be my my AI bot that shows me if I say to your point, hey, I'm looking for shoes, I don't even have to go to a website ever in the first place, not even mobile first, but it's voice first, potentially, right? So Siri says, Great, you know, open up your phone, and I'll show you the three options that I've got pulled up for you that are in stock in your style in your price range, that I know also have the wide feet or whatever that is that you need all of those things. And you're like, wow, these are, these are the three top shoes, great, I'll just go and buy one of those. Now, I don't even go to the individual websites as much anymore. And so I think that that might change even how a lot of that merchandising takes place, too.

Linda Bustos  50:36  

Yeah, I mean, this is an interesting question to ask because DTC is having its moment right now, right? Like back when I started doing get elastic, it was kind of more like there was the internet retailer, top 100. And these were like omni channel retailers. And you didn't really have brands selling direct online. And then Shopify kind of ate everyone's lunch and everybody's selling direct online. But there's some friction in that, right? You have to think about the brand, or click through a meta ad or tic tock, and you have to go to its own thing. Now you're paying a shipping price to get goods from one thing. I think there is sort of like this. If there's, this is tricky, because you don't want to give anyone a monopoly. We don't want it another Amazon or like, I think shop app is trying to do this in some kind of a way being like a meta engine and a shopping engine where, but then you have the question of inventory and fulfillment, does it all come from something? I think, I think that platforms like Tiktok, for sure, Google, I think they do want to be that middleman or they are the merchant of record. And then everybody else is just a supplier. So I don't know if that will happen. It's kind of not great. For competition. And definitely, as a seller, you don't want to lose that layer of personal ability to market to customers and own your own file and own your own channels. On the customer like what they used to say. But from the customer's perspective, I mean, we as a species are going to do what's in our own best interest and what's most convenient for us. So I don't know, we'll see, despite

William Harris  52:12  

the trend all you want, but it reminds me of the image that you see sometimes where they show like the sidewalks, right, and like, like design, like like user design or something like that. And then they show like where there's a path worn through the grass. And it's like user experience, it's like, the reality is, they're going to take this path anyways. And you should have designed around what they were actually going to do. And so you could fight human behavior all you want, but kind of almost just need to be aware of it and use it to your advantage. Yeah,

Linda Bustos  52:41

what do you think of this? What do you think if in, let's say, 25 years from now, every home, every dwelling has a machine, it's kind of like a vending machine. And it has every like, it has a collection of atoms, right? And or molecules or whatever. And so it's basically all products are now files that you can 3d print through this generator that just has all the raw materials to construct your headphones, or your pair of jeans or whatever. Everything's just in zeros and ones file. And you know, everything was print on demand and brands. I mean, AI is designing all of your products. We don't even have developers anymore.

William Harris  53:21  

That's interesting. I think that's, that's more of a Jetsons episode than anything else. But here's where I think I think that there's some truth to what you're saying, which is not that everything would be print on demand. Because I think that there's always going to be a lot of opportunity for just better manufacturing elsewhere. But let's just say that I think that we will see maybe an increase in things that can be printed on demand in that capacity. I think that there's there's a lot of room for improvement there to where you could get more of what you want. Printed, like you said ones and zeros. I don't know if that becomes ubiquitous.

Linda Bustos  54:04  

I mean, I was like six or seven years old. And that was my greatest dream and vision of the future because I was I grew up watching Jetsons and I was just like, Why? Why do I have to ask my parents you know, in the toy store for the stickers, because they never wanted to buy it for me. They never want to spend money on toys or me and Barbie clothes. I just wanted to have a machine where I could think of a sticker that I wanted. I could think of Barbie clothes and it would just spit it out for me. And I think now we kind of have those kinds of that kind of tech. Yeah,

William Harris  54:33  

it's interesting rudimentary forms.

Linda Bustos  54:36  

You can go down to Michael you can get it. Yeah.

William Harris  54:39  

I actually have the cricket right here. You can't see it. It's the girls come in and

Linda Bustos  54:45  

that's the Easter egg. Is that I didn't know that and you haven't.

William Harris  54:53  

Okay, well, I want to get into more of the personal side of Linda boost dose. And I want to say Start with your backstory because again, we call this out at the beginning, you your your professional journey, leading to where you are now, you've gone from being head of content to being a consultant to being actually in house as a VP of e-commerce back into content. Walk me through the journey of where you were to where you are with Ecom Ideas here.

Linda Bustos  55:29  

Okay, well, I'll make a slight correction, I wasn't Head of Content, I was just my own like silo, like they gave me carte blanche as like a 20. Something like I remember getting hired at elastic fat like, here you go, here's the keys to the car, somebody had already started the blog and he moved on to Hootsuite became their community manager. And they gave me like this 200 subscriber little thing to like, grow in shape and take it wherever. And I was like, I think it's really rare that you know, you can get one of your very first jobs where someone like gives you that much freedom. So I'm really grateful for that. And it was really awesome ride with the elastic fat team. And I got mentored really well by Jason Billingsley, who was he was very much like a marketing and social media kind of savvy guy. And he gave me a lot of tips, and I kind of picked it up fast. And yeah, I just love creating content and media. But it's funny because that door opened up because I was like blogging as a hobby. I was working as an SEO and kind of UX kind of consultant in a web design company. That was my very first job. And I started blogging about social media, because social media Twitter and stuff was kind of like aI now, where that's just kind of being that Renaissance, social media was just breaking out, like Facebook was just opening up paths college and stuff. And businesses didn't all have their own piece of that, you know, they didn't need to go get their at symbols. Yet, it was just kind of coming up. So I saw that like that kind of blossoming. And I was like, okay, cool. Like, I see this kind of being part of SEO. And I see this as being like, the next big thing. So I'm already doing SEO and writing about SEO is on a little blog. So I'm gonna write about social media. And then I had this like, so I had this, like, little WordPress blog on my own free thing, and I was doing it, I was doing it before it turned into a job. So then it you know, naturally turned into a job. But like, I kind of feel like what I'm doing now is also doing that, like, I would love to do all of this, you know, professionally, again, I'm doing it like myself and buying my own domain this time, but you have to start like just doing it first before it like become something. But that's kind of the backstory on there. You know, I just started geeking out on on e-commerce kind of stuff. I had an e-commerce client when I was in the SEO role, which kind of like, created a monster out of me and I picked up a book by Steve Krueger, you know, and Jacob Nielsen's early work, and I was like, okay, you know, I don't know if that answer your question. If this was like a politician's job and redirect. Good, but know that so so? Did you. I don't know, I get I get flustered when I'm talking about.

William Harris  58:12  

I think that's, I think we all can so I'm gonna pull a couple more things out. There was something about Seth Godin and breaking into the tribe here that I wanted to hear more about.

Linda Bustos  58:23

Yeah, so I'll tell you that that little um, so I was on Twitter early. And, and so I had this blog, it's still out there. If you want an Easter egg for the thing, if anybody's still watching. It's so cringe, but I haven't taken down is called smug smugger.wordpress.com or something social media blogger, right. And how I accidentally started ranking in the top 10. For the head term social media is there was a little meme that went around the internet. And it was called like the Zed list. It was like the Zed list of or the Z list. Sorry, I'm Canadian. So they said, the Z list of like, you know, the Z list bloggers, the little nobodies on the internet that are talking about marketing. And I was involved with like the Social Media Club and like the blogger community here in Vancouver. And so someone in that community, Jordan, like, added my smugger blog to this tag, you know, that was kind of going around. It went around and around the internet, it got online Ad Week, it got on Seth Godin. reblogged it it went around and around and around, and I got so many like Twitter followers from that, like that was kind of like an accidental Kickstart to like, my, I don't know, like whatever getting traction as a blogger was kind of accidentally through the backdoor by being like, added to it. I

William Harris  59:43  

love it. Well, that's a reminder for everybody who's listening, no matter where you're at allowing your stage of growth through this journey is that you know, you were putting in the work though still, you were doing this. You were blogging, you're writing you were doing everything that you needed to do, and sometimes, you could do that for day after day. Do day after day after day, and not feel like you're seeing the results of it. But that all it takes is one thing. And all of a sudden, you are catapulted into this next stage of growth. And there's all this backlog of stuff that you've already done that has led to that point. And so I'd say if anything, it's just a good reminder of, of, you know, there aren't overnight successes, as much as there's a lot of work that goes into it. And then there's that catalyst that takes you to the next level.

Linda Bustos  1:00:28  

Yeah, and I think, you know, like, you started a podcast, and a lot of people kind of like, if you're going to do any type of content, or like, you're blogging, you're creating YouTube videos like tick tock, whatever you're doing, you have to carve out that time in and above what you're doing in your day. Like there's a cost to that, right. But I think a lot of people that just start putting a foot in front of another, that's how everybody who ever blew up or became successful at something started doing it, you know, like, started taking the first steps. And I'm looking back at everything that like, I'm glad that happened in my life, it was always like, yeah, I was like, just doing that kind of as a hobby, or like, I took some initiative to do it on my own. So I think it's really important. I think sometimes we can get into like, Oh, I really wish that I could do this creative thing on the side. But you know, I need to work and I need to do this kind of stuff. So maybe maybe someone listening is like, okay, I can I can just start getting my hand in the sandbox, and trying something and you never know, it might become your full time, right?

William Harris  1:01:25  

Yeah. So let's just even say examples of people who started doing videos, maybe this is played out. But early videos weren't very good and have gotten a lot better, Mr. Beast, you look at some of his earliest stuff, and it's not very good. Still, probably better than anything I can make. But he'll admit that things were not very good compared to where he is now. And you have to get those first ones out and you learn and you iterate, you grow. But you have another connection there. You really like Mr. Beast, workflow, pick me through what you like about Mr. Beast workflow, and why this resonates with you so much.

Linda Bustos  1:02:02  

So like, I'm not even familiar with his channel, I hear about Mr. Beast, you know, here, there and everywhere, because he's just such a star. But I love watching podcasts of people, you know, like rock stars, artists, you know, whatever, just people doing notable things. So he kind of went on a little bit of junket and I watched a few of his podcasts and something that he stood out to me it like, he's definitely like, the way that his mind works. He's a conversion optimization person through and through, right, because he's doing his art. And he kind of found a mastermind of other people, he reached out, you know, other people on the internet, other creators, and they started like, sharing notes with each other on like, okay, like, let's try the thumbnail. It's like, Okay, what if, what if our mouth is like half open versus closed? You know, or like, they're just micro optimizing all these little things to see like, how does this do this in the algorithm and whatever, and they're doing like, A B testing without AV testing, you know, and the hard way. And, and so that's one of the reasons why he's super successful. He thinks this way. But the other thing that he does is like his workflow, he goes hard to the wall until he just, like, when you talk about burnout, he will just keep going and going and going, because you can't lose that momentum. When you're, you're when you're a creative, right? You just have to go like 10 hour day, 14 hour day, 20 hour day, until he poops out. And then it'll take whatever break. And I'm like, Okay, I feel seen. That's just totally how I worked. And I don't know if I'll ever get to Mr. Beast level, but at least you know, like, I can't say it's, it might work. It might be I

William Harris  1:03:35  

think most artists that I know and even myself included, not that I would be considered a great artists but like, I artistic I play music and things like that too. And write poetry and like, when I get into an artistic mode, what I really want to do is just shut everything else out for the time until you're just like, I just want to complete this song. I just want to do this thing or complete this blog post you like, all notifications off, it just locked me in this room until it's done. It's I get appreciate that.

Linda Bustos  1:04:06  

Well, I think they call that shirlow, right? When you create out of flow. That is when you know time disappears. And you know better work can be done. I don't think creativity can be time boxed ahead of time. Like it's going to be 8am to 4pm. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Thursday and Friday for me like that's very hard to do if you want to build creative things. You have to let the Spirit move

William Harris  1:04:31

Yeah. 100% Who else podcasts wise or books or whatever, who else has inspired you in the way that they think about things?

Linda Bustos  1:04:46

Well, I find like Rick Rubin, inspirational like he's got this podcast that he started up now you wrote a book and kind of went on a junket himself, but like he'll, he'll interview rock stars and stuff like that it'll be funny. Like, you'll get like Steven Tyler on there and like you expect them to still be rockstars now they're talking about like their back aching and like just everyday problems. But like he's interesting because like he's obviously very successful Rick Rubin like Jeff Def Jam, right? He kind of was around the scene when it was just coming up in New York. He was like a college kid and stuff like that. And he kind of like accidentally fell through the backdoor into like, becoming a music producer and everything. But he's really interesting like, because that's an industry where a lot is riding on a drop, right? Like so many careers are shelved where there really talented artists, but they didn't have the right machine behind them or the right timing, or like they launched when another bigger artists launch and then like it's a big flop. So it's really hard. And for him to you know, work on creative projects with people. And then there's so much riding on when to launch and he's just kind of has a zen attitude towards it. Like you can't control it. Like when you launch something, you know, you can't be attached to like, that's easy for him to say, because he's successful. I think a lot of artists are like now under the bus because they launch at the wrong time. But he also said, like, you know, like, make art. Here's where I kind of disagree on this one. But he's like, make art for yourself, not for other people. Because a lot of creative artists and stuff. But I think there's a lot of like commercial artists that went on and started doing their own, like experimental, like personal projects, and they went nowhere, because they have absolutely no commercial appeal. So I disagree with him on that. I think like, if you are a creative you do have unless unless you're like fully like, it doesn't matter. You don't need to support yourself or anything. I think you do have to kind of take like a good DJ approach to it. Where like, you might have your set planned, but you need to feel the crowd, right? You don't play for yourself, you need to play for the crowd, and you need to kind of like, are like a chef, you know, you serve the food. And then you step back and you go, all right, you guys sample it, tell me what you like, I'm here to take feedback, and I'll tweak the recipe and make it better and better. So I like I like Rick Rubin, how he can kind of say I like how he says do it and don't be attached to outcome because you can't do anything on social media and like get disappointed when it didn't take off. Because that's every single day. The algorithm is merciless. Yeah. But um, I,

William Harris  1:07:18  

I like that you call it out? No. I like that. You call it out even just the DJ Elumynt where it's like, you've got your setlist you're making your art, but you've got to, you've got to, you know, see what's going on. My wife's a wedding photographer, and I've co shot with a lot of weddings back in the day. And I can remember being at some weddings where you're like this DJ is completely oblivious to the fact that everybody left the floor. He's just going on his own thing. And you're like, Dude, where are you right now. So I can appreciate that making art for the people. I understand that you met one of your heroes, in a roundabout way at a conference. I'd love to hear the story. You actually referenced him earlier here at Steve crude. So tell me about the time when you met Steve crew.

Linda Bustos  1:08:15

All right. Well, so I took Steve Cruz don't make me think book out of the local library across the street from my house. When I was just getting started. I just graduated college trying to figure out what I can do without having to take a real job. So I liked internet marketing in college and whatever. But yeah, I need I needed more resources and whatnot. So I found his book. It was very, very easy read very visually engaging and fun. Like yeah, that that just you know, peaks that just started at all created the monster I was started getting interested in UI and websites and design and all that kind of stuff. And then fast forward. I guess like five years later, maybe I was speaking at the conversion conference at Tim ashes thing. I think it was in Vegas. And I was just like, wheeling through the hallway. And Tim comes out. He's like, Hey, are you are you available? Are you free now? Because we got this panel starting and we need one more. Right? And I'm like, Yeah, sure. Next thing you know, I'm sitting next to Steve crew on this panel. I've got pictures of this. So not not flying. Yeah, I'm sitting next to you, Steve crew taking questions from the audience. We're all joking laughing and I'm like, wow, this is like a very surreal I

William Harris  1:09:29  

mean, to be to be plucked up and just not even prepared and you're like, hey, great. Hop up on stage and like, wait, what? Okay, and Steve is here. I can only imagine if you had a nervous

Linda Bustos  1:09:46  

I was so excited. It was fun. It was really fun. Yeah,

William Harris  1:09:51

it was really, um, speaking of wheeling through things. I sometimes like to ask people about maybe interesting roadtrip stories. And there was one that you brought up to me before not a road trip. I don't I don't know if you guys drove there. But you, Matt and Mark back at adjacent, had a very interesting travel experience in Mississippi. What happened to Mississippi?

Linda Bustos  1:10:21  

So I usually travel alone, but like I started adjacent with Mark Miller and Matt Dionne, who they're huge fans of you, I remember we met up in, in your part of town, we had a client out there. But on this time we were going actually this client that we went to see, I think became your client. I think we may

William Harris  1:10:38  

have been, I think I know who you're talking about. Yeah.

Linda Bustos  1:10:43

Yeah, yeah. So we're on the on route to go see them. And I was on a connection flight. And I was in a wheelchair at the time, and they didn't load my chair on the connection flight. So I got into Memphis airport at like, midnight in the morning, no chair. And like, if I hadn't been traveling with my business partners, that, you know, were able to like piggyback me or it was days before and they at the airport didn't have they didn't have any, like chairs that you could push yourself manually. They had these kind of rigid, weird things that were just for the airport use. So I mean, if it wasn't for them, but they get they gave me like this little rascal scooter, like the electrical ones you use for a few days. And that was that was a that was interesting. And then and then when I got it, it was all busted up. Like the wheels were ripped off. It was tons and tons of damage. But I'm just grateful because I usually would travel alone, I was grateful to have that backup with me. But that was that was like the worst trip

William Harris  1:11:45  

I can't even imagine. That's, you know, it's one thing to lose your luggage. It's a whole different thing to be like, Oh, you guys literally did not bring my wheelchair here. What am I supposed to do right now.

Linda Bustos  1:11:58  

And they didn't want to take responsibility of it because it's actually a contract or up from the airport. It's not the airline's fault. But the airline I think good have to I don't even remember what happened. Thank

William Harris  1:12:10  

goodness for good friends, though. It's always a blessing, right? Yeah. One of the other things that I like to ask people about is how they're up arrowing their personal life. And so we were talking about this a little bit before, up arrow comes from Knuth up arrow notation, which is mathematical notation for making massively big numbers. But I like this idea of a we're up at a rolling business up throwing our personal life as well. What are some areas of your personal life that you're constantly working towards improving? Or maybe that you wish you would be able to work towards improving more?

Linda Bustos  1:12:50  

Okay, so I like the birdsong to everything, there is a season, you know, there's a time to mourn and for the Psalter and the ashes and Liana and pile up a whole bunch of to dues for yourself to like, self improve. And then there's another time to do something else. Right now, I'm very much in builder mode for Ecom Ideas, and I'm wanting to take all of my energy and push it up the hill. I know there'll be another season for introspection, and you know, peeling the onion, and all that kind of stuff. And that'll come when it comes, right now, I really feel like okay, I want to put all my energy towards like, being productive, and all that kind of stuff and up airwing like the project. So I've kind of not added a whole list of like, things I need to change, and you know, more more energy to think about. So just focusing on that, but you know, life life will, sometimes if you put off doing stuff, life will like force it upon you, you know, either put you on the sidelines or anything. So if that happens, I have to be open to that. And so in the meantime, you know, I try and be kind to myself and be patient and kind to other people. Because you know, we're all not perfect. So

William Harris  1:13:58  

what prompted the question there? Because we had talked about this before? And I like your answer here of this. There's a season and everything. And so I wanted people to hear that too, because I feel very strongly that way as well. When I was building element, I can remember there was there was no time for anything else. There were there was a season it was it was three years where I went to bed at I think like 4am and up by 7am Every single day, seven days a week. It was like, that's what it took at that moment. And I was happy to do it. Right. Like like there's like you said, as an artist, you're like, This is the thing that I'm doing, eventually get to a point where you can't always be that way. There's a season. But I do agree with you that there are seasons and it's okay to recognize that you might be in one of those seasons right now. You don't have to feel bad because you're not talking about how you're wearing your whoop to figure out your heart rate, variability and whatever else right.

Linda Bustos  1:14:52  

Yeah, yeah. And it's hard as entrepreneurs or like as creative people to it's always tempting because Things are open ended, right? And you can work as long and hard as you possibly can stand. And that's not always helpful. There's like that invisible line of where burnout or overtraining, if you're, you know, a runner or an athlete, right? It's kind of that invisible line. And when you cross over it, you hurt, you know, and you're injured for a little while. And you can do that, like in your energy, and you can burn out too. So it's tough because like, when you're self employed, or you know, you're you have set goals, and you know, that like, it's, it's all resting on your shoulders, it's tempting to put everything in and then there's diminishing returns. So I think my biggest challenge is, you know, like, respecting that line and being aware of that line,

William Harris  1:15:41  

the effort to go from 95. But I also know, the effort to go from 95% to 98% can sometimes be 100 times more than it was to go from 90% to 95%. Right. And so recognizing that, that diminishing return, and you say yes, it's worth getting to that that level.

Linda Bustos  1:16:01  

Yeah. Yeah, I don't expect this season to last forever. I've kind of like just, you know, accepted it for now. But that's

William Harris  1:16:09

good. We all have, Linda, we are at time, it has been absolutely amazing talking to you today, sharing your wisdom. I mean, even putting together screenshots, that's probably the first time that's ever happened where we could take through screenshots and I really appreciate the visual approach to that. If people want to follow you and work with you, what is the best way for them to stay in touch?

Linda Bustos  1:16:34  

Um, I've got a LinkedIn. So if you connect me with me there, you've got my inbox. Yeah. And I've also got a Ecom Ideas page where I'm posting every day. So if you liked what we talked about there, got that in the newsletter. So those are other ways to get

William Harris  1:16:52  

and I'll make sure I spell it too. It's Ecom Ecom. There is an imposter out there with two M's do not go to that website. No, I don't know who that person might be nice. But I'm just saying there's a good website that I'm we're talking about today is one ecomideas.com. Then thanks again for coming out. Everybody else. Thank you for joining in. Hope you have a good rest of the day.

Outro  1:17:14  

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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