[Ad]: E Suite's 10 Week E Commerce Accelerator is now open for enrolment. Our very first accelerator earlier this year was a huge success with 54 graduates who are now putting their skills to use to further their E commerce careers. Over 10 weeks, I personally will take you through the fundamentals of E commerce from strategy to marketing, tech, finance, supply chain and more. We've made this course 100% remote and flexible to fit around your busy life with recorded live classes, an active community, over 20 cheat sheets and more than 600 pages of e commerce content. But the best part is you get to meet and connect with some of the best and brightest up and comers in E commerce in Australia. Enrollments are now open and class kicks off on Tuesday, August 23rd. So whether you want to enroll as an individual or sneaky hint, persuade your boss to enrol the whole team. Head on over to esweettalent.com au accelerator to enrol online today. I hope to see you in there.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your.
[Voiceover]: Today's checkout comes from our explainer partner Wayflyer and it features their co founder and CEO Aidan Corbett. Wayflyer deliver short term e commerce funding to help unlock cash flow for activities that truly drive growth such as marketing and inventory. Founded in 2019, today they have over 1000 e commerce customers all over the globe. In this short amount of time they've delivered $700 million of funding for e commerce businesses. They have an office and a team in Sydney and have helped unlock growth for Australian e commerce brands including Stacks, King Kong Apparel and Black Swallow. Aidan, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
Nathan Bush: We obviously heard a lot about what you're doing at Wavefly, which is really exciting for founders looking to get access to cashflow.
[Voiceover]: But we're here to learn a little
Nathan Bush: bit more about you, the co founder of Wayfly. So I've got five quick questions for you. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Aidan Corbett: I'm not sure I bought anything very weird online, but the last thing I did buy online was a wine decanter and that has thankfully arrived without breaking in the post. But that was the last thing I've bought online. Probably not the weirdest thing, but the last thing I got.
Nathan Bush: Very useful, very useful. All right. Number two, who is your favorite retailer? Probably a tricky spot given how many you're working with.
Aidan Corbett: True. I'm actually going to be very boring on this. I only buy clothes from like one or two brands. Not because I like those clothes, because I'm quite lazy and those brands are all saints and wreaths. So I should probably give them a shout out because 99% of my wardrobe is made up of both those brands.
Nathan Bush: Like to keep things simple. Is that the founder's strategy of the kind of keep everything uniform so you don't.
Aidan Corbett: I don't care about sartorial issues as much as I should or as much as my wife tells me to. So it's more laziness than it is any kind of decision making rationalization. Yeah, brilliant.
Nathan Bush: All right, number three, which retail fad do you wish was history?
Aidan Corbett: This is a recent fad, but anything to do with like NFTs or the metaverse, I just don't see any way in which that's not a pyramid scheme. So I would like to see the end of that. And I think it's already happening a bit with NFTs. I think the volume of transactions is dropping. I'm a bit cynical about that.
[Voiceover]: Any chance that the current form of
Nathan Bush: save with stake NFTs will transform into something else? Or do you think that just the concept as a whole, every time somebody
Aidan Corbett: comes up with a use case for the blockchain? The blockchain is never the best technology to do it. There may be something there and there may be something through bitcoin, and I think there is today, certainly. But when it comes to NFTs, that's just something that I would be a bit skeptical about. There does seem to be a lot of fraud. Yeah, it's a little bit suspect. That's the one thing I would probably stay away from as a retailer.
Nathan Bush: Good stuff.
[Voiceover]: All right, number four, can you recommend
Nathan Bush: a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Aidan Corbett: There's a really great business book called Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. That would be a book I'd really recommend. For a podcast, I would recommend a podcast called Acquired. It's a great podcast. Two guys based down on the west coast in the US and each week they go really, really deep into a major company that's IPO'd. So Airbnb is one, Dropbox is another. But they get amazing information on the companies and they tell the stories from the very early days. So that's probably my favorite business podcast. It's one called Acquired.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. Great tip.
[Voiceover]: Thank you. And the last one I have for
Nathan Bush: you, finish this sentence. The future of retail is not paid social.
Aidan Corbett: I think the best brands in the future and the ones that grow the fastest will be the ones that will not have an excessive reliance on paid social, whether they use creators or whether they use other channels to promote their products. If you can innovate on how you acquire customers beyond paid social, I think you'll do remarkably well.
Nathan Bush: Great stuff.
[Voiceover]: And I know it is technically paid
Nathan Bush: social, but some of the tips that you gave around still being an early adopter into TikTok were really great in that main episode. So if you haven't heard that, make sure you go back and check that out.
[Voiceover]: Aidan, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Aidan Corbett: Thanks Aidan.
[Voiceover]: To hear more from Aidan, jump back into our very Special episode number 190 where Aidan shares the process for founders to access Wayflyer funding. But even if you're not a founder, you're going to get some great insights from this episode. We tap into Aidan's global view across all of their clients and we're able to dive into the types of customer acquisition costs retailers are seeing seeing across the board. We also talk about why TikTok is still a developing opportunity with huge returns and how having cash flow frees you up for long term thinking and experimentation. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
