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[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 through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Here's your host, Bushy Today's checkout features Sabri Suby, Founder and Head of Growth at digital marketing agency King Kong. He's the author of Sell Like Crazy and an investor on TV show Shark Tank Australia. Sabri launched King Kong in 2014 as a $50 venture from his bedroom in Byron Bay. The now global business is one of Australia's fastest growing companies and and was valued at $72 million last year.
Nathan Bush: Sabri, welcome to the Checkout. Thank you so much for joining us. We've heard all about your adventures in Shark Tank, what you're doing at King Kong Agency, and your view on storytelling and how to get the most out of e commerce. But we're here to learn a little bit more about you. So I've got five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Sabri Suby: The weirdest thing that I've ever bought online is actually on my desk. It is. Here it is, this little spinning top. I bought it from a company, I can't even remember the name, but I was reading a Forbes article and it popped up and I was like what on earth is this thing? And then I clicked on the ad and they got me because it was a great hook. And then they told me an incredible story about how my life would change that had this spinning top on my desk and all the different use cases and how I could use it and how it'd be an interesting talking point and all of the different things and how it's soothing and it's calming and all the stuff that you can do with it. And I bought this thing. I think it was like $150, and it arrived from Canada, and now it's here on my desk. And people always ask me, is that that spinning top off of Inception? And I said, I guess it might be.
Nathan Bush: So for anyone who can't say it, which is, if you're listening to this, it looks like the spinning top off of Inception.
Nathan Bush: What does it actually do?
Nathan Bush: How do they tell a story to get you to buy that for $150?
Sabri Suby: Yeah, they just basically tell me about how it's made from, like, solid metal. They show all the craftsmanship of it going on, how it will last me a lifetime. Then they tried to increase the average order value by selling me a little mat that I can spin it on that I did not get suckered into. And I just boug bought the spinning top. And they just told me all the different stories and how it would make it so much more interesting and the different use cases, and this is how it would work. And before I knew it, I had been invested 15 minutes of my time, and they had built enough desire where I woke up that morning not knowing that I would be buying $150 spinning top. And yet they got me and I bought it, and I'm very happy with it.
Nathan Bush: Does it help you make decisions? Like, does it have anything on it?
Sabri Suby: No, they don't. It's just very well made. It's a spinning top, and it sits on my desk, and I spin it all the time.
Nathan Bush: Wow.
Nathan Bush: Okay. I love.
Nathan Bush: I love it. And I've worked in advertising agencies for a long time, and I can guarantee the people who work in advertising, we are the ones who get suckered in by good advertising.
Sabri Suby: The best and easiest person to sell is a salesperson.
Nathan Bush: Exactly. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Sabri Suby: I would say that based off my past experience, definitely buying the last crumb cookies, even though they were $140, was an incredible experience because I like to be delighted. I love showmanship, and I think that showmanship is just one of the things that is just so underrated and that we don't see enough of in this modern day of retailing. And I think that there's so much that can be said to having a demonstrable product, having showmanship, from the way that arrives to the packaging to the emails that come out, all of these little opportunities when someone buys for you are just absolute opportunities to delight and surprise people. And it's those details, those little details that most people forget about. That's where a lot of the magic happens. And it's about people will Forget, for instance, about the name of the company that you buy something off, but they won't forget how you make them feel. And that's why we're even talking about any of these things right now, is because when I bought them, it was the way that they made me feel. And that whole experience that makes it memorable and makes it remarkable where I'd actually talk about it again.
Nathan Bush: Did Davey convince you to buy an oody after your time together on Shark?
Sabri Suby: He did not. He lovingly my loving Shark. He was just here two days ago in my office. He gifted me one. But no, I did not buy one.
Nathan Bush: Come on, Davey. All right, number three, which e commerce practice do you wish was history?
Sabri Suby: Split testing button colors. If I hear that again, I'm going to jump out my window. All these conversion rate geeks out there that talk about splitting button colors that are running crappy headlines, no lead in copy, no good story. They're the people that is like they're picking up pennies and they're leaving dollars on the floor. You need to keep the main thing. The main thing, right? And the main thing is not the button color. That is not even a 1 percenter. Yes, I know, I know there are studies out there where people are optimizing button colors. Unless you're getting some outrageous number of visits, like, you know, 300,000 to 400,000 visits a month, button color ain't going to save you. You're going to need really good hook stories even just investing that time and setting up that space split test and just running more hooks, more creatives. Just giving your 10 best headlines on whatever ad platform you're running, giving them to ChatGPT and say write me 30 more like this. That's targeted towards women, that's targeted towards men that talk about this benefit running that is going to be infinitely more valuable than whether or not you go from a green to an orange button.
Nathan Bush: I love it. And I think we found the title for this episode. A Button Color Ain't going to save you. I think it's should be your next book.
Sabri Suby: Fuck your button colors.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Oh, number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Sabri Suby: Yes, I'm more so for long term knowledge. Right. While podcasts and like videos and all of that, they all have their place and I'm a big avid listener of those. I will recommend two books, two audiobooks. Okay. For no one that doesn't want to be reading. Right. One is Wired for story. That is a great book. Everyone should read that, because that is, as we spoke about, the foundation that all of this stuff rests upon. Then the other one, because a lot of business building, a lot of people talk about all the sexy stuff. Oh, I scaled this brand from 0 to 50 million in 12 months using Facebook ads in this one simple ecom funnel. Or I got this product and it sold, solved this problem for my individual business. And then it just exploded and money was raining from the sky. And you see so many of these positive stories over the time that whenever you're in a business and you're experiencing hardship, which everybody does, you start to think like, man, this business is just so hard. If I had one of those businesses, everything would be easy and all of my problems would go away. Right? And all these people sit around and they obsess over other people's businesses thinking that they're better to run than their own individual business. Business running a business is hard as hell, right? So much problems that go into it, Right. That's why very few people succeed, is because it is a very difficult journey. So a great book that unpacks this is a book by Ben Horowitz called the Hard Things about the hard Things and that Chinese shows like the Underbelly of Entrepreneurships and how to Deal with Extreme Adversity. There will be moments of extreme adversity. Everything that you can imagine will go wrong, but it's okay because you'll make it through. And everybody has those moments, right? And it's about how you respond in those moments. And I think it's important to spend your time consuming content that gives you a unique vantage point on those problems. So you don't think that everything's meant to be easy and everything's meant to be fine and dandy.
Nathan Bush: It's a great book. And I read it and I struggled through the first third of it because
Nathan Bush: I was like, where is this going?
Nathan Bush: Because it's all about Ben's story and how he went and then the lessons come after it. But I got a lot out of it, especially the wartime CEO mentality versus there are two types of CEO mentality, the good times and the war times. And you have to juggle both. And it's not easy. You kind of naturally one or the other.
Sabri Suby: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: All right, last question I have for you, Sabri, finish this sentence. The future of retail is scandalous and wild. That's a future I want to be a part of. How's that?
Sabri Suby: Yeah, it's going to be very scandalous because you've got platforms that are. I'm really excited about, like, TikTok shops. And I think that there's going to be a world now that's unfolding in front of us right now where you can get creators and, you know, you spend a short amount of TikTok. It's a wild world out there. Like, it is wild. And I think that one of the things that stop a lot of that stuff from going on on a lot of these ad platforms is that, yes, there's regulations, there's all these things, but there's also a lot of complexity that comes into running ad accounts and stuff, setting up pixels and doing all this stuff where what we're seeing right now, like we're hearing crazy stories about TikTok shop and people doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, if not a month on these platforms with just the ability to tell stories and create content. So I think that you see the stuff that works the best on these platforms, it's the things that are the most polarizing, the most crazy. It's when you speak definitively, you don't play the middle, you play the edges. And that's what you're going to see more of because that's what gets rewarded on these platforms. And now that people are going to be rewarded financially by directly selling on these shops, I think it's going to be crazy. It's going to be wild. There's going to be lots of showmanship, and I'm very excited for it.
Nathan Bush: We're here for the scandals. Don't worry about that. Sabri, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
Sabri Suby: Thanks for having me.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Sabri, jump back into episode 370, where Sabri shares the metrics that matter most and how to use them. He gives us tips on when and when not to use an agency like his, and he shares the brand that gave him the best unboxing experience of his life. We even get to go behind the scenes in a shark Tank deal that he did with one of our previous guests. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
