Ep. #1211 - AI Tools for Amazon Agencies

Andrew Morgans  0:00

Hey, what’s up, Hustlers? Welcome back. This is Andrew Morgans, founder of Marknology, here as today’s host of Startup Hustle. Today we’re going be talking about AI tools for Amazon agencies. And I know this podcast covers a lot of things about e-commerce and Amazon, a lot of times as the Amazon seller, the brand building. Today we’re going to be talking about what some of these tools can be used for by the agencies, building the brands. I’ve got the founder on here. Before I make an introduction, today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult. Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably and has the platform to help you manage that team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. John Tilley, welcome to the show.

Jon Tilley  0:42

Andrew, what’s up, man? Good to be here. I’m excited for today, man. I’ve known you in the space, and I know you get into things, so it’s, it’s gonna be cool.

Andrew Morgans  0:51

Yeah, John is a big-time networker, always sending me introductions all over in the space. I think today, he’s in LA with his company, ZonGuru. But we’re going to be talking about the tool itself, but also how AI is really having a big splash into what we’re doing. Helping us get more cost-effective, helping us get smarter, you know, and ultimately be able to do more with less. But before we just jump into AI, I know it’s a hot topic, John. I like our guests and listeners to get to know each other a little bit. And I’d like to know just a little bit where John’s story, you know, begins, at least when it comes to entrepreneurship and business. Was it something you always, you know, wanted to move into? I know for me, it just kind of hit me, like, by an accident. I didn’t. I was just a hard worker. I didn’t really think about being an entrepreneur. And then I just found myself doing something I loved. Where does your story begin?

Jon Tilley  1:49

Right now, right today, it’s really begins right now. Jesus, it’s, it’s been a journey. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, I’ll give you the quick once over, and you tell me what you want to talk more about. But, you know, my accent is South African. So, you know, I grew up in South Africa, Johannesburg. You know, pretty, pretty yummy. You know about Africa, but, you know, pretty, pretty great upbringing. I thoroughly had an amazing time growing up there. And I went to college in Johannesburg as well. After high school, I studied marketing and psychology as well. I dropped the psychology pipe because my dad’s a psychologist, and I realized I was telling my dad. I stuck with the marketing side. But no, no, I mean,

Andrew Morgans  2:40

I think they go they pair well together, right? I mean, as a marketer, you’re trying to get into the mind of the people you’re selling to, you know.

Jon Tilley  2:47

And then, you know, after college, I took a year off. Typically, you know, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, we like to take a year off either before college or after and kind of travel the globe. And I took a year off. And one thing that I wanted to jump into was snowboarding. And I was like, hey, I can go to the States. Where’s the best mountain to go snowboarding? I pick Big Sky, Montana. So you know, straight up to Big Sky, Montana, for my first snow experience and jumped into the deep end day, which is pretty epic. So you know, I stayed in the US for a year and actually ended up, you know, traveling, I think, already 39 states and a half. Yeah, so we went all around and after, you know, the snow, I played rugby, and I played for a bunch of teams in different cities. That was a great way to travel because you literally landed a place paid sport that you live there with those 30 people that you just got to know. So it was kind of cool. And yeah, after that, I went back to South Africa and started my career in, in advertising. So you know, I was kind of part of some big digital advertising agencies at the time with some pretty big blue-chip clients in South Africa. It was like the chocolate brand Cadbury’s and Gillette. Gillette shaving as well, which was kind of my accounts, and, you know, progressed with them and, you know, moved over to London with an agency over there and worked. I worked on Burger King and launched that in Europe, England.

Andrew Morgans  4:26

That’s a big change. Yeah, so I want to ask a couple of things. One, I did grow up in Africa. I think it was a lot different experience than you. When when I landed in Johannesburg, December 25 2001, I was coming out of a warzone jungle and I just remember going to the shopping mall in Johannesburg and just being like the kids are eating ice cream. Like I remember that. It’s like vaguely what I remember it was like Christmas Day and I’m just like kids eat ice cream here. This is wild. I just been, you know, DRC was in a civil war and it was kind of just a crazy time. Not not my entire childhood was like that. But, you know, my teenage years for sure. And a lot of listeners, I think I know this just because whenever people hear that I’m from Africa, they immediately think South Africa because that’s the, that’s more general. But you know, the countries in Africa are so different and diverse. I mean, I think my number one place in the world is Cape Town, if I, you know, as far as beauty and everything is just a perfect place on Earth. So one, just a little clarity. Two, like people, you know, people don’t understand that there might be massive marketing agencies in South Africa and things like the advertising agencies, like you know, I don’t think people’s minds necessarily understand exactly what that part of the world is, like, like giving a little clarity. So you’re the first I’ve heard of that was started their advertising journey in South Africa, which I think is really cool. And then what I know is that like, whenever I moved to the US, it was a big kind of came in my dad was very sick. It’s why we left Africa. And so I was just like, you know, my acclamation I guess, to the Midwest and society here was, it was off putting. It was confusing, took me a while to get my bearings so to speak. But you know, you did the, I think you did the thing, right, really traveling kind of at a little bit older age than myself. And, but then going from South Africa to London, big difference, I think, in cost of living and just like, the culture, I know, I’ve, I’ve visited a few times, and even I’m just kind of like, this is quite as fast. It’s different. Were you advertising with African brands? And then with, you know, UK-based brands? Or were you like, kind of covering brands, internationally with those agencies?

Jon Tilley  6:45

Yeah, no good questions. I mean, going back to South Africa, I think, I think a lot of people think of third world countries, even Mexico a lot is a place that, you know, it’s third world, right, but, but you know, most of those places have an extreme, you know, the disparity, right? You have a high level of education in high E commerce. And then on the other side, you have these really poor, you know, areas that that are that are need a lot of help, right? So that’s the definition of third world. So the education level, and the e-commerce level, and even the credit, creative level is extremely high. You know, agencies, they’re in South Africa still winning a lot of awards. And the creative level is very high, and is typically, you know, people coming out of third world countries, that there’s a very strong entrepreneurial, creative spirit, just because you have to be, right? You have to make things happen. So, you know, that’s, that’s, yeah, I got a lot of that exposure early on. Actually, you know, part of my my story around entrepreneurship is that, you know, even though I kind of got into advertising, and, you know, it was it was a pretty high level of, of kind of commercial work. I have this, this underlying theme of what, what I call entrepreneurial FOMO, right? It’s this idea of like, always wanting to be an entrepreneur, but, and trying kind of a few things, but being involved in this industry at such a pace that I never really made the leap. And in South Africa itself, you know, I was in advertising and I left advertising. And I went back to Johannesburg, and my whole vision was to open a nightclub bar. And so I kind of went back into bartending to learn the whole idea of of that, and then drop that idea, then, thank goodness, and then moved to Cape Town and worked in the film industry. And then and then on the back of that, you know, I was really interested in the creative aspects of, of filmmaking in Cape Town as a massive studio destination. And then and then after that, you know, I made a decision, hey, I wanted to go and check out London live there. My brother had moved there, and I decided just go there, you know, kind of straight up and just a whim. Yeah. And then when I got there, you know, I kind of looked at the resume and I was like, Okay, well, this is this is, you know, I enjoyed the AC side, and then we get back in so I started playing and getting into that’s, that’s kind of how I got into Lambda was purely a move of going exploring the world and, and then obviously, getting back into advertising, which was amazing, you know, I was like, this was 2002, you know, I was, you know, early, early 20s. You know, living in, in in the center of Europe radius at the cutting edge of the industry in in Europe, with actually funnily enough a lot of buddies from South Africa that are moving there and kind of making a go of living in Europe and the access we had to all of Europe over weekends and you know, I lived right income and got a worked right income and guidance in kind of the cutting edge part of the industry but then had access to all of Europe. It was an amazing change from you know, being, you know, pretty isolated down in the southern tip of Africa to be in the the heartbeat of Europe and heavy access to Europe was awesome time with some cool clubs and cool music and everything else. So it was it was a good time.

Andrew Morgans  10:12

And for me, I’m very inspired, like I’m a creative, I’m definitely a hybrid creative, like I create well with someone else, like, you know, I can think of music in my head, I need the guitar player to play the lick, so to speak, or the DJ to come up, you know, I’m like, I’m humming it and I can come up with it. Or I have a vision for a mural or a vision for a product. But I need the artists I need to pair with the artists, you know, to make my vision come to life. Unless I have it. Yeah, right. But we’ll get to that. But for me, like, you know, a big part of my entrepreneurial journey, the last nine years has been getting that ability to travel. And whether that was getting out of the job that didn’t allow me to travel or having the money to travel at a time to build ability to take time off. But Berlin, Milan, you know, Valencia, Austria, Czech Republic, Spain, you know, Madrid and Barcelona, you know, Portugal, for me, these like, you know, for a lot of people that maybe they get that right after college, I’ve gotten it later in my in my life. And even though I traveled when I was young, I didn’t do this traveling in the middle kind of, and you know how to coming back to it. But, you know, we get stuck in the grind as entrepreneurs, we’re building we’re building we’re building we’re building, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, Man, I just feel drained. Where are you drawing inspiration from, you know, and for me, like the, the freedom that you feel in Berlin, to me is like wild, you can almost taste it. Like they, they just embrace their freedom there in a way that like the Midwest will never know, you know. And I say that, because I’ll come back with crazy amounts of inspiration, just like, from stepping into cultures and languages and different things, then, you know, we get an experience here. And you know, America is made up of all of the countries of the world, we’re one of the only countries I think that’s just because this big of a mixing pot of all the different cultures. But like imagining being, while being an advertiser in the middle of London, just getting access to the clubs, and nightlife, people think of it just as partying, for me, some of the architecture of the buildings, the music, the DJ is like the environment of what’s happening, being plugged into the people is a big way that I find my inspiration for a lot of stuff that I do. You can’t just be an amazing creative or come up with amazing ideas and have no inputs, you know. People, I don’t think people understand that you can’t live a boring life and just have these amazing ideas. So you’re in your young 20s, I was in my young 20s in Hawaii. So I did have a good time, but a different kind of fun. So you’re back into advertising there. And what kind of advertising do imprint? Is it like digital? Is it e-com? Is it paid media, you know?

Jon Tilley  13:01

Yeah, I mean, at the time. I mean, everything you talked about countries I can absolutely relate to so I love to, to mention something on that. But at the time, you know, I was involved in the point of sale side of advertising. So prints, your store, you know, that have a have a job at Burger King was was about taking that brand, trading it and launching it across all those stores in Europe. So I was a lot involved in like in kind of install placement, and all the point of purchase material that goes with that. But through that there was kind of like below the line that through the lines started happening in the digital side started happening. And we started bullying microsites, and I transitioned into the digital side, which, which I loved. But, yeah, just just, you know, the other thing I was doing at that time was I was throwing a lot of parties and music parties in London, we we hide our boats and bore on DJs and did that and that kind of idea or having a nightclub was still sitting with me and running events. And you know, I did some some pretty cool underground party in the, in the London underground tunnels.

Andrew Morgans  14:10

So the stuff I hear about, the stuff I hear about,

Jon Tilley  14:13

Yeah, there’s like these underground kind of cave cabins that happen under under under London Bridge. So we threw some cool parties there. And you know, there was still that strong entrepreneur side of me that that that I was still trying to feed out. So there was this general theme of like, Hey, I was in in this industry and doing all these cool things, but but still feeling that chaos, kind of missing out like I really leaned into wanting to have my own business and do that and figuring out you know, taking all those inspirational ideas and how do you actually execute on them and more importantly be able to make the jump right that’s that’s the tricky part of you in this nine to five. You know, how do you how do you make the jump? Is it a flat on for business plan and funding 100? Or is there another way to do it? And that’s what I was trying to figure out at the time. But yeah, you know, for me, I was coming from, you know, Johannesburg, where you kind of know, most of the people I connected with most into London or even New York was just like, you know, being this, whoever the hell you want to be, you know, sitting at a bar, you don’t even have to look around and you’re just like, I’m here. And then we just meet the coolest people. And America was was what just that mindset of just being open and saying what you want and just being pretty blunt about everything. You know, whether it’s a drink or a hookup, it was pretty bland. It was just like, Okay, well, let’s get at it. You know what? It was, it was awesome. So, you know, yeah, you know, I stayed there for a few years had some fun. And the reason I kind of ended up in, in the US was going back to when I was in the States, I had like a summer romance with a girl who then four years later, we met up again in London and actually had a movie. I No way, it was a REM concert. It was some kind of random, random meetup. And then we started dating between LA and London. And that’s, that’s what really got me at a point later, to move out to Los Angeles, and, and give that a go. So that’s kind of how I ended up. We’ve only got here. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, yeah, it was, it was a pretty, pretty big move, and a very different move. I think when when I moved over to Los Angeles, you know, it’s completely different to literally anywhere else, in terms of connection to, to kind of an English tradition, right to the British tradition, which has, you know, flavors throughout the world, even including New York, the West is completely different. Right. And, you know, I also moved there with with literally no connections at all, other than obviously, the girlfriend at the time. And, and that was like a true, kind of start up from scratch, like normal, no mates, you know, no connections, how am I going to make this? Have no brother? Right? So, yeah, that was, that was a pretty big shift, you know, coming out to Los Angeles, and then, you know, it’s, you know, did a few things, but got back into advertising and worked with some agencies of the year with with a pretty big clients. I think my big one at the time was public storage, which is, you know, kind of a national brand. And I ended up getting involved in the software side of that. And we were, we were doing a lot of the websites and reservation system development. And we started developing the internal enterprise online reservation system, and building it around that. So that’s where I started to kind of cut my teeth.

Andrew Morgans  17:43

Take this advertising from like print and experiential, or, you know, like in store retail or in store, restaurant or in store, like, even the stuff you’re doing on the side was kind of similar to that, which was let me throw an event with my flair, my style, my I’m picking the DJs, the location, whatever, right kind of thing, coming to the US working again, in that space with public storage, but then they make this leap into software, where they’re, they’re trying to automate or systemize or, and that was when you first got kind of introduced to helping along with that. Yeah.

Jon Tilley  18:15

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I’ve already transitioned quite a bit into the digital side, you know, for public storage, and even for karaoke, etc. We were doing website development, you know, running all the online marketing channels, PPC,

Andrew Morgans  18:28

but that’s different than that’s different than software, you know

Jon Tilley  18:31

100%. Yeah. So that was really my first cut into like, okay, cool. Well, we’re getting into a lot of the back end, front end, you know, every kind of piece, how do you manage teams around building that right? And we were way over our head. I mean, I don’t even know why they gave us that project. I was like, This is crazy. But you know,

Andrew Morgans  18:48

You mentioned probably in another area, and then they’re like, Guys, we don’t have anyone that can do this. That’s what I find is that like, you know, if we’re pioneering you don’t know. But notice it neither does anyone else. So yeah, that’s

Jon Tilley  19:02

Yeah, and that’s that’s a big lesson in entrepreneurship. And you kind of mentioned it earlier, which is like, okay, you can have the creative idea and the vision but you want to be the you want to be the conductor of that, right, in the orchestra, conductor the orchestra, right? Find a specialist in the right place, be very clear on the vision and the business objective and have the ability to manage people and, you know, smell bullshit, renew, smell bullshit, right, and kind of feel

Andrew Morgans  19:29

Like that you’re the producer. You know, you’re the producer in a lot of ways like to compare it to music. I traveled for four and a half years playing music full time. That was my journey around the US and all the states. I was chasing freedom and chasing you know, creativity and never didn’t need money at the time. I just didn’t think I needed money at the time coming from Africa missionary family, I was just very minimalistic, you know, and in the things I had with me and needed and you know, to be happy. I eventually realized I wanted financial freedom as well, but at the time Um, it was like, you know, couch surfing and playing shows and venues all over the place. You know, so I think of a lot of things in the, in the context of music and how it’s done. But I think like as a, as an entrepreneur, or my style is very much like a producer where I’m trying to pull in. Even as an athlete, I love sports, I love playing, you know, leagues, men’s league sports or CO Ed, whatever, volleyball, softball, basketball, you name it. I’m not the best talent on the team. I pulled together the best talent into one team is I feel like, you know, it’s kind of my talent. As an entrepreneur, we all create different ways. I feel like everybody creates in a different way. But for me, it’s pulling, I think we need this flavor. I think we need this piece. I think we need this talent, you know, and thinking about creating that way, I think so I hear so many people say they’re not creative. And that’s not necessarily the case, it’s a muscle that you build, like any other muscle, you have to like, you know, work it out, etc. But I still have yet to hear where you left corporate and made. So I feel like that’s coming.

Jon Tilley  21:02

Yeah, that’s, that’s coming right now. But um, yeah, just on that point on producers, you know, my, my, my business partner, and friend, on ZombiU, when when we founded it, it’s, you know, his use a serial entrepreneur. And his whole thing was, if you’re going to be successful in being an entrepreneur, there’s three things you have to do at at the high end, which is vision standards and recruitment, right, you have to have a vision, you have to set super high standards, and you have to recruit the people to do it. And I would throw in the fourth one there, which is execution. You know, one thing this this business guy, Adam Hudson, my good friend, was just amazing is having a vision, but then just executing that MVP, like, how do you roll that out, and, you know, see if it has legs, right? And if you don’t have that execution piece, that was the biggest muscle that I had to really train.

Andrew Morgans  21:58

People have to get that into people, I feel like, that’s why they need partners. Other people can be both, you know, like your friend, Adam, or your partner, Adam. But I think that’s, it’s more rare to be both. You know, for me, I wasn’t, I was more creative. But I had this like, ability. So like, when I was in Congo, I was hacking the satellites. For faster internet, I was just bored and had nothing to do is too dangerous to do a lot of things. So I was a young kid with like, crazy kind of internet access. You know, the web was, there wasn’t like file sharing, and things like that you were like scraping games and videos off of like the back end of porn sites and doing wild stuff. But I was this creative, though, it was like, just I played in my imagination, I lived in my imagination as a kid. I still do a lot of ways, right. But I had this ability to analyze data and just do really hard things like that, honestly, I was doing stuff as a kid that maybe someone get paid like 150 200,000. Now, if they were in networking, or something like that, you know, just networking computers, like, you know, setting up gateways, all this kind of stuff. I just had this like, tinkering mind, I think for it. But I had to really train, how to be organized, how to be like, you know, to execute correctly. Because I am kind of the hybrid, but it came because of a lot of practice, a lot of training. I’m still like, you know, I still have to figure out how to get my ADHD brain, so to speak, like, focused and dialed in. But it is a skill set. You can have all the ideas in the world, you have to be able to say, here’s an idea from nothing. I’m going to execute and get that MVP.

Jon Tilley  23:40

Yeah, I mean, you tap into something that I’ve tapped into all figured out over over years of looking to recruit people, which is, you know, the idea that you can’t teach values, but you can you can train people to do certain things, right? Or you can prove, prove them. And when I go to you can’t teach values, like what are the values that are, you know, very high on our list when we’re looking for people. And, you know, the one that you just brought up in what you explained there is is critical for us, which is which is curiosity, that’s our highest value, right? And what you were saying there, like you could figure out hard things, but it’s not just because you were extremely brilliant at feeling those things. Like you were curious, you were like, Dude, I want to solve this right? People innately have that in them, some people don’t. And those people that are curious about things and want to figure out how to solve things. Those are the guys you want to snap up because you can you can train everything else around that. You can train the execution you can train etc. Right. So, yeah, that’s super cool that you have that, right, which is, which is critical. Yeah. So So, going back to to my story, you know, I think it evolved to a place you know, where, you know, the job was great. I was ,I’d found my place a little bit in Los Angeles and started to, you know, really enjoy the city and the gig but I had some changes happening. In the personal life and, you know, kind of lost a bit of my sense and wanted to connect again with that, and part of that, that frustration was this idea of like, damn, I just, you know, I really feel like I need to have my own thing. And how do I do that and being frustrated as to not freaking out what how to make that switch. And going back to my business partner, Adam, you know, he was like, Hey, there’s this Amazon thing happening in early 2013. Let’s go to Vegas and go to this conference to check it out. And that’s where the penny dropped for me, in terms of how I could, I could take my skill sets and create brands and sell them on Amazon, right? So, you know, that’s, that’s typically typical kind of story of that time as it, you know, it was really just this amazing platform that no matter still today, but then even then, you know, it’s this platform where it doesn’t matter, you know, race, religion, education level of country, you literally, you know, if you apply some, some some knowledge and thinking you can create a brand, and you can launch on Amazon and compete with the best brands in the world, right off the bat, right? And that was just an insane opportunity. And something you could do on the side with a couple of people. So I started that a lot, you know, in a year, year and a half, I launched four or five products, one of them did incredibly well. And that got me out of my nine to five gig where I stopped doing that and focused on on the Amazon side. And the success I can honestly say about, we’ve all got the you just said like most of us have the the idea to learn. We have like the the creativity. We have the way of kind of figuring out, but the biggest thing for me to, to unpack from, from my, my education days, or my college days, or whatever is like that, this idea of like, really say, hey, if I want to start something, do I need a full kind of business plan, where I’ve worked on every single thing about like, how this company is going to be $100 million company? And the answer is no, no. If you start to think about that, you’re just putting in blockages, to getting it right. And what you really need to do is you have to have the vision of what that is, but you have to break it down to what’s the simplest, most immediate step I can take now, to execute on that plan and do it consistently. And that was a big, you know, thing that I had to learn was like how to be consistent about taking action on this idea, without letting it get stale. Where I could do it as a side gig every single week, you know, with with obviously a pretty intense job. And so I figured that out. And honestly, once I, you know, figured out that I shouldn’t focus on the end goal, and actually focus on what I need to do right now and forget about the rest, that was pretty easy. And so I launch those brands, you know, and did well with those. So that’s what got me out of that out of the nine to five, and there was already an inkling of, because of the software experience. I was like, Hey, man, there’s an opportunity here. And, and, you know, exiting to focus on on on the brands, in selling on Amazon. I already kind of started to make the decision that there was a step in the direction of starting the software side, which was really interesting to me. And at the time, I think that, you know, it’s a marketing term guy go write garbage in, garbage out. And I just think the software, the time it felt more like this the sake of software for the sake of software. And you know, it’s not really focusing on answering the right business questions in the most impactful way. And with the knowledge that I had, I could bring that to the software team. We could develop the software in the right way. So that was that was part of the plan. And and you know, shortly after, you know, leaving the agency gig and focusing on on my brands, I started, you know, the software side, which was like, hey, the brands are supporting me as a means to get into software going. And that’s that’s how we got going.

Andrew Morgans  28:57

We’re not really that much different John, in our stories, a little bit different trajectory. But you know, I started and I gotta get degree in computer science. I wasn’t happy with networking. You know, I started, I took a chance and worked at a startup. You know, this was 13 years ago, in e-com, 12 years ago. Start up to that I became an e-commerce manager. And then I started freelancing on the side mainly to help me with my finances. I was going through a relationship thing about a bad one. And I was like, how can I get ahead on my finances and then then it became more passion than anything else. And it became I just fell in love with e-com and Amazon specifically because it was a great equalizer. Like I’m you know, my family is very religious, and I guess we’re kind of have a pedigree and religion in some ways, but besides that, you know, American mutt in from the bottom, you know, I think I’m the first male to get a college degree and my family you know, great people, just not really business minded in that sense. Um, and this was like I didn’t need a some guys to say you’re given come to this club, I didn’t need anyone to let me in, I didn’t need any of that Amazon was the best person can win. And I’ve always known. If I applied myself, I can be good at anything I’ve always known that kind of wasn’t the person picked for this or for that I wasn’t in sports, because I moved as a junior in high school, and, you know, just all these different reasons why, you know, didn’t get the shot. And Amazon for me, I’m just a massive fan, because it really I mean, it’s changed my family’s life has changed my life, it gave me opportunity. And I have now you know, a team of 35 have created opportunity for others. And I love I love building and creating and solving problems. So it was like, it was just a homerun for me. You know, I built some clients on the side and the agency and a lot of ways, I’m not sure if I’ve ever says on the air, but like, Marknology I’ve been building, I’ve been investing back into the agency to be the best agency in space. At least we can be there’s no like, I guess, ranking system, so to speak, you know, but I feel like we do amazing work with amazing talent. And it’s been to build my own brands, you know, to build my own brands and, and exit those. And I just love the process, whether it’s learning, you know, off Amazon stuff, or evaluating the data, becoming a data scientist and getting into it, and just diving in. I mean, I still love it today, it’s been 13 years now. And I think it’s because it continues to evolve, and you get to keep keep that creative side going, like, you know, with different ideas, and you know, kind of what’s out there, but I never really thought like, hey, I need my own thing, I just I, the companies I were at were so resistant to change that I was like, I want to keep learning this, the only way I’m going to keep learning this is to do it on my own. And so that kind of forced me to take the leap more than, you know, just like I want to I want to own my own business, know, love managing people, you know, I like everybody to just be happy and do their thing and stuff. So it’s taken me a little bit to figure out how to do that with my personality type. But okay, so you know, you’re successful with your brands on Amazon. You know, I think Adam is Adam, the other co-founder of Xanga. So you already knew him, he had taken you, I’m assuming Amazon Prosper in Vegas at the time

Jon Tilley  32:18

Was before Prosper. I think it was like the the amazing conference or whatever.

Andrew Morgans  32:23

Okay, there was an at that time, like, I don’t know, if anyone listening is like, you know, in the Amazon space, not long, but all of the conferences were ran by software companies. So as an attendee, myself, I’d go and he was getting kind of sold software, you know, how do I use this? How do I not use this, you know, and I knew that the kind of the human way of doing things was, you know, CSV files and flat files and things like that, PPC, the software wasn’t great. And in those early days, in my opinion, it wasn’t really that great. So I was kind of just like resistant to a lot of it. But I can remember early like, kind of what was leading the narrative, and I want to go into kind of was on GRU, and how you’ve kind of how you bring an AI and what you brought to the team in the last 15 minutes here. Shout out again, to our sponsor, Full Scale.io. Finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit FullScale.io. We can build a software team quickly and affordably. Use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs. And then see what available testers, developers, and leaders are ready to join your team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. Okay, so you, you know, you’re taking your experience with brand building and saying, Hey, I know what brands are needing what Amazon sellers are needing, you know, how we’re using this data in the real world to build a brand. And you join the team? Where do you go from there?

Jon Tilley  33:43

Yeah, look, I mean, enjoy, you know, starting the software business, right? We’ll go from there. Yeah, yeah, look, you know, we we had a pretty strong vision at the beginning. You know, my, my co-founder of ZonGuru, Adam, you started an education course, you know, really teaching people how to create proper businesses on Amazon and e-commerce brands, right, beyond, you know, just just just a product that you sold on Amazon, which at the time was pretty unique, right, I think there was a lot of like, a, just sell the CEO, black yoga mat, and you’ll make millions and not really thinking about scalars. And so he focused on that. And I built the software to support, you know, the education program as a start. So that was that was the initial ride. And, you know, trust me, our product was shipped, it was ready. You know, I was scrambling to figure it out. And we had, we had figured out some things rebuilding in India was the MVP. There was no like, real understanding of, from a developer side of what the what the vision of or not the vision but like, you know, understanding our target audience in a better way to make sense.

Andrew Morgans  34:46

of the seller, is it the agency as a brand,

Jon Tilley  34:49

We’re constantly putting out fires and just trying to build software for this team of people that needed it? So you know, that was kind of the start and yeah, I remember the You’d go into the back rooms of pubs and, you know, holding a cellar event with five people and looking for that first one or two signups and you know, I can show you a picture of our first ZonGuru, like logo, it was, like, terrible. But you know, that’s how you started writing. And we just hustled it. And you know that the true kind of vision of ZonGuru really started to happen when I found my CTO, Stefan, who’s based in Bulgaria, he grew up in Canada, Toronto, but then moved over to Bulgaria, which for me was. And the good thing was that he was, you know, had a deep experience in developing and working with big, scalable organizations, but he was also an Amazon seller, right? And so there was a massive connection that he could make,

Andrew Morgans  35:46

He could bridge the gap for you.

Jon Tilley  35:47

Yeah. And it was like, dude, now we get someone who really is a developer knows how to scale software, but actually understands our true audience. And what we do speak a different language was just like magic, right. And so that was the start of, you know, me, realizing that, like, you know, everyone’s going to be doing a side hustle. And if I can get my team to side hustling Amazon, even better, right? So we incentivize our team, whoever we hired, there got an opportunity to start a brand on Amazon. We sponsored the first order of stock, you know, to get them going. And, you know, through that process, we have a bunch of sellers that are on our team. So we truly have that DNA, and it makes a huge difference where we have on the team that are actually, you know, our target audience, right? So yeah, we just started, you know, grow from there and had some decent explosion. Over the years, we have 17 different tools. You know, and then really kind of arrived into 2022, you know, with with quite significant changes happening in the industry. COVID happened, you know, like Mom and Pop, SMB, you know, as the, you know, rightly so, as the industry has gotten more sophisticated, you’re getting, you know, bigger e-commerce brands coming onto the platform. How do you serve as those, you know, in person events, we’re kind of going away, so so there was a, there was a and massive competitors, you know, you know, all the big guys, right? 30 million in funding, blah, blah, blah, you know, and he has us competing, right? So we went to raise, you got a VC partner, you know, put some VC into into into the company, really around adding fuel to the fire of, like, okay, where’s the industry dry? How do we? How do we better fit with with the marketplace? So, you know, in a nutshell, you know, we still have our core focus on brands on Amazon sellers. But we also have an agency solution. So we started to focus on how do we fit better with agencies and help them scale enterprise brands on on Amazon globally. Right? So what’s cool about that is that we’re, we definitely have our best product market fit with with agencies that are beyond 20 clients that are that are scaling. Mainly for a few reasons, but just the impact and efficiency of our software and hardware, how can I help the team scale, but by solving problems at that level, it’s a trickle down effect that solves it for the individual set anyway, right? So it’s a pretty cool model, where, you know, we’re solving more complex problems that are, you know, aligning with where the industry is going. And then we trickling that down all the way to the individual seller. So it’s the right thing.

Andrew Morgans  38:32

I think, something that I just want to add a little color to it is when you’re working with the agencies that are then working with the brands or the sellers because it has evolved it started with you had to be wholesale or private label sellers even. No one was even paying attention to Amazon. Then brands started, you know, small brands started paying attention and a bigger enterprise brands are paying attention. Enterprise brands are already there, but they didn’t have anyone internal that was managing it. They were outsourcing it to two agencies, or Amazon one p or whatever the case might have been right, they weren’t actually like navigating the intricacies of selling on Amazon. But what you get with an agency, I think running the software is you’re now selling to other Amazon pros instead of and they can use the software in better ways, these more advanced ways than if you’re, you know, having to educate each individual seller. You know, it’s one thing to teach them kind of the basics of how to use the tools to help you. It’s another thing to get into the more advanced stuff. It’s just like, just like you made sellers out of your own team members, you know, by helping them get launched. They’re now working with other people like let’s say at Marknology, for example, where our account team understands selling on Amazon. And so it’s a conversation between two Amazon sellers using a tool versus people that created the tool that are Amazon sellers selling to someone trying to figure out Amazon, you know,

Jon Tilley  39:53

I don’t know. Yeah, great. Very good point. And that was a really cool aftereffect from from me. Been there is that the conversation was elevated. And our team actually enjoyed the gig more because they were just asking simplistic questions that was more complex questions where they had to, you know, kind of scratch that curiosity side of their brain and figure things out as well. Right? So, yeah, it’s a pretty cool space to be in. And it’s really nice being in that elevated conversation with experts. You know, and frankly, you know, a lot of the bigger brands out there, I still, you know, are not experts, and need a lot of help. And, you know, there’s still this, like, black box around Amazon, and they’re like, Oh, we’re gonna lose control of our brand. And I’m like, Well, you’re not there, you’ve already lost control your brand. And Amazon, let me tell you, but, you know, it’s, yeah, yeah, you’re right. You know, agencies are a pretty cool space to be. And it’s obviously a massively growing, you know, cohort within within the industry,

Andrew Morgans  40:53

I think that the software can get way better, if that’s who you’re working with day in and day out. Because there’s so many more use cases, there’s so many different, you know, one agency partner might have 40, 50 brands. It got 50, different problems that are coming to the team all the time, and advancing the software much, much faster and more rapidly and quickly than, let’s say, one, you know, a seller with one product line, you know, sell at a time. So it’s just, it’s an exponential, you know, amount of learning for both sides. So, when did ChatGPT and AI kind of hit your guys’s? You know, roadmap?

Jon Tilley  41:26

Yeah, I mean, you know, that it was, it was actually, you know, November of last year, right? We were to what is it? 2022? When, when you know, that ChatGPT started to get announced in, in our lives, right. And that, for me was was a pretty big moment. I mean, obviously, being involved in software, you know, AI is nothing new using it from day one, right? But this was it was a page off of me where I was like, Okay, well, you know, it was almost like how I like aligned Amazon going to global markets, right? Amazon is amazing at going to global markets because they are extremely good at distribution. And the reason that the Amazon Prime minute distribution in the data or whatever works incredibly well as it becomes something that has evolved in consumers daily lives, right? And that’s why Amazon explodes, you know, they’ve got the distribution, it makes it simple. Get, you know, becomes the normal daily routine. And that’s the same kind of thing where I saw with ChatGPT, like, okay, cool. This could be a game changer, like social media, like anything. It’s going to be AI in your contestable way for the normal, you know, consumer, right? And so we just set up a pretty small mini-team, and we’re like, hey, let’s explore using this. And there was a lot of pushback, initially, and just saying like, this is, yeah, this is this is nothing. But obviously, when we started to really test it, we were blown away by the results. So, you know, we moved pretty quick on it. And we were the first in the space to integrate ChatGPT into our listing tool. In January, we launched our beta, and got a lot of, you know, good, good exposure with that. And, you know, there were a couple of things that aligned for us. One was, obviously being sellers understanding how to prompt ChatGPT and get the results we needed for the algorithm. So, you know, that was a pretty straightforward win for us. But the second was, you know, our listing tool is built with this idea of contextual SEO. So whether it’s a keyword tool, or our listing tool, we built this idea of context, which was like, you know, we don’t really show you like, where you know, what keywords you should be adding, and how would you go on a listing, but we can compare it to the best listings on page one. So you can literally load any listings and compare where they’re strong, weak and context to what you’re doing. So, you know, it was a pretty easy thing for us to plug in. And also be able to develop a listing that you can compare to enlisting, see how you better score, that’s an understanding that was a baseline. It’s going to get you, you know, 85% of the way there a better, you know, optimization score than the best this is on page one. But it’s 85% there, where it’s a baseline that you as a seller or an agency have to go in and obviously bring your creativity and expertise. So we understood right from the beginning that it wasn’t a replacement for for creative content execution. It was the idea of giving you a much faster, you know, high level intelligent baseline that then allows the team to focus their expertise and creativity around getting that 210%. So you know, work well across the board. And and we’ve had incredible success with that, you know, we’re seeing just from the way that we can train the AI to write a listing based importantly on the keywords that we generate, which is which is the secret it’s not the secret sauces, right, in the AI the secret sauce is what what are you basing that on? Right, which is the keywords you know, we just do that in a in a great way and we get incredible results. I think, you know, right now we have about a 23% increase in revenue across existing listings across our platform that use our AI tool, right? So we take new listings out of the picture because it just skews the results. But you know, existing listings, if you can get a bump in revenue just from from that it’s pretty significant. So

Andrew Morgans  45:18

No, that’s amazing, especially since, for context, I think I saw a number recently that e-commerce as a whole has grown only 5% in 2023. One of the slowest years since 2007. To see growth of, you know, I know it’s an average, we’re talking averages, but to see a growth of 23 to 25%. On existing listings, meaning to see that type of growth in a year when they’re normally seeing 5% is, is a pretty bold statement. I mean, I think that’s pretty amazing. Outside of like writing copy, is there anything else AI is touching across your tools, like, I guess, in a big way. Like, let’s say PPC or, you know, like profitability, or any of those other analysis tools, like I don’t know, enough to ask or get some proper questions here.

Jon Tilley  46:04

But yeah, yeah, look, I mean, AI, you know, as I said, you know, every software has got AI involved, and it’s where you apply it, you know, a lot of it is going on pricing automation. You know, as that, which is, which is a

Andrew Morgans  46:19

A rule-based, you know, in some ways, like, I felt like, I felt like the tools of the past have been more rule based, which can be very intelligent, but there will base versus getting smarter over time, if that makes sense. To me, there’s, there’s a bit of difference there.

Jon Tilley  46:34

Definitely, yeah. And I think there’s a few tools now that are claiming AI on on the pricing side of it. From from our side, you know, obviously, we’re using, you know, ChatGPT as an AI in content creation, we’ve chosen so far, I like to do that on image creation. And I saw, you know, I think there is a place for that. I think it’s about getting better ideas in for brainstorming, and that can be good at it. But I still, you know, I still think image creation can can be something something creative teams can do. You know, we motion,

Andrew Morgans  47:10

I think the main thing there is emotion. You know, that’s the one thing that we can as humans, we have emotions, you know, and there’s, there’s the math of photography, and the math of creative and math of content, you know, everything is math, in some ways, even music, but there’s also that emotion, that intangible that, I think, is going to be the difference in the long run. And we’re going to start noticing kind of just those differences between like, AI-created stuff and, and human-created suff. Yeah, it’s

Jon Tilley  47:39

Emotion is creativity, right? And it’s having faith in the in humans, right. And people will say that, like, there’s the fear of like, Hey, is AI replacing us? I’m like, you know, yeah, I could replace you. But But what it’s going to do as to us, as humans, is push us into the more creative expert areas of our fields, right? And it’s already creating amazing jobs, and it’s pushing us, even agencies, right? The baseline of like, creating a listing is now literally evaporated, you know, something that took you an hour is not taking you one minute. So then based on

Andrew Morgans  47:43

your time tracking, how to make it better how to reiterate that, yeah.

Jon Tilley  48:15

How do I how do I connect with the emotion on my customers? Okay, well, when are we have more time to put into the research and understanding the brand and the customer and the connection there and, etc, right? So, you know, we we have AI built around, obviously, our sales estimates, and that’s been in place for a long time. And, and, you know, Amazon’s pretty careful about that. So, we’re always testing and improving and learning and teaching our AI and getting into self learn. We do, we’ve also built an AI algorithm around review, sentiment analysis, and picking out you know, positive and negative sentiment, it’s a tool called love hate. Amazon has recently come up with something similar, but we’ve had that for for a couple of years now. So those are areas where we’ve, we’ve put our efforts into right now. And certainly, we were gonna go into other areas, you know, our role is that 80-20 rule, right, which is, at the end of the day, we want to we want to focus on what’s most impactful, but that we don’t need to finesse and further once we want to nail that we like okay, you know, you know, let’s let’s focus on what is the next big thing that we can we can impact on so. You know, certainly AI is at a different level and leveraging some of that. I mean, you know, the ChatGPT stuff is insane, you know, what were these kind of things you could do and if you can leverage any software, it’s amazing. So we’ll keep going and solving problems as we go forward with with with Amazon software.

Andrew Morgans  49:38

I think it’s amazing as an agency, I was waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for the software companies to stop selling to the sellers and and, you know, start putting together a different package for agencies, just because, you know, we had different problems. Different problems as an agency managing lots of brands, tracking lots of different things. It’s different than than a one-off seller and you know, but you selling to the customer at hand and the customer at hand at that time before the agencies were of any size to matter, you know, what was the individual private label seller or the wholesaler. So it’s cool to see these things kind of come to life and take away some of the nuance, or I guess, take away some of the mundane, you know, tasks that we have to do as account managers as, as a team and get to focus more on the creativity. We’re talking earlier about, you know, my creative style being kind of like a producer, right? Where you’re bringing your break pulling in the team, or you’re saying this idea or this, you know, you’re kind of pulling it together, and then you’re getting the team to execute. And I think that’s kind of how you address AI in a lot of ways. Like, if you’re asking it the right questions, if you’re telling it to do the right thing, with the right prompts, you can get it to do you know, quite a bit, but you have to have somebody kind of asking the right questions, you know, to get the answers that you want her to get the things, the results that you want. But it’s absolutely amazing. I was at a mastermind recently, and just they were sharing ideas with different ways they were using AI on their own as agency owners and stuff. And it was just like, you know, mind blowing. I’ve only I’ve been using it mainly to help me write the emails. I don’t want to write, you know,

Jon Tilley  51:13

You know, AI is it’s an assistant, that executional thing, that is smart in a lot of ways. But again, it’s going back to this idea of like, if you are helping a brand, whether it’s your brand, or someone else’s brand review, if you’re truly trying to develop and push the brand further and scale them, the more you understand about their business, the more you understand about their customer, or the business objective, and the smarter you can get about that, you know, then it’s just about, you know, executing on that. So, if you can, if if as software developers can give agencies, more space at the account manager level, and, you know, at a higher level, to focus on, you know, the strategy, the creativity, and more thoughts and spacing to that, and then do the rest for them, you know, the better, right? And so, for sure, you know, as we work with agencies, this kind of beaner reignition, of like, reporting and analysis, because that that’s the mundane, you know, that’s the bane of these, for us is like not only just like understanding the data, but like having to report that activity to clients, and like, how can we solve that better? How can we do things in bulk? And how can we automate things so that you guys can really focus on Mac, you know, at the extra 10%, that’s going to matter most when they’re competing against competitors, right, get the baseline done by software and focus on the creative part,

Andrew Morgans  52:34

or thing, especially as our, let’s say, We’re consultants in the Amazon space, as our clients go from wholesalers or resellers to private label to small business brands to, let’s say, you know, enterprise brands, the demand or the like, I guess the culture within those companies becomes more corporate as you go. And so you know, if we’re working with a Nestle or we’re working with a Coca Cola or someone like that, reporting is a must, a mandatory muscle, it leads the way for all conversations, all meetings, all that kind of stuff. So I think the agencies and the consultants that are looking to move up in their industry are now facing these needs, you know, these needs around reporting and how to do it faster, and how to look more professional and present better to the C suite or whoever you’re talking to, right. And so, a lot of times, we know, the software has all the data that we want, you know, just how do we package this together in a way that they’re used to that they’ve been getting on their DTC side or the retail side of their business for a long time. And now they’re looking at the Amazon industry or the e-Commerce Industry for the same things. I started, I started with Tableau, I think, six years ago, trying to get CSV reports to look sharp, you know, so it’s been, it’s definitely been like, a thorn in my heel in a lot of ways, you know, getting to that point where you’re just like, look, I don’t want to spend all my time building a PPC report for 40 brands, and have my account manager spend a couple of hours every day at the end of every month putting these things together, you know, how can we speed these things up? And I think of it like kind of, like, maybe it’s a silly analogy, but you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs and these guys, these like, you know, front-runner entrepreneur guys that we’ve heard about how they wear the same outfits, every day, the white t-shirt or whatever, it’s because you know, as a leader, you need your creative abilities, or your decision making abilities at their highest. And if you’re making little decisions around this keyword, this wording, or this, you know, this little change. Sure, it’s not that hard. It’s not belief beneath me or anything like that, or you know, but you’re losing the ability to use that for a bigger decision or, you know, a bigger problem or have more creativity. So these things can help us do our jobs better as effectively and give us more brainpower for other tasks. I think the world is just so used to being in a, you know, an hourly wage type of this is what I do. Do This is my job instead of a meritocracy, you know, that I think a lot of entrepreneurs like to think we exist in is this meritocracy, I get paid based on my work, what I deliver, and the quality of my work. That’s what these tools are doing for us, just making it so that we can work faster, smarter, and more effectively. And, you know, you’re trying to have a brainstorming session. You can have one right there with ChatGPT. You don’t need to bring in, you know, all five team members and waste an hour or two hours of a meeting, you know, you can honestly come to the table with a lot of great ideas to come to that meeting with and hit the ground running. So

Jon Tilley  52:41

Yeah, just to play on that. Like, I remember back in my agency days, like, you know, what, what made me or anyone on our team successful in growing our clients, business or business with clients was, you know, figuring out their, what I used to call like the CYA trigger, right? Which is like, you know, everyone in these corporate gigs, you know, they’re they, at number one, it’s like, the hierarchy of needs is like, they want to cover their own ass, right? So like, you have to figure out what their CYA trigger is, you know, and once you understand what that is, and you can, you can really connect with your, with your clients at that level, you like, okay, what are they, whatever they need to have to make them feel like their assets covered and that they feel comfortable, it typically is reporting in some kind of way or form. But as soon as you can solve that, then the conversation gets elevated into the stuff that really matters, right? But if you can’t figure out, like, you can’t jive with the person and figure out what their CYA trigger is, like, it’s hard to elevate yourself. And so, you know, that’s part of our gig is, you know, working with agencies to figure out like, hey, what’s the baseline level of reporting, etc., that we can cover that makes them feel comfortable with their clients, they’ve got the reporting go in and elevate you guys into the more meaningful conversations, right? And so yeah, that’s always the trick, the CYA trigger.

Andrew Morgans  55:35

I love it, John. We’re up on time. But as we sign off, I would love for you to just give your information so that people can contact you. Follows on ZonGuru, you know, get in, get in touch if they want to know more about the tools and what you guys are offering. And stay in contact.

Jon Tilley  57:07

Yeah, you know, obviously, it’s on Google.com. You know, we have a team there, you can, you can come there, check out our blog. You know, there’s someone on chat there that you can connect with and get whatever you need. You know, and certainly, LinkedIn, if you want to get in touch with me directly, just go straight to LinkedIn. I think it’s my handle is Jon Tilley. We are putting a lot of content out there that will help your sellers and agencies, so you can get in touch with me there. So I would say those are the two best places to go check out.

Andrew Morgans  57:36

Yeah, and I’ll have them in the show notes as well for anyone that’s, you know, on a computer on their phone and can get into the show notes, and maybe they’re on the road. But, Jon, thank you so much for your time sharing your story. You know, sharing value about what you guys are doing there at ZonGuru and how you can help sellers and agencies alike. You know, dominate Amazon and using the latest and greatest technologies that our disposal to do so. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show.

Jon Tilley  58:01

Thank you, Andrew. It’s been amazing. Thank you for the question.

Andrew Morgans  58:03

Of course. And, Hustlers, thanks again for you tuning in. And thanks again to our sponsor. Do you need to hire software engineers, testers, and leaders? Let Full Scale help. When you visit FullScale.io, all you need to do is answer a few questions and let the platform match you up with a fully vetted, highly experienced team of software engineers, testers, and leaders. Full Scale specializes in building long-term teams that work only for you. Learn more when you visit FullScale.io. John, Hustlers, we’ll see you next time.