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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent Peterson (00:01.292)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Sabir Semmerkent. He is a e-commerce growth advisor. Sabir, go ahead, give us an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role. Pronounce your name if I got your last name wrong, which I often do. And give us maybe one of your passions in life outside of work.
Sabir Semerkant (00:20.695)
So my name is Sabir Samarkand. Just the way you said it exactly right, Brent. So first of all, thank you for having me on Talk Commerce. It would be great to jam about all things e-commerce DTC. So that would be phenomenal. Quick introduction. I've been in the e-commerce DTC game since the birth of e-commerce. So really, really an OG. Over the 25 plus years of career of growth,
revenue growth profitably for 200 plus brands over $1 billion in incremental revenue for these brands. So lots of deep scars, no hair follicles on my head. This is not Dwayne Johnson cut. This is just follicles are not my friend anymore. So they decided to move out. So that's about it for that. And over this period came up with a framework to
You know, for every e-comm DTC brand that has a good product market fit to see a ridiculous growth and explosive growth profitably. Cause a lot of brands focus too much on, my problem is a meta ads thing. The next meta ads thing I'm going to do, that's going to be my win. It rarely happens. you're just in for a big disappointment. That's what it is.
Brent Peterson (01:44.534)
Yeah, that's great. And how about a passion outside of work? What do you like to do?
Sabir Semerkant (01:49.335)
So here's the thing, that's a great question, but for me, if I was getting paid for this, I would do it. If I'm not getting paid for this, this is what I'm going to do, right? This is my passion. Back when I remember when I was six years old, from six all the way to 24, computer programming, For 25, almost 20 plus years, right? And then...
you know, accidentally falling into this e-commerce growth role, right, which we can go into the story of how that act, it was a very nice accident 25 years ago, right, to becoming this growth advisor that the Sharks and the venture capital firms and 200 plus e-commerce founders rely on me to help them grow their businesses. So this is my passion also. This is not just work, you know.
Brent Peterson (02:37.41)
That's awesome.
Brent Peterson (02:41.578)
Yeah, I hear you. I'm an entrepreneur as well. And I'm an entrepreneur's organization, EONetwork.org. I have a different podcast that they sponsor, but anyways, we won't get into that right now. Sabir, but before we start, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Jo project. I'm going to tell you a joke. The rating is eight through 13. So here we go. A man loses three fingers in a work accident at the hospital.
He asks the doctor, will I be able to drive with this hand? The doctor replies, maybe, but I wouldn't count on it.
Sabir Semerkant (03:18.039)
love that joke, by the way. It's a solid 10.75.
Brent Peterson (03:24.403)
Alright, that's perfect. Alright, I like the fact that you're getting very granular there. It's not an int. Yeah, we're... Yeah.
Sabir Semerkant (03:26.135)
Listen, listen, I'm a data driven guy. going to, I just gave you 10 and three quarters, you know. I'm very precise with everything that I do, you know.
Brent Peterson (03:34.55)
Yeah, thank you very much. appreciate that. And I'm old enough. Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when the stock market was in eighths.
Sabir Semerkant (03:43.549)
I used to go through the newspaper myself too, you know.
Brent Peterson (03:46.254)
Right. Good. All right. Let's dive right in. I know in the green room, you mentioned that you co-founded with Gary Vee and my claim to fame is I was in the Magento space for a long time and I was a prolific tweeter, let's just say. This is before automation. I was so good at tweeting inline while listening to somebody, I could put out...
Sabir Semerkant (03:59.513)
very cool.
Brent Peterson (04:11.79)
more than two or 300 tweets in a matter of 10 to 15 minutes. Gary V actually followed me for a short time on Twitter, which is my only claim to fame. But tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into it.
Sabir Semerkant (04:27.265)
So in this role, mean, originally I was a computer scientist, like I said, from the age of six, I've been coding just for fun, right? I got bored as a kid with my elder brother who was two and a half years older than me, right? After playing so many games, you get bored. And actually we got pissed at our dad for buying a Commodore 64 because we had asked for an Atari 600. I don't know if you know those machines from back then, right?
So he gets us a Commodore 64, we play some games on it. All of our friends have Atari 600, right? Go like, why did you get us this? know, we don't have any friends with the similar games. We cannot exchange games anymore and stuff like that. we play enough games that he bought us and then we get bored and then we start looking in the box and we come across Commodore 64 Basic programming language book. Back then...
computers came with a programming language manual, the initial one that you can get. And we started poking around, I mean, literally poke, poke 53280 comma whatever color, right? That was a background color. And then the foreground color was 53281, so that you would do those things. as a kid, is the, you just told me a joke, but what is the first thing you learned to do? Input your name and then whatever they type in, you say you're a donkey or something like that.
And we learned about variables at that time. Fast forward, you know, we get bored and we go like, why don't we write our own game? Something that would be fun for us. So we start on that at the age of, six and he's nine, right? We start writing code and we actually write our first game. We finish our first game, really good game, graphical with sprites and movement and stuff like that. Right. And we actually publish it in the Ahoy magazine back then. was a Commodore 64 magazine back in the day, right? As kids.
Right. So fast forward, get to college. know, now college wants to give me a degree in computer science that I've been doing since I was six. Right. It's like somebody want to give me, if I'm fluent in English and somebody wants to give me a degree in English, you know, that's computer science. Computers were that to me, you know, and for my elder brother too. Right. So we get that degree, millions of lines of code, internet has, becomes commercialized. We start developing internet applications for clients, for ourselves.
Sabir Semerkant (06:47.541)
You know, fast forward now internet goes into commerce, right? HTTP is introduced and commercialized, right? We start, I start going into the e-commerce area, right? And start building a lot of things out all technical completely. If you think about captain Kirk and Scotty, I'm Scotty, you know, on, Star Trek. So complete nerd, complete tech, millions of lines of code, 20 plus coding languages, like very fluent in it. Then say, you know,
I'm on that journey vitamin shop happens right vitamin shop.com goes public it goes bankrupt Jeff Horowitz the founder Acquires all these assets from a bankruptcy court from a fire sale brings it back in and looks into his network to see who he can hire To put this back together, you know because it was a disaster the first time around it went bankrupt with a lot of bad decisions, right? So comes across me. I get involved. You know, I literally
because all of these things were seized by US Marshals. So these are physical assets. It's in North Bergen, New Jersey, in a warehouse, in a physical warehouse. So I started moving these things. I even cut my finger right here, like moving it, because there was no Shopify or Magento back then. You had everything on the hardware. You had to install everything. You had to develop everything. Payment processing does not exist. have to...
you had to write your own APIs to do that yourself from the ground up. Right. So I start putting it in back then there was a data center called Exodus. I don't know if you remember, you know, they were very popular back then. So I put, the servers back up. Vitamin shop.com is back, comes back to life. Right. And then I start poking around as an engineer. find a lot of problems with the infrastructure. So I start ripping things out and fixing it. Right. One of those things I've, I ripped out was.
Search engine they had invested. I don't know between implementation and licensing close to a million dollars I Come along I rip it out out of the site because I look at the data and stuff horrible It's a horrible search engine Implementation is wrong. I rip it out and just throw it out, right? I don't want to What search engine it is? I think they still exist, but I don't want to name them right and I replace it with a new search engine I write from the ground up for ecommerce specifically
Sabir Semerkant (09:10.731)
Where do I get my inspiration from? I was beta testing Google when it was at Stanford. I was beta testing them. That's the timeline, right? So relevance, I want to bring Google, the concept of Google and relevance into e-commerce, which did not exist at that time. There was no search engine for e-commerce at that time. So I put this in and I, you know, being a total nerd, we love acronyms as nerds, right? So I call this search engine Moses.
Right now everybody who's religious, they think, my God, parting of the sea, Bible, blah, blah. No, no, no. Remember I'm a total nerd. This is, this has to do with an acronym. Right? So this is Moses. Moses stands for my own search engine by severe O S E S. That's what Moses stands for. It takes the conversion rate from the site, which was hovering between two and 3 % to over 12%. Right. I finished that. I.
go and talk to and give them, give them the bad news that I just tossed a million dollars worth of investment to the garbage, basically, to Jeff Horowitz. And then I said, I, I, instead I implemented a better search engine. it's, it's giving me 12 % conversion rate. Cause like, yeah, I don't care about the million dollars. He was pissed for two seconds, you know, until he learned that we're making more money now. Right. Then I go like, okay, you know what? I did all the technical stuff. Now it's in a top shape.
Can you connect me with a business marketing person that I can work with to make this go like even faster? It gives me a puzzle that goes like, what are you talking about? My network told me that you're the guy who's going to be doing this, right? It's not, I mean, you're the guy. I'm I'm sorry, I'm an engineer. I'm not a marketer, right? That's it again, Scotty and Kirk, right? So I'm an engineer. It was like, no, no, no, I've seen what you have done. You have a great knack for these things.
I'm gonna teach you the vitamin business. Mind you, I didn't know anything about the vitamins at all. I barely took any vitamins. Maybe my parents may have shoved some vitamins into my mouth when I was very, very young, right? But never had it for a while. So one, I don't know anything about the vitamin industry. So it goes like, well, okay, I'll teach you the vitamin industry, the ebb and flow of the industry and what works and what things go together and stuff like that. You need to learn business and marketing.
Sabir Semerkant (11:30.999)
Did you take any courses? Because this was 25 years ago, right? I said, no. mean, they made me take for my BA in computer science, they made me take accounting 101, economics 101. Does that count? I was like, no, that's not business or marketing. That's accounting, right? That has nothing to do with what you need. I was like, why don't you go and learn business and marketing? You're an intelligent guy. You'll pick it up. And if you have any questions related to vitamins and supplements, I'll...
Come and ask me questions, I'll explain it to you. So what I would do, I took it as an engineering challenge. So I want to engineer this growth. I want to engineer this learning, this skill set. So what I would do during the week, Monday through Friday, I'm at Vitamin Shop on the weekends, Saturday, Sunday. I live in New York City, so I would drive out to Long Island. There's a beautiful bookstore. Timeline again, no Amazon Kindle, no audible.com. Doesn't exist. There is no books on e-commerce.
So I go out there and I go into a bookstore near Roosevelt Field Mall called Barnes and Noble, right? They had a beautiful, still stands there today, right? I go in there, I go to the business and marketing section and I'm picking out books. I want to find books that are similar to this new industry, e-commerce industry. What are those? TV, radio, direct marketing, books on HSN, QVC, stuff like that, right?
So I picked those things out, I start reading it, I sit there 10 hours a day. I did that for four and a half years every weekend, right? I would take notes diligently and then anything that was a dense book, I would go and buy it because I needed it as a reference for me, right? And during the week, thanks to Jeff and his trust, he gave me like a very long rope to test everything that I was learning because...
He tried it the other way before and the company went bankrupt because it was spun out as a dot com. So I take it and I did that four and half years if you count the working days, Monday through Friday, that's 1,000 days. Before it went bankrupt, it was eight to $10 million. In four and a half years, first try, $52 million and highly profitable. That was my first try. And I engineered that growth and I had quite a lot of learnings in that process I would love to share here.
Brent Peterson (13:52.782)
Yeah, that's a fascinating story. I'm, well, number one, I'm surprised the vitamin business went bankrupt in the first place. had to be, you know, like vitamins. seems like the margins are so high. It's so hard to go, but it is an amazing story. yeah, tell us a little bit about the growth path then that you employed and that you deployed to make that happen.
Sabir Semerkant (14:15.639)
So a couple of lessons, and I think anyone that's listening to this podcast, these are the really highly valuable lessons, right? Number one, park your ego at the door. There is no place for it in e-commerce at all. You have so much rich data, right? It's just knowing what's good data versus bad data, right? That's the thing you need to learn. Do you have so much incredible amounts of data? There is no room.
I'm telling you with 25 years and $1 billion in incremental revenue to my name and to my credit, I'm telling you my opinion doesn't matter, let alone anybody else in the field. I'm one of the OGs and I can tell you, nobody, it doesn't matter what resume you hire, VP of marketing, CMO of Johnson and Johnson or proctoring gamble. And you're like salivating, you can't believe that that person is joining your team, has nothing to do with performance.
It's whatever they say, it's one data point. Take it, test it. If it works, then pour more money into it. If it doesn't work, thank them, maybe even release them to the community of the world, right? So that they're no longer are damaging your company and your brand. Right? So there is no place for ego at all. It's cold hard data. You just need to understand what's good data, what's good KPI, what's good metric and how it's that's going to help you.
scale your business, right? It's basically that's it, right? That's number one, rule number one, rule number two. There is no such thing as 10 X and 15 X and 15 % and whatever doesn't exist. Let's lower the barrier because you're testing, learning, and optimizing on a daily basis. That's your job as an e-commerce person, right? On a daily basis, test, learn, optimize, test, learn, optimize. That's it.
Like your mouse on a wheel. That's all you're doing all the time. What are you testing? What is A-B testing? Always B testing. That's it. Right? You're testing email. You're testing email creative. You're testing ad creative. You're testing audiences. You're testing product titles, SEO tags, whatever. Every single day is a test. Every single day. And what is the success criteria for these tests? 1 % improvement daily. Right?
Sabir Semerkant (16:43.165)
And if you can improve it 1 % and I'm now going to channel Warren Buffett, 1 % improvement gives you compounded effect. Right. And that in a 365 day calendar is 36.5 X growth for your brand. But, but, but Sabir, I don't work on the weekends. I want to take time off for sick days. have family, I have grandkids, I have, you know, federal holidays. got to take, okay, I did the math for you because remember,
Remember Brent, I gave your joke a very precise score, right? That's 220 working days. That's how many days it is. That means it's 22X you can grow any calm business. But Sabir, you know that even 1 % sounds low, but you're not going to succeed all the time. Okay, fair. Let's cut that in less than half success rate. 10X. I have 10X brands in 12 to 18 months profitably and they continue growing.
highly doable, but you have to be very diligent, very patient. In the story of hair in the tortoise, Be the tortoise, slow and steady, slow and steady. There's no need for you to race. There is no such thing as, you race, you're gonna burn very quickly, right? And you're gonna lose very quickly too. It's better to be the tortoise in this story. And I have been the tortoise for 25 years and I've incrementally grown businesses over $1 billion.
Brent Peterson (18:08.92)
So just so somebody can walk away from this with some actionable items, do you have a punch list that people can start with or is there somewhere that you would start to make sure that you're on the path for this success and getting that 1 %? Do you have the basic items that somebody should cover?
Sabir Semerkant (18:27.063)
So the documentation I've done for this framework is called the 8D method, right? That's a documentation of it, right? And 8D stands for eight dimensions of e-commerce optimization. There are eight dimensions. So when whoever wants to go in and start optimizing their ad creative and meta ads, that's a sub dimension of a dimension, right? This is why it's lopsided. That's why when you go from $100 per day to $150 per day, your ROAS tanks on meta ads. That's a very...
critical issue across a lot of people who try to scale their meta ads campaigns and stuff, because there there's other problems with it. So we go through, we started with the first dimension of performance optimization. Why performance optimization? Nobody in the business, this is where you experience plays a huge role. It's not about your ad creative. It's not about your audiences. Like why are you trying to implement tactics?
your site is loading, taking more than 28 seconds. Do you know what the attention span of an average consumer is in 2025? 1.7 seconds. If your average site, let's say it's a Shopify site, the average number for 2024 data is 28 seconds. Your site, on average, and some sites don't even load in 28 seconds. It takes longer. So 28 seconds.
It's 22X worse than the consumer attention span. And if your attention span is not caught, what do you do? You ignore. Who you got to tank? TikTok, Instagram Reels, Amazon app, those three. They have spent trillions of dollars into optimizing the consumer attention span. You have no chance in winning unless you actually address this optimization specifically.
And we go through that. takes about six weeks to first optimize what you already have. And then we move on to dimension two through eight, which includes things like marketing, storytelling, pricing optimization, branding, all of these things, logistics, including team optimization. So there are eight dimensions in total. The implementation program is called the Rapid 2X. It's a one-year program. We start with performance optimization in the first six weeks.
Sabir Semerkant (20:49.815)
On average performance, that's 118 % compounded growth. Across 12 test brands, we tried in different categories, in different countries and currencies also. Just to prove that this works, regardless of where you are and what niche you're in. No snowflakes here. This is a tried and true things that actually works across the board. And for your audience, what we have done is actually we have given a very special offer.
You can go to growthbysabir.com slash top commerce, just like the name of the podcast, and we will give a special offer to them. And also they can apply to the program if they're an e-commerce DTC brand, you know, they can apply to the program to see if they're a good fit. We have certain criteria regarding product market fit and also entrepreneurial fit to make sure that if you are the right fit for the program also as an entrepreneur, because it's not for everybody, you know? And yeah.
They could check that out. They can apply to the program. Once they go there, the site has a lot of great content. goes pretty deep into detailed case study walkthroughs to show you exactly how do we achieve these things. So they can learn quite a lot from that.
Brent Peterson (22:05.294)
Yeah, that's great. mean, think a lot of times merchants forget the idea of, well, a lot of times merchants aren't tracking any of these measurements or KPIs, but they, and I'm going to say the majority of merchants overlook the idea of testing and by testing you have to have an A and B, right? So maybe is that always your starting point? Is getting some hypothesis created on what those tests should be? I mean, I understand the, the, the speed part, but in, in terms of
of knowing what is going to perform better. guess we know that speed is faster is going to perform better, we have a few minutes left here. Maybe talk a little bit about the importance of that and how to get started in tracking some of those metrics.
Sabir Semerkant (22:49.409)
So one in the program, when we are going through the optimization phase, you're given prescriptions, right? Like literally I give you prescriptions on what you need to do, right? Based on 200 plus e-coms case studies, A lot of like follicle reducing ideas that have actually worked, right? So that's a good starting point. For a lot of merchants, they don't know where to even start. That's the problem, right? They don't even know what to do. They hear a lot of things.
But they don't know. I hear a thousand things. Tell me the two things I need to do, right? That's everybody's complaint, right? So in this program, that's what you're getting. You're getting that prescription. And over time, because this program is for over a year, what you learn to do is to come up with the behavior of finding out how to test, right? For example, most merchants come to us and they go like, they make a statement, right? They heard it from somewhere.
I've heard it for 25 plus years, right? So they make a statement, go like, okay, why do you think that that's true? Right? Whatever that statement is, they go like, because they try to make a come up with a good reason to make it sound intelligent. Right? But like, no, that's not from you. I know that you heard it from somewhere. Where'd you hear it from? Right. And then they tell me the honest answer. And then I go like, okay, here's a reason why that's not a good idea. Right. Or why this is a good idea.
But however, still if you want to test it, I've tested this a thousand times, but if you still want to test it for your own sake, here's the test. I would test A like this and I would test B like this. Is it percent off or is it dollar off? Is it free shipping or is it fast shipping? Right? These are all good places. Start from the very basics, right? A lot of brands are nowhere near advanced skilled.
so advanced that they are testing, A-B testing at that level, right? No, but not very rarely that happens, right? In most cases, like even the likes of amazon.com, that's the DOG of e-commerce, right? Even they keep testing this product detail page versus this product detail page. Should we put the star rating here or should we put it over here? Even they are trying to figure it out, even now. I mean, in their case, they learn a lot quickly because it's 220 million active shoppers.
Sabir Semerkant (25:12.905)
on the platform on a monthly basis, right? So their learnings are a lot faster. For a brand that barely gets like, I don't know, seven to 10,000 visitors a month, right? You need to figure out the tests you want to do that are going to be really tangible and meaningful that you're going to get results from it. The other tests you can do, most merchants I can tell you, that enter the program, they have no clue what RFM or life cycle marketing is. That means translation.
You don't know your customer, right? That's the plain, simple English translation of it, right? One, I'll give you one golden nugget, one hit wonders, right? One hit wonders and Brent, you're an OG, you know this, right? There are some songs, you hear it, Macarena, Mamba No. 5. It's great for a short while, short bus gone, right? You have customers in your database. They sang to you one time. They gave you one time payment. That's it, right? Never to be seen again.
That number is 70 to 100 % of your customer database. Not subscribers. I'm not counting subscribers. I'm talking about all the transactions you have gotten, legitimate transactions, right? 70 to 100 % of your customer database is one hit wonder. Now, this is on the first transaction. I'm not even counting returns. Not for me, not the right size, not the right color. I need to return it. You take that into account.
into account, that number jumps from 85 to 150 % of your database is one hit wonders. Knowing your customer is really critical. Knowing where are they, are they elapsing? When you get a prospect, what is the time lag between the latency between prospect and first order? What is the latency between first order and second order? What is their recency? What is their monetary value?
What can you offer in order to increase their lifetime value? These are very critical. They sound very simple things that I'm describing to you, but most brands get it wrong. They just either don't understand it at all, or they heard it, but they don't really don't know how to actually make it a practical thing for their business, and let alone make it an ongoing strategy that they keep on repeating on a monthly basis so that their brand becomes a cash cow.
Brent Peterson (27:38.19)
Yeah. And I'll just make one comment and maybe one thing that somebody could take out of this as an action today would be segment their day, their customer database by who's bought something twice and who's bought something once that gets you a big segment of what you talked about. Nobody's going to come back and buy again. That's going to be 80 % of your customers and 20 % are repeats and then continue that process. And I agree that doing that as a, as a regular weekly or monthly or
quarterly exercise to continue to do that. then I think what I hear you saying is that you want to continue digging into that. The more and more you get to know your customers, the better and better. And, I think one thing that we're in this age of AI right now, we made it through 28 minutes without mentioning AI once, which I think is, I think is refreshing that, that those tools are going to only get better over time. Now, and AI is not generative that the best thing AI does is
find patterns in data rather than create images and videos and content, right? That's what we're gonna be, should be deploying it for.
Sabir Semerkant (28:43.681)
So two things there about AI. And thank you for, by the way, making that statement, right? First is, if you're an entrepreneur that gets distracted with shiny new objects, please stop, right? That's why this podcast started not talking about AI. It started talking about the right strategies, regardless of if you do it on a piece of paper, not even on an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets, right? Because that's the sound strategies that you want to implement.
Now AI, you could weaponize and you could implement speed in that growth. It took me four and a half years to take a brand from a bankrupt brand from eight to $10 million to $52 million. It took me four and a half years. Fast forward because of technology, because of AI, because of machine learning, because of all these kinds of things. Now...
In six weeks, can do that. I can do on my average scorecard, 118 % growth, right? In six weeks. That's something that took me, you know, it took me that long, four and half years, right? And I think it's going to get better and better. You have to use these things for what they are, right? You have to think about like, I would rather with AI do like these five things really, really effectively than get distracted with, I'm sorry for the language, with stupid shit, you know?
Like, I saw this YouTube, it lets you do this kind of thing. Yeah, now you just wasted three hours going down that rabbit hole. What does that have to do with your business? So in the program, in the Rapid2X program, we actually do actively do workshops, premium workshops, utilizing AI and e-commerce specifically. So several use cases I'll give you. One of the biggest problems that most merchants have
is coming up with creative ideas for creative ad testing, for example, or creatives for their product carousel on the product detail page, for example. Huge problem, right? They don't have the creativity. Maybe they are a product designer, but not really a photographer, videographer, stuff like that. How can we use something like ChatGPT 4.0 in order to speed that up, right? Speed up the learnings, speed up everything that we can do with that.
Sabir Semerkant (31:03.211)
Those are the types of things very effectively. One, every rapid to Xer learns from that, right, in that workshop. And number two, it becomes part of their weekly task to execute those things against campaigns and then come back on a weekly basis. Come back, go like, yeah, I tested these 50 different concepts. And from these 50, we've identified these five creatives that we are actually scaling now, right?
And they go after each every detail, not, yeah, look at this fancy AI prompt I came up with. It puts you in a little tiny little, I don't know, one of those toy things that became a trend, right? There is place for fun. It's fine, right? But the thing is, I want to make e-commerce as boring as possible, right? That's how you're to win, right? As boring as possible, you do the right things. You just do a handful of those right things over and over again.
In the words of Bruce Lee, he said that, he's very infamous for saying it, he goes like, I'm not afraid of getting in a fight with a person that knows a thousand moves. I am afraid of a person in that tournament that has tried that one move a thousand times. And that's a great analogy, that's a great saying to utilize in business, in your e-comm business. It's more about...
Like the prescriptions that these rapid two Xers get in the program are literally five. Why five? You have five fingers on your hand. If I tell you these are the five things you need to do, you can tell everyone around you what those five things are this week. That's it. And some weeks, maybe because it's a little more complicated, it's only three things you're going to be working on. That's it. Not 3,000 things, not 500 things. Why are you working and wearing a badge of honor like
I'm working 17 hours a day. Why? In 2025, given all these incredible tools you have from AI, ML, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, all these add-ons that you have, all these incredible analytics tools, Advantage Plus from Meta, incredible, incredible. Most people complain about it because they don't know what to do with it, right? And they fail miserably at it, right? Or Performance Max is incredible, you know, given the richness of Google data.
Sabir Semerkant (33:23.743)
It's incredible for me. I'm like a kid in a candy store. Like literally I put in my right strategies. I'm cashing out at a four to six X ROAS, right? Not one and a half. One and a half? I'm gonna go bankrupt if I do one and a half ROAS. For some reason for most merchants, that has become an acceptable thing when they hear that from their agencies. It shouldn't be.
Brent Peterson (33:49.278)
All right. That's great. And I'm glad that we had a chance to get the Bruce Lee quote in there. That's perfect. I appreciate the severe. have a few minutes left, a few seconds left even as I close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Sabir Semerkant (34:06.055)
Be patient and don't waste your time. Just go to growthbysabir.com slash talk commerce. And if you're running an e-commerce DTC brand, this is the right program for you. Nothing like it exists, first of all, because there are so many programs that focus on a very specific niche thing like paid media or TikTok or whatever. This is the program that looks at your business holistically and tells you,
And you start working on that journey to fix your brand so that you can actually scale it, whether you're starting at zero to 100k or 10 million plus. We have rapid two X-ers who are multi-million dollar brands that are succeeding. And we have brands that just surpassed their proof of concept stage at 100k per year.
Brent Peterson (34:53.516)
That's perfect. Sabeer Semmerkant is a e-commerce growth advisor. You can find him at growth by Sabeer and I would go to forward slash talk commerce. Thank you so much for being here today.
Sabir Semerkant (35:04.811)
Thank you, Brent, for having me.