030: John Li's Masterclass on Leveraging PickFu for Game-Changing Amazon Feedback and Product Optimization

Unlock the secrets of consumer feedback that could revolutionize your Amazon business, as we chat with John Li, the innovative mind behind PickFu. You're about to embark on a journey that will reveal how a simple idea evolved into an indispensable tool for entrepreneurs eager to refine their products and branding to perfection. Prepare to be inspired by John's vision of a digital focus group that's not just reshaping how we validate our brand's resonance with customers but is also transforming the way we approach market research and product development.

With the power of PickFu, we navigate the complexities of market segmentation, touching on the art of crafting questions that unearth the gold mine of consumer insights. John shares how PickFu's nuanced demographic breakdowns are the key to tailoring your product packaging and promotions to the audience that will love them most. Our conversation also shines a light on the indispensable templates PickFu offers, designed to streamline your strategic planning and ensure your brand story isn't just heard but felt by the right people.

Finally, we dissect the critical role of product imagery and the necessity of iterative testing for continual marketplace success. Through a captivating case study, John illustrates how PickFu's rapid polling leads to actionable results that can dramatically escalate your Amazon listing performance. By the end of our discussion, you'll have grasped the profound impact that data-driven design adjustments—based on authentic customer feedback—can have on your sales and brand growth. Don't miss the chance to learn from John Li and start harnessing the full potential of PickFu for your online empire.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome everyone to the Brandfortress HQ podcast. I'm your host, john Stochan, I have my co-founder here today, mike Kaufman, and our guest today is John Lee, the co-founder of Pickfoo, and Pickfoo is a consumer research platform for getting instant feedback from target audiences, working with thousands of global brands that rely on Pickfoo to help make better data-driven decisions about their products and marketing, and I think it just has such a massive impact on the Amazon community and helping them really improve products and listings in a lot of other areas. So, john, I'm happy to have you on the podcast, welcome.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Oh, thank you so much, John and Mike Super excited to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:40

So for the folks that maybe aren't familiar with you and kind of your journey, what did it look like for you getting involved in Pickfoo and kind of the Amazon world?

Speaker 2: 0:52

Yeah for sure. So, like you mentioned Pickfoo, pickfoo is a way for you to get feedback from your target audience. We have a panel of 10 million consumers in the US, 15 million worldwide that you can tap into to get direct feedback on your business listings, business anything related to your business. So the backstory is that we actually started to Pickfoo as a tool for ourselves when we were running a different business. So my co-founder, justin, and I we've been building web businesses for over a dozen years. We were working on some other main business at the time.

Speaker 2: 1:25

It was the two of us and our background is both products and in product and engineering, and you can imagine two nerds with no design sense trying to agonize over a design decision here like a logo, a website, some kind of headline over here Like what do you think about this, what do you think about this? We would just keep butting heads and neither of us were experts in this thing. So we would ask our friends and family and friends and family love you. You know they're biased. They can kind of get sick sick of you asking for feedback on your business and everything. So instead we built a tool to get unbiased feedback on the stuff that mattered to us and that was Pickfoo.

Speaker 2: 2:05

Put it aside for a while. It just kind of grew organically in a couple of different verticals and every once in a while we'd look back on it and we'd be like, oh look, it looks like it's growing. And then we focus on our main business and at some point, after enough of that, we realize, ok, well, the main business is not as interesting. Pickfoo is the thing that's really taken off helping other entrepreneurs, which is really near and dear to our hearts. And around that time, that's when we entered the Amazon world, where it turns out that running the proper handful of Pickfoo tests can really make a big difference in terms of both Amazon traffic and sales and so on. Very nice.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Well, I want to take a little bit of a different direction here. So I think for folks that look at Pickfoo on your website or have heard of you before are probably really familiar with the listing side of things of like, how do I choose this image over that image? Based on the notes I have here, what I wanted to do was just hear your feedback on one of the things that you mentioned here was validating branding for brand value, specifically Because brand is one of the things that is a big part of what were involved in brand fortress HQ and really where we see Amazon going is that the days where you could just source up something off of Alibaba, put it up on Amazon and essentially flip that product are essentially dead at this point, and really who's going to win over the next five to 10 years are going to be those people that build a very powerful and cohesive brand that communicates effectively to customers. So I'm really curious as to how Pickfoo can essentially help with that.

Speaker 2: 3:47

Yeah. So I think you should just think of Pickfoo as a digital focus group, so anything that you would ask a in-person focus group the same kind of focus groups that CPGs like Kellogg's uses to figure out their next flavor of Cheerios or something right you can think of using Pickfoo as that as getting feedback from your target audience. So if you're building a brand on Amazon, like you mentioned, you have a brand story. You have a cohesive brand story and a set of emotions and feelings that you're trying to convey to the potential customer. And if you have this brand story, you want to make sure that all your assets are aligned and conveying that brand story the way that you're hoping that it would. And so when you're setting up your brand, your logo, all your collateral, you want to be able to put that up and test that beforehand that it is actually conveying.

Speaker 2: 4:42

Like, if you're trying to, let's say, for example, you're trying to build a brand that like, let's say, a nutritional supplement brand that conveys strength and strength and reliability and so on, you can take your name, your potential logos, all your logo designs, all your collateral, put that up on Pickfoo and actually ask the audience to, let's say, take a look at your logo. Or take a look at your logo and write down the first three things that they think about when they see your logo. Or take a look at this piece of collateral and think about and convey what kind of feelings or what kind of feelings or attributes, those that collateral is conveying to them as they're doing this thing.

Speaker 2: 5:25

If that's because you want to make sure that what you're putting out in the world is conveying what you're trying to achieve.

Speaker 1: 5:33

So walk me through that a little bit with a tool like Pickfoo. What sort of questions or do you have some recommendations on, because I think most people that are listening to this probably already have. They've got some traction on Amazon and they're like OK, I've got at least the beginnings of a brand, or I think I've got a brand. What does that operationally look like? If they're like I've had this logo for the last two years and this is kind of what we started out with, but I don't know how well that really I'm guessing, kind of like back to you and your partner, where you guys are having an argument over is this speaking the right message or is it not? And rather than guessing, what does that process look like for them to really validate if their branding is hitting home or if it's not?

Speaker 2: 6:24

Yeah. So I mean from a structural perspective, if you were already selling on Amazon, what I would suggest is that you actually take your logo and some of your top maybe your top product or your top logo or header image and actually go over to Pickfoo, toss it in as a single what we call an open-ended poll and basically you can ask your target audience please review this image and write down the qualities that you believe this brand conveys, and you can target anywhere between 15 to 500 people. I recommend somewhere between 30 to 50. And you can micro-target down to, obviously, your target audience and go through and take a look at the results and see how those results compare to what your hope is that your brand is conveying.

Speaker 3: 7:15

Go ahead? How does Pickfoo so, let's say, I run that test, right? Yeah, for our audience. How is that information aggregated? So, in other words, you know, like, depending on how many people I polled, it could be a fair amount of information that I'm sifting through in terms of trying to figure out what do people think. How does Pickfoo aggregate that and display that to me in a way that's meaningful, like is there any AI analysis? Is it? You know charts and graphs, is it just? This is the text and I have to read you know 500 messages and try to pull out from it. You know what I think. You know how does that work?

Speaker 2: 7:54

Great question. So with Pickfoo, like as you mentioned earlier, you can do comparative tests on Pickfoo, right? You can put up to eight different options and then the audience will vote on what they prefer and write down why they chose how they chose. With an open-ended question, they just answer the question, or maybe they provide a star rating or they do a click test. We offer that as well. But one core thing about Pickfoo is that we always ask every panelist to answer the question and provide a written response.

Speaker 2: 8:28

Now, Mike, as you said, if you get 500 people to write a written response and we keep set the quality bar super high that can be a lot of text to read.

Speaker 2: 8:38

So obviously you're going to get a list of all the different responses, but we do use AI to analyze all of those responses and provide you a three-paragraph executive summary on every single poll. So if you are comparing four different potential main image variations for your listing, you will get an executive summary of how the audience felt about across those four variations. If you're running a poll comparing your main image to your competitor's top images, you'll get that executive summary too. And if you are doing a single image asking about your branding, that AI summary will summarize everything from those 15 to 500 people in a nice executive summary. On top of that, we do demographic breakdowns of all the panelists. So if you have 100 people, we will tell you for every single person. We can give you the demographic breakdown of gender, age, income, so on, and give you an overall breakdown of across these 100 people, how many males versus females preferred A or B or C or D, income breakdowns and so on.

Speaker 2: 9:43

So that can be really useful if you are trying to figure out a target market for your product. If you are potentially putting a new product out there and you want to understand what types of demographics might respond to that better than others, you could run a pretty broad poll and actually dive into the demographic reports and understand well, for this option actually like higher earning females of a certain demographic might prefer this over this and so on. Interesting.

Speaker 3: 10:18

I wouldn't have thought of it as a platform for researching who your target demographic might be for a specific product. I've always looked at PICFU as really being that thing like that. You're doing that testing after the fact for listing testing and things of that nature. I like the idea of potentially using it more on the front end and validating your branding, validating whether you're actually correct about who your target audience is. I think that's a good use case.

Speaker 1: 10:49

When you provided a great example of logo. Are there any other kind of high level areas of again if they've got some traction but they're like hey, I want to validate that my brand is really hitting home or I think that my brand could be more cohesive. Are there other aspects of that brand that you'd recommend they test on?

Speaker 2: 11:12

PICFU. Yeah, I would love to hear from your end what are some of the brand problems that you see, and maybe I can try to figure out where PICFU might be helpful on that.

Speaker 3: 11:23

Well, one of the things I mean is that we do a lot of what we're doing at Brand Fortress HQ is working on that kind of branding and post-purchase process to create that engagement with customers. One of the things that comes to mind is product packaging and or inserts or hang tags or things like that. Instead of waiting for the results to come back from, say, a split test of an insert that you put in, maybe doing some PICFU testing on those inserts ahead of time in terms of what that messaging might look like seems like maybe a good use case. We haven't tried it ourselves.

Speaker 2: 12:08

Oh yeah, we absolutely see a lot of insert testing on PICFU, not just from the perspective of a design sense, but it's also really helpful to. Picfu is really useful for highlighting areas of confusion and questions that you might be missing or that your customer might have, that you might have overlooked, particularly in the area of inserts. Obviously you can run a poll on PICFU and get feedback on sort of if you have two or three different variations of inserts or even on one insert, like what the audience perception is of that. But if you are very direct and actually ask like please review this insert, what are the questions that you have after reviewing this or is there any missing information from your perspective that can uncover a whole set of information that improvements to the information that you're putting on that insert, that can save you a lot of time and money and particularly a lot of headache afterwards.

Speaker 3: 13:17

Yeah, it seems like you could also potentially. I mean, if you pretty well squared away what your target audience is like, if you really feel like you've got that nailed pretty well, it seems like you can even use that just simply as a more generic test of the offer itself. Just two different offers like which one of these would you respond to? It's very generic, there's not really much design to it, it's just this is the offer, which one would you prefer?

Speaker 2: 13:46

We have large sweepstakes companies who use PICFU to test exactly those kinds of offers Because, like you said, mike, that they have figured out exactly who their target audience is and they are trying to run these weekly promotions. And they will use PICFU to test the promotions and not only the promotions, but then also how you phrase the promotions, right, right, like that matters a ton.

Speaker 3: 14:17

Yeah, I could take. I mean, I could see a situation where you could take, you know, three or four iterations of that test. You know the front end is okay, what is the offer? Then the next stage is okay, we figured out what the offer is. How do we phrase the offer? Now? We know how to phrase the offer. Now we need to figure out how we want to lay out the actual formatting of the insert to get the best response rate. You know XYZ. So you know I could see how you could iterate through that process fairly quickly.

Speaker 1: 14:42

Yeah, and I think you'd have a ton of benefits from layering those on top of each other in order to kind of solve each one of those problems individually. This might be a little bit tactical, but I'm curious. So are there set questions when you're setting up a poll, or is it, you know, is there an art to kind of asking that right question in order to get the data you want out?

Speaker 2: 15:07

of a test, yes and yes. So at its core we want it to be as flexible as possible so anyone can go on to PickFu itself service and you can write any question you want, upload up to eight options text, images, audio, video and choose your target audience and then you're off to the races. But, john, as you said, there is an art to asking the right questions. If you, I will promise you that if you try to stuff questions into a single question box like, you're not going to get great, great results.

Speaker 2: 15:43

What we have done is, over the years, with like all the thousands and whatever of polls that we've seen, we have coalesced templates for specific use cases, like Amazon product, like an Amazon main, image optimization, competitive tests, quality control on stuff, and we've made really simple, easy to use templates where you can just where the question is pre filled, the options are set up in a proper way. The audience is, the audience is pre targeted, so you can just drop in your options and you're off to the races. So we have pre built templates for all of our most common use cases and actually those are discounted off the market price. But you can always just write any question you want, because we want to provide that flexibility for all of our users.

Speaker 1: 16:28

Okay, very nice, because I imagine listeners that are, you know, listening to this. Okay, well, that sounds like amazing things to test. And then you know, once, you make sure that they get the most out of it when they get in the nuts and bolts. So that's, that's fantastic. So one of the other things that I've got here from in my notes is because I think that this is probably one of the most painful things for sellers is you know they've, they've got some traction, they've got a cure product and you know they're looking at. You know they understand that they need to be launching at least a couple of new products a year in order to continue to grow.

Speaker 1: 17:06

And you know, no matter how much time and effort you put into a product and hopefully, you know, as we discussed earlier, do some of that research on the front end, but unfortunately, you know, sometimes we launch a product doesn't go the way we want. We want and we have that. You know launch that fails. So tell me a little bit about this. You know case study and how you guys use what you do at Pickfoo Pickfoo in order to essentially rescue a failed launch.

Speaker 2: 17:35

Yeah, so. So first of all, to clarify, we don't do anything because it's all self service, like, like. Please don't put me on the listing, right, but I mean, I'll credit all credit to our users who figure out these amazing ways of using being able to tap into the consumer insights. So so the story you're referring to is is this agency called LeapStores, and what they were doing is that they were helping out this client, who was, who had already tried to launch twice in a very competitive category, and it was this product that he was selling. He launched once, got no traction on this set of target keywords, went back, changed up a couple things, launched again, also zero traction on any of the sort of the keywords that they were looking at. And then he then LeapStores was.

Speaker 2: 18:26

He started working with LeapStores, they came over and they started using Pickfoo and what they did is that they kept the product exactly the same, but the hypothesis is that the main image wasn't strong enough to be competitive in that category. So what they did was they went and they took the best sellers in that target category for like for those target keywords and they took I think it was the three best sellers and they ran a Pickfoo poll for the, just with those three. So removing his own product, just the three, the three best seller, best selling main images. And they ran a Pickfoo poll on that and he didn't care which one won. What he cared about was reading the comments, right? So like they're all there, they're all pop sellers for a reason and those images appeal to shoppers for some kind of reason. And so they went through and read all the comments, coalesced, all the positive attributes of what consumers liked about option A, option B, option C, and then started reverse engineering a hybrid image based on that feedback and around those three images.

Speaker 2: 19:37

And so he actually went through and he went.

Speaker 2: 19:43

He made one pass, ran a Pickfoo poll failed, took the feedback, tweaked the image, went back again tweaked the image, ran another poll, failed again. I think he went through maybe six, six to eight different polls and different iterations of this image until he got an image that was consistently not necessarily beating all the best sellers, but held its ground, you know. And so with that, like right, because you can't, you're not going to win every single time, but the fact that you are at least standing your ground from a visual perspective on the search results is going to matter a lot. So then he took that. So then he took that image and that was the only thing that he changed on.

Speaker 2: 20:27

That launch, relaunched and within a week he had top rankings for a lot of the keywords that he was going for and there was literally nothing else that had changed right same product, same price point. All of that stuff and that kind of just goes to show the power of putting your best, like visually, putting your best foot forward when you're doing a launch, and how that can completely change the trajectory of like how your product is going to do.

Speaker 3: 20:53

I think, you know, one of the things that I think is also valuable in that is really kind of a larger, more generic recommendation, and that is to, like, every entrepreneur should understand this. But a lot of people who are selling on Amazon, entrepreneurs and I don't think they necessarily do understand this, and that is, failure is pretty much inevitable. But it doesn't have to be the end of that story, right? Like I mean, he failed twice with his launch, didn't give up on it, said hey, I think I can still do this, right. And then proceeded to fail numerous additional times in his testing process before he came out with something that was like, okay, yeah, this works right. And so I think you know it's interesting.

Speaker 3: 21:41

You know, a lot of people run their split tests and whatnot and they give up way too soon, right? Like they run these tests and they're like, oh, it wasn't any better, you know. So I guess I'll just leave it, you know, or you know, whatever the end result is, depending on what the test is, right, I mean, test it three, four, five, 10 times. Like I mean, there is a way most likely to improve on whatever it is that you have. Like, there is almost certainly a way to improve on it. But if you only test it once or twice or three times, chances are you're not going to find it, you know. But if you're willing to, you know, test it five, six, 10 times, you're probably going to find something that's better.

Speaker 1: 22:20

So yeah, mike, in my experience I'd even go farther than that. And you know brands that have come to me and said, hey, this product. You know we just can't figure out this product. A lot of it is because their first solution isn't even to test new main images or to test different aspects of the listing, it's to crank up the ads and hope that it gets better. You know.

Speaker 1: 22:46

Yes, more money on that right right because they don't know what else to do. So I think this is just a good example of, okay, you know, ads can definitely be a hammer, but there are one tool in your toolbox and you need to have more tools because it's not gonna solve every problem for you. And this is a great example of you know, sometimes you need something different in order to get where you want to go, because ads, yes, they will get you Visibility, but if your product isn't earning its place there, when it comes to that main image and the other aspects of that listing, you know you're You're not doing yourself any favors in the long-running. You're much better off taking some of that money that you would have spent on ads, on Duding, that iterating, and I'm sure that that you know this.

Speaker 1: 23:33

You know in this example that you provided John. You know I'm sure they were frustrated after the first round, the second round, the third round, the fourth round, the fifth round, the sixth round. You know I mean, like everybody hopes that, okay, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna find that solution, and it does take some, some efforts. But if you compare that to I'm just gonna crank up ads and hope for the best, this has Such a better outcome to it and gives you so much more value on how you can improve and gives you a lot more tools to work with.

Speaker 3: 24:08

We know you're sharp nail right, like I mean it's like you. Like you say like okay, that's great, I've got a hammer, but I have a nail that has no sharp point on it. Like I mean, you can pound on that a lot, of a long time before you get any penetration If you sharpen the nail. One swipe at that nail and you can get super huge penetration. So I mean I think that's the thing you know. You sharpen the nail, stop hitting it with the hammer.

Speaker 2: 24:28

Yeah, I mean, if it's like you have you, you guys have no idea how many times I've talked to PPC agencies who are like I Can't do anything with this listing because the client will not change the image and they just want to keep, you know, turning the crank on turning up spend. And it's like if you have a leaky bucket, the solution is not to pour more water into it. Right, it's to fix your bucket first, then you can pour water into it. And I think that every we've seen so many times Listings where if you fix the main image, right, it's, it's a, it's a conversion funnel. Right, ads are a conversion funnel.

Speaker 2: 25:02

But, honestly, organic is a conversion funnel. Right, like the, the search results are just a conversion funnel. So if you, if you have a poor converting main image and title and Secondary but title matters too but if that isn't converting well, your ads aren't going to convert well. And when you, when you improve the conversion of what you put Out there organically, your ads will perform better, your organic traffic will be better and your conversion rate will be better on your main, on like once people actually go to your listing.

Speaker 3: 25:33

Well, and your PPC comes down, you know, like, because the better conversion that you have, the less. And you know Amazon doesn't have to charge you as high of a click through to get to make so much out of you. Exactly, they want to make it on the sale too. So it's like you know there's such a, you know, a flywheel like we talk about the flywheels all the time on Amazon. Like any time You've got an algorithm that you're working with, there's flywheels involved. You know, and sometimes you tweak one thing, pull one lever and the flywheel spins three times faster.

Speaker 1: 25:58

Yep, yeah, and it's not only conversion either. I mean, I, I love conversion rate as much as anybody, but I think the other number that people need to keep in mind too here is you know your click-through rate, especially when you're talking about ads, because Amazon wants to make. Well, amazon is optimizing to make money in every step of that process, and so if they can show an ad to a customer and you know maybe you are bidding a dollar, but somebody else is bidding 90 cents, but they know that that other product is much more likely to get a click in to convert, they're gonna show that ad and they're gonna show that product a lot more often. So you know, if you understand it from Amazon's perspective of they're trying to optimize Every step of that process to make as much money as possible, then it gives you, I think, a little bit Better alignment with what Amazon wants in addition to your, your customers, in order to be successful in Moving your products forward.

Speaker 2: 26:56

I've got one tip on, I think, for the for the product display pages, for improving some conversion rates. We, you can. We have this poll we call the listing audit, which is basically sending customers, sending potential customers, to your Amazon listing To review it and then surface questions. It's kind of like a quality control thing that I mentioned earlier, right? So if you, if you run a quick poll, send 30, 15, 30 people To with your and just put in your Amazon listing and say after reviewing this Amazon listing, what questions do you have, I promise you you're gonna get eye-popping responses and there's gonna be like three things that you're gonna want to go into your Amazon listing to tweak just to make sure that those bases are covered, because the Questions that our panelists have about your product after taking a look at it are exactly, are gonna be the same questions that a potential shopper are gonna have.

Speaker 3: 27:52

Can I ask you, john? This is one of the things that has always I don't want to say perplexed to me, but but makes me wonder a little bit sometimes. You know. So, with a service like pick-foo, you know you're, you're putting your images or your questions, or whatever it is, in front of this.

Speaker 3: 28:08

You know potential audience and I believe you do have, you know, certain availability in terms of targeting the right audience? But if you're, you know like, say so, we sell you know, my brain is protop products and we sell pool cleaning tools and one of the interesting things about pool cleaning tools and of course, there's other products that are like that but is it's a very specific audience, right? I mean, like, there's 300 million people who are using it, there's a hundred million people in the US, but there's only 10 million pools in the US, you know. So I'm selling to a much smaller subset of a much larger group of individuals and then, of course, I'm selling to an even smaller subset because I'm targeting a very specific pool owner, right?

Speaker 3: 28:50

So, on pick-foo, or even you know some other platform that maybe does something similar, you know, how granular can you get with that, or how granular should you get with that testing To try and make sure you're getting the right answer? Because I've always looked at it and said, if I, if I'm testing with too generic of an audience, then I'm not necessarily so sure that the answers I'm getting back Are the answers that my target customers would give me. So what, how do you, what's your response on that?

Speaker 2: 29:20

Sure. So with PickFu we are able to provide over 90 different targeting traits. So, mike, in your case specifically, we do have a segmentation of homeowners versus renters and so on, so that can get you a little bit closer. I do not know off the top of my head whether we can target pool owners on PickFu, but we do have the ability to build custom audiences. We could dig into that for you if that was, but we have built custom audiences in the past. I think a combination of homeowners plus maybe the demographics of your target buyer might get you like a pretty close approximation, obviously go ahead.

Speaker 3: 30:02

Do you guys have an option for targeting geographically at all?

Speaker 2: 30:06

Yeah, I believe five or six different geos in the US. Ok, because potentially.

Speaker 3: 30:13

the one thing that I did determine is, if you think about it, if I live in someplace really warm and I have a lot of money, I have a pool, I'm not going to live someplace hot and have that kind of money and not have a pool. So that for us is actually a fairly simple identifier of our target. And I would argue and I've said this to other sellers that if you're having trouble targeting, sometimes thinking outside the box like that- and say, OK, I can't, on this platform I can't choose pool owner.

Speaker 3: 30:46

But I can choose somebody in Florida who has this much money. It's an 80% chance he probably has a pool. Yeah, you can probably.

Speaker 2: 30:54

Maybe three or four of them. Yeah, you can probably target homeowner income over $100,000 and in the Southwest or Southeast or something you might get pretty close. Sure, yep.

Speaker 1: 31:09

So, working off that optimization piece of it and you gave a great tip there how do you, or what recommendations would you have for listeners that are like OK, I'm familiar with Amazon, manage my Experiments and I think, for me, I don't think about it as using one or the other, it's really a combination of both. What recommendations would you have for listeners out there as far as how to leverage those two together in order to really improve their listings? Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 31:42

I think Manager Experiments is a fantastic tool and I think the best sellers use both PICFU in conjunction with Manager Experiments. So I think with PICFU what you can do is you do your rapid iterations on PICFU as you're working with your designer for different collateral, different offers and so on. You test those reps on PICFU to make sure that you have the absolute optimized variation of what your team is producing. Then you can go put that into Manager Experiments once you have more confidence and then you can go validate that on Manager Experiments. I have heard adding totally that Manager Experiments may or may not necessarily work all the time, but at least you can use PICFU to get that quick feedback to understand, iterate your way to a better final product before you actually or a better final option before actually putting that out onto Manager Experiments.

Speaker 3: 32:43

How would you recommend to sellers who are thinking of using a service like PICFU in terms of, if we get into procedurally, how you might walk through it? Let's get specific and just talk main image. Let's say so we're talking about that idea of using PICFU on the front end for rapid iteration and then maybe we confirm our results with our Manager Experiments and see how we go. So if we're using PICFU and we want to do this rapid iteration how large? What's the best way to say this so that we can get the results that we need as quickly as possible but with the least amount of expense as possible? What size audience would you recommend that somebody actually use? Because obviously you can tell a person can choose on PICFU, I want 50 people or I want 500 people. If I'm going to run iterations like that, what's the sweet spot?

Speaker 2: 33:38

30 to 50 people, many iterations. That's your sweet spot, as when you're in the iteration process, you want to make it fast and you want and in our study, from what we've seen 30 to 50 is a pretty good. What you want is directional significance. You don't want absolute statistical significance. We can get into a whole debate about what that actually means, but 30 to 50 people will get you directional significance, and it's not just about the numbers, but it's also about the insights that you and your team and your designer are pulling from the responses that help guide you to the next iteration of what it is that you're building.

Speaker 2: 34:19

So, in terms of getting really tactical, if you were to say that, ok, well, I have this listing. It's not performing well and I would like to take a swing at optimizing this main image. What I would recommend is that first you run a competitive test with your image against the category bestsellers. Read the responses, understand what are the pros of the category leaders compared to your image. Go to your designer, work with them to figure out an image that incorporates some of those other additional benefits eye candy, whatever it is that are eye catching on the top sellers. Then work with that image and keep iterating on that image over and, over and over again until you have a new image that is competitive. Then now you have an image that you feel is confident, that you are confident, that is competitive to the category bestsellers. Then you take that image. You can go ahead and pop that into manager experiments or a lot of our users. They'll just swap the image and they'll usually see increases of 15% increases in click through rate.

Speaker 1: 35:24

Right, and I want to double click on what you just said there because to me that's one of the things that's kind of my axe to grind with managed my experiments. So it's great to see conversion rates and some of the other data that they give you, but what they don't give you is your CTR, so they don't tell you what your click through rate is. Well, if you have an image that actually has a little bit better conversion rate but has a much lower click through rate, well, you've actually done more harm than good in that process. So how does that? If we're running a pick food experiments, how can we pull out or basically test for that CTR component?

Speaker 2: 36:06

So I think it's hard to test for the CTR component. What I will say anecdotally is that generally, pick food pulls can be a pretty good proxy for a better performing main image on the Amazon search results. The heuristic that I've seen working with a lot of the aggregators who use pick food is that they will keep when they are doing their own image variation, like improving their main image and taking the original image and comparing it to these new variations that their designers are creating. They want to win. I think it's 70, 30, that the new image beats the old image by 70 to 30. And that gives them confidence to just go put that up there and they will see better results on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 37:03

OK, because I think the other piece that you pointed out is the time component. So if I'm running a pick food poll, what does the timeline generally look like for getting those results back?

Speaker 2: 37:16

50 responses in 30 minutes.

Speaker 1: 37:19

Yeah, so that's so much faster than if you look at manage my experiments. Best case scenario if you have a ton of traffic, you can get results back in a couple of weeks. Worst case scenario if you have a product that maybe barely qualifies, or even if it assuming it does qualify for manage my experiments, it can take a month to six weeks in order to get those results back that are significant enough to make a decision of hey, did this new image or any other components of your listing move the needle? And so I think, going back to what you said, being able to iterate very quickly is a big advantage.

Speaker 3: 37:57

I think a component of that too that strikes me is that if you're going to use pick food, then I think set up your process in such a way that it makes the greatest use of what appears to be one of the greatest assets that Pickfoo has to offer, which is that quick iteration.

Speaker 3: 38:20

Right, like if I can get results back in 30 minutes but I can't get a new design to test for three days, well then I've lost a lot of the benefit of using Pickfoo.

Speaker 3: 38:32

You know like, yes, it still benefits me because I'm still going to take two or three or four or five weeks, you know, through manage my experiments.

Speaker 3: 38:38

But I could if I had a designer ready, like I'm like okay, I've set this project up, we're going to iterate this. As soon as we get a result, I want you to take that new image and I want you to just keep iterating on that. I'm going to connect you to the Pickfoo account and just keep rolling this through. You know, in a day you could run all of those experiments and be where you need to be and have that finalized image ready to go, rather than three weeks from now having that, because it takes you three days. To reiterate again. So I would suggest, if you're listening to this and you're considering Pickfoo, you know, make the best use out of that speed of iteration by having the back end process already set up, with a designer and maybe your brand manager who are just right on that, you know to keep moving through that and that that's a really good point and that's how we see a lot of our power users using it.

Speaker 2: 39:28

Is that the? You know when it's time for a new design, it comes really rapidly because we know that it's the brand manager and the designer sitting on the other side who are making iterations running a poll, going out for coffee, coming back, you know, taking a look at the results, iterating again and running another poll, and so you can get so much done in a day like that. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 39:50

I like. I think that's one of the things that we've struggled with as a brand is speed, you know, in terms of making those adjustments and doing that testing, and I would say, to our detriment, we haven't made effective use. We've utilized Pickfoo on occasion. I mean, we have used the service, but we haven't used it to the fullest extent that we could and we certainly haven't iterated like that with that speed. To be honest, as much as I knew like in my head, you know, I knew that okay, yeah, you could iterate faster with Pickfoo it didn't really occur to me until just a moment ago just how quickly you could really iterate from start to finish and have a really good performing you know image done, you know and you know, in a day.

Speaker 2: 40:37

Yep, you're not the only one, don't worry, don't feel bad.

Speaker 1: 40:44

Well, and even as my wheels turning, as far as you know, thinking about maybe you have, because I mean, I feel like there's always these discussions of like kind of back to what you were talking about earlier where, john, where you're like, okay, you know, we have some creative discussions about, well, I think this image is going to be best, and you think that image is going to be best and you know, somebody else thinks that this image is going to be best. So, having you know, even if you have those different iterations of the image, to say, okay, here's the top three iterations of this image that we have and we can spend, you know, we can get the results back on all three of those images within three day, or, excuse me, within, you know, 30 minutes each, so an hour and a half to know exactly which image is going to be best. And then it gives us, like you said, kind of that directional nudge to say, hey, here's the direction that we go in.

Speaker 2: 41:31

Yeah, just pickfoo it right, as we say, as we say internally, like we, we can debate about it, or you can just pickfoo it and like debating and just pickfoo it, right, yeah exactly Right.

Speaker 2: 41:40

I mean it's, look, it's not, it's fun to joke about, but like it's not. This is like pickfoo is not the answer, right, pickfoo is just information, right it's. It's ultimately up to you to make that decision, but obviously, if you, if you want to be data driven, then it helps to have that information to give you that confidence about you know the good like a go, no go decision, or an A or B or whatever.

Speaker 3: 42:01

Yeah, you know, it's also interesting. I think that it's likely that a lot of individuals who might consider using a service like pickfoo would would maybe bristle a little bit at taking the time to actually dig into the, the text based responses Like they, I think, to their detriment. I think a lot of sellers would likely take the the short run at that and instead run test that they believe they can just simply use the numbers and make that determination and ignore the text when you're missing probably 75% of the value of the test if you're not reading through the text Because, again, like you said, you may run across a theme in there that you know somebody's mentioning something that the numbers don't necessarily bear it out, but if you address that issue in your next image, you might find a very significant change in the result.

Speaker 2: 42:56

Exactly Like losing numerically doesn't mean you've lost, it just means that there's opportunity to uncover on you know, on in those comments, for you to improve.

Speaker 1: 43:07

Yeah Well, and I want to roll back to this, just listing optimization in general, because I think that that's a huge opportunity that's missed by sellers. Because I mean, if you think about increasing, you know, your conversion rate or your click through rate by, you know, let's say, right now, a year at 10%, and then you you're able to increase that to 12%, that 2% doesn't seem like a whole lot. But if you're selling that product over the course of, you know, six months to a year and you think about not only how many additional sales you got from that, but we all know, you know, mike, like you talked about the Amazon flywheel like, okay, how much more visibility do I get, how much more does that decrease my ad costs and all the other compounded effects, that that can have a huge impact on your listing just by increasing it. You know that extra. You know 2% for your conversion rate.

Speaker 3: 44:00

So, John, if you were to, if you were to express the one thing, that is what's the best way to say it, the one mistake that most individuals make when they come in and start using pick food. What is the thing that most everybody is doing wrong?

Speaker 2: 44:24

Not iterating, I would say, is the is the biggest thing. That is where the opportunity is. I think they come in, they run one poll, they think that that is the be all end all of either optimization or, mike, like you said, they look at the numbers and they're either discouraged or they feel like that's enough, right, and then they stop iterating. And so they're they're. They're coming to pick food for an answer rather than for insight, and it's if you come to pick food for insight that gives you ideas and opportunities for even more improvement.

Speaker 3: 45:02

I like that. Insights, not answers, yeah.

Speaker 1: 45:05

Well, I think you've. That is a phenomenal tip for listeners. You gave one earlier about. You know, just run your listings. You'll be surprised at the feedback that you'll get from people in gaps that you have that you never even thought about. Is there any other kind of you know action tips that you would have, kind of that one thing that listeners should definitely do in order to move their brand forward?

Speaker 2: 45:30

Yeah, I would say, take one other one that would be really insightful is to run. Run a competitive test with your main image against your category bestsellers and I would promise you that you're going to get a ton of insight. And don't feel bad if you lose, it's okay, because just just read the comments and I promise you you're going to get a lot of ideas for improvement.

Speaker 1: 45:57

Okay, yeah, and I think, like you said, you've given us some really good ideas here today on. You know how we can iterate quickly and get those insights. John, for people that want to learn more about you and more about Pickfoo, where are the best places for them to go?

Speaker 2: 46:13

Yeah, I mean Pickfoo is a self service. The self service website just go to pickfoocom, piscfucom. For me, I'm on LinkedIn. You can reach me John and Pickfoo.

Speaker 1: 46:26

Perfect. Well, John, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Absolutely, it's been wonderful Thanks.

Speaker 3: 46:32

John Thanks.