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Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
This is episode 300.
Seven years. I genuinely don't know how that happened, and I'd have laughed at you in 2019 if you'd told me we'd still be going.
There's a bit of fitting timing to it as well. We move house next week after 22 years in this one, which means 300 is the last episode I'll ever record in this studio. A few more will come out of here that we made earlier, but this is the last one actually made in the room.
So I did the thing you're supposed to do at a milestone. I went back through it all and asked what 300 conversations have actually taught me.
The answer turned out to be a bit embarrassing.
The promise I didn't keep
Back in May I committed on the show to a 90-day Instagram experiment. Personal brand against a paid-ads benchmark, numbers published either way, reports at 30, 60 and 90 days.
The ads benchmark never got run. Not underperformed, never happened. So the head-to-head I promised you doesn't exist, and I can only apologise for that. We got a few reels out, nowhere near what I said.
Here's the bit that should bother us both. I capped myself at two to three hours a week and never got close to spending it. Not once. So it wasn't a time problem. I had the time. And I don't think it was discipline either.
What it actually was is a cost I never budgeted for. Not the filming, filming's easy, I've got three studios and more iPhones than sense. The expensive part was deciding what to say and then getting in front of a camera cold, from a blank page, every single time.
Two questions, and I only ever ask one
I've got two questions I've put to probably a thousand founders over the years when I'm coaching.
One. Will this move the needle between where I am and where I want to be?
Two. Can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 at doing this?
I broke the second one. In public. On my own podcast.
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Every idea in my notebook is good. That's the problem. Not one of them is bad, which means the test I was using filtered absolutely nothing.
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Think about what's in your notes app right now. Everything in there passed question one. That's the only reason you wrote it down. So question one isn't a filter, it's a green light machine, and what you're left with isn't a list of options, it's two hundred things you feel vaguely guilty about.
Question two is the one that turns two hundred into three.
And the word doing the work in it is consistent. Hitting an 8 once is easy, that's a good afternoon. Can you do it in week nine, when the novelty's gone and nobody's clapping? A brilliant idea you manage at 4 out of 10 when you feel like it is worth close to nothing. A fairly boring idea at 8 out of 10 every week for a year compounds into a business.
Which, incidentally, is the only reason this podcast exists. It was nowhere near the best idea I had in 2019, I had two eight-by-four whiteboards crammed with better ones and couldn't tell you what most of them were now. It's just the one I could sustain.
When it fails, don't bin it yet
Here's the part that stops all this becoming a very sophisticated way of doing nothing.
When something fails question two, ask one more. Does it fail because of me, or because of the task?
If it's the task, drop it and feel good about it. If it's me (my face, my hours, my brain) then work out which bits genuinely need me and which bits I've just assumed do. With the reels, the honest answer is thirty seconds of my face on camera. Choosing the idea, the beat sheet, the edit, the scheduling, none of that had to be me. I'd kept the lot on my own desk, which was daft.
Drop it. Delegate it. Systematise it. Only one of those is a no.
I ran exactly that diagnostic on a mobile conversion problem earlier this year. I can't be a consistent 8 out of 10 at CRO, I'm not a specialist and I'm not going to become one. So instead of learning it, we built a tool that audits our mobile experience, finds the problems and tells the developers how to fix them, then turned the output into a three-phase plan.
Two phases done. Mobile conversion up over 400%, on a site turning over millions.
Same filter. Different exit.
Have a listen, there's a fair bit more in there, including how this whole thing started with my best mate telling me I had a great face for radio.
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