Digital Social Hour - Future of AI Chat Bots, Living in Australia and Reading Life Changing Book by Alex Hormozi | Liziana Carter DSH #288

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Liziana Carter comes on the show to talk about her move to Australia, why she went all in on chat bots and how Alex Hormozi changed her life. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get 15% off a set of Brake Mess Select, Select Pro, or Import Direct Brake Pads and 2 Rotors now at O'Reilly Auto Parts. Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly Auto Parts. We're presenting people with an offer inside of the child bot, and then if they don't purchase, we're getting the chatbot to start new conversations over weeks, even months. Follow up. Exactly. They start conversations tackling those objections because people come into the bot and sometimes they just type.

And then we collect more data around why they're not buying. And then we build that back into the follow ups. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests. And it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot.

Thank you guys for supporting. And here's the episode. All right. All the way from Australia, Liz Carter in the building today. How's it going? I'm doing great, Sean. How are you? Good.

I can't wait to get into chatbots today with you. Yeah. It's going to be an interesting conversation. Absolutely. Yeah. So I first heard of chatbots today with you. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting conversation. Absolutely, yeah. So I first heard of chatbots years ago. ManyChat was kind of the first one, right? ManyChat, yes. I started with ManyChat in 2016.

I tried a few different platforms in the meantime. Then I came back to ManyChat. They are by far the most complex. They have the most functionality, although still not enough. We've actually built a mini SaaS on top of ManyChat. But they also have a very good relationship with Meta. And so that puts them at the forefront of pretty much everything that Meta is trying to do with conversation, with messaging. We got into a lot of better programs with them testing out all sorts of features.

And so, yeah, ManyChat is the way to go right now. And talk to me about why you went all in on chatbots. I know the open rates are pretty high on Messenger, right? So I did chatbots between 2016 and 2018. I was running my online fitness business at that time, and I pretty much taught myself chatbots. Then I kind of dropped off. I got a job in the Microsoft space and then I still wanted to have my own business. And so I quit my job. I went on a

cruise and I did a lot of research and then I settled on a chatbot agency. I felt like during the two years that I'd done chatbots, I liked it. I liked geeking out. There was a lot and I could see the future kind of going that way. And also I'd been hearing about, and it was 2019, right? I kept hearing about AI and how I could potentially make it work with AI. I wasn't entirely sure how, but I just saw that being the future. And so I opened this chatbot agency. And initially I was doing gyms and mess bars. And right about the time when my chatbot started picking up with a few clients, COVID hit. And so I had to pivot to the e-commerce space.

That was pretty much everything that was working back then. And so that's what I've been doing probably for the last four straight years. Wow. Mainly e-commerce. Probably 95% of our clients have been e-commerce. But then we've also been getting a lot of interest from coaches, course creators. You have 11 million followers.

Yeah. So coaches and course creators that have massive following and they just don't know how to monetize it or do more. So that's also been a bit of our target market, but mainly e-commerce. And pretty much right now, we're reverse engineering their best performing funnels. When we kick off, when we launch a chatbot,

we have a look at what's your acquisition process looking like right now. And so we reverse engineer that and we convert that funnel into a chat funnel. It's almost like a guided conversation. But when we look at their acquisition process, we usually ask them, you know, what are the top three to five reasons why people don't buy from you immediately? Let's say you run a Facebook ad. They land on the website.

People have questions. And so they can have that conversation with themselves in their heads. Like, is this going to work for me? You know, they have it. Or they can have it with a brand. Right. And progress faster to checkout. And we're pretty much converting that funnel into a chat funnel.

And so we're taking purchase rates, because you said open rates, click-through rates, that's just... Super high, right? That is super high, but at the end of the day, every business is looking, how am I going to make money out of this? Like, where's the revenue coming from? What are the numbers looking like? And so with an e-commerce site, it's going to convert, you know,

1%, 2%, 5% if you're lucky, maybe. Kind of that's where the benchmark. Instead of a chat funnel, we're seeing anywhere between 7% to 39% purchase rate. Not conversion, like not clicking to the website. Shout out to the Science of Scaling podcast hosted by Mark Roberge. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week, Mark, founding CRO at HubSpot CRO and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, interviews some of the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets,

strategies, and tactics to scaling company growth. He recently had on the head of sales from OpenAI, and that was a very interesting episode on the future of AI. Listen to The Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts today. The website, actual purchases. That's hot. Yeah. And so that's pretty much what we're doing. We're presenting people with an offer inside of the chatbot,

and then if they don't purchase, we're getting the chatbot to start new conversations over weeks, even months sometimes. Follow-up. Exactly. It's like free retargeting. They start conversations tackling those objections. And so we keep improving that follow-up process

based on what, because people come into the bot and sometimes they just type, will this work for my skin? You know, how is this? And then we collect more data around why they're not buying and then we build that back into the follow-ups. Interesting. Every business should have this then because the conversion rates are high,

open rates are high. There's almost no competition right now. Almost nobody's doing it. Exactly. And the cost is pretty reasonable too. Yeah. And with what Meta, because Meta has been actively working

on pushing messaging, even messaging ads, like messaging ads. So it's scalable. It's not just leveraging organic traffic. It's also scalable with chatbot ads, Messenger and Instagram DM ads. But what they've been working

is allowing businesses to free push, like free push notifications. Because per Meta's policies, you cannot re-engage a chatbot subscriber outside of a 24-hour window since their last interaction. However, there's a way now where you can get their permission, just like they would opt into your email list or SMS list. They opt into your DM list. And you build a subscriber's list, a DM list, and then you send a broadcast that is literally free.

Wow. That is nuts. Yeah, DM list sounds like a really valuable asset to any business. Yeah. They've been rolling it out over the last couple of years. So they initially tested it out on Messenger. We were in the beta program with them and we tested it out. Then they opened it up to the public.

And now we've been testing Instagram DM lists in beta for about a year. Oh, you can do it on Instagram now? It's literally just opening up now. So they're rolling it out to everybody on Instagram now. That's exciting because I literally get over a thousand messages a day on Instagram probably. Wow. And I'm probably losing millions of dollars. And it's not just the DM list, the email capture rate in the DMs. So every single one of our chat funnels has anywhere between 92 to 99% email capture rate.

Wow. So you could use it to collect a fat email list. Massive. So on organic, you're going to collect higher, right? Because people know you. But even with paid traffic, so we have clients who are running messenger ads, the conversation literally starts with capturing the email address. With ads, the capture rate is not that high.

So it's anywhere between 75%, 85%, sometimes even 70%. If you're literally doing top of funnel, it's probably going to be 65%, 70%. It's still a very high email capture rate. Yeah. And a lot of newsletters are selling these days for high valuations. So just having an email list of 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 is a really big asset to any company. Yeah. Because that increases your company valuation as well.

And now that there's DM lists, I mean, they might even factor that when you're selling a company. Absolutely. We have one of our clients now who is literally talking to investors and they're presenting what we're doing with them as a part of their business plan. Wow. Did you raise money for this company?

I did not, no. All self-funded? Yeah, starting from scratch. Dang, because it sounds expensive to build out this software, right? It took us about two years, but at the point where we've started, so the mini SaaS that I'm talking about sits behind ManyChat. Got it. ManyChat does not have a way to track sales.

Revenue, it doesn't. That's it. You can see, like you said, click-through rates, open rates. That's pretty much it. Oh, it doesn't, that's it. You can see, like I said, click the rates, open rates, that's pretty much it. Oh, it's contract revenue, wow. So we've built a mini SaaS in the backend that allows the chatbot to know in real time whether these people are placing an order or not. And we tie that attribution to the email collected that's why we aim to collect email addresses at such a high rate and if that purchase doesn't come then those follow-ups trigger interesting because otherwise you don't want to spam people right so first of all you have to give

them the option to say you know no thanks maybe later not interested because dms convert really well but they're still very personal, sensitive channels, so you don't want to spam people. And so what we've built in the back end is a system that tracks revenue and a bunch of other metrics that just give our clients a lot more insight into how people are buying, when they're buying, what makes them buy. So they can see literally what, if they build 15 follow-ups over the course of a month,

that starts new conversations. They will know which follow-up converts better. So they can see, okay, follow-up number two, 10% of people bought. Follow-up number three, only 1%. Clearly that's not working so much, so let's tweak that a little bit. Split test it, yeah. Correct, correct. Wow, this is so fascinating. So is there a number of people, is there a limit to how many people you can have on these lists? Or is it unlimited? Not that I've seen so far. So we've worked with accounts of up to four to five million followers.

We haven't hit a limit so far. Wow. I'm just thinking like, even like Logan Paul's brand Prime, he could build a fat list and then whenever they have a new flavor or something, just send out a blast. Yeah, that's it. It sounds super useful and super,

you said it's free to send out a blast, right? They might make it paid at some point. Meta right now is free. That is crazy. Because to do that over any other ad platform would cost thousands. Yeah. They might make it paid at some point. Meta right now is free. That is crazy. Because to do that over any other ad platform would cost thousands. Yeah. And imagine if you're running a messenger ad, you're literally getting people. We're getting people in the messenger.

We're capturing email. We're getting them on the DM list, presenting them with an offer. Then we start following up on them over a month if they don't purchase. Wow. So, you know, running ads like that will beat any other ad. That's cool. So when you're running these messenger ads, what cost are you getting per subscriber on average right now?

We're not looking at the cost per subscriber. We're looking at the ROAS. So we want that ROAS to beat all of our clients' ads in their ad account. Wow. Yeah, if you pull that off, they'll sign up all day. You almost did like what Alex Becker did with Hyros. Yeah. So we're actually, some of our clients are using Hyros as well.

And they've just now got us to track via Hyros as well. So we can see the difference between one and the other because our tracking system is not 100% accurate because we're relying on attributing orders back to the email address. And so if we're capturing email addresses from, let's say, 90, 95% of the subscribers, we're still missing that 5%. That's one thing. The other thing is that some people, that's not a high percentage, maybe 1% to 2%. Some will give us

one email and then place the order with a different one. And so right now we're testing to see what does Hyros say compared to what we're tracking. What's the actual difference that's there? I suspect it's anywhere between 3%-ish.

I have multiple emails. I don't order anything to my personal address on certain emails, you know what I mean? Yeah. Does that make sense? Where do you want to take this thing? Do you want to raise money? Do you want to take on partners?

I don't have a reason to raise money right now because I've already bootstrapped it. It's highly profitable and it's scalable. So what I want to do now is scale it. And so that's where we're going. One year ago, there were three of us on the team. Now we're 10. We're scaling fast. One of the factors that helped me take it to where we are now has been Hormozy's because we spoke about Hormozy. Alex Hormozy's million dollar

offers pretty much changed my offer. Started running Facebook ads and that just blew up. Wow. And all 10 people are in Australia? Nobody's in Australia. Oh, just you? We are everywhere. Canada, US, Latin America, Thailand. Yeah, we're everywhere. Dang. The thing is that I'm the only one based in Australia. The company is based in Australia, but all of our clients are US and Canada based. So did you grow up there and you're just still living there?

No, I'm Romanian. Oh. I moved to Australia seven years ago. Wow. With my daughter and pretty much started from scratch. Wow. So what caused you to pick Australia? You could have picked anywhere, right? I saw a photo of Surfer's Paradise on Google.

No way. That's what caused it? Well, I was following this girl's fitness influencer, Emily Skye, who lives on the Gold Coast. And one day she posted on Snapchat a photo of, she was coming back from Sydney. I looked it up and I saw Surfer's Paradise on Google and I went, wow, I want to live there. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I'm like, that sounds like a dream.

Manifest it. I read about it, 50 days of rain a year everything else is sunny is just right now is summer in australia yeah so honestly for me it's just the best life sounds beautiful big change from romania too i bet right yes there's no beaches out there we we have but but it's different. Yeah. The society is different. The lifestyle is different. You know, a first world country, to me and to my daughter,

growing up in a first world country, that's just, you can't beat that. Right. Because I know how I grew up, and I know that by the time that I was 30, I'd hit a ceiling. Professionally speaking, you know, I had pretty much everything I wanted. I had a house, cars, I had everything. But there was no more challenge for me in Romania. Like, where do I go from here?

Yeah. And then if I'd hit that ceiling by the time that I was 30, what's to say of my daughter? She was going to leave either way. So I'm like, I might as well do it now. Wow. So there's not much entrepreneurship out in Romania? Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? Well, click the application link below in the description of this video.

We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to you about business and life. Click the application link below, and here's the episode, guys. There is some, but I feel like the culture is different. The opportunities are different. And just Australia is just different from all sports of you. People are happier.

Yeah, every Australian I know is super happy, actually. And maybe it's because of the sun i don't know probably they say people in cali are happier than people in colder places in the u.s it's very similar yeah yeah wow um you run into andrew tate out there and i've seen he he's in romania but i had I had left, yes, by the time he was. By the time he blew up? Yeah. So reading 100 Million Offers by Hormozy really changed your business. And you said you're going to one of his events too as well, right?

I signed up for it. I literally have a call at 2 p.m. today with his team. Wow. And hopefully I get in and go to the workshop and I meet them. What are the requirements I get in and go to the workshop and I meet them. What are the requirements to get in? You'd have to be making at least 250 million, 250k per year. And obviously you need to have your numbers ready. And that's pretty much all I said. Wow. That could be a life-changing event for you. It could be because they're looking at helping you scale, you know, paid traffic,

scale teams, which is exactly what I'm, what I need right now. Yeah. So when it comes to the paid traffic, how did you learn to do that? Did you take a course or something? I'm not doing it. I have a media buyer. Got it. But, um, like I had a few nasty experiences.

Like I hired a different media buyer before. They charged me a lot to build a funnel and it didn't work out. And then I found these other guys that they're just, they're **** for me. So they really brought my cost per book call down. They've nailed my funnel. You know, they just handle everything. Yeah. I could bring it in-house, but for now I don't want to because.

Too expensive, yeah. I had a bad experience. I feel like everyone had a bad experience with a agency. Because a lot of the incentives aren't aligned. Yeah. Because they'll charge you like a flat monthly plus percent of spend. And at that point, they just want to spend as much. They don't really care about profitability.

Right. So. Yeah. I like agencies that charge like, I don't know, like a rev share maybe. My media buyer charges just a flat fee per month. Yeah. And that's it. Okay.

Plus, like by now we've nailed the funnel. It's working. And I mean, all we have to do is just shoot new creatives every month. Nice. Is it on ClickFunnels? No, my website is built on Webflow. Webflow. Yeah.

Got it. It is very easy. It's like a sales page to the booking page. Yeah. Sometimes we just run an ad, like a one-minute ad to the booking page. That's cool to see you making it work on Facebook ads because a lot of people left Facebook ads, got too expensive for them. Sometimes it gets expensive, but what we've seen and what we've learned is that there are periods where you just don't see any book calls for like a day or two and you almost freak out. Then it goes back to normal. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm starting Google and YouTube right now. It's crazy. Wow. I'm growing 20,000 subscribers a day right now on YouTube. With the ads? With the ads, yeah. Really?

It's nuts. And it's pretty cheap too. Like I'll be at a million. I just hit 200K today. Last week I was at 100K. So I'll be at a million in like two months on YouTube, which is, I'm doing it myself. I mean, so Aleric Heck just came on the podcast last week. He owns a YouTube ads agency.

So I asked him for tips, but I was doing it myself before and he just helped me optimize them a bit. But YouTube ads right now are hot. I tried TikTok and Google and some YouTube couldn't crack it. Really? Again, it was a different agency. Different agency plus different offer.

So I'm just trying to get more views and subscribers. I don't have anything to sell. So I think it's a different type of model but uh in general youtube is in my opinion is one of the most valuable platforms i'm literally starting youtube yeah in a couple of weeks i have my editor video editors i told them we're kicking off youtube at least one video a week i'm going all in like even though i have 11 mil on Instagram, I value my YouTube following more because I know in the long run that's going to produce way more connections and money and stuff. Interesting.

I mean, the long form viewership is just so powerful. You know what I mean? Building an audience off just shorts, it's not really an audience. They don't have a bond with you. I agree because I'm posting my shorts as well on YouTube. It's good for views, but it's not like a long-term play in my opinion yeah that's smart is uh podcasting being australia i don't think so um obviously there are people who do who do it but um or maybe i haven't paid attention to it too much um i've been i've been on a few podcasts most of them have been

u.s based interesting yeah i like to think long term so like i'm learning spanish right now partially because my fiancee but also i see the spanish podcasting space starting to blow up a little bit really so in like two three years i'm gonna be interviewing people in spanish ah yeah i speak some spanish and my daughter doesn't want to learn French. So she got me to get her a Spanish tutor. Oh, nice. She doesn't want to learn French? She doesn't.

Why? Because she doesn't like French. Interesting. So I'll say this, okay. I've been to France and no offense because you sound like you like French people. It was probably my least favorite country. I do not. Oh, you don't? I don't like i'm i'm the same as she is in school i started i studied german

okay and i did not want to learn it and my mom always told me you have to learn two foreign languages and i knew english and i had picked up spanish from just watching tv and i told her well i speak spanish, you don't. Yes, I do. And I started speaking Spanish. I'm like, okay, then you have to learn how to spell it as well. So she took me in tutoring to learn how to spell Spanish as well. And then I'm like, great.

So I won't learn German because I know Spanish. That's impressive. You learned a whole language behind your mother's back. By accident. By accident? I enjoyed watching telenovelas on tv yeah and i watched them for years for it and then i just suddenly i could speak that's one of the quickest ways i've been learning it i watched netflix in uh spanish with english subtitles

and it's yeah because i tried duolingo i had like a 300 day streak and i barely learned honestly yeah that's that's how I learned as well. Yeah, I just go to the sauna and put on like 30 minutes of whatever. I'm watching Narcos right now, but that's definitely the quickest way. How old is your daughter right now? She's 12 this week, actually. Wow. Yeah. Congrats.

Thank you. And you raised her by yourself? Yes. I have a partner. We've been together for five years but mainly by myself initially we flew and moved to australia with my ex-husband but we got divorced he left back to romania so it's just been her and me for for a while so that first seven years it was mainly just you and her um in in australia yes wow that must been tough. It was tough in the beginning because I kept insisting on building an online business.

And I was usually always broke. I didn't want to do anything else. I kept trying all sorts of other businesses. My online fitness business usually was, however much I put in Facebook ads, I made back. So I see that as a win because, a win because I gained a lot of experience. But I also had, I tried affiliate marketing. I know a print-on-demand shop. And after about two to three years of doing that, I'm like, okay, this has got to stop.

I'm going to go and get a job. And I got a job in the Microsoft space. Because with my studies and everything from Romania, I could do a lot of stuff. I just didn't want to do it. I wanted my own business. And so I got a job in the Microsoft space. That went really well.

I was doing about 100K a year. Dang. And then, you know, again, I hit a ceiling with that job. I was implementing one of Microsoft's ERP systems, Business Central. But again, there's only so much you can do in this space, right? I mean, and I didn't want to have a job. So at the point where I put some money aside,

I quit my job and I started my chatbot agency. Nice. And the first year, did it do well? Did it kick off right off the bat or did it take some time? No, I think it took me about six months to get some good clients under my belt okay and it was just me at that time so like literally i had no fulfillment costs no even now like if if i didn't have my team um like we don't have you know overhead not not much maybe a few thousand dollars so it's not because our clients literally pay for

everything themselves they manage that whatever they that's they incur the costs right because whatever we build becomes their ip their build is all theirs so we don't have to spend too much that makes sense um so what's the goal for 2024 you got any goals i would like to to take my agency to one mil per month damn one mil a month let's do it it's not that i don't think it's that hard i love that and i would like to better package the mini sass that we have right now because it's there but it's there, but it's complicated. Somebody else who comes in could not manage it. We manage it. We set it up for each client, and then they just have to see everything in a nice format, but it's not packaged properly. My agency, I would like

to exit it in two years. it would be worth a lot more if I had that mini SaaS stacked on top of it. So there's some user friction there. Yes. Yeah, that's part of what makes SaaS so valuable when people like Becker can figure out how to implement it easily. Yes.

And people don't even have to do any hard setup because anything coding, I'm out. I'm not doing that, you know what I mean? That's why Shopify was so ahead of its time because prior to shopify you had to know coding yeah to make an e-commerce business and it was just like you mess up one line the whole site shuts down and i have some horror stories of like this site closing on black friday or something important you know what i mean i've i've had like we've had black fr probably in 2022. I remember we had a client. Their website, we had built this massive DM list inside of Messenger.

We didn't have Instagram back then. Their website crashed. We did a countdown. Everything was going through Messenger. We built this VIP list. You only get access through Messenger. We send out the broadcast and the, you know, the free push. Yeah.

Their website crashed. Too many people on it. They probably weren't on Shopify because Shopify is really good about that. I can't remember. It was in 2020. But it was, wow, that was a big stress for me as well. They probably blamed you and then it was a whole fight no they didn't but it just didn't turn out the way that it should have right because everybody had worked so much

and then it just didn't it was like a at 30 probably of what it could have been yeah i'm really excited to try these lists out because i know instagram kind of limits your your dms per day like 100, 150. But with these lists, you could just send out. If you go through many chat, it won't. You might have the volume that you're at. You might have issues if you also automate comment replies. Because I do it with my, that's how I grew my Instagram account, using comment to DM automation.

And I had one of my very first posts go viral. I think it's now at 1.3 million views. Wow. It's at around 30,000 comments. Damn. And because it took off and the chatbot kept replying at the same time, I didn't realize it. Yeah. They restricted my account for a week.

I couldn't comment. That was it. Everything else worked. Oh, that's not too bad. Wait, so you can do comments with this comment reply i might need that because i get thousands a day and it's like i can't even respond to people i kind of feel bad yeah so if you build something very easy very evergreen where they comment and you can even exclude if you know you get some negative comments

we get our clients to exclude like i've done that. I exclude them and it won't fire on those comments. Got it. It will just simply reply, check your DMs, I sent you a DM. That's it. It doesn't have to be in the context of what's been asked or anything like that. Wow.

No, that's a good funnel because then once they're in the DM, they're in your messenger list and then get their email. That's it. And in the DMs, you could literally have some form of freebie and say, hey, would you like to download my whatever?

And then they say yes. Next step, great. type your email below and i'll send it to you yeah that email flows to what's your mdu use uh hubspot yeah we use house for as well so it flows to housepot it triggers an email to be sent but you can also deliver it via dms so now you're literally in front of that audience we two channels. Wow. That's cool. And DMs. I've seen it set up in people's DMs where when you go to message them, it pops up like a message.

Yeah, that's a conversation starter. Got it. There's a lot of ways you can pull people into conversations, like from stories, from reels, live videos, even from your website. So we literally have clients right now who have buttons on their website that leads to Instagram DM. Wow. I need to step it up with my DM game. We're going to talk after this for sure.

Liz, where can people find you and the company and what you're up to? Yeah, if you look up Liziana Carter on Instagram or you can go to our website, gsagroryi.com. Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for watching, guys. As always, see you tomorrow.