Digital Social Hour - Growing up Broke in Ukraine, FB Ads & Making Millions with eCommerce I Anatoliy Labinsky DSH #390

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Anatoliy Labinsky comes to the show to talk about his journey growing up broke in Ukraine, getting good at FB Ads & making millions with eCommerce APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/D2cLkWfJx46pDK1MA BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: 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/ Digital Social Hour works with participants in sponsored media and stays compliant with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding sponsored media. #ad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

war started war started like what what are you speaking about wow anyway like i was with the four-year-old and it was really scary scared moment because for me was only one thing i have to avoid him to be a part of that kind of terror which is what's happening there so we woke up it was explosions around it it was later on like there was really mess uh going on 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 guys we got anatoly here two comma club award winner

founder of gsm growth and co-founder of EcomScout. Thanks for coming on, man. Thanks, Sean, for having me here. I'm really looking forward to share some value. Absolutely, man. You grew up in Ukraine, right? Yeah, I'm basically from Ukraine. I used to live there until 2013. Then I moved to Dubai, to UAE. And after that, I came back to Ukraine. I wasn't planning to move until war started. So right now I'm staying in Portugal, traveling quite a bit to US, like five, six times a year for a couple of weeks, couple of months I'm in US. So when you heard the war was starting in Ukraine, walk me through what happened from there. That's not the most funniest thing from my personal life.

But the thing is that I started really making great results with e-commerce and living in Kyiv, building my dream in life. And we were buying apartments there, all this stuff. And suddenly, just like 24th of February 2022, my wife was in Spain, that time in Barcelona, for some girls' event. And I woke up because several calls were there. And my father, my sister-in-law, several people were trying to reach me out.

And actually, I just picked up the phone at 5 a.m. And they're like, war started, war started. I'm like, what are you speaking about? Anyway, I was with the four-year-old. And it was a really scary, scared moment because for me was only one thing I have to avoid him to be a part of that kind of terror which is what's happening there. So we woke up it was explosions around it it was later on like there was really mess going on so like we went out of Kiev by end of this same day and me and our friends we were

trying to cross the border because for me the number one goal was is to bring him outside of it and the main thing like the borders were closed we were not able to pass through and when i have seen explosions 10 kilometers from us on the border side, I said, no, I won't allow my kid go back that side that way. And it was only the road through the military city where the explosions were happening. And I done whatever it takes. I didn't pay anyone. Like it was all legal. I just like crossed the border with my baby after

three days staying there and uh yeah like my life started completely from scratch like we have previous life in ukraine and we like start rebuilding it but in the same time i was like managing my agency jsm grows and 44 team members will rely on me in terms of like working space. You know, there is 40% of them are Ukrainians. So almost half of the team are Ukrainians. And like I knew that I have to do whatever it takes, not just like handle my emotional part, my personal life, but I have to as well secure the spots for my guys who are in Ukraine. And actually, during the war, it was our biggest month in terms of performance, in terms of revenues, because guys said to me, I said, guys, take care of your family.

Make sure that you are safe. Make sure that you protect them, because all of them were still in Ukraine. And they said, better I'll stay in basement with the laptop and focus on work then we'll be seeing what's going on around here i like well okay and this is like was just full of focus on how to deliver results how to make sure that guys are protected how to make sure that everything everyone alive and the first six months after the war it was quite challenging but full of life experience

moments which has helped us to become stronger as a team to become me stronger as a leader and as well first time in my life i got depression wow like i i i will find out the way how to handle it so guys sport is must i mean when i i like i just say to myself it and start doing sport start like just like focusing a lot on the business on the education again since i was doing that for a while but that time i didn't think about anything except war and family and all that stuff so after figuring out how to handle depression it was july 2022 things started rolling even better and we fired some people who actually were done nothing how we find out later on and our team became stronger and results like were doubled in in a year damn and this is the agency

yeah i'm speaking about the agency it's a marketing agency yeah we are advertising agency focusing on shipify store owners where we managing tiktok facebook google email sms marketing so basically building advertising ecosystem for the shipify brands and was dropshipping big in ukraine uh there is quite but there is cash on delivery system so i never dive into it like it's a too problematic uh audience i would say a lot of refunds uh on the cash on delivery on our market and plus like it's like 40 millions or 360 millions only us or worldwide it's like a billions of people obviously like i choose United States market from the beginning and that was definitely right decision right so where did you go after Ukraine

where did you move to the second time yeah so we went first of all main goal was when I was on staying next to the border I was speaking to all the guys my relatives like father-in-law my father my sister-in-law husband and all of them were saying to me, take care of our ladies. Make sure that you cross the border and take care of the kids and ladies. So like first four months, I was full of girls and kids around me.

And I was like in Germany for a couple of days. My mom, my sister and her kids stayed there. We went to Switzerland for a couple of months. We stayed there making sure kids stay there we went to switzerland for a couple of months we'll stay there making sure the sister-in-law mother-in-law everyone would stay find out the place and like we were just making sure that we are helping them financially to that everyone like starting their own new life and then after switzerland after four months i said when everything was handled i said to my wife now it's time to build our life from scratch. And we started traveling through whole Europe because we were not planning to move to the US.

And we decided to stay in Europe. And we were traveling France, Spain, Germany again, like through Switzerland. Nothing was really attractive. And then we find out for ourselves Portugal and Portugal is really beautiful for nature place and amazing people like great Ukrainian community

we find out the city name is Kashkash really quiet and amazing like paradise village I would say I would say and we are staying there our kids going to international school there and have quite fun. Nice.

Do they speak Portuguese or Spanish? They speak in Portuguese, but all the people in the country speak in English. Oh, okay. Yeah, we will not need to learn the language. Nice. But now you might be moving here, right? You know, everything is forced me here

because I have real estate business now except digital agency. Plus I have a software business related to e-commerce for that attribution. And like a lot of business partners, friends who are here. And I'm like now in Miami for three months. And I got recently newborn here in US. Nice, got that citizenship, baby. Yeah.

And basically, during these three months, I've done much more than in one year in terms of networking, in terms of connections. First of all, I have already quite a bit of connections. But when you meet people again and again and again and again for several years and now you're living next to them, definitely things go moving much faster. And it's just even funner.

I would say not even about business. It's just fun. Yeah, Miami is a lot of fun and a lot of business. Yeah, I'm a parent. I'm not looking for nightclubs or something like that. But it's fun in terms of, I would say, it's inspiring you. All that's around you, it just shows you what's possible. And I'm from small town

in Ukraine like grow up in quite poor neighborhood and like seeing that I'm in US in like nice ocean area building looking on from my gym on to into the beach you know and like having fun with my kid and showing him what's possible I'm just just like, have smile on my face. Life unpredictable. We can be in whatever we want to be, just like we have to take action. Yeah. Did you have a hungry drive for money growing up? 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. Yeah, all the time. My childhood was, I started working since 13 years old. So I was 13. My first job was I was cleaning graphite stones in some mining in our city and it was like quite horrible for the kid but i mean i just was excited i mean first job and i i earned so less that i wasn't able to pay and went for bus

but the thing is that from that moment i started working on hard labor works like construction site and different different similar jobs. But I was always hustling, and I didn't understand what hustle meant. I was thinking it's just survival mode. I call that all the time. I'm surviving. I need to help my mom because my mom got divorced with my father. We had a business before.

When they got divorced, everything went up and down. And this is where kind of challenging started. And I was always on the go to help my mom to make sure that i can pay for myself when i'm going with the girlfriend and so on and never ever was able to travel never ever was out of my city so like it was quite quite really average average low income life but i was always pushing forward to find out how i can make more and i didn't know that actually uh not physical work can make you wealth right who can build your wealth like or only by the brain by the skills you can really study the skills study wealthy people and find out how to make money because i was thinking that like all

the money in the world are earnable just by physical work which is it's actually a low income low income work and it was just average understanding yeah you're trading your time for money with physical work you can never scale to making millions a year exactly and now when you understand how everything is working just puzzles which you need just to put together and everything just growing horizontally. Did you have a lot of fear and doubt when you were starting entrepreneurship? Oh, yeah. The thing is why I started. And I tend to go for this moment because otherwise, I most probably would never open for myself what is entrepreneurship means and especially commerce so basically 24th of February 2017 my wife came in our master room so we were not able to rent even apartment for so we were living in the master room with another Filipino couple in the same

apartment and like she came in the room and start crying it was in uae in dubai this is when in 2013 i left ukraine and went to uae as a food runner i was cleaning dirty plates like from the tables and bring to washing area and i after that got married bring my wife there and my wife had amazing life in ukraine quite high income salary she's a pharmaceutical lady she was working in like finland, had great life. But because she became in love with me, she decided to leave everything and go with me to UAE.

And so everything like when she came to our room, I was always started trying to start something extra and always losing money on it. I was trying to get better better job and canceling the contracts before the termination of the contract was there.

And every single time I was paying fines. And those fines were always taken out from our pocket, everything that we saved. And basically all the time I was kind of feel broke, but motivated to move forward and like again looking on physical works there on some kind of uh extra stuff but when my wife came in the room and said babe i'm pregnant i look on her eyes and she start crying and she was crying not because she's happy because she is terrified what's going to happen

next if she lose the job we won't be able to pay for the room we won't be able to like handle the birth and so on and that moment i went to pharmacy to buy another test uh just to double check if it's everything correct and yeah because i she was like scared i said let's check just in case and i was like i remember i was walking on on the parking spot outside in Dubai, plus 35 degrees. And I was just staying on the sun next to the pharmacy entrance and just squeezing my arms and saying to myself, I won't allow my baby to come in the same financial position as I grew up and as I am right now. And from that moment, the fun began. So basically, it was February. In June, I sent my wife back to Ukraine because when she lost the

job, we were not able to handle the birth in Dubai. So I brought her back to Ukraine and started reading more books about the business, start opening my eyes about everything and find out the book starting from zero, Fred Lam. It was a lead magnet book, nothing special. But the thing is, I find out what is Facebook ads means. And that was insane, insane knowledge for me. It was a gum moment because I never knew what I want to do in my life.

And that moment I said, I want to do that until the end of my life. It's freaking insane. The good old days. Yeah. And 29 of September, 2017, the same year, I opened my first Shopify store. And this is where I lost everything that I was making. I was doing five jobs, like waiter, gas company salesperson. I got the job there when my wife left.

Waiter in nightclubs, waiter in restaurants, supervising private villa events, like different part-times, even for photo video shooting for Dubai commercials, Bollywood movies. And start making quite like, by all these kind of physical jobs, I start making quite good income,

especially my wife is not there, so I can save. But instead of saving, I just start throwing everything into e-commerce. And obviously I've done all the dumb mistakes, which people are doing at the beginning without mentor. It's just like throwing money into the ads and nothing is working.

And everything's simply because I didn't know what I'm doing. And by November, invested in crypto, in the mining, and the company shut down in January. I lost money. Damn.

Yeah, it was quite a tough time because I was working on five jobs, sleeping maybe five hours a day, four hours maximum, five to four hours maximum, and I was coming back always like 1 2 a.m you know and destroyed and my neighbors i was living that time in the two-bedroom apartments with seven other guys jeez and i was just renting the bed space there like and they were like hey what are you doing like i was sleeping while driving a couple of times

almost crushed like my face was yellow like eyes black my wife saying like you're in some kind of secta stop doing whatever you're doing she didn't understand what infcommerce means i said i don't care i will until i figure out i won't stop and like she said i will divorce and you won't stop it like you have newborn you have to come back to us i said i don't care i lost all the money which we which i the e-commerce, on the crypto, everywhere. And then I understand one simple thing. I have to find mentor. I didn't know that mentor exists in the world.

I mean, my mentality was that what kind of mentors? In Ukraine, in Russia, in all those countries, like if you have some wealth, they usually put it here and just, know close it and like i won't tell you how i make it because you'll steal it right and after that i started learning the american mentality with e-commerce that people are sharing yeah you need to pay the price but people sharing how they made it right and basically when i find out the mentor i like invest 47 a month which is for me it was huge money at that moment i like i have to take a risk it's stupid but yeah mark hager he it's not big name but he is the one of the most grateful one of the people who i'm grateful in life to have wow and like uh he was having the live calls

where he going to your ad account as you giving him permissions and on the live calls in the group calls in Facebook he just going through that account is saying to you what's wrong what's right and what you have to do next in the first 15 days I made $8,000 yeah I like this thing is real I just take the screenshot sent to my wife look look it's real I was telling you she said what is that I said it's 5700 I just made you. She said, what is that? I said, it's 5,700. I just made a bid in more than one week. She said, how much you'll bring home? I'm like, come on, it's a business.

I have to reinvest. I have to put more and then it will be blah, blah. She said, stop it, stop it. Like, I will go divorce you if you won't stop. I'm like, f**k it. Like, I just dropped the phone. I know that from this moment, I definitely won't quit because it's

possible a little taste exactly i know that it's possible now and in two weeks i lost everything what i made algorithms updates i had the winning product like a funny t-shirt with the pocket where like a nice kitty inside when you remove the pocket, the kitty is showing the middle finger. So it was quite funny stuff. And my audience, 45 plus ladies, teachers in the United States, were really in love with that stuff. It was a super engaged ad and so on. Facebook made the updates, how they love to do it. Classic.

Classic, yeah. And now no more middle fingers in the ads. And it was actually the thing which was attractive. thousand a month in profit and and august i came back to ukraine already managing some like gym legion some restaurant beauty salon and i said okay now i can pay for living in ukraine by managing legion plus having my couple of thousand in e-commerce and october i start partnering with one of my good friends from mastermind and And we made our first $50,000 a month with zero profit almost. Sounds like e-commerce. Exactly.

But November 150 with quite good profitability, November 150 plus. March next year, 2019, like 250 in a couple of weeks. Then we got our accounts shut down. But like full of fun, full of difficulties, standard difficulties in e-commerce. But from that moment, like numbers are six, seven figures went up. Different problems, different fun.

Life completely was switched completely. My son in his four years, when he was four, we went first time to United States. Nice. Like, yeah, I was 30 years old. And I was like, I was almost crying because it was my dream. You know, like Jay-Z, the song about New York.

Classic. Yeah. I'm just like in the plane. Landing. We are landing to New York. I'm looking out the window, listening to this music. And then I understand my son is four and I'm 30 and 30

year old, like I couldn't before even dream that I would see all those fans and we came not like you know people who are poor and need to like find any job or whatever, we came helicopter like in the Manhattan like all the like a lot of cool fans and I

look on my son and start understanding that i have to educate him i have to explain to him like what it means like to be here and i start sharing with him that like i couldn't even dream about and you are four four year old and now my goal like then then forward we're going he's growing up he like seeing all those lamborghinis all those bmws around france and all that you know, that he's thinking that it's normal. I mean, it's great that it's normal, but it's not like coming by itself. So basically, like now it's one of my, like as a man, big goal to educate him, to like teach him, to share with him more about my background, that everything wasn't as it is. That he need to understand how to win. He need to understand how to deal with fear how to deal with the failure

and that's a big big thing which is like right now i'm working on because i see he's growing up now he's six and a half and he already have kind of the kind of behavior which i need to cut and making sure that he would be not spoiled He will understand the matter of the things and how to build businesses instead of thinking that money are coming just by itself. He'll never know what it was like growing up broke like you did. You went through it. Your parents probably went through it too.

Yeah. My father was an entrepreneur, and he was an unsuccessful entrepreneur. He lost a leg. He became diabetic. He has heart attacks three times already. So he has a lot of health issues. And when I was looking at him, I was thinking that being an entrepreneur is a curse.

Nothing could be worse than being an entrepreneur. So until I figured out what is that in UAE in 2017, really before that, I was thinking that it's the worst thing ever, which could be because my father was example. He's amazing dude. He's amazing man. He's great example for me

as being a great father and so on, but not as a great entrepreneur, as a great business owner. And like everyone were going through their own and I was able to handle it. And now the main point, I have to educate the kids to be better. Yeah, you have an all-in mentality. There was no plan B for you.

No, that's the thing. Why it worked for me, because it was only plan A. I have a newborn, and I have to handle it whatever it takes my my why was my son and like I was just pushed forward and I was ignoring all the fails I mean if you have plan b you will most probably quit wow that's a statement right there a lot of people try to have exit strategies but I think going all in is is important at least at the beginning for sure like when when you have all the struggles at the beginning if you look around When you have all the struggles at the beginning, if you look around and if your goal will be only financial goal,

only financial, then you're going to quit because financial goal is not the strong goal because you can find out the job and make money with no stress. But if you have your big why, the better life for your son, and the position where you right now you know that it can't provide it so then you're going to be doing whatever it takes absolutely are you still seeing success with facebook ads in 2024 i would say like 2023 2024 it's a success came back to facebook i mean it was always there but like 2021 2023 it was quite disaster it was quite mess and tiktok started showing up and we got a lot of success on tiktok but right now we see that facebook better than

ever in terms of performance still struggles in terms of like rejections attribution and so on that's why we find out the ecomscout.. It's our software which we decided to develop exactly to cover the attribution problem. Because all the similar softwares, which are like our competitors, like the bigger ones, Triple Whale, NorthBeam, and some others. Hyros, yes. They are quite expensive, and it was always annoying several people who I was talking to before. Plus, we are having an agency, our clients are always complaining that they're expensive. And we decided, why won't we do the software, which is going to be quite cheap and for us, only for us.

And we created it, and it made such a great impact from our media buying team. And they give us such a cool feedback that it's working really well. We decided to open that for the crowd and made just flat $99 monthly fee. Nothing else. That's way cheaper than others. It's much, much way. So because we know that it's easy to create, we create it, we handle it. We were testing that almost for a year and we understand

that it's working. Now we just like it's completely AI operated platform. So now we just integrated a lot of more features to it for media buyers to make sure that media buyer has like you know what's the thing about the media buying as an agency and i can say media buyers are struggling because of the no weekends no normal routine for them because if we are scaling like 20k a day 30k a day you always have to look on the account you have to control

that you're like if there is not overspend, because overspend on such kind of levels, there's always painful. I mean, if you not cut something on time or not slow down the budget, something will suck all the profitability. And we could have problems with the clients after that. It can get problems to us.

And like, it's all, media bar always has to be next to the laptop. And obviously obviously after four years agency exists we understand that uh handling the um handling this problem has to be in in better we need to find out the better solution for that yeah so and now in the com scout we're creating the app which is like they won't be needed even uh the laptop that much like where they're going to be able to control the ads from the app they will be able to control the vertical scaling horizontal scaling all through the app and plus ai one of the ideas

one of our like uh surrounding in e-commerce one person said to us and we're like we're working on it right now it's like making ai make a decision according to all the previous historical campaigns which were running through this platform, what's actually going to be working better, and just taking the step ahead and, like, duplicate or scaling vertically for a particular campaign according to the metrics, according to PPI. This is what we're working on right now,

and this is, like, one of the challenges, but we see, according to developers' feedback, that it's possible to make. We already made, like, ad captures like you just pressing on one button in three seconds you have three different variations of better captures from your winning ad and then you're going to be just split testing that and usually we see the great uh one of those three showing the great potential for the new winning ad and And you can scale faster just by pressing one single button on EcomScout. Wow, that is powerful.

Being able to split test using AI because there's no human emotion involved so you can make logical decisions. Yeah, basically we train AI both there by the 100 years of the advertisers experience. We took the biggest marketers, the biggest marketers, the biggest like marketing studies and place it in one spot

for to teach the AI the right approach. That's cool. And yeah, like my partner in it, he's having the software business so he know how to train the AI. And basically when he done it, I was really shocked. Like when we press the button,

we've seen the different ad copies and we see the powerful angles which shows from nowhere i mean before we were spent like couple of days to do the research in amazon to do the research on uh youtube and like internet forums before now it's like like some groups and now uh ai just doing everything for us and like in matter one we're just getting the powerful angles for the winning creative and just testing different captures. And plus, have separately trained media buyers

to get perfect UGC scripts for our UGC creators. And all of that combination really give us a powerful approach on the advertising. That's big. It used to take months to find winning products, winning creatives. Now you can find it with AI in minutes.

Yeah, winning products is still, I would say, challenging because one of the things in e-commerce, you should not marry the product if it doesn't work. So before building your own brand, buying thousands of inventories, you have to find out the proof of concept yeah if this product actually has attraction so like after the split test and testing so the different angles you will understand if it's a product which is could really deliver you great results and scale and become a brand or it just like looks awesome product but has no luck as for now and like by this ai you can make this kind of uh

judgment much faster so first of all this charge gpt like and all the prompts which we have we're finding out the perfect avatar for every single product in matter of like minutes before it was takes really hours and hours especially if brand is coming to us he's they're filling up like five to ten pages of the onboarding form. And before we would need to go through several places to find it out and collect the information and get the summary and make that according to that copywriting task and so on. Now

we have all that information provided just going through a couple of resources after combining all under the prompts and boom, a perfect avatar already analyzed, already angles exist and like it's giving us like uh potential the best possibilities for the creatives and then we see if this product is working actually or not and like what has to be adjusted yeah and with the

attribution platform a com scout we are seeing what's working, making just better in terms of adjusting the ad copies and by looking the perfect tracking for cheap price, we're able to control the ads as well faster. I love that. We'll link this in the video. Anything else you want to promote or close off with?

Yeah, basically, I believe EcomScout, I'm not promoting, I'm just sharing because it's this platform which will promote by itself. Just try and you'll see. And from another side,

if you're in e-commerce and you're looking to scale your brand and looking for building an advertising ecosystem like with Facebook, you have only Facebook, but you want to be in TikTok, email, SMS marketing, Google, or you are in two platforms, you want to be in all of them, this is exactly what we are doing.

A person is coming to us in 60 to 90 days, we just implemented Google, TikTok, Facebook, email SMS marketing, and building the strong ecosystem. Because if Facebook, again, will make some kind of trouble to your account, you have TikTok, you have Google, which is covering, and profitability is still going on. If you have trouble with TikTok, you have Facebook, you have email SMS marketing, whichok you have facebook you have ml sms

marketing which is actually a money printing machine uh all the profits in emails and sms people i really don't understand that so many people coming to us and they have just basic flows or just no flows at all so that's exactly like uh we can help you out with and they are just some gross agency.com you can just check us and make your decision by yourself. Perfect. Thanks for coming on, man. That was fun. Yeah. Thanks for watching guys as always. See you next time. When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof like aloe or all birds or skims, you think about a great product a cool brand and brilliant marketing but an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business

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